One Step Behind (1997) kw-7

by Henning Mankell

  Maybe even two or three by now. Someone had moved them. He walked into the kitchen and saw that the Wednesday and Thursday editions lay on the counter. Friday's edition lay on the kitchen table.

  Wallander called Nyberg's mobile phone. He answered right away. Wallander started by telling him about the cement mixer. Nyberg sounded doubtful.

  "Sound travels inwards," he said. "People on the street would be unable to hear shots from inside if the cement mixer had been on, but inside the building it would be a different story. Sound travels differently in buildings. I read about it somewhere."

  "Maybe we should do some test shots," Wallander said. "With and without the cement mixer on and without telling the neighbours about it beforehand."

  Nyberg agreed.

  "But what I'm really calling about is the paper," Wallander said. "Ystad Allehanda!'

  "I put it on the kitchen table," Nyberg said. "But someone else is responsible for the ones lying on the counter."

  "We should test them for prints," Wallander said. "We don't know who might have put them there."

  Nyberg was silent for a moment. "You're right," he said. "How the hell could I have missed it?"

  "I won't touch them," Wallander told him.

  "How long are you going to be there?"

  "Two or three hours at least."

  "I'll come down."

  Wallander pulled out one of the kitchen drawers and found a couple of pens and a pad of paper where he remembered seeing them before. He wrote down Nils Linnman's and Robert Tarnberg's names and noted that someone should talk to the newspaper delivery person. Then he returned to the hall. Traces and shadows, Rydberg had told him. He held his breath while he let his gaze travel over the room. The leather coat Svedberg wore both winter and summer hung by the door. Wallander searched the pockets and found his wallet.

  Nyberg has been sloppy, he thought.

  He returned with it to the kitchen and emptied the contents onto the table. There was 847 kronor, a cash card, a card for petrol, and some personal identification cards. Detective Inspector Svedberg, he read. He compared the police ID and the driver's licence. The photo on the driver's licence was the older. Svedberg stared glumly into the lens. It looked like it had been taken in the summertime; the top of Svedberg's head was sunburned.

  Louise should have told you to wear a hat, Wallander thought. Louise. Only two people claimed she existed. Svedberg and his cousin, the monster maker. But he had never seen her, only strands of her hair. Wallander made a face. It didn't make sense.

  He picked up the phone and called Ylva Brink at the hospital. He was told she would be in that evening. Wallander looked up her home phone number and got her machine.

  He went back to the contents of the wallet. The photo on the police ID was recent. Svedberg's face was a little fuller but just as glum. Wallander looked through the rest of the contents and found some stamps. That was all. He got out a plastic bag and dumped everything into it. Then he went out into the hall for the third time. Peel everything away, find the traces, Rydberg had said.

  Wallander went into the bathroom and relieved himself. He thought about what Sture Bjorklund had said about the different coloured hairs. The only thing that Wallander knew about the woman in Svedberg's life was that she dyed her hair. He went out into the living room and stood beside the overturned chair. Then he changed his mind. You're proceeding too quickly, Rydberg would have told him. Traces of a crime need to be coaxed out, not rushed.

  He returned to the kitchen and called Ylva Brink again. This time she answered.

  "I hope I'm not disturbing you," he said. "I know you work all night."

  "I can't sleep anyway," she said.

  "A lot of questions have come up and I need to ask you some of them right away."

  Wallander told her about his talk with Sture Bjorklund and Bjorklund's claim that Svedberg had a woman called Louise.

  "He never told me any of this," she said when Wallander had finished.

  He sensed that the information disturbed her.

  "Who never told you? Kalle or Sture?"

  "Neither one."

  "Let's start with Sture. What kind of relationship do you two have? Are you surprised that he never told you about this?"

  "I just can't believe it."

  "But why would he lie?"

  "I don't know."

  Wallander realised that the conversation needed to be continued in person. He looked at the time. It was 5.40 p.m. He needed another hour in the flat.

  "It's probably best if we meet," he suggested. "I'm free after 7 p.m. tonight."

  "How about at the station? That's close to the hospital, and I could come by on my way to work."

  Wallander hung up and returned to the living room. He approached the broken and overturned chair, looked around the room, trying to imagine the actions that had taken place. Svedberg had been shot straight on. Nyberg had mentioned the possibility that the buckshot had entered slightly from below, suggesting that the killer held the shotgun at hip or chest level. The bloodstain on the wall confirmed this upward trajectory. Svedberg must have then fallen to the left, most probably taking the chair down with him, at which point one of its arms broke. But had he been about to sit down, or get up?

  Wallander realised the importance of this at once. If Svedberg had been sitting in the chair he must have known his killer. If a burglar had surprised him, he would hardly have sat down or remained sitting.

  Wallander went over to the spot where the shotgun had been found. He turned around and looked at the room from his new vantage point. This may not have been the point from which the shot was fired, but it would have been close. He kept still and tried to coax the shadows from their hiding places. The feeling that something about the case was very strange grew stronger. Had Svedberg come in from the hall and surprised a burglar? If this was the case, he would have been in the way. This would also have been true if Svedberg had entered from the bedroom. It was reasonable to assume that a burglar would not have had the shotgun at the ready. Svedberg would no doubt have tried to attack him. He may have been afraid of the dark, but he was certainly not afraid to take action when necessary.

