Sidetracked

by Unknown

  “We think we found the place where Fredman was killed,” he said. “At a dock just west of town.”

  Wallander felt his spirits rise.

  “Great news,” he said.

  “A tip-off,” Svedberg continued. “The person who called mentioned blood stains. It could have been somebody cleaning fish, of course. But I don’t think so. The caller was a laboratory technician. He’s worked with blood samples for 35 years. And he said that there were tyre tracks nearby. A vehicle had been parked there. Why not a Ford van?”

  “We can drive over there and work it out very shortly,” said Wallander.

  They continued up the hill, much more quickly now. Wallander told Höglund the news. Neither of them was thinking about Erika Carlman any more.

  Hoover got off the train in Ystad just after 11 a.m. He had decided to leave his moped at home today. When he came out of the railway station and saw that the cordon around the pit where he had dumped his father was gone, he felt a twinge of disappointment and anger. The policemen who were hunting him were much too weak. They would never have passed the easiest entrance exam to the F.B.I.’s academy. He felt Geronimo’s heart start to drum inside him. He understood the message, simple and clear. He was going to fulfil the mission he had been chosen for. He would bring his sister two final sacrifices before she returned to life. Two scalps beneath her window. And the girl’s heart. As a gift. Then he would walk into the hospital to get her and they would leave together. Life would be very different. One day they might even read her diary together, remembering the events that had led her back, out of the darkness.

  He walked into Ystad. He was wearing shoes so as not to attract attention, but his feet didn’t like it. He turned right at the square and went to the house where the policeman lived with the girl who must be his daughter. He had come to take a closer look. The action itself he was planning for the next evening. Or at the latest, one day later. Not more. His sister shouldn’t have to stay in that hospital any longer. He sat down on the steps of one of the neighbouring buildings. He practised forgetting time. Just sitting, empty of thought, until he again took hold of his mission. He still had a lot to learn before he mastered the art to perfection, but he had no doubt that one day he would succeed.

  His wait lasted for two hours. Then she came out of the front door, obviously in a hurry, and set off towards the town centre. He followed her and never let her out of his sight.

  CHAPTER 32

  When they got to the dock, ten kilometres west of Ystad, Wallander was immediately sure that it was the right place. It was just as he had imagined it. They had driven along the coast road and stopped where a man in shorts and a T-shirt advertising the golf course in Malmberget waved them down and directed them to a barely visible dirt road. They stopped just short of the dock, so they wouldn’t disturb the tyre marks.

  The laboratory technician, Erik Wiberg, told them that in the summer he lived in a cabin on the north side of the coast road. He often came down to this dock to read his morning paper, as he had on 29 June. He’d noticed the tyre tracks and the dark spots on the brown wood, but thought nothing of it. He left that same day for Germany with his family, and it wasn’t until he saw in the paper on his return that the police were looking for a murder site, probably near the sea, that he remembered those dark spots. Since he worked in a laboratory, he knew that what was on the dock at least looked like blood. Nyberg, who had arrived just after Wallander and the others, was on his knees by the tyre tracks. He had toothache and was more irritable than ever. Wallander was the only one he could bear to talk to.

  “It could be Fredman’s van,” he said, “but we’ll have to do a proper examination.”

  They walked out on the dock together. Wallander knew they had been lucky. The dry summer helped. If it had rained there wouldn’t have been tracks. He looked for confirmation from Martinsson, who had the best memory for the weather.

  “Has it rained since 28 June?” he asked.

  “It drizzled on the morning of Midsummer Eve,” he said. “Ever since then it’s been fine.”

  “Arrange to cordon off the whole place,” said Wallander, nodding to Höglund. “And be careful where you put your feet.”

  He stood near the land end of the dock and looked at the patches of blood. They were concentrated in the middle of the dock, which was four metres long. He turned around and looked up towards the road. He could hear the noise, but he couldn’t see the cars, just the roof of a tall lorry flashing by. He had an idea. Höglund was on the phone to Ystad.

