“The most important thing is to find out if Runfeldt had ever bought anything else from them,” Wallander said. “The rest is not our immediate concern.”
“Their list of customers is incomplete, to say the least. But the Boras police have found prohibited and highly sophisticated equipment at their offices. It sounds as though Runfeldt could practically be a spy.”
Wallander pondered this for a moment.
“Why not?” he said finally. “We can’t rule anything out. He must have had some reason for buying the stuff.”
They had searched for Harald Berggren but hadn’t found the slightest trace of him. The museum in Stockholm confirmed that the shrunken head was definitely human, and probably came from the Congo. So far so good. But who was this Berggren? They had already spoken with people who had known Eriksson during different periods of his life, but none had ever heard him speak of Berggren. No-one had heard that he’d had contact with the underworld in which mercenaries moved like wary rats and wrote their contracts with messengers of the Devil, either. It was Wallander who came up with the idea that got the investigation moving again.
“There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Eriksson,” he said. “Particularly the fact that there isn’t a woman in his life. Not anywhere, not ever. That made me start to wonder whether there was a homosexual relationship between Eriksson and this Harald Berggren. There are almost no women in Berggren’s diary either.”
There was silence in the conference room. No-one seemed to have considered this possibility.
“It sounds a little strange that homosexual men would choose such a macho occupation as being soldiers,” Hoglund said.
“Not at all,” Wallander replied. “It’s not unusual for gay men to become soldiers. They do it to hide their preference. Or just to be around other men.”
Martinsson studied the photograph of the three men.
“I get a feeling you might be right,” he said. “These men have something feminine about them.”
“Like what?” Hoglund asked.
“I don’t know,” Martinsson said. “Maybe the way they’re leaning against the termite mound. Or is their hair?”
“It doesn’t do us any good to sit here guessing,” Wallander interrupted. “I’m only pointing out one more possibility. We should keep it in mind, just like everything else.”
“In other words, we’re looking for a gay mercenary,” Martinsson said dourly. “Where would we find one of those?”
“That’s not exactly what we’re doing,” Wallander said. “But we have to weigh this possibility alongside the rest of the material.”
“Nobody I spoke to so much as intimated that Eriksson might have been gay,” said Hansson, who had been sitting in silence.
“It’s not something people talk about openly,” Wallander said. “At least not the older generation. If Eriksson was gay, then he can remember the time when blackmail was used against people of that persuasion in this country.”
“So you mean we have to start asking people if Eriksson may have been homosexual?” Svedberg asked.
“You have to decide how you want to proceed,” Wallander said. “I don’t even know if this is the right track, but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility.”
It was as if they all suddenly understood that there wasn’t anything simple or easily understandable about the murder of Holger Eriksson. They were dealing with one — or maybe more — cunning killers, and it was possible that the motive for the murder lay hidden in a past well shielded from view.
They continued with the painstaking work. They recorded everything they knew about Eriksson’s life. Svedberg spent long evenings reading carefully through the books of poetry Eriksson had published. In the end he thought he would go mad if he read any more about the spiritual complexities that existed in the world of birds, but he’d gained no insight into Eriksson.
Martinsson took his daughter Terese to Falsterbo Point one windy afternoon and walked around talking to birdwatchers standing straining their necks and staring up at the grey clouds. The only thing he gained — apart from time well-spent with his daughter, who wanted to become a field biologist — was that on the night Eriksson was murdered huge flocks of red-winged blackbirds had left Sweden. Martinsson conferred with Svedberg, who claimed that there were no poems about red-winged blackbirds in any of the books.
“On the other hand, there are three long poems about the single snipe,” said Svedberg hesitantly. “Is there such a thing as a double snipe?”
Martinsson didn’t know. The investigation continued.
The day of the funeral arrived. They were all meeting at the cemetery. A few days before, Wallander had learned to his surprise that a certain female vicar would officiate. He had met her on a memorable occasion in the summer. Afterwards he was glad that she was the one; her words were simple, and never sentimental. The day before, she had called to ask whether his father had been religious. Wallander said no. Instead, he told her about his paintings, and their week in Rome. The funeral was not as unbearable as Wallander had feared. The casket was made of dark wood with a simple decoration of roses. Linda was the one who showed her emotions most openly. No-one doubted that her sorrow was genuine. She was probably the one who would miss him the most.
After the ceremony they drove to Loderup. Wallander felt relieved that it was over. How he would react later he had no idea. He belonged to a generation that was particularly ill-prepared to accept that death was always nearby, he thought. This was intensified for him by the fact that he had to deal with dead people so often in his work.
On the night of the funeral he and Linda stayed up talking for hours. She was going back to Stockholm early the next morning. Wallander asked tentatively whether she would visit him less frequently now that her grandfather was gone, but she promised that she would come more often. In turn, Wallander promised that he wouldn’t neglect Gertrud.
When he went to bed that night he felt that it was time to get back to work at full speed. For a week he had been distracted. Only when he had put some distance between himself and his father’s sudden death could he begin to come to terms with it. To get that distance he had to work. There was no other way.
I never did find out why he didn’t want me to be a policeman, he thought before he went to sleep. Now I’ll never know. If there is a spirit world, which I doubt, then my father and Rydberg can keep each other company. Even though they met very seldom when they were alive, they would find a lot to talk about.
She had made an exact and detailed timetable for Runfeldt’s last hours. He was so weak now that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. She had broken him down. The worm hidden in the flower portends the flower’s death, she thought as she unlocked the door to the house in Vollsjo. According to her timetable, she was to arrive at 4 p.m. She was three minutes ahead of schedule. She had to wait until dark. Then she would pull him out of the oven. For safety’s sake she’d put handcuffs on him. And a gag. But nothing over his eyes. Even though he’d have trouble with the light after so many days spent in utter darkness, after a few hours he would see again. She wanted him to really see her. And then she would show him the photographs. The pictures that would make him understand.
There were some elements she couldn’t completely ignore which might affect her planning. One was the risk that he might be so weak that he couldn’t stand up, so she had borrowed a small baggage cart from the Central Station in Malmo. No-one had seen her taking it. She could use it to roll him out to the car if necessary.
The rest of the timetable was quite simple. Just before 9 p.m. she would drive him to the woods. She would tie him to the tree she had already picked out. And show him the photographs.