Oscarsson stared at him in evident unease.
“No,” he said. “Never. Why on earth would I have thought that?”
“I was only asking,” Wallander said. “Many thanks for your help. I might need to be in touch again.”
Oscarsson stood on the steps, watching him leave. Wallander was now so exhausted he wanted nothing more than to lie down in the car and go to sleep, but he forced himself to think ahead. The natural thing would have been to return to Höör, call Thomas Rundstedt out from his budget conference, and ask him some quite different questions.
He set off for Malmö while allowing a decision to mature in his mind, then he stopped on the hard shoulder and called the Malmö police. He asked for Roslund, gave his name, and said he had an urgent matter to discuss. It took the operator less than a minute to find Roslund.
“It’s Wallander here, from Ystad,” he said. “We met last night.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Roslund said. “They told me you had something urgent to discuss.”
“I’m in Malmö,” Wallander said. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“I’m listening.”
“About a year ago, at the beginning of September, the first or second Sunday in the month, a man called Lars Borman hanged himself in a clearing in the woods at Klagshamn. There must be an incident report, some notes about death by unnatural causes, and a postmortem report. I’d be very grateful if you could dig them out for me. If at all possible I’d like to get in touch with one of the officers who answered the call and took the body down. Do you think this might be possible?”
“What was the name again?”
Wallander spelled it out.
“I don’t know how many suicides we get per year,” Roslund said. “I don’t recall this one. But I’ll look for the documents and see if one of the officers called out is in today.”
Wallander gave him his cell phone number.
“I’ll drive to Klagshamn in the meantime,” he said.
It was 2:00. He tried in vain to shake off his exhaustion, but was forced to give in and turned off onto a road that he knew led to an old quarry. He switched off the engine and pulled his jacket tightly around him. A minute later he was asleep.
He woke up with a start. He was freezing cold and didn’t know where he was at first. Something had strayed into his consciousness, something he had dreamed, but he couldn’t remember what it was. A feeling of depression gripped him when he looked around at the gray landscape on every side. It was 2:35, so he had been asleep for half an hour. He felt as if he had been roused from a long period of unconsciousness.
That is about as close as one can get to the greatest loneliness of all, he thought. Being all alone in the world. The final human being, forgotten about.
He was roused from his thoughts by the phone ringing. It was Roslund.
“You sound half asleep,” he said. “Have you been taking a nap in the car?”
“Not at all,” Wallander said. “I have a bit of a cold.”
“I’ve found the stuff you asked for,” Roslund said. “I have the papers here on my desk. I also have the name of the police officer: Magnus Staffansson. He was in the car that was called out when a jogger found a body hanging from a birch tree. No doubt he can explain how a man can hang himself in a birch, of all trees. Where would you like to meet him?”
Wallander could feel his exhaustion slipping away. “At the slip road for Klagshamn,” he said.
“He’ll be there in a quarter of an hour,” Roslund said. “By the way, I spoke to Sven Nyberg a few minutes ago. He hasn’t found anything in your car.”
“I’m not surprised,” Wallander said.
“You won’t have to see the wreck when you drive back home,” Roslund said. “We’ve just arranged for it to be towed away.”
“Thanks for your help.”
He drove straight to Klagshamn and parked at the meeting place. After a few minutes a police car drove up. Wallander had gotten out of his car and was walking up and down; Magnus Staffansson was in uniform, and saluted. Wallander responded with an awkward wave. They sat in Wallander’s car. Staffansson handed over a plastic file containing photocopies.
“I’ll glance through this,” Wallander said. “Meanwhile, you can try to remember what happened.”
“Suicide is something you’d prefer to forget,” Staffansson said, in a thick Malmö accent. Wallander smiled to hear how he too used to speak, before his move to Ystad had changed his dialect.
He read swiftly through the terse reports, the postmortem document, and the record of the decision to abandon the investigation. There were no suspicious circumstances.
I wonder, Wallander thought. Then he put the file on the shelf on the dashboard and turned to Staffansson.
“I think it would be a good idea to take a look at the place where it happened. Can you remember how to get there?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a few kilometers outside the village. I’ll go first.”
They left Klagshamn and drove south along the coast. A container ship was on its way through the Sound. A bank of clouds hovered over Copenhagen. The housing estates petered out and soon they were surrounded by fields. A tractor made its way slowly over one of them.
They were there almost before he knew it. There was a stretch of deciduous woods to the left of the road. Wallander pulled up behind Staffansson’s police car and got out. The path was wet and he thought he better put on his rubber boots, but on his way to the trunk to get them he realized they had been in his Peugeot.
Staffansson pointed to a birch tree, bigger than the rest. “That’s where he was hanging,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” Wallander said.
“Most of it’s in the report,” Staffansson said.
“It’s always better from the horse’s mouth.”
“It was a Sunday morning,” Staffansson began. “About eight. We’d been called out to calm down an angry passenger on the morning ferry from Dragør who claimed he had gotten food poisoning from the breakfast during the crossing. That was when we got the emergency calclass="underline" a man hanging from a tree. We got a location and headed there. A couple of joggers had come across him. They were in shock, of course, but one of them had run to the house on the hill over there and called the police. We did what we’re trained to do and took him down, as it sometimes happens that they’re still alive. Then the ambulance arrived, the CID took over, and eventually it was put down as a suicide. That’s all I can remember. Oh, I forgot to say he had gotten there on a bike. It was lying here among the bushes.”
Wallander examined the tree while listening to what Staffansson had to say. “What kind of a rope was it?” he said.
“It looked like a hawser from a boat, about as thick as my thumb.”
“Do you remember the knot?”
“It was an ordinary running noose.”
“How did he do it?”
Staffansson stared at him, bewildered.
“It’s not all that easy to hang yourself,” Wallander said. “Did he stand on something? Did he climb up the tree?”
Staffansson pointed at the trunk. “He probably pushed off from that bulge in the trunk,” he said. “That’s what we guessed. There was nothing he could have stood on.”
Wallander nodded. The postmortem made it clear Borman had choked to death. His neck was not broken. He had been dead for an hour at most when the police arrived.
“Can you remember anything else?” he asked.
“Such as what?”
“Only you can answer that.”
“You do what you have to do,” Staffansson said. “You write your report and then you try to forget it as soon as you can.”
Wallander knew how it was. There’s an atmosphere of depression about a suicide unlike anything else. He thought of all the occasions when he himself had been forced to deal with suicides.