Authors: Henning Mankell
“My father bought it in Gothenburg sometime in the early 1960s.
Around the time when they started building bigger boats and no longer used wood as the main material. He got it cheap. There was no shortage of herring in those days.”
Wallander described the photo, and wondered where it had been taken.
“Fyrudden,” said Lundberg. “That’s where the boat was berthed.
Helga
, she was named. She was built in a yard in the south of Norway. Tønsberg, I think.”
“Who took the picture?”
“It must have been Gustav Holmqvist. He ran a marine joinery business and was always taking pictures when he wasn’t working.”
“Could your father have known Håkan von Enke?”
“My father’s dead. He never mixed with that crowd.”
“What do you mean, ‘that crowd’?”
“Noblemen.”
“Håkan von Enke is also a seafarer. Like you and your father.”
“I don’t know him. Neither did my dad.”
“Then how did he get ahold of that photograph?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe I should ask Gustav Holmqvist. Do you have his phone number?”
“He doesn’t have a phone number. He’s been dead for fifteen years. And his wife is dead. Their daughter too. They’re all dead.”
Wallander obviously wasn’t going to get any further. There was nothing to suggest that Eskil Lundberg wasn’t telling the truth. Yet at the same time, Wallander had the feeling that something didn’t add up. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
Wallander apologized to Lundberg for disturbing him, and remained sitting with his cell phone in his hand. The drunken man on the other end of the bench had fallen asleep. It suddenly dawned on Wallander that he recognized him. Several years ago Wallander had arrested him and some accomplices for a series of burglaries. The man had spent some years in jail, and then left Ystad. Evidently he was back again.
Wallander stood up and began walking to the police station. He repeated the conversation to himself, word for word. Lundberg hadn’t displayed any curiosity at all. Was he really as uninterested as he seemed to be? Or did he know what I was going to ask about? Wallander continued rehashing the conversation until he was back in his office. He hadn’t reached any clear conclusion.
His thoughts were interrupted by Martinsson, who appeared in the doorway.
“We’ve found the old woman,” he said.
Wallander stared at him. He didn’t know what Martinsson was talking about.
“Who?”
“The woman who killed her husband with an ax. Evelina Andersson. The woman in the swamp. I’m going to drive out there again. Do you want to come with me?”
“Yes, I’ll come.”
Wallander racked his memory in vain. But he didn’t have the slightest idea what Martinsson was talking about.
They took Martinsson’s car. Wallander still didn’t know where they were going, or why. He was feeling increasingly desperate. Martinsson glanced at him.
“Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine.”
It was only after they had left Ystad that his memory became unblocked. It’s that shadow inside my head, Wallander thought, furious with himself. Everything came back to him now, with full force.
“Something just occurred to me,” he said. “I forgot that I have a dentist appointment.”
Martinsson braked.
“Should I turn around?”
“No. One of the others can drive me back.”
Wallander didn’t bother to take a look at the woman they had just lifted out of the swamp. A patrol car took him back to Ystad. He got out at the police station and thanked the driver for the lift, then sat in his own car. He felt cold and worried. The gaps in his memory were scaring him.
After a while he went up to his office. He had decided to talk to his doctor about the sudden spells of darkness that filled his head. He had just sat down when his cell phone gave a chime: he had received a text. It was short and precise.
Both stones Swedish. Neither from U.S.A.’s coasts. Hans-Olov
.
Wallander sat motionless in his chair. He couldn’t decide immediately what that meant, but now he knew for sure that something didn’t add up.
He felt that this was a sort of breakthrough. But exactly what the implications were he didn’t know.
He couldn’t decide if the von Enkes were gliding farther away from him or if they were slowly getting closer.
A few days before Midsummer, Wallander drove north along the coast road. Shortly after Västervik he nearly ran into an elk. He pulled onto the shoulder, his heart racing, and thought of Klara before he could bring himself to continue. His journey took him past a café where, many years ago, he had stopped, exhausted, and been allowed to sleep in a back room. Several times over the years he had thought with a sort of melancholy longing about the waitress who had been so kind to him. When he came to the café he slowed down and drove into the parking area. But he didn’t leave the car. He sat there, hesitating, his hands clamped to the steering wheel. Then he continued on his way.
