Sidetracked

by Henning Mankell

  “I’m going to see him tonight,” said Wallander, thinking about the pile of dirty laundry on his floor.

  “I’d appreciate it if you called me,” she said.

  Wallander promised he would. Then he called Riga. When the phone was picked up he thought it was Baiba at first. Then he realised that it was her housekeeper, who spoke nothing but Latvian. He hung up quickly. At the same moment his phone rang and he jumped.

  He picked up the phone and heard Martinsson’s voice.

  “I hope I’m not bothering you,” said Martinsson.

  “I just stopped by to change my shirt,” said Wallander, wondering why he always felt it necessary to excuse himself for being at home. “Has something happened?”

  “A few calls have come in about missing persons,” said Martinsson. “Ann-Britt is busy going through them.”

  “I was thinking more of what you had come up with on the computer.”

  “The mainframe has been down all morning,” Martinsson replied glumly. “I called Stockholm a while ago. Somebody there thought it might be up and running again in an hour, but he wasn’t sure.”

  “We’re not chasing crooks,” Wallander said. “We can wait.”

  “A doctor called from Malmö,” Martinsson continued. “A woman. Her name was Malmström. I promised her you’d call.”

  “Why couldn’t she talk to you?”

  “She wanted to talk to you. I suppose it’s because you were the last one to see the woman alive.”

  Wallander wrote down the number. “I was out there today,” he said. “Nyberg was on his knees in the filth, sweating. He was waiting for a police dog.”

  “He’s like a dog himself,” said Martinsson, not disguising his dislike of Nyberg.

  “He can be grumpy,” Wallander protested. “But he knows his stuff.”

  He was about to hang up when he remembered Salomonsson.

  “The farmer died,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The man whose kitchen we were drinking coffee in last night. He had a heart attack.”

  After he hung up, Wallander went to the kitchen and drank some water. For a long time he sat at the kitchen table doing nothing. Eventually he called Malmö. He had to wait while the doctor named Malmström was called to the phone. From her voice he could hear that she was very young. Wallander introduced himself and apologised for the delay in returning her call.

  “Has any new information come to light that indicates that a crime was committed?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “In that case we won’t have to do an autopsy,” she replied. “That will make it easier. She burned herself to death using petrol – leaded.”

  Wallander felt that he was about to be sick. He imagined her blackened body, as if it were lying right next to the woman he was speaking to.

  “We don’t know who she was,” he said. “We need to know as much as possible about her in order to be able to give a clear description.”

  “It’s always hard with a burned body,” she said, without emotion. “All the skin is burned away. The dental examination isn’t ready yet. But she had good teeth. No fillings. She was 163 centimetres tall. She had never broken a bone.”

  “I need her age,” said Wallander. “That’s almost the most important thing.”

  “That’ll take a few more days. We can base it on her teeth.”

  “What would you guess?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I saw her from 20 metres away,” said Wallander. “I think she was about 17. Am I wrong?”

  The female doctor thought a moment before she replied.

  “I don’t like to guess,” she said at last. “But I think she was younger.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’ll tell you when I know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out she was only 15.”

  “Could a 15-year-old really kill herself in that way?” Wallander asked. “I have a hard time believing that.”

  “Last week I put together the pieces of a seven-year-old girl who blew herself up,” replied the doctor. “She had planned it very carefully. She made certain that no-one else would be hurt. Since she could barely write, she left behind a drawing as her farewell letter. And recently I heard of a four-year-old who tried to poke his own eyes out because he was afraid of his father.”

  “That just isn’t possible,” said Wallander. “Not here in Sweden.”

  “It was here, all right,” she said. “In Sweden. In the centre of the universe. In the middle of summer.”

  Wallander’s eyes filled with tears.

  “As we don’t know who she was, we’ll keep her here,” the doctor said.

  “I have a question,” said Wallander. “Is it incredibly painful to burn to death?”

  “People have known that through the ages,” she replied. “That’s why they used fire as one of the worst punishments or tortures that someone could be subjected to. They burned Joan of Arc, they burned witches. In every era people have been tortured by fire. The pain is beyond imagining. And, you don’t lose consciousness as fast as you would hope. There’s an instinct to run from the flames that’s stronger than the desire to escape the pain. That’s why your mind forces you not to pass out. Then you reach a limit. For a while the burned nerves become numbed. There are examples of people with 90 per cent of their body burned who for a brief time felt uninjured. But when the numbness wears off . . .”

  She didn’t finish her sentence.

  “She burned like a flare,” said Wallander.

  “The best thing you can do is stop thinking about it,” she said. “Death can actually be a liberator. No matter how reluctant we are to accept that.”

  When the conversation was over, Wallander got up, grabbed his jacket, and left the flat. The wind had started blowing outside. Cloud cover had moved in from the north. On the way to the station he pulled in to the M.O.T. garage and made an appointment. When he arrived at the station, he stopped at the reception desk. Ebba had recently slipped and broken her hand. He asked how she was feeling.

