‘Say nothing for the moment. Ask nothing. I have to think about what this implies. So do you. But I’ll talk to Ytterberg.’
He accompanied her to the car. She held on to his arm so as not to slip.
‘You should do something about this parking area,’ she said. ‘Have you thought about spreading some gravel around?’
‘It had occurred to me,’ said Wallander.
She had already got into her car when she began talking about Baiba again.
‘Is it really that bad? That she’s going to die?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did she leave?’
‘Early this morning.’
‘Will you see her again?’
‘She came here to say goodbye. She has cancer and will die before long. I think you can work out how that feels without any help from me.’
‘It must have been awful.’
Wallander turned away and walked round the corner of the house. He didn’t want to burst out crying - not because he didn’t want to display weakness in front of his daughter, but for his own sake. He simply didn’t want to think about his own death, which was basically the only thing that frightened him. He remained there until he heard her start the car and drive away. She had realised that he wanted to be left alone.
When he went back into the kitchen, he sat in the chair opposite where he usually sat at mealtimes.
He thought about what Linda had said about Hakan von Enke. They were back to square one.
28
Wallander clambered up the rickety ladder leading to the attic. A musty smell of damp and mould hit him hard. He was aware that one of these days he would have to have the whole roof removed and replaced. But not yet. Maybe in a year or, with a bit of luck, two.
He knew roughly where he had put the cardboard box he was looking for, but another one caught his eye first. In a box supplied by the moving company in Helsingborg was his collection of LPs. During all the years he had lived in Mariagatan, he had a record player on which he could listen to them, but it had finally broken, and he hadn’t been able to find anybody to repair it. It had been taken away with the rest of the rubbish when he moved, but he had kept the records and stored them in the attic. He sat down and thumbed through his old albums. Every sleeve contained a memory, sometimes clear and comprehensive, just as often a flickering image of faces, smells, emotions. In his late teens he had been an almost fanatical fan of the Spotnicks. He had their first four records, and he recognised the title of every song. The music and the electric guitars echoed inside him. Also in the box was a record featuring Mahalia Jackson, which he had once been astonished to receive as a present from one of the silk knights who bought his father’s paintings. The man probably spent his life peddling paintings and gramophone records. Wallander remembered carrying a canvas to the man’s car and being given the record in return. The gospel songs had made a big impression on him.
He suddenly found himself sitting there with an Edith Piaf record in his hands. The album cover, in black and white, was a close-up of her face. Mona, who hated the Spotnicks, had given him that LP - she preferred other Swedish groups such as Streaplers and Sven-Ingvars, but her great favourite was the French chanteuse. Neither she nor Wallander understood a word of what Piaf sang, but her voice fascinated them both.
After Piaf came a record featuring the jazz musician John Coltrane; where had he got that one? He couldn’t remember. When he took it out of the sleeve he saw that it had barely been played. He tried hard, but the record didn’t speak to him. He couldn’t hear a single note from Coltrane’s saxophone.
Right at the back of the box were two opera LPs:
He remained there, sitting on the attic floor, wondering if he should take the box downstairs and buy a new record player so that he could listen to them. But in the end he slid the box to one side. The music he listened to nowadays was on cassette or CD. He didn’t need those scratchy vinyl LPs any more. They belonged to the past, and they could stay there in the darkness of the attic.
He found the box he was looking for and brought it down to the kitchen. He took out of it a large number of Lego pieces, and spread them out over the table. He had given the Lego to Linda when she was a little girl - he’d won them in a raffle.
He’d got the idea from Rydberg. They’d been sitting at his kitchen table late one evening in spring, not long before Rydberg died. Ystad and the surrounding area had been subjected to a series of robberies by a masked man with a sawn-off shotgun. In order to organise the incidents and in the hope of finding a pattern, Rydberg had produced a pack of cards and used it to trace the robber’s movements. The unknown villain had been the jack of spades. It had taught Wallander a way of seeing how a criminal went about his business, possibly even how he thought. When he had tried out the Rydberg method himself a few years later, he used Lego pieces instead of playing cards. But he had never told Rydberg.
He arranged figures to represent Hakan and Louise, various dates, places and events. A fireman in a red helmet was Hakan; Louise was a little girl Linda had called Cinderella. He placed a group of marching Lego soldiers on one side; they were the unanswered questions he now considered the most important. Who was pretending to be Signe’s uncle? Why had her father emerged from the shadows? Where had he been and why had he hidden himself away?
He remembered that he needed to call Niklasgarden. He did so and was informed that nobody had been to visit Signe. Neither her father nor some unknown uncle.
He sat there at the kitchen table with a piece of Lego in his hand. Somebody isn’t telling the truth, he thought. Of all the people I’ve spoken to about Hakan and Louise von Enke, there’s one who’s not being straight with me. He or she is either lying or distorting the truth by holding back information. Who? And why?
*
The phone rang. He took it out into the garden. It was Linda. She came straight to the point.
‘I talked to Hans. He felt like I was pressuring him. He got annoyed and stormed out. When he comes back, I’ll apologise.’
‘That’s something Mona never did.’
‘What? Storm out or apologise?’
‘She often stormed out. That was always the last card she played whenever we had an argument. A slammed door. When she came back she never apologised.’
Linda laughed. She’s on edge, Wallander thought. They probably argue a lot more often than she wants me to know.
‘According to Mona it was the other way round,’ she said. ‘It was you who slammed the door, you who never apologised.’
‘I thought we’d already agreed that Mona sometimes says things that aren’t true,’ Wallander said.
‘You do exactly the same. Neither of my parents is a thoroughly honest person.’
Wallander reacted angrily.
‘Are you? Thoroughly honest?’
‘No. But I’ve never claimed to be.’
‘Get to the point!’
‘Am I interrupting something?’
Wallander decided on the spur of the moment, not without a certain amount of pleasure, to tell a lie.
‘I’m cooking.’
She saw through him right away.
‘In the garden? I can hear birds singing.’
‘I’m having a barbecue.’
‘You hate barbecues.’
‘You don’t know everything I hate and don’t hate. What is it you want to tell me?’
