Firewall Read online

  "I just wanted to see how you were doing," Gertrud said.

  "I'm busy, but otherwise I'm doing fine."

  "It's been a while since you were here."

  "I know. I'll come and see you as soon as I have more time."

  "One day it may be too late," she said. "At my age you never know how much more time you have."

  Gertrud was a little over 60. A little young for this kind of emotional blackmail. She was taking after his father in this respect.

  "I'll get there," he said in a friendly tone. "Just as soon as I am less busy."

  He excused himself, saying that people were waiting to talk to him. He went to the canteen to get some coffee. Nyberg was drinking an unusual kind of herbal tea. For once he seemed rested. His hair, which normally stood on end, was combed into rare order.

  "We have no fingerprints," Nyberg said. "The dogs have searched everywhere. But we did do a check on the ones we found in his flat, that is, the ones we're assuming belong to Falk. They don't turn up in our records."

  "Send them on to Interpol. By the way, do you know if that covers Angola?"

  "How would I know a thing like that?"

  "I was just wondering."

  Nyberg left. Wallander stole a couple of rusks from Martinsson's private stash and returned to his room. It was already midday. The morning had gone by quickly. The album lay in front of him and he was momentarily unsure of how to proceed. He knew more about Falk now than he had a couple of hours ago, but nothing that satisfactorily clarified his connection to Hökberg.

  He pulled the phone towards him and called Höglund. No answer. Nor from Hansson. Martinsson, of course, was still with Modin.

  Wallander tried to think what Rydberg would have done. It was easier to imagine his voice. Rydberg would have taken time to think. That was the most important thing a policeman could do besides gathering facts. Wallander put his feet up on the desk and shut his eyes. He went through all the events of the case in his head once again, trying all the time to keep in mind what had happened in Angola all those years ago. He tried various scenarios and thought them through. Lundberg's death. Then Hökberg's. The large power cut.

  When he opened his eyes it was with the feeling of being very close to an explanation, but he couldn't seize hold of it.

  He was interrupted by the phone. Siv Eriksson was waiting for him in the reception area. He jumped up from his chair, ran his fingers through his hair and went out to see her. She really was an extremely attractive woman. He asked her if she wanted to come back to his office, but she said she had no time. She handed him an envelope.

  "Here is the list of clients you asked for."

  "I hope it wasn't too much trouble."

  "It took a little time, but it was no trouble."

  She declined his offer of a cup of coffee.

  "Tynnes left some loose threads behind," she said. "I have to attend to them."

  "But can you be sure that he had no other project in hand?"

  "I don't think he did. Lately he was saying no to most prospective clients. I know that because he asked me to deal with most of them."

  "Had that ever happened before? That he turned down so many new jobs?"

  "I really couldn't be sure."

  "But he offered you no explanation?"

  "No. I thought he needed time to rest."

  Eriksson walked to a taxi that was waiting for her. When the driver got out to open the door for her Wallander noticed that he was wearing a black armband of mourning.

  He went back to his office with her envelope. Many of the companies on her list were unknown to him, apart from two banks, but all, with one exception, were in Skåne. The exception was a company in Denmark. It seemed to Wallander that they manufactured loading cranes. Neither Sydkraft nor any other utility company was on the list.

  After a few moments Wallander called the Ystad branch of the North Bank. He had taken out car loans with them on the few occasions he had traded in his old cars for new models. He had come to know a man there called Winberg. He asked to speak to him, but the telephone operator said his line was busy. He left the station and went down to the bank in person. Winberg was busy with a customer. He nodded at Wallander, who sat down and waited. After five minutes he was free.

  "I've been expecting you," Winberg said. "Is it time for a new car?"

  Wallander was always surprised by how young the bank employees were. The first time he had applied for a loan here Winberg himself had approved it, though he looked hardly old enough to have a driving licence.

  "I've come about something else, in fact. Something work-related. The new car will have to wait."

  Winberg's smile waned. "Has anything happened here at the bank?"

  "If it had I would have spoken to your boss. What I need now is information about your cash machines."

  "I'm glad to be of help, but there are some things I can't disclose for security reasons."

  Winberg was sounding as bureaucratic as Wallander sometimes did.

  "What I'm after is of a technical nature. The first question is very simple: how often does it happen that a machine makes a mistake on a withdrawal or with an account balance?"

