“So what’s your conclusion?”
“It’s just a theory.”
“I still want to hear it.”
“It’s somewhat bizarre, I admit, but I think it’s possible to see Lundberg’s murder as a kind of revenge by proxy.”
“Revenge?”
“At least that gives us a motive. And we also know something about Sonja.”
“What is that?”
“That she was stubborn. And you said her stepfather described her as a strong person.”
“I’m still not entirely convinced. How did the girls know that the father would be the one picking them up in the taxi? And how would she have known it was Carl-Einar’s father?”
“Ystad is a small town. And we don’t know how Sonja reacted to the rape. She could have been consumed by thoughts of revenge. Women are deeply affected by rape. Some withdraw and turn inward. But some do become possessed by violent thoughts of revenge.”
Wallander realized that what Höglund had discovered could be important. It fit his idea that Lundberg’s murder was incidental to the central chain of events surrounding Falk.
“I think you need to find out if Eva Persson knew any of this,” he said.
“I agree. Then we need to check if Sonja ever came home with bruises. The rape that Carl-Einar Lundberg was accused of was violent.”
“You’re right.”
“I’ll get on it.”
Höglund promised to call if she found anything else. Wallander put his phone in his pocket but stayed out on the dark landing. There was a thought that was bubbling up from his unconscious. Why was it that Sonja Hökberg had escaped from the police station? They had never dug very deeply into that matter. They had simply stopped at the most logical conclusion; that she wanted to skip out and avoid responsibility. After all, she had already confessed to the crime. But now Wallander saw another way to look at it. Sonja Hökberg may have left because she had something else to hide. What could that have been? Wallander instinctively sensed that he was getting closer to something important. But there was still something missing, a connection he was trying to make.
Then he thought of what it was. Sonja Hökberg could have left the station in the vain hope of getting away. So far so good. But somewhere out there waiting for her had been a person who was not as concerned about the fact that she had just confessed to killing Lundberg as about the fact that she might have told the police something else while she was there. Something that concerned a very different matter than personal revenge.
This works, Wallander thought. This way Lundberg fits with everything else and there’s a reasonable explanation for what follows. Something had to be kept quiet, something Sonja might have told us if she had lived. She is killed to keep her quiet. But her killer is done away with in turn. just like Modin sweeps away any traces of himself in the computer. Someone has been trying to clean up.
What was it that had transpired in Luanda? he thought again. Who is “C”? And what does the number twenty refer to?
Höglund’s idea had cheered him up. He returned to Modin’s side with renewed energy.
Fifteen minutes later, Martinsson came back. He described in detail the cake he had just eaten, while Wallander listened impatiently. Then Wallander asked Modin to fill Martinsson in on what they had discovered while he was gone.
“The World Bank?” Martinsson asked. “What does that have to do with Falk?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
Martinsson removed his coat, sat back down on the folding chair, and rubbed his hands together. Wallander summarized his conversation with Höglund. Martinsson also sensed the importance of the discovery.
“That gives us a way in,” he said when Wallander had finished.
“It gives us more than that,” he said. “We’re finally starting to make sense of this.”
“I’ve never seen a case like this,” Martinsson said thoughtfully. “We still have so much we can’t account for. We don’t know why the electrical relay was placed in the morgue. We don’t know why Falk’s body was removed. I just don’t think cutting off his fingers was the driving motive.”
“We’ll do what we can to fill in these holes,” Wallander said. “I’m going to head back to the office. But let me know if anything happens.”
“We’ll keep going until ten,” Modin said suddenly. “But then I need to sleep.”
Once Wallander was down on the street he was suddenly at a loss. Should he try to keep going for a few hours? Or should he head straight home?
He decided to do both. There was no reason he couldn’t work at the kitchen table. All he needed was time to digest what Höglund had told him. He got into his car and drove home.
He sat down at the kitchen table and spread out his notes. Höglund’s theory was on his mind and he wanted to go through the case methodically. At eleven he finally got up from the table and went to bed.
The holes are still there, he thought. But it still seems that Höglund’s insight has brought us forward.
He went to bed shortly before midnight and fell asleep almost immediately.
Modin stopped at exactly ten o’clock. They packed up his computers, and Martinsson drove him out to Löderup personally. They agreed that he would pick him up at eight the following morning.
Modin did not go straight to bed after Martinsson left. He knew he shouldn’t be doing what he was about to do. The memory of what happened after he broke into the Pentagon system was still strong. But the temptation was too great. And he had learned his lesson. Now he knew to erase all his tracks.
His parents had already gone to bed. The house was silent. Martinsson hadn’t noticed when Modin started copying some of the material he had accessed in Falk’s computer. Now he hooked up his two computers and started going through the files again, looking once more for clues and openings, new ways to climb the firewall.
A storm front came in over Luanda in the evening.
Carter had spent the evening reading a report that criticized the International Monetary Fund’s operations in some East African countries. The criticisms were well-formulated and devastating. Carter couldn’t have done a better job himself. But he remained convinced of the necessity of his actions. There was no other way to consider at this point. If the world’s financial systems remained as they were, there could be no true reform.
He put the report down and walked over to the window and watched the lightning dance across the sky. His night guards huddled under the small rain shelter they had erected.
He was about to go to bed when something led him into the study. The air conditioning unit droned loudly.
He could tell immediately that someone was trying to break into the server. But something was different. He sat down at the computer. After a while he saw what it was.
Someone had become careless.
Carter dried his hands on a handkerchief.
Then he started chasing the person who was threatening to reveal his secret.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Wallander stayed at home until nearly ten o’clock on Thursday morning. He woke up early and felt fully rested. His joy at having been able to sleep undisturbed for a whole night was so great that it gave him a guilty conscience. He should have used the extra time to work. He often wondered where his overdeveloped work ethic had come from. His mother had been a housewife who had never complained about not being able to work outside the house. At least, she had never said anything about it.
His father had certainly never undertaken extra work if he could help it. Wallander had sometimes spied on him and discovered that his father did not spend a lot of time in front of the easel. Sometimes he had been reading a book or sleeping on the old mattress in the corner of the studio. Other times he had been seated at the rickety old table playing solitaire. Physically Wallander was starting to look more and more like his father, but on the inside he was driven by a constant state of unrest and dissatisfaction, demons he had never seen in either of his parents.