The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  That evening he had dinner with Linda in a restaurant not far from the hotel.

  This time he felt more secure in her presence. When he got to bed shortly before one, it occurred to him that this was the most pleasant evening he’d had for a long time.

  Wallander arrived at the Kungsholmen police station just before eight the next morning. An audience of cops listened in astonishment to what he had discovered in Hallunda, and the conclusions he had drawn. As he spoke, he could feel the skepticism that surrounded him. But the desire of the cops to catch the man who had shot their colleague was overwhelming, and he could feel the mood slowly changing. In the end, nobody challenged his conclusions.

  Things moved quickly throughout the morning. The apartment block in Hallunda was placed under observation while the raid was prepared. An energetic young prosecutor had no hesitation in approving plans for arrest.

  The raid was set for two o’clock. Wallander kept discreetly in the background while Loven and his colleagues went through what was going to happen in detail. At about ten, right in the middle of the most chaotic phase of the preparations, he went to Loven’s office and made a call to Bjork in Ystad. He explained about the action planned for that afternoon, and how the murder of Louise Akerblom might soon be solved.

  “I have to say it all sounds pretty improbable,” said Bjork.

  “We live in an improbable world,” said Wallander.

  “Whatever happens, you’ve done a good job,” said Bjork. “I’ll let everybody at this end know what’s going on.”

  “No press conference, though,” said Wallander. “And nobody is to speak with Robert Akerblom yet, either.”

  “Of course not,” said Bjork. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “As soon as possible,” said Wallander. “How’s the weather?”

  “Terrific,” said Bjork. “It feels like spring is on the way. Svedberg is sneezing like a man with hay fever. That’s usually a sure sign of spring, as you well know.”

  Wallander felt vaguely homesick as he put the phone down. But his excitement over the imminent raid was even stronger.

  At eleven Loven called together everybody who would be taking part in the raid. Reports from those watching the building suggested both Vladimir and Tania were in the apartment. It was not possible to establish whether anybody else was there.

  Wallander listened carefully to Loven’s summary. He could see that a raid in Stockholm was very different from anything he was used to. Besides, operations of this size were practically unknown in Ystad. Wallander could only remember one incident the previous year, when a guy high on narcotics had barricaded himself into a summer cottage in Sandskogen.

  Before the meeting Loven had asked Wallander if he wanted to play an active role.

  “Sure,” he replied. “If Konovalenko is there, in a sense he’s my baby. Half of him at least. Besides, I’m looking forward to seeing Rykoff’s face.”

  Loven brought the meeting to a close at half past eleven.

  “We really don’t know what we’ll be up against,” he said. “Probably just two people who’ll go along with the inevitable. But it could turn out different.”

  Wallander had lunch in the police canteen with Loven.

  “Have you ever asked yourself what you’ve gotten involved in?” asked Loven, all of a sudden.

  “That’s something I think about every day,” said Wallander. “Don’t most cops?”

  “I don’t know,” said Loven. “I only know what I think. And the thoughts that go through my head depress me. We’re on the brink of losing control here in Stockholm. I don’t know how it is in a smaller district like Ystad, but being a crook in this city must be a pretty pleasant existence. At least as far as the chances of getting caught are concerned.”

  “We’re still in control, I guess,” said Wallander. “But the differences between different districts are decreasing all the time. What’s happening here happens in Ystad as well.”

  “Lots of cops in Stockholm can’t wait to get transferred to the provinces,” said Loven. “They think they’d have an easier time there.”

  “I guess there are quite a few who’d like to transfer here as well,” Wallander countered. “They think they lead too quiet a life out in the sticks, or in some little town.”

  “I doubt if I’d be able to change,” said Loven.

  “Me neither,” said Wallander. “Either I’m an Ystad cop, or I’m not a cop at all.”

  The conversation petered out. Afterwards Loven had things to do.

  Wallander found a quiet spot where he could stretch out on a sofa. It occurred to him that he had not had a good night’s sleep since the moment Robert Akerblom came into his office.

  He dozed off for a few minutes, and awoke with a start.

  Then he just lay there, thinking about Baiba Liepa.

  The raid on the apartment in Hallunda took place at exactly two o’clock. Wallander, Loven, and three other cops climbed the stairs. After ringing twice without reply, they broke down the door with a crowbar. Specially trained men with automatic weapons were waiting in the background. All the cops on the stairs carried pistols, apart from Wallander. Loven asked him if he wanted a gun. But he declined. On the other hand, he was glad he was wearing a bulletproof vest like the others.

  They stormed into the apartment, spread out, and it was all over before it had even begun.

  The apartment was empty. All that remained was the furniture.

  The cops looked at each other in bewilderment. Then Loven took out his walkie-talkie and contacted the officer in charge down below.

  “The apartment’s empty,” he said. “There will be no arrests. You can call the special units off. But you can send in the technical guys to go over the place.”

  “They must have left last night,” said Wallander. “Or at the crack of dawn.”

  “We’ll get ’em,” said Loven. “Within half an hour there’ll be a country-wide APB.”

