An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery Read online

  “Yes, do.”

  “Katja Blomberg has been found guilty twice of assault. She’s done time in Hinseberg. She also robbed a bank with a man she was married to for a few years. Now she’s apparently one of several suspects in connection with a robbery from a grocer’s shop in Limhamn. Shall I go on?”

  “Not for the moment.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “We can talk about that later.”

  Wallander hung up and looked at Katja Blomberg, who was studying her nails: they were painted bright red, the shade varying from finger to finger.

  “Your grandfather and your grandmother,” he said. “Somebody must have told you about them. Not least your parents. Your mother. Is she still alive?”

  “She died twenty years ago.”

  “Your father?”

  She looked up from her nails.

  “The last I heard of him was when I was six or seven years old. He was in jail for fraud. I’ve never been in touch with him. Nor him with me. I don’t know if he’s still alive. As far as I’m concerned I don’t mind if he’s dead. If you understand what I mean.”

  “I understand what you mean.”

  “Do you?”

  “This will be over more quickly if you let me ask the questions. Surely your mother must have told you something about your grandparents?”

  “There wasn’t much to say.”

  “But they disappeared. Without trace. Isn’t that something to talk about?”

  “But good Lord! They came back again!”

  Wallander stared at her.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “I want to know what you mean!”

  “They came back. They left the caravan during the night, took some essentials with them, and disappeared. I think they lived on a farm up in Småland for a few years. Then when everything had quietened down they came back, changed their names, altered their hairstyles, and nobody asked any questions about the thefts anymore.”

  “Thefts?”

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “The reason you’re here is so that you can explain it to me.”

  “They had burgled a farmer near here. But then they got cold feet. They took whatever they could carry, pretended to have disappeared, and kept out of the way. I think Richard called himself Arvid and Irina called herself Helena. I only saw them a few times. But I liked them. Grandad died at the beginning of the seventies, and Grandma a few years later. They’re buried in the cemetery at Hässleholm. But not under their real names.”

  Wallander said nothing. He didn’t doubt for a moment that what he had just heard was true. Every single word.

  The abandoned horse and caravan in October 1942 had been a red herring. It had remained a red herring for sixty years.

  There was disappointment, but at the same time relief in the knowledge that they hadn’t wasted a lot of energy unnecessarily.

  “Why are you asking about all this?”

  “An investigation that has to be concluded. Two skeletons have been discovered in somebody’s garden. Perhaps you’ve read about it in the newspapers? I’ll leave the business of the grocer’s shop in Limhamn to my colleagues in Malmö for the time being.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “I heard you say that.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Yes, you can.”

  He accompanied her to reception.

  “I liked them,” she said before leaving. “Both Grandad and Grandma. They were odd people, both secretive and open at the same time. I just wish I could have spent more time with them than turned out to be possible.”

  Wallander watched her walk away in her high-heeled boots. It occurred to him that she was somebody he would never meet again in this life. But not somebody he would forget all about.

  Shortly before twelve he talked briefly to Martinson and Lindman. He explained that the lead had gone cold. They could drop it and move on. Then he informed the prosecutor.

  Wallander took the rest of the day off. He bought a new shirt in a shop down in the square, had a pizza at the restaurant next door, then went home to Mariagatan.

  When Linda came in that evening, he was already asleep.

  CHAPTER 20

  The following day was a clear December day with glittering sunshine. Wallander got up early and went for a long walk by the sea before deciding at eight o’clock that it was time to become a police officer again, and headed for the station. They would be forced to take a step backward, and restart the investigation where they had left it when the Simon Larsson lead cropped up.

  Before he got down to business, however, there was a telephone call he needed to make. He looked up the number. It rang several times before anybody answered.

  “Larsson.”

  “It’s Wallander. Nice to see you the other day.”

  “Ditto.”

  “I just wanted to tell you that we’ve looked into the information you gave us—but there was a natural explanation. Would you like me to tell you what it was?”

  “I’m interested, of course.”

  Wallander spelled it out. Simon Larsson listened in silence.

  “Well, at least I now know what really happened,” he said. “I’m sorry I landed you with unnecessary work.”

  “Nothing is unnecessary,” said Wallander. “You know what being a police officer involves. In many cases it is just as important to eliminate leads as it is to find them.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it was. But I’m so old now that I don’t remember much of my time in the police.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your memory. You’ve proved that already.”

  Wallander could feel that Simon Larsson wanted to continue talking. Even though they had no more to say, he kept the conversation going. Wallander thought of the woman he had seen lying asleep on top of the bed.

  He eventually managed to end the call, and couldn’t help wondering what growing old entailed. How would he manage it himself? Becoming ancient and unable to stop talking?

  At nine o’clock they assembled in the conference room.

