The White Lioness (12 page)

Wallander saw a shadow of unease flit over Gustafson's face. Just so he knows we know. He walked with Gustafson to the reception, and organised his lift home. I won't be seeing him again, he thought. We can write him off.

After an hour for lunch, they reassembled in the conference room. Wallander had been home for some sandwiches in his kitchen.

"Where are all the honest thieves nowadays?" Martinsson said with a sigh. "This case seems to have come out of a novel. All we have is a woman from a free church, dead and dumped in a well. And a black finger."

"I agree with you," Wallander said. "We can't get away from that finger, no matter how much we'd like to."

"There are too many loose ends flying around out of control," Svedberg said, scratching his bald head in irritation. "We have to collect everything we have. And we must do it now. Otherwise we'll never get anywhere."

Wallander could detect indirect criticism of the way he was leading the investigation, but he had to concede even now that it was not entirely unjustified. There was always a danger of concentrating too soon on a single line of investigation. Svedberg's imagery reflected all too accurately the confusion he felt.

"You're right," Wallander said. "Let's see how far we've come. Louise Akerblom is murdered. We don't know exactly where and we don't know who did it. But we do know roughly when. Not far from where we found her, a house that had been unoccupied for a year explodes. In the ruins of the fire, Nyberg finds parts of a sophisticated radio transmitter and the remains of a pistol butt. The pistol is manufactured in South Africa. In addition, we find a black finger in the drive outside the house. Then somebody tries to hide Louise Akerblom's car in a pond. It's pure coincidence we find it as quickly as we do. The same goes for her body. She was shot in the middle of her forehead, and the killing calls to mind an execution. I rang the hospital before this meeting. There are no signs of sexual assault. She was just shot."

"We have to find more evidence," Martinsson said. "About the finger, the radio transmitter, the pistol. The lawyer in Varnamo, the one who was looking after the house, has to be contacted immediately. Obviously, there must have been somebody in the house."

"We'll sort out who does what before we close," Wallander said. "I just have two more thoughts I'd like to put forward."

"We'll kick off with them," Bjork said.

"Who could possibly have wanted to shoot Louise Akerblom?" Wallander said. "A rapist would have been a possibility. But she was not raped. There are no signs of her being beaten or held prisoner. She has no enemies. That all makes me wonder if the whole business could have been a mistake. She was killed instead of somebody else. The other possibility is that she happened to witness something she should not have seen or heard."

"The house could fit in there," Martinsson said. "It wasn't far from the property she was to look at. Something has definitely been going on in that house. She might have seen something, and been shot. Peters and Noren went to the house she was going to examine. The one that belongs to a widow by the name of Wallin. They both said it was easy to get lost on the way there."

Wallander nodded. "Go on," he said.

"There's not much more to say," Martinsson said. "For some reason or other, a finger gets cut off. Unless that happened when the house blew up. But it doesn't look that way. An explosion like that turns a man into pulp. The finger was whole."

"I don't know much about South Africa," Svedberg said. "Except that it's a racist country with lots of violence. Sweden has no diplomatic relations with South Africa. We don't even play tennis or do business with them. Not officially, at least. What I can't for the life of me understand is why something from South Africa should end up in Sweden. You'd think Sweden would be the last place to be involved."

"Maybe that's exactly why," Martinsson said.

Wallander homed in on Martinsson's comment immediately. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing," Martinsson said. "I just think we have to start thinking in a different way if we're going to get anywhere with this case."

"I agree entirely," Bjork said, interrupting the exchange. "I want a written report on this business from every one of you by tomorrow. Let's see if a little quiet contemplation might get us somewhere."

They divided up the assignments among themselves. Wallander took over the lawyer in Varnamo from Bjork, who was going to concentrate on producing a preliminary report on examinations of the finger.

Wallander dialled the number of the lawyer's office, and asked to speak to Mr Holmgren on urgent business. There was such a long delay before Holmgren answered that Wallander grew annoyed.

"I am calling about the property you are looking after in Skane," he said. "The house that burned down."

"Inexplicable," Holmgren said. "But I have checked to make sure the insurance policy arranged by the late owner covers the incident. Do the police have any explanation for what happened?"

"No," Wallander said. "But we're working on it. I have some questions I need to ask you on the telephone."

"I hope this won't take long," the lawyer said. "I'm very busy."

"If you can't take the questions by telephone, the police in Varnamo will have to take you down to the station," Wallander said, "and you can answer them there."

There was a pause before the lawyer responded. "OK, fire away. I'm listening."

"We're still waiting for a fax with the names and addresses of the heirs to the estate."

"I'll make sure that's sent."

"I wonder who is directly responsible for the property."

"I am. I'm not sure what you are asking."

"A house needs attention. Roof tiles need replacing, mice need keeping under control. Do you do that as well?"

"One of the beneficiaries of the estate lives in Vollsjo. He looks after the house. His name is Alfred Olsson."

Wallander took down his address and telephone number.

"So the house has been empty for a year?"

"For more than a year. There's been some disagreement as to whether it should be sold or not."

"In other words, nobody's been living in the house?"

"Of course not."

"Are you quite sure?"

"I don't understand what you're getting at. The house has been boarded up. Alfred Olsson has been calling me at regular intervals to report that all is in order."

"When did he call last?"

"How on earth am I supposed to remember that?"

"You tell me, but I'd like an answer to my question."

