The Pyramid (17 page)

'How are you?' Wallander asked.

'I'm here,' said Rydberg evasively. 'What's all this nonsense about a man being murdered in the back seat of a taxi?'

'Let's start at the beginning,' Wallander said.

He looked around. Somebody was missing.

'Where's Martinsson?'

'He called in to say he had tonsillitis,' said Rydberg. 'Maybe Svedberg can stand in for him?'

'We'll see if we need him,' said Wallander, picking up his papers.
The fax had arrived from Lund.

Then he looked at his colleagues.

'What started off looking like a straightforward case could turn out to be much more problematic than I'd thought. A man died in the back seat of a taxi. The medico-legal people in Lund have established that he was poisoned. What we don't know yet is how long before his death the poison got into his system. Lund promises to let us know that in a few days.'

'Murder or suicide?' Rydberg wondered.

'Murder,' said Wallander without hesitation. 'I find it hard to imagine a suicide taking poison and then calling for a taxi.'

'Could he have taken the poison by mistake?' Hansson asked.

'Hardly likely,' said Wallander. 'According to the doctors it's a very unusual mixture of poisons.'

'What do they mean by that?' Hansson asked.

'It's something that can only be made by a specialist – a doctor, a chemist or a biologist, for instance.'

Silence.

'So, we need to regard this as a murder case,' Wallander said. 'What do we know about this man, Göran Alexandersson?'

Hansson leafed through his notebook.

'He was a businessman,' he said. 'He owned two electronics shops in Stockholm. One in Västberga, the other in Nortull. He lived alone in an apartment in Åsögatan. He doesn't seem to have had any family.
His divorced wife lives in France. His son died seven years ago. The employees I've spoken to all describe him in exactly the same way.'

'How?' asked Wallander.

'They say he was nice.'

'Nice?'

'That was the word they all used. Nice.'

Wallander nodded.

'Anything else?'

'He appears to have led a pretty humdrum existence. His secretary guessed that he probably collected stamps. Catalogues kept arriving at the office. He doesn't seem to have had any close friends. At least, none that his colleagues knew about.'

Nobody said anything.

'We'd better ask Stockholm to help us with his apartment,' Wallander said when the silence had started to feel oppressive. 'And we must get in touch with his ex-wife. I'll concentrate on trying to find out what he was doing down here in Skåne, in Ystad and Svarte. Who did he meet? We can get together again this afternoon and see how far we've got.'

'One thing puzzles me,' said Rydberg. 'Can a person be murdered without knowing anything about it?'

Wallander nodded.

'That's an interesting idea,' he said. 'Somebody gives Göran
Alexandersson some poison that doesn't have any effect until an hour later. I'll ask Jörne to answer that one.'

'If he can,' muttered Rydberg. 'I wouldn't count on it.'

The meeting was over. They went their different ways after dividing up the various tasks. Wallander stood at the window of his office, coffee cup in hand, and tried to make up his mind where to start.

Half an hour later he was in his car, on the way to Svarte. The wind was slowly dropping. The sun shone through the parting clouds. For the first time that year Wallander had the feeling that perhaps spring really was on the way at last. He stopped when he came to the edge of Svarte and got out of the car. Göran Alexandersson came here, he thought. He came in the morning and returned to Ystad in the afternoon.
On the fourth occasion, he was poisoned and died in the back seat of a taxi.

Wallander started walking towards the village. Many of the houses on the beach side of the road were summer cottages and were boarded up for the winter.

He walked through the whole village and only saw two people. The desolation made him feel depressed. He turned round and walked quickly back to his car.

He had already started the engine when he noticed an elderly lady working on a flower bed in a garden next to where the car was parked.
He switched off the ignition and got out. When he closed the door, the woman turned to look at him. Wallander walked over to her fence, raising his hand in greeting.

'I hope I'm not disturbing you,' he said.

'Nobody disturbs anybody here,' said the woman, giving him an inquisitive look.

'My name's Kurt Wallander and I'm a police officer from Ystad,' he said.

