“You knew that your father was due to go to Nairobi,” he continued. “When one of my colleagues spoke to you, you seemed incredulous that he hadn’t turned up at Kastrup Airport.”
“I talked to him the day before.”
“How did he seem?”
“The same as usual. He talked about his trip.”
“He didn’t seem apprehensive?”
“No.”
“You must have been worried about his disappearance. Can you come up with any explanation for why he would miss his trip? Or mislead you?”
“There’s no reasonable explanation for it.”
“It looks as if he packed his suitcase and left the flat. That’s where the trail ends.”
“Someone must have picked him up.”
Wallander paused before asking the next question.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did your father have any enemies?”
“None that I know of. Not any more.”
“What do you mean by that? Not any more?”
“Exactly what I said. I don’t think he’s had any enemies for a long time.”
“Could you explain what you mean?”
Runfeldt took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Wallander noticed that his hand was shaking slightly.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
Wallander waited. He knew there would be more. He also had a feeling that he was closing in on something important.
“I don’t know if my father had any enemies,” he said. “But I do know there’s one person who had reason to hate him.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
Runfeldt waited for Wallander to ask him a question. But it didn’t come. He kept on waiting.
“My father sincerely loved orchids,” Runfeldt said. “He was a knowledgeable man, a self-taught botanist. But he was also something else.”
“What’s that?”
“He was a brutal man. He abused my mother throughout their marriage. Sometimes so badly that she had to be hospitalised. We tried to get her to leave him, but she wouldn’t. He beat her. Afterwards he would be contrite, and she would give in. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end. The brutality didn’t stop until she drowned.”
“As I understand it, she fell through a hole in the ice?”
“That’s as much as I know, that’s what my father told us.”
“You don’t sound totally convinced.”
Runfeldt stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray.
“Maybe she went out there beforehand and sawed a hole in the ice. Maybe she decided to put an end to it all.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“She talked about committing suicide. Not often; a few times during the last years of her life. But we didn’t believe her. People usually don’t. Suicides are fundamentally inexplicable to those who should have paid attention and understood what was happening.”
Wallander thought about the pungee pit. The partially sawed-through planks. Gosta Runfeldt had been a brutal man. He had abused his wife. He tried to measure the significance of what Bo Runfeldt was telling him.
“I don’t grieve for my father,” Runfeldt continued. “I don’t think my sister does either. He was a cruel man. He tortured the life out of our mother.”
“He was never cruel towards the two of you?”
“Never. Only towards her.”
“Why did he mistreat her?”
“I don’t know. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was a monster.”
Wallander thought for a moment.
“Has it ever crossed your mind that your father might have killed your mother? That it wasn’t an accident?”
“Many times. But there is no way to prove it. There were no witnesses. They were alone on the ice on that winter day.”
“What’s the name of the lake?”
“Stang Lake. It’s not far from Almhult. In southern Smaland.”
Wallander thought for a moment. Did he really have any other questions? It felt as if the investigation had taken a stranglehold on itself. There ought to be plenty of questions. And there were. But there was no-one to ask.
“Does the name Harald Berggren mean anything to you?”
Runfeldt gave it careful thought before he answered.
“No. Nothing. But I could be mistaken. It’s a common name.”
“Has your father ever had contact with mercenaries?”
“Not as far as I know. But I remember that he often talked about the Foreign Legion when I was a child. Never to my sister, only to me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Adventure stories. Maybe joining the Foreign Legion was some kind of teenage dream he’d had. But I’m pretty sure that he never had anything to do with them. Or with mercenaries.”
“Holger Eriksson? Have you ever heard that name?”
“The man who was murdered the week before my father? I saw it in the newspapers. As far as I know, my father never had anything to do with him. I could be wrong, of course. We didn’t keep in close contact.”
“How long are you staying in Ystad?”
“The funeral will be as soon as we can make the necessary arrangements. We have to decide what to do with the shop.”
“It’s very possible that you’ll hear from me again,” Wallander said, getting to his feet.
He left the hotel. He was hungry. The wind tugged and pulled at his clothes. He stood in the shelter of a building and tried to decide what to do. He should eat, he knew that, but he also knew that he had to sit down soon and try to collect his thoughts. He was still looking for the point where the lives of Eriksson and Runfeldt intersected. It’s there somewhere, in the dim background, he told himself. Maybe I’ve even seen it already, or walked past it without seeing.
He got his car and drove over to the station. On the way he called Hoglund on her mobile phone. She told him that they were still going through the office, but they had sent Nyberg home because his foot was hurting badly.
“I’m on my way to the station. I’ve just had an interesting conversation with Runfeldt’s son,” Wallander said. “I need some time to go over it.”
“It’s not enough for us to shuffle our papers,” Hoglund replied. “We also need someone to do the thinking.”
He wasn’t sure if she meant this last remark to be sarcastic, but he pushed the thought aside.
Hansson was sitting in his office going through the reports that were starting to pile up. Wallander stood in the door. He had a coffee cup in his hand.
“Where are the pathologists’ reports?” he asked. “They must have come in by now. At least the one on Holger Eriksson.”
“It’s probably in Martinsson’s office. I seem to recall he mentioned something about it.”
“Is he still here?”
“He went home. He copied a file to a disk and was going to keep working on it at home.”
“Is that really allowed?” Wallander wondered absentmindedly. “Taking investigative material home?”
“I don’t know,” Hansson replied. “For me, it’s never come up. I don’t even have a computer at home. But maybe that’s a breach of regulations these days.”
“What’s a breach of regulations?”
“Not having a computer at home.”
“In that case, we’re both guilty,” Wallander said. “I’d like to see those reports early tomorrow morning.”
“How did it go with Bo Runfeldt?”
“I have to write up my notes tonight, but he said some things that may prove important. And now we know for sure that Gosta Runfeldt spent some of his time working as a private detective.”
“Svedberg called in. He told me.”
Wallander took his mobile phone out of his pocket.
“What did we do before we had these things?” he asked. “I can hardly remember.”
“We did exactly the same thing,” Hansson replied. “But it took longer. We searched for phone boxes. We spent a lot more time in our cars. But we did exactly the same things that we do now.”
Wallander walked down the hall to his office, nodding to a few officers as they came out of the canteen. He went into his office and sat down. More than ten minutes passed before he pulled over an unused notebook.
It took him two hours to put together a thorough summary of the two murders. He had been trying to steer two vessels at the same time, while looking for the point of contact that he knew had to exist. After 11 p.m. he threw down his pen and leaned back in his chair. He had reached a point where he could see nothing more. But he was positive. The contact was there. They just hadn’t found it yet.