An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

Chapter 10

When they arrived at the house in Löderup, nearly all the spotlights were switched off. The hole in which they had discovered the body was covered by a tarpaulin. A single police car was parked by the cordoned-off area; Nyberg and the other forensic officers had left. Wallander still had the house keys in his pocket. He handed them over to Martinson.

“I’m not out viewing houses now,” he said. “These are your keys, so it’s up to you to open up.”

“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” asked Martinson.

He didn’t wait for an answer. They entered the house and switched on the lights.

“Deeds,” said Wallander. “Documents that tell the story of the house. Let’s devote some time to looking for those. Then we can wait until the forensic boys and the medical crowd have had their say.”

“I asked Stefan to conduct a search through old reports on missing persons,” said Martinson. “Linda was going to help him.”

Stefan Lindman had joined the Ystad police at about the same time as Linda. Wallander soon realized that Linda and Stefan were involved in some kind of relationship. When he tried to talk to her about it, he had got mainly evasive responses. Wallander liked Stefan Lindman. He was a good police officer. But he found it hard to reconcile himself to the thought that he had a daughter who no longer regarded him as the most important man in her life.

They began their search at opposite ends of the house — Martinson in the bedroom and Wallander in what seemed to be a combination of drawing room and study.

Once he was alone, Wallander stood absolutely still for a moment and allowed his gaze and his thoughts to wander around the room. Had there once been a woman here who for some reason or other had been murdered and then buried in the garden? Why had nobody missed her if this had been where she lived? What had happened in this house, and when? Twenty years ago? Fifty years ago? Perhaps a hundred years ago?

Wallander started searching methodically. First with his eyes. People always leave a lot of traces behind them. And he knew that people were hamsters. They kept things, not least documents. His eyes alighted on a desk in front of a window. That was where he would start. The desk was dark brown, definitely old. Wallander sat down on the chair in front of it and tried the drawers. They were locked. He searched the desk top but could see no sign of a key. Then he felt with his fingers underneath the desk top: still no keys. He lifted up the heavy, brass table lamp, and found a key attached to a thin strand of silk.

He opened the desk’s cupboard. There were five drawers. The top one was full of old pens, empty ink bottles, a few pairs of spectacles, and dust. It struck Wallander that nothing could make him as depressed as the sight of old spectacles that nobody wanted anymore. He opened the next drawer down. It contained a bundle of old income tax returns. He saw that the oldest was from 1952. That year Karl Eriksson and his wife had paid 2,900 kronor in tax. Wallander tried to work out if that was about what might have been expected, or if it was a surprisingly low sum. He decided the latter. The third drawer contained various diaries. He leafed through some of them. They contained no personal notes, not even references to birthdays: just the purchase of seedcorn, the cost of repairs to a combine harvester, and new wheels for a tractor. Eriksson had evidently run a small farm. He put the diaries back into the drawer. Every time he searched through other people’s belongings, he wondered how anybody could cope with being a thief — to spend more or less every day rummaging through other people’s clothes and personal belongings.

Wallander opened the fourth drawer, the last but one. And there he found what he was looking for: a file with the words “Property Documents” written in ink. He took it carefully out of the drawer, slid the desk lamp closer to him, directed it at the file, and began to leaf through the papers. The first thing he came across was a deed of conveyance dated November 18, 1968. Karl Eriksson and his wife Emma had bought the property and the surrounding fields from the estate left by the farmer Gustav Valfrid Henander. The beneficiaries comprised the widow, Laura, and three children: Tore, Lars and Kristina. The purchase price was 55,000 kronor. Karl Eriksson paid a deposit of 15,000 kronor on the house, and the transaction was supervised by the Savings Bank in Ystad.

Wallander produced a notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket. In the old days he had nearly always forgotten to take a notebook with him, and been forced to scribble on scraps of paper and the backs of receipts. But Linda had bought him a collection of small notebooks, and put one in the pocket of each of his coats and jackets. Wallander made a note of two figures: at the top he wrote today’s date, October 28, 2002, and underneath it, November 18, 1968. This was a stretch of time covering thirty-four years — a whole generation. He noted down all the names that were on the conveyance, then put it to one side and surveyed the remaining documents. Most of them were of no interest, but he proceeded carefully. Working through a series of documents could be just as risky as walking through a dark forest: you could stumble, fall down, get lost.

Martinson’s cell phone rang somewhere. Wallander assumed it was his wife. They had innumerable phone conversations with each other every day. Wallander often wondered what they could possibly think of to say. He couldn’t remember phoning his own wife Mona, or her him, during working hours even once over all the years they were married. Work was work, and talking was something you could do before or afterward. He sometimes wondered if that had been a contributory factor in the break-up of their marriage. The fact that he had phoned her so seldom. Or her him.

He carried on looking at the documents. Paused. He found he was holding an old title deed, an attested copy. It was dated 1949 and concerned Gustav Valfrid Henander. Henander had bought the property, Legshult 2:19, from Ludvig Hansson, who was listed as a widower and the sole owner. The purchase price had been 29,000 kronor, and this time the transaction was arranged by the Skurup Savings Bank.

Wallander noted it all down. Another few years were now accounted for. He had gone back in time fifty-three years from 2002. He smiled to himself. When Ludvig Hansson had sold his farm to Gustav Valfrid Henander, Wallander was a little boy, still living in Limhamn. He had no memories from that time.

He carried on searching. Martinson had finished his call and was now whistling to himself. Wallander thought it was something Barbra Streisand had sung. Maybe “Woman in Love.” Martinson was a good whistler. Wallander looked at some more documents, but there were none that went back further in time. Ludvig Hansson had left the property in 1949. The desk drawer contained no more answers to questions about what had happened before then.

He searched the rest of the room without finding anything of interest. Not even in a corner cupboard or a secretary.

Martinson came in, sat down in a chair and yawned. Wallander told him what he had found, but Martinson shook his head when he handed over the papers.

“I don’t need to look. Ludvig Hansson. That name means nothing to me.”

“We’ll carry on looking via the land register,” said Wallander. “Tomorrow. But at least we now have a sort of outline covering the last fifty years or so. Have you found anything?”

“No. A few photo albums. But nothing that throws any light on that woman.”

Wallander closed the file containing all the documents relevant to the property.

“We must talk to the neighbors,” he said. “The closest ones, at least. Do you know if Karl Eriksson was especially friendly with any of them?”

“If anybody, I suppose it would be the people in that pink house on the left just after you turn into the side road. There’s an old milking stool standing outside it.”

Wallander knew which house and milking stool Martinson was referring to. He also had a vague memory of someone there once buying one of his father’s paintings. He couldn’t remember if it had been one with or without a great grouse.

“There’s an old lady there called Elin,” said Martinson. “Elin Trulsson. She’s been to visit Karl a few times — but she’s also old. Maybe not quite as senile as he is, though.”

Wallander stood up.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk to her tomorrow.”