Wallander thought about the nights he’d spent with Baiba Liepa in a church in Riga the previous year. But he said nothing. Even if he wanted to, he had no time to think about her just now.
Pastor Tureson was an elderly man, tall and well built, with a mop of white hair. Wallander could feel the strength in his grip when they shook hands.
The inside of the chapel was simple. Wallander did not feel the oppression that often affected him when he went into a church. They sat down on wooden chairs by the altar.
“I called Robert a couple of hours ago,” said Pastor Tureson. “Poor man, he was beside himself. Have you found her yet?”
“No,” said Wallander.
“I don’t understand what can have happened. Louise wasn’t the type to get herself into dangerous situations.”
“Sometimes you can’t avoid it,” said Wallander.
“What do you mean by that?”
“There are two kinds of dangerous situations. One is the kind you get yourself into. The other just sucks you in. That’s not quite the same thing.”
Pastor Tureson threw up his hands in acknowledgment. He seemed genuinely worried, and his sympathy with the husband and their children appeared to be real.
“Tell me about her,” said Wallander. “What was she like? Had you known her long? What sort of a family were the Akerbloms?”
Pastor Tureson stared at Wallander, a serious expression on his face.
“You ask questions as though it were all over,” he said.
“It’s just a bad habit of mine,” said Wallander apologetically. “Of course I mean you should tell me what she is like.”
“I’ve been pastor in this parish for five years,” he began. “As you can probably hear, I’m originally from Goteborg. The Akerbloms have been members of my congregation the whole time I’ve been here. They both come from Methodist families, and they met through the chapel. Now they’re bringing up their daughters in the true religion. Robert and Louise are good people. Hard-working, thrifty, generous. It’s hard to describe them any other way. In fact, it’s hard not to talk about them as a couple. Members of the congregation are shattered by her disappearance. I could feel that at our prayer meeting yesterday.”
The perfect family. Not a single crack in the facade, thought Wallander. I could talk to a thousand different people, and they would all say the same thing. Louise Akerblom doesn’t have a single weakness. Not one. The only odd thing about her is that she has disappeared.
Something doesn’t add up. Nothing adds up.
“Something on your mind, Inspector?” asked Pastor Tureson.
“I was thinking about weakness,” said Wallander. “Isn’t that one of the basic features of all religions? That God will help us to overcome our weaknesses?”
“Absolutely.”
“But it seems to me like Louise Akerblom didn’t have any weaknesses. The picture I’m getting of her is so perfect, I start getting suspicious. Do such utterly good people really exist?”
“That’s the kind of person Louise is,” said Pastor Tureson.
“You mean she’s almost angelic?”
“Not quite,” said Pastor Tureson. “I remember one time when she was making coffee for a social evening the chapel had organized. She burnt herself. I happened to hear that she actually swore.”
Wallander tried going back to the beginning and starting again.
“There’s no chance she and her husband were fighting?” he asked.
“None at all,” replied Pastor Tureson.
“No other man?”
“Of course not. I hope that isn’t a question you’ll put to Robert.”
“Could she have felt some kind of religious doubt?”
“I regard that as being out of the question. I’d have known about it.”
“Was there any reason why she might have committed suicide?”
“No.”
“Could she have gone out of her mind?”
“Why ever should she? She’s a perfectly stable character.”
“Most people have their secrets,” said Wallander after a moment’s silence. “Can you imagine that Louise Akerblom might have had some secret she couldn’t share with anybody, not even her husband?”
Pastor Tureson shook his head.
“Of course everybody has secrets,” he said. “Often very murky secrets. All the same, I’m convinced Louise didn’t have any that could lead her to abandon her family and cause all this worry.”
Wallander had no more questions.
It doesn’t add up, he thought again. There’s something in this picture of perfection that simply doesn’t add up.
He got to his feet and thanked Pastor Tureson.
“I’ll be talking with other members of your congregation,” he said. “If she doesn’t turn up, that is.”
“She’ll have to turn up,” said Pastor Tureson. “There’s no other possibility.”
It was five minutes past four when Wallander left the Methodist chapel. It had started raining, and he shivered in the wind. He sat in the car for a while, feeling tired. It was as if he couldn’t cope with the thought that two little girls had lost their mother.
At half past four they were all gathered in Bjork’s office at the police station. Martinson was slumped back on the sofa; Svedberg leaned against a wall. As usual he was scratching his bald head, as if searching absentmindedly for the hair he had lost. Wallander sat on a wooden chair. Bjork was leaning over his desk, engrossed in a telephone conversation. At last he put down the receiver and told Ebba they were not to be disturbed for the next half-hour. Unless it was Robert Akerblom.
“Where are we?” asked Bjork. “Where shall we start?”
“We’ve gotten nowhere,” replied Wallander.
“I’ve filled in Svedberg and Martinson,” Bjork went on. “We’ve put out a search for her car. All the usual routines for missing person cases we consider to be serious.”
“Not consider to be serious,” said Wallander. “They are serious. If there had been an accident, we’d have heard about it by now. But we haven’t. That means we’re dealing with a crime. I’m convinced she’s dead.”
Martinson started to ask a question, but Wallander interrupted and summarized what he’d been doing that afternoon. He had to get his colleagues to see what he had realized. A person like Louise Akerblom wouldn’t voluntarily abandon her family.
Somebody or something must have forced her to fail to turn up at home at five o’clock, as she had promised on the telephone.
“It sounds nasty, no doubt about that,” said Bjork when Wallander had finished.
“Real estate agent, free church member, family,” said Martinson. “Maybe it all got too much for her? She buys the pastries, drives off home. Then all of a sudden she turns around and heads for Copenhagen instead.”
“We have to find the car,” said Svedberg. “Without that, we won’t get anywhere.”
“First of all we have to find the house she was going to see,” Wallander pointed out. “Hasn’t Robert Akerblom called yet?”
No one had heard from him.
“If she really did go to see that house somewhere near Krageholm, we ought to be able to follow her tracks until we find her, or until the tracks come to an end.”
“Peters and Noren have been combing the side roads around Krageholm,” said Bjork. “No Toyota Corolla. They did find a stolen truck, though.”
Wallander took the cassette from the answering machine out of his pocket. With some considerable difficulty they eventually managed to find a machine to play it. They all stood around the desk, listening to Louise Akerblom’s voice.
“We have to analyze the tape,” said Wallander. “I can’t imagine what the technical guys could possibly find. But still.”
“One thing is clear,” said Martinson. “When she left her message she wasn’t threatened or pressured, scared or worried, desperate or unhappy.”
“Which means something must have happened,” said Wallander. “Between three and five. Somewhere in the area of Skurup, Krageholm, Ystad. Just over three days ago.”
“How was she dressed?” asked Bjork.
Wallander suddenly realized he’d forgotten to ask her husband this most basic question. He admitted as much.