Henning Mankell - The Pyramid

If it was true, as he was now convinced, that it was Rolf Nyman who had shot Holm and the Eberhardsson sisters, Nyman definitely counted as potentially dangerous. In addition, he had tricked Wallander. And he had done so effortlessly and with great skill. On his car ride from Malmö, Wallander had been wondering what could be driving him. What was the crack that had appeared in the pattern? The answers he came up with pointed in at least two different directions. It could be a power struggle or about influence over the drug trade.

The point in the whole situation that worried him most was what Linda Boman had said about Nyman's own drug habit. That he was a heroin addict. Wallander had almost never come across drug dealers above the absolute bottom level who were also addicts. The question went around in Wallander's head. There was something that did not make sense, a piece that was missing.

Wallander turned by the road that led to the house where Nyman lived. He turned off the engine and the headlights. He took out a torch from the glove compartment. Then he carefully opened the door after first turning off the interior lights. Listened out into the darkness and then closed the car door as quietly as he could. It was about a hundred metres to the yard entrance. He shielded the torch with one hand and directed the beam in front of him. The wind was cold, he felt. Time for a warmer sweater. But his nose had almost dried up. When he reached the edge of the woods, he turned out the torch. One window in the house was lit up. Someone must be home. Now comes the dog, he thought. He walked back the way he had come, about fifty metres. Then he went into the woods and turned the torch back on. He was going to approach the house from the back. As far as he could recall, the room with the lighted window had windows both to the front and back of the house.

He moved slowly, trying to avoid stepping on twigs. He was sweating by the time he had reached the back of the house. He had also started to question himself more and more as to what he thought he was up to. In the worst-case scenario the dog would bark and give Rolf Nyman the first warning that someone was watching him. He stood still and listened. All he could hear was the sighing of the trees. In the distance a plane was coming in for landing at Sturup. Wallander waited until his breathing was back to normal before he carefully walked up to the house. He crouched down and held the torch only a few centimetres from the ground. Just before he entered the area lit up by the window, he turned off the torch and drew back into the shadows next to the house. The dog was still quiet. He listened with his ear pressed against the cold wall. No music, no voices, nothing. Then he stretched up and carefully peered in through the window.

Rolf Nyman was sitting at a table in the middle of the room. He was leaning over something that Wallander could not immediately see. Then he realised that Rolf Nyman was playing a game of patience. Slowly, he turned over card after card. Wallander asked himself what he had been expecting. A man who was measuring out tiny bags of white powder on some scales? Or someone with a rubber tube around his upper arm, injecting himself?

I'm wrong, he thought. This is a mistake from beginning to end.

But he was still convinced. The man sitting at the table playing a game of patience had recently killed three people. Brutally executed them.

Wallander was just about to pull away from the house wall when the dog at the front of the house started to bark. Rolf Nyman jumped. He looked straight at Wallander. For one second, Wallander thought he had been discovered. Then Nyman quickly stood up and walked to the front door, at which point Wallander was already on his way back into the woods. If he lets the dog loose I'm in trouble, he thought. He directed the torch at the ground that he was stumbling over. He slipped and felt a branch cut his cheek. In the background he could still hear the dog barking.

When he reached the car he dropped the torch but did not stop to pick it up. He turned the key and wondered what would have happened if he had had his old car. Now he was able to put the car in reverse without a problem and drive away. Just as Wallander got into the car he heard a tractor approach on the main road. If he could get the sound of his own engine to coincide with the sound of the other vehicle then he would be able to get away without Rolf Nyman hearing him. He stopped and quietly turned and sneaked slowly into third gear. When he got out onto the main road he saw the tail lights of the tractor. Since he was going downhill he turned off the engine and let the car coast. There was no one in his rear-view mirror. No one had come in pursuit. Wallander stroked his cheek and felt blood and then felt around for the toilet paper. In a brief moment of inattentiveness he almost drove into a ditch. At the last moment he was able to straighten the car.

It was already past midnight when he reached Mariagatan. The branch had made a deep cut in his cheek. Wallander briefly considered going to the hospital, but he settled for cleaning the wound himself and applying a large Band-Aid. Then he put on a pot of strong coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with one of his many half-full notepads in front of him.

He reviewed his triangle-shaped pyramid once more and replaced the question mark in the middle with Rolf Nyman. He knew from the start that the material was very thin. The only thing that he could produce against Nyman was the suspicion that he had stolen the lights that were later used to mark the area for the plane drop.

But what else did he have? Nothing. What relationship had Holm and Nyman shared? Where did the plane and the Eberhardsson sisters fit in? Wallander pushed the notepad away. They would need a more thoroughgoing investigation in order to move forward. He was also wondering how he could convince his colleagues that despite how it looked, he really had found the lead that they should concentrate on. How far could he go by simply citing his intuition again? Rydberg would understand, perhaps even Martinsson. But both Svedberg and Hansson would dismiss it.

It was two o'clock before he turned out the light and went to bed. His cheek ached.

In the morning, the third of January, it was cold and clear in Skåne. Wallander got up early, changed the bandage on his cheek, and arrived at the station shortly before seven. Today he was in before even Martinsson. In reception he was told about a serious traffic accident that had happened an hour earlier, just outside Ystad, involving several deaths, including a young child, which always evoked a particularly sombre mood among his colleagues. Wallander went to his office and was grateful for the fact that he no longer found himself called out to the scene of traffic accidents. He poured himself some coffee and then sat down and thought back to the events of the evening before.

But his doubts from the day before remained. Rolf Nyman could turn out to be a red herring. But there were still grounds for investigating him thoroughly. Wallander also decided that they should put his house under discreet surveillance, not least in order to find out when Nyman would be out. Technically this fell to the Sjöbo police, but Wallander had already decided simply to keep them informed. The Ystad police would insist on undertaking this work themselves.

They needed to get into the house. But there was an additional complication. Rolf Nyman was not alone. There was also a woman, whom no one had seen, and who had been sleeping when Wallander stopped by.

Wallander suddenly wondered if the woman even existed. Much of what Nyman had told him had turned out not to be true. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes past seven. It was probably very early for a woman who ran a disco. But he still searched around for Linda Boman's telephone number in Lund. She picked up almost immediately. Wallander could hear that she was groggy.