assistance and ascertained that the number was unlisted. He nodded to himself, as if that was exactly what he had expected.
As he drank his morning cup of coffee, he asked himself if he should take Rydberg with him or drive out to Svarte on his own. It wasn't until he was behind the wheel that he decided to go himself. The fog was thick along the coast road.
Wallander drove very slowly. It was nearly eight when he pulled up outside the Stenholm house. He walked through the gate and rang the doorbell. It wasn't until the third ring that the door opened. When Stenholm saw that it was Wallander, he tried to slam it shut again, but Wallander managed to put his foot in the way.
'What right do you have to break in here?' the old man shouted in a shrill voice.
'I'm not breaking in,' Wallander said. 'I have a search warrant. You might as well accept that. Can we sit down somewhere?'
Stenholm suddenly seemed resigned. Wallander followed him into a room full of books. Wallander sat down in a leather armchair, and Stenholm sat opposite him.
'Do you really have nothing to say to me?' Wallander asked.
'I haven't seen anybody wandering up and down the beach. Nor has my wife, who's seriously ill. She's in bed upstairs.'
Wallander decided to come right to the point. There was no reason to beat around the bush any longer.
'Your wife was a public prosecutor,' he said. 'For most of 1980 she was assigned to Stockholm. Among a lot of other things, she was in charge of a preliminary investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of an eighteen-year-old named Bengt Alexandersson. She was also responsible for putting the case aside some months later. Do you recall those events?'
'Of course not,' said Stenholm. 'It has always been our habit not to talk shop at home. She said nothing about the people she was prosecuting, I said nothing about my patients.'
'The man who was walking on the beach here was the father of Bengt Alexandersson,' said Wallander. 'He was poisoned and died in the back seat of a taxi. Does that seem like a mere coincidence?'
Stenholm made no reply. And then the penny suddenly dropped for Wallander.
'When you retired you moved down from Nynashamn to Skane,' he said slowly. 'To a place in the middle of nowhere like Svarte. You're not even in the telephone book because your number's unlisted. Needless to say, that could be because you want to be left in peace and quiet, to live out your old age in anonymity. But there could be another explan ation. You might have moved out here as discreetly as possible in order to escape from something or somebody. Perhaps to get away from a man who can't understand why a prosecutor didn't put more effort into solving the pointless murder of his only child. You moved, but he tracked you down. I don't suppose we'll ever know how he managed that. But one day, there he is on the beach. You meet him while you're out walking your dog. Naturally, it's a big shock. He repeats his accusations, maybe he even makes threats. Your wife is seriously ill upstairs. I have no doubt that's the case. The man on the beach keeps on coming back, day after day. He won't let you shake him off. You see no way of getting rid of him. No way out at all. Then you invite him into your house. Presumably you promise him that he can talk to your wife. You give him some poison, possibly in a cup of coffee. Then you suddenly change your mind and tell him to come back the next day. Your wife is in great pain, or perhaps she's asleep. But you know he'll never come back. The problem is solved. Goran Alexandersson will die of something that looks like a heart attack. Nobody has ever seen you together, nobody knows about the link between you. Is that what happened?'
Stenholm sat motionless in his chair.
Wallander waited. He could see through the window that the fog was still very thick. Then the man raised his head.
'My wife never did anything wrong,' he said. 'But times changed, crimes multiplied and became more serious. Overworked police officers and courts couldn't cope with it. You should know that, you're a policeman yourself. That's why it was so unjust for Alexandersson to blame my wife when the murder of his son was never solved. He persecuted us and threatened us and terrorised us for seven years. And he did it in such a way that we could never actually pin anything on him.'
Stenholm fell silent. Then he stood up.
'Let's go up to my wife. She can tell you about it herself.'
'That's not necessary any more,' Wallander said.
'For me it's necessary,' said Stenholm.
They went upstairs. Kajsa Stenholm was lying in a sickbed in a large, bright, airy room. The Labrador was lying on the floor beside the bed.
'She's not asleep,' said Stenholm. 'Go up to her and ask her whatever you want.'
Wallander approached the bed. Her face was so thin, her skin was stretched tight over her cranium. Wallander realised she was dead. He turned round quickly. The old man was standing in the doorway. He was holding a pistol, aimed at Wallander.
'I knew you'd come back,' he said. 'That's why it's just as well she died.'
'Put the gun down,' Wallander said.
Stenholm shook his head. Wallander could feel himself stiffening with fear.
Then everything happened very fast. Suddenly Stenholm pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the room. The man was thrown halfway through the door. Blood had spurted all over the walls. Wallander felt as if he were about to faint. Then he staggered out of the door and down the stairs. He called the police station. Ebba answered.
'Hansson or Rydberg,' he said. 'As fast as possible.'
It was Rydberg who came to the phone.
'It's all over,' said Wallander. 'I want an emergency team sent to the house in Svarte. I've got two dead bodies here.'
'Did you kill them? What's happened?' Rydberg asked. 'Are you hurt? Why the hell did you go there on your own?'
'I don't know,' Wallander said. 'Get a move on. I'm not hurt.'
Wallander went outside to wait. The beach was covered in fog. He thought about what the old doctor had said. About crimes becoming more frequent and more serious. Wallander had often thought that as well. He sometimes thought he was a police officer from another age. Even though he was only forty. Maybe a new kind of police officer was needed nowadays.
He waited in the fog for them to arrive from Ystad. He was deeply upset. Yet again, against his will, he had found himself involved in a tragedy. He wondered how long he would be able to keep going.
When the emergency services arrived and Rydberg got out of his car, it seemed to him that Wallander was a black shadow in the white fog.
'What happened?' Rydberg asked.
'We've solved the case of the man who died in the back seat of Stenberg's taxi,' Wallander said.
He could see that Rydberg was waiting for something more, but there would be nothing more.
'That's all,' he said. 'That's all we've done, in fact.'
Then Wallander turned on his heel and walked down to the beach. Soon he had disappeared into the fog.
THE DEATH OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Every year, in early spring, he had a recurring dream. That he could fly. The dream always unfolded in the same way. He was walking up a dimly lit staircase. Suddenly the ceiling opened and he discovered that the stairs led him to a treetop. The landscape spread out under his feet. He lifted up his arms and let himself fall. He ruled the world.
At that moment he always woke up. The dream always left him right there. Although he had had the same dream for many years, he had not yet experienced actually floating away from the top of the tree.
The dream kept coming back. And it always cheated him.
