An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

Chapter 18

It took Martinson four hours to find microfilm versions of Ystads Allehanda that contained articles about the mysterious horse and caravan. A few hours later he came to the police station with lots of copies of the microfilm pages. Together with Stefan Lindman, Wallander and Martinson sat down in the conference room.

“The fifth of December 1944,” said Martinson. “That’s when it begins. The headline over the first report of the incident in Ystads Allehanda is ‘THE FLYING DUTCHMAN ON THE COUNTRY ROAD.’ ”

They spent the next hour reading through everything that Martinson had collected. Wallander noted that the two people who had lived in the caravan were called Richard and Irina Pettersson. There was even a blurred picture of them — a copy of a framed photograph hanging inside the caravan.

“Simon Larsson has a good memory,” said Wallander when they had finished reading the articles. “We can be grateful for that. We might have caught on to this pair sooner or later, but you never know. The question is, of course: can these two be the people we are looking for?”

“They are the right age,” said Lindman. “And the place fits in. The question is: what happened?”

“The records,” said Wallander. “We need to dig out all the information we can find about them. If there really were such a thing as a time machine, now is when we could make use of it.”

“Perhaps Nyberg has one,” suggested Lindman.

Wallander and Martinson burst out laughing. Wallander stood up and walked over to the window. Martinson continued laughing in the background, and Lindman sneezed.

“Let’s concentrate on this for the next few days,” said Wallander. “We shouldn’t abandon all the other leads, but we’ll let them rest. Let them mature, as you might say. But something tells me this one is right. There are too many things that fit in for these not to be the two people we’re looking for.”

“Everybody in the newspapers speaks well of them,” said Martinson. “But somewhere between the lines you get the feeling that people didn’t care all that much about what happened to them. It’s the mystery that captured everybody’s attention. You get the impression that we should feel most sorry for the horse, pulling around an empty caravan. Just imagine what would have been said and written if it had been two old local farmers who had disappeared.”

“You’re right,” said Wallander. “But until we know just who exactly those two people were, we can’t exclude the possibility that they are somehow involved in the murder. I’ll ring the prosecutor and tell her about this. OK, let’s get going.”

They agreed who would do what in their efforts to get a more detailed picture of Richard and Irina Pettersson who had gone missing sixty years ago. Wallander went to his office to ring the prosecutor and report on the new development, and was given the green light to go ahead as they had planned. Then he sat down and read through the newspaper articles one more time

When he had finished, he still felt strongly about it. He really did think they were finally on the right track.