“I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “Thanks for sharing it with me.”
They lingered a while longer. Linda wanted to ask about the identity of a few more of the trees but she said nothing. The sun was shining through the leaves, but the wind picked up and it immediately became colder. Linda took a deep breath and launched into the topic of Anna’s disappearance.
“It’ll drive me up the wall if you shake your head at me and tell me I’m imagining things. But if you can explain to me exactly why I’m wrong, I promise I’ll pay attention.”
“There’s something you’ll find out when you become a police officer,” he said. “The unexplainable almost never happens. Even a disappearance turns out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation. You’ll learn to differentiate between the unexplained and the merely unexpected. The unexpected can look baffling until you have the necessary background information. This is generally the case with disappearances. You don’t know what’s happened to Anna and it’s only natural that it would worry you, but my intuition tells me you should draw on the highest virtue of our profession.”
“Patience?”
“Exactly.”
“For how long?”
“A few more days. She’ll have turned up by then, or at least been in touch.”
“I’m still convinced her mother was lying to me.”
“I’m not sure your mother and I always stuck to the truth when we were asked about you.”
“I’ll try to be patient, but I do feel like there’s more to this. It’s not right.”
They returned to the car. It was past one o’clock and Linda suggested they stop for lunch somewhere. They chose a roadside restaurant with the funny name My Father’s Hat. Wallander had a fleeting recollection of lunching with his father at this restaurant and ending up in a huge argument. He couldn’t remember what their argument had been about.
They were drinking their coffee when a phone rang. Linda fumbled for hers but it turned out to be her father’s. He answered, listened, and made a few notes on the back of the check.
“What was that?”
“Someone’s been reported missing.”
He put money on the table and tucked the bill into his pocket.
“What do you have to do now?” Linda asked. “Who’s disappeared?”
“We’ll go back to Ystad via Skurup. A widow by the name of Birgitta Medberg has been reported missing. Her daughter is worried.”
“What are the circumstances?”
“The caller wasn’t sure. Apparently the woman is a historian interested in mapping old walkways and she often does extensive fieldwork, sometimes in very dense forest. An unusual occupation.”
“So she may simply be lost?”
“My first thought. We’ll soon find out.”
Wallander called the daughter of Birgitta Medberg to tell her he was on his way, and then they drove to Skurup. The wind was blustery. It was nine minutes past three on August 29.
12
They stopped in front of a two-story brick building — quintessentially Swedish, Linda thought. Wherever you go in this country the houses all look the same. The central square in Västerås could be replaced with the one in Örebro, and this Skurup apartment building could as easily be in Sollentuna.
“Where have you ever seen a building like this before?” she asked her father when they stepped out of the car and he was fumbling with the keys. He glanced at the brick facade.
“Looks like the place you had in Sollentuna, before you moved to the dorms at the police academy.”
“Good memory. So what do I do now?”
“Come with me. You can treat this as a warm-up exercise for real police work.”
“Aren’t you breaking some rules by doing this? No one should be present at an interrogation without relevant cause — something like that?”
“This isn’t an interrogation session, it’s a conversation. Let’s hope it will simply serve to put someone’s fears to rest.”
“But still.”
“No buts. I’ve been breaking rules since I first started working. According to Martinsson’s calculations I should have been locked up for a minimum of four years for all the things I’ve done. But who cares, if you’re doing a good job? That’s one of the few points Nyberg and I can agree on.”
“Nyberg? The head of forensics?”
“The one and only. He’s retiring soon, and in one sense no one will be sorry to see him go. On the other hand, despite his terrible temper, maybe all of us will.”
They crossed the street. A bike missing its back wheel was propped up against the wall. The frame was bent as if it had been the victim of a violent assault. They walked into the entry and read the names of the people who lived there.
“Birgitta Medberg. Her daughter’s name is Vanya. From the phone call I would say she has a tendency to hysteria. She also has a very shrill voice.”
“I am not hysterical!” a woman yelled from above. She was leaning over the railing of the staircase, watching them.
“Remind me to keep my voice down in stairwells,” Wallander muttered.
They walked up to her landing.
“Just as I thought,” Wallander said in a friendly voice to the hostile woman waiting for them. “The boys at the station are too young. They still can’t tell the difference between hysteria and a normal level of concern.”
The woman, Vanya, was in her forties, heavy, with yellow stains around the collar and cuffs of her blouse. Linda thought it was probably a long time since she had washed her hair. They walked into the apartment and Linda immediately recognized the strong scent that hung in the air. Mom’s perfume, she thought. The one she wears when she’s upset or angry. She had another she preferred when she was happy.
They were shown into the living room. Vanya dropped into an armchair and pointed her finger at Linda.
“Who is she?”
“An assistant,” Wallander said in a firm voice. “Please tell us what happened, starting at the beginning.”
Vanya told them in a nervous, jerky style. She seemed to have trouble finding the right words even though it was clear that she was not the kind of person who spoke in long sentences. Linda immediately understood her concern was genuine, and compared it to the way she felt about Anna.
Vanya told them that her mother was a cultural geographer whose principal work was tracing and mapping old roads and walkways in southern Sweden. She had been widowed for a year and had four grandchildren, of which two were Vanya’s. On this particular day, Vanya and her daughters were supposed to have visited her at noon. Birgitta had planned to be out on one of her short excursions before then. But when Vanya arrived, Birgitta had not yet returned. Vanya waited for two hours, then called the police. Her mother would never have disappointed her grandchildren like this, she reasoned. Something must have happened.
When she finished her story, Linda tried to guess what question her father would ask first. Perhaps something along the lines of: “Where was she going?”
“Do you know where she was going this morning?” he asked.
“No,” Vanya said.
“She has a car, I take it.”
“Actually, she has a red Vespa. Forty years old.”
“Really?”
“All Vespas used to be red, my mother tells me. She’s in an association for owners of vintage mopeds and Vespas. The headquarters are in Staffanstorp, I think. I don’t know why — why she wants to be with those people, I mean. But she seems to like them.”
“You said she became a widow about a year ago. Did she show any signs of depression?”