Kenneth Branagh
has achieved something which I thought impossible. He has matched the brilliant performances of the Swedish production of the Wallander Police Detective Books written by Henning Mankel with a three of four bi annual series. The fourth will be the last comprising the White Lioness and the two part adaptation of the final book Wallancer book, a Troubled Man.
The first of the third series, “An event in autumn” Wallander is setting up home with his new girl friend, after the death of his father. He has become estranged from his daughter following her marriage to which he was not invited. This marks a change from the original TV series in which the daughter comes to work as a police woman at his station.
The story begins with the audience understanding that an inebriated lorry driver on the ferry between Sweden and Poland spots what he believes is a person falling from the side of the ship in the water past the window at which he is sitting in a bar lounge. The vessel is halted and a passenger and crew count taken and no one are found to be missing.
There are then two events which become connected to this incident. First the part remains, including a hand, of a female are found washed ashore suggesting a body caught up in a ship’s propeller. Meanwhile Kurt’s (Wallander’s) dog discovers a body buried under brambles in the garden of his idyllic new home and situation. This depresses him more than his partner. The length of time the body has lain leads to an investigation of previous owners. It also leads to contact with the neighbouring farmer and when his partner is attacked while investigation movement outside, Kurt chases the individual to the premises of the father. How are these events connected?
The mystery is solved when Kurt speaks to a young woman waiting at the quayside and finds that her friend has not appeared following a ferry trip to Poland which had been taken to seek financial assistance for the child the friend was carrying. It subsequently emerges that the father of the child is the bar man from the ferry who is also the son of the neighbouring farmer. He altered the ship’s passenger list via a computer terminal in the bar, It also emerges that the son had previously killed the girl whose body is found during close to the bramble bush. Kurt had discovered that in the advertising brochure for the property there were no bramble bushes but on visiting the farm he noted some bramble bushes and spaces revealing that some of the bushes had been transplanted.
It emerges that the son had befriended a girl staying at Wallander’s new home in the past. He had killed the girl and the knowledge of what happened had led his mother to commit suicide. The father had reburied the body on learning that the new owner was the famous police inspector. Once the truth emerges the father also commits suicide. However before this Montalbano turns his attention of a scrap yard owner who lived at the home for a time and to the mystery surrounding there whereabouts of his daughter who is found to be living in the USA and who contacts Wallander to prove she is alive. This part of the investigation reveals that the man sexual abused his daughter forcing her to also act as a prostitute along with the girl discovered buried and the two Polish girls’ one of whom was murdered. The other girl is also ordered by the killer of the other two.
This depressing episode gets worse when Kurt pressurises his female assistant to break into the Scrap yard against her better judgement. She is forced to shoot the two guard dogs that attack them and the owner strikes the assistant with a spade placing her in a coma from which she does not immediately recover. His partner leaves him not so much because of the history of the property but Kurt finds it increasingly difficult to communicate and share his feelings, in part requirements of his work but also tied in with the relationship with his father and daughter, the separation from his wife and feeling correctly responsible for what happened to his female
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