The Fifth Woman

Prologue

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The night they had come to perform their holy deed was very still.

Afterwards it occurred to the one whose name was Farid, the youngest of the four men, that even the dogs had not made any sound. The men were enveloped by the warm air and barely noticed the faint breezes occasionally wafting in from the desert. They had been waiting since the onset of darkness.

The car that had transported them on the long journey from Algiers and the meeting place at Dar Aziza was old and had bad shocks. They had been forced to interrupt their journey twice, the first time to repair a flat on the left rear tire. They had not even traveled halfway at that point. Farid, who had never before ventured beyond the capital, had sat in the shadow of a boulder and gazed in wonderment at the dramatic shifts in the landscape. The tire’s rubber surface was cracked and worn, and it had blown out slightly north of Bou Saâda. It had taken a long time to unscrew the old nuts and attach the spare. Farid had understood from the muffled exchanges of the others that this delay meant that they would not have time to stop to eat. The journey was finally resumed. Then, shortly outside El Oued, the engine failed. Only after an hour were they able to locate the problem and find a temporary solution. Their leader, a pale man in his thirties with dark hair and the kind of burning eyes found only among those who lived with the call of the Prophet, angrily chided the chauffeur as he bent over the hot engine. Farid did not know the leader’s name, who he was, or where he was from. It was a measure of precaution.

Neither did he know the names of the other two men.

He only knew his own.

Eventually, they continued, the darkness already upon them, and had only water to drink. Nothing to eat.

When they finally reached El Oued, the night was, as mentioned, very still. They had stopped somewhere deep inside the town’s labyrinth of streets, close to a market. As soon as they stepped outside, the car disappeared. Somewhere out of the shadows a fifth man appeared and guided them on. It was only then, as they hurried through the darkness on unknown streets, that Farid began to think in earnest about what would soon take place. With his hand he could feel the slightly curved blade of the knife that rested in a case deep inside the pockets of his caftan.

It had been his brother, Rachid Ben Mehidi, who had first spoken to him of foreigners. They had spent a warm night sitting on the roof of their father’s house, looking out over the glimmering lights of Algiers. Even back then, Farid had known that Rachid was deeply involved in the struggle to change their country into an Islamic state, one that would follow only those laws prescribed by the Prophet. Now he spoke with Farid every evening about the importance of expelling the foreigners from their land. At first Farid had felt flattered that his brother took the time to discuss politics with him, even if at first he did not understand everything Rachid said. It was only later that he realized that Rachid had had another reason for devoting so much time to him. He wanted Farid himself to be part of the fight to drive the foreigners out of the land.

All this had taken place over a year ago. And now, as Farid followed the black-clothed men through the dark and narrow alleyways where the night air was completely stagnant, he was on his way to fulfilling Rachid’s request. Foreigners had to be expelled. But they would not be escorted to the harbors or airports. They would be killed. Then those who had not yet come to this land would decide to stay where they were.

Your task is holy, Rachid had repeatedly told him. The Prophet will be pleased. Your future will be very bright once we have transformed this country according to his wishes.

Farid fingered the knife in his pocket. Rachid had given it to him the night before, when they had said goodbye to each other on the roof. It had a beautiful ivory shaft.

They stopped when they reached the outskirts of the town. The streets opened onto a plaza. The night sky above them was very clear. They stood in the shadow of a long building with stucco walls, roller blinds shuttering its row of closed shops. On the other side of the street was a large stone villa behind an iron fence. The man who had led them here disappeared without a sound. Again they were only four. Everything was very quiet. Farid had never experienced anything like it before. It had never been so quiet in Algiers. In the nineteen years he had lived up to this moment he had never found himself in such stillness as he experienced now.

Not even the dogs, he thought. I can’t even hear the dogs that are out there in this darkness.

Lights were on in a few of the windows of the villa across the street. A bus with broken, flickering headlights came clattering down the street. Then silence fell again.

One of the lit windows went black. Farid tried to guess the time. They had been waiting perhaps half an hour. He was very hungry, having had nothing to eat since the early morning. The two flasks of water they had brought with them were also gone. But he did not want to ask for anything more. It would infuriate their leader. They were there to carry out a holy order and he asked for water?

