Faceless Killers

Chapter fourteen

After intensive work that dragged on until late into the night on Friday, January nineteenth, Kurt Wallander and his colleagues were ready for battle. Björk had sat in on the long meeting of the investigative team, and at Wallander’s request he had let Hanson put aside work on the murder in Hageholm so he could join the Lenarp group, as they now called themselves. Näslund was still sick, but he called in and said he’d be there the next day.

In spite of the weekend, the work had to continue with undiminished effort. Martinson had returned with a canine patrol from a detailed inspection of the dirt road that led from Veberödsvägen to the rear of Lövgren’s stable. He had made a meticulous examination of the road, which ran for 1.912 kilometers through a couple of patches of woods, divided two pieces of pasture land as the boundary line, and then ran parallel to an almost dry creek bed. He hadn’t found anything unusual, even though he returned to the police station with a plastic bag full of objects. Among other things, there was a rusty wheel from a doll’s baby buggy, a greasy sheet of plastic, and an empty cigarette pack of a foreign brand. The objects would be examined, but Wallander didn’t think they would produce anything of use to the investigation.

The most important decision during the meeting was that Erik Magnusson would be placed under round-the-clock surveillance. He lived in a rented house in the old Rosengård area. Since Hanson reported that there were harness races at Jägersrö on Sunday, he was assigned the surveillance during the races.

“But I’m not authorizing any tote receipts,” said Björk, in a dubious attempt at a joke.

“I propose that we all go in on a regular v5 ticket,” replied Hanson. “There’s a unique possibility that this murder investigation could pay off.”

But it was a serious mood that dominated the group in Björk’s office. There was a feeling that a decisive moment was approaching.

The question that aroused the longest discussion concerned whether Erik Magnusson should be told that a fire had been lit under his feet. Both Rydberg and Björk were skeptical. But Wallander thought that they had nothing to lose if Magnusson discovered that he was the object of police interest. The surveillance would be discreet, of course. But beyond that, no measures would be taken to hide the fact that the police had mobilized.

“Let him get nervous,” said Wallander. “If he has anything to be nervous about, then I hope we discover what it is.”

It took three hours to go through all the investigative material to look for threads that indirectly could be tied to Erik Magnusson. They found nothing, but they also found nothing to contradict the idea that it could have been Magnusson who was in Lenarp that night, despite the alibi his fiancée gave him. Now and then Wallander felt a vague uneasiness that they were traipsing around in yet another blind alley after all.

It was mostly Rydberg who showed signs of doubt. Time after time he asked himself whether a lone individual could have carried out the double murder.

“There was something that hinted at teamwork in that slaughterhouse,” he said. “I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Nothing is preventing Erik Magnusson from having an accomplice,” replied Wallander. “We have to take one thing at a time.”

“If he committed the murder to cover up a gambling debt, he wouldn’t want an accomplice,” Rydberg objected.

“I know,” said Wallander. “But we have to keep at it.”

Thanks to some quick work by Martinson, they obtained a photograph of Erik Magnusson, which was dug up from the county council’s archives. It was taken from a brochure in which the county council presented its comprehensive activities for a populace that was assumed to be ignorant. Björk was of the opinion that all national and municipal governmental institutions needed their own ministries of defense, which when necessary could drum into the uninformed public the colossal significance of precisely that institution. He thought the brochure was excellent. In any case, Erik Magnusson was standing next to his yellow forklift truck, dressed in dazzling white overalls. He was smiling.

The police officers looked at his face and compared it with some black-and-white photos of Johannes Lövgren. One of the pictures showed Lövgren standing next to a tractor in a newly plowed field.

Could they be father and son? The tractor driver and the forklift operator?

Wallander had a hard time focusing on the pictures and making them blend together.

The only thing he thought he saw was the bloody face of an old man with his nose cut off.

By eleven o’clock on Friday night they had completed their plan of attack. By that time Björk had left them to go to a dinner organized by the local country club.

