An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  “Are you referring to your father?”

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  “I ask questions I need answers to. Nothing else.”

  “He was so incredibly mean. And evil. He wouldn’t let her go to the dentist until her teeth had started to rot away. He treated my mother as if she were totally devoid of dignity. He used to humiliate her by waking her up in the middle of the night, forcing her to lie naked on the floor and repeat over and over again how worthless she was, until dawn. She was so scared of him that she started shaking whenever he was near.”

  Ivar Pihlak suddenly fell silent. Wallander waited. The gun was still pointing straight at him. Wallander had the feeling that this trial of strength could last awhile. But he had to wait for the moment when the man lost concentration. Then Wallander would have the opportunity of attacking him and taking away his gun.

  “During those years I often wondered about my mother,” said Pihlak. “Why couldn’t she simply leave him? It made me both despise her and feel sorry for her. How can you possibly have such contrasting feelings for the same person? I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to that. But if she had left him, it would never have happened.”

  Wallander suspected there was deep-seated anguish in everything Ivar Pihlak said. But he still wasn’t sure what caused that feeling.

  “One day she’d had enough,” said Pihlak. “She hanged herself in the kitchen. I couldn’t take any more …”

  “So you killed him?”

  “It was during the night. I must have woken up when she kicked the chair away. But my father carried on sleeping peacefully. I hit him on the head with a hammer. I dug the graves that same night. By dawn they were already buried and the surface soil had been replaced.”

  “But some of the currant bushes ended up in the wrong place.”

  Pihlak looked at Wallander in surprise.

  “Is that how you caught on to it?”

  “What happened next?”

  “It was all straightforward. I reported that they had both left Sweden. Nobody checked up on that information: the war was still on, everything was in chaos, people were fleeing all over the place, without identities, without roots, without aims. And so I moved, first to Sjöbo, and then, after the war, to Gothenburg. I lived in various apartments while I was studying. I supported myself by working in the docks. I had strong arms in those days.”

  The gun was still pointing at Wallander, but he had the feeling that Ivar Pihlak’s concentration was less intense. Wallander cautiously moved his feet so that when the moment came he would be able to brace himself before throwing himself at the old man.

  “My father was a monster,” said Pihlak. “I have never regretted what I did. But I was unable to avoid my punishment. I see his shadow around me all the time. I think I see my father’s face and hear him saying: ‘You will never be able to shake me off.’ ”

  He suddenly burst into tears. Wallander hesitated, but realized the moment had come. He jumped up off the chair and threw himself at Ivar Pihlak—but he had misjudged the old man’s alertness. He swayed to one side and hit Wallander on the head with the butt of his pistol. It was not a hard blow, but it was sufficient to knock Wallander out. When he came back to his senses, Pihlak was leaning over him.

  “You should have left me alone,” Pihlak yelled. “You should have let me die with my shame and my secret. That was all I asked. But now you’ve come and ruined everything.”

  Wallander was horrified to note that Pihlak had now passed beyond his limit. He would shoot at any moment. Trying to attack him again was bound to fail.

  “I’ll leave you in peace,” said Wallander. “I understand why you did what you did. I shall never say anything.”

  “It’s too late. Why should I believe you? You threw yourself at me. You thought you’d be able to sort out an old codger like me without any difficulty.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Nobody does. But we all do in the end.”

  Ivar Pihlak took a step toward him. He was holding the gun with both hands now. Wallander wanted to close his eyes, but he didn’t dare. Linda’s face flitted past in his mind’s eye.

  Pihlak pulled the trigger. But no bullet hit Wallander. No bullet emerged at all. When Ivar Pihlak pulled the trigger, the gun exploded. Bits of metal from the ancient pistol hit Pihlak in the forehead, making a deep hole, and he was dead before his body hit the floor.

  Wallander sat there for ages without moving. He felt incomprehensibly happy inside. He was alive, but the old man was dead. The gun Ivar Pihlak had held in his hands had not obeyed him during the last second of his life.

  Wallander eventually stood up and staggered out to his car. He phoned Martinson and told him what had happened.

  He remained outside the house, buffeted by the wind, waiting. He was thinking of nothing, and he wanted nothing. Being able to continue living was quite enough.

  It was fourteen minutes before he saw the first of the blue lights approaching.

  CHAPTER 26

  Two weeks later, a few days before Christmas, Linda accompanied her father to the farm in Löderup. She had insisted that he should pay the place one more visit, then he could give the keys back to Martinson and begin looking seriously for another house.

  It was a cold, clear day. Wallander said nothing, and had his cap pulled down low over his forehead. Linda wanted him to show her where Ivar Pihlak had died, and where her father had also thought death had come to collect him. Wallander pointed and mumbled, but when Linda wanted to ask questions he merely shook his head. There was nothing else to say.

