The Pyramid (32 page)

'I've actually flown a Piper Cherokee a few times,' Blomell answered.
'A good plane.'

'If I put my finger on a map,' Wallander said, 'and then gave you a compass direction, and ten minutes, how far would you be able to fly the plane?'

'A matter of straightforward computation,' Blomell said. 'Do you have a map?'

Wallander shook his head. Blomell stood up and left. Several minutes later he returned with a rolled-up map. They spread it out on the kitchen table. Wallander located the field that must have been the crash site.

'Imagine that the plane came straight in off the coast. The engine noise is heard here at one point. Then, at most twenty minutes later, it returns. Of course, we cannot know that the pilot held the same course for the duration, but let us assume he did. How far did he go, then, in half that time? Before he turned round?'

'The Cherokee normally flies at around 250 kilometres an hour,'
Blomell said. 'If the load is of a normal weight.'

'We don't know about that.'

'Then let's assume maximum load and an average headwind.'

Blomell computed silently, then pointed to a spot north of Mossby.
Wallander saw that it was close to Sjöbo.

'About this far,' Blomell said. 'But keep in mind that there are many unknowns included in this estimation.'

'Still, I know a lot more now than just a moment ago.'

Wallander tapped his fingers on the table reflectively.

'Why does a plane crash?' he asked after a while.

Blomell looked quizzically at him.

'No two accidents are alike,' he said. 'I read some American magazines that refer to various accident investigations. There may be recurring causes. Errors in the plane's electrical wiring, or something else.
But in the end there is nonetheless almost always some exceptional reason at the root of any given accident. And it almost always involves some degree of pilot error.'

'Why would a Cherokee crash?' Wallander asked.

Blomell shook his head.

'The engine may have stalled. Poor maintenance. You'll have to wait and see what the accident commission comes up with.'

'The plane's identifying marks had been painted over, both on the fuselage and the wings,' Wallander said. 'What does that mean?'

'That it was someone who didn't want to be known,' Blomell said.
'There is a black market for aeroplanes just as for anything else.'

'I thought Swedish airspace was secure,' Wallander said. 'But you mean that planes can sneak in?'

'There is nothing in this world that is absolutely secure,' Blomell answered. 'Nor will there ever be. Those who have enough money and enough motivation can always find their way across a border, and back again, without interception.'

Blomell offered him a cup of coffee, but Wallander declined.

'I have to look in on my father in Löderup,' he said. 'If I'm late I'll never hear the end of it.'

'Loneliness is the curse of old age,' Blomell said. 'I miss my air control tower with a physical ache. All night I dream of ushering planes through the air corridors. And when I wake up it's snowing and all I can do is repair a gutter.'

They took leave of each other outside. Wallander stopped at a grocery shop in Herrestad. When he drove away again, he cursed. Even though it had been on his list he had forgotten to buy toilet paper.

He arrived at his father's house at three minutes to seven. The snow had stopped, but the clouds hung heavy over the countryside.
Wallander saw the lights on in the little side building that his father used as a studio. He breathed in the fresh air as he walked across the yard. The door was ajar; his father had heard his car. He was sitting at his easel, an old hat on his head and his near-sighted eyes close to the painting he had just started. The smell of paint thinner always gave
Wallander the same feeling of home. This is what is left of my childhood.
The smell of paint thinner.

'You're on time,' his father observed without looking at him.

'I'm always on time,' Wallander said as he moved a couple of newspapers and sat down.

His father was working on a painting that featured a wood grouse.
Just as Wallander had stepped into the studio he had placed a stencil onto the canvas and was painting a subdued sky at dusk. Wallander looked at him with a sudden feeling of tenderness. He is the last one in the generation before me, he thought. When he dies, I'll be the next to go.

His father put away his brushes and the stencil and stood up.

They went into the main house. His father put on some coffee and brought some shot glasses to the table. Wallander hesitated, then nodded. He could take one glass.

'Poker,' Wallander said. 'You owe me fourteen kronor from last time.'

His father looked closely at him.

'I think you cheat,' he said. 'But I still don't know how you do it.'

Wallander was taken aback.

'You think I'd cheat my own father?'

For once his father backed down.

'No,' he said. 'Not really. But you did win an unusual amount last time.'

