They turned off the main road. It was raining more heavily now. Martinsson’s windshield wipers were on full speed. Wallander regretted not having his raincoat or his boots, which he kept in the back of his car, now stuck down at the station.
Hansson stopped the car. Flashlights were on in the dark. Wallander saw a man in overalls who was gesturing for them to follow him.
“This is a high-voltage station,” Martinsson said. “It won’t be a pretty sight.”
They stepped out into the rain. The wind was stronger out here in the open fields. The man who came toward them was clearly shaken. Wallander no longer had any doubts that something serious had occurred.
“In there,” the man said and pointed behind him.
Wallander went ahead. The rain whipped him in the face and made it hard to see. Martinsson and Hansson were somewhere behind him. Their shaken guide was walking to one side.
“In there,” he repeated, when they stopped in front of the transformer building.
“Is anything still live in there?” Wallander asked. “I mean the power lines.”
“Nothing. Not anymore.”
Wallander took Martinsson’s flashlight and went in. He could smell it now, the stench of scorched human flesh. It was a smell he had never been able to get used to, although he had been exposed to it on frequent occasions when houses burned down and people were trapped inside. Hansson will probably be sick to his stomach, Wallander thought absently. He can’t take the smell of burned bodies.
The corpse was completely blackened and sooty. The face was gone. The body was trapped in a mess of lines, switches, and circuit breakers.
Wallander moved aside so Martinsson could take a look.
“Oh, Christ,” Martinsson groaned.
Wallander called out to Hansson to get Nyberg on the line and organize the backup they needed.
“And tell them to bring a generator,” he said. “We’ll need it to get some light in here.”
He turned back to Martinsson.
“What’s the guy’s name, the one who discovered the body?”
“Olle Andersson.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Sydkraft had sent him down here to take a look. They always have repairmen on call in case of emergencies.”
“Have a chat with him. See if you can get some specifics on the sequence of events from him. And don’t walk around too much in here or Nyberg will be on your case.”
Martinsson took Andersson with him to one of the cars. Wallander was left alone. He crouched down and shone his flashlight on the body. Nothing remained of the clothes. It was like looking at a mummy, or a body that had been fished out of a bog after a thousand years. But this person had only been dead for a few hours. He tried to think back to when the power had been cut off. That had been some time around eleven. Now it was almost one o’clock in the morning. If this body had caused the outage then this had happened about two hours ago.
Wallander got up and let his flashlight rest on the floor. What had happened here? A person goes to a remote power substation and causes a major blackout by killing him- or herself. Wallander made a face. That made no sense. The questions were starting to pile up. He bent down to pick up the flashlight. The only thing to do was to wait for Nyberg.
At the same time something was bothering him. He let the beam of light from the flashlight travel over the blackened remains. He didn’t know what was causing this feeling, but it was as if he was sensing something that was no longer there. But that had been there.
He walked out of the building and studied the reinforced steel door. He could see no signs of a forced entry. There were two impressive locks. Wallander started walking back the way he had come. He tried to retrace his steps exactly so he wouldn’t interfere with any tracks that might be there. When he reached the gates he examined the lock. It had been broken and forced open. What did that mean? The gates had been clumsily cut open, but a reinforced steel door had posed no problem?
Martinsson was sitting in Andersson’s car. Hansson was making phone calls from his own car. Wallander tried to shake the rain off his coat and got into Martinsson’s car. The engine was running and the windshield wipers were still on high. He turned up the heat. His throat ached. He turned the radio on to get the latest news. He listened and began to realize the enormity of what was happening.
A quarter of Scania was without power. It was dark from Trelleborg to Kristianstad. The hospitals were using their emergency generators, but otherwise the power outage was total. A Sydkraft executive had been reached and had said that the problem had been located. He was expecting the power in most areas to be restored in half an hour.
There won’t be any power coming from here in half an hour, that’s for sure, Wallander thought. He wondered if the executive really knew what had happened. I have to let Lisa Holgersson know about this. He reached for Martinsson’s cell phone and dialed her number. It took a while for her to answer.
“Wallander here. Have you noticed the power’s off?”
“A blackout? I was sleeping.”
Wallander outlined the situation for her. She became fully alert.
“Do you want me to come down there right away?”
“I think you should get in touch with Sydkraft and explain that their power problem now also involves a police investigation.”
“What do you think has happened? Is it a suicide?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about sabotage? A terrorist act?”
“I don’t think we can answer that question yet. We can’t rule any of these things out yet.”
“I’ll call Sydkraft. Keep me posted.”
Wallander hung up. Hansson came running through the rain over to his car. Wallander opened the door.
“Nyberg is on his way. How did things look in there?”
“Pretty bad. There was nothing left, not even a face.”
Hansson didn’t answer. He ran back through the rain to his own car.
Twenty minutes later, Wallander saw the lights from Nyberg’s car appear in the rearview mirror. Wallander stepped out of the car and greeted him. Nyberg looked tired.
“What is it that’s happened, exactly? I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out of Hansson.”
“We have a dead body in there. Burned to a crisp. There’s nothing left.”
Nyberg looked around.
“That’s what usually happens when high-voltage transformers are involved. Is that why the power’s out?”
“Seems so.”
“Does that mean half of Scania will be waiting for me to finish?”
“We can’t take that into consideration. I think they’re working on restoring the power anyway, just not by means of this substation.”
“We live in a vulnerable society,” Nyberg said and immediately started commandeering his crew of technicians.
Erik Hökberg said the same thing, Wallander thought. We live in a vulnerable society. His computers will have been shut off by this, if he sits up with them at night trying to make more money.
Nyberg worked quickly and efficiently. Soon all the spotlights were up and running, connected to a noisy generator. Martinsson and Wallander went back to the car. Martinsson flipped through his notes.
“Andersson was called by some central command employee called Ågren. They had pinpointed the blackout to this substation. Andersson lives in Svarte. It took him twenty minutes to get here. He found that the gates to the area had been tampered with, but that the steel door was simply unlocked. When he looked in, he saw what had happened.”