Sidetracked kw-5

by Henning Mankell

  Magnusson was a good many years older than Wallander. He had a mane of grey hair falling over his dirty collar. His face was red and swollen, but his eyes were curiously clear. No-one doubted Magnusson’s intelligence. Rumour had it that he once had a collection of poems accepted by Bonniers, but had withdrawn it at the last minute and repaid the small advance.

  “This is unexpected,” said Magnusson. “Have a seat. What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” said Wallander, moving a pile of newspapers and making himself comfortable on a sofa.

  Magnusson casually took a swig from the bottle of vodka and sat down opposite Wallander. He had turned down the piano music.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Wallander. “I’m trying to remember when it was.”

  “At the state off licence,” Magnusson replied quickly. “Almost exactly five years ago. You were buying wine and I was buying everything else.”

  Wallander nodded. He remembered now.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your memory,” he said.

  “I haven’t ruined that yet,” said Magnusson. “I’m saving it for last.”

  “Have you ever considered quitting?”

  “Every day. But I doubt you came here to talk me into going on the wagon.”

  “You’ve probably read that Gustaf Wetterstedt was murdered, haven’t you?”

  “I saw it on the TV.”

  “I seem to remember that you told me something about him once. About the scandals that were hushed up.”

  “And that was the biggest scandal of them all,” Magnusson interrupted him.

  “I’m trying to get a fix on what sort of man he was,” Wallander went on. “I hoped you might be able to help me.”

  “The question is whether you want to hear the unsubstantiated rumours or whether you want to know the truth,” said Magnusson. “I’m not sure I can tell them apart.”

  “Rumours don’t usually get started without reason,” said Wallander.

  Magnusson pushed away the vodka bottle as though it was too close to him.

  “I started as a 15-year-old trainee at one of the Stockholm news-papers,” he said. “That was in the spring of 1955. There was an old night editor there named Ture Svanberg. He was almost as big a drunk as I am now. But he was meticulous at his work. And he was a genius at writing headlines that sold papers. He wouldn’t stand for anything sloppily written. Once he flew into such a rage over a story that he tore up the copy and ate the pieces, chewed the paper and swallowed it. Then he said: ‘This isn’t coming out as anything but shit.’ It was Svanberg who taught me to be a journalist. He used to say that there were two kinds of reporters. ‘The first kind digs in the ground for the truth. He stands down in the hole shovelling out dirt. But up on top there’s another man, shovelling the dirt back in. There’s always a duel going on between these two. The fourth estate’s eternal test of strength for dominance. Some journalists want to expose and reveal things, others run errands for those in power and help conceal what’s really happening.’

  “And that’s how it really was. I learned fast, even though I was only 15. Men in power always ally themselves with symbolic cleaning companies and undertakers. There are plenty of journalists who won’t hesitate to sell their souls to run errands for those men. To shovel the dirt back into the hole. Paste over the scandals. Pile on the semblance of truth, maintain the illusion of the squeaky-clean society.”

  With a grimace he reached for the bottle again and took a swig. Wallander saw that he’d put on weight around the middle.

  “Wetterstedt,” Magnusson said. “So what was it that actually happened?” He fished a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “Whores and art,” he said. “For years it was common knowledge that the good Gustaf had a girl delivered to the block of flats in Vasastan every week, where he kept a small hideaway his wife didn’t know about. He had a right-hand man who took care of the whole thing. The rumour was that this man was hooked on morphine, supplied by Wetterstedt. He had a lot of doctor friends. The fact that he went to bed with whores wasn’t something the papers bothered with. He was neither the first nor the last Swedish minister to do that. Sometimes I wonder whether we’re talking about the rule or the exception. But one day it went too far. One of the hookers got her courage up and reported him to the police for assault.”

  “When was that?” Wallander interrupted.

  “Mid-60s. Her client said he’d beaten her with a leather belt and cut the soles of her feet with a razor. It was probably the stuff with the razor and her feet that made the difference. Perversion was newsworthy. The only problem was that the police had lodged a complaint against the highest defender of Swedish law and order next to the king. So the whole thing was hushed up, and the police report disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “It literally went up in smoke.”

  “But the girl who reported him? What happened to her?”

  “Overnight she became the proprietor of a lucrative boutique in Vasteras.”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I knew a journalist called Sten Lundberg. He dug around in the whole mess. But when the rumours started that he was about to snoop his way to the truth, he was frozen out, blacklisted.”

  “And he accepted it?”

  “He had no choice. Unfortunately he had a weakness that couldn’t be covered up. He gambled. Had huge debts. There was a rumour that those gambling debts suddenly went poof. The same way the hooker’s assault report did. So everything was back to square one. And Wetterstedt went on sending his morphine addict out after girls.”

  “You said there was one more thing,” Wallander said.

  “There was a story that he was mixed up in some of those art thefts carried out during his term as minister of justice. Paintings that were never recovered, and which now hang on the walls of collectors who will never show them to the public. The police arrested a fence once, a middleman. Unintentionally, I’m afraid. The fence swore that Wetterstedt was involved. But it couldn’t be proved. It was buried. There were more people filling up the hole than there were people standing down in it and tossing the dirt out.”

