Chapter 10: Where Are They Now?

A/N: A longish chapter this time round, and uploaded a little later than normal, as I have been visiting the Land of No Internet Access, otherwise known as my parents' house! :) Big drama on the way after this one...

Petya gazed out the window. Physically she was there in the room, right next to Linda, but mentally she was now a long way from this room, a long way from Ystad. A small smile formed on her lips.

"I'm from Novgorod," she began. "I lived there all my life. It's nice there, you know. I had a happy time growing up with my three brothers. We only had a little house, but it didn't matter. We were all together and our grandmother even lived on the same street."

"It sounds nice," said Linda, to which Petya nodded. "So what happened? How did you get here?"

Petya gazed back out the window. The smile on her lips became rueful and she wrung her hands together.

"When I was seventeen I was offered a job in Saint Petersburg, so I decided to move. I had to leave my family, but I was going to be working in a wonderful restaurant." She sighed, then continued. "I always wanted to be a chef – my uncle has a restaurant and I used to help him there, since I was twelve in fact. Anyway, this was a good chance for me to train as a real chef.

"I did okay, but I didn't get paid much. Sometimes it was hard to pay the rent. But then one day I met this guy who said he could get me a job in Sweden and I could earn good money and I wouldn't have to worry about rent any more. It sounded good to me, so he said he would arrange everything. Then he introduced me to Lasse." Petya broke off for a moment and gestured to the jug of water by the bed. "Please, can you give me a drink?"

Linda nodded and poured a glass of water for the girl, who took it and drank deep. When she had finished, she began her story again.

"Lasse seemed nice at first. He told jokes and he flirted with me. I thought he really liked me and he was going to get me a new job. I was worried about getting a passport and getting a visa for Sweden, but he told me he would take care of everything. He got me a fake passport and some other stuff. I don't know where he got them, but they were good. You couldn't tell they were fake.

"I was worried because of the fakes, instead of them being real ones, but he said it was okay. I should never have trusted him.

"He took me with him to Helsinki, then we got the ferry to Stockholm. When we got to Stockholm he told me to stay in the hotel room and wait for him to come back. So I waited all day for him. When he came back he was drunk and he had another girl with him. I asked him what was going on and he said this girl was going to be my flatmate, so we'd better make friends. Then he locked us in the room together and went out again." Petya looked at her hands, chewing her lip as if unsure of whether to go on.

"You're doing fine, Petya," Linda reassured her. "Go on, tell me about the other girl. Who was she?"

"Annushka." Linda could see deep sorrow etched all over the girl's thin face. The dark circles under her eyes had intensified and the strain of relating the tale was beginning to show.

"It was Annushka," Petya repeated with a sigh. "They had just brought her from Minsk and she was very scared because they had lied to her about where she was going. She didn't know what was going to happen to her. Neither did I."

"I see. Can you tell me more about Annushka? What was her surname? Did she have a family?"

"We called her Annushka, but her proper name was Anna, Anna Yankovskaya. She told me she lived with her grandmother and brother in Minsk. Her mother and father died in an accident when she was young, so her grandmother looked after her. She met one of Lasse's friends and he promised her a job in Sweden and told her she would earn a lot of money. Enough to send some back to her grandmother. She believed him and that's how she ended up getting smuggled to Stockholm. She was so young and so scared. I looked after her from then on because she needed a friend and I cared about her, but I was scared too.

"Anyway, the day after I met Annushka, Lasse made us get into a van. We were driving for a long time and then we arrived here. Lasse took us to the flat and left us there. We didn't know what to do. Next day he came back and said that because he did so much for us and brought us all the way to Sweden we had to pay him back. That's when he started making us… do things." Petya put her head in her hands and began to cry. Linda could hardly bear to see her so distressed. She put a hand on the girl's arm and tried to comfort her.

"It's all right," she said. "You won't ever have to do those things again." Petya leaned against her shoulder, sobbing. Since the day Lasse had beaten her senseless she had been alone and friendless. But with Linda and the other CID officers on her side she was no longer felt ignored and abandoned.

Stefan and Wallander arrived at the address that Wallander had retrieved from public records. Lasse Hallström's business premises were in an unremarkable little warehouse near the harbour. At Holgersson's insistence they had requested an armed unit to go into the building ahead of them, on the off-chance that an armed and not too happy Lasse might be hiding there. However, the building was empty. Wallander nodded to his colleague and they stepped through the door that the armed officers had forced open.

