Wallander put force into his words. The reporters immediately bombarded him with questions, but there weren’t many in attendance, and they only wanted details clarified. Hoglund and Hansson were standing at the back of the room. Wallander searched through the group for the man from the Anmarkaren, but he wasn’t there.
After less than half an hour the press conference was over.
“You handled it extremely well,” Chief Holgersson said.
“There was only one way to handle it,” Wallander replied.
Hoglund and Hansson applauded when he came over to them. Wallander was not amused. He was hungry, and he needed some air. He looked at the clock.
“Give me an hour. Let’s meet at 5 p.m. Is Svedberg back yet?”
“He’s on his way.”
“Who’s relieving him?”
“Augustsson.”
“Who’s that?” Wallander asked.
“One of the policemen from Malmo.”
Wallander had forgotten his name. He nodded.
“We’ll meet at 5 p.m.,” he repeated. “We’ve got a lot to do.”
He stopped in reception and thanked Ebba for her help. She smiled.
Wallander walked to the centre of town. It was windy. He sat down in the cafe by the bus station and had a couple of sandwiches and felt better. His head was empty. On his way back to the police station he stopped and bought a hamburger. He tossed the napkin in the rubbish bin and started thinking about Katarina Taxell again. Eskil Bengtsson no longer existed for him. He knew they’d have another confrontation with the local citizen militia. What had happened to Ake Davidsson was only the beginning.
They gathered in the conference room at the appointed time. Wallander began by telling the group everything that they had discovered about Katarina Taxell. He noticed that everyone in the room was listening with great attention. For the first time during the investigation he felt as though they were getting close to something that might be a breakthrough. This was reinforced by what Hansson had to say.
“The amount of investigative material on Krista Haberman is huge,” he said. “I haven’t had much time, and it’s possible I may have missed something important. But I did find one thing that might be of interest.”
He leafed through his notes until he found the right place.
“At some point in the 1960s Krista Haberman visited Skane on three occasions. She had made contact with a bird-watcher who lived in Falsterbo. Many years later, long after she’d disappeared, a police officer named Fredrik Nilsson travelled from Ostersund to talk to this man in Falsterbo. He took the train the whole way. The man in Falsterbo is named Tandvall. Erik Gustav Tandvall. He confirmed without hesitation that he’d received visits from Krista Haberman. It seemed as though they’d had a relationship. Detective Nilsson didn’t find anything suspicious in this. The relationship between Haberman and Tandvall ended long before she vanished. Tandvall had nothing to do with her disappearance. So he was removed from the investigation and never reappears.”
Up to this point Hansson had been reading from his notes. Now he looked up at everyone listening around the table.
“There was something familiar about the name,” he said. “Tandvall. An unusual name. I got the feeling I’d seen it before. It took me a while before I remembered where. It was in a list of men who had worked as car salesmen for Holger Eriksson.”
There was total silence in the room. The tension was high. Hansson had made an important connection.
“The car salesman’s name wasn’t Erik Tandvall,” he continued. “His first name was Gote, Gote Tandvall. And right before this meeting I got a confirmation that he’s Erik Tandvall’s son. I should probably also mention that Erik Tandvall died several years ago. I haven’t been able to locate the son yet.”
Hansson was done. No-one said anything for a long time.
“So there’s a possibility that Holger Eriksson met Krista Haberman,” Wallander said slowly. “A woman who has disappeared without a trace. A woman from Svenstavik, where there is a church that has received a bequest in accordance with Eriksson’s will.”
Everyone knew what this meant. A connection was finally beginning to emerge.
CHAPTER 29
Just before midnight Wallander realised that they were too tired to do any more. The meeting had been going on since 5 p.m., and they had only taken short breaks to air out the conference room. Hansson had given them the opening they needed. A connection was established. The contours of a person who moved like a shadow among the three men who had been killed were being to appear. Even though they were still cautious about stating that there was a definite motive, they now had a strong feeling that they were skirting the edges of a series of events connected by revenge.
Wallander had called them together to make a unified advance through difficult terrain. Hansson had given them a direction. But they still had no map to follow. At first there was still a lingering feeling of doubt among the team. Could this really be right? That a mysterious disappearance so many years ago, revealed in kilos of investigative materials from police officers in Jamtland who were no longer alive, might help them unmask a killer who had set a trap made of sharpened bamboo stakes in a ditch in Skane?
It was when the door opened and Nyberg came in, several minutes after 6 p.m., that all doubt was dispelled. He didn’t even bother to take his usual place at the far end of the table. For once he was excited, something no-one could remember ever having seen before.
“There was a cigarette butt on the jetty,” he said. “We were able to identify a fingerprint on it.”
Wallander gave him a surprised look.
“Is that really possible? Fingerprints on a cigarette butt?”
“We were lucky,” Nyberg said. “You’re right that it’s not usually possible. But there’s one exception: if the cigarette is rolled by hand. And this one was.”
First Hansson had discovered a plausible and even likely link between a long-vanished Polish woman and Holger Eriksson, and now Nyberg told them that a fingerprint on Runfeldt’s suitcase matched one at the site where Blomberg’s body was found.
Silence fell over the room. It almost felt like too much to handle in such a short time. An investigation that had been dragging along without direction was now starting to pick up speed in earnest.
After presenting his news, Nyberg sat down.
“A killer who smokes,” Martinsson said. “That’ll be easier to find today than it was 20 years ago.”
Wallander nodded thoughtfully. “We need to find other points of intersection between these murders,” he said. “With three people dead, we need at least nine combinations. Fingerprints, times, anything that will prove that there’s a common denominator.”
He looked around the room.
“We need to put together a proper sequence of events,” he said. “We know that the person or persons behind these killings acts with appalling cruelty. We’ve discovered a deliberate element in the way the victims have been killed. But we haven’t succeeded in reading the killer’s language, the code we discussed earlier. We have a feeling that the murderer is talking to us. But what is he or she trying to say? We don’t know. The question is whether there are more patterns to the whole thing that we haven’t yet found.”