Faceless Killers

Chapter twelve

He thought he had slept for a long time. But when he woke up and looked at the clock on the nightstand, he realized that he had been asleep for only seven minutes. It was the telephone that woke him. Rydberg was calling from a phone booth in Malmö.

“Come on back,” said Wallander. “You don’t have to stand there freezing. Come here, to my place.”

“What happened?”

“It’s him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely positive.”

“I’m on my way.”

Kurt Wallander climbed laboriously out of bed. His body ached and his temples were throbbing. While the coffee was brewing he sat at the kitchen table with a pocket mirror and a cotton ball. With great difficulty he succeeded in fastening a gauze pad over the wound on his forehead. He thought his whole face was nothing but shades of blue and purple.

Forty-three minutes later Rydberg stood in the doorway.

While they drank coffee, Wallander told him his story.

“Good,” Rydberg said afterward. “Excellent footwork. Now we’ll bring in those bastards. What was the name of the guy in Lund?”

“I forgot to look at the name in the entryway. And we’re not the ones who’ll bring them in. That’s Björk’s job.”

“Is he back?”

“He was supposed to arrive last night.”

“Then let’s get him out of bed.”

“The prosecutor too. And the action will probably have to be coordinated with our colleagues in Malmö and Lund, right?”

While Wallander was getting dressed, Rydberg was on the phone. With satisfaction Wallander could hear that he wasn’t taking no for an answer.

He wondered whether Anette Brolin’s husband was visiting this weekend.

Rydberg stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him knot his tie.

“You look like a boxer,” he said, laughing. “A punch-drunk boxer.”

“Did you get hold of Björk?”

“He seems to have spent the evening catching up with everything that’s happened. He was relieved to hear that we had solved one of the murders, at least.”

“The prosecutor?”

“She’ll come right away.”

“Was she the one who answered the phone?”

Rydberg looked at him in surprise. “Who else would have answered?”

“Her husband, for instance.”

“What difference would that make?”

Wallander didn’t feel like answering. “Goddamn, I feel like shit,” he said instead. “Let’s go.”

They went out into the early dawn. A gusty wind was still blowing and the sky was overcast with dark clouds.

“You think it’s going to snow?” asked Wallander.

“Not before February,” said Rydberg. “I can feel it. But then it’ll be a hard winter.”

A Sunday calm prevailed at the police station. Norén had been relieved by Svedberg. Rydberg gave him a brief rundown of what had happened during the night.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Svedberg. “A cop?”

“An ex-cop.”

“Where did he hide the car?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Is the case airtight?”

“I think so.”

Björk and Anette Brolin arrived at the police station simultaneously. Björk, who was fifty-four years old and originally from Västmanland, had a nice tan. Wallander had always imagined him to be the ideal chief for a medium-sized police district. He was friendly, not too intelligent, and at the same time extremely concerned with the good name and reputation of the police.

He gave Kurt Wallander a dismayed look. “You really look terrible.”

“They beat me up,” said Wallander.

“Beat you up? Who?”

“The cops. That’s what happens when you’re acting chief. They let you have it.”

Björk laughed.

Anette Brolin looked at him with what seemed to be genuine sympathy.

“That must hurt,” she said.

“I’ll be all right,” replied Wallander.

He turned his face away when he answered, remembering that he had forgotten to brush his teeth.

They all went into Björk’s office.

Since there was no written report, Wallander gave a verbal summary of the case. Both Björk and Anette Brolin asked a lot of questions.

“If it had been anyone but you who dragged me out of bed on Sunday morning with this kind of cops-and-robbers story, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Björk.

Then he turned to Anette Brolin. “Do we have enough to detain them? Or should we just bring them in for questioning?”

“I’ll get the detention order on them based on the interrogation results,” said Anette Brolin. “Then, of course, it would be good if that Romanian woman could identify the man in Lund in a line-up.”

“We’ll need a court order for that,” said Björk.

“Yes,” said Anette Brolin. “But we could do a provisional identification.”

Wallander and Rydberg gave her an interested look.

“We could bring in the woman from the refugee camp,” she went on. “Then they could walk past each other by chance here in the hallway.”

Wallander nodded in approval. Anette Brolin was a prosecutor who was Per Akeson’s equal when it came to taking a flexible view of the applicable rules.

“All right,” said Björk. “I’ll get in touch with our colleagues in Malmö and Lund. Then we’ll pick up the suspects in two hours. At ten o’clock.”

