August 20 2008, 01:50 AM
Day 12: Fjällbacka to Ystad
By: Stefan Geens
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Kurt Wallander had just finished leaving a contrite message on his daughter's answering machine —the third that morning — when Martinsson, his colleague, walked in, looking morose.
"Wallander, we have a situation."
"A situation?" He hated euphemisms. They never brought good news.
"A cyclist found a body over at the lime kilns of Östra Torp this morning. A middle-aged man. Seems he was some kind of photographer. Found in the middle of a field, as if hit by lightning."
"Maybe he was hit by lightning." Wallander mused aloud, wishing it were true.
"Lighting wouldn't cause his right index finger to be cut off and missing."
The inspector looked up and frowned. By the standards of Skåne, a missing index finger was nothing, really. In the past few years he'd seen children immolate themselves, bodies float ashore from the Baltic, religious fanatics and wayward assassins come to grievous ends, all on his watch. Anyone could miss a finger. And yet he knew how small mysteries had a way of growing into something bigger, especially here in Ystad.
"How do you know he was a photographer?"
"His equipment was right there next to him. But here's the weird thing. His rental car was parked nearby and we checked the onboard GPS. He's been driving right round the country these past two weeks. He was in Kiruna just a few days ago. Doesn't stay in one place for more than a night."
So the photographer was fleeing. Wallander wondered: Who or what might have given him reason to run? Had he seen something? And then he thought: We use our index finger to push the shutter button on a camera. So was this a warning? To whom? Obviously not to our dead photographer — it was too late for him. Wallander didn't like where this was going.
"Let's head on over, then," he said, picking up the his car keys and throwing them at Martinsson. "You drive."
The lime kilns of Östra Torp were 20 minutes to the west of Ystad. They were once the center of a booming industry in the 19th century, when the 40 meters of limestone bedrock that lay beneath southern Skåne were mined and fired to produce quicklime. The quicklime was then used as construction material for local houses, giving them their distinctive whitewashed color.
While in the car, Wallander wondered why Skåne's murders were always being perpetrated in interesting historical settings, such as the lime kilns. There were certainly plenty of pittoresque places in the area to commit crimes in, he conceded, but why did nobody around Ystad ever get killed somewhere boring? It's as if his life was being written by a novelist, he concluded grimly, before dismissing the thought. "This photographer's certainly found a beautiful place for a Wallander crime scene," he said aloud, to nobody in particular.
Then his phone rang. He saw it was his daughter calling. Now he was in no mood to answer.
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