Yet another light went off, and then, very shortly, the last one. The villa on the other side of the street was now dark. They continued to wait. Then their leader made a sign and they hastened across the street. An old guard posted at the gate was sleeping. He had a wooden stick in his hand. The leader gave him a kick. When the guard awoke, Farid saw the leader hold a knife close to his face and whisper something in his ear. Even in the poor light of the streetlamp Farid could see the fear in the old man’s eyes. The guard stood up and limped away. The gate creaked faintly as they opened it and slipped into the garden. There was a strong scent of jasmine and an herb that Farid recognized but could not remember the name of. Everything was still very quiet. Next to the tall doors of the house was a sign that read Order of the Sisters of Christ. Farid tried to think about what this could mean. At the same moment he felt a hand on his shoulder. He jumped. It was the leader who had touched him. For the first time he spoke—so softly that not even the night wind could hear what was said.

There are four of us, he said. Inside there are also four people. They are sleeping one by one in separate rooms on either side of a corridor. They are old and will not offer any resistance.

Farid looked at the other two men at his side. They were a couple of years older than he was. All at once Farid was sure they had done something like this before. He was the only one who was new. But he did not feel any anxiety. Rachid had assured him that what he was doing was for the sake of the Prophet.

The leader glanced at him, as if reading his thoughts.

Four women live in this house, he said. They are foreigners who have refused to leave our land willingly. Therefore they have chosen to die. In addition, they are Christian.

I am going to kill a woman, Farid thought. Rachid had not said anything about this.

There could be only one reason for it.

It was of no significance. It made no difference.

Then they entered the house. The front door had a lock that was easy to force with the blade of a knife. Inside, where it was dark and very warm since there was no breeze, they turned on their flashlights and carefully made their way up the wide staircase that wound its way up through the house. In the upstairs corridor there was a single bulb in the ceiling. All was still. There were four closed doors before them. The men unsheathed their knives. The leader pointed to the doors and nodded. Farid knew there was no room for hesitation. Rachid had said that everything had to be done very quickly. He would avoid looking at the eyes. He would look only at the throat and then make his cut firmly and decisively.

Afterwards he could not remember much of what had happened. The woman lying in the bed with a white sheet pulled over her had possibly had gray hair. He saw only a dim outline since very little light came in from the street. At the moment he had pulled the sheet away, she had woken up. But she had no time to scream, no time to understand what was happening, before he slashed her throat and immediately stepped back in order to avoid the blood. Then he had turned around and returned to the corridor. The whole thing had taken less than half a minute. Somewhere inside him the seconds had ticked by. They were just about to leave when one of the men called out in a low voice. The leader stiffened for a moment as if he didn’t know what to do.

There was another woman in one of the rooms. A fifth woman.

She should not have been there. She was a stranger. Perhaps she was visiting.

But she was also a foreigner. That much was apparent to the man who had discovered her.

The leader entered the room. Farid, who was standing behind him, could see that the woman had curled up on the bed. Her fear filled him with nausea. There was a dead body in the bed across from her. The white sheet was drenched with blood.

The leader pulled out his knife and slit the throat of the fifth woman.

Afterwards they left the house as silently as they had come. Somewhere in the darkness, the car was waiting for them. When dawn arrived, they had already left El Oued and the corpses of the five women far behind.

It was May 1993.

The letter arrived in Ystad on August 19th, 1993.

Since it had an African stamp and must be from her mother, she waited to open it. She wanted to have peace and quiet when she read it. From the thickness of the envelope she could tell there were many pages. She hadn’t heard a word from her mother in over three months; surely she must have plenty of news by now. She left the letter lying on the coffee table and decided to wait until evening. But she felt vaguely uneasy. Why had her mother typed her name and address this time? No doubt the answer would be in the letter. It was close to midnight by the time she opened the door to the balcony and sat down in her easy chair, which was squeezed in among all her flowerpots. It was a lovely, warm August evening. Maybe one of the last of the year. Autumn was already at hand, hovering unseen. She opened the letter and started to read.

Only afterwards, when she had read the letter to the end and put it aside, did she start to cry.

By that time, she also knew that the letter was written by a woman. The style of the handwriting was not her first clue. There was also something about the choice of words, how the unknown woman tentatively and cautiously approached the task of describing as mercifully as possible all the gruesome events that had occurred.

But there was no mercy involved. There was only the act itself. That was all.

The letter was signed by Françoise Bertrand, a police officer. Her position was not entirely clear, but apparently she was employed as a criminal investigator for the country’s central homicide commission. It was in this capacity that she had learned of the events that took place one night in May in a remote desert town.

Outwardly the facts of the case were clear, easy to grasp, and utterly terrifying. Four nuns, French citizens, had been slaughtered by unknown assailants. The women’s throats had been cut. The perpetrators had left no traces, only blood; thick, congealed blood everywhere.

