That it might involve Nelson Mandela had never even occurred to him.
On Wednesday, May 13, shortly after six in the evening, a fishing boat pulled into the harbor at Limhamn.
Sikosi Tsiki jumped ashore. The fishing boat pulled out right away, headed back to Denmark.
An unusually fat man was standing on the dark to welcome him.
That particular afternoon there was a southwesterly gale blowing over Skane. The wind did not die down until the evening.
Then came the heat.
Chapter Twenty
Shortly after three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, Peters and Noren were driving through central Ystad in their patrol car. They were waiting for their shift to come to an end. It had been a quiet day with only one real incident. Just before noon they received a call to say a naked man had started demolishing a house out in Sandskogen. His wife made the call. She explained how the man was in a rage because he had to spend all his leisure time repairing her parents’ summer cottage. In order to secure some peace and quiet in his life, he decided to pull it down. She explained how he would prefer to sit by a lake, fishing.
“You’d better go straight there and calm the guy down,” said the operator at the emergency center.
“What’s it called?” asked Noren, who was looking after the radio while Peters did the driving. “Disorderly conduct?”
“There’s no such thing anymore,” said the operator. “But if the house belongs to his in-laws, you could say it’s taking the law into his own hands. Who cares what it’s called? Just calm the guy down. That’s the main thing.”
They drove out toward Sandskogen without speeding up.
“I guess I understand the guy,” said Peters. “Having a house of your own can be a pain in the ass. There’s always something that needs to be done. But you never have time, or it’s too expensive. Having to work on somebody else’s house in the same way can’t make things any better.”
“Maybe we’d better help him pull the house down instead,” said Noren.
They managed to find the right address. Quite a crowd had gathered on the road outside the fence. Noren and Peters got out of the car and watched the naked guy crawling around on the roof, prying off tiles with a crowbar. Just then his wife came running up. Noren could see she had been crying. They listened to her incoherent account of what had happened. The main thing was, he obviously did not have permission to do what he was doing.
They went over to the house and yelled up at the guy sitting astride the roof ridge. He was concentrating so hard on the roof tiles, he hadn’t noticed the patrol car. When he saw Noren and Peters he was so surprised, he dropped the crowbar. It came sliding down the roof, and Noren had to leap to one side to avoid being hit.
“Careful with that!” yelled Peters. “I guess you’d better come down. You have no right to be demolishing this house.”
To their astonishment the guy obeyed them right away. He let down the ladder he had pulled up behind him, and climbed down. His wife came running up with a robe, which he put on.
“You gonna arrest me?” asked the guy.
“No,” said Peters. “But you’d better quit pulling that house down. To tell you the truth, I don’t really think they’ll be asking you to do any more repairs.”
“All I want to do is to go fishing,” said the man.
They drove back through Sandskogen. Noren reported back to headquarters.
Just as they were about to turn into the Osterleden highway, it happened.
“Here comes Wallander,” he said.
Noren looked up from his notebook.
As the car drove past, it looked like Wallander had not seen them. That would have been very strange if true, as they were in a marked patrol car painted blue and white. What attracted the attention of the two cops most of all, however, was not Wallander’s vacant stare.
It was the guy in the passenger seat. He was black.
Peters and Noren looked at each other.
“Wasn’t that an African in the car?” wondered Noren.
“Yeah,” said Peters. “He sure was black.”
They were both thinking about the severed finger they had found a few weeks earlier, and the black man they’d been searching for all over the country.
“Wallander must have caught him,” said Noren hesitantly.
“Why is he traveling in that direction, then?” objected Peters. “And why didn’t he stop when he saw us?”
“It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Noren. “Like kids do. If they close their eyes, they think nobody can see them.”
Peters nodded.
“Do you think he’s in trouble?”
“No,” said Noren. “But where did he manage to find the black guy?”
Then they were interrupted by an emergency call about a suspected stolen motorcycle found abandoned in Bjaresjo. When they finished their shift they went back to the station. To their surprise, when they asked about Wallander in the coffee room they discovered he had not shown up. Peters was just going to tell everybody how they had seen him when he saw Noren quickly put his finger over his lips.
“Why shouldn’t I say anything?” he asked when they were together in the locker room, getting ready to go home.
“If Wallander hasn’t shown up, there must be some reason why,” said Noren. “Just what, is nothing to do with you or me. Besides, it could be some other African. Martinson once said Wallander’s daughter had something going with a black man. It could have been him, for all we know.”
“I still think it’s weird,” Peters insisted.
That was a feeling that stayed with him even after he got back home to his row house on the road to Kristianstad. When he had finished his dinner and played with his kids for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinson lived in the same neighborhood, so he decided to stop by and tell him what he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinson had inquired recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.
Martinson himself answered the door. He invited Peters to come in.
“I must get back home in a minute,” said Peters. “But there is one thing I’d like to mention. Do you have time?”
Martinson had some position or other in the Liberal Party and was hoping for a seat on the local council before long; he had been reading some boring political reports the party had sent him. He lost no time putting on a jacket, and came out to join Peters. The latter told him what had happened earlier that afternoon.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Martinson when Peters had finished.
“We can’t both have been seeing things,” said Peters.
“Strange,” said Martinson thoughtfully. “I’d have heard right away if it was the African who’s missing a finger.”
“Maybe it was his daughter’s boyfriend,” hazarded Peters.
“Wallander said that was all over and done with,” said Martinson.
They walked in silence for a while, watching the dog straining at its leash.
“It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Peters tentatively. “And that can only mean one thing. He didn’t want us to know what he was up to.”
“Or at least about the African in the passenger seat,” said Martinson, lost in thought.
“I guess there’ll be some natural explanation,” said Peters. “I mean, I don’t want to suggest Wallander is up to something he shouldn’t be.”
