The Magpies of Ystad

[ingebjorg9]

A little story that kind of leads on from an incident in "Stefan's Day".  Light and humourous, not too serious.

The first thing that was noticed to have disappeared was a large number of shopping trolleys belonging to one of Ystad’s supermarkets.  The duty manager had no idea where, or even how, they could have gone.  One day they had been there, the next they weren’t.

Kurt Wallander’s first priority was not shopping trolleys.  He had serious crimes to solve, and Chief Holgersson to keep happy.  The force’s annual performance reviews were coming up and there were a great number of far more pressing things to do than look for a hundred shopping trolleys that, for all he knew, the supermarket staff had probably misplaced themselves.

If it had just been the missing shopping trolleys nobody would have given the odd business a second thought.  It would have been chalked up to carelessness, or the work of shiftless young boys with nothing better to do.  But when other things began to go missing, everybody in the town soon knew about it.  And everybody in town was soon outraged by it.

 

One night, the hubcaps disappeared from all the cars parked around the town centre.  The next night, someone took most of the street signs.  Tourists visiting the town in cars drove around, utterly lost, looking for places that were no longer clearly signposted.  Minor traffic accidents increased 300%.

Manhole covers started to disappear.  Someone even purloined the lampposts from a street on the edge of town.  However, it wasn’t until the alloy wheels were taken from chief Holgersson’s new Audi that it got personal.

“This has gone far enough!” she stormed, as she burst into Wallander’s office.  “We need to put a stop to these thefts right now.”

Wallander looked at her enquiringly.

“Lisa, we’ve done what we can to investigate these… disappearances.  What do you want me to do?  Send officers to wait all over town for the thieves to turn up?  We don’t know what they’re going to take next, and we don’t have enough people to patrol every single street in the hope that whoever this is will put in an appearance.”

Holgersson gave an exasperated sigh.

“Look,” she said, “just do something, yes?”  She turned and left the room.  Wallander decided he would send Svartman out to do some sniffing around.  The man had been making repeated hints that he wanted to do more detection work.  Well, this couldn’t hurt, could it?

Svartman was duly dispatched on his mission.  For a while he drove around Ystad, tracing the order in which things had been taken.  He wasn’t sure there was a pattern, but it was a start.  He didn’t know what Wallander expected him to find, but whatever it was, he would look for it.

At the supermarket he walked slowly round the car park, trying to see how someone could have taken a hundred trolleys without being noticed.  The thief had either had a very large truck, or he had taken them in several smaller batches.  A large truck would surely have been noticed, and the incident report made no mention of anyone spotting any unusually large vehicles that day.  Svartman was willing to bet that the trolleys had been taken in several lots by someone with a nondescript-looking van.  He wandered round the side of the building, towards the loading bays.  Something caught his eye there.  There were some large spots of oil on the concrete, where something with a leaky sump had been parked for a while.  From the pattern of the drips on the concrete, it looked like the van had been and gone several times.

Svartman smiled to himself.  It wasn’t much, but it was something at last.

Next he visited the streets where the hubcaps, street signs and manhole covers had been taken.  The previous day the leader of the county council had almost fallen down one of the open manholes.  Now they were all cordoned off with bright yellow tape so there was no risk of any other local VIPs taking an unexpected swim in the drains.  Svartman walked slowly up and down each street, looking for anything unusual.  These disappearances had taken place at night or in the early morning, under the cover of darkness.  It was the only way that someone could have removed so many highly visible objects without being noticed.

In or near to each street that Svartman surveyed, there was the same pattern of oil spots, either on the road or in a parking space.  Svartman’s smile grew wider each time, safe in the knowledge that he was really on to something.  In the final street he took out a swab kit that he had pocketed on a recent visit to Nyberg’s office, and took a sample of the oil.  Whether Nyberg would be able to tell anything from it or not, at least he couldn’t be accused of not behaving like a detective.

Finally, Svartman drove to Holgersson’s house.  The Audi had been taken back to the garage to have new alloys fitted, but he could see its tyre tracks in Holgersson’s muddy driveway.  And what else?  Crouching down in the mud he could make out another set of tracks, which definitely did not belong to either of Holgersson’s expensive cars.  The tyres had a distinctive tread, and the rear left one was slightly bald.  Svartman grinned, noticing how oily the mud was.

