reservations. Obviously, whoever the intruder was might have had reasons for breaking in that had nothing to do with Hakan and Louise von Enke, but what could they possibly be? The first thing he did that morning was make a thorough search of the house. One of the windows facing east, in the room where he had a guest bed that was never used, was ajar. He was quite certain he hadn’t left it open. A thief could easily have entered through that window and left again the same way without leaving much in the way of traces. But why hadn’t he taken anything? Nothing was missing, Wallander was sure of that. He could think of only two possibilities. Either the thief hadn’t found what he was looking for, or he had left something behind. And so Wallander didn’t simply look for something that was missing, but also for something that hadn’t been there before. He crawled around, looking under chairs, beds and sofas, and searched among his books. After almost an hour, just before Nordlander called, he concluded his search without having discovered anything at all. He wondered if he should talk to Nyberg, the forensic expert attached to the Ystad police force, and ask him to look for possible hidden microphones. But he decided not to - it would raise too many questions and give rise to too much gossip.
Sten Nordlander explained that he was sitting with a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe in Sandhamn.
‘I’m on my way north,’ he said. ‘My holiday route is going to take me up to Harnosand, then across the gulf to the Finnish coast, then back home via Aland. Two weeks alone with the wind and the waves.’
‘So a sailor never gets tired of the sea?’
‘Never. What did you find?’
Wallander described the steel cylinder in great detail. Using a yardstick - his father’s old one, covered in paint stains - he had measured the exact length, and he’d used a piece of string to establish the diameter.
‘Where did you find it?’ Nordlander asked when Wallander had finished.
‘In Hakan and Louise’s basement storeroom,’ Wallander lied. ‘Do you have any idea what it might be?’
‘No, not a clue. But I’ll think about it. In their basement, you said?’
‘Yes. Have you ever seen anything like it?’
‘Cylinders have aerodynamic qualities that make them useful in all kinds of circumstances. But I can’t recall having seen anything like what you describe. Did you open up any of the cables?’
‘No.’
‘You should. They could provide some clues.’
Wallander found an appropriate knife and carefully split open the black outer casing of one of the cords. Inside were even thinner wires, no more than threads. He described what he had found.
‘Hmm,’ said Nordlander. ‘They can hardly be live electricity cables. They seem more likely to have some kind of communications function. But exactly what, I can’t say. I’ll have to mull it over.’
‘Let me know if you figure it out,’ said Wallander.
‘It’s odd that it doesn’t say where it was made. The serial number and place of manufacture are usually engraved in the steel. I wonder how it came to be in Hakan’s basement, and where he got hold of it.’
Wallander glanced at his watch and saw that he had to head to the police station or he would be late for the meeting. Nordlander ended the call by describing in critical terms a large yacht on its way into the harbour.
The meeting about the motorbike gang lasted for nearly two hours. Wallander was frustrated by Lennart Mattson’s inability to steer the meeting efficiently and his failure to reach any practical conclusions. In the end, Wallander became so impatient that he interrupted Mattson and said that it should be possible to stop the purchase of the house by directly contacting the present owner. Once that was done they could develop strategies to put obstacles in the way of the gang’s activities. Mattson refused to be put off. However, Wallander had information that nobody else in the room knew about. He had been given a tip by Linda, who had heard about it from a friend in Stockholm. He requested permission to speak, and spelled it out.
‘We have a complication,’ he began. ‘There is a notorious medical practitioner whose contribution to the well-being of Swedish citizenry includes providing doctor’s certificates for no less than fourteen members of one of these Hell’s Angels gangs. All of them have been receiving state benefits because they are suffering from severe depression.’
A titter ran through the room.
‘That doctor has now retired, and unfortunately he’s moved down here,’ he went on. ‘He bought a pretty little house in the centre of town. The risk is, of course, that he will continue writing sick notes for these poor motor- cyclists who are so depressed that they are unable to work. He’s being investigated by the social services crowd, but as we all know, they can’t be relied on.’
Wallander stood up and wrote the doctor’s name on a flip chart.
‘We should be keeping an eye on this fellow,’ he said, and left the room.
As far as he was concerned, the meeting was now over.
He spent the rest of the morning brooding over the cylinder. Then he drove to the library and asked for help looking up all the literature they had about submarines, naval ships in general and modern warfare. The librarian, who had been a school friend of Linda’s, produced a large pile of books. Just before he left he also asked her for Stig Wennerstrom’s memoirs.
Wallander went home, stopping on the way to do some shopping. When he left the house that morning he had fixed little pieces of tape discreetly on doors and windows. None had been disturbed. He ate his fish stew and then turned to the books he had piled up on the kitchen table. He read until he couldn’t go on any longer. When he went to bed at about midnight, heavy rain was pummelling the roof. He fell asleep immediately. The sound of rain had always put him to sleep, ever since he was a child.
When Wallander arrived at the police station the next morning he was soaking wet. He had decided to walk part of the way to work, and hence parked at the railway station. The high blood sugar reading of the other night was a challenge. He must get more exercise, more often. Halfway there he had been caught in a heavy shower. He went to the locker room, hung up his wet trousers and took another pair out of his locker. He noticed that he had put on weight since he wore them last. He slammed the door in anger, just as Nyberg entered the room. He raised an eyebrow at Wallander’s extreme reaction.
‘Bad mood?’
‘Wet trousers.’
Nyberg nodded and replied with his own personal mixture of jollity and gloom.
‘I know exactly what you mean. We can all cope with getting our feet wet. But getting your trousers wet is much worse. It’s like pissing yourself. You feel pleasantly warm but then it gets uncomfortably cold.’
Wallander went to his office and called Ytterberg, who was out and hadn’t said when he would be back. Wallander had already tried calling his mobile phone, without getting an answer. When he went to get a cup of coffee, he bumped into Martinsson, who felt he needed some fresh air. They went to sit down on a bench outside the police station. Martinsson talked about an arsonist who was still on the run.
‘Are we going to catch him this time?’ Wallander asked.
‘We always catch him,’ said Martinsson. ‘The question is whether we can keep him or if we’ll have to let him go. But we have a witness I believe in. This time we might be able to nail him at last.’
They went back inside, each to his own office. Wallander stayed for several hours. Then he went home, still not having managed to contact Ytterberg. But he had scribbled down the most important points on a scrap of paper and intended to keep on trying to make contact during the evening. Ytterberg was the man in charge of the investigation. Wallander would hand over the material he had, the file inside the black covers and the steel cylinder. Then Ytterberg could draw the necessary and the possible conclusions. The investigation had nothing to do with Wallander. He was not a member of the investigating team, he was merely a father who didn’t like the idea of his daughter’s future parents-in-law disappearing without a trace. Now Wallander would concentrate on celebrating midsummer, and then taking a holiday.
But things didn’t turn out as planned. When he got home he found an unknown car parked outside his house, a beaten-up Ford covered in rust. Wallander didn’t recognise it. He wondered whose it could be. As he approached the house he saw that on one of the white chairs, the one he had dozed on the night before, there was a woman.
There was an open bottle of wine on the table in front of her. Wallander could see no trace of a glass.
Reluctantly he went up to her and said hello.
17
