The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  “Why did he do that?”

  “She asked him.”

  Wallander looked at the kitchen clock.

  “You’d better make the call,” he said. “My father might answer. He’s probably eating just now. Ask to talk to my daughter. Then I’ll take over.”

  Wallander gave him the number. It rang for a long time before anybody answered. It was Wallander’s father. Svedberg asked to speak to his granddaughter. When he heard the reply, he cut the conversation short.

  “She went down to the beach on her bike,” he said.

  Wallander felt a stabbing pain in his stomach.

  “I told her to stay indoors.”

  “She left half an hour ago,” said Svedberg.

  They took Svedberg’s car, and drove fast. Wallander did not say a word. Svedberg occasionally glanced at him. But he said nothing.

  They came to the Kaseberga exit.

  “Keep going,” said Wallander. “Next exit.”

  They parked as close to the beach as they could get. There were no other cars. Wallander raced onto the sands with Svedberg behind him. The beach was deserted. Wallander could feel panic rising. Once again he had the invisible Konovalenko breathing down his neck.

  “She could be behind one of the sand dunes,” he said.

  “Are you sure this is where she’ll be?” wondered Svedberg.

  “This is her beach,” said Wallander. “If she goes to the beach, this is where she comes. You go that way, I’ll go this way.”

  Svedberg walked back towards Kaseberga while Wallander continued in an easterly direction. He tried to convince himself that he had no need to worry. Nothing had happened to her. But he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t stayed inside the house as promised. Was it really possible that she did not understand how serious it was? In spite of all that had happened?

  Occasionally he would turn around and look toward Svedberg. Nothing as yet.

  Wallander suddenly thought of Robert Akerblom. He would have said a prayer in this situation, he told himself. But I have no god to pray to. I don’t even have any spirits, like Victor Mabasha. I have my own joy and sorrow, that’s all.

  There was a guy with a dog on top of the cliff, gazing out to sea. Wallander asked him if he had seen a solitary girl walking along the beach. But the guy shook his head. He had been on the beach with his dog for twenty minutes, and had been alone the whole time.

  “Have you seen a man?” asked Wallander, and described Konovalenko.

  The guy shook his head again.

  Wallander walked on. He felt cold even though there was a trace of spring warmth in the wind. He started walking faster. The beach seemed endless. Then he looked around again. Svedberg was a long way away, but Wallander could see somebody standing by his side. Suddenly, Svedberg started waving.

  Wallander ran all the way back. When he got to Svedberg and his daughter he was shattered. He looked at her without saying anything while he waited to get his breath back.

  “You were supposed not to leave the house,” he said. “Why did you?”

  “I didn’t think a walk along the beach would matter,” she said. “Not when it’s light. It’s nighttime when things happen, isn’t it?”

  Svedberg drove and the other two sat in the back seat.

  “What shall I tell Grandad?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” answered Wallander. “I’ll talk to him tonight. I’ll play cards with him tomorrow. That will cheer him up.”

  They separated on the road not far from the house.

  Svedberg and Wallander drove back to Stjarnsund.

  “I want that guard starting tonight,” said Wallander.

  “I’ll go and tell Martinson right away,” said Svedberg. “We’ll arrange it somehow.”

  “A police car parked on the road,” said Wallander. “I want it to be obvious the house is being watched.”

  Svedberg got ready to leave.

  “I need a few days,” said Wallander. “Until then you can keep on looking for me. But I’d like you to call me here occasionally.”

  “What shall I tell Martinson?” wondered Svedberg.

  “Tell him you got the idea of guarding my father’s house yourself,” said Wallander. “You can figure out how best to convince him.”

  “You still don’t want me to fill Martinson in?”

  “It’s enough for you to know where I am,” said Wallander.

  Svedberg left. Wallander went to the kitchen and fried a couple of eggs. Two hours later the horse trailer returned.

  “Did she win?” asked Wallander as Sten Widen came into the kitchen.

