‘I had just started to wonder where you were,’ he said.
‘I’ve been ill,’ Wallander said.
‘And yet people reported seeing you in the building.’
‘I’m fine again now,’ Wallander said. ‘It was the stomach flu. Mussels.’
‘You’ve been assigned to foot patrol,’ Lohman said. ‘Talk to Hakansson.’
Wallander walked to the room where the patrol squad received their assignments. Hakansson, who was large and fat and always sweating, was sitting at a table and leafing through a magazine. He looked up when Wallander walked in.
‘Central city,’ he said. ‘Wittberg is leaving at nine. End at three. Go with him.’
Wallander nodded and walked to the changing room. He took his uniform out of his locker and changed. Just as he finished, Wittberg walked in. He was thirty years old and always talked about his dreams of one day driving a racing car.
They left the station at a quarter past nine.
‘Things are always calmer when it’s warm,’ Wittberg said. ‘No unnecessary intervention on our part, then perhaps the day will turn out calm.’
And the day did indeed turn out to be calm. By the time Wallander hung up his uniform, shortly after three, they had not made a single intervention, except for stopping a cyclist who was riding on the wrong side of the street.
Wallander got home at four o’clock. He had stopped at the shop on the way home, just in case Mona changed her mind and was hungry when she came by after all.
By half past four he had showered and changed his clothes. There were still four and a half hours until Mona would come. Nothing prevents me from taking another walk in Pildamms Park, Wallander thought. Especially if I’m out with my invisible dog.
He hesitated. Hemberg had given him express orders.
But he went anyway. At half past five he walked down the same path as before. The young people who had been playing guitar and drinking wine were gone. The bench where the drunk men had been sitting was also empty. Wallander decided to keep going for another quarter of an hour. Then he would go home. He walked down a hill and paused, watching some ducks swimming around in the large pond. He heard birds singing nearby. The trees gave off a strong scent of early summer. An older couple walked past. Wallander heard them talking about someone’s ‘poor sister’. Whose sister it was and why she was the object of pity, he never found out.
He was just about to walk back the same way he had come when he discovered two people sitting in the shade of a tree. If they were drunk, he couldn’t tell. One of the men stood up. His walk was unsteady. His friend still sitting under the tree had nodded off. His chin rested against his chest. Wallander walked closer but did not recognise him from the night before. The man was poorly dressed and there was an empty vodka bottle between his feet.
Wallander crouched down to try to see his face. At the same time he heard the crunch of steps on the gravel path behind him. When he turned round there were two girls standing there. He recognised one of them without being able to say from where.
‘It’s one of those damn cops,’ the girl said. ‘Who hit me at the demonstration.’
Then Wallander realised who it was: the girl who had verbally assaulted him at the cafe the week before.
Wallander rose to his feet. At that same moment he saw from the other girl’s face that something was happening behind his back. He quickly turned round. The man who had been leaning against the tree had not been asleep. Now he was standing. And he had a knife in his hand.
After that everything happened very quickly. Later Wallander would only remember that the girls had screamed and run away. Wallander had lifted his arms to shield himself, but it was too late. He had not managed to block the thrust. The knife struck him in the middle of his chest. A warm darkness washed over him.
Even before he sank down onto the gravel path his memory had stopped registering what was happening.
After that everything had been a fog. Or perhaps a thickly flowing sea in which everything was white and still.
Wallander lay sunken in deep unconsciousness for four days. He underwent two complicated operations. The knife had grazed his heart. But he survived. And slowly he returned from the fog. When at last, on the morning of the fifth day, he opened his eyes, he did not know what had happened or where he was.
But next to his bed there was a face he recognised.
A face that meant everything. Mona’s face.
And she was smiling.
EPILOGUE
One day at the start of September, when Wallander received the go-ahead from his doctor that he could start work a week later, he called up Hemberg. Later that afternoon Hemberg came out to his apartment in Rosengard. They bumped into each other in the stairwell. Wallander had just taken out the rubbish.
‘It was here where it all started,’ Hemberg said, nodding at Halen’s door.
‘No one else has moved in yet,’ Wallander said. ‘The furniture is still there. The fire damage hasn’t been repaired. Every time I walk in or out I still think it smells like smoke.’
They sat in Wallander’s kitchen drinking coffee. The September day was unusually brisk. Hemberg was wearing a thick sweater under his coat.
‘Autumn came early this year,’ he said.
‘I went out to visit my father yesterday,’ Wallander said. ‘He’s moved from the city to Loderup. It’s beautiful out there in the middle of the plains.’
‘How one can voluntarily make one’s home out there in the middle of all that mud exceeds my powers of comprehension,’ Hemberg said dismissively. ‘Then comes winter. And one is trapped by the snow.’
‘He seems to like it,’ Wallander said. ‘And I don’t think he cares very much about the weather. He just works on his paintings from morning till night.’
‘I didn’t know your father was an artist.’
‘He paints the same motif again and again,’ Wallander said. ‘A landscape. With or without a grouse.’
He stood up. Hemberg followed him to the main room, where the painting hung.
‘One of my neighbours has one of those,’ Hemberg said. ‘They appear to be popular.’
They returned to the kitchen.
‘You made all the mistakes you can make,’ Hemberg said. ‘But I’ve already told you that. You don’t undertake investigative work alone, you don’t intervene without backup. You were only a centimetre or so from death. I hope you’ve learned something. At least how not to act.’
Wallander did not answer. Hemberg was right, of course.
‘But you were stubborn,’ Hemberg continued. ‘It was you who discovered that Halen had changed his name. We would of course also have discovered this eventually. We would also have found Rune Blom. But you thought logically, and you thought correctly.’
‘I called you out of curiosity,’ Wallander said. ‘There’s still a lot I don’t know.’
Hemberg told him. Rune Blom had confessed, and he could also be tied to the murder of Alexandra Batista through the forensic evidence.
‘The whole thing started in 1954,’ Hemberg said. ‘Blom has been very detailed. He and Halen, or Hansson as he was called back then, had been on the same crew on a ship bound for Brazil. In Sao Luis they had come into possession of the precious stones. He claims that they bought them for a negligible price from a drunk Brazilian who didn’t know their true worth. They probably didn’t either. If they stole them or actually purchased them, we’ll probably never know. They had decided to split their bounty. But then it so happened that Blom ended up in a Brazilian prison, for manslaughter. And then Halen took advantage of the situation, since he had the stones. He changed his name and quit sailing after a few years and hid out here in Malmo. Met Batista and counted on the fact that Blom would spend the rest of his life in a Brazilian prison. But Blom was later released and started to look for Halen. Somehow Halen found out that Blom had turned up in Malmo. He got scared and put an extra lock on the door. But continued seeing Batista. Blom was spying on him. Blom claims that Halen committed suicide on the day that Blom found out where he lived. Apparently this was enough to frighten him so much that he went home and shot himself. You may wonder about that. Why didn’t he give the stones to Blom? Why swallow them and then shoot himself? What’s the point of being so greedy that you prefer dying instead of giving away something that has a little monetary value?’