He was taking some photos of the scene when his phone rang.  It was Wallander, and he was quite agitated.

“Have you found anything?”

“I think so.  The thief drives a van that leaks oil.  There’s puddles of it everywhere it’s been.  It’s also got a bald rear tyre.”

“Half the vans in Skåne probably answer to that description, but it’s a start at least.  Listen, I need you to go to St. Maria’s Church.”

“St. Maria’s?  Why?”

“Because someone’s stolen the weathervane from the church spire.”

“What?!”

“Somebody climbed up the spire and took the weathervane.  The bishop is breathing down Holgersson’s neck about it, and of course now she’s breathing down my neck.”

“I’m on to it.”

Svartman pocketed his phone and drove back into town, wondering what kind of thief had the nerve to steal a weathervane from the top of a church spire in the middle of town.  Whoever it was they were dealing with, it was certainly someone out of the ordinary.

When he arrived at St. Maria’s an anxious priest and curate met him and described the situation.  He took statements, but nobody had actually seen the thief.  It was only that day that someone had actually noticed that the weathervane was gone and called the police.

Svartman walked round Stortorget and all the side streets around the church, looking for the now-familiar pattern of oil spots.  Strangely, he couldn’t find any.  Perhaps the thief had used a different vehicle?  But why would he switch now, when his method was so well-established?  He shook his head and drove back to the station.

“Well?” demanded Wallander, as Svartman entered his office.

“Whoever this is, he’s a clever fellow.  However, not clever enough to notice that his van’s bleeding oil all over the road.  And not clever enough to avoid leaving his tracks outside Chief Holgersson’s house.”  Svartman showed him the pictures he had taken on his digital camera.

“Hmm,” muttered Wallander.  “Get Nyberg to check what kind of tyres made those tracks.  They’re unusual.”  He sighed.  “Any idea at all how this person could have burgled the weathervane?”

“I’m not sure.  He might have used some climbing gear and climbed up on the roof that way.”

“Anyone who does all that just to steal a weathervane must be mad,” snorted Wallander.

Nyberg was not pleased at having extra samples and photos to analyse.  However, he duly got to work, and his results were sitting on Wallander’s desk by the middle of next afternoon.  As Wallander read his colleague’s reports a smile spread across his face.  The sump oil that Svartman had collected was pretty standard, but the tyres were only sold by one garage in Ystad.  And at that particular moment Wallander would have bet his next paycheque on the owner of the van they had been fitted to.  There was one regular customer of Greger Enander’s garage that Wallander had brought in for questioning so many times that he was considering asking him if he wanted to move into the station permanently.

Stefan put his head round the door.

“I have those expense reports Holgersson wanted,” he said.

“Good.  Leave them on my desk, yes?”

Stefan nodded.

“You look pleased with yourself,” he commented.

“Thanks to Svartman I’ve just made a breakthrough.  Maybe now Lisa will stop pestering me about her alloy wheels.”

“Oh, those.”  Stefan rolled his eyes.  Wallander got up and put on his jacket.

“Now,” he said.  “I’m going to go and see someone.  Tell Lisa I’ve gone to catch a magpie.”  He walked out of the office, a bewildered Stefan staring after him.

Wallander walked through the building and found Svartman leaning on the front desk.  He tapped him sharply on the shoulder. The uniformed officer jumped, then saw who had tapped him and relaxed.

“Come on,” Wallander told him.  “You’re coming with me.”

As they drove through the streets of Ystad Svartman’s curiosity niggled at him.  Finally, he had to ask.

“Who are we going to see, exactly?”

“A very old acquaintance, who drives an elderly Transit van and has his tyres fitted by Greger Enander.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes.  Thanks to your sharp eyes I think I know who our magpie is.”

Svartman grinned.  This would look good on his performance evaluation.  Maybe he would get that pay rise he’d been gunning for. His wife would be so happy with him if he did.

