At 9.30 a.m. Nyberg appeared carrying the head and the other things he had found in the safe. Wallander moved the poem about the woodpecker aside, and Nyberg set down the head. In the safe with the diaries and notebook, there had been a box with a medal in it. But it was the shrunken head that captured their full attention. In the daylight there was no longer any doubt. It was a human head. A black head. Maybe a child. Or at least a young person. When Nyberg looked at it with a magnifying glass he could see that moths had been at the skin. Wallander grimaced with disgust when Nyberg leaned close to the head and sniffed it.
“Who do we know that might know about shrunken heads?” Wallander asked.
“The Ethnographic Museum,” Nyberg said. “These days it’s called the Museum of World Peoples. The national police board have issued a little booklet that’s excellent. It lists where you can find information on the most peculiar phenomena.”
“Then we’ll get in touch with them,” Wallander said.
Nyberg laid the head gently on a plastic bag. Wallander and Hoglund sat down at the desk and started examining the other items. The medal, which rested on a little silk pillow, was foreign. It had an inscription in French. None of them could read it. They started going through the books. The diaries were from the early 1960s. On the half-title page they could make out a name: Harald Berggren. Wallander shot Hoglund a questioning glance. She shook her head. That name hadn’t come up in the investigation so far. There were very few entries in the diaries. A few times of day noted with initials. In one place were the initials H.E. It was dated February 1960 — more than 30 years earlier.
Wallander began to leaf through the notebook. It was a diary, crammed with entries. The first entry had been made in November of 1960, the last in July of 1961. The handwriting was cramped and hard to read. He realised that he had forgotten to keep his appointment with the optician. He borrowed the magnifying glass from Nyberg and read a line here and there.
“It’s about the Belgian Congo,” he said. “Somebody who was there during the war. As a soldier.”
“Holger Eriksson or Harald Berggren?”
“Harald Berggren. Whoever that is.”
He put down the notebook. It might be important and he’d have to read it carefully. They looked at each other. Wallander knew they were thinking the same thing.
“A shrunken human head,” he said. “And a diary about a war in Africa.”
“A pungee pit,” Hoglund said. “A reminder of the war. In my mind shrunken heads and impaled people go together.”
“Mine too,” Wallander said. “The question is whether we’ve found a lead or not.”
“Who is Harald Berggren?”
“That’s one of the first things we have to find out.”
Wallander remembered that Martinsson was visiting a former employee of Eriksson in Svarte. He asked Hoglund to call him. Starting right now, the name Harald Berggren would be mentioned and examined in all conceivable connections. She punched in the number. Waited. Then she shook her head.
“His phone isn’t switched on,” she said.
Wallander was irritated. “How are we supposed to conduct an investigation if we aren’t all contactable?”
He knew he often broke the rule himself — he was probably the hardest to reach of all. At least sometimes. But Hoglund didn’t say a word.
“I’ll find him,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Harald Berggren,” said Wallander. “That name is important.”
“I’ll see that word gets out,” she replied.
When Wallander was alone in the room, he turned on the desk lamp. He was just about to open the diary when he noticed that something was stuck inside the leather cover. Carefully he coaxed out a photograph. It was black-and-white, well-thumbed and stained. One corner was torn off. The photograph showed three men in uniform, laughing towards the camera. Wallander remembered the photograph of Runfeldt surrounded by giant orchids. The landscape in this picture wasn’t Sweden either. He studied the photograph with the magnifying glass. The men were very tanned. Their shirts were unbuttoned and their sleeves rolled up. There were rifles at their feet. They were leaning against an oddly shaped boulder and behind it was open countryside with no distinguishable features. The ground was crushed gravel or sand.
The men looked like they were in their early 20s. He turned the picture over. It was probably taken at about the same time the diary entries were made. The early 1960s. Their age meant that he could eliminate Holger Eriksson. In 1960 he would have been between 40 and 50 years old.
Wallander opened one of the desk drawers. He had seen some loose passport photographs in an envelope earlier. He placed one of the photographs of Eriksson on the desk. It was dated 1989. Holger Eriksson, aged 73. Wallander stared at his face. The pointed nose, the thin lips. He tried to imagine away the wrinkles and see a younger face. He went back to the photograph with the three men posing. He studied their faces one by one. The man on the left had some features that resembled Holger Eriksson. Wallander leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Holger Eriksson lies dead in a ditch. In his safe we find a shrunken head, a diary, and a photograph.
Suddenly Wallander sat up straight in the chair, his eyes wide. He was thinking about the break-in. The safe was untouched. Let’s assume, thought Wallander, that whoever broke in also had a hard time finding the safe. And assume the contents were the same then as they are now. That’s precisely what the thief was looking for. He failed and apparently didn’t repeat the attempt. And Eriksson died a year later.
But there was something that presented a serious contradiction to this attempt to find a link between the two events. After Eriksson’s death, his safe would be found — by the executors of the estate if no-one else. The intruder must have been aware of this.
Still, this was something. A lead.
He looked at the photograph one more time. The men were smiling. They had been smiling in this picture for 30 years. Could the photographer have been Eriksson? But Eriksson had been selling cars in Ystad, Tomelilla, and Sjobo. He hadn’t taken part in some far-off African war. Or had he?
Wallander regarded the diary lying in front of him pensively. He slipped the photograph into his jacket pocket, picked up the book, and went in to Nyberg, who was busy with a technical examination of the bathroom.
“I’m taking this diary. I’ll leave the pocket calendars.”
“You think there’s something there?” asked Nyberg.
“I think so,” said Wallander. “If anyone wants me I’ll be at home.”
When he came out into the courtyard he could see that some officers were busy taking down the crime-scene tape by the ditch. The rain canopy was already gone.
An hour later he was sitting at his kitchen table. He opened the diary.
The first entry was made on 20 November 1960.
CHAPTER 10
It took Wallander almost six hours to read Harald Berggren’s diary from cover to cover. With interruptions, of course. The telephone rang again and again. Wallander tried to keep the interruptions brief.
The diary was one of the most fascinating yet frightening things he had ever encountered. It was a record of several years in the man’s life. For Wallander it was like stepping into an alien world. Although Harald Berggren, whoever he was, couldn’t be described as a master of language — he often expressed himself sentimentally or with an uncertainty that gave way to helplessness — the descriptions of his experiences had a force that shone through the prose. Wallander sensed that they must decipher the diary in order to understand what had happened to Eriksson. And yet he could hear a voice inside warning him that this could lead them in completely the wrong direction. Wallander knew that most truths were both expected and unexpected at the same time. It was simply a matter of knowing how to interpret the connection. Besides, no criminal investigation ever resembled another, not deep down, not once they went past the superficial similarities.