Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell is back—20 years after he introduced Kurt Wallander in Faceless Killers, the first in a series of critically acclaimed and bestselling thrillers. Now Mankell has confirmed that The Troubled Man is the last Wallander book he will write. Prospect prints below an exclusive extract from one of its early chapters.
As miserable as he is modern, Kurt Wallander is still a decent, moral man. His long-suffering colleagues, dreary flat in Ystad, on-off relationship with daughter Linda, and ferry rides from Sweden to Denmark or east across the Baltic have become celebrated fixtures in the landscape of crime writing. He will be missed.
Three months later—on 11th April, to be more precise—something happened that forced Wallander to think back yet again to that evening in January.
It happened without warning and was totally unexpected by everyone involved. Håkan von Enke disappeared without a trace from his home in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. Every morning, von Enke went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. On that particular day, it was drizzling all over Stockholm. He got up early, as usual, and shortly after six was enjoying his breakfast. At seven o’clock he knocked on the bedroom door in order to wake up his wife, and announced that he was going out for his usual walk. It generally lasted about two hours, except when it was very cold; then he would shorten it to one hour, since he used to be a heavy smoker, and his lungs had never recovered. He always took the same route. From his home in Grevgatan he would walk to Valhallavägen and from there turn off into the Lill-Jansskogen woods, following an intricate sequence of paths that eventually took him back to Valhallavägen, then southward along Sturegatan before turning left into Karlavägen and back home again. He would walk fast, using various walking sticks he had inherited from his father, and was always sweaty by the time he arrived back home and tumbled into a hot bath.
This particular morning had been like all the others, apart from one thing: Håkan von Enke never came home. Louise was very familiar with his route—she used to accompany him sometimes, but she stopped when she could no longer keep up with his pace. When he didn’t turn up, she started to worry. He was in good shape, no doubt about that; but nevertheless he was an old man and something might have happened to him. A heart attack, or a burst blood vessel perhaps? She went out to look for him, having first established that he hadn’t taken his mobile phone, in spite of their agreement that he always would. It was lying on his desk. She came back at one o’clock, having retraced his footsteps. The whole time, she was half expecting to find him lying dead by the side of the road. But there was no sign of him. He had vanished. She called two, maybe three friends he might conceivably have visited, but nobody had seen him. Now she was sure that something had happened. It was about 2pm when she called Hans at his office in Copenhagen. Although she was very worried and wanted to report Håkan’s absence to the police, Hans tried to calm her down. Louise reluctantly agreed to wait a few more hours.
But Hans called Linda immediately, and from her Wallander heard what had happened. He was trying to teach Jussi to sit still while he cleaned his paws—he had been taught what to do by a dog trainer he knew in Sturup. He was just about to give up on the grounds that Jussi had no ability whatsoever to learn new habits when the phone rang. Linda told him about Louise’s worries and asked for his advice.
“You’re a police officer yourself,” Wallander said. “You know the routine. Wait and see. Most of them come back.”
“But this is the first time he’s deviated from his routine in many years. I understand why Louise is worried. She’s not the hysterical type.”
“Wait until tonight,” said Wallander. “He’ll come back; you’ll see.”
Wallander was convinced that Håkan von Enke would turn up and that there would be a perfectly logical explanation for his absence. He was more curious than worried, and wondered what the explanation would be. But von Enke never did return, not that evening or the next one. Late in the evening of 11th April Louise reported her husband missing. She was then driven around the narrow labyrinthine roads in the Lill-Jansskogen woods in a police car, but they failed to find him. The following day her son travelled up from Copenhagen. It was then that Wallander began to realise something serious must have happened.
