interesting. Let me just say that the Ystad police are currently investigating a murder, possibly two murders, and there are certain indications to suggest that the transportation and illegal selling of body organs might be involved. I can't say for certain if that is the case, and I'm afraid I can't go into any more detail for technical reasons associated with the case.'
Why can't I express myself more simply? he wondered, crossly. I speak like a parody of a police officer. I sound like a machine.
'I see why Lasse Stromberg gave you my name,' she said, and Wallander could tell that her interest had been aroused.
'If I understand it rightly you're doing work on this horrific traffic,' he said. 'It would be a big help to me if you could give me an overview.'
'It would take all day to do that,' she said. 'Possibly all night as well. Besides, you'd soon find there was an invisible question mark behind every word I said. It's a gruesome activity that practically nobody has dared look into, apart from a handful of American journalists. I'm probably the only journalist in Scandinavia who's started digging into it.'
'I take it that's a pretty risky business.'
'Maybe not here, and maybe not for me,' she said. 'But I know personally one of the American journalists involved, Gary Becker from Minneapolis. He went to Brazil to look into rumours about a gang said to be operating in Sao Paulo. He wasn't just threatened - one night as his taxi stopped outside his hotel someone fired a whole magazine at it. He booked the next flight and got the hell out of there.'
'Have you come across any suggestion that Swedes could be involved in the trafficking?'
'No. Should I have done?'
'I was only asking,' Wallander said.
She studied him without speaking, then leaned across the table towards him. 'If you and I are going to have a conversation, you have to be honest with me,' she said. 'Don't forget that I'm a journalist. You don't have to pay for this visit because you're a police officer, but the least I can ask is that you tell me the truth.'
'You're right,' Wallander said. 'There is a slight possibility that there might be a connection. That's the nearest I can go to telling you the truth.'
'OK,' she said. 'Now we understand each other. But I want just one more thing from you. If in fact there does turn out to be a connection, I want to be the first journalist who knows about it.'
'I can't promise you that,' Wallander said. 'It's against our regulations.'
'No doubt it is. But killing people to take their body parts goes against something much more important than regulations.'
Wallander considered what she had said. He was citing regulations that he had long since ceased to observe uncritically himself. In recent years his experiences as a police officer had taken place in a no man's land where any good he might have been able to do had always involved his having to decide which regulations to abide by, and which not. Why should he change now?
'You'll be the first to know,' he said. 'But you'd better not quote me. I'll have to remain anonymous.'
'That's good,' she said again. 'Now we understand each other even better.'
*
When Wallander looked back over all the hours he spent in that hushed kitchen, with the cat asleep among the pot plants and the rays of the sun moving slowly over the plastic tablecloth before disappearing altogether, he was surprised at how quickly the time had passed. They had started talking at 10 a.m. and it was evening by the time they finished. They had had a few breaks, she had prepared lunch for him, and her father had entertained Wallander with stories about his life as captain of various ships plying the Baltic coast, with occasional voyages to Poland and the Baltic States. Otherwise they had been alone in the kitchen, and she had talked about her research. Wallander envied her. They both worked on investigations, they both spent their time constantly up against crime and human suffering. The difference was that she was trying to expose crime to prevent it happening, while Wallander was always occupied in clearing up crimes that had already been committed.
What he remembered most from his time in that kitchen was a journey into an unimagined world where human beings and body parts had been reduced to market commodities, with no sign of any moral consideration. If she was correct in her assumptions, the trade in body parts was so vast that it was almost beyond comprehension. What shook him most, however, was her claim that she could understand the people who killed healthy human beings in order to sell parts of their bodies.
'It's a reflection of the world,' she said. 'This is how things are, whether we like it or not. When a person is sufficiently poor, he's ready to do anything at all to keep body and soul together, no matter how squalid his life might be. How can we presume to make moral judgments about what they do? When their circumstances are so far beyond our understanding? In the slums on the edge of cities like Rio or Lagos or Calcutta or Madras, you can hold up 30 dollars and announce that you want to meet somebody who's prepared to kill another human being. Within a minute you have a queue of willing assassins. And they don't ask who they're going to be required to kill, nor do they wonder why. And they're prepared to do it for 20 dollars. Maybe even ten. I'm aware of a sort of abyss in the middle of what I'm working on. I get shocked, I feel desperate, but as long as the world continues as it is, I recognise that everything I do could be regarded as meaningless.'
Wallander had sat in silence for most of the time. From time to time he asked a question the better to understand what she was saying. But he could see that she really was trying to pass on everything she knew - or suspected, because there was so little anybody could be 100 per cent certain about.
And then, hours later, they had come to a stop.
'I don't know any more,' she said. 'But if what I've said is of help to you, I'm glad of it.'
'I don't even know if I'm on the right track,' Wallander said. 'But if I am, I know we've identified a Swedish link to this abominable trade. And if we can put a stop to it, that surely has to be a good thing.'
'Of course it does,' she said. 'One plundered corpse fewer in a South American ditch - that makes it all worthwhile.'
It was almost 7 p.m. by the time Wallander left Malmo. He knew he ought to have phoned Ystad and told them what he was doing, but he had been too taken up by his conversation with Norin.
She had accompanied him to the car park where they had said their goodbyes.
'You've given me an awful lot to think about,' Wallander said. 'I can't thank you enough.'
'Who knows,' she said, 'perhaps I'll get payment in kind one of these days.'
'You'll be hearing from me.'
'I'm counting on that. You'll normally find me in Gothenburg. Unless I'm on my travels.'
Wallander stopped at a grill bar near Jagersro for something to eat. He was thinking all the time about what she had told him, and how he could fit Harderberg into that picture. But he couldn't.
He wondered if they would ever find an answer to the question of why the two solicitors had been killed. In all his years as a police officer, he had so far been spared the experience of being involved in an unsolved murder case. Was he standing now outside a door that would never open?
He drove home to Ystad that evening feeling the weariness seep through his body. The only thing he had to look forward to was phoning Linda when he got in.
But the moment Wallander stepped into his flat he knew that something was not as it had been when he left that morning. He paused in the hall, listening intently. Maybe it was his imagination. Yet the feeling would not go away. He switched on the light in the living room, sat down on a chair and looked around him. Nothing was missing, nothing seemed to have been moved. He went into the bedroom. The unmade bed was exactly as he had left it. The half-empty coffee cup was still on his bedside table next to the alarm clock. He went into the kitchen.
Only when he opened the refrigerator to get out the margarine and a piece of cheese was he sure that he was right. He looked hard at the opened packet of blood pudding. He had an almost photographic memory and he knew he had put it on the third of the four shelves. It was on the second shelf now.
The packet of blood pudding had been at the very edge and could easily have fallen out on to the floor - it had happened to him before. Then somebody had put it back on the wrong shelf.
He had no doubt at all that he remembered it rightly. Somebody had been in his flat during the day. And whoever had been there had opened his refrigerator, either to look for something or to hide something.
His first reaction was to laugh. Then he closed the fridge door and walked quickly out of the flat. He was scared. He had to force himself to think clearly. They're not far away, he thought. I'll let them think I'm still in the
