Precisely those words. Then I dug in a ditch at night. Maybe they best summed up Wallander’s experience of his many conversations with Yvonne Ander that autumn. It was like a picture of the time he was living in. What ditch was he digging?
One question was never answered: why she suddenly, in the mid-1980s, changed professions and became a conductor. Wallander had understood that the train timetable was the liturgy she lived by, her handbook. But the trains remained her private world. Maybe the only one; maybe the last one.
Did she feel guilt? Akeson asked him about that many times. Lisa Holgersson asked less often, his colleagues almost never. The only person besides Akeson who really insisted on knowing was Ann-Britt Hoglund. Wallander told her the truth: he didn’t know.
“Ander reminds me of a coiled spring,” he told her. “I can’t express it better than that. I can’t say whether guilt is part of it, or whether it’s gone.”
On 4 December it was over. Wallander had nothing more to ask, and Yvonne Ander had nothing more to say. The confession was complete. Wallander knew he had reached the end of the long descent. Now he could return to the surface. The psychiatric examination could begin, the defence lawyer could sharpen his pencils, and only Wallander had any idea what would happen.
He knew that Yvonne Ander would fall silent again, with the determined will of someone who has nothing more to say. Just before he left, he asked her about two more things he didn’t have answers to. The first was a detail that no longer had any significance, but he needed to satisfy his own curiosity.
“When Katarina Taxell called her mother from the house in Vollsjo, something was making a banging noise,” he said. “We couldn’t work out where that sound was coming from.”
She gave him a baffled look. Then her face broke open in a smile, the only one Wallander saw in all his talks with her.
“A farmer’s tractor had broken down in the field next to us. He was hitting it with a big hammer to get something loose from the undercarriage. Could you really hear that on the phone?”
Wallander nodded. He was already thinking of his last question.
“I think we actually met once,” he said. “On a train.”
She nodded.
“South of Almhult? I asked you when we would get to Malmo.”
“I recognised you from the newspapers. From last summer.”
“Did you already know then that we’d catch you?”
“Why should I?”
“A policeman from Ystad gets on a train in Almhult. What’s he doing there? Unless he’s following the trail of what happened to Gosta Runfeldt’s wife?”
She shook her head. “I never thought about that. I should have.”
Wallander had nothing more to ask. He had found out everything he wanted to know. He stood up, muttered goodbye, and left.
That afternoon Wallander visited the hospital as usual. Ann-Britt was asleep when he arrived, but he spoke to a doctor who told him that in six months she could return to work. He left the hospital just after 5 p.m. It was already dark, just below freezing, no wind. He drove out to the cemetery and went to his father’s grave. Withered flowers had frozen solid to the ground. It was still less than three months since they had come back from Rome. The holiday was vivid in his mind as he stood by the grave, wondering what his father had actually been thinking when he took his night-time walk to the Spanish Steps, to the fountain, with that gleam in his eyes.
It was as if Yvonne Ander and his father could have stood on either side of a river and waved to each other, even though they had nothing in common. Or did they? Wallander wondered what he himself had in common with her. He had no answer.
That night, out by the grave in the dark cemetery, the investigation came to an end for him. There would still be papers he would have to read over and sign, but the case was finished. The psychiatric examination would declare that she was in full possession of her faculties. Then she would be convicted and hidden away at Hinseberg. The investigation of the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death in Africa would also continue. But that had nothing to do with his own work.
The night of 4 December he slept badly. The next day he decided to look at a house just north of town. He was also going to visit a kennel in Sjobo where they had a litter of black Labrador puppies for sale. The next day he had to go to Stockholm and speak at the police academy. Why he had given in when Chief Holgersson asked him again, he didn’t know. Now he lay awake wondering what the hell he was going to say.
On that restless night, he thought mostly about Baiba. Several times he got up and stood at the kitchen window, staring at the streetlight swaying on its wire.
Just after he had come back from Rome, at the end of September, they had decided that she would come to Ystad soon — no later than November. They would have a serious discussion about whether she should move to Sweden. But her visit had been postponed, first once, then again. Each time there were excellent reasons for why she couldn’t come, not yet. Wallander believed her, of course, but he couldn’t quell his feeling of uncertainty. Was it still there, invisible, between them? A rift he hadn’t seen? If so, why hadn’t he seen it? Because he didn’t want to?
Now she was really going to come. They were supposed to meet in Stockholm on 8 December. He would go straight from the police academy to Arlanda to meet her. Linda would join them in the evening and they would all head south to Skane the following day. How long she would stay, he didn’t know, but this time they would have a serious discussion about the future, not just about the next time they could meet.
The night turned into a long vigil. The weather had turned warmer and the meteorologists were predicting snow. Wallander wandered like a lost soul between his bed and the kitchen window. Now and then he sat down at the kitchen table and made a few notes, in a futile attempt to find a starting point for the lecture he was going to give in Stockholm. All the time he couldn’t stop thinking about Yvonne Ander and her story. She was constantly on his mind, and occasionally she even blocked out thoughts of Baiba.
The person he thought very little about was his father. He was already far away. At times Wallander had trouble recalling all the details of his lined face. He’d had to reach for a photograph and look at it so that the memory wouldn’t completely slip away. During November he had visited Gertrud. The house in Loderup seemed empty, the studio cold and forbidding. Gertrud always gave the impression of being composed, but lonely.
Maybe he finally slept for a few hours towards dawn or maybe he was awake the whole time. By 7 a.m. he was already dressed. At 7.30 a.m. he drove his car, which sputtered suspiciously, to the police station. It was a particularly quiet morning. Martinsson had a cold; Svedberg had gone to Malmo on an assignment. The hall was deserted. He sat down in his office and read through the transcript of his notes of his last conversation with Yvonne Ander. On his desk there was also a transcript of an interview Hansson had carried out with Tore Grunden, the man she had tried to push in front of the train at Hassleholm. His background contained the same ingredients as all the other names in her macabre death ledger. Tore Grunden had once served time for abusing a woman. Wallander could see that Hansson had made it very clear to Grunden that he had been close to being torn to shreds by the oncoming train.
Wallander noticed that there was some tacit understanding among his colleagues of what Ander had done. That this understanding existed at all surprised him. She had shot Hoglund, she had attacked and killed men. Normally a team of policemen wouldn’t be supportive of a woman like Yvonne Ander. It was possible to ask whether the police had a friendly attitude towards women at all, unless they were officers with the special stamina that both Ann-Britt Hoglund and Lisa Holgersson possessed.