Firewall - By Henning Mankell & Ebba Segerberg Page 0,19

that Rydberg had imparted a crucial piece of knowledge.

Wallander's head was starting to ache, especially in his temples. He got up and opened the wardrobe door. There were clothes on hangers and shoes on the floor. On the inside of the door was a poster from a film called The Devil's Advocate. The star was Al Pacino. Wallander remembered him from The Godfather. He shut the wardrobe door and sat on the chair by the desk. That gave him a new angle from which to view the room.

There's something missing, he thought. He remembered what Linda's room had looked like when she was a teenager. There had been some stuffed animals of course. But above all there were the pictures of her idols, who changed from time to time but were always there in some form or another.

There was nothing like that in Hökberg's room. She was 19 and all she had was a movie poster inside her wardrobe.

Wallander remained there for a few more minutes, then he left the room and walked back down the stairs. Hökberg looked at him carefully.

"Did you find anything?"

"I just wanted to have a look around."

"What's going to happen to her?"

Wallander shook his head. "She'll be tried as an adult. She's confessed to the crime. They're not going to be easy on her."

Hökberg didn't say anything. Wallander could see he was pained.

Wallander wrote down the number for Hökberg's sister-in-law in Höör. Then he left the townhouse and drove back to the station, feeling worse and worse. He was going to go home after the press conference and crawl into bed.

As he walked into reception, Irene waved him over. Wallander saw that she was pale.

"Something's happened?" he said.

"I don't know," she said. "They were looking for you, and as usual you didn't have your mobile with you."

"Who was looking for me?"

"Everyone."

Wallander lost his patience. "What do you mean 'everyone'? Give me some names, dammit!"

"Martinsson. And Lisa."

Wallander went straight to Martinsson's office. Hansson was there.

"What's happened?"

Martinsson said: "Hökberg has escaped."

Wallander stared at him in disbelief. "Escaped?"

"Gone. It happened about an hour ago. We've put all available personnel on the search, but she's disappeared into thin air."

Wallander looked at his colleagues. Then he took off his coat and sat down.

CHAPTER SIX

It didn't take Wallander long to grasp what must have happened. Someone had been careless, someone had disregarded the most basic security measures. But above all someone had forgotten the fact that Sonja Hökberg was not the innocent young girl she appeared to be, that she had committed a brutal murder only a couple of days before.

It was easy to reconstruct the chain of events. Hökberg was to be moved from one room to another. She had met her lawyer and was to be brought back to the holding cell. While she was waiting to be moved she had asked to go to the toilet. When she came back out she saw that the officer on guard had turned his back and was talking to someone in one of the offices. She had simply walked the other way. No-one had tried to stop her. She had walked straight out through the front hall. No-one had seen her. Not Irene, not anyone else. After about five minutes the officer in charge of her had gone into the toilet and discovered that she was gone. He had then looked into the room where she had talked to her lawyer, and once he had established she was not there either, alerted security. At which point Hökberg had had ten minutes to do her disappearing act.

Wallander groaned and felt his headache worsen.

"I've alerted all available personnel," Martinsson said. "And I called her father. You had just left the house. Did you discover anything that might tell us where she might be heading?"

"Her mother is staying with her sister in Höör." He gave Martinsson the number.

"She can hardly be planning to go there on foot," Hansson said.

"She has a driving licence," Martinsson said, with the telephone receiver pressed against his ear. "She could hitch a lift, steal a car."

"We have to talk to Persson," Wallander said. "And pronto. Juvenile or not, she's going to tell us everything she knows."

Hansson got up to leave and almost collided with Holgersson who had only just learned of the disappearance. While Martinsson was talking on the phone with Hökberg's mother, Wallander told Holgersson how the escape had happened.

"This is simply unacceptable," she said. She was furious.

Wallander liked that about her. The previous chief, Björk, would always