An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

  I miss the old man, Wallander thought. He was the only father I’ll ever have. He was often a pain in the neck and could drive me up the wall. But I miss him. There’s no getting away from that.

  Wallander turned off into a familiar road and glimpsed the roof of his father’s old house. But he continued past the side road and turned in the other direction instead.

  He stopped after two hundred meters and got out of the car. It was only drizzling now.

  Karl Eriksson’s house was in a neglected and overgrown garden. It was an old Scanian farmhouse, and would originally have had two wings. One had disappeared—maybe it had burned down, maybe it had been demolished. The house and garden were well away from the road, apparently in the middle of a field. The soil had been tilled, and was waiting for its winter covering of snow and ice. In the distance Wallander could hear the noise of a tractor.

  Wallander opened the squeaking gate and entered the yard. The sandy path had certainly not been raked for many years. A small flock of crows was cawing away in a tall chestnut tree directly in front of the house. Perhaps it was originally the family’s magic tree—planted in the old days to stand guard over the house and be a home to the trolls and fairies and spirits who looked after the welfare of the inhabitants. Wallander stood still underneath it and listened—he needed to like the noise surrounding a house before he could start thinking about the possibility of living in it. If the sound of the wind or even the silence wasn’t right, he might just as well get back in his car and drive away. But he was duly impressed by what he heard. It was the stillness of autumn, the Scanian autumn, waiting for the onset of winter.

  Wallander walked around the building. Behind it were a few apple trees, currant bushes and some dilapidated stone tables, chairs and benches. He strolled around among the fallen autumn leaves, stumbling over something lying on the ground—possibly the remains of an old rake—and returned to the front of the house. He guessed which of the keys would open the front door, inserted it in the keyhole and turned it.

  The house was musty and stuffy inside and there was a distinct smell of old man. He explored the rooms one by one. The furniture was old-fashioned and worn; crocheted proverbs hung on the walls. An ancient television set stood in what must have been the old man’s bedroom. Wallander went into the kitchen. There was a refrigerator that had been switched off. In the sink were the remains of a dead mouse. He went upstairs, but the upper floor was simply an unfurnished loft. The house would need a lot of work, that was obvious. And it wouldn’t be cheap, even if he were able to do much of it himself.

  He returned downstairs, sat down cautiously on an old sofa, and dialed the number of the Ystad police station. It was several minutes before Martinson answered.

  “Where are you?” Martinson asked.

  “In the old days people used to ask how you were,” said Wallander. “Now they ask where you are. The way we greet each other really has undergone a revolution.”

  “Did you ring me in order to tell me that?”

  “I’m sitting inside the house.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. It feels unfamiliar.”

  “But it’s the first time you’ve been there, isn’t it? Of course it feels unfamiliar.”

  “I’d like to know what kind of price you’re asking for it. I don’t want to start thinking seriously about it until I know that. I take it you know there’s a lot of work that needs doing.”

  “I’ve been there. I know that.”

  Wallander waited. He could hear Martinson breathing.

  “It’s not easy to do business with good friends,” said Martinson eventually. “I can see that now.”

  “Regard me as an enemy,” said Wallander cheerfully. “But preferably a poverty-stricken enemy.”

  Martinson laughed.

  “We’ve been thinking in terms of a bargain price. Five hundred thousand. No haggling.”

  Wallander had already decided that he could pay a maximum of 550,000.

  “That’s too expensive,” he said.

  “The hell it is! For a house in much sought-after Österlen?”

  “The place is a ramshackle hovel.”

  “If you spend a hundred thousand on it, it will be worth well over a million.”

  “I can stretch to four hundred and seventy-five thousand.”

  “No.”

  “That’s that, then.”

  Wallander hung up. Then he stood with the cell phone in his hand, waiting. Counting the seconds. He got as far as twenty-four before Martinson rang.

  “Let’s say four hundred and ninety thousand.”

  “Let’s shake on that over the phone,” said Wallander. “Or rather, I’ll pay a deposit twenty-four hours from now. I need to talk to Linda first.”

  “Do that, then. And say yea or nay by this evening.”

  “Why the rush? I need twenty-four hours.”

  “OK, you can have them. But no more.”

  They ended the call. Wallander felt a surge of elation. Was he now, at long last, about to acquire the house in the country he had dreamed about for so long? And in the vicinity of his father’s house, where he had spent so much time?

  He worked his way through the house once more. In his mind’s eye he was already knocking down partition walls, installing new electricity sockets, papering the walls, buying furniture. He was tempted to phone Linda, but managed to control himself.

  It was too early to tell her. He still wasn’t totally convinced.

  He walked around the ground floor once again, pausing here and there to listen before continuing into the next room. Hanging on the walls were faded photographs of the people who used to live there. Between two windows in the biggest room was also a colored aerial photograph of the house and grounds.

