Firewall

by Henning Mankell

  "Then she's lying. Ask her mother."

  Holgersson hesitated before answering. "We did," she said. "She says her daughter never hit her."

  Wallander was quiet. I'm going to resign, he thought. I'm going to resign from the force and leave this place. And I'm never coming back. Holgersson waited for an answer, but Wallander said nothing. Finally she left the room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wallander left the station immediately. He wasn't sure if he was running away or just going out for air. He knew he was right about what happened, but Holgersson didn't believe him and that upset him. It was only when he was outside that he remembered he didn't have a car. He swore. When he was upset he liked to drive around until he had calmed down again.

  He went down to the off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky. Then he went straight home, unplugged the phone and sat at the kitchen table. He opened the bottle and took a couple of deep draughts. It tasted awful. But he felt he needed it. If there was one thing that made him feel helpless it was being accused of something he hadn't done. Holgersson hadn't spelled it out for him, but he wasn't wrong about her doubts. Maybe Hansson had been right all along, he thought angrily. Never have a woman for a boss. He took another swig. He was beginning to feel better, and was even starting to regret the fact that he had come straight home. That could be interpreted as a sign that he was guilty. He plugged in the phone. He felt a sense of childish impatience over the fact that no-one called him. He dialled the station and Irene answered.

  "I just wanted to let you know I've gone home for the day," he said. "I have a cold."

  "Hansson has been asking for you, and Nyberg. Also people from several newspapers."

  "What did they want?"

  "The papers?"

  "No, Hansson and Nyberg."

  "They didn't say."

  She probably has the paper in front of her right now, Wallander thought. She and all the rest of them. Probably no-one's talking about anything else. Some of them are probably even gleeful about the fact that that bastard Wallander has finally got what's been coming to him.

  He asked Irene to put him through to Hansson's office. It was a while before he answered. Wallander suspected that Hansson had been pouring over some complicated betting sheets that were supposed to get him that big jackpot, but never helped him do much more than break even.

  "How are the horses doing?" Wallander asked when Hansson answered.

  He said that to let him know that the story in the evening papers hadn't affected him.

  "What horses?"

  "You're not betting on horses these days?"

  "No, not right now. Why do you ask?"

  "It was just a joke. What was it you wanted to ask me?"

  "Are you in your office?"

  "I'm at home with a cold."

  "I wanted to tell you that I've worked out the times that our cars went up and down that road. I've talked to the drivers and no-one saw Hökberg. All in all that stretch of road was covered four times."

  "Then she didn't walk. She must have had a lift. The first thing she did when she left the station was call someone. Or else she walked to someone's house first. I hope Ann-Britt knew enough to ask Persson about that, about who could have given Hökberg a lift. Have you talked to Ann-Britt?"

  "I haven't had time."

  There was a pause. Wallander decided to be the first to bring it up.

  "That picture in the paper wasn't too flattering, I suppose."

  "No."

  "The question is what was a photographer doing floating around the corridor of the station. They're always brought in as a group for the press conferences."

  "It's odd that you didn't notice someone taking pictures."

  "With today's cameras it's not so easy."

  "What exactly happened?"

  Wallander told him what had happened. He used the same words that he had used when he described it to Holgersson.

  "There were no witnesses?" Hansson said.

  "No-one apart from the photographer and he's going to lie. Otherwise his picture wouldn't be worth anything."

  "You'll have to make a public rebuttal and tell your side."

  "And how well would that work? An ageing police officer's word against a mother and her daughter? It'll never work."

  "You forget that this particular girl committed murder."

  Wallander wondered if that was really going to help. A policeman using excessive force was always a serious matter. That was his own opinion. It didn't help that the details of the situation had been quite unusual.

  "I'll think about it," he said and asked Hansson to put him through to Nyberg.

  By the time Nyberg came on the line Wallander had taken a few more swigs from his whisky bottle and was beginning to feel tipsy, but the pressure was lifting from his chest.