  "Very rarely, I believe, though I have no exact figures to give you."

  "Can I take it that 'very rarely' means that it virtually never happens?"

  "Yes."

  "And is there any possibility that the date and time printed on a slip would be incorrect?"

  "I've never heard of it. I imagine it's not inconceivable, but the odds against it happening would be astronomical. Security and accuracy at the bank, all banks, have to be as good as perfect."

  "So one can absolutely rely on what comes out of these machines?"

  "Have you had an experience to the contrary?"

  "No, but I need answers to these questions."

  Winberg opened a drawer in his desk and looked for something. Then he pulled out a cartoon strip of a man being slowly swallowed by a cash machine.

  "It never gets quite this bad," he said, smiling. "But it's a funny image. And when it comes down to it the bank's computers are as vulnerable as all other computerised systems."

  There it is again, Wallander thought, this talk of vulnerability. He looked at the sketch and agreed it was good.

  "North Bank has a customer by the name of Tynnes Falk," Wallander said. "I need printouts of his bank activities for the past year, which should include his withdrawals at cash machines."

  "You'll have to speak to someone higher up," Winberg said. "I couldn't authorise the release of such information, even to you."

  "Who should I talk to?"

  "Martin Olsson, the manager, is your best bet. He has an office on the second floor."

  "Can you see if he's free now?"

  Winberg left his desk. Wallander glumly anticipated an extended bureaucratic process before he could reach Olsson, but Winberg escorted him directly to the bank manager. He, too, was surprisingly young. He would do all he could to help Wallander. All he required was an official police request. Once he learned that the customer was deceased, he said the widow could sign in his stead.

  "He was divorced," Wallander said.

  "A paper from the police is all we need," Olsson said. "I'll see that this is taken care of quickly at our end."

  Wallander thanked him and returned to Winberg. "One more question," he said. "Can you check to see if Falk kept a security box here?"

  "I don't know if that's allowed," Winberg said.

  "Your boss has already cleared it," Wallander lied.

  Winberg was gone for a few minutes.

  "There's no box in his name," he said when he returned.

  Wallander was about to leave, when it occurred to him that he might as well take care of all his business at once.

  "You're right, it is time for me to get a new car. Let's do the paperwork now while we're at it," he said.

  "How much do you need?"

  Wallander thought quickly. He had no other
debt right now.

  "One hundred thousand should do it. If I qualify for that much."

  "No problem," Winberg said, and reached for the appropriate form.

  They were finished by 1.30 p.m. Wallander left the bank with the feeling of being rich. When he walked past the bookshop by Stortorget he remembered the book on renovating furniture that he should have collected a couple of days ago. He also remembered he had no cash on him. He turned back and walked to the cash machine next to the post office. There were four people ahead of him in line. A woman with a pram, two teenage girls and an older man. Wallander watched absently as the woman put in her card, took out the cash and then the printed slip. Then he started thinking about Falk. The two girls took out their money, then discussed the amount printed on the slip with great energy. The older man looked around before putting in his card and punching in his code. He put his notes into his wallet and pocketed the printed slip without looking at it.

  Then it was Wallander's turn. He took out one thousand kronor and read through the account balance on the slip. Everything seemed to be in order. He crumpled the piece of paper and fed it into the bin next to the machine. Then he froze. He thought about the blackout that had cut the power to most of Skåne. Someone had known exactly which point to hit to affect as many areas as possible. However advanced technology might become, there would always be points of vulnerability. He thought about the blueprint in Falk's office. It could not have been coincidence. Just as it had been no coincidence that the electrical relay was in the morgue. None of what had happened had been coincidence.

  Perhaps it was a kind of sacrifice, he thought. There was an altar in Falk's secret chamber, with Falk's face as an object of worship. Perhaps Sonja Hökberg wasn't simply killed but had been sacrificed. To the end that the point of vulnerability would become more evident. A black hood had been pulled down over Skåne and everything had been brought to a halt.

  The thought made him shiver. The feeling that he and his colleagues were fumbling around in the dark grew stronger.

  He watched the steady stream of people coming to the cash machine. If you can control the power supply you can control this machine, he thought. And God only knows what else you control. Air traffic, trains, the water supply, electricity. All of this can be brought to its knees if you know the right place to strike.

