“I’ll ask Martinsson to take a look at this,” Wallander said.
“Do you want me to start it up for you?”
“No, let’s hold off.”
They went back downstairs. Wallander searched through the slips of paper stuffed into a kitchen drawer until he found what he was looking for.
“I don’t know if you noticed this or not,” he said, “but there was no name on the front door. That’s a little unusual. But here at least is some junk mail addressed to Harald Landahl, Jonas’s father.”
“Are we going to put out a search for him? I mean the boy.”
“No, not just yet. We need a little more information first.”
“Was he the one who killed her?”
“We don’t know. But his departure can be interpreted as an attempt to flee.”
They went through more drawers while they waited for Nyberg. Höglund found a number of photographs of what looked to be a newly built house in Corsica.
“Is that where they keep going?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“Where do they get their money?”
“The son is still the main focus of our investigation.”
The doorbell rang. It was Nyberg and his team of technicians. Wallander led them out to the garage.
“Concentrate on fingerprints,” he said. “They might correspond with some we’ve found in other places. On Sonja Hökberg’s handbag, for example. Or in the office in Runnerström Square. Also, look for signs placing it at the power substation. Or that Sonja Hökberg has been in it.”
“In that case we’ll start with the tires,” Nyberg said. “That will be the fastest. You remember we had one set of tire marks out there we couldn’t account for.”
Wallander waited, and it only took Nyberg ten minutes to give him the answer he had been hoping for.
“This is the car,” Nyberg said after having compared the tread with pictures taken of the crime scene.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not. There are thousands of tires out there that are almost identical. But if you look at this back left tire you’ll see that it’s low on air and is also worn on the inside since the tires haven’t been balanced properly. That dramatically increases our chances of being right.”
“So then you are sure.”
“As sure as I can be without total certainty.”
Wallander left the garage. Höglund was busy with the living room. He went to the kitchen. Am I doing the right thing? he thought. Should I send out a description of him right now? A sudden sense of anxiety drove him back upstairs to the boy’s bedroom. He sat down at the desk and looked around. Then he got up and went over to the closet. There was nothing that caught his eye. He stood on tiptoe and felt around on the upper shelves. Nothing. He returned to the desk and looked at the computer. Impulsively he lifted the keyboard but there was nothing underneath. He paused before going to the top of the stairs and calling out to Höglund. They went back into the boy’s bedroom together and Wallander pointed to the computer.
“Do you want me to start it up now?”
He nodded.
“So we’re not waiting for Martinsson?”
There was no attempt to hide the irony in her voice. Perhaps she had been hurt by his earlier insistence that they wait for their colleague. But right now he didn’t have time to think about that. How many times had he felt overlooked or humiliated during his years as a policeman? By other police officers, criminals, prosecutors, and journalists, and not least by those who were usually referred to as “members of the public.”
Höglund sat down at the computer and started it. It made a little noise and the screen slowly came to life. She clicked open the hard drive and various icons emerged.
“What is it you want me to look for?”
“I don’t know.”
She chose an icon at random and double-clicked on it. In contrast to Falk’s computer, this one didn’t put up any resistance. It dutifully opened the file, the only problem being that the file was completely empty.
Wallander put on his glasses and leaned over her shoulder.
“Try the one called ‘Correspondence,’” he said.
She clicked on the icon, but the same thing happened. There was nothing there.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“That it’s empty.”
“Or it’s been emptied. Keep going.”
She tried file after file but kept getting the same result.
“It’s strange,” she said. “There really isn’t anything here at all.” Wallander looked around to see if he could find any diskettes. But he couldn’t find anything.
Höglund proceeded to the icon that held the information about computer activity.
“The last activity occurred on the ninth of October,” she announced.
“That was last Thursday.”
They looked questioningly at each other.
“The day after he went to Poland?”
“If the neighborhood spy is to be believed, which I actually think he is.”
Wallander sat down.
“Explain it to me.”
“Well, as far as I can see, that leaves us with two explanations. Either he came back, or else someone else has been here.”
“And the person who was here could have emptied the computer of all content?”
“Quite easily, considering there were no security barriers.”
Wallander tried to work with the little computer knowledge he had managed to absorb.
“Could this person also have removed the traces of such an existing barrier?”
“Yes, if they had already bypassed it themselves.”
“And then emptied the computer at the same time?”
“There would always be prints left behind,” she said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s something Martinsson explained to me.”
“Tell me.”
“You can try to understand it by comparing a computer to a house that has been emptied of its furniture. There are always a few traces left behind. There might be scratches on the hardwood floors, or perhaps there are patches of light and dark left from where the furniture once was.”
“Like a wall after the paintings have been taken down,” Wallander said. “There are lighter patches where they used to be.”
“Martinsson used the example of a cellar. Somewhere deep inside the computer there’s a space where everything that is supposed to be erased continues to live on. That means that until a hard drive has been destroyed, it is theoretically possible to reconstruct everything that was once in it.”
Wallander shook his head.
“I understand what you’re saying, though I don’t understand how it would be possible,” he said. “But what interests me most right now is the fact that someone used the computer on the ninth.”
Höglund turned back to the monitor.
“Let me just check the games that are on here,” she said and started double-clicking on the icons she hadn’t yet touched.
“That’s funny,” she mumbled. “I’ve never heard of this game. ‘Jacob’s Marsh’.”
When she finished, she turned off the computer.
“There’s nothing there. I just wonder why the icons were left on the desktop.”
They searched the room thoroughly, hoping to find some diskettes, but had no luck. Wallander was intuitively convinced that getting to the bottom of the use of the computer on the ninth was a key to unlocking the entire case. Someone had deliberately cleaned out the computer, and the only question was whether it was Jonas Landahl or someone else.
They finally gave up looking and went downstairs. Wallander asked Nyberg to go through the house with a fine-tooth comb after he was done with the car. Looking for diskettes would be his highest priority.