trunk, watching the boats passing and relishing the smell of the sea. It was still warm. He lay down with his jacket draped over him and fell asleep. He woke up after about ten minutes. The pains had almost gone altogether now. He stood up and started walking around the little island. On one side, facing south, the rock formed an almost vertical cliff. It was strenuous, skirting it at the very edge of the water.
He suddenly stopped dead. There was a small, narrow creek about twenty yards ahead. A boat had anchored at its entrance, and a dinghy had been beached on the rocks. A couple was lying at the edge of the water, making love. He pressed himself against the cliff, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to watch. They were young - barely twenty years old, he guessed. He stared as if bewitched at their naked bodies before gathering the strength to drag himself away and retrace his steps as quietly as possible. A few hours later, as twilight was at last beginning to creep up on the island, he saw the motor cruiser with the dinghy bobbing along behind it sailing past. He stood up and waved. The couple on board waved back.
In a way he was jealous of them. But his thoughts were far from gloomy. His own earliest erotic experiences had been just like most other people’s - uncertain, disappointing, bordering on the embarrassing. He had never really believed his friends’ descriptions of their escapades and conquests. It was only after he met Mona that sex had become a serious pleasure as far as he was concerned. During their early years together their sex life was beyond his wildest dreams. He had achieved considerable satisfaction with a handful of other women, but nothing like what he and Mona experienced at the beginning of their relationship. The big exception in his life was, of course, Baiba.
But he had never made love to a woman on a rock by the open sea. The nearest he had been to something as risky as that was when he had been slightly tipsy and managed to entice Mona into a toilet on a train. But they had been interrupted by angry pounding on the door. Mona had found it embarrassing in the extreme, and insisted angrily that he promise never again to try to engage her in such erotic adventures.
And he never had. Towards the end of their long relationship and marriage, their sexual desire had ebbed - although it returned in spades for Wallander when she told him she wanted a divorce. But she had no longer accepted his advances. Her door was locked, once and for all.
Suddenly he seemed to see his life mapped out before his very eyes. Four decisive moments. The first was when I rebelled against my dominating father and became a police officer, he thought. The second was when I killed a man in the line of duty, and didn’t think I could take any more, but in the end decided not to resign from the police force. The third was when I left Mariagatan, moved out to the country and got Jussi. The fourth was probably when I finally accepted that Mona and I could never live together again. That was probably the most difficult to negotiate. But I’ve made my choices; I haven’t ummed and aahed and then realised one day that it was too late. I have nobody but myself to thank for that. When I see the bitterness in a lot of people around me, I’m glad I’m not one of them. Despite everything, I’ve tried to take responsibility for my life, and not merely allowed it to float away at the mercy of whatever current came along.
As dusk fell, so the mosquitoes arrived to plague him. But he had remembered to take mosquito repellent, and he pulled the hood of his anorak over his head. There weren’t many motor cruisers to be heard now, plying the surrounding channels and straits. A lone yacht was heading for the open sea.
Shortly after midnight, with the mosquitoes whining around his ears, he left the island. He followed the increasingly dark silhouettes of the islands lining the route he had planned with the aid of his sea chart. He was travelling slowly, constantly checking to make sure he didn’t deviate from his course. When he was approaching his goal he reduced his speed still further, and eventually he switched off the engine completely. A gentle evening breeze had begun to blow. He tilted up the motor, set up the oars and started rowing. He occasionally paused and tried to peer through the darkness, but he couldn’t see any light, and that worried him. There should be a light, he thought. It shouldn’t be dark.
He rowed up to the beach and climbed cautiously out of the boat. There was a scraping noise as he pulled it over the shingle. He tied the painter around some of the alders growing on the shore. He had taken the torches out of his backpack before he beached the boat, and now he put one of them in his pocket. He held the other one in his hand.
But there was something else that he was groping for, among the sandwich wrappings and the spare clothes. He had also packed his service pistol. He had hesitated until the very last moment, but eventually he made up his mind and put it in his backpack, along with a full magazine. He wasn’t at all sure why he had done this. There was nothing to suggest that he was exposing himself to immediate physical danger.
But Louise is dead, he had thought. And Hermann Eber convinced me that she was murdered. Until I have more information, I have to assume that the culprit could be Hakan, even if I have neither proof nor motive.
He loaded the pistol and checked that the safety catch was on. Then he switched on the torch and checked that the blue filter he had placed over the lens was still in place. The light was very pale, and would be difficult to detect by anybody not on his guard.
He listened through the darkness. The noise from the sea drowned out other sounds. He put his backpack back into the boat, then checked the painter and made sure that the boat was securely moored. He began walking slowly and carefully away from the shore. The brushwood was dense near the water’s edge. He had been walking for only a few yards when he stepped into a spiderweb, and he started flailing with his arms when he realised that an enormous spider was clinging to his anorak. He could cope with snakes, but not spiders. Instead of fumbling through the brush, he decided to walk along the shore in the hope of finding somewhere where it was less overgrown. After about fifty yards he came to a place where the remains of an old slipway could be made out. Since he had never been ashore on this island before, and had seen it only from a boat, he was finding it difficult to orient himself. The last time he was here they had passed by on the other side, facing west. This time he had landed on the east side, hoping that this was what you might call the rear of the island.
His mobile phone started ringing in one of his pockets. He cursed under his breath as he pulled and tugged at his clothes in an effort to find it, dropping the torch in the process. He counted at least six rings before he finally succeeded in switching it off. He could see from the display that it was Linda who had been trying to reach him. He put the phone in his breast pocket and closed the zip. The ringing had sounded like an alarm in his ears. He listened hard, but there was nothing to be seen or heard in the darkness. Only the surging of the sea.
He continued cautiously on his way until he could make out the outline of the house shrouded in darkness. He stationed himself behind an oak tree, but he couldn’t see any trace of a light. I got it wrong, he thought. There’s nobody here. My deduction was simply wrong.
But then he noticed a faint gleam of light seeping out from between a lowered blind and a window frame. When he came closer he could see more faint glows from other windows as well.
He walked as quietly as he could around the house. The windows were blacked out, as if it were wartime and all lights had been extinguished in order to confuse the enemy. I am the enemy, Wallander thought.
He pressed his ear against the wooden wall and listened. He could hear the murmur of voices, and occasionally music. From a television set or a radio, he couldn’t be sure which.
He withdrew into the shadows again and tried to make up his mind about what to do next. He had planned only as far as the point where he now found himself. Now what? Should he wait until the next morning before knocking on the door and waiting to see who answered?
He hesitated. He was annoyed by his indecision. What was he afraid of?
He had no time to answer that question. He felt a hand on his shoulder, gave a start and turned round. Even though this was the reason he had set out on his journey, he was still surprised to see Hakan von Enke standing there in the darkness, wearing a tracksuit top over a pair of jeans. He was unshaven and in need of a haircut.
They stared at each other without speaking, Wallander with his torch in his hand, von Enke barefoot on the wet soil.
‘I suppose you heard the phone ringing?’ Wallander said.
Von Enke shook his head. He seemed to be not only scared, but rueful.
‘I have alarms set all around the house. I’ve spent the last ten minutes trying to work out who tracked me to this island.’
‘It’s only me,’ said Wallander.
‘Yes,’ said Hakan von Enke. ‘It’s only you.’
They went into the house. It was only when everything was lit up that Wallander noticed that von Enke was also armed. He was carrying a pistol, tucked into his waistband.
What’s he afraid of? Wallander thought. Who is he hiding from?
