Authors: Henning Mankell
“I’m aware that this request comes out of the blue,” he said. “But I have a personal reason. And I can make myself available during the Midsummer holiday, even though I’m down for a week’s vacation then.”
Mattson didn’t protest. Wallander was granted four days off. He went back to his office and looked up on the Internet the exact locations of Amalienborg and Niklasgården. The information he found about the two institutions wasn’t enough to help him decide which was the right one. Both of them seemed to care for people with a wide variety of serious disabilities.
He handed Jussi over to his neighbors, who would look after him for the next few days. The dog’s kennel was deserted. Wallander lay down on top of the bed, set the alarm clock for three, and slept for a few hours. It was four o’clock when he got into his car and set off northward. Dawn was enveloped by a diaphanous mist, but that meant it would be a fine day. He arrived in Mariefred shortly after noon. After lunch in a roadside restaurant, he dozed
in his car for a while, then set off for Amalienborg, a former college with an annex that had been turned into a nursing home. At the front desk Wallander produced his police ID and hoped that would be sufficient for him to find out whether he had come to the right place. The receptionist wasn’t sure what to do and got her supervisor, who studied Wallander’s ID carefully.
“Signe von Enke,” he said in a friendly tone. “That’s all I need to know. Is she here or not? It’s really about her parents, who have disappeared.”
The supervisor’s badge indicated that her name was Anna Gustafsson.
She listened to Wallander, then studied him for a moment before answering.
“A naval commander?” she said. “Is that him?”
“Yes, that’s him,” said Wallander, making no attempt to conceal his surprise.
“I’ve read about him in the newspapers.”
“I’m talking about his daughter,” said Wallander. “Is she here?”
Anna Gustafsson shook her head.
“No,” she said. “We don’t have anyone named Signe. None of our patients is the daughter of a naval commander. I can promise you that.”
On the way to his next port of call, Wallander ran into a violent thunderstorm. The rain was so heavy that he was forced to stop, unable to see anything through the windshield. He drove down a side road and switched off the engine. As he sat there, enclosed in a kind of bubble, with the rain pelting against the car roof, he tried yet again to work out what had happened to the two missing persons. Even if Håkan von Enke was the first to run away, or to be the victim of a crime or an accident, that didn’t necessarily mean that Louise’s disappearance was a direct consequence of what had happened to him. That was an elementary pearl of wisdom from Rydberg during his time as Wallander’s mentor. Often an incident that happened or was discovered last was actually the beginning rather than the conclusion of a sequence of events. He thought about the messy state of one of Håkan von Enke’s desk drawers. The compass inside his head was whirling around without settling on a direction in which to point.
The bottom line was that anything was possible. Not even the perception that Håkan von Enke was worried was necessarily fact. Wallander had seen ghosts before, even if he usually managed to stay immune to illusions. He had also tried to trace lots of missing persons during his career. Nearly always there were indications from the very beginning that there was either a natural explanation or there were grounds for being worried. But in the case of Håkan and Louise, he simply didn’t know. Everything was very unclear, he
thought as he sat in his car, waiting for the cloudburst to subside. A state of mental fog to match the lack of real-life visibility.
When the rain eventually stopped, he made his way to Niklasgården, attractively located on the shore of a lake that his map told him was called Vångsjön. The white-painted wood buildings were on a slope dotted with clumps of tall trees, and beyond them extensive cornfields and pastureland. Wallander got out of the car and took deep breaths of air made invigorating after the rain. It was like looking at one of the old posters that decorated the walls of his classroom at school in Limhamn: biblical landscapes, always Palestine with shepherds and flocks of sheep, and Swedish agricultural landscapes in all their variations. For a moment he was overcome by a nostalgic longing to be back in the days when those posters had dominated his thoughts, but he shrugged it off. He knew that sentimentality about the past only drew attention to the fact that he was getting old, and made the process even more painful and frightening.
