“No.”

“There’s no other possibility you can think of?”

“No.”

“I hope you won’t mind if I ask you some personal questions.”

“We’ve never quarreled. If that’s what you were wanting to know.”

Wallander nodded.

“That was what I was going to ask,” he said.

He started all over again.

“You say she disappeared last Friday afternoon. But you waited for three days before coming to us?”

“I was afraid,” said Robert Akerblom.

Wallander stared at him in surprise.

“Going to the police would be like accepting that something awful had happened,” Robert Akerblom went on. “That’s why I didn’t dare.”

Wallander nodded slowly. He knew exactly what Robert Akerblom meant.

“You’ve been out looking for her, of course,” he went on.

Robert Akerblom nodded.

“What other steps have you taken?” he asked, starting to make notes again.

“I’ve prayed to God,” replied Robert Akerblom, quite simply.

Wallander stopped writing.

“Prayed to God?”

“My family are Methodists. Yesterday, we joined the whole congregation and Pastor Tureson in praying that nothing unthinkable can have happened to Louise.”

Wallander could feel something gnawing away in his stomach. He tried to conceal his disquiet from the man in the chair before him.

A mother with two children, member of a free church, he thought to himself. She wouldn’t just disappear of her own accord. Not unless she’d gone out of her mind. Or been possessed by religion. A mother of two children would hardly stroll out into the forest and take her own life. Such things do happen, but very rarely.

Wallander knew what was afoot.

Either there had been an accident, or Louise Akerblom was the victim of a crime.

“Of course, you realize there might have been an accident,” he said.