Free Murder on the Thirty-First Floor by Per Wahlöö Page A

the drawers, got out his ruler and drew fine, straight lines through three of the names. Then he numbered the rest, from one to nine, looked at the clock and made a note in small letters at the top of the sheet: Thursday, 16.25.
    He got out a fresh notebook, opened the first page and wrote: Number 1, former director of distribution, age 48, married, early retirement on health grounds.
    Two minutes later the head of the plainclothes patrol was back with the address. Jensen wrote it down, shut the notebook, put it in his inside pocket and got to his feet.
    ‘Find out the rest,’ he said. ‘I shall need them as soon as I get back.’
    He drove through the city hub of office blocks and department stores, passed the Trades Union Palace and joined the stream heading west. The queues of cars moved quickly along the broad, straight motorway as it cut through industrial areas and vast dormitory towns with thousands of tower blocks lined up in identical columns.
    In the clear light of the evening sun, he could clearly see thepall of greyish exhaust fumes. It was about fifteen metres thick and lay like a bank of poisonous fog over the city.
    Several hours earlier he had drunk two cups of tea and eaten four rusks. Now there was a pain on the right of his diaphragm, a dull, heavy ache as if a low-speed drill had been rotating in soft tissue. Despite the pain, he was still hungry.
    Another ten kilometres or so further on and the tower blocks looked older and more dilapidated. They rose like pillars from vegetation that had been left untended and was now running wild; large sections of plaster had come away from the uneven, weathered blocks of lightweight concrete, and many of the windowpanes were broken. Once the authorities had found a solution to the housing problem ten years before in mass construction of a type of tower block containing only identical, standard apartments, large numbers of people had deserted the older housing areas. In most of those suburbs, only about a third of the flats were now occupied. The rest were standing empty and had been left to decay, as had the buildings as a whole. The properties were no longer profitable, so nobody bothered with their repair or upkeep. What was more, the blocks had been shoddily built and soon crumbled. Many of the neighbourhood shops had gone bankrupt and closed, or simply been abandoned by their owners, and since the state’s calculations allowed for private car ownership for everyone there was no longer any public or state-owned transport serving the housing estates.
    Among the scrubby trees and bushes round the blocks lay shoals of car wrecks and indestructible, throwaway plastic packaging. At the Ministry for Social Affairs they counted on the blocks gradually being abandoned entirely and falling down, at which point the areas would automatically and at no extra cost be converted into rubbish dumps.
    He left the motorway, drove over a bridge and found himself on a long, leafy island dotted with swimming pools, bridleways, and white villas along the shore. He drove on for several minutes and then slowed down, turned left, through an open pair of tall wrought-iron gates, drove up to a house and stopped.
    The villa was large and expensive, its spotless glass façades creating an impression of luxury. There were three cars parked beside the entrance, one of them large and silvery grey, a foreign make and the latest model.
    Inspector Jensen went up the steps and as he passed the electric eye a door chime rang inside the house. The door was immediately opened by a young woman in a black dress and starched, white lace cap. She asked him to wait and disappeared back into the house. The furnishing of the hall and what he could see of the other rooms was modernist and impersonal. It had the same chilly elegance as the management floors of the publishing house.
    In the hall there was also a youth who looked about nineteen. He was sitting on one of the steel armchairs with his legs