Authors: Henning Mankell
“You just vanished into thin air,” she said. “I think we have enough missing persons to contend with.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Wallander. “I came home an hour or so ago. I was planning to call you tomorrow.”
“No,” she said, “now! I—not to mention Hans—want to know what you’ve found out.”
“Is he at home?”
“He’s at work. I told him off this morning because he’s never here. I tried to hammer it into him that one of these days I’ll start working again. What will happen then?”
“Well, what will happen?”
“He’ll have to help. Anyway, tell me all about it.”
Wallander started to describe his visit to Signe, the lonely, hunched-up creature with the blond hair, but before he had hit his stride, Klara started crying and Linda was forced to hang up. He promised to call her the following day.
The first thing he did when he arrived at the police station the next morning was to find Martinsson and figure out whether or not he would be on duty over the Midsummer holiday. Martinsson was, of all his colleagues, best acquainted with the constantly changing work schedule, and he was able to answer within a couple of minutes. Despite so many officers being on leave, Wallander would not be required to work over Midsummer. As for Martinsson, he had arranged to take his youngest daughter to a yoga camp in Denmark.
“I don’t really know what it involves,” he said, trying to hide his concern. “Is it normal for a thirteen-year-old to be so crazy about yoga?”
“Better that than a lot of other things.”
“My two older children were into horses. Much less stressful. But this girl is different.”
“We’re all different,” said Wallander mysteriously, and left the room.
He dialed the number he had tracked down the previous evening and soon discovered that NRG123 belonged to a fisherman by the name of Eskil Lundberg on Bokö in the Gryt southern archipelago. He made another call and, when an answering machine came on, he left a message saying it was urgent.
Then he called Linda and finished the conversation they had begun the previous evening. She had spoken to Hans, and as soon as possible they
would go visit Signe. Wallander wasn’t surprised, but he wondered if they really understood what was in store for them. What had he himself expected to find?
“We’ve decided to celebrate Midsummer,” she said. “In spite of everything that’s happened, and all the anguish over his parents’ disappearance. We thought we’d cheer you up by coming to visit you.”
“By all means,” said Wallander. “I’m looking forward to it. What a nice surprise!”
He got a cup of coffee from the machine, which was actually working for once, and exchanged a few words with one of the forensic officers who had spent the night in a swamp where a confused woman appeared to have committed suicide. When the officer eventually arrived home at dawn, he had produced a frog from one of the many pockets in his uniform. His wife had been less than overjoyed.
Wallander returned to his office and managed to find yet another number in his overloaded address book. It was the last call he planned to make that morning before abandoning the missing von Enkes and returning to his routine police work. Earlier he had left a message on an answering machine. Now he was about to dial the cell phone number of that same person. This time he got through.
“Hans-Olov.”
Wallander recognized the almost childish voice of the young professor of geology he had met in the course of duty several years ago. He could hear an announcement in the background about a flight departure.
“Wallander here. I gather you’re at an airport?”
“Yes, Kastrup. I’m on my way back home after a geology congress in Chile, but my suitcase seems to have been lost.”
“I need your help,” said Wallander. “I’d like you to compare some stones.”
“Sure thing. But can it wait until tomorrow? I’m always a wreck after a long flight.”
Wallander remembered that Uddmark had no less than five children, despite his youth.
“I hope your presents for the children weren’t in the missing bag.”
“It’s worse than that. It contains some beautiful stones I brought home with me.”
“Is your office address the same as it was the last time we worked together? If it is I can send you the stones later today.”
“What do you want me to do with them, apart from establishing what kind of rock they are?”
“I want to know if any of them might have originated in the U.S.A.”
“Can you be more precise?”
“In the vicinity of San Diego in California, or somewhere on the east coast, near Boston.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but it sounds difficult. Do you have any idea how many different species of rock there are?”
Wallander told him that he didn’t know, sympathized with him once again about the missing suitcase, hung up, and then hurried to join a meeting he should have been at. Someone had left a note on his desk saying it was important. He was the last person to enter the conference room, where the window was wide open because the forecast said it was going to be a hot day. He couldn’t help thinking about all the times he had been in charge of these kinds of meetings. During all the years when it had been his responsibility, he had often dreamed of the day when the burden would no longer be on his shoulders. But now, when it was often somebody else in charge of investigations, he sometimes missed not being the driving force sorting through proposals and telling people what to do.
The man in charge today was a detective by the name of Ove Sunde. He had arrived in Ystad only the previous year, from Växjö. Somebody had whispered in Wallander’s ear that a messy divorce and a less than successful investigation that led to a heated debate in the local newspaper,
Smålandsposten
, had induced him to request a transfer. He came from Gothenburg originally, and never made any attempt to disguise his dialect. Sunde was considered to be competent, but a bit on the lazy side. Another rumor suggested that he had found a new companion in Ystad, a woman young enough to be his daughter. Wallander distrusted men his own age who chased after women far too young for them. It rarely ended happily, but often led to new, heart-rending divorces.
It was doubtful, though, that his own constant loneliness was a better alternative.
Sunde began his presentation. It was about the case of the woman in the swamp, which was probably not just a suicide but also a murder. Her husband was found lying dead in their home in a little village not far from Marsvinsholm. The situation was complicated by the fact that a few days earlier the man had gone to the police station in Ystad and said that he thought his wife was planning to kill him. The officer who spoke to him hadn’t taken him seriously because the man seemed confused and made a lot of contradictory claims. They needed to figure out as quickly as possible what had actually happened, before the media caught on to the fact that the man’s complaint had been shelved. Wallander was annoyed by Sunde’s excessively officious tone. He considered this fear of the opinion of the mass media sheer cowardice. If a mistake was made, it should be acknowledged and the consequences accepted.
