Herdin stared at the floor. Wallander knew instinctively that he must wait.
'Would you get us some coffee?' he asked Hansson. 'And see if you can find some pastries.'
While Hansson was gone, Herdin kept staring at the floor, and Wallander waited. Hansson brought in the coffee, and Herdin ate a stale pastry.
Wallander thought it was time to ask the question again. 'Sooner or later you'll have no choice but to answer,' he said.Herdin raised his head and looked him straight in the eye.
'When they got married I already had a feeling that there was another person behind Johannes Lovgren's friendly yet taciturn exterior. I thought there was something fishy about him. Maria was my little sister. I wanted the best for her. I was suspicious of Lovgren from the first time he came to our parents' house to court her. It took me 30 years to work out who he was. How I did it is my business.''Did you tell your sister what you found out?'
'Never. Not a word.''Did you tell anyone else? Your own wife?' 'I'm not married.'
Wallander looked at the man sitting in front of him. There was something hard and dogged about him. Like a man who had been brought up eating gravel.
'One last question,' said Wallander. 'Now we know that Lovgren had plenty of money. Maybe he also had a large sum of money at home the night he was murdered. We'll have to find that out. But who would have known about it? Besides you.'
Herdin looked at him. Wallander saw a glint of fear in his eyes.
'I didn't know about it,' said Herdin. Wallander nodded.
'We'll stop here,' he said, shoving aside the pad on which he had been taking notes. 'But we're going to be needing your help again.''Can I go now?' said Herdin, getting up.
'You can go,' replied Wallander. 'But don't leave the district without talking to us first. And if you think of anything else, we'd like to hear from you.'
As he was leaving, Herdin hesitated as if there was something more he wanted to say. Then he pushed open the door and was gone.
'Tell Martinsson to run a check on him,' said Wallander. 'Probably we won't find anything. But it's best to make sure.'
'What do you think about what he said?' Hansson wondered.Wallander thought before replying.
'There was something convincing about him. I don't think he was lying or making things up. I believe he did discover that Johannes Lovgren was living a double life. I think he was protecting his sister.''Do you think he could have been involved?'
Wallander was certain when he answered. 'Herdin didn't kill them. Nor do I think he knows who did. I believe he came to us for two reasons. He wanted to help us find the people responsible so he can both thank them and spit in their faces.
Hansson got up. 'I'll tell Martinsson. Anything else you need right now?'Wallander looked at his watch.'Let's have a meeting in my office in an hour. See if you can get hold of Rydberg. He was supposed to go to Malmo to find a man who makes sails.'Hansson gave him a questioning look.'The noose. The knot. I'll fill you in later.'
Hansson left, and Wallander was alone. A breakthrough, he thought. All successful criminal investigations reach a point where we break through the wall. We don't know what we're going to find. But there's always a solution somewhere.
He went over to the window and looked out into the twilight. A cold draught was seeping through the window frame, and he could see from the way a streetlight was swaying that the wind was blowing harder.
He thought about Nystrom and his wife. For a lifetime they had lived in close contact with a man who had not been the man he pretended to be at all.
How would they react when the truth came out? With denial? Bitterness? Amazement?
He went back to the desk and sat down. The first feeling of relief that followed a breakthrough like this one often faded quite rapidly. Now there was a possible motive, the most common of all: money. But so far there was no invisible finger pointing in a specific direction. No murderer yet.
Wallander cast another glance at his watch. If he hurried, he could drive down to the hot dog stand at the railway station and get a bite to eat before the meeting. This day too was going to pass without a change in his eating habits.
He was just about to put on his jacket when the phone rang. At the same time there was a knock on the door. The jacket fell to the floor as he grabbed the phone and shouted, 'Come in.'
Rydberg stood in the doorway. He was holding a large plastic bag.
He heard Ebba's voice on the phone.'The TV people insist on speaking to you,' she said.
He quickly decided to talk to Rydberg before he had to deal with the media again.
'Tell them I'm in a meeting and won't be available for half an hour,' he said.'Are you sure?''Sure of what?'
'That you'll talk to them in half an hour? Swedish TV doesn't like to be kept waiting. They take it for granted that everyone will fall to their knees when they call.'
'That I will not do. But I can talk to them in half an hour.'He hung up.
Rydberg had sat down on the chair by the window. He was busy drying off his hair with a paper napkin.'I've got good news,' said Wallander.Rydberg went on drying his hair.
'I think we've got a motive. Money. And I think we should look for the killers among people who were close to the Lovgrens.'Rydberg tossed the wet napkin into the wastebasket.
'I've had a miserable day,' he said. 'Good news is welcome.'
Wallander spent 5 minutes recounting the meeting with the farmer, Lars Herdin. Rydberg stared gloomily at the shards of glass on the floor.
'Strange story,' said Rydberg when Wallander was finished. 'It's strange enough to be true.'
'I'll try to sum it up,' Wallander went on. 'Someone knew that Johannes Lovgren from time to time kept large sums of money at home. This gives us robbery as a motive. And the robbery developed into a murder. If Herdin's description of Lovgren is right, that he was an unusually stingy man, he would naturally have refused to reveal where he had hidden the money. Maria Lovgren, who can't have understood much of what was happening on the last night of her life, was forced to accompany Johannes on his final journey. So the question is who besides Herdin knew about the irregular but substantial cash withdrawals. If we can answer that, we can probably answer everything.'Rydberg sat there thinking after Wallander fell silent.'Did I leave anything out?' asked Wallander.
'I'm thinking about what she said before she died,' said Rydberg. 'Foreign. And I'm thinking about what I've got in this plastic bag.'
He stood up and dumped the contents of the bag onto the desk. A heap of pieces of rope. Each one artfully tied in a knot.
'I've been with an old sail maker in a flat that smells worse than anything you can imagine,' said Rydberg with a grimace. 'It turns out that this man is almost 90, and practically senile. I wonder whether I shouldn't contact the social services. He was so confused he thought I was his son. Later one of the neighbours told me that his son has been dead for 30 years. But he certainly knows about knots. When I finally got out of there, it was four hours later. These pieces of rope were a present.''Did you find out what you wanted to know?'
'The old man looked at the noose and said he thought the knot was ugly. Then it took me three hours to get him to tell me something about this ugly knot. In the meantime he managed to nod off for a while.'
Rydberg gathered up the bits of rope in his plastic bag as he went on. 'When he woke up he started talking about his days at sea. And then he said that he'd seen that knot in Argentina. Argentine sailors used that knot for making leads for their dogs.' Wallander nodded.
'So you were right. The knot was foreign. The question now is how this all fits in with Herdin's story.'
They went out in the corridor, Rydberg went to his office, and Wallander went to see Martinsson and study the print-outs. It turned out that there were exhaustive statistics on overseas-born citizens who had either committed or been suspected of committing crimes in Sweden. Martinsson had also managed to run a check on
