One Step Behind (24 page)

"There will be a press conference at 11 a.m.," Wallander said. "I think we should reveal these latest findings to the press and have pictures of the guns published."

"Do we have any pictures of them available now?"

"We'll get them tomorrow at the latest." Thurnberg made no objections, and said he would participate in the press conference. They kept the conversation brief, but Wallander noticed by the end that he had broken into a sweat.

They held the press conference in the largest room available. Wallander couldn't remember another case ever getting so much attention. As usual he got terribly nervous when he walked up to the podium. To his surprise, Thurnberg began. That had never happened in all the years he had worked there. Per Åkeson always let Wallander or the chief of police take on that task. Thurnberg spoke as if he was accustomed to speaking to the press. It's a new era, Wallander thought. He wasn't sure that he didn't feel a tiny bit envious. He listened carefully to what Thurnberg said, and couldn't deny that he expressed himself well.

Next it was his turn to speak. He had made some notes on a piece of paper to remind himself of what to say, but now, naturally, couldn't find it. He told them they had traced the murder weapons to Ludvika, with a possible link to a robbery in Orsa. He also told them that they were still waiting for a positive ID on the weapon used on Bärnsö Island in the Östergötland archipelago. As he spoke he thought of Westin, the postman who had taken him out to the island. Why he thought of him at that moment he couldn't say. He also talked about the findings regarding the stolen boat. When he finished, there were many questions. Thurnberg handled most of them, with Wallander jumping in from time to time. Martinsson was listening to the proceedings from the very back of the room.

Finally a woman from one of the evening papers indicated that she wanted to ask a question. Wallander had never seen her before.

"Would it be accurate to say that the police have no leads at this time?" she said, turning directly to Wallander.

"We have many leads," Wallander said. "We're just not close to making an arrest."

"It seems to me that the police investigation hasn't yielded any results. It seems more than likely that this killer will strike again. After all, I think it's clear to all of us that we're dealing with a madman."

"We don't know that," Wallander answered. "That's why we're keeping our approach as comprehensive as we can."

"That sounds like a strategy," the reporter said. "But it could also give the impression that you don't know where to turn, that you're helpless."

Wallander glanced at Thurnberg, who encouraged him to continue with an almost invisible nod of his head.

"The police are never helpless," Wallander said. "If we were, we wouldn't be police officers."

"Don't you agree that you're looking for a madman?"

"No."

"What else could this person be?"

"We don't know yet."

"Do you think you'll catch whoever did this?"

"Yes, without a doubt."

"Will he strike again?"

"We don't know."

There was a brief pause. Wallander got up, which the others took as a signal that the conference was over. Wallander thought Thurnberg had probably intended to end it in a more formal manner, but Wallander left the room before Thurnberg had a chance to talk to him. TV news teams were waiting to interview him in the reception area. Wallander told them to speak with Thurnberg. Later Ebba told him that Thurnberg was more than happy to oblige.

Wallander went into his office to get his coat. He tried to think what it was that made him think of Westin during the press conference. He knew it was significant. He sat down at his desk and tried to coax the thought to the surface, but it wouldn't come. He gave up. As he was putting his coat on, Hansson called.

"I found the cars," he said. "Norman's and Boge's: a 1991 Toyota and a Volvo that's one year older. They were in a car park down by Sandhammaren. I've already called Nyberg. He's on his way there."

"So am I."

At the edge of town, Wallander pulled over at a takeaway bar and ate a hotdog. It had become habit now to buy one-litre bottles of mineral water. He had forgotten to take the medication that Dr Göransson had prescribed for him, and he didn't have it with him.

He drove back to Mariagatan in a bad temper. There was a heap of post on the floor in the hall, and he noticed a postcard from Linda, who was visiting friends in Hudiksvall, and a letter from his sister Kristina. Wallander took the post with him into the kitchen. His sister had put the name and address of a hotel on the back of the envelope. It was in Kemi, which Wallander knew was in northern Finland. He wondered what she was doing there, but he let the post wait, and took his medicine instead. Before he left the kitchen, he glanced at the post lying on the table and again his thoughts returned to Westin. Now he was able to catch hold of the thought.

There was something Westin had said during their trip out to Bärnsö Island, something that Wallander's subconscious had been turning over and was trying to send to the surface. He tried to reconstruct their conversation in the noisy wheelhouse without success. But Westin had said something important. He decided to call him after he had looked at the two cars.

Nyberg was already there when Wallander got out of his car. The Toyota and Volvo were parked next to each other. Police tape was plastered all around the area and the cars were being photographed. The doors and boots were wide open. Wallander walked up to Nyberg, who was getting a bag out of his car.

