“Tandvall is an extremely precise individual,” Hamren said. “He seems to have a complicated sort of memory. Some things he couldn’t remember at all, but on other matters he was crystal clear.”
“Krista Haberman?”
“He remembered her. I got a feeling that she must have been rather beautiful. He was positive that Eriksson had met her on a couple of occasions. He remembered them watching returning geese one morning on the pier at Falsterbo. Or maybe it was cranes. On that point he was unclear.”
“Is he a bird-watcher too?”
“He was dragged along by his father.”
“So now we know the most important thing,” Wallander said.
“It does look as if it all fits. Krista Haberman, Holger Eriksson.”
Wallander felt a sudden wave of disgust. It came to him with horrifying clarity what he was now starting to believe.
“I want you to return to Ystad,” he said. “Go through all the material on Haberman’s actual disappearance. When and where was she last seen? I want you to put together a summary of that part of the investigation.”
“It sounds as though you have something in mind,” Hamren said.
“She disappeared,” Wallander said. “She was never found. What does that indicate?”
“That she’s dead.”
“More than that. Don’t forget that we’re skirting the edges of an investigation in which both men and women are subjected to the most brutal violence imaginable.”
“Do you believe that she was murdered?”
“Hansson gave me a summary of the investigation. The possibility of murder has been there from the start, but since there was nothing to suggest that this had happened, it wasn’t allowed to outweigh other possible explanations for her disappearance. That’s correct police procedure. No hasty conclusions.”
“You think that Eriksson killed her?”
Wallander could hear that this idea was occurring to Hamren for the first time.
“I am not certain of it,” said Wallander. “But it’s a possibility that we can’t ignore.”
Wallander left Katarina Taxell’s flat. He had to have something to eat. He found a pizzeria close by. He ate too fast and immediately got a stomach ache.
Since there was nothing to indicate that the series of killings was over, they were working against time. And they didn’t know how much time they had. He reminded himself that Martinsson had promised to put together a timetable of everything that had happened so far. He was supposed to have done that on the day that Terese was attacked. On his way back to Taxell’s flat, Wallander decided it couldn’t wait. He stopped in a bus shelter and called Ystad. He was in luck. Hoglund was there. She had already talked to Hamren and knew that they had positive confirmation that Krista Haberman and Holger Eriksson had met. Wallander asked her to make the timetable of events.
“I have no idea whether it’s important,” he said. “But we know too little about how this woman moves around. Maybe the geographical centre will become clear if we make a timetable.”
“Now you’re saying ‘she’,” Hoglund said.
“Yes, I am. But we don’t know if she’s alone. We also don’t know what role she plays.”
“What do you think has happened to Katarina Taxell?”
“She’s run away, in a hurry, when she discovered that the building was being watched. She’s run away because she has something to hide.”
“Is it possible that she killed Blomberg?”
“Taxell is a link in the chain. She doesn’t represent a beginning or an end. I can’t imagine her killing anyone. She presumably belongs to the group of women who have been victims of abuse.”
“Was she abused too? I didn’t know that.” Hoglund sounded genuinely surprised.
“She might not have been beaten up or cut with a knife,” Wallander said. “But I suspect that she’s been victimised in some other way.”
“Psychologically?”
“Something like that.”
“By Blomberg?”
“Yes.”
“But she still had his child? If what you think about the father is true.”
“I described to you the way she held her baby. But of course there are still a lot of holes,” Wallander admitted. “Police work is a question of piecing together tentative solutions. We have to make the gaps speak and the pieces tell us about things that have hidden meanings. We have to try to see through the events, turn them on their heads in order to set them on their feet.”
“Nobody at the police academy ever talked about this. Weren’t you invited to give a lecture there?”
“Never,” Wallander said. “I can’t give lectures.”
“That’s exactly what you can do,” she replied. “You just refuse to admit it. And besides, I think you’d actually enjoy doing it.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Wallander said.
Afterwards he thought about what she had said. Did he really want to speak to trainee police officers? In the past he was convinced that his reluctance was genuine. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He left the bus shelter and hurried on through the rain. It was starting to get windy. Back at Taxell’s flat, he continued to search methodically. In a box in the back of a cupboard he found a large number of diaries. She had started the first one when she was twelve. Wallander noticed with surprise that it had a beautiful orchid on the cover. She had kept on writing the diaries through her teenage years and into adulthood. The last diary he found was from 1993. But there were no entries after September. He kept searching, without finding another. But he was certain that it existed. He enlisted the help of Birch, who had finished interviewing the other residents in the building.
Birch found the keys to Taxell’s basement storage room. It took him an hour to go through it. There weren’t any diaries there either. Wallander was convinced that she had taken it with her. They were in the bag that Hader had seen her put in the boot of the car.
Finally only her desk was left. He had quickly gone through the drawers earlier, now he would do it more thoroughly. He sat down on an old chair with the heads of dragons carved into the armrests. The desk was a small secretary in which the top folded down to make a desk surface. On top of the desk there were framed photographs of Katarina Taxell as a child. Katarina sitting on a lawn, with white garden furniture and blurry figures in the background. Katarina sitting next to a big dog, looking straight at the camera with a bow in her hair. Katarina with her mother and her father, the engineer at the sugar refinery. He had a moustache, and seemed to exude self-confidence. Katarina looked more like her father than her mother. Wallander took down the photograph and looked on the back. There was no date. The picture had been taken in a studio in Lund. There was a graduation photograph of Katarina with her white cap, flowers around her neck. She was thin, and had grown pale. Now Katarina was living in a different world. The last picture was an old photograph, the contours faded. It was of a barren landscape by the sea. An old couple gazed stiffly at the camera. In the distance was a three-master, anchored, sails furled. Wallander thought the picture could be from Oland, taken sometime at the end of the last century. Perhaps the couple were Katarina’s great-grandparents. There was nothing written on the back of that one either. He put the photographs back. There was no sign of Blomberg. That might be understandable, but no other man either. Did that mean anything? Everything means something, he thought. The question was what.
One by one he pulled out the small drawers. Letters, documents, bills. Old report cards. Her highest marks were in geography, she had done poorly in physics and maths. In the next drawer he found pictures taken in a photographic booth. Three girls, crowded together, making faces. Another picture, this time of the pedestrian street in Copenhagen. The same three girls were sitting on a bench, laughing. Katarina was on the far right. There was another drawer full of letters, some from as far back as 1972. A stamp with a picture of the man-of-war Wasa. If the secretary contains Taxell’s innermost secrets, thought Wallander, then she doesn’t have many. An impersonal life. No passions, no summer adventures on Greek islands, but high marks in geography. He continued going through the drawers, but nothing caught his attention. He moved on to the three larger drawers below. Still no diaries. Wallander didn’t feel like digging through layer after layer of impersonal mementos. He couldn’t see the woman behind them. Had she even been able to see herself?