“Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee?”
“As you may have heard, there’s been a break-in upstairs. I don’t have time right now.”
She pointed to her door.
“I had a security door put in several years ago. Almost all of us did. Everyone except Falk.”
“Did you know him?”
“He kept to himself. We said hello if we met on the stairs. But that was it.”
Wallander suspected she wasn’t telling the truth but decided not to ask anything else. The only thing he wanted was to get away.
“I’ll have to take a rain check on that coffee,” he said.
“We’ll see,” she said.
The door closed. Wallander was sweating. He rushed up the last flight of stairs. At least she had pointed out a significant fact. Most people in the building had put in security doors, but not Tynnes Falk, the man whom his wife said was anxious and sure he was surrounded by enemies.
The door had not been repaired yet. Wallander walked into the apartment and saw that Nyberg and his team had left the chaos intact.
He walked into the kitchen and sat down by the table. It was very quiet in the apartment. He looked down at his watch. It was ten to three. He thought he could hear footsteps on the stairs. Tynnes Falk was probably too cheap to have it put in, he thought. Security doors cost somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand crowns. Or maybe Marianne Falk is wrong. There were no enemies. But Wallander was doubtful. He thought about the mysterious notations in the diary. There was also the facts that Tynnes Falk’s body had been stolen from the morgue and that someone had broken into his apartment and stolen at least the diary and a photograph.
That could only mean one thing. Someone didn’t want the picture or the diary to be studied too closely.
Wallander cursed himself once again for not removing the picture when he had had the chance.
He heard footsteps on the stairs outside the apartment. That had to be Marianne Falk. The door to the apartment softly opened and Wallander got up to greet her. He left the kitchen and stepped into the hall.
He sensed the danger instinctively and pulled back.
But it was too late.
A violent explosion ricocheted through the apartment.
Chapter Fifteen
Wallander threw himself to one side.
It was only later that he realized his quick reflexes had saved his life, after Nyberg and the forensic team had extracted the bullet in the wall next to the front door. In the subsequent reconstruction of events, and above all from examining the entry hole in Wallander’s jacket, they were able to determine what had happened. Wallander had walked into the hall to greet Marianne Falk. He had turned toward the front door only to sense that something behind it constituted a threat — that the person behind the door was not Marianne Falk. Wallander had jerked backward and tripped on the rug in the hallway. That had been enough to let the bullet aimed at his chest pass between his body and his left arm. It had torn through his jacket, leaving a small but distinct hole.
That evening he got out the measuring tape and measured the distance from his shirt sleeve to where he thought his heart was. Seven centimeters. The conclusion he came to, as he was pouring himself a glass of whiskey, was that the rug had saved his life. It reminded him of the time long ago when he had been stabbed. He had been a young officer in Malmö. The blade had penetrated his chest within eight centimeters of his heart. At the time he had created a kind of mantra for himself. There is a time for living, a time for dying. Now he was struck by the worrying fact that his margin of survival during the past thirty years had decreased by exactly one centimeter.
He still didn’t know exactly what had happened or who had fired the shot. Wallander had not been able to catch a glimpse of more than a shadow behind that door — a rapidly moving figure that seemed to dissipate the moment the shot ricocheted through the apartment and he found himself on the floor of the closet among Tynnes Falk’s coats.
He thought he had been hit. He thought the cry that he heard as the deafening roar of the shot was still echoing in his ears must be his own. But it had come from Marianne Falk, who had been knocked down on the stairs by the fleeing shadow. She had not managed to get a good look at him either. She had heard the shot but thought that it came from below. Therefore she stopped and turned around. Then when she heard someone approach from behind, she turned back, but as she was turning she was hit in the face and tumbled over backwards.
Perhaps most remarkable was the fact that neither of the two officers in the patrol car stationed outside the building saw anything. The assailant must have left the building by the front entrance, since the door to the cellar was locked. But the officers claimed not to have seen anyone leave the building. They had seen Marianne Falk go in, then they had heard the shot without immediately knowing what it was. But they had not seen anyone leave.
Martinsson grudgingly accepted this fact, after having the whole building searched. He forced all the nervous senior citizens and the somewhat more controlled physical therapist to have their apartments scrutinized by policemen, who peeked into every closet and under every bed. There was no trace of the assailant anywhere. If it hadn’t been for the bullet buried in the wall, Wallander would have started to think it had all been his imagination.
But he knew it was real, and he knew something else he didn’t yet want to admit to himself. He knew that the rug had been even more of a blessing than he’d first thought. Not only because it let him escape the bullet, but because his fall had convinced the assailant that he had hit his mark. The bullet that Nyberg extracted from the wall had been the kind that formed a crater-like wound in its victim. When Nyberg showed it to Wallander, the latter instantly understood why the marksman had fired only one shot. He had been convinced that one bullet would have been fatal.
A regional alert had gone out at once, but everyone knew it wouldn’t lead to anything, because no one knew who they were looking for. After all, neither Marianne Falk nor Wallander had been able to give a description of the assailant. Wallander and Martinsson sat down in the kitchen while Nyberg’s team worked on the bullet. Wallander had handed over his jacket to them as well. His ears still hurt from the loud explosion. Lisa Holgersson arrived with Höglund, and Wallander had to explain all over again what had happened.
“The question is why he fired,” Martinsson said. “There’s already been a break-in here. Now an armed assailant returns.”
“We can perhaps speculate that it was the same person,” Wallander said. “But why did he return? I can’t see any other explanation than that he’s looking for something — something he didn’t manage to get the first time he was here.”
“Aren’t we forgetting something else?” Höglund asked. “Who was he trying to kill?”
Wallander had asked himself the same question from the very beginning. Did this have anything to do with the night he’d come here to search the apartment? Had it been a mistake to look out of the window? Had someone been out there watching him? He knew he should tell them about it, but something kept him from doing so.
“Why would anyone want to shoot me?” Wallander asked. “I think it was just plain bad luck that I was here when he returned. What we should ask ourselves is what he came back for, which in turn means that Marianne Falk should be brought back here as soon as possible.”
Marianne Falk had gone home to change her clothes.
Martinsson left the apartment with Holgersson. The forensic team was finishing up. Hoglund stayed in the kitchen with Wallander. Marianne Falk called to say she was on her way.