The White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

  He told her what had happened. Traced all the events back to the day two weeks ago when his father had announced he was going to get married, and Robert Åkerblom came to his office to report that his wife was missing. She listened attentively, and for the very first time he had the impression his daughter was a grown-up. A person who undoubtedly had much more experience in certain fields than he did himself.

  “I’ve been missing somebody to talk to,” he said when he’d finished. “If only Rydberg were still alive. Do you remember him?”

  “Was he the one who always seemed so miserable?”

  “That’s the one. He could appear strict as well.”

  “I remember him. I hoped you’d never be like him.”

  Now it was his turn to change the subject.

  “What do you know about South Africa?” he asked.

  “Not a lot. Just that the blacks are treated like slaves. And I’m against that, of course. We had a visit at school by a black woman from South Africa. You just couldn’t believe what she had to say was true.”

  “You know more than I do in any case,” he said. “When I was in Latvia last year, I often used to wonder how I could have gotten to be over forty without having a clue about what was going on in the world.”

  “You just don’t keep in touch,” she said. “I remember when I was twelve, thirteen, and tried to ask you things. Neither you nor Mom had the slightest idea about what was going on beyond your own back yard. All you wanted to know about was the house and the flower beds and your work. Nothing else. Is that why you divorced?”

  “You think?”

  “You had made your lives a matter of tulip bulbs and new faucets in the bathroom. That’s all you ever talked about, when you did talk with each other, that is.”

  “What’s wrong with talking about flowers?”

  “The flower beds grew so high, you couldn’t see anything that was happening beyond them.”

  He decided to put an end to that discussion.

  “How much time do you have?”

  “An hour, at least.”

  “No time at all, really. How about meeting tonight, if you feel like it?”

  They went out into the street when the rain had stopped.

  “Don’t you find those high heels difficult to walk in?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she replied. “But you get used to them. Like a try?”

  Wallander was just pleased that she existed. Something inside him eased up. He watched as she walked to the subway, waving to him.

  At that very moment it dawned on him what he had seen in the apartment in Hallunda earlier that day. What it was that had caught his attention, although he couldn’t say why.

  Now he knew.

  There was a shelf hanging on the wall, and on it was an ashtray. He’d seen an ashtray like that somewhere before. It might have been a coincidence. But he did not think so.

  He remembered his meal at the Continental Hotel in Ystad. He’d started out in the bar. On the table in front of him was a glass ashtray. Exactly the same as the one in the guest room in Tania’s and Vladimir’s guest room.

  Konovalenko, he thought.

  At some time or other, he’s been at the Continental Hotel. He might even have been sitting at the same table as me. He couldn’t resist the temptation to take home one of their heavy glass ashtrays. A human failing, one of the most common. He could never have imagined that a detective inspector from Ystad would ever take a look at the little room in Hallunda where he occasionally spends his nights.

  Wallander went up to his hotel room and thought he might not be such an incompetent cop after all. The times had not passed him by completely, not just yet. Maybe he was still capable of solving the pointless and brutal murder of a woman who happened to take a wrong turn not far from Krageholm.

  He synopsized what he thought he had established so far. Louise Åkerblom and Klas Tengblad had been shot by the same weapon. Tengblad by a white man with a foreign accent. The black African who had been around when Louise Åkerblom was killed had been chased by a man who also had a foreign accent, and was probably called Konovalenko. This Konovalenko was known to Rykoff, even though he denied it. To judge by his build, Rykoff could very well be the guy who had rented the house from Alfred Hanson. And in Rykoff’s apartment was an ashtray that proved somebody had been to Ystad. It was not a lot to go on, and had it not been for the bullets, the link would have been tenuous, to say the least. But he also had his hunches, and he knew it made sense to pay attention to them. A raid on Rykoff could provide the answers they were so eager to obtain.

  That evening he had dinner with Linda in a restaurant not far from the hotel.

  This time he felt more secure in her presence. When he got to bed shortly before one, it occurred to him that this was the most pleasant evening he’d had for a long time.

  Wallander arrived at the Kungsholmen police station just before eight the next morning. An audience of cops listened in astonishment to what he had discovered in Hallunda, and the conclusions he had drawn. As he spoke, he could feel the skepticism that surrounded him. But the desire of the cops to catch the man who had shot their colleague was overwhelming, and he could feel the mood slowly changing. In the end, nobody challenged his conclusions.

  Things moved quickly throughout the morning. The apartment block in Hallunda was placed under observation while the raid was prepared. An energetic young prosecutor had no hesitation in approving plans for arrest.

  The raid was set for two o’clock. Wallander kept discreetly in the background while Lovén and his colleagues went through what was going to happen in detail. At about ten, right in the middle of the most chaotic phase of the preparations, he went to Lovén’s office and made a call to Björk in Ystad. He explained about the action planned for that afternoon, and how the murder of Louise Åkerblom might soon be solved.

  “I have to say it all sounds pretty improbable,” said Björk.

  “We live in an improbable world,” said Wallander.

