The Pyramid

by Henning Mankell

  Rydberg appeared behind Wallander.

  'One shouldn't have to tramp around in the mud at my age,' he said. 'And this damned rheumatism.'

  Wallander threw a quick glance at him.

  'You didn't have to come out here,' he said. 'We can handle it. Then the accident commission can take over.'

  'I'm not dead yet,' Rydberg said with irritation. 'But who the hell knows . . .' He didn't finish the sentence. Instead he made his way over to the plane, bent down and looked in.

  'This one will have to be dental,' he said. 'I don't think there will be any other way of getting a positive ID.'

  Wallander ran through the main points for Rydberg's benefit. They worked well together and never had to give each other lengthy explan ations. Rydberg was also the one who had taught Wallander what he now knew about being a criminal investigator. That is, after the foundation had been laid in Malmö with Hemberg, who sadly had died in a traffic accident last year. Wallander had departed from his usual habit of never attending funerals and attended the ceremony in Malmö. But after Hemberg, Rydberg had been his role model. They had worked together for many years now. Wallander had often thought that Rydberg must be one of the most skilful criminal investigators in Sweden. Nothing escaped him, no hypothesis was so outlandish that Rydberg did not test it. His ability to read a crime scene always surprised Wallander, who greedily absorbed it all.

  Rydberg was single. He did not have much of a social life and did not appear to want one. Wallander was still, after all these years, not sure if Rydberg actually had any interests apart from his work.

  On the occasional warm evening in early summer, they would sometimes get together and sit on Rydberg's balcony and drink whisky. Often in a pleasant silence that was broken from time to time with some comment about work.

  'Martinsson is trying to establish some clarity with regard to the time of the events,' Wallander said. 'Then it seems to me that we have to find out why the control tower at Sturup didn't raise the alarm.'

  'You mean, why the pilot didn't raise the alarm,' Rydberg corrected him.

  'Maybe he didn't have time?'

  'It doesn't take many seconds to send an SOS,' Rydberg said. 'But you must be right. The plane would have been flying in an assigned air lane. If it wasn't flying illegally, of course.'

  'Illegally?'

  Rydberg shrugged.

  'You know the rumours,' he said. 'People hear aeroplane noise at night. Low-flying, darkened planes slipping covertly into these areas close to the border. At least that's how it was during the Cold War. Perhaps it's not completely over yet. Sometimes we get reports about suspected espionage. And then you can always question if all drugs actually come in by way of the sound. We will never know for sure about this plane. It may simply be our imagination. But if you fly low enough you escape the defence department's radar. And the control tower.'

  'I'll drive in and talk to Sturup,' Wallander said.

  'Wrong,' Rydberg said. 'I'll do that. I leave this mud to you, by the rights of my old age.'

  Rydberg left. It was starting to get light. One of the technicians was photographing the wreck from various angles. Peter Edler had delegated his responsibilities to someone else and returned to Ystad in one of the fire engines.

  Wallander saw Hansson talking to several reporters down on the dirt road. He was happy not to have to do it himself. Then he spotted Martinsson tramping back through the mud. Wallander walked over to meet him.

  'You were right,' Martinsson said. 'There's an old man in there who lives by himself. Robert Haverberg. Seventies, alone with nine dogs. To be honest, it smelled like hell in there.'

  'What did he say?'

  'He heard the roar of a plane. Then it got quiet. And then the sound returned. But at that point it sounded more like a whine. And then he heard the crash.'

  Wallander often felt that Martinsson was bad at formulating simple and clear explanations.

  'Let's go over this again,' Wallander said. 'Robert Haverberg heard the engine noise?'

  'Yes.'

  'When was this?'

  'He had just woken up. Sometime around five o'clock.'

  Wallander frowned.

  'But the plane crashed half an hour later?'

  'That's what I said. But he was very firm on this point. First he heard the sound of a passing plane, at a low altitude. Then it grew quiet. He made some coffee. And then the sound returned, and then the explosion.'

  Wallander reflected on this. What Martinsson had told him was clearly significant.

  'How much time elapsed between the first time he heard the sound and the subsequent crash?'

  'We worked out that it must have taken around twenty minutes.'

  Wallander looked at Martinsson.

  'How do you account for that?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Did the old man seem sharp?'

  'Yes. He also has good hearing.'

  'Do you have a map in your car?' Wallander asked.