'I recognise you,' she said. 'Have I seen you on TV? Some current affairs debate, maybe?'

'I don't think so,' Wallander said. 'But my picture has been in the papers now and again, I'm afraid.'

'My name's Agnes Ehn,' said the woman, reaching out her hand.

'Do you live here year-round?' Wallander asked.

'No, just the summer half of the year. I usually move out here at the beginning of April and stay till October. I spend the winter in
Halmstad. I'm a retired schoolteacher. My husband died a few years ago.'

'It's pretty here,' said Wallander. 'Pretty, and quiet. Everybody knows everybody else.'

'I don't know about that,' she said. 'Sometimes you don't even know your next-door neighbour.'

'Did you happen to see a man by himself who came here to Svarte by taxi several times this last week? And was then picked up by a taxi again in the afternoon?'

Her reply surprised him.

'He used the telephone in my house to call for the taxi,' she said.
'Three days in a row, in fact. Assuming it's the same man.'

'Did he say his name?'

'He was very polite.'

'Did he introduce himself?'

'You can be polite without saying what your name is.'

'And he asked to use your phone?'

'Yes.'

'Did he say anything else?'

'Has something happened to him?'

Wallander thought he might as well tell her the truth.

'He's dead.'

'That's awful. What happened?'

'We don't know. All we know at the moment is that he's dead. Do you know what he did here in Svarte? Did he say who he'd come to see? Where did he go? Was there anybody with him? Anything at all you can remember is important.'

She surprised him again with her precise reply.

'He walked down to the beach,' she said. 'There's a path leading to the beach on the other side of the house. He took that. Then he walked along the sands in a westerly direction. He didn't come back until the afternoon.'

'He walked along the beach? Was he alone?'

'I can't tell you that. The beach curves away. He might have met somebody further away, where I can't see.'

'Did he have anything with him? A briefcase or a package, for instance?'

She shook her head.

'Did he seem worried at all?'

'Not as far as I could tell.'

'But he borrowed your telephone?'

'Yes.'

'Did you notice anything worth mentioning?'

'He seemed to be a very nice, friendly man. He insisted on paying for all the telephone calls.'

Wallander nodded.

'You've been a big help,' he said, giving her his business card. 'If you remember anything else, please call me at the number on the card.'

'It's a tragedy,' she said. 'Such a pleasant man.'

Wallander went round to the other side of the house and walked down the path to the beach. He went as far as the water's edge. The beach was deserted. When he turned back he saw that Agnes Ehn was watching him.

He must have met somebody, Wallander thought. There's no other plausible explanation. The only question is, who?

He drove back to the police station. Rydberg stopped him in the corridor and told him he had managed to track Alexandersson's exwife to a house on the Riviera.

'But nobody answered the telephone,' he said. 'I'll try again later.'

'Good,' said Wallander. 'Let me know when you get hold of her.'

'Martinsson came in,' said Rydberg. 'It was almost impossible to understand a word he said. I told him to go home again.'

'You did the right thing,' Wallander said.

He went to his office, closed the door behind him and pulled over the notepad on which he had written Göran Alexandersson's name.
Who? he wondered. Who did you meet on the beach? I must find out.

By one o'clock Wallander felt hungry. He put on his jacket and was about to leave when Hansson knocked on his door. It was obvious he had something important to say.

'I've got something that might be important,' Hansson said.

'What?'

'As you'll recall, Alexandersson had a son who died seven years ago.
It looks very much like he was murdered. But as far as I can see, nobody's ever been charged with it.'

Wallander looked long and hard at Hansson.

'Good,' he said eventually. 'Now we've got something to go on. Even if I can't put my finger on what it is.'

The hunger he'd been feeling just moments ago had disappeared.

Shortly after two in the afternoon on 28 April, Rydberg knocked on
Wallander's half-open door.

'I've made contact with Alexandersson's ex-wife,' he said as he came into the room. He made a face as he sat down on the visitor's chair.

'How's your back?' Wallander asked.

'I don't know,' said Rydberg. 'There's something funny going on.'

'Perhaps you came back to work too soon?'

