The White Lioness (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

When Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander arrived at the police station in Ystad on Monday morning, April 27, he was furious. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in such a bad mood. His anger had even left its mark, a plaster where he had cut his cheek shaving.

He muttered a reply to colleagues who said good morning. When he got to his office, he slammed the door behind him, took the phone off its hook, and sat staring out the window.

Kurt Wallander was 44 years old. He was considered a proficient policeman, persistent and occasionally astute. That morning, though, he felt only irritation and an increasingly bad temper. Sunday had been one of those days he would have preferred to forget all about.

One of the reasons was his father, who lived alone in a house on the flat land outside Loderup. His relationship with his father had always been complicated. Things had not improved over the years. Wallander realised, with an increasing annoyance, that he was becoming more and more like him. He tried to imagine himself at the same age as his father, but this induced in him only despair. Was he to end up a sullen and unpredictable old man, capable, out of the blue, of doing something absolutely crazy?

On Sunday afternoon Wallander had visited his father as usual. They played cards and drank coffee on the veranda in the warm spring sunshine. And then without warning, his father announced that he was getting married. Wallander thought at first he had misheard.

"No," he said, "I have no intention of getting married."

"I'm not talking about you," his father said, "I'm talking about me."

Kurt Wallander stared at him in disbelief. "You're almost 80," he said. "You aren't getting married."

"I'm not dead yet," his father said. "I'll do whatever I like. You'd be better off asking me who I'm marrying."

Wallander did as he was told.

"You ought to be able to work it out for yourself," his father said. "I thought policemen were paid to draw conclusions?"

"But you don't know anybody your age, do you? You keep pretty much to yourself."

"I know one," his father said. "And anyway, who says you have to marry somebody your own age?"

Wallander realised that there was one possibility: Gertrud Anderson, the 50-year-old woman who came to do the cleaning and wash his father's feet three times a week.

"Are you going to marry Gertrud?" he asked. "Have you thought of asking her if she wants to? There's 30 years between you. How do you think you're going to be able to live with another person? You've never been able to. Not even with my mother."

"I've grown better tempered in my old age," said his father mildly.

Wallander couldn't believe his ears. His father was going to get married? Better tempered in his old age? Now, when he was more impossible than he'd ever been?

Then they had quarrelled. It ended up with his father throwing his coffee cup into the tulip bed and locking himself in the shed where he painted his pictures, all with the same subject, repeated over and over again: sunset in an autumnal landscape with or without a wood grouse in the foreground, depending on the preference of whoever had commissioned it.

Wallander drove home much too fast. He had to put a stop to this absurd business. How on earth could Gertrud Anderson work for his father for a year and not see that it was impossible to live with him?

He parked the car on Mariagatan in central Ystad where he lived, and decided to call his sister Kristina in Stockholm. He would ask her to come to Skane. Nobody could change his father's mind. But perhaps Gertrud Anderson could be made to see sense.

He never called his sister. When he got to his apartment on the top floor, the door had been broken open. Moments later it was clear the thieves had marched off with his brand-new stereo equipment, CD player, all his discs and records, the television, radio, clocks and a camera. He slumped into a chair and just sat there for a long while, wondering what to do. In the end, he rang the police station and asked to speak with one of the CID inspectors, Martinsson, who he knew was on duty that Sunday.

He was kept waiting for an age before Martinsson came to the phone. Wallander guessed he'd been having coffee and chatting to some of the officers who were taking a rest from the big traffic operation they were mounting that weekend.

"Martinsson here. How can I help?"

"It's Wallander. You'd better come over here."

"Where? To your office? I thought you were off today."

"I'm at home. Get over here."

Martinsson asked no more questions.

"Right," he said. "I'm on my way."

The rest of Sunday was spent doing a forensic investigation of the apartment and writing a case report. Martinsson, one of the younger policemen Wallander worked with, was sometimes careless and impulsive. All the same, Wallander liked working with him, not least because he often proved surprisingly perceptive. When Martinsson and the forensic technician had left, Wallander did a provisional repair job on the door.

He spent most of the night lying awake, thinking about how he'd beat the shit out of the thieves if he ever laid hands on them. When he could no longer bear to torture himself thinking about the loss of all his music, he lay there worrying about what to do with his father, feeling more and more resigned to it all.

At dawn he got up, brewed some coffee and looked for his home insurance documents. He sat at his kitchen table going through the papers, getting crosser by the minute at the insurance company's incomprehensible jargon. In the end he flung the papers to one side and went to shave. When he cut himself, he considered calling the station and telling them he was sick, then going back to bed with the duvet over his head. But the thought of being in his apartment without being able to listen to a CD was too much for him.

It was 7.30 a.m. and he was sitting in his office with the door closed. With a groan, he forced himself to become a policeman again, and replaced the phone.

It rang immediately. It was Ebba on reception.

"Sorry to hear about the burglary," she said. "Did they really take all your records?"

"They left me a few 78s. I thought I might listen to them tonight. If I can get hold of a wind-up gramophone."

"It's awful."

"That's the way it goes. What do you want?"

"There's a man out here who insists on talking to you."

"What about?"

"About a missing person."

Wallander looked at the heap of case notes on his desk. "Can't Svedberg look after him?"

"Svedberg's out hunting."

"He's what?"