They turned into a driveway and bumped along a muddy, uneven track until they came to a yard that was strewn with the remains of several ancient cars and a number of abandoned fridge-freezers and cookers.  The only thing that was more of a mess than the yard was the house next to it, which looked like a complete pigsty.  Wallander strode into one of the outbuildings.

“All right, Herbert.  Where are you?”

A small, shifty-looking middle-aged man emerged from the gloom at the back of the building, wiping his oily hands on a rag.

“Inspector,” he acknowledged sulkily.

“Okay, Herbert, where is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”  The man’s bewildered innocence was well-practiced, but didn’t fool either of the officers for a moment.

“Been working on your van, I see,” remarked Wallander, nodding at Herbert’s oily hands.  “I think I’ll take a look at it for you.”

“No, really, you don’t need to…” the man protested as Wallander marched through the doorway into the garage, where a large rusty van was parked.  Herbert chased after him and Svartman followed, amused.

Wallander had gone to the back of the van and had his hand on the door handle.

“This really is unnecessary!” Herbert protested again.

“I beg to differ,” replied Wallander.  “Svartman, behold!”

He threw the van’s back doors open to reveal an interior cluttered with road signs, railings, iron garden gates and hubcaps.

“Scrap metal prices have gone up again, haven’t they Herbert?  Thought you’d make some easy money, didn’t you?”

“Yes, all right,” Herbert sighed.  “I got a good price for some of the stuff.  You’d be surprised how much those shopping trolleys were worth.”

“And what did you do with the weathervane?”

Herbert looked puzzled.

“Weathervane?  I didn’t take a weathervane.”

“Well someone did.  The weathervane is missing from St. Maria’s.”

Herbert shrugged, shaking his head.

“That wasn’t me, Inspector, I swear.”  And that was all they could get out of him on the matter.

Even after Herbert had been charged and was waiting to go to court, the incident would not go away.  Holgersson came into Wallander’s office as he was wrestling with the report of an armed robbery in Skurup.

“Kurt, the bishop has been on the phone to me again.  He wants the weathervane back.”

“Hasn’t he got other things to worry about?  Herbert says he doesn’t know where it is, and we didn’t find it on his property.”  He looked at the Chief and shrugged.  “The only thing I can suggest is that they get a new one installed.”

“They’ve been giving me a hard time about this.  It would help relations with them immensely if you would have another look.”

Wallander sighed silently.  There was no arguing with her in situations like this.  He had absolutely no idea what else they could do to find the weathervane.  After Holgersson left his office, Wallander gave himself the rest of the day off and walked home through the town.  He wandered to Stortorget and walked round St Maria’s, gazing thoughtfully up at the spire.  As he walked away from the square he asked himself why he was even bothering with this pointless task.  Let the bishop give Lisa a hard time.  It was what she was there for.

He strolled down a path through a small park and was jolted out of his reverie when something hit his head.  It was a stick, dropped on him from the tree above.  He looked up.  There were birds circling the tree.  Magpies.  He snorted to himself. 

They were building a large, untidy nest and one of them had dropped a stick on him.

As he gazed up at the birds and their nest, something caught his eye.  Something large and shiny that was sticking out of the nest.  Magpies, of course, have a habit of stealing shiny things for their nests, but this?  This was huge.

Wallander squinted up into the tree and realised what he was looking at.  A smile spread itself slowly across his face.  He turned on his heel and strode back to the church, where he found the curate.

“Come with me,” Wallander urged.

“Why?” asked the curate, incredulously.

“Trust me, I’m a policeman.”

The man shrugged and followed him down to the park, where Wallander pointed up into the tree.

“Do you recognise that?”

“The weathervane?  But how…?”

“I would guess that the bolts holding it on to your spire worked loose.  Then one of these birds took a fancy to it and didn’t have much trouble taking it.”

Once the weathervane had been retrieved and firmly attached back on to the church, no more was said about the magpies of Ystad.   Svartman got his payrise, Wallander got a personal thank-you from the bishop, and everyone happily got on with their lives.  Everyone, of course, apart from Herbert, who was sentenced to community service, and spent many long hours replacing street signs and fishing abandoned shopping trolleys out of the harbour.