An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery (8 page)

“Why are you so sure? Please forgive me for asking the question.”

“My father was a friendly, peaceful man. He never touched another person. I can’t remember him ever smacking one of my brothers. He simply lacked the ability to get angry. Surely you must have a streak of uncontrolled fury in order to kill another human being? I think so in any case.”

For now, Wallander had only one question left to ask.

“Your brothers and sister are dead—but is there anybody else you think I ought to talk to? Somebody who might have some memory of this?”

“It’s all so long ago. Everybody from my parents’ generation died ages ago. As you say, my brothers and sister are also dead. I’ve no idea who else might be able to help you.”

Wallander stood up. He shook hands with the two women. Then he and Linda left the apartment.

When they came out into the street below, she stood in front of him.

“I don’t want a dad who starts drooling at the sight of a pretty young girl who is younger than I am.”

Wallander reacted vehemently.

“What are you trying to suggest? I didn’t drool. I thought she was pretty, yes. But don’t try to tell me that I did anything improper. If you do, you can take the train back to Ystad. And you can move out of my apartment and live somewhere else.”

Wallander strode off. She didn’t catch up with him until he reached the car. She stood in front of him again.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I don’t want you to tell me how to behave. I don’t want you forcing me to be somebody I’m not.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“I heard you.”

Linda wanted to say something else, but Wallander held up his hand. That was enough. There was no need to say any more.

They drove back to Ystad. They didn’t start talking again until after they had passed Svaneholm. Linda agreed with him that, despite everything, something must have happened during the years when Ludvig Hansson was living alone on his farm.

Wallander tried hard to envisage what it might have been, but he could see nothing. Only that hand sticking up out of the ground.

The wind was even stronger now. It struck him that winter was just around the corner.

The following day, Friday, November 8, Wallander woke up early. He was sweaty. He tried to remember what he had been dreaming about—it was something to do with Linda, perhaps a rerun of the confrontation they had had the previous day. But his memory was empty. The dream had closed all the doors surrounding it.

It was ten minutes to five. He lay there in the darkness. The rain was pounding against his bedroom window. He tried to go back to sleep, but failed. After tossing and turning until six o’clock, he got up. He paused outside Linda’s door: she was asleep, snoring softly.

He made some coffee and sat down in the kitchen. The rain was coming and going. Without really thinking about it, he decided to begin his working day by making
another visit to the property where they had found the skeleton. He had no idea what he hoped to gain by doing so, but he often returned to crime scenes, not least to reassess his first impressions.

He left Ystad half an hour later, and when he arrived at the house in Löderup it wasn’t yet light. The police tape was still in place, cordoning off the scene. He walked slowly around the house and garden. All the time he was looking out for something he hadn’t noticed before. He had no idea what that might be. Something that didn’t fit in, something that stood out. At the same time he tried to imagine a possible sequence of events.

Once upon a time a woman lived here, but never left the place. Yet somebody must have wondered what had happened to her. And it is obvious that nobody has ever been here, looking for her. Nobody has suspected anything that has led to the police investigating this property
.

He paused next to the grave, which was now covered by a dirty tarpaulin.

Why was the body buried just here? The garden is large. Somebody must have thought about alternatives, and made a decision. Here, just here, not anywhere else
.

Wallander started walking again, but stored away in his memory the questions he had formulated. He could hear a tractor in the background. A lone red kite was soaring up above, then swooped down onto one of the fields that surrounded the property. He went back to the grave, and looked around. He suddenly noticed a
place next to some currant bushes. At first he didn’t know what had attracted his attention: it was something to do with the relationship of the bushes to one another. A characteristic of the garden as a whole was symmetry: everything was planted in a way that created a pattern. Even though the garden was neglected and very overgrown, he could still see all those patterns. And there was something about the currant bushes that didn’t fit in.

The bushes were an exception that went against the rule that held sway in the garden as a whole.

After a few minutes the penny dropped. It wasn’t a pattern that had been broken: it was a pattern that was no longer there. Several currant bushes were in the wrong place, in this garden that was based on a pattern of straight lines.

He went back and examined the area more closely. There was no doubt about it, some of the bushes were in the wrong place. But as far as he could see the bushes had not been planted at different times—they all seemed to be the same age.

He thought for a while. The only explanation he could think of was that at some point the bushes had been dug up, and then replanted by somebody with no sense of the garden’s symmetry.

But then it occurred to him that there might be another explanation. Whoever dug up the bushes and then replanted them might have been in a hurry.

It was starting to get light now. It was almost eight o’clock. He sat down on one of the moss-covered stone chairs and continued to study the currant bushes. Was he just imagining it all, despite everything?

After another quarter of an hour he was certain. The haphazard planting of the currant bushes told a story. About somebody who was either careless, or had been in a hurry. Or of course the person might come into both categories.

He took out his cell phone and rang Nyberg, who had just arrived at the police station.

“I’m sorry I rang you so late the other day,” said Wallander.

“If you were really sorry you’d have stopped ages ago ringing me at all hours of the day and night. You’ve frequently rung me at four or five in the morning without having any questions that couldn’t have waited until a decent time of day. I don’t recall you apologizing any of those times.”

“Perhaps I’ve become a better person.”

“Don’t talk shit! What do you want?”

Wallander told him where he was, and about his feeling that something was wrong. Nyberg was a person who would understand the significance of currant bushes planted in the wrong place.

“I’ll come out there,” said Nyberg when Wallander had finished. “But I’ll be on my own. Do you have a spade in your car?”

