“I guess I understand the guy,” said Peters. “Having a house of your own can be a pain in the ass. There’s always something that needs to be done. But you never have time, or it’s too expensive. Having to work on somebody else’s house in the same way can’t make things any better.”
“Maybe we’d better help him pull the house down instead,” said Noren.
They managed to find the right address. Quite a crowd had gathered on the road outside the fence. Noren and Peters got out of the car and watched the naked guy crawling around on the roof, prying off tiles with a crowbar. Just then his wife came running up. Noren could see she had been crying. They listened to her incoherent account of what had happened. The main thing was, he obviously did not have permission to do what he was doing.
They went over to the house and yelled up at the guy sitting astride the roof ridge. He was concentrating so hard on the roof tiles, he hadn’t noticed the patrol car. When he saw Noren and Peters he was so surprised, he dropped the crowbar. It came sliding down the roof, and Noren had to leap to one side to avoid being hit.
“Careful with that!” yelled Peters. “I guess you’d better come down. You have no right to be demolishing this house.”
To their astonishment the guy obeyed them right away. He let down the ladder he had pulled up behind him, and climbed down. His wife came running up with a robe, which he put on.
“You gonna arrest me?” asked the guy.
“No,” said Peters. “But you’d better quit pulling that house down. To tell you the truth, I don’t really think they’ll be asking you to do any more repairs.”
“All I want to do is to go fishing,” said the man.
They drove back through Sandskogen. Noren reported back to headquarters.
Just as they were about to turn into the Osterleden highway, it happened.
“Here comes Wallander,” he said.
Noren looked up from his notebook.
As the car drove past, it looked like Wallander had not seen them. That would have been very strange if true, as they were in a marked patrol car painted blue and white. What attracted the attention of the two cops most of all, however, was not Wallander’s vacant stare.
It was the guy in the passenger seat. He was black.
Peters and Noren looked at each other.
“Wasn’t that an African in the car?” wondered Noren.
“Yeah,” said Peters. “He sure was black.”
They were both thinking about the severed finger they had found a few weeks earlier, and the black man they’d been searching for all over the country.
“Wallander must have caught him,” said Noren hesitantly.
“Why is he traveling in that direction, then?” objected Peters. “And why didn’t he stop when he saw us?”
“It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Noren. “Like kids do. If they close their eyes, they think nobody can see them.”
Peters nodded.
“Do you think he’s in trouble?”
“No,” said Noren. “But where did he manage to find the black guy?”
Then they were interrupted by an emergency call about a suspected stolen motorcycle found abandoned in Bjaresjo. When they finished their shift they went back to the station. To their surprise, when they asked about Wallander in the coffee room they discovered he had not shown up. Peters was just going to tell everybody how they had seen him when he saw Noren quickly put his finger over his lips.
“Why shouldn’t I say anything?” he asked when they were together in the locker room, getting ready to go home.
“If Wallander hasn’t shown up, there must be some reason why,” said Noren. “Just what, is nothing to do with you or me. Besides, it could be some other African. Martinson once said Wallander’s daughter had something going with a black man. It could have been him, for all we know.”
“I still think it’s weird,” Peters insisted.
That was a feeling that stayed with him even after he got back home to his row house on the road to Kristianstad. When he had finished his dinner and played with his kids for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinson lived in the same neighborhood, so he decided to stop by and tell him what he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinson had inquired recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.
Martinson himself answered the door. He invited Peters to come in.
“I must get back home in a minute,” said Peters. “But there is one thing I’d like to mention. Do you have time?”
Martinson had some position or other in the Liberal Party and was hoping for a seat on the local council before long; he had been reading some boring political reports the party had sent him. He lost no time putting on a jacket, and came out to join Peters. The latter told him what had happened earlier that afternoon.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Martinson when Peters had finished.
“We can’t both have been seeing things,” said Peters.
“Strange,” said Martinson thoughtfully. “I’d have heard right away if it was the African who’s missing a finger.”
“Maybe it was his daughter’s boyfriend,” hazarded Peters.
“Wallander said that was all over and done with,” said Martinson.
They walked in silence for a while, watching the dog straining at its leash.
“It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Peters tentatively. “And that can only mean one thing. He didn’t want us to know what he was up to.”
“Or at least about the African in the passenger seat,” said Martinson, lost in thought.
“I guess there’ll be some natural explanation,” said Peters. “I mean, I don’t want to suggest Wallander is up to something he shouldn’t be.”
“Of course not,” said Martinson. “But it was good you told me about it.”
“I mean, I don’t want to go spreading gossip,” Peters insisted.
“This isn’t gossip,” said Martinson.
“Noren will be mad,” said peters.
“He doesn’t need to know,” said Martinson.
They separated outside Martinson’s house. Peters promised Martinson he could buy a puppy when the time came.
Martinson wondered if he ought to call Wallander. Then he decided to wait and talk to him the next day. With a sigh, he returned to his endless political documents.
When Wallander showed up at the police station the next morning shortly before eight, he had an answer ready for the question he knew would come. The previous day when, after much hesitation, he had decided to take Victor Mabasha out with him in the car, he thought the risk of bumping into a police colleague or anybody he knew was small. He had taken roads he knew patrol cars seldom used. But needless to say, he ran into Peters and Noren. He noticed them so late there was no time to tell Victor Mabasha to crouch down and make himself invisible. Nor had he managed to turn off in some other direction. He could see in the corner of his eye that Peters and Noren had noticed the man in the seat beside him. They would ask for an explanation the next day, that was clear to him right away. At the same time he cursed his luck, and wished he had never set out.
Was there no end to it, he asked himself.
Then, when he had calmed down, he turned to his daughter for help once more.
“Herman Mboya will have to be resurrected as your boyfriend,” he said. “If anybody should ask. Which is pretty unlikely.”
She stared at him, then burst out laughing in resignation.
“Don’t you remember what you told me when I was a kid?” she asked. “That one lie leads to another? And eventually you get into such a mess, nobody knows what’s true any more.”
“I dislike this just as much as you do,” said Wallander. “But it’ll soon be over. He’ll soon be out of the country. Then we can forget he was ever here.”
“Sure I’ll say Herman Mboya has come back,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I sometimes wish he had.”
When Wallander got to the police station on Monday morning, then, he had an explanation ready for why there was an African sitting beside him in the car on Sunday afternoon. In a situation where most things were complicated and threatening to slide out of control, that seemed to him the least of his problems. When he noticed Victor Mabasha on the street that morning, shrouded in fog and looking like nothing more than a mirage, his first instinct was to rush back to the apartment and summon his colleagues for assistance. But something held him back, something at odds with all his usual police logic. Even when they were together in the cemetery that night in Stockholm, he had the distinct impression the black man was telling the truth. He was not the killer of Louise Akerblom. He might have been there, but he was innocent. It was another guy, a guy called Konovalenko, and later he’d tried to kill Victor Mabasha as well. There was a possibility the black man missing a finger had tried to prevent what happened at the deserted house. Wallander had been thinking non-stop about what was behind it all. That was the spirit in which he took him back to the apartment, well aware that he might be making a mistake. On several occasions Wallander had used unconventional methods, to say the least, when dealing with suspects or convicted criminals. More than once Bjork had felt obliged to remind Wallander of the regulations regarding correct police procedures. Even so, he required the black man to surrender any weapon he was carrying while they were still on the street. He accepted the pistol, and then frisked him. The black man had seemed strangely unaffected, as if he expected nothing less of Wallander than an invitation to join him in his home. Just to prove he was not completely naive, Wallander asked how he had managed to track down his address.