  “It reminds me that I’m getting old,” she said.

  “You’ll never get old,” said Wallander.

  “That’s a nice thing to say,” she said. “But it’s not true.”

  On the way to his office Wallander stopped to see Martinsson, who was sitting in front of his computer.

  “They got it up and running 20 minutes ago,” he said. “I’m just checking the description to see whether there are any missing persons who fit.”

  “Add that she was 163 centimetres tall,” said Wallander. “And that she was between 15 and 17 years old.”

  Martinsson gave him a baffled look.

  “Only 15? That can’t be possible, can it?”

  “I wish it weren’t true,” said Wallander. “But for now we have to consider it a possibility. How’s it going with the initials?”

  “I haven’t got that far yet,” said Martinsson. “But I was planning to stay late this evening.”

  “We’re trying to make an identification,” said Wallander. “We’re not searching for a fugitive.”

  “There’s no-one at home tonight anyway,” said Martinsson. “I don’t like going back to an empty house.”

  Wallander left Martinsson and looked in on Höglund’s room, which was empty. He went back down the hall to the operations centre, where the emergency alerts and phone calls were received. Höglund was sitting at a table with a senior officer, going through a pile of papers.

  “Any leads?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a couple of tip-offs we have to look into more closely,” she said. “One is a girl from Tomelilla Folk College who’s been missing for two days.”

  “Our girl was 163 centimetres tall,” said Wallander. “She had perfect teeth. She was between 15 and 17 years old.”

  “That young?” she asked in amazement.

  “Yep,” said Wallander. “That young.”

  “Then it’s not the gi
rl from Tomelilla, anyway,” said Höglund, putting down the paper in her hand. “She’s 23 and tall.”

  She searched through the stack of papers for a moment.

  “Here’s another one,” she said. “A 16-year-old girl named Mari Lippmansson. She lives here in Ystad and works in a bakery. She’s been missing from her job for three days. It was the baker who called. He was furious. Her parents evidently don’t care about her at all.”

  “Take a look at her,” Wallander said encouragingly. But he knew she wasn’t the one.

  He got a cup of coffee and went to his room. The folder on the car thefts was still lying on the floor. He’d better turn the case over to Svedberg now. He hoped no serious crimes would be committed before he started his holiday.

  Later that afternoon they met in the conference room. Nyberg was back from the farm, where he had finished his search. It was a short meeting. Hansson had excused himself because he had to read an urgent memo from national headquarters.

  “Let’s be brief,” said Wallander. “Tomorrow we’ll go over all the cases that can’t wait.”

  He turned to Nyberg, sitting at the end of the table.

  “How’d it go with the dog?” he asked.

  “He didn’t find a thing,” Nyberg replied. “If there was ever anything to give him a scent, it was covered up by the odour of petrol.”

  Wallander thought for a moment.

  “You found five melted petrol containers,” he said. “That means that she must have come to Salomonsson’s field in some sort of vehicle. She couldn’t have carried all that petrol by herself. Unless she walked there several times. There’s one more possibility, of course. That she didn’t come alone. But that doesn’t seem reasonable, to say the least. Who would help a young girl commit suicide?”

  “We could try to trace the petrol containers,” said Nyberg dubiously. “But is it really necessary?”

  “As long as we don’t know who she was, we have to trace her by any leads we have,” Wallander replied. “She must have come from somewhere, somehow.”

  “Did anyone look in Salomonsson’s barn?” asked Höglund. “Maybe the petrol containers came from there.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “Someone had better drive out there and check,” he said.

  Höglund volunteered.

  “We’ll have to wait for Martinsson’s results,” Wallander said, winding up the meeting. “And the pathologists’ work in Malmö. They’re going to give us an exact age tomorrow.”

  “And the gold medallion?” asked Svedberg.

  “We’ll wait until we have some idea of what the letters on it might mean,” said Wallander.

  He suddenly realised something he had completely overlooked earlier. Behind the dead girl there were other people. Who would mourn her. Who would forever see her running like a living flare in their heads, in a totally different way from him. The fire would stay with them like scars. It would gradually fade away from him like nightmare.

  They went their separate ways. Svedberg went with Wallander to get the papers on the car thefts. Wallander gave him a brief run-down. When they were done, Svedberg didn’t get up, and Wallander sensed that there was something he wanted to talk about.

  “We ought to get together and talk,” said Svedberg hesitantly. “About what’s going on.”

  “You’re thinking about the cuts? And security companies taking over the custody of suspects?”

  Svedberg nodded glumly. “What use are new uniforms if we can’t do our jobs?”

  “I don’t really think it’ll help to talk about it,” Wallander said warily. “We have a union that’s paid to take care of these matters.”

  “We ought to protest, at least,” said Svedberg. “We ought to talk to people on the street about what’s going to happen.”

  “People have their own troubles,” replied Wallander, and at the same time it occurred to him that Svedberg was quite right. The public was prepared to bend over backwards to save their police stations.

