Birch found the keys to Taxell’s basement storage room. It took him an hour to go through it. There weren’t any diaries there either. Wallander was convinced that she had taken it with her. They were in the bag that Hader had seen her put in the boot of the car.
Finally only her desk was left. He had quickly gone through the drawers earlier, now he would do it more thoroughly. He sat down on an old chair with the heads of dragons carved into the armrests. The desk was a small secretary in which the top folded down to make a desk surface. On top of the desk there were framed photographs of Katarina Taxell as a child. Katarina sitting on a lawn, with white garden furniture and blurry figures in the background. Katarina sitting next to a big dog, looking straight at the camera with a bow in her hair. Katarina with her mother and her father, the engineer at the sugar refinery. He had a moustache, and seemed to exude self-confidence. Katarina looked more like her father than her mother. Wallander took down the photograph and looked on the back. There was no date. The picture had been taken in a studio in Lund. There was a graduation photograph of Katarina with her white cap, flowers around her neck. She was thin, and had grown pale. Now Katarina was living in a different world. The last picture was an old photograph, the contours faded. It was of a barren landscape by the sea. An old couple gazed stiffly at the camera. In the distance was a three-master, anchored, sails furled. Wallander thought the picture could be from Oland, taken sometime at the end of the last century. Perhaps the couple were Katarina’s great-grandparents. There was nothing written on the back of that one either. He put the photographs back. There was no sign of Blomberg. That might be understandable, but no other man either. Did that mean anything? Everything means something, he thought. The question was what.
One by one he pulled out the small drawers. Letters, documents, bills. Old report cards. Her highest marks were in geography, she had done poorly in physics and maths. In the next drawer he found pictures taken in a photographic booth. Three girls, crowded together, making faces. Another picture, this time of the pedestrian street in Copenhagen. The same three girls were sitting on a bench, laughing. Katarina was on the far right. There was another drawer full of letters, some from as far back as 1972. A stamp with a picture of the man-of-war Wasa. If the secretary contains Taxell’s innermost secrets, thought Wallander, then she doesn’t have many. An impersonal life. No passions, no summer adventures on Greek islands, but high marks in geography. He continued going through the drawers, but nothing caught his attention. He moved on to the three larger drawers below. Still no diaries. Wallander didn’t feel like digging through layer after layer of impersonal mementos. He couldn’t see the woman behind them. Had she even been able to see herself?
He pushed back the chair and closed the last drawer. Nothing. He didn’t know much more than he had before. He frowned. Something didn’t add up. If her decision to leave was sudden, and he was convinced that it had been, then she wouldn’t have had time to take along everything that might give away her secrets. She had the diaries within easy reach. But there is almost always a messy side to a person’s life. Here there was nothing. He stood up and cautiously moved the desk away from the wall. Nothing was fastened to the back. He sat down in the chair again, thinking hard. There was something he had noticed. Something that only now came back to him. He tried to coax the image out. Not the photographs. Not the letters either. What was it then? The report cards? The rental contract? The bills from her credit card company? None of those. What was left?
There’s nothing else but the furniture, he thought. Then it came to him. It was something about the small drawers. He pulled one of them out again, then the next, and compared them. Then he took them all the way out and looked inside. There was nothing there either. He put the drawers back in and pulled out the one on the top left, and then the second. That’s when he discovered it. The drawers were not equally deep. He pulled out the smaller one and turned it around. There was another opening. It was a double drawer. It had a secret compartment in the back. There was only one thing inside. He took it out and put it on the desk.
It was a timetable for Swedish Railways, from the spring of 1991. The trains between Malmo and Stockholm. He took out the other drawers, one by one. He found another secret compartment. It was empty. He leaned back in his chair and thought about the timetable. Why was it important? It was even harder to understand why it had been put into a secret compartment. But it couldn’t have ended up there by mistake.
Birch came into the room.
“Take a look at this,” Wallander said, pointing at the timetable. “This was in Katarina Taxell’s secret hiding place.”
“A timetable?”
Wallander nodded. “I don’t get it,” he said.
He leafed through it, page by page. Birch had pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. Wallander turned the pages. Nothing was written on it, no page had been pressed down and fell open by itself. It was only when he came to the next to last page that he stopped. Birch saw it too. A departure time from Nassjo was underlined. Nassjo to Malmo. Departure at 16.00. Arrival in Lund at 18.42, Malmo at 18.57. Nassjo 16.00. Someone had underlined the whole row.
Wallander looked at Birch. “Does that tell you anything?”
“Not a thing.”
Wallander put down the timetable.
“Does Katarina Taxell have something to do with Nassjo?” Birch asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Wallander said. “But it’s possible that she does. Our biggest problem right now is that everything seems to be possible. We can’t tell what is important and what isn’t.”
Wallander had acquired several plastic bags from the forensic technicians who had gone through the flat earlier in the day, searching for fingerprints that didn’t belong to Katarina Taxell or her mother. He put the timetable in one of them.
“I’m taking this along,” he said, “if you have no objections.”
Birch shrugged.