But there had also been a fifth woman, a Swedish tourist, who had renewed her residence permit in the country several times and happened to be visiting the nuns on the night the assailants appeared with their knives. Her passport, found in a handbag, revealed that her name was Anna Ander, sixty-six years old, in the country on a legal tourist visa. There was also an open-return plane ticket. Since it was bad enough that four nuns had been murdered, and since Anna Ander seemed to have been traveling alone, the detectives on the case, in response to political pressure, decided not to mention the fifth woman. She was simply not there on that fateful night. Her bed was empty. Instead, they reported her death in a traffic accident and then buried her, nameless and unknown, in an unmarked grave. All her belongings were discarded, all traces of her erased. And it was here that Françoise Bertrand entered the picture. Early one morning I was called in by my boss, she wrote in the long letter, and ordered to drive out to the scene at once. By this time the woman was already buried. Françoise Bertrand’s job was to get rid of any last traces of her and then destroy her passport and other effects.

Anna Ander had supposedly never arrived or spent any time in the country. She had ceased to exist, obliterated from all official records. But Françoise Bertrand discovered a travel bag that the sloppy homicide investigators had overlooked. It was lying behind a wardrobe. Or maybe it had been on top and then fallen off, she couldn’t tell. But there were letters in it that Anna Ander had begun to write, and they were addressed to her daughter in a town called Ystad in faraway Sweden. Françoise Bertrand apologized for reading these private papers. She had asked for help from a drunken Swedish artist she knew in the capital, and he had translated the letters for her without knowing anything about the case. Françoise wrote down the translations as he read, and a picture gradually began to take shape.

Even then she already had serious pangs of conscience about what had happened to this fifth woman. Not only about the fact that she was murdered so ruthlessly in the country that Françoise loved so much but which was so torn by internal strife. In the letter, she tried to explain what was happening in her country, and she also told something about herself. Her father was born in France but came to Africa as a child with his parents. There he grew up, and later married a local woman. Françoise, the oldest of their children, had always had the feeling of having one foot in France and the other in Africa. But now she no longer had any doubt. She was an African. And that was why she was so tormented by the antagonisms tearing her country apart. That was also why she didn’t want to contribute to the wrongs against herself and her country by erasing this woman, by drowning the truth in a fabricated car crash, refusing even to take the responsibility for Anna Ander’s presence. Françoise Bertrand had begun to suffer from insomnia, she wrote. Finally she decided to write to the dead woman’s daughter and tell her the truth. She forced herself to act in spite of the loyalty she felt to the police force. But she asked that her name be kept secret. I’m writing you the truth, she concluded her long letter. Maybe I’m making a mistake by telling you what happened. But how could I do otherwise? I found a bag containing letters that a woman wrote to her daughter. Now I’m telling you how they came into my possession and forwarding them to you.

Françoise Bertrand had enclosed the unfinished letters in the envelope.

Along with Anna Ander’s passport.

Her daughter didn’t read the letters. She put them on the floor of the balcony and wept for a long time. Not until dawn did she get up and go into the kitchen. She sat motionless at the kitchen table for quite a while. Her head was completely empty. But then she started to think, and suddenly everything seemed simple to her. She realized that she had done nothing but wait all these years. She hadn’t understood that before: the fact that she had been waiting, or why. Now she knew. She had a mission, and she didn’t need to wait any longer to carry it out. It was time. Her mother was gone. A door had been thrown wide open.

She stood up and went to get her box with the slips of paper she had cut up, and the big ledger she kept in a drawer under her bed. She spread the folded slips of paper on the table in front of her. She knew there were exactly forty-three of them. One of them had a black cross. Then she started unfolding the slips, one by one.

The cross was on the twenty-seventh one. She opened the ledger and ran her finger down the column of names until she reached the twenty-seventh row. She stared at the name she had written there and slowly saw a face materialize in her mind.

Then she closed the book and put the slips of paper back in the box.

Her mother was dead.

She no longer had any doubt. And now there was no turning back. She would give herself a year to work out the grief, to make all her preparations.

Once more she went out on the balcony. She smoked a cigarette and gazed out over the waking city. A rainstorm was moving in from the sea.

Just after seven she went to bed.

It was the morning of August 20th, 1993.

Skåne

21 September—11 October 1994

Chapter One

Just after 10:00, he finally finished the poem.

The last stanzas had been difficult to write; they took him a long time. He had wanted to achieve a melancholy yet beautiful expression. He broke off several attempts by tossing them in the wastebasket. Twice he was close to giving up altogether. But now the poem lay before him on the table—his lament over the middle spotted woodpecker, which had almost disappeared from Sweden; it hadn’t been seen in the country since the early 1980s. One more bird about to be eradicated by humankind.

