Sidetracked

by Henning Mankell

  Wallander nodded. “You’ll have to wait here,” he said. “We’ll have to ask you these questions again in a while. Have you touched anything?”

  Lindgren shook his head.

  “Has anyone other than you seen him?”

  “No.”

  “When did you or your father last turn over this boat?”

  Lindgren thought for a moment.

  “It was over a week ago,” he said.

  Wallander had no more questions. He stood there thinking for a moment and then left the boat and walked in a wide arc up towards the villa where Wetterstedt lived. He tried the gate. It was locked. He waved Lindgren over.

  “Do you live nearby?” he asked.

  “No,” he said. “I live in Åkesholm. My car is parked on the road.”

  “But you knew that Wetterstedt lived in this house?”

  “He used to walk along the beach here. Sometimes he stopped to watch while we were working on the boat, Dad and I. But he never spoke to us. He was rather arrogant.”

  “Was he married?”

  “Dad said that he’d read in a magazine that he was divorced.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “Don’t you have a raincoat in that bag?”

  “It’s up in the car.”

  “Go ahead and get it,” Wallander said. “Did you call anyone besides the police and tell them about this?”

  “I think I ought to call Dad. It’s his boat, after all.”

  “Hold off for the time being,” said Wallander. “Leave the phone here, and go and get your raincoat.”

  Lindgren did as he was told. Wallander went back to the boat. He stood looking at it and tried to imagine what had happened. He knew that the first impression of a crime scene was often crucial. During an investigation that was long and difficult, he would return to that first moment.

  Some things he was already sure of. It was out of the question that Wetterstedt had been murdered underneath the boat. Someone had wanted to hide him. Since Wetterstedt’s villa was so close, there was a good chance that he had died there. Besides, Wallander had a hunch that the killer couldn’t have acted alone. The boat must have been lifted to get the body underneath. And it was the old-fashioned kind, clinker-built and heavy.

  Wallander turned his mind to the torn-off scalp. What was it that Martinsson had said? Lindgren had told him on the phone that the man had been “scalped”. Wallander tried to imagine what other reasons there might be for the wound to the head. They didn’t know how Wetterstedt had died. It wasn’t natural to think that someone would intentionally have torn off his hair. Wallander felt uneasy. The torn-off skin disturbed him.

  Just then the police cars started to arrive. Martinsson had been smart enough to tell them not to turn on their sirens and lights. Wallander walked about ten metres away from the boat so that the others wouldn’t trample the sand around it.

  “There’s a dead man underneath the boat,” said Wallander when the police had gathered. “Apparently it’s Gustaf Wetterstedt, who was once our top boss. Anyone as old as I am, at least, will remember the days when he was minister of justice. He was living here in retirement. And now he’s dead. We have to assume that he was murdered. So we’ll start by cordoning off the area.”

  “It’s a good thing the game isn’t on tonight,” said Martinsson.

  “No doubt the person who did this is a football fan too,” said Wallander. He was getting annoyed at the constant references to the World Cup, but he hid his irritation from Martinsson.

  “Nyberg is on his way,” said Martinsson.

  “We’ll have to work on this all night,” said Wallander. “We might as well get started.”

  Svedberg and Ann-Britt Höglund were in one of the first cars. Hansson showed up right after they did. Lindgren reappeared in a yellow raincoat. He explained again how he had found the dead man while Svedberg took notes. It was raining hard now, and they gathered under a tree at the top of one of the dunes. When Lindgren had finished, Wallander asked him to wait. Since he still didn’t want to turn the boat over, the doctor had to dig out some sand to get far enough in under the boat to confirm that Wetterstedt was indeed dead.

  “Apparently he was divorced,” said Wallander. “But we’ll have to get confirmation on that. Some of you will have to stay here. Ann-Britt and I will go up to his house.”

  “Keys,” said Svedberg.

  Martinsson went down to the boat, lay on his stomach, and reached in. After a minute or so he managed to find a key ring in Wetterstedt’s jacket pocket. Covered in wet sand, Martinsson handed Wallander the keys.

  “We’ve got to put up a canopy,” Wallander said testily. “Where is Nyberg? Why the delay?”

  “He’s coming,” said Svedberg. “Today is his sauna day.”

  Wallander and Höglund made their way up to Wetterstedt’s villa.

  “I remember him from the police academy,” she said. “Somebody put up a photo of him on the wall and used it as a dartboard.”

  “He was never popular with the police,” Wallander said. “It was during his administration that we noticed something new was coming, a change that snuck up on us. I remember it felt like someone had pulled a hood over our eyes. It was almost shameful to be a policeman then. People seemed to worry more about how the prisoners were doing than the fact that crime was steadily on the rise.”

  “There’s a lot I can’t recall,” said Höglund. “But wasn’t he mixed up in some sort of scandal?”

  “There were a lot of rumours,” said Wallander. “About one thing and another. But nothing was ever proven. A number of police officers in Stockholm were said to be quite upset.”

  “Maybe time caught up with him,” she said.

