“Sometime back in the 1960s a Polish woman came here,” he said. “Where exactly she came from, I don’t think anybody knew. But she worked at the local inn. Rented a room. Kept to herself. Even though she quickly learned to speak Swedish, she didn’t seem to have any friends. Later she bought a house. Out towards Sveg. I was young back then, young enough to often think about how beautiful she was. She was interested in birds. At the post office they said she got letters and cards from all over Sweden. They were postcards with information about ringed owls and God knows what else. She wrote lots of cards and letters herself. They had to stock extra postcards for her at the local shop. She didn’t care what the picture was of. They bought up postcards that shops in other villages couldn’t sell.”
“How do you know all this?” Wallander asked.
“In a village you know about a lot of things, whether you want to or not,” Melander said. “That’s the way it is.”
“Then what happened?”
“She disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“What’s that expression? She went up in smoke. Vanished.”
Wallander wasn’t sure he had understood correctly. “Did she go away somewhere?”
“She travelled a great deal, but she always came back. When she disappeared, she was here. She had gone for a walk through town one afternoon in October. She often took walks. Strolls. After that day she was never seen again. There was a lot written about it back then. She hadn’t packed her things. People started to wonder when she didn’t show up at the inn. They went over to her house. She was gone. They searched for her. But she was never found. That happened about 25 years ago. They’ve never found anything. But there have been rumours that she was seen in South America or Alingsas. Or as a ghost in the woods outside Ratansbyn.”
“What was her name?” Wallander asked.
“Krista. Her surname was Haberman.”
Wallander remembered the case. There’d been a lot of speculation. He vaguely recalled the newspaper headline: “The Polish Beauty”.
“So she corresponded with other bird-watchers,” he said. “And sometimes she visited them?”
“Yes.”
“Do the letters still exist?”
“She was declared dead years ago. A relative from Poland turned up and her belongings disappeared. And the house was later torn down.”
Wallander nodded. It would have been too much to expect to find the letters and postcards.
“I have a hazy recollection of the whole thing,” he said. “But wasn’t there suspicion that she had committed suicide or been the victim of a crime?”
“Of course there were all manner of rumours. I think the police who investigated the case did a good job. They were people from the area who could tell the difference between gossip and the truth. There were rumours about mysterious cars. That she’d had secret visitors in the night. And no-one knew what she did when she went travelling. She disappeared. And she’s still missing. If she’s alive, she’s 25 years older. Everyone gets older. Even people who disappear.”
It’s happening again, thought Wallander. Something from the past is coming back. I come up here to find out why Holger Eriksson bequeathed his money to the church in Svenstavik. I don’t get an answer to my question, but I discover that there was also a bird-watcher here, a woman who disappeared over 25 years ago. Perhaps I’ve found an answer to my question after all. Even though I don’t yet understand it.
“The case material is still in Ostersund,” Melander said. “It probably weighs several kilos.”
They left the church. Wallander looked at a bird sitting on the cemetery wall.
“Have you ever heard of a bird called a middle spotted woodpecker?” he asked.
“Isn’t it extinct?” Melander asked. “At least in Sweden?”
“It’s close to extinction,” said Wallander. “It’s been gone from this country for 15 years.”
“I may have seen one a few times,” Melander said doubtfully. “But any sort of woodpecker is scarce these days. The old trees have disappeared. That’s where they usually lived. And on telephone poles, of course.”
They had walked back to the shopping centre and stopped at Wallander’s car. It was 2.30 p.m.
“Are you going further?” Melander asked. “Or are you heading back to Skane?”
“I’m going to Gavle,” replied Wallander. “How long does it take? Three, four hours?”
“Closer to five. There’s no snow and it’s not slippery. The roads are good. But it’ll take you that long. It’s almost 400 kilometres.”
“I want to thank you for all your help,” said Wallander. “And for the nice lunch.”
“But you didn’t get any answers to your questions.”
“Maybe I did,” Wallander said. “We’ll see.”
“The officer who handled Krista Haberman’s disappearance was an old man,” said Melander. “He started when he was middle-aged. Stayed with the police until he retired. They say the last thing he talked about on his deathbed was what had happened to her. He could never let it go.”
“There’s always that danger,” Wallander said.
They said goodbye.
“If you ever come south, stop in,” Wallander said.
Melander smiled. His pipe had gone out again.
“I think my travels will take me mostly north,” he said. “But you never know.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d get in touch with me,” Wallander said, “if anything happens that might explain why Holger Eriksson left the money to the church.”
“It’s strange,” Melander said. “If he’d seen the church, it might be understandable. It’s so beautiful.”
“You’re right,” Wallander replied. “If he’d ever been here, it might make sense.”
“Maybe he went through here sometime? Without anyone knowing about it?”
“Or maybe only one person knew,” Wallander replied.
Melander looked at him.
“You have something in mind?”
