The Pyramid (38 page)

'Hello, old man,' he said. 'How are you?'

His father looked at him without the slightest trace of surprise.

'I intend to protest,' he said.

'Protest what?'

'That they prevent people from climbing the pyramids.'

'I think we should wait on that protest,' Wallander said. 'The most important thing right now is for me to get you out of here.'

'I am not paying any fines,' his father replied angrily. 'I want to wait out my punishment instead. Two years, they said. That will go by quickly.'

Wallander quickly considered getting angry, but that could simply egg his father on.

'Egyptian prisons are probably not particularly comfortable,' he said carefully. 'No prisons are. I also doubt they would allow you to paint in your cell.'

His father stared back at him in silence. Apparently he had not considered this possibility.

He nodded and stood up.

'Let's go then,' he said. 'Do you have the money to pay the fine?'

'Sit down,' Wallander said. 'I don't think it's quite that simple. That you can just stand up and leave.'

'Why not? I haven't done anything wrong.'

'According to what I understand, you tried to climb the Cheops pyramid.'

'That was why I came here. Ordinary tourists can stand among the camels and look. I wanted to stand on the top.'

'That's not allowed. It's also very dangerous. And what would happen if everyone started to climb all over the pyramids?'

'I'm not talking about everyone else, I'm talking about me.'

Wallander realised it was futile to try to reason with his father. At the same time he couldn't help but be impressed with his intractability.

'I'm here now,' Wallander said. 'I'll try to get you out tomorrow. Or later today. I'll pay the fine and then it's over. We'll leave this place, go to the hotel and get your suitcase. Then we'll fly home.'

'I've paid for my room until the twenty-first.'

Wallander nodded patiently.

'Fine. I'm going home. You stay. But if you climb the pyramids one more time you're on your own.'

'I never got that far,' his father said. 'It was difficult. And steep.'

'Why did you want to get to the top?'

His father hesitated before answering.

'It's a dream I've had all these years. That's all. I think that one should be faithful to one's dreams.'

The conversation died away. Several minutes later Radwan returned.
He offered Wallander's father a cigarette and lit it for him.

'Have you started smoking now?'

'Only when I'm in jail. Never anywhere else.'

Wallander turned to Radwan.

'I assume there's no possibility that I can take my father with me now?'

'He must appear before the court today at ten o'clock. The judge will most likely accept the fine.'

'Most likely?'

'Nothing is certain,' Radwan said. 'But we have to hope for the best.'

Wallander said goodbye to his father. Radwan followed him out to a patrol car that was waiting to take him back to the hotel. It was now six o'clock.

'I will send a car to pick you up a little after nine,' Radwan said as they parted. 'One should always help a foreign colleague.'

Wallander thanked him and got into the car. Again he was thrown back against the seat as it sped off, sirens blaring.

At half past six Wallander ordered a wake-up call and collapsed naked on the bed. I have to get him out, he thought. If he ends up in prison he'll die.

Wallander sank into a restless slumber but was awakened by the sun rising over the horizon. He had a shower and dressed. He was already down to his last clean shirt.

He walked out. It was cooler now, in the morning. Suddenly he stopped. Now he saw the pyramids. He stood absolutely still. The feeling of their enormity was overwhelming. He walked away from the hotel and up the hill that led to the entrance to the Giza plateau. Along the way he was offered rides on both donkeys and camels. But he walked.
Deep down he understood his father. One should stay faithful to one's dreams. How faithful had he been to his own? He stopped close to the entrance and looked at the pyramids. Imagined his father climbing up the steeply inclined walls.

He ended up standing there for a long time before he returned to the hotel and had breakfast. At nine o'clock he was outside the hotel entrance, waiting. The patrol car arrived after several minutes. Traffic was heavy and the sirens were on as usual. Wallander crossed the Nile for the fourth time. He saw now that he was in a huge metropolis, incalculable, clamorous.

The court was on a street by the name of Al Azhar. Radwan was standing on the steps, smoking, as the car pulled up.

'I hope you had a few hours of sleep,' he said. 'It is not good for a person to go without sleep.'

They walked into the building.

'Your father is already here.'

'Does he have a defence lawyer?' Wallander asked.

'He has a court-assigned assistant. This is a court for minor offences.'

'But he could still receive two years in prison?'

'There is a big difference between a death sentence and two years,'
Radwan said thoughtfully.

They walked into the courtroom. Some cleaners were walking around, dusting.

'Your father's case is the first of the day,' Radwan said.

