“Of course it does,” she said. “One less plundered corpse in a South American ditch—that makes it all worthwhile.”
It was almost 7 p.m. by the time Wallander left Malmö. He knew he should have phoned Ystad and told them what he was doing, but he had been too taken up by his conversation with Norin.
She had accompanied him to the car park, where they had said their good-byes.
“You’ve given me an awful lot to think about,” Wallander said. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Who knows,” she said, “perhaps I’ll get payment in kind one of these days.”
“You’ll be hearing from me.”
“I’m counting on that. You’ll normally find me in Gothenburg. Unless I’m traveling.”
Wallander stopped at a bar and grill near Jägersro for something to eat. He was thinking all the time about what she had told him, and how he could fit Harderberg into that picture. But he couldn’t.
He wondered if they would ever find an answer to the question of why the two lawyers had been killed. In all his years as a police officer, he had so far been spared the experience of being involved in an unsolved murder case. Was he now standing outside a door that would never open?
He drove home to Ystad that evening feeling the weariness seep through his body. The only thing he had to look forward to was calling Linda when he got in.
But the moment Wallander stepped into his apartment he knew that something was not as it had been when he left that morning. He paused in the hall, listening intently. Maybe it was his imagination. Yet the feeling would not go away. He switched on the light in the living room, sat down on a chair, and looked around him. Nothing was missing, nothing seemed to have been moved. He went into the bedroom. The unmade bed was exactly as he had left it. The half-empty coffee cup was still on his bedside table next to the alarm clock. He went into the kitchen.
Only when he opened the refrigerator to get out the margarine and a piece of cheese was he sure that he was right. He looked hard at the open package of blood sausages. He had an almost photographic memory and he knew he had put it on the third of the four shelves. It was on the second shelf now.
The package of blood sausages had been at the very edge and could easily have fallen out onto the floor—it had happened to him before. Then somebody had put it back on the wrong shelf.
He had no doubt at all that he remembered it correctly. Somebody had been in his apartment during the day. And whoever had been there had opened his refrigerator, either to look for something or to hide something.
His first reaction was to laugh. Then he closed the fridge door and walked quickly out of the apartment. He was scared. He had to force himself to think clearly. They’re not far away, he thought. I’ll let them think I’m still in the apartment.
He went downstairs to the basement. There was a door at the back leading to the garbage. He unlocked and opened it. He looked out at the parking places lined up along the back of the building. There was no one around. He closed the door behind him and edged his way through the shadows along the wall. When he came to where it opened out onto Mariagatan, he kneeled down and peered at waist height from behind the drainpipe.
The car was parked about ten meters behind his own. The engine was not running and the lights were off. He could make out a man behind the wheel, but could not be sure if there was anybody else in the car.
He pulled back his head and stood up. From somewhere he could hear the sound of a TV set. He wondered feverishly what to do next. Then he made up his mind.
He started running across the empty car park, turned left at the first corner and was gone.
Chapter 14
He was gasping for breath before he had gotten as far as Blekegatan. Once more Wallander thought he was about to die. He had taken Oskarsgatan from Mariagatan, it was not very far, and he had not been running at full speed. Even so, the raw autumn air was tearing at his lungs and his pulse was racing. He forced himself to slow down, fearful that his heart would stop. The feeling of lacking the strength to do anything worried him more than the discovery that someone had been in his apartment and was now sitting in a car in the street, keeping watch over him. He struggled to suppress the thought, but what was upsetting him was really his fear, the fear he recognized so clearly from the previous year, and he did not want it back. It had taken him almost twelve months to shake it off, and he thought he had succeeded in burying it once and for all on the beaches at Skagen—but here it was, back to haunt him.
He started running again. It wasn’t far to the block of apartments on Lilla Norregatan where Svedberg lived. He had the hospital on his right, then he turned downhill toward the town center. A torn poster outside the kiosk on Stora Norregatan caught his eye, then he turned right and almost immediately left and could see that the lights were on in the top-floor apartment where Svedberg lived.
Wallander knew the lights were often on all night. Svedberg was afraid of the dark; indeed, that might have been why he chose to become a police officer, to try to cure his fear. But he still left the lights on in his apartment at night, so his career had not been any help.
Everyone is frightened of something, Wallander thought, police officers or not. He stumbled through the front door and ran up the stairs, then paused when he reached the top floor to get his breath back. He rang Svedberg’s bell. The door was opened almost immediately. Svedberg had a pair of reading glasses pushed on top of his head and was holding a newspaper. Wallander knew he would be surprised to see him. During all the years they had known each other, Wallander had only been in Svedberg’s apartment two or three times, and then only after making an arrangement to meet there.
“I need your help,” Wallander said when the astonished Svedberg had let him in and closed the door.
“You look shattered,” Svedberg said. “What’s happened?”
“I’ve been running. I want you to come with me. It won’t take long. Where’s your car?”
“It’s right outside the front door.”
“Drive me back to my place on Mariagatan,” Wallander said. “Let me get out shortly before we get there. You know the car I’m using at the moment, a police Volvo?”
“The dark blue one or the red one?”
“The dark blue one. Turn onto Mariagatan. There’s another car parked behind my Volvo, you can’t miss it. I want you to drive past and see whether there’s anybody in the car besides the driver. Then come back to where you’ve dropped me off. That’s all. Then you can go home to your paper.”
“You don’t want to arrest somebody?”
“That’s exactly the last thing I want to do. I just want to know how many people are in the car.”
Svedberg had taken off his glasses and put down the newspaper.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“I think somebody’s watching my apartment,” Wallander said. “I only want to know how many of them there are. That’s all. But I want whoever it is in the car to think I’m still in my apartment. I came out by the back door.”
“I’m not sure I understand all this. Wouldn’t it be best to make an arrest? We can ask for help.”
“You know what we’ve decided,” Wallander said. “If it has anything to do with Harderberg we should pretend we’re not very alert.”
Svedberg shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he said.
“All you need to do is to drive to Mariagatan and make an observation,” Wallander said. “Then I’ll go back to my apartment. I’ll phone you if I need help.”
“I suppose you know best,” Svedberg said, sitting on a stool in order to tie his shoelaces.