***
At that point he had still not returned to work. The internal investigation had dragged on and on. And to make matters worse, at the beginning of February he had fallen badly on the icy road outside his house and broken his left wrist. He had tripped over Jussi’s leash because the dog still hadn’t learned to stop pulling and dragging, or to walk on the correct side. His wrist was put in a cast and Wallander was given sick leave. It had been a period of short temper and frequent outbursts of anger, aimed at himself and Jussi and also at Linda. As a result, Linda had avoided seeing him any more than was necessary. She thought he had become like his father—surly, irritable, impatient. Reluctantly, he accepted that she was right. He didn’t want to turn into his father; he could cope with anything else, but not that. He didn’t want to be a bitter old man who kept repeating himself, both in his paintings and in his opinions about a world that grew increasingly incomprehensible to him. It was a time when Wallander strode around and around his house like a bear in a cage, no longer able to ignore the fact that he was now sixty years old and hence inexorably on his way into old age. He might live for another ten or twenty years, but he would never be able to experience anything but growing older and older. Youth was a distant memory, and now middle age was behind him. He was standing in the wings, waiting for his cue to go onstage to begin the third and ?nal act, in which everything would be explained, the heroes placed in the spotlight while the villains died. He was ?ghting as hard as he could to avoid being forced to play the tragic role. He would prefer to leave the stage with a laugh.
What worried him most was his forgetfulness. He would write a list when he drove to Simrishamn or Ystad to do some shopping, but when he entered the shops he would realise he had forgotten it. Had he in fact ever written one? He couldn’t remember. One day, when he was more worried than usual about his memory, he made an appointment with a doctor in Malmö who advertised herself as a specialist in “the problems of old age.” The doctor, whose name was Margareta Bengtsson, received him in an old house in the centre of Malmö. In Wallander’s prejudiced view she was too young to be capable of understanding the miseries of old age. He was tempted to turn round and leave, but he controlled himself, sat down in a leather armchair and began talking about his bad memory that was getting worse all the time.
“Do I have Alzheimer’s?” Wallander asked as the interview drew to a close.
Margareta Bengtsson smiled, not condescendingly but in a straightforward and friendly way.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. But obviously, nobody knows what’s lurking round the next corner.”
Round the next corner, Wallander thought as he walked back to his car through the bitterly cold wind. When he got there he found a parking ticket tucked under a windscreen wiper. He flung it into the car without even looking to see how much he had been fined and drove home.
A car he didn’t recognise was waiting outside his front door. When Wallander got out of his own car, he saw Martinsson standing by the dog kennel, stroking Jussi through the bars.
“I was just going to leave,” said Martinsson. “I left a note on the door.”
“Have they sent you to deliver a message?”
“Not at all—I came entirely of my own accord to see how you were.”
They went into the house. Martinsson took a look at Wallander’s library, which had become extensive over the years. Then they sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Wallander said nothing about his trip to Malmö and the appointment with the doctor. Martinsson nodded at his plastered hand.
“The cast will come off next week,” said Wallander. “What does the gossip have to say?”
“About your hand?”
“About me. The gun at the restaurant.”
“Lennart Mattson is an unusually taciturn man. I know nothing about what’s going on. But you can count on our support.”
“That’s not true. You no doubt support me. But the leak must have come from somewhere. There are a lot of people at the police station who don’t like me.”
Martinsson shrugged.
“That’s life. There’s nothing you can do about it. Who likes me?”
They talked about everything under the sun. It struck Wallander that Martinsson was now the only one left of the colleagues who were at the police station when he first moved to Ystad.
Martinsson seemed depressed as he sat there at the table.Wallander wondered if he was ill.
“No, I’m not ill,” said Martinsson. “But I’m resigned to the fact that it’s all over now. My career as a police officer, that is.”
“Did you also leave your gun in a restaurant?”
“I just can’t take it any more.”
To Wallander’s astonishment, Martinsson started crying. He sat there like a helpless child, his hands wrapped around his coffee cup as the tears ran down his cheeks. Wallander had no idea what to do. He had occasionally noticed that Martinsson was depressed over the years, but he had never broken down like this before. He decided simply to wait it out. When the phone rang he unplugged it.
Martinsson pulled himself together and dried his face.
“What a thing to do!” he said. “I apologise.”
“Apologise for what? In my opinion anyone who can cry in front of another man displays great courage. Courage I don’t have, I’m afraid.”
