Wallander wondered if that was really going to help. A policeman using excessive force was always a serious matter. That was his own opinion. It didn’t help that the details of the situation had been quite unusual.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and asked Hansson to connect him with Nyberg.
Several minutes later, Nyberg came on the line. Wallander had taken a few more swigs from the whiskey bottle and was starting to feel tipsy, but the pressure was lifting from his chest.
“Have you seen the papers?” Wallander asked.
“Which paper?”
“The picture? The picture of Eva Persson?”
“I don’t read the evening papers, but I heard about it. I understand she had been in the process of attacking her mother.”
“That’s not what the picture indicates.”
“What does that matter?”
“It means I’m in big trouble. Lisa is going to set up a formal investigation.”
“So then the truth comes out. Isn’t that what you want?”
“I just wonder if the media will buy it. Who cares about an old policeman when there’s a young fresh-faced murderess involved?”
Nyberg sounded surprised. “Since when do you care what they write in the paper?”
“Maybe I still don’t. But it’s different when they publish a picture saying I’ve punched out a young girl.”
“But she’s committed murder.”
“It still makes me uncomfortable.”
“It’ll blow over. Look, I just wanted to confirm that one of the car prints was from Moberg’s car. That means all sets of car tracks have been accounted for except for one, but I can say that the unknown car is a common model.”
“So we know someone drove her out there. And left her.”
“There’s one other thing,” Nyberg said. “Her handbag.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out why it was so far away, over by the fence.”
“Don’t you think he just threw it there?”
“But why? He couldn’t have expected us not to find it.”
Nyberg was right. This was important.
“You mean, why didn’t he just take it with him? Especially if he was hoping the body wouldn’t be identified.”
“Something like that.”
“What would the answer be?”
“That’s your job. I’m just telling you the facts. The handbag lay fifteen meters from the door of the transformer building.”
“Anything else?”
“No. We didn’t manage to get any other prints or tracks.”
The conversation was over. Wallander lifted up the bottle of whiskey but then quickly put it down. He had had enough. If he kept drinking he would cross a line he didn’t want to cross. He walked out into the living room. It felt strange to be home in the middle of the day. Was this what retirement would be like? The thought made him shiver. He walked over to the window and looked out at the street. It was already getting dark. He thought about the doctor who had paid him a visit, and about the man who had been found dead next to the cash machine. Wallander decided to call the pathologist the following day and tell him what Enander had said about not accepting a heart attack as the reason for Falk’s death. It wouldn’t change anything, but at least then he would have passed on the information.
He switched to thinking about what Nyberg had said about Sonja Hokberg’s handbag. There was really only one conclusion, and it was one that brought out his keenest investigative instincts. The bag lay there because someone had wanted it to be found.
Wallander sat back down in his sofa and thought it through. A body can be burned beyond recognition, he thought. Especially if it is burned with a high-voltage charge that can’t be controlled. A person who is executed in the electric chair is boiled from the inside out. Sonja Hokberg’s murderer knew it would be hard to identify her body. That’s why the handbag was left behind.
It still didn’t explain its position over by the fence, however. Wallander thought it all through again, but still could not come up with an explanation that accounted for this fact. He abandoned the question of the bag. In any case, he was proceeding too quickly. First they had to confirm that Sonja Hökberg had actually been murdered.
He returned to the kitchen and made some coffee. The phone was silent. It was four o’clock. He sat down at the kitchen table with his cup of coffee and called in again. Irene told him that the papers and TV had been calling all afternoon. She had not given out his phone number: it had been unlisted for a couple of years now. Wallander thought again that his absence was going to be interpreted as an admission of guilt, or at least as a sign of deep embarrassment about the matter. I should have stood my ground and stayed put, he thought. I should have talked to every damned reporter who called and told them the truth, that both Eva Persson and her mother were lying.
The moment of weakness was over. He was starting to get angry. He asked Irene to put him through to Hoglund. He should have started with Holgersson and told her once and for all that her suspicious attitude was unacceptable. But he put the phone down before there was an answer.
Right now he didn’t want to talk to either one of them.
Instead, he dialed Sten Widen’s number. By the time he picked up, Wallander had almost had time to regret it. But he was fairly sure Widen would not yet have seen the picture in the papers.
“I was thinking of stopping by,” Wallander said. “The only problem is, my car is broken.”
“I’ll pick you up if you like.”
They decided on seven o’clock. Wallander glanced in the direction of the whiskey bottle, but didn’t touch it.
The doorbell rang. Wallander jumped. No one ever came by his house unannounced. It was probably a reporter who had found his address somehow. He put the bottle of whiskey in a cabinet and opened the door. But it wasn’t a reporter. It was Hoglund.
“Is this a bad time?”
He stood by to let her in and turned his face away so she wouldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath. They sat down in the living room.
“I have a cold,” Wallander said. “I didn’t have the energy to keep working.”
She nodded, but he didn’t think for a second that she believed him. She had no reason to. Everyone knew Wallander always kept working in spite of whatever fevers or ailments he was suffering from.
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
The moment of wedkness is over, Wallander thought. Even if it just retreated for now and I know it’s still in there. But I’m not going to show it.
“If you’re referring to the picture in the paper, I know it looks bad. How can a photographer make his way unseen all the way into our interrogation rooms?”
“Lisa is very concerned.”
“She should listen to what I have to say,” Wallander said, “She should support me, not immediately believe everything they say in the paper.”
“She can’t just ignore what’s in the picture.”
“I’m not saying she should. I hit the girl, but only because she was laying into her mother.”
“You know of course that they have a different story.”
“They’re lying. But maybe you believe them?”
She shook her head.
“The question is only how to prove that they’re lying.”
“Who’s behind it?”
Her answer came quickly and firmly.
“The mother. I think she’s smart. She sees an opportunity to turn the attention away from her daughter’s deeds. And now that Sonja Hokberg is dead, they can try to pin everything on her.”
“Not the bloody knife.”
“Oh, but they can. Even though it was recovered with Eva’s help, she can claim that Sonja was the one who used it against Lundberg.”