Sidetracked - By Henning Mankell & Steven T. Murray Page 0,89

it.”

Wallander thought for a moment.

“Do me a favour,” he said. “Drive there and find out if there was a note or not. If there is something, you’ll have to check it carefully.”

They left the cafeteria. Wallander went back to the station with Svedberg. He might as well get hold of a doctor by phone to hear how the girl was.

“I put a few reports on your desk,” said Svedberg. “I did a phone interview with the reporter and photographer who visited Wetterstedt the day he died.”

“Anything new?”

“Only a confirmation of what we already know. That Wetterstedt was his usual self. There didn’t seem to be anything threatening him. Nothing he was aware of, anyway.”

“So I don’t need to read the report?”

Svedberg shrugged.

“It’s always better to have four eyes look at something than two.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Wallander distractedly.

“Ekholm is busy putting the finishing touches to his psychological profile,” said Svedberg.

Wallander muttered something in reply. Svedberg dropped him off outside the station and drove on to talk to Carlman’s widow. Wallander picked up his messages at the front desk. A new girl was there again. He asked about Ebba and was told that she was at the hospital having the cast taken off her wrist. I could have stopped in and said hello to her, thought Wallander. Since I was over there anyway. If it was possible to say hello to someone who was just having a cast removed.

He went to his office and opened the window wide. Without sitting down he riffled through the reports Svedberg had mentioned. Then he remembered that he had also asked to see the photographs taken by the magazine. Where were they? Unable to control his impatience, he found Svedberg’s mobile number and called him.

“The photos,” he asked. “Where are they?”

“Aren’t they on your desk?” Svedberg replied, surprised.

“There’s nothing here.”

“Then they’re in my office. I must have forgotten them. They were in today’s post.”

They were in a brown envelope on Svedberg’s tidy desk. Wallander spread them out and sat in Svedberg’s chair. Wetterstedt posing in his home, in the garden, and on the beach. In one of the pictures the overturned rowing boat could be seen in the background. Wetterstedt was smiling at the camera. The grey hair which would soon be torn from his head was ruffled by the wind. The photos showed a man who seemed at peace with his old age. Nothing in the pictures hinted at what was to happen. Wetterstedt had less than 15 hours left to live when the pictures were taken. The photos lying before him showed how he’d looked on the last day of his life. Wallander studied the pictures for a few minutes more before stuffing them back in the envelope. He started towards his office but changed his mind and stopped outside Höglund’s door, which was always open.

She was bent over some papers.

“Am I interrupting you?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

He went in and sat down. They exchanged a few words about Carlman’s daughter.

“Svedberg is out at the farmhouse hunting for a suicide note,” said Wallander. “If there is one.”

“She must have been very close to her father,” said Höglund.

Wallander didn’t reply. He changed the subject.

“Did you notice anything strange when we were visiting the Fredman family?”

“Strange?”

“A chill that settled over the room?”

He immediately regretted his description. Höglund wrinkled her brow as if he had said something out of line.

“I mean that they seemed evasive when I asked questions about Louise,” he explained.

“No, I didn’t,” she replied. “But I did notice that you acted differently.”

He told her of the feeling he’d had. She thought before she answered.

“You might be right,” she said. “Now that you mention it, they did seem to be on their guard. That chill you were talking about.”

“The question is whether they both were, or only one of them,” said Wallander.

“Was that the case?”

“I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling I had.”

“Didn’t the boy start answering the questions you were actually asking his mother?”

Wallander nodded.

“That’s it,” he said. “And I wonder why.”

“Still, you have to ask yourself whether it’s really important,” she said.

“Of course,” he admitted. “Sometimes I have a tendency to get hung up on unimportant details. But I still want to have a talk with that girl.”

This time she was the one who changed the subject.

“It frightens me to think about what Anette Fredman said. That she felt relief that her husband would never walk through their door again. I can’t imagine what it means to live like