Book extract

Sweden’s Department of Sensitive Crimes is on the case once again…

A glimpse of The Man

With the Silver Saab by Alexander McCall Smith

Ihappened very quickly. One moment, Ulf Varg’s hearingimpaired dog, Martin, was enjoying his outing to the park, sniffing about in the bushes, pursuing ancient and tantalising smells, the next he was bleeding copiously from a number of severe head wounds. Above him in the trees, the unrepentant perpetrator of this outrage, a large male squirrel, bloodstained himself but clearly the victor, looked down on his victim with all the mocking impunity that the arboreal have for the land-bound.

At first, Ulf barely noticed what was happening. He was having a conversation with a fellow dog owner about a puzzling series of incidents that had taken place in the park a few weeks earlier and that, in the opinion of the other man, had been scandalously under-investigated by the police.

The incidents in question had occurred at night, and had all involved young women being approached by a man who, without warning, danced up and down in front of them shouting, ‘Cucumber! Cucumber!’ before rushing off into the trees.

‘It’s utterly bizarre,’ said Stig, Ulf’s friend in the park, about whom he knew very little other than that he was a doctor, and often overworked. ‘Seemingly, it was not all that serious, but the victims have all been young women in their late teens or early 20s and they’ve been pretty shocked by the experience. I know one of them – she works in the hospital pharmacy. A very open, friendly girl – and robust, too, I would have thought. But she was pretty shaken.’

Ulf tried not to grin. As a member of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Malmö, he had seen just about every sort of bizarre behaviour that people were capable of, and he had long assumed nothing would surprise or shock him. Human perversity, he realised, was endlessly inventive. No sexual fixation or aberration, however ridiculous, struck Ulf as being unlikely or impossible: no private fantasy was too odd not to have its secret practitioners; nothing was out of bounds or unlikely as a vehicle for concupiscence.

Ulf managed a serious face. ‘That’s not good,’ he said at last. ‘People should not frighten other people with… with cucumbers. That’s bad.’

There was a note of accusation in Stig’s tone. ‘Then why did your colleagues in the uniformed police not do anything? Why did they say: probably just a harmless crazy person? Why did they not lift a finger to investigate?’

Ulf felt he had to explain about operational discretion. ‘The police can’t do everything,’ he pointed out. ‘We have to pick and choose – according to what’s most urgent, or most serious. If somebody threatens to kill somebody, for instance, we drop everything to investigate.’

‘Yes,’ said Stig. ‘But… ’ He paused. ‘It’s just that people think the police have become soft. They think the police will let people get away with anything. And that’s particularly the case here in

Malmö, where the police are anxious to not be seen to be picking on people.’

He paused, looking hesitantly at Ulf: one had to be careful what one said, and many people said nothing. ‘Is it because the police are party to our great Swedish pretence that crime doesn’t exist here? That people are imagining it? Or that it’s all socio-economic?’

Well, it is, thought Ulf. Or, at least, to an extent: crime was committed by those on the outside. But he looked away; he knew what the other man meant, but he knew, too, that he could quite quickly be drawn into the sort of conversation that he wanted to avoid. He reached for the anodynes. ‘We do our best,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, if you come down too hard on a particular group, it makes matters worse. They think you’re picking on them. And you might be – even subconsciously. You have to keep everybody onside – as far as possible.’

The doctor sighed. ‘I know, Ulf.

I know. You’re right about that. We wouldn’t want Sweden to become an oppressive society.’

‘No, we wouldn’t.’ His agreement was real, and heartfelt; he would not have wanted to be a member of the Criminal Investigation Department of a heavyhanded government.

‘And yet,’ Stig continued, ‘a light touch should not allow people to go around frightening people by shouting “Cucumber” at them.’ He fixed Ulf with a challenging stare. ‘In the dark.

In a park. Whether or not a cucumber is threatening is surely contextual, wouldn’t you say?’

✢ The Man with the Silver Saab by Alexander McCall Smith is available now (£18.99, Little, Brown)

He’d seen every bizarre behaviour