The Pyramid (20 page)

Stenholm sat motionless in his chair.

Wallander waited. He could see through the window that the fog was still very thick. Then the man raised his head.

'My wife never did anything wrong,' he said. 'But times changed, crimes multiplied and became more serious. Overworked police officers and courts couldn't cope with it. You should know that, you're a policeman yourself. That's why it was so unjust for Alexandersson to blame my wife when the murder of his son was never solved. He persecuted us and threatened us and terrorised us for seven years. And he did it in such a way that we could never actually pin anything on him.'

Stenholm fell silent. Then he stood up.

'Let's go up to my wife. She can tell you about it herself.'

'That's not necessary any more,' Wallander said.

'For me it's necessary,' said Stenholm.

They went upstairs. Kajsa Stenholm was lying in a sickbed in a large, bright, airy room. The Labrador was lying on the floor beside the bed.

'She's not asleep,' said Stenholm. 'Go up to her and ask her whatever you want.'

Wallander approached the bed. Her face was so thin, her skin was stretched tight over her cranium. Wallander realised she was dead. He turned round quickly. The old man was standing in the doorway. He was holding a pistol, aimed at Wallander.

'I knew you'd come back,' he said. 'That's why it's just as well she died.'

'Put the gun down,' Wallander said.

Stenholm shook his head. Wallander could feel himself stiffening with fear.

Then everything happened very fast. Suddenly Stenholm pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the room. The man was thrown halfway through the door. Blood had spurted all over the walls. Wallander felt as if he were about to faint.
Then he staggered out of the door and down the stairs. He called the police station. Ebba answered.

'Hansson or Rydberg,' he said. 'As fast as possible.'

It was Rydberg who came to the phone.

'It's all over,' said Wallander. 'I want an emergency team sent to the house in Svarte. I've got two dead bodies here.'

'Did you kill them? What's happened?' Rydberg asked. 'Are you hurt?
Why the hell did you go there on your own?'

'I don't know,' Wallander said. 'Get a move on. I'm not hurt.'

Wallander went outside to wait. The beach was covered in fog. He thought about what the old doctor had said. About crimes becoming more frequent and more serious. Wallander had often thought that as well. He sometimes thought he was a police officer from another age.
Even though he was only forty. Maybe a new kind of police officer was needed nowadays.

He waited in the fog for them to arrive from Ystad. He was deeply upset. Yet again, against his will, he had found himself involved in a tragedy. He wondered how long he would be able to keep going.

When the emergency services arrived and Rydberg got out of his car, it seemed to him that Wallander was a black shadow in the white fog.

'What happened?' Rydberg asked.

'We've solved the case of the man who died in the back seat of
Stenberg's taxi,' Wallander said.

He could see that Rydberg was waiting for something more, but there would be nothing more.

'That's all,' he said. 'That's all we've done, in fact.'

Then Wallander turned on his heel and walked down to the beach.
Soon he had disappeared into the fog.

Every year, in early spring, he had a recurring dream. That he could fly. The dream always unfolded in the same way. He was walking up a dimly lit staircase. Suddenly the ceiling opened and he discovered that the stairs led him to a treetop. The landscape spread out under his feet. He lifted up his arms and let himself fall. He ruled the world.

At that moment he always woke up. The dream always left him right there. Although he had had the same dream for many years, he had not yet experienced actually floating away from the top of the tree.

The dream kept coming back. And it always cheated him.

He was thinking of this as he walked through central Ystad. The dream had come to him one night a week ago. And as always, it left him right as he was going to fly away. Now it would probably not return for a long time.

It was an evening in the middle of April, 1988. The warmth of spring had not yet manifested itself with any seriousness. As he walked through the town he regretted not having put on a warmer sweater. He also still had a lingering cold. It was shortly after eight o'clock. The streets were empty of people. Somewhere in the distance he heard a car drive off with a screech. Then the engine noise died away. He always followed the same route. From Lavendelvägen, where he lived, he followed
Tennisgatan. At Margareta Park he turned left and then followed
Skottegatan down to the centre. Then he took another left, crossed
Kristianstad Road, and soon arrived at St Gertrude's Square, where he had his photography studio. If he had been a young photographer who was just in the process of establishing himself in Ystad, it would not have been the optimal location. But he had run his studio for more than twenty-five years. He had a stable list of clients. They knew where to find him. They came to him to be photographed for their weddings.
Then they liked to return with the first child. Or for different occasions that they knew they would want to remember. The first time he had taken the wedding pictures for a client's child, he realised he was getting old. He had not thought so much about it before but suddenly he had turned fifty. And that was now six years ago.

He stopped at a shop window and studied his face in the reflection.
Life was what it was. He couldn't really complain. If he were allowed his health for ten or fifteen years more, then . . .