  He handed Wallander a pair of plastic gloves.

  “Maybe you’d like to do some dusting,” he said.

  While Loven was talking to headquarters in Kungsholmen on his mobile, Wallander went into the little guest room. He put on the gloves and carefully removed the ashtray from the shelf. His eyes had not deceived him. It was an exact copy of the ashtray he had been staring at a couple of nights previously, when he had a skinful of whiskey. He handed the ashtray to a technician.

  “There’s bound to be fingerprints on this,” he said. “We probably won’t have them in our files. But Interpol might have them.”

  He watched the technician put the ashtray into a plastic bag.

  Then he went over to the window and absentmindedly contemplated the surrounding buildings and the gray sky. He remembered vaguely that this was the window Tania had opened the day before, to let out the smoke that was irritating Vladimir. Without really being able to decide whether he was depressed or annoyed at the failure of the raid, he went into the big bedroom. He examined the wardrobes. Most of the clothes were still there. On the other hand, there was no sign of any suitcases. He sat on the edge of one of the beds and casually opened a drawer in the other bedside table. It was empty save for a cotton reel and half a pack of cigarettes. He noted that Tania smoked Gitanes.

  Then he bent down and looked under the bed. Nothing but a pair of dusty slippers. He walked around the bed and opened the drawer in the other bedside table. It was empty. Standing on the table were a used ashtray and a half-eaten bar of chocolate.

  Wallander noticed the cigarette butts had filters. He picked one of them up and saw it was a Camel.

  He suddenly became pensive.

  He thought back to the previous day. Tania had lit a cigarette. Vladimir had immediately displayed his annoyance, and she had opened a window that was stuck.

  It was not usual for smokers to complain about others with the same habit. Especially when the room was not smoky. Did Tania smoke several different brands? That was hardly likely.
So, Vladimir smoked as well.

  Thinking hard, he went back into the living room. He opened the same window Tania had opened. It was still sticking. He tried the other windows and the glazed door leading to the balcony. They all opened with no problem.

  He stood in the middle of the floor, frowning. Why had she chosen to open a window that stuck? And why was that window so difficult to open?

  It suddenly dawned on him. After a moment he realized there was only one possible answer.

  Tania had opened the window that stuck because there was some pressing reason for that particular window to be opened. And it was sticking because it was opened so seldom.

  He went back to the window. It occurred to him that if you were in a car in the parking lot, this was the window that could most clearly be seen. The other window was adjacent to the projecting balcony. The balcony door itself was completely invisible from the parking lot.

  He thought through the whole sequence one more time.

  He’d cracked it. Tania seemed nervous. She had been looking at the wall clock behind his head. Then she opened a window that was only used to signal to somebody in the parking lot that they should not go up to the apartment.

  Konovalenko, the thought. He’d been that close.

  In a gap between two phone calls, he told Loven about his conclusions.

  “You may well be right,” said Loven. “Unless it was somebody else.”

  “Of course,” said Wallander. “Unless it was somebody else.”

  They drove back to Kungsholmen while the technicians continued their work. They had barely entered Loven’s office when the telephone rang. The technicians out at Hallunda had discovered a tin box containing the same kind of tear gas canisters that had been thrown into that disco the previous week.

  “It’s all falling into place,” said Loven. “Unless it’s just getting more confusing. I don’t understand what they had against that particular disco. In any case, the whole country is looking out for them. And we’ll make sure there’s wide coverage on the television and in the newspapers.”

  “That means I can go back to Ystad tomorrow,” said Wallander. “When you pick up Konovalenko, maybe we can borrow him down in Skane for a while.”

  “It’s always annoying when a raid goes wrong,” said Loven. “I wonder where they’re holed up.”

  The question remained unanswered. Wallander went back to his hotel and decided to pay a visit to the Aurora that evening. Now he had some more questions for the bald guy behind the bar.

  He had a feeling that things were coming to a head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The man outside President de Klerk’s office had been waiting a long time.

  It was already midnight, and he’d been there since eight o’clock. He was completely alone in the dimly lit antechamber. A security guard occasionally looked in and apologized for his being kept waiting. The latter was an elderly man in a dark suit. He was the one who had put out all the lights just after eleven, apart from the single lamp that was still burning.

  Georg Scheepers had the feeling the guy could easily have been employed at a funeral parlor. His discretion and unobtrusiveness, his servility bordering on submission, reminded him of the guy who had taken charge of his own mother’s funeral a few years back.

  It’s a symbolic comparison that could be pretty close to the truth, thought Scheepers. Maybe President de Klerk is in charge of the last, dying remnants of the white South African empire? Maybe this is more of a waiting room for a man planning a funeral, than the office of somebody leading a country into the future?

  He had plenty of opportunity to think during the four hours he had been kept waiting. Now and then the security guard opened the door quietly and apologized-the president was held up by some urgent business. At ten o’clock he brought him a cup of lukewarm tea.

