The White Lioness (34 page)

Konovalenko repeated his question. Mabasha gave his negative, defiant response. Then Konovalenko raised his pistol and shot Mabasha in the head.

Wallander yelled and fired. But it was too late. Mabasha had fallen backwards and was lying motionless. Wallander's shot had missed Konovalenko and now the real threat was Rykoff's automatic pistol. He aimed at the fat man and fired shot after shot. To his surprise, he saw Rykoff twitch, then fall in a heap. When Wallander turned his aim back to Konovalenko, he saw that the Russian had lifted Mabasha and was using him as a shield as he shuffled backwards to the beach. Mabasha was obviously dead, but Wallander could not bring himself to shoot. He stood up and yelled at Konovalenko to drop his gun and give himself up. His answer came in the form of a bullet. Wallander flung himself to one side. Mabasha's body had saved him. Not even Konovalenko could take a steady aim while holding a heavy corpse upright in front of him. In the distance he could hear a single siren approaching. The fog grew thicker as Konovalenko got closer to the sea. Wallander followed him, both of his weapons at the ready. Suddenly Konovalenko dropped the dead body and disappeared down the slope. Just then Wallander heard a sheep bleat behind him. He spun around and raised both the pistol and the shotgun.

Then he recognised Martinsson and Svedberg emerging from out of the fog. Their faces were pictures of astonished horror.

"Put your guns down!" Martinsson yelled. "It's us, can't you see!"

Wallander knew Konovalenko was about to escape yet again. There was no time for explanations.

"Stay where you are," he yelled. "Don't follow me!"

Then he started backing away, still pointing his guns. Martinsson and Svedberg did not move a muscle. Then he disappeared into the fog. Martinsson and Svedberg looked at each other in horror.

"Was that really Kurt?" Svedberg wondered.

"Yeah," Martinsson said. "But he seemed out of his mind."

"He's alive," Svedberg said. "He's still alive despite everything."

Cautiously they approached the slope down to the beach where Wallander had disappeared. They could detect no movement in the fog, but could hear the gentle lapping of the sea on the sand.

Martinsson contacted Bjork, giving him precise directions, and called for ambulances.

"What about Wallander?" Bjork said.

"He's still in one piece," Martinsson said. "But I can't tell you where he is just now." He switched off his walkie-talkie, before Bjork could ask any more questions. He found Svedberg standing over the man Wallander had killed. Two entry marks just above the man's navel.

"We'll have to tell Bjork," Martinsson said. "Wallander seemed completely out of his mind." Svedberg agreed. They had no choice. Then they made their way to where they had last seen Wallander and found the second body.

"The man without a finger," Martinsson said. "And now he's dead." He bent down and pointed to the bullet hole in his forehead. They were thinking the same thing. Louise Akerblom.

Then the police cars arrived, followed by two ambulances. As the examination of the two bodies got under way, Svedberg and Martinsson took Bjork aside. They told him what they had seen. Bjork looked at them doubtfully.

"This all sounds very strange," he said. "Kurt can be pretty odd at times, but I can't imagine him going clean off his head."

"You should have seen what he looked like," Svedberg said. "He seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown. He pointed guns at us. He had one in each hand."

Bjork shook his head. "And then he disappeared along the beach?"

"He was following Konovalenko," Martinsson said.

Bjork said nothing, trying to let what he had heard sink in.

"We'd better send in dog patrols," he said after a few moments. "Set up roadblocks, and call in helicopters as soon as it gets light and the fog lifts."

A single shot rang out in the fog. It came from the beach, somewhere to the east of where they were standing. Everything went very quiet. Police, ambulance men and dogs all waited to see what would happen next. Finally a sheep bleated. The desolate sound made Martinsson shudder.

"We've got to help Kurt," he said eventually. "He's on his own out there in the fog. He's up against a man who won't hesitate to kill him. We've got to give him help. Now, Otto."

Svedberg had never heard Martinsson call Bjork by his first name before. Even Bjork was startled, as if he did not realise at first who Martinsson was talking to.

"Dog handlers with bulletproof vests," he said.