Martinsson explained that he felt he had lost his way. He found himself questioning more and more the value of his work as a police officer. He wasn’t dissatis?ed with the work he did, but he worried about the role of the police in the Sweden of today. The gap between what the general public expected and what the police could actually do seemed to be growing wider all the time. Now he had reached a point where every night was a virtually sleepless wait for a day he knew would bring more torture.
“I’m packing it in this summer,” he said. “There’s a ?rm in Malmö I’ve been in contact with. They provide security consultants for small businesses and private properties. They have a job for me. At a salary significantly higher than what I’m getting now, incidentally.”
Wallander recalled another time many years ago when Martinsson had made up his mind to resign. On that occasion Wallander had managed to persuade him to soldier on. That must have been at least fifteen years ago. He could see that this time, it was impossible to talk his colleague out of it. It wasn’t as if his own situation made his future in the police force particularly attractive.
“I think I understand what you mean,” he said. “And I think you’re doing the right thing. Change course while you’re still young enough to do it.”
“I’ll be fifty in a few years’ time,” he said. “You call that young?”
“I’m sixty,” said Wallander. “By then you’re definitely on a one-way street to old age.”
Martinsson stayed a bit longer, talking about the work he would be doing in Malmö. Wallander realised the man was trying to show him that, despite everything, he still had something to look forward to, that he hadn’t lost all his enthusiasm.
Wallander walked him to his car.
“Have you heard anything from Mattson?” Martinsson asked tentatively.
“There are four possible options,” Wallander told him. “A ‘constructive reprimand.’ for instance. They can’t do that to me. That would make a laughing stock of the whole police force. A sixty-year-old officer sitting before some police commissioner like a naughty schoolboy, told to mend his ways.”
“Surely they aren’t seriously considering that? They must be out of their minds!”
“They could give me an official warning,” Wallander went on. “Or they could give me a fine. As a last resort, they could give me the boot. My guess is I’ll get a fine.”
They shook hands when they came to the car. Martinsson vanished into a cloud of snow. Wallander went back into the house, leafed through his calendar, and established that three months had now passed since that unfortunate evening when he forgot his service pistol.
He remained on sick leave even after the cast had been removed. On 10th April an orthopaedic specialist at Ystad Hospital discovered that a bone in Wallander’s hand had not healed as it should have. For a brief, horrific moment Wallander thought they were going to break his wrist again, but the doctor assured him that there were other measures they could take. But it was important that Wallander not use his hand, so he couldn’t go back to work.
After leaving the hospital, Wallander stayed in town. There was a play by a modern American dramatist on at the Ystad theatre, and Wallander had been given a ticket by Linda, who had a bad cold and couldn’t go herself. As a teenager she had thought briefly about becoming an actress, but that ambition passed quickly. Now she was relieved she had realised early on that she didn’t have enough talent to go on the stage.
After only ten minutes, Wallander started checking his watch. The play was boring him. Moderately talented actors were wandering around in a room and reciting their lines from various places—a stool, a table, a window seat. The play was about a family in the process of breaking up as a result of internal pressures, unresolved conflicts, lies, thwarted dreams; it completely failed to engage his interest. When the first interval came at last, Wallander grabbed his jacket and left the theatre He had been looking forward to the production, and he felt frustrated. Was it his fault, or was the play really as boring as he found it?
