Sidetracked

by Unknown

  Wallander thought about what Ekholm had said about invocations and initiation rites. A sacrifice was made so that another could obtain grace. Become rich, make a fortune, get well? There were many possibilities. There were motorcycle gangs with rules about how new members proved themselves worthy. In the United States it wasn’t unusual to have to kill someone, whether picked at random or specially chosen, to be deemed worthy of membership. This macabre rite had spread, even to Sweden. Wallander thought of the motorcycle gangs in Skåne, and he remembered the road workers’ hut at the bottom of Carlman’s hill. The thought was dizzying – that the tracks might lead them to motorcycle gangs. Wallander put aside this idea for the moment, although he knew that nothing could be ruled out.

  He walked back to the other bench where he had sat before. He was back at the starting point. He realised that he couldn’t go any further without discussing it with someone. He thought of Ann-Britt Höglund. Could he bother her on a Sunday? He got up and went over to his car to call her. She was at home. He was welcome to drop by. Guiltily, he postponed his visit to his father. He had to have someone else confront his ideas, and if he waited, there was a good chance he would get lost among multiple trains of thought. He drove back towards Ystad, keeping just above the speed limit. He hadn’t heard about any speed traps planned for this Sunday.

  It was 3 p.m. when he pulled up in front of Höglund’s house. She was in a light summer dress. Her two children were playing in a neighbour’s garden. She offered Wallander the porch swing while she sat in a wicker chair.

  “I really didn’t want to bother you,” he said. “You could have said no.”

  “Yesterday I was tired,” she replied. “As we all were. Are, I mean. But today I feel better.”

  “Last night was definitely the night of the sleeping policemen,” said Wallander. “It reaches a point where you can’t push yourself any further. All you get is empty, grey fatigue. We’d reached that point.”

  He told her about his trip to Simrishamn, about how he went back and forth between the benches in the park down by the harbour.

  “I went over everything again,” he said. “Sometimes it’s possible to make unexpected discoveries. But you know that already.”

  “I’m hoping something will come of Ekholm’s work,” she said. “Computers that are correctly programmed can cross-reference investigative material and come up with links that you wouldn’t have dreamed were there. They don’t think. But sometimes they combine better than we can.”

  “My distrust of computers is partly because I’m getting old,” said Wallander. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want Ekholm to succeed with his behavioural method. For me, of course, it’s of no importance who sets the snare that catches the killer just as long as it happens. And soon.”

  She gave him a sombre look.

  “Do you think that he will strike again?”

  “I do. Without being able to get a handle on why, I think there’s something unfinished about this murder scenario. If you’ll pardon the expression. There’s something missing. It scares me. And yes, it makes me think he’ll strike again.”

  “How are we going to find where Fredman was killed?” she asked.

  “Unless we’re lucky, we won’t,” said Wallander. “Or unless somebody heard something.”

  “I’ve been checking up on whether there have been any calls coming in from people who heard screams,” she said. “But I have found nothing.”

  The unheard scream hung over them. Wallander rocked slowly back and forth on the swing.

  “It’s rare that a solution comes clean out of the blue,” he said when the silence had lasted too long. “I was walking back and forth between the benches in the park, and I wondered whether I had already had the idea that would give me the solution. I might have got something right without being aware of it.”

  She was thinking about what he had said. Now and then she glanced over at the neighbour’s garden.

  “We didn’t learn anything at the police academy about a man who takes scalps and pours acid into the eyes of his victims,” she said. “Life really turns out to be as unpredictable as I imagined.”

  Wallander nodded without replying. Then he started, unsure whether he could pull it off, and went over what he had been thinking about by the sea. He knew that telling someone else would shed a different light on it. But even though Ann-Britt listened intently, almost like a student at her master’s feet, she didn’t stop him to say that he had made a mistake or drawn a wrong conclusion. All she said when he had finished was that she was bowled over by his ability to dissect and then summarise the whole investigation, which seemed so overwhelming. But she had nothing to add. Even if Wallander’s equations were correct, they lacked the crucial components. Höglund couldn’t help him, no-one could.

  She went inside and brought out some cups and a thermos of coffee. Her youngest girl came and crept onto the porch swing next to Wallander. She didn’t resemble her mother, so he assumed she took after her father, who was in Saudi Arabia. Wallander realised he still hadn’t met him.

  “Your husband is a puzzle,” he said. “I’m starting to wonder if he really exists. Or if he’s just someone you dreamed up.”

  “I sometimes ask myself the same question,” she answered, laughing.

  The girl went inside.

  “What about Carlman’s daughter?” asked Wallander, watching the girl. “How is she?”

  “Svedberg called the hospital yesterday,” she said. “The crisis isn’t over. But I had the feeling that the doctors were more hopeful.”

  “She didn’t leave a note?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It matters most that she’s a well human being,” said Wallander. “But I can’t help thinking of her as a witness.”

  “To what?”

  “To something that might have a bearing on her father’s death. I don’t believe that the timing of the suicide attempt was coincidental.”

  “What makes me think that you’re not convinced of what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not,” said Wallander. “I’m groping and fumbling my way along. There’s only one incontrovertible fact in this investigation, and that is that we have no concrete evidence to go on.”

