Authors: Henning Mankell
“Linda was just the same,” said Wallander, in an attempt to appear interested. He thanked Martinsson again for his help regarding the moon, and hung up. He ate a couple of sandwiches, then lay down with a stone as a pillow.
The pains came from nowhere. He was lying there, looking up at the sky and listening to seagulls screeching in the distance, when he felt a stab of pain in his left arm, which then spread to his chest and stomach. At first he thought he must be lying on a sharp edge of stone, but then he realized that the pains were coming from inside his body, and he suspected that what he had always dreaded had now come to pass. He’d had a heart attack.
He lay completely motionless, stiff and terrified, and held his breath, afraid that if he tried to breathe he would use up the rest of his heart’s ability to beat.
The memory of his mother’s death suddenly came vividly into his mind. It was as if her last moments were being played out by his side. She had been only fifty years old. His mother had never worked outside the home, but had always struggled to maintain her marriage to her temperamental husband, whose income could never be relied on, and look after their two children, Kurt and Kristina. They had been living in Limhamn at the time, sharing a house with a family that Wallander’s father couldn’t stand. The father was a train conductor who never hurt a fly, but once, in the friendliest possible way, he asked Wallander’s father if it might be relaxing to paint some other motif rather than the same old landscape over and over again. Wallander had overheard the conversation. The conductor, whose name was Nils Persson, had used his own working life as an example. After a long period driving back and forth between Malmö and Alvesta, he was very pleased when he was transferred to an express route that went to Gothenburg, and sometimes even as far as Oslo. Wallander’s father had naturally reacted furiously. After that it had been Wallander’s mother who tried to smooth things over and make living alongside the other family not completely intolerable.
Her death had come suddenly one afternoon in the early fall of 1962. She had been in their little garden, hanging up laundry. Wallander had just come home from school and was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich. He had looked out of the window and seen her hanging up sheets with a bunch of clothespins in her hand. He had returned to his sandwich. The next time he looked out, she was on her knees, clutching at her chest. At first he
thought she had dropped something, but then he watched her fall over onto her side, slowly, as if she were trying hard not to. He ran outside, shouting her name, but she was beyond help. The doctor who performed the autopsy said she had suffered a massive heart attack. Even if she had been in a hospital when it happened, they wouldn’t have been able to save her.
Now he could see her in his mind’s eye, a series of blurred, jerky images as he tried to keep his own pains at arm’s length. He didn’t want his life to end early like hers had, and least of all now, all alone on a little island in the Baltic Sea.
He said silent, agitated prayers—not really to any god, but more to himself, urging himself to resist, to not allow himself to be dragged down into eternal silence. And he eventually realized that the pains were not getting any worse; his heart was still beating. He forced himself to remain calm, to act sensibly, to not sink into a desperate and blind panic. He sat up gingerly and felt for his cell phone, which he had left next to his backpack. He started to dial Linda’s number but changed his mind. What would she be able to do? If he really had suffered a heart attack, he should be calling the emergency number.
But something held him back. Perhaps it was the feeling that the pain was receding? He carefully moved his left arm and found a position in which the pain was less, as well as other positions where it was worse. That was not in accordance with the symptoms of a serious heart attack. He sat up slowly and took his pulse. It was seventy-four beats per minute. His normal rate was somewhere between sixty-six and seventy-eight. Everything was as it should be. It’s stress, he thought. My body is simulating something that can afflict me if I don’t take it easy.
He lay down again. The pain faded away even more, even if it was still present, nagging away, a sort of background threat.
An hour later he was convinced that he hadn’t in fact suffered a heart attack. It had been a warning. He thought, I should stop kidding myself that I’m an irreplaceable police officer and take a proper vacation. Perhaps he should go home, call Ytterberg and tell him what conclusions he had drawn. But he decided to stay on. He had come a long way, and he was keen to establish if his suspicions were justified or not. No matter what the outcome, he could then hand the matter over to Ytterberg and not bother with it anymore.
He felt very relieved. It was a sort of positive affirmation of life that he hadn’t experienced for years. He had an urge to stand up and roar in the direction
of the open sea. But he remained seated, leaning against the tree 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 bathroom 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. Toward 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 hemmed and hawed and then realized 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 traveling 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 flashlights 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 Håkan, 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 flashlight 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 realized 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 cell 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 flashlight 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 zipper. 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 around. Even though this was the reason he had set out on his journey, he was still surprised to see Håkan von Enke standing there in the darkness, wearing a tracksuit jacket over a pair of jeans. He was unshaven and in need of a haircut.
They stared at each other without speaking, Wallander with his flashlight 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 Håkan 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.