A strong man, Wallander thought instantly. A person in good shape, who has no qualms about killing with his bare hands.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“It’s impossible to say for sure. Within the last 24 hours, not longer. You’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report.”
“Can we take him down?”
“I’ve finished,” said the doctor.
“Then I can get started,” muttered Nyberg.
Hoglund came up beside them. “Vanja Andersson is here. She’s waiting in a car down there.”
“How did she take the news?” asked Wallander.
“It’s a hell of a way to be woken up, of course, but I got the feeling she wasn’t surprised.”
Nyberg had unwound the ropes. Runfeldt’s body lay on a stretcher.
“Bring her up here,” Wallander said. “Then she can go straight home.”
Vanja Andersson was very pale. Wallander noticed she was dressed in black. She looked at the dead man’s face, took a deep breath, and nodded.
“You can identify him as Gosta Runfeldt?” Wallander asked. He groaned inwardly at how clumsy this sounded.
“He’s so thin,” she murmured.
Wallander pricked up his ears. “What do you mean, thin?”
“His face is all sunken in. He didn’t look like this three weeks ago.”
Wallander knew that death could alter a person’s face dramatically, but he guessed that Vanja Andersson was talking about something else.
“You mean he’s lost weight since the last time you saw him?”
“Yes. He’s grown terribly thin.”
Wallander sensed that what she was saying was important.
“You don’t have to stay here any longer,” he said. “We’ll drive you home.”
She gave him a forlorn look.
“What am I supposed to do with the shop?” she asked. “And all the flowers?”
“Tomorrow you can leave it closed, I’m sure,” Wallander answered. “Start with that. Don’t think any further ahead.”
She nodded mutely and allowed Hoglund to lead her away. Wallander thought about what she had said. For almost three weeks Runfeldt had been missing without a trace. When he reappeared, tied to a tree and possibly strangled, he was inexplicably thin. Wallander knew what that meant: imprisonment.
He stood still. Imprisonment could be related to a wartime situation. Soldiers take prisoners.
He was interrupted when Chief Holgersson stumbled and almost fell as she walked over to him.
“You’re freezing,” she said.
“I forgot to bring a warmer jumper,” Wallander replied. “Some things you never learn.”
She nodded at the stretcher. It was being carried off towards the ambulance.
“What do you think of all this?” she asked.
“Same killer. It wouldn’t make sense to think otherwise.”
“The doctor says he was strangled.”
“I try not to draw conclusions too soon,” Wallander said. “But I think I can imagine how it all happened. He was alive when he was tied to the tree. Maybe unconscious, but he was strangled here. And he didn’t put up any resistance.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“The ropes were tied loosely. If he’d wanted to, he could have struggled free.”
“Couldn’t the loose ropes indicate that he did try to free himself?”
Good question, thought Wallander. Lisa Holgersson is a detective, all right.
“That could be,” he replied. “But I don’t think so, because of something Vanja Andersson said. That he had grown terribly thin.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“He would have been very weak.”
She understood.
“He was left hanging on the ropes,” Wallander went on. “The killer didn’t try to hide the body. It is very like what happened with Eriksson.”
“Why here?” she asked. “Why tie a person to a tree? Why this brutality?”
“When we understand that, maybe we’ll know why this happened in the first place,” Wallander said.
“Have you any ideas?”
“I have plenty of ideas, but I think the best thing we can do now is let Nyberg and his people work in peace. It’s more important to have a meeting in Ystad than to wander around out here wearing ourselves out. There’s nothing left to see, anyway.”
She didn’t object. By 2 a.m. Nyberg and his forensic technicians were alone in the woods. It had started to drizzle and the wind came up. Wallander was the last to leave the scene.
What do we do now? he asked himself. How do we proceed? We don’t have a motive or a suspect. All we have is a diary that belonged to a man named Harald Berggren. A bird-watcher and a passionate orchid lover have been killed with consummate savagery.
He tried to remember what Hoglund had said. It was important. Something about the masculine world of Berggren. This made him think of a killer with a military background. Harald Berggren had been a mercenary. A person who defended neither his country, nor a cause. A man who killed people for a monthly wage, paid in cold cash.
At least we have a starting point, he thought. We have to stick with it until it collapses. He went over to say good-bye to Nyberg.
“Is there anything special you want us to look for?” he asked.
“No, but look for anything that reminds you of what happened to Eriksson.”
“I think everything does,” Nyberg said. “Only the bamboo stakes are missing.”
“I want dogs up here early tomorrow,” Wallander said.
“I’ll probably still be here,” said Nyberg dismally.
“I’m going to bring up your work situation with Lisa,” Wallander said, hoping it would at least offer him a modicum of encouragement.
“It probably won’t do any good.”
“Well, it won’t do any good not to try,” Wallander said, putting an end to the conversation.
By 3 a.m. they were all gathered in the conference room. Wallander looked at the tired, sallow faces round the table, and realised that his main task was to infuse the investigative team with renewed energy. From experience he knew that there were moments in any investigation when it seemed as though all their self-confidence was gone. That moment had arrived unusually early this time.
We could have used a calm autumn, Wallander thought. The summer wore us out. He sat down and Hansson brought him a cup of coffee.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” he began. “What we feared most has happened. Gosta Runfeldt has been murdered. Apparently by the same person who killed Holger Eriksson. We don’t know what this means, and we don’t know whether we’re going to have more unpleasant surprises. We don’t know if this will be similar to what we went through this summer. We shouldn’t draw any parallels beyond the fact that the same man has been at work. There are a lot of differences between these two crimes. More differences than similarities.”
He paused for comments. No-one had anything to say.
“We’ll have to continue working on a wide front. We have to track down Harald Berggren. We have to find out why Runfeldt wasn’t on that plane to Nairobi. We have to find out why he ordered sophisticated bugging equipment just before he died. We have to find a connection between these two men, who seem to have lived their lives with no contact with one another. Since the victims were obviously not chosen at random, there has to be some kind of link.”
Still nobody had any comments. Wallander decided to adjourn the meeting. What they needed more than anything was a few hours’ sleep. They would meet again in the morning.
Outside, the wind and rain had got worse. As Wallander hurried across the wet car park to his car, he thought about Nyberg and his forensic technicians. He also thought about Vanja Andersson having said that Runfeldt had become emaciated in the three weeks that he was missing. This had to mean imprisonment. But where had he been held captive? Why? And by whom?
CHAPTER 14
Wallander slept fitfully under a blanket on the sofa in his living room, since he had to get up in a few hours. It had been quiet in Linda’s room when he’d come in. He had dozed off, then woken abruptly, drenched in sweat, after a nightmare he could only vaguely recall. He had dreamed about his father; they were in Rome again, and something frightening happened. What it was vanished into the darkness. Maybe in the dream, death had already been with them, like a warning. He sat up on the sofa with the blanket wrapped around him. It was 5 a.m. The alarm clock would ring any minute now. He sat there heavy and unmoving, exhaustion like a dull ache through his whole body. It seemed to take all his strength to get up and go to the bathroom. After a shower he felt a little better. He made breakfast and woke Linda at 5.45 a.m. By 6.30 a.m. they were on their way out to the airport. She was groggy and didn’t say much during the ride. She didn’t seem to wake up until they turned off the E65 for the last few kilometres to Sturup.