He had parked his car at the train station. He crossed over the tracks and followed a well-trodden path towards the rear of the station building. He suddenly felt a blow in the small of his back and fell over. Two young men, eighteen or nineteen, were standing over him. One of them was wearing a hooded sweater, the other a leather jacket. The one with the hood was carrying a knife. A kitchen knife, Wallander noted before being punched in the face by the one in the leather jacket. His upper lip split and started bleeding. Another punch, this time on the forehead. The boy was strong and was hitting hard, as if he was in a rage. Then he started tugging at Wallander’s clothes, hissing that he wanted his wallet and mobile phone. Wallander raised an arm to protect himself. The whole time, he was keeping an eye on the knife. It then dawned on him that the kids were more scared than he was, and that he didn’t need to worry about that trembling hand holding the weapon. Wallander braced himself, then aimed a kick at the kid with the knife. He missed, but grabbed hold of his hand and gave it a violent twist. The knife flew away. At the same time, he felt a heavy blow to the back of his neck, and he fell down again. This time the blow had been so hard that he couldn’t stand up. He managed to raise himself onto his knees, and he felt the chill from the wet ground through his trouser legs. He expected to be stabbed at any moment. But nothing happened. When he looked up, the kids had disappeared. He rubbed the back of his head, which felt sticky. He slowly got to his feet, realised that he was in danger of fainting, and grabbed hold of the fence surrounding the tracks. He took a few deep breaths, then made his way gingerly to the car. The back of his neck was bleeding, but he could take care of that when he got home. He didn’t seem to have any signs of a concussion.
He sat behind the wheel for a while without turning the ignition key. From one world to another, he thought. First I’m sitting in a theatre but don’t feel a part of what’s happening. So I leave and then find myself in a world I often come across from the outside; but this time I am the one lying there, injured, under threat.
He thought about the knife. Once, at the very beginning of his career, as a young police officer in Malmö, he had been stabbed in Pildamm Park by a madman running amok. If the knife had entered his body only an inch to one side it would have hit his heart. In that case he would never have spent all those years in Ystad, or seen Linda grow up. His life would have come to an end before it had started in earnest.
He remembered thinking at the time: There’s a time to live, and a time to die.
It was cold in the car. He started the engine and switched on the heating. He relived the attack over and over again in his mind. He was still in shock, but he could feel the anger boiling up inside him.
He gave a start when somebody knocked on the window, afraid that the young men had come back. But the face peering in through the glass was that of a white-haired elderly lady in a beret. He opened the door a little.
“Don’t you know it’s forbidden to leave your engine running for as long as you have?” she said. “I’m out walking my dog, but I’ve been checking my watch and know how long you’ve been standing here with the engine on.”
Wallander made no reply, simply nodded and drove off. That night he lay in bed without being able to sleep. The last time he looked at the clock it was 5am. The following day Håkan von Enke disappeared. And Wallander never reported the attack he had suffered. He told no one, not even Linda.
As miserable as he is modern, Kurt Wallander is still a decent, moral man. His long-suffering colleagues, dreary flat in Ystad, on-off relationship with daughter Linda, and ferry rides from Sweden to Denmark or east across the Baltic have become celebrated fixtures in the landscape of crime writing. He will be missed.
Three months later—on 11th April, to be more precise—something happened that forced Wallander to think back yet again to that evening in January.
It happened without warning and was totally unexpected by everyone involved. Håkan von Enke disappeared without a trace from his home in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. Every morning, von Enke went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. On that particular day, it was drizzling all over Stockholm. He got up early, as usual, and shortly after six was enjoying his breakfast. At seven o’clock he knocked on the bedroom door in order to wake up his wife, and announced that he was going out for his usual walk. It generally lasted about two hours, except when it was very cold; then he would shorten it to one hour, since he used to be a heavy smoker, and his lungs had never recovered. He always took the same route. From his home in Grevgatan he would walk to Valhallavägen and from there turn off into the Lill-Jansskogen woods, following an intricate sequence of paths that eventually took him back to Valhallavägen, then southward along Sturegatan before turning left into Karlavägen and back home again. He would walk fast, using various walking sticks he had inherited from his father, and was always sweaty by the time he arrived back home and tumbled into a hot bath.
This particular morning had been like all the others, apart from one thing: Håkan von Enke never came home. Louise was very familiar with his route—she used to accompany him sometimes, but she stopped when she could no longer keep up with his pace. When he didn’t turn up, she started to worry. He was in good shape, no doubt about that; but nevertheless he was an old man and something might have happened to him. A heart attack, or a burst blood vessel perhaps? She went out to look for him, having first established that he hadn’t taken his mobile phone, in spite of their agreement that he always would. It was lying on his desk. She came back at one o’clock, having retraced his footsteps. The whole time, she was half expecting to find him lying dead by the side of the road. But there was no sign of him. He had vanished. She called two, maybe three friends he might conceivably have visited, but nobody had seen him. Now she was sure that something had happened. It was about 2pm when she called Hans at his office in Copenhagen. Although she was very worried and wanted to report Håkan’s absence to the police, Hans tried to calm her down. Louise reluctantly agreed to wait a few more hours.
