“Why?”
“I can’t tell you why. Not yet.”
Wallander’s curiosity was piqued. During the past few months, he had begun to suspect that Linda’s plans for the future had taken a new turn. But in what direction he had no idea, and she had always changed the subject.
They ended their conversation by talking about when she was coming to Ystad next. She thought she could make it in the middle of November, but not before.
Wallander put the phone down and wondered if she would ever get a real job and try to settle down in Ystad.
She’s got something on her mind, he thought. But for some reason she won’t tell me what it is.
It was senseless to try to figure it out. He looked at the time. It was twenty minutes past eight. Martinsson would soon be picking up the cybercrime expert named Alfredsson from Stockholm. Wallander thought about how Modin had turned up so unexpectedly at the restaurant the night before. He had seemed very sure of his discovery. Wallander should let Martinsson know. Something inside Wallander, however, resisted having more contact with Martinsson than absolutely necessary. He still had lingering doubts about what Höglund had told him. He knew these doubts were caused mainly because he wanted it to be untrue. To lose Martinsson as a trusted friend would create an impossible work environment. The betrayal would be too hard to bear. He felt he had trained Martinsson the way Rydberg had trained him, but Wallander had never been tempted — had never wanted — to overthrow Rydberg’s authority.
The force is a wasp’s nest, he thought angrily. Nothing but envy, gossip, and intrigue. I’ve always liked to imagine that I remained above it all, but now it seems I’ve been pulled into the very center. I’m a ruler whose successor is getting impatient.
Despite his resistance, he made himself call Martinsson’s cell phone. After all, Modin had forced his father to drive him in all the way from Löderup the night before. They had to take him seriously. He may have already been in touch with Martinsson, but if not, Wallander’s call could be important. Martinsson picked up immediately. He had just parked the car and was on his way to the terminal. Modin had not contacted him. Wallander briefly explained the situation.
“It seems a little strange,” Martinsson said. “How could he have thought of this when he didn’t have access to the computer anymore?”
“You’ll have to ask him about that.”
“He’s wily,” Martinsson said. “I wouldn’t put it past him to have copied some of that material over onto his own computer.”
Martinsson promised to call Modin, and they agreed they would be in touch again in the afternoon.
As Wallander was putting his phone back, he thought that Martinsson sounded completely normal. Either he’s much better at this game of deception than I could have imagined, he thought, or else what Höglund told me isn’t right.
Wallander got to the station at a quarter to nine. When he reached his office there was a message on his desk. “Something has come up,” he read in Hansson’s jerky handwriting. Wallander sighed over his colleague’s inability to communicate more effectively. “Something” was his trademark. The question was always what this “something” referred to. He left and walked to the lunchroom.
The coffee machine had been fixed. Nyberg sat at a table eating his breakfast. Wallander sat down across from him.
“If you ask me about my vertigo, I’m leaving,” Nyberg said.
“I guess I’ll pass, then.”
“I feel fine,” Nyberg said. “I just wish retirement would hurry up and get here. Even though the money will be bad.”
Wallander knew it wasn’t true. Clearly Nyberg was tired and worn out, but he probably feared his retirement more than anything else.
“Is there any word on Landahl from the coroner’s office?”
“He died about three hours before the ferry arrived in Ystad. I guess that means whoever killed him was still aboard, unless he jumped ship, of course.”
“That was a mistake on my part,” Wallander admitted. “We should have checked the passengers before allowing them to get off.”
“What we should have done was choose a different career,” said Nyberg.
He didn’t say anything else, and Wallander decided it was best to leave him alone. This was an easy choice, since he never had to direct him in any way. Nyberg was thorough and well-organized and could always judge which aspects of a case were most urgent and which could wait. Wallander got up to leave.
“I’ve been thinking,” Nyberg said suddenly.
Wallander looked attentively at him, since he knew that Nyberg sometimes had an uncanny ability to come up with crucial observations. In more than one instance, what he had said had helped to completely turn a case around.
“What have you been thinking?”
“About that relay that we found in the morgue. About the handbag that was thrown down by the fence. And the body put back by the cash machine, without two of its fingers. We’ve been trying to find a meaning in all of this, to get it to fit into a pattern. Isn’t that right?”
Wallander nodded.
“We’ve been trying. But it’s not going very well. At least not so far.”
Nyberg scraped up the rest of his muesli from his bowl before continuing.
“I talked to Höglund yesterday. She filled me in on what you talked about at the meeting. Apparently you stressed the double meanings in the events of this case. You said there was something both deliberate and accidental about the events. Is that right?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, what happens if we take this more seriously, that there is both deliberate planning and coincidence at work here?”
Wallander shook his head. He had nothing to say and waited for Nyberg to go on.
“So I had an idea. What if we’re over-interpreting what’s happened? First, we find out the murder of the taxi driver is much less significant than we thought. What if that’s true about other things as well? What if much of what has happened is for our benefit — to lead us astray, as it were?”
Wallander sensed that Nyberg was onto something important. “What are you thinking of, specifically?”
“First of all, this relay.”
“Are you trying to say that Falk had nothing to do with Sonja’s murder?”
“Not really. But I think someone wants us to think that Falk had much more to do with it than was actually the case.”
Wallander was starting to get very interested.
“Or this business about his body turning up again. What if we assume it doesn’t mean anything? Where does that get us?”
Wallander thought about it.
“It leaves us in a swamp. We don’t know where to put our feet to get to solid ground.”
“Good image,” Nyberg said approvingly. “I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to top Rydberg as far as fitting analogies went, but I wonder if you aren’t even sharper than he was. We’re wading through a swamp, exactly where someone wants us to be.”
“And we need to find our way back to solid ground?”
“Take the business with the fence, for example. We’ve been driving ourselves crazy trying to figure out why the outer gate was forced and the inner door was unlocked.”
Wallander understood what Nyberg was driving at. It irritated him that he hadn’t picked up on this himself.
“So the person who unlocked the door later banged up the gate simply in order to confuse us. Is that what you mean?”
“Seems like the easiest explanation to me.”
Wallander nodded in agreement.
“Good job,” he said. “I’m embarrassed I haven’t seen this myself until now.”