Wallander and Rydberg were going to spend Saturday paying another visit to Ellen Magnusson in Kristianstad. Martinson, Naslund, and Hanson would split up the surveillance of Erik Magnusson and also confront his fiancée with his alibi. Sunday would be devoted to surveillance and an additional run-through of all the investigative material. On Monday Martinson, who had been appointed computer expert in spite of his lack of any real interest in the subject, would examine Erik Magnusson’s business dealings. Did he have other debts? Had he ever been mixed up in any kind of criminal activity before?

Wallander asked Rydberg to go through everything personally. He wanted Rydberg to do what they called a crusade. He would try to match up events and individuals who outwardly had nothing in common. Were there actually points of contact that they had previously missed? That was what Rydberg would examine.

Rydberg and Wallander walked out of the police station together. Wallander was suddenly aware of Rydberg’s fatigue and remembered that he had paid a visit to the hospital.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Rydberg shrugged his shoulders and mumbled something unintelligible in reply.

“With your leg, I mean,” said Wallander.

“Same old thing,” replied Rydberg, obviously not wanting to talk any more about his ailments.

Wallander drove home and poured himself a glass of whiskey. But he left it untouched on the coffee table and went into the bedroom to lie down. His exhaustion got the upper hand. He fell asleep at once and escaped all the thoughts that were whirling around in his head.

That night he dreamed about Sten Widen.

Together they were attending an opera in which the performers were singing in an unfamiliar language.

Later, when he awoke, Wallander couldn’t remember which opera they had seen.

On the other hand, as soon as he woke up the next day he remembered something they had talked about the day before.

Johannes Lövgren’s will. The will that didn’t exist.

Rydberg had spoken with the estate administrator who had been engaged by the two surviving daughters, a lawyer who was often called on by the farmers’ organizations in the area. No will existed. That meant that the two daughters would inherit all of Johannes Lövgren’s unexpected fortune.

Could Erik Magnusson have known that Lövgren had huge assets? Or had Lövgren been just as reticent with him as he had been with his wife?

Wallander got out of bed intending not to let this day pass before he knew definitively whether Ellen Magnusson had given birth to her son Erik with Johannes Lövgren as the unknown father.

He ate a hasty breakfast and met Rydberg at the police station just after nine o’clock. Martinson, who had spent the night in a car outside Erik Magnusson’s apartment in Rosengård and had been relieved by Naslund, had turned in a report which said that absolutely nothing had happened during the night. Magnusson was in his apartment. The night had been quiet.

The January day was hazy. Hoarfrost covered the brown fields. Rydberg sat tired and uncommunicative in the front seat next to Wallander. They didn’t say a word to each other until they were approaching Kristianstad.

At ten thirty they met Göran Boman at the police station in Kristianstad.

Together they went through the transcript of the woman’s interrogation, which Boman had conducted earlier.

“We’ve got nothing on her,” said Boman. “We ran a vacuum over her and the people she knows. Not a thing. Her whole story fits on one sheet of paper. She has worked at the same pharmacy for thirty years. She belonged to a choral group for a few years but finally quit. She takes out a lot of books from the library. She spends her vacations with a sister in Vemmenhög, never travels abroad, never buys new clothes. She’s a person who, at least on the surface, lives a completely undramatic life. Her habits are regular almost to the point of pedantry. The most surprising thing is that she can stand to live this way.”

Wallander thanked him for his work.

“Now we’ll take over,” he said.

They drove to Ellen Magnusson’s apartment building.

When she opened the door, Wallander thought that the son looked a lot like his mother. He couldn’t tell whether she had been expecting them. The look in her eyes seemed remote, as if she were actually somewhere else.

Wallander looked around the living room of the apartment. She asked if they wanted a cup of coffee. Rydberg declined, but Wallander said yes.

Every time Wallander stepped into a strange apartment, he felt as though he were looking at the covers of a book he had just bought. The apartment, the furniture, the pictures on the walls, and the smells were the title. Now he had to start reading. But Ellen Magnusson’s apartment was odorless. As if Wallander were in an uninhabited apartment. He breathed in the smell of hopelessness. A gray resignation. Against a background of pale wallpaper hung colored prints with indefinable abstract motifs. The furniture that filled the room was heavy and old-fashioned. Doilies lay decoratively arranged on several mahogany drop-leaf tables. On a little shelf stood a photograph of a child sitting in front of a rose bush. Wallander noticed that the only picture of her son she had on display was one from his childhood. As a grown man he was not present at all.

