Wallander looked closely at her.
“Did he look different at all?”
“No. Not apart from having a tan.”
“He was tanned? You mean from the sun?”
“Yes. But that was the only thing. It was only by accident that I ever found out where it was that he had been all that time.”
At that moment Wallander’s cell phone rang. He hesitated, but decided to answer. It was Hansson.
“Martinsson gave me the task of identifying the car that was seen last night,” he said. “The computer registers keep crashing, but now I’ve finally been able to determine that it’s a stolen car.”
“The car, or just the license plate?”
“The plates. They were taken from a Volvo that was parked down by the Nobel Square in Malmö last week.”
“Good,” Wallander said. “Then Elofsson and El Sayed were right. That car was keeping an eye on things.”
“I’m not really sure how to proceed with this now.”
“Talk to the Malmö police about the Volvo. And send out a nationwide alert for the Mazda.”
“What crime do we suspect the driver of?”
Wallander paused.
“We suspect he has something to do with Sonja Hökberg’s murder. He may also have been the one who fired that shot at me.”
“He was the one who shot at you?”
“Or been a witness,” Wallander answered.
“Where are you right now?”
“I’m with Marianne Falk. I’ll call you later.”
She was serving him coffee from a beautiful blue-and-white coffeepot. Wallander thought he remembered seeing similar china in his parents’ home as a child.
“Why don’t you tell me about that ‘by accident’ part,” he said when she sat down again.
“It was about a month after Tynnes had turned up again in my life. He had bought a car, and he often came by to pick me up. One of the doctors I worked with at the hospital saw him come by one day. The following day he asked me if the man he had seen was Tynnes Falk. When I said yes, he told me he had met him the year before. But not in Sweden. In Africa.”
“Where in Africa?”
“In Angola. The doctor had been there doing volunteer work, just after Angola had gained independence. One day he bumped into another Swede. They met in a restaurant late at night. Tynnes took out his Swedish passport to take out the money he kept in it, and when the doctor saw that, he said hello. They only spoke briefly, but the doctor remembered him. Not least because he thought Tynnes seemed so unfriendly to a fellow Swede, as if he didn’t want to be recognized.”
“You must have asked him what he was doing there?”
“You would think so, but I never did. I meant to, but I guess it came down to the promise we had made to each other not to ask. Instead I tried to find out what he had done through other channels.”
“What other channels?”
“I called various relief organizations that had chapters in Africa. No one had any record of him. It was only when I called the Swedish Relief Agency that I got something. They said Tynnes had been in Angola for two months to help with the installation of various radio towers.”
“But he was gone for four years,” Wallander said. “Not just two months.”
She didn’t reply, perhaps lost in thought. Wallander waited.
“We married and had children,” she said finally. “Apart from that meeting in Angola, I had no idea what he had done those four years. And I never asked. It’s only now that he’s dead and we’re divorced that I’m finally starting to find out.”
She got up and left the room. When she returned she had a package in her hand. It was something wrapped in a torn plastic cloth. She lay it on the coffee table in front of Wallander.
“After he died, I went down into the basement. I knew he had a steel trunk down there. It was locked but I broke the lock. Apart from this there was nothing but dust.”
She nodded for him to open the package. Wallander flicked the plastic cloth aside. Inside was a brown leather photo album. Someone had written ANGOLA 1973–1977 on the front cover in permanent ink.
Wallander hadn’t even opened it when a thought came to him. “My education isn’t what it should be,” he said. “What’s the capital of Angola?”
“Luanda.”
Wallander nodded. He still had the postcard in his breast pocket that had the letters “l” and “d” on it.
The postcard must have been sent from Luanda. What was it that had happened there?
And who was the man or woman whose name started with C?
He leaned forward and opened the album.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The first picture was of a burned-out bus. It was lying by the side of the road, which was red, perhaps from sand or blood. The photograph had been taken from a distance. The bus looked like the body of a dead animal. A note under the picture said NORTHEAST OF HUAMBO, 1975. There was a small stain below that, similar to the one on the postcard. Wallander turned the page. A group of African women were gathered around a small water hole. The landscape looked parched. There were no shadows on the ground; the picture must have been taken at midday. None of the women was looking into the camera. The water level in the hole was low.
Wallander studied the picture carefully. Tynnes Falk, assuming he was the photographer, had chosen to capture these women on film. But it was the dried-up water hole that was the real focus of the photo. That was the story the photographer was telling, not the lives of the women. Wallander kept turning the pages. Marianne Falk sat quietly on the other side of the room. A clock ticked somewhere in the room.
Wallander kept leafing through the shots of villages, war sites, and radio towers until he came to a group photograph. In the picture were nine men, one boy, and a goat. The goat seemed to have entered the picture at random, from the right. One of the men had been trying to wave it away when the picture was taken. The boy had stared straight into the camera, laughing. Seven of the men were black, two were white. The black men looked cheerful; the white men had serious expressions on their faces. Wallander looked up from the page and asked Marianne Falk if she knew the names of any of the men. She shook her head. The place name scribbled under the picture was illegible, but it had a date: JANUARY 1976. Falk had been done with his radio towers for a long time at this point. Was he on a return trip to make sure the work had been done correctly? Was he returning at all, or had he simply stayed on in Angola after the job was done?
Wallander continued to page through the album until Marianne Falk leaned over and pointed out a picture to him. It was taken at something that looked like a party, with a small group of men in the foreground. There were only white people in the photo, their eyes red from the flash, like those of nocturnal animals. There were bottles and glasses on a table. Marianne was pointing to one man in particular with a glass in his hand. It was Falk. The young men around him were cheering and toasting each other. But Falk had his mouth shut and looked serious. He looked thin in the picture, dressed in a white shirt buttoned all the way to his throat. The other men were half-naked, flushed and sweaty. Wallander asked her again if she recognized any of them, but she shook her head.
Wallander stopped at another picture a few pages on. It was outside what looked like a whitewashed church. Tynnes Falk was standing against the wall, looking at the photographer. He was smiling for the first time in the album, and his shirt was not buttoned to the throat. Who was taking the picture? Was it “C”?
Next page. Falk was taking the pictures again. Wallander leaned in more closely to the next photo. For the first time he recognized a face from an earlier picture. It was a fairly close shot. The man was tall, thin, and tanned. His gaze was very determined, his hair shortly cropped. He looked like a Northern European, maybe German or even Russian. Wallander switched to examining the background. The picture was taken outside. There seemed to be a skyline of hills covered in thick green vegetation. But slightly closer than that, between the hills and the man, was something that looked like a large machine. Wallander thought the construction looked familiar, but it was only when he held the picture away from himself that he realized what it was. A power substation.