He got up from his desk and stretched. With every passing year, it was harder and harder for him to sit bent over his writings for hours on end.

An old man like me shouldn’t be writing poems anymore, he thought. When you’re seventy-eight years old, your thoughts are of little use to anyone but yourself.

At the same time he knew that he was wrong. It was only in the Western world that old people were viewed with indulgence or contemptuous sympathy. In other cultures, age was respected as a time of enlightened wisdom. He would keep writing poems as long as he lived, as long as he could manage to lift a pen and his mind was as clear as it was now. He was not capable of much else. Not anymore. Once, a long time ago, he had been an expert car dealer, the most successful in the region. He was known as a tough negotiator in business deals. And he had certainly sold a lot of cars. During the good years he had owned branches in both Tomelilla and Sjöbo. He had amassed a fortune large enough to let him live in style.

But it was his poetry that really mattered to him. All the rest was ephemeral necessity. The verses lying on the table gave him a satisfaction he seldom felt.

He drew the curtains so they covered the picture windows that faced the fields rolling gently down toward the sea, somewhere beyond the horizon. He went over to his bookshelf. In his lifetime he had published nine collections of poetry. There they stood, side by side. None of them had sold more than a small printing. Three hundred copies, sometimes a few more. The unsold copies were in cartons in the basement. But they had not been banished there. They were still his pride and joy, although long ago he had decided to burn them one day. He would carry the cartons out to the courtyard and put a match to them. The day he received his death sentence, either from a doctor or from a premonition that his life would soon be over, he would get rid of the thin volumes that no one wanted to buy. No one would be allowed to throw them onto a trash heap.

He looked at the books standing on the shelf. He had been reading poems his whole life, and he had memorized a lot of them. He had no illusions; his poems were not the best ever written. But they weren’t the worst, either. In each of his poetry collections, which had been published about every five years since the late 1940s, there were individual stanzas that could measure up to anyone’s standard. But he had been a car dealer by profession, not a poet. His poems were not reviewed on the cultural pages. He hadn’t received any literary awards. And his books had been printed at his own expense. The first poetry collection he put together he had sent around to the big publishing houses in Stockholm. They were always returned with brusque refusals in preprinted form letters. One editor, however, had taken the trouble to make a personal comment. He said nobody would want to read poems that were about nothing but birds. The spiritual life of the white wagtail is of no interest, the editor had written.

After that, he stopped turning to publishers. He paid for publication himself. Simple covers, black text on white paper. Nothing expensive. The words between the covers were what mattered. In spite of everything, many people had read his poems over the years. And many of them had expressed their appreciation.

Now he had written a new one, about the middle spotted woodpecker, a lovely bird no longer seen in Sweden.

The bird poet, he thought.

Almost everything I’ve written is about birds. About the flapping of wings, the rushing in the night, a lone mating call somewhere in the distance. In the world of birds I have found an intimation of the innermost secrets of life.

He returned to his desk and picked up the sheet of paper. The last stanza had finally worked. He placed the paper back on the desk. He felt a sharp pain in his back as he crossed the large room again. Was he getting sick? Every day he listened for signs that his body had started to betray him. He had stayed in good shape throughout his life. He had never smoked, always eating and drinking in moderation. This regime had endowed him with good health. But soon he would be eighty years old. The end of his allotted time was fast approaching. He went out to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee from the coffee maker, which was always on. The poem he had finished writing filled him with both sadness and joy.

The autumn of my years, he thought. An apt name. Everything I write could be the last. And it’s September. It’s autumn. Both on the calendar and in my life.

He carried his coffee cup back to the living room. He sat down carefully in one of the brown leather armchairs that had kept him company for more than forty years. He had bought them to celebrate his triumph when he was awarded the Volkswagen franchise for southern Sweden. On a little table next to his armrest stood the photo of Werner, the German shepherd that he missed more than all the other dogs that had accompanied him through life. To grow old was to grow lonely. The people who filled your life died off. Finally even your dogs vanished into the shadows. Soon he would be the only one left. At a certain point in life, everyone was alone in the world. Recently he had tried to write a poem about that idea, but he could never seem to finish it. Maybe he ought to try again, now that he was done with his lament for the middle spotted woodpecker. But birds were what he knew how to write about. Not people. Birds he could understand. People were usually incomprehensible. Had he ever once understood himself? Writing poems about something he didn’t understand would be like trespassing in a forbidden area.

