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

which indicated this. Needless to say, Hurlén could not be certain that the injury hadn’t been caused after her death, but she thought that was unlikely. As yet she was unable to say how long the woman had been dead, but there were indications that the corpse had been lying in the grave for many years.
    Wallander put the report down on the desk and picked up the cup of coffee Martinson had brought him.
    “What do we know then?” said Wallander. “If we sum up.”
    “Unusually little. A dead woman in a shallow grave in a garden in Löderup. Who was about fifty when she died. But we don’t know when she died. If I understand Hurlén rightly, that woman could have been lying under the ground for a hundred years. Or more.”
    “Or less,” said Wallander. “What’s the name of the owner of the house? Your relative?”
    “Karl Eriksson. My wife’s cousin.”
    “I suppose the best we can do is to have a chat with him.”
    “No,” said Martinson. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
    “Why not?”
    “He’s ill. He’s old.”
    “Being old doesn’t mean being ill. What are you implying?”
    Martinson walked over to the window and looked out.
    “All I’m saying is that my wife’s cousin Karl Eriksson is ninety-two years old. He was clear in the head until a few months ago, but then something happened. One day he went out into the street naked, and when people tried to help him he didn’t know who he was or where he lived. He’d managed on his own at home until then. Dementia normally comes creeping up on you—but in his case it hit him with a bang.”
    Wallander looked at Martinson in surprise.
    “But if he became senile so suddenly, how could he ask you to look after the sale of his house?”
    “I’ve already told you. We drew up an agreement about that several years ago. Perhaps he had an inkling that one of these days he would float off into the mists, and wanted to have his affairs in order before it happened.”
    “Does he have any moments of clarity?”
    “None at all. He doesn’t recognize anybody anymore. The only person he ever talks about is his mother, whodied about fifty years ago. He keeps saying he must go and buy some milk. He repeats that over and over again all the time he’s awake. He lives in a care home for people who no longer live in the real world.”
    “Surely there must be someone else who can answer questions?”
    “No, there isn’t. Karl Eriksson and his wife, who died sometime in the 1970s, didn’t have any children. Or rather, they had two children, two daughters, who died in a horrific accident in a muddy pond a long time ago. There were no other relatives. They lived isolated lives—the only people they were occasionally in contact with were me and my family.”
    Wallander felt impatient. And he was also hungry—the sandwich Linda had given him had long since proved insufficient.
    “We’d better start searching the house,” he said, rising to his feet. “There must be deeds. All people have a story; so do all houses. Let’s go and have a word with Lisa.”
    They sat down in Lisa Holgersson’s office. Wallander let Martinson tell her about Stina Hurlén’s report and the senile Karl Eriksson. It had become a characteristic of their working relationship that they took it in turns to report on specific cases so that the other one could listen and keep the whole business at arm’s length.
    “We can’t devote much in the way of resources to this,” said Holgersson when Martinson had finished. “It seemshighly probable that it will end up as an old murder inquiry in any case.”
    That was exactly the reaction that Wallander had expected. It seemed to him that in recent years fewer and fewer police resources were allocated to what ought to have been most important: fieldwork. More and more of his colleagues were glued to their desks, and had to work in accordance with confusing and meaningless priorities that were changing all the time. An old