“Let’s move further back,” Nyberg said. “I’m going to move my own car further back as well.”
They watched him drive further away. The hazard lights were still flashing on Wallander’s car. The wind was still gusty. Another overfull car with a Polish license plate passed them going east. Nyberg came to join them. They all looked at Wallander’s car.
“If somebody drains gas from a tank, they do it to make room for something else,” Nyberg said. “Somebody might have planted explosives with some kind of delayed ignition that is gradually eaten away by the gas. Eventually it blows up. Does your gas gauge usually go down when the car’s in neutral?”
“No.”
“Then I think we should leave the car here till tomorrow,” Nyberg said. “In fact, we should close off the E65 altogether.”
“Björk would never agree to that,” Wallander said. “Besides, we don’t know for sure that anybody’s put anything in the gas tank.”
“I think we should call people out to cordon the area off, no matter what,” Nyberg said. “This is the Malmö police district, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Wallander said. “But I’ll phone them even so.”
“My handbag’s still in the car,” Höglund said. “Can I get it?”
“No,” Nyberg said. “It’ll have to stay there. And the engine can keep running.”
Höglund got back into Nyberg’s car. Wallander called the police in Malmö. Nyberg had wandered off to the side of the road to urinate. Wallander looked up and contemplated the stars while he waited to be connected.
It was 3:04 in the morning.
Malmö answered. Wallander saw Nyberg zipping up his fly.
Then the night exploded in a flash of white. The telephone was ripped from Wallander’s hand.
Chapter 8
The painful silence.
Afterward, Wallander recalled the explosion as a large space with all the oxygen squeezed out, the sudden arrival of a strange vacuum on the E65 in the middle of a November night, a black hole in which even the blustery wind had been silenced. It happened very quickly, but memory has the ability to stretch things out and in the end he remembered the explosion as a series of events, each one rapidly replacing the other but nevertheless distinct.
What surprised him most was that his telephone was lying on the wet asphalt just a few meters away. That was the most incomprehensible part, not the fact that his car was enveloped by intense flames and seemed to be melting away.
Nyberg had reacted quickest. He grabbed hold of Wallander and dragged him away, possibly afraid there would be another explosion from the blazing car. Höglund had flung herself out of Nyberg’s car and sprinted to the other side of the road. Perhaps she had screamed, but it seemed to Wallander he might have been the one to scream, or Nyberg, or none of them; perhaps he had imagined it.
On the other hand, he thought he should have screamed. He should have screamed and yelled and cursed the fact that he had gone back to duty, that Sten Torstensson had been to see him in Skagen and dragged him into a murder investigation he should never have been involved in. He should never have gone back, he should have signed the documents Björk had prepared for him, attended the press conference and allowed himself to be interviewed for a feature in Swedish Police magazine, on the back page no doubt, and gotten out of it all.
In the confusion following the explosion there had been a moment of painful silence when Wallander had been able to think perfectly clearly as he looked at the telephone lying in the road and his old Peugeot going up in flames on the hard shoulder. His thoughts had been lucid and he had been able to reach a conclusion: the first indication that the double murder of the lawyers, the mine in Mrs. Dunér’s garden, and now the attempted murder of himself had a pattern, not itself clear as of yet and with many locked doors still to open.
But a conclusion had been possible and unavoidable, amid the chaos, and it had been a terrifying one: somebody thought Wallander knew something they did not want him to know. He was convinced that whoever had put the explosives in the gas tank had not planned to kill Ann-Britt Höglund. That merely revealed another aspect of the people who lurked in the shadows: they didn’t care about human life.
Wallander recognized, with a mixture of fear and despair, that these people who hid in cars with stolen license plates were wrong. He could have made an honest public statement that it was all based on a mistake and that he knew nothing about what lay behind the murders, or the mine, or even the suicide of the accountant Lars Borman, if indeed it was suicide.
The truth was that he knew nothing. But while his car was still ablaze and Nyberg and Höglund were directing inquisitive late-night drivers away from the scene and calling the police and firefighters, he had continued to stand in the middle of the road, thinking things through to their conclusion. There was only one starting point for the awful mistake of thinking he knew something, and that was Sten’s visit to Skagen. The postcard from Finland had not been sufficient. They had followed Sten to Jutland, they had been there among the dunes, hidden in the fog. They had been watching the art museum where Wallander had drunk coffee with Sten, but they had not been close enough to hear what was said, for if they had been, they would have known that Wallander knew nothing, since Sten knew nothing either; the whole business was no more than suspicions. But they had not been able to take the risk. That’s why his old Peugeot was burning by the side of the road; and that’s why the neighbor’s dog had been barking while they had been talking to the Forsdahls.
The painful silence, he thought. That’s what’s enveloping me, and there is one more conclusion to draw, perhaps the most vital one of all. For it means we have made a breakthrough in this awful case, we have found a point around which we can all gather and say: this is our starting point. It might not take us to the Holy Grail, but it might lead to something else that we need to find.
The chronology was right, he thought. It started with that muddy field where Gustaf Torstensson met his end almost a month ago. Everything else, including the execution of his son, must derive from what happened that night, when he was on his way home from Farnholm Castle. We know that now, which means we now know what we should be doing.
He bent to retrieve his telephone. The emergency number for the Malmö police was staring him in the face. He turned off the phone and established that it had not been damaged by the blast or by being dropped on the road.
The fire engine had arrived. He watched as they put out the flames, covering the car with white foam. Nyberg appeared at his side. Wallander could see that he was sweating and afraid.
“That was a close call,” he said.
“Yes,” Wallander said. “But not close enough.”
Nyberg looked at him in surprise.
At that moment a senior officer from the Malmö police came up to Wallander. They had met before but Wallander could not remember the man’s name.
“I gather it was your car that got torched,” he said. “Rumor had it you’d left the force. But you come back, and your car gets set on fire.”
Wallander was not sure if the man was being ironic, but he decided he wasn’t, that it was a natural reaction. At the same time he wanted to ensure that there were no misunderstandings.
“I was on my way home with a colleague,” he said.
“Ann-Britt Höglund,” said the man from Malmö. “I’ve just spoken to her. She passed me on to you.”
Well done, Wallander thought. The fewer people who comment, the easier it is to keep the thing under control. She’s learning fast.