One Step Behind

"No one will believe you," he said. "There's no way you'd get past this on your own."

Then he got to work. At just before 1 a.m., the door finally opened.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The first thing he noticed was the smell. After he stepped into the hall, he stood absolutely still to and listened for sounds within the flat. That's when it hit him. Nyberg stayed where he was on the other side of the door. The smell was overpowering.

He realised that it was merely the smell of a place that was never aired. The air had actually gone bad. Wallander gestured for Nyberg to follow him in, which he did unwillingly. Wallander told him to wait there and walked into the rest of the flat on his own. There were three rooms and a little kitchen, all clean and orderly. The neatness contrasted strongly with the bad air.

The door to one of the rooms differed from the others. It looked as if it had been specially made. When Wallander pushed it open he saw that it was extremely thick. It reminded him of a door to a recording studio, like the ones he had seen on the few occasions he'd done radio interviews. Wallander stepped inside. There was something strange about the room. There were no windows and the walls were reinforced. There was a bed and a lamp in the room, nothing else. The bed was made, but there was a faint imprint of a body on the bedspread. It took him a while to put it together: the room looked as it did because it had been soundproofed. His curiosity piqued, Wallander walked through the rest of the flat again, hoping to find a picture of the man who lived there. There were shelves full of porcelain figures, but not a single photograph. Wallander came to a halt in the living room, suddenly overtaken by the sense that he was violating someone's privacy.

He had no business being here. He should leave at once. But something held him back. He returned to the hall where Nyberg was waiting.

"Five more minutes," he said. "That's all."

Nyberg didn't reply. Wallander returned to the flat, conducting a methodical search now. He knew what he was looking for. He went through the three cupboards one by one. In the first two he found only men's clothing. He was about to close the door of the third when he caught sight of something. He reached into one end of the cupboard, where some clothes had been hung behind the others, and pulled out a hanger. It held a red dress. He started going through the drawers with equal concentration, feeling underneath the neatly folded piles of men's clothing. The sense that time was ru

Wallander could see that he was furious. Or possibly afraid.

"It's been almost 15 minutes," he hissed. "What the hell are we doing here?"

Wallander didn't answer. Now he was looking around for a desk. There was an old secretary's desk in the corner. It was locked. He motioned for Nyberg to work on it, but Nyberg objected.

Wallander interrupted his protests, giving him the shortest possible answer he could think of.

"Louise lives here," he said. "You know, the woman in the picture we found in Svedberg's flat. The woman in Copenhagen. The one who doesn't really exist. She lives here."

"You could have said that a little earlier," Nyberg said.

"I didn't know for sure," Wallander said. "Not until this moment. Could you open that desk for me, without leaving any marks?"

Nyberg unlocked it quickly with his tools. The lid folded down into a writing surface.

It had often seemed to Wallander that police work was characterised by a series of expectations that were inevitably disappointed. What he had been expecting at this particular moment, he was later unable to determine, but it could not have been what actually awaited his gaze.

There was a plastic folder full of newspaper clippings, all related to the murder investigation. There was a copy of Svedberg's obituary, which Wallander hadn't seen until then.

Nyberg was waiting behind him. "You should take a look at this," Wallander said slowly. "It'll explain what we're doing in this flat."

Nyberg took a few steps forward, flinched, then looked at Wallander.

"We could leave," Wallander said, "and put the house under surveillance. Or we could call for reinforcements and start going through the flat right away."

"He's killed eight people," Nyberg said. "That means he's armed and dangerous."

It hadn't occurred to Wallander that they might be in danger. That made up his mind for him: they'd get reinforcements. Nyberg closed the desk. Wallander went into the kitchen, where he had seen some glasses on the counter. He wrapped one of them in paper and put it in his pocket. He was about to leave the kitchen when he noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. He felt a wave of fear so powerful it almost knocked him over. He thought someone was about to push the door open and shoot. But nothing happened. Gingerly he approached the back door and nudged it gently. The back stairs were empty. Nyberg was already on his way out of the flat by the front door. Wallander joined him.

They listened carefully. Nothing. Nyberg softly closed the front door. He examined the threshold with a torch.

"There are a few scratches," he said. "But they're not noticeable unless you're really looking for them."

Wallander thought about the back door that had been slightly ajar. He decided to keep it to himself for now. When they got to the station, Wallander literally ran down the corridor to his office. The first person he called was Martinsson, since he wanted him there as soon as possible.

During the next ten minutes he talked to a number of sleepy people who became surprisingly alert when he told them about his find. Martinsson was the first to arrive, then Höglund and the others in rapid succession.

"I'm lucky," she said. "My mother's visiting."

"I went back to Harmonigatan," Wallander said. "I had the feeling it couldn't wait."

By 2 a.m., everyone was assembled. Wallander looked around the table. He wondered briefly how Thurnberg had found the time to get such a perfect knot in his tie. Then he told them about his discovery.

"What made you go over there in the middle of the night?" Hansson asked.

"I'm usually sceptical of my intuition," Wallander said. "But this time I was right."

He shook off his tiredness. Now he had to shape his investigative team into hunters, stalking their prey in ever-narrowing circles until he was caught.

"We don't know where he is right now," he said. "But the back door was open. Given the nature of the locks on his front door, I think we can assume he heard us working on them and fled. In other words, he knows we're closing in on him."

"That means he's not likely to return," Martinsson said.

"We don't know that for sure. I'd like to put the place under surveillance. One car is fine, as long as there are several others close by."

Wallander brought his palms down heavily on the table.

"This man is extremely dangerous," he said. "I want everyone to be fully armed."

Hansson and one of the reinforcements from Malmö volunteered to take the first watch. Nyberg said he would take them to the flat and see if there had been any change in the lights in the window.

"I want to talk to Kjell Albinsson in Rydsgård," Wallander continued. "A car should be sent out to bring him in."

No one remembered Albinsson. Wallander explained that he was the manager at the postal depot and moved on.

"We need to check if Åke Larstam turns up in any police records," he said. "That's your responsibility, Martinsson. It may be the middle of the night to everyone else, but to us it's a normal working day. Feel free to call anyone you can think of who may have important information. Albinsson will give us some details about Larstam, but it may not be enough. This man dresses up as a woman and takes on other personas. His name may not even be Larstam. We have to look everywhere we can think of for clues. Everywhere."