One Step Behind

Wallander kept going. You ate and drank and became intoxicated. You had a tape recorder, you were listening to music. Someone entered this scene and killed you when you were resting on the blue cloth with your arms around each other. One of you, Astrid Hillström, may in fact have been asleep. It was probably already morning, maybe early dawn.

Wallander paused.

His eyes fell on a wineglass near one of the baskets. He knelt down to examine it and waved a photographer over to get a close-up. The glass was leaning against the basket but there was a little pebble supporting it underneath. Wallander looked around. He lifted the edge of the cloth carefully but didn't see any stones or rocks anywhere. He tried to think what it meant. When Nyberg walked by he stopped him.

"There's a pebble propping up that wineglass. If you see any others like it please let me know."

Nyberg made a note of it. Wallander continued his rounds. Then he pulled back a bit and surveyed the scene from more of a distance.

You spread your feast out at the foot of a tree. You chose a private place where no one would see you. Wallander pushed his way through the bushes and stood on the other side of the tree.

He must have come from somewhere. There are no signs of panic. You were resting on the cloth, and one of you was already asleep. But the other two were perhaps still awake.

Wallander went back and studied the corpses for a long time. Something wasn't right. Then he realised what it was. The picture in front of him wasn't real. It had been arranged.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As dusk approached on Sunday, 11 August, and police spotlights gave an unearthly glow to the scene, Wallander did something unexpected. He left. The only person he spoke to was Höglund. He needed to borrow her car since his own was still parked at Mariagatan. He told her to get in touch with him on his mobile phone if he was needed. He didn't tell her where he was going. She returned to the crime scene, where there were no longer any bodies. They had been carried out around 4 p.m. Once the bodies had been removed, Wallander felt consumed by fatigue and nausea. He forced himself to put in a couple more hours; then he felt the need to leave the scene. When he asked Höglund for her car keys, he knew where he was going. He wasn't simply going away. However tired and depressed he got, he rarely functioned without a clear plan. He drove off almost in a hurry. There was something he wanted to see, a mirror he wanted to hold up in front of himself.

Wallander pulled up outside Svedberg's building on Lilla Norregatan. The cement mixer was still there, and Svedberg's keys were in his pocket. The air inside the flat was stale. He went into the kitchen and opened the window. Then he drank a glass of water and reminded himself that he had an appointment with Dr Göransson the next morning. He knew he was going to miss it. He hadn't managed to improve his habits at all since receiving the diagnosis. He still ate as poorly, and had taken no exercise. At this point even his own health would have to be put on hold.

The streetlamps cast a faint light into the living room. Wallander stood completely still in the twilight. He had left the crime scene because he needed some perspective on what had happened. But there was also a thought that had occurred to him earlier and that he wanted time to consider. They had all talked about the co

The events of the day slowly passed through his mind. Only an hour or so after they had discovered the bodies, Wallander had come to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the scene. He discovered what it was when the pathologist told him he was certain that the time of death was not as long ago as 50 days. This suggested two possibilities: either the shots were fired later than Midsummer, or else the bodies had been stored somewhere in the meantime, where they would have been better preserved. They couldn't conclude that the place where the bodies were found was necessarily the same place as the location of the crime.

For Wallander and the team, it didn't seem possible that someone had killed the three people where they were found, moved them to an unknown location for storage, then returned them to their original place. Hansson had suggested that they really did go on their European holiday, but that they returned earlier than anticipated. Wallander acknowledged this as a possibility, however unlikely. But he didn't write anything off yet. He made his observations, listened to anyone who had anything to say, and felt he was being forced deeper and deeper into an endless fog.

The warm August day had seemed never-ending. They took refuge in the structure of police routines and made their thorough examination of the scene. Wallander watched his colleagues, downcast and horrified, do what was expected of them. He watched them and wondered if every one of them was wishing that he or she had become anything but a police officer. People left as soon as they got the chance. Some camping chairs and tables were placed along the path where they could drink cups of coffee that got colder each time the thermoses were opened. Wallander didn't see anyone eat anything all day.

It was Nyberg's tenacity that was the most impressive of all. He rummaged around the half-rotten, stinking food remains with sullen determination. He directed the photographer and the policeman doing the videotaping, sealed countless objects in plastic bags, and made detailed maps of the crime scene. Wallander sensed the hatred Nyberg felt for the person who had caused the mess he was now forced to root around in. He knew that no one else was capable of Nyberg's thoroughness. At one point Wallander had realised that Martinsson was exhausted. He took him aside and ordered him to go home, or at the very least to go down to the forensic technicians' van and sleep for a while. But Martinsson simply shook his head and continued his work on the area closest to the cloth. Some dog patrols from Ystad arrived. Edmundsson was there with his dog, Kall. The dogs had picked up a couple of different scents. One of them had found human excrement behind one of the bushes. In other places there were beer cans and pieces of paper. Everything was duly noted on Nyberg's maps. In one particular spot, under a tree a little distance away, Kall indicated a find but after a careful search they were still unable to locate any human object. Wallander returned to the spot behind this tree several times that day. He discovered that it was one of the most sheltered locations from which to observe the place where the Midsummer celebrations had taken place. He felt a cold grip around his stomach. Had the murderer stood in this very place? What had he seen?

Shortly after midday, Nyberg told Wallander to take a look at the tape recorder that lay on its side by the cloth. They found a number of unmarked cassette tapes in one of the baskets.' Everyone stopped talking when Wallander turned on the tape recorder. A dusky male voice they all recognised came on: the singer Fred Åkerström interpreting a ballad from the collection Fredman's Epistles. Wallander looked at Höglund. She had been right. This was a celebration set in the 18th century, the age of that eternally popular poet Bellman.