'I treat them like valuables,' Widen said. 'I've put them in my secret compartment.'
Wallander watched as Widen removed part of the wooden panelling next to the window and took out a metal box that had been jammed into the space underneath. The pictures were in the box. Widen held them out to Wallander, who took them, marvelling at what he saw.
One of the pictures was taken at a roadside rest area outside Lubeck. Wallander had a bottle of beer in his hand and was bellowing at the photographer.
'We had a great time,' Widen said. 'Maybe more fun than we've ever had since.'
Wallander poured some more whisky into his glass. Widen was right. They had never had as much fun after that.
Close to 1 a.m., they called a company in Skurup and ordered a taxi. Widen agreed to drive his car in the next day. Wallander already had a headache and felt sick to his stomach. He was very, very tired.
'We should go back to Germany sometime,' Widen said as they were waiting for the cab.
'No, we shouldn't go back,' Wallander said. 'We should take a new trip. Not that I have any property I can sell.'
The car came and Wallander got into the back seat, leaned back, and fell asleep immediately.
Just as they passed the turn-off to Rydsgard something pulled him up to the surface again. At first he didn't know what it was. Something had flickered through his mind in the dream he'd been having. But then he remembered what it was: Widen had removed a piece of the wood panelling.
Wallander's mind became crystal clear at once. Svedberg had kept the woman in his life a secret for years. But when Wallander had searched his desk he hadn't found anything except some old letters from his parents. Svedberg must have a secret compartment, Wallander thought. Just like Sten Widen.
He leaned forward to the driver and changed the destination from Mariagatan to the town square. A little after 1.30 a.m. he got out of the cab. He still had the keys to Svedberg's flat in his pocket. He remembered seeing some aspirin in Svedberg's medicine cabinet. He unlocked the front door of the flat, held his breath, and listened. Then he poured himself a glass of water and took the aspirin.
Some drunken teenagers walked by on the street below, and then the silence returned. He put the glass down and started looking for Svedberg's secret compartment. By 2.45 a.m. he had found it. A corner of the plastic flooring under the chest of drawers in the bedroom could be peeled away from the concrete base. Wallander repositioned the bedside lamp so that light fell on the exposed area. There was a brown envelope stuffed in the space under the mat. It wasn't sealed. He took it out into the kitchen and opened it.
Like Widen, Svedberg treated his photographs as valuables. There were two pictures inside the envelope. One was a studio portrait of a woman's face. The other photograph was a snapshot of a group of young people who sat in the shadow of a tree and raised their wineglasses towards an unknown photographer.
The scene was idyllic. There was only one thing that struck Wallander as odd. The young people were dressed in elaborate, old-fashioned costumes, as if the party had taken place in a bygone era.
Wallander put on his glasses. His stomach started to ache. He recalled having seen a magnifying glass in one of Svedberg's drawers, and he got it out and studied the photograph more closely. There was something familiar about these young people, especially the girl who sat on the extreme right. Then he suddenly knew who it was. He had seen another picture of her recently, one in which she was not dressed up. The girl on the far right was Astrid Hillstrom.
Wallander slowly lowered the photograph. Somewhere a clock struck 3 a.m.
CHAPTER NINE
By 6 a.m. on Saturday, 10 August, Wallander couldn't stand it any longer. He had spent most of the remaining night pacing back and forth in his flat, too anxious to sleep. The two pictures he had found at Svedberg's place lay on the kitchen table. They had been burning a hole in his pocket ever since he'd made his way home through the deserted town. It wasn't until he took off his coat that he realised it must have been raining slightly outside.
The photographs in Svedberg's secret compartment were a crucial find. What convinced him of this he couldn't say, but the free-floating anxiety he had felt since the beginning of this case had now escalated into full- blown fear. A case that hadn't even been a case, three young people who were travelling around Europe somewhere, now appeared in the middle of one of the most serious murder investigations the Ystad police had ever undertaken - the killing of one of their own. During the hours after Wallander's discovery, his thoughts were muddled and contradictory. But he knew that this was a crucial breakthrough.
What was it the photographs told him? The picture of Louise was in black-and-white, the snapshot in colour. There was no date printed on the back of either. Did that mean they weren't developed in commercial laboratories? Or were there local businesses that didn't use automatic dating systems? The sizes of the photographs were standard. He tried to decide if the pictures were taken by an amateur or not, since he knew that pictures developed in private darkrooms often did not dry to a uniform finish. But he lacked the expertise to answer his questions.
Next he asked himself what feelings the two photographs evoked. What did they say about the photographer? He was not yet willing to assume that they were taken by the same person. Had Svedberg taken the picture of Louise? Her gaze was impenetrable. The picture of the young people was also hard to pin down. He did not see a conscious sense of composition. The dominating principle appeared to be the inclusion of everyone in the frame. Someone had picked up a camera, told everyone to look over, and pushed the button. Maybe there was a whole series of pictures from this festive occasion. But where were they?
The sheer implausibility of the connection worried him. They already knew that Svedberg had started investigating the disappearance of the young people only a few days before he had gone on holiday.
Why would he have done that? And why would he have done it in secret? Where did the photograph of the young revellers come from? Where was it taken? And then this picture of the woman. It couldn't be anyone but Louise. Wallander studied it for a long time as he sat at the kitchen table. The woman was in her 40s, perhaps a couple of years younger than Svedberg. If they had met 10 years earlier, she might have been 30 and he 35. That seemed pretty reasonable. The woman had straight, dark hair in a style Wallander knew was called a page boy cut. Because it was a black-and-white photograph, he couldn't tell what colour her eyes were. She had a thin nose and face, and her lips were pressed together in the hint of a smile. It was a Mona Lisa smile, but the woman had no glimmer of a smile in her eyes. Wallander thought the picture had been retouched, or else she was heavily made up. There was something veiled about the photograph, something he couldn't place. The woman's face was evasive. It had been captured by the camera but was still not there somehow.
These photographs have been kept in a vacuum, Wallander thought. They lack fingerprints, like two unread books.
He managed to hold out until 6 a.m. and then he called Martinsson, who was an early riser. He answered almost at once.
'I hope I didn't wake you.'
'If you call me at 10 p.m. you'd be in danger of doing that. But not at 6 a.m. I was about to go out and work in the garden.'
Wallander came right to the point. He told him about the photographs. Martinsson listened without asking any questions.
'I want to meet with everyone as soon as possible,' Wallander said when he finished. 'Not at 9 a.m. At 7 a.m.'
'Have you talked to anyone else?'
'No, you're the first.'
'Who do you want?'
'Everyone, including Nyberg.'
'Then you'll have to call him yourself - he's so moody in the mornings. I can't deal with angry people until after I've had my morning coffee.'
Martinsson volunteered to call Hansson and Hoglund, leaving the others to Wallander. He started with Nyberg, who was as sleepy and ill-tempered as expected.
'We're meeting at 7 a.m., not 9 a.m.,' Wallander said.
'Has anything happened, or are you just doing this for the hell of it?'
'If you ever find you've been called to an investigative meeting just for the hell of it, you should contact your