  “Whatever happens, you’ve done a good job,” said Björk. “I’ll let everybody at this end know what’s going on.”

  “No press conference, though,” said Wallander. “And nobody is to speak with Robert Åkerblom yet, either.”

  “Of course not,” said Björk. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “As soon as possible,” said Wallander. “How’s the weather?”

  “Terrific,” said Bjork. “It feels like spring is on the way. Svedberg is sneezing like a man with hay fever. That’s usually a sure sign of spring, as you well know.”

  Wallander felt vaguely homesick as he put the phone down. But his excitement over the imminent raid was even stronger.

  At eleven Lovén called together everybody who would be taking part in the raid. Reports from those watching the building suggested both Vladimir and Tania were in the apartment. It was not possible to establish whether anybody else was there.

  Wallander listened carefully to Lovén’s summary. He could see that a raid in Stockholm was very different from anything he was used to. Besides, operations of this size were practically unknown in Ystad. Wallander could only remember one incident the previous year, when a guy high on narcotics had barricaded himself into a summer cottage in Sandskogen.

  Before the meeting Lovén had asked Wallander if he wanted to play an active role.

  “Sure,” he replied. “If Konovalenko is there, in a sense he’s my baby. Half of him at least. Besides, I’m looking forward to seeing Rykoff’s face.”

  Lovén brought the meeting to a close at half past eleven.

  “We really don’t know what we’ll be up against,” he said. “Probably just two people who’ll go along with the inevitable. But it could turn out different.”

  Wallander had lunch in the police canteen with Lovén.

  “Have you ever asked yourself what you’ve gotten involved in?” asked Lovén, all of a sudden.

  “That’s something I think about every
day,” said Wallander. “Don’t most cops?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lovén. “I only know what I think. And the thoughts that go through my head depress me. We’re on the brink of losing control here in Stockholm. I don’t know how it is in a smaller district like Ystad, but being a crook in this city must be a pretty pleasant existence. At least as far as the chances of getting caught are concerned.”

  “We’re still in control, I guess,” said Wallander. “But the differences between different districts are decreasing all the time. What’s happening here happens in Ystad as well.”

  “Lots of cops in Stockholm can’t wait to get transferred to the provinces,” said Lovén. “They think they’d have an easier time there.”

  “I guess there are quite a few who’d like to transfer here as well,” Wallander countered. “They think they lead too quiet a life out in the sticks, or in some little town.”

  “I doubt if I’d be able to change,” said Lovén.

  “Me neither,” said Wallander. “Either I’m an Ystad cop, or I’m not a cop at all.”

  The conversation petered out. Afterwards Lovén had things to do.

  Wallander found a quiet spot where he could stretch out on a sofa. It occurred to him that he had not had a good night’s sleep since the moment Robert Åkerblom came into his office.

  He dozed off for a few minutes, and awoke with a start.

  Then he just lay there, thinking about Baiba Liepa.

  The raid on the apartment in Hallunda took place at exactly two o’clock. Wallander, Lovén, and three other cops climbed the stairs. After ringing twice without reply, they broke down the door with a crowbar. Specially trained men with automatic weapons were waiting in the background. All the cops on the stairs carried pistols, apart from Wallander. Lovén asked him if he wanted a gun. But he declined. On the other hand, he was glad he was wearing a bulletproof vest like the others.

  They stormed into the apartment, spread out, and it was all over before it had even begun.

  The apartment was empty. All that remained was the furniture.

  The cops looked at each other in bewilderment. Then Lovén took out his walkie-talkie and contacted the officer in charge down below.

  “The apartment’s empty,” he said. “There will be no arrests. You can call the special units off. But you can send in the technical guys to go over the place.”

  “They must have left last night,” said Wallander. “Or at the crack of dawn.”

  “We’ll get ’em,” said Lovén. “Within half an hour there’ll be a country-wide APB.”

  He handed Wallander a pair of plastic gloves.

  “Maybe you’d like to do some dusting,” he said.

  While Lovén was talking to headquarters in Kungsholmen on his mobile, Wallander went into the little guest room. He put on the gloves and carefully removed the ashtray from the shelf. His eyes had not deceived him. It was an exact copy of the ashtray he had been staring at a couple of nights previously, when he had a skinful of whiskey. He handed the ashtray to a technician.

  “There’s bound to be fingerprints on this,” he said. “We probably won’t have them in our files. But Interpol might have them.”

  He watched the technician put the ashtray into a plastic bag.

  Then he went over to the window and absentmindedly contemplated the surrounding buildings and the gray sky. He remembered vaguely that this was the window Tania had opened the day before, to let out the smoke that was irritating Vladimir. Without really being able to decide whether he was depressed or annoyed at the failure of the raid, he went into the big bedroom. He examined the wardrobes. Most of the clothes were still there. On the other hand, there was no sign of any suitcases. He sat on the edge of one of the beds and casually opened a drawer in the other bedside table. It was empty save for a cotton reel and half a pack of cigarettes. He noted that Tania smoked Gitanes.