  “And tell them to bring me a map,” he said. “One that includes Ystad, Malmö, and Helsingborg.” Then he walked to the end of the dock and looked into the water. The bottom was rocky. Wiberg was standing on the beach.

  “Where’s the nearest house?” asked Wallander.

  “A couple of hundred metres from here,” replied Wiberg. “Across the road.”

  Nyberg had come out onto the dock.

  “Should we call in divers?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Wallander. “Start with a radius of 25 metres around the dock.”

  Then he pointed at the rings set into the wood.

  “Prints,” he said. “If Fredman was killed here he must have been tied down. Our killer goes barefoot and doesn’t wear gloves.”

  “What are the divers looking for?”

  Wallander thought.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s see if they come up with anything. But I think you’re going to find traces of kelp on the slope, from the place where the tyre tracks stop all the way down to the dock.”

  “The van didn’t turn around,” said Nyberg. “He backed it all the way up to the road. He couldn’t have seen whether any cars were coming. So there are only two possibilities. Unless he’s totally crazy.”

  Wallander raised his eyebrows.

  “He is crazy,” he said.

  “Not in that way,” said Nyberg.

  Wallander understood what he meant. He wouldn’t have been able to back up onto the road unless he had an accomplice who signalled when the road was clear. Or else it happened at night. When he’d see headlights and know when it was safe to back out onto the road.

  “He doesn’t have an accomplice,” said Wallander. “And we know that it must have happened at night. The only question is why did he drive Fredman’s body to the pit outside the railway station in Ystad?”

  “He’s crazy,” said Nyberg. “You said so yourself.”

  When a car arrived with the map, Wallander asked Martinsson for a pen and then sat on a rock next to the dock. He drew circles around Ystad, Bjäresjö and Helsingborg. Then he marked the dock. He wrote numbers next to his marks. He waved over Höglund, Martinsson and Svedberg, who had arrived last, wearing a dirty sun hat instead of his cap for a change. He pointed at the map on his knee.

  “Here we have his movements,” he said. “And the murder sites. Like everything else they form a pattern.”

  “A road,” Svedberg said. “With Ystad and Helsingborg as the end points. The scalp murderer on the southern plain.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Martinsson snapped.

  “I’m not trying to be funny,” Svedberg protested. “It’s how it is.”

  “Looking at the big picture, you’re probably right,” said Wallander. “The area is limited. One murder takes place in Ystad. One murder occurs here, perhaps, we aren’t sure yet, and the body is taken to Ystad. One murder happens just outside Ystad, in Bjäresjö, where the body is also discovered. And then we have Helsingborg.”

  “Most of them are concentrated around Ystad,” said Höglund. “Does that mean that the man we’re looking for lives here?”

  “With the exception of Fredman the victims were found close to or inside their homes,” said Wallander. “This is the map of the victims, not the murderer.”

  “Then Malmö should be marked too,” said Svedberg. “That’s where Fredman lived.”

  Wallander circled Malmö. The breeze tugged at th
e map.

  “Now the picture is different,” said Höglund. “We get an angle, not a straight line. Malmö is in the middle.”

  “It’s always Fredman who’s different,” said Wallander.

  “Maybe we should draw another circle,” said Martinsson. “Around the airport. What do we get then?”

  “An area of movement,” said Wallander. “Revolving around Fredman’s murder.”

  He knew that they were on their way towards a crucial conclusion.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “Fredman lives in Malmö. Together with the man who kills him, either held captive or not, he is driven east in the van. They come here, where Fredman dies. The journey continues to Ystad. The body is dumped in a hole under a tarpaulin in Ystad. Later the van returns west. It’s parked at the airport, about halfway between Malmö and Ystad. There the tracks vanish.”

  “There are plenty of ways to get away from Sturup,” said Svedberg. “Taxis, airport buses, rental cars. Another vehicle parked there earlier.”

  “So the murderer probably doesn’t live in Ystad,” Wallander said. “Malmö’s a good possibility. But it could just as well be Lund. Or Helsingborg. Or why not Copenhagen?”

