“You mean something like whether the killer strikes when there’s a full moon?” Svedberg asked.
“That sort of thing. The symbolic full moon. What does it look like in this case? Does it exist? I’d like someone to put together a timetable. Is there anything there that might give us another lead?”
Martinsson undertook to put together what information they had. Wallander knew that — on his own initiative — Martinsson had obtained several computer programmes developed by the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, D.C. He assumed that Martinsson saw an opportunity to make use of them.
Then they started talking about whether there actually was a geographical centre to the crimes. Hoglund put a map on the slide projector, and Wallander stationed himself at the edge of the image.
“It starts in Lodinge,” he said, pointing. “A person begins surveillance of Holger Eriksson’s farm. We can assume that he travels by car and that he uses the tractor path on the hill behind Eriksson’s tower. A year earlier someone, maybe the same person, broke into his house, without stealing anything. Possibly to warn him, leave him a sign. We don’t know, but it doesn’t have to be the same person.”
Wallander pointed at Ystad.
“Gosta Runfeldt is looking forward to his trip to Nairobi. Everything is ready. His suitcase is packed, money changed, the tickets collected. He has even ordered a taxi for early on the morning of the day of his departure. But he never takes the trip. He disappears without a trace for three weeks.”
Wallander moves his finger again. “Now to the woods west of Marsvinsholm. An orienteer training at night finds him tied to a tree, strangled, emaciated. He must have been held captive in some way during the time he was missing. So, two murders at different places, with Ystad as a kind of midpoint.”
His finger moved northeast.
“We find a suitcase along the road to Hoor, not far from a point where you can turn off towards Holger Eriksson’s farm. The suitcase is lying at the side of the road as though it was placed there to be found. We can ask ourselves the question: why that particular spot? Because the road is convenient for the killer? We don’t know. This question may be more important than we’ve realised up until now.”
Wallander moved his hand again. To the southwest, to Krageholm Lake.
“Here we find Eugen Blomberg. This means we have a defined area that isn’t particularly large, only 30 or 40 kilometres between the outer points. It’s no more than half an hour by car between each site.”
He sat down.
“Let’s draw up some tentative and preliminary conclusions,” he went on. “What does this indicate?”
“Familiarity with the local area,” Hoglund said. “The site in the woods at Marsvinsholm was well chosen. The suitcase was placed at a spot where there are no houses from which you could see a driver stop and leave something behind.”
“How do you know that?” Martinsson asked.
“Because I checked.”
“You can either be familiar with an area yourself, or else you can find out about it from someone else,” Wallander said. “Which seems likely in this case?”
They couldn’t agree. Hansson thought that a stranger could easily have decided on each of the sites. Svedberg thought the opposite, that the place where they had found Runfeldt indicated beyond a doubt that the killer was extremely familiar with the area. Wallander had his doubts. Earlier he had tended to think of a person who was an outsider. He was no longer so sure. They didn’t come to any agreement on this, and they couldn’t pinpoint an obvious centre, either. It was most likely to be near to where Runfeldt’s suitcase was found, but that didn’t get them any further.
During the evening they kept returning to the suitcase. Why had it been put there, next to the road? And why had it been repacked, probably by a woman? They also couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why the underwear was missing. Hansson had suggested that Runfeldt might be the type of person who didn’t wear any. No-one took that seriously. There had to be some other explanation.
At 9 p.m. they took a break to get some air. Martinsson disappeared into his office to call home, Svedberg put on his jacket to take a walk. Wallander went to the bathroom and washed his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. Suddenly he had a feeling that his appearance had changed since his father’s death. What the difference was, he couldn’t tell. He shook his head at his reflection. Soon he would have to make time to think about what had happened. His father had been dead for several weeks. He also thought about Baiba, the woman he cared so much about but never called.
He doubted that a policeman could combine his job with anything else. But Martinsson had an excellent relationship with his family, and Hoglund had almost total responsibility for her two children. It was Wallander who didn’t seem able to combine the two things.
He yawned at himself in the mirror. From the hall he could hear that they had started to reconvene. He decided that now they would have to talk about the woman who could be glimpsed in the background. They had to try to picture her and the role that she had actually played. This was the first thing he said when they closed the door.
“There’s a woman involved somewhere in all of this,” he said. “For the rest of this meeting, as long as we can keep at it, we have to go over the background. We talk about a motive of revenge. But we’re not being very precise. Does that mean we’re thinking incorrectly? That we’re on the wrong track? That there might be a completely different explanation?”
They waited in silence for him to continue. Even though they all looked exhausted, he could see that they were still concentrating. He started by going back to Katarina Taxell in Lund.
“She gave birth here in Ystad,” he said. “On two nights she had a visitor. I’m convinced that this woman did visit her, even though she denies it. So she’s lying. Why? Who was the woman? Why won’t Taxell reveal her identity? I think that we can assume that Eugen Blomberg is the father of Katarina Taxell’s child — she’s lying about this. I’m sure that she lied about everything during our meeting in Lund. I don’t know why, but I think that we can probably assume that she holds a crucial key to this whole mess.”
“Why don’t we just bring her in?” Hansson asked with some vehemence.
“On what grounds?” Wallander replied. “She’s a new mother. We have to treat her carefully. And I doubt that she would tell us more than she has already if we interrogate her at Lund police station. We’ll have to try to go around her, smoke out the truth another way.”
Hansson nodded reluctantly.
“The third woman linked to Eugen Blomberg is his widow,” Wallander continued. “She gave us a lot of important information. Probably the fact that she doesn’t seem to mourn his death at all is most significant. He abused her, for a long time, and quite severely judging by her scars. She also confirms, indirectly, our theory about Katarina Taxell, since she says he has had extramarital affairs.”
As he said these last words, he thought he sounded like an old-fashioned preacher. He wondered what term Hoglund would have used.
“Let’s say that the details surrounding Blomberg form a pattern,” he said. “Which we’ll come back to later.”
He switched to Runfeldt. He was moving backwards, towards the first killing.
“Gosta Runfeldt was known to be a brutal man. Both his son and daughter confirm this. Behind the orchid lover, a whole different person was concealed. He was a private detective, something that we don’t have a good explanation for. Was he looking for excitement? Weren’t orchids enough for him?”
He switched to Runfeldt’s wife.
“I made a trip to a lake outside Almhult without knowing for sure what I would find. I don’t have any proof, but I can imagine that Runfeldt actually killed his wife. We’ll never know what happened out there on the ice. The main players are dead. There were no witnesses, but I still have a hunch that someone outside the family knew about it. For lack of anything better, we have to consider the possibility that the death of his wife had something to do with Runfeldt’s fate.”