  Martinsson nodded. They walked up to the dirt road where Hansson was still talking with the media. One of them saw Wallander and started approaching him. Wallander waved dismissively.

  'I have nothing to say,' he called out.

  They got into Martinsson's car and unfolded the map. Wallander studied it in silence. He thought about what Rydberg had said, about aeroplanes on illegal missions, beyond authorised air lanes and control towers.

  'One could imagine the following,' Wallander said. 'A plane comes in low over the coast, passes by and continues out of earshot. Returns shortly thereafter. And then it goes straight down.'

  'You mean it dropped something off somewhere? And then turned back?' Martinsson asked.

  'Something like that.'

  Wallander folded the map back up.

  'We know too little. Rydberg is on his way to Sturup. Then we have to try to identify the bodies, as well as the plane itself. We can't do any more at the moment.'

  'I've always been a nervous flyer,' Martinsson said. 'It doesn't exactly help to see things like this. But it's even worse when Teres talks about becoming a pilot.'

  Teres was Martinsson's daughter. He also had a son. Martinsson was a real family man. He was always worried that something might have happened and called home several times a day. Often he went home for lunch. Sometimes Wallander was a little envious of his colleague's seemingly problem-free marriage.

  'Tell Nyberg we're going now,' he said to Martinsson.

  Wallander waited in the car. The landscape around him was grey and desolate. He shivered. Life goes on, he thought. I've just turned forty-two. Will I end up like Rydberg? A lonely old man with rheumatism?

  Wallander shook off these thoughts.

  Martinsson returned and they drove back to Ystad.

  At eleven o'clock Wallander stood up to go to the room where a suspected drug dealer by the name of Yngve Leonard Holm was waiting for him. At that moment Rydberg came in. He never bothered to knock. He sat down in the visitor's chair and got straight to the point.

  'I've talked to an air traffic controller by the name of Lycke,' he said. 'He claimed to know you.'

  'I've spoken to him before, I don't remember the context.'

  'He was very firm, in any case,' Rydberg continued. 'No single-engine plane was cleared to pass over Mossby at five o'clock this morning. They have also not received any emergency broadcast from any pilot. The radar screens have been empty. There were no strange signals that may have indicated the presence of an unidentified plane. According to Lycke, the plane that crashed did not exist. They have already reported this both to the defence department and to God knows how many other authorities. Customs, probably.'

  'So you were right,' Wallander said. 'Someone was out on an illegal mission.'

  'We don't know that,' Rydberg objected. 'Someone was flying illegally. But if it was also an illegal mission, we don't know.'

  'Who would be out flying around in the dark without a particular reason?'

  'There are s
o many idiots,' Rydberg said. 'You should know that.'

  Wallander looked closer at him.

  'You don't believe that for a minute, do you?'

  'Of course not,' Rydberg said. 'But until we know who they were or identify the plane, we can't do anything. This has to go to Interpol. I'm willing to wager a pretty penny that the plane came from the outside.'

  Rydberg left.

  Wallander mulled over what he had said.

  Then he stood up, took his papers and walked to the room where Yngve Leonard Holm was waiting with his lawyer.

  It was exactly a quarter past eleven when Wallander started the tape recorder and began his interrogation.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wallander turned off the tape recorder after one hour and ten minutes. He had had enough of Yngve Leonard Holm. Both because of the man's attitude and the fact that they were going to have to release him. Wallander was convinced that the man on the other side of the table was guilty of repeated and serious drug offences. But there was not one prosecutor in the world who would judge their pre-investigation worthy of taking to trial. Certainly not Per Åkeson, to whom Wallander was going to submit his report.

  Yngve Leonard Holm was thirty-seven years old. He was born in Ronneby but had been registered as a resident of Ystad since the mid- 1980s. He listed his profession as a paperback-book salesman at outdoor summer markets, specialising in the 'Manhattan series'. For the last few years he had declared a negligible income. At the same time, he was having a large villa built in an area close to the police station. The house was taxed at several million kronor. Holm claimed to be financing the house with large gambling profits from both the Jägersro and Solvalla tracks, as well as various racetracks in Germany and France. Predictably, he had no receipts for his wins. They had disappeared when the trailer where he had stored his financial records caught fire. The only receipt he could show was a lesser one for 4,993 kronor that he had claimed a couple of weeks earlier. Possibly, Wallander thought, this indicated that Holm knew something about horses. But it hardly meant more than that. Hansson should have been sitting here in my place. He is also interested in racing. They could have talked horses to each other.