"Thanks again for meeting me last night," he said.

"An old friend came down to see me from Stockholm in 1973," Nyberg replied. "We went out to a bar one evening. I don't think I've been out since then."

Wallander remembered that he hadn't paid Edmundsson back.

"Well, anyway, I had a nice time," he said.

"There's already a rumour going around that we were caught trying to get out of paying the bill," Nyberg said.

"Just as long as Thurnberg doesn't get wind of it. He might take it the wrong way."

Wallander walked over to Hansson, who was making some notes.

"Any doubt they're the right ones?"

"The Toyota is Lena Norman's, the Volvo belongs to Martin Boge."

"How long have they been here?"

"We don't know. In July the car park is full of cars coming and going. It's only in August that it starts to slow down and that people start noticing which cars haven't been moved."

"Is there any other way to find out if they've been here since Midsummer?"

"You'll have to talk to Nyberg about that."

Wallander went back to Nyberg, who was staring at the Toyota.

"Fingerprints are the most important," Wallander said. "The cars must have been driven here from the reserve."

"Someone who leaves his prints on a boat might well leave us a greeting on a steering wheel."

"That's what I'm hoping."

"That probably also means our killer is fairly sure his prints don't appear in any records, either here or abroad."

"I was thinking the same thing," Wallander said. "We'll just have to hope you're wrong."

Wallander didn't need to stay any longer. As he passed the turn-off to his father's house, he couldn't resist having a look. There was a For Sale sign by the driveway. He didn't stop. Seeing the sign gave him a fanny feeling. He had just made it back to Ystad when the mobile phone rang. It was Höglund.

"I'm in Lund," she said. "In Lena Norman's flat. I think you should come here."

"What is it?"

"You'll see when you get here. I think it's important."

Wallander wrote down the address and was on his way.

The block of flats was on the outskirts of Lund. It was four storeys high, one of five buildings comprising a large housing estate. Once, many years ago when Wallander had come down to Lund with Linda, she had pointed them out to him and told him they were student flats. If she had chosen to study in Lund, she would have lived in a place like this. Wallander shivered, imagining Linda out in the reserve.

He didn't have to guess which building it was, as a police car was parked outside one of them. Wallander put his phone in his pocket and got out. A woman was stretched out in the sun on one of the lawns. Wallander wished he could lie down beside her and sleep for a while. His tiredness came and went in heavy waves. An officer stood inside the doorway, yawning. Wallander waved his identification in front of him and the officer pointed up the stairs absentmindedly.

"All the way up. No elevator."

Then he yawned again and Wallander felt a sudden urge to whip him into shape. Wallander was the superior officer, and one from another district at that. They were trying to catch a man who had killed five people so far. He didn't need to be greeted by an officer who yawned and could hardly bring himself to speak.

But he said nothing. He walked up the stairs. Apart from the loud, raucous music coming from one flat, the building seemed abandoned. It was still August and the autumn term had not yet begun. The door to Lena Norman's flat was slightly ajar but Wallander rang the bell anyway.

Höglund came to the door herself. He tried to read her expression without success.

"I didn't mean to sound so dramatic over the phone," she said quickly. "But I think you'll understand why I wanted you to see this."

He followed her into the flat, which hadn't been aired out for a while. The air had that characteristic but indescribable dry quality he had so often encountered in concrete buildings. He had read somewhere that the FBI had developed a method for determining how long a house had been locked up. He didn't know whether Nyberg had the technique at his disposal.

At the thought of Nyberg he made another mental note to repay Edmundsson. The flat had two rooms and a kitchen. They reached the combined living room and study. The sun was shining in through the window and dust drifted slowly in the still air. There were a number of photographs tacked up on one wall. Wallander put on his glasses and peered at them. He recognised her at once. Lena Norman was dressed up in a scene that looked like it was supposed to be from the 17th century. Martin Boge was also in the picture, which was taken with what appeared to be a castle in the background. The next picture was also of a party. Lena Norman was in that one too, and now Astrid Hillström was there. They were indoors somewhere, half-naked. Wallander guessed they were staging a bordello scene. Neither Norman nor Hillström was particularly convincing. Wallander straightened up and cast a glance over the entire wall.

"They play different roles at their parties," he said.

"It goes further than that," she said and went over to a desk that stood at right angles to one of the windows. It was covered with binders and plastic folders.

"I've gone through this material," she said. "Not completely, of course, but what I've seen so far worries me." Wallander lifted his hand to interrupt her.

"Wait a second. I need to drink a glass of water, and use the bathroom."

"My father has diabetes," she said.

Wallander froze on his way to the door. "What do you mean by that?"

