“Are you carrying the solution in there?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“But honestly, how’s it going?”
“There’ll be a press conference on Monday. Until then we don’t have anything to tell you.”
“But he was impaled on sharpened steel pipes?”
Wallander gave him an astonished look.
“Who on earth said that?”
“One of your colleagues.”
“There must be a misunderstanding. There weren’t any steel pipes.”
“But he was impaled?”
“That’s correct.”
“It sounds like some sort of torture chamber dug into a field in Skane.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“What are your words, then?”
“That there will be a press conference on Monday.”
The reporter shook his head.
“You’ve got to give me something.”
“We’re still in the preliminary stage of this investigation. We can confirm that a murder has been committed. But we don’t have any leads.”
“Nothing?”
“I have no further comment.”
The reporter gave up. Wallander knew he would quote him accurately. He was one of the few reporters who didn’t misquote him.
In the distance the abandoned plastic canopy fluttered down by the ditch. The crime-scene tape was still there. An officer appeared near the tower. They could probably stop guarding the site now. Just as he got to the house the door opened. Nyberg stood there with plastic covers on his shoes.
“I saw you from the window,” he said.
Nyberg was in a cheerful mood. That was a good omen for the day’s work.
“I’ve got a something for you,” Wallander said as he entered. “Take a look at this.”
“Does it have anything to do with Eriksson?”
“No, Runfeldt. The florist.”
Wallander set the box down on the desk. Nyberg moved the poem aside to make room to unpack it. His reaction was the same as Martinsson’s. It was definitely bugging equipment. And it was highly sophisticated. Nyberg put on his glasses and searched for the manufacturer’s stamp.
“It says Singapore. But it was probably made somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“The US, or Israel.”
“So why does it say Singapore?”
“Some of these manufacturers try to maintain as low a profile as possible. They’re involved in one way or another with the international arms trade, and they don’t reveal secrets to each other unless they have to. The parts are manufactured in various countries. Assembly is done somewhere else. And another country altogether provides the stamp of origin.”
“What could you use this for?” Wallander asked him.
“You could bug a flat. Or a car.”
Wallander shook his head.
“Runfeldt is a florist. What would he need this for?”
“Find him and ask him yourself,” Nyberg said.
They put everything back in the box. Nyberg sniffled. He had a bad cold.
“Try and take it a little easier,” Wallander said. “Get some sleep.”
“It’s that bloody mud. I get sick from standing out in the rain. I don’t understand why it should be so damned difficult to design a shelter that would hold up under the weather conditions of Skane.”
“Write an article about it for Swedish Police,” Wallander suggested.
“When am I going to have time for that?”
The question went unanswered. They moved through the house.
“I haven’t found anything out of the ordinary,” said Nyberg. “At least not yet. But the house has a lot of nooks and crannies.”
“I’ll hang around for a while,” Wallander said. “I want to think.”
Nyberg went to join his forensic technicians. Wallander sat down by the window in the sun.
His gaze took in the large room. What kind of man writes poems about a woodpecker? He read again what Holger Eriksson had written. There were some beautiful turns of phrase. Wallander had written verse in the autograph books of his female friends at school when he was young, but he had never really read poetry. Linda had complained that there were too few books in the house when she was growing up, and Wallander couldn’t argue with her.
A wealthy car dealer, almost 80 years old, who writes poems, and is interested in birds. So interested that he goes out late at night or in the early dawn and stares at the migrating night birds.
The sunshine was still warming him as he looked around the room. He remembered something from the report of the break-in. According to Eriksson, the front door was forced open with a crowbar. But nothing seemed to have been stolen.
There was something else. Wallander searched his memory. Then he remembered. Yes, the safe was untouched. He stood up and went to find Nyberg. He was in one of the bedrooms.
“Did you find a safe?”
“No.”
“We have to find it,” Wallander said. “Let’s start looking.”
Nyberg was on his knees next to the bed.
“Are you sure?” Nyberg asked. “I would have found it.”
“Yes, I am. Somewhere there’s a safe.”
They searched the house methodically. It took them half an hour before they found the safe. One of Nyberg’s assistants discovered it behind a false oven door in a serving area of the kitchen. The door could be swung open laterally. The safe was built into the wall and had a combination lock.
“I think I know where the combination is,” Nyberg said. “Eriksson was probably afraid his memory might fail him in his old age.”
Wallander followed Nyberg back to the desk. In one of the drawers Nyberg had found a little box containing a slip of paper with a row of numbers on it. They tried it on the safe, and the lock clicked into place. Nyberg stepped aside to allow Wallander to open it.
Wallander peered inside. Then he gave a start. He took a step back and trod on Nyberg’s toes.
“What is it?” Nyberg asked.
Wallander nodded for him to look. Nyberg leaned forwards. He recoiled, but less violently than Wallander.
“It looks like a human head,” Nyberg said.
He turned to one of his assistants, who had blanched when he’d heard Nyberg’s words, and asked him to get a torch. They stood there waiting uneasily. Wallander felt dizzy. He took a few deep breaths. Nyberg gave him a curious look. The torch arrived. Nyberg shone it into the safe. There really was a head in there, cut off at the neck. Its eyes were open. But it was shrunken and dried. They couldn’t tell whether it was an ape or a human. Only a few pocket diaries and a notebook were in there with it.
At that moment Hoglund came in. From the tense atmosphere she knew that something had happened. She didn’t ask what, but stood quietly in the background.
“Should we call in the photographer?” asked Nyberg.
“No, just take a few pictures yourself,” replied Wallander. “The most important thing is to get it out of the safe.”
He turned to Hoglund.
“There’s a head in there,” he said. “A shrunken human head. Or maybe it’s an ape.”
She leaned forwards and looked. Wallander noticed that she didn’t flinch. They left the serving area to give Nyberg and his assistants room to work. Wallander could feel himself sweating.
“A safe with a head in it,” she said. “Possibly shrunken, possibly an ape. How do we interpret that?”
“Eriksson must have been a more complex man than we imagined,” Wallander said.
They waited for Nyberg and his team to empty the safe. It was 9 a.m. Wallander told Hoglund about the parcel from the mail-order company in Boras. They decided that someone should go through Runfeldt’s flat more methodically than Wallander had had time to do. It would be best if Nyberg could spare some of his technicians. Hoglund called the station and was told that the Danish police had confirmed that no bodies had drifted ashore recently. The Malmo police and the sea rescue service hadn’t found any either.