Firewall

by Henning Mankell

  Afterwards she had asked him about it. He was furious that she had seen him in the demonstration. It was the first time she had witnessed his temper. But then he had calmed down. She never found out why it had so affected him, but from that day she had known there was a lot more to Falk than met the eye.

  "I broke up with him that June," she said. "Not because I had found anyone else. It was just that I didn't believe we were going anywhere. His angry reaction about the demonstration had played a part in that."

  "How did he take it?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We had met at an outdoor café in Kungsträdgården. I told him straight out that I wanted to end the relationship and that I didn't think we had a future. He listened to what I had to say and he just got up and left."

  "And that was the end?"

  "He didn't say a single word. I remember that his face was a complete blank. When I had finished talking he left. He did leave money on the table for our coffees."

  "What happened after that?"

  "I didn't see him again for several years."

  "How long exactly?"

  "Four years, I think."

  "What did he do during that time?"

  "I don't know for sure."

  "He vanished without a trace during those four years? Is that what you are saying?"

  "It's hard to believe, I know, but about a week after our date in Kungsträdgården I decided I needed to talk to him again. That's when I discovered he had moved out of his student room without leaving a forwarding address. After a few weeks I managed to get in touch with his parents in Linköping, but they, too, had no idea where he had gone. He was gone for four years, and I had no idea where he was. He had withdrawn from the business school. No-one knew anything. And then he turned up."

  "When was that?"

  "I remember it exactly. It was August 2, 1977. I had just accepted my first nursing position at Sabbatsberg Hospital. And there he was, waiting for me outside the hospital, carrying a big bouquet of flowers. He was smiling. I had gone through a failed relationship over those four years. When I saw him there, it cheered me up. I think I was feeling pretty lost and lonely. My mother had just died."

  "You started seeing each other again?"

  "He even thought we should get married. He asked me just a few days later."

  "But he must have told you what he had been doing the past few years?"

  "Actually, he didn't say a word about that. He said he wouldn't ask me about my life if I wouldn't ask him about his. He wanted us to pretend that the past four years had never happened."

  Wallander looked closely at her. "Did he look at all different?"

  "No. Not apart from the tan."

  "He was tanned? Sunburned?"

  "Yes. But that was all. It was only by accident that I found out where he had been all that time."

  Wallander's mobile rang. He hesitated, but decided to answer. It was Hansson.

  "Martinsson gave me this business with the car that was seen last night," he said. "The computer records keep crashing, but at last I've been able to establish that it's a stolen car."

  "The car or just the number plate?"

  "Probably both, but we are talking number plates here. They were taken from a Volvo that was parked down by the Nobeltorget in Malmö last week."

  "Good," Wallander said. "Then Elofsson and El Sayed were right. That car was keeping an eye on things."

  "I'm not really sure where to go next."

  "Talk to Malmö police about the Volvo. And send out a nationwide alert for the Mazda."

  "What crime is the driver suspected of?'

  Wallander paused. "That he has something to do with Hökberg's murder. Also that he may have been the one who fired that shot at me."

  "He was the one who shot at you?"

  "Or been a witness," Wallander answered.

  "Where are you right now?"

  "I'm with Mrs Falk. I'll call you later."

  She was serving him coffee from a beautiful blue-and-white pot. Wallander thought he remembered seeing similar china as a child in his parents' home.

  "Why don't you tell me about that 'by accident' part," he said when she sat down again.

  "It was about a month after Tynnes had appeared in my life again. He had bought a car and often came to pick me up. One of the doctors I worked with at the hospital saw him one day. The next day he asked me if the man he had seen was Tynnes Falk. When I said yes, he told me he had met him the year before, not in Sweden, but in Africa."

  "Where in Africa?"

  "In Angola. The doctor had been doing volunteer work, just after Angola had become independent. He had bumped into another Swede in a restaurant late one night. Tynnes had produced his Swedish passport, from which he took out the money to pay his bill. When the doctor saw that, he said hello. They spoke only briefly, but the doctor remembered him. Not least because he thought Tynnes had been so unfriendly to a fellow Swede, as if he didn't want to be recognised."

