“I think he’s dead. I think somebody killed him.”
Wallander said nothing. He was waiting for Tyren to continue. But he didn’t.
“Why do you think that?”
“He had ordered heating oil. He was always home when I came. He wouldn’t have left the coffee machine on. He wouldn’t have gone out without locking the door. Even if he was just taking a little walk around his property.”
“Did you get the impression the house had been broken into?”
“No, everything seemed the same as usual. Except for that coffee machine.”
“So you’ve been in his house before?”
“Every time I delivered oil. Usually he offered me some coffee and read me some of his poems. He was probably a pretty lonely man, and I think he looked forward to my visits.”
Wallander paused to think about it.
“You said you think he’s dead, but you also said you think someone killed him. Why would anyone do that? Did he have any enemies?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But he was wealthy.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that.”
Wallander let the question pass.
“We’ll look into it,” he said. “There’s probably an ordinary explanation. There usually is.”
Wallander wrote down the address. The name of the farm was “Seclusion”.
Wallander walked out to reception with Tyren.
“I’m sure something has happened,” Tyren said as he was leaving. “He’d never go out when I was coming with oil.”
“I’ll be in touch,” Wallander said.
Just then Hansson came into reception.
“Who the hell is blocking the driveway with an oil truck?” he fumed.
“Me,” Tyren said calmly. “I’m leaving now.”
“What was he doing here?” asked Hansson after Tyren had gone.
“He wanted to report a missing person,” said Wallander. “Have you ever heard of a writer named Holger Eriksson?”
“A writer?”
“Or a car dealer.”
“Which?”
“He seems to have been both. And according to this truck driver, he’s disappeared.”
They went to get coffee.
“Seriously?” said Hansson.
“The man seems worried.”
“I thought I recognised him,” Hansson said.
Wallander had great respect for Hansson’s memory. Whenever he forgot a name, it was to Hansson that he went for help.
“His name is Sven Tyren,” Wallander said. “He said he’d done time for a thing or two.”
Hansson searched his memory.
“He might have been mixed up in some assault cases,” he said after a while. “Quite a few years ago.”
Wallander listened thoughtfully.
“I think I’ll drive out to Eriksson’s place,” he said after a while. “I’ll log him in as reported missing.”
Wallander went into his office, grabbed his jacket, and stuffed the address of “Seclusion” in his pocket. He should have begun by filling out a missing-person form, but he skipped it for the time being. It was 2.30 p.m. when he left the police station. The heavy rain had eased to a steady drizzle. He shivered as he walked to his car.
Wallander drove north and had no problem finding the farmhouse. As the name implied, it lay quite isolated, high up on a hill. Brown fields sloped down towards the sea, but he couldn’t see the water. A flock of rooks cawed in a tree. He raised the lid of the letter box. It was empty. Tyren must have taken in the post. Wallander walked into the courtyard. Everything was well kept. He stood there and listened to the silence. The farmhouse consisted of three wings, and he could see that it had once formed a complete square. He admired the thatched roof. Tyren was right. Anyone who could afford to maintain a roof like that was a wealthy man.
Wallander walked up to the door and rang the bell. Then he knocked. He opened the door and stepped inside, listening. The letters lay on a stool next to an umbrella stand. There were several binocular cases hanging on the wall. One was open and empty. Wallander moved slowly through the house. It still smelled of burnt coffee. The large living room was split-level with an exposed-beam ceiling. He stopped at the wooden desk and looked at a sheet of paper lying on it. Since the light was poor, he picked it up carefully and went over to a window.
It was a poem about a bird. At the bottom a date and time was written. 21 September 1994. 10.12 p.m. On that evening Wallander and his father had eaten dinner at a restaurant near the Piazza del Popolo. As he stood in the silent house, Rome felt like a remote, surreal dream.
He put the paper back on the desk. On Wednesday night Eriksson had written a poem, even noting down the time. The next day Tyren was supposed to deliver oil. By then he was gone, leaving the door unlocked. Wallander went outside and found the oil tank. The meter showed that it was almost empty. He went back inside the house. He sat down in an old Windsor chair and looked around. Instinct told him that Sven Tyren was right. Holger Eriksson had truly disappeared. He wasn’t just away from home.
After a while Wallander stood up and searched through several cupboards until he found a set of spare keys. He locked the house and left. The rain had picked up again. He was back in Ystad just before 5 p.m. He filled out the form on Holger Eriksson. Early the next morning they would start looking for him in earnest.
Wallander drove home. On the way he stopped and bought a pizza. He ate it while he watched TV. Linda still hadn’t called. Just after 11 p.m. he went to bed and fell asleep almost at once.
At 4 a.m. Wallander sat up abruptly in bed feeling ill. He was going to throw up. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. At the same time he realised he had diarrhoea. He didn’t know whether it was the pizza or a stomach bug he had brought home from Italy. By 7 a.m. he was so exhausted that he called the police station to report in sick. He got hold of Martinsson.
“You heard what happened, I guess,” Martinsson said.
“All I know is I’m puking and shitting,” Wallander replied.
“A ferry boat sank last night,” Martinsson went on. “Somewhere off the coast of Tallinn. Hundreds of people died, they think. And most of them were Swedes. There seem to have been quite a few police officers on board.”
Wallander was about to throw up again. But he stayed on the line.
“Police from Ystad?” he asked.
“No. But it’s terrible, what happened.”
Wallander could hardly believe what Martinsson was saying. Several hundred people dead in a ferry accident? That just didn’t happen. At least not around Sweden.
“I don’t think I can talk,” he said. “I’m going to be sick again. But there’s a note on my desk about a man named Holger Eriksson. He’s missing. One of you will have to look into it.”
He put down the receiver and made it to the bathroom just in time. As he was on his way back to bed, the phone rang again. This time it was Mona, his ex-wife. He felt on edge at once. She never called unless something was wrong with Linda.
“I talked to Linda,” she said. “She wasn’t on the ferry.”
It took a moment before Wallander grasped what she meant.
“You mean the ferry that sank?”
“What did you think I meant? When hundreds of people die in an accident, at least I call my daughter to see if she’s all right.”
“You’re right, of course,” Wallander said. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little slow today, but I’m sick. I’m throwing up. I’ve got a stomach bug. Maybe we can talk another time.”
“I just didn’t want you to worry,” she said.
Wallander said goodbye and went back to bed. He was worried about Holger Eriksson, and about the ferry disaster that had occurred during the night, but he was feverish, and soon he was asleep.
CHAPTER 4
He began to gnaw on the rope again.
The feeling that he was about to go insane had been with him the whole time. He couldn’t see; something was tied over his eyes and made the world dark. He couldn’t hear either. Something had been forced into his ears, and was pressing on his eardrums. There were sounds, but they came from inside. An internal rushing that wanted to force its way out. But what bothered him most was that he couldn’t move. That was what was driving him insane. Despite the fact that he was lying down, stretched out on his back, he had the constant feeling that he was falling. A dizzy plummeting, without end. Maybe it was just a hallucination, a manifestation of the fact that he was falling apart from within. Madness was about to shatter his mind into pieces.