“You mean it could have been somebody else? But who? Why? Who would want to pretend they were you?”
Wallander looked at her in all seriousness. Then he switched off the light and went cautiously over to one of the living room windows.
The street down below was deserted.
He went back to the hall.
“I don’t know who it was,” he said. “But you’re going back with me to Ystad tomorrow. I don’t want you around here on your own right now.”
She could tell he was deadly serious.
“OK,” she said simply. “Do I need to be scared tonight?”
“You don’t need to be scared at all,” he said. “It’s just that you shouldn’t be here on your own for the next few days.”
“Don’t say any more,” she begged. “Right now I want to know as little as possible.”
She made up a bed for him on a mattress.
Then he lay there in the dark, listening to her breathing. Konovalenko, he thought.
When he was certain she was asleep, he got up and went over to the window.
The street down below was just as deserted as before.
Wallander had called a prerecorded information service and established there was a train to Malmo at three minutes past seven, and they left the apartment in Bromma soon after six.
He had slept restlessly, dozing off then waking up with a start. He wanted to spend a few hours in a train. Flying would mean he got to Malmo too quickly. He needed to rest, and he needed to think.
They came to a standstill just outside Mjolby with an engine failure, and waited there nearly an hour. But Wallander was just grateful for the extra time. They occasionally exchanged a few words. But just as often she was buried in a book, and he was lost in thought.
Fourteen days, he thought as he watched a lonely tractor plowing what looked like a never-ending field. He tried counting the seagulls following the plow, but could not manage it.
Fourteen days since Louise Akerblom had disappeared. The image of her was already beginning to melt away from the two small children’s consciousness. He wondered if Robert Akerblom would be able to cling to his God. What sort of answers could Pastor Tureson give him?
He looked at his daughter, who had fallen asleep with her cheek resting against the window. What did her mostly solitary fear look like? Was there a landscape where their abandoned and deserted thoughts could arrange to meet, without their knowing about it? We don’t really know anybody, he thought. Least of all ourselves.
Had Robert Akerblom known his wife?
The tractor disappeared into a dip in the field. Wallander imagined it sinking slowly into a bottomless pit of mud.
The train suddenly jerked into motion. Linda woke up and looked at him.
“Are we there?” she asked, drowsily. “How long have I been asleep?”
“A quarter of an hour, maybe,” he said with a smile. “We haven’t reached Nassjo yet.”
“I could use a cup of coffee,” she said, yawning. “How about you?”
They sat in the buffet car as far as Hassleholm. For the first time he told her the full story of his two trips to Riga the previous year. She listened in fascination.
“It doesn’t sound like you at all,” she said when he had finished.
“That’s how I feel as well,” he said.
“You could have died,” she said. “Did you never think about me and Mom?”
“I thought about you,” he said. “But I didn’t think about your mother.”
When they got to Malmo, they only had to wait half an hour for a train to Ystad. They were back in his apartment shortly before four. He made up a bed for her in the guest room, and when he went to look for some clean sheets it struck him that he had forgotten all about the time he had booked in the laundry room. At about seven they went out to one of the pizzerias on Hamngatan and had dinner. They were both tired, and were back home again before nine.
She called her grandfather, and Wallander stood by her side, listening. She promised to go and see him the next day.
He was surprised at how his father could sound so different when he talked to her.
He thought he had better call Loven. But he put it off, since he was not yet sure how he was going to explain why he did not contact the police immediately after the incident in the cemetery. He could not understand that himself. It was a breach of duty, no doubt about it. Had he started to lose control over his own judgment? Or had he been so scared that he lost the ability to act?
Long after she fell asleep he stood in the window, looking down at the deserted street.
The images in his mind’s eye were alternating between Victor Mabasha and the man known as Konovalenko.
While Wallander was standing in his window in Ystad, Vladimir Rykoff was noting that the police were still interested in his apartment. He was two floors higher up in the same building. It was Konovalenko who once suggested they should have an escape route in case the usual apartment could not or ought not to be used. It was also Konovalenko who explained how the safest haven was not always the one furthest away. The best plan is to do the unexpected. And so Rykoff rented an identical apartment in Tania’s name, two floors higher up. That made it easier to move the necessary clothes and other baggage.
The previous day Konovalenko had told them to leave the apartment. He questioned Vladimir and Tania, and realized the cop from Ystad was evidently no fool. He should not be underestimated. Nor could they exclude the possibility that the cops might search the place. But most of all, Konovalenko was afraid Vladimir and Tania might be subjected to more serious interrogation. He was not convinced they were always capable of distinguishing between what they could say, and what not.
Konovalenko had also wondered whether the best solution might be to shoot them. But he decided that was unnecessary. He still needed Vladimir’s legwork. Besides, the cops would only get more excited than they already were.
They moved to the other apartment that same night. Konovalenko had given Vladimir and Tania strict instructions to stay at home the next few days.
Among the first things Konovalenko learned as a young KGB officer was that there were deadly sins in the shadowy world of the intelligence service. Being a servant of secrecy meant joining a brotherhood where the most important rules were written in invisible ink. The worst sin of all, of course, was being a double agent. Betraying one’s own organization, but at the same time doing it in the service of an enemy power. In the mystical hell of the intelligence service, the moles were closest to the center of the inferno.
There were other deadly sins. One was to arrive too late.
Not just to a meeting, emptying a secret letter box, a kidnapping, or even nothing more complicated than a journey. Just as bad was being too late with regard to oneself, one’s own plans, one’s own decisions.
Nevertheless, that is what had happened to Konovalenko early in the morning of May 7. The mistake he made was to put too much faith in his BMW. As a young KGB officer, his superiors had always taught him to plan a journey on the basis of two parallel possibilities. If one vehicle proved to be unserviceable, there should always be time to resort to a planned alternative. But that Friday morning, when his BMW suddenly stopped on St. Erik’s Bridge and refused to start again, he had no alternative. Of course, he could take a cab or the subway. Besides, since he did not know if and when the cop or his daughter would leave the apartment in Bromma, it was not even certain he would be too late, anyway. Nevertheless, it seemed to him like the mistake, all the guilt, was his, not the car’s. He spent nearly twenty minutes trying to restart it, and it seemed like he was trying to bring about a resurrection. But the engine was dead as far as he was concerned.
In the end he gave up, and flagged down a cab. He had planned to be outside the red-brick apartment block by seven at the latest. As it was, he did not get there until nearly a quarter to eight.
It had not been difficult to find out that Wallander had a daughter and that she was the one living in Bromma. He called the police station in Ystad and was told that Wallander was staying at the Central Hotel in Stockholm. He claimed to be a cop himself. Then he went to the hotel and pretended to be discussing a block booking for a sizable group of tourists a couple of months later. When he was not being observed, he stole a look at a message left for
