He leaned his cheek against the car window. The landscape was brown with a tinge of grey, but the grass was still green. There was a lone tractor working out in a field.
Wallander thought about the pungee pit where he had found Holger Eriksson. The tree that Gosta Runfeldt had been tied to when he was strangled. And now a man was stuffed alive into a sack and tossed into Krageholm Lake to drown.
The only possible motive was revenge, he was sure of that. But this went beyond all reasonable proportions. What was the killer seeking revenge for? Something so horrific that it wasn’t enough simply to kill. The victims also had to be conscious of what was happening to them.
There’s nothing random about what’s behind all this, thought Wallander. Everything has been carefully thought out and chosen. He paused at the last thought. The killer chose. Someone was chosen. Selected from what group or for what reason?
When he reached the station he felt the need for some solitude before he sat down with his colleagues. He took the phone off the hook, pushed aside the phone messages lying on his desk, and put his feet up on a pile of memos from the national police board.
The hardest thing to comprehend was the possibility that the murderer might be a woman. He tried to remember the times he had dealt with female criminals. It hadn’t happened often. He could recall all the cases he had ever heard about during his years as a policeman. Once, almost 15 years back, he had caught a woman who had committed murder. Later the district court changed the charge to manslaughter. She was a middle-aged woman who had killed her brother. He had persecuted and molested her ever since they were children. Finally she couldn’t take it any more and killed him with his own shotgun. She hadn’t really meant to shoot him. She just wanted to scare him, but she was a bad shot. She hit him right in the chest, and he died instantly. In all the other cases that Wallander could remember, the women who had used violence had done so on impulse and in self-defence. It involved their own husbands, or men they were having relationships with. In many cases, alcohol was part of the picture.
Never, in all his experience, had there been a woman who planned in advance to commit a violent act. He got up and walked to the window. What was it that made him unable to let go of the idea that a woman was involved this time? He had no answer to this. He didn’t even know whether he believed it was a woman working alone or collaborating with a man. There was nothing to indicate one or the other.
Martinsson knocked on his door and came in.
“The list is almost ready,” he said.
“What list is that?” Wallander asked.
“The list of missing persons,” Martinsson replied, looking surprised.
Wallander nodded. “Then let’s meet,” he said, motioning Martinsson ahead of him down the hall.
When they had closed the door of the conference room behind them, his feeling of powerlessness vanished. He remained standing at the head of the table. Usually he sat down. Now he felt as if he didn’t have time for that.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“In Ystad no reports of anyone missing during the past few weeks,” Svedberg said. “The ones we’ve been searching for over a longer period don’t match with the man we found in Krageholm Lake. There’s a couple of teenage girls, and a boy who ran away from a refugee camp. He’s very likely on his way back to the Sudan.”
“What about the other districts?”
“We’ve got a couple of people in Malmo,” Hoglund said. “But they don’t match either. In one case the age might be right, but the missing person is from southern Italy.”
They went through the bulletins from the closest districts. Wallander was aware that if necessary they might have to cover the whole country and even the rest of Scandinavia. They could only hope that the man had lived somewhere near Ystad.
“Lund took a report late last night,” Hansson said. “A woman called to report that her husband hadn’t come home from his evening walk. The age is about right. He’s a researcher at the university.”
“Check it out, of course.”
“They’re sending us a photograph,” Hansson went on. “They’ll fax it over as soon as they get it.”
Now Wallander sat down. At that moment Per Akeson came into the room. Wallander wished he hadn’t come. It was never easy to report that they were at a standstill. The investigation was stuck with its wheels deep in the mud. And now they had another victim.
Wallander felt uncomfortable, as if he were personally responsible for the fact that they had nothing to go on. Yet he knew they had been working as hard and as steadily as they could. The detectives gathered in the room were intelligent and dedicated.
Wallander pushed aside his annoyance at Akeson’s presence.
“You’re here just in time,” he said. “I was just thinking about summarising the state of the investigation.”
“Does an investigative state even exist?” asked Akeson.
Wallander knew he didn’t mean this as a sarcastic or critical remark. Those who didn’t know Akeson might be put off by his brusque manner. But Wallander had worked with him for so many years that he knew that what he had just said was intended to demonstrate a willingness to help if he could.
Hamren stared at Akeson with obvious disapproval. Wallander wondered how the prosecutors in Stockholm behaved.
“There’s always an investigative state,” Wallander replied. “We have one this time too. But it’s extremely hazy. A number of clues we were following are no longer relevant. I think we’ve reached a point where we have to go back to the beginning. What this new murder means, we can’t yet say. It’s too early for that.”
“Is it the same killer?” Akeson asked
“I think so,” said Wallander.
“Why?”
“The modus operandi. The brutality. The cruelty. Of course a sack isn’t the same thing as sharpened bamboo stakes. But you have to admit it’s a variation on a theme.”
“What about the suspicion that a mercenary soldier might be behind all this?”
“That led us to discover that Harald Berggren has been dead for seven years.”
Akeson had no more questions. The door was cautiously pushed open, and a clerk handed in a picture that had arrived by fax.
“It’s from Lund,” the girl said, and then she closed the door behind her.
Everyone stood up and gathered around Martinsson, who stood holding the picture. Wallander gave a low whistle. There could be no doubt. It was the man they had found in Krageholm Lake.
“Good,” he said in a low voice. “We just got a good jump on the murderer’s lead.”
They sat down again.
“Who is he?” Wallander asked.
Hansson had his papers in order.
“Eugen Blomberg, 51 years old. A research assistant at Lund University. His research has something to do with milk.”
“Milk?” Wallander said in surprise.
“That’s what it says. ‘The relationship between milk allergies and various intestinal diseases.’”
“Who reported him missing?”
“His wife. Kristina Blomberg. She lives on Siriusgatan in Lund.”
Wallander knew they had to make the best use of their time. He wanted to make an even bigger dent in the killer’s lead.
“Then we’ll go there,” he said, getting to his feet. “Tell our colleagues that we’ve identified him. See to it that they track down the wife so I can talk to her. There’s a detective in Lund named Birch. Kalle Birch. We know each other. Talk to him, tell him that I’m on my way.”
“Can you really talk to her before we have a positive identification?”
“Someone else can identify him. Someone from the university. Another milk researcher. Now we’ll have to go through all the material on Eriksson and Runfeldt again. Eugen Blomberg. Is he there somewhere? We need to get through a lot of it today.”
Wallander turned to Akeson. “I think we could safely say that the investigative state has changed.”