The Troubled Man (5 page)

Mattson thought for a moment before his next question. Wallander was annoyed by his squeaky voice and wondered if the man sitting opposite him had the slightest idea of what police work in the field entailed, what horrific experiences it could involve.

“About twenty years ago you were apprehended by some of your colleagues for driving under the influence. They hushed it up, and nothing came of it. But you must understand that I wonder if you do in fact have an alcohol problem that you have been keeping under wraps, and which has now led to a most unfortunate consequence.”

Wallander remembered that occasion all too well. He had been in Malmö and had dinner with Mona. It was after their divorce, at a time when he still imagined he would be able to persuade her to come back to him. They had ended up arguing, and he had seen her being picked up outside the restaurant by a man he didn’t recognize. He was so jealous and upset that he took leave of his senses and drove home, instead of getting a hotel room or sleeping in the car. His colleagues brought him back to his apartment and parked his car there, and he heard nothing more about it. One of the officers who had arrested him that night was now dead; the other had retired. But evidently rumors were still buzzing around the station. That surprised him.

“I’m not denying that. But as you said yourself, it was twenty years ago. And I assure you, I don’t have an alcohol problem. If I choose to eat out one night in the middle of the week, I can’t see why that should be anybody’s business but my own.”

“I will have to take the necessary steps. Since you are due some vacation time and are not involved in a serious investigation at the moment, I suggest you take a week off. There will have to be an internal investigation, of course. That’s all I can say at the moment.”

Wallander stood up. Mattson remained seated.

“Is there anything you’d like to add?” he asked.

“No,” said Wallander. “I’ll do what you suggest. I’ll take time off and go home.”

“It would be best if you left your gun here.”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Wallander. “Irrespective of what you think.”

Wallander went back to his office and fetched his jacket. Then he left the police station via the garage and drove home. It occurred to him that he might still have alcohol in his blood after yesterday’s gallivanting, but since things couldn’t get any worse than they were, he kept on going. A strong northeasterly wind had blown up. Wallander shuddered as he walked from the car to his front door. Jussi was leaping around inside his kennel, but Wallander didn’t have the strength even to think about taking him for a walk. He undressed, lay down, and went to sleep. By the time he woke up it was twelve o’clock. He lay there motionless, his eyes open, and listened to the wind battering the house walls.

The feeling that something wasn’t as it should be had started nagging at him again. A shadow had descended over his existence. How had he not even missed the gun when he woke up? It was as if somebody else had been acting in his stead, and then had switched off his memory so that he wouldn’t know what had happened.

He got up, dressed, and tried to eat, although he still felt sick. He was very tempted to pour himself a glass of wine, but he resisted. He was doing the dishes when Linda called.

“I’m on my way,” she said. “I’m just checking that you’re at home.”

She hung up before he had chance to say a single word. She arrived twenty minutes later, carrying her sleeping baby. Linda sat down opposite her father on the brown leather sofa he had bought the year they moved to Ystad. The baby was asleep on a chair next to her. Kurt wanted to talk about her but Linda shook her head. Later, but not now; first things first.

“I heard what happened,” she said. “But even so, I feel as if I don’t know anything about it.”

“Did Martinsson call?”

“Yes, right after he spoke to you. He was very unhappy about it all.”

“Not as unhappy as I am,” said Wallander.

“Tell me what I don’t know.”

“If you’ve come here to interrogate me you might as well leave.”

“I just want to know. You’re the last person I’d ever have expected to do something like this.”

“Nobody died,” said Wallander. “Nobody even got hurt. Besides, anyone can do anything. I’ve lived long enough to know that.”

Then he told her the whole story, from the restlessness that had driven
him out of the house in the first place, to not knowing why he had taken his gun with him. When he had finished she said nothing for a long time.

“I believe you,” she said eventually. “Everything you’re telling me comes down to one single fact, one single circumstance in your life. That you are far too lonely. You suddenly lose control, and there’s nobody around to calm you down, to stop you from rushing off. But there’s still something I wonder about.”

