her.’
Wallander wondered why Louise hadn’t told him that she had a cleaning woman come in three times a week. Hans hadn’t mentioned her either. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The von Enke family belonged to the upper class, and to them household help were taken for granted. You didn’t need to talk about them; they were simply there.
Ytterberg promised to keep him informed. They were just about to end their conversation when Wallander asked if Ytterberg had contacted Atkins, whom he had met in Stockholm.
‘Does he have any useful information?’ Ytterberg sounded doubtful.
Wallander thought it was odd that Ytterberg evidently didn’t know how close the two families were. Or had Atkins told him a different story?
‘What time is it in California?’ Ytterberg asked. ‘There’s not much point in waking people up in the middle of the night.’
‘The difference between us and the east coast of the USA is six hours,’ said Wallander, ‘but I don’t know about California. I can find out and give him a call.’
‘Do that,’ said Ytterberg. ‘Order the call and we’ll pay for it.’
‘My official telephone hasn’t been blocked yet,’ said Wallander. ‘I don’t think the police lose money on unpaid phone bills. Things haven’t gone quite that far yet.’
Wallander called directory assistance and was informed that the time difference was nine hours. That meant it was six in the morning in San Diego, so he decided to wait a couple of hours before calling Atkins. Instead he called Linda. She had already had a long conversation with Hans in Copenhagen.
‘Come over,’ she said. ‘I’m just sitting around, and Klara is asleep in her pushchair.’
‘Klara?’
Linda laughed lightly at his confusion.
‘We decided last night. She’s going to be named Klara. She’s already named Klara.’
‘Like my mother? Your grandma?’
‘I never met her, as you know. Don’t get upset, but we chose it basically because it’s a nice name. And it goes well with both last names. Klara Wallander and Klara von Enke.’
‘What will her full name be?’
‘For now it will be Klara Wallander. She can make up her own mind eventually. Are you coming? You can have a cup of coffee and we can have a provisional baptism celebration.’
‘Are you going to have her baptised? Properly?’
She didn’t answer that. And Wallander was sensible enough not to push the issue.
Fifteen minutes later he pulled up outside Linda’s house. The garden was aflame with colour. Wallander thought about his own neglected garden, in which he planted almost nothing. When he lived in Mariagatan he had always envisioned an entirely different environment, with him crawling around on his hands and knees inhaling all the earthy smells, weeding the flower beds.
Klara was asleep in her pushchair in the shade of a pear tree. Wallander observed her little face behind the mosquito net.
‘Klara’s a pretty name,’ he said. ‘What made you think of it?’
‘We saw it in a newspaper. Someone named Klara behaved heroically in connection with a major fire in Ostersund. We made up our minds more or less on the spot.’
They wandered around the garden talking about what had happened. The disappearance of Louise was as big a surprise for Linda and Hans as for everybody else. There had been no indications, nothing to suggest that Louise had been hatching a plan.
‘Could it be another act of violence?’ Wallander wondered. ‘If we assume that Hakan was attacked in some way?’
‘You mean someone wanted to get rid of the pair of them?’ Linda said. ‘But why? What could the motive possibly be?’
‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ said Wallander, contemplating a bush covered in flame-red roses. ‘Could they both have been involved in something the rest of us know nothing about?’
They continued their tour of the garden in silence. Linda was considering his question.
‘We know so little about people,’ she said in the end, when they had returned to the front of the house and she had checked on Klara behind the net.
Klara was fast asleep, her hands gripping a quilt.
‘You could say that I know no more about that couple than this little girl does,’ she said.
‘Did you find Louise and Hakan mysterious?’
‘Not at all. On the contrary! They were always frank and straightforward with me.’
‘Some people can leave false tracks,’ Wallander said thoughtfully. ‘Frankness and straightforwardness could be a sort of invisible lock protecting a reality they’d prefer not to reveal.’
They sat in the garden drinking coffee until Wallander checked his watch and saw that it was time for him to call Atkins. He went back to the police station and dialled the number from his office. After four rings Atkins answered with a grunt that sounded as if he were waiting to receive an order. Wallander told him what had happened. When he finished there was such a long silence that he began to wonder if they had been cut off. Then Atkins reacted in a loud voice.
‘It’s not possible,’ he said.
‘Nevertheless, she’s been missing since Monday or Tuesday.’
Wallander could hear that Atkins was shocked. He was breathing heavily. Wallander asked when he had last spoken to her. There was a pause while Atkins thought it over.
‘Friday afternoon. Her afternoon, my morning.’
‘Who made the call?’
‘She did.’
Wallander frowned. That was not the answer he had expected.
‘What did she want?’
‘She wanted to wish my wife a happy birthday. Both my wife and I were surprised. Neither of us bothers about birthdays.’
‘Could there have been some other reason why she called?’
‘We had the impression that she was feeling lonely, and wanted to talk to somebody. That’s not so difficult to understand.’
‘If you think carefully, looking back, was there anything she said that could be tied to her disappearance?’
Wallander didn’t trust his bad English, but Atkins understood what he meant. There was a pause before he answered.
‘Nothing,’ he said eventually. ‘She sounded exactly the same as always.’
‘But there must be something going on,’ said Wallander. ‘First he disappears, and then she does.’
‘It’s sort of like the poem about the ten little Indians,’ said Atkins. ‘They disappear one after the other. Half the family has vanished now. There’s only the two children left.’
Wallander gave a start. Had he heard wrong?
‘But there’s only one who could disappear,’ he said tentatively. ‘You’re not including Linda, surely?’
‘We shouldn’t forget the sister,’ said Atkins.
‘Sister? Does Hans have a sister?’
‘Oh yes. She’s named Signe. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. I can spell it if you like. She didn’t live with her parents. I don’t know why. You shouldn’t dig into other people’s lives unnecessarily. I’ve never met her. But Hakan told me he had a daughter.’
Wallander was too astonished to ask any more questions, and they hung up. He stood by the window and contemplated the water tower.
That evening Wallander sat at his kitchen table and worked through all his notes from the day Hakan von Enke had disappeared. But nowhere did he discover any hint at all of a daughter in the family. There was no mention of a Signe. It was as if she had never existed.