  “She won,” he replied. “But barely.”

  Peters and Noren were in their patrol car, drinking coffee.

  They were both in a bad mood. They had been ordered by Svedberg to guard the house where Wallander’s father lived. The longest shifts were when your car was standing still. They would be sitting here until somebody came to relieve them. That was many hours away yet. It was a quarter past eleven at night. Darkness had fallen.

  “What do you think’s happened to Wallander?”

  “No idea,” said Noren. “How many times do I have to say the same thing? I don’t know.”

  “It’s hard not to think about it,” Peters went on. “I’m sitting here wondering whether he might be an alcoholic.”

  “Why should he be?”

  “Do you remember that time we caught him drunk?”

  “That’s not the same as being alcoholic.”

  “No. But still.”

  The conversation petered out. Noren got out of the car and stood legs apart to urinate.

  That was when he saw the fire. At first he thought it was the reflection from a car’s headlights. Then he noticed smoke spiraling up from where the fire was burning.

  “Fire!” he shouted to Peters.

  Peters got out of the car.

  “Can it be a forest fire?” wondered Noren.

  The blaze was in a clump of trees on the far side of the nearest group of fields. It was hard to see where the center was because the countryside was undulating.

  “We’d better drive over and take a look,” said Peters.

  “Svedberg said we weren’t to leave our posts,” said Noren. “No matter what happened.”

  “It’ll only take ten minutes,” said Peters. “We have a duty to intervene if we find a fire.”

  “Call Svedberg first and get permission,” said Noren.

  “It’ll only take ten minutes,” said Peters. “What are you scared of?”

  “I’m not scared,” said Noren. “But orders are orders.”

  They did as Peters wanted even so. They found their way to the fire via a muddy tractor track. When they got there, they found an old oil drum. Somebody had filled it with paper and plastic to make a good blaze. By the time Peters and Noren arrived, the fire was almost out.

  “Funny time to burn garbage,” said Peters, looking round.

  But there was no sign of anybody. The place was deserted.

  “Let’s get back,” said Noren.

  Barely twenty minutes later they were back at the house they were supposed to be guarding. All seemed to be quiet. The lights were out. Wallander’s father and daughter were asleep.

  Many hours later they were relieved by Svedberg himself.

  “All quiet,” said Peters.

  He did not mention the excursion to the burning oil drum.

  Svedberg sat dozing in his car. Dawn broke, and developed into morning.

  By eight o’clock he started wondering why there was nobody up. He knew Wallander’s father got up early.

  By half past eight, he had the distinct impression something was wrong. He got out of his car, crossed the courtyard to the front door and tried the handle.

  The door was not locked. He rang the bell and waited. Nobody opened. He entered the dark vestibule and listened. Not a sound. Then he thought he could hear a scratching sound somewhere or other. It sounded like a mouse trying to ge
t through a wall. He followed the noise until he found himself in front of a closed door. He knocked. By way of answer he could hear a muffled bellowing. He flung open the door. Wallander’s father was lying in bed. He was tied up, with a length of black tape over his mouth.

  Svedberg stood quite still. He carefully removed the tape and untied the ropes. Then he searched through the whole house. The room in which he assumed Wallander’s daughter slept was empty. There was nobody in the house but Wallander’s father.

  “When did it happen?” he asked.

  “Last night,” said Wallander’s father. “Just after eleven.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “One.”

  “One?”

  “Just one. But he had a gun.”

  Svedberg stood up. His head was a complete blank.

  Then he went out to the telephone to call Wallander.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The acrid smell of winter apples.

  That was the first thing she noticed when she came to. But then, when she opened her eyes in the darkness, there was nothing but solitude and terror. She was lying on a stone floor and it smelled of damp earth. There was not a sound to be heard, even though fear sharpened all her senses. Carefully, she felt the rough surface of the floor with one hand. It was made of individual slabs fitted together. She realized she was in a cellar. In the house at Osterlen where her grandfather lived and where she had been brutally woken and abducted by an unknown man, there was a similar floor in the potato cellar.