He closed his eyes and suddenly remembered The 10,000 Kronor Question during the late fifties, or maybe it was the early sixties. The TV screen was still black-and-white back then. A cross-eyed young man with slicked-back hair had chosen the topic Birds. He answered all the questions and received his check for the incredible sum, in those days, of 10,000 kronor.

He had not been sitting in the television studio, in the isolation booth with headphones over his ears. He had been sitting in this very same leather armchair. But he too had known all the answers. Not once did he even need extra time to think. But he didn’t win any 10,000 kronor. Nobody knew about his vast knowledge of birds. He just kept writing his poems instead.

He awoke with a start from his daydreams. A sound had caught his attention. He listened in the darkened room. Was there someone moving outside in the courtyard?

He pushed away the thought. It was just his imagination. Part of getting old meant suffering from anxiety. He had good locks on his doors. He kept a shotgun in his bedroom upstairs, and he had a pistol close at hand in a kitchen drawer. If any intruders came to this isolated farmhouse just north of Ystad, he could defend himself. And he wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

He got up from his chair. There was another sharp twinge in his back. The pain came and went in waves. He set his coffee cup on the drainboard and looked at his watch. Almost 11:00. It was time to go outside. He squinted at the thermometer outside the kitchen window and saw it was 7° Celsius. The barometer was rising. A slight breeze from the southwest was passing over Skåne. The conditions were ideal, he thought. Tonight the flight would be to the south. The long-range migratory birds would pass over his head by the thousands on invisible wings. Although he wouldn’t be able to see them, he could feel them out there in the dark, high above his head. For more than fifty years he had spent countless autumn nights out in the fields, just to experience the feeling of the night birds passing somewhere up above him.

The whole sky is moving, he often thought.

Entire symphony orchestras of silent songbirds would be leaving before the approaching winter, heading for warmer climes. The urge to leave lay deep in their genes. And their unsurpassed ability to navigate by the stars and the earth’s magnetic field always steered them right. They sought out the favorable winds, they had built up their layer of fat, and they could stay aloft for hour after hour.

A whole sky, vibrating with wings, was beginning its annual pilgrimage. The flight of birds toward Mecca.

What is a person compared to a night flyer? A lonely, earthbound old man. While up there, high above, a whole sky sets off on its journey.

He had often thought it was like performing a sacred act. His own autumnal high mass, standing there in the dark, sensing the departure of the migratory birds. And then, when spring came, he was there to welcome them back.

The night migration was his religion.

He went out to the entryway and stood with one hand on the coat hanger. Then he went back to the living room and pulled on the sweater lying on a stool by the desk.

Along with all the other vexations, getting old meant that you got cold more quickly.

Once more he looked at the poem lying there finished on the desk. The lament for the middle spotted woodpecker. It had turned out the way he wanted at last. Maybe he would live long enough to put together enough poems for a tenth and final collection. He had already decided on the title:

High Mass in the Night.

He went back to the entryway, put on his jacket, and pulled a cap over his forehead. He opened the front door. The fall air was filled with smells from the wet clay. He closed the door behind him and let his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. The garden was desolate. In the distance he could see the glow of the lights in Ystad. Otherwise, he lived so far from his other neighbors that only darkness surrounded him. The starry sky was almost completely clear. A few clouds were visible on the horizon.

On a night like this, the migration was bound to pass above his head.

He started walking. The farmhouse he lived in was old, with three wings. The fourth had burned down sometime early in the century. He had kept the cobblestones in the courtyard. He spent a lot of money on a thorough renovation of his farmhouse, which was still not completed. In his will he would give it all to the Cultural Association in Lund. He had never been married, never had any children. He sold cars and got rich. He had had dogs. And then the birds had appeared over his head.

I have no regrets, he thought, as he followed the path that led down to the tower he had built himself, where he usually stood to watch for the night birds. I regret nothing, since it is meaningless to regret.

It was a beautiful September night.

Still, something was making him uneasy.

He stopped on the path and listened, but all he could hear was the soft sighing of the wind. He kept walking. Could it be the pain that was worrying him, those sudden sharp pains in his back? The worry was prompted by something inside him.

He stopped again and turned around. Nothing there. He was alone. The path sloped downward, leading to a little hill. Just before the hill there was a broad ditch over which he had placed a footbridge. At the top of the hill stood his tower. From his front door it was exactly 247 meters. He wondered how many times he had walked along this path. He knew every turn, every hollow. And yet he walked slowly and cautiously. He didn’t want to risk falling and breaking his leg. Old people’s bones grew brittle, he knew that. If he wound up in the hospital with a broken hip he would die, since he couldn’t endure lying idle in a hospital bed. He would start worrying about his life. And then nothing could save him.

