The Pyramid

by Henning Mankell

  'How's your back?' Wallander asked.

  'I don't know,' said Rydberg. 'There's something funny going on.'

  'Perhaps you came back to work too soon?'

  'Lying at home staring at the ceiling wouldn't do it any good.'

  That put an end to any discussion about Rydberg's back. Wallander knew it was a waste of time trying to persuade him to go home and rest.

  'What did she have to say?' he asked instead.

  'She was shocked, naturally enough. It must have been a minute before she was able to say anything at all.'

  'That will be an expensive call for the Swedish state,' said Wallander.

  'But then what? After that minute had passed.'

  'She asked what had happened, of course. I gave her the facts. She had trouble understanding what I was talking about.'

  'That's hardly surprising,' said Wallander.

  'Anyway, I found out that they weren't in touch with each other. According to the wife, they divorced because their married life was so boring.'

  Wallander frowned.

  'What exactly did she mean?'

  'I suspect that's a more common reason for divorce than people realise,' said Rydberg. 'I think it would be awful, having to live with a boring person.'

  Wallander thought that over. He wondered if Mona had the same view of him. What did he think himself?

  'I asked her if she could think of anybody who might want to murder him, but she couldn't. Then I asked her if she could explain what he was doing in Skåne, but she didn't know that either. That was all.'

  'Didn't you ask her about that son of hers who died? The one Hansson says was murdered?'

  'Of course I did. But she didn't want to talk about it.'

  'Isn't that a bit odd?'

  'That's exactly what I thought.'

  'I think you'll have to talk to her again,' Wallander said.

  Rydberg nodded and left the room. Wallander thought he would have to find an opportunity to talk to Mona and ask her if boredom was the biggest problem in their marriage. His train of thought was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Ebba in reception, telling him that the Stockholm police wanted to talk to him. He pulled over his notepad and listened. An officer by the name of Rendel was put through to him. Wallander had never had any contact with him before.

  'We went to take a look at that apartment in Åsögatan,' Rendel said.

  'Did you find anything?'

  'How could we find anything when we'd no idea what we were looking for?'

  Wallander could hear that Rendel was under pressure.

  'What was the apartment like?' Wallander asked, as nicely as he could.

  'Clean and neat,' said Rendel. 'Everything in its place. A bit fussy. I had the impression of a bachelor pad.'

  'That's what it was, in fact,' Wallander said.

  'We checked his mail,' said Rendel. 'He seems to have been away for a week at most.'

  'That's correct,' said Wallander.

  'He had an answering machine, but there was nothing on it. Nobody had tried to call him.'

  'What was the message he'd recorded?' Wallander asked.

  'Just the usual.'

  'Well, at least we know that,' said Wallander. 'Thanks for your help. We'll come back to you if we need anything else.'

  He hung up and saw from the clock that it was time for the investigative team's afternoon meeting. When he got to the conference room, Hansson and Rydberg were already there.

  'I've just been speaking to Stockholm,' Wallander said as he sat down. 'They found nothing of interest in the apartment in Åsögatan.'

  'I called the wife again,' said Rydberg. 'She was still unwilling to talk about her son, but when I told her we could make her come back home to assist us with our inquiries, she thawed a little. The boy was evidently beaten up in a street in the centre of Stockholm. It must have been a totally pointless attack. He wasn't even robbed.'

  'I've dug up some documentation about that attack,' said Hansson. 'It hasn't yet been written off, but nobody's done anything about it for at least the last five years.'

  'Are there any suspects?' Wallander wondered.

  Hansson shook his head.

  'None at all. There's absolutely nothing. No witnesses, nothing.'

  Wallander pushed his notepad to one side.

  'Just as little as we've got to go on here at the moment,' he said.

  Nobody spoke. Wallander realised he would have to say something.

  'You'll have to speak to the people working in his shops,' he said. 'Call Rendel from the Stockholm police and ask him for some assistance. We'll meet again tomorrow.'

  They divided up the tasks that had to be done, and Wallander went back to his office. He thought he should call his father out in Löderup and apologise for the previous night. But he didn't. He couldn't get what had happened to Göran Alexandersson out of his mind. The whole situation was so preposterous that it should be explicable on those grounds alone. He knew from experience that all murders, and most other crimes as well, had something logical about them, somewhere. It was just a matter of turning over the right stones in the correct order and following up possible connections between them.