The cold, musty space inside was full of assorted goods, an Aladdin's cave of the illegal, the counterfeit and the purloined. Wallander made a mental inventory of the warehouse's contents, at the top of which were the dozens of boxes of cigarettes wrapped tightly in clear plastic and ready for distribution to those who didn't care about the source or purity of their tobacco as long as it was cheap. Next to the cigarettes he noted a number of large crates marked in Cyrillic letters. Having studied Lasse's file, he knew what would be in those crates, although whether it was branded as "Smirnoff" or something cheaper remained to be seen. He smiled grimly to himself and scanned the rest of the room.

Among the stacked up pallets and crates a group of cardboard boxes caught his eye. Unlike the other boxes in the warehouse, which were stacked neatly, and in some cases even labelled, these were very much the worse for wear and seemed to have been dumped carelessly by the back wall. He made for them and picked one up. It was very light and for a moment he thought perhaps it was full of packing materials, until he lifted the flap and looked inside. There were no packaging materials, but there were some women's clothes. A strange thing for their suspect to keep here, he thought, unless...

Wallander dug into the box and picked out some of the items. These clothes were not new and had been worn many times. Here on this blouse, for instance, there was a seam that had clearly come undone and been re-stitched. A T-shirt showed a small hole near the hem. Wallander stared at them with narrowed eyes. The only reason for these to be here, he thought, is that they belong to one or more of the girls that Lasse has trafficked into the country and he needed to hide them somewhere in a hurry.

He reached deeper into the box, his hand closing on something hard and rectangular: a book. He pulled it out and examined it. It appeared to be a diary, with writing in Cyrillic script. His fingers traced the lettering on the diary's inside front cover, spelling its owner's name. Over the past two or three days he had learned enough about Cyrillic to recognise some of the letters. Piecing his knowledge together, he spelt out the name for himself, nodding in satisfaction as the letters fell into place. "Annushka". The surname was too long for him to make out, but at that moment it didn't matter. What he was holding was another piece of the puzzle, a window into the life of their dead victim.

He called to his colleague through the stockroom's dead air. "Stefan? Come and look at this."

In a few moments Stefan was at his side, peering at the diary.

"Where did you find that?" he asked, taking the book and leafing through it.

"In this pile of boxes. They seem to be full of clothes." Wallander held up a short skirt. Stefan raised his eyebrows.

"Three guesses who this stuff belongs to," said Wallander. Stefan nodded.

"More work for Nyberg, then. And this?" he held up the diary. Wallander took it and showed him the writing inside the cover.

"Annushka's," he explained. "If nothing else, it will tell us something about who she was."

"But it won't tell us where Lasse's disappeared to, will it?"

"No. But perhaps something in here might."

"The computer," said Stefan. "He's got an office upstairs. There's a computer and a filing cabinet. He wasn't expecting us to visit. Maybe there's more in there than he would want us to see."

Wallander nodded. They climbed the stairs to the dusty office, paying no further heed to the contents of the warehouse below.

Once again it was dark outside and all was quiet inside the station. Wallander paced slowly around the room trying to assimilate what seemed to be an endless amount of information. Names, dates, locations, eyewitness reports, interview transcripts, crime scene reports, photographs: in his mind he shuffled them around unceasingly, looking for anything that would help him. Was there something he was missing? Had he overlooked some small clue to the whereabouts of their miscreant and his victims? He was unsure of what he was supposed to see, and it was giving him a headache.

He had had a long conversation with Linda, where they had discussed what Petya had told her. Thanks to her, he now had an understanding of who their two victims were and how they had been sucked into this sordid mess. Once she had finished comforting the distraught girl, Linda had had the wits to ask her for names and dates, information that Wallander and Henrietta had pounced on immediately. Henrietta had recognised the name of Lasse's contact in Russia, and with a glint in her eye had returned to her office to make yet another phone call and check some records. Within half an hour she had announced that she had spoken to a contact in Russia and a raid was being planned on his property.

"We've been after that lowlife for months!" she exclaimed. Wallander smiled back at her, secretly envious of her ability to get results so quickly.

He himself was more interested in the two missing girls. According to Petya they were a pair of sisters from Ukraine. Petya thought they had come from L'Viv. Their names were Iryna and Vira. Now he had their names and descriptions he had circulated them around Skåne. The likelihood of any sightings, however, was minimal.

He sighed. Somewhere in this mass of forensics, interviews and computer records was a clue to the missing girls' location. There had to be.

Nyberg put his head round the door, interrupting Wallander's musings.