“Yes,” Wallander replied. “But I don’t know yet what it means.”
They shook hands. Wallander got into his car and drove off. In the rear-view mirror he saw Melander standing there, gazing after him.
He drove through endless forests. By the time he reached Gavle it was already dark. He made his way to the hotel that Svedberg had told him about. When he asked at the front desk, he was told that Linda had already arrived.
They found a little restaurant that was cosy and quiet, with only a few guests even though it was Saturday night. He was glad that Linda had agreed to come. Finding themselves in this unfamiliar town encouraged Wallander to talk about his ideas for the future, something he hadn’t planned to do.
But first they talked about his father, her grandfather.
“I often wondered about why you were so close,” Wallander said. “Maybe it was envy, plain and simple. I saw something that I remembered from my own childhood, but that had totally disappeared.”
“Perhaps it’s good to have a generation in between,” Linda said. “It’s not uncommon for grandparents and grandchildren to get along better than parents and children.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can see it’s true for me. And a lot of my friends say the same thing.”
“But I’ve always had a feeling that the rift was unnecessary,” said Wallander. “I’ve never understood why he couldn’t accept the fact that I became a policeman. If only he’d told me why. Or suggested an alternative. But he never did.”
“Grandpa was pretty eccentric,” she said. “And temperamental. But what would you say if I suddenly came and told you in all seriousness that I was thinking of becoming a policewoman?”
Wallander started to laugh.
“I honestly don’t know what I’d say. We’ve talked about this before.”
After dinner they went back to the hotel. On a thermometer ouside a shop, Wallander saw that it was -2 °C. They sat down i
n reception. The hotel didn’t have many guests, and they had the place to themselves. Wallander asked Linda cautiously how her acting classes were going. He saw at once that she didn’t want to talk about it. He let the topic drop, but it made him uneasy. Over the course of the past few years Linda had changed plans and interests several times. What made Wallander nervous was how quickly she made these changes. It gave him the impression they were rash decisions.
Linda poured herself some tea and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.
“Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve stopped darning our socks,” Wallander said.
She gave him a perplexed look.
“I mean it,” he continued. “When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks. I even learned how to do it in school myself. Then suddenly one day it was over. Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No-one bothered to repair them. The whole society changed. ‘Wear it out and toss it’ was the only rule that applied. As long as it was just a matter of our socks, the change didn’t make much difference. But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code. I think it changed our view of right and wrong, of what you were allowed to do to other people and what you weren’t. More and more people, especially young people like you, feel unwelcome in their own country. How do they react? With aggression and contempt. The most frightening thing is that I think we’re only at the beginning of something that’s going to get a lot worse. A generation is growing up right now, the children who are younger than you, who are going to react with even greater violence. And they have absolutely no memory of a time when we darned our socks. When we didn’t throw everything away, whether it was our woollen socks or human beings.”
He paused. “Maybe I’m not expressing myself clearly,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said, “but I still think I know what you’re trying to say.”
“It’s also possible I’ve got this wrong. Maybe every age seems worse than the ones that came before.”
“I never heard Grandpa say anything about it.”
“I think he lived in his own world. He painted his pictures so he could decide where the sun would be in the sky. It hung in the same place, above the fields, with or without the grouse, for almost 50 years. Sometimes I don’t think he knew what was going on outside that studio of his. He had put up an invisible wall around himself.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “He knew a lot.”
“If he did, he never let me know about it.”
“He even wrote poems once in a while.”
Wallander looked at her in disbelief. “He wrote poems?”
“He showed me some of them once. Maybe he burned them later on. But he wrote poems.”
“Do you write poetry too?” asked Wallander.
“Maybe,” she replied. “I don’t know whether they’re really poems. But sometimes I write. Just for myself. Don’t you?”
“No,” replied Wallander. “Never. I live in a world of police reports and forensic records, full of unpleasant details. Not to mention all the memos from the national police board.”
She changed the subject so fast that afterwards he thought that she must have planned it all out.
“How’s it going with Baiba?”
“It’s going fine with her. How it’s going with us, I’m not so sure. But I’m hoping that she’ll come here to live.”
“What would she do in Sweden?”
“She’d live with me,” Wallander replied in surprise.
Linda slowly shook her head.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Don’t be offended,” she said. “But I hope you realise you’re a difficult person to live with.”
“Why is that?”
“Just think about Mama. Why do you think she wanted to live a different life?”
Wallander didn’t answer. In a vague way he felt he was being judged unfairly.
“Now you’re angry,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” he replied. “I’m not angry.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m tired.”
She got up from her chair and sat down next to him on the sofa.
“This doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” she said. “It just means that I’m growing up. Our conversations are going to be different.”
“I probably just haven’t got used to it yet,” he said.
