'It's for you,' he said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.
Linda, he thought. It's got to be her. But it was Rydberg calling from the hospital. 'She's dead,' he said. 'Did she wake up?'
'As a matter of fact, she did. For 10 minutes. The doctors thought the crisis was over. Then she died.' 'Did she say anything?'
Rydberg sounded thoughtful when he answered. 'I think you'd better come back to town.'
'What did she say?''Something you won't want to hear.''I'll come to the hospital.'
'It's better if you go to the station. She's dead, I told you.'Wallander hung up. 'I've got to go,' he said.His father glared at him. 'You don't like me,' he said.
'I'll be back tomorrow,' replied Wallander, wondering what to do about the squalor his father was living in. 'I'll come tomorrow for sure. We can sit and talk. We can make dinner. We can play poker if you want.'
Even though Wallander was a wretched card player, he knew that a game would mollify his father. 'I'll be here at seven,' he said.
Then he drove back to Ystad. He walked back through the same glass doors that he had walked out of not much earlier. Ebba nodded at him.'Rydberg is waiting in the canteen,' she said.
He was there, hunched over a cup of coffee. When Wallander saw the other man's face, he knew that something unpleasant was in store for him.
CHAPTER 4
Wallander and Rydberg were alone in the canteen. In the distance they could hear the ruckus a drunk was making, loudly protesting at his arrest. Otherwise it was quiet. Only the faint whine of the radiator could be heard.Wallander sat down across from Rydberg.
'Take off your overcoat,' said Rydberg. 'Or else you'll freeze when you go back out in the wind again.'
'First I want to hear what you have to say. Then I'll decide whether or not to take off my coat.'Rydberg shrugged. 'She died,' he said.'So I understand.''But she woke up for a while right before she died.' 'And she spoke?'
'That may be putting it too strongly. She whispered. Or wheezed.''Did you get it on tape?'
Rydberg shook his head. 'It wouldn't have worked anyway,' he said. 'It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. Most of it was just raving. But I wrote down what I'm sure I understood.'
Rydberg took a battered notebook out of his pocket. It was held together by a wide rubber band, and a pencil was stuck in between the pages.
'She said her husband's name,' Rydberg began. 'I think she was trying to find out how he was. Then she mumbled something I couldn't understand. That's when I tried to ask her, 'Who was it that came in the night? Did you know them? What did they look like?' Those were my questions. I repeated them for as long as she was conscious. And I actually think she understood what I was saying.''So what did she answer?''I only managed to catch one word. 'Foreign'.'''Foreign'?''That's right. 'Foreign'.'
'Did she mean that the people who attacked her and her husband were foreigners?' Rydberg nodded. 'Are you sure?''Do I usually say I'm sure if I'm not?' 'No.'
'Well then. So now we know that her last message to the world was the word 'foreign'. In answer to the question: who committed this insane crime?'
Wallander took off his coat and got himself a cup of coffee.'What the hell could she have meant?' he muttered.
'I've been sitting here thinking about that while I was waiting for you,' replied Rydberg. 'Maybe they looked un-Swedish. Maybe they spoke a foreign language. Maybe they spoke poor Swedish. There are lots of possibilities.'
'What does an 'un-Swedish' person look like?' asked Wallander.
'You know what I mean,' said Rydberg. 'Or rather, you can guess what she thought.''So it could have been her imagination?' Rydberg nodded. 'That's quite possible.' 'But not particularly likely?'
'Why should she use the last minutes of her life to say something that wasn't true? Elderly people don't usually lie.'
Wallander took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
'This means we have to start looking for one or more foreigners,' he said. 'I wish she'd said something different.''It's damned unpleasant, all right.'
They sat in silence for a moment, lost in their own thoughts. They could no longer hear the drunk out in the corridor.
'You can just picture it,' Wallander said after a while. 'The only clue the police have to the double murder in Lunnarp is that those responsible are probably foreigners.''I can think of something much worse,' replied Rydberg.
Wallander knew what he meant. Just 20 kilometres from Lunnarp there was a big refugee camp that had been the focus of attacks against foreigners on several occasions. Crosses had been burned at night in the courtyard, rocks had been thrown through windows, buildings had been spray-painted with slogans. The camp, in the old castle of Hageholm, had been established despite vigorous protests from the surrounding communities. And the protests had continued. Hostility to refugees was flaring up.
But Wallander and Rydberg knew something else that the general public did not know. Some of the asylum seekers being housed at Hageholm had been caught red-handed breaking into a business that rented out farm machinery. Fortunately the owner was not one of those most fiercely opposed to taking in refugees, so it was possible to keep the whole affair quiet. The two men who had committed the break-in were no longer in Sweden either, since they had been denied asylum. Wallander and Rydberg had discussed what might have happened if the incident had been made public on several occasions.
'I have a hard time believing that refugees seeking asylum could commit murder,' said Wallander.
Rydberg gave Wallander a quizzical look. 'You remember what I told you about the noose?''Something about the knot?'
'I didn't recognise it. And I know quite a bit about knots, because I spent my summers sailing when I was young.'
Wallander looked at Rydberg attentively. 'What are you saying?' he asked.
'What I'm saying is that this knot wasn't tied by someone who was a member of the Swedish Boy Scouts.''What the hell do you mean by that?''The knot was made by a foreigner.'
Before Wallander could reply, Ebba came into the canteen to get some coffee.
'Go home and get some rest if you can,' she said. 'By the way, reporters keep calling and saying that they want you to make a statement.''About what?' asked Wallander. 'About the weather?''They seem to have found out that the woman died.'Wallander looked at Rydberg, who shook his head.
'We're not making a statement tonight,' he said. 'We're waiting till tomorrow.'
Wallander got up and went over to the window. The wind was blowing hard, but the sky was still cloudless. It was going to be another cold night.
'We can hardly avoid mentioning what happened,' he said. 'That she managed to say something before she died. And if we say that much, then we'll have to tell them what she said. And then all hell will break loose.'
'We could try to keep it internal,' said Rydberg, getting up and putting on his hat. 'For investigative reasons.'
Wallander looked at him in surprise.
'And risk having it come out later that we withheld important information from the press? That we were shielding foreign criminals?'
