The Pyramid

by Henning Mankell

  'I heard about it from Hansson yesterday.'

  Rydberg pushed his teacup away.

  'It is of course an incredibly compelling thought that the Eberhardsson sisters might turn out to have been involved in drug trafficking. Something like that would strike at the very foundations of the Swedish sewing supplies industry. Out with the embroidery, in with the heroin.'

  'The thought has crossed my mind,' Wallander said. 'I'll see you in a while.'

  As he walked to his office he thought that Rydberg would never have been as open about his health if he wasn't convinced that something was wrong. Wallander felt himself starting to worry.

  Until a quarter to eight he went through some reports that had piled up on his desk during his absence. He had spoken to Linda the day before – just after he had got home and put his bag down. She had promised to go to Kastrup and meet her grandfather and make sure he made it home to Löderup. Wallander had not dared to hope that he would really be approved for a new loan and therefore be able to get a new car and pick up his father in Malmö.

  He found a message that Sten Widén had called. And his sister. He saved these messages. His colleague Gösta Boman in Kristianstad had tried to reach him. Boman was a police officer he got together with from time to time after they had met at one of the countless National Police Commission seminars. He also put this message aside. The rest of them he swept into the bin.

  The investigative meeting started with Wallander briefly describing his adventures in Cairo and the helpful police officer Radwan. Then a discussion broke out about when exactly the death penalty had been abolished in Sweden. There were many guesses. Svedberg claimed that convicts had been executed by firing squad as late as the 1930s, which was firmly dismissed by Martinsson, who maintained that no executions had taken place in Sweden since Anna Månsdotter had her head cut off at the Kristianstad prison sometime in the 1890s. It ended with Hansson calling a crime reporter in Stockholm who shared his interest in horse racing.

  'Abolished in 1910,' he said when he got off the phone. 'It was the first and last time the guillotine was used in Sweden. On a man by the name of Ander.'

  'Didn't he fly in a balloon to the North Pole?' Martinsson said.

  'That was Andrée,' Wallander said. 'And now let's move on.'

  Rydberg had sat quietly throughout. Wallander had the feeling that he was in some way absent from the proceedings. Then they discussed Holm. Administratively, he was on the borderline.

  The body had been found within the Sjöbo police district, but just a couple of hundred metres from the dirt road where Ystad's police district began.

  'Our Sjöbo colleagues are happy to give him to us,' Martinsson said. 'We can symbolically carry the corpse across the dirt road and then it is ours. Especially considering that we have already had dealings with Holm.'

  Wallander asked for a timetable of events, which Martinsson was able to supply. Holm had gone missing shortly after he was brought in for questioning on the day that the aeroplane crashed. While Wallander was in Cairo, a man out walking in the woods had discovered the body. It had been lying at the end of a forest road. There were car tracks. But Holm still had his wallet, so it had not been a case of robbery-homicide. No observations of any interest had been called in to the police. The area was deserted.

  Martinsson had just finished when the door to the conference room was opened. An officer popped his head in and said that a communication had arrived from Interpol. Martinsson went to get it. While he was gone, Svedberg told Wallander about the violent energy with which Björk had gone about getting the front doors repaired.

  Martinsson returned.

  'One of the pilots has been identified,' he said. 'Pedro Espinosa, thirty-three years old. Born in Madrid. He'd been imprisoned in Spain for embezzlement and in France for smuggling.'

  'Smuggling,' Wallander said. 'That fits perfectly.'

  'There's another thing that's interesting,' Martinsson said. 'His last known address is in Marbella. That's where the Eberhardsson sisters' big villa is.'

  The room fell silent. Wallander was clear on the point that it could still be a coincidence. A house in Marbella and a dead pilot who happened to have lived in the same place. But deep down he knew that they were in the process of uncovering a baffling connection. He did not yet know what it would mean. But now they could begin to focus their work in a particular direction.

  'The other pilot is still unidentified,' Martinsson went on. 'But they're working on it.'

  Wallander looked around the table.

  'We need more help from the Spanish police,' he said. 'If they're as helpful as Radwan in Cairo, they should be able to search the Eberhardsson sisters' villa very soon. They should look for a safe. And they should look for drugs. Who did the sisters know down there? This is what we need to find out. And we need to find out soon.'

  'Should one of us go down there?' Hansson asked.

  'Not yet,' Wallander said. 'Your sunbathing will have to wait until next summer.'

  They reviewed the material one more time and assigned the tasks to be performed. Above all they were going to focus on Yngve Leonard Holm. Wallander noticed that the pace in the team had picked up.

  They ended the meeting at a quarter to ten. Hansson reminded Wallander about the traditional Christmas buffet that would be celebrated at the Hotel Continental on the twenty-first of December. Wallander tried to think of a good excuse for missing it, without success.