He stopped suddenly. An owl hooted. Somewhere close by, a twig snapped. The sound had come from the grove just past the hill where his tower stood. He stood motionless, all his senses alert. The owl hooted again. Then all was silent once more. He muttered peevishly to himself as he continued.

Old and scared, he thought. Afraid of ghosts and afraid of the dark.

Now he could see the tower. A black silhouette against the night sky. In twenty meters he would be at the bridge crossing the deep ditch. He kept walking. The owl was gone. A tawny owl, he thought.

No doubt about it, it was a tawny owl.

Suddenly he came to a halt. He had reached the bridge that led over the ditch.

There was something about the tower on the hill. Something was different. He squinted, trying to see details in the dark. He couldn’t make out what it was. But something had changed.

I’m imagining things, he thought. Everything’s the same as always. The tower I built ten years ago hasn’t changed. It’s just my eyesight getting blurry, that’s all. He took another step, out onto the bridge, and felt the planks beneath his feet. He kept staring at the tower.

There’s something wrong, he thought. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a meter higher than it was last night. Or else it’s all a dream, and I’m looking at myself standing up there in the tower.

The moment the thought occurred to him, he knew it was true. There was someone up in the tower. A silhouette, motionless. A sudden twinge of fear passed through him, like a lone gust of wind. Then he got mad. Somebody was trespassing on his property, climbing his tower without asking him for permission. It was probably a poacher hunting the deer that usually grazed around the grove on the other side of the hill. He had a hard time believing it could be another birdwatcher.

He called out to the figure in the tower. No reply, no movement. Again he grew uncertain. His eyes must be deceiving him; they were so blurry.

He called out once more but got no answer. He started to walk across the bridge.

When the planks gave way he fell headlong. The ditch was more than two meters deep. He pitched forward and didn’t even have time to stretch out his arms to break his fall.

He felt a hideous pain. It came out of nowhere and cut right through him, like red-hot irons piercing his body. The pain was so intense he couldn’t even scream. Just before he died he realized that he had never reached the bottom of the ditch. He remained suspended in his own pain.

His last thought was of the night birds migrating somewhere far above him.

The sky moving toward the south.

One last time he tried to tear himself away from the pain.

Then it was all over.

The time was twenty past eleven on the night of September 21, 1994. That night, huge flocks of song thrushes and red-winged blackbirds were flying south.

They came out of the north and set a southwest course over Falsterbo Point, heading for the warmth that awaited them, far away.

When all was quiet, she walked carefully down the tower steps. She shone her flashlight into the ditch. The man named Holger Eriksson was dead.

She switched off the flashlight and stood still in the darkness.

Then she walked quickly away.

Chapter Two

Just after five o’clock on Monday morning, the 26th of September,

Kurt Wallander woke up in bed in his apartment on Mariagatan in central Ystad.

The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was look at his hands. They were tanned. He leaned back on his pillow again and listened to the autumn rain drumming on the window of his bedroom. A feeling of satisfaction came over him at the memory of the trip that had ended two days earlier at Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen. He had spent an entire week with his father in Rome. It had been hot there, and he got a tan. In the afternoons, when the heat was most intense, they had sought out a bench in the Villa Borghese where his father could sit in the shade, while Kurt took off his shirt and turned his face to the sun. That had been the only conflict between them the entire trip. His father simply couldn’t understand how he could be vain enough to spend time getting a tan. But it had been a trivial conflict, and its only purpose seemed to be to give them some sense of perspective on their trip.

That happy vacation, thought Wallander as he lay in bed. We took a trip to Rome, my father and I, and it went well. It went better than I could have ever imagined or hoped.

He looked at the clock on the nightstand. He had to go back on duty today. But he was in no hurry. He could stay in bed for a while yet. He leaned over the stack of newspapers he had glanced through the night before, and started reading about the results of the parliamentary election. Because he had been in Rome on election day, he had sent in an absentee ballot. Now he could see that the Social Democrats had taken a good forty-five percent of the vote. But what did that actually mean? Would there be any changes?

He dropped the newspaper to the floor. In his thoughts he returned to Rome one more time.

They had stayed at an inexpensive hotel near the Campo dei Fiori. From a roof terrace right above their two rooms they had an expansive, beautiful view over the whole city. There they drank their morning coffee and planned what they were going to do each day. Wallander’s father always knew what he wanted to see. Wallander sometimes worried that his father wanted to do too much, that he wouldn’t have the strength. He was always looking for signs that his father was confused or absentminded. The illness was lurking there, and they both knew it. The illness with the strange name, Alzheimer’s disease. But that entire week, the week of the happy vacation, his father had been in a glorious mood. Wallander felt a lump in his throat at the thought that the whole trip now belonged to the past and now remained only as a memory. They would never return to Rome; it was the one and only time they would ever make the trip, he and his almost eighty-year-old father.