  When there was nothing more for her senses to register, she felt dizzy and her headache got steadily worse. She could not say how long she had been there in darkness and silence; her wristwatch was still on the bedside table. Nevertheless she had the distinct impression it was many hours since she had been woken up and dragged away.

  Her arms were free. But she had a chain around her ankles. When she felt it with her fingers she discovered there was a padlock. The feeling of being confined by an iron lock turned her cold. It occurred to her that people are usually tied up with ropes. They were softer, more flexible. Chains belonged to the past, to slavery and ancient witch trials.

  But worst of all during this waking up period were the clothes she had on. She could feel right away they were not hers. They were unfamiliar-their shape, the colors she could not see but seemed to think she could feel with her fingertips, and the smell of a strong washing powder. They were not her clothes, and somebody must have dressed her in them. Somebody had taken off her nightie and dressed her in everything from underclothes to stockings and shoes, an outrage that made her feel sick. The dizziness immediately got stronger. She put her head in her hands and rocked backwards and forwards. It’s not true, she thought in desperation. But it was true, and she could even remember what had happened.

  She had been dreaming something but could no longer remember the context. She was woken by a man pressing a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. A pungent smell, then she was overcome by a feeling of numbness and fading senses. The light from the lamp outside the kitchen door produced a faint glow in her room. She could see a man in front of her. His face was very close when he bent over her. Now when she thought about him she recalled a strong smell of shaving lotion even though he was unshaven. He said nothing, but although it was almost dark in the room she could see his eyes and had time to think she would never forget them. Then she remembered nothing else until she woke up on the damp stone floor.

  Of course she understood why it had happened. The guy who bent over her and anaesthetized her must have been the one who was hunting and being hunted by her father. His eyes were Konovalenko’s eyes, just as she had imagined them. The man who killed Victor Mabasha, who killed a policeman and wanted to kill another, her own father. He was the one who had sneaked into her room, dressed her and put chains around her ankles.

  When the hatch in the cellar ceiling opened, she was completely unprepared. It occured to her afterward that the man had doubtless been standing up there, listening. The light shining through the hole was very strong, perhaps specially planned to dazzle her. She caught a glimpse of a ladder being dropped down and a pair of brown shoes, a pair of trouser legs approaching her. Then, last of all, the face, the same face and the same eyes that had stared at her as she was being knocked out. She looked away in order not to be dazzled and because her fear had returned and was paralyzing her. But she noticed the cellar was larger than she had thought. In the darkness the walls and ceiling seemed close to her. Maybe she was in a cellar extending under the whole ground floor of a house.

  The man stood in such a way that he shielded her from the light streaming down. He had a flashlight in one hand. In the other he had a metal object she could not make out at first.

  Then she realized it was a pair of scissors.

  She screamed. Shrill, long. She thought he had climbed down the ladder in order to kill her, and that he would do it with the scissors. She grabbed the chains around her legs and started pulling at them, as if she could break free despite everything. All the time he was staring at her, and his face was no more than a silhouette against the strong background light.

  Suddenly he turned the flashlight onto his own face. He held it under his chin so that his face looked like a lifeless skull. She fell silent. Her screaming had only increased her fear. And yet she felt strangely exhausted. It was already too late. There was no point in offering resistance.

  The skull suddenly started talking.

  “You’re wasting your time screaming,” said Konovalenko. “Nobody will hear you. Besides, there’s a risk I’ll get annoyed. Then I might hurt you. Better keep quiet.”

  His last words were like a whisper.

  Daddy, she thought. You’ve got to help me.