Then his father was led in. Wallander stared horrified at him. His father was in handcuffs. Tears welled up in Wallander's eyes. Radwan glanced at him and put a hand on his shoulder.

A lone judge walked in and sat down. A prosecutor seemed to appear out of thin air and rattled off a long tirade that Wallander assumed to be the charges. Radwan leaned over.

'It looks good,' he whispered. 'He claims that your father is old and confused.'

As long as no one translates that, Wallander thought. Then he really will go crazy.

The prosecutor sat down. The court assistant made a very brief statement.

'He is making the case for a fine,' Radwan whispered. 'I have informed the court that you are here, that you are his son and that you are a policeman.'

The assistant sat down. Wallander saw that his father wanted to say something. But the court assistant shook his head.

The judge struck the table with his gavel and uttered a few words.

Then he banged the gavel again, got up and left.

'A fine,' Radwan said and patted Wallander on the shoulder. 'It can be paid here in the courtroom. Then your father is free to go.'

Wallander took out the bag inside his shirt.

Radwan led him to a table where a man calculated the sum from
British pounds into Egyptian pounds. Almost all of Wallander's money disappeared. He received an illegible receipt for the amount. Radwan made sure his father's handcuffs were removed.

'I hope that the rest of your journey is pleasant,' Radwan said and shook both their hands. 'But it is not advisable for your father to attempt to climb the pyramids again.'

Radwan had a patrol car take them back to the hotel. Wallander made a note of Radwan's address. He realised that this would not have been so easy without Radwan's help. In some way he wanted to thank him. Perhaps it would be most appropriate to send him a painting with a wood grouse?

His father was in high spirits and commented on everything that they drove past. Wallander was simply tired.

'Now I will show you the pyramids,' his father said happily when they reached the hotel.

'Not right now,' Wallander said. 'I need to sleep for a few hours. You too. Then we'll look at the pyramids. When I've booked my return flight.'

His father looked intently at him.

'I must say that you surprise me. That you spared no expense in flying out here and getting me out. I would not have thought that of you.'

Wallander did not answer.

'Go to bed,' he said. 'I'll meet you here at two o'clock.'

Wallander did not manage to fall asleep. After writhing on his bed for an hour he went to the reception desk and asked them for help in booking his return flight. He was directed to a travel agency located in another part of the hotel. There he was assisted by an unbelievably beautiful woman who spoke perfect English. She managed to get him a seat on the plane that was leaving Cairo the following day, the eighteenth of December, at nine o'clock. Since the plane only stopped in
Frankfurt, he would already be in Kastrup at two o'clock that afternoon.
After he had confirmed his seat, it was only one o'clock. He sat down in a cafe next to the lobby and drank some water and a cup of very hot coffee that was much too sweet. At exactly two o'clock his father appeared. He was wearing his pith helmet.

Together they explored the Giza plateau in the intense heat.
Wallander thought several times that he was going to faint. But his father seemed unaffected by the heat. Down by the Sphinx Wallander at last found some shade. His father narrated and Wallander realised that he knew a great deal about the Egypt of old where the pyramids and the remarkable Sphinx had once been built.

It was close to six o'clock when they finally returned to the hotel.
Since he was travelling very early the next morning they decided to eat dinner in the hotel, where there were several restaurants to choose from.
At his father's suggestion they booked a table at an Indian restaurant and Wallander thought afterwards that he had rarely had such a good meal. His father had been pleasant the entire time and Wallander understood that he had now dismissed all thoughts of climbing the pyramids.

They parted at eleven. Wallander would be leaving the hotel at six.

'Of course I'll get up and see you off,' his father said.

'I'd rather you didn't,' Wallander said. 'Neither of us likes goodbyes.'

'Thank you for coming here,' his father said. 'You're probably right about it being hard to spend two years in prison without being able to paint.'

'Come home on the twenty-first and everything will be forgotten,'
Wallander answered.

'The next time we'll go to Italy,' his father said and walked away towards his room.

That night Wallander slept heavily. At six o'clock he sat in the taxi and crossed the Nile for the sixth and hopefully final time. The plane left at the assigned time and he landed in Kastrup on time. He took a taxi to the ferries and was in Malmö at a quarter to four. He ran to the station and just made a train to Ystad. He walked home to Mariagatan, changed his clothes and walked in through the front doors of the station at half past six. The damaged hinge had been replaced. Björk knows where to set his priorities, he thought grimly. Martinsson's and Svedberg's offices were empty, but Hansson was in. Wallander told him about his trip in broad strokes. But first he asked how Rydberg was doing.

