“The owner is a Kurt Frostengren and lives in Stockholm. He usually comes here in the summer, over Christmas and New Year, and a week in March for some skiing. The house is empty for the rest of the year. Apparently he inherited it from a relative. Someone has broken in and set up his headquarters here, then gone away. He knows Berggren has seen his face. He must be aware of the possibility that we might have put two and two together and realized that he read the back of my bill in the restaurant. There is a cold-blooded side to the man that we mustn’t underestimate. He knows we’ll go looking for him. Especially after he attacked you and Berggren.”
“Where’s he headed?”
Larsson thought before replying. “I’d formulate the question differently. Why is he still here?”
“There’s something he still has to do.”
“The question is: what?”
“He wants to know who murdered Andersson. We’ve already talked about that.”
Larsson shook his head. “Not only that. He wants more than that. He intends to kill whoever murdered Andersson.” There was no other explanation. But he had one more question for Lindman.
“Why is it so important for him?”
“If we knew that, we’d know what this whole business is about.”
They stood gazing into the mist.
“He’s hiding,” Larsson said. “He’s clever, our man from Buenos Aires.”
Lindman looked at him in surprise. “How do you know he’s from Buenos Aires?”
Larsson took a piece of paper out of his pocket. A torn piece of newspaper, the crossword from Aftonbladet. Something like a doodle was in the margin, crossed out but originally written quite firmly.
“541,” Larsson said. “54 is Argentina. And 1 is Buenos Aires. The paper is dated June 12, when Frostengren was here. He saved newspapers for starting fires. The numbers have been written by somebody else. It must be Fernando Hereira. The newspaper in the car is Spanish, not from Argentina, but the language is the same. It can’t be easy to find newspapers from Argentina in Sweden, but it’s comparatively easy to find Spanish ones.”
“Is there a full telephone number for the number in Argentina?”
“No.”
Lindman thought for a moment.
“So he’s been sitting up here in the mountains, and made a phone call to Argentina. Can’t the call be traced?”
“We’re doing that now. Frostengren’s phone has its own line and you can dial direct. If Hereira had used a cell phone, we could have traced that without difficulty.”
Larsson bent down to pick up his coffee.
“I keep forgetting that we’re looking for not one but perhaps two cold-blooded murderers,” he said. “We’re beginning to get an idea of who Hereira might be and how he goes about things, but what about the other one? The one who killed Andersson, who’s he?”
The question remained unanswered in the mist. Larsson left Lindman and went to talk to Rundström and the remaining dog handler. Lindman looked at the Alsatian. It was exhausted. It lay with its neck pressed against the damp earth. Lindman wondered if a police dog could feel disappointment.
Half an hour later Larsson and Lindman returned to Sveg. Rundström would stay in Funasdalen with the dog handler and three other officers. They drove in silence through the forest. This time Larsson did the driving. Lindman could see that he was very tired. A few kilometers short of Sveg he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.
“I can’t work it out,” Larsson said “Who killed Andersson? It’s like we’re only scratching the surface. We have no idea what this is about. A man from Argentina disappears up a mountain when he should be getting away from here as fast as possible. He doesn’t flee up the mountain, he withdraws there, and then comes back again.”
“There’s another possibility that we haven’t considered,” Lindman said. “The man we are calling Fernando Hereira might know something we don’t.”
Larsson shook his head. “In that case he wouldn’t have put on a hood and asked Berggren those questions.”
Then they looked at each other.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Larsson said.
“Possibly,” Lindman said. “That Hereira knows, or thinks he knows, that it was Berggren who killed Andersson. And he wants to make her confess.”
Larsson drummed his fingers on the wheel.
“Perhaps Berggren isn’t telling the truth. She says the man who forced his way into her house asked her who had killed Andersson. He might well have said, ‘I know it was you who killed Andersson.’ ” Larsson restarted the engine. “We’ll continue keeping watch on the mountain,” he said. “And we’ll get tough with Berggren.”