"If I didn't know any better I'd think you had it too, the way you drink water these days. And need to go to the loo constantly."

For a moment Wallander thought he was going to break his silence and tell her the truth: that she was right. But instead he just muttered something inaudible and left the room. When he came out of the kitchen, the toilet was still flushing.

"The flushing mechanism is broken," he said. "I guess that's not our problem."

She was looking at him as if she was expecting him to talk.

"Why are you worried?" he asked.

"I'll tell you what I've found so far," she said. "But I'm convinced there's more, and that it'll become apparent when we've gone through everything."

Wallander sat down on a chair by the desk. She remained standing.

"They dress up," she started. "They have parties, and move between our own time and that of past ages. From time to time they even go into the future, but not very often. Probably because it's harder – no one knows how people will dress in a thousand years, or even 50. We know all this, of course. We've talked to the friends who weren't with them at Midsummer. You even had a chance to talk to Isa Edengren. We know they rented their costumes in Copenhagen. But there's a deeper level to this."

She picked up a folder covered in geometric figures. "They appear to have belonged to a sect," she said. "It has its roots in the United States, in Minneapolis. It strikes me as an updated version of the Jim Jones cult or the Branch Davidians. Their rules are horrifying, something akin to the threatening letters people who have broken chain mail or pyramid schemes hand over to us. Anyone who divulges their secrets will suffer violent retribution – always death, of course. They pay dues to the head office that in turn sends out lists of suggestions for their parties and explains how to maintain their secrecy. But there is also a spiritual dimension to their activities. They think that people who practise moving through time like this will be able to choose the age of their rebirth at the moment of their death. It was highly unpleasant reading. I think Lena Norman was the head of the Swedish chapter."

Wallander was listening with rapt attention. Höglund had called him down here with good reason.

"Does the organisation have a name?"

"I don't know what it would be in Swedish. In English they call themselves the Divine Movers."

Wallander flipped through the folder she had given him. There were geometric figures everywhere, but also pictures of old gods and the mutilated bodies of tortured people. He put the material down with disgust.

"Do you think what happened in the nature reserve was a result of vengeance? That they had divulged the secret and had to be killed?"

"In this day and age I hardly think that can be ruled out."

Wallander knew she was right. Only a short time ago a number of members of a sect in Switzerland and France had committed mass suicide. In May, Martinsson had taken part in a conference in Stockholm devoted to the role of the police in stemming this increased activity. It was getting harder, since modern sects no longer circled around a single crazed individual. Now they were well-organised corporations that had their own lawyers and accountants. Members took out loans to pay fees they couldn't really afford. It wasn't even clear these days if the emotional blackmail that took place could be classified as criminal activity. Martinsson had told Wallander after he returned from the conference that new laws would have to be enacted if they were to have any hope in prosecuting these soul-sucking vampires who were profiting from the increased sense of helplessness in society.

"This is an important discovery," he said to Höglund. "We're going to need help with this. The national police have a special division devoted to working on new sects. We'll also need help from the United States on the Divine Movers. Above all, we have to get the other young people involved in this to talk, get them to divulge their carefully guarded secrets."

"They take their vows and then eat horse liver. Raw," she said, leafing through the folder.

"Who officiates at these ceremonies?"

"It must be Lena Norman."

Wallander shook his head, baffled. "And she's dead now. Do you think she would have broken her vows? Was there someone waiting to replace her?"

"I don't know. Maybe we'll find a name among these papers when we've had a chance to go through them properly."

Wallander stood up and looked out the window. The woman was still down on the lawn. He thought of the woman he had met at the roadside restaurant outside Västervik. He searched for her name for a while before it came to him: Erika. He had a sudden longing to see her again.

"We probably shouldn't get too distracted by all this," he said in an absentminded way. "We shouldn't rule out our other theories."

"Which are?"

He didn't need to spell it out for her. The only possible theory was a deranged killer acting alone. The theory you always worked with when you had no leads.

"I have difficulty seeing Svedberg getting tangled up in all this," he said. "Even though he's surprised us."

"Maybe he wasn't directly involved," Höglund said. "He may simply have known someone who was."

He thought again of Westin, the seafaring postman. Wallander was still desperately trying to catch hold of something he had said during that boat trip. But it remained out of reach.

"There's really only one thing we need to know," Wallander said, "as in all complicated cases. One thing, that would set everything else in motion."

"The identity of Svedberg's killer?"

He nodded. "Exactly. Then we would have an answer to everything, except perhaps the question of the motive. But we could piece that together as well."

Wallander returned to the chair and sat down. "Did you have time to talk to the Danes about Louise?"

"The photograph will be published tomorrow."

