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handle it?”
    “He says he absolutely has to speak with you.”
    Wallander took a look at the open folders on his desk. Nothing in them was so urgent that he couldn’t take a report on a missing person.
    “Send him in,” he said and hung up.
    He opened the door and began moving the folders off his desk. When he looked up, a man was standing at his door. Wallander had never seen him before. He was dressed in overalls bearing the logo of the O.K. oil company. As he entered, Wallander could smell oil and petrol.
    He shook his hand and asked the man to take a seat. He was in his 50s, unshaven and with thin grey hair. He introduced himself as Sven Tyrén.
    “You wanted to talk to me?” Wallander said.
    “I’ve heard you’re a good policeman,” said Tyrén. His accent sounded like western Skåne, where Wallander himself had grown up.
    “Most of us are good,” Wallander answered.
    Tyrén’s reply surprised him.
    “You know that’s not true. I’ve been locked up for a thing or two in my day. And I’ve met a lot of policemen who were real arseholes, to put it mildly.”
    Wallander was startled by the force of his words.
    “I doubt you came here to tell me that,” he said, changing the subject. “There was something about a missing person?”
    Tyrén fidgeted with his O.K. cap.
    “It’s strange, actually,” he said.
    Wallander had taken out a notebook from a drawer and turned to a blank page.
    “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “Who might have disappeared? And what’s strange about it?”
    “Holger Eriksson.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “One of my customers.”
    “I’m guessing that you own a petrol station.”
    Tyrén shook his head.
    “I deliver heating oil,” he said. “I take care of the district north of Ystad. Eriksson lives between Högestad and Lödinge. He called the office and said his tank was almost empty. We agreed on a delivery for Thursday morning. But, when I got there, nobody was home.”
    Wallander jotted this down.
    “You’re talking about last Thursday.”
    “Yes.”
    “And when did he call?”
    “Last Monday.”
    Wallander thought for a moment.
    “Could there have been some misunderstanding about the time?”
    “I’ve delivered to Eriksson for more than ten years. There’s never been a misunderstanding before.”
    “So what did you do when you discovered that he wasn’t there.”
    “His oil tank is locked, so I left a message in his letter box.”
    “Then what?”
    “I left.”
    Wallander put down his pen.
    “When you deliver oil,” Tyrén went on, “you tend to notice people’s routines. I couldn’t stop thinking about Holger Eriksson. It didn’t make sense for him to be away. So I went out there again yesterday afternoon after work. My note was still in the letter box, underneath all the other post that had come since last Thursday. I rang the bell. Nobody was home. His car was still in the garage.
    “Does he live alone?”
    “He’s not married. He made a lot of money selling cars. And he writes poems, too. He gave me a book once.”
    Wallander remembered seeing Eriksson’s name on books on a shelf of literature by local writers at the Ystad Bookshop when he’d been looking for something to give Svedberg for his 40th birthday.
    “There was something else that doesn’t make sense,” Tyrén said. “The door was unlocked. I thought maybe he was sick. He’s almost 80. So I went inside. The house was empty, but the coffee maker in the kitchen was on. It smelled bad. The coffee had boiled dry and burned on the bottom. That’s when I decided to come and see you.”
    Wallander could see that Tyrén’s concern was genuine. From experience, however, he knew that most disappearances usually solved themselves. It was very seldom that anything serious happened.
    “Doesn’t he have any neighbours?” asked Wallander.
    “The farmhouse is pretty isolated.”
    “What do you think might have happened?”
    Tyrén’s reply came at once, quite