He knew why he didn’t go in, of course. He was afraid of finding somebody else behind the counter, and being forced to accept that here too, in that café, time had moved on and that he would never be able to return to what now lay so far away in the past.
He came to the harbor at Fyrudden at eleven o’clock. When he got out of the car he saw that the warehouse in the photo was still there, even though it had been converted and now had windows. But the fish boxes were gone, as was the big trawler alongside the quay. The harbor was now full of pleasure boats. Wallander parked outside the red-painted coast guard building, paid the required entrance fee at the chandler’s, and wandered out to the farthest of the jetties.
He acknowledged to himself that the whole journey was like a game of roulette. He hadn’t warned Eskil Lundberg that he would be coming. If he’d called from Skåne he had no doubt that Lundberg would have refused to meet him. But if he was standing here on the quay? He sat on a bench outside the chandler’s shop and took out his cell phone. Now it was sink or swim. If he had been a von Wallander, with a coat of arms and a family motto, those were the words he would have chosen:
sink or swim
. That’s the way it had always been throughout his life. He dialed the number and hoped for the best.
Lundberg answered.
“It’s Wallander. We spoke about a week ago.”
“What do you want?”
If he was surprised, he concealed it well, Wallander thought. Lundberg was evidently one of those enviable people who are always prepared for anything
to happen, for anybody at all to call them out of the blue, a king or a fool—or a police officer from Ystad.
“I’m in Fyrudden,” Wallander informed him, and took the bull by the horns. “I hope you have time to meet me.”
“Why do you think I’d have any more to tell you now than I did when we last spoke?”
That was the moment when Wallander’s long experience as a police officer told him that Lundberg
did
have more to tell him.
“I have the feeling we should talk,” he said.
“Is that your way of telling me that you want to interrogate me?”
“Not at all. I just want to talk to you, and show you the photo I found.”
Lundberg thought for a few moments.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” he said eventually.
Wallander spent the time eating in the café, where he had a view of the harbor, the islands, and in the distance the open sea. He had consulted a sea chart in a glass case on one of the café walls and established that Bokö was to the south of Fyrudden; so it was boats coming from that direction he kept an eye on. He assumed that a fisherman would have a boat at least superficially reminiscent of Sten Nordlander’s wooden gig, but he was completely wrong. Lundberg came in an open plastic boat with an outboard motor. It was filled with plastic buckets and net baskets. He berthed at the jetty and looked around. Wallander made himself known. It was only when he had clambered awkwardly down into the boat and almost fallen over that they shook hands.
“I thought we could go to my place,” said Lundberg. “There are far too many strangers around here for my taste.”
Without waiting for an answer, he pulled away from the jetty and headed for the harbor entrance at what Wallander thought was far too fast a speed. A man in the cockpit of a berthed sailboat stared at them in obvious disapproval. The engine noise was so loud that conversation was impossible. Wallander sat in the bow and watched the tree-clad islands and barren rocks flashing past. They passed through a strait that Wallander recognized from the map on the wall of the café as Halsösundet, and continued south. The islands were still numerous and close together; only occasionally was it possible to glimpse the open sea. Lundberg was wearing calf-length pants, turned-down boots, and a top with the somewhat surprising logo “I burn my own trash.” Wallander guessed he was about fifty, possibly slightly older. That could well fit in with the age of the boy in the photograph.
They turned into an inlet lined with oaks and birches and berthed by a
red-painted boathouse smelling of tar, with swallows flying in and out. Next to the boathouse were two large smoking ovens.
“Your wife said there weren’t any eels left to catch,” Wallander said. “Are things really that bad?”
“Even worse,” said Lundberg. “Soon there won’t be any fish left at all. Didn’t she say that?”
The red-painted two-story house could just be seen in a dip about a hundred yards from the water’s edge. Plastic toys were scattered about in front. Lundberg’s wife, Anna, seemed just as cautious when they shook hands as she had on the phone.
