An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  “I’ve already told you. We drew up an agreement about that several years ago. Perhaps he had an inkling that one of these days he would float off into the mists, and wanted to have his affairs in order before it happened.”

  “Does he have any moments of clarity?”

  “None at all. He doesn’t recognize anybody anymore. The only person he ever talks about is his mother, who died about fifty years ago. He keeps saying he must go and buy some milk. He repeats that over and over again all the time he’s awake. He lives in a care home for people who no longer live in the real world.”

  “Surely there must be someone else who can answer questions?”

  “No, there isn’t. Karl Eriksson and his wife, who died sometime in the 1970s, didn’t have any children. Or rather, they had two children, two daughters, who died in a horrific accident in a muddy pond a long time ago. There were no other relatives. They lived isolated lives—the only people they were occasionally in contact with were me and my family.”

  Wallander felt impatient. And he was also hungry—the sandwich Linda had given him had long since proved insufficient.

  “We’d better start searching the house,” he said, rising to his feet. “There must be deeds. All people have a story; so do all houses. Let’s go and have a word with Lisa.”

  They sat down in Lisa Holgersson’s office. Wallander let Martinson tell her about Stina Hurlén’s report and the senile Karl Eriksson. It had become a characteristic of their working relationship that they took it in turns to report on specific cases so that the other one could listen and keep the whole business at arm’s length.

  “We can’t devote much in the way of resources to this,” said Holgersson when Martinson had finished. “It seems highly probable that it will end up as an old murder inquiry in any case.”

  That was exactly the reaction that Wallander had expected. It seemed to him that in recent years fewer and fewer police resources were allocated to what ought to have been most important: fieldwork. More and more of his colleagues were glued to their desks, and had to work in accordance with confusing and meaningless priorities that were changing all the time. An old murder, if that was really what had come up to the surface in Löderup, was not something that could be allocated anything more than strictly limited resources.

  He had expected that answer, but was angry even so.

  “We’ll keep you informed,” he said. “We’ll just say for the moment what we know, and that we think perhaps we ought to make a thorough investigation. We’re not asking for much in the way of resources. At least, not until we receive more detailed reports from the Center for Forensic Medicine in Lund. And Nyberg’s report. After all, that’s the least we can do—find out who it is who’s been lying there buried for years. If we still want to call ourselves police officers.”

  Lisa Holgersson gave a start and glared sternly at him.

  “What did you mean by that last sentence?”

  “It’s the results of what we do that show we’re police officers. Not all those statistics we’re forced to spend time working out.”

  “Statistics?”

  “You know as well as I do that our ability to clear up crime is much too limited. Because we’re obliged to spend so much time messing around with unimportant paperwork.”

  Wallander could feel that he was on the verge of bursting into a fit of rage. But he managed to control himself sufficiently for Lisa Holgersson not to notice just how furious he actually was.

  Martinson saw through him, of course.

  Wallander stood up hastily.

  “We’ll go and take a look out there,” he said, trying hard to maintain a friendly tone. “Who knows what we might find?”

  He left the room and strode rapidly along the corridor. Martinson half ran behind him.

  “I thought you were going to burst,” said Martinson. “Not a good idea on a Monday in October as winter is approaching.”

  “You talk too much,” said Wallander. “Fetch your jacket—we’re going for a drive out into the sticks.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When they arrived at the house in Löderup, nearly all the spotlights were switched off. The hole in which they had discovered the body was covered by a tarpaulin. A single police car was parked by the cordoned-off area; Nyberg and the other forensic officers had left. Wallander still had the house keys in his pocket. He handed them over to Martinson.

  “I’m not out viewing houses now,” he said. “These are your keys, so it’s up to you to open up.”

  “Why does everything have to be so complicated?” asked Martinson.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. They entered the house and switched on the lights.

  “Deeds,” said Wallander. “Documents that tell the story of the house. Let’s devote some time to looking for those. Then we can wait until the forensic boys and the medical crowd have had their say.”

  “I asked Stefan to conduct a search through old reports on missing persons,” said Martinson. “Linda was going to help him.”

  Stefan Lindman had joined the Ystad police at about the same time as Linda. Wallander soon realized that Linda and Stefan were involved in some kind of relationship. When he tried to talk to her about it, he had got mainly evasive responses. Wallander liked Stefan Lindman. He was a good police officer. But he found it hard to reconcile himself to the thought that he had a daughter who no longer regarded him as the most important man in her life.

  They began their search at opposite ends of the house—Martinson in the bedroom and Wallander in what seemed to be a combination of drawing room and study.

  Once he was alone, Wallander stood absolutely still for a moment and allowed his gaze and his thoughts to wander around the room. Had there once been a woman here who for some reason or other had been murdered and then buried in the garden? Why had nobody missed her if this had been where she lived? What had happened in this house, and when? Twenty years ago? Fifty years ago? Perhaps a hundred years ago?

