Sidetracked

by Henning Mankell

  Nyberg was in Wetterstedt’s living-room drinking coffee from an old thermos that reminded Wallander of the 1950s. He was sitting on a newspaper to protect the chair.

  “We haven’t found the murder site yet,” said Nyberg “And now there’s no point in looking because of the rain.”

  “I hope the tarpaulins are securely fastened,” Wallander said. “It’s blowing harder all the time.”

  “They won’t move,” said Nyberg.

  “I thought I’d finish going through his desk,” said Wallander.

  “Hansson called. He has spoken to Wetterstedt’s children.”

  “It took him this long?” said Wallander. “I thought he’d done that a while ago.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” said Nyberg. “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  Wallander went into the study and sat down at the desk. He adjusted the lamp so that it cast its light in as big a circle as possible. Then he pulled out one of the drawers in the left-hand cabinet. In it lay a copy of this year’s tax return. Wallander placed it on the desk. He could see that Wetterstedt had declared an income of almost 1,000,000 kronor, and that the income came primarily from Wetterstedt’s private pension plan and share dividends. A summary from the securities register centre revealed that Wetterstedt held shares in traditional Swedish heavy industry; Ericsson, Asea Brown Boveri, Volvo, and Rottneros. Apart from this income, Wetterstedt had reported an honorarium from the foreign ministry and royalties from Tidens publishing company. Under the entry “Net Worth” he had declared 5,000,000 kronor. Wallander memorised this figure.

  He put the tax return back. The next drawer contained something that looked like a photo album. Here are the family pictures Ann-Britt was missing, he thought. But he leafed through the pages with growing astonishment: old-fashioned pornographic pictures, some of them quite sophisticated. Wallander noted that some of the pages fell open more easily than others. Wetterstedt had a preference for young models. Martinsson walked in. Wallander nodded and pointed to the open album.

  “Some people collect stamps,” said Martinsson, “others evidently collect pictures like this.”

  Wallander closed the album and put it back in the desk drawer.

  “A lawyer named Sjögren called from Malmö,” said Martinsson. “He said he had Wetterstedt’s will. There are rather large assets in the estate. I asked him whether there were any unexpected beneficiaries. But everything goes to the direct heirs. Wetterstedt had also set up a foundation to distribute scholarships to young law students. But he put the money into it long ago and paid tax on it.”

  “So, we know that Gustaf Wetterstedt was a wealthy man. But wasn’t he born the son of a poor docker?”

  “Svedberg is working on his background,” said Martinsson. “I gather he’s found an old party secretary with a good memory who had a lot to say about Wetterstedt. But I wanted to have a word about the girl who committed suicide.”

  “Did you find out who she was?”

  “No. But through the computer I’ve found more than 2,000 possibilities for what the letter combination might mean. It was a pretty long print-out.”

  “We’ll have to put it out on Interpol,” said Wallander after a pause. “And what’s the new one called? Europol?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Send out a query with her description. Tomorrow we’ll take a photo of the medallion. Even if everything else is getting pushed aside in the wake of Wetterstedt’s death, we have to try and get that picture in the papers.”

  “I had a jeweller look at it,” said Martinsson. “He said it was solid gold.”

  “Surely somebody is missing her,” said Wallander. “It’s rare for someone to have no relatives at all.”

  Martinsson yawned and asked whether Wallander needed any help.

  “Not tonight,” he said, and Martinsson left the house. Wallander spent another hour going through the desk. Then he turned off the lamp and sat there in the dark. Who was Gustaf Wetterstedt? The picture he had of him was still unclear.

  An idea came to him. He looked up a name in the telephone book. He dialled the number and got an answer almost at once. He explained who it was and asked whether he could come over. Then he hung up. He found Nyberg upstairs and told him he’d be back later that evening.

  The wind and the rain lashed at him as he ran to his car. He drove into town, to a block of flats near Österport School. He rang the bell and the door was opened. When he reached the third floor Lars Magnusson was waiting for him in his stockinged feet. Beautiful piano music was playing.

  “Long time no see,” said Magnusson as they shook hands.

  “You’re right,” said Wallander. “It must be more than five years.”

  Long ago Magnusson had been a journalist. After a number of years at the Express he had tired of city life and returned to his roots in Ystad. He and Wallander met because their wives became friends. The two men discovered that they shared an interest in opera. It wasn’t until many years later, after he and Mona had divorced, that Wallander found out Magnusson was an alcoholic. But when the truth finally did come out, it came out with a vengeance. By chance, Wallander had been at the station late one night when Magnusson was dragged in, so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. He had been driving in that state, and had lost control and gone straight through the plate-glass window of a bank. He’d ended up spending six months in jail.

  When he returned to Ystad he didn’t go back to his job. His wife had left their childless marriage. He continued drinking but managed not to step too far over the line. He gave up his career in journalism and made a living setting chess problems for a number of newspapers. The only reason he hadn’t drunk himself to death was that every day he forced himself to hold off on that first drink until he had devised at least one chess problem. Now that he had a fax machine, he didn’t even have to go to the post office.

