One Step Behind by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online Page B

police station and went to the room where the officer on duty was manning the phones. He was taking a call as Wallander stepped into the room, but pointed to one of the fax machines. Klas Boge had faxed his brother's letter as promised. Wallander went to his office and turned on the desk lamp. He laid the two letters and the postcards next to each other, then angled the light and put on his glasses.
    He leaned back in his chair. His hunch was correct. Both Martin Boge and Lena Norman had irregular, spiky handwriting. If someone had wanted to forge any one of the three's handwriting, the choice would have been clear: Astrid Hillström. Wallander felt profoundly disturbed by this, but his mind kept working methodically. What did this mean? It was nothing, really. It didn't supply an answer to why someone would want to write postcards in their names, and who would have had access to their handwriting. Nonetheless, he couldn't shake off his concern.
    We have to go through this thoroughly, he thought. If something has happened, they've been missing for almost two months.
    He got himself a cup of coffee. It was 10.15 p.m. He read through the description of events one more time but found nothing new. Some good friends had celebrated Midsummer's Eve together, then left for a trip. They sent a few postcards. And that was all.
    Wallander shuffled the letters together and put them in the folder along with the postcards. There was nothing more he could do tonight. Tomorrow he would talk to Martinsson and the others, go through this Midsummer's Eve case one last time, and then decide if they would proceed with a missing persons investigation.
    Wallander turned off the light and left the room. In the corridor he realised that Ann-Britt Höglund's light was on. The door was slightly ajar, and he pushed it open gently. She was staring down at her desk but there were no papers in front of her. Wallander hesitated. She almost never stayed this late at the station. She had children to take care of, and her husband travelled often with his job and was rarely at home. He recalled her emotional behaviour in the canteen. And now here she was staring down at an empty desk. She probably wanted to be left alone. But it was also possible that she wanted to talk to somebody.
    She can always ask me to leave, Wallander thought.
    He knocked on the door, waited for her answer, and stepped inside.
    "I saw your light," he said. "You aren't normally here so late, not unless something has happened."
    She looked back at him without answering.
    "If you want to be left alone, just say the word."
    "No," she replied. "I don't really want to be left alone. Why are you here yourself? Is something going on?"
    Wallander sat down in her visitor's chair. He felt like a big, lumbering animal.
    "It's the young people who went missing at Midsummer."
    "Has anything turned up?"
    "Not really. There was just something I wanted to double-check. But I think that we'll need to do a thorough reexamination of the case. Eva Hillström is seriously concerned."
    "But what could really have happened to them?"
    "That's the question."
    "Are we going to declare them missing?"
    Wallander threw his arms out. "I don't know. We'll have to decide tomorrow."
    The room was dark except for the circle of light projected onto the floor by the desk lamp.
    "How long have you been a policeman?" she asked suddenly.
    "A long time. Too long, maybe. But I'm a policeman through and through. That's not going to change, at least until I retire."
    She looked at him for a long time before asking her next question. "How do you keep going?"
    "I don't know."
    "Don't you ever run out of steam?"
    "Sometimes. Why do you ask?"
    "I'm thinking of what I said in the canteen earlier. I told you I'd had a bad summer and that's true. My husband and I are having problems. He's never at home. It can take us a week to get back to normal after his trips, and then he just has to leave again. This summer we started talking about a