  “So we have no way of knowing if we’re on the right track?”

  “Or if we’re going in circles.”

  She hesitated before she asked the next question.

  “Do you think that maybe there aren’t enough of us?”

  “Until now I’ve dug my heels in on that issue,” said Wallander. “But I’m beginning to have my doubts. The question will come up tomorrow.”

  “With Per Åkeson?”

  Wallander nodded.

  “What have we got to lose?”

  “Small units move more easily than large ones, but you could also argue that more heads do better thinking. Åkeson’s argument is that we can work on a broader front. The infantry is spread out and covers more ground.”

  “As if we were all sweeping the area.”

  Wallander nodded. Her image was telling. What was missing was that the sweep they were doing was happening in a terrain where they were only barely able to take their bearings. And they had no idea of whom they were looking for.

  “There’s something we’re all missing,” said Wallander. “I’m still searching for something someone said right after Wetterstedt was murdered. I can’t remember who said it. I only know that it was important, but it was too soon for me to recognise the significance.”

  “You like to say that police work is most often a question of patience.”

  “And it is. But patience has its limits. Someone else could get killed. We can never escape the fact that our investigation is not just a matter of solving crimes that have already been committed. Right now it feels as though our job is to prevent more murders.”

  “We can’t do any more than we’re doing already.”

  “How do we know that?” asked Wallander. “How do we know we�
�re using our resources to their best effect?”

  She had no answer.

  He sat there for a while longer. At 4.30 p.m. he turned down an invitation to stay and have dinner with them.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said as she followed him to the gate. “Are you going to watch the game?”

  “No. I have to meet my daughter. But I think we’re going to win, 3–1.”

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  “That’s what I bet, too.”

  “Then we’ll both win or we’ll both lose,” said Wallander.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said again.

  “Thanks for what?” he asked in surprise. “For disturbing your Sunday?”

  “For thinking I might have something worthwhile to say.”

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think you’re a talented policewoman. You believe in the ability of computers not only to make our work easier, but to improve it. I don’t, and maybe you can change my mind.”

  Wallander drove towards town. He stopped at a shop that was open on Sundays and bought groceries. Then he lay back in the deckchair on his balcony. His need for sleep was enormous, and he dozed off. But just before 7 p.m. he was standing on the square at Österport. Linda came to get him and took him to the empty shop nearby. They had rigged up some lights and put out a chair for him. At once he felt self-conscious. He might not understand or might laugh in the wrong place. The girls vanished into an adjoining room. Wallander waited. More than 15 minutes passed. When they finally returned they had changed clothes and now looked exactly alike. After arranging the lights and the simple set, they got started. The hour-long performance was about a pair of twins. Wallander was nervous at being the only audience. Most of all he was fearful that Linda might not be very good. But it wasn’t long before he realised that the two girls had written a witty script that presented a critical view of Sweden with dark humour. Sometimes they lost the thread, sometimes he thought that their acting wasn’t convincing. But they believed in what they were doing, and that gave him pleasure. When it was over and they asked him what he thought, he told them that he was surprised, that it was funny, that it was thought-provoking. He could see that Linda was watching to see whether he was telling the truth. When she realised he was, she was very happy. She escorted him out.

  “I didn’t know you could do this sort of thing,” he said. “I thought you wanted to be a furniture upholsterer.”

  “It’s never too late,” she said. “Let me give it a try.”

  “Of course you have to,” he said. “When you’re young you have plenty of time. Not like when you’re an old policeman like me.”

  They were going to rehearse for a few more hours. He would wait for her at home. The summer evening was beautiful. He was walking slowly towards Mariagatan, thinking about the performance, when it dawned on him that cars were driving by, horns honking, people cheering. Sweden must have won. He asked a man he met on the footpath what the score was. 3–1 to Sweden. He burst out laughing. Then his thoughts returned to his daughter, and how little he really knew about her. He still hadn’t asked her if she had a boyfriend.

  He had just closed the door to his flat when the phone rang. At once he felt a twinge of fear. When he heard Gertrud’s voice, he was instantly relieved. But Gertrud was upset. At first he couldn’t understand what she was saying. He asked her to slow down.

  “You must come over,” she said. “Right away.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your father has started burning his paintings. He’s burning everything in his studio. And he’s locked the door. You’ve got to come now.”

  Wallander wrote a quick note to Linda, put it under the doormat, and moments later was on his way to Löderup.

  CHAPTER 28

  Gertrud met him in the courtyard of the farmhouse. He could see that she’d been crying, but she answered his questions calmly. His father’s breakdown, if that was what it was, had come on unexpectedly. They had had their dinner as normal. They hadn’t had anything to drink. After the meal his father had gone out to the barn to continue painting, as usual. Suddenly she’d heard a great racket. When she went out on the front steps she’d seen the old man tossing empty paint cans into the yard. At first she thought he was cleaning out his chaotic studio. But when he started throwing out new frames she went and asked what he was doing. He didn’t reply. He gave the impression of not being there at all, not hearing her. When she took hold of his arm he pulled himself free and locked himself inside the barn. Through the window, she watched him start a fire in the stove, and when he started tearing up his canvases and stuffing them into the flames she called Wallander.