He abandoned his thoughts about the passage of time and walked on.
There was a gusty wind and he pulled his coat more tightly around him.
He was walking neither quickly nor slowly. There was no urgency. Two evenings a week he went down to his studio after dinner. These were the holy moments of his life. Two evenings when he could be completely alone with his own pictures in the room at the back of the studio.

He reached his destination. Before unlocking the door to the shop he studied the display window with a mixture of disapproval and irritation.
He should have changed the display a long time ago. Even if he didn't attract new clients, he should be able to follow the rule he made more than twenty years ago. Once a month he changed the photographs on display. Now almost two months had gone by. When he had employed an assistant, he had had more time to devote to the shop window. But he had let the last one go almost four years ago. It had become too expensive. And it wasn't more work than he could manage on his own.

He unlocked the door and walked in. The shop lay in darkness. He had a cleaning woman who came in three days a week. She had her own key and usually came in at around five in the morning. Since it had rained earlier that morning, the floor was dirty. He didn't like dirt.
Therefore he did not turn on the light and instead walked straight through his studio and into the innermost room, where he developed his pictures. He closed the door and turned on the light. Hung up his coat. Turned on the radio that he kept on a little shelf. He always kept it tuned to a station he could expect to play classical music. Then he filled the coffee-maker and washed out a cup. A feeling of well-being started to spread through his body. The innermost room behind his studio was his cathedral. His holy room. He didn't let anyone other than his cleaning woman in here. Here he found himself in the centre of the world. Here he was alone. An absolute ruler.

While he waited for the coffee to brew, he thought about what awaited him. He always decided in advance what work he would do on a given evening. He was a methodical man who never left anything to chance.

This evening, it was the Swedish prime minister's turn. Actually it had surprised him that he had not spent an evening on him yet. But at least he had been able to prepare. For more than a week he had scoured the daily papers for the picture he was going to use. He had found it in one of the evening papers and known at once that it was the right one. It filled all of his requirements. He had photographed a copy of it a few days ago. Now it was locked in one of his desk drawers. He poured out the coffee and hummed along with the music. A piano sonata by
Beethoven was playing. He preferred Bach to Beethoven. And Mozart best of all. But the piano sonata was beautiful. He could not deny it.

He sat down at the desk, adjusted the lamp and unlocked the drawers on the left. The photograph of the prime minister was inside. He had enlarged the image, as he usually did, to a size somewhat larger than a standard sheet of paper. He laid it out on the table, sipped his coffee and studied the face. Where should he start, where should he begin the distortion? The man in the picture was smiling and looking to the left. There was a touch of anxiety or uncertainty in his gaze. He decided to begin with the eyes. They could be made to look cross-eyed. And smaller. If he angled the enlarger, the face would also become thinner.
He could try to place the paper in an arc in the enlarger and see what effect that had. Then he could cut and paste and excise the mouth. Or perhaps sew it up. Politicians talked too much.

He finished his coffee. The clock on the wall showed a quarter to nine. Some noisy teenagers walked by on the street outside and disturbed the music for a moment.

He put the coffee cup away. Then he started the painstaking but enjoyable work of retouching. He could slowly see the face changing.

It took him more than two hours. You could still see that it was the prime minister's face. But what had happened to it? He got up out of his chair and hung the picture on the wall. Directed the light on it.
The music on the radio was different now. Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring
.
The dramatic music was fitting as he regarded his work. The face was no longer the same.

Now the most important part remained. The most enjoyable. Now he would reduce the picture. Make it small and insignificant. He put it on the glass plate and focused the light. Made it smaller and smaller.
The details pulled together. But remained sharp. Only when the face started to blur did he stop.

He was done.

It was almost half past eleven when he had the finished product in front of him on the desk. The prime minister's distorted face was no bigger than a passport picture. Once again he had shrunk a power-hungry individual down to more suitable proportions. Of large men he made small men. In his world there was no one who was bigger than himself. He remade their faces, made them smaller, more ridiculous, into small and unimportant insects.

He took out the album he kept in his desk and flipped through it until he got to the first empty page. There he pasted in the picture he had just manipulated. He wrote in the day's date with a fountain pen.

He leaned back in his chair. Yet another picture had been produced.
It had been a successful evening. The result had been good. And nothing had disturbed him. No restless thoughts had flown around in his head.
It had been an evening in the cathedral when everything breathed peace and quiet.

He put the album back and locked the cabinet. Stravinsky's
Rite of
Spring
had been followed by Handel. Sometimes he was irritated by the programme director's inability to make softer transitions.

At that moment he had the feeling that something wasn't right. He stood still and listened. Everything was quiet. He thought that he had imagined it. He turned off the coffee-maker and started turning off the lights. Then he stopped again. Something wasn't right. He heard a sound from the studio. Suddenly he was afraid. Had someone broken into the store? He walked carefully over to the door and listened.
Everything was quiet. I'm imagining things, he thought with irritation.
Who would break into a photographer's studio where there are not even any cameras for sale? At least cameras can be stolen.

