The Fifth Woman: A Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

Author:Henning Mankell [Mankell, Henning]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 1565845471
Amazon: B005GPWTVM
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2000-08-02T05:00:00+00:00

They found a little restaurant that was cozy and quiet, with only a few guests even though it was Saturday night. He was glad that Linda had agreed to come. When they found themselves in this town that was unfamiliar to both of them, Wallander decided, without having planned it, to talk about his ideas for the future.

But first, of course, they talked about his father, her grandfather.

“I often wondered about the good relationship the two of you had,” said Wallander. “Maybe it was envy, plain and simple. I would see you together, and I saw something that I remembered from my own childhood, but that had totally disappeared.”

“Maybe it’s good to have a generation in between,” said Linda. “It’s not uncommon for grandparents and grandchildren to get along better than parents and children.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can see it’s true for me. And a lot of my friends say the same thing.”

“But I’ve always had a feeling that it was unnecessary,” said Wallander. “I’ve never understood why he couldn’t accept the fact that I joined the police. If only he’d told me why. Or given me an alternative. But he never did.”

“Grandpa was pretty eccentric,” she said. “And temperamental. But what would you say if I suddenly came and told you in all seriousness that I was thinking of becoming a cop?”

Wallander started to laugh.

“I honestly don’t know what I’d say. We’ve talked about this before.”

After dinner they went back to the hotel. On a thermometer outside a hardware store Wallander saw that it was—2°C. They sat down in the lobby. The hotel didn’t have many guests, and they had the place to themselves. Wallander cautiously asked Linda how it was going with her acting aspirations. He saw at once that she didn’t want to talk about it. At least not right then. He let the topic drop, but it made him uneasy. Over the course of the past few years Linda had changed tracks and interests several times. What made Wallander nervous was how quickly she made these changes. It gave him the impression they were rash decisions.

Linda poured herself some tea from a thermos and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.

“Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve stopped darning our socks,” said Wallander.

She gave him a perplexed look.

“I mean it,” he continued. “When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks. I even learned how to do it in school myself. Then suddenly one day it was over. Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No one bothered to repair them anymore. The whole society changed. ‘Wear it out and toss it’ was the only rule that really applied to everybody. I guess there were some people who kept on darning their socks. But they were never seen or heard from. As long as it was just a matter of our socks, the change didn’t make much difference. But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible but ever-present moral code.

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