The Pyramid

  He was back at the station at four o'clock. A note from Martinsson was on his desk. Wallander went to Martinsson's office. He was on the phone. When Wallander turned up in the doorway, he said he'd call back. Wallander assumed he had been talking with his wife. Martinsson hung up.

  'The Spanish police are searching the villa in Marbella right now,' he said. 'I've been in touch with a colleague by the name of Fernando Lopez.

  He speaks excellent English and seems to be a very high-ranking officer.'

  Wallander told him about his excursion and his conversation with Anette Bengtsson. He showed Martinsson the ticket.

  'That bastard flew business class,' Martinsson said.

  'Be that as it may,' Wallander said, 'we now have another connection. No one can still say this is a coincidence.'

  That was also what he said at the case meeting at five o'clock. It was very brief. Per Åkeson sat in on it without saying anything. He's already finished, Wallander thought. He's physically here, but mentally he's already away on his leave.

  When there was nothing more to say, they finished the meeting. Each of them went back to his tasks. Wallander called Linda and told her he now had a car that worked and could pick up her grandfather in Malmö. He went home a little before seven. Emma Lundin called. This time Wallander said yes. She stayed until just past midnight, as usual. Wallander thought of Anette Bengtsson.

  The following day he stopped by the travel agency and picked up the information he had requested. There were many customers looking for seats for Christmas. Wallander would have liked to stay for a while and talk to Anette Bengtsson, but she didn't have time. He also stopped outside the old sewing shop. The rubble had now been cleared. He walked into town. Suddenly he realised there was only a week left until Christmas. The first one since the divorce.

  That day nothing happened that took the investigation further. Wallander pondered his pyramid. The only addition he made was a thick line between Anna Eberhardsson and Yngve Leonard Holm.

  The next day, the twenty-first of December, Wallander drove to Malmö to pick up his father. He felt great relief when he saw him walk out of the ferry terminal. He drove him back to Löderup. His father talked non-stop about his wonderful trip. He appeared to have forgotten the fact that he had been in prison and that Wallander had actually also been to Cairo.

  That evening Wallander went to the annual police Christmas function. He avoided sitting at the same table as Björk. But the toast the police chief made was unusually successful. He had taken the trouble to look into the history of the Ystad police. His account was both entertaining and well presented. Wallander chuckled on several occasions. Björk was without a doubt a good orator.

  He was drunk when he came home. Before falling asleep he thought of Anette Bengtsson. And decided in the next moment to immediately stop thinking about her.

  On the twenty-second of December they reviewed the state of the investigation. Nothing new had happened. The Spanish police had not found anything noteworthy in the sisters' villa. No hidden valuables, nothing. They were still waiting for the second pilot to be identified.

  In the afternoon, Wallander went and bought himself a Christmas present. A stereo for the car. He managed to install it himself.

  On the twenty-third of December they were able to add to the existing case data. Nyberg informed them that Holm had been shot with the same gun used on the Eberhardsson sisters. But there was still no trace of this weapon. Wallander made new lines in his sketch. The connections grew, but the top of the pyramid was still missing.

  The work was not supposed to stop during Christmas, but Wallander knew it would slow down. Not least because it would be hard to track people down, hard to get information.

  It rained in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Wallander picked Linda up at the station. Together they drove out to Löderup. She had bought her grandfather a new scarf. Wallander had bought him a bottle of cognac. Linda and Wallander made dinner while his father sat at the kitchen table and told them about the pyramids. The evening went unusually well, above all because Linda had such a good relationship with her grandfather. Wallander sometimes felt as if he were on the outside. But it didn't bother him. From time to time he thought about the dead sisters, Holm and the plane that had crashed into a field.

  After Wallander and Linda had returned to Ystad they sat up and talked for a long time. Wallander slept late the following morning. He always slept well when Linda was in the apartment. Christmas Day was cold and clear. They took a long walk through Sand Forest. She told him about her plans. Wallander had given her a promise for Christmas. A promise to cover some of the costs, as much as he could afford, if she decided to pursue an apprenticeship in France. He accompanied her to the train station in the late afternoon. He had wanted to drive her to Malmö, but she wanted to take the train. Wallander felt lonely in the evening. He watched an old film on TV and then listened to Rigoletto. Thought that he should have called Rydberg to wish him a merry Christmas. But now it was too late.

  When Wallander looked out of the window on Boxing Day, just after seven in the morning, a gloomy mix of snow and rain was falling over Ystad. He suddenly recalled the warm night air in Cairo. Thought that he should not forget to thank Radwan for his help in some way. He wrote it down on the pad of paper on the kitchen table. Then he cooked himself a substantial breakfast for once.

  It was close to nine when he finally got to the police station. He talked to some of the officers who had worked during the night. Christmas had been unusually calm in Ystad this year. As usual, Christmas Eve had resulted in a number of family quarrels, but nothing had been really serious. Wallander walked down the deserted corridors to his office.