The kitchen smelled of boiled potatoes and fish, and a radio was playing almost inaudible music. Anna Lundberg put a coffeepot on the table, then left the room. She was about the same age as her husband, and in a way they were quite similar in appearance.
A dog came bounding into the kitchen from some other room. A handsome cocker spaniel, Wallander thought, and stroked it while Lundberg was serving coffee.
Wallander laid the photo on the table. Lundberg took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket. He glanced at the picture, then slid it to one side.
“That must have been 1968 or 1969. In the fall, if I remember correctly.”
“I found it among Håkan von Enke’s papers.”
Lundberg looked him straight in the eye.
“I don’t know who that man is.”
“He was a high-ranking officer in the Swedish navy. A commander. Could your father have known him?”
“It’s possible. But I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t all that fond of military men.”
“You’re in the picture as well.”
“I can’t answer your questions. Even if I’d like to.”
Wallander decided to try a different tack and started again from the beginning.
“Were you born here on the island?”
“Yes. So was my dad. I’m the fourth generation.”
“When did he die?”
“In 1994. He had a heart attack while he was out in the boat, dealing with the nets. When he didn’t come home, I called the coast guard. Our neighbor Lasse Åman found him. He was lying in the boat and drifting toward Björkskär. But I figure that was how the old man would have preferred to go.”
Wallander thought he could detect a tone of voice that suggested the father-son relationship was less than perfect.
“Have you always lived here on the island? While your father was alive?”
“That would never have worked. You can’t be a hired hand for your own father. Especially when he makes all the decisions, and is always right. Even when he’s completely wrong.”
Eskil Lundberg burst out laughing.
“It wasn’t only when we were out fishing that he was always right,” he said. “I remember we were watching a TV show one evening, some kind of quiz show. The question was: Which country shares a border with the Rock of Gibraltar? He said it was Italy and I said it was Spain. When it turned out that I was right, he switched off the television and went to bed. That’s the way he was.”
“And so you moved away?”
Eskil Lundberg pulled a face.
“Is it important?”
“It might be.”
“Tell me again, one more time, so that I understand. Somebody disappeared, is that right?”
“Two people, a man and his wife. Håkan and Louise von Enke. I found this photo in a diary belonging to the husband, the naval commander.”
“They live in Stockholm, you said? And you’re from Ystad? What’s the connection?”
“My daughter is going to marry the son of the missing couple. They have a child. The couple who have vanished are her future parents-in-law.”
Lundberg nodded. He suddenly seemed to be looking at Wallander less suspiciously.
“I left the island as soon as I finished school,” he said. “I found a job in a factory just outside Kalmar. I lived there for a year. Then I came back home and worked with my dad as a fisherman. But we couldn’t get along. If you didn’t do exactly as he said, he was furious. I left again.”
“Did you go back to the factory?”
“Not that one. I traveled east, to the island of Gotland. I worked in the cement factory at Slite for twenty years, until Dad got sick. It was on Gotland that I met my wife. We had two children. We came back here when Dad couldn’t keep the business going any longer. Mom had died and my sister lives in Denmark, so we were the only ones who could help out. We own farmland, fishing waters, thirty-six little islands, countless rocky outcrops.”
“So that means you weren’t here in the early 1980s?”
“The occasional week in the summer, but that’s all.”
“Could it be that around that time your father was in touch with a naval officer?” Wallander asked. “Without you knowing about it?”
Lundberg shook his head energetically.
“That wouldn’t fit at all with the way he was. He thought there should be a bounty on the head of every member of the Swedish navy. Especially if they were captains.”
“Why?”
“They were far too gung-ho during their maneuvers. We have a jetty on the other side of the island where the trawler used to be berthed. Two years in a row the swell from the navy boats wrecked it—the stone caissons were dragged loose. And they refused to pay for repairs. Dad wrote letters, protested, but nothing happened. And the crew often threw slops from the kitchen into wells on the islands—if you know what a freshwater well means to island dwellers, you don’t do things like that. There were other things too.”