  “We’ll have to start up again where we finished,” said Wallander. “There is a solution to this mystery, even if we can’t see it at the moment.”

  “I agree with you,” said Martinson. “Sweden is a small country, but it has unusually good records of the people who live here. It was the same sixty years ago, even if people then didn’t have the personal numbers that accompany us from the cradle to the grave. Somebody must have missed those people. Somebody must have asked after them.”

  Wallander had an idea.

  “You’re right. Somebody ought to have missed them. Two middle-aged people who disappeared. But if we think that nobody actually did miss them after all, that nobody did ask after them—surely that’s meaningful in itself?”

  “Nobody misses them because nobody knows they went missing?”

  “Possibly. It could just as well be that somebody did in fact miss them—but not here.”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  Stefan Lindman joined in the conversation.

  “You’re thinking about the Second World War. We spoke about it earlier. Skåne was an isolated province, surrounded by countries at war. British and German bombers made emergency landings here in our fields, refugees arrived from all over the place.”

  “Something like that, yes,” said Wallander. “I don’t want us to jump to conclusions too soon. I just want us to keep all our options open. There are lots of possible explanations, not just those that our experience tells us are the most likely ones. There might also be an explanation that we haven’t really thought of yet. That’s all I meant.”

  “It wasn’t all that unusual for people to earn a bit of extra cash by looking after and letting rooms to refugees.”

  “Who paid?”

  “The refugees had their own organizations. People who had money helped those who hadn’t. It prod
uced some extra income for farmers—especially as they probably didn’t pay any tax on it.”

  Martinson reached for a file lying on the table.

  “We’ve received an additional report from Stina Hurlén,” he said. “Nothing that changes anything we know already. The only thing is she says that the woman had bad teeth while the man’s were more or less perfect.”

  “Do you think there are dental records that go that far back?”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking about. Nor was Stina Hurlén. It was merely a statement of fact. One of the skulls had lots of mended teeth, the other one had perfect teeth. That also tells a story, even if we don’t know what it is.”

  Wallander noted down the information about the teeth on a sheet of paper in his file.

  “Has she written anything else?”

  “Nothing that seems significant just now. The man had broken his arm at some point. His left arm. That might be helpful to know if we get close to identifying them.”

  “Not if,” said Wallander. “When. In any case, we must find out how things stand with old dental records.”

  They ran through all the investigation material one more time. There were a lot of possibilities that they hadn’t yet started to look into. They broke up as lunch-time approached, having made plans for the next few days.

  Martinson had more to say to Wallander after Stefan Lindman had left.

  “What about the house? What shall we do about that?”

  “It doesn’t seem very important just now. As I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course. But I thought you should have a bit more time. My wife agrees with me. It could be that you’ll view things differently once we’ve identified the skeletons, all being well.”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “I think you should look for another buyer,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to live in a place that’s probably the scene of a crime. Nothing can change that, even if we manage to solve the case.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  Martinson seemed disappointed. But he said nothing, merely left the room. Wallander opened a bottle of mineral water and sat with his feet up on the table.

  He had been on the point of buying a house. But his vision of the house had been undermined by two dead bodies that had been lying in the ground for many years, and now had come up to the surface.

  He wished the house had not been a troll that had suddenly been transformed when exposed to sunlight.

  He couldn’t remember when he had last felt as listless as he did now. What was it due to? Was it the disappointment that he couldn’t manage to shake off? Or was it something else?

  CHAPTER 21

  Many years ago Wallander had learned that one of the manifold virtues a police officer must possess is the ability to be patient with himself. There would always be days when nothing happened, when an investigation had become bogged down and refused to move either forward or backward. All one could do then was to be patient, and wait until a way of solving the problem emerged. It was easy for police officers to become impatient. They could work fast and with great enthusiasm, but they must never become impatient on days when nothing happened.

  Two days passed when nothing happened—not on the surface, at least. Wallander and his colleagues dug deeper and deeper into various archives, searching in basements like animals digging underground passages through the darkness. Occasionally they met over coffee to report on how far they had got, then returned to their own little hideaway.

  Outside the police station the weather seemed unable to make up its mind if it was going to be winter or not. One day it was cold, with snowflakes fluttering to the ground; the next day it was plus temperatures again and relentless rain drifted in from the Baltic.

  It was a few minutes past nine in the morning on December 6 when the telephone on Wallander’s overloaded desk rang. He gave a start, and picked up the receiver. At first he didn’t recognize the voice. It belonged to a woman who spoke with a very marked Scanian accent.