  They crossed the courtyard as she talked. Wallander saw smoke billowing from the chimney. He went up to the window and peered inside. His father looked wild and demented. His hair was on end, he was without his glasses, and the studio was a wreck. He was squishing around barefoot amongst spilled pots of paint, and trampled canvases were strewn everywhere. He was ripping up a canvas and stuffing the pieces into the fire. Wallander thought he saw a shoe burning in the stove. He knocked on the window, but there was no response. He tried the door. Locked. He banged on it and yelled that he had come to visit. There was no answer, but the racket inside continued. Wallander looked around for something to break down the door. But his father kept all his tools in the studio.

  Wallander studied the door, which he had helped build. He took off his jacket and handed it to Gertrud. Then he slammed his shoulder against it as hard as he could. The whole doorjamb came away, and Wallander tumbled into the room, banging his head on a wheelbarrow. His father glanced at him vacantly and went on tearing up canvases.

  Gertrud wanted to come in, but Wallander warned her away. He had seen his father like this once before, a strange combination of detachment and manic confusion. On that occasion he had found him walking in his pyjamas through a muddy field with a suitcase in his hand. Now he went up to him, took him by the shoulders, and began talking soothingly to him. He asked if there was something wrong. He said the paintings were fine, they were the best he’d ever done, the grouse were beautifully painted. Everything was all right. Anyone could have a bad day once in a while. But he had to stop burning things for no reason. Why should they have a fire in the middle of summer, anyway? They could get cleaned up and talk about the trip to Italy. Wallander kept talking, with a strong grip on his father’s shoulders, as the old man squinted myopically at him. While Wallander kept up his reassuring chatter he discovered his glasses trampled to bits on the floor. He asked Gertrud, who was hovering by the door, whether there was a spare pair. She ran to the house to get them and handed them to Wallander, who wiped them on his sleeve and then set them on his father’s nose. He continued to speak in a soothing voice, repeating his words as if he were reading the verses of a prayer. His father looked at him in bewilderment at first, then astonishment, and finally it seemed as though he had come to his senses again. Wallander released his grip. His father looked cautiously about him at the destruction.

  “What happened here?” he asked. Wallander could see that he had forgotten everything. Gertrud began to weep. Wallander told her firmly to go and make some coffee. They’d be there in a minute. At last the old man seemed to grasp that he had been involved in the havoc.

  “Did I do all this?” he asked, looking at Wallander with restless eyes, as if he feared the answer.

  “Who doesn’t get sick and tired of things?” Wallander said. “But it’s all over now. We’ll soon get this mess cleaned up.”

  His father looked at the smashed door.

  “Who needs doors in the middle of summer?” said Wallander. “There aren’t any closed doors in Rome in the summer. You’ll have to get used to that.”

  His father walked slowly through the debris from the frenzy that neither he nor anyone else could explain. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. There was something helpless about his father, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. He l
ifted the broken door and leaned it against the wall. He began tidying up the room, discovering that many of the canvases had survived. His father sat on a stool at his workbench and watched. Gertrud came in and told them that coffee was ready. Wallander gestured to her to take his father inside. Then he cleaned up the worst of the mess.

  Before he went into the kitchen he called home. Linda was there. She wanted to know what had happened; she could barely decipher his quickly scribbled note. Wallander didn’t want to worry her, so he said that her grandfather had just been feeling bad, but was fine now. To be on the safe side he’d decided to stay overnight in Löderup. He went in the kitchen. His father was feeling tired and had gone to lie down. Wallander stayed with Gertrud for a couple of hours, sitting at the kitchen table. There was no way to explain what had happened except that it was a symptom of the illness. But when Gertrud said this attack ruled out the trip to Italy in the autumn, Wallander protested. He wasn’t afraid of taking responsibility. He would manage. It was going to happen, so long as his father wanted to go and was able to stand on his own two feet.

  That night he slept on a fold-out bed in the living-room. He lay staring out into the light summer night for a long time before he fell asleep.

  In the morning, over coffee, his father seemed to have forgotten the whole episode. He couldn’t understand what had happened to the studio door. Wallander told him the truth, that he was the one who had broken it down. The studio needed a new door, and anyway, he would make it himself.

  “When are you going to be able to do that?” asked his father. “You don’t even have time to call ahead of time and tell me you’re coming to visit.”

  Wallander knew then that everything was back to normal. He left Löderup just after 7 a.m. It wasn’t the last time something like this might happen, he knew, and with a shiver imagined what might have occurred if Gertrud hadn’t been there.

  Wallander went straight to the station. Everyone was talking about the match. He was surrounded by people in summer clothes. Only the ones who had to wear uniforms looked remotely like police officers. Wallander thought that in his white clothes he could have stepped out of one of the Danish productions of Italian opera he’d been to. As he passed the reception desk Ebba waved to him that he had a call. It was Forsfält. They had found Fredman’s passport, well hidden in his flat, along with large sums of foreign currencies. Wallander asked about the stamps in the passport.