“You can’t even use it to tell when the trains go,” he said. “It expired three years ago.”
“I rarely take the train,” Wallander said.
“It can be relaxing,” Birch said. “I prefer taking the train to flying. You get time to yourself.”
Wallander thought about his most recent train trip, from Almhult. Birch was right. During the journey he had managed to fall asleep for a while.
“I think it’s time for me to go back to Ystad.”
“We’re not going to put out an APB for Katarina Taxell and her baby?”
“Not yet.”
They left the flat. Birch locked up. The wind was coming in gusts, and it was cold. They said goodbye at Wallander’s car.
“What should we do about her surveillance?” Birch asked.
Wallander thought for a moment.
“Keep it up for the time being,” he said. “Only don’t forget the back this time.”
“What do you think might happen?”
“I don’t know. But someone who has run away might decide to return.”
He drove out of the city. Autumn pressed in all around the car. He switched on the heater, but he was still cold.
What are we going to do now? he asked himself. Katarina Taxell is missing. After a long day in Lund I’m going back to Ystad with an old Swedish Railways timetable in a plastic bag.
But he knew that they had taken an important step forward that day. Eriksson did know Krista Haberman. They knew that there was a connection between the three men who had been murdered. Involuntarily he accelerated. He wanted to find out what Hamren had discovered. When he reached the exit for Sturup Airport he called Ystad. He got hold of Svedberg. The first thing he asked about was Terese.
“She’s getting a lot of support from the school,” Svedberg said. “Especially from the other students. But it’s going to take time.”
“And Martinsson?”
“He’s depressed. He’s talking about quitting.”
“I know.”
“You’re the only one w
ho can talk him out of it.”
“I will.”
He asked if anything important had happened. Svedberg had just arrived at the station himself after sitting in on a meeting with Akeson about obtaining the investigative material on the drowning of Runfeldt’s wife in Almhult.
Wallander asked him to call a meeting of the investigative team for 10 p.m.
“Have you seen Hamren?” was his last question.
“He’s sitting with Hansson going over the material on Krista Haberman. That was apparently something you said was urgent.”
“If they could finish by 10 p.m., I’d be grateful.”
“Are they supposed to find Krista Haberman by then?” Svedberg asked.
“Not exactly. But not far from it, either.”
Wallander put the phone down on the seat next to him. He thought about Katarina Taxell’s secret drawer, which contained an old timetable. He didn’t understand it. Not at all.
At 10 p.m. they were all assembled. Only Martinsson was missing. They began by talking about what had happened that morning. Everyone knew by then that Martinsson had decided to resign from the force.
“I’ll talk to him,” Wallander said. “I’ll find out if he’s really made up his mind. If he has, then of course no-one is going to stop him.”
Wallander gave a brief summary of what had happened in Lund. They considered various explanations as to why Taxell had run away. They also asked themselves if it might be possible to track down the red car. How many red Golfs were there in Skane?
“A woman with a newborn baby can’t disappear without a trace,” Wallander said at last. “It’d be best for us to be patient.”
He looked at Hansson and Hamren.
“The disappearance of Krista Haberman,” he said.
Hansson nodded to Hamren.
“You wanted to know the details surrounding the disappearance itself,” he said. “The last time she was seen was in Svenstavik on Tuesday, 22 October 1967. She went for a walk through town. It wasn’t unusual for her to be out walking. A lumberjack coming from the station on his bike saw her. It was about 5 p.m. and it was already dark. There are several witnesses who said they’d seen a strange car in town that evening. That’s all.”
They sat in silence.
“Did anyone mention the make of the car?” Wallander asked at last.
Hamren searched through the papers. He shook his head and left the room. When he came back he had another stack of papers in his hand. Finally he found what he was looking for.
“One of the witnesses claimed it was a dark blue Chevrolet. He was positive about it. There was a taxi in Svenstavik that was the same make only it was light blue.”
Wallander nodded. “Svenstavik and Lodinge are a long way from each other,” he said softly. “But I seem to remember that Holger Eriksson was selling Chevrolets back then. Is it possible that Eriksson made the long drive to Svenstavik, and that Krista Haberman went back with him?”
He turned to Svedberg.
“Did Eriksson own his farm then?”
Svedberg nodded.
Wallander looked around the room.
“Eriksson was impaled in a pungee pit,” he said. “If the murderer takes the lives of his or her victims in a way that mirrors crimes that were committed earlier, then I think we can imagine our way to a very unpleasant conclusion.”
He wished he was mistaken, but he doubted that he was.
“I think we have to start searching Eriksson’s fields,” he said. “Krista Haberman might be buried there somewhere.”
CHAPTER 32
They went out to the farm in the early dawn. Wallander took Nyberg, Hamren and Hansson along with him. They all drove separately, Wallander in his own car, which was finally back from Almhult. They parked at the entrance to the empty house, which stood like a deserted ship out there in the fog.
