of a time tracking you down. Where have you been?''Is he dead?''His head was blown off.'
Wallander felt sick to his stomach. 'I'm on my way,' he said.
He hung up the phone just as Boman came in, balancing two mugs of coffee. Wallander gave him a rundown of what had happened.
'I'll get you emergency transport,' said Boman. 'I'll send your car over later with one of the boys.'
Everything happened fast. In a few minutes Wallander was on his way to Ystad in a car with sirens wailing. Rydberg met him at the station and they drove at once to Hageholm.'Do we have any leads?' asked Wallander.'None. But the newsroom at
'This is insane,' said Wallander. 'We don't have foreign suspects any more, do we?'
'Somebody seems to have a different opinion. Thinks that we're shielding some foreigners.''But I've already denied that.'
'Whoever did this doesn't give a shit about your denials. They see a perfect case for pulling out a gun and shooting foreigners.''This is crazy!''You're damn right it's crazy. But it's true!''Did the newspaper tape the phone conversation?''Yes.'
'I want to hear it. To see if it's the same person who's been calling me.'The car raced through the landscape of Skane.'What are we going to do now?' asked Wallander.
'We've got to catch the Lunnarp killers,' said Rydberg. 'And damned fast.'
At Hageholm everything was in chaos. Distressed and weeping refugees had gathered in the dining hall, reporters were interviewing people, and phones were ringing. Wallander stepped out of the car onto a muddy dirt road several hundred metres from the residential buildings. The wind was blowing again, and he turned up the collar of his jacket. An area near the road had been cordoned off. The dead man was lying face down in the mud.Wallander cautiously lifted the sheet covering the body.
Rydberg hadn't been exaggerating. There was almost nothing left of the head.'Shot at close range,' said Hansson who was standing nearby. 'Whoever did this must have jumped out of hiding and fired the shots from a few metres away.' 'Shots?' said Wallander.
'The camp director says that she heard two shots, one after the other.' Wallander looked around.'Car tracks?' he asked. 'Where does this road go?' 'Two kilometres further along you come out on the E65. 'And no-one saw anything?'
'It's hard to question refugees who speak 15 different languages. But we're working on it.''Do we know who the dead man is?'
'He had a wife and nine children.'
Wallander stared at Hansson in disbelief. 'Nine children?'
'Just imagine the headlines tomorrow morning,' said Hansson. 'Innocent refugee murdered taking a walk. Nine children left without a father.'Svedberg came running from one of the police cars.'The police chief is on the phone,' he said.Wallander looked surprised.
'I thought he wasn't due back from Spain until tomorrow.'
'Not him. The chief of the national police.'
Wallander got into the car and picked up the phone. The chief's voice was emphatic, and Wallander was immediately annoyed by what he said.
'This looks very bad,' said the chief. 'We don't need racist murders in this country.''No,' said Wallander.
'This investigation must be given top priority.' 'Yes. But we already have the murders in Lunnarp on our hands.'
'Are you making any progress there?' 'I think so. But it takes time.'
'I want you to report to me personally. I'm going to take part in a discussion programme on TV tonight, and I need all the information I can get.'‘I’ll see to it.'He hung up.
Wallander remained sitting in the car. Naslund will have to handle this, he thought. He'll have to feed the paperwork to Stockholm. He felt depressed. His hangover was gone, and he remembered what had happened the night before, as he saw Peters approaching from a police car that had just arrived.
He thought about Mona and the man who had picked her up. And Linda laughing, the black man at her side. His father, painting his everlasting landscape. He thought about himself too.
Wallander forced himself out of the car to take charge of the criminal investigation. Nothing else had better happen, he thought. We can't handle anything else.It was still raining.
CHAPTER 10
Wallander stood in the driving rain, freezing. It was late afternoon, and the police had rigged floodlights around the murder scene. He watched two ambulance attendants squishing through the mud with a stretcher. They were taking away the dead Somali. When he looked at the sea of mud he wondered whether even as skilful a detective as Rydberg would be able to find any tracks.
Still, he felt slightly relieved. Until ten minutes ago the officers had been surrounded by a hysterical woman and nine howling children. The wife of the dead man had thrown herself down in the mud, and her wails were so piercing that several of the policemen couldn't tolerate the sound and had moved away. To his surprise, Wallander saw that the only one who was able to handle the grieving woman and the anguished children was Martinsson. The youngest policeman on the force, who so far in his career had never even been forced to notify someone of a relative's death. He had held the woman, kneeling in the mud, and in some way the two were able to understand each other across the language barrier. A priest who had been called out was unable to do anything, of course. But gradually Martinsson succeeded in getting the woman and the children back to the main building, where a doctor was ready to take care of them.
Rydberg came tramping through the mud. His trousers were splattered all the way up his thighs.
'What a hell of a mess,' he said. 'But Hansson and Svedberg have done a fantastic job. They managed to find two refugees and an interpreter who actually think they saw something.''What did they see?'
'How should I know? I don't speak either Arabic or Swahili. But they're on their way to Ystad right now. The Immigration Service has promised us some interpreters. I thought it would be best if you handled the interviews.'Wallander nodded. 'Have we got anything to go on?'Rydberg took out his grimy notebook.
'He was killed at 1 p.m. precisely,' he said. 'The director was listening to the news on the radio when she heard the noise. There were two shots. But you know that already. He was dead before he hit the ground. It seems to have been regular buckshot. Gyttorp brand, I think. Nytrox 36, probably. That's about all.''That's not much.'
'It's absolutely nothing. But maybe the eyewitnesses will have something to tell us.'
'I've authorised overtime for everyone,' said Wallander. 'Now we'll have to bust our guts night and day if necessary.'
Back at the station, the first interview almost drove him to despair. The interpreter, who was supposed to know Swahili, could barely understand the dialect spoken by the witness, a young man from Malawi. It took him almost 20 minutes to discover that the man for some strange reason knew Luvale, a language spoken in parts of Zaire and Zambia. One of the Immigration Service people knew a former missionary who spoke fluent Luvale. She was close to 90 and lived in sheltered accommodation in Trelleborg. After calling his colleagues there, he was promised that the missionary would be given police transport to Ystad. Wallander suspected that a 90-year-old missionary might not be very sharp, but he was wrong. A little white-haired lady with lively eyes appeared at the
