Wallander and quickly memorized the name Linda and a telephone number. He left the hotel, and then traced the number to an address in Bromma. He chatted to a woman on the stairs there, and soon figured out how things stood.
That morning he waited on the street outside the apartment until half past eight. Just then, an elderly woman emerged from the building. He went over to her and wished her good morning; she recognized the pleasant guy who had spoken to her previously.
“They left early this morning,” she said in reply to his question.
“Both of them?”
“Both of them.”
“Are they going to be away long?”
“She promised to call.”
“She told you where they were going, no doubt?”
“They were going abroad on vacation. I didn’t quite catch where.”
Konovalenko could see she was trying hard to remember. He waited.
“France, I think it was,” she said eventually. “I’m not absolutely sure, mind you.”
Konovalenko thanked her for her assistance, and left. He would send Rykoff later to go over the apartment.
As he needed time to think and was in no special hurry, he walked to Brommaplan where he could no doubt find a cab. The BMW had served its purpose, and he would give Rykoff the job of finding him another car before the day was out.
Konovalenko immediately rejected the possibility that they had gone abroad. The cop from Ystad was a cold, calculating sort of guy. He had discovered that somebody had been asking the old lady questions the day before. Somebody who would doubtless come back and ask some more questions. And so he left a false trail, pointing to France.
Where can they have gone, Konovalenko wondered. In all probability he has taken his daughter back with him to Ystad. But he might have chosen some other place I couldn’t possibly track down.
A temporary retreat, thought Konovalenko. I’ll give him a start that I can recover later.
He drew one more conclusion. The cop from Ystad was worried. Why else would he take his daughter with him?
Konovalenko gave a little smile at the thought that they were thinking along the same lines, he and the insignificant little cop called Wallander. He recalled something a KGB colonel said to his new recruits shortly after they started their long period of training. A high level of education, a long line of ancestors, or even a high level of intelligence is no guarantee of becoming an outstanding chess player.
The main thing just now was to find Victor Mabasha, he thought. Kill him. Finish off what he had failed to do in the disco and the cemetery.
With a vague feeling of unease, he recalled the previous evening.
Shortly before midnight he called South Africa and spoke with Jan Kleyn on his special emergency number. He had rehearsed what he was going to say very carefully. There were no more excuses to explain away Victor Mabasha’s continued existence. And so he lied. He said Victor Mabasha had been killed the previous day. A hand grenade in the gas tank. When the rubber band holding back the firing pin had been eaten away, the car exploded. Victor Mabasha had perished instantaneously.
All the same, Konovalenko sensed a degree of dissatisfaction in Jan Kleyn. A crisis of confidence between himself and the South African intelligence service that he could not afford. That could put his whole future at risk.
Konovalenko resolved to step on the gas. There was no longer any time to spare. Victor Mabasha had to be tracked down and killed within the next few days.
This unfathomable dusk slowly set in. But Victor Mabasha barely noticed it.
Now and again he thought about the man he was to kill. Jan Kleyn would understand. He would allow him to retain his assignment. One of these days, he would have the South African president in his sights. He would not hesitate, he would carry out the assignment he had taken on.
He wondered if the president was aware that he would soon be dead. Did white people have their own songomas who came to them in their dreams?
In the end he concluded they must have. How could any man survive without being in contact with the spirit world that controlled our lives, that had power over life and death?
On this occasion the spirits had been kind to him. They had told him what he had to do.
Wallander woke up soon after six in the morning. For the first time since starting to track down Louise Akerblom’s killer, he was starting to feel properly rested. He could hear his daughter snoring through the half-open door. He got up and stood in the doorway, watching her. He was suddenly overwhelmed by intense joy, and it occurred to him that the meaning of life was quite simply to take care of one’s children. Nothing else. He went to the bathroom, took a long shower, and decided to make an appointment with the police doctor. It must be possible to give some kind of medical help to a cop with the serious intention of losing weight and getting fitter.
Every morning he recalled the occasion the previous year when he woke up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, and thought he was having a heart attack. The doctor who examined him said it was a warning. A warning that there was something completely wrong in his life. Now, a year later, he had to admit he had done nothing at all to change his life style. In addition, he had put on at least three kilos.
He drank coffee at the kitchen table. There was a thick fog over Ystad this morning. But soon spring would really have arrived, and he resolved to go and talk with Bjork this coming Monday about vacation plans.
He left the apartment at a quarter past seven, after scribbling down his direct number on a scrap of paper and leaving it on the kitchen table.
When he came out onto the street, he was enveloped by fog. It was so thick, he could hardly make out his car parked a short way from the apartment block. He thought maybe he should leave it where it was, and walk to the station.
Suddenly he had the feeling something had moved on the other side of the street. A lamppost seemed to sway slightly.
Then he saw there was a man standing there, enveloped by fog just like himself.
The next moment he recognized who it was. Goli had returned to Ystad.
Chapter Nineteen
Jan Kleyn had a weakness, a well-preserved secret. Her name was Miranda, and she was as black as a raven’s shadow.
She was his secret, the crucial counterpoint in his life. Everyone who knew Jan Kleyn would have considered her an impossibility. His colleagues in the intelligence service would have dismissed any rumor about her existence as preposterous fantasy. Jan Kleyn was one of those very rare suns that were considered free from spots.
But there was one, and her name was Miranda.
They were the same age, and had been aware of each other’s existence since they were kids. But they did not grow up together. They lived in two different worlds. Miranda’s mother, Matilda, worked as a servant for Jan Kleyn’s parents in their big, white house on a hill outside Bloemfontein. She lived a few kilometers away in one of a cluster of tin shacks where the Africans had their homes. Every morning, at the first light of dawn, she would make her way laboriously up the steep hill to the white house, where her first task of the day was to serve the family breakfast. That hill was a sort of penance she had to pay for the crime of being born black. Jan Kleyn, like his brothers and sisters, had special servants whose only assignment was to take care of the children. Even so, he used to turn to Matilda all the time. One day when he was eleven, he suddenly started to wonder where she came from every morning, and where she went back to when her day’s work was done. As part of a forbidden adventure-he was not allowed to leave the walled-in yard on his own-he followed her in secret. It was the first time he had seen at close range the clutter of tin shacks where African families lived. Of course, he had been aware that the blacks lived in quite different conditions from his own. He was always hearing from his parents how it was part
