An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online Page B

facial wrinkles.
    They shook hands. Unlike Hanna Trulsson, her mother-in-law gripped Wallander’s hand firmly.
    “I don’t hear well,” Elin Trulsson said. “I can’t hear anything in my left ear; I can with my right, but only if people don’t all talk at the same time.”
    “I’ve explained the situation to my mum,” said Evert Trulsson.
    Wallander leaned toward the old woman. Martinson had a notebook in his hand.
    But Martinson’s notebook remained blank. Elin Trulsson had absolutely nothing of significance to tell. Karl Eriksson and his wife had lived a life that evidently didn’t conceal any secrets, nor did she have anything of interest to say about the Henanders. Wallander tried to take one more step back in time to Ludvig Hansson, who had sold the farm to Henander in 1949.
    “I wasn’t living here at that time,” said Elin Trulsson. “I was working in Malmö in those days.”
    “How long had Ludvig Hansson owned the property?” Wallander asked.
    Elin Trulsson looked questioningly at her son. He shook his head.
    “I suppose they’d been living here for many generations,” he said. “But that’s no doubt information you could dig out.”
    Wallander could see that they weren’t going to getany further. He nodded to Martinson, they said thank you for the coffee, shook hands again, and left the house accompanied by Evert Trulsson. The sleet had turned into rain.
    “It’s a pity my dad isn’t still alive,” said Wallander. “He had an amazing memory. And he was also a bit of a local historian. But he never wrote anything down. He was better than most at telling the tales, though. If I hadn’t been so thick I’d have recorded what he had to say on tape.”
    He was just about to get into his car when he realized that he had one more question to ask.
    “Can you remember if anybody has gone missing in this area? During your time here or earlier? People tend to talk about things like that—missing persons in mysterious circumstances.”
    Evert Trulsson thought for a moment before answering.
    “There was a teenage girl who disappeared from around here in the middle of the fifties. Nobody knows what happened to her—if she committed suicide or ran away or whatever. She was about fourteen or fifteen. Her name was Elin, just like my mum. But I don’t know about anybody else.”
    Wallander and Martinson drove back to Ystad.
    “That’s it for now, then,” said Wallander. “We don’t lift a finger until the forensic medicine crowd in Lund have said what they have to say. Let’s hope that despite everything it turns out to have been a natural death—then all we would need to do is to try to identify the person. But if we fail, it won’t be all that big a deal.”
    “Of course it was an unnatural death,” said Martinson. “But apart from that I agree with you. We’ll just wait.”
    They returned to Ystad and turned their attention to other business.
    A few days later, on Friday, November 1, Skåne was subjected to a snowstorm. Traffic came to a standstill, and all police resources were concentrated on clearing up the situation that ensued. It stopped snowing the following afternoon, November 2. On Sunday it started raining. What was left of the snow was washed away.
    The following Monday morning, November 4, Linda and Wallander walked together to the police station. They had barely entered reception when Martinson came storming down the corridor. He was carrying a bunch of papers in his hand.
    Wallander could see straightaway that they came from the Center for Forensic Medicine in Lund.

CHAPTER 13
    Stina Hurlén and her colleagues in Lund had done a good job. They still needed more time to investigate the woman whose skeleton had been found, but the information they could produce and confirm now was sufficient for Wallander and his colleagues to know what they were up against. In the first place, it really was a murder that had been committed. The woman had been killed. She had all the