An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery Read Online Free PDF

what Stina Hurlén has to say. What we can start doing right away is to see if we can dig out something about the history of the house and the people who have lived there. Has there been a missing person linked with the house? That’s a question we can ask ourselves. As Martinson has a relative who owns the house, perhaps he ought to be the one to look after that aspect.”
    Wallander placed his hands down on the table to indicate that the meeting was closed. Lisa Holgersson held him back as the others left the room.
    “The media want to talk to you,” she said.
    “We’ve found a skeleton. There’s nothing more to say.”
    “You know that journalists love stories about missing persons. Isn’t there anything else you can tell them?”
    “No. We police officers have to wait until we get more facts. The journalists can jolly well do the same.”
    Wallander spent the rest of the day on an inquiry concerning a Pole who had beaten and killed an Ystad resident at some drunken orgy or other. A lot of people had been there at the time, but they all remembered it differently—or had no recollection of it at all. The Polish man who was accused of killing his drinking partner kept changing his story. Wallander had spent hours on fruitless conversations with those involved, and had asked the prosecutor if it was really worth continuing. But the prosecutor was young and new and assiduous, and had insisted. A man, drunk or not, who had killed another man, even if he was just as drunk, must be duly punished. Wallander couldn’t argue with that, of course. But his experience told him that they would never be able to throw light on the situation, no matter how long he or one of his colleagues persisted with the inquiry.
    Martinson called in occasionally to report that Stina Hurlén had still not been in touch. Shortly after two, Linda appeared in the doorway and asked if he was going out for lunch. He shook his head and asked her to buy him a sandwich instead. When she had left, he found himself thinking that he still hadn’t managed to get used to the fact that his own daughter was now a fully grown adult, and a police officer to boot, working at the same police station as he was.
    Linda duly delivered the sandwich in a small carrier bag. Wallander slid aside the voluminous file containing all the material relevant to the drunken orgy. He ate the sandwich, closed the door, then leaned back on his chair for a snooze. As usual he held his bunch of keys in one hand. If he dropped it, he would know he had fallen asleep and that it was time to wake up again.
    He soon dozed off. The keys fell to the floor, and as they did so Martinson opened the door.
    Wallander gathered that Stina Hurlén had sent in her report at last.

CHAPTER 9
    The preliminary, but by no means final, forensic report had come from Lund by courier. It was lying on Martinson’s desk.
    “I think you’d better read it yourself,” said Martinson.
    “I take it that means the discovery of the skeleton is what we suspected it would be—the beginning of a criminal investigation.”
    “It seems so, yes.”
    Martinson went to get some coffee while Wallander read the report. Stina Hurlén wrote simply and clearly. Over the years Wallander had often wondered why police officers and pathologists, prosecutors and defense lawyers sometimes wrote such hopelessly unreadabletexts. They turned out masses of words instead of writing simple, meaningful sentences.
    It took him just over ten minutes to read the report. Whenever he had an important document in his hands, he forced himself to read slowly, at a speed all his thoughts could keep up with.
    Stina Hurlén confirmed that the body was definitely that of a woman. She judged that the woman would have been about fifty when she died. Further analyses would be needed to be precise about her age, but Hurlén could already give the probable cause of death. The dead woman had been hanged. There was an injury on the nape of her neck