He took a pair of binoculars from his backpack and scanned the buildings and their park-like grounds. Wallander couldn’t help smiling at the thought that he was surveying this pretty, summery scene as a sort of periscope in the guise of an old, scratched Peugeot. He noticed several wheelchairs standing in the shade of some trees. He adjusted the focus and tried to hold the binoculars steady. There were people sitting in the wheelchairs with their heads drooping. One of them, a woman whose age he found impossible to guess, was resting her chin on her chest. In another wheelchair was a man, a young man as far as Wallander could make out, with his head leaning back as if his neck was incapable of supporting it. Wallander lowered his binoculars. He felt uneasy about what lay in store for him. He returned to his car and drove up to the main building, where signs informed him that the Södermanland county council welcomed him and told visitors where various paths led. Wallander went into the reception area. He rang a bell and waited. He could hear a radio somewhere in the background. A woman emerged from an adjacent room. She was in her forties, and Wallander was immediately struck by her beauty. She had short black hair and dark eyes, and she greeted him with a smile. When she spoke, he could hear that she had a foreign accent. Wallander guessed that she came from an Arab country. He showed her his ID and asked his question. He didn’t receive a direct answer. The beautiful woman continued to smile at him.
“This is the first time a police officer has visited us,” she said. “And you’ve come from so far away! But I’m afraid I can’t give you any names. Everybody living here has a right to privacy.”
“I understand that, of course,” said Wallander. “But if necessary I will get a warrant that will give me the right to go through every single room you have here and all your records, for every single patient. I would rather not do that. It would be sufficient for you to simply nod or shake your head. Then I promise to go away and never come back.”
She thought for a moment before answering. Wallander was still taken by how beautiful she was.
“Ask your question,” she said eventually. “I see your point.”
“Is there somebody living here named Signe von Enke? She’s about forty years old and handicapped from birth.”
She nodded. Just once, but that was enough. Now Wallander knew where Signe was. Before going any further he must talk to Ytterberg.
He had managed to tear his eyes away from the woman and turn away, when it occurred to him that there was another question she might be prepared to answer. He looked at her again.
“One more thing,” he said. “When did Signe last have a visitor?”
She thought for a moment before answering. With words this time, not a movement of the head.
“That was a few months ago,” she said. “Sometime in April. I can check if it’s important.”
“It’s extremely important,” Wallander said. “It would be a great help.”
She disappeared into the room she had emerged from earlier. A few minutes later she came back with a sheet of paper in her hand.
“April tenth,” she said. “That was her latest visit. Nobody has been here since then. She has become a very lonely person.”
Wallander thought for a moment.
The tenth of April. The day before Håkan von Enke set out on his walk. And never came back
.
“I assume it was her father who visited her on that occasion,” he said slowly.
She nodded.
Wallander left Niklasgården and drove to Stockholm. He parked outside the building in Grevgatan and unlocked the apartment with the keys Linda had given him.
He realized he would have to go back to the beginning. But the beginning of what?
He stood in the middle of the living room for a long time, trying to understand. But he couldn’t think of anything that would further his understanding of the case.
He was surrounded by silence. At submarine depth, where the restless movement of the ocean was undetectable.
Wallander spent the night in the empty apartment.
Because it was warm, almost oppressively so, he left some windows ajar and watched the thin curtains swaying gently. He could occasionally hear people shouting in the street below. Wallander had the feeling that he was listening to phantoms, as you always do in recently vacated houses or apartments. But it wasn’t to save the cost of a hotel room that he had asked Linda for the keys to the apartment. Wallander knew from experience that first impressions are often the most important ones in a criminal investigation. A return visit rarely produces anything new. But this time he knew what he was looking for.
Wallander tiptoed around in his socks to avoid making the neighbors suspicious. He went through Håkan’s study and Louise’s two chests of drawers. He also searched the big bookcase in the living room, and any closets and shelves he could find. By about ten o’clock, when he slipped cautiously out of the apartment to find somewhere to eat, he was as sure as he could be. All trace of the handicapped daughter had been carefully removed.