  Afterward they drove back to Ystad, and went to a pizzeria for a meal. Immediately after the food had been served Wallander started to feel sick. It was a sudden attack, and seemed to come from nowhere. He just managed to get into the men’s room before it was too late.

  Linda looked at him in surprise when he came back.

  “Are you ill?”

  “I suppose it’s only just dawned on me how close I was to dying.”

  He could see that the reality of it all had only just dawned on her as well. They sat there in silence for a long time. The food went cold. It occurred to Wallander later that they had hardly ever been as close to each other as they were at that time.

  The following morning Wallander went early to the police station. He knocked on the door of Martinson’s office. There was nobody there. From another room he could hear the sound of Christmas carols on the radio. Wallander went into the room and put the house keys on Martinson’s desk.

  Then he left the police station and walked down to the center of town. It was snowing—wet snow that melted and formed slush on the pavements.

  Wallander stopped outside the biggest real estate agent’s in town. The windows were covered with pictures of houses for sale between Ystad and Simrishamn.

  Wallander blew his nose into his fingers. There was a house just outside Kåseberga that interested him.

  He went in. As he did so all thoughts of Ivar Pihlak and his story faded into memory. They might come to haunt him in the future, but they would always remain no more than a memory.

  Wallander leafed through catalogues and examined photographs of various houses.

  He lost interest in the house he had seen in the window, the one just outside Kåseberga. The plot was too small, the neighboring houses were too close. He continued looking through the catalogues. There were a lot of houses and farms to choose from, but the price was usually too high. Perhaps an underpaid police officer is condemned to live in an apartment, he thought ironically.

  But he had no intention of giving up. He would find that house one day, and he would buy a dog. Next year he would leave Mariagatan for good. He had made up his mind.

  The day after Wallander’s first visit to the real estate agent’s, there was a thin white layer of snow over the town and the brown fields.

  Christmas that year was cold. Icy winds blew over Skåne from the Baltic.


  Winter had arrived early.

  AFTERWORD

  This story was written many years ago. It had been decided in Holland that everybody who bought a crime novel in a certain month would receive a free book. I was asked if I would write a story. It was a good idea—making people more interested in reading.

  The book was duly published. Many years later the BBC discovered the story and made it the basis of a manuscript for a television film in which Kenneth Branagh would play the part of Wallander. I saw the film, and realized that the story still felt alive and relevant.

  Later, when it became necessary to make a list of all my Wallander stories, I saw an opportunity to publish this “Dutch” story once again.

  Chronologically, it dates to the period just before The Troubled Man, which completed the Wallander series.

  There are no more stories about Kurt Wallander.

  Henning Mankell

  Gothenburg, October 2012

  MANKELL ON WALLANDER

  HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT FINISHED AND WHAT HAPPENED IN BETWEEN

  In a cardboard box down in my cellar is a collection of dusty diaries. They go back quite a long way in time. I’ve been keeping a diary since about 1965. Regularly on and off, you might say. They contain all kinds of things from attempts to create aphorisms to straightforward notes reminding me about things I’d prefer not to have forgotten about the following day. They contain a lot of gaps, sometimes a month or more long, but there are also periods when I have written every day.

  Such as in the spring of 1990. I had returned from a long, unbroken stay in Africa, where I lived for six months at a time. When I got home I soon realized that while I had been away racist tendencies had started to spread in Sweden in a most unpleasant way. Sweden has never been totally free from this social evil, but it was obvious to me that it had increased dramatically.

  After a few months, I made up my mind to write about racism. I had quite different plans at the time for what I was going to write about, but I thought this was important.

  More important.

  When I began to think about what kind of story it would be, it soon dawned on me that the natural path to follow was a crime novel. This was obvious because in my world racist acts are criminal outrages. A logical consequence of this was that I would need an investigator, a crime expert, a police officer.

  One day in May 1990 I wrote in my diary—unfortunately more or less illegible for anyone but me: The warmest day this spring. Went for a walk round the fields. A lot of birdsong. It seemed to me that the police officer I shall describe must realize how difficult it is to be a good police officer. Crime changes in the same way that a society changes. If he is going to be able to do his work properly, he must understand what is going on in the society he lives in.

  I was living in Skåne at the time, in the middle of what could be called “Wallanderland.” I lived in a farmhouse on the edge of the village of Trunnerup. From the garden I could see the sea and a lot of church towers and steeples. When I got back from my walk I took out the telephone directory. First I found the name Kurt. It was short and sounded fairly usual. A longer surname would be appropriate. I spent quite a while looking, and eventually hit upon Wallander.

  That was also neither too common, nor too uncommon.

  So that was what my police officer would be called: Kurt Wallander. And I let him be born in the same year as me: 1948. (Some pedants maintain that this isn’t consistently true in all the books. I’m sure they are right. What is consistently true in this life?)