  Nothing of this altered Wallander's conviction that Holm was the final link in a chain that imported and sold significant amounts of drugs in southern Sweden. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. But Holm's arrest had been very poorly organised. The raids should have been synchronised to take place at the same time. One at Holm's house, the other at the warehouse in an industrial area in Malmö where he rented space for his paperbacks. It had been a coordinated operation between the police in Ystad and their colleagues in Malmö.

  But something had gone wrong from the start. The warehouse space had been empty, except for a lone box of old, well-thumbed Manhattan books. Holm had been watching TV in his house when they rang the bell. A young woman was curled up at his feet, massaging his toes, while the police searched the house. They found nothing. One of the drug-sniffing dogs they had brought in from customs had spent a long time sniffing a handkerchief they had found in the rubbish. Chemical analysis had only been able to establish that the cloth could have come into contact with a drug. In some way, Holm had been tipped off about the raid. Wallander did not doubt that the man was both intelligent and good at covering up his activities.

  'We have to let you go,' he said. 'But our suspicion of you remains. Or, to be precise, I'm convinced that you're involved in extensive drug trafficking in Skåne. Sooner or later, we will get you.'

  The lawyer, who resembled a weasel, straightened up.

  'My client doesn't have to put up with this,' he said. 'Slander of this kind against my client is inadmissible under the law.'

  'Of course it is,' Wallander said. 'You're welcome to try to have me arrested.'

  Holm, who was unshaven and appeared sick of the whole situation, stopped his lawyer from continuing.

  'I understand that the police are simply doing their job,' he said. 'Unfortunately you made a mistake in directing your suspicions at me. I'm a simple citizen who knows a lot about horses and bookselling. Nothing else. Moreover, I regularly donate money to Save the Children.'

  Wallander left the room. Holm would go home and have his feet massaged. Drugs would continue to stream into Skåne. We will never win this battle, Wallander thought as he walked down the corridor. The only room for hope is if future generations of young people reject it entirely.

  It was now half past twelve. He felt hungry and regretted not having taken the car this morning. He could see through the window that it had started to rain. There was snow mixed in with the rain. The thought of walking all the way downtown and back in order to eat was not appealing. He pulled out a desk drawer and found the menu of a pizzeria that delivered. He eyed the menu without being able to decide on anything. Finally he closed his eyes and placed his index finger down somewhere at random. He called and ordered the pizza that fate had selected for him. Then he walked over to the window and stared at the water tower on the other side of the road.

  The phone rang. He sat down at his desk and picked up. It was his father, calling from Löderup.

  'I thought we had agreed that you would come by here last night,' his father said.

  Wallander sighed quietly.

  'We didn't agree to anything.'

  'Yes we did, I remember it very well,' his father said. 'You're the one who's starting to get forgetful. I thought the police had notepads. Can't you write down that you're planning to arrest me? Then maybe you'll remember.'

  Wallander didn't have the energy to get angry.

  'I'll come by tonight,' he said. 'But we had not arranged that I was coming over last night.'

  'It's possible I made a mistake,' his father replied, suddenly surprisingly meek.

  'I'll be there around seven,' Wallander said. 'Right now I have a lot to do.' He hung up. My father engages in finely tuned emotional blackmail, Wallander thought. And the worst thing about it is that he's continually successful.

  The pizza arrived. Wallander paid and took the box back to the break room. Per Åkeson was sitting at a table eating some porridge. Wallander sat down across from him.

  'I thought you were going to come by and talk about Holm,' Åkeson said.

  'And I will. But we had to release him.'

  'That doesn't surprise me. The whole operation was exceedingly poorly executed.'

  'You'll have to talk to Björk about that,' Wallander said. 'I wasn't involved.'

  To Wallander's surprise, Åkeson salted his porridge.

  'I'm taking a leave of absence in three weeks,' Åkeson said.

  'I haven't forgotten,' Wallander replied.

  'A young woman will be replacing me. Anette Brolin is her name. From Stockholm.'

  'I'm going to miss you,' Wallander said. 'I'm also wondering how a female prosecutor is going to work out.'

  'Why would that be a problem?'

  Wallander shrugged.

  'Prejudice, I guess.'

  'Six months goes by fast. I have to admit that I'm looking forward to getting away for a while. I need to think.'

  'I thought you were getting some additional education?'