The Man With the Silver Saab: A Detective Varg Novel (3) (Detective Varg, 3) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 4: Detective Varg Series

McCall Smith, Alexander

 
9780593313633: The Man With the Silver Saab: A Detective Varg Novel (3) (Detective Varg, 3)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593313631 ISBN 13: 9780593313633
Verlag: Anchor Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

In the hilarious new novel in the best-selling Detective Varg series, an eminent art historian is framed and the ace investigators of the department of sensitive crimes are on the case.
 
Detective Ulf Varg is a man of refined tastes and quite familiar with the art scene in Malmö. So when art historian Anders Kindgren visits the Department of Sensitive Crimes to report a series of bizarre acts that have been committed against him, Ulf and his team swing into action. Fish stuffed into the vents of Kindgren’s car and a manipulated footnote in a recent publication would be cause enough for an investigation, but when a painting Kindgren had confidently appraised as genuine is later declared to be a fake, it’s clear that someone is out to tarnish his reputation.
 
Meanwhile, Ulf is also weathering personal issues, which quickly spiral out of control. When his lip-reading dog, Martin, engages in a contretemps with a squirrel that results in a grievous wound, Ulf must rush Martin to the veterinarian and weigh the merits of cosmetic surgery for animals. And later, when Martin’s blood is found in the back of Ulf’s classic Saab, Ulf finds himself the subject of a departmental investigation.
 
In the end, Ulf will have to muster all his detective skills and bureaucratic cunning to restore Kindgren’s reputation—as well as his own.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels and of a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been best sellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.

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CHAPTER ONE: AN ATTACK WITH IMPUNITY

It happened very quickly. One moment, Ulf Varg’s hearing-impaired 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.
 
Of course, these things often take place against a background of entirely ordinary events. A big thing happens while small things are going on all about it. Take suffering: Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a reflection on Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, reminds us of just that—of how the Old Masters under­stood only too well the human context of suffering, about how it occurs when people in its vicinity are going about their ordinary business, their innocent routines. The tragedy of the boy falling into the sea unfolds while a ship sails blithely on, while a man ploughs a field unaware of what is happening in the bay. Ordinary human business. So it was that when misfortune struck Martin on that Saturday morning, Ulf himself was chatting in the park to a fellow dog owner; a small boy was trying—unsuccessfully—to launch an uncooperative kite, the boy being still too young to understand that kites require wind; and a young couple, newly in love, were having their first disagreement, on a park bench, about what to do that evening.
 
At first, Ulf barely noticed what was happening. His conversa­tion with the other dog owner was 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 twenties, 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. Eyebrows may have been raised in the past over these things, but not now, when all judgement as to personal erotic preference had been more or less abandoned in the name of . . . in the name of what? wondered Ulf. Freedom? Personal fulfilment? That must be it: our ability to disapprove had been blunted. And as disapproval waned, so too did morality itself change. It was no longer about goodness; it was about freedom to do what you wanted to do. In a world in which the concept of sin was so out­dated as to seem like a medieval survival, the real offence seemed to be disrespect for the tastes and ambitions of others.
 
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.”
 
Stig nodded. “So you should.”
 
“But if it’s something minor—a small theft, for example, or a row between neighbours—we might decide we just don’t have the time to look into it.”
 
“All right—triage.”
 
Ulf thought the analogy apposite. “Yes, it’s what you people do in the emergency department, isn’t it? People come in and you decide who’s bleeding the most or who’s in most pain. It’s the same sort of decision.”
 
“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 appreciable 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 heavy-handed government. Policemen could sometimes find themselves becoming oppressors because of the very nature of what they did, but Ulf had always seen the police as public guardians—the protectors rather than the destroyers of people’s freedoms. That was his vision of police work in general, and in particular it was the philosophy that guided his approach to the unusual complaints with which his own department, the Department of Sensitive Crimes, was concerned.
 
“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?”
 
It would be easy to laugh now, thought Ulf. Of course, cucumbers were capable of being threatening in a way in which peaches and nectarines, for instance, were not. But this man, this cucuberist, was...

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Verlag
Anchor Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593313631
ISBN 13 
9780593313633
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
238
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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