Apelbergsgatan is the setting for a sequence of discoveries and attacks that brings Kurt Wallander repeatedly to the same building, number 10. Falk’s top-floor apartment first offers a quiet, meticulously ordered interior; soon it is broken into and stripped apart, and a later visit nearly costs Wallander his life. The address becomes both a practical focus of the inquiry and a place where its uncertainties turn physical: evidence disappears, the apparent safety of a familiar doorway fails, and the police return to watch it again.

The building and Falk’s apartment

Kurt Wallander first goes to number 10 late at night, before the police have formally arranged access to Falk’s flat. He has pass keys in his pocket and knows that entering is unnecessary as well as unlawful, but his sense of urgency keeps him from waiting until morning. The town seems deserted beneath an overcast sky; heavily laden trucks pass on their way to the Poland ferries. The hour reminds him of the time at which Falk died. From the street, Wallander sees that the top floor, where Falk lived, is dark.

The building’s stairs are dark too. Wallander uses a small flashlight, listens at the two top-floor doors, and opens the right-hand one with the pass keys. The ordinary locks surprise him: they sit uneasily with Marianne Falk’s account of her ex-husband as anxious and surrounded by enemies. Inside, the flat has an unusual absence of smell, which Wallander notices before searching. He checks that he is alone, takes off his shoes, closes the curtains, puts on rubber gloves, and turns on a lamp. The phone rings, but the caller leaves no message. From behind a narrow gap in the curtains, Wallander sees nobody in the empty street.

The rooms initially suggest order rather than threat. In the living room, leather furniture, maritime pictures, and a large bookcase make a settled interior. An old brass compass, a green writing pad, carefully aligned pens, and an antique clay oil lamp occupy the desk. In the kitchen, a coffee cup and notepad remain in place. These details make the later disorder legible: the apartment is not merely a location in which evidence is found, but a carefully arranged private space whose contents are subsequently disturbed.

An unauthorized visit becomes a crime scene

The next formal visit begins with Martinsson bringing Wallander to number 10 to meet Marianne Falk, who has come with the keys. She is angry that Falk’s body has gone missing and demands to know how such a failure could happen. Before they enter, Wallander stops Martinsson: the apartment door stands wide open, and the locks Wallander had carefully worked the previous night have been broken, apparently with a crowbar. The difference between the entry he made and the damage now visible makes clear that someone else has forced their way inside.

Wallander sends Marianne Falk to wait in her car and asks Martinsson to call for backup. They wait on the stairs until Hansson and three other officers arrive; Wallander takes a gun from one of them. After calling into the flat and receiving no answer, the officers enter. No intruder is there. Instead, drawers have been emptied onto the floor, paintings hang crooked, and a record collection lies shattered. Wallander recognizes a change in the room but initially cannot identify what has been taken.

The investigators later establish that the diary and a photograph are missing. The missing objects give the ransacking a more specific meaning: someone appears not simply to have searched the apartment, but to have wanted those materials kept from the police. Wallander regrets not taking the photograph during his first, unauthorized search. A neighbour adds another point of contrast: most residents had installed security doors, but Falk had not. The detail complicates the picture of a man supposedly worried about enemies, without resolving whether Marianne Falk’s account was mistaken or Falk had another reason for leaving his door less secure.

The shot at the doorway

At 2:50 p.m., Wallander is alone in the damaged flat when Marianne Falk appears to be returning. He rises to greet her and steps into the hall. Sensing danger, he pulls back, but a shot tears through the apartment. The later reconstruction establishes that the bullet was aimed at his chest and passed between his body and his left arm, leaving a small hole in his jacket. He had tripped on a rug and ended up on the floor of the hall cupboard beneath Falk’s coats; the rug and his movement had helped him escape the bullet.

The attacker is beyond the door, but Wallander sees only a rapidly moving shadow. Marianne Falk is struck in the face on the stairs as the assailant flees, and she tumbles backwards while clutching the banister. She has not seen the attacker clearly either. Officers in a patrol car outside fail to see anyone leave, though their later search establishes that the front entrance was the only apparent exit: the cellar door was locked. The building’s ordinary passages therefore become a puzzle as well as a crime scene, with the shooter’s escape unexplained despite the police presence.

That evening, Wallander measures the gap between his sleeve and the place he thinks his heart is: nine centimetres. The near miss recalls an earlier stabbing, when the blade came within ten centimetres of his heart. His private measure of survival has narrowed by one centimetre over thirty years. The address thus joins an immediate assault to a longer awareness of mortality, without disclosing who fired or how the attacker escaped.

A recurring investigative address

The apartment remains a point of comparison as the inquiry widens. Hansson reports that a dark blue Mercedes van, rented in Malmö under the name Fu Cheng and paid for with American Express, was overdue; the false hotel and nonexistent address leave the vehicle’s trail unresolved. Later, when Robert Modin disappears, Wallander directs forensic technicians to compare fingerprints with material from Apelbergsgatan as well as Runnerströms Torg, the power substation, Hökberg’s handbag, and Eriksson’s flat. The address has become one element in a network of linked crime scenes, not an isolated burglary.

After the gunman dies by suicide in a muddy field, Wallander believes the dead man was the intruder who entered Falk’s flat and tried to kill him. He also suspects that the same man may have been responsible for Hökberg’s and Landahl’s deaths, but this remains a hypothesis, not a confirmed identification. Wallander briefly feels that the danger has ended, then learns that he is wrong. When he concludes that another event is likely to occur in Ystad and may be rooted in Falk’s death or the contents of Falk’s computer, he orders surveillance at Apelbergsgatan resumed, alongside surveillance at Runnerströms Torg. The building’s significance is therefore cumulative: each return adds evidence, but none makes the apartment’s central mysteries fully secure or settled.