  Georg Scheepers wondered why he had been summoned to see President de Klerk that evening, Wednesday, May 7. The previous day, at lunchtime, he had taken a call from the secretary to his superior, Henrik Wervey. Georg Scheepers was an assistant of the widely feared chief prosecutor in Johannesburg, and he was not used to meeting him except in court or at the regular Friday meetings. As he hurried through the corridors, he wondered what Wervey wanted. Unlike this evening, he had been shown straight into the prosecutor’s office. Wervey indicated a chair, and continued signing various documents a secretary was waiting for. Then they were left alone.

  Wervey was a man feared not only by criminals. He was nearly sixty, almost two meters tall, and sturdily built. It was a well-known fact that he occasionally demonstrated his great strength by performing various feats. Some years ago, when his offices were being refurbished, he had singlehandedly carried out a cupboard that later needed four men to lift it onto a truck. But it was not his bodily strength that made him so fearsome. During his many years as prosecutor he had always pressed for the death penalty whenever there was the slightest possibility of winning it. On those occasions, and there were many of them, when the court accepted his plea and sentenced a criminal to be hanged, Wervey was generally a witness when the sentence was carried out. That had given him the reputation of being a brutal man. Then again, no one could accuse him of racial discrimination in applying his principles. A white criminal had just as much to fear as a black one.

  Georg Scheepers sat there worrying if he had done something to invoke censure. Wervey was well known for his ruthless criticism of his assistants, if he considered it justified.

  But the conversation turned out to be completely unlike what he expected. Wervey had left his desk and sat down in an easy chair beside him.

  “Late last night a man was murdered in his hospital bed at a private clinic in Hillbrow,” he began. “His name was Pieter van Heerden, and he worked for BOSS. The homicide squad think everything points to robbery with violence. His wallet is missing. Nobody saw anybody enter the room, nobody saw the murderer leave. It looks like whoever did it was alone, and there is evidence to suggest he pretended to be a messenger from a laboratory used by Brenthurst. As none of the night nurses heard anything, the murderer must have used a gun with a silencer. It looks very much as though the police theory about robbery being the motive is correct. On the other hand, we must also bear in mind that van Heerden worked for the intelligence service.”

  Wervey raised his eyebrows, and Georg Scheepers knew he was waiting for a reaction.

  “That sounds reasonable,” said Scheepers. “There should be an investigation to see if it was in fact an opportunist robbery.”

  “There’s another aspect which complicates matters,” Wervey went on. “What I’m about to say is extremely confidential. You must be absolutely clear about that.”

  “I understand,” said Scheepers.

  “Van Heerden was responsible for keeping President de Klerk informed about secret intelligence activities outside the usual channels,” said Wervey. “In other words, he was in an extremely sensitive post.”

  Wervey fell silent. Scheepers waited tensely for him to continue.

  “President de Klerk called me a few hours ago,” he said. “He wanted me to select one of my prosecutors to keep him specially informed about the police investigation. He seems convinced the motive for the murder had something to do with van Heerden’s intelligence work. Although he has no proof, he rejects outright any suggestion that this was a routine robbery.”

  Wervey looked at Scheepers.

  “We cannot know exactly what van Heerden was keeping the president informed about,” he said pensively.

  Georg Scheepers nodded. He understood.

  “I have picked you as the man to keep President de Klerk informed,” he said. “From now on you will drop all other matters and concentrate exclusively on the investigation into the circumstances surrounding van Heerden’s death. Is that understood?”

  Georg Scheepers nodded. He was still trying to grasp the full implications of what Wervey had just said.

  “You will be summoned regu
larly to the president,” he said. “You will keep no minutes of those meetings, only a few brief notes that you will later burn. You will speak only with the president and me. If anybody in your section wonders what you’re doing, the official explanation is that I’ve asked you to look into the recruitment requirements regarding prosecutors over the next ten-year period. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” said Georg Scheepers.

  Wervey stood up, took a plastic wallet from his desk, and handed it to Scheepers.

  “Here is what little investigative material the police have so far,” he said. “Van Heerden has been dead for only twelve hours. The hunt for the assassin is being led by an inspector called Borstlap. I suggest you go to Brenthurst Clinic and speak with him.”

  That concluded the business.

  “Do a good job,” said Wervey. “I’ve chosen you because you have proved to be a good prosecutor. I don’t like to be disappointed.”

  Georg Scheepers went back to his office and tried to come to terms with what was actually required of him. Then he thought he should buy himself a new suit. None of the clothes he possessed would be suitable for meeting the president.

  Now he was in the dimly lit antechamber, wearing a dark blue suit that had been very expensive. His wife wondered why he had bought it. He said he was to take part in an inquiry chaired by the Minister of Justice. She accepted this explanation without any further questions.

  It was twenty minutes to one before the discreet security guard opened the door and told him the president was now ready to receive him. Georg Scheepers jumped up from his chair, aware of how nervous he felt. He followed the guard who marched up to a high double door, knocked, and opened it for him.

  Sitting at a desk, illuminated by a single lamp, was the balding man he was destined to meet. Scheepers remained standing hesitantly in the doorway until the man at the desk beckoned him to approach and gestured towards a visitor’s chair.