“What?”

“Have you told me everything? Or is there something you’re not saying?”

Wallander wondered for a moment if he should tell her about the strange feeling of a shadow closing in on him. But he shook his head; there was nothing more to tell her.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” she asked. “I can’t remember what the rule book says.”

“There’ll be an internal investigation. After that, I have no idea.”

“Is there a chance they’ll fire you?”

“I figure I’m too old to be fired. Besides, the offense isn’t all that serious. But they might force me into early retirement.”

“Wouldn’t that appeal to you?”

Wallander was chewing away at an apple when she asked him that question. He hurled the core at the wall with all his strength.

“You’ve just said that my problem is loneliness!” he roared. “What would it be like if I was forced to retire? I’d have nothing at all left.”

Wallander’s bellowing woke the baby up.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re scared,” she said. “I can understand that. I would be too. I don’t think anybody should apologize for being scared.”

Linda stayed until the evening, made him dinner, and they spoke no more about what had happened. Kurt escorted her to the car through the cold, gusting wind.

“Will you manage?” she asked.

“I’ll always get by. But thank you for asking.”

The following day Wallander had a call from Lennart Mattson, who wanted to see him without delay. When they met, he was introduced to an internal affairs officer from Malmö who had come to interrogate him.

“Whenever it suits you,” said the investigator, whose name was Holmgren and who was about the same age as Wallander.

“Now,” said Wallander. “Why put it off?”

They shut themselves away in one of the police station’s smallest conference rooms. Wallander made an effort to be precise, not to make excuses, not to trivialize what had happened. Holmgren took notes, occasionally asked Wallander to take a step backward, repeat an answer, and then continue. It seemed to Wallander that if the roles had been reversed, the interrogation would doubtless have proceeded in exactly the same way. It took slightly more than an hour. Holmgren put down his pen and looked at Wallander—not in the way one would look at a criminal who had just confessed, but as somebody who had messed things up. He seemed to be feeling sorry for the trouble Wallander found himself in.

“You didn’t fire a shot,” said Holmgren. “You forgot your gun when you drank too much at a restaurant. That’s serious—there’s no getting away from that—but you haven’t actually committed a crime. You haven’t assaulted anyone; you haven’t taken bribes; you haven’t harassed anyone.”

“So I’m not going to be fired, you don’t think?”

“Hardly. But it’s not up to me.”

“But your guess would be …?”

“I’m not going to guess. You’ll have to wait and see.”

Holmgren began collecting his papers and placing them carefully in his briefcase. He suddenly paused.

“It’s obviously an advantage if this business doesn’t get into the hands of the media,” he said. “Things always take a turn for the worse when we can’t hush up this sort of thing and keep it inside the police force.”

“I think we’ll be okay,” Wallander said. “There’s been no mention of it so far, so that’s an indication that nothing has been leaked.”

But Wallander was wrong. That same day there was a knock on his door. He had been lying down, but he got up because he thought it was one of his neighbors. When he opened the door, a photographer took a flash picture of Wallander’s face. Standing next to the cameraman was a reporter who introduced herself as Lisa Halbing, with a smile Wallander immediately classified as fake.

“Can we talk?” she asked aggressively.

“What about?” wondered Wallander, who already had a pain in his stomach.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything.”

The cameraman took a whole series of pictures. Wallander’s first instinct was to punch him, but he did no such thing, of course. Instead he demanded that the cameraman promise not to take any photographs inside the house; that was his private domain. When both the cameraman and Lisa Halbing
promised to respect his privacy, he let them in and invited them to sit down at his kitchen table. He served them coffee and the remains of a sponge cake he’d been presented with a few days earlier by one of his neighbors who was an avid baker.

“Which newspaper?” he asked when he had finished serving coffee. “I forgot to ask.”

“I should have said.” Lisa Halbing was heavily made up and was trying to conceal her excess weight beneath a loose-fitting tunic shirt. She was in her thirties, and looked a bit like Linda—although his daughter would never have worn so much makeup.