  Wallander left the police station shortly before five and took the coastal road to Svarte. This time he parked further into the village. He took a pair of wellingtons out of the boot, put them on, then walked down to the beach. In the distance he could see a cargo ship steaming westward.

  He started walking along the beach, examining the houses on his right side. There seemed to be somebody living in every third house. He kept on walking until he had left Svarte behind. Then he returned. He suddenly realised that he was hoping Mona would appear from nowhere, walking towards him. He thought back to the time they had gone to Skagen. That had been the best part of their life together. They had so much to talk about, things they never had time to do.

  He shook off these unpleasant thoughts and forced himself to concentrate on Göran Alexandersson. As he walked along the sand he tried to make a summary of the case so far.

  What did they know? That Alexandersson lived by himself, that he owned two electronics shops, that he was forty-nine years old, and that he had travelled to Ystad and stayed at the King Charles Hotel. He had told his staff he was going on holiday. While at the hotel he had received no telephone calls or visitors. Nor had he used the phone in his room himself.

  Every morning he had taken a taxi out to Svarte, where he had spent the day walking up and down the beach. In the afternoon, he had returned to Ystad after borrowing Agnes Ehn's telephone. On the fourth day, he had entered the back seat of a taxi and died.

  Wallander stopped and looked around. The beach was still deserted. Alexandersson is visible nearly all the time, he thought, but somewhere along the sand he disappears. Then he comes back again, and a few minutes later, he's dead.

  He must have met somebody here, Wallander thought. Or rather, he must have arranged to meet somebody. You don't bump into a poisoner by accident.

  Wallander started walking again. He eyed the houses along the beach. The following day they would start knocking on doors here. Somebody must have seen Alexandersson walking on the beach, somebody might have seen him meeting somebody else.

  Wallander saw that he was no longer alone on the beach. An elderly man was coming towards him. He had a black Labrador trotting decorously along by his side. Wallander paused and looked at the dog. Lately he had been wondering if he should suggest to Mona that they buy a dog. But he hadn't done so because he so often found himself working unsociable hours. In all probability a dog would mean more guilt rather than more company.

  The man raised his cap as he approached Wallander.

  'Are we going to have any spring this year, do you think?' the man asked.

  Wallander noticed that he didn't speak with a local accent.

  'I expect it will show up eventually, as usual,' Wallander replied.

  The man was about to continue on his way when W
allander spoke again.

  'I take it you go walking along the beach every day?' he asked.

  The man pointed at one of the houses.

  'I've been living here ever since I retired,' he said.

  'My name's Wallander and I'm a police officer in Ystad. Did you happen to see a man of about fifty walking along the sand here by himself in recent days?'

  The man's eyes were blue and bright. His white hair stuck out from under his cap.

  'No,' he said, with a smile. 'Who would want to come walking here? I'm the only person who walks along this beach. Now, in May, when it gets a bit warmer, it will be a different story.'

  'Are you absolutely sure?' Wallander asked.

  'I walk the dog three times every day,' said the man. 'And I haven't seen any man wandering around here by himself. Until you appeared, that is.'

  Wallander smiled.

  'Don't let me disturb you any longer,' he said.

  Wallander resumed walking. When he stopped and turned round, the man with the dog had disappeared.

  Where the thought – or rather, the feeling – came from, he never managed to figure out. Nevertheless, from that moment on, he was quite certain. There had been something about the man's expression, a faint, almost imperceptible movement of his eyes, when Wallander asked him if he had seen a solitary man walking along the beach. He knows something, Wallander thought. But what?

  Wallander looked around once more. The beach was deserted.

  He stood there motionless for several minutes.

  Then he went back to his car and drove home.

  Wednesday, 29 April, was the first day of spring in Skåne that year. Wallander woke up early, as usual. He was sweaty and knew he had had a nightmare but couldn't remember what it was about. Perhaps he had dreamed yet again about being chased by bulls? Or that Mona had left him? He took a shower, had a cup of coffee and leafed absentmindedly through the Ystad Chronicle.