  “Unless he’s leading us on a wild-goose chase,” Höglund said. “And he really does live in Ystad.”

  “That’s possible, of course,” said Wallander, “but I don’t buy it.”

  “Which means that we ought to concentrate on Sturup more than we have so far,” Martinsson said.

  Wallander nodded. “I believe that the man we’re looking for uses a motorcycle,” he said. “We talked about this before. Witnesses may have seen one outside the house in Helsingborg. Sjösten is working on that right now. Since we’re getting reinforcements this afternoon, we can afford to do a careful examination of the transport options from Sturup. We’re looking for a man who parked the van there on the night of 28 June. And somehow left. Unless he works at the airport.”

  “There’s one question we can’t yet answer,” said Svedberg. “And that is: what does this monster look like?”

  “We know nothing about his face,” Wallander said. “But we know he’s strong, and a basement window in Helsingborg tells us that he’s thin. We’re dealing with someone in good shape, who goes barefoot.”

  “You mentioned Copenhagen just now,” Martinsson said. “Do you think he’s a foreigner?”

  “I doubt it,” Wallander replied. “I think we’re dealing with a 100 per cent Swedish serial killer.”

  “That’s not much to go on,” said Svedberg. “Haven’t we found a single hair? Does he have light or dark hair?”

  “We don’t know. According to Ekholm he probably tries not to attract attention. And we can’t say anything about the way he’s dressed when he commits the murders.”

  “What about his age?” asked Höglund.

  “His victims have been men in their 70s, except for Fredman. But he’s in good shape, goes barefoot, and may ride a motorcycle, and these facts don’t imply an older man. We just can’t guess.”

  “Over 18,” said Svedberg. “If he rides a motorcycle.”

  “Can’t we start with Fredman?” asked Höglund. “He differs from the other men, who are considerably older. Maybe we can assume that Fredman and the man who killed him are the same age. Then we’re talking about a man who’s under 50. And there are quite a few of them who are in good shape.”

  Wallander gave his colleagues a gloomy look. They were all under 50; Martinsson, the youngest, was barely 30. None of them was in particularly good shape.

  “Ekholm is working on the psychological profile,” said Wallander, getting to his feet. “It’s important that we all read through it every day. It might give us some ideas.”

  Norén came towards Wallander with a telephone in his hand. Wallander squatted down out of the wind. It was Sjösten.

  “I think I’ve got someone for you,” he said. “A woman who was at parties at Liljegren’s villa.”

  “Well done,” Wallander said. “When can I meet her?”

  “Any time.”

  Wallander looked at his watch. “I’ll be there no later than 3 p.m.,” he said. “By the way, we think we’ve found the place where Fredman died.”

  “I heard about it,” Sjösten said. “I also heard that Ludwigsson and Hamrén are on their way from Stockholm. They’re good men, both of them.”

  “How’s it going with the witnesses who saw a man on a motorcycle?”

  “They didn’t see a man,” Sjösten answered. “But they did see a motorcycle. We’re trying to establish what kind it was. But it’s not easy. Both the witnesses are old. They’re also passionate health nuts who despise all petrol-powered vehicles. In the end it may turn out to be a lawnmower they saw.”

  A scratchy noise came from the phone. The conversation sputtered out in the wind. Nyberg was looking at the dock, rubbing his swollen cheek.

  “How’s it going?” Wallander asked him cheerily.

  “I’m waiting for the divers.”

  “Are you in a lot of pain?”

  “It’s a wisdom tooth.”

  “Get it removed.”

  “I will. But first I want those divers here.”

  “Is it blood on the dock?”

  “Almost certainly. Tonight you’ll know whether it ever ran around inside Fredman’s body.”

  On his way to the car Wallander remembered something. He went back.

  “Louise Fredman,” he said to Svedberg. “Did Åkeson come up with anything else on her?”

  Svedberg didn’t know, but said he’d talk to Åkeson.