Next to the living room was a small dining room. Wallander nudged the half-open door with his foot. To his undisguised amazement, one of his father’s paintings hung on the wall.

It was the autumn landscape without the grouse.

He stood looking at the picture until he heard the rattle of a tray behind him.

It was as if he were looking at his father’s motif for the first time.

Rydberg had sat down on a chair by the window. Wallander thought that someday he would have to ask him why he always sat by a window.

Where do our habits come from? he thought. What secret factory produces our habits, both good and bad?

Ellen Magnusson served him coffee.

He figured he’d better begin.

“Göran Boman from the Kristianstad police was here and asked you a number of questions,” he said. “Please don’t be surprised if we ask you some of the same questions.”

“Just don’t be surprised if you get the same answers,” said Ellen Magnusson.

At that moment Wallander realized that the woman sitting across from him was the mystery woman with whom Johannes Lövgren had had a child.

Wallander knew it without knowing how he knew.

In a rash moment he decided to lie his way to the truth. If he wasn’t mistaken, Ellen Magnusson was a woman who had very little experience with the police. She no doubt assumed that they searched for the truth by using the truth themselves. She was the one who would be lying, not the police.

“Mrs. Magnusson,” said Wallander. “We know that Johannes Lövgren is the father of your son Erik. There’s no use denying it.”

She looked at him, terrified. The absent look in her eyes was suddenly gone. Now she was fully present in the room again.

“It’s not true,” she said.

A lie begs for mercy, thought Wallander. She’s going to break soon.

“Of course it’s true,” he said. “You and I both know it’s true. If Johannes Lövgren hadn’t been murdered, we would never have had to worry about asking these questions. But now we have to know. And if we don’t find out now, you’ll be forced to answer these questions under oath in court.”

It went more quickly than he thought.

Suddenly she broke.

“Why do you want to know?” she shrieked. “I haven’t done anything. Why can’t a person be allowed to keep her secrets?”

“No one is forbidding secrets,” said Wallander deliberately. “But as long as people are murdered, we have to search for the perpetrators. This means we have to ask questions. And we have to get answers.”

Rydberg sat motionless on his chair by the window. His tired eyes stared at the woman.

Together they listened to her story. Wallander thought it inexpressibly dreary. Her life, as it was laid out before him, was just as hopeless as the frosty landscape he had driven through that same morning.

She had been born the daughter of an elderly farming couple in Yngsjö. She had torn herself free from the land and had eventually become a clerk in a pharmacy. Johannes Lövgren had come into her life as a customer at the pharmacy. She told Wallander and Rydberg that they first met when he was buying bicarbonate of soda. Then he had returned and started to court her.

His story was that of the lonely farmer. Not until the baby was born did she find out that he was married. Her feelings had been resigned, never spiteful. He had bought her silence with money, which was paid several times a year.

But she had raised the son alone. He was hers.

“What did you think when you found out that he had been murdered?” asked Wallander when she fell silent.

“I believe in God,” she said. “I believe in righteous vengeance.”

“Vengeance?”

“How many people did Johannes betray?” she asked. “He betrayed me, his son, his wife, and his daughters. He betrayed everyone.”

And now she will sc learn that her son is a murderer, thought Wallander. Will she imagine that he was an archangel who was carrying out a divine decree for vengeance? Will she be able to stand it?

He continued asking his questions. Rydberg shifted his position on the chair by the window. A bell went off in the kitchen.

When they finally left, Wallander felt that he had gotten the answers to all his questions.

He knew who the mystery woman was. The secret son. He knew that she was expecting money from Johannes Lövgren. But Lövgren had never shown up.

Another question, however, proved to have an unexpected answer.

Ellen Magnusson never gave any of Lövgren’s money to her son. She put it into a savings account. He wouldn’t inherit the money until she was gone. Maybe she was afraid he would gamble it away.

But Erik Magnusson knew that Johannes Lövgren was his father. On that point he had lied. And did he also know that Lövgren, who was his father, had vast financial assets?

