that might even lead us to the truth?
Wallander came into the conference room at 8.30. Bjork was already at the short end of the table, Akeson was standing by the window, looking out, and Martinsson and Svedberg were deep in conversation about what sounded to Wallander like salaries. Hoglund was in her usual place opposite Bjork at the other short end of the table. Neither Martinsson nor Svedberg seemed to be worried by Akeson being there.
Wallander said good morning to Hoglund. 'How do you think this is going to go?' he asked softly.
'When I woke up I thought I must have dreamed it all,' she said. 'Have you spoken yet to Bjork and Akeson?'
'Akeson knows most of what happened,' he said. 'I only had time to give Bjork the short version.'
'What did Akeson say?'
'He'll go along with us.'
Bjork tapped on the table with a pencil and those who were still standing sat down.
'All I have to say is that Kurt is going to do the talking,' Bjork said. 'Unless I am much mistaken, it looks as though there might have been a dramatic development.'
Wallander wondered what to say, his mind a sudden blank. Then he found the thread and began. He went through in detail what Hoglund's colleague in Eskilstuna had been able to enlighten them about, and he set out the ideas that had developed in the early hours of the morning, about how they should proceed without waking the sleeping bear. When he had finished - and his account lasted 25 minutes - he asked Hoglund if she had anything to add, but she shook her head: Wallander had said all there was to say.
'So, that's where we've got to,' Wallander said. 'Because this means that we have no choice but to reassess our priorities for the investigation, we have got Per with us. Another consideration is whether we need to call in outside help at this stage. It's going to be a very tricky and in many ways a laborious process, penetrating Harderberg's world, especially since we can't afford to let him notice how interested in him we are.'
Wallander was not sure whether he had succeeded in putting across all the things he had wanted to. Hoglund smiled and nodded at him, but when he studied the other faces around the table he still could not tell.
'This really is something for us to get our teeth into,' Akeson said when the silence had lasted long enough. 'We must be clear about the fact that Alfred Harderberg has an impeccable reputation in the Swedish business community. We can expect nothing but hostility if we start questioning that reputation. On the other hand, I have to say there are sufficient grounds for us to start taking a special interest in him. Naturally, I find it difficult to believe that Harderberg was personally involved in the murders or the other events, and of course it might be that things happen in his set-up over which he has no control.'
'I've always dreamed of putting one of those gentlemen away,' Svedberg suddenly said.
'A most regrettable attitude in a police officer,' Bjork said, unable to control his displeasure. 'It shouldn't be necessary for me to remind you all of our status as neutral civil servants - '
'Let's stick to the point,' Akeson interrupted. 'And perhaps we should also remind ourselves that in our role as servants of the law we are paid to be suspicious in circumstances in which normally we would not need to be.'
'So we have the go-ahead to concentrate on Harderberg, is that right?' Wallander asked.
'On certain conditions,' Bjork said. 'I agree with Per that we have to be very careful and prudent, but I also want to stress that I shall regard it as dereliction of duty if anything we do is leaked outside these four walls. No statements are to be made to the press without their first having been authorised by me.'
'We gathered that,' said Martinsson, speaking for the first time. 'I'm more concerned to find out how we're going to manage to run a vacuum cleaner over the whole of Harderberg's empire when there are so few of us. How are we going to coordinate our investigation with the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo? How are we going to cooperate with the tax authorities? I wonder if we shouldn't approach it quite differently.'
'How would we do that?' Wallander said.
'Hand the whole thing over to the national CID,' Martinsson said. 'Then they can arrange cooperation with whichever squads and authorities they like. I think we have to concede that we're too small to handle this.'
'That thought had occurred to me too,' Akeson said. 'But at this stage, before we've even made an initial investigation, the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo would probably turn us down. I don't know if you realise this, but they're probably even more overworked than we are. There are not many of us, but they are so understaffed they're verging on collapse. We'll have to take charge of this ourselves for the time being at least. Do the best we can. Nevertheless, I'll see if I can interest the fraud squads in helping us. You never know.'
Looking back, Wallander had no doubt that it was what Akeson had to say about the hopeless situation the national CID were in that established once and for all the basis of the investigation. The murder investigation would be centred on Harderberg and the links between him and Lars Borman and him and the dead solicitors. Wallander and his team would also be on their own. It was true that the Ystad police were always having to deal with fraud cases of various kinds, but this was so much bigger than anything they had come across before, and they did not know of any financial impropriety associated with the deaths of the two solicitors.
In short, they had to start looking for an answer to the question: what were they really looking for?
When Wallander wrote to Baiba in Riga a few nights later and told her about 'the secret hunt', as he had started to call the investigation, he realised that as he wrote to her in English, he would have to explain that hunting in Sweden was different from an English fox hunt. 'There's a hunter in every police officer,' he had written. 'There is rarely, if ever, a fanfare of horns when a Swedish police officer is after his prey. But we find the foxes we are after even so. Without us, the Swedish hen house would long since have been empty: all that remained would have been a scattering of bloodstained feathers blowing around in the autumn breeze.'
The whole team approached their task with enthusiasm. Bjork removed the lid of the box where generally he kept overtime locked away. He urged everybody on, reminding them again that not a word of their activities must leak out. Akeson had removed his jacket, loosened his tie which was usually so neatly knotted, and become one of the workers, even if he never let slip his authority as ultimate leader of the operation that was now getting under way.
But it was Wallander who called the shots; he could feel that, and it gave him frequent moments of deep satisfaction. Thanks to unexpected circumstances and the goodwill of his colleagues, which he scarcely deserved, he had been given an opportunity to atone for some of the guilt he felt after rejecting the confidence Sten Torstensson had shown in him by coming to Skagen and asking for his help. Leading the search for Sten's murderer and the murderer of his father was enabling Wallander to redeem himself. He had been so preoccupied with his own private woes that he had failed to hear Sten's cry for help, had not allowed it to penetrate the barricades he had built around his all-consuming depression.
He wrote another letter to Baiba that he never posted. In it he tried to explain to her, and hence also to himself, just what it meant, killing a man last year and now, adding to his guilt, rejecting Sten Torstensson's plea for help. The conclusion he seemed to reach, even though he doubted it deep down, was that Sten's death had started to trouble him more than the events of the previous year on the fog-bound training area, surrounded by invisible sheep.
But nothing of this was discernible to those around him. In the canteen his colleagues would comment in confidence that Wallander's return to duty and to health was as much a surprise as it would have been if he had taken up his bed and walked when he had been at his lowest. Martinsson, who was sometimes unable to hold his cynicism in check, said: 'What Kurt needed was a challenging murder. Not some nervous, carelessly executed manslaughter committed on the spur of the moment. The dead solicitors, a mine in a garden and some Far Eastern explosive mixture in his petrol tank - that was just what he needed to bring him back to the fold.'
The others agreed that there was more than a grain of truth in what Martinsson said.
It took them a week to complete the exhaustive survey of Harderberg's empire that would be the platform for the rest of the investigation. During that week neither Wallander nor any of his colleagues slept for more than five hours at a time. They would later look back at that period and conclude that a mouse really could roar if it had to. Even Akeson, who was rarely impressed by anything, had to doff his non-existent hat to what the team had achieved.
'Not a word of this must get out,' he said to Wallander one evening when they had gone outside for a breath of fresh autumn air, trying to drive away their tiredness. Wallander did not at first understand what he meant.
'If this gets out, the Central Police Bureau and the Ministry of Justice will set up an inquiry that will eventually lead to something called the 'Ystad Model' being presented to the Swedish public: how to achieve