“What about the woman in the bed?” asked Kurt Wallander. “The one in Lund?”

“We’ll bring her in too,” said Björk. “How should we divide up the interrogations?”

“I want Rune Bergman,” said Wallander. “Rydberg can talk to the man who munches on apples.”

“At three o’clock we’ll decide about the detention order,” said Anette Brolin. “I’ll be at home until then.”

Wallander accompanied her out to the lobby. “I was thinking about asking you to dinner last night,” he said. “But something came up.”

“There’ll be plenty more evenings,” she said. “I think you’ve done a good job on this case. How did you figure out that he was the one?”

“I didn’t. It was just a hunch.”

He watched her as she headed toward town. He realized that he hadn’t thought of Mona at all since the evening they had dinner together.

Then everything started to move very fast.

Hanson was wrenched out of his Sunday calm and ordered to bring in the Romanian woman and an interpreter.

“Our colleagues don’t sound happy,” Björk said with concern. “It’s never popular to bring in someone from your own force. It’s going to be a dismal winter because of this.”

“What do you mean by dismal?” asked Wallander.

“New attacks on the police force.”

“He was retired early, wasn’t he?”

“Even so. The papers will be screaming about the fact that the murderer was a cop. There will be new persecution of the force.”

At ten o’clock Wallander returned to the building that was covered in sacking and construction scaffolding. To assist him he had four plainclothes policemen from Lund.

“He has weapons,” said Wallander while they were still sitting in the car. “And he has committed a cold-blooded execution. Still, I think we can take it easy. He’s certainly not counting on the fact that we’re on his tail. Two weapons drawn should be enough.”

Wallander had brought along his service revolver from Ystad.

On the way to Lund he tried to remember when he had last taken it out. He decided it was over three years earlier, in conjunction with the capture of an escaped convict from Kumla prison who had barricaded himself in a summerhouse near Mossby beach.

Now they were sitting in a car outside the building in Lund. Wallander realized that he had climbed considerably higher than he had thought. If he had fallen all the way to the ground, he would have crushed his spine.

That morning the police in Lund had sent out an inspector disguised as a newspaper carrier to case the apartment.

“Let’s review,” said Wallander. “No back stairs?”

The officer sitting next to him in the front seat shook his head.

“No scaffolding on the rear side?”

“Nothing.”

According to the officer, the apartment was occupied by a man named Valfrid Ström.

He wasn’t listed in any police files. No one knew how he made his living either.

At ten o’clock on the dot they got out of the car and crossed the street. One officer stayed at the outside door of the building. There was an intercom system, but it was out of order. Wallander jimmied the door open with a screwdriver.

“One man stay in the stairwell,” he said. “You and I will go upstairs. What was your name?”

“Enberg.”

“You’ve got a first name, haven’t you?”

“Kalle.”

“Okay, let’s go, Kalle.”

They listened in the darkness outside the door.

Wallander drew his pistol and nodded to Kalle Enberg to do the same.

Then he rang the doorbell.

The door was opened by a woman wearing a housecoat. Wallander recognized her from the night before. It was the same woman who had been asleep in the double bed.

He hid his pistol behind his back.

“We’re with the police,” he said. “We’re looking for your husband, Valfrid Ström.”

The woman, who was in her forties and had a harried expression, looked scared.

Then she stepped aside and let the policemen in.

Suddenly Valfrid Ström was standing in front of them. He was dressed in a green jogging suit.

“Police,” said Wallander. “We need to ask you to come with us.”

The man with the half-moon-shaped bald spot looked at him tensely. “Why?”

“For questioning.”

“About what?”

“You’ll find out at the station.”

Then Wallander turned to the woman. “You’d better come along too. Put on some clothes.”

The man facing him seemed completely calm. “I’m not going anywhere if you don’t tell me why,” he said. “Perhaps you could start by showing me some ID?”

When Kurt Wallander put his right hand in his inside pocket, he couldn’t hide the fact that he was carrying a pistol. He switched it over to his left hand and fumbled for his billfold, where he kept his ID.

At the same instant Ström leaped straight at him. He butted Wallander right in the forehead, smack in the middle of his swollen wound. Wallander went sailing backward, and the pistol flew out of his hand. Kalle Enberg didn’t have time to react before the man in the green jogging suit had disappeared out the door. The woman shrieked, and Wallander fumbled for his pistol. Then he dashed down the stairs after the man, yelling a warning to the two officers posted farther down.

