“He said she was very secretive,” Hansson said. “Whatever that means.”
After twenty minutes, Wallander tried to sum up the state of the investigation. He stressed the fact that he thought they had more work ahead of them than they expected.
The meeting was over shortly before five. Höglund wished him good luck.
“They’re going to accuse me of being a violent misogynist,” Wallander complained.
“I don’t think so. You have a good reputation.”
“I thought that was destroyed a long time ago.”
Wallander went home. There was a letter from Per Akeson in Sudan. He put it on the kitchen table to be opened later. Then he showered and changed. He left the apartment at six-thirty and walked to the place where he was supposed to meet all these unknown women. He stood for a moment staring up at the lighted house before he had the courage to enter.
When he reemerged from the house it was past nine o’clock. He was drenched in sweat. He had talked longer than he had planned to, and there had been more questions than he had expected. But the women there had inspired him. Most of them were his age, and their attentions had flattered him. When he left, part of him had actually wanted to stay longer.
He walked home slowly. He hardly knew anymore what he had actually told them. But they had listened to him. That had been the most important thing.
There was one woman in particular who stood out in his mind. He had exchanged a few words with her right before he left. She had said her name was Solveig Gabrielsson. Wallander had trouble getting her out of his head.
When he got home, he wrote down her name. He didn’t know exactly why.
The phone rang before he’d even taken his coat off. He answered it.
It was Martinsson.
“How did the lecture go?” he asked.
“Good, I think. But that can’t be why you’re calling.”
“I’m just here working,” Martinsson said slowly. “There’s this phone call from the coroner’s office in Lund that I don’t quite know what to do with.”
Wallander caught his breath.
“Do you remember Tynnes Falk?” Martinsson asked.
“The man by the automatic teller. Yes, of course I do.”
“Well, it seems as if his body has disappeared.”
Wallander frowned.
“I thought dead bodies only disappeared into coffins.”
“One would think so, but it appears in this case that someone has actually stolen the corpse.”
Wallander didn’t know what to ask next. He tried to think.
“There’s one other thing,” Martinsson said. “It’s not just that the body has gone missing. Something was left in its place on the stretcher in the morgue.”
“What was that?”
“A broken relay.”
Wallander wasn’t exactly sure what that was, other than that it had something to do with electricity.
“It’s not just an ordinary relay,” Martinsson continued. “It’s large.”
Wallander’s heart was beating faster. He sensed what was coming.
“And where does one normally find large relays?” he asked.
“In power substations, just like the one where Sonja’s body was found.”
Wallander was silent.
They had finally found a connection.
But not the kind he had been expecting.
Chapter Twelve
Martinsson was waiting in the lunchroom.
It was ten o’clock on Thursday evening. The faint sound of a radio came from the control room that handled all the incoming emergency calls. Otherwise, it was completely quiet. Martinsson was drinking a cup of tea and eating some rusks. Wallander sat down across from him without taking off his coat.
“How did your lecture go?”
“You’ve already asked me that.”
“I used to enjoy public speaking, but I don’t know if I’d be any good at it anymore.”
“I’m sure you’d still be better at it than me. But since you’re asking, I can tell you that I had nineteen middle-aged women listening with bated breath to bloodthirsty stories about our socially responsible profession. They were very nice and asked me polite and friendly questions that I answered in a manner that even the National Chief of Police would not have been able to fault. Does that give you the picture?”
Martinsson nodded and brushed the crumbs from his mouth before pulling out his notes.
“I’ll take it from the top. At nine minutes to nine the phone rings in the control room. The officer in charge puts the call through to me, since he knows it doesn’t involve sending out any patrol cars. If I hadn’t been here, the caller would probably have been told to call back tomorrow morning. The caller’s name was Palsson. Sture Pålsson. I don’t know what his position was, but he’s in charge of the coroner’s office in Lund. Anyway, at around eight o‘clock he checked the morgue and noticed that one of the lockers — do they call them lockers? — wasn’t fully closed, and when he pulled out the stretcher, the body was gone and an electrical relay was in its place. He called home to the janitor who had been working there that day. His name was Lyth. He was able to confirm that the body had been there at six o’clock when he left for the day. The body seems to have disappeared sometime between six and eight. On one side of the morgue there’s a back entrance that opens onto the yard. When Pålsson checked the door, he saw that the lock had been broken. He immediately called the Malmö police. The whole thing went very fast. A patrol car was there within fifteen minutes. When they heard that the body in question was from Ystad and had been the subject of a criminal investigation, they told Pålsson to contact us, which he did.”
Martinsson put his notes down.
“The task of finding the body falls primarily to our colleagues in Malmö,” he continued. “But I guess it’s also something that we have to deal with.”
Wallander turned the matter over in his mind. It was a strange and unpleasant incident. He felt his sense of anxiety grow stronger.
“We’ll have to assume that our colleagues will think of searching for fingerprints,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what category this kind of crime falls into. Desecration of the dead? But there is a good chance they won’t take it as seriously as we would like. Did Nyberg manage to secure any fingerprints from the substation?”
Martinsson thought about it.
“I think so. Would you like me to call him?”
“Not right now. But I’d like our Malmö colleagues to look for fingerprints on the relay and around the morgue. ”
“Right now?”
“I think that would be best.”
Martinsson left to go make the phone call. Wallander poured himself a cup of coffee and tried to understand exactly what this meant. A connection had emerged, but it was not one he would have expected and it could still turn out to be an unlikely coincidence. He had experienced such things before. But something told him it wouldn’t be the case here. Someone had broken into a morgue and stolen a dead body, leaving an electrical relay in its place. It made Wallander think of something Rydberg had said many years ago, when they first started working together: “Criminals often leave a greeting at the scene of the crime. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes by accident.”
This is no mistake, Wallander thought. No one just happens to be carrying a big electrical relay around. It’s even less Likely that someone would accidentally leave it on a gurney in a morgue. It was supposed to be found, and it was hardly a message meant for the pathologists. It was left for us.
This led to the other question: Why had the body been stolen? He had heard of cases where the bodies of people who had been members of strange sects were removed. That hardly applied in the case of Tynnes Falk, although it couldn’t be entirely ruled out. But there was really only one wholly plausible explanation: the body had been removed in order to conceal something.