Ylva Brink thought back on the times when Skane had been snowed in. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was terrible for women who were in labour but couldn’t get to the hospital. She remembered sitting freezing in a tractor as it crept along through the blizzard and snowdrifts to an isolated farm north of town. The woman was haemorrhaging. It was the only time in her years as a midwife that she had been seriously afraid of losing a patient. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen. Women simply did not die giving birth in Sweden.
But still, it was autumn now. Ylva came from the far north of Sweden, and sometimes missed the melancholy Norrland forests. She had never got used to the open landscape of Skane where the wind reigned supreme. But her husband had been born in Trelleborg and couldn’t imagine living anywhere but in Skane. When he had time at home, that is.
Her musings were interrupted when Lena Soderstrom came into the room. She was about 30. She could be my daughter, Ylva thought. I’m twice her age.
“She probably won’t deliver before early morning,” Lena said. “We’ll get to go home.”
“It’ll be quiet tonight,” said Ylva. “Take a nap if you’re tired.”
A nurse hurried by in the hall. Lena Soderstrom was drinking her tea. The other two nurses sat bent over a crossword puzzle.
Already October, Ylva thought. The middle of autumn already. Soon winter will be here. In December Harry has a holiday, a month off, and we’ll remodel the kitchen. Not because it needs it, but so he can have something to do. Harry’s not wild about holidays. He gets restless.
Someone had pressed a call button. A nurse got up and left. A few minutes later she came back.
“Maria in Room 3 has a headache,” she said, sitting back down to her crossword puzzle. Ylva sipped her coffee. Suddenly she realised that she was sitting wondering about something, without knowing exactly what it was. Then it came to her. The nurse who had walked past in the hall. Hadn’t all the women working in the ward been here in the office? And no call bells had rung from intensive care. She must have been imagining things.
But at the same time she knew she hadn’t been.
“Who just walked by?” she asked softly.
The two nurses gave her curious looks.
“What’s that?” Lena Soderstrom asked.
“A nurse walked down the hall a few minutes ago. While we were sitting here.”
They still couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She didn’t understand it herself. Another bell rang. Ylva quickly set down her cup.
“I’ll get it.”
The woman in Room 2 was feeling bad. She was about to have her third child. Ylva suspected that the child hadn’t exactly been planned. After she had given the woman something to drink she went out into the hall. She looked around. All the doors were closed. But a nurse had walked past. She hadn’t imagined it, and suddenly she felt uneasy. Something wasn’t quite right. She stood still in the hall and listened. The muted radio could be heard in the office. She went back and picked up her coffee cup.
“It was nothing,” she said.
At that instant the nurse she had seen earlier went by in the other direction. This time Lena saw her too. They both gave a start as they heard the door to the main hall close.
“Who was that?” asked Lena.
Ylva shook her head. The nurses looked up from their puzzle.
“Who are you talking about?” one of them asked.
“The nurse who just walked past.”
The one sitting with a pen in her hand, filling in the crossword, started to laugh.
“But we’re right here, both of us.”
Ylva got up quickly. When she pulled open the door to the outer hall, which connected the maternity ward to the rest of the hospital, it was empty. She listened, and far off she heard a door close. She went back to the nurses’ station, shaking her head.
“What’s a nurse from another ward doing here?” Lena asked. “Without even saying hello?”
Ylva didn’t know, but she knew it hadn’t been her imagination.
“Let’s take a look in all the rooms,” she said, “and see if everything’s all right.”
Lena gave her a searching look.
“What could be wrong?”
“Just for safety’s sake, that’s all.”
They went into all the rooms. Everything seemed normal. At 1 a.m. a woman started bleeding. The rest of the night was taken up with work.
At 7 a.m., after briefing the day shift, Ylva Brink went home. She lived in a house right near the hospital. When she got home she started thinking again about the strange nurse she had seen in the hall. Suddenly she was sure it hadn’t been a nurse at all. Even if she did have a uniform on. A nurse wouldn’t have come into the maternity ward at night without saying hello and telling them what she was doing there.
Ylva kept thinking about it. She grew more and more anxious. The woman must have had some purpose. She stayed for ten minutes, then she vanished. Ten minutes. She must have been in a room visiting someone. Who? And why?
Ylva lay there trying to sleep, but it was no use. The strange woman kept appearing in her thoughts. At 11 a.m. she gave up, and got out of bed and made some coffee. She thought she’d better talk to somebody.
I’ve got a cousin who’s a policeman. I’m sure he could tell me if I’m worrying about this for nothing.
She picked up the phone and dialled his home number. The message on his answering machine said that he was on duty. Since it wasn’t far to the police station, she decided to walk over. Maybe the police didn’t take visitors on Saturdays. She had read about the terrible thing that happened outside Lodinge — a car dealer had been murdered and tossed in a ditch. Maybe the police wouldn’t have time for her. Not even her cousin. At the front desk she asked if Inspector Svedberg was in. He was, but he was very busy.
“Tell him it’s Ylva,” she said. “I’m his cousin.”
Svedberg came out to meet her. He was fond of her, and couldn’t resist giving her a few minutes of his time. He got coffee for both of them and they went to his office. She told him what had happened the night before. Svedberg said that it was odd, of course, but hardly anything to worry about. She let herself be reassured. She had three days off and soon forgot about the nurse who had walked through the maternity ward.
Late on Friday evening Wallander called his weary colleagues together for a meeting of the investigative team at the police station. They closed the doors at 10 p.m., and the meeting dragged on until past midnight. He began by telling them about the second missing person inquiry that they now had on their hands. Martinsson and Hoglund had finished their preliminary check of the records, but had found nothing to indicate a connection between Eriksson and Runfeldt. Vanja Andersson didn’t recall Runfeldt ever mentioning Eriksson. Wallander made it clear that all they could do was keep on working without making any assumptions. Runfeldt might show up at any time with a perfectly reasonable explanation for his disappearance. But they couldn’t ignore the ominous signs.
Wallander asked Hoglund to take responsibility for the Runfeldt investigation, but that didn’t mean she was released from the Eriksson case. In the past Wallander had been opposed to asking Stockholm for reinforcements, but this time he had a feeling that maybe they should do so right from the start. He’d mentioned this to Hansson, and they’d agreed to wait until early next week.
They sat around the conference table and went over what they had learned so far. Wallander asked if anyone had anything important to report. His gaze wandered around the table. They all shook their heads. Nyberg sat sniffling quietly at the end of the table in his usual place, by himself. Wallander let him have the first word.
“Nothing at all so far. You’ve all seen exactly what we’ve seen. The planks were sawed through. He fell and was impaled. We didn’t find anything in the ditch. We don’t know yet where the bamboo stakes came from.”