'He's supposed to be coming in tomorrow,' Hansson said. 'That was what Martinsson said.'

Wallander immediately felt relieved. Apparently it had not been as serious as they had feared.

'And here?' he asked. 'The investigation?'

'There has been another important development,' Hansson said. 'But that has to do with the plane that crashed.'

'What is it?'

'Yngve Leonard Holm has been found murdered. In the woods outside Sjöbo.'

Wallander sat down.

'But that isn't all,' Hansson said. 'He hasn't only been murdered. He was shot in the back of the head, just like the Eberhardsson sisters.'

Wallander held his breath.

He had not expected this. That a connection would suddenly appear between the crashed plane and the two murdered women who had been found in the remains of a devastating fire.

He looked at Hansson.

What does it mean, he thought. What is the significance of what
Hansson is telling me?

All at once the trip to Cairo felt very distant.

At ten o'clock in the morning on the nineteenth of December, Wallander called the bank and asked if he could increase his loan by another twenty thousand kronor. He lied and said he had misheard the price of the car he intended to buy. The bank loan officer replied that it shouldn't present any difficulties. Wallander could come by and sign the loan documents and collect the money the same day. After Wallander hung up the phone, he called Arne, who was selling him the car, and arranged for him to deliver the new Peugeot to Mariagatan at one o'clock. Arne would also either try to bring the old one to life or tow it back to his garage.

Wallander made these two calls right after the morning meeting.
They had met for two hours, starting at a quarter to eight. But
Wallander had been at the station since seven o'clock. The night before, when he had learned that Yngve Leonard Holm had been murdered and that there was a possible connection between him and the
Eberhardsson sisters, or at least with their killer, he had perked up and sat with Hansson for close to an hour, learning all the available facts.
But then he had suddenly felt exhausted. He had gone home and stretched out on the bed in order to rest before undressing but had fallen asleep and slept through the night. When he woke up at half past five he felt restored. He stayed in bed for a while and thought about his trip to Cairo, which was already a distant memory.

When he reached the station, Rydberg was already there. They went to the break room, where they found several bleary-eyed officers who had just finished the night shift. Rydberg had tea and rusks. Wallander sat down across from him.

'I heard you went to Egypt,' Rydberg said. 'How were the pyramids?'

'High,' Wallander said. 'Very strange.'

'And your father?'

'He could have gone to prison. But I got him out by paying almost ten thousand kronor in fines.'

Rydberg laughed.

'My dad was a horse-trader,' he said. 'Have I told you that?'

'You've never said anything about your parents.'

'He sold horses. Travelled around to markets, checking the teeth, and was apparently a devil at inflating the price. That old stereotype about the horse-trader's wallet is actually true. My dad had one of those filled with thousand-kronor notes. But I wonder if he even knew that the pyramids were in Egypt. It's even less likely that he knew the capital was Cairo. He was completely uneducated. There was only one thing he knew and that was horses. And possibly women. All his dalliances drove my mother crazy.'

'One has the parents one has,' Wallander said. 'How are you feeling?'

'Something is wrong,' Rydberg said firmly. 'One doesn't collapse like that from rheumatism. Something is wrong. But I don't know what it is. And right now I'm more interested in this Holm who got a bullet in the back of his head.'

'I heard about it from Hansson yesterday.'

Rydberg pushed his teacup away.

'It is of course an incredibly compelling thought that the Eberhardsson sisters might turn out to have been involved in drug trafficking.
Something like that would strike at the very foundations of the Swedish sewing supplies industry. Out with the embroidery, in with the heroin.'

'The thought has crossed my mind,' Wallander said. 'I'll see you in a while.'

As he walked to his office he thought that Rydberg would never have been as open about his health if he wasn't convinced that something was wrong. Wallander felt himself starting to worry.

Until a quarter to eight he went through some reports that had piled up on his desk during his absence. He had spoken to Linda the day before – just after he had got home and put his bag down. She had promised to go to Kastrup and meet her grandfather and make sure he made it home to Löderup. Wallander had not dared to hope that he would really be approved for a new loan and therefore be able to get a new car and pick up his father in Malmö.

He found a message that Sten Widén had called. And his sister. He saved these messages. His colleague Gösta Boman in Kristianstad had tried to reach him. Boman was a police officer he got together with from time to time after they had met at one of the countless National
Police Commission seminars. He also put this message aside. The rest of them he swept into the bin.

