‘What do you think it is?’ he asked when he stood up again.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lundberg. ‘Neither did my dad. He didn’t like that. That’s one way in which I’m like him. We want answers to our questions.’
Lundberg paused for a few moments before continuing.
‘I don’t need it. Maybe it’s of some use to you?’
Wallander didn’t realise at first that Lundberg was referring to the steel cylinder at their feet.
‘Yes, I’d be happy to take it,’ he said, thinking that Sten Nordlander might be able to explain what the cylinder was used for.
They put it in the boat and Wallander unfastened the line. Lundberg turned east and headed for the strait between Boko and Bjorkskar. They passed a small island with a building at the edge of a clump of trees.
‘An old hunting lodge,’ said Lundberg. ‘They used to use it as a base when they were out shooting seabirds. My dad sometimes stayed there for a few nights when he wanted to spend some time drinking and be on his own. It’s a good hiding place for anybody who wants to disappear from the face of the earth for a while.’
They docked at the pier. Wallander reversed the car to the water’s edge, and they lifted the steel cylinder onto the back seat.
‘There’s one thing I’m wondering about,’ said Lundberg. ‘You said that both husband and wife vanished. Am I right in thinking that they didn’t disappear at the same time?’
‘Yes. Hakan von Enke disappeared in April, and his wife only a few weeks ago.’
‘That’s strange. The fact that there’s no trace of them at all. Where could he have gone to? Or they?’
‘We simply don’t know. They might be alive, they might be dead.’
Lundberg shook his head.
‘There’s still the question about the photograph,’ said Wallander.
‘I don’t have an answer for you.’
Was it because Lundberg’s reply came too quickly? Wallander wasn’t sure, but he did wonder, purely intuitively, if what Lundberg said was true. Was there something he didn’t want to tell Wallander about, despite everything?
‘Maybe it will come to you,’ said Wallander. ‘You never know. A memory might rise to the surface one of these days.’
Wallander watched him backing away from the quay, then they both raised their hands to say goodbye, and the boat shot off at high speed towards the strait and Halso.
Wallander took a different route home. He wanted to avoid passing that little cafe again.
When he arrived he was tired and hungry, and he didn’t pick up Jussi from the neighbour’s. He could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It had been raining; he could smell it in the grass under his feet.
He unlocked the door and went into the house, took off his jacket and kicked off his shoes.
He paused in the hall, held his breath, listened intently. Nobody there. Nothing had been disturbed, but even so he knew that somebody had been in the house while he was away. He went into the kitchen in his socks. No message on the table. If it had been Linda, she would have scribbled a note and left it there. He went into the living room and looked around.
He’d had a visitor. Somebody had been there and had left.
Wallander pulled on his boots and walked around the outside of the house.
When he was sure that nobody was observing him, he went to the dog kennel and squatted down.
He felt around inside. What he had stashed was still there.
16
He had inherited the tin box from his father. Or rather, he had found it among all the discarded paintings, tins of paint and paintbrushes. When Wallander cleared out the studio after his father’s death, it brought tears to his eyes. One of the oldest paintbrushes had a maker’s mark indicating that it had been manufactured during the war, in 1942. This had been his father’s life, he thought: a constantly growing heap of discarded paintbrushes in the corner of the room. When he was cleaning up and throwing everything into big paper bags before losing patience and ordering a skip, he had come across the tin box. It was empty and rusty, but Wallander could vaguely remember it from his childhood. At one time in the distant past his father had used it to store his old toys - well made and beautifully painted tin soldiers, parts of a Meccano set.
Where all these toys had disappeared to he had no idea. He had looked in every nook and cranny of both the house and the studio without finding them. He even searched through the old rubbish heap behind the house, dug into it with a spade and a pitchfork without finding anything. The tin box was empty, and Wallander regarded it as a symbol, something he had inherited and could fill with whatever he pleased. He cleaned it up, scraped away the worst of the rust, and put it in the storeroom in the basement in Mariagatan. It was only when he moved into his new house that he rediscovered it. And now it had come in handy, when he was wondering where to hide the black file he had found in Signe’s room. In a way it was her book, he thought; it was Signe’s book and might contain an explanation for her parents’ disappearance.
He decided the best place to hide the tin box was under the wooden floor of the kennel in which Jussi slept. He was relieved to find that the book was still there. He decided to pick up Jussi without further ado. The neighbouring farm was at the other side of several oilseed-rape fields that had been harvested while he was away. He walked until he came to where his neighbour was repairing a tractor and collected Jussi, who was leaping around and straining at his chain at the back of the house. When they arrived home he dragged in the cylinder, spread some newspapers out on the kitchen table and started to examine it. He was being very cautious since alarm bells were ringing deep down inside him. Perhaps there was something dangerous inside it? He carefully disentangled all the cords and disconnected the various relays and plugs and switches. He could see that some sort of fastening device on the underside of the cylinder had been torn off. There was no serial number or any other indication of where the cylinder had been made, or who its owner had been. He took a break to make dinner, an omelette that he filled with the contents of a can of mushrooms and ate in front of the television while failing to be enthused by a football match as he tried to forget all about the cylinder and missing persons. Jussi came and lay down on the floor in front of him. Wallander gave him the rest of the omelette, then took him for a walk. It was a lovely summer evening. He couldn’t resist sitting down on one of the white wooden chairs on the western side of the house, where he had a superb view of the setting sun as it sank below the horizon.
He woke with a start, surprised to realise that he had fallen asleep. He had been oblivious to the world for nearly an hour. His mouth was dry, and he went back inside to measure his blood sugar. It was much higher than normal, 274. That worried him. The only conclusion he could draw was that it was time to increase yet again the amount of insulin he injected into his body at regular intervals.
He remained seated for a while at the kitchen table, where he had pricked his finger when checking his blood sugar level. Once again he was overcome by feelings of dejection, resignation, awareness of the curse of old age. And by worry about the blackouts when his memory and sense of time and place disappeared completely. I’m sitting here, he thought, messing around with a steel cylinder when I should be visiting my daughter and getting to know my grandchild.
He did what he always did when he was feeling dejected. He poured himself a substantial glass of schnapps and downed it in one go. Just one big glass, no more, no refill, no topping up. Then he messed around with the cylinder one more time before deciding that enough was enough. He had a bath, and was asleep before midnight.
Early the next day he called Sten Nordlander. He was out in his boat but said he should be on land in an hour and promised to call back then.
‘Has anything happened?’ he shouted in an attempt to make himself heard above all the interference.
‘Yes,’ shouted Wallander in return. ‘We haven’t found the missing persons, but I’ve found something else.’
Martinsson called at seven thirty and reminded Wallander of the meeting due to take place later in the morning. A member of a notorious Swedish gang of Hell’s Angels was in the process of buying a property just outside Ystad, and Lennart Mattson had called a meeting. Wallander promised to be there at ten o’clock.
He didn’t intend to tell Sten Nordlander exactly where he’d found the cylinder. After discovering that somebody had invaded his house while he was away, he had decided not to trust anyone - at least not without
