Henning Mankell: An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

“What’s happened?”

“I stumbled.”

Martinson looked at him in surprise.

“Did you ring me just to say that you’d stumbled over something?”

“In a way, yes. I want you to see what it was that I stumbled over.”

They walked around to the back of the house. Wallander pointed. Martinson stepped back in surprise.

“What the hell is that?”

“It looks like a hand. Obviously I can’t tell if there’s a whole skeleton.”

Martinson continued to stare at the hand in astonishment.

“I don’t understand a thing.”

“A hand is a hand. A dead hand is a dead person’s hand. As this isn’t a cemetery, there’s something odd here.”

They stood there, staring at the hand. Wallander wondered what Martinson was thinking. Then he wondered what he was thinking himself.

The desire to buy this house had deserted him altogether.

Two hours later the whole house and grounds had been sealed off by police tape, and the technical team had started work. Martinson had tried to persuade Wallander to go home, as it was his day off, but Wallander had no intention of following Martinson’s advice. His Sunday was already ruined.

Wallander wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t stumbled over the hand. If he had bought the house and only later discovered the human bones. How would he react if it turned out that there was a whole skeleton lying in the ground?

A police officer buys a house from a colleague, then discovers that a serious crime of violence has been committed on the premises. He could imagine the newspapers and their sensationalist headlines.

The forensic pathologist, who had come from Lund, was called Stina Hurlén and in Wallander’s opinion was far too young for the job she was doing. But he said nothing, of course. Besides, in her favor was that she paid meticulous attention to detail.

Martinson and Wallander waited while Hurlén made a quick preliminary investigation. Nyberg, the officer in charge of the forensic team, could be heard complaining angrily in the background. Wallander had the feeling he had heard similar rants a thousand times before. On this occasion the problem was a missing tarpaulin.

It’s always missing, he thought. During all my years as a police officer a damned tarpaulin has always been mislaid.

Stina Hurlén stood up.

“Well, it’s a human hand all right. An adult’s hand. Not a child’s.”

“How long has it been lying there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you must have some idea?”

“You know how I hate guessing. And besides, I’m not a specialist in pieces of bones.”

Wallander eyed her in silence for a moment.

“Let’s take a guess. I’ll guess and you’ll guess. As we don’t know. The guesses might help us to get started. Even if they eventually turn out to be quite wrong.”

Hurlén thought for a moment.

“All right, I’ll take a guess,” she said. “I might be completely wrong, but I think that hand has been lying there for a long time.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even really think it — I’m only guessing. Perhaps you could say that experience is set on autopilot.”

Wallander left her to sort herself out and went over to Martinson, who was speaking on his cell phone. He had a mug of coffee in his other hand. He held it out toward Wallander. Neither of them took milk or sugar with their coffee. Wallander took a sip. Martinson hung up.

“Hurlén thinks the hand has been lying here for a long time.”

“Hurlén?”

“The pathologist. Haven’t you come across her before?”

“Huh, they’re changing all the time in Lund. What’s happened to all the old pathologists? They just seem to disappear into their own private heaven.”

“Wherever they all are, Hurlén thinks the hand has been lying here for a long time. That could mean anything, of course. But maybe you know something about the history of this house?”

“Not a lot. Karl Eriksson has owned it for about thirty years. But I don’t know who he bought it from.”

They went into the house and sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander had the feeling that he was now in a house quite different from the one he had come to look at a couple of hours earlier, wondering whether to buy it or not.

“I suppose we’ll have to dig up the whole garden,” said Martinson. “But I gather that they first have to check it out with a new machine — some sort of detector for human remains. A bit like a metal detector. Nyberg has no faith in it at all, but his boss insists. I reckon Nyberg is looking forward to the fancy new machine turning out to be useless, so that he can resort to his tried and tested method of digging away with spades.”

“What happens if we don’t find anything?”

Martinson frowned. “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? There’s a hand lying there in the ground. That suggests there ought to be more hidden away down there. A whole body. Let’s face it, how can a dead hand come flying into this garden? Has a crow found it somewhere and then happened to drop it here of all places? Do hands grow in this garden? Or has it been raining hands over Löderup this autumn?”

“You’re right,” said Martinson. “We ought to find more bones.”

Wallander gazed out of the window, thinking hard.

“Nobody knows what we might find,” he said. “Possibly a whole graveyard. An old plague cemetery perhaps?”

They went out into the garden again. Martinson spoke to Nyberg and some of the other technicians. Wallander thought about his imaginary dog, which just then seemed more unlikely than ever.

Martinson and Wallander drove back to the police station. They parked their cars and went to Martinson’s office, which was in a bigger mess than Wallander had ever seen it before. Once upon a time, a long time ago, Martinson had been an extremely well-organized, almost pedantic police officer. Now he lived in a state of chaos, in which anybody would think it was impossible to find a particular document at all.

Martinson seemed to have read his thoughts.

“It looks a hell of a mess in here,” he said grimly, removing several papers from his desk chair. “I try to keep it tidy, but no matter what I do the papers and files just keep on piling up.”

“It’s the same with me,” said Wallander. “When I first managed to work out how to use a computer, I thought the heaps of paper would dwindle away. Some hope — things just got even worse.”

He gazed out of the window.

“Go home,” said Martinson. “This is your day off. I feel terrible about asking you to take a look at that house.”

“I liked it,” said Wallander. “I liked it and I was pretty sure that Linda would have been just as enthusiastic. I’d already made up my mind to phone you and confirm that I was going to buy it. Now I’m not so sure.”

Martinson accompanied him down to reception.

“Just what is it we’ve found?” said Wallander. “A hand. The remains of a hand. In a garden.”

He broke off as he didn’t need to say any more. They had a case of murder to solve. Unless the hand had been lying there for so long that it would be impossible to identify it or establish the cause of death.

“I’ll phone you,” said Martinson. “If nothing happens, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“At eight o’clock,” said Wallander. “We’ll have a run-through then. If I know Nyberg he’ll spend all night digging away out there.”

Martinson returned to his office. Wallander got into his car, then changed his mind and left it parked where it was. He walked back home, taking the long route through town and pausing at the kiosk next to the railway station where he bought an evening newspaper.