  After Wallander had made his telephone calls, he put down the receiver and closed the door. Slowly he went back through the material they had uncovered so far, regarding the plane that had crashed, Yngve Leonard Holm and the two Eberhardsson sisters. He drew a triangle on his notepad: each of the three components marked a corner. Five dead people, he thought. Two pilots, one of whom came from Spain. In an aeroplane that was literally a Flying Dutchman since it had supposedly been scrapped after an accident in Laos. An aeroplane that flew in across the Swedish border at night, turned round just south of Sjöbo and crashed next to Mossby Strand. Lights had been observed on the ground, which could mean that the plane had dropped something.

  This is the first point of the triangle.

  The second point is the two sisters, who ran their sewing shop in Ystad. They are killed with shots to the head and their building is burned down. They turn out to have been wealthy, with a safe built into the foundation and a villa in Spain. The second point, in other words, consists of two sisters who lived a double life.

  Wallander drew a line between Pedro Espinosa and the Eberhardsson sisters. There was a connection there. Marbella.

  The third point consisted of Yngve Leonard Holm, who had been executed on a forest road outside Sjöbo. About him they knew that he was a notorious drug dealer who possessed an unusually well-developed ability to cover his tracks.

  But someone caught up with him outside Sjöbo, Wallander thought.

  He got up from the desk and studied his triangle. What did it say? He made a point in the middle of the triangle. A centre, he thought. Hemberg and Rydberg's constant question: where was the centre, a midpoint? He continued to study his sketch. Then all at once he realised that what he had drawn could be interpreted as a pyramid. The base was a square. But from a distance, the pyramid could look like a triangle.

  He sat down at the desk again. Everything that I have in front of me tells me one thing. That something has happened that has disturbed a pattern. The most likely thing is that the plane crash is the beginning. It has set a chain reaction in motion that has resulted in three murders, three executions.

  He started over from the beginning. He couldn't drop the thought of a pyramid. Could it be that a kind of strange power play had been enacted? Where the triangle points consisted of the Eberhardsson sisters, Yngve Leonard Holm and the downed plane? But where there was still an unknown centre?

  Slowly and methodically he proceeded through all the known facts. Now and again he wrote down a question. Without him noticing the time
pass, it was suddenly twelve o'clock. He dropped the pen, took his coat and walked down to the bank. It was a couple of degrees above zero and drizzling. He signed his loan documents and received another twenty thousand kronor. Right now he did not want to think about all the money that had disappeared in Egypt. The fine was one thing. What gnawed at him and ate away at his parsimonious inner recesses was the price of the plane ticket. He held out no hopes that his sister would agree to help defray the costs.

  At exactly one o'clock the car salesman arrived with his new Peugeot. The old one refused to start. Wallander did not wait for the tow truck. Instead he took a drive in the new dark blue car. It was worn and reeked of smoke. But Wallander noticed that the engine was good. That was the most important thing. He drove towards Hedeskoga and was about to turn when he decided to continue. He was on the road to Sjöbo. Martinsson had explained in detail where Holm's body had been found. He wanted to see the place with his own eyes. And perhaps even stop by the house where Holm had lived.

  The place where Holm had been found was still cordoned off. But there were no police. Wallander stepped out of the car. There was silence all around. He stepped over the police tape and looked about. If someone wanted to kill a person, this was an excellent location. He tried to imagine what had happened. Holm had arrived here with someone. According to Martinsson there were only tracks from one car.

  A confrontation, Wallander thought. Certain goods are handed over, a payment is to be made. Then something happens. Holm is shot in the back of the head. He is dead before he falls to the ground. The person who has committed the murder vanishes without a trace.

  A man, Wallander thought. Or more than one. The same person or people who killed the Eberhardsson sisters a few days earlier.

  Suddenly he felt close to something. There was yet another connection here that he would be able to see if only he made an effort. That it had to do with drugs appeared obvious, even if it was still hard to accept that two sisters who owned a sewing shop would have been mixed up in something like that. But Rydberg had been right. His first comment – what did they really know about the two sisters? – had been justified.

  Wallander left the forest road and drove on. He could see Martinsson's map clearly in his head. He had to turn right at the large roundabout south of Sjöbo. Then another road, a gravel road, to the left, to the last house on the right, a red barn next to the road. A blue mailbox that was about to fall to the ground. Two junked cars and a rusty tractor on a field next to the barn. A barking dog of indeterminate breed in a dog run. He had no trouble finding it. He heard the dog before he even got out of the car. He stepped out and walked into the yard. The paint on the main house was peeling. The gutters hung in pieces at the corners. The dog barked desperately and scratched at the fence. Wallander wondered what would happen if the fence gave way and the dog was let loose. He walked over to the door and rang a bell. Then he saw that the wiring was loose. He knocked and waited. Finally he banged on the door so hard that it opened. He called out to see if anyone was home. Still no answer. I shouldn't go in, he thought. I will break many rules that pertain not only to the police but to all citizens. Then he pushed the door open further and went in. Peeling wallpaper, stale air, a mess. Broken couches, mattresses on the floor. Yet there was a large-screen television and a relatively new video recorder. A CD player with large speakers. He called out again and listened. No answer. There was indescribable chaos in the kitchen. Dishes piled up in the sink. Paper bags, plastic bags, empty pizza cartons on the floor to which various lines of ants led.