  Then he bent down and looked under the bed. Nothing but a pair of dusty slippers. He walked around the bed and opened the drawer in the other bedside table. It was empty. Standing on the table were a used ashtray and a half-eaten bar of chocolate.

  Wallander noticed the cigarette butts had filters. He picked one of them up and saw it was a Camel.

  He suddenly became pensive.

  He thought back to the previous day. Tania had lit a cigarette. Vladimir had immediately displayed his annoyance, and she had opened a window that was stuck.

  It was not usual for smokers to complain about others with the same habit. Especially when the room was not smoky. Did Tania smoke several different brands? That was hardly likely. So, Vladimir smoked as well.

  Thinking hard, he went back into the living room. He opened the same window Tania had opened. It was still sticking. He tried the other windows and the glazed door leading to the balcony. They all opened with no problem.

  He stood in the middle of the floor, frowning. Why had she chosen to open a window that stuck? And why was that window so difficult to open?

  It suddenly dawned on him. After a moment he realized there was only one possible answer.

  Tania had opened the window that stuck because there was some pressing reason for that particular window to be opened. And it was sticking because it was opened so seldom.

  He went back to the window. It occurred to him that if you were in a car in the parking lot, this was the window that could most clearly be seen. The other window was adjacent to the projecting balcony. The balcony door itself was completely invisible from the parking lot.

  He thought through the whole sequence one more time.

  He’d cracked it. Tania seemed nervous. She had been looking at the wall clock behind his head. Then she opened a window that was only used to signal to somebody in the parking lot that they should not go up to the apartment.

  Konovalenko, the thought. He’d been that close.

  In a gap between two phone calls, he told Lovén about his conclusions.

  “You may well be right,” said Lovén. “Unless it was somebody else.”

  “Of course,” said Wallander. “Unless it was somebody else.”

  They drove back to Kungsholmen while the technicians continued their work. They had barely entered Lovén’s office when the telephone rang. The technicians out at Hallunda had discovered a tin box containing the same kind of tear gas canisters that had been thrown into that disco the previous week.

  “It’s all falling into place,” said Lovén. “Unless it’s just getting more confusing. I don’t understand what they had against that particular disco. In any case, the whole country is looking out for them. And we’ll make sure there’s wide coverage on the television and in the newspapers.”

  “That means I can go back to Ystad tomorrow,” said Wallander. “When you pick up Konovalenko, maybe we can borrow him down in Skane for a while.”

  “It’s always annoying when a raid goes wrong,” said Lovén. “I wonder where they’re holed up.”

  The question remained unanswered. Wallander went back to his hotel and decided to pay a visit to the Aurora that evening. Now he had some more questions for the bald guy behind the bar.

  He had a feeling that things were coming to a head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The man outside President de Klerk’s office had been waiting a long time.

  It was already midnight, and he’d been there since eight o’clock. He was completely alone in the dimly lit antechamber. A security guard occasionally looked in and apologized for his being kept waiting. The latter was an elderly man in a dark suit. He was the one who had put out all the lights just after eleven, apart from the single lamp that was still burning.

  Georg Scheepers had the feeling the guy could easily have been employed at a funeral parlor. His discretion and unobtrusiveness, his servility bordering on submission, reminded him of the guy who had taken charge of his own mother’s funeral a few years back.

  It’s a symbolic comparison that could be pretty close to the truth, thought Scheepe
rs. Maybe President de Klerk is in charge of the last, dying remnants of the white South African empire? Maybe this is more of a waiting room for a man planning a funeral, than the office of somebody leading a country into the future?

  He had plenty of opportunity to think during the four hours he had been kept waiting. Now and then the security guard opened the door quietly and apologized—the president was held up by some urgent business. At ten o’clock he brought him a cup of lukewarm tea.

  Georg Scheepers wondered why he had been summoned to see President de Klerk that evening, Wednesday, May 7. The previous day, at lunchtime, he had taken a call from the secretary to his superior, Henrik Wervey. Georg Scheepers was an assistant of the widely feared chief prosecutor in Johannesburg, and he was not used to meeting him except in court or at the regular Friday meetings. As he hurried through the corridors, he wondered what Wervey wanted. Unlike this evening, he had been shown straight into the prosecutor’s office. Wervey indicated a chair, and continued signing various documents a secretary was waiting for. Then they were left alone.

  Wervey was a man feared not only by criminals. He was nearly sixty, almost two meters tall, and sturdily built. It was a well-known fact that he occasionally demonstrated his great strength by performing various feats. Some years ago, when his offices were being refurbished, he had singlehandedly carried out a cupboard that later needed four men to lift it onto a truck. But it was not his bodily strength that made him so fearsome. During his many years as prosecutor he had always pressed for the death penalty whenever there was the slightest possibility of winning it. On those occasions, and there were many of them, when the court accepted his plea and sentenced a criminal to be hanged, Wervey was generally a witness when the sentence was carried out. That had given him the reputation of being a brutal man. Then again, no one could accuse him of racial discrimination in applying his principles. A white criminal had just as much to fear as a black one.