No need for the heirs or Holmgren in Varnamo to know anything about it.”
“How long was he going to rent the house?”
“He came at the beginning of April. Said he wanted it till the end of May.”
“Did he say what he was going to use it for?”
“For people who wanted to be left in peace to do some painting.”
“Painting?”
Wallander thought of his father.
“Artists, that is. And he offered cash up front. Damn right I was going to take it.”
“When did you meet him next?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“It was a sort of unspoken condition. That I should keep my nose out of it. And I did. He got the keys, and that was that.”
“Have you got the keys back?”
“No. He was going to mail them to me.”
“And you have no address?”
“No.”
“Can you describe him?”
“He was extremely fat.”
“Anything else?”
“How the hell do you describe a fat guy? He was balding, red-faced and fat. And when I say fat, do I mean fat! He was like a barrel.”
Wallander nodded.
“Have you any of the money left?” he asked, thinking of possible fingerprints.
“Not an ore. That’s why I started distilling again.”
“If you stop that as of today, I won’t take you in to Ystad,” said Wallander.
Alfred Hanson could hardly believe his ears.
“I mean what I say,” said Wallander. “But I’ll check up that you really have stopped. And you must pour away everything you’ve made already.”
The man was sitting open-mouthed at the kitchen table when Wallander left.
Dereliction of duty, he thought. But I haven’t time to bother with moonshiners just now.
He drove back to Ystad. Without really knowing why, he turned into the parking lot by Krageholm Lake. He got out of the car and walked down to the water’s edge.
There was something about this investigation, about the death of Louise Akerblom, that scared him. As if the whole thing had barely started yet.
I’m scared, he thought. It’s like that black finger were pointing straight at me. I’m in the middle of something I can’t understand.
He sat down on a rock, even though it was damp. Suddenly his weariness and depression threatened to overwhelm him.
He gazed out over the lake, thinking there was a fundamental similarity between this case he was up to his neck in and the feelings he had inside. He seemed to have as little control over himself as he had chance of solving the case. With a sigh even he thought was pathetic, he decided he was as much at sea with his own life as he was with the search for Louise Akerblom’s murderer.
“Where do I go from here?” he said aloud to himself. “I don’t want anything to do with ruthless killers with no respect for life. I don’t want to get involved in a kind of violence that will be incomprehensible to me as long as I live. Maybe the next generation of cops in this country will have a different kind of experience and have a different view of their work. But it’s too late for me. I’ll never be any different than what I am. A pretty good cop in a medium-sized Swedish police district.”
He stood up and watched a magpie launching itself from a treetop.
All questions remain unanswered in the end, he thought. I devote my life to trying to catch and then put away crooks who are guilty of various crimes. Sometimes I succeed, often I don’t. But when I eventually pass away one of these days, I’ll have failed in the biggest investigation of all. Life will still be an insoluble riddle.
I want to see my daughter, he thought. I miss her so much at times, it hurts. I have to catch a black man missing a finger, especially if he’s the one who killed Louise Akerblom. I have a question for him I need an answer to: why did you kill her?
I must follow up on Stig Gustafson, not let him slide out of the picture too soon, even though I’m already convinced he’s innocent.
He walked back to his car.
The fear and repugnance would not go away. The finger was still pointing.
The Man from Transkei
Chapter Eight
You could hardly see the man squatting in the shadow of the wrecked car. He did not move a muscle, and his black face was indistinguishable from the dark bodywork.
He had chosen his hiding place carefully. He had been waiting since early afternoon, and now the sun was beginning to sink beyond the dusty silhouette of the suburban ghetto that was Soweto. The dry, red earth glowed in the setting sun. It was April 8, 1992.
He had traveled a long way to get to the meeting place on time. The white man who sought him out had said he would have to set off early. For security reasons they preferred not to give him a precise pickup time. All he as told was that it would be shortly after sunset.
Only twenty-six hours had passed since the man who introduced himself as Stewart stood outside his home in Ntibane. When he heard the knock at the door, he thought at first it was the police in Umtata. Seldom a month went by without a visit from them. As soon as a bank robbery or a murder took place, there would be an investigator from the Umtata homicide squad at his door. Sometimes they would take him in to town for questioning, but usually they accepted his alibi, even if it was no more than that he’d been drunk in one of the local bars.
When he emerged from the corrugated iron shack that was his home, he did not recognize the man standing in the bright sunlight claiming to be Stewart.
Victor Mabasha could see right away the man was lying. He could have been called anything at all, but not Stewart. Although he spoke English, Victor could hear from his pronunciation that he was of Afrikaner origin. And boere just weren’t called Stewart.
It was afternoon when the man showed up. Victor Mabasha was asleep in bed when the knock came. He made no attempt to hurry as he got up, put on a pair of pants, and opened the door. He was getting used to nobody wanting him for any thing important anymore. It was usually somebody he owed money to. Or somebody stupid enough to think he could borrow money from him. Unless it was the cops. But they didn’t knock. They hammered on the door. Or forced it open.
The man claiming to be Stewart was about fifty. He wore an ill-fitting suit and was sweating profusely. His car was parked under a baoba tree on the other side of the road. Victor noticed the plates were from Transvaal. He wondered briefly why he had come so far, all the way to Transkei province, in order to meet him.
The man did not ask to come in. He just handed over an envelope and said somebody wanted to see him on important business on the outskirts of Soweto the following day.
“All you need to know is in the letter,” he said.
A few half-naked children were playing with a buckled hubcap just outside the hut. Victor yelled at them to go away. They disappeared immediately.
“Who?” asked Victor.
He mistrusted all white men. But most of all he mistrusted white men who lied so badly, and made things
