Wislander showed the way and turned left when he reached the altar. Wallander observed from his back that he appeared unusually strong. This could have been the man he had tried to catch up with and who had knocked him down.

There was a little table and a couple of chairs in the sacristy. Wislander sat down and pointed at the other chair. Wallander pulled it out from under the table, wondering how he should begin. Wislander stared at him with his moist eyes. Wallander glanced around the room. On another table there were two large candelabra. Wallander studied them without first knowing what it was that had caught his attention. Then he saw that one was different from the other. One of the arms of one candelabrum was missing. And it was made of brass. He looked at Wislander, and realised that the man was aware of what Wallander had seen. Nonetheless the attack took him by surprise. Wislander threw himself at Wallander with something like a roar. His fingers dug into his neck and his strength, or his insanity, was great. Wallander struggled against him while Wislander shouted things incomprehensibly, something about Simon Lamberg, that the photographer had to die. Then Wislander, in his delirium, started in on a diatribe about the riders of the Apocalypse. Wallander struggled to free himself. Finally, with enormous effort, he managed to do so. But then Wislander was on him again, like an animal fighting for its life. During their wrestling match, they reached the table with the candelabra. Wallander managed to grab one and strike Wislander in the face. Wislander immediately collapsed. For a moment, Wallander believed he had killed him. The same way that Lamberg had died. But then he saw that Wislander was breathing.

Wallander sank down on a chair and tried to catch his breath. He noticed that his face was scratched up. The repaired tooth had broken for the third time.

Wislander lay on the floor. Slowly he started to regain consciousness. At the same moment Wallander heard the church door open.

He left the sacristy to meet Martinsson, who had got worried and called a taxi from the house of one of the neighbours.

Everything had happened very fast, but Wallander knew it was now over. He had also recognised Wislander as the man who had attacked him. He had recognised him without ever really having seen his face. But it was him, there was no doubt about that.

A couple of days later Wallander had a meeting with his colleagues in the conference room. It was the afternoon. A window was open. The spring warmth appeared to have arrived for good. Wallander had completed his questioning of Anders Wislander, at least for the moment. The man was now in such poor psychological shape that a physician had advised Wallander to stop. But the picture was complete. Wallander had called this meeting in order to provide them with an overview of what had happened.

'It is dark and sombre and tragic,' he began. 'But Simon Lamberg and Louise Wislander continued to meet in secret after that bus trip. And Louise's husband knew nothing of it. Until recently, shortly before she died. She had a tumour on her liver. On her deathbed she confessed her infidelity. Wislander had then been overcome by something that can only be described as insanity. In part, grief over his wife's death, in part rage and anguish over her betrayal. He started stalking Lamberg. In his mind, Lamberg was also guilty of his wife's death. He took sick leave and spent almost all his time here in Ystad. He kept the studio under surveillance, staying at one of the small hotels in town. He followed the cleaning lady, Hilda Waldén. One Saturday, he broke into her apartment, took the keys, and had them copied. Before she returned, he replaced the originals. Then he entered the studio and killed Lamberg with the candelabrum. After that, in his confusion, he still believed that Lamberg was alive. He actually returned in order to kill him a second time. He dropped the hymn book when he was hiding in the garden. The fact that he turned on the radio and changed the setting is a bizarre detail. He had apparently started imagining that he would be able to hear God's voice through the radio. That God would forgive him for the sin he had committed. But all he managed to find was a station that broadcast rock music. The photographs were Lamberg's work through and through. They had nothing to do with the death. He nourished a contempt for politicians and other powerful men. In addition, he was displeased with the work of the police. He was a curmudgeon. A little man who tried to control his world by deforming faces. But this solves our case. I can't help pitying Wislander. His world collapsed. He didn't have the strength to bear it.'

The room was silent.

'Why did Louise visit Lamberg's handicapped daughter?' Hansson asked.

'I've been asking myself that,' Wallander answered. 'Perhaps her love affair had religious undertones. Perhaps the two of them were involved in praying for Matilda? Did Louise then go to the nursing home in order to check the effect of her prayers? Perhaps she regarded Matilda as the victim of her parents' earlier sinful life? We'll never know. As little as we'll ever know what bound these two singular people together. There are always secret rooms that we don't manage to find a way into. And perhaps that's for the best.'

'One can take a step further,' Rydberg said, 'if you think about Wislander. Perhaps his rage actually stemmed from the fact that Lamberg had seduced his wife from a religious perspective. Not erotically. One has reason to question if it was only the usual jealousy that played a role in this case.'

Again, there was silence. Then they went on to discuss Lamberg's pictures.

'He must have been crazy in his own way,' Hansson said. 'To spend his spare time distorting images of well-known people.'

'Perhaps the explanation is quite different,' Rydberg suggested. 'Perhaps there are people in today's society that feel so powerless they no longer partake in what we call democratic society. Instead they devote themselves to rites. If this is the case, our nation is in trouble.'

'I hadn't considered that possibility,' Wallander said. 'But you could be right. And in that case I agree with you. Then the foundation has really started to crack.'

The meeting came to an end. Wallander felt tired and despondent, despite the beautiful weather. And he missed Mona.

Then he checked the time. A quarter past four.

He had to go back to the dentist.

How many times it had been, he no longer knew.

THE PYRAMID

PROLOGUE

The aeroplane flew in over Sweden at a low altitude just west of Mossby Beach. The fog was thick out at sea but growing lighter closer to shore. Contours of the shoreline and the first few houses rushed towards the pilot. But he had already made this trip many times. He was flying by instruments alone. As soon as he crossed the Swedish border and identified Mossby Beach and the lights along the road to Trelleborg, he made a sharp turn north-east and then another turn east. The plane, a Piper Cherokee, was obedient. He positioned himself along a route that had been carefully planned. An air corridor cut an invisible path over an area in Skåne where the houses were few and far between. It was a little before five o'clock on the morning of 11 December 1989. Around him there was an almost solid darkness. Every time he flew at night he thought about his first few years, when he had worked as a co-pilot for a Greek company that had transported tobacco at night and in secret from what had then been Southern Rhodesia, restricted by political sanctions. That had been in 1966 and 1967. More than twenty years ago. But the memory never left him. That was when he had learned that a skilled pilot can fly even at night, with a minimum of aids, and in complete radio silence.