Henning Mankell: An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

“Who is it?”

“How the hell can we be expected to know that?”

“Why do you sound so angry?”

“I’m tired. And maybe disappointed as well. I liked that house. And I could have managed the price.”

She reached out her hand and tapped him on the arm.

“There are other houses,” she said. “And you do have a home already, of course.”

“I suppose I was disappointed,” said Wallander again. “I could have done with a bit of good news, today of all days. Not a bit of a skeleton sticking out of the ground.”

“Can’t you try to see it as something exciting? Instead of a boring old garden, you get something that nobody knows about.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Linda looked at him in amusement.

“You wouldn’t need to risk being burgled,” she said. “I think thieves are just as scared of ghosts as everybody else is.”

Wallander put the kettle on. Linda shook her head when he asked her if she’d like some tea.

He sat down with a pink teacup.

“You got that from me,” said Linda. “Do you remember?”

“You gave me it as a Christmas present when you were eight years old,” he said. “And I’ve always drunk tea out of this cup ever since.”

“It cost one krona at a rummage sale.”

Wallander sipped the tea. Linda yawned.

“I was looking forward to living in that house,” he said. “Or at least I’d begun to believe that I could move out of town at long last.”

“There are other houses,” said Linda.

“It’s not as easy as that.”

“What’s so difficult about it?”

“I think I demand too much.”

“Demand a bit less then!”

Wallander could feel that he was beginning to get angry again. Ever since she had been in her teens, Linda had accused him of making his life more complicated than it needed to be. He knew that what irritated him most of all was that, on occasions like this, Linda reminded him of her mother. And her voice was almost identical to Mona’s. If Wallander closed his eyes he felt uncertain about who was actually sitting opposite him at the kitchen table.

“Enough of that now,” said Wallander, rinsing out his cup.

“I’m going to bed,” said Linda.

Wallander sat up for a while, watching the television with the sound turned down. One of the channels was showing a program about penguins.

He woke up with a start. It was four o’clock in the morning. The television was blank but buzzing. He switched it off and hurried to bed before he had time to wake up properly.

It was two minutes past eight on Monday, October 28, when Wallander closed the door of one of the police station’s conference rooms behind him. He had slept badly after waking up on the sofa. And to make things worse, his electric razor had broken. He was unshaven and felt dirty. Sitting around the table were the people he was used to working alongside. He had been working with some of them for over fifteen years. It occurred to him that these were people who made up the content of a large proportion of his life. He was now the one who had been working longer than anybody else in the Ystad CID. Once upon a time he’d been the newcomer.

Those present at the meeting, apart from Wallander himself, were Nyberg, Martinson and the chief of police, Lisa Holgersson. She was the first female boss Wallander had worked for. When she first came to Ystad some time in the 1990s, he had been as skeptical as all the other — mainly male — officers. But he had soon realized that Lisa Holgersson was very competent. It became clear to him that she might well be the best boss he had ever had. Over the years that ensued he had found no reason to reconsider that judgment, even if they had occasionally had fierce disagreements.

Wallander took a deep breath and turned first to Nyberg, then to Martinson, who had spoken to Stina Hurlén before the meeting.

Nyberg was tired and looked at Wallander with bloodshot eyes. He ought to have retired by now, but he had changed his mind and stayed on. Wallander was not surprised. Despite all the unpleasant aspects of his work, without it Nyberg would find life pointless.

“A dead body,” said Nyberg. “A few decayed scraps of clothing. It’s not my job to look for the cause of death among all the old bones, but nothing seemed to be broken or crushed. I haven’t found anything else. The question is, of course, whether we should dig up the whole garden.”

“How did that new machine perform?” asked Holgersson.

“Exactly as I thought it would,” growled Nyberg. “It’s a bundle of crap that some idiot has tricked the Swedish police into buying. Why can’t we have a dog trained to sniff out corpses?”

Wallander found it hard not to burst out laughing. Even if Nyberg could be surly and difficult to work with, he had a unique sense of humor. He also had views that Wallander shared.

“Stina Hurlén needs a bit of time,” said Martinson, leafing through his notebook. “The bones have to be examined. But she thought she would be able to give us some kind of report later today.”

Wallander nodded. “So, that’s all we have to go on so far,” he said. “It’s not a lot — but of course we have to face up to the possibility that this might become a murder inquiry. For the moment, we have to wait for what Stina Hurlén has to say. What we can start doing right away is to see if we can dig out something about the history of the house and the people who have lived there. Has there been a missing person linked with the house? That’s a question we can ask ourselves. As Martinson has a relative who owns the house, perhaps he ought to be the one to look after that aspect.”

Wallander placed his hands down on the table to indicate that the meeting was closed. Lisa Holgersson held him back as the others left the room.

“The media want to talk to you,” she said.

“We’ve found a skeleton. There’s nothing more to say.”

“You know that journalists love stories about missing persons. Isn’t there anything else you can tell them?”

“No. We police officers have to wait until we get more facts. The journalists can jolly well do the same.”

Wallander spent the rest of the day on an inquiry concerning a Pole who had beaten and killed an Ystad resident at some drunken orgy or other. A lot of people had been there at the time, but they all remembered it differently — or had no recollection of it at all. The Polish man who was accused of killing his drinking partner kept changing his story. Wallander had spent hours on fruitless conversations with those involved, and had asked the prosecutor if it was really worth continuing. But the prosecutor was young and new and assiduous, and had insisted. A man, drunk or not, who had killed another man, even if he was just as drunk, must be duly punished. Wallander couldn’t argue with that, of course. But his experience told him that they would never be able to throw light on the situation, no matter how long he or one of his colleagues persisted with the inquiry.

Martinson called in occasionally to report that Stina Hurlén had still not been in touch. Shortly after two, Linda appeared in the doorway and asked if he was going out for lunch. He shook his head and asked her to buy him a sandwich instead. When she had left, he found himself thinking that he still hadn’t managed to get used to the fact that his own daughter was now a fully grown adult, and a police officer to boot, working at the same police station as he was.

Linda duly delivered the sandwich in a small carrier bag. Wallander slid aside the voluminous file containing all the material relevant to the drunken orgy. He ate the sandwich, closed the door, then leaned back on his chair for a snooze. As usual he held his bunch of keys in one hand. If he dropped it, he would know he had fallen asleep and that it was time to wake up again.