He listened again. Nothing. He took his coat from the peg and put it on. The clock on the wall said nineteen minutes before midnight.
Everything was normal. Now he was ready to lock up his cathedral and go home.

He looked around one more time before he turned off the last light.
Then he opened the door. The studio lay in darkness. He turned on the light. It was as he had thought. There was no one there. He turned the light off again and walked out towards the shop.

Then everything happened very quickly.

Suddenly someone came at him from the shadows. Someone who had been hiding behind one of the backdrops he used for his studio portraits. He could not see who it was. Since the shadow was blocking the exit there was only one thing left for him to do. Flee into the back room and lock the door. He also had a phone in there. He could call for help.

He turned round. But he never made it to the door. The shadow was quicker. Something struck him in the back of the head, something that made the world explode in a white light, then become total darkness.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

The time was seventeen minutes to midnight.

The cleaning woman's name was Hilda Waldén. She arrived at Simon
Lamberg's studio shortly after five o'clock, when she began her morning round. She leaned her bike next to the entrance and locked it carefully with a chain. It was drizzling and had grown colder, and she shivered as she searched for the right key. Spring was taking its time. She opened the door and stepped inside. The floor was dirty after the latest rain shower. She put her handbag on the counter next to the cash register and put her coat on the chair next to the little newspaper table.

There was a cupboard in the studio where she kept her cleaning coat as well as her equipment. Lamberg would have to buy her a new vacuum cleaner soon. This one was getting too weak.

She saw him as soon as she walked into the studio. She immediately understood that he was dead. The blood had run out around his body.

Then she ran out onto the street. A retired bank director who had been ordered to take regular walks by his doctor anxiously asked her what had happened, after he managed to calm her down somewhat.

She was shaking all over, and he ran to a telephone booth on the nearest street corner and dialled emergency.

It was twenty minutes past five.

A drizzling rain, with a gusty wind from the south-west.

It was Martinsson who called and woke up Wallander. It was three minutes past six. Wallander knew from long experience that when the phone rang this early something serious must have happened. Normally he was awake before six. But this morning he was sleeping and he woke up with a start when the telephone rang. The main reason he wasn't already awake was that he had bitten off part of his tooth the night before and had been in pain during the night. He had only fallen asleep around four after having been up several times to take pills for the pain. Before he picked up the receiver he noted that the pain was still there.

'Did I wake you?' Martinsson asked.

'Yes,' Wallander said and was surprised that he answered truthfully for once. 'You did, actually. What's happened?'

'The night shift called me at home. Sometime around half past five they received an unclear emergency call about a supposed murder by
St Gertrude's Square. A patrol unit was dispatched.'

'And?'

'And it turned out to be correct, unfortunately.'

Wallander sat up in bed. The call must have come in half an hour ago.

'Have you been down there?'

'How would I have had time to do that? I was getting dressed when the phone rang. I thought it was best to call you myself immediately.'

Wallander nodded mutely on the other end.

'Do we know who it is?' he then asked.

'It seems to be the photographer whose studio is at the square. But right now I've forgotten the name.'

'Lamberg?' Wallander said, furrowing his brow.

'Yes, that was his name. Simon Lamberg. If I've understood correctly, it was the cleaning lady who discovered him.'

'Where?'

'What do you mean?'

'Was he found dead inside the shop or outside?'

'Inside.'

Wallander thought about this while he looked at his alarm clock next to the bed. Seven minutes past six.

'Should we say we'll meet in a quarter of an hour?' he then said.

'Yes,' Martinsson replied. 'The patrol unit down there said it was very unpleasant.'

'Murder scenes tend to be,' Wallander said. 'I think I have never in my life been at a crime scene that you would have been able to describe as pleasant.'

They ended the conversation.

Wallander remained sitting up in the bed. The news Martinsson had given him had disturbed him. If he was right, Wallander knew very well who had been murdered. Simon Lamberg had photographed Wallander on several occasions. Memories of various times he had visited the photo studio went through his head. When he and Mona had married at the end of May in 1970, it was Lamberg who had photographed them. That had not taken place in his studio, however, but down by the beach right next to the Saltsjöbadens
Hotel. It was Mona who had insisted on this. Wallander remembered how he felt it was an unnecessary amount of trouble. That their wedding had even taken place in Ystad was due to the fact that
Mona's old confirmation minister was now posted there. Wallander had thought they should get married in Malmö, in a civil service.
But Mona had not agreed. That they should have to stand on a cold and blustery beach on top of all this trouble and let themselves be photographed had not amused him. For Wallander it was a wasted effort for a romantic product that was not particularly successful.
Lamberg had also taken their daughter Linda's picture on more than one occasion.