Within a short space of time the hunt was on. The dogs picked up the scent immediately, and started straining at their leashes. Martinsson and Svedberg followed close on the heels of the dog handlers.

About 200 metres from where the body of the black man was found the dogs discovered a patch of blood in the sand. They searched around in circles without finding anything else until one of the dogs set off in a northerly direction. They were on the perimeter of the training ground, following the fence. The trail the dogs found led over the road and then towards Sandhammaren.

After a couple of kilometres the trail fizzled out. The dogs whimpered and started backtracking the way they had come.

"What's going on?" Martinsson asked one of the handlers.

He shook his head. "The trail's gone cold," he said.

"Wallander can't have just gone up in smoke?"

"That's what it looks like," the handler said.

They kept on searching, and then dawn came. Roadblocks were erected. The whole southern Swedish police force was involved one way or another in the hunt for Konovalenko and Wallander. When the fog lifted, helicopters joined the search. But they found nothing. The two men had disappeared.

By 9 a.m. Svedberg and Martinsson were sitting with Bjork in the conference room, all nursing cups of coffee. They were cold, very tired and soaked through from the fog. Martinsson had also the unmistakeable symptoms of a cold coming on.

"What do I tell the Commissioner?" Bjork said.

"Sometimes it's best to give it to him straight," Martinsson said.

Bjork shook his head. "Can't you just see the headlines? 'Crazed detective is Swedish police secret weapon in hunt for police killer.'"

"A headline has to be short," Svedberg said.

Bjork stood up. "Go home and get something to eat," he said. "Get changed. Then we have to get going again."

Martinsson raised his hand, as if in a classroom. "I think I'll drive out to his father's place at Loderup. His daughter's there. She might be able to tell us something useful."

"You do that," Bjork said. "But get moving." Then he went to his office and called the Commissioner.

When eventually he managed to bring the conversation to an end, he was seething with indignation, and he had been - just as he had anticipated - hauled over the coals. His face was red with anger.

He had received the negative criticism he was expecting.

Martinsson was sitting in the kitchen of the house in Osterlen. Wallander's daughter was making coffee as they talked. When he arrived, he went straight out to the studio to say hello to Wallander's father. He said nothing to him about what had happened during the night, however. He wanted to talk to the daughter first.

He could see she was shocked. There were tears in her eyes.

"I should really have been sleeping at the apartment on Mariagatan last night, too," she said.

She served him coffee. He noticed her hands were shaking.

"I don't understand it all," she said. "That he's dead. Victor Mabasha. I just don't understand it."

Martinsson mumbled something vague in reply. He suspected she could tell him quite a lot about what had been going on between her father and the African. Obviously it had not been her Kenyan boyfriend in Wallander's car a few days earlier. But why had he lied?

"You've got to find Papa before anything worse happens," she said, interrupting his train of thought.

"We'll do what we can," Martinsson said.

"That's not good enough," she said. "You have to do much more."

Martinsson nodded. "Right," he said. "We'll do more than we can."

Martinsson left the house half an hour later. She had undertaken to tell her grandfather what had happened. He in turn had promised to keep her informed as things developed. Then he drove back to Ystad.

After lunch Bjork sat down with Svedberg and Martinsson in the conference room. Bjork did something most unusual. He locked the door.

"We need to be undisturbed," he said. "It's essential that we put a stop to this catastrophic mess before we lose control."

Martinsson and Svedberg stared down at the table. Neither of them knew what he was going to say next.

"Have either of you noticed any signs that Kurt was losing his mind?" Bjork said. "You must have seen something. I've always thought he could be strange, but you're the ones who work with him on a daily basis."

"I don't think he's out of his mind," Martinsson said after a long pause. "Maybe he's overworked?"

"If that were anything to go by every police officer in the country would go off his rocker now and then," Bjork said. "And they don't. Of course he's out of his mind. Or mentally unbalanced, if that sounds better. Does it run in the family? Didn't somebody find his father wandering around in a field a year or two back?"

"He was drunk," Martinsson said. "Or temporarily senile. Kurt isn't suffering from senility."

