They listened to it once, then a second time. Svedberg handed Wallander a pair of earphones so that he could listen to the two voices more closely.
“Mama? It’s me.”
“Dear God. Where on earth are you? What happened?”
“Nothing happened, we’re fine.”
“Where on earth are you?”
“With a good friend.”
“Who?”
“A good friend. I just wanted to call and tell you everything’s fine.”
“What happened? Why did you disappear?”
“I’ll explain some other time.”
“Who are you staying with?”
“You don’t know her.”
“Don’t hang up. What’s your phone number?”
“I’m going now. I just wanted to call so you wouldn’t worry.”
Her mother tried to say something else, but Katarina hung up.
They listened to the tape at least 20 times. Svedberg wrote down what was said on a piece of paper.
“It’s the eleventh line that interests us,” Wallander said. “‘You don’t know her.’ What does she mean by that?”
“Just what she says,” Hoglund said.
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” Wallander answered. “‘You don’t know her.’ That could mean two things. Either that her mother has never met her or that her mother doesn’t understand what she means to Katarina.”
“The first one is the most plausible,” Hoglund said.
While they talked Nyberg put on the earphones and listened again. The sounds seeping out told them that he had the volume turned up high.
“There’s something audible in the background,” Nyberg said. “A banging noise.”
Wallander put on the earphones. Nyberg was right. There was a steady pounding in the background. The others took turns listening. No-one could say for sure what it was.
“Where is she?” asked Wallander. “She’s arrived somewhere. She’s staying with the woman who came to pick her up. And somewhere in the background something is banging.”
“Could it be near a construction site?” Martinsson suggested. It was the first thing he had said since returning to work.
“That’s a possibility,” Wallander said.
They listened again. It was definitely a banging sound.
“Send the tape to Linkoping,” he said. “If we can identify the sound, it might help us.”
“How many construction sites are there in Skane alone?” Hamren said.
“It could be something else,” Wallander said. “Something that might give us an idea where she is.”
Nyberg left. They stayed in Wallander’s office, leaning against the walls and desk.
“Three things are important from now on,” Wallander said. “For the time being we’ll have to put aside certain aspects of the investigation. We have to keep mapping out Katarina Taxell’s life. Who is she? Who are her friends? That’s the first thing. The second thing is: who is she staying with?”
He paused before he went on.
“We’ll wait until Hansson comes back from Lodinge, but I think our third task will be to start digging at Eriksson’s place.”
The meeting broke up. Wallander had to go to Lund, and he was thinking of taking Hoglund with him. It was already late afternoon.
“Do you have a babysitter?” he asked when they were alone in his office.
“Yes,” she said. “My neighbour needs the money, thank God.”
“How can you afford it on a police salary?” Wallander asked.
“I can’t,” she said. “But my husband makes a good living. That’s what saves us. We’re one of the lucky families today.”
Wallander called Birch and told him that they were on their way. He let Hoglund take her car. He no longer trusted his own car, in spite of the expensive repairs. The land-scape slowly vanished into the twilight. A cold wind blew across the fields.
“We’ll start at Taxell’s mother’s house,” he said. “Later we’ll go back to her flat.”
“What do you think you might find? You’ve already gone over the flat. And you’re usually thorough.”
“Maybe nothing new. But maybe a connection between two details that I didn’t see before.”
She drove fast.
“Do you usually rev the engine when you start the car?” Wallander asked suddenly.
She gave him a quick look. “Sometimes. Why do you ask?”
“Because I wonder if it was a woman driving the red Golf that picked up Taxell and the baby.”
“Don’t we know that for sure?”
“No,” Wallander said firmly. “We hardly know anything for sure.”
He looked out the window. They were passing Marsvinsholm.
“There’s something else we don’t know with certainty,” he said after a while. “Though I’m becoming more and more convinced of it.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s alone. There’s no man anywhere near her. There’s no-one at all. We’re not looking for a woman who might give us a possible lead. There’s nothing behind her. There’s just her. No-one else.”
“So she’s the one who committed the murders? Dug the pungee pit? Strangled Runfeldt after holding him captive? Tossed Blomberg in the lake, alive in a sack?”
Wallander replied by asking another question.
“Do you remember, early on, when we talked about the killer’s language? That he or she wanted to tell us something? About the deliberateness of the modus operandi?”
She remembered.
“It strikes me now that from the start we saw things correctly. But we were thinking wrong.”
“Because a woman was behaving like a man?”
“Maybe not exactly the behaviour. But she committed deeds that made us think of brutal men.”
“So we were supposed to think about the victims? It was they who were brutal?”
“Exactly. Them and not the killer. We read the wrong message into what we saw.”
“But here’s where it gets difficult,” she said. “To believe that a woman can be capable of this. I’m not talking about physical strength. I’m just as strong as my husband, for example. He has trouble beating me at arm wrestling.”
Wallander looked at her in surprise. She noticed and laughed.
“People amuse themselves in different ways.”
Wallander nodded.
“I remember having a finger-pulling match with my mother when I was little,” he said. “I think I was the winner.”
“Maybe she let you win.”
They turned off towards Sturup.
“I don’t know what motivation this woman has for her actions,” Wallander said. “But if we find her, I think we’ll be dealing with someone the likes of whom we’ve never encountered before.”
“A female monster?”
“Maybe. But that’s not certain either.”
The phone interrupted their conversation. Wallander answered. It was Birch. He gave them directions to Katarina Taxell’s mother’s house.
“What’s her first name?” Wallander asked.
“Hedwig. Hedwig Taxell.”
They would be there in about half an hour. The twilight wrapped around them.
Birch was on the steps to receive them. Hedwig Taxell lived at the end of a row of terrace houses on the outskirts of Lund. Wallander guessed that the houses had been built in the early 1960s. Flat roofs, square boxes facing onto small courtyards. He recalled having read that the roofs sometimes caved in during heavy snowfalls.
“They almost started talking before I got the machine set up,” he said.
“We haven’t exactly been overwhelmed with good luck,” Wallander replied. “What’s your impression of Hedwig Taxell?”
“She’s worried about her daughter and grandson. But she seems more composed than before.”
“Do you think she’ll help us? Or is she protecting her daughter?”
“I think she wants to know where she is.”
He let them into the living room. Without being able to define it, Wallander had a feeling that the room was somehow similar to Katarina Taxell’s flat. Hedwig Taxell came in and greeted them. As usual, Birch stayed in the background. Wallander studied her. She was pale. Her eyes shifted restlessly. Wallander was expecting this. Her voice on the tape had been nervous and tense, close to breaking point. He had brought Hoglund along because she had a great ability to reassure nervous people. Mrs Taxell didn’t seem to be on her guard. He had a feeling that she was glad not to be alone. They sat down. Wallander had prepared his first questions.