Rydberg was silent during the entire interrogation. Just as they were about to leave, he had asked her how often she saw her son. Whether they got along well with each other. Did she know about his fiancée?

Her reply was evasive. “He’s grown now,” she said. “He lives his own life. But he’s good about coming to visit. And of course I know that he has a fiancée.”

Now she’s lying again, thought Wallander. She didn’t know about the fiancée.

They stopped at the inn at Degeberga and ate. Rydberg seemed to have revived.

“Your interrogation was perfect,” he said. “It should be used as a training exercise at the police academy.”

“Still, I did lie,” said Wallander. “And that’s not considered kosher.”

During the meal they took stock of their strategy. Both of them agreed that they should wait for the background investigation of Erik Magnusson. Not until that was compiled and ready would they pick him up for questioning.

“Do you think he’s the one?” asked Rydberg.

“Of course he is,” replied Wallander. “Alone or with an accomplice. What do you think?”

“I hope you’re right.”

They arrived back at the police station in Ystad at quarter past three. Näslund was sitting in his office, sneezing. He had been relieved by Hanson at noon.

Erik Magnusson had spent the morning buying new shoes and turning in some betting coupons at a tobacco shop. Then he had returned home.

“Does he seem on guard?” asked Wallander.

“I don’t know,” said Naslund. “Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I think I’m imagining things.”

Rydberg drove home, and Wallander locked himself in his office.

He leafed absentmindedly through a new stack of papers that someone had put on his desk.

He was having a hard time concentrating.

Ellen Magnusson’s story had made him uneasy.

He imagined that his own life wasn’t that far from her reality. His own dubious life.

I’m going to take some time off when this is over, he thought. With all my overtime I could probably be gone for a week. I’m going to devote seven whole days to myself. Seven days like seven lean years. Then I’ll emerge a new man.

He pondered whether he ought to go to some health spa where he could get help losing some weight. But he found the thought disgusting. He would rather get in his car and drive south.

Maybe to Paris or Amsterdam. In Arnhem he knew a cop he had met once at a narcotics seminar. Maybe he could visit him.

But first we’ve got to solve the murder in Lenarp, he thought. We’ll do that next week.

Then I’ll decide where I’m going to go.

On Thursday, January twenty-fifth, Erik Magnusson was picked up by the police for questioning. They nabbed him right outside the building where he lived. Rydberg and Hanson took care of it while Wallander sat in the car and watched. Erik Magnusson went along to the squad car without protest. They had scheduled it for morning, when he was on his way to work. Since Kurt Wallander was anxious for the first interrogations with the man to take place without arousing any attention, he let Magnusson call his workplace and explain why he wasn’t coming in. Björk, Wallander, and Rydberg were present in the room when Magnusson was interrogated. Björk and Rydberg stayed in the background while Wallander asked the questions.

During the days before Erik Magnusson was taken to Ystad for the first interrogations, the police grew even more certain that he was guilty of the double murder in Lenarp. Various investigations had shown that Magnusson was a man with heavy debts. On several occasions he had barely managed to avoid being physically beaten because he had not paid off his gambling debts. In a visit to Jägersrö, Hanson had seen Magnusson wagering large sums. His financial situation was catastrophic.

The year before, he had been the object of attention by the Eslöv police for some time as the suspect in a bank robbery. It was never possible to connect him to the crime, however. It did seem conceivable, on the other hand, that Magnusson was mixed up in narcotics smuggling. His fiancée, who was now unemployed, had on several occasions been sentenced for various narcotics violations, and in one instance for postal fraud. So Erik Magnusson had large debts. At times, however, he had amazing amounts of money. In comparison, his salary from the county council was insignificant.

This Thursday morning in January would mean the final breakthrough in the investigation. Now the double murder in Lenarp would be cleared up. Kurt Wallander had awakened early this morning with a great sense of tension in his body.

The next day, Friday, January twenty-sixth, he realized that he was wrong.

The assumption that Erik Magnusson was the guilty party, or at least one of the guilty parties, was completely obliterated. The track they had been following was a blind alley. On Friday afternoon they realized that Magnusson could never be tied to the double murder, for the simple reason that he was innocent.

