Henning Mankell: The Troubled Man

Two weeks later he acquired a dog, a black Labrador puppy. He wasn’t quite a purebred, but he was nevertheless described by the owner as top class. Wallander had decided in advance that the dog would be called Jussi, after the world-famous Swedish tenor who was one of Wallander’s greatest heroes.

Nearly four years after he bought the house, on January 12, 2007, Wallander’s whole life changed in an instant.

As he stepped out into the hall a few paces behind Kristina Magnusson, whom he liked viewing from behind when nobody was looking, the phone rang in his office. He considered ignoring it, but instead he turned and went back in. It was Linda. She had a few days off, having worked on New Year’s Eve, during which Ystad had been unusually lively, with lots of cases of domestic violence and assaults.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Not really. We’re on the verge of identifying some crooks in a big case.”

“I need to see you.”

Wallander thought she sounded tense. He started to worry, as he always did, that something might have happened to her.

“Is it anything serious?”

“Not at all.”

“I can meet you at one o’clock.”

“Mossby Strand beach?”

Wallander thought she was joking.

“Should I bring my bathing suit?”

“I’m serious. Mossby Strand. But no bathing suit.”

“Why do we have to go out there in the cold with this icy wind blowing?”

“I’ll be there at one o’clock. So will you.”

She hung up before he could ask anything else. What did she want? He stood there, trying in vain to think of an answer. Then he went to the conference room with the best television set and sat for two hours going through CCTV camera footage for the case he was working on, the brutal attack and robbery of an elderly arms dealer and his wife. As twelve-thirty approached, they were still only halfway through. Wallander stood up and announced that they could review the rest of the tapes after two o’clock. Martinsson, one of the officers Wallander had worked with longest in Ystad, looked at him in surprise.

“You mean we should stop now? With so much still to do? You don’t usually break for lunch.”

“I’m not going to eat. I have an appointment.”

He left the room, thinking that his tone of voice had been unnecessarily sharp. He and Martinsson were not only colleagues, they were also friends. When Wallander threw his housewarming party out at Löderup it was of course Martinsson who gave a speech in praise of him, the dog, and the house. We are like an old hardworking couple, he thought as he left the police station. An old couple who are always bickering, mainly to keep each other on our toes.

He went to his car, a Peugeot he’d had for the last four years, and drove off. How many times have I driven along this road? How many more times will I drive along it? As he waited for a red light to change, he remembered something his father had told him about a cousin Wallander had never met. His cousin used to be captain of a ferry plying between several islands in the Stockholm archipelago — short trips, no more than five minutes at a time, but year in, year out, the same crossings. One afternoon in October something snapped inside him. The ferry had a full load, but he suddenly changed course and headed straight out to sea. He said later that he knew there was enough diesel in the tank to take him as far as one of the Baltic states. But that was all he said, after he was overpowered by angry passengers and the coast guard raced out to put the ferry back on course. He never explained why he did what he did.

But in a vague sort of way, Wallander thought he understood him.

As he drove west along the coast road he could see dark thunderclouds building up on the horizon. The radio had warned that there was a risk of more snow in the evening. Shortly before he passed the side road to Marsvinsholm he was overtaken by a motorcycle. The rider waved at him and made Wallander think of something that frightened him more than anything else: that one of these days Linda would have a motorcycle accident. He had been totally unprepared when, several years earlier, she turned up outside his apartment on her newly bought bike, a Harley-Davidson covered in glittering chrome. His first question when she took off her crash helmet was whether she had lost her mind.

“You don’t know about all my dreams,” she had said with a broad, happy grin. “Just as I’m sure I don’t know all yours.”

“I don’t dream about a motorbike, that’s for sure.”

“Too bad. We could have gone for rides together.”

He had gone so far as to promise to buy her a car and pay for all her gas if she got rid of the motorcycle. But she refused, and he knew that the battle was lost. She had inherited his stubbornness, and he would never be able to take the motorcycle away from her, no matter what temptations he could offer.

When he turned into the parking lot at Mossby Strand, which was deserted and windswept, she had taken off her helmet and was standing on top of a sand dune, her hair fluttering in the wind. Wallander switched off the engine and sat looking at her, his daughter in the dark leather outfit and the expensive boots from a factory in California that she had paid nearly a month’s wages for. Once upon a time she was a little girl sitting on my knee, Wallander thought, and I was the biggest hero in her life. Now she is thirty-six, a police officer just like me, with a brain of her own and a big smile. What more could I ask for?

He stepped out into the wind and plowed his way through the soft sand until he was standing by her side. She smiled at him.

“Something happened here,” she said. “Do you remember what?”

“You told me that you were going to become a police officer. On this very spot.”

“I’m thinking of something else.”

Wallander realized what she was getting at.

“A rubber dinghy drifted ashore here, with two dead men inside it,” he said. “So many years ago that I can’t remember exactly when. An incident from a different world, you might say.”

“Tell me about that world.”

“That couldn’t possibly be why you made me come here.”

“Tell me anyway!”

Wallander stretched out his hand toward the water.

“We didn’t know much about the countries on the other side of the sea. We sometimes pretended the Baltic states didn’t exist. We were cut off from our nearest neighbors. And they were cut off from us. But then that rubber dinghy came ashore, and the investigation took me to Latvia, to Riga. I went behind the iron curtain that no longer exists. The world was different then. Not worse, not better, just different.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” said Linda. “I’m pregnant.”

Wallander held his breath, as if he didn’t understand what she’d said. Then he stared at her stomach, hidden behind her leather suit. She burst out laughing.

“There’s nothing to see. I’m only in the second month.”

Looking back, Wallander remembered every detail of that meeting with Linda, when she told him her staggering news. They walked down to the beach, leaning into the howling wind. She answered his questions. When he arrived back at the police station an hour late, he had almost forgotten all about the investigation he was in charge of.

Shortly before the end of that day, just as it was beginning to snow again, they finally found pictures of the two men who had probably been involved in the arms theft and brutal murder. Wallander summed up what they all knew: that they had taken a big step toward solving this case.

When the meeting ended and everybody was gathering together their papers, Wallander felt an almost irresistible urge to tell them about the great joy he had just been gifted with.