The Pyramid

Rolf Nyman was sitting at a table in the middle of the room. He was leaning over something that Wallander could not immediately see. Then he realised that Rolf Nyman was playing a game of patience. Slowly, he turned over card after card. Wallander asked himself what he had been expecting. A man who was measuring out tiny bags of white powder on some scales? Or someone with a rubber tube around his upper arm, injecting himself?

I'm wrong, he thought. This is a mistake from beginning to end.

But he was still convinced. The man sitting at the table playing a game of patience had recently killed three people. Brutally executed them.

Wallander was just about to pull away from the house wall when the dog at the front of the house started to bark. Rolf Nyman jumped. He looked straight at Wallander. For one second, Wallander thought he had been discovered. Then Nyman quickly stood up and walked to the front door, at which point Wallander was already on his way back into the woods. If he lets the dog loose I'm in trouble, he thought. He directed the torch at the ground that he was stumbling over. He slipped and felt a branch cut his cheek. In the background he could still hear the dog barking.

When he reached the car he dropped the torch but did not stop to pick it up. He turned the key and wondered what would have happened if he had had his old car. Now he was able to put the car in reverse without a problem and drive away. Just as Wallander got into the car he heard a tractor approach on the main road. If he could get the sound of his own engine to coincide with the sound of the other vehicle then he would be able to get away without Rolf Nyman hearing him. He stopped and quietly turned and sneaked slowly into third gear. When he got out onto the main road he saw the tail lights of the tractor. Since he was going downhill he turned off the engine and let the car coast. There was no one in his rear-view mirror. No one had come in pursuit. Wallander stroked his cheek and felt blood and then felt around for the toilet paper. In a brief moment of inattentiveness he almost drove into a ditch. At the last moment he was able to straighten the car.

It was already past midnight when he reached Mariagatan. The branch had made a deep cut in his cheek. Wallander briefly considered going to the hospital, but he settled for cleaning the wound himself and applying a large Band-Aid. Then he put on a pot of strong coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with one of his many half-full notepads in front of him.

He reviewed his triangle-shaped pyramid once more and replaced the question mark in the middle with Rolf Nyman. He knew from the start that the material was very thin. The only thing that he could produce against Nyman was the suspicion that he had stolen the lights that were later used to mark the area for the plane drop.

But what else did he have? Nothing. What relationship had Holm and Nyman shared? Where did the plane and the Eberhardsson sisters fit in? Wallander pushed the notepad away. They would need a more thoroughgoing investigation in order to move forward. He was also wondering how he could convince his colleagues that despite how it looked, he really had found the lead that they should concentrate on. How far could he go by simply citing his intuition again? Rydberg would understand, perhaps even Martinsson. But both Svedberg and Hansson would dismiss it.

It was two o'clock before he turned out the light and went to bed. His cheek ached.

In the morning, the third of January, it was cold and clear in Skåne. Wallander got up early, changed the bandage on his cheek, and arrived at the station shortly before seven. Today he was in before even Martinsson. In reception he was told about a serious traffic accident that had happened an hour earlier, just outside Ystad, involving several deaths, including a young child, which always evoked a particularly sombre mood among his colleagues. Wallander went to his office and was grateful for the fact that he no longer found himself called out to the scene of traffic accidents. He poured himself some coffee and then sat down and thought back to the events of the evening before.

But his doubts from the day before remained. Rolf Nyman could turn out to be a red herring. But there were still grounds for investigating him thoroughly. Wallander also decided that they should put his house under discreet surveillance, not least in order to find out when Nyman would be out. Technically this fell to the Sjöbo police, but Wallander had already decided simply to keep them informed. The Ystad police would insist on undertaking this work themselves.

They needed to get into the house. But there was an additional complication. Rolf Nyman was not alone. There was also a woman, whom no one had seen, and who had been sleeping when Wallander stopped by.

Wallander suddenly wondered if the woman even existed. Much of what Nyman had told him had turned out not to be true. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes past seven. It was probably very early for a woman who ran a disco. But he still searched around for Linda Boman's telephone number in Lund. She picked up almost immediately. Wallander could hear that she was groggy.

'I'm sorry if I woke you up,' he said.

'I'm awake.'

She is like me, Wallander thought. Doesn't like to admit that she has been woken up. Even if this is a perfectly decent hour to still be sleeping.

'I have some more questions,' Wallander said. 'And unfortunately they can't wait.'

'Call me in five minutes,' she said and hung up.

Wallander waited for seven minutes. Then he dialled the number again. Her voice was less hoarse now.

'This is in regard to Rolf Nyman, of course,' he said.

'Are you still not planning to tell me why you're interested in him?'

'I can't do that right now. But I promise you'll be the first to know.'

'I feel honoured.'

'You said that he had a serious heroin addiction.'

'I remember.'

'My question is very simple: how do you know this?'

'He told me. It took me by surprise. He didn't try to hide it, and that made an impression on me.'

'He told you?'

'Yes.'

'Does this mean that you never noticed that he had a problem?'

'He always did his job.'

'He never appeared high?'

'Not that I could tell.'

'And he never appeared nervous or anxious?'

'No more so than anyone else. I can also be nervous and anxious. Especially when the police in Lund bother me and the disco.'

Wallander sat quietly for a moment and wondered if he should ask his Lund colleagues about Linda Boman. She waited.

'Let me go through this one more time,' he said. 'You never saw him when he was under the influence. He only told you that he was a heroin addict.'

'I have a hard time believing that a person would lie about something like that.'

'I agree,' Wallander said. 'But I want to assure myself that I've understood this correctly.'

'Is that why you're calling at six o'clock in the morning?'

'It's half past seven.'

'Same difference.'

'I have one more question,' Wallander continued. 'You said that you never heard about a girlfriend.'

'No, I didn't.'

'You never saw him with one?'

'No, never.'

'So if we assume that he said he had a girlfriend you couldn't verify if this were true or not?'

'Your questions are getting stranger and stranger. Why wouldn't he have a girlfriend? He isn't worse-looking than other guys.'

'Then I have no more questions for the moment,' Wallander concluded. 'And what I said yesterday is still very much in effect.'