His alibi for the night of the murder had been corroborated by his fiancée’s mother, who was visiting. Her credibility was beyond reproach. She was an elderly lady who suffered from insomnia. Erik Magnusson had snored all night long the night that Johannes and Maria Lövgren were so brutally murdered.

The money with which he had paid his debt to the hardware store owner in Tågarp came from the sale of a car. Magnusson was able to produce a receipt for the Chrysler he had sold. And the buyer, a cabinetmaker in Lomma, told them that he had paid cash, with thousand-krona and five-hundred-krona bills.

Magnusson was also able to give a believable explanation for the fact that he lied about Johannes Lövgren being his father. He had done it for his mother’s sake, since he thought she would want it that way. When Wallander told him that Lövgren was a wealthy man, he had looked truly astonished.

In the end there was nothing left.

When Björk asked whether anyone was opposed to sending Erik Magnusson home and dropping him from the case until further notice, no one had any objections. Wallander felt a crushing guilt over having steered the entire investigation in the wrong direction. Only Rydberg seemed unaffected. He was also the one who had been the most skeptical from the beginning.

The investigation had run aground. All that was left was a wreck.

There was nothing to do but start over again.

At the same time the snow arrived.

In the wee hours of Saturday, January twenty-seventh, a violent snowstorm came in from the southwest. After a few hours, E14 was blocked. The snow fell steadily for six hours. The heavy wind made the efforts of the snowplows futile. As fast as they scraped the snow off the roads, it would collect in drifts again.

For twenty-four hours the police were busy preventing the mess from developing into chaos. Then the storm moved off, as quickly as it had come.

January thirtieth was Kurt Wallander’s forty-third birthday. He celebrated by reforming his eating habits and starting to smoke again. To his great delight, his daughter Linda called him that evening. She was in Malmö and had decided to enroll at a college outside Stockholm. She promised to come and see him before she left.

Wallander arranged his schedule so that he could visit his father at least three times a week. He wrote a letter to his sister in Stockholm, telling her that the new home-care worker had done wonders with their father. The confusion that had driven him out on that desolate nighttime promenade toward Italy had dissipated. Having a woman come regularly to his house had been his salvation.

One evening several days after his birthday, Wallander called up Anette Brolin and offered to show her around wintry Skane. He again apologized for the night at her apartment. She thanked him and said yes, and the following Sunday, February fourth, he took her out to see the ancient stones at Ales Stenar and the medieval castle of Glimmingehus. They ate dinner in Hammenhög at the inn, and Wallander started to think that she really had decided that he was someone other than the man who had pulled her down on his knee.

The weeks passed with no new breakthrough in their investigation. Martinson and Naslund were transferred to new assignments. Wallander and Rydberg, however, were allowed to concentrate exclusively on the double murder for the time being.

One cold, clear day in the middle of February, a day with absolutely no wind, Wallander was visited in his office by the Lövgrens’ daughter, who lived and worked in Göteborg.

She had returned to Skane to oversee the placement of a headstone on her parents’ grave in Villie cemetery. Wallander told her the truth — that the police were still fumbling around for some definite clue. The day after her visit, he drove out to the cemetery and stood there for a while, meditating by the black stone with the gold inscription.

The month of February was spent in broadening and deepening the investigation.

Rydberg, who was silent and uncommunicative and was suffering greatly from the pain in his leg, did most of his work by phone, while Wallander was often out in the field. They checked out every single bank in Skane, but found no additional safe-deposit boxes. Wallander talked with over two hundred people who were either relatives or acquaintances of Johannes and Maria Lövgren. He made numerous return forays into the bulging investigative material, went back to points he had covered long ago, and ripped up the floorboards in old, played-out reports and scrutinized them anew. But he found no opening anywhere.

One icy and windy February day he picked up Sten Widen at his farm and they visited Lenarp. Together they inspected the horse that might be concealing a secret and watched the mare eat an armload of hay. Old Nyström was at their heels wherever they went. Nyström had been given the mare by the two daughters.

