At a quarter to three in the afternoon, Francisco Bajamonde Cassavetes y Larrinaga glanced at his watch and said, ‘Twenty-one minutes to go, I presume.’
There had been no need for a Spanish-speaking delegate. The security man spoke the Queen's English as used in the most sophisticated clubs of Belgravia.
Gunvald Larsson looked at his own chronograph and nodded. At that moment, to be more precise, it was exactly thirteen minutes and thirty-five seconds to three on Wednesday the fifth of June, nineteen hundred and seventy-four.
Outside the harbour entrance, the frigate was turning to sound the welcoming salute, which was its only real assignment. High above the paseo the eight fighter planes drew white zigzag lines in the bright blue sky.
Gunvald Larsson looked around. Down the paseo was a huge brick bullring with curved arcades plastered in red and white. In the other direction they were just turning on the multicoloured sprays of a tall fountain; there had been a severe drought all year and the fountains – this was not the only one – were only set going on especially grand occasions.
Now they could hear the drone of helicopters and the sirens on the motorcycles. Gunvald Larsson checked the time. The motorcade seemed to be ahead of schedule. Then his china-blue gaze swept the harbour and noted that all the police boats were now in action. The harbour installations themselves were much the same as when he had been at sea, only the ships were completely different. Supertankers, container ships, huge ferries on which cars were more important than passengers – they were all unfamiliar to him from his own years at sea.
Gunvald Larsson was not alone in his observation that the order of events was ahead of the prescribed schedule. Cassavetes y Larrinaga spoke swiftly but calmly into his radio, smiled at his fair-haired guest and looked out over the sparkling fountains, where the first motorbike formation of specially trained security police was already appearing between the lines of green-uniformed police officers.
Gunvald Larsson shifted his gaze. Immediately below them a cigar-smoking security man was strolling along the middle of the street keeping an eye on the police marksmen posted on the surrounding roofs. Behind the line of policemen was the row of taxicabs with blue lines along their sides, and in front of them an open yellow-and-black horse-drawn carriage. The man on the box was also dressed in yellow and black, and the horse had yellow-and-black plumes in the band round its forehead.
Behind all this were the palms and acacias and a few lines of curious people. A handful of them carried the only sign approved by the authorities, a picture of that bull-necked head, puffy face and black enamel steel-framed glasses. The President was not a particularly popular visitor.
The motorcade was moving very quickly. The first of the Security Service cars was already below the balcony. The security expert smiled at Gunvald Larsson, nodded assuringly and began to fold up his papers.
At that moment, the ground opened, almost directly beneath the bulletproof Cadillac.
The pressure waves flung both men backwards, but if Gunvald Larsson was nothing else, he was strong. He grabbed the balustrade with both hands and looked upward.
The roadway had opened like a volcano from which smoking pillars of fire were rising to a height of a hundred and fifty feet. Atop the flaming pillars were diverse objects. The most prominent were the rear section of the bulletproof Cadillac, an overturned black cab with a blue line along its side, half a horse with black-and-yellow plumes in the band round its forehead, a leg in a black boot and green uniform material, and an arm with a long cigar between the fingers.
Gunvald Larsson ducked as a mass of flammable and nonflammable objects began to rain down on him. He was just thinking about his new suit when something struck him in the chest with great force and hurled him backwards on to the marble tiles of the balcony.
The roar of the explosion finally faded away, and there were sounds of cries, desperate calls for help, someone weeping and another person screaming hysterical curses, before all human sounds were drowned by the sirens of ambulances and the wail of a fire engine.
Gunvald Larsson got to his feet, found himself not seriously hurt and looked about to see what it was that had knocked him down. The object lay at his feet. It had a bull neck and a puffy face, and strangely enough, the black enamel steel-framed glasses were still on.
The security expert scrambled to his feet, clearly unhurt, even if some of his elegance had been dissipated. He stared incredulously at the head and crossed himself.
Gunvald Larsson looked down at his suit. It was ruined. ‘Goddammit,’ he said.
Then he looked at the head lying at his feet. ‘Maybe I ought to take it home,’ he said to himself. ‘As a souvenir.’
Francisco Bajamonde Cassavetes y Larrinaga looked questioningly at his guest. ‘Catastrophe,’ he said.
‘Yes, you could say that,’ said Gunvald Larsson.
Francisco Bajamonde Cassavetes y Larrinaga looked so unhappy that Gunvald Larsson felt duty-bound to add, ‘But no one could really blame you. And anyhow, he had an unusually ugly head.’
The same day that Gunvald Larsson had his strange experience on the balcony with the lovely view, an eighteen-year-old girl named Rebecka Lind was being tried in Stockholm city court on a charge of armed robbery of a bank.
The public prosecutor in her case was Bulldozer Olsson, who for some years had been the judiciary's expert in armed robberies, which were spreading across the land like a plague. He was, as a result, an extremely harried man with so little time to spend at home that it had taken him three weeks, for instance, to discover that his wife had left him for good and been replaced by a laconic message on his pillow. This had not made all that much difference, as with his usual swiftness of action he had found himself another within three days. His new life partner was one of his secretaries who admired him unreservedly and devotedly, and certainly his suits appeared to be slightly less rumpled from that day on.
On this day he arrived breathlessly, two minutes before the trial was to begin. He was a corpulent but light-footed little man with a joyous countenance and lively movements. He always wore bright pink shirts, and his ties were in such indescribably bad taste that they had driven Gunvald Larsson almost insane when he had worked in Bulldozer's special group.
He looked round the bare and ill-heated anteroom of the court and discovered a group of five people, among them his own witnesses, and a person whose presence surprised him enormously. It was, in fact, the chief of the Murder Squad.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he said to Martin Beck.
‘I've been called as a witness.’
‘By whom?’
‘The defence.’
‘The defence? What does that mean?’
‘Braxén, counsel for the defence,’ said Martin Beck. ‘He drew this case, apparently.’
‘Crasher,’ said Bulldozer, clearly upset. ‘I've already had three meetings and two arrests today, and now I'll have to sit and listen to Crasher for the rest of the afternoon, I suppose. Do you know anything about this case?’
‘Not much, but Braxén's argument convinced me I ought to come. And I don't have anything special on at the moment.’
‘You people in the Murder Squad don't know what real work is,’ said Bulldozer Olsson. ‘I've got thirty-nine cases on the books and just as many on ice. You should work with me for a while, then you'd find out.’
Bulldozer Olsson won all his cases, with very few exceptions indeed. This, to put it delicately, was not especially flattering to the judiciary.
‘But you'll have an amusing afternoon,’ said Olsson. ‘Crasher'll give you a good show, for sure.’
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