They talked for another half hour over a glass of whisky. Sjosten made a call to check that Elisabeth Carlen was still under surveillance.
“She’s asleep,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go to bed too.”
Sjosten gave him sheets and Wallander made up a bed for himself in a room with children’s drawings on the walls. He turned off the light and was asleep immediately.
He woke drenched in sweat. He must have had a nightmare, although he remembered nothing. He had only slept for a couple of hours. He wondered why he’d woken, and turned over to go back to sleep. But he was wide awake. Where the feeling came from he had no idea. He was gripped with panic.
He had left Linda alone in Ystad. She shouldn’t be there by herself. He had to go home. Without another thought he got up, dressed, and quickly scribbled a note to Sjosten. He drove out of town. Perhaps he should call her. But what would he say? She’d just be frightened. He drove as fast as he could through the light summer night. He didn’t understand where the panic had come from. But it was definitely there, and it wouldn’t let go.
It was light when he parked on Mariagatan. He unlocked the door carefully. The terror had not abated. Not until he pushed open Linda’s door gently, saw her head on the pillow and heard her breathing, did he calm down.
He sat on the sofa. Now fear had been replaced by embarrassment. He wrote a note to her, which he left on the coffee table in case she got up, saying that his plans had changed and that he’d come home. He set the alarm clock for 5 a.m, knowing that Sjosten got up early to work on his boat. He had no idea how he was going to explain his departure in the middle of the night. He lay in bed and wondered what lay behind his panic, but he couldn’t find an answer. It took a long time before he fell asleep.
CHAPTER 34
When the doorbell rang he knew at once that it had to be Baiba. Oddly, he wasn’t nervous at all, even though it wasn’t going to be much fun explaining to her why he hadn’t told her that their holiday had to be postponed. Then he started and sat up in bed. Of course she wasn’t there. It was only the alarm clock ringing, the hands positioned like a gaping mouth at 5.03 a.m. The confusion passed, he put his hand over the alarm button and then sat motionless. Reality slowly dawned. The town was quiet. Few sounds other than birdsong penetrated his room. He couldn’t remember whether he’d dreamed about Baiba or not. The flight from the child’s room in Sjosten’s flat now seemed wildly irrational. Not like him at all.
With a yawn he got up and went into the kitchen. On the table he found a note from Linda. I communicate with my daughter through a series of notes, he thought. When she makes one of her occasional stops in Ystad. He read over what she had written and realised that the dream about Baiba, waking up and believing that she was standing outside his door, had contained a warning. Linda’s note said that Baiba had called and would he call right away. Baiba’s irritation was recognisable from the note.
He couldn’t call her, not now. He’d call her tonight, or maybe tomorrow. Or should he have Martinsson do it? He could give her the unfortunate news that the man she was intending to go to Skagen with, the man she assumed would be standing at Kastrup Airport to meet her, was up to his neck in a hunt for a maniac who smashed axes into the heads of his fellow human beings and then cut off their scalps. What he might tell Martinsson to say was true, and yet not true. It could never explain or excuse the fact that he was too weak to do the decent thing and call Baiba himself.
He picked up the phone, not to call Baiba, but Sjosten in Helsingborg, to explain why he had left during the night. What could he possibly say? The truth was one option: sudden concern for his daughter, a concern all parents feel without being able to explain. But when Sjosten answered he said something quite different, that he’d forgotten about a meeting he had arranged with his father for early that morning. It was something that couldn’t be revealed by accident, since Sjosten and his father would never cross paths. They agreed to talk later, after Wallander had been to Malmo.
Then everything seemed much easier. It wasn’t the first time in his life he had started his day with a bunch of white lies, evasions and self-deceptions. He took a shower, had some coffee, wrote a new note to Linda, and left the flat just after 6.30 a.m. Everything was quiet at the station. It was this early, lonely hour, when the weary graveyard shift was on its way home and it was still too early for the daytime staff, that Wallander took pleasure in. Life took on a special meaning in this solitude. He never understood why this was so, but he could remember the feeling from deep in his past, maybe as far back as 20 years.
Rydberg, his old friend and mentor, had been the same way. Everyone has small but extremely personal sacred moments, Rydberg had told him on one of the few occasions when they had sat in either his or Wallander’s office and split a small bottle of whisky behind a locked door. No alcohol was permitted in the station. But sometimes they had something to celebrate. Or to grieve over, for that matter. Wallander sorely missed those brief and strangely philosophical times. They had been moments of friendship, of irreplaceable intimacy.
Wallander read quickly through a stack of messages. In a memo he saw that Dolores Maria Santana’s body had been released for burial and now rested in a grave in the same cemetery as Rydberg. This brought him back to the investigation; he rolled up his sleeves as though going out into the world to do battle, and skimmed as fast as he could through the copies of investigative material his colleagues had prepared. There were papers from Nyberg, laboratory reports on which Nyberg had scrawled question marks and comments, and charts of the tip-offs that had come in from the public. Tyren must be an extraordinarily zealous young man, Wallander thought, without being able to decide whether that meant he would be a good policeman in the field in the future, or whether he was already showing signs that he belonged somewhere in the hunting grounds of the bureaucracy. Wallander read quickly, but nothing of value escaped him. The most important thing seemed to be that they had established that Fredman had indeed been murdered on the dock below the side road to Charlottenlund.
He pushed the stacks of papers aside and leaned back pensively in his chair. What do these men have in common? Fredman doesn’t fit the picture, but he belongs just the same. A former minister of justice, an art dealer, a criminal fraudster and a petty thief. They’re all murdered by the same killer, who takes their scalps. Wetterstedt, the first, is barely hidden, just shoved out of sight. Carlman, the second, is killed in the middle of a summer party in his own arbour. Fredman is kidnapped, taken to an out-of-the-way dock and then dumped in the middle of Ystad, as if being put on display. He lies in a pit with a tarpaulin over his head, like a statue waiting to be unveiled. Finally, the killer moves to Helsingborg and murders Liljegren. Almost immediately we pin down a connection between Wetterstedt and Liljegren. Now we need the links between the others. After we know what connected them, we have to discover who might have had reason to kill them. And why the scalps? Who is the lone warrior?
Wallander sat for a long time thinking about Fredman and Liljegren. There was a similarity there. The kidnapping and the acid in the eyes on the one hand, and the head in the oven on the other. It hadn’t been enough to kill these two. Why? He took another step. The water got deeper around him. The bottom was slippery. Easy to lose his footing. There was a difference between Fredman and Liljegren, a very clear one. Fredman had hydrochloric acid poured into his eyes while he was alive. Liljegren was dead before he was stuck in the oven. Wallander tried to conjure up the killer again. Thin, in good condition, barefoot, insane. If he hunts evil men, Fredman must have been the worst. Then Liljegren. Carlman and Wetterstedt in about the same category.