  He was in his office by six thirty. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky. Wallander hoped that Martinsson had recovered and could take over the register searches from Hansson. That usually produced better and faster results. If Martinsson was well again, Wallander could take Hansson with him to Svarte and start knocking on doors. But perhaps the most important thing just now was to try to create as accurate a picture as possible of Göran Alexandersson. Martinsson was much more thorough than Hansson when it came to contact with people who might be able to provide information. Wallander also made up his mind that they should make a serious effort to find out what had really happened when Alexandersson's son had been beaten to death.

  When the clock struck seven, Wallander tried to get hold of Jörne, who had done the autopsy on Alexandersson, but in vain. He realised he was being impatient. The case of the dead man in the back seat of Stenberg's taxi was making him uneasy.

  It was 7.58 when they assembled in the conference room. Rydberg reported that Martinsson still had a fever and a very sore throat. Wallander thought how typical it was that Martinsson should succumb to something like this when he was so obsessed by germs in general.

  'OK, in that case it'll be you and me knocking on doors in Svarte today,' he said. 'You, Hansson, stay here and keep digging away. I'd like to know more about Alexandersson's son, Bengt, and how he died. Ask Rendel for help.'

  'Do we know any more about that poison yet?' asked Rydberg.

  'I tried to find out this morning,' Wallander said, 'but I haven't heard anything yet and I can't get a response from anybody.'

  The meeting was very short. Wallander asked for an enlargement of the photograph on Alexandersson's driver's licence, plus several copies. Then he went to see Björk, the chief of police. On the whole, he thought Björk was good at his job and let everybody get on with their own work. Occasionally, however, the chief would suddenly become proactive and ask for a rundown on the latest situation in an investigation.

  'How's it going with that gang exporting the luxury cars?' Björk asked, dropping his hands onto his desk as a sign that he wanted a concise answer.

  'Badly,' said Wallander, truthfully.

  'Are any arrests imminent?'

  'No, none,' Wallander told him. 'If I were to go to one of the prosecutors with the evidence I have available, they'd throw me out immediately.'

  'We mustn't give up, though,' said Björk.

  'Of course not,' said Wallander. 'I'll keep working away. As soon as we've solved this case of the man who died in the back seat of a taxi.'

  'Hansson told me about that,' said Björk. 'It all sounds very strange.'

  'It is strange,' said Wallander.

  'Can that man really have been murdered?'

  'The doctors tell us he was,' Wallander said. 'We'll be knocking on doors today out at Svarte. Somebody must have seen him.'

  'Keep me informed,' said Björk, standing up as a signal that the conversation was at an end.

  They drove to Svarte in Wallander's car.

  'Skåne is beautiful,' said Rydberg, apropos of nothing.

  'On a day like this, at least,' said Wallander. 'But let's face it, it can be pretty awful in the autumn. When the mud's higher than your doorstep. Or when it seeps in under your skin.'

  'Who's thinking about autumn now?' said Rydberg. 'Why worry about the bad weather in advance? It'll come eventually, like it or not.'

  Wallander didn't respond. He was too busy passing a tractor.

  'Let's start with the houses along the beach to the west of the village,' he said. 'We can go in different directions and work our way towards the middle. Try to find out who lives in the empty houses as well.'

  'What are you hoping to find?' Rydberg asked.

  'The solution,' he replied, without beating around the bush.

  'Somebody must have seen him out there on the beach. Somebody must have seen him meeting some other person.'

  Wallander parked the car. He let Rydberg start with the house where Agnes Ehn lived. Meanwhile Wallander tried to contact Jörne from his mobile phone. No luck this time either. He drove a bit further west, then parked the car and started working his way east. The first house was an old, well-cared-for traditional Skåne cottage. He opened the gate, went down the path and rang the doorbell. When there was no reply, he rang again, and was just about to leave when the door was opened by a woman in her thirties, dressed in stained overalls.

  'I don't like being interrupted,' she said, glaring at Wallander.

  'Sometimes it's necessary, I'm afraid,' he said, showing her his ID.

  'What do you want?' she asked.

  'You may find my question a little strange,' Wallander said, 'but I want to know if you've seen a man aged about fifty wearing a light blue overcoat walking along the beach in the last few days.'

  She raised her eyebrows and looked at Wallander with a smile.

  'I paint with the curtains drawn,' she said. 'I haven't seen anything at all.'