"I'm going home now," he said, wiping a drip from the end of his nose with a battered tissue.

"Fine, fine. I'll see you tomorrow."

Nyberg tossed a bundle of papers onto the table.

"I thought you might want to see these before I go." His curiosity piqued, Wallander picked up the bundle and leafed through it.

"Anything unusual?"

"Not particularly. The Customs people will be interested in the goods he had in that warehouse. Beyond that we've got the usual traces: fingerprints, hair, all that stuff. I gave the computer to Martinsson to look at; he's already going through Hallström's bank records."

"Oh, okay."

"There was one small thing though," Nyberg continued, coughing hoarsely.

"Yes?"

"Straw."

"Straw?"

"Yes, we found wisps of straw all over the warehouse floor, and there was a bale of the stuff by the back door. It caught my eye, and I thought it was strange, because I also found some strands of it in that filthy caravan you gave me to look at." He coughed again and returned the stare that Wallander was giving him. "Do you think it's important?"

Wallander shook his head.

"I don't know, Nyberg. I don't know. I hope it doesn't mean that Lasse is also smuggling animals. That would complicate things even further."

Nyberg shrugged.

"Who knows," he coughed. "Anyway, I'm going to die of bronchitis if I stay here. I'm going home to my bed. I'll see you tomorrow, if I make it through the night."

Wallander smiled after his departing colleague, then resumed his pacing. He found it helped him think.

Straw. For some reason a spark had ignited in his mind. He felt that there was something, some tiny detail somewhere, something that somebody had said, that connected. Something that would explain why Lasse had a bale of straw in his warehouse. But whatever it was, it refused to come into his mind. He would have to sleep on it.

Grumbling quietly to himself, he picked up his jacket and made his way to the door. Henrietta stepped out of her office and they looked at each other in surprise.

"Still here?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, yes." Wallander yawned, and rubbed at the ache in the back of his head. "It's been a long day. Would you like to come for a drink with me?" The invitation slipped out unbidden, but Henrietta looked grateful rather than put off.

"Why not indeed?" she smiled.

"Good. Shall we go to my place?"

She nodded cheerfully and they headed off together to Wallander's flat, where a bottle of red wine awaited them.

The wine was relaxing and the conversation flowed freely between Wallander and Henrietta, as if they were old friends. At first they discussed the case. From speaking to a number of contacts and authorities, Henrietta had already pieced together an amazing amount of Lasse's activity during the previous year and a half. What puzzled her was how he had made so many trips in such a short space of time. She had some records of ferry bookings he had made, but not enough to account for all the trips he needed to have taken.

"He's clever, I'll give him that," she said, sipping her wine. "There's something we're not seeing here."

"I know the feeling." Wallander sank deeper into his armchair. "I know there's something I've overlooked, but I can't work out what it is. You know the police in Växjö and Gothenburg paid Lasse's other properties a visit for us? There wasn't a sign of anything untoward. One of the houses was empty; the other two were let out to people. Everything above board. We've checked every property we know to be in his name and nothing. He's got some bolt-hole we know nothing about."

He shook his head and offered Henrietta more wine. They both drank another glass and gradually the case was forgotten about for a while and they discussed lighter subjects. Eventually Henrietta looked at her watch and protested that she really needed to go. Wallander saw her off in a taxi and cleared the wine glasses.

As he ran hot water over one of the glasses, his phone rang. Drying his hands on a tea-towel he moved into the living room and picked up the handset. It was Linda.

"Dad, I've had a call from Raakel. Someone's been making threatening phone calls and she's worried. I'm going over now. There's still a patrol car watching the place, isn't there?"

"Yes, I think Hansson and Elofsson are up there tonight. But be careful, yes? You've already had a narrow escape."

"I'll be fine, Dad." The line went dead as Linda hung up. Wallander replaced the handset and finished washing the glasses. Then he went to bed, letting out a grateful sigh as he pulled the covers over his body and sank into his pillow.

He had been asleep for barely thirty minutes when the phone rang, jolting him from the welcome doze that had overtaken him. He groped blindly for the extension that sat by his bed, and picked it up, holding it to his ear.

"Hmn?" he mumbled.

"Kurt?" Martinsson's voice cut through his drowsiness like a blade. Something was terribly wrong.

"Yes? What's happened?" Wallander hoisted himself upright, his heart suddenly racing at a sickening speed.

"It's Linda," Martinsson's voice had a note of panic. "She's been abducted."