on his blood sugar readings. Wallander had been Dr Hansen’s patient for nearly twenty years, and there were no excuses that would impress this decidedly unsentimental physician. Dr Hansen told him over and over again that as far as he was concerned, Wallander was welcome to walk the tightrope and not take his illness seriously, but the next time anything like this happened he should expect consequences that he was really too young to suffer.
‘I’m sixty years old,’ Wallander said. ‘Isn’t that old?’
‘A couple of generations ago that was old. But not now. The body gets older; there’s nothing we can do about that. But nowadays we can expect to live for another fifteen or twenty years.’
‘What’s going to happen now?’
‘You’ll stay in the hospital until tomorrow so that my colleagues can make sure that your blood sugar readings have stabilised, and that you haven’t suffered any damage. Then you can go home and continue in your sinful ways.’
‘But I don’t lead a sinful life, do I?’
Dr Hansen was a few years older than Wallander and had been married no less than six times. Local gossip in Ystad suggested that his maintenance payments to his former wives forced him to spend his holidays working in Norwegian hospitals way up inside the Arctic circle, where nobody would volunteer unless they had to.
‘Maybe that’s what’s missing from your life. A little pinch of refreshing sinfulness - a detective breaking the rules.’
It was only after Dr Hansen had left that it really dawned on him how close to death he had been. For a brief moment he was overcome by panic and fear, stronger than ever before. In situations not connected with his professional duties, that is. There was a sort of fear that police officers felt, and a different sort that was experienced by a civilian.
He was reminded yet again of the time he had been stabbed when he was a young constable on foot patrol in Malmo. On that occasion the final darkness had been only a hair’s breadth away. Now death had been breathing down his neck once again, and this time it was Wallander himself who had opened the door and let him in.
That evening, lying in his hospital bed, Wallander made a series of decisions that he knew he would probably never be able to stick to. They were about eating habits, exercise, new interests, a renewed battle with loneliness. Above all he must make the most of his holiday, not work, not keep hunting for Hans’s missing parents. He must take it easy, rest, catch up on sleep, go for long walks along the beach, play with Klara.
He made a plan. Over the next five years he would walk the whole length of the Skane coastline, from the end of Hallandsasen in the west to the Blekinge border in the east. He doubted he would ever make it happen, but it made him feel a bit better, letting a dream form then watching it slowly fade away again.
A few years earlier he had attended a dinner party at Martinsson’s house and spoken to a retired schoolteacher, who told him about his experiences walking to Santiago de Compostela, the classic pilgrimage. Wallander had immediately wanted to make that pilgrimage himself, divided into instalments, perhaps over a five- year period. He even started to train, carrying a backpack full of stones - but he overdid it and succumbed to bone spurs in his left foot. His pilgrimage came to an end before it had even started. The bone spurs were cured now, thanks to treatment that included painful cortisone injections into his heel. But perhaps a number of well-planned walks along Scanian beaches might be within the bounds of possibility.
The following day he was discharged and sent home. He picked up Jussi, who had once again been looked after by his neighbour, and declined Linda’s offer to drive to Loderup to make him dinner. He felt he needed to come to terms with his situation without her help. He was on his own, so he had to accept personal responsibility.
Before going to bed that night he wrote a long email to Ytterberg. He didn’t mention having been ill, merely that he had to take a holiday since he was feeling burned out, and he needed to give Hakan and Louise von Enke a rest for a while.
He read through what he had written, clicked on Send, then switched off his computer. As he went to bed, he could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.
The storm was approaching, but the summer evening sky was still light.
20
Wallander woke the next day to find that the thunderstorm had moved on without affecting his house. The front had veered away to the east. Wallander felt fully rested when he got up at about eight o’clock. It was chilly, but even so he took his breakfast with him into the garden and ate it at the white wooden table. As a way of celebrating his holiday, he snipped a few roses from one of the bushes and laid them on the table. He had just sat down again when his mobile phone rang. It was Linda, wanting to know how he was feeling.
‘I’ve had my warning,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine at the moment. But I’m going to make sure my mobile phone is always within reach.’
‘That’s exactly what I was going to advise you to do.’
‘How are you all?’
‘Klara has a bit of a cold. Hans took this week off.’
‘Because he wanted to, or against his will?’
‘Because
‘What?’
‘Me or his work. We don’t negotiate where Klara is concerned.’
Wallander ate the rest of his breakfast, thinking that it was becoming more and more obvious how much Linda took after her grandfather. The same caustic tone of voice, the same ironic, slightly mocking attitude to the world around her. But also a tendency to anger lurking just under the surface.
Wallander put his feet up on a chair, leaned back and closed his eyes. At last his holiday had begun.
The phone rang.
‘Ytterberg here. Did I wake you?’
‘You’d have had to call a few hours ago to do that.’
‘We found Louise von Enke. She’s dead.’
Wallander held his breath, and slowly rose to his feet.
‘I wanted to call you right away,’ said Ytterberg. ‘We might be able to keep the news quiet for another hour or so, but we need to inform her son. Am I right in thinking the only other family member is the cousin in England?’
‘You’re forgetting the daughter at Niklasgarden. The staff there should be informed. But I can take care of that.’
‘I suspected you would want to - but if you’d rather not, which I would understand perfectly, I’ll call them myself.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Wallander. ‘Just tell me the most important details that I need to know.’
‘The whole thing is absurd, to be honest,’ said Ytterberg. ‘Last night a senile woman went missing from a nursing home on Varmdo island. She usually went out for walks in the evening - they’d fitted her with some sort of GPS tag that would make it easier to track her down, but she somehow managed to take it off. So the police had to organise a search party. They eventually found her; she wasn’t in too bad a state. But two of the searchers got lost - can you believe it? The batteries in their mobile phones were so low that another search party had to be sent out to find them. Which they did. But on the way back they happened to come across somebody else.’
‘Louise?’
‘Yes. She was lying at the side of a woodland path, a couple of miles from the nearest road. The path went through a clear-cut area, and I just got back from there.’
‘Was she murdered?’
‘There’s no sign of violence. In all probability she committed suicide. We found an empty bottle of sleeping pills. If the bottle was full, she would have swallowed a hundred tablets. We’re waiting to see what the forensic boys have to say.’