But the property itself, which stood silent and closed up, had been turned over to a real estate agent in Skurup for sale. Kurt Wallander stood in the wind looking at the broken kitchen window, which had never been fixed, just boarded up with a piece of masonite. He tried to reestablish the contact with Sten Widen that had been lost for the past ten years, but the racehorse trainer and former friend appeared uninterested. After Wallander had driven him home, he realized that their contact was broken permanently.

The preliminary investigation of the murder of the Somali refugee was concluded, and Rune Bergman was brought before the district court in Ystad. The court building was filled with a large crowd from the media. By now it had been established that it was Valfrid Ström who had fired the fatal shots. But Rune Bergman was indicted for complicity in the murder, and the psychiatric evaluation declared him fit to stand trial.

Kurt Wallander testified in court, and on several occasions he sat in and listened to Anette Brolin’s appeals and cross-examinations. Rune Bergman didn’t say much, even though his silence was no longer unbroken. The court proceedings revealed a racist underground landscape in which political views similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan were prevalent. Bergman and Ström had acted on their own at the same time as they were connected to various racist organizations.

The thought again occurred to Wallander that something decisive was about to happen in Sweden. For brief moments he could also detect contradictory sympathies in himself for some of the anti-immigrant arguments that came up in discussions and the press while the trial was in progress. Did the government and the Immigration Service have any real control over which individuals sought to enter Sweden? Who was a refugee and who was an opportunist? Was it possible to differentiate at all?

How long would the principle of the generous refugee policy be able to hold without leading to chaos? Was there any upper limit?

Kurt Wallander had made halfhearted attempts to study the questions thoroughly. He realized that he harbored the same vague apprehension that so many other people did. Anxiety about the unknown, about the future.

At the end of February the sentence was pronounced, giving Rune Bergman a long prison term. To everyone’s undisguised astonishment, he did not appeal the verdict, which took effect immediately.

No more snow fell on Skåne that winter. One early morning at the beginning of March, Anette Brolin and Kurt Wallander took a long walk along Falsterbo Spit. Together they watched the early flocks of birds returning from the distant lands of the Southern Cross. Wallander suddenly took her hand, and she didn’t pull it away, at least not at once.

He managed to lose four kilos, but he realized that he would never get back to what he had weighed when Mona had suddenly left him.

Occasionally their voices would meet on the telephone. Wallander noticed that his jealousy was gradually crumbling away. The black woman who used to visit him in his dreams no longer showed up either.

March began with Svedberg repeating his desire to move back to Stockholm. At the same time Rydberg was admitted to the hospital for two weeks. At first everyone thought it was for his bad leg. But one day Ebba told Wallander in confidence that Rydberg was apparently suffering from cancer. She didn’t say how she knew, or what type of cancer it was. When Wallander visited Rydberg at the hospital, he told him it was only a routine check of his stomach. A spot on an X-ray plate had revealed a possible lesion on his large intestine.

Wallander felt a burning pain inside at the thought that Rydberg might be seriously ill. With a growing sense of hopelessness he trudged on with his investigation. One day, in a fit of rage, he threw the thick folders at the wall. The floor was covered with paper. For a long time he sat looking at the havoc. Then he crawled around sorting the material again and started from the beginning.

Somewhere there’s something I’m not seeing, he thought.

A connection, a detail, which is exactly the key I have to turn. But should I turn it to the right or the left?

He often called Göran Boman in Kristianstad to complain about his plight.

On his own authority, Boman had carried out intensive investigations of Nils Velander and other conceivable suspects. Nowhere did the rock crack. For two whole days Wallander sat with Lars Herdin without advancing a single meter.

He still didn’t want to believe that the crime would never be solved.

In the middle of March he managed to entice Anette Brolin to make an opera trip with him to Copenhagen. During the night she embraced his desolation. But when he told her that he loved her, she shied away.

It was what it was. Nothing more.

On the weekend of March seventeenth and eighteenth his daughter came to visit. She came alone, without the Kenyan medical student, and Wallander met her at the train station. Ebba had sent a friend of hers over the day before to give his apartment on Mariagatan a major cleaning. And he finally felt that he had his daughter back. They took a long walk along the beach by Osterleden, ate lunch at Lilla Vik, and then stayed up talking till five in the morning. They visited Wallander’s father, and he surprised them both by telling funny stories about Kurt as a child.

