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

just wanted to share her frustration.
    “Is that really possible?” asked Wallander cautiously.
    “Everything is possible. I’m just waiting for the day when the National Audit Office discovers that we’ve been recording shelved investigations as solved.”
    “We’ll be the ones who suffer,” said Wallander. “We’ll be the ones the general public blame.”
    “No,” said Martinson. “People aren’t that stupid. They see that there are fewer and fewer of us. They recognize that it’s not us who are the problem.”
    Lisa Holgersson stood up. The meeting was closed. Shehad no desire to continue an unpleasant conversation about any sleight of hand concerning unsolved—and yet solved—criminal cases.
    Martinson and Wallander headed toward one of the conference rooms. They bumped into Linda in the corridor. She was on her way out to one of the patrol cars.
    “How did it go?”
    “As expected,” said Wallander. “We have too much to do, and so we should do as little as we can.”
    “That was an unjust comment,” said Martinson.
    “Of course it was unjust. Who said that police work had anything to do with justice?”
    Linda shook her head and left.
    “I didn’t understand that last comment you made,” said Martinson.
    “Neither did I,” said Wallander cheerfully. “But it does no harm to give the younger generation something to think about.”
    They sat down at the table. Martinson contacted Stefan Lindman on the intercom; he arrived after a few minutes, carrying a file.
    “Missing persons,” said Wallander. “Nothing fascinates the public at large like people who go up in smoke. People who go out to buy a bottle of milk and never come back. Or visit a girlfriend and are never seen again. Young women who go missing never fail to stimulate the general public’s imagination. I still remember a girl called Ulla who disappeared after a dance in Sundbyberg sometimein the fifties. She was never seen again. I can still conjure up her face whenever I think about her.”
    “There are some statistics,” said Stefan Lindman. “They’re pretty reliable, given that they come from the police … Most people reported as missing usually turn up again very soon—after just a couple of days, or maybe a week. Only a few never return.”
    He opened the file.
    “I’ve dug down into the past,” he said. “In order to cover the time the medics think we should be looking at, I’ve fished out information relevant to the period 1935 to 1955. Our registers—even the old ones and those dealing with unsolved investigations at various points in time—are pretty detailed. I think I’ve produced quite a good picture of the overall situation, and the missing women who might be of interest.”
    Wallander leaned forward over the table.
    “So what have you to tell us?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?”
    Stefan Lindman nodded.
    “Your ears are not deceiving you. During the period of time in question there wasn’t a single woman in the appropriate age range who was reported as missing in this area. Nor was there anybody in Malmö. I thought I’d found a woman who might be the one we were after—a forty-nine-year-old from Svedala who went missing in December 1942. But she turned up again a few years later.She had left her husband and gone off with a soldier from Stockholm who had been stationed here. But she grew tired of him, the passion cooled down, and she came back home. There’s nothing at all apart from her.”
    They thought over what Stefan Lindman had said, in silence.
    “So nobody is reported missing,” said Martinson after a while. “But a woman was buried in a garden. She had been murdered. Somebody must have missed her.”
    “She could have come from somewhere else,” said Lindman. “A list of all the women of the appropriate age in Sweden who have gone missing during those years would produce a quite different result, naturally. Besides, there was a war on, and a lot of people were constantly on the