When the conversation petered out, they watched a movie on TV. Linda had to go back to Stockholm early the next morning. Wallander thought he had had a glimpse of how the future would be. They would meet whenever they both had time. From now on she would also say what she really thought.
Just before 1 a.m. they said goodnight in the hall. Afterwards Wallander lay in bed for a long time, trying to decide whether he had lost something or gained something. His child was gone. Linda had grown up.
They met for breakfast at 7 a.m., and then he walked her the short distance to the train station. As they stood on the platform, she started to cry. Wallander stood there bewildered. Only a moment ago she hadn’t shown any signs of being upset.
“What is it?” he asked. “Did something happen?”
“I miss Grandpa,” she replied. “I dream about him every night.”
Wallander gave her a hug. “I do too.”
The train arrived. He stood on the platform until it pulled away. The station seemed terribly desolate. For a moment he felt like someone who was lost or abandoned, utterly powerless.
He wondered how he could go on.
CHAPTER 22
When Wallander got back to the hotel, there was a message for him from Robert Melander. He went up to his room and dialled the number. Melander’s wife answered. Wallander introduced himself, careful to thank her for the nice lunch she had prepared the day before. Melander came to the phone.
“I couldn’t help thinking about things some more last night,” he said. “I called the old postman too. Ture Emmanuelsson is his name. He told me that Krista Haberman received postcards regularly from Skane, a lot of them. From Falsterbo, he thought. I don’t know if this means anything, but I thought I’d tell you anyway. She had a lot of bird related post.”
“How did you find me?” Wallander asked.
“I called the police in Ystad and asked them. It wasn’t difficult.”
“Skanor and Falsterbo are well-known meeting places for bird-watchers,” Wallander said. “That’s the only reasonable explanation for why she got so many postcards from there. Thanks for taking the time to call me.”
“I just keep wondering,” Melander said, “why the car dealer should have left money to our church.”
“Sooner or later we’ll find out why. But it might take time. Anyway, thanks for calling.”
Wallander stayed where he was after he hung up. It wasn’t 8 a.m. yet. He thought about the feeling he had experienced at the train station, the feeling that something insurmountable stood before him. He also thought about the conversation with Linda. Most of all, he thought about what Melander had said and what he now faced. He was in Gavle because he had an assignment. It was six hours before his plane left and he had to turn in the rental car at Arlanda.
He got some papers out of his case. Hoglund’s notes said that he should start by getting in touch with a police inspector named Sten Wenngren. He would be home all day Sunday and was expecting Wallander’s call. She had also written down the name of the man who had advertised in Terminator magazine: Johan Ekberg, who lived out in Brynas. Wallander stood by the window. A cold autumn rain had started falling. Wallander wondered whether it would turn to sleet, and if there were snow tyres on the rental car. He thought again about what he had to do in Gavle. With each step he took he felt himself moving further and further away from the heart of the matter.
The feeling that there was something he hadn’t discovered; that he had misinterpreted something fundamental in the pattern of the crimes, came back as he s
tood by the window. Why the deliberate brutality? What is it the killer wants to tell us? The killer’s language was the code he hadn’t been able to crack.
He shook his head, yawned, and packed his suitcase. Since he didn’t know what he would talk to Sten Wenngren about, he decided to go straight to Johan Ekberg. If nothing else, he might be able to get a glimpse into the murky world where soldiers sold themselves to the highest bidder. He took his bag and left the room. At the front desk, he asked how to get to Sodra Faltskarsgatan in Brynas.
When he got into his car he was overcome by that feeling of weakness again. He sat there without starting the engine. Was he coming down with something? He didn’t feel sick — not even particularly tired. He realised it had to do with his father. It was a reaction to everything that had happened, to having to adjust to a new life that had been changed in a traumatic way. There was no other explanation. His father’s death was causing him to suffer recurrent attacks of powerlessness.
At last he started the engine and drove out of the garage. The desk clerk had given him clear directions, but Wallander got lost immediately. The city was deserted. He felt as though he was driving around in a labyrinth. It took him 20 minutes to find the right street. He stopped outside a block of flats in what he thought must be the old section of Brynas. Vaguely he wondered whether mercenaries slept late on Sunday mornings. He also wondered if Johan Ekberg was a mercenary himself at all. Just because he advertised in Terminator didn’t mean he had done any military service.
Wallander sat in the car looking at the building. The rain was falling. October was the most disconsolate month. Everything turned to grey. The colours of autumn faded away.
For a moment he felt like giving up the whole thing and driving away. He might just as well go back to Skane and ask one of the others to call this Johan Ekberg on the phone. Or he could do it himself. If he left Gavle now he might be able to catch an earlier flight to Sturup.
But of course he didn’t leave. Wallander had never been able to conquer the sergeant inside him who made sure he did what he was supposed to do. He hadn’t taken this trip at the taxpayer’s expense just to sit in his car and stare at the rain. He got out of the car and crossed the street.
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