"You get to know after a while," Martinsson replied hesitantly. "Sometimes you can hear straight away that it's a hoax. This time whoever rang seemed very definite."

"Two dead men in a rubber life-raft that's going to be washed up on the coast near here?"

Martinsson nodded.

Wallander stifled another yawn and leaned back in his chair.

"Have we had any reports about a boat sinking or anything like that?" he asked.

"None at all," Martinsson replied.

"Inform all the other police districts along the coast" Wallander said. "Talk to the coastguards. But we can't start a search based on nothing more than an anonymous telephone call. We'll just have to wait and see what happens."

Martinsson nodded and stood up.

"I agree," he said. "We'll have to wait and see."

"It could get pretty hellish tonight," Wallander said, nodding towards the window. "Snow."

"I'm going home now anyway," Martinsson said, looking at his watch. "Snow or no snow."

Martinsson left, and Wallander stretched out in his chair. He could feel how tired he was. He'd been forced to answer emergency calls two nights in a row. The first night he'd led the hunt for a suspected rapist who'd barricaded himself in an empty summer cottage at Sandskogen. The man was drugged to the eyeballs and there was reason to think he could be armed, so they'd surrounded the place until 5 a.m., when he'd given himself up. The following night Wallander had been called out to a murder in the town centre. A birthday party had got out of hand, and the man whose birthday it was had been stabbed in the temple with a carving knife.

He got up from his chair and put on his fleece jacket. I've got to get some sleep, he thought. Somebody else can look after the snowstorm. When he left the station, the gusts of wind forced him to bend double. He unlocked his Peugeot and scrambled in. The snow that had settled on the windows gave him the feeling of being in a warm, cosy room. He started the engine, inserted a tape, and closed his eyes.