  Wallander walked into the simple flat. He could smell that Magnusson had been drinking. A bottle of vodka stood on the coffee table, but Wallander didn’t see a glass.

  Magnusson was a good many years older than Wallander. He had a mane of grey hair falling over his dirty collar. His face was red and swollen, but his eyes were curiously clear. No-one doubted Magnusson’s intelligence. Rumour had it that he once had a collection of poems accepted by Bonniers, but had withdrawn it at the last minute and repaid the small advance.

  “This is unexpected,” said Magnusson. “Have a seat. What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” said Wallander, moving a pile of newspapers and making himself comfortable on a sofa.

  Magnusson casually took a swig from the bottle of vodka and sat down opposite Wallander. He had turned down the piano music.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Wallander. “I’m trying to remember when it was.”

  “At the state off licence,” Magnusson replied quickly. “Almost exactly five years ago. You were buying wine and I was buying everything else.”

  Wallander nodded. He remembered now.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your memory,” he said.

  “I haven’t ruined that yet,” said Magnusson. “I’m saving it for last.”

  “Have you ever considered quitting?”

  “Every day. But I doubt you came here to talk me into going on the wagon.”

  “You’ve probably read that Gustaf Wetterstedt was murdered, haven’t you?”

  “I saw it on the TV.”

  “I seem to remember that you told me something about him once. About the scandals that were hushed up.”

  “And that was the biggest scandal of them all,” Magnusson interrupted him.

  “I’m trying to get a fix on what sort of man he was,” Wallander went on. “I hoped you might be able to help me.”

  “The question is whether you want to hear the unsubstantiated rumours or whether you want to know the truth,” said Magnusson. “I’m not sure I can tell them apart.”

  “Rumours don’t usually get s
tarted without reason,” said Wallander.

  Magnusson pushed away the vodka bottle as though it was too close to him.

  “I started as a 15-year-old trainee at one of the Stockholm news-papers,” he said. “That was in the spring of 1955. There was an old night editor there named Ture Svanberg. He was almost as big a drunk as I am now. But he was meticulous at his work. And he was a genius at writing headlines that sold papers. He wouldn’t stand for anything sloppily written. Once he flew into such a rage over a story that he tore up the copy and ate the pieces, chewed the paper and swallowed it. Then he said: ‘This isn’t coming out as anything but shit.’ It was Svanberg who taught me to be a journalist. He used to say that there were two kinds of reporters. ‘The first kind digs in the ground for the truth. He stands down in the hole shovelling out dirt. But up on top there’s another man, shovelling the dirt back in. There’s always a duel going on between these two. The fourth estate’s eternal test of strength for dominance. Some journalists want to expose and reveal things, others run errands for those in power and help conceal what’s really happening.’

  “And that’s how it really was. I learned fast, even though I was only 15. Men in power always ally themselves with symbolic cleaning companies and undertakers. There are plenty of journalists who won’t hesitate to sell their souls to run errands for those men. To shovel the dirt back into the hole. Paste over the scandals. Pile on the semblance of truth, maintain the illusion of the squeaky-clean society.”

  With a grimace he reached for the bottle again and took a swig. Wallander saw that he’d put on weight around the middle.

  “Wetterstedt,” Magnusson said. “So what was it that actually happened?” He fished a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “Whores and art,” he said. “For years it was common knowledge that the good Gustaf had a girl delivered to the block of flats in Vasastan every week, where he kept a small hideaway his wife didn’t know about. He had a right-hand man who took care of the whole thing. The rumour was that this man was hooked on morphine, supplied by Wetterstedt. He had a lot of doctor friends. The fact that he went to bed with whores wasn’t something the papers bothered with. He was neither the first nor the last Swedish minister to do that. Sometimes I wonder whether we’re talking about the rule or the exception. But one day it went too far. One of the hookers got her courage up and reported him to the police for assault.”

  “When was that?” Wallander interrupted.

  “Mid-60s. Her client said he’d beaten her with a leather belt and cut the soles of her feet with a razor. It was probably the stuff with the razor and her feet that made the difference. Perversion was newsworthy. The only problem was that the police had lodged a complaint against the highest defender of Swedish law and order next to the king. So the whole thing was hushed up, and the police report disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “It literally went up in smoke.”

  “But the girl who reported him? What happened to her?”

  “Overnight she became the proprietor of a lucrative boutique in Västerås.”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I knew a journalist called Sten Lundberg. He dug around in the whole mess. But when the rumours started that he was about to snoop his way to the truth, he was frozen out, blacklisted.”

  “And he accepted it?”

