The Pyramid

When he reached the station, Rydberg was already there. They went to the break room, where they found several bleary-eyed officers who had just finished the night shift. Rydberg had tea and rusks. Wallander sat down across from him.

'I heard you went to Egypt,' Rydberg said. 'How were the pyramids?'

'High,' Wallander said. 'Very strange.'

'And your father?'

'He could have gone to prison. But I got him out by paying almost ten thousand kronor in fines.'

Rydberg laughed.

'My dad was a horse-trader,' he said. 'Have I told you that?'

'You've never said anything about your parents.'

'He sold horses. Travelled around to markets, checking the teeth, and was apparently a devil at inflating the price. That old stereotype about the horse-trader's wallet is actually true. My dad had one of those filled with thousand-kronor notes. But I wonder if he even knew that the pyramids were in Egypt. It's even less likely that he knew the capital was Cairo. He was completely uneducated. There was only one thing he knew and that was horses. And possibly women. All his dalliances drove my mother crazy.'

'One has the parents one has,' Wallander said. 'How are you feeling?'

'Something is wrong,' Rydberg said firmly. 'One doesn't collapse like that from rheumatism. Something is wrong. But I don't know what it is. And right now I'm more interested in this Holm who got a bullet in the back of his head.'

'I heard about it from Hansson yesterday.'

Rydberg pushed his teacup away.

'It is of course an incredibly compelling thought that the Eberhardsson sisters might turn out to have been involved in drug trafficking. Something like that would strike at the very foundations of the Swedish sewing supplies industry. Out with the embroidery, in with the heroin.'

'The thought has crossed my mind,' Wallander said. 'I'll see you in a while.'

As he walked to his office he thought that Rydberg would never have been as open about his health if he wasn't convinced that something was wrong. Wallander felt himself starting to worry.

Until a quarter to eight he went through some reports that had piled up on his desk during his absence. He had spoken to Linda the day before – just after he had got home and put his bag down. She had promised to go to Kastrup and meet her grandfather and make sure he made it home to Löderup. Wallander had not dared to hope that he would really be approved for a new loan and therefore be able to get a new car and pick up his father in Malmö.

He found a message that Sten Widén had called. And his sister. He saved these messages. His colleague Gösta Boman in Kristianstad had tried to reach him. Boman was a police officer he got together with from time to time after they had met at one of the countless National Police Commission seminars. He also put this message aside. The rest of them he swept into the bin.

The investigative meeting started with Wallander briefly describing his adventures in Cairo and the helpful police officer Radwan. Then a discussion broke out about when exactly the death penalty had been abolished in Sweden. There were many guesses. Svedberg claimed that convicts had been executed by firing squad as late as the 1930s, which was firmly dismissed by Martinsson, who maintained that no executions had taken place in Sweden since A

'Abolished in 1910,' he said when he got off the phone. 'It was the first and last time the guillotine was used in Sweden. On a man by the name of Ander.'

'Didn't he fly in a balloon to the North Pole?' Martinsson said.

'That was Andrée,' Wallander said. 'And now let's move on.'

Rydberg had sat quietly throughout. Wallander had the feeling that he was in some way absent from the proceedings. Then they discussed Holm. Administratively, he was on the borderline.

The body had been found within the Sjöbo police district, but just a couple of hundred metres from the dirt road where Ystad's police district began.

'Our Sjöbo colleagues are happy to give him to us,' Martinsson said. 'We can symbolically carry the corpse across the dirt road and then it is ours. Especially considering that we have already had dealings with Holm.'

Wallander asked for a timetable of events, which Martinsson was able to supply. Holm had gone missing shortly after he was brought in for questioning on the day that the aeroplane crashed. While Wallander was in Cairo, a man out walking in the woods had discovered the body. It had been lying at the end of a forest road. There were car tracks. But Holm still had his wallet, so it had not been a case of robbery-homicide. No observations of any interest had been called in to the police. The area was deserted.

Martinsson had just finished when the door to the conference room was opened. An officer popped his head in and said that a communication had arrived from Interpol. Martinsson went to get it. While he was gone, Svedberg told Wallander about the violent energy with which Björk had gone about getting the front doors repaired.

Martinsson returned.

'One of the pilots has been identified,' he said. 'Pedro Espinosa, thirty-three years old. Born in Madrid. He'd been imprisoned in Spain for embezzlement and in France for smuggling.'

'Smuggling,' Wallander said. 'That fits perfectly.'

'There's another thing that's interesting,' Martinsson said. 'His last known address is in Marbella. That's where the Eberhardsson sisters' big villa is.'

The room fell silent. Wallander was clear on the point that it could still be a coincidence. A house in Marbella and a dead pilot who happened to have lived in the same place. But deep down he knew that they were in the process of uncovering a baffling co

'The other pilot is still unidentified,' Martinsson went on. 'But they're working on it.'

Wallander looked around the table.

'We need more help from the Spanish police,' he said. 'If they're as helpful as Radwan in Cairo, they should be able to search the Eberhardsson sisters' villa very soon. They should look for a safe. And they should look for drugs. Who did the sisters know down there? This is what we need to find out. And we need to find out soon.'

'Should one of us go down there?' Hansson asked.

'Not yet,' Wallander said. 'Your sunbathing will have to wait until next summer.'

They reviewed the material one more time and assigned the tasks to be performed. Above all they were going to focus on Yngve Leonard Holm. Wallander noticed that the pace in the team had picked up.

They ended the meeting at a quarter to ten. Hansson reminded Wallander about the traditional Christmas buffet that would be celebrated at the Hotel Continental on the twenty-first of December. Wallander tried to think of a good excuse for missing it, without success.

After Wallander had made his telephone calls, he put down the receiver and closed the door. Slowly he went back through the material they had uncovered so far, regarding the plane that had crashed, Yngve Leonard Holm and the two Eberhardsson sisters. He drew a triangle on his notepad: each of the three components marked a corner. Five dead people, he thought. Two pilots, one of whom came from Spain. In an aeroplane that was literally a Flying Dutchman since it had supposedly been scrapped after an accident in Laos. An aeroplane that flew in across the Swedish border at night, turned round just south of Sjöbo and crashed next to Mossby Strand. Lights had been observed on the ground, which could mean that the plane had dropped something.

This is the first point of the triangle.