The investigative meeting started with Wallander briefly describing his adventures in Cairo and the helpful police officer Radwan. Then a discussion broke out about when exactly the death penalty had been abolished in Sweden. There were many guesses. Svedberg claimed that convicts had been executed by firing squad as late as the 1930s, which was firmly dismissed by Martinsson, who maintained that no executions had taken place in Sweden since Anna Månsdotter had her head cut off at the
Kristianstad prison sometime in the 1890s. It ended with Hansson calling a crime reporter in Stockholm who shared his interest in horse racing.

'Abolished in 1910,' he said when he got off the phone. 'It was the first and last time the guillotine was used in Sweden. On a man by the name of Ander.'

'Didn't he fly in a balloon to the North Pole?' Martinsson said.

'That was Andrée,' Wallander said. 'And now let's move on.'

Rydberg had sat quietly throughout. Wallander had the feeling that he was in some way absent from the proceedings.
Then they discussed Holm. Administratively, he was on the borderline.

The body had been found within the Sjöbo police district, but just a couple of hundred metres from the dirt road where Ystad's police district began.

'Our Sjöbo colleagues are happy to give him to us,' Martinsson said.
'We can symbolically carry the corpse across the dirt road and then it is ours. Especially considering that we have already had dealings with Holm.'

Wallander asked for a timetable of events, which Martinsson was able to supply. Holm had gone missing shortly after he was brought in for questioning on the day that the aeroplane crashed. While
Wallander was in Cairo, a man out walking in the woods had discovered the body. It had been lying at the end of a forest road. There were car tracks. But Holm still had his wallet, so it had not been a case of robbery-homicide. No observations of any interest had been called in to the police. The area was deserted.

Martinsson had just finished when the door to the conference room was opened. An officer popped his head in and said that a communication had arrived from Interpol. Martinsson went to get it. While he was gone, Svedberg told Wallander about the violent energy with which
Björk had gone about getting the front doors repaired.

Martinsson returned.

'One of the pilots has been identified,' he said. 'Pedro Espinosa, thirty-three years old. Born in Madrid. He'd been imprisoned in Spain for embezzlement and in France for smuggling.'

'Smuggling,' Wallander said. 'That fits perfectly.'

'There's another thing that's interesting,' Martinsson said. 'His last known address is in Marbella. That's where the Eberhardsson sisters' big villa is.'

The room fell silent. Wallander was clear on the point that it could still be a coincidence. A house in Marbella and a dead pilot who happened to have lived in the same place. But deep down he knew that they were in the process of uncovering a baffling connection. He did not yet know what it would mean. But now they could begin to focus their work in a particular direction.

'The other pilot is still unidentified,' Martinsson went on. 'But they're working on it.'

Wallander looked around the table.

'We need more help from the Spanish police,' he said. 'If they're as helpful as Radwan in Cairo, they should be able to search the
Eberhardsson sisters' villa very soon. They should look for a safe. And they should look for drugs. Who did the sisters know down there? This is what we need to find out. And we need to find out soon.'

'Should one of us go down there?' Hansson asked.

'Not yet,' Wallander said. 'Your sunbathing will have to wait until next summer.'

They reviewed the material one more time and assigned the tasks to be performed. Above all they were going to focus on Yngve Leonard
Holm. Wallander noticed that the pace in the team had picked up.

They ended the meeting at a quarter to ten. Hansson reminded
Wallander about the traditional Christmas buffet that would be celebrated at the Hotel Continental on the twenty-first of December.
Wallander tried to think of a good excuse for missing it, without success.

After Wallander had made his telephone calls, he put down the receiver and closed the door. Slowly he went back through the material they had uncovered so far, regarding the plane that had crashed, Yngve Leonard
Holm and the two Eberhardsson sisters. He drew a triangle on his notepad: each of the three components marked a corner. Five dead people, he thought. Two pilots, one of whom came from Spain. In an aeroplane that was literally a Flying Dutchman since it had supposedly been scrapped after an accident in Laos. An aeroplane that flew in across the Swedish border at night, turned round just south of Sjöbo and crashed next to Mossby Strand. Lights had been observed on the ground, which could mean that the plane had dropped something.

This is the first point of the triangle.

The second point is the two sisters, who ran their sewing shop in
Ystad. They are killed with shots to the head and their building is burned down. They turn out to have been wealthy, with a safe built into the foundation and a villa in Spain. The second point, in other words, consists of two sisters who lived a double life.

