"I mean that we have reason to believe that Harderberg is directly or indirectly mixed up in the murder of the two solicitors. And the attempted murder of Mrs Duner. And the blowing up of my car."
Bjork stared at him in disbelief. "Am I really expected to take that seriously?"
"Yes, you are," Wallander said. "Akeson does."
Wallander gave Bjork a brisk summary of what had happened. When he had finished, Bjork sat looking at his hands before responding.
"It would be very unpleasant, of course, if this were to turn out to be true," he said in the end.
"Murder and explosions are certainly unpleasant things," Wallander said.
"We must be very, very careful," Bjork said, apparently ignoring Wallander's comment. "We can't accept anything short of conclusive proof before we consider making a move."
"We don't normally do that," Wallander said. "Why should this case be any different?"
"I have no doubt at all that this will turn out to be a dead end," Bjork said, getting to his feet to indicate that the conversation was over.
"That is a possibility," Wallander said. "So is the opposite."
It was 8.10 when he left Bjork's office. He fetched a cup of coffee and called in at Hoglund's office, but she had not yet arrived. He went to his office to telephone Waldemar Kage, the taxi driver in Simrishamn. He got through to him on his mobile and explained what it was about. He made a note that he should send Kage a cheque for 230 kronor. He wondered if he should phone the haulage contractor his father had punched and try to persuade him not to take the case to court, but decided against it. The meeting was due to start at 8.30. He needed to concentrate until then.
He stood at the window. It was a grey day, very cold and damp. Late autumn already, winter just round the corner. I'm here, he thought: I wonder where Harderberg is right now. At Farnholm Castle? Or 30,000 feet up, in his Gulfstream, on the way to and from some intricate negotiation? What had Gustaf Torstensson and Borman discovered? What had really happened? What if Hoglund and I are right, if two police officers of different generations, each with their own view of what the world is like, have come to the same conclusion? A conclusion that might even lead us to the truth?
Wallander came into the conference room at 8.30. Bjork was already at the short end of the table, Akeson was standing by the window, looking out, and Martinsson and Svedberg were deep in conversation about what sounded to Wallander like salaries. Hoglund was in her usual place opposite Bjork at the other short end of the table. Neither Martinsson nor Svedberg seemed to be worried by Akeson being there.
Wallander said good morning to Hoglund. "How do you think this is going to go?" he asked softly.
"When I woke up I thought I must have dreamed it all," she said. "Have you spoken yet to Bjork and Akeson?"
"Akeson knows most of what happened," he said. "I only had time to give Bjork the short version."
"What did Akeson say?"
"He'll go along with us."
Bjork tapped on the table with a pencil and those who were still standing sat down.
"All I have to say is that Kurt is going to do the talking," Bjork said. "Unless I am much mistaken, it looks as though there might have been a dramatic development."
Wallander wondered what to say, his mind a sudden blank. Then he found the thread and began. He went through in detail what Hoglund's colleague in Eskilstuna had been able to enlighten them about, and he set out the ideas that had developed in the early hours of the morning, about how they should proceed without waking the sleeping bear. When he had finished - and his account lasted 25 minutes - he asked Hoglund if she had anything to add, but she shook her head: Wallander had said all there was to say.
"So, that's where we've got to," Wallander said. "Because this means that we have no choice but to reassess our priorities for the investigation, we have got Per with us. Another consideration is whether we need to call in outside help at this stage. It's going to be a very tricky and in many ways a laborious process, penetrating Harderberg's world, especially since we can't afford to let him notice how interested in him we are."
Wallander was not sure whether he had succeeded in putting across all the things he had wanted to. Hoglund smiled and nodded at him, but when he studied the other faces around the table he still could not tell.
"This really is something for us to get our teeth into," Akeson said when the silence had lasted long enough. "We must be clear about the fact that Alfred Harderberg has an impeccable reputation in the Swedish business community. We can expect nothing but hostility if we start questioning that reputation. On the other hand, I have to say there are sufficient grounds for us to start taking a special interest in him. Naturally, I find it difficult to believe that Harderberg was personally involved in the murders or the other events, and of course it might be that things happen in his set-up over which he has no control."
"I've always dreamed of putting one of those gentlemen away," Svedberg suddenly said.
"A most regrettable attitude in a police officer," Bjork said, unable to control his displeasure. "It shouldn't be necessary for me to remind you all of our status as neutral civil servants - "
"Let's stick to the point," Akeson interrupted. "And perhaps we should also remind ourselves that in our role as servants of the law we are paid to be suspicious in circumstances in which normally we would not need to be."
"So we have the go-ahead to concentrate on Harderberg, is that right?" Wallander asked.
"On certain conditions," Bjork said. "I agree with Per that we have to be very careful and prudent, but I also want to stress that I shall regard it as dereliction of duty if anything we do is leaked outside these four walls. No statements are to be made to the press without their first having been authorised by me."
"We gathered that," said Martinsson, speaking for the first time. "I'm more concerned to find out how we're going to manage to run a vacuum cleaner over the whole of Harderberg's empire when there are so few of us. How are we going to coordinate our investigation with the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo? How are we going to cooperate with the tax authorities? I wonder if we shouldn't approach it quite differently."
"How would we do that?" Wallander said.
"Hand the whole thing over to the national CID," Martinsson said. "Then they can arrange cooperation with whichever squads and authorities they like. I think we have to concede that we're too small to handle this."
"That thought had occurred to me too," Akeson said. "But at this stage, before we've even made an initial investigation, the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo would probably turn us down. I don't know if you realise this, but they're probably even more overworked than we are. There are not many of us, but they are so understaffed they're verging on collapse. We'll have to take charge of this ourselves for the time being at least. Do the best we can. Nevertheless, I'll see if I can interest the fraud squads in helping us. You never know."
Looking back, Wallander had no doubt that it was what Akeson had to say about the hopeless situation the national CID were in that established once and for all the basis of the investigation. The murder investigation would be centred on Harderberg and the links between him and Lars Borman and him and the dead solicitors. Wallander and his team would also be on their own. It was true that the Ystad police were always having to deal with fraud cases of various kinds, but this was so much bigger than anything they had come across before, and they did not know of any financial impropriety associated with the deaths of the two solicitors.
In short, they had to start looking for an answer to the question: what were they really looking for?
When Wallander wrote to Baiba in Riga a few nights later and told her about "the secret hunt", as he had started to call the investigation, he realised that as he wrote to her in English, he would have to explain that hunting in Sweden was different from an English fox hunt. "There's a hunter in every police officer," he had written. "There is rarely, if ever, a fanfare of horns when a Swedish police officer is after his prey. But we find the foxes we are after even so. Without us, the Swedish hen house would long since have been empty: all that remained would have been a scattering of bloodstained feathers blowing around in the autumn breeze."