  Wallander looked at her in surprise. But he said nothing.

  They had reached the gate.

  “I’ve been here before, you know,” she said suddenly. “He used to call the police and complain about young people sitting on the beach and singing on summer nights. One of those young people wrote a letter to the editor of Ystad Recorder to complain. Björk asked me to look into it.”

  “Look into what?”

  “I’m not really sure,” she answered. “But Björk was very sensitive to criticism.”

  “That was one of his best traits,” said Wallander. “He always defended us and that isn’t always the case.”

  They found the key and opened the gate. Wallander noticed that the light was burned out. The garden they stepped into was well tended. There were no fallen leaves on the lawn. There was a little fountain with two nude plaster children squirting water at each other from their mouths. A swing hung in the arbour. On a flagstone patio stood a marble-topped table and chairs.

  “Well cared for and expensive,” said Höglund. “What do you think a marble table like that costs?”

  Wallander didn’t answer, since he had no idea. They continued up towards the villa. He guessed that it had been built around the turn of the century. They followed the flagstone path around to the front of the house. Wallander rang the bell. He waited for over a minute before he rang again. Then he looked for the key and unlocked the door. They stepped into a lit hall. Wallander called out into the silence, but there was no-one there.

  “Wetterstedt wasn’t killed under the boat,” said Wallander. “Of course he could have been attacked on the beach. But I think it happened here.”

  “Why’s that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just a hunch.”

  They went through the house slowly, from the basement to the attic, without touching anything but the light switches. It was a cursory examination. Yet for Wallander it was important. The man who now lay dead on the beach had lived in this house. They had to seek clues as to how his death had come about.

  But they didn’t find the slightest sign of disorder. Wallander looked in vain for the place where the crime might have taken place. At the front door he had looked for signs of a break-in. As they had st
ood in the hall listening to the silence, Wallander had told Höglund to take off her shoes. Now they padded soundlessly through the huge villa, which seemed to grow with each step they took. Wallander could feel his colleague looking as much at him as at the objects in the rooms they passed through. He remembered how he had done the same thing with Rydberg, when he was still a young, inexperienced detective. Instead of considering it flattering, it depressed him. The changing of the guard was under way already. She was the one on the way in, he was on the way out.

  He remembered when they had first met, almost two years ago. She was a pale, plain young woman who had graduated from the police academy with top marks. But the first thing that she said to him was that he’d teach her everything that the academy couldn’t about the unpredictability of the real world. But maybe it was the other way round, he thought, as he looked at a rather blurry lithograph. Imperceptibly, the transition had taken place.

  They stopped by a window on the upper floor where they had a view of the beach. The floodlights were in place; Nyberg was gesticulating angrily as he supervised the arrangement of a plastic canopy over the rowing boat. The cordon was guarded by policemen in raincoats. Only a few people stood outside the cordon in the driving rain.

  “I’m beginning to think I was wrong,” Wallander said as he watched the canopy finally settle into place. “There are no signs that Wetterstedt was killed in here.”

  “The killer might have cleaned up,” Höglund suggested.

  “We’ll find that out after Nyberg goes through the house with a fine-tooth comb,” said Wallander. “But I’m sure it happened outside.”

  They went back downstairs in silence.

  “There was no mail on the floor inside the front door,” she said. “The property is walled off. There must be a letter box somewhere.”

  “We’ll take that up later,” said Wallander.

  He walked into the living-room and stood in the middle. She watched from the doorway, as though expecting him to make an impromptu speech.

  “I make a habit of asking myself what I’m missing,” Wallander said. “But everything here seems in place. A man living alone in a house where everything is orderly, no bills are unpaid, and where loneliness lingers like old cigar smoke. The only thing that doesn’t fit is that the man in question is now lying dead underneath a rowing boat down on the beach.”

  Then he corrected himself, “No, there’s one other thing,” he said. “The light by the garden gate isn’t working.”

  “It may have just burned out,” she said, surprised.

  “Right,” said Wallander, “but it still breaks the pattern.”

  There was a knock on the door. When Wallander opened it, Hansson was standing there, raindrops streaming down his face.

  “Neither Nyberg nor the doctor are going to get anywhere unless we turn that boat over,” he said.

  “Turn it over,” said Wallander. “I’ll be right there.”

  Hansson disappeared into the rain.

  “We have to start looking for his relatives,” Wallander said. “He must have an address book somewhere.”

  “There’s one thing that’s odd,” said Höglund. “This house is full of souvenirs from a long life with lots of travel and countless meetings with people. But there are no family photographs.”

  They were back in the living-room. Wallander looked around and saw that she was right. It bothered him that he hadn’t thought of it himself.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to be reminded that he was old,” Wallander said without conviction.

  “A woman would never be able to live without pictures of her family,” she said. “That’s probably why I thought of it.”

  There was a telephone on a table next to the sofa.

  “There’s a phone in his study too,” he said, pointing. “You look in there, and I’ll start here.”