"Do you think he might have Alzheimer's?" Bjork said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Svedberg said suddenly. "For God's sake, let's stick to the facts. Whether or not Kurt has had some kind of breakdown is something only a doctor can decide. Our job is to find him. We know he was involved in a shoot-out in which two people died. We saw him out there in the training ground. He pointed his gun at us. But he wasn't dangerous. It was more like desperation. Or confusion. I'm not sure which. Then he disappeared."

Martinsson nodded slowly. "Kurt wasn't at the scene by chance," he said thoughtfully. "His apartment had been attacked. We must assume the black man was there with him. What happened next we can only guess. But Kurt must be onto something, something he never had a chance to tell us about. Or maybe something he chose not to tell us about for the moment. We know he does that sometimes, and we get irritated. But right now only one thing matters, and that is finding him."

"I never thought I'd have to do anything like this," Bjork said eventually. Martinsson and Svedberg at once understood what he meant.

"But you've got to do it," Svedberg said. "You have to get the whole force looking for him. Put out an APB."

"Awful," Bjork muttered. "But I have no choice." There was nothing else to say. With a heavy heart, Bjork went back to his office to put out an APB on his colleague and friend, Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander.

It was May 15, 1992. Spring had truly arrived in Skane. It was a very hot day. In the late afternoon a thunderstorm moved in over Ystad.

The White Lioness

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The lioness looked pure white in the light of the moon. Georg Scheepers held his breath as he stood in the back of the safari vehicle. She was lying by the river, not more than 30 paces away, motionless. He glanced at his wife Judith, standing beside him. He could tell she was scared. "It's not dangerous," he said. "She won't hurt us."

In the Kruger National Park, animals were used to people watching them from the back of open safari vehicles, even at midnight. But he could not forget that the lioness was unpredictable, governed by instinct and nothing else. She was young. Her strength and speed would never be greater than they were now. It would take her a very few seconds to shake herself out of her sprawling languor and bound to their car. The black driver did not seem to be alert. Neither of them carried a gun.

The lioness seemed to have read his thoughts. She lifted her head and stared at the car. Judith took hold of his arm. The lioness was looking straight at them. The moonlight was reflected in her eyes, making them luminous. Scheepers' heart beat faster. He wished the driver would start the engine, but perhaps - it occurred to Scheepers in horror - the man had fallen asleep.

At that moment the lioness got up from the sand. She never took her eyes off the people in the car for a second. Scheepers knew there was such a thing as freezing. You could think about being afraid and running away, but you had no strength to move.

She stood absolutely still, watching them. Her powerful shoulder muscles rippled under her skin. He thought how beautiful she was. He also thought that she was first and foremost a beast of prey. Being white was secondary. That thought stuck fast in his mind. It was a sort of reminder to himself of something he had forgotten about. He couldn't remember what.

"Why doesn't he drive away?" Judith whispered.

"It's not dangerous," he said. "She won't come over here."

The lioness stood still, watching the people in the car parked by the water's edge. The moonlight was very bright. The night was clear, and it was warm. Somewhere in the dark river they could hear the lazy sounds of hippos moving.

It seemed to Scheepers that the scene was a reminder. The feeling of imminent danger, which could at any moment become uncontrollable violence, was the everyday state of affairs in his country. Everybody waiting for something to happen, the creature watching them. It was like being there on the river bank, watched by a lion.

She was an albino. He thought of the myths attached to albino people and animals: that their strength was mighty, they could never die.

Suddenly the lioness moved, came straight towards them. Her concentration was unbroken, her movements stealthy. The driver hastily started the engine and switched on the headlights. The light blinded her. She stopped in mid-movement, one paw in the air. Scheepers felt his wife's fingernails piercing his khaki shirt. Drive, he thought. Go now, before she attacks. The driver engaged reverse. The engine coughed. Scheepers thought his heart would stop there and then when the engine almost died. But the driver revved the engine and the car started rolling backwards. The lioness turned her head to one side to avoid being blinded.

