The Troubled Man Read Free

than anything he had experienced in his young life. More than forty years later, Wallander had no difficulty recalling all those chaotic emotions.
Death strikes
, he sometimes thought. It has a powerful and unforgiving fist.
    Two weeks later he acquired a dog, a black Labrador puppy. He wasn’t quite a purebred, but he was nevertheless described by the owner as top class. Wallander had decided in advance that the dog would be called Jussi, after the world-famous Swedish tenor who was one of Wallander’s greatest heroes.
    Nearly four years after he bought the house, on January 12, 2007, Wallander’s whole life changed in an instant.
    As he stepped out into the hall a few paces behind Kristina Magnusson,whom he liked viewing from behind when nobody was looking, the phone rang in his office. He considered ignoring it, but instead he turned and went back in. It was Linda. She had a few days off, having worked on New Year’s Eve, during which Ystad had been unusually lively, with lots of cases of domestic violence and assaults.
    “Do you have a minute?”
    “Not really. We’re on the verge of identifying some crooks in a big case.”
    “I need to see you.”
    Wallander thought she sounded tense. He started to worry, as he always did, that something might have happened to her.
    “Is it anything serious?”
    “Not at all.”
    “I can meet you at one o’clock.”
    “Mossby Strand beach?”
    Wallander thought she was joking.
    “Should I bring my bathing suit?”
    “I’m serious. Mossby Strand. But no bathing suit.”
    “Why do we have to go out there in the cold with this icy wind blowing?”
    “I’ll be there at one o’clock. So will you.”
    She hung up before he could ask anything else. What did she want? He stood there, trying in vain to think of an answer. Then he went to the conference room with the best television set and sat for two hours going through CCTV camera footage for the case he was working on, the brutal attack and robbery of an elderly arms dealer and his wife. As twelve-thirty approached, they were still only halfway through. Wallander stood up and announced that they could review the rest of the tapes after two o’clock. Martinsson, one of the officers Wallander had worked with longest in Ystad, looked at him in surprise.
    “You mean we should stop now? With so much still to do? You don’t usually break for lunch.”
    “I’m not going to eat. I have an appointment.”
    He left the room, thinking that his tone of voice had been unnecessarily sharp. He and Martinsson were not only colleagues, they were also friends. When Wallander threw his housewarming party out at Löderup it was of course Martinsson who gave a speech in praise of him, the dog, and the house. We are like an old hardworking couple, he thought as he left the police station. An old couple who are always bickering, mainly to keep each other on our toes.
    He went to his car, a Peugeot he’d had for the last four years, and drove off. How many times have I driven along this road? How many more timeswill I drive along it? As he waited for a red light to change, he remembered something his father had told him about a cousin Wallander had never met. His cousin used to be captain of a ferry plying between several islands in the Stockholm archipelago—short trips, no more than five minutes at a time, but year in, year out, the same crossings. One afternoon in October something snapped inside him. The ferry had a full load, but he suddenly changed course and headed straight out to sea. He said later that he knew there was enough diesel in the tank to take him as far as one of the Baltic states. But that was all he said, after he was overpowered by angry passengers and the coast guard raced out to put the ferry back on course. He never explained why he did what he did.
    But in a vague sort of way, Wallander thought he understood him.
    As he drove west along the coast road he could see dark thunderclouds building up on the horizon. The