He thought he should point that out, calmly and objectively, firmly but without losing his temper. But he said nothing. Martinsson was sitting at the other side of the table, watching him. He knows exactly what’s going on inside my head at the moment, Wallander thought, and he agrees with me, whether I speak up now or hold my tongue.
After the meeting they drove out to the house where the dead man had been found. With photographs in their hands and plastic bags over their shoes, he and Martinsson went from room to room in the company of a forensic officer. Wallander suddenly experienced déjà vu, feeling like he had already visited this house at some point in the past and made an “ocular inspection” (as Lennart Mattson would no doubt have described it) of the crime scene. He hadn’t, of course; it was simply that he had done the same thing so many times before. A few years ago he bought a book about a crime committed on the island of Värmdö off Stockholm in the early nineteenth century. As he read it, he became increasingly involved, and had the distinct feeling that he could have entered the story and together with the county sheriff and prosecutor worked out how the victims, man and wife, had been murdered. People have always been the same, and the most common crimes are more or less repeats of what happened in earlier times. They are nearly always due to arguments about money, or jealousy, sometimes revenge. Before him, generations of police officers, sheriffs, and prosecutors had made the same observations. Nowadays they had superior technical means of establishing evidence, but the ability to interpret what you see with your own eyes was still the key to police work.
Wallander stopped dead and broke off his train of thought. They had entered the couple’s bedroom. There was blood on the floor and on one side of the bed. But what had caught Wallander’s attention was a painting hanging on the wall above the bed. It depicted a capercaillie in a woodland setting. Martinsson materialized by his side.
“Painted by your father, right?”
Wallander nodded, but also shook his head in disbelief.
“I never cease to be amazed.”
“Well, at least he didn’t need to worry about forgeries,” said Martinsson thoughtfully.
“Of course not,” said Wallander. “From an artistic point of view, it’s crap.”
“Don’t say that,” protested Martinsson.
“I’m only calling a spade a spade,” said Wallander. “Where’s the murder weapon?”
They went out into the yard. A plastic tent had been erected over an old ax. Wallander could see blood high up on the shaft.
“Is there a plausible motive? How long had they been married?”
“They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary last year. They have four grown children and goodness knows how many grandchildren. Nobody can understand what happened.”
“Is there money involved?”
“According to the neighbors they were both thrifty and stingy. I don’t know yet how much they have stashed away. The bank’s looking into it. But we can assume that there’s a fair amount.”
“It looks as if there was a fight,” Wallander said after a few minutes’ thought. “He resisted. Until we recover the body, we can’t say what sort of injuries she had.”
“It’s not a big swamp,” said Martinsson. “They expect to pull her out today.”
They drove back from the depressing scene of the crime to the police station. It seemed to Wallander that just for a moment, the summer landscape had been transformed into a black-and-white photograph. He spent some time swiveling back and forth in his desk chair, then dialed Eskil Lundberg’s number. His wife answered, and she said her husband was out in his boat. Wallander could hear young children playing in the background. He guessed that Eskil Lundberg was the boy he had seen in the photograph.
“I assume he’s out fishing,” said Wallander.
“What else? He has nearly a mile of nets out there. Every other day he delivers fish to Söderköping.”
“Eel?”
She sounded almost offended when she replied.
“If he’d been after eels he’d have taken eel traps with him,” she said. “But there are no eels anymore. Before long there won’t be any fish left at all.”
“Does he still have the boat?”
“Which boat?”
“The big trawler. NRG123.”
Wallander noticed that she was becoming less and less cooperative, almost suspicious.
“He tried to sell it ages ago. Nobody wanted it, it was such a wreck. It rotted away. He sold the engine for a hundred kronor. What exactly do you want?”
“I want to speak to him,” Wallander said, in as friendly a tone as he could manage. “Does he have a cell phone with him?”
“There’s not much of a signal out there. You’d be better off calling him when he gets back home. He should be here in about two hours.”
“I’ll do that.”
He managed to bring the call to a close before she had another chance to ask him what he wanted. He leaned back and put his feet on his desk. Now he had no meetings, no tasks that required his immediate attention. He grabbed his jacket and left the police station—to be on the safe side, he left via the basement garage, so that nobody could catch him at the last moment. He walked down the hill into town, and felt a spring in his step. He wasn’t yet so old that nothing affected him anymore. Sun and warm weather made everything more tolerable.
He had lunch in a café just off the square, read
Ystads Allehanda
and one of the evening newspapers. Then he sat on a bench in the square. He had another quarter of an hour to kill. He wondered where Håkan and Louise were at that moment. Were they still alive, or were they dead? Had they made some kind of pact regarding their disappearance? He was reminded of the turmoil caused by the spy Stig Bergling, but he had trouble finding any similarities between the serious submarine commander and the conceited Bergling.
Wallander also considered another factor that he reluctantly conceded could be of vital significance. Håkan von Enke had visited his daughter regularly. Was he really prepared to let her down by going underground? The inevitable conclusion was that von Enke must be dead.
There was an alternative, of course, Wallander thought as he watched people rummaging through old LP records at one of the market stands. Von Enke had been scared. Could it be that whoever he was afraid of had caught up with him? Wallander had no answers, only questions that he must try to formulate as clearly and precisely as possible.
When the time came he called Bokö just as a somewhat drunk man sat down on the other end of the bench. A man’s voice eventually answered. Wallander decided to put all his cards on the table. He said his name, and explained that he was a police officer.
“I found a photograph in a file that belongs to a man called Håkan von Enke. Do you know him?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly and firmly. Wallander had the impression that Lundberg was on his guard.
“Do you know his wife? Louise?”
“No.”
“But your paths must have crossed somehow. Why else would he have a photo of you and a man I assume is your father. And of the boat NRG123. That’s your boat, isn’t it?”