refusing to look at himself in the mirror. When he returned to the conference room, someone was passing around a plate of sandwiches, but he shook his head. Hoglund appeared in the doorway.
'Both of his parents are dead,' she said.
'Any siblings?'
'Two older sisters.'
'Find them.'
She left, and Wallander thought about his own sister, Kristina. How would she describe him if the police came around asking questions?
He heard someone shouting in the corridor. Wallander got up quickly as a policeman appeared in the door.
'Gunfire,' he shouted. 'Down at the main square.'
Wallander knew what it meant. 'It must be Svedberg's flat,' he shouted back. 'Anyone injured?'
'I don't know. But the gunfire has been confirmed.'
Four cars with blaring sirens were on their way in less than a minute. Wallander sat in the back seat with his gun held tightly in his hand. Larstam was there, he thought. What had happened to Hansson and the colleague from Malmo? He feared the worst, but pushed the thought away. It was too unbearable.
Wallander was out of the car before it came to a halt. A crowd had gathered at the door to the block of flats on Lilla Norregatan. Wallander dived through the crowd at full speed, bellowing, he was later told, like a charging bull. Then he saw both Hansson and the officer from Malmo. They were unhurt.
'What happened?' Wallander yelled.
Hansson was pale and shaking. The Malmo officer was sitting on the kerb.
'He was there,' Hansson said. 'I had just unlocked the door and stepped inside. He appeared out of nowhere and fired his gun. Then he was gone. It was pure luck we weren't hit. We turned and ran. It was sheer luck.'
Wallander didn't say anything, but he knew luck had nothing to do with it. Larstam was an excellent marksman. He could have taken out both of them if he had wanted to. But he hadn't. Someone else was marked as his victim.
The flat was now empty. The back door was ajar. A greeting, Wallander thought when he saw it. A second door left open. He's showing us how good he is at getting away.
Martinsson emerged from Svedberg's bedroom.
'He's been sleeping in there,' he said. 'Now at least we know how he thinks. He takes shelter in empty nests.'
'We know how he thought,' Wallander corrected. 'He won't do the same thing twice.'
'Are you sure?' Martinsson said. 'He's probably trying to figure out how we think. Maybe it makes sense to leave some men here. We don't expect him to return here, so that may be exactly what he does.'
'He can't read our thoughts.'
'It seems to me,' Martinsson said, 'that he gets pretty damn close to that. He always manages to stay one step ahead of us and one step behind at the same time.'
Wallander didn't reply. He was thinking the same thing.
It was 10.30 a.m. There was only one thing Wallander was sure of and that was that Larstam had not yet killed victim number nine. If he had, Hansson would have been number ten, and their colleague from Malmo number eleven.
Why is he waiting, Wallander thought. Because he has to? Is his victim out of reach, or is there another explanation? Wallander left Svedberg's flat with nothing but more questions. I might as well face it, he thought. I'm back to square one.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He felt a sense of regret when it was over. Should he have aimed at their heads after all? He knew that it had to be the police. Who else would have reason to visit Karl Evert's flat, now that he was dead and buried? He also knew that they were trying to track him down. There was no other reasonable explanation.
Once again he had managed to escape, something that was both reassuring and satisfying. Although he hadn't expected them to come looking for him there, he had taken the necessary precautions by unlocking the back door and propping a chair against the front door. It would fall to the ground if someone tried to enter. The gun lay loaded on the bedside table. He slept with his shoes on.
The noise from the street disturbed him. It wasn't like sleeping in his soundproofed room. How many times had he tried to convince Karl Evert to renovate his bedroom? But nothing had come of it, and now it was too late.
The images had been blurry and indistinct, but he'd known he was dreaming of his own childhood. He was standing behind the sofa. He was very young. Two people were fighting, probably his parents. There was the harsh, domineering voice of a man. It swooped over his head like a bird of prey. Then there was a woman's voice, weak and afraid. When he heard it, he thought he was hearing his own voice, though he was still safely hidden behind the sofa.
That was when he was woken by the sounds from the hall. They entered his dreams by force. By the time the chair fell over, he was on his feet, the gun cocked in his hand. It would have meant changing his plans, but he should have shot them. He had left the building, his gun tucked into his coat pocket. The car was parked down at the railway station. He'd heard sirens in the distance. He'd driven out past Sandskogen, towards Osterlen. He stopped in Kaseberga and took a walk down to the harbour. He thought about what he should do next. He needed more sleep, but it was getting late and he had no idea when Wallander would return home. He had to be there when he did. He had already decided that it should happen today, and he couldn't risk changing his plans.
When he arrived at the far end of the pier, he made up his mind. He drove back to Ystad and parked at the back of the block of flats on Mariagatan. No one saw him slip in through the front door of the building. He rang the doorbell and listened carefully. No one was home. He unlocked the door, walked in, and sat down on the sofa in the living room. He put his gun down on the coffee table. It was a few minutes after 11 a.m.
Hansson and the Malmo officer were still so shaken that they had to be sent home. This meant that the team shrank by two people, and Wallander detected a new level of tension among members of the group when they gathered after the chaotic events at Lilla Norregatan.
Holgersson took him aside to ask if it was time to send for more reinforcements. Wallander wavered, exhausted and starting to doubt his judgment, but then answered with an emphatic no. They didn't need reinforcements, they just needed to focus.
'Do you really think we can find him?' she asked. 'Or are you just hoping there will be another breakthrough?'
'I don't know,' he admitted.
They sat back down at the conference table. Martinsson had still not been able to find anything on Larstam in the police registers, so he turned the matter over to a subordinate who would search the files in the basement. Hoglund hadn't yet managed to find anything on the two sisters. Now that Hansson was out of the game, Wallander asked her to hold off on that. He needed to have her close by; the sisters would have to wait. They had to concentrate on finding Larstam before he turned to victim number nine.
'We have to ask ourselves what we know,' Wallander said, for the umpteenth time.
'He's still in town,' Martinsson said. 'That must mean he's preparing to strike somewhere close by.'
'He's not unaffected by us,' Thurnberg said, who rarely commented on the action. 'He knows we're on his heels.'
'It's also possible he likes it this way,' Wallander said.
Kjell Albinsson, who was sitting silently in a corner of the room, now indicated that he wanted to speak. Wallander nodded to him and he got up and approached the table.
'I don't know if this is anything,' he said. 'But I just remembered that last summer someone at work claimed to have seen Larstam down at the marina. That might mean he owns a boat.'
Wallander hit the table with the flat of his hand. 'How seriously can we take this?'
'It was one of the other postmen who saw him. He was sure it was him.'
'Did he ever actually see Larstam climb onto one of the boats?'