The conversation died. They drank coffee. His father slurped as usual. This irritated Wallander as much as it always did.

'I'm going to go away,' his father said suddenly. 'Far away.'

Wallander waited for more, but none came.

'Where to?' he asked finally.

'To Egypt.'

'Egypt? What are you going to do there? I thought it was Italy you wanted to see.'

'Egypt and Italy. You never listen to what I say.'

'What are you going to do in Egypt?'

'I'm going to see the Sphinx and the pyramids. Time is running out.
No one knows how long I will live. But I want to see the pyramids and
Rome before I die.'

Wallander shook his head.

'Who are you going with?'

'I'm flying with Egypt Air, in a few days. Straight to Cairo. I'm going to stay in a very nice hotel called Mena House.'

'But you're going alone? Is it a charter trip? You can't be serious,'
Wallander said in disbelief.

His father reached for some tickets on the windowsill. Wallander looked through them and realised that what his father said was true.
He had a regular-fare ticket from Copenhagen to Cairo for the fourteenth of December.

Wallander put the tickets down on the table.

For once he was completely speechless.

Wallander left Löderup at a quarter past ten. The clouds had started to break up. As he walked to the car he noticed that it had turned colder. This in turn would mean that the Peugeot would be harder to start than usual. But it wasn't the car that occupied his thoughts, it was the fact that he had not managed to talk his father out of taking the trip to Egypt. Or at least wait until a time when he or his sister could accompany him.

'You're almost eighty years old,' Wallander had insisted. 'At your age, you can't do this kind of thing.'

But his arguments had been hollow. There was nothing visibly wrong with his father's health. And even if he dressed unconventionally at times, he had a rare ability to adapt to new situations and the new people he met. When Wallander realised that the ticket included a shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel that was situated close to the pyramids, his concerns had slowly dissipated. He did not understand what drove his father to go to Egypt, to the Sphinx and the pyramids.
But he couldn't deny that – many years ago now, when Wallander was still young – his father had actually told him many times about the marvellous structures on the Giza plateau, just outside Cairo.

Then they had played poker. Since his father ended in the black, he was in a great mood when Wallander said his goodbyes.

Wallander paused with his hand on the car-door handle and drew in a breath of night air.

I have a strange father, he thought. That's something I'll never escape.

Wallander had promised to drive him into Malmö on the morning of the fourteenth. He had made a note of the telephone number for
Mena House, where his father would be staying. Since his father never spent money unnecessarily, he had of course not taken any travel insurance and so Wallander was going to ask Ebba to take care of it tomorrow.

The car started reluctantly and he turned towards Ystad. The last thing he saw was the light in the kitchen window. His father had a habit of sitting up for a long time in the kitchen before going to bed.
If he didn't return to the studio and add yet another few brushstrokes to one of his paintings. Wallander thought about what Blomell had said earlier that evening, that loneliness was a curse of the aged. But
Wallander's father lived no differently since he had grown old. He continued to paint his pictures as if nothing had changed, neither anything around him nor himself.

Wallander was back at Mariagatan shortly after eleven o'clock. When he unlocked the front door he saw that someone had slipped a letter through the letter box. He opened the envelope and already knew whom it was from. Emma Lundin, a nurse at the Ystad hospital. Wallander had promised to call her yesterday. She walked past his building on her way home to Dragongatan. Now she was wondering if something was wrong. Why had he not called her? Wallander felt guilty. He had met her a month before. They had fallen into conversation at the post office on Hamngatan. Then they had bumped into each other a few days later at the grocery shop and after only a couple of days they had started a relationship that was not particularly passionate on either side. Emma was a year younger than Wallander, divorced with three children. Wallander had soon realised that the relationship meant more to her than to him. Without really daring to, he had started trying to extricate himself. As he stood in the hall now he knew very well why he hadn't called. He simply had no desire to see her. He put the letter down on the kitchen table and decided he had to end the relationship.
It had no future, no potential. They did not have enough to talk about, and too little time for each other. And Wallander knew that he was looking for something completely different, someone completely different. Someone who would actually be able to replace Mona. If that woman even existed. But above all it was Mona's return that he dreamed of.