  Now he would take up the murder investigations in earnest again. There were still technically two cases, even though he was convinced that the same person, or people, had killed the Eberhardsson sisters and Yngve Leonard Holm. It was not simply the same weapon and the same style. There was also a common motive. He got himself a cup of coffee in the break room and sat down with his notes. The pyramid with its base. He drew a large question mark in the middle. The apex, which his father had been aiming for, he now had to find himself.

  After two hours of thinking, he was sure. They now had to concentrate most forcefully on the missing link. A pattern, perhaps an organisation, had collapsed when the plane crashed. Then one or several unknown individuals had hastily stepped out of the shadows and acted. They had slain three people.

  Silence, Wallander thought. Perhaps that is what all this is about? To prevent information from trickling out. Dead people do not speak.

  That could be what it was. But it could also be something completely different.

  He went over and stood by the window. The snow was falling more thickly now.

  This will take time, he thought.

  That's the first thing I'll say when we have our next meeting.

  We have to count on the fact that it will take time to solve this case.

  CHAPTER 10

  The night before the twenty-seventh of December Wallander had a nightmare. He was back in Cairo again, in the courtroom. Radwan was no longer at his side. But now he could suddenly understand everything that the prosecutor and judge were saying. His father had been sitting there in handcuffs at his side and Wallander had listened in horror as his father was sentenced to death. He had stood up in order to protest. But no one had heard him. At that point he had kicked himself out of the dream, up to the surface, and when he woke up he was covered in sweat. He lay completely still, staring into the darkness.

  The dream had made him so unsettled that he got out of bed and went to the kitchen. It was still snowing. The street lamp was swaying gently in the wind. It was half past four. He drank a glass of water, then stood for a while fingering a half-empty bottle of whisky. But he let it be. He thought about what Linda had said, that dreams were messengers. Even if dreams were about other people, they consisted foremost of messages to the self. Wallander ha
d always doubted the value of trying to interpret dreams. What could it mean for him to imagine that his father had been sentenced to death? Had the dreams pronounced a death sentence on him? Then he thought that perhaps it had to do with the concern he felt for Rydberg's health. He had another glass of water and went back to bed.

  But sleep would not come. His thoughts wandered. Mona, his father, Linda, Rydberg. And then he was back to his constant point of departure. Work. The murders of the Eberhardsson sisters and Yngve Leonard Holm. The two dead pilots, the one from Spain and the other as yet unidentified. He thought about his sketch. The triangle with a question mark in the middle.

  But now he was lying in darkness, thinking about the fact that a pyramid also has different cornerstones.

  He tossed and turned until six o'clock. Then he got out of bed, ran a bath and made a cup of coffee. The morning paper had already arrived. He turned the pages until he reached the property section. There was nothing of interest to him there today. He took his coffee cup with him into the bathroom. Then he lay and dozed in the warm water until close to six thirty. Thinking about going out into the weather was unpleasant. This endless slush. But now at least he had a car that would presumably start.

  He turned the key in the ignition at a quarter past seven. The engine started at once. He drove to the station and parked as close to the entrance as possible. Then he ran through the snow and slush and almost slipped on the front steps. Martinsson was in reception, skimming the police magazine. He nodded when he spotted Wallander.

  'It says here that we're supposed to get better at everything,' he said with a note of despondence. 'Above all, we're supposed to improve our relations with the general public.'

  'That sounds excellent,' Wallander said.

  He had a recurring memory, something that had happened in Malmö over twenty years ago. He had been accosted by a girl at a cafe who accused him of hitting her with a baton at a Vietnam demonstration. For some reason he had never forgotten this moment. That she had been partly responsible for his almost being stabbed to death with a knife at a later time was of a lesser concern. It was her expression, her complete contempt, that he had never forgotten.

  Martinsson threw the magazine onto the table.

  'Don't you ever think about quitting?' he asked. 'Doing something else?'

  'Every day,' Wallander answered. 'But I don't know what that would be.'

  'One could apply to a private security company,' Martinsson said.

  This surprised Wallander. He had always imagined that Martinsson nurtured a heady dream of one day becoming police chief.

  Then he told him about his visit to the house that Holm had lived in. Martinsson expressed concern when he heard that only the dog had been home.

  'At least two others live there,' Martinsson said. 'A girl around twentyfive. I never saw her. But a man was there. Rolf was his name. Rolf Nyman, I think. I don't remember her name.'

  'There was only a dog,' Wallander repeated. 'It was such a coward it crawled on its belly when I raised my voice.'

  They agreed to wait until around nine before meeting in the conference room. Martinsson was not sure if Svedberg was coming. He had called the night before and said that he had come down with a bad cold and a temperature.

  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.