Wallander stood up. Mattson remained seated.
‘Is there anything you’d like to add?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Wallander. ‘I’ll do what you suggest. I’ll take time off and go home.’
‘It would be best if you left your gun here.’
‘I’m not an idiot,’ said Wallander. ‘Irrespective of what you think.’
Wallander went back to his office and fetched his jacket. Then he left the police station via the garage and drove home. It occurred to him that he might still have alcohol in his blood after yesterday’s gallivanting, but since things couldn’t get any worse than they were, he kept on going. A strong north-easterly wind had blown up. Wallander shuddered as he walked from the car to his front door. Jussi was leaping around inside his kennel, but Wallander didn’t have the strength even to think about taking him for a walk. He undressed, lay down and went to sleep. By the time he woke up it was twelve o’clock. He lay there motionless, his eyes open, and listened to the wind battering the house walls.
The feeling that something wasn’t as it should be had started nagging at him again. A shadow had descended over his existence. How had he not even missed the gun when he woke up? It was as if somebody else had been acting in his stead, and then had switched off his memory so that he wouldn’t know what had happened.
He got up, dressed and tried to eat, although he still felt sick. He was very tempted to pour himself a glass of wine, but he resisted. He was doing the dishes when Linda called.
‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘I’m just checking that you’re at home.’
She hung up before he had chance to say a single word. She arrived twenty minutes later, carrying her sleeping baby. Linda sat down opposite her father on the brown leather sofa he had bought the year they moved to Ystad. The baby was asleep on a chair next to her. Kurt wanted to talk about her but Linda shook her head. Later, but not now; first things first.
‘I heard what happened,’ she said. ‘But even so, I feel as if I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Did Martinsson call?’
‘Yes, right after he spoke to you. He was very unhappy about it all.’
‘Not as unhappy as I am,’ said Wallander.
‘Tell me what I don’t know.’
‘If you’ve come here to interrogate me you might as well leave.’
‘I just want to know. You’re the last person I’d ever have expected to do something like this.’
‘Nobody died,’ said Wallander. ‘Nobody even got hurt. Besides, anyone can do anything. I’ve lived long enough to know that.’
Then he told her the whole story, from the restlessness that had driven him out of the house in the first place, to not knowing why he had taken his gun with him. When he had finished she said nothing for a long time.
‘I believe you,’ she said eventually. ‘Everything you’re telling me comes down to one single fact, one single circumstance in your life. That you are far too lonely. You suddenly lose control, and there’s nobody around to calm you down, to stop you from rushing off. But there’s still something I wonder about.’
‘What?’
‘Have you told me everything? Or is there something you’re not saying?’
Wallander wondered for a moment if he should tell her about the strange feeling of a shadow closing in on him. But he shook his head; there was nothing more to tell her.
‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ she asked. ‘I can’t remember what the rule book says.’
‘There’ll be an internal investigation. After that, I have no idea.’
‘Is there a chance they’ll fire you?’
‘I reckon I’m too old to be fired. Besides, the offence isn’t all that serious. But they might force me into early retirement.’
‘Wouldn’t that appeal to you?’
Wallander was chewing away at an apple when she asked him that question. He hurled the core at the wall with all his strength.
‘You’ve just said that my problem is loneliness!’ he roared. ‘What would it be like if I was forced to retire? I’d have nothing at all left.’
Wallander’s bellowing woke the baby up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You’re scared,’ she said. ‘I can understand that. I would be too. I don’t think anybody should apologise for being scared.’
Linda stayed until the evening, made him dinner, and they spoke no more about what had happened. Kurt escorted her to the car through the cold, gusting wind.
‘Will you manage?’ she asked.
‘I’ll always get by. But thank you for asking.’
The following day Wallander had a call from Lennart Mattson, who wanted to see him without delay. When they met, he was introduced to an internal affairs officer from Malmo who had come to interrogate him.
‘Whenever it suits you,’ said the investigator, whose name was Holmgren and who was about the same age as Wallander.
‘Now,’ said Wallander. ‘Why put it off?’
They shut themselves away in one of the police station’s smallest conference rooms. Wallander made an effort to be precise, not to make excuses, not to trivialise what had happened. Holmgren took notes, occasionally asked Wallander to take a step backwards, repeat an answer and then continue. It seemed to Wallander that if the roles had been reversed, the interrogation would doubtless have proceeded in exactly the same way. It took slightly more than an hour. Holmgren put down his pen and looked at Wallander - not in the way one would look at a criminal who had just confessed, but as somebody who had messed things up. He seemed to be feeling sorry for the trouble Wallander found himself in.
‘You didn’t fire a shot,’ said Holmgren. ‘You forgot your gun when you drank too much at a restaurant. That’s serious - there’s no getting away from that - but you haven’t actually committed a crime. You haven’t assaulted anyone; you haven’t taken bribes; you haven’t harassed anyone.’
‘So I’m not going to be fired, you don’t think?’
‘Hardly. But it’s not up to me.’
‘But your guess would be … ?’
‘I’m not going to guess. You’ll have to wait and see.’
Holmgren began collecting his papers and placing them carefully in his briefcase. He suddenly paused.
‘It’s obviously an advantage if this business doesn’t get into the hands of the media,’ he said. Things always take a turn for the worse when we can’t hush up this sort of thing and keep it inside the police force.’
‘I think we’ll be OK,’ Wallander said. ‘There’s been no mention of it so far, so that’s an indication that nothing has been leaked.’
But Wallander was wrong. That same day there was a knock on his door. He had been lying down, but he got up because he thought it was one of his neighbours. When he opened the door, a photographer took a flash picture of Wallander’s face. Standing next to the cameraman was a reporter who introduced herself as Lisa Halbing, with a smile Wallander immediately classified as fake.
‘Can we talk?’ she asked aggressively.
‘What about?’ wondered Wallander, who already had a pain in his stomach.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think anything.’
The cameraman took a whole series of pictures. Wallander’s first instinct was to punch him, but he did no such thing, of course. Instead he demanded that the cameraman promise not to take any photographs inside the house; that was his private domain. When both the cameraman and Lisa Halbing promised to respect his privacy, he let them in and invited them to sit down at his kitchen table. He served them coffee and the remains of a sponge cake he’d been presented with a few days earlier by one of his neighbours who was an avid baker.
‘Which newspaper?’ he asked when he had finished serving coffee. ‘I forgot to ask.’
‘I should have said.’ Lisa Halbing was heavily made up and was trying to conceal her excess weight beneath a
