Sidetracked - By Henning Mankell & Steven T. Murray Page 0,160
going to have a big traffic safety campaign in schools,” said Hansson. “Too many children are being killed.”
The detective returned to the table.
“I presume you’ve also looked for Stefan in his father’s flat,” Wallander said.
“We’ve already searched there and everywhere else his father usually hung out. And we’ve picked up Peter Hjelm and asked him to try and think of other hideouts Fredman may have had access to that his son might know about. Forsfält is taking care of it.”
The meeting dragged on, but Wallander knew that they were really just waiting for something to happen. Stefan Fredman was somewhere with his sister. Logård was out there too. A large contingent of police officers were looking for them. They went in and out of the conference room, getting coffee, sending out for sandwiches, dozing in their chairs, drinking more coffee. The German police found Sara Pettersson in Hamburg. She’d been able to identify Stefan Fredman at once. Ekholm arrived from the airport, still shaken and pale.
Around 11 a.m. they got the confirmation they were waiting for. Stefan Fredman’s fingerprints had been identified on his father’s eyelid, on the comic book, the bloody scrap of paper and Liljegren’s stove. The only sound in the conference room was the faint hiss of the speaker phone linked to Birgersson. There was no turning back. All the false leads, especially those they had thought up themselves, had been erased. All that was left was the realisation of the appalling truth: they were searching for a 14-year-old boy who had committed four cold-blooded, premeditated and atrocious murders.
Finally Wallander broke the silence and turned to Ekholm.
“What’s he doing? What’s he thinking?”
“I know this is very risky,” Ekholm said. “But I don’t think he intends to hurt his sister. There’s a pattern, call it logic if you will, to his behaviour. Revenge for his little brother and his sister is the goal. If he diverges from that goal, then everything he so laboriously built up will collapse.”
“Why did he take her from the hospital?” Wallander asked.
“Maybe he was afraid that you would influence her somehow.”
“How?” asked Wallander in surprise.
“Picture a confused boy who has taken on the role of a lone warrior. Suppose men have done his sister irreparable harm. That’s what drives him. Assuming this theory is correct, that means he’ll want to keep all men away from her. He’s the only exception. And you can’t rule out the fact that he may have suspected you were on his trail. Certainly he knows that you’re in charge of the investigation.”
Wallander remembered something.
“The pictures that Norén took,” he said. “Of the spectators outside the cordons? Where are they?”
Nyberg, who most of the time had sat quiet and meditative at the meeting table, went to get them. Wallander spread them out on the table. Someone got a magnifying glass. They gathered around the pictures. It was Höglund who found him.
“There he is,” she said, pointing.
He was almost hidden behind some other onlookers, but part of his moped was visible, along with his head.
“I’ll be damned,” Hamrén said.
“It should be possible to identify the moped,” Nyberg said. “If we blow up the details.”
“Do that,” Wallander said.
It was obvious now that there had been a good reason for the feeling gnawing at Wallander’s subconscious. Grimly he thought that at least he could close the case on his own anxiety.
Save for one thing. Baiba. It was midday. Svedberg was asleep in his chair, and Åkeson was on the phone to so many different people that no-one could keep track of them. Wallander gestured to Höglund to follow him out into the hall. They sat down in his office and closed the door. Without beating around the bush, he told her of the mess he’d made. In doing so he broke his cardinal rule: never to confide a personal problem to a colleague. He had stopped doing that when Rydberg died. Now he was doing it again. He was unsure whether he could develop the same trusting relationship with Ann-Britt Höglund that he had enjoyed with Rydberg, especially since she was a woman. She listened attentively.
“What the hell am I going to do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. It’s already too late. But I could talk to her if you like. I assume she speaks English. Give me her number.”
Wallander wrote it down, but when she reached for his telephone he asked her to wait.