“No. But no doubt there’ll be one in the shed somewhere.”

“That’s not what I meant. I have my own spade. I just wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t start rooting around yourself before I got there.”

“I’ll do nothing at all until you arrive.”

They hung up. Wallander sat in his car, as he was feeling cold. He listened somewhat absentmindedly to the car radio. Somebody was going on about a new infectious disease that they suspected was spread by common ticks.

He switched off the radio and waited.

Nineteen minutes later Nyberg turned into the yard. He was wearing Wellington boots, overalls and a strange old hunting hat pulled down over his ears. He took a spade out of the trunk.

“I suppose we can be pleased that you didn’t stumble over that hand after the frost had made it impossible to dig in the soil.”

“Surely the ground doesn’t get frozen before Christmas in these parts? If it ever does.”

Nyberg mumbled something inaudible in response. They went to the spot in question at the back of the house. Wallander could see that Nyberg had understood the significance of his observations about the currant bushes without needing further explanation. Nyberg tested the ground with the edge of his spade, as if he were looking for something.

“The soil is pretty tightly packed,” he said. “Which
suggests that it’s been a long time since anybody was digging here. The roots from the bushes bind the soil together.”

He started digging. Wallander stood to one side, watching. After only a few minutes, Nyberg stopped digging and pointed down at the soil. He picked up something that looked like a stone and handed it to Wallander.

It was a tooth. A human tooth.

Two days later, the whole of Karl Eriksson’s garden had been dug up. At the spot where Nyberg had picked up the tooth and handed it to Wallander, they had found a skeleton that Stina Hurlén and other forensic medicine experts had concluded was the remains of a man. He was also in his fifties at the time of death, and had also been lying in that grave for a long time. But there was an injury to his skull that suggested a blow from a heavy instrument.

There had naturally been an outburst of excitement when news of the discovery of a second skeleton reached the mass media. Large black headlines proclaimed “
THE GARDEN OF DEATH
” or “
DEATH IN THE CURRANT BUSHES
.”

Lisa Holgersson could no longer limit the allocation of resources. Wallander was put in charge of the case along with a female prosecutor, who had just returned from study leave during which she had undergone further training. She told Wallander to take his time, and to be thorough in all aspects of the investigation. Until the identity of those who had been buried in the garden had been established, there was very little that could be done with regard to finding a culprit.

Stefan Lindman continued to search through registers and old cases which might possibly give them a clue they could follow up. At first they had been looking for one woman. Now it was two missing persons. The general public came up with various tips—shadows of people who had disappeared mysteriously many years ago. Wallander allocated another police officer to assist Lindman in making a rough preliminary assessment of all the tips they received.

After two weeks, they still hadn’t got anywhere when it came to identifying the two dead bodies. Wallander gathered together all his assistants one Thursday afternoon in the large conference room, asked everybody to switch off their cell phones, and gave a thorough account of what had happened so far. They went back to the start, reassessed the forensic and medical reports, and listened to what Wallander described as a brilliant presentation by Stefan Lindman. After four hours, when
everything had been discussed ad nauseam, Wallander adjourned the meeting briefly and aired the room, then reassembled everybody for a summary.

He used five words to say what they all knew already.

We’re still at square one
.

They had two skeletons, the remains of two middle-aged people who had been murdered. But they had no identities, and didn’t even have any potentially rewarding leads to follow up.

“The past has closed all doors behind it,” said Wallander when the formal summary was complete and they were talking more freely about what had happened.

There was no need to allocate new duties—they were already following the only routes open to them. They would make no progress until they discovered new information about who these two people could have been.

During the two weeks that had passed Wallander and Martinson had tried, with increasing levels of impatience, to find people who could remember a little more about the years during the war when Ludvig Hansson had lived alone on the farm. But they were all dead. Wallander had a recurrent, creepy feeling that what he really ought to be doing was to set up interrogations with all the gravestones in nearby cemeteries. That was where all conceivable witnesses, and any others who might have been involved, were to be found now. There might even be a murderer lying there, with all the answers Wallander and his colleagues were looking for.

Martinson shared his superior’s feelings with regard to the seemingly hopeless search for some living person who could be of assistance to them. But they did not give up, of course. They followed their routines, kept sifting through various archives and old criminal investigations—looking for people who might still be alive and could possibly have something of interest to tell them.

One evening when Wallander returned home with a headache, Linda sat down opposite him at the kitchen table and asked how things were going.

“We’re not giving up,” he said. “We never give up.”

She asked no more questions. She knew her father.

He had said all he had to say.

The next day, November 29, it was snowing heavily over Skåne. A storm was blowing in from the west, and flights were disrupted at Sturup airport for several hours. Lots of cars skidded off the road between Malmö and Ystad. But after a few hours, the strong wind suddenly dropped, it became warmer, and it began to rain.

Wallander stood at his window in the police station, gazing out over the road and noting how the snow suddenly became rain. The telephone rang. As usual he gave a start. He answered it.

“It’s Simon,” said a voice.

“Simon?”

“Simon Larsson. Once upon a time we used to be colleagues.”

Wallander thought at first that he had misunderstood what had been said. Simon Larsson had been a police officer when Wallander had come to Ystad from Malmö. That was a long time ago. Simon Larsson had been old even then. Two years after Wallander’s arrival in Ystad Larsson had retired and been formally thanked at a party hosted by the then chief of police. As far as Wallander was aware, Simon Larsson had never set foot inside the police station since then. He had severed all contact. Wallander had heard a rumor that Larsson had an apple orchard just north of Simrishamn to which he devoted all his time.