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advantage if this business doesn’t get into the hands of the media,’ he said. Things always take a turn for the worse when we can’t hush up this sort of thing and keep it inside the police force.’
    ‘I think we’ll be OK,’ Wallander said. ‘There’s been no mention of it so far, so that’s an indication that nothing has been leaked.’
    But Wallander was wrong. That same day there was a knock on his door. He had been lying down, but he got up because he thought it was one of his neighbours. When he opened the door, a photographer took a flash picture of Wallander’s face. Standing next to the cameraman was a reporter who introduced herself as Lisa Halbing, with a smile Wallander immediately classified as fake.
    ‘Can we talk?’ she asked aggressively.
    ‘What about?’ wondered Wallander, who already had a pain in his stomach.
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘I don’t think anything.’
    The cameraman took a whole series of pictures. Wallander’s first instinct was to punch him, but he did no such thing, of course. Instead he demanded that the cameraman promise not to take any photographs inside the house; that was his private domain. When both the cameraman and Lisa Halbing promised to respect his privacy, he let them in and invited them to sit down at his kitchen table. He served them coffee and the remains of a sponge cake he’d been presented with a few days earlier by one of his neighbours who was an avid baker.
    ‘Which newspaper?’ he asked when he had finished serving coffee. ‘I forgot to ask.’
    ‘I should have said.’ Lisa Halbing was heavily made up and was trying to conceal her excess weight beneath a loose-fitting tunic shirt. She was in her thirties, and looked a bit like Linda - although his daughter would never have worn so much make-up.
    ‘I work for various papers,’ Halbing said. ‘If I have a good story, I sell it to the one that pays best.’
    ‘And right now you think I’m a good story, is that it?’
    ‘On a scale of one to ten you might just about scrape into four. No more than that.’
    ‘What would I have been if I’d shot the waiter in the restaurant?’
    ‘Then you’d have been a perfect ten. That would obviously have been worth a front-page headline.’
    ‘How did you find out about this?’
    The photographer was itching to pick up his camera, but he kept his promise. Lisa Halbing was still wearing her forced smile.
    ‘You realise of course that I’m not going to answer that question.’
    ‘I assume it was the waiter who tipped you off.’
    ‘It wasn’t, in fact. But I’m not going to say anything more about that.’
    Looking back, it was clear to Wallander that one of his colleagues must have leaked the details. It could have been anyone, even Lennart Mattson himself. Or the investigating officer from Malmo. How much would they have earned? All the years he had been a police officer, leaks had been a continuing problem, but he had never been affected himself until now. He had never contacted a journalist, nor had he ever heard the slightest suggestion that any of his close colleagues had done so either. But then, what did he know? Precisely nothing.
    Later that evening he called Linda and warned her about what she could expect to read in the following day’s paper.
    ‘Did you tell them the honest truth?’
    ‘At least nobody can accuse me of lying.’
    ‘Then you’ll be OK. Lies are what they’re after. They’ll make a meal of it, but I don’t think there’ll be any repercussions.’
    Wallander slept badly that night. The following day he was waiting for the phone to ring, but he had only two calls. One was from Kristina Magnusson, who was angry about the way the incident had been blown out of proportion. Shortly afterwards, Lennart Mattson called.
    ‘It’s a pity you made a statement to the press,’ he said disapprovingly.
    Wallander was furious.
    ‘What would you have done if you’d been confronted by a journalist and a cameraman on your