“Could you possibly pick them up?”
“I don’t think that I can,” said Wallander. “I have to go back to Helsingborg.”
“Birgersson didn’t mention that. I spoke to him a little while ago.”
“They probably have the same communication problems that we do,” Wallander said patiently. “I think it would be a nice gesture if you went to pick them up yourself.”
“What do you mean by gesture?”
“Of respect. When I went to Riga I was picked up in a limousine. An old Russian one, but even so. It’s important for people to feel that they’re being welcomed and taken care of.”
“All right,” said Hansson. “I’ll do it. Where are you now?”
“At the hospital.”
“Are you sick?”
“Carlman’s daughter. Did you forget about her?”
“To tell you the truth, I did.”
“We should be glad we don’t all forget the same things,” Wallander said. He didn’t know whether Hansson had recognised that he was being ironic. He put the phone down on the bench and watched a sparrow perched on the edge of a rubbish bin. Ann-Britt had been gone for almost half an hour. He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sun, rehearsing what he would say to Baiba. A man with his leg in a cast sat down with a thud next to him. After five minutes a taxi arrived. The man with the cast left. Wallander paced back and forth in front of the hospital entrance. Then he sat down again.
After more than an hour Ann-Britt came out and sat down next to him. He couldn’t tell from the expression on her face how it had gone.
“I think we missed one reason why a person would want to commit suicide,” she said. “Being tired of life.”
“Was that her answer?”
“I didn’t even have to ask. She was sitting in a white room, in a hospital gown, her hair uncombed, pale, out of it. Still immersed in a mixture of her own crisis and heavy medication. ‘Why go on living?’ That was her greeting. To be honest, I think she’ll try to kill herself again. Out of sheer loathing.”
Wallander had overlooked the most common motive for committing suicide. Simply not wanting to go on living.
“But did you talk about her father?”
“She despised him, but I’m quite sure that she wasn’t abused by him.”
“Did she say so?”
“Some things don’t have to be actually said.”
“What about the murder?”
“She was strangely uninterested in it. She wondered why I had come. I told her the truth. We’re searching for the killer. She said there were probably plenty of people who wanted her father dead. Because of his ruthlessness in business. Because of the way he was.”
“She didn’t say anything about him having another woman?”
“No.”
Wallander watched the sparrow despondently.
“Well, at least we know that much,” he said. “We know that we don’t know anything else.”
When they were halfway back to the station, Wallander’s phone rang. He turned away from the wind to answer it. It was Svedberg.
“We think we found the place where Fredman was killed,” he said. “At a dock just west of town.”
Wallander felt his spirits rise.
“Great news,” he said.
“A tip-off,” Svedberg continued. “The person who called mentioned blood stains. It could have been somebody cleaning fish, of course. But I don’t think so. The caller was a laboratory technician. He’s worked with blood samples for 35 years. And he said that there were tyre tracks nearby. A vehicle had been parked there. Why not a Ford van?”
“We can drive over there and work it out very shortly,” said Wallander.
They continued up the hill, much more quickly now. Wallander told Hoglund the news. Neither of them was thinking about Erika Carlman any more.
Hoover got off the train in Ystad just after 11 a.m. He had decided to leave his moped at home today. When he came out of the railway station and saw that the cordon around the pit where he had dumped his father was gone, he felt a twinge of disappointment and anger. The policemen who were hunting him were much too weak. They would never have passed the easiest entrance exam to the F.B.I.’s academy. He felt Geronimo’s heart start to drum inside him. He understood the message, simple and clear. He was going to fulfil the mission he had been chosen for. He would bring his sister two final sacrifices before she returned to life. Two scalps beneath her window. And the girl’s heart. As a gift. Then he would walk into the hospital to get her and they would leave together. Life would be very different. One day they might even read her diary together, remembering the events that had led her back, out of the darkness.
He walked into Ystad. He was wearing shoes so as not to attract attention, but his feet didn’t like it. He turned right at the square and went to the house where the policeman lived with the girl who must be his daughter. He had come to take a closer look. The action itself he was planning for the next evening. Or at the latest, one day later. Not more. His sister shouldn’t have to stay in that hospital any longer. He sat down on the steps of one of the neighbouring buildings. He practised forgetting time. Just sitting, empty of thought, until he again took hold of his mission. He still had a lot to learn before he mastered the art to perfection, but he had no doubt that one day he would succeed.
His wait lasted for two hours. Then she came out of the front door, obviously in a hurry, and set off towards the town centre. He followed her and never let her out of his sight.
CHAPTER 32
When they got to the dock, ten kilometres west of Ystad, Wallander was immediately sure that it was the right place. It was just as he had imagined it. They had driven along the coast road and stopped where a man in shorts and a T-shirt advertising the golf course in Malmberget waved them down and directed them to a barely visible dirt road. They stopped just short of the dock, so they wouldn’t disturb the tyre marks.
The laboratory technician, Erik Wiberg, told them that in the summer he lived in a cabin on the north side of the coast road. He often came down to this dock to read his morning paper, as he had on 29 June. He’d noticed the tyre tracks and the dark spots on the brown wood, but thought nothing of it. He left that same day for Germany with his family, and it wasn’t until he saw in the paper on his return that the police were looking for a murder site, probably near the sea, that he remembered those dark spots. Since he worked in a laboratory, he knew that what was on the dock at least looked like blood. Nyberg, who had arrived just after Wallander and the others, was on his knees by the tyre tracks. He had toothache and was more irritable than ever. Wallander was the only one he could bear to talk to.
“It could be Fredman’s van,” he said, “but we’ll have to do a proper examination.”
They walked out on the dock together. Wallander knew they had been lucky. The dry summer helped. If it had rained there wouldn’t have been tracks. He looked for confirmation from Martinsson, who had the best memory for the weather.
“Has it rained since 28 June?” he asked.
“It drizzled on the morning of Midsummer Eve,” he said. “Ever since then it’s been fine.”
“Arrange to cordon off the whole place,” said Wallander, nodding to Hoglund. “And be careful where you put your feet.”
He stood near the land end of the dock and looked at the patches of blood. They were concentrated in the middle of the dock, which was four metres long. He turned around and looked up towards the road. He could hear the noise, but he couldn’t see the cars, just the roof of a tall lorry flashing by. He had an idea. Hoglund was on the phone to Ystad.
“And tell them to bring me a map,” he said. “One that includes Ystad, Malmo, and Helsingborg.” Then he walked to the end of the dock and looked into the water. The bottom was rocky. Wiberg was standing on the beach.
“Where’s the nearest house?” asked Wallander.