“I already have. It wasn’t assault.”
Wallander hung up and unplugged the phone. He could already see the headlines: Defensive silence from police. Officer hangs up on reporter. He sank back onto the pillows. The streetlamp outside his window was swaying in the wind. The light flickered across the wall.
He had been dreaming something when the phone rang. The images slowly returned from his subconscious.
They were images from last fall, when he had taken a trip to the Östergötland archipelago. He had been invited to stay with the postman who delivered mail out in the islands. They had met during one of the worst cases Wallander had ever been involved in. He had accepted the invitation somewhat hesitantly. One early morning, the postman took him to explore one of the remote little islands on the edge of the archipelago, where craggy rocks poked out of the sea like fossilized creatures from the ice age. As he had wandered around the small island on his own, he had experienced a remarkable feeling of clarity. He had often returned to this moment in his thoughts since that time. He had often longed to experience the feeling again.
The dream is trying to tell me something, he thought. I just don’t know what.
He stayed in bed until a quarter to six, when he got up and plugged the phone back in. While he drank a cup of coffee he tried to go through everything that had happened in his head, trying to make sense of the new connection drawn between Sonja Hökberg’s death and the man whose apartment he had searched the night before.
At seven o’clock he gave up trying to make sense of it and went in to the station. It was colder than he had been expecting. He hadn’t yet become accustomed to the fact that it was fall. He wished he had put on a warmer sweater. As he walked, he felt his left foot getting wet. When he stopped and looked at the shoe, he discovered a tear in the sole. It made him furious. He had to restrain himself from tearing off both of his shoes and continuing in bare feet.
When he came into the reception area, he asked Irene who else was already in. She said that both Martinsson and Hansson had arrived. Wallander asked her to send them in to see him. Then he changed his mind and decided to meet them in one of the conference rooms. He asked her to make sure Höglund joined them when she came in.
Martinsson and Hansson entered the room at the same time.
“How did the lecture go?” Hansson asked.
“Let’s not waste our time on that,” Wallander said irritably, then felt guilty that he had taken his bad mood out on Hansson.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Who isn’t?” Hansson said.
Höglund opened the door and stepped in.
“That’s some wind,” she said as she took off her jacket.
“It’s fall,” Wallander said. “All right, let’s start. Something happened last night that dramatically alters the investigation.”
He nodded to Martinsson, who told the others about the disappearance of Tynnes Falk’s body.
“At least this is something new,” Hansson said when Martinsson had finished. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a stolen body before. I know there was that rubber raft. But not a dead body.”
Wallander made a face. He remembered the rubber raft that had floated ashore on Mossby beach after it had mysteriously and by stillunclear means disappeared from the police station.
Höglund looked at him.
“So are we to accept a connection between the man who died near the cash machine and Lundberg’s murder? That seems ludicrous.”
“Yes,” Wallander said. “But I don’t think we can avoid working with this assumption for now. I think we should also be prepared for the fact that this will be a difficult case. We thought we were dealing with an unusually brutal but clear-cut case of murder. We then saw this first scenario dissolve when Sonja Hökberg escaped and was later found dead at the power substation. We were aware of the fact that a man had been found dead by a cash machine, but we had already declared that case closed from lack of evidence that any crime had been committed. This conclusion still cannot be ruled out. Then the body disappears, and someone puts an electrical relay in its place.”
Wallander interrupted himself and thought back to the questions he had regarding Sonja’s and Eva’s visit to the restaurant and the identity of the Asian man. Now he saw that they should actually start from a totally different angle.
“Someone breaks into a morgue and steals a dead body. We can’t be sure of the reasons, but it seems probable that someone wants to conceal something. At the same time the relay is left as a kind of message. It wasn’t left by accident. The person who removed the body wanted us to find it.”
“Which can only mean one thing,” Höglund said.
Wallander nodded.
“That someone wants us to see a connection between Sonja Hökberg and Tynnes Falk.”
“Couldn’t it be a red herring?” Hansson objected. “Someone who’s read about how the girl was burned to death?”
“Our colleagues in Malmö have assured me the relay is large and heavy,” Martinsson said. “It’s hardly the kind of thing you carry around with you in a briefcase.”
“We have to proceed step by step,” Wallander said. “Nyberg will examine the relay and determine whether or not it originates from our substation. If it does, then we’re home free.”
“Not necessarily,” Höglund said. “It could still be a symbolic act.”
Wallander shook his head.
“I just don’t get that feeling in this case.”
Martinsson called Nyberg while the others went to get coffee. Wallander told them about the reporter who had woken him up that morning.
“It’ll blow over soon,” Höglund said.
“I hope you’re right, but I’m not so sure.”
They returned to the conference room.
“Listen up,” Wallander said. “We have to get serious with Eva Persson. It doesn’t matter anymore that she’s a juvenile. We’ve got to throw away the kid gloves and start getting some real answers. That will be up to you, Ann-Britt. You know what questions to ask, and you’re not going to give up until she starts telling the truth.”
They continued planning the next stages of the investigation. Wallander suddenly realized he had completely recovered from his cold. His strength was returning. They finished around half past nine. Hansson and Höglund disappeared down the hall to their various tasks. Wallander and Martinsson were going to examine Tynnes Falk’s apartment together. Wallander was tempted to tell him about his visit the night before, but he decided against it. He knew that one of his faults was his tendency not to tell his colleagues about all the steps he took in his detective work. But he had also given up hope a long time ago that he would ever be able to change this aspect of his personality.
While Martinsson was arranging getting keys to the apartment, Wallander went to his office with the newspaper that Hansson had earlier thrown on the table. He flipped through it to see if there was anything about himself. The only thing he found was a small item about a police officer suspected of use of excessive force against a juvenile offender. His name did not appear anywhere, but his sense of outrage returned.
He was about to put the paper aside when his gaze fell on the personal ads. He started reading. There was an ad from a divorced fifty-year-old woman who said she felt lonely now that the kids were grown up. She listed her main interests as travel and classical music. Wallander tried to imagine what she looked like, but he kept seeing the face of a woman named Erika whom he had met a year ago at a roadside café in Västervik. He had thought about her from time to time since then, without being able to say why. Irritably he tossed the paper into the trash. But just before Martinsson came into the room he fished it up, tore out the page with the ad and slipped it into one of his drawers.