Read An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery for Free Online Page A

people were hamsters. They kept things, not least documents. His eyes alighted on a desk in front of a window. That was where he would start. The desk was dark brown, definitely old. Wallander sat down on the chair in front of it and tried the drawers. They were locked. He searched the desk top but could see no sign of a key. Then he felt with his fingers underneath the desk top: still no keys. He lifted up the heavy, brass table lamp, and found a key attached to a thin strand of silk.
    He opened the desk’s cupboard. There were five drawers. The top one was full of old pens, empty ink bottles, a few pairs of spectacles, and dust. It struck Wallander that nothing could make him as depressed as the sight of old spectacles that nobody wanted anymore. He opened the next drawer down. It contained a bundle of old income tax returns. He saw that the oldest was from 1952. That year Karl Eriksson and his wife had paid 2,900 kronor in tax. Wallander tried to work out if that was about what might have been expected, or if it was a surprisingly low sum. He decided the latter. The third drawer contained various diaries. He leafed through some of them. They contained no personal notes, not even references to birthdays: just the purchase of seedcorn, the cost of repairs to a combine harvester, and new wheels for a tractor. Eriksson had evidently run a small farm. He put the diaries back into the drawer. Every time he searched through other people’s belongings, he wondered howanybody could cope with being a thief—to spend more or less every day rummaging through other people’s clothes and personal belongings.
    Wallander opened the fourth drawer, the last but one. And there he found what he was looking for: a file with the words “Property Documents” written in ink. He took it carefully out of the drawer, slid the desk lamp closer to him, directed it at the file, and began to leaf through the papers. The first thing he came across was a deed of conveyance dated November 18, 1968. Karl Eriksson and his wife Emma had bought the property and the surrounding fields from the estate left by the farmer Gustav Valfrid Henander. The beneficiaries comprised the widow, Laura, and three children: Tore, Lars and Kristina. The purchase price was 55,000 kronor. Karl Eriksson paid a deposit of 15,000 kronor on the house, and the transaction was supervised by the Savings Bank in Ystad.
    Wallander produced a notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket. In the old days he had nearly always forgotten to take a notebook with him, and been forced to scribble on scraps of paper and the backs of receipts. But Linda had bought him a collection of small notebooks, and put one in the pocket of each of his coats and jackets. Wallander made a note of two figures: at the top he wrote today’s date, October 28, 2002, and underneath it, November 18, 1968. This was a stretch of time covering thirty-four years—a whole generation. He noted downall the names that were on the conveyance, then put it to one side and surveyed the remaining documents. Most of them were of no interest, but he proceeded carefully. Working through a series of documents could be just as risky as walking through a dark forest: you could stumble, fall down, get lost.
    Martinson’s cell phone rang somewhere. Wallander assumed it was his wife. They had innumerable phone conversations with each other every day. Wallander often wondered what they could possibly think of to say. He couldn’t remember phoning his own wife Mona, or her him, during working hours even once over all the years they were married. Work was work, and talking was something you could do before or afterward. He sometimes wondered if that had been a contributory factor in the break-up of their marriage. The fact that he had phoned her so seldom. Or her him.
    He carried on looking at the documents. Paused. He found he was holding an old title deed, an attested copy. It was dated 1949 and concerned Gustav Valfrid Henander.