Henning Mankell - The Pyramid

But sleep would not come. His thoughts wandered. Mona, his father, Linda, Rydberg. And then he was back to his constant point of departure. Work. The murders of the Eberhardsson sisters and Yngve Leonard Holm. The two dead pilots, the one from Spain and the other as yet unidentified. He thought about his sketch. The triangle with a question mark in the middle.

But now he was lying in darkness, thinking about the fact that a pyramid also has different cornerstones.

He tossed and turned until six o'clock. Then he got out of bed, ran a bath and made a cup of coffee. The morning paper had already arrived. He turned the pages until he reached the property section. There was nothing of interest to him there today. He took his coffee cup with him into the bathroom. Then he lay and dozed in the warm water until close to six thirty. Thinking about going out into the weather was unpleasant. This endless slush. But now at least he had a car that would presumably start.

He turned the key in the ignition at a quarter past seven. The engine started at once. He drove to the station and parked as close to the entrance as possible. Then he ran through the snow and slush and almost slipped on the front steps. Martinsson was in reception, skimming the police magazine. He nodded when he spotted Wallander.

'It says here that we're supposed to get better at everything,' he said with a note of despondence. 'Above all, we're supposed to improve our relations with the general public.'

'That sounds excellent,' Wallander said.

He had a recurring memory, something that had happened in Malmö over twenty years ago. He had been accosted by a girl at a cafe who accused him of hitting her with a baton at a Vietnam demonstration. For some reason he had never forgotten this moment. That she had been partly responsible for his almost being stabbed to death with a knife at a later time was of a lesser concern. It was her expression, her complete contempt, that he had never forgotten.

Martinsson threw the magazine onto the table.

'Don't you ever think about quitting?' he asked. 'Doing something else?'

'Every day,' Wallander answered. 'But I don't know what that would be.'

'One could apply to a private security company,' Martinsson said.

This surprised Wallander. He had always imagined that Martinsson nurtured a heady dream of one day becoming police chief.

Then he told him about his visit to the house that Holm had lived in. Martinsson expressed concern when he heard that only the dog had been home.

'At least two others live there,' Martinsson said. 'A girl around twentyfive. I never saw her. But a man was there. Rolf was his name. Rolf Nyman, I think. I don't remember her name.'

'There was only a dog,' Wallander repeated. 'It was such a coward it crawled on its belly when I raised my voice.'

They agreed to wait until around nine before meeting in the conference room. Martinsson was not sure if Svedberg was coming. He had called the night before and said that he had come down with a bad cold and a temperature.

Wallander walked to his office. As usual it was twenty-three steps away from the beginning of the corridor. Sometimes he wished that something would suddenly have happened. That the corridor would turn out to be longer or shorter. But everything was normal. He hung up his coat and brushed off a couple of hairs that had stuck to the back of the chair. He brushed his hand along the back and top of his head. With every year he became more worried that he was going to lose his hair. Then he heard rapid steps outside in the corridor. It was Martinsson, waving a piece of paper.

'The second pilot has been identified,' he said. 'This came just now from Interpol.'

Wallander immediately stopped thinking about his hair growth.

'Ayrton McKenna,' Martinsson read. 'Born 1945 in Southern Rhodesia. A helicopter pilot since 1964 in the then Southern Rhodesian military. Decorated many times during the 1960s. For what, one might ask. For bombing a lot of black Africans?'

Wallander only had a very vague sense of what had transpired in the former British colonies in Africa.

'What is Southern Rhodesia called today?' he asked. 'Zambia?'

'That was Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia is Zimbabwe today.'

'My knowledge of Africa isn't what it should be. What else does it say?'

Martinsson continued to read.

'At some point after 1980, Ayrton McKenna moved to England. Between 1983 and 1985 he was in prison in Birmingham for drug smuggling. From 1985 on there are no records until he suddenly turns up in Hong Kong in 1987. There he is suspected of smuggling people from the People's Republic. He escapes from a prison in Hong Kong after shooting two guards to death and has been a wanted man ever since. But the identification is definitive. He was the one who crashed with Espinosa outside Mossby.'

Wallander mulled this over.

'What do we have?' he said. 'Two pilots with criminal histories. Both with smuggling on their records. In an aeroplane that does not exist. They cross illegally over the Swedish border for a few short minutes. They are probably on their way out again when the plane crashes. That leaves us with two possibilities. They were either leaving or collecting something. Since there are no indications that the plane landed, this seems to indicate that something was tossed out. What is dropped from a plane? Besides bombs?'

'Drugs.'

Wallander nodded. Then he leaned over the table.

'Has the accident commission begun its work yet?'

'Things have proceeded very slowly. But nothing indicates that the plane was shot down, if that's what you're getting at.'

'No,' Wallander said. 'I'm only interested in two things. Did the plane have extra fuel tanks, that is, from how far away could it have come? And was it an accident?'

'If it wasn't shot down, it could hardly have been anything other than an accident.'

'There is a possibility that it was sabotage. But perhaps that's remote.'

'It was an old plane,' Martinsson said. 'We know that. It probably ran into the hillside outside Vientiane. And was then put back together again. It could, in other words, have been in bad shape.'

'When is this accident commission going to get started for real?'

'The twenty-eighth. Tomorrow. The plane's been transported to a hangar in Sturup.'

'You should probably be there,' Wallander said. 'This matter of the extra fuel tanks is an important one.'

'I think it would need a great deal to be able to fly here from Spain without landing somewhere in between,' Martinsson said hesitantly.

'I don't believe that either. But I want to know if the flight could have originated from the other side of the sea. Germany. Or one of the Baltic States.'

Martinsson left. Wallander made some notes. Next to the name Espinosa he now wrote McKenna, unsure of the exact spelling.

The investigators met at half past eight. Their group was down to the bare bones. Svedberg did in fact turn out to have a cold. Nyberg had gone to Eksjö to visit his ninety-six-year-old mother. He would have been back this morning but his car had broken down somewhere south of Växjö. Rydberg looked tired and harried. Wallander thought he caught a whiff of alcohol. Probably Rydberg had spent the holidays alone, drinking. Not to the point of drunkenness, since he rarely did. But a steady, quiet drinking. Hansson complained that he had eaten too much. Neither Björk nor Per Åkeson showed up. Wallander studied the three men around the table. You don't see this on TV very often, he thought. There they have young, fresh and enthusiastic policemen in action. Martinsson could possibly fit such a context. Apart from him this squad is not such an edifying sight.

'There was a stabbing incident last night,' Hansson said. 'Two brothers who ended up in a fight with their father. Drunk, of course. One of the brothers and the father are in the hospital. Apparently they attacked each other with various tools.'