  “Not a pretty picture,” said Wallander.

  “Remember what I asked? Do you want the truth or the rumours? Because the rumour about Wetterstedt was that he was a talented politician, a loyal party member, an amiable human being. Educated and competent. That’s how his obituaries will read. As long as none of the girls he whipped talk.”

  “Why did he leave office?” asked Wallander.

  “I don’t think he got along so well with some of the younger ministers. Especially the women. There was a big shift between the generations in those days. I think he realised that his time was over. Mine was too. I quit being a journalist. After he came to Ystad I never wasted a thought on him. Until now.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to kill him, so many years later?”

  Magnusson shrugged.

  “That’s impossible to answer.”

  Wallander had just one question left.

  “Have you ever heard of a murder in this country where the victim was scalped?”

  Magnusson’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Wallander with a sudden, alert interest.

  “Was he scalped? They didn’t say that on TV. They would have, if they knew about it.”

  “Just between the two of us,” Wallander said, looking at Magnusson, who nodded.

  “We didn’t want to release it just yet,” he went on. “We can always say we can’t reveal it ‘for investigative reasons’. The excuse the police have for presenting half-truths. But this time it’s actually true.”

  “I believe you,” said Magnusson. “Or I don’t believe you. It doesn’t really matter, since I’m no longer a journalist. But I can’t recall a murderer who scalped people. That would have made a great headline. Ture Svanber
g would have loved it. Can you avoid leaks?”

  “I don’t know,” Wallander answered frankly. “I’ve had a number of bad experiences over the years.”

  “I won’t sell the story,” said Magnusson.

  Then he accompanied Wallander to the door.

  “How the hell can you stand being a policeman?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Wallander. “I’ll let you know when I work it out.”

  Wallander drove back to Wetterstedt’s house. The wind was gusting up to gale force. Some of Nyberg’s men were taking fingerprints upstairs. Looking out of the balcony window, he saw Nyberg perched on a wobbly ladder leaning against the light pole by the garden gate. He was clinging to the pole, so the wind wouldn’t blow the ladder over. Wallander went to help him, but saw Nyberg begin to climb down. They met in the hall.

  “That could have waited,” said Wallander. “You might have been blown off the ladder.”

  “If I fell off I might have hurt myself,” Nyberg said sullenly. “And of course checking the light could have waited, but it might have been forgotten. Since you were the one who wondered about it, and I have a certain respect for your ability to do your job, I decided to look at the light. I can assure you that it was only because you were the one who asked me.”

  Wallander was surprised, but he tried not to show it.

  “What did you find?” he asked instead.

  “The bulb wasn’t burnt out,” said Nyberg. “It was unscrewed.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Wallander said, and went into the living-room to call Sara Bjorklund. She answered.

  “Excuse me for disturbing you so late at night,” he began. “But I have an urgent question. Who changed the light bulbs in Wetterstedt’s house?”

  “He did that himself.”

  “Outside also?”

  “I think so. He did all of his own gardening, and I think I was the only other person who set foot inside his house.”

  Except for whoever was in the black car, thought Wallander.

  “There’s a light by the garden gate,” he said. “Was it usually turned on?”

  “In the winter, when it was dark, he always kept it lit.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Wallander. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Can you manage to climb up the ladder one more time?” he asked Nyberg when he came back to the hall. “I’d like you to screw in a new bulb.”

  “The spare bulbs are in the room next to the garage,” said Nyberg and started to pull on his boots.

  They went back out into the storm. Wallander held the ladder while Nyberg climbed up and screwed in the bulb. It went on at once. Nyberg climbed back down the ladder. They walked out onto the beach.

  “There’s a big difference,” said Wallander. “Now it’s light all the way down to the water.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Nyberg.

  “I think the place where he was murdered is somewhere within this circle of light,” said Wallander. “If we’re lucky we can get fingerprints from the light fixture.”

  “So you think the murderer planned the whole thing? Unscrewed the bulb because it was too bright?”

  “Yes,” said Wallander, “that’s pretty much what I’m thinking.”

  Nyberg went back into the garden with the ladder. Wallander stayed behind, the rain pelting against his face.

  The cordons were still there. A police car was parked just above the dunes. Except for a man on a moped there were no onlookers left.

  Wallander turned around and went back inside the house.

  CHAPTER 10

  He stepped into the basement just after 7 a.m. The floor was cool under his bare feet. He stood still and listened. Then he closed the door behind him and locked it. He squatted to inspect the thin layer of flour he had dusted over the floor the last time he was here. No-one had intruded into his world. There were no footprints. Then he checked the traps. He had been lucky. He had a catch in all four cages. One of the cages held the biggest rat he had ever seen.

  Once, towards the end of his life, Geronimo told the story of the Pawnee warrior he had vanquished in his youth. His name was Bear with Six Claws, since he had six fingers on his left hand. That had been his first enemy. Geronimo came close to dying that time, even though he was very young. He cut off his enemy’s sixth finger and left it in the sun to dry. Then he carried it in a little leather pouch on his belt for many years.