“I work for various papers,” Halbing said. “If I have a good story, I sell it to the one that pays best.”

“And right now you think I’m a good story, is that it?”

“On a scale of one to ten you might just about scrape into four. No more than that.”

“What would I have been if I’d shot the waiter in the restaurant?”

“Then you’d have been a perfect ten. That would obviously have been worth a front-page headline.”

“How did you find out about this?”

The cameraman was itching to pick up his camera, but he kept his promise. Lisa Halbing was still wearing her forced smile.

“You realize of course that I’m not going to answer that question.”

“I assume it was the waiter who tipped you off.”

“It wasn’t, in fact. But I’m not going to say anything more about that.”

Looking back, it was clear to Wallander that one of his colleagues must have leaked the details. It could have been anyone, even Lennart Mattson himself. Or the investigating officer from Malmö. How much would they have earned? All the years he had been a police officer, leaks had been a continuing problem, but he had never been affected himself until now. He had never contacted a journalist, nor had he ever heard the slightest suggestion that any of his close colleagues had done so either. But then, what did he know? Precisely nothing.

Later that evening he called Linda and warned her about what she could expect to read in the following day’s paper.

“Did you tell them the honest truth?”

“At least nobody can accuse me of lying.”

“Then you’ll be okay. Lies are what they’re after. They’ll make a meal of it, but I don’t think there’ll be any repercussions.”

Wallander slept badly that night. The following day he was waiting for the phone to ring, but he had only two calls. One was from Kristina Magnusson,
who was angry about the way the incident had been blown out of proportion. Shortly afterward, Lennart Mattson called.

“It’s a pity you made a statement to the press,” he said disapprovingly.

Wallander was furious.

“What would you have done if you’d been confronted by a journalist and a cameraman on your front doorstep? People who knew every detail of what had happened? Would you have shut the door in their face, or lied to them?”

“I thought it was you who had contacted them,” said Mattson lamely.

“Then you are even more stupid than I thought you were.”

Wallander slammed down the phone and unplugged it. Then he called Linda on his cell phone and said she should use that number if she wanted to talk to him.

“Come with us,” she said.

“Come with you where?”

She seemed surprised.

“Didn’t I tell you? We’re off to Stockholm. It’s Håkan’s seventy-fifth birthday. Come with us!”

“No,” he said. “I’m staying here. I’m not in a party mood. I’ve had enough of that after my evening at the restaurant.”

“We’re leaving the day after tomorrow. Think about it.”

When Wallander went to bed that night he was convinced that he wasn’t going anywhere. But by the next morning he had changed his mind. The neighbors could take care of Jussi. It might be a good idea to make himself scarce for a few days.

The following day he flew to Stockholm. Linda and her family drove. He checked into a hotel across from the Central Station. When he leafed through the evening newspapers, he noted that the gun story had already been relegated to an inside page. The big news story of the day was an unusually audacious bank robbery in Gothenburg, carried out by four robbers wearing ABBA masks. Reluctantly, he sent the robbers his grateful thanks.

That night he slept unusually soundly in his hotel bed.

Håkan von Enke’s birthday party was held in a rented party facility in Djursholm, the upmarket suburb of Stockholm. Wallander had never been there before. Linda assured him that a business suit would be appropriate—von Enke hated dinner jackets and tails, although he was very fond of the various uniforms he had worn during his long naval career. Wallander could have worn his police uniform if he’d wanted to, but he had taken his best suit with him. Under the circumstances, it didn’t feel right for him to use his uniform.

Why on earth had he agreed to go to Stockholm? Wallander asked himself as the express train from Arlanda Airport came to a halt in the Central Station. Perhaps it would have been better to go somewhere else. He occasionally used to take short trips to Skagen in Denmark, where he liked to stroll along the beaches, visit the art gallery, and lounge around in one of the guesthouses he had been using for the past thirty years. It was to Skagen that he had retreated many years ago when he had toyed with the idea of resigning from the police forcce. But here he was in Stockholm to attend a birthday party.