  "Have you seen the papers?" Wallander said.

  "Which papers?"

  "The picture? The picture of the Persson girl?"

  "I don't read the evening papers, but I heard about it. I understand she had been attacking her mother."

  "That's not what the picture caption says."

  "So what does that matter?"

  "It means I'm in big trouble. Lisa is going to set up a formal investigation."

  "So then the truth comes out. Isn't that what you want?"

  "I just wonder if the media will buy it. Who cares about an old policeman when there's a young, fresh-faced murderess involved?"

  Nyberg sounded surprised. "Since when have you cared what they write in the paper?"

  "Maybe I still don't. But it's different when they publish a picture saying I've punched out a young girl."

  "But she's committed murder."

  "It still makes me uncomfortable."

  "It'll blow over. Look, I just wanted to confirm that one of the car prints was from Moberg's car. That means that all the sets of tracks have been accounted for except one, but that unknown one is using common tyres."

  "So we know someone drove her out there. And left her."

  "There's one other thing," Nyberg said. "Her handbag."

  "What about it?"

  "I've been trying to work out why it was so far away, over by the fence."

  "Don't you think he just threw it there?"

  "But why? He couldn't have expected us not to find it."

  Nyberg was right. This was important.

  "You mean: why didn't he just take it with him? Especially if he was hoping the body wouldn't be identified."

  "Something like that."

  "What would the answer be?"

  "That's your job. I'm just giving you the facts. The handbag was lying 15 metres from the transformer building."

  "Anything else?"

  "No."

  The conversation was over. Wallander lifted up the bottle of whisky but then quickly put it down. He had had enough. If he kept on drinking he would cross a threshold he didn't even want to think about. He walked into the living room. It felt strange to be home in the middle of the day. Was this what retirement would be like? The thought made him shiver. He walked to the window and looked into the street. It was already getting dark. He thought about the doctor who had paid him a visit and about the man who had been found dead next to the cash machine. Wallander decided to call the pathologist the next day and tell him what Enander had said. It wouldn't change anything, but at least he would have passed on the information.

  He switched to thinking about what Nyberg had said about Hökberg's handbag. There was really only one conclusion, and it was one that brought out his keenest investigative instincts. The bag was where it was because someone wanted it to be found.

  Wallander sat on his sofa and thought it through. A body can be burned beyond recognition, he thought. Especially if it is burned with a high-voltage charge that can't be controlled. A person who is executed in the electric chair is boiled from the inside out. Hökberg's murderer knew it would be hard to identify her body. That's why the handbag was left behind.
>
  That still didn't explain what it was doing by the fence, however. Wallander thought it through again, but still could not come up with a sensible explanation. He abandoned the question of the bag. In any case, he was proceeding too quickly. First they had to confirm that Hökberg had in fact been murdered.

  He returned to the kitchen and made some coffee. Still no telephone call and it was 4 p.m. He sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and called in again. Irene told him that the papers and television had been on the line all afternoon. She had not given out his number: it had been unlisted for a couple of years now. Wallander thought again that his absence was going to be interpreted as an admission of guilt, or at least as a sign of deep embarrassment about the matter. I should have stood my ground and stayed put, he thought. I should have talked to every damned reporter who called and told them the truth: that both Persson and her mother were lying.

  The moment of weakness was over. He was starting to get angry. He asked Irene to put him through to Höglund. He should have started with Holgersson and told her once and for all that her attitude was unacceptable. But he put the phone down before there was an answer. He didn't want to talk to either one of them. Instead he dialled Sten Widén's number. By the time he picked up, Wallander had almost had time to regret it. But he was fairly sure Widén would not yet have seen the picture in the papers.

  "I was thinking of coming over," Wallander said. "The only problem is that my car is in the garage."

  "I'll pick you up if you like."

  They decided on 7 p.m. Wallander glanced in the direction of the whisky bottle, but didn't touch it.

