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crack divided his face in two.
    Wallander sat down on the toilet seat. There was another feeling nagging at him, not just the shame and the fear following what he had done. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He couldn’t recall ever having handled his service issue pistol in a way that broke the rules. Whenever he took it home he always locked it away in the cabinet where he kept a licensed shotgun that he used on the very infrequent occasions he hunted hares with his neighbors. But there was something affecting him much more deeply thanhaving been drunk. Another sort of forgetfulness that he didn’t recognize. A darkness in which he could find no lamps to light.
    When he finally stood up and went to see the chief of police, he had been sitting in the bathroom for over twenty minutes. If Martinsson called to say I was on my way, they probably think I’ve run off, he thought. But it’s not quite as bad as that.
    Following two female police chiefs, Lennart Mattson had taken up his post in Ystad the previous year. He was young, barely forty, and had risen surprisingly quickly through the police bureaucracy, which is where most senior officers came from nowadays. Like most active police officers, Wallander regarded this type of recruitment as ominous for the ability of the police force to carry out its duties properly. The worst part was that Mattson came from Stockholm and complained often that he had difficulty understanding the Skåne dialect. Wallander was aware that some of his colleagues made an effort to speak as broadly as possible whenever they had to talk to Mattson, but Wallander refrained from such malevolent demonstrations. He had decided to keep to himself and not get involved in anything Mattson was doing, as long as he didn’t interfere too much in real police work. Since Mattson also seemed to respect him, Wallander had not had any problems with his new boss so far.
    But he realized that things had now changed once and for all.
    The door to Mattson’s office was ajar. Wallander knocked and went in when he heard Mattson’s high-pitched, almost squeaky voice.
    A patterned sofa and matching armchairs had been squeezed into the office with considerable difficulty. Wallander sat down. Mattson had developed a technique of never opening a conversation if it could possibly be avoided, even if he was the one who had called the meeting. There was a rumor that a consultant from the National Police Board had sat in silence with Mattson for half an hour before standing up, leaving the room without a word having been spoken, and flying back to Stockholm.
    Wallander toyed with the idea of challenging Mattson by not saying anything. But that would only have made him feel worse—he needed to clear the air as quickly as possible.
    “I have no excuse for what happened,” he began. “I accept that it is indefensible, and that you have to take whatever disciplinary steps the regulations specify.”
    Mattson seemed to have prepared his questions in advance, since they came out like machine-gun fire.
    “Has it happened before?”
    “That I’ve left my gun in a restaurant? Of course not!”
    “Do you have an alcohol problem?”
    The question made Wallander frown. What had given Mattson that idea?
    “I’m a moderate drinker,” Wallander said. “When I was younger I suppose I drank a fair amount on the weekend. But I don’t do that anymore.”
    “But nevertheless you went out boozing on a weekday evening?”
    “I didn’t go out
boozing
. I went out for dinner.”
    “A bottle of wine and a cognac with your coffee?”
    “If you already know what I drank, why are you asking? But I don’t call that boozing. I don’t think any sane person in this country would call it that. Boozing is when you swill down schnapps or vodka, probably straight from the bottle, and drink in order to get drunk, not for any other reason.”
    Mattson thought for a moment before his next question. Wallander was annoyed by his squeaky