minutes. No more.'
'The bank has a copy of their receipt, I suppose?' She nodded.
'I exchanged money at the bank today. I had to give my name. Did they give an address?' 'Perhaps. I don't remember.'
Kurt Wallander nodded. Now something was starting to spark. 'Your memory is phenomenal,' he said. 'Did you ever see those two men again?''No. Never.''Would you recognise them?' 'I think so. Maybe.'
Wallander thought for a few moments. 'You might have to interrupt your holiday for a few days,' he said.'We're supposed to drive to Oland tomorrow!'
Wallander made a decision on the spot. 'I'm sorry, you can't,' he said. 'Maybe the next day. But not before then.'
He stood up and brushed off the sand. 'Be sure to tell your parents where we can reach you,' he said. She stood up and got ready to rejoin her friends. 'Can I tell them?' she asked.
'Invent something,' he replied. 'I'm sure you can do that.'
Late that afternoon they found the exchange receipt in the Union Bank's files.The signature was illegible. No address was given.
Wallander was not disappointed, because now at least he understood how the whole thing might have happened. From the bank he drove straight to Rydberg's place, where he was convalescing.
Rydberg was sitting on his balcony when Wallander rang the doorbell. He had grown thin and was very pale. Together they sat on the balcony, and Wallander told him about his discovery. Rydberg nodded thoughtfully.
'You're probably right,' he said when Wallander finished. 'That's probably how it happened.'
'The question now is how to find them,' said Wallander. 'Some tourists who happened to be visiting Sweden more than six months ago.
'Maybe they're still here,' said Rydberg. 'As refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants.''Where do I start?' asked Wallander.
'I don't know,' said Rydberg. 'But you'll figure out something.'They sat for a couple of hours on Rydberg's balcony. In the early evening Wallander went back to his car. The stones under his feet were no longer so cold.
CHAPTER 15
Wallander would always remember the following days as the time when the chart was drawn. He started with what Britta-Lena Boden remembered and an illegible signature. A possible scenario existed, and the last word Maria Lovgren spoke before she died was a piece of the puzzle that had finally fallen into place. He also had the oddly-knotted noose to consider.
He drew the chart. On the day he had talked with Britta-Lena Boden in the warm sand dunes at Sandhammaren he had gone to Bjork's house, interrupted his dinner, and extracted from him a promise there and then to assign Hansson and Martinsson back to the investigation, which was once again given top priority.
On Wednesday, 11 July, before the bank opened for business, they reconstructed the scene. Britta-Lena Boden took her place behind the window, Hansson assumed the role of Lovgren, and Martinsson and Bjork played the two men who came in to change their money. Wallander insisted that everything should be exactly as it was on that day six months earlier. The anxious bank manager eventually agreed to allow Britta-Lena Boden to hand over 27,000 kronor notes of mixed, large denominations to Hansson, who had borrowed an old briefcase from Ebba.
Wallander stood to one side, watching everything. Twice he ordered them to begin again when Britta-Lena Boden remembered some detail that didn't seem right.
Wallander set up this reconstruction in order to trigger her memory. He was hoping that she could open a door to yet another room in her exceptional memory.
When it was over, she shook her head. She had told him everything she could remember. There was nothing more she could say. Wallander asked her to postpone her journey to Oland another couple of days and then left her in an office where she could look through photographs of foreign criminals who, for one reason or another, had been caught in the net of the Swedish police. When this produced no results, she was put on a flight to Norrkoping to go through the extensive photo archives at the Immigration Service. After 18 hours spent studying countless pictures, she returned to Sturup, where Wallander himself went to meet her. The results were negative.
The next step was to link up with Interpol. The scenario of how the crime might have occurred was fed into their computers, which then made comparative studies at European headquarters. Again, nothing turned up to change the situation significantly.
While Britta-Lena Boden was sitting puzzling over the endless rows of photographs, Wallander conducted three long interviews with Arthur Lundin, the chimney sweep from Slimminge. The drives between Lunnarp and Ystad were reconstructed, clocked, and repeated. Wallander continued to draw up his chart.
Now and then he went to see Rydberg, who sat on his balcony, weak and pale, and went over the investigation with him. Rydberg insisted that these visits were not a burden for him. But Wallander left him each time with a nagging feeling of guilt.
Anette Brolin returned from her holiday, which she had spent with her husband and children in a summerhouse in Grebbestad on the west coast. Her family came back to Ystad with her, and Wallander adopted his most formal tone when he called to report his breakthrough in the hitherto stalled investigation.
After a week of intensive activity, everything came to a standstill. Wallander stared at his chart. They were stuck again.
'We'll just have to wait,' said Bjork. 'Interpol's dough rises slowly.'
Wallander winced at the strained metaphor, but realised that Bjork was right.
When Britta-Lena Boden came back from Oland, Wallander asked the bank to give her a few more days off. He took her to the refugee camps around Ystad. They also visited the floating camps on ships in Malmo's Oil Harbour. But nowhere did she see a face that she recognised. Wallander arranged for a police artist to come down from Stockholm, but after coundess sketches, Britta-Lena Boden was not satisfied with any of the faces the artist produced.
Wallander began to have doubts. Bjork forced him to give up Martinsson and make do with Hansson as his only colleague on the case.
On Friday, 20 July, Wallander was once more ready to give up. Late in the evening he sat down and wrote a memo suggesting that the investigation be put on hold for the time being because no pertinent material that would move the case forward could be found.
He put the paper on his desk and decided to leave the decision to Bjork and Anette Brolin on Monday morning.
He spent Saturday and Sunday on the Danish island of Bornholm. It was windy and rainy, and something he ate on the ferry made him ill. He spent Sunday night in bed. At regular intervals he had to get up and vomit.
When he woke on Monday morning, he was feeling better, but he was still undecided about whether to stay in bed or not. At last he got up and left the flat. A few minutes before 9 a.m. he was at the station. Since it was Ebba's birthday, they all had cake in the canteen. It was almost 10 a.m. before Wallander finally had a chance to read through his memo to Bjork. He was about to deliver it when the phone rang. It was Britta-Lena Boden.Her voice was barely a whisper.'They've come back. Get here as fast as you can!''Who's come back?' asked Wallander.
'The men who changed the money. Don't you understand?'
In the corridor he ran into Noren, just come back from traffic duty.'Come with me!' shouted Wallander.
'What the hell's going on?' said Noren biting into a sandwich.'Don't ask. Just come!'
When they reached the bank Noren was still clutching the half-eaten sandwich. On the way over, Wallander had gone through a red light and driven over a flower bed. He left the car right in the middle of some market stalls in the square by the town hall. But still they got there too late. The two men had disappeared. Britta-Lena Boden had been so shaken to see them again that it hadn't occurred to her to ask anyone to follow them. But she had had the presence of mind to activate the security camera.
Wallander studied the signature on the receipt. The name was again illegible, but the signature was the