  "You must have asked him what he was doing there?"

  "You might think so, but I never did. I meant to, but I suppose it came down to the promise we had made to each other not to ask. Instead, I tried to find out through other channels what he had been doing."

  "What other channels?"

  "Various relief organisations that had branches in Africa. No-one had any record of him. It was only when I called the Swedish International Development Agency that I got something. They said Tynnes had been in Angola for two months to help with the installation of various radio towers."

  "But he was gone for four years," Wallander said. "Not two months."

  She didn't reply, perhaps lost in thought. Wallander waited.

  "We married and had children," she said finally. "Apart from that chance meeting in Luanda, I had no idea what he had been or what he had done in those four years. And I never asked. It's only now that he's dead that I'm beginning to find out."

  She got up and left the room. When she returned she had in her hand something wrapped in a plastic cloth. She put it on the coffee table in front of Wallander.

  "After he died I went down to the basement. I knew he had a steel trunk down there. It was locked, but I broke the lock. Apart from this there was nothing but dust."

  She nodded for him to open the package. Wallander pulled the plastic cloth aside. Inside was a brown leather photograph album. Someone had written Angola 1973-1977 on the cover in permanent ink.

  Wallander hadn't even opened it when a thought came to him.

  "My education isn't what it should be," he said. "What's the capital of Angola?"

  "Luanda."

  Wallander nodded. He still had the postcard with the letters "1" and "d" on it in his pocket.

  What was it that had happened in Luanda? And who was C? He leaned forward and opened the album.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The first picture was of a burned-out bus. It was lying by the side of a road which was red, perhaps sand or stained darker with blood. The photograph had been taken from a distance. The bus resembled the body of a dead animal. The handwritten caption read: Northeast of Huambo, 1975. Wallander turned the page: a group of African women around a waterhole, the landscape parched. The water level was low. There were no shadows on the ground; the picture must have been taken at midday. None of the women was looking at the camera.

  Wallander studied the picture. Falk, assuming he was the photographer, had captured these women on film. But it was the dried-up waterhole that was the real focus of the picture. That was the story the photographer was telling, not the lives of the women. Mrs Falk sat quietly on the other side of the room as he turned the pages. He was aware of the ticking of a clock somewhere in the room.

  Wallander kept leafing through the shots of villages, war sites and radio towers until he came to a photograph of a group of nine men, a boy and a goat. The goat seemed to have walked into the picture by chance. One of the men was trying to wa
ve it away as the picture was taken. The boy was looking straight at the camera, laughing. Seven of the men were black, two were white. The black men looked cheerful; the white men had serious expressions on their faces. Wallander asked Mrs Falk if she knew who any of the men were. She shook her head. The place name scribbled under the picture was illegible, but it had a date: January 1976. Falk had long been finished with his radio towers by then. Was he on a return trip to make sure the work had been maintained? Or had he stayed on in Angola after the job was done?

  Wallander continued through the album until Mrs Falk drew his attention to a picture taken at what seemed to be a party. There were only white people in the group, their eyes red from the flash like nocturnal creatures. There were bottles and glasses on a table. Mrs Falk was pointing out one man with a glass in his hand. It was Falk. The young men around him were cheering and toasting each other, but Falk had a serious expression. He looked thin, dressed in a white shirt buttoned all the way to his throat. The others were in various states of undress, flushed and sweaty. Wallander asked her again if she recognised any of them, but she said no.

  Wallander stopped at another picture. It was taken outside what looked like a whitewashed church. Falk was standing against the wall looking at the photographer. For the first time in the album he was smiling, and his shirt was not buttoned to the throat. Who took the photograph? Was it C?

  Next page. Wallander leaned in more closely. He recognised a face from an earlier photograph. It was a fairly close shot. A tall man, thin and tanned. His gaze was very determined, his hair cropped short. He looked northern European, possibly German or Russian. Wallander examined the background. There seemed to be a skyline of hills covered in thick green vegetation. In the middle ground, between the hills and the man, was something that looked like a large machine. The construction seemed familiar, but it was only when he held the picture away from himself that he realised what it was. A power substation.