  He started walking again. The bookshop would have to wait. He returned to the station. Irene wanted to tell him something, but he waved her away and continued to his office. He threw his coat onto the visitor's chair and reached for his notepad. He wrote out the facts again, this time from the perspective that all that had happened was part of a planned act of sabotage. He thought back to the perplexing fact that Falk had been involved in the release of those minks. Did that gesture foreshadow something bigger, something much more sinister?

  He threw the pen down and leaned back in his chair. He was still not convinced that he had found the point that would truly break the case open, but it did offer new possibilities. Lundberg's murder fell outside this scheme of things, but perhaps it was unforeseen, something that had not been planned. That needed addressing. It had, nevertheless, to be the case that Hökberg was killed to keep her quiet. And why were Falk's fingers cut off? To keep something from coming to light.

  He kept delving through his material. What happened if they assumed Lundberg's death wasn't part of the larger pattern?

  Half an hour later he was less convinced. It was too early to hope that the case would hang together, but he cheered himself up with the thought that he had come a bit further along the road. No doubt, there were more angles from which to view these events, and these would come to light if all of the team persevered.

  He had just got up to go to the toilet when Höglund knocked and came in.

  "You were right," she said. "Hökberg did have a boyfriend."

  "What's his name?"

  "More to the point, where is he?"

  "Don't you know?"

  "It looks as if he's vanished."

  Wallander took stock. That visit to the toilet would have to wait.

  It was 2.45 p.m.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In hindsight, Wallander would feel he had made one of the biggest mistakes of his life that afternoon by listening to what Höglund had to say. As soon as he heard that Hökberg had had a boyfriend, he should have immediately realised that the truth was more complicated. What Höglund had discovered was a half-truth, and half-truths have a tendency to lead you astray. The result was that he didn't see what he should have seen, and it was a costly mistake. In his darkest hours, he would feel that it had cost a person his life. And it could have led to an even greater catastrophe.

  That Monday, October 13, Höglund had taken on the job of finding out once and for all if there had been a boyfriend in Hökberg's life. She had brought this up again with Persson, who had persisted in denying that there was one. The only name she gave was Kalle Ryss, with whom Hökberg had been close at an earlier time. Höglund wasn't sure if Persson was telling the truth, but she had not been able to get any further.

  Höglund drove to the hardware shop where Ryss worked. They had gone into the storeroom to speak undisturbed. In contrast to Persson, Ryss answered simply and apparently truthfully all Höglund's questions. She thought that, although their relationship had been over for at least a year, he missed Sonja, mourned her death and was frightened by what had happened. He could not shed much light on the direction her life had taken after their break-up. Even though Ystad was not a big town, their paths had not crossed very often. And Ryss usually drove to Malmö at the weekends. That was where his new girlfriend lived.

  "But I think there was someone else," he said. "Someone that Sonja was with."

  Ryss didn't know much about him except that his name was Jonas Landahl and that he lived all alone in a big house on Snappehanegatan. He didn't know the exact address, but it was by the corner of Friskyttegatan, on the left-hand side if you were coming from town. What Landahl did for a living he couldn't say.

  Höglund drove there immediately and saw a beautiful modern house on the left-hand side of the street. She walked through the gate and rang the bell. The house seemed deserted, though she couldn't have said why she thought so. No-one came to the door. She rang the bell several more times, then walked round to the back of the house. She banged on the back door and tried to look in through the windows. When she came back to the front she saw a man in a dressing gown and boots standing outside the front gate. It was a strange sight given the time of day and the cold. He explained that he lived in the house across the street and that he had seen her ringing the doorbell. He said his name was Yngve, but didn't give his last name.

  "No-one's home," he said firmly. "Not even the boy."

  Their conversation was short but informative. Yngve was apparently a man who liked to keep his neighbours under surveillance. The Landahl family were strange birds in these parts, he said, and had been there about 10 years. What Mr Landahl did he didn't know. They hadn't even bothered to call and introduce themselves when they moved in. They had carried all their possessions and the boy into the house and then shut their doors. He hardly ever saw them. The boy couldn't have been more than 12 or 13 when they arrived, but they often left him alone for long stretches of time. The parents took off on long trips to God knows where. From time to time they came back only to disappear as suddenly as they had come. Neither one of them seemed to hold down a job, but there was always money. The last time he had seen them was some time in September. Then the boy, now a grown man, was alone again. But a few days ago a taxi had come for him and taken him away.