pizza that arrived after 30 minutes, and ate it at his desk. Nyberg hadn't called back, and he wondered briefly if he should drive out to the nature reserve, but then decided against it. He wouldn't be able to speed anything up. Nyberg knew what he was doing. He wiped his mouth, threw out the pizza box, and went out to the men's room to wash his hands. Then he left the station, crossed the road, and started walking up towards the water tower. There he sat down in the shade and concentrated on a thought that kept returning to him.
His worst fear, that Svedberg was the one who killed the three young people, had started to fade. Svedberg was on the side of the pursuers in this case, still a little ahead of Wallander. It would be a while until they caught him up.
Svedberg could not be the murderer because he had been killed, too. Wallander's worst fear was starting to leave him, only to be replaced by another. Someone was observing their investigation, someone who kept himself very well informed. Wallander knew that he was right about this, even though he couldn't yet see how it all hung together.
The person who had killed Svedberg and killed the three young people had some means of access to the information he required. The Midsummer's Eve party was planned in complete secrecy and yet someone else knew about it, someone who realised that Svedberg was closing in on him.
Svedberg must simply have got too close, Wallander thought, without realising that he had wandered into forbidden territory. That was why he was murdered. There is no other reasonable explanation.
He could make sense of events up to this point, but beyond it the questions piled up one on top of the other. Why was the telescope at Bjorklund's house? Why had someone sent postcards from all over Europe?
I have to find Isa, he thought. I have to get her to tell me what she doesn't even know she knows. And I have to follow in Svedberg's footsteps. What had he discovered that we still haven't seen? Or did he have access to some information from the very beginning that we don't have?
Wallander thought briefly about Louise, the woman in Svedberg's life, whom he had kept secret. There was still something about her picture that disturbed him, although he couldn't put his finger on it. The feeling was strong enough that he knew he mustn't give up on it, that he must bide his time. It occurred to him that there was a similarity between the young people in the reserve and Svedberg. They had all had secrets. Was this also significant?
Wallander got up and walked back to the police station. His body still ached from the hours he had spent sleeping curled up on the back seat of his car. His biggest anxiety still lay at the back of his mind - the fear that the killer would strike again.
When he got to the station he realised what he had to do. He had to drive up to Barnso and see if Isa Edengren was there. He had to choose between all the important tasks that lay before him. The most important was to find her.
Time was running out. He returned to his office and managed to get in touch with Martinsson, who had finally left the Norman family's home.
'Has anything happened?' Martinsson asked.
'Not nearly enough. Why haven't we heard anything from the pathologist? We're helpless until we have a time of death. Why aren't we getting any good leads? Where are the missing cars? We have to talk. Get here as soon as you can.'
While they were waiting for Hoglund, Wallander and Martinsson called the young people in Svedberg's photograph. It turned out that they had all visited Isa on Barnso at one time or another. Martinsson spoke to the pathologist in Lund and was told that no results were available yet, either for the Svedberg case or the three young people. Wallander worked through a list of the leads that had come in from the general public. Nothing looked significant. The strangest thing was that no one had called to say they recognised the woman they were calling Louise. It was the first thing Wallander brought up with his colleagues in one of the smaller conference rooms. He put the photograph of her on the projector again.
'Someone must recognise her,' he said. 'Or at least think they do. But no one has called in.'
'The picture has only been out there a few hours,' Martinsson said.
Wallander dismissed this explanation. 'It's one thing to ask people to recall an event,' he said. 'That can take time. But this is a face.'
'Perhaps she's foreign?' Hoglund suggested. 'Even if she only lives in Denmark. Who bothers to read the Skane papers over there? The photo won't be published in the national papers until tomorrow.'
'You might be right,' Wallander said, thinking of Sture Bjorklund, who commuted between Hedeskoga and Copenhagen. 'We'll get in touch with the Danish police.'
They looked at the picture of Louise for a long time.
'I can't escape the feeling that there's something unusual about her,' Wallander said. 'I just don't know what it is.'
No one could say what it was. Wallander turned off the projector.
'I'm going up to Ostergotland tomorrow,' he said. 'It's possible that Isa might have gone there. We have to find her and we have to get her to talk.'
'What exactly do you think she can tell us? She wasn't there when it happened.'
Wallander knew that Martinsson's objection was reasonable. He wasn't sure that he could give him a good answer. There were so many gaps, so many thoughts that were closer to vague assumption than firm opinion.
'She is a witness, in a way,' he said. 'We're convinced that this is not a crime of opportunity. Svedberg's murder may still turn out to be just that, although I doubt it, but the deaths of these young people were well planned. The crucial thing here is that they made their own arrangements in secret, but someone else seems to have had access to that information - what they were thinking, where they were going to meet, perhaps even the exact time. Someone was spying on them. Someone managed to find out what they were up to. If it turns out that the bodies were buried fairly close to the place where they were killed, then we'll know this for sure. Holes don't dig themselves. Isa was part of these elaborate preparations. But she fell ill at the moment when everything was to begin. If she had been able to go, she would have. Her illness saved her life. And she is the one who can help us find out what happened that night. Somewhere along the way, without their realising it, she and the others crossed paths with the person who decided to take their lives.'
'Is that what you think Svedberg believed?' Martinsson asked.
'Yes. But he knew something else as well. Or at least suspected it. We don't know how this suspicion arose in the first place, or why he conducted his whole investigation in secret. But it must have been important. He dedicated his entire holiday to it. He insisted on taking all of his holiday time. He had never done that before.'
'Something's still missing,' Hoglund said. 'And that's a motive. Revenge, hatred, jealousy. It doesn't add up. Who would've wanted to murder three young people? Or four, for that matter. Who could've hated them? Who had reason to be jealous? There's a brutality to this crime that goes beyond anything I've ever seen. It's worse than the case involving the poor boy who dressed up as an Indian.'
'He may have chosen this party deliberately,' Wallander said. 'Although it's almost too terrible to imagine, he could have chosen his moment precisely because their joy was at its peak. Think how alone people can feel over Midsummer.'
'In that case we're dealing with a madman,' Martinsson said, visibly upset.
'A methodical and deliberate madman, yes,' Wallander said. 'But the important thing is to try to find the invisible common denominator in these crimes. The murderer got his information from some source. He must have had access to their lives. That's the key we're after. We have to look thoroughly into their lives. We'll find this point of intersection. We may already have come across it and not seen it.'
'So you think Isa Edengren should be our focus,' Hoglund said. 'In a way you think she's leading this investigation, and we're carefully following in her footsteps.'
'Something like that. We can't overlook the fact that she tried to kill herself. We have to find out why. We also don't know how the killer feels about the fact that she survived.'
'You're thinking about the person who called the hospital and pretended to be Lundberg,' Martinsson said.
Wallander nodded. 'I want one of you to talk to whoever took that call. Find out what the caller sounded like. Was he old or young? What dialect did he speak? Anything could turn out to be important.'
Martinsson promised to take on this task. For the next hour they went over what else had to be covered. At one point Holgersson came in to talk about the arrangements for Svedberg's funeral.
