“What does she do?”
“What she’s doing now, I don’t know. But back in those days she was a waitress in a dining car on a train.”
Wallander frowned.
“You ran into Katarina Taxell on a train?”
“I just happened to catch sight of her in town with another woman. I was walking on the other side of the street. We didn’t even say hello to each other. A few days later I took the train to Stockholm. I went into the dining car somewhere after Alvesta. When I was paying the bill I recognised the woman working there. I’d seen her with Katarina.”
“You say you don’t know what her name is?”
“No.”
“But you mentioned this to Katarina later on?”
“Actually, I didn’t. I forgot all about it. Is it important?”
Wallander suddenly thought about the timetable he had found in Taxell’s desk.
“Maybe. What day was it? Which train?”
“How would I remember that?” she said in surprise. “It was three years ago.”
“Do you happen to have an old calendar? We’d like you to try and remember.”
Her husband, who had been sitting quietly and listening, stood up.
“I’ll get the calendar,” he said. “Was it 1991 or 1992?”
She thought for a moment.
“1991. In February or March.”
Several minutes passed as they waited tensely. The music from somewhere in the flat had been replaced by sounds from a TV. The husband came back and handed her an old black calendar. She leafed through a few months. Then she found the right place.
“I went to Stockholm on 19 February 1991. On a train that left at 7.12 a.m. Three days later I came back. I’d been to see my sister.”
“You didn’t see this woman on your return trip?”
“I’ve haven’t seen her since.”
“But you’re positive that it was the same woman as the one you’d seen on the street here in Lund with Katarina?”
“Yes.”
Wallander regarded her thoughtfully.
“There’s nothing else you think might be important for us?”
She shook her head.
“I realise how little I know about Katarina. But she’s a good badminton player.”
“How would you describe her as a person?”
“That’s hard. Maybe that describes her right there. A hard-to-describe person. She’s temperamental. She can be depressed. But that time I saw her on the street with the waitress she was happy and laughing.”
“There’s nothing else you think might be important?”
Wallander saw that she was making an effort to be helpful.
“I think she misses her father,” she said after a moment.
“Why do you think that?”
“It’s just a feeling I got. Something to do with the way she acted towards men who were old enough to be her father.”
“How did she act?”
“She’d stop behaving naturally, as if unsure of herself.”
Wallander thought about Katarina’s father, who had died when she was still young. He also wondered if what Annika Carlman had said could explain her relationship with Eugen Blomberg.
He looked at her again. “Anything else?”
“No.”
Wallander nodded to Birch and stood up.
“We won’t bother you any more,” he said.
“I’m curious, of course,” she said. “Why are the police asking questions if nothing has happened?”
“A lot has happened,” Wallander said. “But not to Katarina. I’m afraid that’s all the answer I can give you.”
They left the flat.
“We have to find this waitress,” Wallander said.
“Swedish Railways must have lists of employees,” Birch said. “But I wonder if we’re going to find out anything more tonight. It was three years ago, after all.”
“We have to try,” Wallander said. “Of course I can’t ask you to do it. We can handle it from Ystad.”
“You have enough to do,” Birch replied. “I’ll take care of it.”
Wallander could tell that Birch was sincere. It was no sacrifice.
They drove back to Hedwig Taxell’s house. Birch dropped Wallander off and continued on to the police station to start looking for the waitress. Wallander wondered whether it was an impossible task.
Just as he rang the bell, his phone rang. It was Martinsson. Wallander could hear from his voice that he was managing to pull himself out of his depression. It was going better than Wallander had dared hope.
“How are things?” Martinsson asked. “Are you still in Lund?”
“We’re trying to trace a waitress who works for Swedish Railways,” Wallander replied.
Martinsson was wise enough not to ask any further questions.
“A lot’s been going on here,” he said. “Svedberg managed to get hold of the person who printed Eriksson’s poetry books. He was a very old man, but his mind was sharp. And he didn’t mind telling us what he thought of Eriksson. Apparently he had trouble getting paid for his work.”
“Did he tell us anything new?”
“Eriksson seems to have made regular trips to Poland since the war. He took advantage of the poverty there to buy women. When he came home, he would boast about his conquests. That old printer really told us what he thought of him.”
Wallander remembered what Sven Tyren had told him during one of their first conversations. Now it had been confirmed. So Krista Haberman wasn’t the only Polish woman in Eriksson’s life.
“Svedberg wondered whether it would be worth contacting the Polish police,” Martinsson said.
“Maybe,” Wallander replied. “But for the time being, I think we’ll wait on that.”
“There’s more,” Martinsson said. “I’ll let you talk to Hansson now.”
Hansson came on the phone.
“I think I have a clear picture of who worked Eriksson’s land,” he said. “It all seems to be distinguished by one thing.”
“What?”
“An unsolved crime. If I can believe my source, Eriksson had an incredible ability to make enemies. You’d think that his life’s great passion was to make new enemies.”
“The fields,” Wallander said impatiently.
He could hear how Hansson’s voice changed when he replied. He sounded more serious.
“The ditch,” Hansson said. “Where we found Eriksson hanging on the stakes.”
“What about it?”
“It was dug some years back. It wasn’t there to start with. Nobody really understood why Eriksson needed to put it in. It wasn’t necessary for drainage. The mud was shovelled out, and made the hill taller where the tower is.”
“A ditch isn’t what I had in mind,” Wallander said. “It doesn’t seem believable that it could have anything to do with a grave.”
“That was my first thought too,” Hansson said. “But then I heard something that made me change my mind.”
Wallander held his breath.
“The ditch was dug in 1967. The farmer I talked to was sure about that. It was dug in the late autumn of 1967.”
“So that means the ditch was dug about the same time that Krista Haberman disappeared.”
“My farmer was even more specific. He was certain that the ditch was dug at the end of October. He remembered because of a wedding in Lodinge on the last day of October that year. The times match exactly. Krista Haberman goes on a car ride from Svenstavik. He kills her. Buries her. A ditch appears. A ditch that wasn’t really necessary.”
“Good,” Wallander said. “This means something.”
“If she’s there, then I know where we should start searching,” Hansson said. “The farmer claimed that they started digging the ditch just southeast of the hill. Eriksson had rented a digger. The first few days he did the digging himself, then he let others finish.”
“Then that’s where we’ll start digging,” Wallander said, noticing his feeling of unease growing. “We’ll start tomorrow,” he went on. “I want you to make all the preparations.”
“It’s going to be impossible to keep this secret,” Hansson said.
“We have to try, at least,” Wallander said. “I want you to talk to Chief Holgersson about it. And Per Akeson, and the others.”
“There’s one thing that puzzles me,” Hansson said hesitantly. “If we do find her, what does it really prove? That Holger Eriksson killed her? We can assume so, even if we can never prove a dead man’s guilt. But what will it really mean for the murder investigation we’re doing right now?”