Henning Mankell - The Pyramid

Wallander was taken aback.

'You think I'd cheat my own father?'

For once his father backed down.

'No,' he said. 'Not really. But you did win an unusual amount last time.'

The conversation died. They drank coffee. His father slurped as usual. This irritated Wallander as much as it always did.

'I'm going to go away,' his father said suddenly. 'Far away.'

Wallander waited for more, but none came.

'Where to?' he asked finally.

'To Egypt.'

'Egypt? What are you going to do there? I thought it was Italy you wanted to see.'

'Egypt and Italy. You never listen to what I say.'

'What are you going to do in Egypt?'

'I'm going to see the Sphinx and the pyramids. Time is running out. No one knows how long I will live. But I want to see the pyramids and Rome before I die.'

Wallander shook his head.

'Who are you going with?'

'I'm flying with Egypt Air, in a few days. Straight to Cairo. I'm going to stay in a very nice hotel called Mena House.'

'But you're going alone? Is it a charter trip? You can't be serious,' Wallander said in disbelief.

His father reached for some tickets on the windowsill. Wallander looked through them and realised that what his father said was true. He had a regular-fare ticket from Copenhagen to Cairo for the fourteenth of December.

Wallander put the tickets down on the table.

For once he was completely speechless.

Wallander left Löderup at a quarter past ten. The clouds had started to break up. As he walked to the car he noticed that it had turned colder. This in turn would mean that the Peugeot would be harder to start than usual. But it wasn't the car that occupied his thoughts, it was the fact that he had not managed to talk his father out of taking the trip to Egypt. Or at least wait until a time when he or his sister could accompany him.

'You're almost eighty years old,' Wallander had insisted. 'At your age, you can't do this kind of thing.'

But his arguments had been hollow. There was nothing visibly wrong with his father's health. And even if he dressed unconventionally at times, he had a rare ability to adapt to new situations and the new people he met. When Wallander realised that the ticket included a shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel that was situated close to the pyramids, his concerns had slowly dissipated. He did not understand what drove his father to go to Egypt, to the Sphinx and the pyramids. But he couldn't deny that – many years ago now, when Wallander was still young – his father had actually told him many times about the marvellous structures on the Giza plateau, just outside Cairo.

Then they had played poker. Since his father ended in the black, he was in a great mood when Wallander said his goodbyes.

Wallander paused with his hand on the car-door handle and drew in a breath of night air.

I have a strange father, he thought. That's something I'll never escape.

Wallander had promised to drive him into Malmö on the morning of the fourteenth. He had made a note of the telephone number for Mena House, where his father would be staying. Since his father never spent money unnecessarily, he had of course not taken any travel insurance and so Wallander was going to ask Ebba to take care of it tomorrow.

The car started reluctantly and he turned towards Ystad. The last thing he saw was the light in the kitchen window. His father had a habit of sitting up for a long time in the kitchen before going to bed. If he didn't return to the studio and add yet another few brushstrokes to one of his paintings. Wallander thought about what Blomell had said earlier that evening, that loneliness was a curse of the aged. But Wallander's father lived no differently since he had grown old. He continued to paint his pictures as if nothing had changed, neither anything around him nor himself.

Wallander was back at Mariagatan shortly after eleven o'clock. When he unlocked the front door he saw that someone had slipped a letter through the letter box. He opened the envelope and already knew whom it was from. Emma Lundin, a nurse at the Ystad hospital. Wallander had promised to call her yesterday. She walked past his building on her way home to Dragongatan. Now she was wondering if something was wrong. Why had he not called her? Wallander felt guilty. He had met her a month before. They had fallen into conversation at the post office on Hamngatan. Then they had bumped into each other a few days later at the grocery shop and after only a couple of days they had started a relationship that was not particularly passionate on either side. Emma was a year younger than Wallander, divorced with three children. Wallander had soon realised that the relationship meant more to her than to him. Without really daring to, he had started trying to extricate himself. As he stood in the hall now he knew very well why he hadn't called. He simply had no desire to see her. He put the letter down on the kitchen table and decided he had to end the relationship. It had no future, no potential. They did not have enough to talk about, and too little time for each other. And Wallander knew that he was looking for something completely different, someone completely different. Someone who would actually be able to replace Mona. If that woman even existed. But above all it was Mona's return that he dreamed of.

He undressed and put on his old worn dressing gown. Realised again that he had forgotten to buy toilet paper and found an old telephone book that he put in the bathroom. Then he put the grocery items he had bought in Herrestad into the fridge. The phone rang. It was a quarter past eleven. He hoped that nothing serious had occurred that would make him have to get dressed again. It was Linda. It always made him happy to hear her voice.

'Where have you been?' she asked. 'I've been calling all evening.'

'You could have guessed,' he replied. 'And you could have called your grandfather. That's where I was.'

'I didn't think of that,' she said. 'You never go to see him.'

'I don't?'

'That's what he says.'

'He says a lot of things. By the way, he's going to fly to Egypt in few days to see the pyramids.'

'Sounds fun. I wouldn't mind going along.'

Wallander said nothing. He listened to her lengthy narrative about how she had spent the past couple of days. He was pleased that she had now clearly recommitted herself to a career in upholstering furniture. He assumed that Mona was not home since she would normally get irritated when Linda talked so much and for so long on the phone. But he also felt a pang of jealousy. Even though they were now divorced, he could not reconcile himself to the thought of her seeing other men.

The conversation ended with Linda promising to meet him in Malmö and see her grandfather off for his trip to Egypt.

It was past midnight. Since Wallander was hungry he went back to the kitchen. The only thing he could be bothered to make was a bowl of porridge. At a half past twelve he crawled into bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

On the morning of the twelfth of December, the temperature had sunk to four degrees below zero. Wallander was sitting in the kitchen, just before seven o'clock, when the telephone rang. It was Blomell.

'I hope I didn't wake you,' he said.

'I was up,' Wallander said, coffee cup in hand.

'Something occurred to me after you left,' Blomell went on. 'I'm not a policeman, of course, but I still thought I should call you.'

'Tell me.'

'I was simply thinking that for someone to hear the engines outside Mossby the plane must have been at a very low altitude. That should mean that even others heard it. In that way you should be able to find out where it went. And perhaps you might even find someone who heard it turn round in the air and head back. If someone, for example, heard it with a break of only several minutes, you may be able to figure out what the turning radius was.'