  Everything one writes is part of a tradition. Authors who maintain that they are totally divorced from literary traditions are lying. You don’t become an artist in no-man’s-land.

  When I started thinking about how Faceless Killers should be written, I realized that the best and most fundamental “crime stories” I could think of were classical Greek dramas. The tradition goes back more than two thousand years in time. A play like Medea, which is about a woman who murders her children because she is jealous of her husband, reflects human beings through the mirror of crime. It’s about contradictions between us and inside us, between individuals and society, between dream and reality. Sometimes these contradictions express themselves in violence, such as racial conflict. And this mirror of crime can take us back to the Greek authors.

  They still inspire us. The only real difference between then and now is that in those days there was hardly anything corresponding to our police force. Conflicts were resolved in a different way; often, gods held sway over human destiny. But generally speaking, that is the only basic difference.

  The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, “the only things worth writing about are love and murder.” He may well have been right. If he had added money, he would have created a trinity, which in one way or another is always present in literature, then as now, and presumably always will be.

  I wrote that novel without ever thinking that there might be more featuring Chief Inspector Wallander. But I realized after the book had been published—and even won a prize—that I might have created a set-up that could be developed further. Another book was written, The Dogs of Riga, dealing with what happened in Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I flew to Riga, and afterward often felt that I ought to write a book about those weeks I spent in Latvia. It was a remarkable time. Tensions between Russians and Latvians had not yet reached bursting point. When I wanted to speak to a Latvian police officer it had to be a secret meeting in a dimly lit beer house. Much of the atmosphere in the novel was a gift as far as I was concerned—I merely had to reproduce the difficulties I had in finding my way around with political tensions red-hot on all sides.

  But I was still not convinced that there would be a series of novels featuring Kurt Wallander. However, on January 9, 1993, I sat down in my little apartment in Maputo to write a third book. It was to be called The White Lioness, and would be about the situation in South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison some years previously, but there was still a real danger that civil war might break out and plunge the country into chaos. It did not take long to work out that the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for Mandela to be murdered. Nothing could prevent that from leading to a bloodbath.

  But just before I actually started writing I became very ill. I had been wandering around Maputo for some time feeling out of sorts. I was tired out, pale, couldn’t sleep. Could I be suffering from malaria? But blood tests showed no sign of parasites. Then one day I bumped into a good friend of mine who took one look at me and said:

  “Your face is all yellow!”

  I don’t remember much about being rushed into a hospital in Johannesburg, but once I got there I was diagnosed as suffering from an aggressive type of jaundice, and had been doing so for far too long.

  I lay in my hospital bed, working out the story in my mind during the nights. By the time I had recovered sufficiently to travel back home to Maputo, it was more or less ready for writing down. If I remember rightly, I wrote the last page first. That was the point I was working toward!

  On April 10 that year, when I had already submitted the text to my publisher, I received worrying confirmation of how my thoughts on the subject had been only too right. On Good Friday a fanatical apartheid supporter shot dead Chris Hani, the chairman of South Africa’s Communist Party, and number two in the ANC. There was no civil war, thanks largely to Nelson Mandela’s intelligent politics. But I still wonder what would have happened if he had been the victim.

  People sometimes say about the Wallander books that they deal with events that later happen in real life. I think that is true. I have no doubt that in some respects it is not impossible to foresee the future, and actually to be right. I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened.

  The starting point
for The Man Who Smiled is about the worst crime involving property one could possibly commit or be a victim of—and it is not being robbed of one’s possessions. What is stolen in such cases is a part of a human being, an organ that can then be sold for transplantation. When I began writing the book I had no doubt that it was a crime that would increase.

  Today it is an industry that is flourishing and expanding.

  Why did Wallander become so popular in so many different countries and cultures? What exactly was it that made him so many people’s friend? It is something I have wondered about, of course, and there is no definite answer. But there might be several partial explanations.

  Here is the one I believe in preference to all others!

  From the very beginning, when I made that spring walk through the fields, I was clear that I would create a human being who was very like myself and the unknown reader. A person who is constantly changing, both mentally and physically. I am changing all the time, and so he would also do the same.

  That led eventually to what I somewhat ironically call “the diabetes syndrome.” After the third novel, I asked Victoria, a friend and a doctor who had read the books: “What disease that a lot of people suffer from would you give this man?”

  Without a trace of doubt she replied immediately: “Diabetes.”

  And so the next time I wrote about Wallander, he was diagnosed as having diabetes. And that made him even more popular.

  Nobody can imagine James Bond stopping in a street, while chasing after some criminal or other, in order to inject himself with insulin. But Wallander does, and so he becomes like any other person who suffers from that illness, or something similar. He might have been afflicted by rheumatism or gout, a heart with an irregular beat or soaring blood pressure. But in fact he has diabetes, and he still suffers from it, although he has it under control.