By the time he had made his way through the pile of papers, it was almost 7.30 p.m. He called Loderup and told his sister that he was on his way.'We're starving,' she said. 'Do you always work this late?'
Wallander selected a cassette of a Puccini opera and went out to his car. He had wanted to make sure that Anette Brolin had put out of her mind what had happened the night before after all. But this would have to wait.
Kristina told him that the help for their father had turned out to be a solid woman in her 50s who would have no trouble taking care of him.
'He couldn't ask for anyone better,' she said when she came out to the driveway and met him in the dark.'What's Dad doing?''He's painting,' she said.
While his sister made dinner, Wallander sat on the toboggan in the studio and watched the autumn motif emerge. His father seemed to have completely forgotten about what had happened.
I have to visit him more regularly, thought Wallander. At least three times a week, and preferably at specific times.
After dinner they played cards with their father for a couple of hours. At 11 p.m. he went to bed.
'I'm going home tomorrow,' said Kristina. 'I can't be away any longer.''Thanks for coming,' said Wallander.
They decided that he would pick her up at 8 a.m. the next morning and drive her to the airport.
'The plane was full out of Sturup,' she said. 'I'm leaving from Everod.'
That suited Wallander just fine, since he had to drive to Kristianstad anyway.
Just after midnight he walked into his apartment on Mariagatan. He poured himself a big glass of whisky and took it with him into the bathroom. He lay in the bath for a long time, thawing out his limbs in the hot water.
He tried to push them away, but Rune Bergman and Valfrid Strom kept popping into his thoughts. He was trying to understand. The only thing he came up with was the same idea he had had so many times before. A new world had emerged, and he hadn't even noticed it. As a policeman, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live in the new? How would he deal with the great uneasiness he felt at these changes, at so much happening so fast?
The murder of the Somali had been a new kind of murder. The double murder in Lunnarp, however, was an old-fashioned crime. Or was it really? He thought about the savagery, and the noose. He wasn't sure.
It was 1.30 a.m. when finally he crawled between the chilly sheets. He felt more lonely there than ever.
For the next three days nothing happened. Naslund came back to work and succeeded in solving the problem of the stolen car. A man and a woman went on a robbery spree and then left the car in Halmstad. On the night of the murder they had been staying in a boarding house in Bastad. The owner vouched for their alibi.
Goran Boman talked to Ellen Magnusson. She resolutely denied that Johannes Lovgren was the father of her son.
Wallander visited Erik Magnusson again and asked for the alibi he had forgotten to get during their first encounter. He had been with his fiancee. There was no reason to doubt him. Martinsson got nowhere with Lovgren's trip to Ystad. The Nystroms were quite sure about their story, as were the bus drivers and taxi companies. Rydberg went to the funeral, and talked to nineteen different relatives of the Lovgrens.Nothing gave them any leads.
The temperature hovered around freezing point. One day there was no wind, the next day it was gusty. Wallander ran into Anette Brolin in the corridor. She thanked him for the flowers. But he couldn't be certain that she really had decided to forget about what had happened that night.
Bergman still refused to talk, even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. Various extreme nationalist movements tried to take credit for the crime. The press and the rest of the media became involved in a violent debate about Sweden's immigration policy. Although all was calm in Skane, crosses burned in the night outside various refugee camps in other parts of the country.
Wallander and his colleagues on the investigative team shielded themselves from all of this. Only rarely were any opinions expressed that were not directly related to the deadlocked investigation. But Wallander realised that he was not alone in his feelings of uncertainty and confusion at the new society that was emerging.
We live as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and nor is it certain that they were as idyllic as we remember them.
Then on Friday, 19 January, everything happened at once.
The day did not start off well for Wallander. At 7.30 a.m. he had his Peugeot checked out and barely managed to avoid having it declared unfit for the road. When he went through the inspection report, he saw that his car needed repairs that would cost thousands of kronor. Despondent, he drove to the police station.
He hadn't even taken off his overcoat when Martinsson came storming into his office.
'Damn it,' he said. 'I know how Johannes Lovgren got to Ystad and back home again.'
Wallander forgot all about the car and felt himself instantly seized with excitement.
'It wasn't a flying carpet, after all,' continued Martinsson. 'The chimney sweep drove him.'Wallander sat down in his desk chair.'What chimney sweep?'
'Master chimney sweep Arthur Lundin from Slimminge. Out of the blue Hanna Nystrom has remembered that the chimney sweep had been that Thursday, 4 January. He cleaned the chimneys at both houses and then left. When she told me that he cleaned the Lovgrens' flues second and that he left around 10.30 a.m., bells started to go off in my head. I just talked to him. He was cleaning the hospital chimney in Rydsgard. It turned out that he never listens to the radio or watches TV or reads the papers. He cleans chimneys and spends the rest of his time drinking aquavit and looking after pet rabbits. He had no idea that the
Lovgrens had been murdered. But he told me that he gave Johannes Lovgren a lift into Ystad. Since he has a van and Lovgren was sitting in the windowless back seat, it's not so strange that nobody saw him.''But didn't the Nystroms see the car coming back?'
'No,' replied Martinsson triumphantly. 'That's just it. Lovgren asked Lundin to stop on Veberodsvagen. From there you can walk along a dirt road right up to the back of Lovgren's house. It's about a kilometre. If the Nystroms were sitting in the window, it would have looked as if Lovgren were coming in from the stable.'Wallander frowned. 'It still seems odd.'
'Lundin was very frank. He said that Lovgren promised him a bottie of vodka if he would drive him home. He let Lovgren out in Ystad and then went on to a couple of houses north of town. He picked up him up at the agreed time, dropped him off on Veberodsvagen, and got his bottle of vodka.''Good,' said Wallander. 'Do the times match up?''They fit perfectly.'
'Did you ask him about the briefcase?' 'Lundin seemed to remember that he had a briefcase with him.''Did he have anything else?' 'Lundin didn't think so.''Did he see whether Lovgren met anybody in Ystad?' 'No.'
'Had Lovgren said anything about what he was going to do in town?' 'No, nothing.'
'And you don't think that this chimney sweep knew about Lovgren having 27,000 kronor in his briefcase?' 'Hardly. He seemed the least likely person to be a robber.
I think he's just a solitary chimney sweep who lives contentedly with his rabbits and his aquavit. That's all.'
Wallander thought for a moment. 'Do you think Lovgren could have arranged a meeting with someone on that dirt road? Since the briefcase is gone.'
'Maybe. I was thinking of taking a dog patrol out there.'
'Do it right away,' said Wallander. 'Maybe we're at last getting somewhere.'
Martinsson left the office. He almost collided with Hansson, who was on his way in.'Do you have a minute?' he asked.Wallander nodded. 'How's it going?'
'He's not talking. But he's been linked to the crime. That bitch Brolin is going to remand him today.'