  Wallander turned off at Charlottenlund, thinking that if they’d found the place where Fredman was murdered, it was chosen with great care. The closest house was too far away for screams to be heard. He drove to the E65 and headed towards Malmö. The wind was buffeting the car, but the sky was still totally clear. He thought about the map. There were a lot of reasons to think the killer lived in Malmö. He didn’t live in Ystad, that seemed certain. But why did he go to the trouble of dumping Fredman’s body in a pit at the railway station? Was Ekholm right, that he was taunting the police? Wallander took the road to Sturup and briefly considered stopping at the airport. But what good would that do? The interview in Helsingborg was more important.

  Her name was Elisabeth Carlén. They were in the Helsingborg police station in Sjösten’s office. As Wallander shook hands with her he thought of the female vicar he had met the week before. Maybe it was because she was dressed in black and wore heavy make-up. She was about 30. Sjösten’s description of her was quite apt. Sjösten had said that she was attractive because she looked at the world with a cold, disparaging expression. To Wallander it seemed as if she had decided to challenge any man who came near her. He’d never seen eyes like hers before. They blazed contempt and interest at the same time. He went over Sjösten’s account of her as she lit a cigarette.

  “Elisabeth Carlén is a whore,” he had said. “I doubt she’s been anything else since she was 20. She left middle school and then worked as a waitress on one of the ferries crossing the Sound. Got tired of that and opened a boutique with a girlfriend. That was a flop. Her parents had guaranteed a loan she took out for the business. After the money was gone, she did nothing but fight with them, and she drifted around a lot. Copenhagen for a while, then Amsterdam. When she was 17 she went there as a courier with a haul of amphetamines. Probably she was a user herself, but she seemed to be able to control it. That was the first time I met her. Then she was away for a few years, a black hole I don’t know anything about, before she popped up in Malmö, working in a chain of brothels.”

  Wallander had to interrupt. “Are there still brothels?” he asked in surprise.

  “Whorehouses, then,” said Sjösten. “Call them what you like. But yes, there are still plenty of them. Don’t you have them in Ystad? Just wait.”

  Wallander didn’t interrupt again.

  “She never walked the streets, of cours
e. She built up an exclusive clientele. She had something that was attractive and raised her market value to the skies. She didn’t even need to put those classified ads in the porn magazines. You can ask her what it is that makes her so special. It might be interesting to find out. During the last few years she’s turned up in certain circles that are connected to Liljegren. She’s been seen at restaurants with a number of his directors. Stockholm has a record of quite a few occasions when the police were interested in the man who happened to be escorting her. That’s Elisabeth Carlén in a nutshell. Quite a successful Swedish prostitute.”

  “Why did you choose her?”

  “She’s fun. I’ve spoken with her many times. She isn’t timid. If I tell her she isn’t suspected of anything, she believes me. Also I imagine that she has a whore’s sense of self-preservation. She notices things. She doesn’t like the police. A good way to keep us out of the way is to stay on good terms with us.”

  Wallander hung up his jacket and shifted a heap of papers on the table. Elisabeth Carlén followed all his movements with her eyes. Wallander was reminded of a wary bird.

  “You know that you aren’t suspected of anything,” he began.

  “Åke Liljegren was roasted in his kitchen,” she said. “I’ve seen his oven. Quite fancy. But I wasn’t the one who turned it on.”

  “Nor do we think you were,” said Wallander. “What I’m looking for is information. I’m trying to build a picture. I’ve got an empty frame. I’d like to put a photo in it. Taken at a party at Liljegren’s. I want you to point out his guests.”

  “No,” she said, “that’s not what you want. You want me to tell you who killed him. And I can’t.”

  “What did you think when you heard Liljegren was dead?”

  “I didn’t think anything. I burst out laughing.”

  “Why? No-one’s death should be funny.”

  “He had plans other than winding up the way he did. The mausoleum in the cemetery outside Madrid? That’s where he was going to be buried. A virtual fortress built according to his own sketches. Out of Italian marble. But he fetched up dying in his own oven. I think he would have laughed himself.”