“Perhaps we should talk about this tomorrow,” he said.
“I had to bring this up with you right away,” she said. “It’s my duty as your commanding officer. You’re in a delicate enough situation as it is.”
She left him and continued on toward the road.
Wallander realized he was trembling with fury. Martinsson had lied. He claimed Wallander had ordered him not to follow him out onto the field, where Wallander had subsequently become trapped and had thought he was going to die.
He looked up and saw that Martinsson and Hansson were on their way toward him. The light from their flashlights bobbed up and down. From the other direction he heard Holgersson start up her car and drive away.
Martinsson and Hansson stopped when they reached him.
“Could you hold Martinsson’s flashlight for a moment?” Wallander asked, looking at Hansson.
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
Martinsson handed Hansson his flashlight. Wallander took a step forward and hit Martinsson in the face. However, since it was hard to judge the distance between them in the poor light from the flashlights, the blow didn’t land squarely on his jaw as intended. It was more of a gentle nudge.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Wallander yelled back.
Then he threw himself on Martinsson and they fell back into the mud. Hansson tried to get between them but slipped. One of the flashlights went out, the other landed some distance away.
“You told Holgersson I ordered you to stay behind! You’ve been spreading lies about me this whole time!”
Wallander pushed Martinsson away and stood up. Hansson was also standing. A dog was barking in the background.
“You’ve been going behind my back,” Wallander continued, and heard that his voice had become completely steady.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You go behind my back and say that I’m a bad at my job. You sneak away into Holgersson’s office when you think no one sees you.”
Hansson entered the conversation for the first time.
“What is going on between you two?”
“We’re discussing the issue of good teamwork,” Wallander answered. “If it’s best to say what you think to someone’s face, or whether you should go behind someone’s back and complain about them to their superior officer.”
“I still don’t get it,” Hansson said.
Wallander sighed. He saw no point in dragging this out.
“That was all I wanted to say,” he said and threw a flashlight at Martinsson’s feet.
Then he walked over to a patrol car and asked the officer behind the wheel to take him home.
He took a bath and then went and sat in the kitchen. It was close to three o’clock. He tried to think, but his head still felt empty. He went to bed but couldn’t sleep. His thoughts returned to the field, and to the terror he had experienced as he lay with his face pressed into the wet clay. The intense sense of humiliation at dying without his shoes on. And then his confrontation with Martinsson.
I’ve reached my limit, he thought. Not only in relation to Martinsson but perhaps in relation to everything I do.
He wondered what the consequences of his fight with Martinsson would be. He had struck him in the face. It would come down to word against word, just like the case with Eva Persson and her mother. Holgersson had already proved that she put greater stock in Martinsson’s accounts than his own. And now Wallander had shown himself guilty of excessive force for the second time in only two weeks.
As he lay in the dark, he wondered if he regretted his behavior. He couldn’t honestly say that he did. It was motivated by a sense of personal dignity. The assault had been a necessary reaction to Martinsson’s betrayal. All of the rage that he had been feeling since Höglund had told him about Martinsson had finally bubbled up to the surface.
It was shortly after four when he finally fell asleep.
It was Sunday, the nineteenth of October.
Carter landed in Lisbon on the TAP Portuguese Airlines flight 553 at exactly six thirty in the morning. The connecting flight to Copenhagen was leaving at eight fifteen. As usual, his entry into Europe disturbed him. He felt protected in Africa. Here he was in foreign territory.
At home he had looked carefully at his selection of passports and finally settled on the identity of Lukas Habermann, a German citizen born in Kassel in 1939. After going through customs in Portugal, he went into the nearest bathroom and cut the passport into small pieces that he then flushed down the toilet. He would continue his journey as the Englishman Richard Stanton, born in Oxford in 1940. He put on another coat and slicked his hair down with water. After checking his luggage to Copenhagen, he went through the passport control again, this time studiously avoiding the line to the customs officer from the time before. He did not run into any problems. He walked through the terminal until he reached an area that was under construction. Since it was Sunday, there were no workers around. He took out his cell phone only after making sure that he was alone.
She answered immediately. He didn’t like talking on the phone, so he only asked short questions and received equally brief and concise answers.
She was not able to tell him anything about Cheng’s whereabouts. He was supposed to have contacted her in the early evening, but he had never called.
Carter listened to her big news with some skepticism. He could not fully believe that it was true. He was not used to being lucky.
But he was finally convinced. Robert Modin had indeed been brought straight into their trap.
After the conversation was over, Carter thought about Cheng. Something must have happened to him. But on the other hand, they now had access to Modin, and he was their biggest threat.
Carter put away his phone and went to the executive lounge, where he had an apple and a cup of tea.
The plane to Copenhagen took off five minutes later than scheduled.
Carter sat in seat 3D, on the aisle. The window seat made him feel too trapped.
He told the flight attendant that he would not be requiring breakfast.
Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Wallander and Martinsson met in the corridor outside the lunchroom at the police station at exactly eight o’clock on
Sunday morning. It was as if they had decided on the time and place in advance. Since they approached the lunchroom from opposite ends of the corridor, Wallander felt as if they were participating in a duel. But instead of drawing pistols, they nodded curtly at each other and went in to get coffee. The coffee machine had broken down again. They read the handwritten sign that had been affixed to the front. Martinsson had a black eye and his lower lip was swollen.
“I’m going to get you for what you did,” Martinsson said. “But first we have to finish this case.”
“It was wrong of me to hit you,” Wallander said. “But that’s the only thing I’ll take back.”
They said nothing more about what had happened. Hansson came in and stared nervously at them.
Wallander suggested that they may as well have their meeting in the lunchroom rather than move to a conference room. Hansson put on a pot of water and offered to make them coffee from his private stash. Just as they were pouring it out, Höglund arrived. Wallander assumed it must be Hansson who had notified her of the latest events, but it turned out to be Martinsson. Wallander gathered that he had said nothing about the fight, but he noticed that Martinsson looked at her with a new coldness. He must have spent the brief night figuring out just who could have snitched on him to Wallander.
Once Alfredsson had joined them, they were ready to begin the meeting. Wallander asked Hansson to inform Viktorsson of the night’s events. In the present situation it was even more important that the district attorney’s office was kept up to date. There would probably be a press conference later in the day, but Chief Holgersson would have to take care of it. Wallander asked Höglund to assist her if she had time. She looked surprised.