  Svedberg stood up. “That’s about it,” he said.

  “Set up a meeting,” Wallander said. “I promise I’ll come. But wait until summer’s over.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Svedberg and left the room with the files under his arm.

  It was late afternoon. Through the window Wallander could see that it was about to rain. He decided to have a pizza before he drove out to see his father in Löderup. On the way out he stopped in on Martinsson.

  “Don’t stay there too long,” he said.

  “I haven’t found anything yet,” said Martinsson.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Wallander went out to his car, which was already spattered with raindrops. He was just about to drive away when Martinsson ran out waving his arms. We’ve got her, he thought, and felt a knot in his stomach. He rolled down the window.

  “Did you find her?” he asked.

  “No,” said Martinsson.

  Wallander realised something serious had happened. He got out of the car.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Someone phoned in,” said Martinsson. “A body has been found on the beach out past Sandskogen.”

  Damn, thought Wallander. Not now. Not that.

  “It sounds like a murder,” Martinsson went on. “It was a man that called. He was unusually lucid, even though I think he was in shock.”

  “Get your jacket,” said Wallander. “It’s raining.”

  Martinsson didn’t move.

  “The man who called seemed to know who the victim was.”

  Wallander could tell by Martinsson’s face that he ought to dread what would come next.

  “He said it was Wetterstedt. The former minister of justice.”

  Wallander stared at Martinsson.

  “What?”

  “Gustaf Wetterstedt. The minister of justice. And he said it looked as if he’d been scalped.”

  It was Wednesday, 22 June.

  CHAPTER 6

  The rain was coming down harder by the time they got to the beach. On the way there they had spoken very little. Martinsson gave directions. They turned off onto a narrow road past the tennis courts. Wallander tried to picture what awaited them. What he wanted least of all had happened. If the man who called the station turned out to be right, his leave was in danger. Hansson would appeal to him to postpone it, and eventually he would have to give in. What he had been hoping for – that his desk would be cleared of pressing matters at the end of June – was not going to happen.

  They saw the dunes ahead of them and stopped. A man came forward to meet them. To Wallander’s surprise, he didn’t seem older than 30. If it was Wetterstedt who had died, this man couldn’t have been more than ten when the minister of justice had retired and vanished from public view. Wallander had been a young detective at the time. In the car he had tried to remember Wetterstedt’s face. He wore his hair cropped short, and glasses without frames. Wallander vaguely recalled his voice: blaring, invariably self-confident, never willing to admit a mistake.

  The young man introduced himself as Göran Lindgren. He was dressed in shorts and a thin sweater, and he seemed very agitated. They followed him down to the beach, deserted now that it had started to rain. Lindgren led them over to a big rowing boat turned upside down. On the far side there was a wide gap between the sand and the boat’s gunwale.

  “He’s under there,” said Lindgren in an unsteady voice.

  Wallander and Martinsson looked at each other, still hoping the man had imagined it. They knelt down and peered in under the boat. In the dim light they could see a body lying there.

  “We’ll have to turn the boat over,” said Martinsson in a low voice, as if afraid the dead man would hear him.

  “No,” said Wallander, “we’re not turning anything over.” He got up quickly and turned to Göran Lindgren.

  “I assume you have a torch,” he said. “Otherwise you couldn’t have described the body in such detail.”

  The man
nodded in surprise and pulled a torch out of a plastic bag near the boat. Wallander bent down again and shone the light inside.

  “Holy shit,” said Martinsson at his side.

  The dead man’s face was covered with blood. But they could see that the skin from the forehead up over his skull was torn off, and Lindgren had been right. It was Wetterstedt under the boat. They stood up. Wallander handed back the torch.

  “How did you know it was Wetterstedt?” he asked.

  “He lives here,” said Lindgren, pointing up towards a villa to the left of the boat. “Besides, everyone knows him. You don’t forget a politician who was on TV all the time.”

  Wallander nodded doubtfully.

  “We’ll need a full team out here,” he said to Martinsson. “Go and call. I’ll wait here.”

  Martinsson hurried off. It was raining harder now.

  “When did you find him?” asked Wallander.

  “I don’t have a watch on me,” said Lindgren. “But it couldn’t have been more than half an hour ago.”

  “Where did you call from?”

  Lindgren pointed to the plastic bag.

  “I have a mobile phone.”

  Wallander regarded him with interest.

  “He’s lying under an overturned boat,” he said. “He’s invisible from outside. You must have bent down to be able to see him?”

  “It’s my boat,” said Lindgren simply. “Or my father’s, to be exact. I usually walk here on the beach when I finish work. Since it was starting to rain, I thought I’d put my things under the boat. When I felt the bag bump into something I bent down. At first I thought it was a plank, but then I saw him.”

  “It’s really none of my business,” said Wallander, “but I wonder why you had a torch with you?”

  “We have a summer cottage in the woods at Sandskogen,” replied Lindgren. “Over by Myrgången. We’re in the process of rewiring it, so it has no lights. My father and I are electricians.”