On Monday morning he took her to the train.

He seemed to have regained some of her trust.

When he was back in his office, poring over the investigative material, Rydberg suddenly came in. He sat down on the spindle-backed chair by the window and told Wallander straight out that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now he was going in for cytotoxin and radiation therapy, which could last a long time and might not do any good. He wouldn’t permit any sympathy. He had merely come to remind Wallander about Maria Lövgren’s last words. And the noose. Then he stood up, shook Wallander’s hand, and left.

Wallander was left alone with his pain and his investigation. Björk thought that for the time being he ought to work alone, since the police were swamped.

Nothing happened in March. Or in April either.

The reports on the status of Rydberg’s health varied. Ebba was the unflagging messenger.

On one of the first days in May, Wallander went into Björk‛s office and suggested that someone else take over the investigation. But Björk refused. Wallander would have to continue at least until the summer and vacation period were over. Then they would reevaluate the situation.

Time after time Wallander started over. Retreated, prying and twisting at the material, trying to make it come alive. But the stones he was walking on remained cold.

At the beginning of June he traded in his Peugeot on a Nissan. On June eighth he went on vacation and drove up to Stockholm to see his daughter.

Together they drove all the way to the North Cape. Herman Mboya was in Kenya but would be coming back in August.

On Monday, July ninth, Wallander was back on duty.

A memo from Björk informed him that he was to continue with his investigation until Björk returned in early August. Then they would decide what to do next.

He also received a message from Ebba that Rydberg was doing much better. The doctors might be able to control his cancer after all.

Tuesday, July tenth, was a beautiful day in Ystad. At lunchtime Wallander went downtown and strolled around. He went into the store by the square and decided to buy a new stereo.

Then he remembered that he had some Norwegian bills in his wallet that he had forgotten to exchange. He had been carrying them around since the trip to the North Cape. He went down to the Union Bank and got in line for the only window that was open.

He didn’t recognize the woman behind the counter. It wasn’t Britta-Lena Bodén, the young woman with the good memory, or any of the other tellers he had met before. He thought it must be a summer temp.

The man in front of him in line made a large withdrawal. Distractedly, Wallander wondered what he was going to use such a large amount of cash for. While the man counted up his bills, Wallander absentmindedly read his name on the driver’s license he had placed on the counter.

Then it was his turn, and he exchanged his Norwegian money. Behind him in the line he heard a summer tourist speaking Italian or Spanish.

As he emerged onto the street, an idea suddenly occurred to him.

He stood there motionless, as if he were frozen solid in his inspiration.

Then he went back inside the bank. He waited until the tourists had exchanged their money.

He showed his police ID to the teller.

“Britta-Lena Bodén,” he said, smiling. “Is she on vacation?”

“She’s probably with her parents in Simrishamn,” said the teller. “She has two weeks of vacation left.”

“Bodén,” he said. “Is that her parents’ name too?”

“Her father runs a gas station in Simrishamn. I think it’s the one called Statoil nowadays.”

“Thank you,” said Wallander. “I just have some routine questions to ask her.”

“I recognize you,” said the teller. “So you haven’t been able to solve that awful crime yet?”

“No,” said Wallander. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

He practically ran back to the police station, jumped into his car, and drove to Simrishamn. From Britta-Lena Bodén’s father he learned that she was spending the day with friends at the beach at Sandhammaren. He searched a long time before he found her, well hidden behind a sand dune. She was playing backgammon with her friends, and all of them gave Wallander an astonished look as he came tramping through the sand.

“I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important,” he said.

Britta-Lena Bodén seemed to grasp his serious mood and stood up. She was dressed in a minuscule bathing suit, and Wallander averted his eyes. They sat down a little way from the others, so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

“That day in January,” said Wallander. “I wanted to ask you about it again. I’d like you to think back to that day. And I want you to try and remember whether there was anyone else in the bank when Johannes Lövgren made his big withdrawal.”

Her memory was still excellent.

“No,” she said. “He was alone.”

He knew that what she said was true.