Ström was fast. He gave the policeman standing inside the door an elbow to the chin. The man outside was rammed by the front door when Ström flung himself out into the street. Wallander, who could hardly see with the blood streaming into his eyes, stumbled over the unconscious policeman lying in the stairwell. He pulled at the safety on his pistol, which was stuck.

Then he was out on the street.

“Which way did he go?” he called to the bewildered policeman who had gotten entangled in the sacking.

“To the left.”

Wallander ran. He could see Ström’s green jogging suit just as he ducked under a viaduct. He tore off his cap and wiped his face. Several elderly women, who looked like they were on their way to church, jumped aside in fright. He ran under the viaduct just as a train rumbled by overhead.

When he reached the street level again, he saw how Ström stopped a car, dragged out the driver, and drove off.

The only vehicle in the vicinity was a large horse van. The driver was pulling a pack of condoms out of a vending machine on the wall of the building. When Wallander came racing up, his pistol drawn and blood running down his face, the man dropped the condoms and ran off.

Wallander climbed into the driver’s seat. Behind him he heard a horse whinny. The engine was running, and he threw it into first gear.

He thought he had lost sight of the car Valfrid Ström had stolen, but then he saw it again. The car drove through a red light and continued down a narrow street that led straight toward the cathedral. Wallander was shifting gears fast, trying not to lose sight of the car. Horses were whinnying behind him, and he smelled the odor of warm manure.

In a tight curve he almost lost control of the van. He caromed off two cars parked by the curb, but finally managed to straighten out the van again.

The chase proceeded toward the hospital and then through an industrial area. Wallander suddenly discovered that the van was equipped with a cellular phone. He tried to dial the emergency number with one hand while struggling to keep the heavy vehicle on the road.

Just as the emergency operator answered, he had to negotiate a curve.

The phone fell out of his hand, and he realized that he wouldn’t be able to reach it without stopping.

This is crazy, he thought in desperation. Totally nuts.

At the same time he remembered his sister. Right now he was supposed to be meeting her at Sturup airport.

In the roundabout by the entrance to Staffanstorp the chase ended.

Ström was forced to screech to a stop for a bus that had already entered the roundabout. He lost control of the car and ran straight into a cement column. Wallander, who was about a hundred meters behind him, saw the flames shooting out of the car. He braked so hard that the van slid into the ditch and tipped over. The back gates flew open and three horses jumped out and galloped away across the fields.

Ström was flung out of the car on impact. One foot was sliced off. His face had been gashed by shards of glass.

Even before Wallander reached him he could tell that he was dead.

People came running out of the nearby houses. Cars pulled over to the side of the road.

Suddenly he noticed that he was still holding his pistol.

A few minutes later the first squad car arrived. Then an ambulance. Kurt Wallander showed his ID and made a call from the squad car. He asked to talk to Björk.

“Did it go all right?” asked Björk. “Rune Bergman has been picked up and is on the way here. Everything went without a hitch. And the Yugoslavian woman is waiting here with her interpreter.”

“Send them over to the morgue at Lund General Hospital,” said Wallander. “Now she’ll have to identify a corpse. By the way, she’s Romanian.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” said Björk.

“Just what I said,” replied Wallander and hung up.

At that moment he saw one of the horses come galloping across the field. It was a beautiful white horse.

He didn’t think he’d ever seen such a beautiful horse.

When he got back to Ystad the news of Valfrid Ström’s death had already made the rounds. The woman who was his wife had collapsed, and a doctor refused to let the police interrogate her.

Rydberg told Wallander that Rune Bergman denied everything. He hadn’t stolen his own car and then ditched it. He hadn’t been at Hageholm. He hadn’t visited Valfrid Ström the night before.

He demanded to be taken back to Malmö at once.

“What a goddamned weasel,” said Wallander. “I’ll crack him.”

“Nobody is doing any cracking here,” said Björk. “That ridiculous high-speed chase through Lund has caused enough trouble already. I don’t understand why four full-grown policemen can’t manage to bring in an unarmed man for questioning. By the way, do you know that one of those horses was run over? Its name was Super Nova, and its owner put a value of a hundred thousand kronor on it.”

Wallander felt anger rise up inside him.

Why couldn’t Björk grasp that it was support he needed? Not this officious whining.