But Hans called Linda immediately, and from her Wallander heard what had happened. He was trying to teach Jussi to sit still while he cleaned his paws—he had been taught what to do by a dog trainer he knew in Sturup. He was just about to give up on the grounds that Jussi had no ability whatsoever to learn new habits when the phone rang. Linda told him about Louise’s worries and asked for his advice.
“You’re a police officer yourself,” Wallander said. “You know the routine. Wait and see. Most of them come back.”
“But this is the first time he’s deviated from his routine in many years. I understand why Louise is worried. She’s not the hysterical type.”
“Wait until tonight,” said Wallander. “He’ll come back; you’ll see.”
Wallander was convinced that Håkan von Enke would turn up and that there would be a perfectly logical explanation for his absence. He was more curious than worried, and wondered what the explanation would be. But von Enke never did return, not that evening or the next one. Late in the evening of 11th April Louise reported her husband missing. She was then driven around the narrow labyrinthine roads in the Lill-Jansskogen woods in a police car, but they failed to find him. The following day her son travelled up from Copenhagen. It was then that Wallander began to realise something serious must have happened.
***
At that point he had still not returned to work. The internal investigation had dragged on and on. And to make matters worse, at the beginning of February he had fallen badly on the icy road outside his house and broken his left wrist. He had tripped over Jussi’s leash because the dog still hadn’t learned to stop pulling and dragging, or to walk on the correct side. His wrist was put in a cast and Wallander was given sick leave. It had been a period of short temper and frequent outbursts of anger, aimed at himself and Jussi and also at Linda. As a result, Linda had avoided seeing him any more than was necessary. She thought he had become like his father—surly, irritable, impatient. Reluctantly, he accepted that she was right. He didn’t want to turn into his father; he could cope with anything else, but not that. He didn’t want to be a bitter old man who kept repeating himself, both in his paintings and in his opinions about a world that grew increasingly incomprehensible to him. It was a time when Wallander strode around and around his house like a bear in a cage, no longer able to ignore the fact that he was now sixty years old and hence inexorably on his way into old age. He might live for another ten or twenty years, but he would never be able to experience anything but growing older and older. Youth was a distant memory, and now middle age was behind him. He was standing in the wings, waiting for his cue to go onstage to begin the third and ?nal act, in which everything would be explained, the heroes placed in the spotlight while the villains died. He was ?ghting as hard as he could to avoid being forced to play the tragic role. He would prefer to leave the stage with a laugh.
What worried him most was his forgetfulness. He would write a list when he drove to Simrishamn or Ystad to do some shopping, but when he entered the shops he would realise he had forgotten it. Had he in fact ever written one? He couldn’t remember. One day, when he was more worried than usual about his memory, he made an appointment with a doctor in Malmö who advertised herself as a specialist in “the problems of old age.” The doctor, whose name was Margareta Bengtsson, received him in an old house in the centre of Malmö. In Wallander’s prejudiced view she was too young to be capable of understanding the miseries of old age. He was tempted to turn round and leave, but he controlled himself, sat down in a leather armchair and began talking about his bad memory that was getting worse all the time.
“Do I have Alzheimer’s?” Wallander asked as the interview drew to a close.
Margareta Bengtsson smiled, not condescendingly but in a straightforward and friendly way.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. But obviously, nobody knows what’s lurking round the next corner.”
Round the next corner, Wallander thought as he walked back to his car through the bitterly cold wind. When he got there he found a parking ticket tucked under a windscreen wiper. He flung it into the car without even looking to see how much he had been fined and drove home.
A car he didn’t recognise was waiting outside his front door. When Wallander got out of his own car, he saw Martinsson standing by the dog kennel, stroking Jussi through the bars.
