“He’ll be here in about an hour,” Hansson said, glancing at the clock. “Someone’s picking him up at the airport.”
“How is his daughter?” asked Hoglund.
Wallander was ashamed that he’d forgotten the reason for Ekholm’s absence.
“She’s OK,” said Svedberg. “A broken foot, that’s all. She was very lucky.”
“This autumn we’re going to have a big traffic safety campaign in schools,” said Hansson. “Too many children are being killed.”
The detective returned to the table.
“I presume you’ve also looked for Stefan in his father’s flat,” Wallander said.
“We’ve already searched there and everywhere else his father usually hung out. And we’ve picked up Peter Hjelm and asked him to try and think of other hideouts Fredman may have had access to that his son might know about. Forsfalt is taking care of it.”
The meeting dragged on, but Wallander knew that they were really just waiting for something to happen. Stefan Fredman was somewhere with his sister. Logard was out there too. A large contingent of police officers were looking for them. They went in and out of the conference room, getting coffee, sending out for sandwiches, dozing in their chairs, drinking more coffee. The German police found Sara Pettersson in Hamburg. She’d been able to identify Stefan Fredman at once. Ekholm arrived from the airport, still shaken and pale.
Around 11 a.m. they got the confirmation they were waiting for. Stefan Fredman’s fingerprints had been identified on his father’s eyelid, on the comic book, the bloody scrap of paper and Liljegren’s stove. The only sound in the conference room was the faint hiss of the speaker phone linked to Birgersson. There was no turning back. All the false leads, especially those they had thought up themselves, had been erased. All that was left was the realisation of the appalling truth: they were searching for a 14-year-old boy who had committed four cold-blooded, premeditated and atrocious murders.
Finally Wallander broke the silence and turned to Ekholm.
“What’s he doing? What’s he thinking?”
“I know this is very risky,” Ekholm said. “But I don’t think he intends to hurt his sister. There’s a pattern, call it logic if you will, to his behaviour. Revenge for his little brother and his sister is the goal. If he diverges from that goal, then everything he so laboriously built up will collapse.”
“Why did he take her from the hospital?” Wallander asked.
“Maybe he was afraid that you would influence her somehow.”
“How?” asked Wallander in surprise.
“Picture a confused boy who has taken on the role of a lone warrior. Suppose men have done his sister irreparable harm. That’s what drives him. Assuming this theory is correct, that means he’ll want to keep all men away from her. He’s the only exception. And you can’t rule out the fact that he may have suspected you were on his trail. Certainly he knows that you’re in charge of the investigation.”
Wallander remembered something.
“The pictures that Noren took,” he said. “Of the spectators outside the cordons? Where are they?”
Nyberg, who most of the time had sat quiet and meditative at the meeting table, went to get them. Wallander spread them out on the table. Someone got a magnifying glass. They gathered around the pictures. It was Hoglund who found him.
“There he is,” she said, pointing.
He was almost hidden behind some other onlookers, but part of his moped was visible, along with his head.
“I’ll be damned,” Hamren said.
“It should be possible to identify the moped,” Nyberg said. “If we blow up the details.”
“Do that,” Wallander said.
It was obvious now that there had been a good reason for the feeling gnawing at Wallander’s subconscious. Grimly he thought that at least he could close the case on his own anxiety.
Save for one thing. Baiba. It was midday. Svedberg was asleep in his chair, and Akeson was on the phone to so many different people that no-one could keep track of them. Wallander gestured to Hoglund to follow him out into the hall. They sat down in his office and closed the door. Without beating around the bush, he told her of the mess he’d made. In doing so he broke his cardinal rule: never to confide a personal problem to a colleague. He had stopped doing that when Rydberg died. Now he was doing it again. He was unsure whether he could develop the same trusting relationship with Ann-Britt Hoglund that he had enjoyed with Rydberg, especially since she was a woman. She listened attentively.
“What the hell am I going to do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. It’s already too late. But I could talk to her if you like. I assume she speaks English. Give me her number.”
Wallander wrote it down, but when she reached for his telephone he asked her to wait.
“A couple more hours,” he said.
“Miracles don’t happen very often,” she said.
At that moment Hansson burst through the door.
“They found his hideout. A basement in a condemned school building. It’s right near the flats where he lives.”
“Are they there?” Wallander asked, getting up from his chair.
“No. But they’ve been there.”
They went back to the meeting room. Another speaker phone was hooked up. Wallander heard Forsfalt’s friendly voice. He described what they had found. Mirrors, brushes, make-up. A cassette player with a tape of drums on it. He played a few seconds of the tape. It echoed spookily in the meeting room. War paint, thought Wallander. How had he signed at the hospital? Geronimo. There were axes on a piece of cloth, and knives too. They could hear that Forsfalt was upset.
“We didn’t find scalps,” he said. “We’re still looking.”
“Where the hell are they?” said Wallander.
“Either he has them with him, or else he’s left them as a sacrifice somewhere,” Ekholm said.
“Where? Does he have his own sacrificial grove?”
“Could be.”
The waiting continued. Wallander lay down on the floor of his office and managed to sleep for half an hour. When he woke up he felt more tired than before. His body ached all over. Now and then Hoglund gave him a questioning look, but he shook his head and felt his self-loathing grow.
At 6 p.m. that evening, there was still no trace of Logard, Fredman or his sister. They had discussed at length whether to put out a nationwide alert for the Fredmans. Everyone was reluctant to do so. The risk that something would happen to Louise was too great. Akeson agreed. They kept waiting.
Just after 6 p.m. Hoover took his sister to the house he had chosen. He parked the moped on the beach side. He quickly picked the lock on the gate to the garden. Wetterstedt’s villa was deserted. They walked up the path to the main door. Suddenly he stopped and held Louise back. There was a car in the garage. It hadn’t been there this morning. He carefully pushed Louise down to sit on a rock behind the garage wall. He took out an axe and listened. He walked forward and looked at the car. It belonged to a security company. One of the front windows was open. He peered inside. There were some papers lying on the seat. He picked them up and saw that there was a receipt among them, made out to Hans Logard. He put it back and stood still, holding his breath. The drums started to pound. He remembered the conversation he had heard that morning. Hans Logard was on the run too.
So he’d had the same idea about the empty house. He was somewhere inside. Geronimo had not failed him. He had helped him track the monster to his lair. He didn’t have to search any further. The cold darkness that had penetrated his sister’s soul would soon be gone. He went back to her and told her to stay there for a while, and keep as quiet as she could. He would be back very soon.
He went into the garage. There were some cans of paint, and he opened two of them carefully. With his fingertip he drew two lines across his forehead. One red line, then a black one. He picked up his axe and took off his shoes. Just as he was about to leave he had an idea. He held his breath again, which he had learned from Geronimo. Compressed air in the lungs made thoughts clearer. He knew that his idea was a good one. It would make everything easier. Tonight he would bury the last of the scalps outside the hospital window alongside the others. There would be two of them. And he would bury a heart. Then it would be all over. In the last hole he would bury his weapons. He gripped the axe handle and started walking towards the house and the man he was to kill.