anguish over his parents’ disappearance. We thought we’d cheer you up by coming to visit you.’
‘By all means,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m looking forward to it. What a nice surprise!’
He got a cup of coffee from the machine, which was actually working for once, and exchanged a few words with one of the forensic officers who had spent the night in a swamp where a confused woman appeared to have committed suicide. When the officer eventually arrived home at dawn, he had produced a frog from one of the many pockets in his uniform. His wife had been less than overjoyed.
Wallander returned to his office and managed to find yet another number in his overloaded address book. It was the last call he planned to make that morning before abandoning the missing von Enkes and returning to his routine police work. Earlier he had left a message on an answering machine. Now he was about to dial the mobile phone number of that same person. This time he got through.
‘Hans-Olov.’
Wallander recognised the almost childish voice of the young professor of geology he had met in the course of duty several years ago. He could hear an announcement in the background about a flight departure.
‘Wallander here. I gather you’re at an airport?’
‘Yes, Kastrup. I’m on my way back home after a geology congress in Chile, but my suitcase seems to have been lost.’
‘I need your help,’ said Wallander. ‘I’d like you to compare some stones.’
‘Sure. But can it wait until tomorrow? I’m always a wreck after a long flight.’
Wallander remembered that Uddmark had no less than five children, despite his youth.
‘I hope your presents for the children weren’t in the missing bag.’
‘It’s worse than that. It contains some beautiful stones I brought home with me.’
‘Is your office address the same as it was the last time we worked together? If it is I can send you the stones later today.’
‘What do you want me to do with them, apart from establishing what kind of rock they are?’
‘I want to know if any of them might have originated in the USA.’
‘Can you be more precise?’
‘In the vicinity of San Diego in California, or somewhere on the east coast, near Boston.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, but it sounds difficult. Do you have any idea how many different species of rock there are?’
Wallander told him that he didn’t know, sympathised with him once again about the missing suitcase, hung up and then hurried to join a meeting he should have been at. Someone had left a note on his desk saying it was important. He was the last person to enter the conference room, where the window was wide open because the forecast said it was going to be a hot day. He couldn’t help thinking about all the times he had been in charge of these kinds of meetings. During all the years when it had been his responsibility, he had often dreamed of the day when the burden would no longer be on his shoulders. But now, when it was often somebody else in charge of investigations, he sometimes missed not being the driving force sorting through proposals and telling people what to do.
The man in charge today was a detective by the name of Ove Sunde. He had arrived in Ystad only the previous year, from Vaxjo. Somebody had whispered in Wallander’s ear that a messy divorce and a less than successful investigation that led to a heated debate in the local newspaper,
It was doubtful, though, that his own constant loneliness was a better alternative.
Sunde began his presentation. It was about the case of the woman in the swamp, which was probably not just a suicide but also a murder. Her husband was found lying dead in their home in a little village not far from Marsvinsholm. The situation was complicated by the fact that a few days earlier the man had gone to the police station in Ystad and said that he thought his wife was planning to kill him. The officer who spoke to him hadn’t taken him seriously because the man seemed confused and made a lot of contradictory claims. They needed to work out as quickly as possible what had actually happened, before the media caught on to the fact that the man’s complaint had been shelved. Wallander was annoyed by Sunde’s excessively officious tone. He considered this fear of the opinion of the mass media sheer cowardice. If a mistake was made, it should be acknowledged and the consequences accepted.
He thought he should point that out, calmly and objectively, firmly but without losing his temper. But he said nothing. Martinsson was sitting at the other side of the table, watching him. He knows exactly what’s going on inside my head at the moment, Wallander thought, and he agrees with me, whether I speak up now or hold my tongue.
After the meeting they drove out to the house where the dead man had been found. With photographs in their hands and plastic bags over their shoes, he and Martinsson went from room to room in the company of a forensic officer. Wallander suddenly experienced deja vu, feeling like he had already visited this house at some point in the past and made an ‘ocular inspection’ (as Lennart Mattson would no doubt have described it) of the crime scene. He hadn’t, of course; it was simply that he had done the same thing so many times before. A few years ago he bought a book about a crime committed on the island of Varmdo off Stockholm in the early nineteenth century. As he read it, he became increasingly involved, and had the distinct feeling that he could have entered the story and together with the county sheriff and prosecutor worked out how the victims, man and wife, had been murdered. People have always been the same, and the most common crimes are more or less repeats of what happened in earlier times. They are nearly always due to arguments about money, or jealousy, sometimes revenge. Before him, generations of police officers, sheriffs and prosecutors had made the same observations. Nowadays they had superior technical means of establishing evidence, but the ability to interpret what you see with your own eyes was still the key to police work.
Wallander stopped dead and broke off his train of thought. They had entered the couple’s bedroom. There was blood on the floor and on one side of the bed. But what had caught Wallander’s attention was a painting hanging on the wall above the bed. It depicted a capercaillie in a woodland setting. Martinsson materialised by his side.
‘Painted by your father, right?’
Wallander nodded, but also shook his head in disbelief.
‘I never cease to be amazed.’
‘Well, at least he didn’t need to worry about forgeries,’ said Martinsson thoughtfully.
‘Of course not,’ said Wallander. ‘From an artistic point of view, it’s crap.’
‘Don’t say that,’ protested Martinsson.
‘I’m only calling a spade a spade,’ said Wallander. ‘Where’s the murder weapon?’
They went out into the garden. A plastic tent had been erected over an old axe. Wallander could see blood high up on the shaft.
‘Is there a plausible motive? How long had they been married?’
‘They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary last year. They have four grown children and goodness knows how many grandchildren. Nobody can understand what happened.’
‘Is there money involved?’
‘According to the neighbours they were both thrifty and stingy. I don’t know yet how much they have stashed away. The bank’s looking into it. But we can assume that there’s a fair amount.’
‘It looks as if there was a fight,’ Wallander said after a few minutes’ thought. ‘He resisted. Until we recover the body, we can’t say what sort of injuries she had.’
‘It’s not a big swamp,’ said Martinsson. ‘They expect to pull her out today.’
They drove back from the depressing scene of the crime to the police station. It seemed to Wallander that just for a moment, the summer landscape had been transformed into a black-and-white photograph. He spent some time swivelling back and forth in his desk chair, then dialled Eskil Lundberg’s number. His wife answered, and she said her husband was out in his boat. Wallander could hear young children playing in the background. He guessed that Eskil Lundberg was the boy he had seen in the photograph.