“I was just going to leave,” said Martinsson. “I left a note on the door.”
“Have they sent you to deliver a message?”
“Not at all—I came entirely of my own accord to see how you were.”
They went into the house. Martinsson took a look at Wallander’s library, which had become extensive over the years. Then they sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Wallander said nothing about his trip to Malmö and the appointment with the doctor. Martinsson nodded at his plastered hand.
“The cast will come off next week,” said Wallander. “What does the gossip have to say?”
“About your hand?”
“About me. The gun at the restaurant.”
“Lennart Mattson is an unusually taciturn man. I know nothing about what’s going on. But you can count on our support.”
“That’s not true. You no doubt support me. But the leak must have come from somewhere. There are a lot of people at the police station who don’t like me.”
Martinsson shrugged.
“That’s life. There’s nothing you can do about it. Who likes me?”
They talked about everything under the sun. It struck Wallander that Martinsson was now the only one left of the colleagues who were at the police station when he first moved to Ystad.
Martinsson seemed depressed as he sat there at the table.Wallander wondered if he was ill.
“No, I’m not ill,” said Martinsson. “But I’m resigned to the fact that it’s all over now. My career as a police officer, that is.”
“Did you also leave your gun in a restaurant?”
“I just can’t take it any more.”
To Wallander’s astonishment, Martinsson started crying. He sat there like a helpless child, his hands wrapped around his coffee cup as the tears ran down his cheeks. Wallander had no idea what to do. He had occasionally noticed that Martinsson was depressed over the years, but he had never broken down like this before. He decided simply to wait it out. When the phone rang he unplugged it.
Martinsson pulled himself together and dried his face.
“What a thing to do!” he said. “I apologise.”
“Apologise for what? In my opinion anyone who can cry in front of another man displays great courage. Courage I don’t have, I’m afraid.”
Martinsson explained that he felt he had lost his way. He found himself questioning more and more the value of his work as a police officer. He wasn’t dissatis?ed with the work he did, but he worried about the role of the police in the Sweden of today. The gap between what the general public expected and what the police could actually do seemed to be growing wider all the time. Now he had reached a point where every night was a virtually sleepless wait for a day he knew would bring more torture.
“I’m packing it in this summer,” he said. “There’s a ?rm in Malmö I’ve been in contact with. They provide security consultants for small businesses and private properties. They have a job for me. At a salary significantly higher than what I’m getting now, incidentally.”
Wallander recalled another time many years ago when Martinsson had made up his mind to resign. On that occasion Wallander had managed to persuade him to soldier on. That must have been at least fifteen years ago. He could see that this time, it was impossible to talk his colleague out of it. It wasn’t as if his own situation made his future in the police force particularly attractive.
“I think I understand what you mean,” he said. “And I think you’re doing the right thing. Change course while you’re still young enough to do it.”
“I’ll be fifty in a few years’ time,” he said. “You call that young?”
“I’m sixty,” said Wallander. “By then you’re definitely on a one-way street to old age.”
Martinsson stayed a bit longer, talking about the work he would be doing in Malmö. Wallander realised the man was trying to show him that, despite everything, he still had something to look forward to, that he hadn’t lost all his enthusiasm.
Wallander walked him to his car.
“Have you heard anything from Mattson?” Martinsson asked tentatively.
“There are four possible options,” Wallander told him. “A ‘constructive reprimand.’ for instance. They can’t do that to me. That would make a laughing stock of the whole police force. A sixty-year-old officer sitting before some police commissioner like a naughty schoolboy, told to mend his ways.”
“Surely they aren’t seriously considering that? They must be out of their minds!”
“They could give me an official warning,” Wallander went on. “Or they could give me a fine. As a last resort, they could give me the boot. My guess is I’ll get a fine.”
They shook hands when they came to the car. Martinsson vanished into a cloud of snow. Wallander went back into the house, leafed through his calendar, and established that three months had now passed since that unfortunate evening when he forgot his service pistol.