He undressed and put on his old worn dressing gown. Realised again that he had forgotten to buy toilet paper and found an old telephone book that he put in the bathroom. Then he put the grocery items he had bought in Herrestad into the fridge. The phone rang. It was a quarter past eleven. He hoped that nothing serious had occurred that would make him have to get dressed again. It was Linda. It always made him happy to hear her voice.

'Where have you been?' she asked. 'I've been calling all evening.'

'You could have guessed,' he replied. 'And you could have called your grandfather. That's where I was.'

'I didn't think of that,' she said. 'You never go to see him.'

'I don't?'

'That's what he says.'

'He says a lot of things. By the way, he's going to fly to Egypt in few days to see the pyramids.'

'Sounds fun. I wouldn't mind going along.'

Wallander said nothing. He listened to her lengthy narrative about how she had spent the past couple of days. He was pleased that she had now clearly recommitted herself to a career in upholstering furniture.
He assumed that Mona was not home since she would normally get irritated when Linda talked so much and for so long on the phone.
But he also felt a pang of jealousy. Even though they were now divorced, he could not reconcile himself to the thought of her seeing other men.

The conversation ended with Linda promising to meet him in
Malmö and see her grandfather off for his trip to Egypt.

It was past midnight. Since Wallander was hungry he went back to the kitchen. The only thing he could be bothered to make was a bowl of porridge. At a half past twelve he crawled into bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

On the morning of the twelfth of December, the temperature had sunk to four degrees below zero. Wallander was sitting in the kitchen, just before seven o'clock, when the telephone rang. It was Blomell.

'I hope I didn't wake you,' he said.

'I was up,' Wallander said, coffee cup in hand.

'Something occurred to me after you left,' Blomell went on. 'I'm not a policeman, of course, but I still thought I should call you.'

'Tell me.'

'I was simply thinking that for someone to hear the engines outside
Mossby the plane must have been at a very low altitude. That should mean that even others heard it. In that way you should be able to find out where it went. And perhaps you might even find someone who heard it turn round in the air and head back. If someone, for example, heard it with a break of only several minutes, you may be able to figure out what the turning radius was.'

Blomell was right. Wallander should have thought of it himself. But he did not say this.

'We're already on it,' he said instead.

'That was all,' Blomell said. 'How was your father?'

'He told me he's taking a trip to Egypt.'

'That sounds like a wonderful idea.'

Wallander didn't answer.

'It's getting colder,' Blomell concluded. 'Winter is on its way.'

'Soon we'll have snowstorms upon us,' Wallander said.

He went back to the kitchen, thinking about what Blomell had said.
Martinsson or someone else could get in touch with colleagues in
Tomelilla and Sjöbo. Maybe also Simrishamn to be safe. It might be possible to pinpoint the plane's route and destination by looking for people who were early risers and who had noticed an engine noise overhead, twice in a row if they were lucky. Surely there were still some dairy farmers around who were up at that time of day? But the question remained. What had the two men been doing on their flight? And why had the plane lacked all signs of identification?

Wallander quickly leafed through the paper. The Labrador puppies were still for sale. But there was no house that caught his eye.

Wallander walked in through the doors of the station a little before eight o'clock. He was wearing the sweater he reserved for days of up to five degrees below zero. He asked Ebba to arrange travel insurance for his father.

'That has always been my dream,' she said. 'To go to Egypt and see the pyramids.'

Everyone seems to be envious of my father, Wallander thought as he poured himself a cup of coffee and went to his office. No one even seems surprised. I'm the only one who's worried that something will happen. That he'll get lost in the desert, for example.

Martinsson had placed a report on his desk about the accident.
Wallander eyed it quickly and thought that Martinsson was still far too verbose. Half as much would have been enough. Once Rydberg had told him that that which could not be expressed in a telegram format was either poorly conceived or completely wrong. Wallander had always tried to make his reports as clear and brief as possible. He called Martinsson and told him about his conversation with Björk the day before. Martinsson seemed pleased. Then Wallander suggested a meeting. What Blomell had said was worth following up. Martinsson managed to locate Hansson and Svedberg at half past eight. But
Rydberg had still not arrived. They filed into one of the conference rooms.

'Has anyone seen Nyberg?' Wallander asked.

Nyberg walked in at that moment. As usual, he appeared to have been up all night. His hair was standing on end. He sat in his usual seat, somewhat apart from the others.

