The Troubled Man Read Free Page A

radio had warned that there was a risk of more snow in the evening. Shortly before he passed the side road to Marsvinsholm he was overtaken by a motorcycle. The rider waved at him and made Wallander think of something that frightened him more than anything else: that one of these days Linda would have a motorcycle accident. He had been totally unprepared when, several years earlier, she turned up outside his apartment on her newly bought bike, a Harley-Davidson covered in glittering chrome. His first question when she took off her crash helmet was whether she had lost her mind.
    “You don’t know about all my dreams,” she had said with a broad, happy grin. “Just as I’m sure I don’t know all yours.”
    “I don’t dream about a motorbike, that’s for sure.”
    “Too bad. We could have gone for rides together.”
    He had gone so far as to promise to buy her a car and pay for all her gas if she got rid of the motorcycle. But she refused, and he knew that the battle was lost. She had inherited his stubbornness, and he would never be able to take the motorcycle away from her, no matter what temptations he could offer.
    When he turned into the parking lot at Mossby Strand, which was deserted and windswept, she had taken off her helmet and was standing on top of a sand dune, her hair fluttering in the wind. Wallander switched off the engine and sat looking at her, his daughter in the dark leather outfit and the expensive boots from a factory in California that she had paid nearly a month’s wages for. Once upon a time she was a little girl sitting on my knee, Wallander thought, and I was the biggest hero in her life. Now she is thirty-six, a police officer just like me, with a brain of her own and a big smile. What more could I ask for?
    He stepped out into the wind and plowed his way through the soft sand until he was standing by her side. She smiled at him.
    “Something happened here,” she said. “Do you remember what?”
    “You told me that you were going to become a police officer. On this very spot.”
    “I’m thinking of something else.”
    Wallander realized what she was getting at.
    “A rubber dinghy drifted ashore here, with two dead men inside it,” he said. “So many years ago that I can’t remember exactly when. An incident from a different world, you might say.”
    “Tell me about that world.”
    “That couldn’t possibly be why you made me come here.”
    “Tell me anyway!”
    Wallander stretched out his hand toward the water.
    “We didn’t know much about the countries on the other side of the sea. We sometimes pretended the Baltic states didn’t exist. We were cut off from our nearest neighbors. And they were cut off from us. But then that rubber dinghy came ashore, and the investigation took me to Latvia, to Riga. I went behind the iron curtain that no longer exists. The world was different then. Not worse, not better, just different.”
    “I’m going to have a baby,” said Linda. “I’m pregnant.”
    Wallander held his breath, as if he didn’t understand what she’d said. Then he stared at her stomach, hidden behind her leather suit. She burst out laughing.
    “There’s nothing to see. I’m only in the second month.”
    Looking back, Wallander remembered every detail of that meeting with Linda, when she told him her staggering news. They walked down to the beach, leaning into the howling wind. She answered his questions. When he arrived back at the police station an hour late, he had almost forgotten all about the investigation he was in charge of.
    Shortly before the end of that day, just as it was beginning to snow again, they finally found pictures of the two men who had probably been involved in the arms theft and brutal murder. Wallander summed up what they all knew: that they had taken a big step toward solving this case.
    When the meeting ended and everybody was gathering together their papers, Wallander felt an almost irresistible urge to tell them about the great joy