Wallander was interrupted in his train of thought by Martinsson finishing his calls.
“Björk asked me if I’d lost my senses,” he said, making a face. “I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure at first how I should answer that. He says it’s inconceivable that it could be a land mine. Even so, he wants one of us to update him as soon as possible.”
“When we’ve got something to say,” Wallander said. “Where’s Nyberg disappeared to?”
“He’s gone to the barracks himself to fetch a mine detector,” Martinsson said.
Wallander looked at the time. 10:15. He thought about his visit to Farnholm Castle, but didn’t really know what conclusion to draw.
Martinsson was standing in the doorway, studying the hole in the lawn. “There was an incident about twenty years ago in Söderhamn,” he said. “In the municipal law courts. Do you remember?”
“Vaguely,” Wallander said.
“There was an old farmer who’d spent countless years bringing just as countless a series of lawsuits against his neighbors, his relatives, anybody and everybody. It ended up by becoming a clinical obsession that nobody diagnosed as such soon enough. He thought he was being persecuted by all his imagined opponents, not least by the judge and his own lawyer. In the end he snapped. He drew a revolver in the middle of a case and shot both the judge and his lawyer. When the police tried to get into his house afterward, it turned out he’d booby-trapped all the doors and windows. It was sheer luck that nobody was injured once the fireworks started.”
Wallander remembered the incident.
“A prosecutor in Stockholm has his house blown up,” Martinsson went on. “Lawyers are threatened and attacked. Not to mention police officers.”
Wallander nodded without replying. Höglund emerged from the kitchen, notebook in hand. Somewhat to his surprise, Wallander noticed that she was an attractive woman. It had not occurred to him before. She sat on a chair opposite him.
“Nothing,” she said. “She hadn’t heard a thing during the night, but she is certain the lawn hadn’t been messed up by nightfall. She’s an early riser and as soon as it was light she saw that somebody had been in her garden. She says she has no idea why anybody would want to kill her. Or at the very least blow her legs off.”
“Is she telling the truth?” Martinsson said.
“It’s not easy to tell if a person in shock is telling the truth,” Höglund said, “but I am positive she thinks the mine was put in her lawn during last night. And that she doesn’t have a clue why.”
“Something about it worries me,” Wallander said. “I’m not sure if I can get a handle on it.”
“Try,” Martinsson said.
“She looks out of the window this morning and sees that somebody has been digging up her lawn. So what does she do?”
“What doesn’t she do?” Höglund said.
“Precisely,” Wallander said. “The natural thing for her to do would have been to open the French windows and go out and investigate. But what does she do instead?”
“She calls the police,” Martinsson said.
“As if she’d suspected there was something dangerous out there,” said Höglund.
“Or known,” Wallander said.
“An antipersonnel mine, for instance,” Martinsson said. “She was quite upset when she phoned the police station.”
“She was upset when I got here,” Wallander said. “In fact, I’ve had the impression that she was nervous every time I’ve spoken to her. Which could be explained by all that’s happened over the last week or two, of course, but I’m not convinced.”
The front doorbell rang and in marched Nyberg ahead of two men in uniform carrying an implement that reminded Wallander of a vacuum cleaner. It took the soldiers a quarter of an hour to go over the little garden with the mine detector. The police officers stood at the window watching intently as the men worked. Then they announced that it was all clear, and prepared to leave. Wallander accompanied them out into the street where their car was waiting for them.
“What can you say about the mine?” he asked them. “Size, explosive power? Can you guess where it might have been made? Anything at all could be of use to us.”
LUNDQVIST, CAPTAIN, it said on the badge attached to the uniform of the older of the two soldiers. He was also the one who replied to Wallander’s question.
“Not a particularly powerful mine,” he said. “A few hundred grams of explosive at most. Enough to kill a man, though. We usually call this kind of mine a Four.”
“Meaning what?” Wallander said.
“Somebody walks on a mine,” Captain Lundqvist said. “You need three men to carry him out of battle. Four people removed from active duty.”
“And the origin?”
“Mines aren’t made the same way as other weapons,” Lundqvist said. “Bofors makes them, as do all the other major arms manufacturers. But nearly every industrialized country has a factory making mines. Either they’re manufactured openly under license, or they’re pirated. Terrorist groups have their own models. Before you can say anything about where the mine comes from, you have to have a fragment of the explosive and preferably also a bit of the material the casing was made from. It could be iron or plastic. Even wood.”
“We’ll see what we can find,” Wallander said. “Then we’ll get back to you.”
“Not a nice weapon,” Captain Lundqvist said. “They say it’s the world’s cheapest and most reliable soldier. You put him somewhere and he never moves from the spot, not for a hundred years if that’s how what you want. He doesn’t require food or drink or wages. He just exists, and waits. Until somebody comes and walks on him. Then he strikes.”
“How long can a mine remain active?” Wallander asked.
“Nobody knows. Land mines that were laid in the First World War still go off now and then.”
Wallander went back into the house. Nyberg was in the garden and had already started his meticulous investigation of the crater.
“The explosive and if possible also a piece of the casing,” Wallander said.
“What else do you suppose we’re looking for?” Nyberg snarled. “Bits of bone?”
Wallander wondered whether he should let Mrs. Dunér calm down for a few more hours before talking to her, but he was getting impatient again. Impatient at never seeming to be able to see any sign of a breakthrough, or finding any clear starting point for this investigation.
“You two had better go and fill Björk in,” he said to Martinsson and Höglund. “This afternoon we’ll go through the whole case in detail, to see where we’ve gotten.”
“Have we gotten anywhere at all?” Martinsson said.
“We’ve always gotten somewhere,” Wallander said, “but we don’t always know exactly where. Has Svedberg been talking to the lawyers going through the Torstensson archives?”
“He’s been there all morning,” Martinsson said. “But I expect he’d rather be doing something else. He’s not really one for reading papers.”
“Go and help him,” Wallander said. “I have an idea that it’s urgent.”
He went back into the house, hung up his jacket, and went to the bathroom in the hall. He gave a start when he saw his face in the mirror. He was unshaven and red-eyed, and his hair was standing on end. He wondered about the impression he must have made at Farnholm Castle. He rinsed his face in cold water, asking himself where he was going to start in order to get Mrs. Dunér to understand that he knew she was holding back information—and he did not know why. I must be friendly, he decided. Otherwise she’ll close herself off completely.
He went to the kitchen where she was still slumped on a chair. The forensic team was busy in the garden. Occasionally Wallander heard Nyberg’s agitated voice. He had the sense of having experienced exactly what he was now seeing, feeling, a moment before, the bewildering sensation of having gone around in a circle and returned to a point far in the distant past. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he sat at the kitchen table and looked at the woman facing him. Just for a moment he thought she reminded him of his long-dead mother. The gray hair, the thin body that seemed to have been compressed inside a tiny frame. He could not conjure up a picture of his mother’s face, though: it had faded from his memory.