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Date One, in which Wallander has a lucky escape.

Wallander arrived somewhat nervously at the restaurant.  They’d arranged to meet for 7:30 and he was a few minutes early.  He hoped they would be able to recognise each other.  If she was as attractive as her voice on the phone had suggested he would have no trouble picking her out, but he hoped she didn’t take one look at him and change her mind.

“Who wants an aging policeman anyway?” he thought.  It had mainly been his daughter Linda’s idea to answer the advert in the Personals section of the paper.  Given his own previous experience with such things he could be forgiven for feeling sceptical.

A little story that kind of leads on from an incident in "Stefan's Day".  Light and humourous, not too serious.

The first thing that was noticed to have disappeared was a large number of shopping trolleys belonging to one of Ystad’s supermarkets.  The duty manager had no idea where, or even how, they could have gone.  One day they had been there, the next they weren’t.

Kurt Wallander’s first priority was not shopping trolleys.  He had serious crimes to solve, and Chief Holgersson to keep happy.  The force’s annual performance reviews were coming up and there were a great number of far more pressing things to do than look for a hundred shopping trolleys that, for all he knew, the supermarket staff had probably misplaced themselves.

If it had just been the missing shopping trolleys nobody would have given the odd business a second thought.  It would have been chalked up to carelessness, or the work of shiftless young boys with nothing better to do.  But when other things began to go missing, everybody in the town soon knew about it.  And everybody in town was soon outraged by it.