  Then everything happened very quickly. With the same hand in which he held the flashlight, he grabbed her hair, pulled it and started cutting it off. She started back, in pain and surprise. But he was holding her so tightly, she could not move. She could hear the dry sound of the sharp scissors clipping away around the back of her neck, just under her earlobes. It happened very quickly. Then he let her go. The feeling of wanting to vomit came back. Her cropped hair was another outrage, just like him dressing her without her being aware of it.

  Konovalenko rolled up the hair into a ball and put it in his pocket.

  He’s sick, she thought. He’s crazy, a sadist, a madman who kills and feels nothing.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by him talking again. The flashlight was shining on her neck, where she was wearing a necklace. It was in the form of a lyre, and she had gotten it from her parents for her fifteenth birthday.

  “The necklace,” said Konovalenko. “Take it off.”

  She did as she was told and was careful to avoid touching his hands when she held it out. He left her without a word, climbed up the ladder, and returned her to the darkness.

  She crawled away, to one side, until she came up against a wall. She groped along till she came to a corner. Then she tried to hide there.

  The previous night, after successfully abducting the cop’s daughter, Konovalenko had ordered Tania and Sikosi Tsiki out of the kitchen. He had a great need to be alone, and the kitchen suited him best just now. The house, the last one Rykoff had rented in his life, was planned so that the kitchen was the biggest room. It was arranged in old-fashioned style, with exposed beams, a deep baking oven, and open china cupboards. Copper pots were hanging along one wall. Konovalenko was reminded of his own childhood in Kiev, the big kitchen in the kolkhoz where his father had been a political superintendent.

  He realized to his surprise that he missed Rykoff. It was not just a feeling of now having to shoulder an increased practical workload. There was also a feeling that could hardly be called melancholy or sorrow, but which nevertheless made him occasionally feel depressed. During his many years as a KGB officer, the value of life, for everybody but himself and his two children, had gradually been reduced to calculable resources or
, at the opposite pole, to expendable persons. He was always surrounded by sudden death, and all emotional reactions gradually disappeared more or less completely. But Rykoff’s death had affected him, and it made him hate even more this cop who was always getting in his way. Now he had his daughter under his feet, and he knew she would be the bait that would entice him out into the open. But the thought of revenge could not liberate him entirely from his depression. He sat in the kitchen drinking vodka, being careful not to get too drunk, and occasionally looking at his face in a mirror hanging on the wall. It suddenly occurred to him that his face was ugly. Was he starting to get old? Had the collapse of the Soviet empire resulted in some of his own hardness and ruthlessness softening?

  At two in the morning, when Tania was asleep or at least pretending to be, and Sikosi Tsiki had shut himself away in his room, he went out into the kitchen where the telephone was, and called Jan Kleyn. He had thought carefully about what he was going to say. He decided there was no reason to conceal the fact that one of his assistants was dead. It would do no harm for Jan Kleyn to be aware that Konovalenko’s work was not without its risks. Then he decided to lie to him one more time. He would say that damned nuisance of a cop had been liquidated. He was so sure he would get him, now that he had his daughter locked up in the cellar, that he dared to declare Wallander dead in advance.

  Jan Kleyn listened and made no special comment. Konovalenko knew Jan Kleyn’s silence was the best approval he could get for his efforts. Then Jan Kleyn had mentioned that Sikosi Tsiki ought to return to South Africa soon. He asked Konovalenko if there was any doubt about his suitability, if he had displayed any signs of weakness, as Victor Mabasha had done. Konovalenko replied in the negative. That was also a claim made in advance. He had been able to devote very little time to Sikosi Tsiki so far. The main impression he had was of a man completely devoid of emotion. He hardly ever laughed at all, and was just as controlled as he was impeccably dressed. He thought that once Wallander and his daughter were out of the way he would spend a few intensive days teaching the African all he needed to know. But he said Sikosi Tsiki would not let them down. Jan Kleyn seemed satisfied. He concluded their conversation by asking Konovalenko to call again in three days. Then he would receive precise instructions for Sikosi Tsiki’s return to South Africa.