  Then he realized that the person he was speaking to was somebody he had met recently. It was Katja Blomberg.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Thinking and thinking, ever since I spoke to you. And then I read about the missing persons. That was when something struck me. The chest in the attic.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

  “I’ve kept everything I inherited from my grandparents in an old chest. It’s been standing in the attic ever since they died. I thought I recognized the name Ludvig Hansson: it was his house they burgled. Then I looked again in the old chest. I haven’t done that for many years. There were quite a lot of diaries in a box in there. Or perhaps I ought to call them almanacs. They belonged to Ludvig Hansson. I thought they might be something you ought to take a look at.”

  “Almanacs?”

  “He noted down when he sowed and when he harvested. He recorded the price he had to pay for things. But he also wrote about a few other things as well.”

  “What things?”

  “About his family and friends, and people who came to visit him.”

  Wallander started to become interested.

  “So he kept these almanacs during the war years, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d certainly like to look at them. Preferably without delay.”

  “I could call in right away if you’d like me to.”

  An hour later Katja Blomberg was sitting at his desk again, smoking. On the desk in front of her was an old wooden box.

  The box contained almanacs with black leather covers. The year was printed in gold on the front cover of each. Ludvig Hansson had written his name on the title pages. There were four almanacs, dated 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1944. The box also contained some old bills. Wallander put on his glasses and started leafing through the almanacs. He started with the one for 1941 and worked through the rest. Sure enough, there was information about sowing and harvesting, a broken plow and a horse that “died mysteriously on September 12.” There were records about cows and volumes of milk, the slaughter of pigs and the selling of eggs. Occasionally Ludvig Hansson made notes about extreme temperatures. A week in December 1943 had been “hellish cold,” while July 1942 was so dry that Hansson “despaired about the harvest.”

  Wallander read. He noted that various people’s birthdays were celebrated, and occasionally there were funerals that were either “painful” or “too long.” All the time Katja sat there, chain-smoking.

  Wallander moved on to the last of the almanacs, the one for 1944, without feeling that he had become better acquainted with Ludvig Hansson; neither had he found any details that could throw light on the discovery of the skeletons.

  But suddenly he paused at the entry for May 12, 1944. Hansson had noted down that “the Estonians have arrived. Three of them: father, mother and son. Kaarin, Elmo and Ivar Pihlak. An advance has been paid.” Wallander frowned. Who were these Estonians? What had been paid in advance, and why? He continued reading slowly. Another note on August 14 said: “payments on time again. The Estonians pleasant and cause no trouble. Good business.” What exactly had been good business? He continued reading.

  It was not until November 20 that there was another note—and it was the last one. “They have left. Accommodation a mess.”

  Wallander looked through the loose papers in the box without finding anything of note.

  “I need to keep these almanacs,” he said. “You can have the box back, of course.”

  “Was there anything of interest?” Katja Blomberg asked.

  “Perhaps. In 1944 an Estonian family appears to have been living there. Between May 12 and the end of November.”

  Wallander thanked her, and left the almanacs lying on the desk. Could this be the solution? he wondered. An Estonian family living at the farm in 1944. But they leave, they don’t die. Ludvig Hansson can hardly have killed them.

  Martinson was about to
go and eat when Wallander came to his office. Wallander asked him to delay his lunch. Stefan Lindman was too busy ferreting away in some of the endless registers and archives. They sat down in Martinson’s office. Wallander did the talking while Martinson leafed through the almanacs.

  Wallander finished his account of what he had discovered. Martinson seemed doubtful.

  “It doesn’t seem all that credible.”

  “It’s the first bit of new concrete information we have.”

  “Three people. A whole family. We’ve found two skeletons. Nyberg is sure that there aren’t any more.”

  “There could be another body buried somewhere else.”

  “If we assume that they were staying in Sweden illegally, or in secret, it won’t be so easy to track them down.”

  “Even so, we’ve got some names. Three names. Kaarin, Elmo and Ivar Pihlak. I’m going to look into them anyway, and see if we can come up with anything.”

  Martinson stood up and prepared to leave for his delayed lunch.

  “If I were you I’d start with the annual census,” he said. “Even if it’s not all that likely they’ll be in it.”

  “I can’t think of any better place to start,” said Wallander. “Then we’ll see.”

  Wallander left the police station. He thought he ought to eat. There was a lot he ought to do.

  For a brief moment he felt listless again as he sat in the driving seat of his car with the key in his hand. Then he got a grip of himself, switched on the engine and set off to trace the Estonian family.

  CHAPTER 22

  The woman behind the counter at the local tax office listened sympathetically to what he had to say, but she was not exactly encouraging once she had heard the whole story.

  “It will probably be difficult,” she said. “We’ve had people here before looking for traces of people from the Baltic States who had been in Skåne during the war years. You’re the first police officer, but there have been others—mainly relatives. We very rarely find them.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Some probably gave false names. Many of them didn’t have any identity documents at all when they arrived. But of course the most important reason is that so much has happened in the Baltic States, both during and after the war.”