Henning Mankell - Sidetracked

“All he has is ground coffee,” she said after searching through the drawers and cupboards. “Is that all right?”

“That’s fine,” said Wallander. “Just as long as it’s strong.”

Hanging on the wall beside the ancient cupboards with sliding doors was an old-fashioned clock. Wallander noticed that it had stopped. He had seen a clock like that once before, at Baiba’s flat in Riga, and it too had had a pair of immobile hands. As though they were trying to ward off events that had not yet happened by stopping time, he thought. Baiba’s husband was killed execution-style on a frozen night in Riga’s harbour. A lone girl appears as if shipwrecked in a sea of rape and takes her life by inflicting the worst pain imaginable.

She had set herself on fire as though she were her own enemy, he thought. It wasn’t him, the policeman with the waving arms, she had wanted to escape. It was herself.

He was jolted out of his reverie by the silence around the table. They were looking at him and waiting for him to take the initiative. Through the window he could see the technicians moving slowly about in the glare of the floodlights. A camera flash went off, then another.

“Did somebody call for the hearse?” asked Hansson.

For Wallander it was as if someone had struck him with a sledgehammer. The simple, matter-of-fact question from Hansson brought him back to painful reality.

The images flickered inside his head. He imagined driving through the beautiful Swedish summertime, Barbara Hendricks’s voice strong and clear. Then a girl skitters away like a frightened animal in the field of tall rape. The catastrophe strikes. Something happens that shouldn’t. The hearse on its way to carry off the summer itself.

“Prytz knows what to do,” said Martinsson, and Wallander recognised the ambulance driver whose name he’d forgotten earlier.

He knew he had to say something.

“What do we know?” he began tentatively, as if each word were offering resistance. “An elderly farmer, living alone, rises early and discovers a strange woman in his rape field. He tries calling to her, to get her to leave, since he doesn’t want his crop destroyed. She hides and then reappears, again and again. He calls us late in the afternoon. I drive out here, since the regular officers are all busy. To be honest, I have trouble taking him seriously. I decide to leave and contact social services, since he seems so confused. But the woman suddenly pops up in the field again. So I try to reach her, but she moves away. She lifts a plastic container over her head, drenches herself in petrol, and sets fire to herself with a cigarette lighter. The rest you know. She was alone, she had a container of petrol, and she took her own life.”

He broke off abruptly, as if he no longer knew what to say. A moment later he went on.

“We don’t know who she is,” he said. “We don’t know why she killed herself. I can give a fairly good description of her. But that’s all.”

Ann-Britt Hoglund got some cracked coffee cups out of a cupboard. Martinsson went out into the yard to have a pee. When he returned, Wallander continued his cautious summary.

“The most important thing is to find out who she was. We’ll search through all missing persons. Since I think she was dark-skinned, we can start by putting a little extra focus on checking on refugees and the refugee camps. Then we’ll have to wait for what the forensic technicians come up with.”

“At any rate, we know there was no crime committed,” said Hansson. “So our job is to determine who she was.”

“She must have come from somewhere,” said Hoglund. “Did she walk here? Did she ride a bike? Did she drive? Where did she get the petrol?”

“And why here, of all places?” said Martinsson. “Why Salomonsson’s place? This farm is way off the beaten track.”

The questions hung in the air. Noren came into the kitchen and said that some reporters had arrived who wanted to know what happened. Wallander, who knew that he had to get moving, stood up.

“I’ll talk to them,” he said.

“Tell them the truth,” said Hansson.

“What else?” Wallander replied in surprise.

He went out into the yard and recognised the two newspaper reporters. One was a young woman who worked for Ystad Recorder , the other an older man from Labour News .

“It looks like a film shoot,” said the woman, pointing at the floodlights in the charred field.

“It’s not,” said Wallander.

He told them what had happened. A woman had died in a fire. There was no suspicion of criminal activity. Since they still didn’t know who she was, he didn’t want to say anything more at this time.

“Can we take some pictures?” asked the man from Labour News .

“You can take as many pictures as you like,” replied Wallander. “But you’ll have to take them from here. No-one is allowed to go into the field.”

The reporters drove off in their cars. Wallander was about to return to the kitchen when he saw one of the technicians working out in the field waving to him. Wallander went over. It was Sven Nyberg, the surly but brilliant head of forensics. They stopped at the edge of the area covered by the floodlights. A slight breeze came wafting from the sea across the field. Wallander tried to avoid looking at the body, with its upstretched arms.

“I think we’ve found something,” said Nyberg.

In his hand he had a little plastic bag. He handed it to Wallander, who moved under one of the floodlights. In the bag was a gold necklace with a tiny pendant.

“It has an inscription,” said Nyberg. “The letters ‘D.M.S.’ and it’s a picture of the Madonna.”

“Why didn’t it melt?” asked Wallander.

“A fire in a field doesn’t generate enough heat to melt jewellery,” Nyberg replied. He sounded tired.

“This is exactly what we needed,” said Wallander.

“We’ll be ready to take her away soon,” said Nyberg, nodding towards the black hearse waiting at the edge of the field.

“How does it look?” Wallander asked cautiously.

Nyberg shrugged.

“The teeth should tell us something. The pathologists are excellent. They can find out how old she was. With DNA technology they can also tell you whether she was born in this country of Swedish parents or if she came from somewhere else.”

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” said Wallander.

“No thanks,” said Nyberg. “I’ll be done here pretty soon. In the morning we’ll go over the entire field. Since there was no crime it can wait until then.”

Wallander went back to the house. He laid the plastic bag containing the necklace on the kitchen table.

“Now we have something to go on,” he said. “A pendant, a Madonna. Inscribed with the initials ‘D.M.S.’ I suggest you all go home now. I’ll stay here a while longer.”

“We’ll meet at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Hansson, getting up.

“I wonder who she was,” said Martinsson. “The Swedish summertime is too beautiful and too brief for something like this to happen.”

They parted in the yard. Hoglund lingered behind.

“I’m thankful I didn’t have to see it,” she said. “I think I understand what you’re going through.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

When the cars had gone he sat down on the steps of the house. The floodlights shone as if over a bleak stage on which a play was being performed, with him the only spectator.

The wind had started to blow. They were still waiting for the warmth of summer. The night air was cold, and Wallander realised that he was freezing sitting there on the steps. How intensely he longed for the summer heat. He hoped it would come soon.

After a while he got up and went inside the house and washed the coffee cups.