Хеннинг Манкелль - Firewall

Now Wallander no longer had to fear for his colleagues’ or Robert Modin’s safety.

There was no way for him to know that he was wrong about this assumption. It was something he would only come to understand in time.

Martinsson was the first person to reach Wallander. The latter stood up. Elofsson was also nearby. Wallander asked him to find his shoes and bring them over.

“Did you shoot him?” Martinsson asked in disbelief.

Wallander shook his head.

“No, he shot himself. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

Lisa Holgersson suddenly appeared, as if out of thin air. Wallander let Martinsson do the explainaing. Elofsson turned up with Wallander’s shoes, which were covered in thick clay. Wallander wanted to get away as soon as possible. Not only to be able to change his clothes, but to get away from the memory of what it was like to lie there in the mud expecting the end. The depressingly pathetic end.

Somewhere deep inside there was probably a flicker of happiness, but for the moment a feeling of emptiness dominated.

The helicopter was gone now. Hansson had dismissed it, and the large operation was now being dismantled. The only people left were the team who were going to do the investigation surrounding the suspect’s death.

Hansson made his way through the mud. He was wearing bright orange boots.

“You should go home,” he said, looking at Wallander.

Wallander nodded and started walking the same way he had come. All around him he saw the flickering of flashlights. Several times he almost tripped.

Shortly before he got to the road, Holgersson caught up with him.

“I think I have a fairly complete picture of what happened,” she said. “But tomorrow we’ll have to have a thorough debriefing. It’s lucky things turned out as well as they did.”

“Soon we should be able to determine if this is the individual who was responsible for Sonja Hokberg’s and Jonas Landahl’s deaths.”

“But why did all of this happen?”

“We don’t know why, but Falk is in the center of it all. Or rather, whatever is in his computer.”

“This hypothesis still seems unfounded to me,” Holgersson said.

“There’s no alternative, as far as I see.”

Wallander had no more energy for this discussion.

“I have to get into some dry clothes,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m heading home now.”

“One more thing,” she said. “I have to say this to you. It was completely irresponsible of you to have gone after this man alone. You should have taken Martinsson along as backup.”

“Everything happened so fast.”

“But you should not have ordered him to stay behind.”

Wallander had been brushing clay from his clothes. Now he looked up.

“Ordered him?”

“Yes, ordered him to stand back while you went in. You know as well as I do that one of the most basic rules of police work is never to act alone.”

Wallander had forgotten all about the mud now.

“Who says I ordered him to stay behind?”

“It has emerged from various reports.”

Wallander knew there was only one possible explanation for this version of the events. Martinsson must have said this to her. Elofsson and El Sayed had been too far back to be able to hear anything.

“Perhaps we should talk about this tomorrow,” he said.

“I had to bring this up with you right away,” she said. “It’s my duty as your commanding officer. You’re in a delicate enough situation as it is.”

She left him and continued on toward the road.

Wallander realized he was trembling with fury. Martinsson had lied. He claimed Wallander had ordered him not to follow him out onto the field, where Wallander had subsequently become trapped and had thought he was going to die.

He looked up and saw that Martinsson and Hansson were on their way toward him. The light from their flashlights bobbed up and down. From the other direction he heard Holgersson start up her car and drive away.

Martinsson and Hansson stopped when they reached him.

“Could you hold Martinsson’s flashlight for a moment?” Wallander asked, looking at Hansson.

“Why?”

“Just do it, please.”

Martinsson handed Hansson his flashlight. Wallander took a step forward and hit Martinsson in the face. However, since it was hard to judge the distance between them in the poor light from the flashlights, the blow didn’t land squarely on his jaw as intended. It was more of a gentle nudge.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Wallander yelled back.

Then he threw himself on Martinsson and they fell back into the mud. Hansson tried to get between them but slipped. One of the flashlights went out, the other landed some distance away.

“You told Holgersson I ordered you to stay behind! You’ve been spreading lies about me this whole time!”

Wallander pushed Martinsson away and stood up. Hansson was also standing. A dog was barking in the background.

“You’ve been going behind my back,” Wallander continued, and heard that his voice had become completely steady.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You go behind my back and say that I’m a bad at my job. You sneak away into Holgersson’s office when you think no one sees you.”

Hansson entered the conversation for the first time.

“What is going on between you two?”

“We’re discussing the issue of good teamwork,” Wallander answered. “If it’s best to say what you think to someone’s face, or whether you should go behind someone’s back and complain about them to their superior officer.”

“I still don’t get it,” Hansson said.

Wallander sighed. He saw no point in dragging this out.

“That was all I wanted to say,” he said and threw a flashlight at Martinsson’s feet.

Then he walked over to a patrol car and asked the officer behind the wheel to take him home.

He took a bath and then went and sat in the kitchen. It was close to three o’clock. He tried to think, but his head still felt empty. He went to bed but couldn’t sleep. His thoughts returned to the field, and to the terror he had experienced as he lay with his face pressed into the wet clay. The intense sense of humiliation at dying without his shoes on. And then his confrontation with Martinsson.

I’ve reached my limit, he thought. Not only in relation to Martinsson but perhaps in relation to everything I do.

He wondered what the consequences of his fight with Martinsson would be. He had struck him in the face. It would come down to word against word, just like the case with Eva Persson and her mother. Holgersson had already proved that she put greater stock in Martinsson’s accounts than his own. And now Wallander had shown himself guilty of excessive force for the second time in only two weeks.

As he lay in the dark, he wondered if he regretted his behavior. He couldn’t honestly say that he did. It was motivated by a sense of personal dignity. The assault had been a necessary reaction to Martinsson’s betrayal. All of the rage that he had been feeling since Höglund had told him about Martinsson had finally bubbled up to the surface.

It was shortly after four when he finally fell asleep.

It was Sunday, the nineteenth of October.

Carter landed in Lisbon on the TAP Portuguese Airlines flight 553 at exactly six thirty in the morning. The connecting flight to Copenhagen was leaving at eight fifteen. As usual, his entry into Europe disturbed him. He felt protected in Africa. Here he was in foreign territory.

At home he had looked carefully at his selection of passports and finally settled on the identity of Lukas Habermann, a German citizen born in Kassel in 1939. After going through customs in Portugal, he went into the nearest bathroom and cut the passport into small pieces that he then flushed down the toilet. He would continue his journey as the Englishman Richard Stanton, born in Oxford in 1940. He put on another coat and slicked his hair down with water. After checking his luggage to Copenhagen, he went through the passport control again, this time studiously avoiding the line to the customs officer from the time before. He did not run into any problems. He walked through the terminal until he reached an area that was under construction. Since it was Sunday, there were no workers around. He took out his cell phone only after making sure that he was alone.