Martinsson left. Wallander sat down and read the paper. After reading it twice he was furious. He went out to the hall and strode into Svedberg’s office.
“Have you seen this?” he asked, waving Martinsson’s sheet of paper.
Svedberg shook his head.
“What is it?”
“It’s from a new organisation that wants to know whether the police would have any objections to its name.”
“Which is?”
“They were thinking of calling themselves ‘Friends of the Axe’.”
Svedberg gave Wallander a baffled look.
“Friends of the Axe?”
“That’s right. And now they’re wondering — in light of what happened here this summer — if the name might possibly be misconstrued. This organisation has no intention of going out and scalping people.”
“What are they going to do?”
“If I understand correctly, it’s some sort of home crafts association that wants to establish a museum for old-fashioned hand tools.”
“That sounds all right, doesn’t it? Why are you so worked up?”
“Because they think the police have time to make pronouncements about such things,” Wallander said. “Personally, I think Friends of the Axe is a pretty strange name for a home crafts association. But I can’t waste time on stuff like this.”
“So tell the chief.”
“I’m going to.”
“Though she probably won’t agree with you, since we’re all supposed to become local police officers again.”
Wallander knew that Svedberg was right. During the years he had been a policeman, the force had undergone endless and sweeping changes because of the complex relationship between the police and that vague and threatening entity known as “the public”. This public, which hung like a nightmare over the national police board as well as over the individual officers, was characterised by one thing: fickleness. The latest attempt to satisfy the public was to change the entire Swedish police force to “local police”. Just how this was supposed to be done, no-one knew. The national commissioner had proclaimed how important it was for the police to be seen. But since nobody had ever thought the police were invisible, they couldn’t see how this strategy was to be implemented. They already had policemen walking the beat, officers were also riding bicycles around in small, swift mini-squads. The national commissioner seemed to be talking about some other kind of visibility, something less tangible. “Local police” sounded cosy, like a soft pillow under your head. But how it was actually going to be combined with the fact that crime in Sweden was growing more brutal and violent all the time, no-one could see. In all probability, this new regime would require them to spend time making decisions as to whether it was proper for a home crafts organisation to call itself “Friends of the Axe”.
Wallander went back to his office with a cup of coffee, closing his door behind him. He tried again to make some headway with the huge amount of material. At first he found it hard to concentrate. His conversation with Baiba kept intruding. But he forced himself to act like a policeman again, and after a few hours he had reviewed the investigation and reached the point where he had left off before he went to Italy. He telephoned a detective in Goteborg with whom he was collaborating, and they discussed some of the issues. By the time he hung up it was midday, and Wallander was hungry. It was still raining. He went out to his car, drove to the centre of town, and ate lunch. He was back at the station within the hour. Just as he sat down, the telephone rang. It was Ebba in reception.
“You have a visitor,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“A man named Tyren. He wants to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Somebody who might be missing.”
“Isn’t there someone else who can handle it?”
“He says he absolutely has to speak with you.”
Wallander took a look at the open folders on his desk. Nothing in them was so urgent that he couldn’t take a report on a missing person.
“Send him in,” he said and hung up.
He opened the door and began moving the folders off his desk. When he looked up, a man was standing at his door. Wallander had never seen him before. He was dressed in overalls bearing the logo of the O.K. oil company. As he entered, Wallander could smell oil and petrol.
He shook his hand and asked the man to take a seat. He was in his 50s, unshaven and with thin grey hair. He introduced himself as Sven Tyren.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Wallander said.
“I’ve heard you’re a good policeman,” said Tyren. His accent sounded like western Skane, where Wallander himself had grown up.
“Most of us are good,” Wallander answered.
Tyren’s reply surprised him.
“You know that’s not true. I’ve been locked up for a thing or two in my day. And I’ve met a lot of policemen who were real arseholes, to put it mildly.”
Wallander was startled by the force of his words.
“I doubt you came here to tell me that,” he said, changing the subject. “There was something about a missing person?”
Tyren fidgeted with his O.K. cap.
“It’s strange, actually,” he said.
Wallander had taken out a notebook from a drawer and turned to a blank page.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “Who might have disappeared? And what’s strange about it?”
“Holger Eriksson.”
“Who’s that?”
“One of my customers.”
“I’m guessing that you own a petrol station.”
Tyren shook his head.
“I deliver heating oil,” he said. “I take care of the district north of Ystad. Eriksson lives between Hogestad and Lodinge. He called the office and said his tank was almost empty. We agreed on a delivery for Thursday morning. But, when I got there, nobody was home.”
Wallander jotted this down.
“You’re talking about last Thursday.”
“Yes.”
“And when did he call?”
“Last Monday.”
Wallander thought for a moment.
“Could there have been some misunderstanding about the time?”
“I’ve delivered to Eriksson for more than ten years. There’s never been a misunderstanding before.”
“So what did you do when you discovered that he wasn’t there.”
“His oil tank is locked, so I left a message in his letter box.”
“Then what?”
“I left.”
Wallander put down his pen.
“When you deliver oil,” Tyren went on, “you tend to notice people’s routines. I couldn’t stop thinking about Holger Eriksson. It didn’t make sense for him to be away. So I went out there again yesterday afternoon after work. My note was still in the letter box, underneath all the other post that had come since last Thursday. I rang the bell. Nobody was home. His car was still in the garage.
“Does he live alone?”
“He’s not married. He made a lot of money selling cars. And he writes poems, too. He gave me a book once.”
Wallander remembered seeing Eriksson’s name on books on a shelf of literature by local writers at the Ystad Bookshop when he’d been looking for something to give Svedberg for his 40th birthday.
“There was something else that doesn’t make sense,” Tyren said. “The door was unlocked. I thought maybe he was sick. He’s almost 80. So I went inside. The house was empty, but the coffee maker in the kitchen was on. It smelled bad. The coffee had boiled dry and burned on the bottom. That’s when I decided to come and see you.”
Wallander could see that Tyren’s concern was genuine. From experience, however, he knew that most disappearances usually solved themselves. It was very seldom that anything serious happened.
“Doesn’t he have any neighbours?” asked Wallander.
“The farmhouse is pretty isolated.”
“What do you think might have happened?”
Tyren’s reply came at once, quite firmly.