  Wallander squatted by the low telephone stand. Next to the phone was the remote control for the TV. Wetterstedt could talk on the phone and watch TV at the same time, he thought. Just like me. We live in a world where people can’t bear not to be able to change channel and talk on the phone at the same time. He riffled through the phone books, but didn’t find any private notes. Next he pulled out two drawers in a bureau behind the telephone stand. In one there was a stamp album, in the other some tubes of glue and a box of napkin rings.

  As he was walking towards the study, the phone rang. He stopped. Höglund appeared at once in the doorway to the study. Wallander sat down carefully on the corner of the sofa and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s voice. “Gustaf? Why haven’t you called me?”

  “Who’s speaking, please?” asked Wallander.

  The woman’s voice suddenly turned formal. “This is Gustaf Wetterstedt’s mother calling,” she said. “With whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Kurt Wallander. I’m a police officer here in Ystad.”

  He could hear the woman breathing. He realised that she must be very old if she was Gustaf Wetterstedt’s mother. He made a face at Höglund, who was standing looking at him.

  “Has something happened?” asked the woman.

  Wallander didn’t know how to react. It went against all written and unwritten procedures to inform the next of kin of a sudden death over the telephone. But he had already told her his name, and that he was a police officer.

  “Hello?” said the woman. “Are you still there?”

  Wallander didn’t answer. He stared helplessly at Höglund. Then he did something which he couldn’t decide was justified. He hung up.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  Wallander shook his head. He picked up the phone and called the headquarters of the Stockholm police.

  CHAPTER 7

  Later that evening, Gustaf Wetterstedt’s telephone rang again. By that time Wallander had arranged for his colleagues in Stockholm to tell Wetterstedt’s mother of his death. An inspector who introduced himself as Hans Vikander was calling from the Östermalm police. In a few days, 1 July, the old name would disappear and be replaced by “city police”.

  “She’s been informed,” Vikander said. “Because she was so old I took a clergyman along with me. I must say she took it calmly, even though she’s 94.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” said Wallander.

  “We’re trying to track down Wetterstedt’s two children,” Vikander went on. “The older, a son, works at the UN in New York. The daughter lives in Uppsala. We hope to reach them this evening.”

  “What about his ex-wife?” asked Wallander.

  “Which one?” Vikander asked. “He was married three times.”

  “All three of them,” said Wallander. “We’ll have to contact them ourselves later.”

  “I’ve got something that might interest you,” Vikander went on. “When we spoke with the mother she said that her son called her every night, at precisely nine o’clock.”

  Wallander looked at his watch. It was just after 9 p.m. At once he understood the significance of what Vikander had said.

  “He didn’t call yesterday” Vikander continued. “She waited until 9.30 p.m. Then she tried to call him. No-one answered, although she claimed she let it ring at least 15 times.”

  “And the night before?”

  “She couldn’t remember too well. She’s 94, after all. She said that her short-term memory was pretty bad.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “It was a little hard to know what to ask.”

  “We’ll have to talk to her again,” Wallander said. “Since she’s already met you, it would be good if you could take it on.”

  “I’m going on holiday the second week in July,” said Vikander. “Until then, that’s no problem.”

  Wallander hung up. Höglund came into the hall. She had been checking the letter box.

  “Newspapers from today and yesterday,” she said. “A phone bill. No personal letters. He can’t have been under that boat for very long.”

&n
bsp; Wallander got up from the sofa.

  “Go through the house one more time,” he said. “See if you can find any sign that something is missing. I’ll go down and take a look at him.”

  It was raining even harder now. As Wallander hurried through the garden he remembered that he was supposed to be visiting his father tonight. With a grimace he went back to the house.

  “Do me a favour,” he asked Höglund. “Call my father and tell him I’m tied up with an urgent investigation. If he asks who you are, tell him you’re the new chief of police.”

  She nodded and smiled. Wallander gave her the number. Then he went out into the rain.

  The cordoned area was a ghostly spectacle, lit up by the powerful floodlights. With a strong feeling of unease, Wallander walked in under the temporary canopy. Wetterstedt’s body lay stretched out on a plastic sheet. The doctor was shining a torch down Wetterstedt’s throat. He stopped when he realised that Wallander had arrived.

  “How are you?” asked the doctor.

  Wallander hadn’t recognised him until that moment. It was the doctor who had treated him in hospital a few years earlier when he’d thought he was having a heart attack.

  “Apart from this business, I’m doing fine,” said Wallander. “I never had a recurrence.”

  “Did you take my advice?” asked the doctor.

  “Of course not,” Wallander muttered.

  He looked at the dead man, who gave the same impression in death as he had on the TV screen. There was something obstinate and unsympathetic about his face, even when covered with dried blood. Wallander leaned forward and looked at the wound on his forehead, which extended up towards the top of his head, where the skin and hair had been ripped away.

  “How did he die?” asked Wallander.

  “From a powerful blow to the spine with an axe,” the doctor replied. “It would have killed him instantly. The spine is severed just below the shoulder blades. He was probably dead before he hit the ground.”

  “Are you sure it happened outside?” Wallander asked.