  Wallander started searching methodically. First with his eyes. People always leave a lot of traces behind them. And he knew that people were hamsters. They kept things, not least documents. His eyes alighted on a desk in front of a window. That was where he would start. The desk was dark brown, definitely old. Wallander sat down on the chair in front of it and tried the drawers. They were locked. He searched the desk top but could see no sign of a key. Then he felt with his fingers underneath the desk top: still no keys. He lifted up the heavy, brass table lamp, and found a key attached to a thin strand of silk.

  He opened the desk’s cupboard. There were five drawers. The top one was full of old pens, empty ink bottles, a few pairs of spectacles, and dust. It struck Wallander that nothing could make him as depressed as the sight of old spectacles that nobody wanted anymore. He opened the next drawer down. It contained a bundle of old income tax returns. He saw that the oldest was from 1952. That year Karl Eriksson and his wife had paid 2,900 kronor in tax. Wallander tried to work out if that was about what might have been expected, or if it was a surprisingly low sum. He decided the latter. The third drawer contained various diaries. He leafed through some of them. They contained no personal notes, not even references to birthdays: just the purchase of seedcorn, the cost of repairs to a combine harvester, and new wheels for a tractor. Eriksson had evidently run a small farm. He put the diaries back into the drawer. Every time he searched through other people’s belongings, he wondered how anybody could cope with being a thief—to spend more or less every day rummaging through other people’s clothes and personal belongings.

  Wallander opened the fourth drawer, the last but one. And there he found what he was looking for: a file with the words “Property Documents” written in ink. He took it carefully out of the drawer, slid the desk lamp closer to him, directed it at the file, and began to leaf through the papers. The first thing he came across was a deed of conveyance dated November 18, 1968. Karl Eriksson and his wife Emma had bought the property and the surrounding fiel
ds from the estate left by the farmer Gustav Valfrid Henander. The beneficiaries comprised the widow, Laura, and three children: Tore, Lars and Kristina. The purchase price was 55,000 kronor. Karl Eriksson paid a deposit of 15,000 kronor on the house, and the transaction was supervised by the Savings Bank in Ystad.

  Wallander produced a notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket. In the old days he had nearly always forgotten to take a notebook with him, and been forced to scribble on scraps of paper and the backs of receipts. But Linda had bought him a collection of small notebooks, and put one in the pocket of each of his coats and jackets. Wallander made a note of two figures: at the top he wrote today’s date, October 28, 2002, and underneath it, November 18, 1968. This was a stretch of time covering thirty-four years—a whole generation. He noted down all the names that were on the conveyance, then put it to one side and surveyed the remaining documents. Most of them were of no interest, but he proceeded carefully. Working through a series of documents could be just as risky as walking through a dark forest: you could stumble, fall down, get lost.

  Martinson’s cell phone rang somewhere. Wallander assumed it was his wife. They had innumerable phone conversations with each other every day. Wallander often wondered what they could possibly think of to say. He couldn’t remember phoning his own wife Mona, or her him, during working hours even once over all the years they were married. Work was work, and talking was something you could do before or afterward. He sometimes wondered if that had been a contributory factor in the break-up of their marriage. The fact that he had phoned her so seldom. Or her him.

  He carried on looking at the documents. Paused. He found he was holding an old title deed, an attested copy. It was dated 1949 and concerned Gustav Valfrid Henander. Henander had bought the property, Legshult 2:19, from Ludvig Hansson, who was listed as a widower and the sole owner. The purchase price had been 29,000 kronor, and this time the transaction was arranged by the Skurup Savings Bank.

  Wallander noted it all down. Another few years were now accounted for. He had gone back in time fifty-three years from 2002. He smiled to himself. When Ludvig Hansson had sold his farm to Gustav Valfrid Henander, Wallander was a little boy, still living in Limhamn. He had no memories from that time.

  He carried on searching. Martinson had finished his call and was now whistling to himself. Wallander thought it was something Barbra Streisand had sung. Maybe “Woman in Love.” Martinson was a good whistler. Wallander looked at some more documents, but there were none that went back further in time. Ludvig Hansson had left the property in 1949. The desk drawer contained no more answers to questions about what had happened before then.

  He searched the rest of the room without finding anything of interest. Not even in a corner cupboard or a secretary.

  Martinson came in, sat down in a chair and yawned. Wallander told him what he had found, but Martinson shook his head when he handed over the papers.

  “I don’t need to look. Ludvig Hansson. That name means nothing to me.”

  “We’ll carry on looking via the land register,” said Wallander. “Tomorrow. But at least we now have a sort of outline covering the last fifty years or so. Have you found anything?”

  “No. A few photo albums. But nothing that throws any light on that woman.”

  Wallander closed the file containing all the documents relevant to the property.

  “We must talk to the neighbors,” he said. “The closest ones, at least. Do you know if Karl Eriksson was especially friendly with any of them?”

  “If anybody, I suppose it would be the people in that pink house on the left just after you turn into the side road. There’s an old milking stool standing outside it.”