  He thought about the possibility of people who had once lived there still being present and breathing in the walls. But there are no ghosts here, he thought. There aren’t any because I don’t believe in ghosts.

  Wallander went out into the garden. It had stopped raining, and the clouds were dispersing. He pushed and pulled the handle of a pump in the middle of the courtyard. There were squeaking and grinding noises, and the water that eventually appeared was first brown, but then turned crystal clear. He tasted it, and found himself already imagining a dog drinking water from a bowl by his side.

  He walked around the outside of the house one more time, then returned to the car.

  Just after opening the car door he paused: a thought had struck him. At first he couldn’t understand what it was that was preventing him from sitting down behind the steering wheel. He frowned. Something was nagging away inside him. Something he had seen. Something that didn’t fit in.

  He turned to face the house. Something or other had etched itself into his brain.

  Then it dawned on him. He had stumbled over something lying on the ground at the back of the house. The remains of a small rake, or perhaps the root of a tree. That was what was preventing him from leaving the place.

  It was something he had seen. Without seeing it properly.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wallander returned to the back of the house. At first he couldn’t be sure exactly where he had stumbled, nor could he understand why he seemed to think it was so important to find out what it was that had nearly tripped him up.

  He looked around, and before long found what he was looking for. He stared long and hard at the object that was sticking up out of the ground. At first he just stood there motionless, but then he walked slowly around it. When he returned to his starting point Wallander squatted down. His knees felt stiff.

  There was no question about what was lying there, half buried in the soil. It was not the remains of an old rake. Nor was it a tree root.

  It was a hand. The bones were brown, but there was no doubt in his mind. It was the remains of a human hand, sticking up out of the brown clay soil.

  Wallander straightened up. The alarm bell that had started ringing whe
n he had stood there with his hand on the handle of the car door had delivered him a serious warning.

  There was no sign of other bones. Just that hand sticking up out of the ground. He bent down again and poked cautiously into the earth. Was there a whole skeleton under there, or was it just the hand? He was unable to decide for sure.

  The clouds had disappeared. The October sun was giving a suggestion of warmth. The crows were still cawing away in the tall chestnut tree. The whole situation seemed to Wallander to be unreal. He’d driven out on a Sunday to take a look at a house he might decide to move into. And, purely by chance, he had happened upon human remains in the garden.

  Wallander shook his head in disbelief. Then he phoned the police station. Martinson was in no hurry to answer.

  “I’m not going to reduce the price any further. My wife thinks I’ve gone too far already.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with the price.”

  “What’s it about, then?”

  “Come here and see.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Come here. Just do that. Come here.”

  Martinson realized that something important must have happened. He asked no more questions. Wallander continued walking around the garden, scrutinizing the ground while he waited for the police car to turn up. It took nineteen minutes. Martinson had driven fast. Wallander met him in front of the house. Martinson seemed worried.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I stumbled.”

  Martinson looked at him in surprise.

  “Did you ring me just to say that you’d stumbled over something?”

  “In a way, yes. I want you to see what it was that I stumbled over.”

  They walked around to the back of the house. Wallander pointed. Martinson stepped back in surprise.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It looks like a hand. Obviously I can’t tell if there’s a whole skeleton.”

  Martinson continued to stare at the hand in astonishment.

  “I don’t understand a thing.”

  “A hand is a hand. A dead hand is a dead person’s hand. As this isn’t a cemetery, there’s something odd here.”

  They stood there, staring at the hand. Wallander wondered what Martinson was thinking. Then he wondered what he was thinking himself.

  The desire to buy this house had deserted him altogether.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two hours later the whole house and grounds had been sealed off by police tape, and the technical team had started work. Martinson had tried to persuade Wallander to go home, as it was his day off, but Wallander had no intention of following Martinson’s advice. His Sunday was already ruined.

  Wallander wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t stumbled over the hand. If he had bought the house and only later discovered the human bones. How would he react if it turned out that there was a whole skeleton lying in the ground?

  A police officer buys a house from a colleague, then discovers that a serious crime of violence has been committed on the premises. He could imagine the newspapers and their sensationalist headlines.

  The forensic pathologist, who had come from Lund, was called Stina Hurlén and in Wallander’s opinion was far too young for the job she was doing. But he said nothing, of course. Besides, in her favor was that she paid meticulous attention to detail.

  Martinson and Wallander waited while Hurlén made a quick preliminary investigation. Nyberg, the officer in charge of the forensic team, could be heard complaining angrily in the background. Wallander had the feeling he had heard similar rants a thousand times before. On this occasion the problem was a missing tarpaulin.

  It’s always missing, he thought. During all my years as a police officer a damned tarpaulin has always been mislaid.

  Stina Hurlén stood up.

  “Well, it’s a human hand all right. An adult’s hand. Not a child’s.”

  “How long has it been lying there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely you must have some idea?”

  “You know how I hate guessing. And besides, I’m not a specialist in pieces of bones.”