There had been moments of great closeness between them. For the first time in nearly forty years.

Wallander pondered the discovery he had made, that they were a lot like each other, much more than he had ever wanted to admit before. Especially the fact that they were both definitely morning people. When Wallander told his father that the hotel didn’t serve breakfast before seven in the morning, he protested at once. He dragged Wallander down to the front desk and in a mixture of Skåne dialect, a few English words, and some German phrases, as well as a number of random Italian words, he managed to explain that he wanted to have breakfast presto. Not tardi. Absolutely not tardi. For some reason he also said passaggio a livello several times as he was urging the hotel to start its breakfast service at least an hour earlier, at six o’clock, at which time they would either get their coffee or seriously consider looking for another hotel. Passaggio a livello, said his father, and the desk clerk had looked at him in shock but also with respect.

Naturally, they got their breakfast at six o’clock. Wallander later looked in his Italian dictionary and found that passaggio a livello meant railroad crossing. He assumed that his father had mixed it up with some other phrase. But he didn’t know what, and he was wise enough not to ask.

Wallander listened to the rain. The trip to Rome, one brief week, seemed in his memory an endless and bewildering experience. What time he wanted to have his morning coffee was not the only thing his father had fixed ideas about. He had also matter-of-factly and self-confidently guided his son through the city; he knew what he wanted to see. Nothing had been haphazard. Wallander could tell that his father had been planning this trip his whole life. It was a pilgrimage, which Wallander had been allowed to take part in. He was a component in his father’s journey, an invisible but ever-present servant. There was a secret significance to the journey that he had never been able to grasp. His father had traveled to Rome to see something he already seemed to have experienced within himself.

The third day they had visited the Sistine Chapel. For almost an hour Wallander’s father stood staring at the ceiling that Michelangelo had painted. It was like watching an old man send a wordless prayer directly to heaven. Wallander himself soon got a crick in his neck and had to give up. He understood that he was looking at something very beautiful. But he knew his father saw infinitely more. For an instant he wondered facetiously if his father might be searching for a grouse or a sunset in the huge ceiling fresco. But he regretted his thought. There was no doubt that his father, commercial painter that he was, stood gazing at a master’s work with reverence and insight.

Wallander opened his eyes. The rain was drumming on the window.

It was on the same evening, their third in Rome, when he suddenly had a feeling that his father was preparing something he wanted to keep as his own secret. Where this feeling came from Wallander had no idea. They had eaten dinner on Via Veneto, way too expensive in Wallander’s view, but his father insisted that they could afford it. They were on their first and last trip together to Rome, so they ought to be able to afford a decent dinner. Then they strolled slowly through the city. The evening was warm, they were surrounded by people everywhere, and Wallander’s father had talked about the ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Twice they lost their way before they finally found their hotel. Wallander’s father was greeted with great respect after his breakfast outburst, and they picked up their keys, received a polite bow from the desk clerk, and went up the stairs. In the corridor they said good night and then closed their doors. Wallander lay down and listened to the sounds from the street. Maybe he thought about Baiba, maybe he was just falling asleep.

All of a sudden he was wide awake again. Something made him uneasy. After a while he put on his robe and went down to the lobby. Everything was quiet. The night clerk was sitting watching TV on low in the room behind the front desk. Wallander bought a bottle of mineral water. The clerk was a young man working nights to finance his theological studies. That’s what he had told Wallander the first time he came downstairs to buy some water. He had dark, wavy hair and was born in Padua. His name was Mario and he spoke excellent English. Wallander stood there holding his water bottle and suddenly heard himself asking the young night clerk to come upstairs and wake him if his father showed up in the lobby during the night, or happened to leave the hotel. The desk clerk looked at him; maybe he was surprised, or maybe he had worked there long enough that no nighttime requests from hotel guests could surprise him anymore. He nodded and said, certainly, if the senior signor Wallander went out during the night, he would knock on the door of room 32 at once.

It was on the sixth night that it happened. That day they had strolled around the Forum Romanum and also paid a visit to Galleria Doria Pamphili. In the evening they went through the dark underground passages that led to the Spanish Steps from the Villa Borghese, and ate dinner in a restaurant; Wallander was shocked when the bill arrived. It was their last night, and this vacation, which could never be described as anything but happy, was coming to an end. Wallander’s father showed the same boundless energy and curiosity that he had on the whole trip. They walked through the city and stopped at a café for a cup of coffee and toasted each other with a glass of grappa. At the hotel they picked up their keys—the evening had been just as warm as all the other evenings that week in September—and Wallander fell asleep as soon as he fell into bed.