  The cement mixer was suddenly turned off. Wallander listened. The sound of traffic was not very loud.

  There is another alternative, he thought. The person who entered the flat was someone Svedberg knew. He knew him so well that it would not have worried him to see the shotgun. Then something happened, Svedberg was killed, and the unknown assailant turned the flat inside out looking for something.

  Perhaps he simply tried to make it look like a burglary. Wallander thought about the telescope again. It was missing, but who could say if anything else was gone? Maybe Ylva Brink would know the answer.

  Wallander went up to the window and looked down at the street. Nils Linnman was locking up a work shed. Robert Tarnberg must already have gone. He had heard the roar of a motorbike being started up a couple of minutes ago.

  The doorbell rang. Wallander jumped. He opened the door, and Ann-Britt Hoglund came in.

  "The construction workers have gone home," Wallander said. "You're too late."

  "I showed them Svedberg's picture," she said. "No one saw him, or at least they don't remember it."

  They sat down in the kitchen and Wallander told her about his meeting with Sture Bjorklund. She listened attentively.

  "If he's right then that changes our picture of Svedberg quite dramatically," she said when Wallander had finished.

  "Why did he keep her a secret for so long?" Wallander asked.

  "Maybe she was married."

  "An illicit affair? Do you think they met only at Bjorklund's house? That doesn't seem feasible. They only had access to it a couple of times a year. She can't have come to this flat without anyone ever seeing her."

  "Whatever the case, we have to find her," Hoglund answered.

  "There's something else I've been thinking about," Wallander said slowly. "If he kept her a secret, w
hat else might he have hidden from us?"

  He could see she was following his train of thought.

  "You don't think it's a burglary."

  "I doubt it. A telescope is missing, and Ylva Brink may be able to tell us if anything else is gone, but it doesn't add up. There's no coherence to the scene of the crime."

  "We've checked his bank accounts," Hoglund said. "At least the ones we've managed to find. There's nothing of note, no outlandish deposits or debts. He has a loan of 25,000 kronor for his car. The bank said that Svedberg always managed his affairs conscientiously."

  "One shouldn't speak ill of the dead," Wallander said, "but to tell the truth I thought he was downright miserly."

  "How do you mean?"

  "We'd always share the tab when we went out, but I'd always leave the tip."

  Hoglund slowly shook her head. "It's funny how differently we can see people. I never thought of him like that."

  Wallander told her about the cement mixer. He had just finished when they both heard a key turning in the lock. They were both struck by the same fleeting sense of dread until they heard Nyberg clearing his throat.

  "Those damn newspapers," he said. "I don't know how I could have overlooked them."

  He put them into a plastic bag and sealed it.

  "When can we find out about prints?" Wallander asked.

  "Monday at the earliest."

  "What about the autopsy report?"

  "Hansson's in charge," Hoglund said. "But it should be done pretty quickly."

  Wallander asked Nyberg to sit down, then recounted the story of Louise one more time.

  "That sounds completely implausible," Nyberg said. "Was there a more confirmed bachelor than Svedberg? What about his lone sauna stints on Friday evenings?"

  "It's even more implausible that a professor at Copenhagen University is lying to us," Wallander said. "We have to assume he's telling the truth."

  "What if Svedberg simply invented her? If I understood you correctly, no one actually saw her."

  Wallander thought about this. Could Louise be a figment of Svedberg's imagination?

  "What about the hairs in Bjorklund's bathtub? They're clearly not an invention."

  "Why would anyone invent a story like that about himself?" Nyberg asked.

  "Because he's lonely," Hoglund answered. "People can go to great lengths to invent the companionship missing from their lives."

  "Have you found any hairs in the bathroom?" Wallander asked.

  "No," Nyberg answered. "But I'll go and have another look."

  Wallander got up. "Come with me for a minute," he said.

  They went into the living room and Wallander walked them through the various thoughts that had come to him.

  "I'm trying to come up with a provisional starting point for this case," he said. "If this is a burglary, there are many issues that need clearing up. How did the killer enter? Why was he carrying a shotgun? At what point did Svedberg appear? What besides the telescope has been stolen? And why was Svedberg shot? There's no sign of a struggle. There's a mess in almost every room, but I doubt they chased each other around the flat. I can't get the various pieces to fit together, and so I ask myself, what happens if we push the burglary hypothesis aside for a moment? What do we see then? Is it a matter of revenge? Insanity? Since there's a woman in the picture, we can entertain the idea of jealousy. But would a woman shoot Svedberg in the face? I doubt it. What other possibilities are there?"

  No one spoke. This silence confirmed Wallander's impression that there was no obvious logic to this case, no simple way to categorise it as a burglary, crime of passion, or something else. There was no apparent reason for Svedberg's murder.

  "Can I leave now?" Nyberg said finally. "I still have some reports to finish tonight."

  "We're going to have another meeting tomorrow morning."

  "What time?"

  "We'll aim for 9 a.m."