  “He had no choice. Unfortunately he had a weakness that couldn’t be covered up. He gambled. Had huge debts. There was a rumour that those gambling debts suddenly went poof. The same way the hooker’s assault report did. So everything was back to square one. And Wetterstedt went on sending his morphine addict out after girls.”

  “You said there was one more thing,” Wallander said.

  “There was a story that he was mixed up in some of those art thefts carried out during his term as minister of justice. Paintings that were never recovered, and which now hang on the walls of collectors who will never show them to the public. The police arrested a fence once, a middleman. Unintentionally, I’m afraid. The fence swore that Wetterstedt was involved. But it couldn’t be proved. It was buried. There were more people filling up the hole than there were people standing down in it and tossing the dirt out.”

  “Not a pretty picture,” said Wallander.

  “Remember what I asked? Do you want the truth or the rumours? Because the rumour about Wetterstedt was that he was a talented politician, a loyal party member, an amiable human being. Educated and competent. That’s how his obituaries will read. As long as none of the girls he whipped talk.”

  “Why did he leave office?” asked Wallander.

  “I don’t think he got along so well with some of the younger ministers. Especially the women. There was a big shift between the generations in those days. I think he realised that his time was over. Mine was too. I quit being a journalist. After he came to Ystad I never wasted a thought on him. Until now.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to kill him, so many years later?”

  Magnusson shrugged.

  “That’s impossible to answer.”

  Wallander had just one question left.

  “Have you ever heard of a murder in this country where the victim was scalped?”

  Magnusson’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Wallander with a sudden, alert interest.

  “Was he scalped? They didn’t say that on TV. They would have, if they knew about it.”

  “Just between the two of us,” Wallander said, looking at Magnusson, who nodded.

  “We didn’t want to release it just yet,” he went on. “We can always say we can’t reveal it ‘for investigative reasons’. The excuse the police have for presenting half-truths. But this time it’s actually true.”

  “I believe you,” said Magnusson. “Or I don’t believe you. It doesn’t really matter, since I’m no longer a journalist. But I can’t recall a murderer who scalped people. That would have made a great headline. Ture Svanberg would have loved it. Can you avoid leaks?”

  “I don’t know,” Wallander answered frankly. “I’ve had a number of bad experiences over the years.”

  “I won’t sell the story,” said Magnusson.

  Then he accompanied Wallander to the door.

  “How the hell can you stand being a policeman?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Wallander. “I’ll let you know when I work it out.”

  Wallander drove back to Wetterstedt’s house. The wind was gusting up to gale force. Some of Nyberg’s men were taking fingerprints upstairs. Looking out of the balcony window, he saw Nyberg perched on a wobbly ladder leaning against the light pole by the garden gate. He was clinging to the pole, so the wind wouldn’t blow the ladder over. Wallander went to help him, but saw Nyberg begin to climb down. They met in the hall.

  “That could have waited,” said Wallander. “You might have been blown off the ladder.”

  “If I fell off I might have hurt myself,” Nyberg said sullenly. “And of course checking the light could have waited, but it might have been forgotten. Since you were the one who wondered about it, and I have a certain respect for your ability to do your job, I decided to look at the light. I can assure you that it was only because you were the one who asked me.”

  Wallander was surprised, but he tried not to show it.

  “What did you find?” he asked instead.

  “The bulb wasn’t burnt out,” said Nyberg. “It was unscrewed.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Wallander said, and went into the living-room to call Sara Björklund. She answered.

  “Excuse me for disturbing you so late at night,” he began. “But I have an urgent question. Who changed the light bulbs in Wetterstedt’s house?”

  “He did that himself.”

  “Outside also?”

  “I think so. He did all of his own gardening, and I think I was the only other person who set foot inside
his house.”

  Except for whoever was in the black car, thought Wallander.

  “There’s a light by the garden gate,” he said. “Was it usually turned on?”

  “In the winter, when it was dark, he always kept it lit.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Wallander. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Can you manage to climb up the ladder one more time?” he asked Nyberg when he came back to the hall. “I’d like you to screw in a new bulb.”

  “The spare bulbs are in the room next to the garage,” said Nyberg and started to pull on his boots.

  They went back out into the storm. Wallander held the ladder while Nyberg climbed up and screwed in the bulb. It went on at once. Nyberg climbed back down the ladder. They walked out onto the beach.

  “There’s a big difference,” said Wallander. “Now it’s light all the way down to the water.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Nyberg.

  “I think the place where he was murdered is somewhere within this circle of light,” said Wallander. “If we’re lucky we can get fingerprints from the light fixture.”

  “So you think the murderer planned the whole thing? Unscrewed the bulb because it was too bright?”

  “Yes,” said Wallander, “that’s pretty much what I’m thinking.”

  Nyberg went back into the garden with the ladder. Wallander stayed behind, the rain pelting against his face.

  The cordons were still there. A police car was parked just above the dunes. Except for a man on a moped there were no onlookers left.

  Wallander turned around and went back inside the house.

  CHAPTER 10