Wallander got up again. "We have to go through this flat thoroughly," he said. "From top to bottom. But I think I'll be of more use in Ystad. If we have time, we'll contact Interpol today and get the Americans involved. Martinsson will love taking charge of that."

"I think he dreams about being a federal agent in the United States," Höglund agreed. "Not just a policeman in Ystad."

"We all have our dreams," Wallander said, in an awkward and completely unnecessary attempt to come to Martinsson's defence. He gathered the papers from the desk while Höglund looked around the kitchen for some plastic bags to put them in. They talked for a while in the small hall before he left.

"I keep having this feeling that I'm overlooking something," Wallander said. "I think it has something to do with Westin."

"Westin?"

"He was the one who took me out to Bärnsö Island. He's the postman in the archipelago. He said something when we were standing in the wheelhouse. I just can't remember what it was."

"Why don't you call him? The two of you might be able to reconstruct the conversation. Maybe simply hearing his voice will bring whatever it was back to you."

"You may be right," Wallander said doubtfully. "I'll call."

Then he remembered another voice. "What happened with Lundberg? I mean the person who wasn't him, but who pretended to be. The one who called the hospital and asked about Isa."

"I passed that on to Martinsson. We exchanged a couple of tasks; I can't remember now what they were. I took on something he hadn't had time to do. He promised to talk to the nurse."

Wallander sensed a note of criticism in her voice. They all had so much to do. The tasks were piling up.

Wallander drove back to Ystad, thinking over the latest events. How did the revelations in Lena Norman's flat alter the picture? Were these parties much more sinister than he had thought? He recalled the time a few years earlier, when Linda had undergone what might be described as a religious crisis. It was right after the divorce. Linda was as lost as he was, and one night he had heard a soft mumbling from inside her bedroom that he thought must be prayer. When he found books in her room about Scientology, he'd become seriously concerned. He tried to reason with her without much success. Finally Mona sorted things out. He didn't know exactly what happened, but one day the soft mumbles behind her door stopped and she went back to her old interests.

He shivered at the thought of sects. Were the answers to this case lying somewhere in these plastic bags? He accelerated. He was in a hurry.

The first thing he did back at the station was to find Edmundsson and pay him the money he owed. Then he went to the conference room where Martinsson was briefing the three police officers from Malmö who were joining the investigation. Wallander had met one of them before, a detective in his 60s by the name of Rytter. He didn't recognise either of the other two, who were younger. Wallander said hello, but didn't stay. He asked Martinsson to try to catch him sometime later that evening. Then he went to his office and started going through the papers from Lena Norman's flat. He was about half finished when Martinsson appeared. It was a little after 11 p.m. Martinsson was pale and bleary-eyed. Wallander wondered how he looked himself.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"They're good," Martinsson said. "Especially the old guy, Rytter."

"They're going to make a real difference," Wallander said enthusiastically. "It will give us the break we need."

Martinsson pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his collar.

"I have a project for you," Wallander said. He told him in some detail about the materials that had turned up in Lena Norman's flat. Martinsson became more and more interested. The thought that he would be contacting colleagues in the U.S. was clearly invigorating.

"The most important thing is to get a clear picture of these people," Wallander said.

Martinsson looked at his watch. "I guess this isn't the best time of day to get in touch with the U.S., but I'll give it a shot."

Wallander got up and gathered the papers together, and they went to copy the material that Wallander hadn't had time to look through.

"Apart from drugs, sects are the thing I'm most afraid of for my children," Martinsson said. "I'm afraid of them getting pulled into some religious nightmare they won't be able to get out of, where I won't be able to reach them."

"There was a time when I had those exact worries about Linda," Wallander said. He didn't say anything more, and Martinsson didn't ask any questions.

The copier suddenly stopped working. Martinsson reloaded it with a new sheaf of blank paper. Wallander left Martinsson and returned to his office. A report on the charges once filed against Svedberg was lying on his desk. He read through it quickly to get a sense of what had happened. It was dated 19 September 1985. A man named Stig Stridh, the complainant, was assaulted by his brother, an alcoholic, who had come to ask him for money. He knocked out two of Stridh's teeth, stole a camera, and demolished a large part of his living room. Two police officers, one by the name of Andersson, showed up at the flat and took down details of the incident. Stridh was called down to the police station on 26 August for a meeting with Inspector Karl Evert Svedberg. Svedberg explained to him that there would not be an investigation into the case since there was no evidence. Stridh argued vehemently that a camera was missing and a large part of his living room was damaged, and that the two officers had seen his cuts and bruises. According to Stridh, at this point Svedberg's manner became threatening and he ordered him to drop the charges. Stridh left and later wrote a letter to Björk, in which he complained about the treatment he had received.