  Wallander knew which house and milking stool Martinson was referring to. He also had a vague memory of someone there once buying one of his father’s paintings. He couldn’t remember if it had been one with or without a great grouse.

  “There’s an old lady there called Elin,” said Martinson. “Elin Trulsson. She’s been to visit Karl a few times—but she’s also old. Maybe not quite as senile as he is, though.”

  Wallander stood up.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Linda surprised Wallander by having dinner ready when he came back home. Although it was an ordinary weekday he was tempted to open a bottle of wine—but if he did Linda would only start stirring up trouble, so he didn’t. Instead he told her about the return visit he and Martinson had made in Löderup.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I now have an overall view of who owned the property over the past fifty years. But, of course, it’s too early to say whether that knowledge will prove to be useful to us.”

  “I spoke to Stefan. He hadn’t discovered any missing woman who might fit in the picture.”

  “I didn’t expect he would.”

  They ate in silence. It was only when they came to the coffee that they resumed talking.

  “You could have bought the house,” she said. “You could have lived there until the day you died without knowing that there was a cemetery in your garden; lived there for the rest of your life without knowing that every summer you walked around in your bare feet on grass that was growing over a grave.”

  “I keep thinking about that hand,” he said. “Something had caused it to come up to the surface. Obviously, if you have a tendency to believe in ghosts you might well think that the hand was sticking up on purpose in order to attract the attention of a visiting police officer.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a call to Linda’s cell phone. She answered, listened, then hung up.

  “That was Stefan. I’m going to drive over to his place.”

  Wallander immediately felt that nagging feeling of jealousy. He made an unintentional grimace, which of course she noticed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I can see that there is something. You’re pulling a face.”

  “That’s just because something’s got caught in my teeth.”

  “When will you learn that you can never get away with telling me lies?”

  “I’m just a simple, jealous old father. That’s all.”

  “Find yourself a woman. You know what I’ve said. If you don’t find someone to fuck soon, you’ll die.”

  “You know I don’t like you using words like that.”

  “I think you need somebody to annoy you sometimes. Bye.”

  Linda left the room. Wallander thought for a few moments. Then he stood up, opened the bottle of wine, took out a glass and went into the living room. He dug out a record of Beethoven’s last string quartet and sat down in his armchair. His thoughts started to wander as he listened to the music. The wine was making him dozy. He closed his eyes, and was soon half asleep.

  He suddenly opened his eyes. He was wide awake again. The music was finished—the record had come to an end. A thought had struck him deep in his subconscious mind. That hand he had stumbled over. He had received an explanation from Nyberg that the forensic officer thought was plausible. Groundwater could rise and fall, the clay soil could sink down and hence force the undersoil up toward the surface. And so the hand had risen up to ground level. But why just the hand? Was that remark at the dinner table more significant than he had realized? Had that hand risen to the surface specifically in order to be observed?

  He poured another glass of wine, then telephoned Nyberg. It was always a bit dodgy calling him because he could object angrily to someone disturbing him. Wallander waited, listening to the phone ringing at the other end.

  “Nyberg.”

  “It’s Kurt. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Of course you’re disturbing me, for Christ’s sake. What do you want?”

  “That hand sticking up out of the ground. The one I stumbled over. You said that the clay soil keeps shifting, gliding around, and that the groundwater level is changing constantly. But I stil
l don’t understand why that hand should emerge through the topsoil just now.”

  “Who said it happened just now? I didn’t. It could have been lying there for many years.”

  “But surely somebody ought to have seen it in that case?”

  “That’s a problem for you to solve. Was that all?”

  “Not really. Would it be possible for the hand to have been placed there on purpose? Specifically for it to be discovered? Did you notice if the ground there had been dug up recently?”

  Nyberg was breathing heavily. Wallander was worried that he might burst into a fit of rage.

  “That hand had moved there of its own accord,” said Nyberg.

  He hadn’t become angry.

  “It was exactly that I was wondering about,” said Wallander. “Thank you for taking the trouble to respond.”

  He hung up and returned to his glass of wine.

  Linda returned home shortly after midnight. By then he had already gone to bed and fallen asleep, after washing his glass and hiding away the empty bottle.

  CHAPTER 12

  At a quarter past ten the next day, October 29, Martinson and Wallander drove along the slushy roads to Löderup in order to speak to Elin Trulsson, and possibly other neighbors, in an attempt to find out more about who had been living in that house many years ago.

  Earlier that morning they had attended a meeting, which had turned out to be very brief. Lisa Holgersson had insisted that no extra resources could be allocated to the investigation into the skeleton until the forensic report was completed.

  “Winter,” said Martinson. “I hate all this slush. I buy scratch cards and scrape away hopefully. I don’t envisage masses of banknotes raining down over me: instead I see a house somewhere in Spain or on the Riviera.”

  “What would you do there?”

  “Make long-pile rugs. Just think of all the slush and wet feet I’d avoid.”