  Nyberg left the other two in the living room.

  "I've tried to see an unfolding drama," Wallander said. "What do you see?"

  He knew that Hoglund could be sharp-sighted, and there was nothing wrong with her analytical skills.

  "What if we start with the state of the flat?"

  "Yes, what then?"

  "There are three possible explanations for the mess. A nervous or hurried burglar, a person looking for something, which of course could also apply to a burglar although he wouldn't know what he was looking for. The third possibility is a person bent on destruction for its own sake. Vandalism."

  Wallander followed her train of thought closely.

  "There's a fourth possibility," he said. "A person who acts out of uncontrollable rage."

  They looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking. Occasionally Svedberg would become so angry that he lost all self-control. His rage seemed to come out of the blue. Once he had almost destroyed his office.

  "Svedberg could have done this himself," Wallander said. "It's not totally out of the realm of possibility. We know it's happened before. It leads us to a very important question."

  "Why?"

  "Exactly. Why?"

  "I was there when Svedberg trashed his office, but I never understood why he did it," Hoglund said.

  "It was when Bjork was chief of police. He accused Svedberg of stealing confiscated material."

  "What kind of material?"

  "Some valuable Lithuanian icons, among other things," Wallander answered. "It was loot from a big racketeering case."

  "So Svedberg was accused of stealing?"

  "No - incompetence and sloppy police work. But, of course, the suspicion was implicit."

  "What came of it?"

  "Svedberg felt humiliated and smashed everything in his office."

  "Did the icons ever turn up?" she asked.

  "No, but no one was ever able to prove anything. The racketeers were prosecuted successfully anyway."

  "But Svedberg felt humiliated?"

  "Yes."

  "Unfortunately it doesn't help us. Svedberg trashes his own flat, but then what?"

  "We don't know," Wallander said.

  They left the living room.

  "Did you ever hear of Svedberg receiving threats?" Wallander asked her when they had reached the hall.

  "No."

  "Has anyone else received any?"

  "You know how it is - strange letters and calls are par for the course," she said. "But naturally there would be a record of it."

  "Why don't you go through everything that's come in lately," Wallander said. "I'd also like you to talk to whoever delivers the newspapers."

  Hoglund wrote his requests in her notebook. Wallander opened the front door.

  "At least it wasn't Svedberg's gun," she said. "He had no registered weapons."

  "That's good to know."

  She started walking down the stairs and Wallander returned to the kitchen. He drank a glass of water and thought that he should eat something soon. He was tired. He sat down with his head against the wall and fell asleep.

  He was surrounded by snowy mountains that sparkled in the strong sun. His skis looked like the ones he had seen down in Svedberg's basement. He was going faster and faster and he was heading straight down towards a thick layer of fog. Suddenly a ravine opened up in front of him.

  He woke up with a start. He looked at the kitchen clock and saw that he had been asleep for eleven minutes.

  He sat still and listened to the silence. Then the phone rang. It was Martinsson.

  "I thought that's where you were."

  "Has anything happened?"

  "Eva Hillstrom has been to see me again."

  "What did she want?"

  "She said she was going to go to the papers if we don't do something."

  Wallander thought for a moment before answering. "I think I may have been misguided this morning," he said. "I'd been meaning to talk about it tomorrow morning anyway."

  "What about?"

  "Naturally our
first priority is Svedberg. But we can't shelve the case of the missing young people. Somehow we have to find the time to do both."

  "How are we going to do that?"

  "I don't know. But it's not the first time we've had so much work to do."

  "I promised Mrs Hillstrom I would call her after speaking with you."

  "Good. Try to calm her down. We're going to move on it."

  "Are you coming by?"

  "I'm on my way. I'm going to see Ylva Brink."

  "Do you think we'll solve Svedberg's murder?"

  Wallander sensed Martinsson's concern.

  "Yes," he said. "Of course we will. But I have a feeling it'll be complicated."

  He hung up. Some pigeons flew by the window and a thought suddenly came to Wallander.

  Hoglund had said that the murder weapon was not registered in Svedberg's name. The reasonable conclusion to make was that Svedberg had no weapons. But reality was rarely reasonable. Weren't there countless unregistered guns floating around Swedish society? It was a constant source of concern for the police. Couldn't a police officer in fact also possibly be in possession of an unregistered weapon? What would that mean? What if the murder weapon did belong to Svedberg? Wallander felt his sense of urgency return. He got up quickly and left the flat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Istvan Kecskemeti had come to Sweden exactly 40 years earlier, part of that stream of Hungarian immigrants who were forced to leave their country after the failed revolution. He had been 14 years old when he came to Sweden with his parents and his three younger siblings. His father was an engineer who at the end of the 1920s had visited the Separator factories outside of Stockholm. That's where he was hoping to find work. But they never got further than Trelleborg. On the way down the steep stairs of the ferry terminal, he suffered a stroke. His second encounter with Swedish soil was when his body smacked into the wet asphalt. He was buried in the graveyard in Trelleborg, the family stayed in Skane, and now Istvan was 54 years old. He had long been the owner and manager of one of the many pizzerias dotting the length of Ystad's Hamngatan.