"I don't quite know what to call it. He's out looking for a young bull that broke out of a field at Marsvinsholm. It's cantering around on the E14, playing havoc with the traffic."

"Surely the traffic people can deal with that? Why should one of our men have to get involved?"

"It was Bjork who sent Svedberg."

"Oh, my God!"

"Shall I send him in, then? The man who wants to report a missing person?"

"All right," Wallander said.

The knock on his door a few minutes later was so discreet, Wallander wasn't sure at first whether he'd heard anything at all. When he shouted "Come in", however, the door opened right away.

Wallander had always been convinced the first impression a person makes is crucial. The man who entered Wallander's office was in no way remarkable. Wallander guessed he was about 35, he was wearing a dark brown suit, he had close-cropped blond hair, and glasses.

Wallander noticed something else as well. The man was obviously worried. Wallander was not the only one with a sleepless night behind him. He got to his feet and offered his hand. "Kurt Wallander. Inspector Wallander."

"My name is Robert Akerblom," the man said. "My wife has disappeared."

Wallander was surprised by the man's forthright statement. "Please sit down. I'm afraid the chair's a bit old. The left armrest keeps dropping off. Don't worry about it," he said. "Let's start from the beginning."

The man sat down on the chair. Then he started sobbing, heart-broken, desperate.

Wallander remained standing behind his desk, at a loss.

The man in the visitor's chair calmed down after a couple of minutes. He dried his eyes and blew his nose. "I'm sorry," he said. "Something must have happened to Louise, though. She would never go away of her own accord."

"Can I get you a cup of tea?" Wallander said. "Maybe we can get a pastry or something as well."

"No, thank you," Akerblom said.

Wallander nodded and took a notebook out of one of the desk drawers. He used regular note pads he bought himself at the local book shop. He'd never managed to cope with the flood of printed report forms the Central Police Authority used to overwhelm the force with. He'd sometimes thought of writing to
Swedish Policeman
proposing that whoever invented the forms should be presented with pre-printed responses.

"You'd better start by giving me your personal details," Wallander said.

"My name is Robert Akerblom," the man said. "I run Akerblom's Estate Agency with my wife."

Wallander nodded as he wrote. He knew the offices, close to the Saga cinema.

"We have two children, four and seven. Two girls. We live in a terrace house, 19 Akarvagen. I was born in this town. My wife comes from Ronneby."

He broke off, took a photograph out of his inside pocket, and put it on the desk in front of Wallander. It was of a woman; she looked like any other woman. She was smiling at the photographer, and Wallander could see it was taken in a studio. He contemplated her face and decided it was somehow or other just right for Robert Akerblom's wife.

"That photograph was taken only three months ago," Akerblom said. "That's exactly what she looks like."

"And she's disappeared, has she?"

"Last Friday she was at the Savings Bank in Skurup, clinching a house sale. Then she was going to look at a house somebody was putting on the market. I spent the afternoon with our accountant, at his office. I stopped in at the office in Ystad on my way home. She'd left a message on the answering machine saying she'd be home by 5.00. She said it was 3.15 when she called. That's the last we know."

Wallander frowned. Mrs Akerblom had been gone two-and-a-half days, with two small children waiting for her at home. He felt instinctively that this was no routine disappearance. Most people who went missing came back sooner or later, and a natural explanation would emerge. It was common enough for people to go away for a few days, even a week, and forget to tell anybody. On the other hand, he knew that women rarely abandoned their children. That worried him.

He made a few notes on his pad.

"Do you still have the message she left on the answering machine?" he said.

"Yes," Akerblom said. "I didn't think of bringing the cassette with me, though."

"That's OK, we'll sort that out later," Wallander said. "Was it clear where she was calling from?"

"She was using the car phone."

Wallander put down his pen and contemplated the man on the visitor's chair. His anxiety seemed absolutely genuine.

"You can't think of any reason she might have had to go away?"

"No."

"She can't be visiting friends?"

"No."

"Relatives?"

"No."

"There's no other possibility you can think of ?"

"No."

"I hope you won't mind if I ask you some personal questions."

"We've never quarrelled, if that's what you were wanting to know."

Wallander nodded. "That was what I was going to ask," he said. Then he started all over again. "You say she disappeared on Friday afternoon. But you waited until Monday before coming to us?"

"I was afraid," Akerblom said.

Wallander stared at him in surprise.

"Going to the police would be like accepting that something awful had happened," Akerblom said. "That's why I didn't dare."

Wallander knew exactly what Akerblom meant. "You've been out looking for her, of course," he said.

Akerblom nodded.

"What other steps have you taken?" Wallander said, starting to make notes again.

"I have prayed to God."

Wallander stopped writing. "Prayed to God?"

"My family are Methodists. Yesterday, we joined the whole congregation and Pastor Tureson in praying that nothing unthinkable has happened to Louise."

Wallander could feel something gnawing away in his stomach. He tried to conceal his disquiet from the man in the chair before him.

A mother with two children, member of a church, he thought to himself. She wouldn't disappear of her own accord. Not unless she'd gone out of her mind. Or been possessed by religion. A mother of two children would hardly stroll into the forest and take her own life. Such things do happen, but only once in a blue moon.

Wallander knew that either there had been an accident or Louise Akerblom was the victim of a crime.