"Some time around New Year's, I believe. But I can't swear to it. Why is that important?"

"Everything is important for the moment. But thank you for the information."

Wallander hung up, opened his telephone directory, and checked Alfred Olsson's address. Then he got up and grabbed his jacket.

"I'm off to Vollsjo," he said as he passed the door to Martinsson's office. "There's something odd about the house that blew up."

"There's something even more odd about it," Martinsson said. "I was just talking to Nyberg. He says that the radio transmitter may have been made in Russia."

"Russia?"

"That's what he said."

"Another country," Wallander said. "Sweden, South Africa, Russia. Where's it all going to end?"

Half an hour later, he arrived at Alfred Olsson's address. It was a relatively modern house, very different from the houses that must have first been built in that street. Three Alsatians started barking frenziedly as Wallander got out of his car. It was 4.30 p.m., and he was feeling hungry.

A man in his forties opened the door and came out onto the steps in his stockinged feet. His hair was in a mess, and as Wallander approached he could smell alcohol.

"Alfred Olsson?"

The man nodded.

"I'm from the police in Ystad."

"Oh, hell!" the man said even before Wallander had given his name.

"Excuse me?"

"Who's squealed? Is it that shit Bengtson?"

Wallander thought rapidly. "I can't comment on that," he said. "The police protect all their informers."

"It's got to be Bengtson. Am I under arrest?"

"We can talk about that," Wallander said.

Olsson let Wallander into his kitchen. He detected the faint but unmistakable smell of fusel oil. Olsson was running an illegal still, and must have assumed Wallander had come to arrest him.

The man sank onto a kitchen chair and was scratching his head. "Just my luck," he sighed.

"We'll talk about the moonshine later," Wallander said. "There's something else I want to talk about."

"What?"

"The property that burned down."

"I know nothing about that," the man said.

Wallander noticed immediately that he was alarmed. "You know nothing about what?"

The man lit a crumpled cigarette with trembling fingers. "I'm really a paint sprayer," he said. "But I can't face starting work at 7 a.m. every morning. So I thought I might as well rent out that little shack, if anybody was interested. I mean, I want to sell the thing, but the family's making such a damned fuss."

"Who was interested?"

"Some fellow from Stockholm. He'd been driving around the area, looking for something suitable. He found the house and liked the location. I'm still wondering how he managed to trace it to me."

"What was his name?"

"He said he was called Nordstrom. I took that with a pinch of salt, though."

"Why?"

"He spoke good Swedish, but he had a foreign accent. You show me a goddamned foreigner called Nordstrom!"

"But he wanted to rent the house?"

"Yeah. And he paid well. I was gonna get 10,000 kronor a month. You don't turn your nose up at a deal like that. It wasn't doing anybody any harm, I thought. I get a bit of a reward in return for looking after the house. No need for the heirs or Holmgren in Varnamo to know anything about it."

"For how long was he going to rent the house?"

"He came at the beginning of April. Said he wanted it till the end of May."

"Did he say what he was going to use it for?"

"For people who wanted to be left in peace to do some painting."

"Painting?" Wallander thought of his father.

"Artists, that is. And he offered cash up front. Damn right I was going to take it."

"Did you see him again?"

"Never. It was a sort of unspoken condition. That I should keep my nose out of it. And I did. He got the keys, and that was that."

"Have you got the keys back?"

"No. He was going to mail them to me."

"And you have no address?"

"No."

"Can you describe him?"

"He was extremely fat."

"Anything else?"

"How the hell do you describe a fat guy? He was balding, red-faced, fat. And when I say fat, I do mean fat! He was like a barrel."

Wallander nodded.

"Have you any of the money left?" he asked, thinking of possible fingerprints.

"Not an ore. That's why I started distilling again."

"If you stop that as of today, I won't take you in to Ystad," Wallander said.

Olsson could hardly believe his ears.

"I mean what I say," Wallander said. "But I'll check up that you really have stopped. And you must pour away everything you've made already."

The man was sitting open-mouthed at the kitchen table when Wallander left. Dereliction of duty, he thought. But I haven't time to bother with moonshiners just now.

He drove back towards Ystad, and without really knowing why, he turned into the car park by Krageholm Lake. He got out of the car and walked down to the water's edge.

There was something about this investigation, about the death of Louise Akerblom, that scared him. As if the whole thing had barely started yet. I am afraid, he thought. It's as if that black finger was pointing straight at me. I'm in the middle of something I can't understand.

He sat down on a rock, even though it was damp. All of a sudden his weariness and depression threatened to overwhelm him. With a sigh even he thought was pathetic, he decided he was as much at sea with his own life as he was with the search for Louise Akerblom's murderer.

Where do I go from here? he said to himself. I don't want anything to do with ruthless killers, with no respect for life. I don't want to get involved in a kind of violence that will be incomprehensible to me as long as I live. Maybe the next generation of policemen in this country will have a different kind of experience and have a different view of their work. But it's too late for me. I'll never be any different from what I am, a pretty good policeman in a medium-sized Swedish police district.

He stood up and watched a magpie launching itself from a treetop.

All questions remain unanswered in the end, he thought. I devote my life to trying to catch and then put away criminals guilty of various crimes. Sometimes I succeed, often I don't. But when one of these days I pass away, I'll have failed in the biggest investigation of all. Life will still be an insoluble riddle.