“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’ll explain later,” said Wallander. “But don’t stamp around in the field. There’s a body out there.”
“The house isn’t threatened,” said Edler. “We’ll work on containing the fire.”
Edler turned to Salomonsson and asked how wide the tractor paths and the ditches between the fields were. One of the ambulance crew came over. Wallander had met him before but couldn’t remember his name.
“Is anyone hurt?” he asked.
Wallander shook his head.
“One person dead,” he replied. “She’s lying out in the field.”
“Then we’ll need a hearse,” said the ambulance driver. “What happened?”
Wallander didn’t feel like answering. Instead he turned to Noren, who was the officer he knew best.
“There’s a dead woman in the field,” he said. “Until the fire is put out we can’t do anything but block it off.”
Noren nodded.
“Was it an accident?” he asked.
“More like a suicide,” said Wallander.
A few minutes later, as Martinsson arrived, Noren handed him a paper cup of coffee. He stared at his hand and wondered why it wasn’t shaking. Hansson and Ann-Britt Hoglund arrived in Hansson’s car, and he told his colleagues what had happened.
Again and again he used the same phrase: She burned like a flare.
“This is just terrible,” said Hoglund.
“It was worse than you can imagine,” said Wallander. “Not to be able to do anything. I hope none of you ever has to experience anything like this.”
Silently they watched the firefighters work. A large group of bystanders had gathered, but the police kept them back.
“What did she look like?” asked Martinsson. “Did you see her?”
Wallander nodded.
“Someone ought to talk to the old man,” he said. “His name is Salomonsson.”
Hansson took Salomonsson into his kitchen. Hoglund went over and talked to Peter Edler. The fire had begun to die down. When she returned she told them it would be all over shortly.
“Rape burns fast,” she said. “And the field is wet. It rained yesterday.”
“She was young,” said Wallander, “with black hair and dark skin. She was dressed in a yellow windcheater. I think she had jeans on. I don’t know about her feet. And she was frightened.”
“What of?” asked Martinsson.
Wallander thought a moment.
“She was frightened of me,” he replied. “I’m not absolutely sure, but I think she was even more terrified when I called out that I was a policeman and told her to stop. But beyond that, I have no idea.”
“She understood everything you said?”
“She understood the word ‘police’ at least. I’m certain of that.”
All that remained of the fire was a thick pall of smoke.
“There was no-one else out there in the field?” asked Hoglund. “You’re sure she was alone?”
“No,” said Wallander. “I’m not sure at all. But I didn’t see anyone but her.”
They stood in silence. Who was she? Wallander asked himself. Where did she come from? Why did she set herself on fire? If she wanted to die, why did she choose to torture herself?
Hansson came back from the house, where he had been talking with Salomonsson.
“We should do what they do in the States,” he said. “We should have menthol to smear under our noses. Damn, the smell in there. Old men shouldn’t be allowed to outlive their wives.”
“Get one of the ambulance crew to ask him how he’s feeling,” said Wallander. “He must be suffering from shock.”
Martinsson went to deliver the message. Peter Edler took off his helmet and stood next to Wallander.
“It’s nearly out,” he said. “But I’ll leave a truck here tonight.”
“When can we go out in the field?” asked Wallander.
“Within an hour. The smoke will hang around for a while yet. But the field has already started to cool off.”
Wallander took Peter Edler aside.
“What am I going to see?” he asked. “She poured a five-litre container of petrol over herself. And the way everything exploded around her, she must have already poured more on the ground.”
“It won’t be pretty,” Edler replied candidly. “There won’t be a lot left.”
Wallander said nothing. He turned to Hansson.
“No matter how we look at it, we know that it was suicide,” said Hansson. “We have the best witness we can get: a policeman.”
“What did Salomonsson say?”
“That he’d never seen her before she appeared at 5 a.m. this morning. There’s no reason to think he’s not telling the truth.”
“So we don’t know who she is,” said Wallander, “and we don’t know what she was running from either.”
Hansson looked at him in surprise.
“Why should she be running from something?” he asked.
“She was frightened,” said Wallander. “She was hiding. And when a policeman arrived she set herself on fire.”
“We don’t know what she was thinking,” said Hansson. “You may be imagining that she was frightened.”
“No,” said Wallander. “I’ve seen enough fear in my time to know what it looks like.”
One of the ambulance crew came walking towards them.
“We’re taking the old boy with us to the hospital,” he said. “He looks in pretty bad shape.”
Wallander nodded.
Soon the forensic team arrived. Wallander tried to point out where in the smoke the body might be located.
“Maybe you should go home,” said Hoglund. “You’ve seen enough this evening.”
“No,” said Wallander. “I’ll stay.”
Eventually the smoke had cleared, and Peter Edler said they could start their examination. Even though the summer evening was still light, Wallander had ordered floodlights to be brought in.
“There might be something out there apart from a body,” said Wallander. “Watch your step, and everyone who doesn’t have work to do out there should stay back.”
He realised then that he really didn’t want to do what had to be done. He would far rather have driven away and left the responsibility to the others. He walked out into the field alone. The others watched. He was afraid of what he would see, afraid that the knot he had in his stomach would burst.
He reached her. Her arms had stiffened in the upstretched motion he had seen her make before she died, surrounded by the raging flames. Her hair and face, along with her clothes, were burned off. All that was left was a blackened body that still radiated terror and desolation. Wallander turned around and walked back across the charred ground. For a moment he was afraid he was going to faint.
The forensic technicians started to work in the harsh glare of the floodlights, where moths swarmed. Hansson had opened Salomonsson’s kitchen window to drive out the smell. They pulled out the chairs and sat around the kitchen table. At Hoglund’s suggestion they made coffee on Salomonsson’s ancient stove.
“All he has is ground coffee,” she said after searching through the drawers and cupboards. “Is that all right?”
“That’s fine,” said Wallander. “Just as long as it’s strong.”
Hanging on the wall beside the ancient cupboards with sliding doors was an old-fashioned clock. Wallander noticed that it had stopped. He had seen a clock like that once before, at Baiba’s flat in Riga, and it too had had a pair of immobile hands. As though they were trying to ward off events that had not yet happened by stopping time, he thought. Baiba’s husband was killed execution-style on a frozen night in Riga’s harbour. A lone girl appears as if shipwrecked in a sea of rape and takes her life by inflicting the worst pain imaginable.