It was all over. Judith's fingernails were no longer digging into his arm. They clung to the rail as the safari vehicle bumped and jerked its way back to the bungalow where they were staying. The midnight adventure would soon be over, but the memory of the lioness, and the thoughts her lying there by the river aroused, would stay with him.

Scheepers had suggested to his wife they should go up to the Kruger for a few days. He had spent a week or more trying to sort and make sense of the papers van Heerden left at his death. They would be away on Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday, May 17, he would try to master van Heerden's computer files. He wanted to do that when nobody was about. The police investigators had made sure all his material, all his disks, had been sent to the public prosecutor's office. His own chief, Verwey, had given the order for the intelligence service to hand over the material. Officially Verwey, in his capacity as chief public prosecutor of Johannesburg, should be going through the material himself. NIS had immediately classified it as top secret. When van Heerden's superiors refused to release the material until their own people had gone through it, Verwey threw a fit and at once got on to the Minister of Justice. A few hours later NIS relented. The material would be Verwey's responsibility, but it was Scheepers who would go through it.

They left Johannesburg early on the morning of Friday, May 15. They took the N4 and entered the Kruger National Park at the Nambi Gate. Judith had booked a bungalow in one of the remote camps, Nwanetsi, close to the Mozambique border. They had been there several times and liked going back. The camp appealed primarily to guests who went to bed early and got up at dawn to see the animals coming to the river to drink. During their two days there they were out on game drives all the time. They delighted in the animals and the scenery. After meals Judith would bury her head in one of the books she had brought, while Scheepers thought through what he now knew about van Heerden and his secret work.

He had started methodically, going through van Heerden's filing cabinet, and very soon realised he would have to step up his ability to read between the lines. In among formal memoranda and reports he found loose scraps of paper with scribbled notes. Making sense of them was slow work; the handwriting called to mind the work of a pedantic schoolteacher. They seemed to be sketches for poems, lyrical insights, sketches for metaphors and images. It was when he tried to penetrate this informal part of van Heerden's work that he had a premonition that something was going to happen. The reports, memos and loose notes -
divine poems
, as he began to regard them - went back a long way. At first they were often precise observations and reflections expressed in a cool, neutral style. But about six months before van Heerden died, a different, darker tone had crept into his thoughts. Something had changed dramatically either in his work or his private life. What had previously been certain became unsure, the clear voice became hesitant, tenuous. Scheepers thought he could see another change too. Before, the loose papers had been haphazard. From now on van Heerden noted down the date and sometimes even the time. Van Heerden had often worked late into the night. Many of the notes were timed after midnight. It all started to look like a poetically expressed diary. He tried to find a consistent theme as a starting point. Because van Heerden never referred to his private life, Scheepers assumed he was only writing about what happened at work. There was nothing concrete to guide him, only synonyms and parallels. Obviously,
Homeland
stood for South Africa. But who was
The Chameleon
? Who were
The Mother and Child
? Van Heerden had no wife or child, according to what Chief Inspector Borstlap of the Johannesburg police had written in a memo.

Van Heerden's language was evasive, as if he would prefer not to be associated with what he was writing. Scheepers often sensed a note of danger threatening. Sometimes a hint of confession. He wrote about a kingdom of death, seeming to imply that we all had it inside ourselves. In van Heerden there were feelings of guilt and sorrow, which grew dramatically during his last weeks.

He wrote all the time about the blacks, the whites, the
Boers
, God and forgiveness. But nowhere did he use the words conspiracy or plot. The thing I'm supposed to be looking for, the thing van Heerden warned President de Klerk about.
Why is there nothing about it
?

On the Thursday evening, the day before he and Judith left for Nwanetsi, he stayed in his office until very late. He had switched off all the lights apart from his desk lamp. Now and then he heard the guards talking outside his window, which he had left ajar.

Pieter van Heerden had been the ideal loyal servant, he thought. In the course of his work for the intelligence service that was growing more divided, acting more autonomously, he had come across something significant. A conspiracy against the state. A conspiracy whose aim was somehow or other to spark off a coup d'etat. Van Heerden was attempting to track the core of the conspiracy. And yet he wrote poems about his anxieties and about the kingdom of death he had discovered inside himself.

