Then it was Wallander’s turn. He took out one thousand crowns and read through the account balance on the slip. Everything seemed to be in order. He crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it into the garbage bin. Then he froze. He thought about the blackout that had cut power to most of Scania. Someone had known exactly which point to hit to affect as many areas as possible. However advanced technology became, there were always these occasional points of vulnerability. He thought about the blueprint they had found in Falk’s office. It could not have been coincidence. Just as it had not been a coincidence that the electrical relay was found in the morgue.
Suddenly he was struck by what he had seen before but not fully absorbed: the realization that none of what had happened had been coincidence.
Perhaps it was a kind of sacrifice, he thought. There was an altar in Tynnes Falk’s secret chamber, with Falk’s face as a divine being. Perhaps Sonja Hökberg wasn’t simply killed but also sacrificed. So that the point of vulnerability would become more visible. A black hood had been pulled down over Scania and everything had been brought to a halt.
The thought made him shiver. The feeling that he and his colleagues were fumbling around in the dark grew stronger.
He watched the stream of people who came up to the cash machine. If you can control the power supply you can control this machine, he thought. And God only knows what else you control. Air traffic, trains, the water supply, and electricity. All of this can be brought to its knees if you know the right place to strike.
He started walking again. Linda’s book would have to wait. He returned to the station. Irene wanted to tell him something but he waved her away and continued to his office. He threw his coat down on a chair and pulled his pad of paper toward him. He wrote out the facts again, this time from the perspective that all that had happened was part of a well-planned act of sabotage. He thought back to the perplexing fact that Falk had been involved in the release of those minks. Did that act foreshadow something even bigger? Was it a prelude to something much more sinister?
When he threw the pen down and leaned back in his chair he still was not convinced he had found the point that would truly break the case open, but it did offer new possibilities. Unfortunately Lundberg’s murder fell outside these parameters, but was that perhaps an unforeseen development, something that had not been planned out in advance? It had to be the case that Sonja Hökberg was killed in order to keep her quiet. And why cut off Falk’s fingers? To keep something from coming to light.
He kept working through his material. What happened if they assumed Lundberg was an accident, something that wasn’t part of the larger pattern?
But after only half an hour he was less convinced of this idea. It was too early. The case still didn’t hang together.
He cheered himself up with the thought that at least he had come a bit further along. He had realized there were probably more explanations and angles from which to view these events.
He had just gotten up to go to the bathroom when Höglund knocked on the door.
She got right to the point.
“You were right,” she said. “Sonja did have a boyfriend.”
“What’s his name?”
“A more pertinent question would be to ask where he is.”
“Why? Don’t we know?”
“It looks like he’s disappeared.”
Wallander looked at her. That visit to the bathroom would have to wait.
It was a quarter to three in the afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In hindsight Wallander would always feel he had made one of the biggest mistakes of his life that afternoon by sitting down and listening to what Höglund had to say. As soon as he heard that Sonja Hökberg had had a boyfriend, he should have realized that the truth was more complicated than that. What Höglund had discovered was a half-truth, and half-truths had a tendency to lead you into a mess of lies. The end result was that he didn’t see then what he should have seen, and it was a costly mistake. In his darkest hours, Wallander would always feel it had cost a person his life. And it could have led to an even greater catastrophe.
That Monday, the thirteenth of October, Höglund had taken on the task of finding out once and for all if there had been a boyfriend in Sonja Hökberg’s life. She had once more brought this topic up with Eva Persson, who had continued to deny the existence of a boyfriend in Sonja’s life. The only name she gave was Kalle Ryss, who Sonja had been with at an earlier time. Höglund wasn’t sure if Persson was telling the truth or not, but she had not been able to get any further and had finally given up.
Höglund then drove out to the hardware store where Kalle Ryss worked. They had gone out into the storeroom in order to speak undisturbed. In contrast to Eva Persson, Kalle Ryss answered simply and seemingly truthfully to all of Höglund’s questions. She had the impression that he was still very fond of Sonja, although their relationship had been over for at least a year. He missed her, mourned her death, and was frightened by what had happened. But he couldn’t shed much light on the direction her life had taken after their breakup. Even though Ystad was a small city, their paths had not crossed very often. And Kalle Ryss usually drove out to Malmö on the weekends. His new girlfriend lived there.
“But I think there was someone else,” he said suddenly. “Someone that Sonja was with.”
Kalle Ryss didn’t know much about his successor except that his name was Jonas Landahl and that he lived all alone in a big house on Snappehanegatan. He didn’t know the exact address, but it was by the corner of Friskyttegatan, on the left-hand side if you were coming from town. What Jonas Landahl did for a living he couldn’t say.
Höglund immediately drove down there and saw a beautiful modern house on the left side of the street. She walked through the gate and rang the bell. The house seemed deserted, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. No one came to the door. She rang the bell several more times, then walked to the back of the house. She banged on the back door and tried to look in through the windows. When she came back to the front she saw a man in a dressing gown and tall boots standing outside the front gate. It was a strange sight given the time of day and the cold. He explained that he lived in the house across the street and that he had seen her ringing the doorbell. He said his name was Yngve, but he didn’t give his last name.
“No one’s home,” he said firmly. “Not even the boy.”
Their conversation had been short but informative. Yngve was apparently a man who liked to keep his neighbors under surveillance. The Landahl family had been strange birds in these parts, he said, and had moved in about ten years ago. What Mr. Landahl did he didn’t know. They hadn’t even bothered to stop by and introduce themselves when they moved in. They had brought all their possessions and the boy into the house and then shut their doors. He hardly ever saw them. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when they arrived, but they often left him alone for long stretches of time. The parents took off on long trips to God knows where. From time to time they came back, only to disappear as suddenly as they had come. Neither one of them seemed to hold down a job, but there was always money. The last time he had seen them was sometime in September. Then the boy, now a grown man, was left alone again. But a couple of days ago a taxi had come for him and taken him away.