It was half past one when the knock on the door came.

At first he didn’t know where he was. But when he jumped up, half awake, and opened the door, the night clerk was standing there, and in his excellent English he explained that signor Wallander’s father had just left the hotel. Wallander threw on his clothes. When he reached the street he saw his father walking with purposeful steps along the opposite sidewalk. Wallander followed him at a distance; he thought that for the first time he was tailing his own father, and he knew that his premonitions had been right. At first he was unsure where they were heading. Then, when the streets began to narrow, he realized they were on their way to the Spanish Steps. He still kept his distance. And then, in the warm Roman night, he watched his father climb all the way up the Spanish Steps to the church with two towers. There his father sat down; he looked like a black dot way up there, and Wallander kept himself hidden in the shadows. His father stayed there for almost an hour. Then he stood up and came back down the steps. Wallander continued to tail him; it was the most mysterious assignment he had ever carried out, and soon they were at the Fontana di Trevi. His father did not toss a coin over his shoulder, but just watched the water spraying out of the huge fountain. His face was lit enough by a streetlight for Wallander to catch sight of a gleam in his eyes.

Then he followed his father back to the hotel.

The next day they were sitting in the Alitalia plane to Copenhagen, with his father in the window seat, just as on the trip down. Wallander looked at his hands and saw that he had a tan. Not until they were on the ferry heading back to Limhamn did Wallander ask whether his father was pleased with the trip. He nodded, mumbled something unintelligible, and Wallander knew that he couldn’t demand more enthusiasm than that. Gertrud was waiting for them in Limhamn and drove them home. They dropped Wallander off in Ystad, and later that night, when he called to ask if everything was all right, Gertrud told him that his father was already out in his studio painting his trademark motif, the sunset over a motionless, becalmed landscape.

Now Wallander got out of bed and went to the kitchen. It was five thirty. He brewed some coffee. Why had his father gone out into the night? Why did he sit there on the steps? What was it that gleamed in his eyes at the fountain?

He had no answers. But he had been allowed a glimpse into his father’s secret interior landscape. He also had the wits to stay where he was, outside the invisible fence. And he would never ask him about his solitary promenade through Rome.

As the coffee was brewing, Wallander went into the bathroom. He noticed with pleasure that he looked healthy and energetic. The sun had bleached his blond hair. All that spaghetti might have put a few kilos on him, but he refused to step on the bathroom scale. He felt rested. That was the most important thing. He was glad they had actually made the trip.

The feeling that in just a few hours he would turn into a cop again didn’t bother him. He often had trouble going back to work after a vacation, especially in recent years; he felt a strong reluctance. He had also gone through periods when he harbored serious thoughts of leaving the force and finding another job, maybe as a security officer at some corporation. But a cop was what he was. This insight had matured slowly but irrevocably. He would never be anything else.

As he showered he thought back to the events of several months before, during the hot summer and Sweden’s triumphant victory in the World Cup soccer tournament. He still recalled with anguish the desperate hunt that summer for a serial axe murderer who scalped his victims. During the week in Rome, all thoughts of this had been banished from his mind. Now they came flooding back. A week in Rome hadn’t changed a thing. He was coming back to the same world.

He sat at his kitchen table until after seven. The rain continued to beat on the windowpanes. The heat of Italy already seemed a distant memory. Fall had come to Skåne.

At seven thirty he left his apartment and drove to the police station. His colleague Martinsson arrived at the same time, parking next to him. They said a quick hello in the rain and hurried into the entryway of the station.

How was the trip? asked Martinsson. Welcome back, by the way.

My father was very pleased, replied Wallander.

What about you?

It was a great trip. And hot.

They went inside. Ebba, who had been the receptionist at the station for more than thirty years, greeted him with a big smile.

Can you get so tan in Italy in September? she asked in surprise.

You can, said Wallander, if you stay in the sun.

They walked down the hall. Wallander realized he should have bought Ebba a little something. He was annoyed at his thoughtlessness.

Everything’s calm here, said Martinsson. No serious cases. Almost nothing going on.

Maybe we can hope for a calm autumn, said Wallander dubiously.

Martinsson went off to get coffee. Wallander opened the door to his office. Everything was just as he’d left it. The desk was empty. He hung up his jacket and opened the window a crack. In the in-box someone had placed a