‘Not quite. But almost. The Berlin Wall was smashed to pieces in 1989. I remember the date because I got married that autumn.’
Ytterberg had nothing more to say. Wallander tried to think.
‘It sounds very odd,’ he said eventually.
‘Yes, it does. But I thought you’d be interested. Shall I send a copy of the report to the police station in Ystad?’
‘I’m on holiday. But I can stop in and pick it up.’
‘There’ll be more to come,’ said Ytterberg. ‘But now I’m going for a walk through the woods with my wife.’
Wallander hung up and thought about what Ytterberg had said. Something had already occurred to him. He knew what he was going to do next.
Shortly after eight o’clock he was in his car, heading north-west. His destination was just outside Hoor, a little house that was long past its prime.
22
On the way to Hoor Wallander picked up the report from the reception desk at the police station. Then he did something he very rarely permitted: he pulled over just north of Ystad and picked up a hitchhiker. It was a woman in her thirties with long, dark hair and a small backpack over one shoulder. He didn’t really know why he stopped; perhaps it was just pure curiosity. Over the years he noticed that hitchhikers had largely disappeared from the roads. Cheap buses and flights had made that way of travelling almost obsolete.
As a young man, first when he was seventeen and then the following year, he had hitchhiked his way through Europe, despite his father’s stern opposition to such hazardous undertakings. On both trips he had succeeded in getting as far as Paris, and then back home again. He still recalled desperate roadside waits in the rain, his backpack far too heavy, and the drivers who picked him up but bored him stiff. But two occasions stood out from all the rest. The first time he had been standing in pouring rain just outside Ghent in Belgium - with hardly any money left and on his way home. A car had stopped and taken him all the way to Helsingborg. He had never forgotten that feeling of happiness, of getting back to Sweden with a single ride. The other memory was also from Belgium. One Saturday evening, this time on the way to Paris, he had been marooned in a tiny village off the beaten track. He had indulged in a bowl of soup in a cheap cafe, and then gone out in search of a viaduct he might be able to sleep under. He had noticed a man standing by the side of the road, in front of a war memorial. The man raised a trumpet to his lips and beat a mournful tattoo in memory of all the soldiers who had been killed during the two world wars. Wallander was deeply touched by the moment, and he’d never forgotten it.
But now, early in the morning, there was a woman standing at the side of the road, thumbing a lift. It was almost as if she had materialised from a different era. She ran to catch up with the car as he pulled over, jumped in and sat in the passenger seat beside him. She seemed to be pleased with the prospect of getting as far as Hoor - she would then continue her journey up towards Smaland. She smelled strongly of perfume and seemed very tired. She kept pulling her skirt down over her knees, and he thought he could see traces of stains on it. Even as he pulled over he regretted stopping. Why on earth should he pick up somebody he had never met before? What could he talk to her about? She said nothing, and neither did Wallander. There was a ringing noise inside her backpack. She dug out a mobile phone and read the display, but didn’t answer it.
‘They’re disruptive,’ said Wallander. ‘Mobile phones.’
‘You don’t need to answer if you don’t want to.’
She spoke with a broad Scanian accent. Wallander guessed that she was from Malmo, from a working-class family. He tried to imagine her work, her life. She wasn’t wearing a ring on her left hand, and he noticed that she had bitten her nails down to the quick. Wallander rejected the idea that she was some kind of carer, or a hairdresser. She could hardly be a waitress either. She also seemed restless. She was biting her lower lip, almost chewing it.
‘Were you standing there long?’ he asked.
‘Fifteen minutes or so. I had to get out of the previous car. The driver was making a nuisance of himself.’
She sounded preoccupied, unwilling to talk. Wallander decided not to disturb her any more. He would drop her off in Hoor and they would never meet again. He toyed with the idea of giving her a name: Carola, who came from nowhere.
He asked where she would like to be dropped.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Somewhere near a cafe.’
He stopped at a roadside restaurant. She smiled rather shyly, thanked him and headed for the entrance. Wallander reversed - then suddenly had no idea what to do next. Where was he going? His mind was a blank. He was in Hoor, he’d just dropped off a hitchhiker - but why was he here? He became increasingly panic-stricken. He tried to calm himself down, closed his eyes and waited for normality to return.
It was more than a minute before he remembered where he was going. Where did it come from, this sudden emptiness that overcame him? What was wiping his mind clean? Why couldn’t his doctors tell him what was happening to him?
Although it was five or six years since he had last visited the man he was on his way to see, he remembered how to get there. The road meandered through some woods, passed a few paddocks with Iceland ponies, then sank down into a hollow. The red-brick house was still standing, just as tumbledown as he remembered it from the last time. The only thing that seemed to have changed was that there was a shiny new mailbox beside the open gate, with space for post office vans and refuse trucks to turn round. The name ‘Eber’ was written in large red letters on the box. Wallander switched off the engine but remained sitting at the wheel. He recalled the first time he had met Hermann Eber. It was more than twenty years ago, 1985 or 1986, on police business; Eber had entered Sweden illegally from East Germany. He had requested political asylum, and it had eventually been granted. Wallander was the first to interview him when he turned up at the police station in Ystad and claimed to be a refugee. Wallander could still recall their faltering conversation in English, and his suspicions when Hermann Eber said he was a member of the Stasi, the East German secret police, and feared for his life. Somebody else had taken over the case, and it was only later, when Eber had been granted a residence permit, that he contacted Wallander on his own initiative. He had become almost fluent in Swedish in an astonishingly short time, and he came to see Wallander in order to thank him. Thank me for what? Wallander had asked. Eber had explained how surprised he had been to discover that a police officer could be as friendly as Wallander was to a man from a foreign country. He had slowly realised that the malicious propaganda directed by East Germany towards neighbouring countries was not reciprocated in those lands. He felt he had to thank somebody, he said. And Wallander was the person he had chosen for his symbolic gratitude. They started meeting socially now and then, because Hermann Eber’s great passion was Italian opera. When the Berlin Wall came down, Eber sat in Wallander’s apartment in Mariagatan, his eyes overflowing with tears, and watched the historical events unfolding on television. He had confessed to Wallander in a series of long conversations that he was no longer a passionate enthusiast of the political system in East Germany. He had begun to hate himself. He had been one of the men who had bugged, persecuted and pestered his fellow citizens. He himself had been privileged, and had even shaken the hand of Erich Honecker at one of the sumptuous banquets put on by the state. He had felt so proud to have shaken the hand of the great leader. But afterwards he wished he had never done it. In the end, his doubts about what he had been doing and an increasing conviction that East Germany was a political project condemned to death had become so great that he decided to defect. He chose Sweden merely because he felt his chances of fleeing there were good. He could easily acquire false ID papers and board one of the ferries to Trelleborg.
Eber’s worries about his past eventually catching up with him were very strong. Despite the fact that East Germany no longer existed, the people he had targeted were still there. It had become clear to Wallander that nobody could assuage Eber’s fear; it was a constant presence and would probably never disappear completely. As the years passed, Eber became increasingly reserved and withdrawn; their meetings became less frequent and eventually ceased altogether.
The last time they had seen each other was because Wallander had heard that his friend was ill. One Sunday afternoon he drove out to Hoor in order to see how things were. Eber was the same as ever, possibly a bit thinner. He was about the same age as Wallander but seemed to be ageing more quickly. Wallander had thought a lot about
