islands. He had accepted the invitation somewhat hesitantly. They had met during one of the worst cases Wallander had ever been involved in. One early morning the postman had taken him to explore one of the remote islands on the edge of the archipelago, where craggy rocks poked out of the sea like fossilised creatures from the ice age. As he had wandered around the small island on his own he had experienced a remarkable feeling of clarity. He had often returned to this moment in his thoughts, and longed to experience this feeling again. The dream is trying to tell me something, he thought. I just don't know what.
He stayed in bed until 5.45 a.m. when he got up and plugged the phone back in. He drank a cup of coffee as he tried to go through everything that had happened in his head, trying to make sense of the new connection drawn between H枚kberg's death and the man whose flat he had searched last night.
By 7 a.m., he gave up trying to make sense of it and went in to the station. It was colder than he had anticipated. He wasn't yet accustomed to the fact that it was autumn. He wished he had put on a warmer sweater. As he walked he felt his left foot getting damp. He stopped and discovered a hole in the sole. It made him unaccountably furious. It was as much as he could do not to tear off both his shoes and continue in his stockinged feet.
As he passed through reception, he asked Irene who was in already. She told him that Martinsson and Hansson had arrived. Wallander asked her to send them in to see him. Then he changed his mind and decided to meet in one of the conference rooms. He asked her to send H枚glund to join them when she arrived.
Martinsson and Hansson came in together.
"How did the lecture go?" Hansson asked.
"Let's not waste our time on that," Wallander said irritably, then felt bad that he should have taken his mood out on Hansson.
"I'm tired," he said.
"Who isn't?" Hansson said.
H枚glund opened the door and came in.
"That's some wind," she said, taking off her jacket.
"Autumn is here," Wallander said. "All right, let's start. Something happened last night that dramatically alters the investigation."
He nodded to Martinsson, who told the others about the disappearance of Falk's body.
"At least this is something new," Hansson said when Martinsson had finished. "I don't think we've ever had a stolen body before. I know there was that rubber raft. But not a dead body."
Wallander made a face. He remembered the rubber raft that had floated ashore on Mossbystrand, and how afterwards the raft had mysteriously and by means still unclear disappeared from the station.
H枚glund looked at him. "So are we to accept a connection between the man who died at the cash machine and Lundberg's murder? That seems ludicrous."
"Yes," Wallander said. "But I don't think we can avoid working with this assumption for now. I think we should also be prepared for the fact that this will be a difficult case. We thought we were dealing with an unusually brutal but clear-cut case of murder. We saw this scenario dissolve when H枚kberg escaped and was later found dead at the power substation. We knew that a man had been found dead close to a cash machine, but we had already declared that case closed for lack of evidence that any crime had been committed. This conclusion still cannot be ruled out. Then the body disappears, and someone puts an electrical relay in its place."
Wallander paused and thought back to the questions he had regarding H枚kberg and Persson's visit to the restaurant and the identity of the Asian man. He saw that they would have to start from a quite different angle.
"Someone breaks into a morgue and steals a body. We can't be sure of the motive, but it seems that someone wants to conceal something. At the same time the relay is left, as a kind of message, for us to find. Obviously it wasn't left by accident."
"Which can only mean one thing," H枚glund said. "That someone wants us to see a connection between H枚kberg and Falk."
"Couldn't it be a red herring?" Hansson said. "Put there by someone who's read about the girl being burned to death?"
"Malm枚 have assured me the relay is large and heavy," Martinsson said. "It's hardly the kind of thing you would carry around with you."
"We'll take it step by step,"