One Step Behind

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

He felt a sense of regret when it was over. Should he have aimed at their heads after all? He knew that it had to be the police. Who else would have reason to visit Karl Evert's flat, now that he was dead and buried? He also knew that they were trying to track him down. There was no other reasonable explanation.

Once again he had managed to escape, something that was both reassuring and satisfying. Although he hadn't expected them to come looking for him there, he had taken the necessary precautions by unlocking the back door and propping a chair against the front door. It would fall to the ground if someone tried to enter. The gun lay loaded on the bedside table. He slept with his shoes on.

The noise from the street disturbed him. It wasn't like sleeping in his soundproofed room. How many times had he tried to convince Karl Evert to renovate his bedroom? But nothing had come of it, and now it was too late.

The images had been blurry and indistinct, but he'd known he was dreaming of his own childhood. He was standing behind the sofa. He was very young. Two people were fighting, probably his parents. There was the harsh, domineering voice of a man. It swooped over his head like a bird of prey. Then there was a woman's voice, weak and afraid. When he heard it, he thought he was hearing his own voice, though he was still safely hidden behind the sofa.

That was when he was woken by the sounds from the hall. They entered his dreams by force. By the time the chair fell over, he was on his feet, the gun cocked in his hand. It would have meant changing his plans, but he should have shot them. He had left the building, his gun tucked into his coat pocket. The car was parked down at the railway station. He'd heard sirens in the distance. He'd driven out past Sandskogen, towards Österlen. He stopped in Kåseberga and took a walk down to the harbour. He thought about what he should do next. He needed more sleep, but it was getting late and he had no idea when Wallander would return home. He had to be there when he did. He had already decided that it should happen today, and he couldn't risk changing his plans.

When he arrived at the far end of the pier, he made up his mind. He drove back to Ystad and parked at the back of the block of flats on Mariagatan. No one saw him slip in through the front door of the building. He rang the doorbell and listened carefully. No one was home. He unlocked the door, walked in, and sat down on the sofa in the living room. He put his gun down on the coffee table. It was a few minutes after 11 a.m.

Hansson and the Malmö officer were still so shaken that they had to be sent home. This meant that the team shrank by two people, and Wallander detected a new level of tension among members of the group when they gathered after the chaotic events at Lilla Norregatan.

Holgersson took him aside to ask if it was time to send for more reinforcements. Wallander wavered, exhausted and starting to doubt his judgment, but then answered with an emphatic no. They didn't need reinforcements, they just needed to focus.

"Do you really think we can find him?" she asked. "Or are you just hoping there will be another breakthrough?"

"I don't know," he admitted.

They sat back down at the conference table. Martinsson had still not been able to find anything on Larstam in the police registers, so he turned the matter over to a subordinate who would search the files in the basement. Höglund hadn't yet managed to find anything on the two sisters. Now that Hansson was out of the game, Wallander asked her to hold off on that. He needed to have her close by; the sisters would have to wait. They had to concentrate on finding Larstam before he turned to victim number nine.

"We have to ask ourselves what we know," Wallander said, for the umpteenth time.

"He's still in town," Martinsson said. "That must mean he's preparing to strike somewhere close by."

"He's not unaffected by us," Thurnberg said, who rarely commented on the action. "He knows we're on his heels."

"It's also possible he likes it this way," Wallander said.

Kjell Albinsson, who was sitting silently in a corner of the room, now indicated that he wanted to speak. Wallander nodded to him and he got up and approached the table.

"I don't know if this is anything," he said. "But I just remembered that last summer someone at work claimed to have seen Larstam down at the marina. That might mean he owns a boat."

Wallander hit the table with the flat of his hand. "How seriously can we take this?"

"It was one of the other postmen who saw him. He was sure it was him."

"Did he ever actually see Larstam climb onto one of the boats?"

"No, but he said he was carrying a container of petrol."

"Then it can't be a sailing boat," said one of the Malmö officers. But this comment met with a storm of protests.

"Sailing boats often have engines as well," Martinsson said. "We can't rule anything out, even a little sea plane."

Martinsson's last suggestion met with even more protests. Wallander silenced them.

"A boat is a good hiding place," he said. "The question is how much stock we put in this."

He turned to Albinsson again. "Are you sure you're right?"

"Yes."

Wallander looked over at Thurnberg, who nodded.

"Get some plainclothes officers to look around the marina," Wallander said. "Make the whole thing as discreet as possible. If there's even a hint of a suspicion that Larstam is there, they should turn back. We'll have to decide how to proceed at that point."

"There are probably a lot of people down there," Höglund said, "with this weather we've been having."

Martinsson and one of the Malmö officers headed down to the marina. Wallander asked Albinsson to sit at the table.

"If you have any more of these boat stories up your sleeve, I'd love to hear them."

"I've been trying to think of everything I can, but it's just making me realise how little I knew about him," Albinsson said.

Wallander checked his watch. It was 11.30 a.m. We're not going to get him in time, he thought. At any moment the phone will ring with the news of another murder.

Höglund started talking about Larstam's motive.

"It must be some kind of revenge," Wallander said.

"For what?" she asked. "Because he was fired from his job? What would the newly-weds have to do with that?"

Wallander got up to get some coffee and Höglund came along.

"You're right. There's another motive here," Wallander said, as they were nursing their mugs of coffee in the canteen. "There may be an element of revenge at the bottom of it, but Larstam kills people who are happy. Nyberg was struck by this thought in Nybrostrand. Albinsson confirmed it. Åke Larstam doesn't like it when people laugh."

"Then he's more disturbed than we realised. You don't kill people just because they're happy. What kind of world is this?"

"Good question," Wallander said. "We ask ourselves what kind of world we live in, but it's too painful to face the truth. Maybe our worst fears have already been realised – maybe the justice system has collapsed. More and more people are feeling overlooked and superfluous, and that feeds the escalation of senseless violence we're seeing. Violence has become part of our daily reality. We complain about the way things are, but sometimes I think things are even worse than we're admitting."

Wallander was about to continue with this line of thought when he was told that Martinsson was on the phone. He spilled coffee on his shirt as he ran back to the conference room.

"We haven't found anything," Martinsson said. "There isn't a boat registered under Larstam's name."

Wallander thought for a moment. "He may have registered his boat under someone else's name," he said.