He remained on sick leave even after the cast had been removed. On 10th April an orthopaedic specialist at Ystad Hospital discovered that a bone in Wallander’s hand had not healed as it should have. For a brief, horrific moment Wallander thought they were going to break his wrist again, but the doctor assured him that there were other measures they could take. But it was important that Wallander not use his hand, so he couldn’t go back to work.
After leaving the hospital, Wallander stayed in town. There was a play by a modern American dramatist on at the Ystad theatre, and Wallander had been given a ticket by Linda, who had a bad cold and couldn’t go herself. As a teenager she had thought briefly about becoming an actress, but that ambition passed quickly. Now she was relieved she had realised early on that she didn’t have enough talent to go on the stage.
After only ten minutes, Wallander started checking his watch. The play was boring him. Moderately talented actors were wandering around in a room and reciting their lines from various places—a stool, a table, a window seat. The play was about a family in the process of breaking up as a result of internal pressures, unresolved conflicts, lies, thwarted dreams; it completely failed to engage his interest. When the first interval came at last, Wallander grabbed his jacket and left the theatre He had been looking forward to the production, and he felt frustrated. Was it his fault, or was the play really as boring as he found it?
He had parked his car at the train station. He crossed over the tracks and followed a well-trodden path towards the rear of the station building. He suddenly felt a blow in the small of his back and fell over. Two young men, eighteen or nineteen, were standing over him. One of them was wearing a hooded sweater, the other a leather jacket. The one with the hood was carrying a knife. A kitchen knife, Wallander noted before being punched in the face by the one in the leather jacket. His upper lip split and started bleeding. Another punch, this time on the forehead. The boy was strong and was hitting hard, as if he was in a rage. Then he started tugging at Wallander’s clothes, hissing that he wanted his wallet and mobile phone. Wallander raised an arm to protect himself. The whole time, he was keeping an eye on the knife. It then dawned on him that the kids were more scared than he was, and that he didn’t need to worry about that trembling hand holding the weapon. Wallander braced himself, then aimed a kick at the kid with the knife. He missed, but grabbed hold of his hand and gave it a violent twist. The knife flew away. At the same time, he felt a heavy blow to the back of his neck, and he fell down again. This time the blow had been so hard that he couldn’t stand up. He managed to raise himself onto his knees, and he felt the chill from the wet ground through his trouser legs. He expected to be stabbed at any moment. But nothing happened. When he looked up, the kids had disappeared. He rubbed the back of his head, which felt sticky. He slowly got to his feet, realised that he was in danger of fainting, and grabbed hold of the fence surrounding the tracks. He took a few deep breaths, then made his way gingerly to the car. The back of his neck was bleeding, but he could take care of that when he got home. He didn’t seem to have any signs of a concussion.
He sat behind the wheel for a while without turning the ignition key. From one world to another, he thought. First I’m sitting in a theatre but don’t feel a part of what’s happening. So I leave and then find myself in a world I often come across from the outside; but this time I am the one lying there, injured, under threat.
He thought about the knife. Once, at the very beginning of his career, as a young police officer in Malmö, he had been stabbed in Pildamm Park by a madman running amok. If the knife had entered his body only an inch to one side it would have hit his heart. In that case he would never have spent all those years in Ystad, or seen Linda grow up. His life would have come to an end before it had started in earnest.
He remembered thinking at the time: There’s a time to live, and a time to die.
It was cold in the car. He started the engine and switched on the heating. He relived the attack over and over again in his mind. He was still in shock, but he could feel the anger boiling up inside him.
He gave a start when somebody knocked on the window, afraid that the young men had come back. But the face peering in through the glass was that of a white-haired elderly lady in a beret. He opened the door a little.
“Don’t you know it’s forbidden to leave your engine running for as long as you have?” she said. “I’m out walking my dog, but I’ve been checking my watch and know how long you’ve been standing here with the engine on.”
Wallander made no reply, simply nodded and drove off. That night he lay in bed without being able to sleep. The last time he looked at the clock it was 5am. The following day Håkan von Enke disappeared. And Wallander never reported the attack he had suffered. He told no one, not even Linda.