  A mouse scuttled past in a corner. The place smelled musty. Wallander walked on. Stopped outside a door that had been spray-painted with the words 'Yngve's Church'. He pushed open the door. There was a real bed inside, but only a bottom sheet and a blanket on it. A chest of drawers, two chairs. A radio in the window. A clock that had stopped at ten minutes to seven. Yngve Leonard Holm had lived here. While he was having a large house built in Ystad. On the floor there was a tracksuit top. He had been wearing it when Wallander questioned him. Wallander sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed, afraid that it would give way, and looked around. A person lived here, he thought. A person who lived by herding other people into various forms of drug hell. He shook his head with distaste. Then he leaned over and looked under the bed. Dust. A slipper and some porn magazines. He stood up and pulled out the chest drawers. More magazines with undressed, splay-legged women. Several of them frighteningly young. Underwear, painkillers, Band-Aids.

  Next drawer. An old kerosene blowtorch. The kind you used to start engines on fishing boats. In the final drawer, piles of papers. Old report cards. Wallander saw that Holm had been proficient only in what was also his own favourite subject, geography. Otherwise his marks were forgettable. Some photographs. Holm at a bar somewhere with a glass of beer in each hand. Drunk. Red-eyed. Another photograph: Holm naked on a beach. Grinning straight at the camera. Then an old black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman on a road. Wallander turned it over. Båstad, 1937. It could be Holm's parents.

  He continued to search among the papers. Stopped at an old aeroplane ticket. Took it over to the window. Copenhagen–Marbella, return. The twelfth of August, 1989. The return dated the seventeenth. Five days in Spain, and not on a charter ticket. He was unable to determine if the code was tourist or business class. He tucked it into his pocket and closed the drawer after a few more minutes of searching.

  There was nothing of interest in the wardrobe. More clutter and chaos. Wallander sat back down on the bed. Wondered where the other people who lived in the house were. He walked into the living room. There was a telephone on the table. He called the station and spoke to Ebba.

  'Where are you?' she asked. 'People have been asking for you.'

  'Who is asking for me?'

  'You know how it is. As soon as you aren't here everyone wants you.'

  'I'm on my way,' Wallander said.

  Then he asked her to look up the number of the travel agency where Anette Bengtsson worked. He made a mental note of it, finished his conversation with Ebba and dialled the agency. It was the other girl who answered. He asked to speak with Anette. It took several minutes but then she picked up. He told her who it was.

  'How was the trip to Cairo?' she asked.

  'Good. The pyramids are very high. Remarkable, really. It was also very warm.'

  'You should have stayed longer.'

  'I'll have to do that another time.'

  Then he asked her if she could tell him if Anna or Emilia Eberhardsson had been in Spain between the twelfth and seventeenth of August.

  'That will take a while,' she said.

  'I'll wait,' Wallander said.

  She put the receiver down. Wallander again caught sight of a mouse in a corner. He could not of course be sure that it was the same mouse. Winter is coming, he thought. The mice are on their way back into the house. Anette Bengtsson came back.

  'Anna Eberhardsson left Ystad on the tenth of August,' she said. 'She returned at the beginning of September.'

  'Thanks for the help,' Wallander replied. 'I would very much like to have an inventory of all of the sisters' trips last year.'

  'What for?'

  'For the police investigation,' he said. 'I'll come in tomorrow.'

  She promised to help him. He hung up. Thought that he would probably have fallen in love with her if he had been ten years younger. Now it would be senseless. She would look on advances from him with distaste. He left the house and thought alternately of Holm and Emma Lundin. Then his thoughts returned to Anette Bengtsson. He couldn't be completely sure that she would be offended. But she probably already had a boyfriend. Although he could not recall seeing a ring on her left hand.

  The dog barked like crazy. Wallander walked up to the dog run and screamed at it and then it went quiet. As soon as he turned round and left it started to bark again. I should be grateful, he thought, that Linda doesn't live in a house like this. How many people in Sweden, how m
any normal, unthinking citizens, are familiar with these environments? Where people live in constant mists, misery, despair. He got into the car and drove away. But first he had checked the mailbox. There was a letter in it, addressed to Holm. He opened it. It was the final notice of a bill from a car-hire agency. Wallander put the letter in his pocket.