Scheepers looked at his filing cabinet where he had locked the disks Verwey had demanded of van Heerden's superiors. That is where the solution must be, he thought. Van Heerden's increasingly introspective musings on loose scraps of paper could only be a part of the whole picture. The truth must be in his disks.

They left the Kruger Park early on Sunday, May 17. He took Judith home, and after breakfast he drove to the public prosecutors' office. The city centre was deserted, as if it had been evacuated and the people would never return. The armed guards let him in, and he walked along the echoing corridor.

The moment he walked through the door, he knew someone had been in his office. The smallest traces betrayed it. Presumably the cleaners, but he could not be sure of that. I'm letting my assignment get to me, he said to himself. Van Heerden's constant fear of being watched, threatened, is starting to affect me too.

He took off his jacket and opened his filing cabinet. Then he slid the first disk into his computer. After two hours' work he decided that the files revealed nothing significant, but he was struck by how immaculately everything was organised.

There was one disk left. Scheepers was sure that this was where van Heerden's secret testimony was to be found. The blinking message on his screen demanded a password before the disk could be opened. This is impossible, Scheepers thought. I could run the disk with a programme containing a whole dictionary. But is the password in English or Afrikaans? And surely, van Heerden would not lock his most vital diskette with a trivial password.

Scheepers rolled up his shirtsleeves, filled his coffee cup from the thermos he had brought with him, and started again looking through the loose papers. He was concerned that van Heerden might have programmed the disk so that it erased everything of its own accord after a certain number of wrong choices, but he had no option but to persevere.

By mid-afternoon, he was on the point of giving up. He had run out of ideas. He also felt that he was nowhere near finding the context even. Without expecting any particular help he turned to the memos and investigation documents he had received from Chief Inspector Borstlap. Maybe there would be something there which could help him. He read the autopsy report with distaste and looked at the photographs of the dead man. The long-winded police report gave him no clues nor could it convince him that van Heerden's death was simply a case of aggravated robbery after all.

The last item in Borstlap's file was an inventory of what the police had found in his office. Borstlap had made the comment that, of course, there was no way of knowing if van Heerden's superiors had removed any papers or objects they considered unsuitable for the police to get their hands on. He glanced casually down the list of ashtrays, framed photographs of his parents, some lithographs, a pen rack, diaries, blotting pad. He was just going to put it on one side when he noticed, among the items listed, a small ivory carving of an antelope.
Valuable, antique
, Borstlap had noted.

He typed
antelope
on the keyboard. The computer responded by asking for the correct password. Then he typed
kudu
. Same response. He picked up the telephone and called Judith.

"I need your help," he said. "Can you look up antelopes in our wildlife encyclopaedia?"

"What on earth are you doing?" she said.

"I am trying to write a paper on the development of our antelope species," he said. "I just want to be sure I don't forget any."

She read out the various species of antelope for him.

"When will you be home?" she asked, when she had finished.

"Either pretty soon, or very late," he said. "I'll let you know." As soon as he had rung off he knew which word it must be.
Springbok
, he thought to himself. National symbol. Precious carving on his desk. He keyed the word in slowly, pausing for a moment before the last letter. The computer responded at once. Negative.

One more possibility, he thought. Same word in Afrikaans. He keyed in
steenbok
. Immediately the screen flashed and a list of contents appeared. He had cracked it.

He noticed he was sweating. The elation of a criminal when he's just opened a bank vault, he thought. At almost 1 a.m., when he came to the end of the texts, he was absolutely sure of two things: van Heerden had been murdered because of the work he was doing; second, his own premonition of imminent danger was justified.

He leaned back in his chair and stretched. Then he shuddered.Van Heerden had compiled his notes with precision. He was apparently a split personality. The further he penetrated into the conspiracy, the deeper he penetrated his own real life. The world depicted in the loose sheets of paper, and the surgical clarity of the records on the disk, were both aspects of the same person.

In a sense van Heerden had been close to his own destruction.

He stood up and walked to the window. He could hear police sirens in the distance.