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on the Skåne plains,' Allwright said. 'Speaking of which...' 'Yes?'
    'Well, the last time I was in Stockholm - and I hope to heaven it was the last time - I was looking for the National Police Administration and wandered into Communist Party Headquarters instead. Ran into the head of the Party himself on the stairs and wondered what the hell he was doing at the NPA. But he was very nice. Took me where I wanted to go. Walked his bicycle the whole way.'
    Martin Beck laughed.
    Allwright took the opportunity of joining in.
    ‘But that wasn't all. The next day I thought I'd go up and say hello to your Commissioner. The old one, the one who used to be in Malmö. I don't know the new one, thank God. So I went to the
    City Hall, and some sort of guard tried to give me a tour of the Blue Gallery. When I finally managed to tell him what I wanted, he sent me over to Scheelegatan and I wandered into the courthouse. The guard wanted to know which room my case was coming up in and what I was on trial for. By the time I finally got to the police building on Agnegatan, Lüning had gone for the day. So that took care of that. I took the night train home. Had a wonderful time all the way south. Three hundred and fifty miles. What a difference.' He looked thoughtful.
    'Stockholm,' he said. 'What a miserable city. But then, of course, you like it'
    'Lived there all my life,' said Martin Beck.
    'Malmö's better,' Allwright said. 'Though not much. I wouldn't want to work there, unless they made me Commissioner or something. But let's not even talk about Stockholm.'
    He laughed loudly.
    'Sigbrit Mård,' said Martin Beck.
    'Sigbrit had the day off that day. And she'd left her car to be fixed, so she took the bus to Anderslöv. Ran some errands. Went to the bank and the post office. And then disappeared. She didn't take the bus. The driver knows her, and he knows she wasn't on board. No one's seen her since. That was the seventeenth of October. It was about one o'clock when she left the post office. Her car, a VW, is still at the garage. There's nothing there. I went over it myself. And we took some samples and sent them to the lab in Helsingborg. All negative. Not a clue, as it were.'
    'Do you know her? Personally?'
    'Yes, sure. Until this back-to-nature fad got started, I knew every soul in the district. It's not so easy any more. People live in old abandoned houses and dilapidated outbuildings. They don't register in the township, and when you drive out there, often as not they've already moved. And someone else has moved in. The only thing left is the goat and the macrobiotic vegetable garden.'
    'But Sigbrit Mård is different?'
    'Yes, indeed. She's one of the ordinary types. She's lived here for twenty years. She comes from Trelleborg, originally. She seems like a stable sort of person. Always held down a job, and all that. Highly normal Maybe a little frustrated.'
    He lit a cigarette, after inspecting it thoughtfully.
    'But then, that's normal in this country,' he went on. 'For example, I smoke too much. That's probably frustration too.'
    'So she could simply have run away.'
    Allwright bent down and scratched the dog behind the ears.
    'Yes,' he said finally. 'That's a possibility. But I don't believe it This isn't the sort of place you can run away from just like that, without anyone's noticing. And people don't leave their homes completely intact. I went over the house with the detectives from Trelleborg. Everything was still there, all her papers and personal property. Jewellery and all that sort of thing. The coffee pot and her cup were still on the table. It looked as if she'd gone out for a while and expected to be right back.'
    'Then what do you believe?'
    This time Allwright's answer was even longer in coming. He held his cigarette in his left hand and let the dog chew playfully on his right. Every trace of laughter was gone from his face.
    'I believe she's dead,' he said.
    And that was all he said on the subject
    From a distance came