“What do you mean, crude?”
“His stories made me blush is what I mean.”
Wallander stared at him. He realised that he was thinking of his father, who liked telling crude stories too.
“You didn’t have the feeling he was getting senile?”
“He was as clear-headed as you or I.”
“Did Eriksson have any relatives?”
“He never married. He had no children, no girlfriend. Not that I know of, anyway.”
“No relatives?”
“He didn’t talk about any. He’d decided that an organisation in Lund would inherit all his property.”
“What organisation?”
Tyren shrugged.
“Some home crafts society or something. I don’t know.”
Wallander thought of Friends of the Axe, but then realised that Holger Eriksson must have decided to bequeath his farm to the Cultural Association in Lund.
“Do you know if he owned other property?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe another farmhouse? A house in town? Or a flat?”
Tyren thought before he replied.
“No,” he said. “There was just this farmhouse. The rest is in the bank. Handelsbanken.”
“How do you know that?”
“He paid his bills through Handelsbanken.”
Wallander nodded. He folded up his papers. He had no more questions. Now he was convinced that something terrible had happened to Eriksson.
“I’ll be in touch,” Wallander said, getting to his feet.
“What happens next?”
“The police have their procedures.”
They went outside.
“I’d be happy to stay and help you search,” Tyren said.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Wallander replied. “We prefer to do this our own way.”
Sven Tyren didn’t object. Wallander watched the truck leave. Then he stood at the edge of the fields and gazed towards a grove of trees in the distance. The rooks were still cawing. Wallander pulled his phone from his pocket and called Martinsson at the station.
“How’s it going?” Martinsson asked.
“We’ll have to start with a complete search,” said Wallander. “Hansson has the address. I want to get started as soon as possible. Send a couple of dog units out here.”
Wallander was about to hang up when Martinsson stopped him.
“There’s one more thing. I checked to see if we had anything on Holger Eriksson. And we do.”
Wallander pressed the phone to his ear and moved under a tree to get out of the rain.
“About a year ago he reported that he had a break-in at his house. Is the farm called ‘Seclusion’?”
“Yes,” Wallander said. “Keep going.”
“His report was filed on 19 October 1993. Svedberg took the message. But when I asked him about it, he’d forgotten.”
“And?”
“The report was a little strange,” said Martinsson hesitantly.
“What do you mean, strange?”
“Nothing was stolen, but he was certain that someone had broken into his house.”
“What happened?”
“The whole thing was dismissed. But the report is here. And it was made by Holger Eriksson.”
“That’s odd,” said Wallander. “We’ll have to take a closer look at that later. Get those dog units out here as soon as possible.”
“Isn’t there anything that strikes you about Eriksson’s report?” Martinsson asked.
“Such as?”
“It’s the second time in a few days that we’re discussing break-ins where nothing was stolen.”
Martinsson was right. Nothing had been stolen from the florist’s shop on Vastra Vallgatan either.
“That’s where the similarities end,” said Wallander.
“The owner of the shop is missing too,” said Martinsson.
“No, he isn’t,” said Wallander. “He’s on a trip to Kenya. He hasn’t disappeared. But it certainly looks like Holger Eriksson has.”
Wallander hung up and pulled his jacket tighter around him, moving back to the garage. Nothing serious could be done until the dog units arrived and they could organise the search and start talking to the neighbours. After a while he went back to the house. In the kitchen he drank a glass of water. The pipes clunked when he turned on the tap, another sign that no-one had been in the house for several days. As he emptied the glass he watched the rooks in the distance. He put down the glass and went back outside.
It was raining steadily. The rooks were cawing. Suddenly Wallander halted. He thought of the empty binocular case hanging on the wall just inside the front door. He looked at the rooks. Just past them, on the hill, was a tower. He stood motionless, trying to think. Then he began walking slowly along the edge of the field. The clay stuck to his gumboots in clumps. He discovered a path leading straight through the field. He could see that it led to the hillock on which the tower stood, a few hundred metres away. He started to walk along the path. The rooks were diving down, vanishing, and then flying up again. There must be a hollow or a ditch there. The tower grew clearer. He guessed that it was used for hunting hares or deer. Below the hill on the opposite side was a patch of woods, probably also part of Eriksson’s property. Then he saw the ditch in front of him. Some rough planks seemed to have fallen into it. As he came closer, the rooks got louder, then they rose up and flew off. Wallander looked down into the ditch.
He gave a start and took a step back. Instantly he felt sick. Later he would say that it was one of the worst things he had ever seen. And in his years as a policeman he’d encountered plenty of things he would have preferred not to see. As he stood there with the rain soaking him to the skin, he couldn’t tell at first what he was looking at. Something alien and unreal lay in front of him. Something he could never have imagined. The only thing that was completely clear was that there was a dead body in the ditch.
He squatted down, forcing himself not to look away. The ditch was at least two metres deep. A number of sharp stakes were fixed in the bottom of it. On these stakes hung a man. The spearlike tips of the stakes had pierced the body in several places. The man lay prostrate, suspended on them. The rooks had attacked the back of his neck. Wallander stood up, his knees shaking. Somewhere in the distance he could hear cars approaching.
He looked down again. The stakes seemed to be made of bamboo, like thick fishing rods, with their tips sharpened to points. He looked at the planks that had fallen into the ditch. Since the path continued on the other side, they must have served as a bridge. Why did they break? They were thick boards that should withstand a heavy load, and the ditch was no more than two metres wide.
When he heard a dog barking he turned and walked back to the farmhouse. Now he really felt sick. And he was scared too. It was one thing to discover someone murdered. But the way this had been done. .
Someone had planted sharpened bamboo stakes in the ditch. To impale a man. He stopped on the path to catch his breath. Images from the summer raced through his mind. Was it starting all over again? Were there no limits to what could happen in this country?
He kept walking. Two officers with dogs were waiting outside the house. He could see Hoglund and Hansson there too. When he reached the end of the path and walked into the courtyard, they could see at once that something had happened.
Wallander wiped the rain off his face and told them. He knew that his voice was unsteady. He turned and pointed down towards the flock of rooks, which had returned as soon as he left the ditch.
“He’s lying down there,” he said. “He’s dead. It’s a murder. Get a full team out here.”
They waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t have anything to say.
CHAPTER 6
By nightfall on Thursday, 29 September, the police had put a canopy over the ditch where the body of Holger Eriksson hung impaled on nine solid bamboo poles. They had shovelled out the mud and blood at the bottom of the ditch. The macabre work and the relentless rain made the murder scene one of the most depressing and disgusting Wallander and his colleagues had ever witnessed. The clay stuck to their gumboots, they tripped over electrical cables winding through the mud, and the harsh light from the floodlights they had rigged up intensified the surreal impression. Sven Tyren had come back and identified the man impaled on the stakes. It was Eriksson, all right, Tyren told them. No doubt about it. The search for the missing man had ended even before it had begun. Tyren remained unusually composed, as though not fully comprehending what he saw before him. He paced restlessly outside the cordon for several hours without saying a word, and then suddenly he was gone.