'Rydberg seems ill,' Svedberg said, scratching his bald spot with a pencil.

'He is ill,' Hansson said. 'He has sciatica.'

'Rheumatism,' Wallander corrected. 'There's a big difference.'

Then he turned to Nyberg.

'We've examined the wings,' the latter said. 'And washed away the fire-retardant foam and tried to puzzle the pieces of the fuselage back together. The numbers and letters had not only been painted over, they had also been scraped away beforehand. But that had only been partly successful, hence the need for paint. The people on board definitely did not want to be traced.'

'I imagine there is a number on the engine,' Wallander said. 'And of course not as many planes are manufactured as cars.'

'We're getting in touch with the Piper factory in the United States,'
Martinsson said.

'There are some other questions that need to be answered,' Wallander went on. 'How far can a plane like this fly on one tank of fuel? How common are additional fuel tanks? What is the limit to the amount of petrol a plane of this type can carry?'

Martinsson wrote this down.

'I'll get the answers,' he said.

The door opened and Rydberg came in.

'I've been to the hospital,' he said curtly, 'and things always take a long time there.'

Wallander could see that he was in pain but said nothing.

Instead, he presented the idea of trying to find others who might have heard the engine noise. He felt a little guilty that he did not give
Blomell credit for this insight.

'This will be like in wartime,' Rydberg commented. 'When everyone in Skåne walked around and listened for planes.'

'It's possible it won't yield anything,' Wallander said. 'But there's no harm in checking with our colleagues in nearby districts. Personally I have trouble believing it could have been anything other than a drug transport. An arranged drop somewhere.'

'We should talk to Malmö,' Rydberg said. 'If they've noticed that the supply seems to have increased dramatically, there could be a connection.
I'll call them.'

No one had any objections. Wallander brought the meeting to a close shortly after nine o'clock.

He spent the rest of the morning concluding work on the assault case in Skurup and presenting the findings to Per Åkeson. At lunchtime he went downtown, had the hot-dog special, and bought some toilet paper. He even took the opportunity to drop by the state-run offlicence and buy a bottle of whisky and two bottles of wine. Just as he was leaving he bumped into Sten Widén on his way in. He reeked of alcohol and looked worn out.

Sten Widén was one of Wallander's oldest friends. They had met many years ago, united by their interest in opera. Widén worked for his father in Stjärnsund, where they had raised racehorses. They had seen each other less often the past few years. Wallander had started to keep his distance when he realised that Widén's drinking was getting out of control.

'It's been a while,' Widén said.

Wallander winced at his breath, which seemed to testify to many drinking bouts.

'You know how it is,' Wallander says. 'These things go in waves.'

Then they exchanged some neutral words. Both wanted to end the conversation as soon as possible. In order to meet under different, prearranged circumstances. Wallander promised to call.

'I'm training a new horse,' Widén said. 'She had such a bad name I managed to get it changed.'

'What is she now?'

'La Trottiata.'

Widén smiled. Wallander nodded. Then they went their separate ways.

Wallander walked back to Mariagatan with his bags. He was back at the station at a quarter past two. Everything still seemed deserted.
Wallander continued to work through his pile of paper. After the assault in Skurup came a burglary in central Ystad, on Pilgrimsgatan. Someone had broken a window in the middle of the day and emptied the house of various valuables. Wallander shook his head as he read through
Svedberg's report. It was unbelievable that none of the neighbours had seen anything.

Is this fear starting to spread even in Sweden? he wondered. The fear of assisting the police with the most elementary observations. If this is the case then the situation is far worse that I have wanted to believe.

Wallander struggled on with the material and made notes on who should be questioned and which searches should be made in the files.
But he had no illusions that they would be able to solve the burglary case without a large dose of luck or reliable witnesses' accounts.

Martinsson walked into his office shortly before five. Wallander saw that he was starting to grow a moustache, but he said nothing.

'Sjöbo actually did have something to say,' Martinsson began. 'A man had been out looking for a lost bull calf all night. God only knows how he thought he was going to find anything in the dark. But he called the police in Sjöbo that morning and said he had seen strange lights and heard an engine noise shortly after five.'

'Strange lights? What did he mean by that?'