“Now we’re going to wait for the Romanian woman’s identification,” said Björk. “Nobody talks to the press or the media except me.”

“Thank heaven for that,” said Wallander.

He went back to his office with Rydberg and closed the door.

“Do you have any idea how you look?” Rydberg asked.

“Don’t tell me, please.”

“Your sister called. I asked Martinson to drive out and pick her up at the airport. I assumed that you had forgotten. He said he’d take care of her until you had time.”

Wallander nodded gratefully.

A few minutes later, Björk stormed in.

“The ID is positive,” he said. “We’ve got the murderer we were looking for.”

“Did she recognize him?”

“Without a doubt. It was the same man who was eating the apple out in the field.”

“Who was he?” asked Rydberg.

“Valfrid Ström called himself a businessman,” replied Björk. “Forty-seven years old. But the Security Police in Stockholm didn’t take long to answer our inquiry. Ström has been engaged in nationalist movements since the sixties. First in something called the Democratic Alliance, later in much more militant factions. But how he ended up a cold-blooded murderer — that’s something Rune Bergman may be able to tell us. Or his wife.”

Wallander stood up. “Now we’ll tackle Bergman,” he said.

All three of them went into the room where Rune Bergman sat smoking.

Kurt Wallander led the interrogation.

He went on the offensive at once.

“Do you know what I was doing last night?” he asked.

Bergman gave him a look of contempt. “How would I know that?”

“I tailed you to Lund.”

Wallander thought he caught a fleeting shift in the man’s face.

“I followed you to Lund,” repeated Wallander. “And I climbed up on the scaffolding outside the building where Ström lived. I saw you exchange your shotgun for another one. Now Ström is dead. But a witness has identified him as the murderer at Hageholm. What do you have to say to all this?”

Bergman didn’t say a word. He lit a new cigarette and stared into space.

“Okay, we’ll take it from the top,” said Wallander. “We know how everything happened. There are only two things we don’t know. First, what did you do with your car? Second, why did you shoot the Somali?”

Rune Bergman wasn’t talking.

Right after three that afternoon he was formally put under arrest and assigned a public defender. The charge was murder or accessory to murder.

At four o’clock Wallander questioned Valfrid Ström’s wife briefly. She was still in shock, but she answered his questions. He found out that Ström dealt in importing exclusive automobiles.

She also told him that Ström hated the Swedish refugee policy.

She had only been married to him for a little over a year.

Wallander had the distinct impression that she would get over her loss quite soon.

After the interrogation he talked with Rydberg and Björk. Then they released the woman with a warning not to leave town, and she was taken back to Lund.

Just before they left, Wallander and Rydberg made another attempt to get Rune Bergman to talk. The public defender, who was young and ambitious, claimed that there were no grounds for submission of evidence, and he was of the opinion that the arrest was equivalent to a preliminary miscarriage of justice.

At about the same time Rydberg had an idea.

“Where was Ström trying to escape to?” he asked Wallander.

He pointed at a map.

“The chase ended at Staffanstorp. Maybe he had a warehouse there or somewhere in the vicinity. It’s not far from Hageholm, if you know all the back roads.”

A conversation with Ström’s wife confirmed that Rydberg was on the right track. The man did indeed have a warehouse between Staffanstorp and Veberöd where he kept his imported cars. Rydberg drove over there in a squad car and soon called Wallander back.

“Bingo,” he said. “There’s a pale-blue Citroen here.”

“Maybe we ought to teach our children to identify cars by their sound,” said Wallander.

He tackled Rune Bergman again. But the man said nothing.

Rydberg returned to Ystad after a preliminary examination of the Citroen. In the glove compartment he found a box of shotgun shells. In the meantime the police in Malmö and Lund searched Bergman’s and Ström’s apartments.

“It seems as though these two gentlemen were members of some sort of Swedish Ku Klux Klan movement,” said Björk. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a knotty problem to untangle. There might be more people involved.”

Rune Bergman still wasn’t talking.

Wallander was greatly relieved that Björk was back and could take charge of dealing with the media. His face was stung and burned, and he was very tired. By six o’clock he finally had time to call Martinson and talk to his sister. Then he drove over and picked her up. She was startled when she saw his battered face.

“It might be best if Dad didn’t see me,” said Wallander. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

His sister had already visited their father in the hospital that day. The old man was still tired, but he brightened up a little when he saw his daughter.

