“I saw her from 20 metres away,” said Wallander. “I think she was about 17. Am I wrong?”
The female doctor thought a moment before she replied.
“I don’t like to guess,” she said at last. “But I think she was younger.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I’ll tell you when I know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out she was only 15.”
“Could a 15-year-old really kill herself in that way?” Wallander asked. “I have a hard time believing that.”
“Last week I put together the pieces of a seven-year-old girl who blew herself up,” replied the doctor. “She had planned it very carefully. She made certain that no-one else would be hurt. Since she could barely write, she left behind a drawing as her farewell letter. And recently I heard of a four-year-old who tried to poke his own eyes out because he was afraid of his father.”
“That just isn’t possible,” said Wallander. “Not here in Sweden.”
“It was here, all right,” she said. “In Sweden. In the centre of the universe. In the middle of summer.”
Wallander’s eyes filled with tears.
“As we don’t know who she was, we’ll keep her here,” the doctor said.
“I have a question,” said Wallander. “Is it incredibly painful to burn to death?”
“People have known that through the ages,” she replied. “That’s why they used fire as one of the worst punishments or tortures that someone could be subjected to. They burned Joan of Arc, they burned witches. In every era people have been tortured by fire. The pain is beyond imagining. And, you don’t lose consciousness as fast as you would hope. There’s an instinct to run from the flames that’s stronger than the desire to escape the pain. That’s why your mind forces you not to pass out. Then you reach a limit. For a while the burned nerves become numbed. There are examples of people with 90 per cent of their body burned who for a brief time felt uninjured. But when the numbness wears off. .”
She didn’t finish her sentence.
“She burned like a flare,” said Wallander.
“The best thing you can do is stop thinking about it,” she said. “Death can actually be a liberator. No matter how reluctant we are to accept that.”
When the conversation was over, Wallander got up, grabbed his jacket, and left the flat. The wind had started blowing outside. Cloud cover had moved in from the north. On the way to the station he pulled in to the M.O.T. garage and made an appointment. When he arrived at the station, he stopped at the reception desk. Ebba had recently slipped and broken her hand. He asked how she was feeling.
“It reminds me that I’m getting old,” she said.
“You’ll never get old,” said Wallander.
“That’s a nice thing to say,” she said. “But it’s not true.”
On the way to his office Wallander stopped to see Martinsson, who was sitting in front of his computer.
“They got it up and running 20 minutes ago,” he said. “I’m just checking the description to see whether there are any missing persons who fit.”
“Add that she was 163 centimetres tall,” said Wallander. “And that she was between 15 and 17 years old.”
Martinsson gave him a baffled look.
“Only 15? That can’t be possible, can it?”
“I wish it weren’t true,” said Wallander. “But for now we have to consider it a possibility. How’s it going with the initials?”
“I haven’t got that far yet,” said Martinsson. “But I was planning to stay late this evening.”
“We’re trying to make an identification,” said Wallander. “We’re not searching for a fugitive.”
“There’s no-one at home tonight anyway,” said Martinsson. “I don’t like going back to an empty house.”
Wallander left Martinsson and looked in on Hoglund’s room, which was empty. He went back down the hall to the operations centre, where the emergency alerts and phone calls were received. Hoglund was sitting at a table with a senior officer, going through a pile of papers.
“Any leads?” he asked.
“We’ve got a couple of tip-offs we have to look into more closely,” she said. “One is a girl from Tomelilla Folk College who’s been missing for two days.”
“Our girl was 163 centimetres tall,” said Wallander. “She had perfect teeth. She was between 15 and 17 years old.”
“That young?” she asked in amazement.
“Yep,” said Wallander. “That young.”
“Then it’s not the girl from Tomelilla, anyway,” said Hoglund, putting down the paper in her hand. “She’s 23 and tall.”
She searched through the stack of papers for a moment.
“Here’s another one,” she said. “A 16-year-old girl named Mari Lippmansson. She lives here in Ystad and works in a bakery. She’s been missing from her job for three days. It was the baker who called. He was furious. Her parents evidently don’t care about her at all.”
“Take a look at her,” Wallander said encouragingly. But he knew she wasn’t the one.
He got a cup of coffee and went to his room. The folder on the car thefts was still lying on the floor. He’d better turn the case over to Svedberg now. He hoped no serious crimes would be committed before he started his holiday.
Later that afternoon they met in the conference room. Nyberg was back from the farm, where he had finished his search. It was a short meeting. Hansson had excused himself because he had to read an urgent memo from national headquarters.
“Let’s be brief,” said Wallander. “Tomorrow we’ll go over all the cases that can’t wait.”
He turned to Nyberg, sitting at the end of the table.
“How’d it go with the dog?” he asked.
“He didn’t find a thing,” Nyberg replied. “If there was ever anything to give him a scent, it was covered up by the odour of petrol.”
Wallander thought for a moment.
“You found five melted petrol containers,” he said. “That means that she must have come to Salomonsson’s field in some sort of vehicle. She couldn’t have carried all that petrol by herself. Unless she walked there several times. There’s one more possibility, of course. That she didn’t come alone. But that doesn’t seem reasonable, to say the least. Who would help a young girl commit suicide?”
“We could try to trace the petrol containers,” said Nyberg dubiously. “But is it really necessary?”
“As long as we don’t know who she was, we have to trace her by any leads we have,” Wallander replied. “She must have come from somewhere, somehow.”
“Did anyone look in Salomonsson’s barn?” asked Hoglund. “Maybe the petrol containers came from there.”
Wallander nodded.
“Someone had better drive out there and check,” he said.
Hoglund volunteered.
“We’ll have to wait for Martinsson’s results,” Wallander said, winding up the meeting. “And the pathologists’ work in Malmo. They’re going to give us an exact age tomorrow.”
“And the gold medallion?” asked Svedberg.
“We’ll wait until we have some idea of what the letters on it might mean,” said Wallander.
He suddenly realised something he had completely overlooked earlier. Behind the dead girl there were other people. Who would mourn her. Who would forever see her running like a living flare in their heads, in a totally different way from him. The fire would stay with them like scars. It would gradually fade away from him like nightmare.
They went their separate ways. Svedberg went with Wallander to get the papers on the car thefts. Wallander gave him a brief run-down. When they were done, Svedberg didn’t get up, and Wallander sensed that there was something he wanted to talk about.
“We ought to get together and talk,” said Svedberg hesitantly. “About what’s going on.”
“You’re thinking about the cuts? And security companies taking over the custody of suspects?”
Svedberg nodded glumly. “What use are new uniforms if we can’t do our jobs?”
“I don’t really think it’ll help to talk about it,” Wallander said warily. “We have a union that’s paid to take care of these matters.”
“We ought to protest, at least,” said Svedberg. “We ought to talk to people on the street about what’s going to happen.”