Wallander walked to his office. As usual it was twenty-three steps away from the beginning of the corridor. Sometimes he wished that something would suddenly have happened. That the corridor would turn out to be longer or shorter. But everything was normal. He hung up his coat and brushed off a couple of hairs that had stuck to the back of the chair. He brushed his hand along the back and top of his head. With every year he became more worried that he was going to lose his hair. Then he heard rapid steps outside in the corridor. It was Martinsson, waving a piece of paper.
'The second pilot has been identified,' he said. 'This came just now from Interpol.'
Wallander immediately stopped thinking about his hair growth.
'Ayrton McKenna,' Martinsson read. 'Born 1945 in Southern Rhodesia. A helicopter pilot since 1964 in the then Southern Rhodesian military. Decorated many times during the 1960s. For what, one might ask. For bombing a lot of black Africans?'
Wallander only had a very vague sense of what had transpired in the former British colonies in Africa.
'What is Southern Rhodesia called today?' he asked. 'Zambia?'
'That was Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia is Zimbabwe today.'
'My knowledge of Africa isn't what it should be. What else does it say?'
Martinsson continued to read.
'At some point after 1980, Ayrton McKenna moved to England. Between 1983 and 1985 he was in prison in Birmingham for drug smuggling. From 1985 on there are no records until he suddenly turns up in Hong Kong in 1987. There he is suspected of smuggling people from the People's Republic. He escapes from a prison in Hong Kong after shooting two guards to death and has been a wanted man ever since. But the identification is definitive. He was the one who crashed with Espinosa outside Mossby.'
Wallander mulled this over.
'What do we have?' he said. 'Two pilots with criminal histories. Both with smuggling on their records. In an aeroplane that does not exist. They cross illegally over the Swedish border for a few short minutes. They are probably on their way out again when the plane crashes. That leaves us with two possibilities. They were either leaving or collecting something. Since there are no indications that the plane landed, this seems to indicate that something was tossed out. What is dropped from a plane? Besides bombs?'
'Drugs.'
Wallander nodded. Then he leaned over the table.
'Has the accident commission begun its work yet?'
'Things have proceeded very slowly. But nothing indicates that the plane was shot down, if that's what you're getting at.'
'No,' Wallander said. 'I'm only interested in two things. Did the plane have extra fuel tanks, that is, from how far away could it have come? And was it an accident?'
'If it wasn't shot down, it could hardly have been anything other than an accident.'
'There is a possibility that it was sabotage. But perhaps that's remote.'
'It was an old plane,' Martinsson said. 'We know that. It probably ran into the hillside outside Vientiane. And was then put back together again. It could, in other words, have been in bad shape.'
'When is this accident commission going to get started for real?'
'The twenty-eighth. Tomorrow. The plane's been transported to a hangar in Sturup.'
'You should probably be there,' Wallander said. 'This matter of the extra fuel tanks is an important one.'
'I think it would need a great deal to be able to fly here from Spain without landing somewhere in between,' Martinsson said hesitantly.
'I don't believe that either. But I want to know if the flight could have originated from the other side of the sea. Germany. Or one of the Baltic States.'
Martinsson left. Wallander made some notes. Next to the name Espinosa he now wrote McKenna, unsure of the exact spelling.
The investigators met at half past eight. Their group was down to the bare bones. Svedberg did in fact turn out to have a cold. Nyberg had gone to Eksjö to visit his ninety-six-year-old mother. He would have been back this morning but his car had broken down somewhere south of Växjö. Rydberg looked tired and harried. Wallander thought he caught a whiff of alcohol. Probably Rydberg had spent the holidays alone, drinking. Not to the point of drunkenness, since he rarely did. But a steady, quiet drinking. Hansson complained that he had eaten too much. Neither Björk nor Per Åkeson showed up. Wallander studied the three men around the table. You don't see this on TV very often, he thought. There they have young, fresh and enthusiastic policemen in action. Martinsson could possibly fit such a context. Apart from him this squad is not such an edifying sight.
'There was a stabbing incident last night,' Hansson said. 'Two brothers who ended up in a fight with their father. Drunk, of course. One of the brothers and the father are in the hospital. Apparently they attacked each other with various tools.'
'What kind of tools?' Wallander asked.
'A hammer. A crowbar. Screwdriver maybe. At least, the father has stab wounds.'
'We'll have to deal with that when we have time,' Wallander said. 'Right now we have three murders on our plate. Or two, if we combine the sisters into one.'
'I don't really understand why Sjöbo can't deal with Holm on their own,' Hansson said with irritation.
'Because Holm has to do with us,' Wallander replied, just as irritated. 'If both of us investigate these things on our own we'll never get anywhere.'
Hansson did not back down. He was apparently in a very bad mood this morning.
'Do we know that Holm had anything to do with the Eberhardssons?'
'No,' Wallander said. 'But we know everything indicates that the same person killed them. I think that's enough of a connection to bind the cases and for us to lead a coordinated investigation from Ystad.'
'Has Åkeson weighed in on this?'
'Yes,' Wallander said.
It was not true. Per Åkeson had not said anything. But Wallander knew that he would have backed him up.
Wallander marked the end of this discussion with Hansson by turning to Rydberg.
'Do we have any updates on the drug trade?' he asked. 'Has anything happened in Malmö? Have the prices changed, or the supply?'
'I called,' Rydberg said, 'but there didn't appear to be anyone working there over Christmas.'
'Then we'll have to proceed with Holm,' Wallander decided. 'Unfortunately, I suspect this investigation will prove both long and difficult. We need to dig deeper. Who was Holm? Who did he associate with? What was his position in the drug-trade hierarchy? Did he even have a position? And what about the sisters? We know too little.'
'Absolutely correct,' Rydberg said. 'Digging down usually takes one forward.'
Wallander decided to store these words in his memory.
Digging down usually takes one forward.
They ended the meeting with Rydberg's words of wisdom buzzing in their ears. Wallander drove down to the travel agency to speak to Anette Bengtsson. But to his disappointment she had taken time off over Christmas. Her colleague did, however, find an envelope to give to him.
'Have you found him yet?' she asked. 'The one who killed the sisters?'
'No,' Wallander answered. 'But we're working on it.'
On the way back to the station, Wallander suddenly remembered that he had signed up for the laundry room this morning. He stopped at Mariagatan, walked up to the apartment and carried down all the dirty laundry that had accumulated in his wardrobe. When he reached the laundry room there was a note taped to the front of the washer saying it was out of order. Wallander was so furious he carried all the laundry out to his car and threw it in the boot. There was a washing machine at the station. As he turned onto Regementsgatan he was almost hit by a motorcycle approaching at high speed. He pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine and closed his eyes. I'm stressed, he thought. If a broken washer almost causes me to lose control then there's something wrong with my life.