“I’ve grown better-tempered in my old age,” replied his father mildly.

Kurt Wallander couldn’t believe his ears. His father was going to get married? Better-tempered in his old age? Now, when he was more impossible than he’d ever been?

Then they had quarreled. It ended up with his father throwing his coffee cup into the tulip bed and locking himself in the shed where he used to paint his pictures with the same motif, repeated over and over again: sunset in an autumnal landscape, with or without a wood grouse in the foreground, depending on the taste of whoever commissioned it.

Kurt Wallander drove home much too fast. He had to put a stop to this crazy business. How on earth could Gertrud Anderson work for his father for a year and not see it was impossible to live with him?

He parked the car on Mariagatan in central Ystad where he lived, and made up his mind to call his sister Kristina in Stockholm right away. He would ask her to come to Skane. Nobody could change his father’s mind. But perhaps Gertrud Anderson could be made to see sense.

He never got around to calling his sister. When he got up to his apartment on the top floor, he could see the door had been broken open. A few minutes later it was clear the thieves had marched off with his brand-new stereo equipment, CD player, all his discs and records, the television, radio, clocks, and a camera. He slumped into a chair and just sat there for a long while, wondering what to do. In the end, he rang his workplace and asked to speak with one of the CID inspectors, Martinson, who he knew was on duty that Sunday.

He was kept waiting for ages before Martinson eventually came to the phone. Wallander guessed he’d been having coffee and chatting to some of the cops who were taking a rest from the big traffic operation they were mounting that weekend.