On that particular morning, Thursday, 20 October, the fog was thick. It had come in from the sea and now lay motionless over the landscape. They had agreed to meet at 6.30 a.m., but they were all late because visibility was practically nil. Wallander was the last to arrive. When he got out of his car it occurred to him that it looked like a hunting club had gathered. The only thing missing was their guns. He was dreading the task that awaited them. Somewhere on Eriksson’s property a murdered woman might lie buried. Whatever they found — if they found anything at all — would be skeletal remains. Nothing else, 27 years was a long time.
Shivering, they greeted each other. Hansson had brought a surveyor’s map of the farm and the adjacent fields. Wallander wondered fleetingly what the Cultural Association of Lund would think if they really did find the remains of a body. It would probably increase the number of visitors to the farm, he thought gloomily. There were few tourist attractions that could compete with the scene of a crime.
They spread the map out on the bonnet of Nyberg’s car and gathered around it.
“In 1967 the fields were laid out differently,” Hansson said, pointing. “Eriksson didn’t buy all the fields to the south until the mid-1970s.”
This reduced the relevant area of land by a third, but what remained was still large. They would never be able to dig up the whole area.
“The fog is making things harder for us,” Wallander said. “I thought we could try to get an overview of the terrain. It seems to me that it should be possible to eliminate certain areas. I assume that a person would choose the spot carefully for burying someone he killed.”
“You’d probably pick the spot where you thought it least likely anyone would look,” Nyberg said. “A study was done on it. In the US, of course. But it sounds reasonable.”
“It’s a big area,” Hansson said.
“That’s why we have to make it smaller,” Wallander said. “Nyberg is right. He wouldn’t bury her just anywhere. I imagine, for instance, that you wouldn’t want a body lying in the ground right outside your front door. Unless you’re completely insane, and there’s nothing to indicate that Eriksson was.”
“Besides, there are cobblestones there,” Hansson said. “I think we can eliminate the courtyard.”
They went up to the farmhouse. Wallander wondered whether they should return to Ystad and come back when the fog was gone. Since there was no wind, it could last all day. In the end he decided that they should spend a while trying to gain an overview.
They walked over to the large garden that lay behind the house. The soft ground was covered with fallen, rotten apples. A magpie fluttered up from a tree. They stopped and looked around. Not here either, Wallander thought. A man who murders someone in the city and has only his garden might bury the body there, but not a man who lives out in the country.
He told the others what he was thinking. No-one had any objections.
They started walking out to the fields. The fog was still thick. Hares popped up against all the whiteness and then vanished. They headed towards the northern border of the property.
“A dog wouldn’t be able to find anything, I guess?” Hamren asked.
“Not after 27 years,” Nyberg replied.
The mud was sticking to their gumboots. They tried to balance their way along the narrow ridges of mown grass that formed the boundary of Eriksson’s property. A rusty hoe stood mired in the earth. It wasn’t just their task that bothered Wallander. The fog and the damp grey earth also oppressed him. He was fond of the landscape of Skane, where he had been born and raised, but he could do without the autumn. At least on days like this.
They reached a pond that lay in a hollow. Hansson pointed on the map to where they were. They looked at the pond. It was about 100 metres wide.
“This is full of water all year round,” Nyberg said. “At the middle it’s probably between two and three metres deep.”
“It’s a possibility, of course,” Wallander said. “He could have sunk the body with weights.”
“Or a sack,” Hansson said.
Wallander nodded. There was the mirror image again. But he wasn’t sure
.
“A body can float to the surface. Would Eriksson choose to sink a corpse in a pond when he has thousands of square metres of land to dig a grave in?”
“Who actually worked all this land?” Hansson asked. “Surely not Eriksson. He didn’t have it leased out. But this land is well tended.” Hansson had grown up on a farm outside of Ystad and knew what he was talking about.
“That’s an important question,” Wallander said. “We have to find out.”
“It might also give us the answer to another question,” Hamren said. “Whether any changes have occurred on the land. If you dig in one place, a mound appears somewhere else. I’m not thinking about a grave. But a ditch, for example. Or something else.”
“We’re talking about something that happened almost 30 years ago,” Nyberg said. “Who would remember that far back?”
“It happens,” Wallander said. “But of course we’ll have to look into it. So who worked Holger Eriksson’s land?”
“There could well have been more than one person,” Hansson said.
“Then we’ll talk to all of them,” Wallander replied. “If we can find them. If they’re still alive.”
They moved on. Wallander remembered that he had seen several old aerial photographs of the farm inside the house. He asked Hansson to call the Cultural Association in Lund and get someone to bring the keys out.
“It’s unlikely anyone would be there this early in the morning.”
“Call Hoglund,” Wallander said. “Ask her to contact the lawyer who was the executor of Eriksson’s will. He might still have a set of keys.”
“Lawyers might be morning people,” Hansson said doubtfully as he dialled the number.
“I want to see those aerial shots,” Wallander said. “As soon as possible.”
They kept walking while Hansson talked to Hoglund. The field now sloped downwards. The fog was still just as thick. In the distance they heard a tractor engine dying away. Hansson’s phone rang. Hoglund had spoken to the lawyer. He had turned in his keys. She was trying to get hold of someone in Lund who could help. She would get back to them.
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