Sidetracked - By Henning Mankell & Steven T. Murray Page 0,111

She wanted to know what had happened; she could barely decipher his quickly scribbled note. Wallander didn’t want to worry her, so he said that her grandfather had just been feeling bad, but was fine now. To be on the safe side he’d decided to stay overnight in Löderup. He went in the kitchen. His father was feeling tired and had gone to lie down. Wallander stayed with Gertrud for a couple of hours, sitting at the kitchen table. There was no way to explain what had happened except that it was a symptom of the illness. But when Gertrud said this attack ruled out the trip to Italy in the autumn, Wallander protested. He wasn’t afraid of taking responsibility. He would manage. It was going to happen, so long as his father wanted to go and was able to stand on his own two feet.

That night he slept on a fold-out bed in the living-room. He lay staring out into the light summer night for a long time before he fell asleep.

In the morning, over coffee, his father seemed to have forgotten the whole episode. He couldn’t understand what had happened to the studio door. Wallander told him the truth, that he was the one who had broken it down. The studio needed a new door, and anyway, he would make it himself.

“When are you going to be able to do that?” asked his father. “You don’t even have time to call ahead of time and tell me you’re coming to visit.”

Wallander knew then that everything was back to normal. He left Löderup just after 7 a.m. It wasn’t the last time something like this might happen, he knew, and with a shiver imagined what might have occurred if Gertrud hadn’t been there.

Wallander went straight to the station. Everyone was talking about the match. He was surrounded by people in summer clothes. Only the ones who had to wear uniforms looked remotely like police officers. Wallander thought that in his white clothes he could have stepped out of one of the Danish productions of Italian opera he’d been to. As he passed the reception desk Ebba waved to him that he had a call. It was Forsfält. They had found Fredman’s passport, well hidden in his flat, along with large sums of foreign currencies. Wallander asked about the stamps in the passport.

“I have to disappoint you,” Forsfält told him. “He had the passport for four years, and it has stamps from Turkey, Morocco and Brazil. That’s all.”

Wallander was indeed disappointed, although he wasn’t sure what he had expected. Forsfält promised to fax over the details on the passport. Then he said he had something else to tell him that had no direct bearing on the investigation.

“We found some keys to the attic when we were looking for the passport. Among all the junk up there we found a box containing some antique icons. We were able to determine pretty quickly that they were stolen. Guess where from.”

Wallander thought for a moment but couldn’t come up with anything. “I give up.”

“About a year ago there was a burglary at a house near Ystad. The house was under the administration of an executor, because it was part of the estate of a deceased lawyer named Gustaf Torstensson.”

Wallander remembered him. One of two lawyers murdered the year before. Wallander had seen the collection of icons in the basement that belonged to the older of the two lawyers. He even had one of them hanging on the wall of his bedroom, a present he’d received from the dead lawyer’s secretary. Now he also recalled the break-in; it was Svedberg’s case.

“So now we know,” said Wallander.

“You’ll be getting the follow-up report,” Forsfält told him.

“Not me,” said Wallander. “Svedberg.”

Forsfält asked how it was going with Louise Fredman.

“With a little luck we’ll know something later today,” said Wallander, and told him about his last conversation with Åkeson.

“Keep me informed.”

After they hung up he checked his list of unanswered questions. He could cross out some of them, while others he would have to bring up at the team meeting. But first he had to see the two trainees who were keeping track of the tip-offs coming in from the public. Had anything come in that might indicate exactly where Fredman was murdered? Wallander knew this could be highly significant for the investigation.

One of the trainees had close-cropped hair and was named Tyrén. He had intelligent eyes and was thought of as competent. Wallander quickly explained what he