  The doorbell rang. Wallander jumped. No-one ever came to his flat unannounced. It was probably a reporter who had somehow got hold of his address. He put the whisky in a cabinet and opened the front door. But it wasn't a reporter, it was Höglund.

  "Is this a bad time?"

  He stood aside to let her in and turned his face away so she wouldn't smell the alcohol on his breath. They sat down in the living room.

  "I have a cold," Wallander said. "I didn't have the energy to keep working."

  She nodded, but he didn't for a second suppose that she believed him. She had no reason to. Everyone knew Wallander always kept working through whatever fevers or ailments he was suffering from.

  "How are you holding up?" she said.

  The moment of weakness is over, Wallander thought. Even if it has just retreated for now and I know it's still in there. But I'm not going to show it.

  "If you are referring to the picture in the papers, I know it looks bad. On the other hand, how can a photographer find his way unseen all the way to our interrogation rooms?"

  "Lisa is very concerned."

  "She should listen to what I have to say," Wallander said. "She should support me, not immediately believe everything they say in the paper."

  "She can't just ignore what's in the picture."

  "I'm not saying she should. I hit the girl, but only because she was laying into her mother."

  "You know that they have a different story."

  "They're lying. But maybe you believe them?"

  She shook her head. "The question is only how to prove that they're lying."

  "Who's behind it?"

  Her answer came quickly and firmly. "The mother. I think she's smart. She sees an opportunity to turn the attention away from what her daughter has done. And now that Hökberg is dead they can try to pin everything on her."

  "Not the bloody knife."

  "Oh, but they can. Even though it was recovered with Persson's help she can claim that Hökberg was the one who used it on Lundberg."

  She was right. The dead can't speak. And there was a large colour photograph of a policeman who had knocked a girl to the ground. The picture was somewhat fuzzy, but no-one could have any doubts as to what it depicted.

  "The prosecutor's office has demanded a quick investigation."

  "Who in particular?"

  "Viktorsson."

  Wallander didn't like him. He had only been in Ystad since August, but Wallander had already had a couple of run-ins with him.

  "It's going to be my word against theirs."

  "And there's two of them, of course."

  "The strange thing is that Persson doesn't even like her mother," Wallander said. "It was very clear to me when I spoke to her."

  "She's probably realised that she's in deep trouble, even though she's a juvenile and won't go to jail. Therefore she's declared a temporary truce with her mother."

  Wallander suddenly felt he couldn't keep talking about the subject any longer. Not right now.

  "Why did you come round?"

  "I heard you were sick."

  "But not at death's door. I'll be back tomorrow. Tell me instead what you learned from your conversation with Persson."

  "She's changed her story."

  "But she can't know that Hökberg is dead?"

  "That's what's so strange."

  It took a while for Wallander to understand what Höglund had just said. Then it dawned on him. He looked at her.

  "You're thinking something?"

  "Why does one change one's story? Persson couldn't have known that Hökberg was dead when I started questioning her. But that's when she wholly changed her story. Now Hökberg is the one who did everything. Persson is innocent. They were never going to rob a taxi driver. They weren't going out to Rydsgård. Hökberg had suggested they visit her uncle who lived in Bjäresjö."

  "Does he exist?"

  "I've called him. He says he hasn't seen his niece in five or six years."

  Wallander thought this over. "In that case there's only one explanation," he said. "Persson would never have been able to rescind her confession and fabricate another story if she wasn't sure that Hökberg would never be able to contradict it."

  "I can't find another explanation either. Naturally I asked her why she hadn't said all this earlier."

  "What was her answer?"

  "That she hadn't wanted all the blame to fall on Sonja."

  "Since they were friends?"

  "Yes."

  They both knew what it meant. There was only one explanation: that Persson knew that Hökberg was dead.

  "What are you thinking?" Wallander said.

  "That there are two possibilities. One is that Hökberg could have called Persson after she left the station. She could have told her she was planning to commit suicide."

  "That doesn't sound likely."

  "I don't think so either. I don't think she called Persson. I think she called someone else."