“I don’t remember her ever mentioning anyone.”
“And you never saw her with any men?”
“Never.”
“Did she have any girlfriends she spent time with?”
Margareta Nystedt thought for a moment. Then she gave Wallander three names. The same names Wallander already had.
“No-one else?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Have you ever heard the name Eugen Blomberg before?”
She thought about it.
“Wasn’t he the man who was murdered?”
“That’s right. Can you remember Katarina ever talking about him?”
She suddenly gave him a serious look.
“Was she the one who did it?”
Wallander pounced on her question.
“Do you think she could have killed anyone?”
“No. Katarina was a very gentle person.”
“You went back and forth between Malmo and Stockholm,” he said. “I’m sure you had a lot of work to do, but you must have talked to each other. Are you positive she never mentioned any other girlfriend? It’s important.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t remember anyone.”
At that moment Wallander noticed her hesitate for a split second. She saw that he had noticed.
“Maybe,” she said.
“What?”
“It must have been just before she quit. I’d been sick for a week with the flu. When I came back she was different.”
Wallander was on tenterhooks now. Birch had also noticed that something was up.
“Different in what way?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. Her mood seemed to swing between gloom and exhilaration. She had changed.”
“Try to describe the change. This could be crucial.”
“Usually when we didn’t have anything to do we would sit in the little kitchen in the restaurant car. We talked and looked through magazines. But when I came back we didn’t do that any more.”
“What happened instead?”
“She left.”
Wallander waited for her to go on. But she didn’t.
“She left the dining car? She couldn’t very well have left the train. What did she say she was going to do?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“But you must have asked her. She was different? She didn’t sit and talk any more?”
“Maybe I asked. I don’t remember. But she didn’t say anything. She just left.”
“Did this always happen?”
“No. Just before she quit she was different. She seemed completely closed off.”
“Do you think she was meeting someone on the train? A passenger who was on board each time? It sounds strange.”
“I don’t know.”
Wallander had no more questions. He looked at Birch, who had nothing more to add either.
The hydrofoil was just about to leave the harbour.
“You can have a break now,” Wallander said. “I want you to contact me if you think of anything else.”
He wrote his name and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.
She stood up and left.
“Who would meet Katarina on a train?” Birch asked. “A passenger who travels back and forth between Malmo and Stockholm? Besides, they can’t be serving all the time on the same train. That doesn’t sound logical.”
Wallander was only half listening to what Birch said. An idea had occurred to him that he didn’t want to lose. It couldn’t be a passenger. So it had to be someone else who was on the train for the same reason she was.
Wallander looked at Birch.
“Who works on a train?” he asked.
“I assume there’s an engine driver.”
“Who else?”
“Conductors. One or more.”
Wallander nodded. He thought about what Hoglund had discovered. The faint glimmer of a pattern. A person who had irregular but recurring days off. Like people who work on trains. And then there was the timetable in the secret compartment. He stood up.
“I think we’ll go back and see Bergstrand,” he said.
“Are you looking for more waitresses?”
Wallander didn’t reply. He was already on his way out of the terminal building.
Bergstrand did not look at all happy to see Wallander and Birch again. Wallander moved fast, practically shoving him through the door to his office.
“During the same time period,” he said. “The spring of 1991, there was a woman named Katarina Taxell working for you. I want you to get out all the documents on conductors and engine drivers who worked the shifts when Katarina Taxell was working. I’m especially interested in a week during the spring of 1991 when Margareta Nystedt called in sick. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You can’t be serious,” Bergstrand said. “It’s an impossible job to piece together all that information. It’ll take months.”
“Let’s say you have a couple of hours,” Wallander replied in a friendly voice. “If necessary, I’ll ask the national police commissioner to call up his colleague, the general manager of Swedish Railways. And I’ll ask him to complain about the lack of cooperation by an employee in Malmo named Karl-Henrik Bergstrand.”
Bergstrand smiled grimly. “So let’s do the impossible,” he said. “But it’s going to take hours.”
“If you work as fast as you can, then you can have as long as you need,” Wallander replied.
“You can spend the night in one of our dormitory rooms at the station,” said Bergstrand. “Or at the Hotel Prize, with which we have an agreement.”
“No thanks,” Wallander said. “When you have the information I’ve asked for, send it to me by fax at the police station in Ystad.”
“So you think there is someone else who worked for Swedish Railways back then?” Birch asked.
“There has to be. There’s no other reasonable explanation.”
Birch put on his knitted cap. “That means we wait.”
“You in Lund and me in Ystad. Keep monitoring Hedwig Taxell’s phone. Katarina might call again.”
They parted outside the station building. Wallander got into his car and drove through the city. He wondered whether he had reached the innermost Chinese box. What would he find inside?
He turned into a petrol station right before the last roundabout on the road to Ystad. He filled up the car and went inside to pay. When he came out he heard his phone ringing. He yanked open the door and grabbed the phone. It was Hansson.
“Where are you?” Hansson asked.
“On my way to Ystad.”
“I think you’d better come out here.”
Wallander gave a start. He almost dropped the phone.
“Did you find her?”
“I think so.”
Wallander drove straight to Lodinge.
The wind had picked up and shifted direction until it was blowing from the north.
CHAPTER 35
They had found a thighbone. That was all. It took several more hours before they found any more skeletal remains. There was a cold, blustery wind blowing that day, a wind that cut right through their clothes and magnified the dreariness and horror of the situation.
The femur lay on a plastic sheet. They had dug up an area no larger than 20 square metres, and were surprisingly close to the surface when a spade had struck the bone.
A doctor came and examined it. Naturally he couldn’t say anything except that it was human. But Wallander didn’t need any additional confirmation. In his mind there was no doubt that it was part of Krista Haberman’s remains. They had to keep digging. Maybe they would find the rest of her skeleton, and maybe then they could determine how she had been killed.
Wallander felt tired and melancholy on that endless afternoon. It didn’t help that he had been right. It was as though he was looking straight into a terrible story that he would rather not deal with. The whole time he was waiting tensely for what Karl-Henrik Bergstrand could tell them. He spent two long hours out in the mud with Hansson and the other policemen doing the excavation, then returned to the station, after explaining to Hansson what had happened in Malmo.
When he got to the police station he gathered all the colleagues he could find and repeated his account of what had happened. Now all they had to do was wait for the paper to start coming out of the fax machine. While they were sitting in the conference room, Hansson called to say they had also found a shinbone. The discomfort around the table was palpable. They were sitting there waiting for a skull to appear in the mud.