One Step Behind

"What do you mean, 'disappeared'?" Wallander was having trouble concealing his impatience.

"A woman who was hanging up her laundry when the couple arrived said the same thing," Höglund said. "She thought she saw a swimmer, but when she looked again he was gone."

Wallander shook his head. "What does that mean? That he drowned? Buried himself in the sand?"

Hansson pointed to the stretch of beach that lay directly below the crime scene.

"The place he sat down was right there," he said. "At least according to one child who seems believable. He had his eyes open."

They walked down on the beach. Hansson ran over to a dark-haired boy and his father. Wallander made them all walk in a wide circle to avoid ruining the tracks in the sand and making it harder for the dog to pick up a scent. They could see the marks of someone sitting in the sand, the remains of a little hole and a piece of plastic sheeting.

Wallander shouted for Edmundsson and Nyberg to join him.

"This plastic reminds me of something," he said, and Nyberg nodded. "Maybe it matches the plastic sheeting we found in the nature reserve."

Wallander turned to Edmundsson. "Let her smell this and see what she finds."

They walked off to the side and watched the dog, who immediately took off into the sand dunes. Then she veered to the left. Wallander and Martinsson followed at a distance. The dog was still excited. They arrived at a small road, and there the scent ended. Edmundsson shook his head.

"A car," Martinsson said.

"Someone may have seen it," Wallander said. "Get every police officer out here to work on this: we're looking for a man in a bathing suit. He left about an hour ago in a car that was parked here."

Wallander ran back to the crime scene. One of the forensic technicians was making a mould of a footprint in the sand. Edmundsson's dog was searching the area.

Hansson was just ending a conversation with a woman from the camping ground. Wallander waved him over.

"More people saw him," Hansson said.

"The swimmer?"

"He was down in the water when the couple arrived. Then he walked up onto the beach. Someone said it looked as though he started to build a sand castle, then got up and disappeared."

"No one's seen anyone else in the area?"

"One man, who is clearly under the influence, claimed two masked men were riding down the beach on bicycles, but I think we can safely disregard this."

"Then we'll stick with the swimmer for now," Wallander said. "Do we know who the victims are?"

"The photographer had this invitation in his pocket," Höglund said and handed it over to Wallander. He was overcome by such a wave of despair that he wanted to scream.

"Malin Skander and Torbjörn Werner," he read out loud. "They were married at 2 p.m. this afternoon."

Hansson had tears in his eyes. Höglund was staring at the ground.

"They were man and wife for two whole hours," he said. "They came down here to have their pictures taken. Who was the photographer?"

"We found his name on the inside of the camera bag," Hansson said. "His name was Rolf Haag and he had a studio in Malmö."

"We have to notify the next of kin," Wallander said. "The press will be all over this place before we know it."

"Shouldn't we put up roadblocks?" Martinsson asked. He had just joined them.

"Why? We have no idea what the car looked like. Even though we know when this happened, it's already too late."

"I just want to nail the bastard," Martinsson said.

"We all do," Wallander said. "So let's go through everything we know at this point. The one lead we have is a lone swimmer. We have to assume he's our man. We know two things about him: he's well informed and plans his crimes meticulously."

"You think he was out there swimming in the ocean while he waited for them?" Hansson asked hesitantly.

Wallander tried to imagine the chain of events. "He knew the newly-weds were having their wedding pictures taken here," he said. "On the invitation it said the reception was starting at 5 p.m. He knew the photo session would be around 4 p.m. He waited out in the water, having parked his car nearby in a spot where he could get down to the beach without walking through the camping ground."

"He had his gun with him the whole time he was out in the water?" Hansson was clearly sceptical, but Wallander was starting to see how it hung together.

"Remember that this is a well-informed and meticulous killer," he said. "He's waiting for his victims out in the water. That means he's only wearing a bathing suit, and with his hair wet his whole appearance is altered. No one pays any attention to a swimmer. Everyone saw him and knew he was there, but no one could describe him."

He looked around and they nodded in agreement. None of the witnesses had managed to describe him yet.

"The newly-weds arrive with their photographer," Wallander said. "That's his cue to come up out of the water and sit down on the beach."

"He has a towel," Höglund added. "A striped one. Several people recalled that detail."

"That's good," Wallander said. "The more detail the better. He sits down on his striped towel, and what does he do?"

"He starts to dig in the sand," Hansson said.

The pieces were starting to fit together. The killer followed his own rules, and often varied them, but Wallander was starting to see a pattern.

"He's not building a sand castle," he said. "He's uncovering a gun that he's buried in the sand under a piece of plastic sheeting."

Now they followed his train of thought. Wallander continued slowly. "He planted the gun there at some earlier point," he said. "He just has to wait for the right moment, when no one happens to be walking by. He gets up, probably shielding the gun from view with his towel. He fires the gun three times. The victims die immediately. He must have had a silencer on the gun. He continues past the sand dunes, gets to the road where his car is parked, and escapes. The whole thing doesn't take longer than a minute. But we don't know where he went."

Nyberg walked over and joined them.

"We don't know anything about this killer, other than what he's done," Wallander said. "But we're going to find similarities between these crimes, and new details will emerge."

"I know something about him," Nyberg interjected. "He uses snuff. There's some down there in the hole in the sand. He must have tried to kick some sand over it, but the dog found it. We're sending it to the laboratory. You can find out quite a lot about a person from his saliva."

Wallander saw Holgersson approaching from a distance, with Thurnberg a couple of steps behind. The sense of failure washed over him again. Even though he had acted in good faith, he had failed. They hadn't found the man who had killed their colleague, three young people in a nature reserve, a girl curled up in a cave on an island in the Östergötland archipelago, and now some newly-weds and their photographer. There was only one thing he could do, and that was ask Holgersson to put someone else in charge. Maybe Thurnberg had already asked the national police to step in.

Wallander didn't have the energy to go over the events with them. Instead, he walked to Nyberg, who was turning his attention to the tripod.

"He was able to take one picture before it happened," Nyberg said. "We'll get it developed as soon as possible."

"They were married for two hours," Wallander said.

"It seems like this madman hates happy people, sees it as his life's calling to turn joy into misery."

Wallander listened absently to Nyberg's last comment, but he didn't reply. He still didn't have the energy to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. He had been convinced that the killer would strike again, but he was hoping he would be proved wrong.

A good policeman always hopes for the best outcome, Rydberg had often said. And what else? That fighting crime is simply a question of endurance; about which side can outlast the other.