“I don’t think he remembers much about that night,” she said as they drove up to the hospital. “Maybe that’s just as well.”

Wallander sat in the car and waited while she visited their father again. He closed his eyes and listened to a Rossini opera. When she opened the car door, he jumped. He had fallen asleep.

Together they drove to the house in Löderup.

Wallander could see that his sister was shocked at their father’s decline. They helped each other clean up the stinking garbage and filthy clothes.

“How could this happen?” she asked, and Wallander felt that she was blaming him.

Maybe she was right. Maybe he could have done more. At least discovered his father’s decline in time.

They stopped and bought groceries and then returned to Mariagatan. At dinner they talked about what would happen to their father.

“He’ll die if we put him in a retirement home,” she said.

“What’s the alternative?” asked Wallander. “He can’t live here. He can’t live with you. The house in Löderup won’t work either. What’s left?”

They agreed that it would be best, all the same, if their father could keep on living in his own house, with regular home-care visits.

“He has never liked me,” said Wallander as they were drinking coffee.

“Of course he does.”

“Not since I decided to be a cop.”

“You think maybe he had something else in mind for you?”

“Yes, but what? He never says anything.”

Wallander made up the sofa for his sister.

When they had no more to say about their father, Wallander told her about everything that had happened. Suddenly he realized that the old sense of intimacy, which had always bound them before, was gone.

We haven’t gotten together often enough, he thought. She doesn’t even dare ask me why Mona and I went our separate ways.

He brought out a half-empty bottle of cognac. She shook her head, so he just filled his own glass.

The evening news was dominated by the story of Valfrid Strom. Rune Bergman’s identity was not revealed. Wallander knew that it was because he had a past as a policeman. He assumed that the chief of the National Police was hard at work setting out the necessary smoke screens so they could keep Rune Bergman’s identity a secret for as long as possible.

But sooner or later, of course, the truth would have to come out.

When the news broadcast was over, the telephone rang.

Wallander asked his sister to answer it. “Find out who it is and say you’ll check to see if I’m home,” he told her.

“It’s someone named Brolin,” she said when she came back from the hall.

He laboriously got up from his chair and took the telephone.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” said Anette Brolin.

“Not at all. My sister is visiting.”

“I just thought I’d call and say that I think all of you did an extraordinary job.”

“Mostly we were lucky.”

Why is she calling? he wondered. He made a quick decision.

“How about a drink?” he suggested.

“Great. Where?” He could hear that she was surprised.

“My sister is just going to bed. How about your place?”

“That’s fine.”

He hung up the phone and went back into the living room.

“I wasn’t planning to go to bed at all,” said his sister.

“I have to go out for a while. Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

The cool evening made it easy to breathe. He turned down Regementsgatan and felt a sudden sense of relief. They had solved the brutal murder in Hageholm within forty-eight hours. Now they had to turn their attention back to the double murder in Lenarp.

He knew that he’d done a good job.

He had trusted his intuition, acted without hesitation, and it had produced results.

The thought of the crazy chase with the horse van gave him the shakes. But the relief was still there.

He called up from the intercom and Anette Brolin answered. She lived on the third floor in a building from the turn of the century. The apartment was large but sparsely furnished. Leaning against one wall were several paintings still waiting to be hung up.

“Gin and tonic?” she asked. “I’m afraid I don’t have much of a selection.”

“Please,” he said. “Right now anything is fine. Just so it’s strong.”

She sat down across from him on a sofa and pulled her legs up under her. He thought she was extremely beautiful.

“Do you have any idea how you look?” she asked with a laugh.

“Everybody asks me that,” he replied.

Then he remembered Klas Månson. The man who robbed the store, whom Anette Brolin refused to detain. He really didn’t think he could talk about work. Yet he couldn’t help it.

“Klas Månson,” he said. “Do you remember that name?”

She nodded.

“Hanson complained that you thought our investigation was poor. That you didn’t intend to remand Månson into further custody unless the investigation was done more carefully.”

“The investigation was poor. Sloppily written. Insufficient evidence. Vague testimony. I’d be committing dereliction of duty if I demanded further detention based on material like that.”

“The investigation was no worse than most. Besides, you forgot one important fact.”

“What was that?”

“That Klas Månson is guilty. He robbed stores before.”

“Then you’ll have to come up with better investigative work.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the report. If we let that damned Månson loose, he’ll just commit more crimes.”

