Sidetracked: A Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

Author:Henning Mankell [Mankell, Henning]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled
ISBN: 9781565845077
Google: 0TCSCGzIEy0C
Amazon: B005MJDJQQ
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 1999-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

The heat wave continued.

Wallander realized that he was already in the middle of summer without having noticed it. He was sweating when he walked down the hill from the police station toward town and the hospital.

He hadn’t even stopped by the front desk to see whether he had any messages when they came back from Malmö and got the call from Svedberg. He had stood completely motionless next to the car, as if he had suddenly lost all his bearings, and then slowly, almost drawling, he told Ann-Britt Höglund that she would have to make the report to their colleagues while he walked down to the hospital where Carlman’s daughter lay dying. He hadn’t waited for any answer from her; he just turned and left, and it was then, on the hill, after he had already started to sweat, that he knew he was enveloped by a summertime that might be long and hot and dry. He never noticed when Svedberg drove past him and waved.

He walked looking down at the pavement, a habit he had whenever he had a lot on his mind. This time he tried to make use of the short distance from the police station to the hospital entrance by working on an idea that was entirely new, and which he wasn’t sure how to handle. The starting point was quite simple. In a brief period of time, less than ten days in fact, a girl had burned herself to death in a rapeseed field, another had tried to commit suicide after her father was murdered, and a third, whose father had also been murdered, had disappeared in some unspecified and rather mysterious manner. They were of different ages; Carlman’s daughter was the oldest, but even so, all of them were young. Two of the girls had indirectly run afoul of the same perpetrator, while the third had killed herself. What distinguished them was that the girl in the field had nothing whatsoever to do with the other two. But in Wallander’s mind it felt as if he once again had assumed personal responsibility for all these events on behalf of his own generation, and especially as the bad father he thought he had been to his own daughter Linda. Wallander had a tendency to criticize himself. Then he would grow gloomy and distant, filled with a melancholy that he could scarcely define. Often this led to a period of sleepless nights. But since he was now forced to function in spite of everything, as a cop in a far corner of the world, and as the leader of an investigative team, he tried to shake off his uneasiness and sort out his thoughts by taking a walk.

What kind of a world was he living in? A world in which young people burned themselves to death or tried to kill themselves some other way. He decided they were living in the midst of an era that could be called the Age of Failure. Something they had believed in and built up had turned out to be less tenable than expected.

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