  He decided to try out one of his axes on the big rat. On the small ones he would test the effect of the can of mace.

  But that would be much later. First he had to undergo the big transformation. He sat down before the mirrors, adjusted the light so that there was no glare, and then gazed at his face. He had made a small cut on his left cheek. The wound had already healed. It was the first step in his final transformation.

  The blow had been perfect. It had been like chopping down a tree when he cut into the spine of the first monster. He had heard the jubilation of the spirit world from within him. He had flopped the monster over on his back and cut off his scalp, without hesitation. Now it lay where it belonged, buried in the earth, with one tuft of hair sticking up from the ground.

  Soon another scalp would join it. He looked at his face and considered whether he ought to make the second cut next to the first one. Or should the knife consecrate the other cheek? Really it made no difference. When he was finished, his face would be covered with cuts.

  Carefully he began to prepare himself. From his backpack he pulled out his weapons, paints and brushes. Last of all he took out the red book in which the Revelations and the Mission were written. He set it down on the table between himself and the mirrors.

  Last night he had buried the first scalp. There was a guard by the hospital grounds. But he knew where the fence had come down. The secure wing, where there were bars on the windows and doors, stood apart on the outskirts of the large grounds. When he had visited his sister he had established which window was hers. No light shone from it. A faint gleam from the hall light was all that escaped from the menacing building. He had buried the scalp and whispered to his sister that he had taken the first step. He would destroy the monsters, one by one. Then she would come out into the world again.

  He pulled off his shirt. It was summer, but he shivered in the cool of the basement. He opened the red book and turned past what was written about the man named Wetterstedt, who had ceased to exist. On page 7 the second scalp was described. He read what his sister had written and decided that this time he would use the smallest axe.

  He closed the book and looked at his face in the mirror. It was the same shape as his mother’s, but he had his father’s eyes. They were set deep, like two retracted cannon muzzles. Because of these eyes, he might have regretted that his father would have to be sacrificed too. But it was only a small doubt, one that he could easily conquer. Those eyes were his first childhood memory. They had stared at him, they had threatened him, and ever since then he could see his father only as a pair of enormous eyes with arms and legs and a bellowing voice.

  He wiped his face with a towel. Then he dipped one of the wide brushes into the black paint and drew the first line across his brow, precisely where the knife had cut open the skin on Wetterstedt’s forehead.

  He had spent many hours outside the police cordon. It was exciting to see all these policemen expending their energy trying to find out what happened and who had killed the man lying under the boat. On several occasions he had felt a compulsion to call out that he was the one.

  It was a weakness that he had still not completely mastered. What he was doing, the mission he had undertaken from his sister’s book of revelations, was for her sake alone, not his. He must conquer this urge.

  He drew the second line across his face. The transformation had barely begun, but he could feel his external identity starting to leave him.

  He didn’t know why he had been named Stefan. On one occasion, when his mother had been more or le
ss sober, he had asked her. Why Stefan? Why that name and not something else? Her reply had been very vague. It’s a fine name, she said. He remembered that. A fine name. A name that was popular. He would be spared from having a name that was different. He still remembered how upset he had been. He left her lying there on the sofa in their living-room, stormed from the house and rode his bike down to the sea. Walking along the beach, he chose himself a different name. He chose Hoover. After the head of the F.B.I. He had read a book about him. It was rumoured that Hoover had a drop of American Indian blood in his veins. He wondered whether there was some in his own blood. His grandfather had told him that many of their relatives had emigrated to America a long time ago. Maybe one of them had taken up with an American Indian. Even if the blood didn’t run through his own veins, it might be in the family.

  It wasn’t until his sister had been locked up in the hospital that he decided to merge Geronimo and Hoover. He had remembered how his grandfather had shown him how to melt pewter and pour it into plaster moulds to make miniature soldiers. He had found the moulds and the pewter ladle when his grandfather died. He had changed the mould so that the molten pewter would make a figure that was both a policeman and an Indian. Late one evening when everyone was asleep and his father was in jail, so he wouldn’t come storming into the flat, he locked himself in the kitchen and carried out the great ceremony. By melting Hoover and Geronimo together he created his own new identity. He was a feared policeman with the courage of an American Indian warrior. He would be indestructible. Nothing would prevent him from seeking vengeance.

  He continued drawing the curved black lines above his eyes. They made his eyes appear to sink even deeper into their sockets, where they lurked like beasts of prey. Two predators, watching. Methodically he rehearsed what awaited him. It was Midsummer Eve. It was rainy and windy, which would make the task more difficult, but it wouldn’t stop him. He would have to dress warmly before the trip to Bjaresjo. He didn’t know whether the party he was going to visit had been moved indoors because of the rain, but he would trust in his ability to wait. This was a virtue Hoover had always preached to his recruits. Just like Geronimo. There would always be a moment when the enemy’s alertness flagged. That’s when he had to strike, even if the party was moved indoors. Sooner or later the man he sought would have to leave the house. Then it would be time.