  Here is a connection, he thought. Though I have no idea what to make of it. A picture of a man outside a power substation, not unlike the one where Hökberg's body was found. He kept on in the hope of finding more clues, but there was nothing else of interest. There were animal photographs, taken on tourist safaris, presumably in other parts of Africa. But in the last picture he was back again. Luanda, June 1976. The thin man again with his close-cropped hair. This time he is sitting on a bench looking out at the ocean. For once Falk had managed to compose a good picture. There were several empty pages at the back of the album, but it didn't look as if anything had been taken out. That was the last one, the image of the man staring out over the sea, and in the background, the same city as in the postcard.

  Wallander leaned back in his chair. Mrs Falk gave him a searching look.

  "I don't know what these pictures tell us, but I'd like to borrow the album, if I may," he said. "Enlargements of one or two shots could be useful."

  She followed him into the hall.

  "Why do you think that what he did in those years was so important? It was such a long time ago."

  "Something happened there," Wallander said. "I don't know what. But I think that whatever it was stayed with him for the rest of his life."

  He put on his coat and shook her hand.

  "If you like, we can send a receipt for the loan of the album."

  "That won't be necessary." And as Wallander opened the door, she said, "There's one more thing."

  Wallander looked at her and waited. She seemed unsure of herself.

  "Maybe policemen only want facts," she said. "The thing I've been thinking about is still very unclear even to me."

  "Right now anything could be of help."

  "I lived with Tynnes for a long time," she said, "and I thought I knew him. What he was doing during those years that he was gone, I don't know, but I always knew there was something else in his life. Since he was so good-natured and he treated me and the children so well, I never bothered digging into it." She stopped abruptly. Wallander waited. "Sometimes I had the feeling I had married a fanatic, a person with two lives."

  "A fanatic?"

  "Sometimes he had such strange ideas about things."

  "For example?"

  "About life. About people. About the world. Almost anything. He could suddenly come up with the most violent accusations, not directed at anyone in particular, as if he were sending messages into space almost."

  "He never explained himself?"

  "I didn't dare ask him about it. It scared me. He would become so filled with hate. And besides, his rages would leave him as quickly as they had come. I had the feeling that they were something he wanted to hide, something that embarrassed him."

  Wallander thought carefully. "Did he ever get involved politically?"

  "He despised politicians. I don't think he ever voted."

  "And he had no ties to any political organisation?"

  "No."

  "If you think of anything else, please let us know."

  Wallander got into his car, putting the album on the passenger seat. He wondered about the man in front of the power substation, whom Falk had met in a faraway land 20 years ago. Was he the one who had sent the postcard, the one who called himself C?

  Wallander shook his head. He didn't understand it. Suddenly he felt cold. It was a chilly day. He turned up the heat and drove to the station. His mobile rang as he pulled into the car park. It was Martinsson.

  "Trying to crack this code is like scaling a wall," he said. "Modin is doing his best to get over it, but I couldn't tell you what he's actually up to."

  "We just have to be patient."

  "I take it we pay for his lunch?"

  "Keep the receipt," Wallander said. "Give it to me later."

  "I'm also wondering if now wouldn't be a good time to get in touch with the National Police computer experts. There's not really any good reason to put it off, is there?"

  Martinsson is right, Wallander thought. "We will get in touch with them in good time," he said. "Let's hold off for now."

  Irene told him that Gertrud had called. Wallander went to his office and called her back. Wallander sometimes drove out at the weekend to visit her, but it didn't happen often. He felt guilty about it. Gertrud was after all the one who had taken pity on his father in those last difficult years. Without her he would never have lasted as long as he did, but now that his father was gone they didn't really have anything to talk about.

  Gertrud's sister answered the phone. She was talkative and had strong opinions on most subjects. Wallander explained that he was short of time and she went to get Gertrud. It took a long time for her to answer. When she did, it turned out that nothing was amiss. There was no reason for Wallander to have been worried.