  Wallander eyed her in silence for a moment.

  “Let’s take a guess. I’ll guess and you’ll guess. As we don’t know. The guesses might help us to get started. Even if they eventually turn out to be quite wrong.”

  Hurlén thought for a moment.

  “All right, I’ll take a guess,” she said. “I might be completely wrong, but I think that hand has been lying there for a long time.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even really think it—I’m only guessing. Perhaps you could say that experience is set on autopilot.”

  Wallander left her to sort herself out and went over to Martinson, who was speaking on his cell phone. He had a mug of coffee in his other hand. He held it out toward Wallander. Neither of them took milk or sugar with their coffee. Wallander took a sip. Martinson hung up.

  “Hurlén thinks the hand has been lying here for a long time.”

  “Hurlén?”

  “The pathologist. Haven’t you come across her before?”

  “Huh, they’re changing all the time in Lund. What’s happened to all the old pathologists? They just seem to disappear into their own private heaven.”

  “Wherever they all are, Hurlén thinks the hand has been lying here for a long time. That could mean anything, of course. But maybe you know something about the history of this house?”

  “Not a lot. Karl Eriksson has owned it for about thirty years. But I don’t know who he bought it from.”

  They went into the house and sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander had the feeling that he was now in a house quite different from the one he had come to look at a couple of hours earlier, wondering whether to buy it or not.

  “I suppose we’ll have to dig up the whole garden,” said Martinson. “But I gather that they first have to check it out with a new machine—some sort of detector for human remains. A bit like a metal detector. Nyberg has no faith in it at all, but his boss insists. I reckon Nyberg is looking forward to the fancy new machine turning out to be useless, so that he can resort to his tried and tested method of digging away with spades.”

  “What happens if we don’t find anything?”

  Martinson frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean? There’s a hand lying there in the ground. That suggests there ought to be more hidden away down there. A whole body. Let’s face it, how can a dead hand come flying into this garden? Has a crow found it somewhere and then happened to drop it here of all places? Do hands grow in this garden? Or has it been raining hands over Löderup this autumn?”

  “You’re right,” said Martinson. “We ought to find more bones.”

  Wallander gazed out of the window, thinking hard.

  “Nobody knows what we might find,” he said. “Possibly a whole graveyard. An old plague cemetery perhaps?”

  They went out into the garden again. Martinson spoke to Nyberg and some of the other technicians. Wallander thought about his imaginary dog, which just then seemed more unlikely than ever.

  Martinson and Wallander drove back to the police station. They parked their cars and went to Martinson’s office, which was in a bigger mess than Wallander had ever seen it before. Once upon a time, a long time ago, Martinson had been an extremely well-organized, almost pedantic police officer. Now he lived in a state of chaos, in which anybody would think it was impossible to find a particular document at all.

  Martinson seemed to have read his thoughts.

  “It looks a hell of a mess in here,” he said grimly, removing several papers from his desk chair. “I try to keep it tidy, but no matter what I do the papers and files just keep on piling up.”

  “It’s the same with me,” said Wallander. “When I first managed to work out how to use a computer, I thought the heaps of paper would dwindle away. Some hope—things
just got even worse.”

  He gazed out of the window.

  “Go home,” said Martinson. “This is your day off. I feel terrible about asking you to take a look at that house.”

  “I liked it,” said Wallander. “I liked it and I was pretty sure that Linda would have been just as enthusiastic. I’d already made up my mind to phone you and confirm that I was going to buy it. Now I’m not so sure.”

  Martinson accompanied him down to reception.

  “Just what is it we’ve found?” said Wallander. “A hand. The remains of a hand. In a garden.”

  He broke off as he didn’t need to say any more. They had a case of murder to solve. Unless the hand had been lying there for so long that it would be impossible to identify it or establish the cause of death.

  “I’ll phone you,” said Martinson. “If nothing happens, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “At eight o’clock,” said Wallander. “We’ll have a run-through then. If I know Nyberg he’ll spend all night digging away out there.”

  Martinson returned to his office. Wallander got into his car, then changed his mind and left it parked where it was. He walked back home, taking the long route through town and pausing at the kiosk next to the railway station where he bought an evening newspaper.

  The clouds were gathering again.

  He also noticed that it was getting colder.

  CHAPTER 6

  Wallander opened the front door and listened. Linda wasn’t at home. He made some tea and sat down at the kitchen table. The discovery of the hand had disappointed him. For a brief time during his visit to the house, he had been convinced: it was exactly the place he had been looking for. That house and no other. But then its garden had been transformed into a crime scene. Or, at least, somewhere concealing a dark secret.

  I shall never find a house, he thought. No house, no dog, no new woman either. Everything will remain the same as it always has been.

  He drank his tea then went to lie down on the bed. As it was Sunday, he ought to comply with the routine—a routine introduced by Linda—and change the sheets. But he didn’t have the strength.