Wallander drew a line between Pedro Espinosa and the Eberhardsson sisters. There was a connection there. Marbella.

The third point consisted of Yngve Leonard Holm, who had been executed on a forest road outside Sjöbo. About him they knew that he was a notorious drug dealer who possessed an unusually well-developed ability to cover his tracks.

But someone caught up with him outside Sjöbo, Wallander thought.

He got up from the desk and studied his triangle. What did it say?
He made a point in the middle of the triangle. A centre, he thought.
Hemberg and Rydberg's constant question: where was the centre, a midpoint? He continued to study his sketch. Then all at once he realised that what he had drawn could be interpreted as a pyramid. The base was a square. But from a distance, the pyramid could look like a triangle.

He sat down at the desk again.
Everything that I have in front of me
tells me one thing. That something has happened that has disturbed a
pattern. The most likely thing is that the plane crash is the beginning. It
has set a chain reaction in motion that has resulted in three murders,
three executions
.

He started over from the beginning. He couldn't drop the thought of a pyramid. Could it be that a kind of strange power play had been enacted? Where the triangle points consisted of the Eberhardsson sisters, Yngve Leonard Holm and the downed plane? But where there was still an unknown centre?

Slowly and methodically he proceeded through all the known facts.
Now and again he wrote down a question. Without him noticing the time pass, it was suddenly twelve o'clock. He dropped the pen, took his coat and walked down to the bank. It was a couple of degrees above zero and drizzling. He signed his loan documents and received another twenty thousand kronor. Right now he did not want to think about all the money that had disappeared in Egypt. The fine was one thing.
What gnawed at him and ate away at his parsimonious inner recesses was the price of the plane ticket. He held out no hopes that his sister would agree to help defray the costs.

At exactly one o'clock the car salesman arrived with his new Peugeot.
The old one refused to start. Wallander did not wait for the tow truck.
Instead he took a drive in the new dark blue car. It was worn and reeked of smoke. But Wallander noticed that the engine was good. That was the most important thing. He drove towards Hedeskoga and was about to turn when he decided to continue. He was on the road to
Sjöbo. Martinsson had explained in detail where Holm's body had been found. He wanted to see the place with his own eyes. And perhaps even stop by the house where Holm had lived.

The place where Holm had been found was still cordoned off. But there were no police. Wallander stepped out of the car. There was silence all around. He stepped over the police tape and looked about. If someone wanted to kill a person, this was an excellent location. He tried to imagine what had happened. Holm had arrived here with someone.
According to Martinsson there were only tracks from one car.

A confrontation, Wallander thought. Certain goods are handed over, a payment is to be made. Then something happens. Holm is shot in the back of the head. He is dead before he falls to the ground. The person who has committed the murder vanishes without a trace.

A man, Wallander thought. Or more than one. The same person or people who killed the Eberhardsson sisters a few days earlier.

Suddenly he felt close to something. There was yet another connection here that he would be able to see if only he made an effort. That it had to do with drugs appeared obvious, even if it was still hard to accept that two sisters who owned a sewing shop would have been mixed up in something like that. But Rydberg had been right. His first comment
– what did they really know about the two sisters? – had been justified.

Wallander left the forest road and drove on. He could see
Martinsson's map clearly in his head. He had to turn right at the large roundabout south of Sjöbo. Then another road, a gravel road, to the left, to the last house on the right, a red barn next to the road. A blue mailbox that was about to fall to the ground. Two junked cars and a rusty tractor on a field next to the barn. A barking dog of indeterminate breed in a dog run. He had no trouble finding it. He heard the dog before he even got out of the car. He stepped out and walked into the yard. The paint on the main house was peeling. The gutters hung in pieces at the corners. The dog barked desperately and scratched at the fence. Wallander wondered what would happen if the fence gave way and the dog was let loose. He walked over to the door and rang a bell. Then he saw that the wiring was loose. He knocked and waited.
Finally he banged on the door so hard that it opened. He called out to see if anyone was home. Still no answer. I shouldn't go in, he thought.
I will break many rules that pertain not only to the police but to all citizens. Then he pushed the door open further and went in. Peeling wallpaper, stale air, a mess. Broken couches, mattresses on the floor.
Yet there was a large-screen television and a relatively new video recorder. A CD player with large speakers. He called out again and listened. No answer. There was indescribable chaos in the kitchen.
Dishes piled up in the sink. Paper bags, plastic bags, empty pizza cartons on the floor to which various lines of ants led.