Then he’d broken loose the catch on the window, lifted him up, and thrown him out. Rather a grand sight, actually, as he fell straight down, and it was only when he hit the ground that he’d seen the bum who was prowling along the building exterior with his mangy pooch and almost got the whole package right in the face. When he’d pulled in his head so as not to be unnecessarily visible, he’d seen that one shoe had evidently fallen off when he was wriggling the body out through the rather narrow window. It wouldn’t do to have it lying on the floor, so he’d picked it up to throw it out too, and because the bum had just been standing there glaring with his silly little dog he’d made a serious attempt to put it right in his cap. Although this time it wasn’t exactly a quarter, like when the bums were sitting down in the subway begging change for liquor. Unfortunately he’d missed and instead hit the pooch, which had folded up and lain down flat on the ground. And nothing more than that had happened. He’d just packed up, made a final quick check, and left the place. The rest had been a question of maintaining a good face, which wasn’t too difficult since Waltin was the only person he needed to talk to.
Typical suicide, if anyone were to get the idea of asking him. One of the most typical he’d heard about, actually, with a letter left behind and the whole shebang. Ought to sit like a sports cap on those retarded policemen in Stockholm, thought Hedberg, and then he hadn’t thought about it again.
CHAPTER XVIII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in February
The Stockholm chief constable had received very positive reactions to his New Year’s greeting in the police department’s newspaper. Many people had contacted him, both inside and outside the corps, not least many women who had been tremendously appreciative. All this warmth coming his way had strengthened him in his conviction that perhaps it was high time that he realized yet another of his visions.
If you disregarded his literary activities-for there it was more a matter of an inner calling-the chief constable had two great interests in life: physical training and police problem-solving, or detective work, as it was usually more popularly called. Every year he spent hundreds of hours on jogging tracks and ski trails, and it was during one of these exercise rounds that he’d gotten the extraordinary idea of creating an internal training course in qualified police problem-solving. Obviously nothing for the hoi polloi, but an exclusive forum for the most promising and most qualified of his many coworkers. The actual training operation, lectures, and seminars that he saw before him, he intended to run himself. The lack of qualified forces from other quarters was unfortunately apparent and moreover was one of the reasons that he had developed his thoughts in this area.
He had devoted a great deal of his time to thinking about what he should call the operation. This business of sending the right signals was not only important but often completely decisive. Since it was quite clear that the great deficiency in all investigations of serious crimes was that the intellectual analytical work was neglected in favor of running around out in the so-called field, knocking on doors and talking to witnesses and family members and a lot of other peculiar, time-consuming activities, he’d first thought about christening his lecture series “The Armchair Detective,” but because so few of his coworkers understood English he had dropped that idea early on.
It was then that he had his flash of genius: “The Scientific Detective”! At the first seminar he planned to take up the new systematic arrangement of police clues that he’d developed during all the hours he’d spent on the jogging trails out at the police academy in Ulriksdal to which he’d transferred his regular fitness training. A good system of classification as a foundation; that was the solid ground that must be laid before the purely analytical work could begin, and managed correctly, there wasn’t a crime, however difficult it might appear, that couldn’t be solved by correct intellectual operations. You wouldn’t need to leave the meeting room where you were sitting at all other than to eat, go to the toilet, stretch your legs, and whatever else was necessary in a physical sense, but obviously had nothing to do with the work itself.
He had invited only ten participants to the first seminar, “A Systematic Classification of Police Clues.” Kudo and Bülling, of course; his own Deputy Chief Inspector Grevlinge, who perhaps wasn’t exactly God’s gift to the police academy, but a very industrious and loyal force; an experienced and skillful technician by the name of Wiijnbladh, whom he’d never met-it was the head of the tech squad who’d given him the tip-as well as a few other officers. In addition there were a few external talents, for as always in an intellectual, analytic context it was imperative that you got new, fresh input from outside. It was his best friend, who was now an executive in state-owned industry but who had earlier had a long history as a consultant to the department, who had promised to ask a good friend of his, a former diplomat who had a very high position in the foreign ministry and solid experience of his own in police investigation. And this person had in turn contacted one of his acquaintances, a press spokesman with the National Police Board who also brought great personal experience of “forceful exertions in manly connections and environments,” as the former ambassador summarized it in the very friendly letter that he’d written to the chief constable to thank him for the invitation to the seminar.
After he’d welcomed the participants he started with a little lecture on historical scientific detectives both in literature and in so-called real life, and he’d brought in Holmes, Bertillon, and Locard, and his own great predecessor in the subject, Georg Liljensparre. Only after that had he gotten onto the subject of his own system of classification.
“You must always have a main track,” the chief constable began. “By main track I mean the clue that in the light of earlier empirical experience of similar criminal actions is in statistical terms the most probable.”
No one had had any objections, and most of them had diligently taken notes.
“As far as the next most likely alternative is concerned,” the chief constable continued, “I have chosen to characterize it as the alternative main track. This has among other things the advantage,” he added, “that if new information should present itself that alters the original probabilities of various alternatives, then it’s simple enough to make an alternative main track the main track and vice versa. Any questions?”
“What do we do about the broad unprejudiced effort?” wondered one of those invited, whose name he’d forgotten. He had to ask Grevlinge afterward.
“On that point there is no reason for concern,” the chief constable, who had thought of everything, reassured him. “At the next level, the third level below the main track and the alternative main tracks, we have thus a greater or lesser number of so-called secondary tracks, and the great advantage with that is that we are free to have as many secondary tracks as might need to be mobilized based on the particular case.”
The congregation had pondered this obvious point in deep silence.
“Imagine a pyramid, a logically constructed pyramid,” said the chief constable. “Moving from bottom to top we have secondary tracks, alternative main tracks, and main tracks, and obviously we work in the opposite direction from top to bottom, digging down intellectually, so to speak.”