“Keep going,” he continued. “Lövgren went out the door. The door closed behind him. What happened then?”

Her reply was quick and firm. “The door didn’t close.”

“Another customer came in?”

“Two of them.”

“Did you know them?”

“No.”

The next question was crucial.

“Because they were foreigners?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know until now. Keep thinking.”

“There were two men. Quite young.”

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to exchange money.”

“Do you remember what currency?”

“Dollars.”

“Did they speak English? Were they Americans?”

She shook her head. “Not English. I don’t know what language they were speaking.”

“Then what happened? Try to picture it in your mind.”

“They came up to the window.”

“Both of them?”

She thought carefully before she answered. The warm wind was ruffling her hair.

“One of them came up and put the money on the counter. I think it was a hundred dollars. I asked him if he wanted to exchange it. He nodded.”

“What was the other man doing?”

She thought again.

“He dropped something on the floor, which he bent over and picked up. A mitten, I think.”

He backed up a step with his questions.

“Johannes Lövgren had just left,” he said. “He had received a large amount of cash which he put into his briefcase. Did he receive anything else?”

“He got a receipt for his money.”

“Which he put in the briefcase?”

For the first time she was hesitant.

“I think so.”

“If he didn’t put the receipt in his briefcase, then what happened to it?”

She thought again.

“There was nothing lying on the counter. I’m sure of that. Otherwise I would have picked it up.”

“Could it have slipped off onto the floor?”

“Possibly.”

“And the man who bent over for the mitten could have picked it up?”

“Maybe.”

“What was on the receipt?”

“The amount. His name and address.”

Wallander held his breath.

“All that was on it? Are you sure?”

“He filled out his withdrawal slip in big letters. I know that he wrote down his address too, even though it wasn’t required.”

Wallander backtracked again. “Lövgren takes his money and leaves. In the doorway he runs into two unknown men. One of them bends down and picks up a mitten, and maybe the withdrawal slip too. It says that Johannes Lövgren has just withdrawn twenty-seven thousand kronor. Is that correct?”

Suddenly she understood. “Are they the ones that did it?”

“I don’t know. Think back again.”

“I exchanged their money. He put the bills in his pocket. They left.”

“How long did it take?”

“Three, four minutes. No more.”

“The bank has a copy of their exchange receipt, I suppose?”

She nodded.

“I exchanged money at the bank today. I had to give my name. Did they give any address?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

Kurt Wallander nodded. Now something was starting to burn.

“Your memory is phenomenal,” he said. “Did you ever see those two men again?”

“No. Never.”

“Would you recognize them?”

“I think so. Maybe.”

Wallander thought for a few moments.

“You might have to interrupt your vacation for a few days,” he said.

“We’re supposed to drive to Öland tomorrow!”

Wallander made a decision on the spot. “I’m sorry, you can’t,” he said. “Maybe the next day. But not before then.”

He stood up and brushed off the sand.

“Be sure to tell your parents where we can reach you,” he said.

She stood up and got ready to rejoin her friends.

“Can I tell them?” she asked.

“Make up something,” he replied. “I’m sure you can do that.”

Just after four o’clock that afternoon they found the exchange receipt in the Union Bank’s files.

The signature was illegible. No address was given.

To his surprise, Wallander was not disappointed. He thought this was because now at least he understood how the whole thing might have happened.

From the bank he drove straight to Rydberg’s place, where he was convalescing.

Rydberg was sitting on his balcony when Wallander rang the doorbell. He had grown thin and was very pale.

Together they sat on the balcony, and Wallander told him about his discovery.

Rydberg nodded thoughtfully.

“You’re probably right,” he said when Wallander finished. “That’s probably how it happened.”

“The question now is how to find them,” said Wallander. “Some tourists who happened to be visiting Sweden more than six months ago.”

“Maybe they’re still here,” said Rydberg. “As refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants.”

“Where do I start?” asked Wallander.

“I don’t know,” said Rydberg. “But you’ll figure out something.”

They sat for a couple of hours on Rydberg’s balcony.

Just before seven o’clock Wallander went back to his car.

The stones were no longer as cold under his feet.