Wallander ate at what claimed to be a Hungarian restaurant, despite the fact that all the waiters and other staff in the open-plan kitchen spoke Italian. As he returned to the third-floor apartment in the slow-moving elevator, he wondered where he should sleep. There was a sofa in Håkan’s study, but he eventually lay down under a tartan blanket on a couch in the living room, where he had drunk tea with Louise.
He was woken up at about one by a particularly noisy group of merrymakers, and as he lay in the dark room, he was suddenly wide awake. It was absurd for there to be absolutely nothing at all in the apartment to mark the existence of the woman who was now living at Niklasgården. It almost made him physically ill not to find any pictures or even documents, the bureaucratic identification indicators that surround all Swedes from birth. He got up and tiptoed around once more. He was carrying a penlight, and he occasionally used it to illuminate the darkest corners. He avoided turning on more than a single lamp here and there in case someone in the apartment building across the street might react, but at the same time he also thought of the lamps that Håkan von Enke always used to leave burning all night. Wasn’t the invisible line between reality and lies in the von Enke family unusually easy to cross? He stood in the middle of the kitchen and thought it
over yet again. Then he carried on indefatigably, becoming the bloodhound he could sometimes arouse within himself, and resolved not to allow it to rest until it picked up the trail of Signe; it had to be here somewhere.
He succeeded at about four in the morning. In the bookcase, hidden behind some big art books, he found a photo album. It did not contain many pictures, but they were carefully mounted, most of them in faded color, a few in black and white. There was no written commentary, only pictures. There was no picture of the two siblings together, but then he hadn’t expected to find one. When Hans was born, Signe had already vanished, been whisked away, rubbed out. Wallander counted less than fifty photos. Signe was alone in most of them, lying in various positions. But in the last picture Louise was holding her, looking away from the camera. Wallander felt sad to note that the picture made it clear that Louise would have preferred not to have to sit there, holding the child in her arms. The photograph exuded an atmosphere of intense desolation. Wallander shook his head, feeling very uncomfortable.
He lay down on the sofa again. He was exhausted but also relieved, and he fell asleep immediately. He woke up with a start at about eight o’clock when a car in the street below sounded its horn loudly. He had been dreaming about horses. A herd had come galloping over the sand dunes at Mossby and raced straight into the water. He tried to figure out what the dream meant, but he failed. It hardly ever worked; he had no idea how to do it. He ran a bath, drank some coffee, and called Ytterberg at about nine. He was in a meeting. Wallander asked the receptionist to pass on a message and received a text in response saying that Ytterberg could meet him at ten-thirty at city hall, on the side overlooking the water. Wallander was waiting there when Ytterberg arrived on his bicycle. There was a café nearby, and before long they were sitting at a table, each with a cup of coffee.
“What are you doing here?” asked Ytterberg. “I thought you preferred little towns or rural areas.”
“I do. But sometimes you have no choice.”
Wallander told him about Signe. Ytterberg listened intently without interrupting. Wallander finished by mentioning the photo album he had discovered during the night. He had brought it with him in a plastic bag, and he placed it on the table. Ytterberg slid his coffee cup to one side, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, and leafed carefully through the album.
“How old is she now?” he asked. “About forty?”
“Yes, if I understood Atkins correctly.”
“There aren’t any pictures of her in here after the age of two, or three at the most.”
“Exactly,” said Wallander. “Unless there’s another album. But I don’t think so. After the age of two she’s been expunged.”
Ytterberg pulled a face and carefully slid the album back into the plastic bag. A white-painted passenger boat chugged past along Riddarfjärden. Wallander moved his chair into the shade.
“I thought of going back to Niklasgården,” Wallander said. “After all, I’m now a member of this girl’s family. But I need the go-ahead from you. You should be aware of what I’m doing.”
“What good do you think it would do, meeting her?”
“I don’t know. But her father visited her the day before he disappeared. And she hasn’t had any visitors since then.”