An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

Chapter 12

At a quarter past ten the next day, October 29, Martinson and Wallander drove along the slushy roads to Löderup in order to speak to Elin Trulsson, and possibly other neighbors, in an attempt to find out more about who had been living in that house many years ago.

Earlier that morning they had attended a meeting, which had turned out to be very brief. Lisa Holgersson had insisted that no extra resources could be allocated to the investigation into the skeleton until the forensic report was completed.

“Winter,” said Martinson. “I hate all this slush. I buy scratch cards and scrape away hopefully. I don’t envisage masses of banknotes raining down over me: instead I see a house somewhere in Spain or on the Riviera.”

“What would you do there?”

“Make long-pile rugs. Just think of all the slush and wet feet I’d avoid.”

“You’d be bored stiff,” said Wallander. “You’d make your damned rugs covered in motifs depicting snowstorms, and you’d long to be back here in this shitty weather.”

They turned into the drive leading to the pink house a few hundred meters from Karl Eriksson’s property. A middle-aged man was just about to clamber onto his tractor. He looked at them with a surprised look on his face. They all shook hands. The man introduced himself as Evert Trulsson, the owner of the neighboring farm. Wallander explained why they had come there.

“Who would have thought anything like that about Karl?” he said when Wallander had finished.

“Thought anything like what?”

“That he’d have a dead body buried in his garden.”

Wallander glanced at Martinson and tried to understand the strange logic in what Evert Trulsson had said.

“Can you explain what you mean? Are you suggesting that he buried the body himself?”

“I’ve no idea. What do you know about your neighbors nowadays? In the old days you used to know more or less everything about the people you had around you. But now you haven’t a clue about anything.”

Wallander wondered if he had before him one of those ultraconservative people who had no doubt that everything used to be better in the old days. He made up his mind not to be dragged into a pointless conversation.

“Elin Trulsson,” he said. “Who’s she?”

“She’s my mother.”

“We understand that she’s been to visit Karl Eriksson in his care home.”

“I have an old mum who cares about other people. I think she visits Karl because nobody else does.”

“So they were friends, were they?”

“We were neighbors. That’s not the same as being friends.”

“But you weren’t enemies,” said Martinson.

“No. We were neighbors. Our farms had shared borders. We had shared responsibility for this street. We looked after our own business, we said hello and we helped each other out when it was necessary. But we didn’t socialize.”

“According to the information I have, the Erikssons came here in 1968. Thirty-four years ago. And they bought their property from somebody called Gustav Henander.”

“I remember that. We were related to Henander. I think my dad was a half brother to someone called Henander, but Henander was an adopted child. I don’t really know much about it. My mum might remember. You should ask her. My dad died ages ago.”

They walked to the house.

“Gustav and Laura Henander had three children,” said Martinson. “Two boys and a girl. But was there anybody else who used to live there? A woman, perhaps?”

“No. And we saw everybody who drove past our house. The Henanders lived on their own, and they never had any visitors.”

They went into the warm kitchen, where two fat cats lay on a window ledge, eyeing them vigilantly. A middle-aged woman came into the room. It was Evert Trulsson’s wife. She shook hands with them and said her name was Hanna. Wallander thought her hand was completely limp.

“There’s coffee,” said Evert Trulsson. “Sit down and I’ll fetch my mum.”

It was fifteen minutes before Evert Trulsson returned to the kitchen with his mother Elin. Wallander and Martinson had tried to converse with Hanna Trulsson, without making much progress. It occurred to Wallander that all he had learned during that quarter of an hour was that one of the cats was called Jeppe and the other one Florry.

Elin Trulsson was a very old woman. She had a furrowed face, and the wrinkles dug deep into her skin. It seemed to Wallander that she was very handsome — like an old tree trunk. This was not a new comparison as far as he was concerned. It had first occurred to him some time ago when he was looking at his father’s face. There was a sort of beauty that only comes with age. A whole life engraved into facial wrinkles.

They shook hands. Unlike Hanna Trulsson, her mother-in-law gripped Wallander’s hand firmly.

“I don’t hear well,” Elin Trulsson said. “I can’t hear anything in my left ear; I can with my right, but only if people don’t all talk at the same time.”

“I’ve explained the situation to my mum,” said Evert Trulsson.

Wallander leaned toward the old woman. Martinson had a notebook in his hand.

But Martinson’s notebook remained blank. Elin Trulsson had absolutely nothing of significance to tell. Karl Eriksson and his wife had lived a life that evidently didn’t conceal any secrets, nor did she have anything of interest to say about the Henanders. Wallander tried to take one more step back in time to Ludvig Hansson, who had sold the farm to Henander in 1949.

“I wasn’t living here at that time,” said Elin Trulsson. “I was working in Malmö in those days.”

“How long had Ludvig Hansson owned the property?” Wallander asked.

Elin Trulsson looked questioningly at her son. He shook his head.

“I suppose they’d been living here for many generations,” he said. “But that’s no doubt information you could dig out.”

Wallander could see that they weren’t going to get any further. He nodded to Martinson, they said thank you for the coffee, shook hands again, and left the house accompanied by Evert Trulsson. The sleet had turned into rain.

“It’s a pity my dad isn’t still alive,” said Wallander. “He had an amazing memory. And he was also a bit of a local historian. But he never wrote anything down. He was better than most at telling the tales, though. If I hadn’t been so thick I’d have recorded what he had to say on tape.”

He was just about to get into his car when he realized that he had one more question to ask.

“Can you remember if anybody has gone missing in this area? During your time here or earlier? People tend to talk about things like that — missing persons in mysterious circumstances.”

Evert Trulsson thought for a moment before answering.

“There was a teenage girl who disappeared from around here in the middle of the fifties. Nobody knows what happened to her — if she committed suicide or ran away or whatever. She was about fourteen or fifteen. Her name was Elin, just like my mum. But I don’t know about anybody else.”

Wallander and Martinson drove back to Ystad.

“That’s it for now, then,” said Wallander. “We don’t lift a finger until the forensic medicine crowd in Lund have said what they have to say. Let’s hope that despite everything it turns out to have been a natural death — then all we would need to do is to try to identify the person. But if we fail, it won’t be all that big a deal.”

“Of course it was an unnatural death,” said Martinson. “But apart from that I agree with you. We’ll just wait.”

They returned to Ystad and turned their attention to other business.

A few days later, on Friday, November 1, Skåne was subjected to a snowstorm. Traffic came to a standstill, and all police resources were concentrated on clearing up the situation that ensued. It stopped snowing the following afternoon, November 2. On Sunday it started raining. What was left of the snow was washed away.

The following Monday morning, November 4, Linda and Wallander walked together to the police station. They had barely entered reception when Martinson came storming down the corridor. He was carrying a bunch of papers in his hand.

Wallander could see straightaway that they came from the Center for Forensic Medicine in Lund.