hear footsteps on the stairs. Falk was probably too mean to have it put in, he thought. Security doors cost somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 kronor. Or maybe Marianne Falk is wrong. There were no enemies. But Wallander was doubtful. He thought about the mysterious notations in the diary. There was also the fact that Falk's body had been stolen, and that someone had broken into his flat and made off with the diary and a photograph. That could mean only one thing: someone didn't want the picture or the diary to be studied by the police. Wallander cursed himself once again for not taking the photograph when he had had the chance.
He heard footsteps on the stairs outside. Mrs Falk. The door to the flat softly opened. Wallander got up to greet her. He stepped into the hall.
He sensed danger instinctively and pulled back. But it was too late. A violent explosion ricocheted through the flat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wallander's instincts saved his life. Nyberg extracted the bullet from the wall next to the living-room door jamb. In the reconstruction of events and from examining the entry hole in Wallander's jacket, they were able to determine what had happened. Wallander had walked into the hall to greet Marianne Falk. As he reached for the front door he sensed a threat behind it. Whoever it was behind the door was not Mrs Falk. He had jerked back and tripped on the rug. The bullet aimed at his chest passed between his body and his left arm. It had torn through his jacket, leaving only a small hole.
That evening he measured the distance from his shirtsleeve to where he thought his heart was. Nine centimetres. He reflected, as he was pouring himself a glass of whisky, that the rug had saved him. It reminded him of the time, long ago, when he had been a young officer in Malmö. He had been stabbed and the blade had come within 10 centimetres of his heart. He had created a kind of mantra for himself – "There is a time for living, a time for dying." He was struck by the worrying fact that his margin of survival during the past 30 years had decreased by exactly 1 centimetre.
Wallander did not know who had fired the shot. He had not been able to glimpse more than a rapidly moving shadow beyond the door, a figure that seemed to dissolve the moment the echo of the gunshot had bounced across the flat and he had found himself on the floor of the hall cupboard under Falk's coats.
He thought he had been hit. He thought the cry he heard as the deafening roar of the shot echoed in his ears must be his own. But it came from Mrs Falk, who had been knocked down on the stairs by the fleeing shadow. She had not got a good look at him either. She heard the shot, but she had thought it came from below her. She had stopped and turned to look down. Then, when she heard someone running from above her, she turned but, as she did so, she was hit in the face and tumbled backwards, clutching the banister.
Most extraordinary perhaps was that neither of the officers in the patrol car outside saw anything. Wallander's assailant can only have left the building by the front entrance, since the door to the cellar was locked, but the officers noticed no-one leave the building. They had seen Mrs Falk go in, then they had heard the shot without realising immediately what it was, but they had not seen anyone come out of the building.
Martinsson reluctantly accepted this, after having the building searched from top to bottom. He obliged all the nervous senior citizens and the somewhat more controlled therapist to have their flats scoured by policemen. They peered into every cupboard and under every bed, but there was no trace of the assailant. But for the bullet buried in the wall, Wallander would have started to wonder if it had been a figment of his imagination. But he knew it was real enough, and he knew something else that he didn't yet want to admit to himself. He knew that the rug had been more of a blessing than he first thought. Not only because tripping on it saved his life, but because his fall had persuaded the assailant that he had hit his mark. The bullet that Nyberg extracted from the wall behind him was the kind