'Lying at home staring at the ceiling wouldn't do it any good.'

That put an end to any discussion about Rydberg's back. Wallander knew it was a waste of time trying to persuade him to go home and rest.

'What did she have to say?' he asked instead.

'She was shocked, naturally enough. It must have been a minute before she was able to say anything at all.'

'That will be an expensive call for the Swedish state,' said Wallander.

'But then what? After that minute had passed.'

'She asked what had happened, of course. I gave her the facts. She had trouble understanding what I was talking about.'

'That's hardly surprising,' said Wallander.

'Anyway, I found out that they weren't in touch with each other.
According to the wife, they divorced because their married life was so boring.'

Wallander frowned.

'What exactly did she mean?'

'I suspect that's a more common reason for divorce than people realise,' said Rydberg. 'I think it would be awful, having to live with a boring person.'

Wallander thought that over. He wondered if Mona had the same view of him. What did he think himself?

'I asked her if she could think of anybody who might want to murder him, but she couldn't. Then I asked her if she could explain what he was doing in Skåne, but she didn't know that either. That was all.'

'Didn't you ask her about that son of hers who died? The one
Hansson says was murdered?'

'Of course I did. But she didn't want to talk about it.'

'Isn't that a bit odd?'

'That's exactly what I thought.'

'I think you'll have to talk to her again,' Wallander said.

Rydberg nodded and left the room. Wallander thought he would have to find an opportunity to talk to Mona and ask her if boredom was the biggest problem in their marriage. His train of thought was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Ebba in reception, telling him that the Stockholm police wanted to talk to him. He pulled over his notepad and listened. An officer by the name of Rendel was put through to him. Wallander had never had any contact with him before.

'We went to take a look at that apartment in Åsögatan,' Rendel said.

'Did you find anything?'

'How could we find anything when we'd no idea what we were looking for?'

Wallander could hear that Rendel was under pressure.

'What was the apartment like?' Wallander asked, as nicely as he could.

'Clean and neat,' said Rendel. 'Everything in its place. A bit fussy. I had the impression of a bachelor pad.'

'That's what it was, in fact,' Wallander said.

'We checked his mail,' said Rendel. 'He seems to have been away for a week at most.'

'That's correct,' said Wallander.

'He had an answering machine, but there was nothing on it. Nobody had tried to call him.'

'What was the message he'd recorded?' Wallander asked.

'Just the usual.'

'Well, at least we know that,' said Wallander. 'Thanks for your help.
We'll come back to you if we need anything else.'

He hung up and saw from the clock that it was time for the investigative team's afternoon meeting. When he got to the conference room,
Hansson and Rydberg were already there.

'I've just been speaking to Stockholm,' Wallander said as he sat down.
'They found nothing of interest in the apartment in Åsögatan.'

'I called the wife again,' said Rydberg. 'She was still unwilling to talk about her son, but when I told her we could make her come back home to assist us with our inquiries, she thawed a little. The boy was evidently beaten up in a street in the centre of Stockholm. It must have been a totally pointless attack. He wasn't even robbed.'

'I've dug up some documentation about that attack,' said Hansson.
'It hasn't yet been written off, but nobody's done anything about it for at least the last five years.'

'Are there any suspects?' Wallander wondered.

Hansson shook his head.

'None at all. There's absolutely nothing. No witnesses, nothing.'

Wallander pushed his notepad to one side.

'Just as little as we've got to go on here at the moment,' he said.

Nobody spoke. Wallander realised he would have to say something.

'You'll have to speak to the people working in his shops,' he said.
'Call Rendel from the Stockholm police and ask him for some assistance. We'll meet again tomorrow.'

They divided up the tasks that had to be done, and Wallander went back to his office. He thought he should call his father out in
Löderup and apologise for the previous night. But he didn't. He couldn't get what had happened to Göran Alexandersson out of his mind. The whole situation was so preposterous that it should be explicable on those grounds alone. He knew from experience that all murders, and most other crimes as well, had something logical about them, somewhere. It was just a matter of turning over the right stones in the correct order and following up possible connections between them.