Jonas Landahl's murder aboard the Poland ferry

Jonas Landahl’s murder aboard the Poland ferry turns a suspected fugitive into a likely victim and forces Kurt Wallander to reconsider how the killing fits with Sonja Hökberg’s death and the blackout in Skåne. The body is found beneath the ferry’s propeller shafts after a mechanical problem brings the crew to the engine room; its condition makes identification difficult, while the circumstances persuade Wallander that the death was no accident.

Context and Discovery

Wallander is at home, exhausted after a long day of investigation, when a policeman on night duty calls from the station. A ferry approaching Ystad has reported trouble with one of its propeller axles. When the crew located the problem, they also found a dead body in the engine room. The ship is still half an hour from land, but Wallander immediately sets off for the terminal, asking that Martinsson, Hansson, Nyberg, and Chief Holgersson be notified. He describes the returning man as a suspected murderer who is coming back dead: Landahl’s flight to Poland has ended, though his identity has not yet been confirmed.

Examination of the Body

By the time the ferry docked, the noise from below had settled to an even hum. Two white-faced engineers and the equally pale first mate led the police toward the engine room; a fire engine and rescue crew waited on the quay. Kurt Wallander asked Martinsson to record the circumstances of the discovery and to send Hansson down when he arrived, then descended with Nyberg and the technician who had found the body. The route led through the lowest deck toward the stern, down another steep companionway into the vast space beneath the ship. On the ladder, Nyberg stepped on Wallander’s hand. Wallander cursed, nearly lost his grip, and caught himself. Below, beneath one of the two large, oily propeller shafts, lay a body so badly mangled that the engineers’ warning had not prepared him for it. Its face was almost entirely gone; the head was nearly severed, and the remaining hair was matted with oil except for a few fair tufts. Wallander had seen a photograph of Landahl in his bedroom. The fair hair made him think the body was Landahl’s, but it could not establish the identity. Even after years of confronting deaths from car crashes and bodies undiscovered for months, Wallander considered this one of the worst sights of his career. Nyberg groaned at the sight and muttered about retirement. When Dr Bexell arrived with two rescue workers, Wallander left them to examine the remains. He felt an almost violent need to get out of the engine room so he could think clearly, and climbed back to the deck for air. Martinsson asked whether the body was Landahl’s. Wallander could not be certain, but believed it was. The physical discovery thus sharpened the case without resolving it: the apparent fugitive seemed to have returned from Poland dead, while formal identification and an explanation of how he had reached the engine room remained outstanding.

Investigation and Competing Explanations

The ferry was not due to sail again until the next morning, leaving time to complete the forensic examination and remove the body. But the passenger list offered no simple confirmation: it contained no Jonas Landahl. Wallander insisted that Landahl had been aboard regardless, perhaps under another name, and asked for a printout of the passengers and the crew so the investigators could look for a familiar name or alias. The absence of a listed passenger therefore deepened the uncertainty rather than dispelling it.

Wallander rejected an accident as implausible, comparing the death to what had happened to Hökberg and concluding that the same people were involved. Yet he could not settle on a single account. In one possibility, Landahl had killed Hökberg to keep something quiet, fled to Poland, and was then killed himself—perhaps in revenge, or because he had become a liability. In the other, an unknown person had killed both Hökberg and Landahl: Landahl might have run in fear after learning of Hökberg’s death, only to be caught by the same pursuer. His flight could thus point either to guilt or to terror.

The engine-room death also troubled the pattern Wallander and Martinsson had been tracing. The sequence ran from the release of the minks, to the blackout caused by Hökberg’s body, to Landahl’s body among the ferry’s propeller shafts. Wallander saw a possible domino effect, with Falk as the first piece to fall, but the apparent escalation did not make the acts cohere. Animal-rights activism could explain the mink release, and a demonstration of society’s vulnerabilities could give the blackout a purpose; the reason for creating chaos aboard a ferry remained obscure. Nor could Wallander fit Lundberg’s killing into the same scheme. That difficulty led him to consider separating the events into two sequences and to question whether Hökberg’s role in the larger pattern had been as central as they had assumed.

A Shipboard Investigation Without Witnesses

The ferry’s disruption had been barely noticed above deck. Its third mate approached Wallander to ask why he had not disembarked, apparently mistaking him for a passenger; he knew nothing of the body and had only noticed that the ship had reduced power for part of the trip. While cleaners worked on the broad staircase between decks, the cafeteria stood empty, with activity audible only from the kitchen. Through its portholes, the investigators could see the lights of Ystad. The ordinary routines of the vessel had continued around a death hidden deep below.

Martinsson questioned whether the police should have detained everyone aboard until they had checked the passenger names and the cars. Wallander conceded that the idea had merit, but an operation on that scale required more officers than they could assemble at short notice, and he doubted it would have produced useful results. He told Martinsson they had to work with the situation as it stood. The captain arrived as Hansson joined them; the crew had no witnesses to offer, though, as Hansson observed, it seemed that someone might have noticed the victim being taken down toward the engine room. The murder had occurred in a place built for machinery and largely removed from view, leaving the investigators with a body, uncertain records, and no known account of how it got there.