translate the text and write it down. But then it was ready, and Wallander could read Konovalenko’s memos. It was like reading about his own experiences from a different point of view, he thought. Many details of what had happened now became clear. The main thing was that the answer to the question of who had been Konovalenko’s final and unknown companion, who had moreover managed to leave the yellow house without being seen, was quite different from what he had expected. South Africa had sent a substitute for Victor Mabasha. An African called Sikosi Tsiki. He had entered the country from Denmark. “His training is not perfect,” Konovalenko wrote, “but sufficient. And his ruthlessness and mental resilience are greater than those of Victor Mabasha.” Then Konovalenko referred to a man in South Africa by the name of Jan Kleyn. Wallander assumed he was an important go-between. There was no clue about the organization Wallander was now certain must be behind it all, and hence at the center of everything. He told Blomstrand what he had discovered.
“An African is in the process of leaving Sweden,” said Wallander. “He was in the yellow house this morning. Somebody must have seen him, somebody must have driven him someplace. He can’t have walked over the bridge. We can rule out the possibility he’s still on Oland. There is a possibility that he might have had his own car. But more important is the fact that he’s trying to leave Sweden. Where, we don’t know; just that he is. We have to stop him.”
“That won’t be easy,” said Blomstrand.
“Difficult, but not impossible,” said Wallander. “After all, there must be only a limited number of black men passing through Swedish border controls every day.”
Wallander thanked Blomstrand’s wife. They returned to the police station. An hour later an APB went out on the unknown African. At about the same time the police found a cab driver who had picked up an African that morning from a parking lot at the end of Hemmansvagen. It was after the car burned up and the bridge was blocked. Wallander assumed the African had first hidden outside the house somewhere for an hour or two. The cab driver took him to the center of Kalmar. Then he paid, got out, and disappeared. The cab driver could not give a description. The guy was tall, muscular, dressed in light-colored pants, white shirt, and dark jacket. That was about all he could say. He spoke English with the cab driver.
It was late afternoon by now. There was no more Wallander could do in Kalmar. Once they picked up the fleeing African, the last piece of the puzzle could be fitted in with all the others.
They offered to drive him to Ystad, but he declined. He wanted to be on his own. Shortly after five in the afternoon he said goodbye to Blomstrand, apologized for shamelessly taking over command for a few hours in the middle of the day, and left Kalmar.
He had studied a map and come to the conclusion that the shortest way home was via Vaxjo. The forest seemed eternal. Everywhere was the same mood of silent detachment he had experienced inside himself. He stopped in Nybro for a meal. Although he would have preferred to forget all that had happened to him, he forced himself to call Kalmar and find out if the African had been traced yet. The reply was negative. He got back in the car and kept on driving through the endless forest. He got as far as Vaxjo and hesitated for a moment whether to take the Almhult route or to go via Tingsryd. In the end he chose Tingsryd so that he could start driving southward right away.
It was when he had passed through Tingsryd and turned off toward Ronneby that a moose loomed up on the road. He had not noticed it in the gathering dusk. For one desperate moment, with the brakes screeching in his ears, he was convinced he had reacted too late. He would run straight into the enormous bull moose, and his safety belt was not even fastened. But all of a sudden the moose turned away, and without knowing how it happened, Wallander shot past and did not even touch it.
He stopped at the side of the road and sat there without moving. His heart was beating madly, his breath coming in pants, and he felt ill. When he had calmed down he got out of the car and stood motionless in the silent forest. A hair’s breadth away from death yet again, he thought. I can’t have any get-out-of jail-free cards left. He wondered why he did not feel jubilant at having been miraculously saved from being crushed by the bull moose. What he did feel was more like a vague guilty conscience. The bottomless depression that had taken possession of him that morning as he sat drinking coffee returned. What he wanted most was to leave the car where it was, walk off into the forest and disappear without trace. Not to disappear for ever, but for long enough to recover his equilibrium, to combat the feeling of dizziness that had taken hold of him as a result of the previous week’s events. But he got back into the car and kept on driving southward, now with his safety belt fastened. He came to the main road to Kristianstad, and turned off toward the west. At about nine he stopped at an all-night cafe and had a cup of coffee. Some long-distance truck drivers were sitting in silence at a table, and a group of youths were whooping it up around an electronic games machine. Wallander did not touch his coffee until it was cold. But he did drink it in the end, and went back to his car.
Shortly before midnight he turned into the courtyard outside his father’s house. His daughter came out onto the steps to greet him. He smiled wearily and said everything was fine. Then he asked if there had been a telephone call from Kalmar. She shook her head. The only calls had been from journalists who had found out her father’s telephone number.
“Your apartment has been repaired already,” she said. “You can move back in.”
“That’s great,” he said.
He wondered if he ought to call Kalmar. But he was too tired. He left it until the next day.
They sat up late that night, talking. But Wallander said nothing about the feeling of melancholy weighing down on him. For the moment, that was something he wanted to keep to himself.
Sikosi Tsiki took the express bus from Kalmar to Stockholm. He followed Konovalenko’s emergency instructions, and got to Stockholm just after four in the afternoon. His flight to London would leave at seven o’clock. He got lost and could not find the airport bus, so he took a cab to Arlanda. The driver was suspicious of foreigners and demanded the fare in advance. He had handed over a thousand-kronor bill, then settled down in a corner of the back seat. Sikosi Tsiki had no idea every passport officer in Sweden was on the lookout for him. All he knew was that he should leave the country as a Swedish citizen, Leif Larson, a name he had very quickly learned to pronounce. He was completely calm, as he trusted Konovalenko. His cab had taken him over the bridge, and he could see something had happened. But he had no doubt Konovalenko would have disposed of the unknown man who had shown up in the yard that morning.
Sikosi Tsiki took his change when they got to Arlanda, shaking his head when asked if he wanted a receipt. He went into the departure hall, checked in, and stopped by a newspaper stand on the way to passport control to buy some English newspapers.
If he had not stopped by the newspaper stand, he would have been arrested at passport control. But during those very minutes he took choosing and paying for his newspapers, the passport officers changed shifts. One of the new ones went to the rest room. The other, a girl named Kerstin Anderson, happened to have arrived for work at Arlanda very late. There was something wrong with her car, and she turned up at the last moment. She was conscientious and ambitious and would normally have been early enough to read through all the notices that had arrived that day with lists of people to look out for, as well as the lists still current from previous days. As it was, she had no time to do so, and Sikosi Tsiki went through passport control with his Swedish passport and smiling face, no problem. The door closed behind him just as Kerstin Anderson’s colleague came back from the rest room.
“Is there anything special to look out for this evening?” asked Kerstin Anderson.
“A black South African,” replied her colleague.
She remembered the African who had just gone through. But he was Swedish. It was ten o’clock before the supervising officer came to check that all was in order.
“Don’t forget that African,” he said. “We have no idea what he’s called, or what passport he’ll be traveling on.”
Kerstin Anderson could feel a sudden tightening of her stomach.
“He was a South African, surely?” she said to her colleague.
“Presumably,” said the supervisor. “But that needn’t indicate what nationality he’ll claim when he leaves Sweden.”
She told him immediately what had happened a few hours earlier. After some hectic activity, they established that the man with the Swedish passport had taken a British Airways flight to London at seven o’clock.
The airplane had taken off on time. It had already landed in London, and the passengers had been through customs. Sikosi Tsiki had used his time in London to tear up his Swedish passport and flush it down a toilet. From
