An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

Author:Henning Mankell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, International Mystery & Crime, Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780804170659
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2014-08-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

The following day, Friday, November 8, Wallander woke up early. He was sweaty. He tried to remember what he had been dreaming about—it was something to do with Linda, perhaps a rerun of the confrontation they had had the previous day. But his memory was empty. The dream had closed all the doors surrounding it.

It was ten minutes to five. He lay there in the darkness. The rain was pounding against his bedroom window. He tried to go back to sleep, but failed. After tossing and turning until six o’clock, he got up. He paused outside Linda’s door: she was asleep, snoring softly.

He made some coffee and sat down in the kitchen. The rain was coming and going. Without really thinking about it, he decided to begin his working day by making another visit to the property where they had found the skeleton. He had no idea what he hoped to gain by doing so, but he often returned to crime scenes, not least to reassess his first impressions.

He left Ystad half an hour later, and when he arrived at the house in Löderup it wasn’t yet light. The police tape was still in place, cordoning off the scene. He walked slowly around the house and garden. All the time he was looking out for something he hadn’t noticed before. He had no idea what that might be. Something that didn’t fit in, something that stood out. At the same time he tried to imagine a possible sequence of events.

Once upon a time a woman lived here, but never left the place. Yet somebody must have wondered what had happened to her. And it is obvious that nobody has ever been here, looking for her. Nobody has suspected anything that has led to the police investigating this property.

He paused next to the grave, which was now covered by a dirty tarpaulin.

Why was the body buried just here? The garden is large. Somebody must have thought about alternatives, and made a decision. Here, just here, not anywhere else.

Wallander started walking again, but stored away in his memory the questions he had formulated. He could hear a tractor in the background. A lone red kite was soaring up above, then swooped down onto one of the fields that surrounded the property. He went back to the grave, and looked around. He suddenly noticed a place next to some currant bushes. At first he didn’t know what had attracted his attention: it was something to do with the relationship of the bushes to one another. A characteristic of the garden as a whole was symmetry: everything was planted in a way that created a pattern. Even though the garden was neglected and very overgrown, he could still see all those patterns. And there was something about the currant bushes that didn’t fit in.

The bushes were an exception that went against the rule that held sway in the garden as a whole.

After a few minutes the penny dropped. It wasn’t a pattern that had been broken: it was a pattern that was no longer there.

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