“So we have the go-ahead to concentrate on Harderberg, is that correct?” Wallander asked.
“On certain conditions,” Björk said. “I agree with Per that we have to be very careful and prudent, but I also want to stress that I will regard it as dereliction of duty if anything we do is leaked outside these four walls. No statements are to be made to the press without their first having been authorized by me.”
“We gathered that,” said Martinsson, speaking for the first time. “I’m more concerned about figuring out how we’re going to manage to run a vacuum cleaner over the whole of Harderberg’s empire when there are so few of us. How are we going to coordinate our investigation with the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmö? How are we going to cooperate with the tax authorities? I wonder if we should approach it quite differently.”
“How would we do that?” Wallander said.
“Hand the whole thing over to the national CID,” Martinsson said. “Then they can arrange cooperation with whichever squads and authorities they like. I think we have to concede that we’re too small to handle this.”
“That thought had occurred to me too,” Åkeson said. “But at this stage, before we’ve even made an initial investigation, the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmö would probably turn us down. I don’t know if you realize this, but they’re probably even more overworked than we are. There are not many of us, but they are so understaffed they’re verging on collapse. We’ll have to take charge of this ourselves for the time being at least. Do the best we can. Nevertheless, I’ll see if I can interest the fraud squads in helping us. You never know.”
Looking back, Wallander had no doubt that it was what Åkeson had to say about the hopeless situation the national CID were in that established once and for all the basis of the investigation. The murder investigation would be centered on Harderberg and the links between him and Lars Borman and him and the dead lawyers. Wallander and his team would also be on their own. It was true that the Ystad police were always having to deal with various kinds of fraud cases, but this was so much bigger than anything they had come across before, and they did not know of any financial impropriety associated with the deaths of the two solicitors.
In short, they had to start looking for an answer to the question: what were they really looking for?
When Wallander wrote to Baiba in Riga a few nights later and told her about “the secret hunt,” as he had started to call the investigation, he realized that as he wrote to her in English, he would have to explain that hunting in Sweden was different from an English foxhunt. “There’s a hunter in every police officer,” he had written. “There is rarely, if ever, a fanfare of horns when a Swedish police officer is after his prey. But we find the foxes we are after even so. Without us, the Swedish henhouse would have been emptied long ago: all that remained would have been a scattering of bloodstained feathers blowing around in the autumn breeze.”
The whole team approached their task with enthusiasm. Björk removed the lid of the box where he generally kept overtime locked away. He urged everybody on, reminding them again that not a word of their activities must leak out. Åkeson had removed his jacket, loosened his tie, which was usually so neatly knotted, and become one of the workers, even if he never let slip his authority as ultimate leader of the operation that was now getting under way.
But it was Wallander who called the shots; he could feel that, and it gave him frequent moments of deep satisfaction. Thanks to unexpected circumstances and the goodwill of his colleagues, which he barely deserved, he had been given an opportunity to atone for some of the guilt he felt after rejecting the confidence Sten Torstensson had shown in him by coming to Skagen and asking for his help. Leading the search for Sten’s murderer and the murderer of his father was enabling Wallander to redeem himself. He had been so preoccupied with his own private woes that he had failed to hear Sten’s cry for help, had not allowed it to penetrate the barricades he had built around his all-consuming depression.
He wrote another letter to Baiba that he never mailed. In it he tried to explain to her, and hence also to himself, just what it meant, killing a man last year and now, adding to his guilt, rejecting Sten Torstensson’s plea for help. The conclusion he seemed to reach, even though he doubted it deep down, was that Sten’s death had started to trouble him more than the events of the previous year on the fog-bound training area, surrounded by invisible sheep.
But nothing of this was discernible to those around him. In the canteen his colleagues would comment in confidence that Wallander’s return to duty and to health was as much a surprise as it would have been if he had picked up his bed and walked when he had been at his lowest. Martinsson, who was sometimes unable to hold his cynicism in check, said: “What Kurt needed was a challenging murder. Not some nervous, carelessly executed manslaughter committed on the spur of the moment. The dead lawyers, a mine in a garden, and some Far Eastern explosive mixture in his gas tank—that was just what he needed to bring him back into the fold.”
The others agreed that there was more than a grain of truth in what Martinsson said.
It took them a week to complete the exhaustive survey of Harderberg’s empire that would be the platform for the rest of the investigation. During that week neither Wallander nor any of his colleagues slept for more than five hours at a time. They would later look back at that period and conclude that a mouse really could roar if it had to. Even Åkeson, who was rarely impressed by anything, had to tip his nonexistent hat to what the team had achieved.
“Not a word of this must get out,” he said to Wallander one evening when they had gone outside for a breath of fresh autumn air, trying to drive away their tiredness. Wallander did not at first understand what he meant.
“If this gets out, the National Police Board and the Ministry of Justice will set up an inquiry that will eventually lead to something called the ‘Ystad Model’ being presented to the Swedish public: how to achieve outstanding results with minimal resources. We’ll be used as proof that the Swedish police force is not undermanned at all. We’ll be used as evidence to show that in fact there are too many police officers. So many that they keep getting in each other’s way and that leads to a great waste of money and deteriorating clearance rates.”
“But we haven’t achieved any results at all yet,” Wallander said.
“I’m talking about the National Police Board,” Åkeson said. “I’m talking about the mysterious world of politics. A world where masses of words are used to camouflage the fact that they’re doing nothing but straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. Where they go to bed every night and pray that the next day they’ll be able to turn water into wine. I’m not talking about the fact that we haven’t yet discovered who killed the two lawyers. I’m talking about the fact that we now know that Alfred Harderberg is not the model citizen, superior to all others, that we thought he was.”
That was absolutely true. During that hectic week they had managed to build a bird’s-eye view of Harderberg’s empire that naturally was by no means comprehensive, but they could see that the gaps—indeed, the black holes—indicated quite clearly that the man who lived in Farnholm Castle should not be allowed out of their sight for one minute.
When Åkeson and Wallander stood outside the police station that night, on November 14 to be exact, they had gotten far enough to be able to draw certain conclusions. The first phase was over, the beaters had done their work, and the hunters could prepare to move in. Nothing had leaked out, and they had begun to discern the shape and nature of the leviathan in which Lars Borman and more especially Gustaf Torstensson must have discovered something it would have been safer for them not to have seen.