“You can’t just put people in jail willy-nilly.”

Wallander shrugged. “Will you hold off releasing him if I rustle up some more exhaustive testimony?” he asked.

“That depends on what the witness says.”

“Why are you so stubborn? Månson is guilty. If we just hold him for a while, he’ll confess. But if he has the slightest inkling that he can get out, he’ll clam up.”

“Prosecutors have to be stubborn. Otherwise what do you think would happen to law and order in this country?”

Wallander could feel that the liquor had made him rebellious.

“That question can also be asked by an insignificant, provincial police detective,” he said. “Once I believed that being on the police force meant that you were involved in protecting the property and safety of ordinary people. I probably still believe it. But I’ve seen law and order being eroded away. I’ve seen young people who commit crimes being almost encouraged to continue. No one intervenes. No one cares about the victims of the increasing violence. It just keeps getting worse and worse.”

“Now you sound like my father,” she said. “He’s a retired judge. A true old reactionary civil servant.”

“Could be. Maybe I am conservative. But I mean what I say. I actually understand why people sometimes take matters into their own hands.”

“So you probably also understand how some misguided individuals can fatally shoot an innocent asylum seeker?”

“Yes and no. The insecurity in this country is enormous. People are afraid. Especially in farming communities like this one. You’ll soon find out that there’s a big hero right now at this end of the country. A man who is applauded in silence behind drawn curtains. The man who saw to it that there was a municipal vote that said no to accepting refugees.”

“So what happens if we put ourselves above the decisions of the parliament? We have a refugee policy in this country that must be followed.”

“Wrong. It’s precisely the lack of a refugee policy that creates chaos. Right now we’re living in a country where anyone with any motive at all can come in anywhere in this country at any time and in any manner. Control of the borders has been eliminated. The customs service is paralyzed. There are plenty of unguarded airstrips where the dope and the illegal immigrants are unloaded every night.”

He noticed that he was starting to get excited. The murder of the Somali was a crime with many layers.

“Rune Bergman, of course, must be locked up with the most severe possible punishment,” he went on. “But the Immigration Service and the government have to take their share of the blame.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Is it? People who belonged to the fascist secret police in Romania are starting to show up here in Sweden. They’re seeking asylum. Should they get it?”

“The principle has to apply equally.”

“Does it really? Always? Even when it’s wrong?”

She got up from the sofa and refilled their glasses.

Kurt Wallander was starting to feel depressed.

We’re too different, he thought.

After talking for ten minutes, a chasm opens.

The liquor made him aggressive. He looked at her and could feel himself getting aroused.

How long was it since the last time he and Mona had made love?

Almost a year ago. A whole year with no sex.

He groaned at the thought.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

He nodded. It wasn’t true at all. But he yielded to his dark need for sympathy.

“Maybe it would be best if you went home,” she said.

That was the last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t feel that he even had a home since Mona moved out.

He finished his drink and held out his glass for a refill. Now he was so intoxicated that he was starting to shed his inhibitions.

“One more,” he said. “I’ve earned it.”

“Then you have to go,” she said.

Her voice had suddenly turned cool. But he didn’t let it bother him. When she brought his glass, he grabbed her and pulled her down in the chair.

“Sit here by me,” he said, laying his hand on her thigh.

She pulled herself free and slapped him. She hit him with the hand with the wedding ring, and he could feel it tear his cheek.

“Go home now,” she said.

He put his glass down on the table. “Or you’ll do what?” he asked. “Call the police?”

She didn’t answer. But he could see that she was furious.

He stumbled when he stood up.

Suddenly he realized what he had tried to do.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”

“We’ll forget all about this,” she replied. “But now you have to go home.”

“I don’t know what came over me,” he said, putting out his hand.

She took it.

“We’ll just forget it,” she said. “Good night.”

He tried to think of something more to say. Somewhere in his muddled consciousness the thought gnawed at him that he had done something that was both unforgivable and dangerous. Just as he had driven his car home from the meeting with Mona when he was drunk.

He left and heard the door close behind him.

I’ve got to stop drinking, he thought angrily. I can’t handle it.

Down on the street he sucked the cool air deep into his lungs.

How the hell can anyone act so stupid? he thought. Like some drunken kid who doesn’t know a thing about himself, women, or the world.

He went home to Mariagatan.

The next day he would have to resume the hunt for the Lenarp killers.