Svedberg shrugged.
“It’s always better to have four eyes look at something than two.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Wallander distractedly.
“Ekholm is busy putting the finishing touches to his psychological profile,” said Svedberg.
Wallander muttered something in reply. Svedberg dropped him off outside the station and drove on to talk to Carlman’s widow. Wallander picked up his messages at the front desk. A new girl was there again. He asked about Ebba and was told that she was at the hospital having the cast taken off her wrist. I could have stopped in and said hello to her, thought Wallander. Since I was over there anyway. If it was possible to say hello to someone who was just having a cast removed.
He went to his office and opened the window wide. Without sitting down he riffled through the reports Svedberg had mentioned. Then he remembered that he had also asked to see the photographs taken by the magazine. Where were they? Unable to control his impatience, he found Svedberg’s mobile number and called him.
“The photos,” he asked. “Where are they?”
“Aren’t they on your desk?” Svedberg replied, surprised.
“There’s nothing here.”
“Then they’re in my office. I must have forgotten them. They were in today’s post.”
They were in a brown envelope on Svedberg’s tidy desk. Wallander spread them out and sat in Svedberg’s chair. Wetterstedt posing in his home, in the garden, and on the beach. In one of the pictures the overturned rowing boat could be seen in the background. Wetterstedt was smiling at the camera. The grey hair which would soon be torn from his head was ruffled by the wind. The photos showed a man who seemed at peace with his old age. Nothing in the pictures hinted at what was to happen. Wetterstedt had less than 15 hours left to live when the pictures were taken. The photos lying before him showed how he’d looked on the last day of his life. Wallander studied the pictures for a few minutes more before stuffing them back in the envelope. He started towards his office but changed his mind and stopped outside Hoglund’s door, which was always open.
She was bent over some papers.
“Am I interrupting you?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
He went in and sat down. They exchanged a few words about Carlman’s daughter.
“Svedberg is out at the farmhouse hunting for a suicide note,” said Wallander. “If there is one.”
“She must have been very close to her father,” said Hoglund.
Wallander didn’t reply. He changed the subject.
“Did you notice anything strange when we were visiting the Fredman family?”
“Strange?”
“A chill that settled over the room?”
He immediately regretted his description. Hoglund wrinkled her brow as if he had said something out of line.
“I mean that they seemed evasive when I asked questions about Louise,” he explained.
“No, I didn’t,” she replied. “But I did notice that you acted differently.”
He told her of the feeling he’d had. She thought before she answered.
“You might be right,” she said. “Now that you mention it, they did seem to be on their guard. That chill you were talking about.”
“The question is whether they both were, or only one of them,” said Wallander.
“Was that the case?”
“I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling I had.”
“Didn’t the boy start answering the questions you were actually asking his mother?”
Wallander nodded.
“That’s it,” he said. “And I wonder why.”
“Still, you have to ask yourself whether it’s really important,” she said.
“Of course,” he admitted. “Sometimes I have a tendency to get hung up on unimportant details. But I still want to have a talk with that girl.”
This time she was the one who changed the subject.
“It frightens me to think about what Anette Fredman said. That she felt relief that her husband would never walk through their door again. I can’t imagine what it means to live like that.”
“He was abusing her,” said Wallander. “Maybe he beat the children too. But none of them filed a complaint.”
“The boy seemed quite normal,” she said. “And well brought up, too.”
“Children learn to survive,” said Wallander, reflecting for a moment on his own childhood and Linda’s. He stood up.
“I’m going to try and get hold of Louise Fredman. Tomorrow if I can. I’ve got a hunch that she hasn’t gone away at all.”
He got a cup of coffee and headed towards his room. He almost collided with Noren and remembered the photos he had asked to have taken of the crowd standing outside the cordon watching the police work.
“I gave the film to Nyberg,” said Noren. “But I don’t think I’m much of a photographer.”
“Who the hell is?” said Wallander, in a kindly tone. He went into his room and closed the door. He sat staring at his telephone, collecting his thoughts before he called the M.O.T. garage and asked for a new appointment for his car. The slot they offered him was during the time he had intended to spend at Skagen with Baiba. When he angrily informed them of the atrocities he was trying to solve, a time that had been reserved inexplicably became free. He wondered who that slot had been assigned to. After he hung up he decided to do his laundry that evening.
The phone rang. It was Nyberg.
“You were right,” he said. “The fingerprints on that piece of paper you found behind the road workers’ hut match the ones we found on the pages from the comic book. So there’s no doubt that the same person is involved. In a couple of hours we’ll also know whether we can tie him to the van at Sturup. We’re also going to try and get some prints from Fredman’s face.”
“Is that possible?”
“To pour acid into Fredman’s eyes the killer must have used one hand to hold his eyelids open,” said Nyberg. “It’s unpleasant, but if we’re lucky we’ll find prints on the lids themselves.”
“It’s a good thing people can’t hear the way we talk to each other,” said Wallander. “How about that bulb? The light at Wetterstedt’s garden gate.”
“I was just getting to that,” said Nyberg. “You were right about that too. We found fingerprints.”
Wallander sat up straight in his chair. His bad mood was gone. He could feel his excitement rising. The investigation was showing signs of breaking wide open.
“Have we got the prints in the archives?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” said Nyberg. “But I’ve asked central records to double check.”
“Let’s assume for a moment that we don’t. That means we’re dealing with someone without a record.”
“Could be,” Nyberg replied.
“Run the prints through Interpol too,” said Wallander. “And Europol. Ask for highest priority. Tell them it concerns a serial killer.”
Wallander hung up and asked the girl at the switchboard to find Ekholm. In a few minutes she called back and said he’d gone out for lunch.
“Where?” asked Wallander.
“I think he said the Continental.”
“Get hold of him there,” said Wallander. “Tell him to get over here right away.”
A while later Ekholm knocked on the door. Wallander was talking to Per Akeson. He pointed to a chair. Wallander was busy trying to convince a sceptical Akeson that the investigation wouldn’t be aided by a larger team, at least in the short term. Akeson finally gave in, and they postponed the decision for a few more days.
Wallander leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He told Ekholm about the fingerprints.
“The prints we’re going to find on Bjorn Fredman’s body will be the same ones too,” he said. “We know for certain that we’re dealing with the same killer. The only question is: who is he?”
“I’ve been thinking about the eyes,” said Ekholm. “All available information tells us that aside from the genitals, the eyes are the part of the body most often subjected to a final revenge.”
“What does that mean?”
“That killers seldom begin by putting out someone’s eyes. They save that for last.”