Authors: Henning Mankell
“I’m sixty years old,” Wallander said. “Isn’t that old?”
“A couple of generations ago that was old. But not now. The body gets older; there’s nothing we can do about that. But nowadays we can expect to live for another fifteen or twenty years.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“You’ll stay in the hospital until tomorrow so that my colleagues can make sure that your blood sugar readings have stabilized, and that you haven’t suffered any damage. Then you can go home and continue in your sinful ways.”
“But I don’t lead a sinful life, do I?”
Dr. Hansén was a few years older than Wallander and had been married no less than six times. Local gossip in Ystad suggested that his maintenance payments to his former wives forced him to spend his vacations working in Norwegian hospitals way up inside the Arctic circle, where nobody would volunteer unless they had to.
“Maybe that’s what’s missing from your life. A little pinch of refreshing sinfulness—a detective breaking the rules.”
It was only after Dr. Hansén had left that it really dawned on him how close to death he had been. For a brief moment he was overcome by panic
and fear, stronger than ever before. In situations not connected with his professional duties, that is. There was a sort of fear that police officers felt, and a different sort that was experienced by a civilian.
He was reminded yet again of the time he had been stabbed when he was a young constable on foot patrol in Malmö. On that occasion the final darkness had been only a hair’s breadth away. Now death had been breathing down his neck once again, and this time it was Wallander himself who had opened the door and let him in.
That evening, lying in his hospital bed, Wallander made a series of decisions that he knew he would probably never be able to stick to. They were about eating habits, exercise, new interests, a renewed battle with loneliness. Above all he must make the most of his vacation, not work, not keep hunting for Hans’s missing parents. He must take it easy, rest, catch up on sleep, go for long walks along the beach, play with Klara.
He made a plan. Over the next five years he would walk the whole length of the Skåne coastline, from the end of Hallandsåsen in the west to the Blekinge border in the east. He doubted he would ever make it happen, but it made him feel a bit better, letting a dream form then watching it slowly fade away again.
A few years earlier he had attended a dinner party at Martinsson’s house and spoken to a retired high school teacher, who told him about his experiences walking to Santiago de Compostela, the classic pilgrimage. Wallander had immediately wanted to make that pilgrimage himself, divided into installments, perhaps over a five-year period. He even started to train, carrying a backpack full of stones—but he overdid it and succumbed to bone spurs in his left foot. His pilgrimage came to an end before it had even started. The bone spurs were cured now, thanks to treatment that included painful cortisone injections into his heel. But perhaps a number of well-planned walks along Scanian beaches might be within the bounds of possibility.
The following day he was discharged and sent home. He picked up Jussi, who had once again been looked after by his neighbor, and declined Linda’s offer to drive to Löderup to make him dinner. He felt he needed to come to terms with his situation without her help. He was on his own, so he had to accept personal responsibility.
Before going to bed that night he wrote a long e-mail to Ytterberg. He didn’t mention having been ill, merely that he had to take a vacation since he was feeling burned out, and he needed to give Håkan and Louise von Enke a rest for a while.
For the first time, I have to acknowledge the limitations imposed by my age and my depleted strength
, he ended the message.
I’ve never
done that before. I’m not forty years old anymore, and I have to reconcile myself to the fact that time past will never return. I think that’s an illusion I share with more or less everyone—that it’s possible to step into the same river twice
.
He read through what he had written, clicked on Send, then switched off his computer. As he went to bed, he could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.
The storm was approaching, but the summer evening sky was still light.
Wallander woke the next day to find that the thunderstorm had moved on without affecting his house. The front had veered away to the east. Wallander felt fully rested when he got up at about eight o’clock. It was chilly, but even so he took his breakfast with him into the garden and ate it at the white wooden table. As a way of celebrating his vacation, he snipped a few roses from one of the bushes and laid them on the table. He had just sat down again when his cell phone rang. It was Linda, wanting to know how he was feeling.
“I’ve had my warning,” he said. “Everything’s fine at the moment. But I’m going to make sure my cell phone is always within reach.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to advise you to do.”
“How are you all?”
“Klara has a bit of a cold. Hans took this week off.”
“Because he wanted to, or against his will?”
“Because
I
wanted him to! He didn’t dare do anything else. I gave him an ultimatum.”
“What?”
“Me or his work. We don’t negotiate where Klara is concerned.”
Wallander ate the rest of his breakfast, thinking that it was becoming more and more obvious how much Linda took after her grandfather. The same caustic tone of voice, the same ironic, slightly mocking attitude to the world around her. But also a tendency to anger lurking just under the surface.
Wallander put his feet up on a chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. At last his vacation had begun.
The phone rang.
“Ytterberg here. Did I wake you?”
“You’d have had to call a few hours ago to do that.”
“We found Louise von Enke. She’s dead.”
Wallander held his breath, and slowly rose to his feet.
“I wanted to call you right away,” said Ytterberg. “We might be able to keep the news quiet for another hour or so, but we need to inform her son. Am I right in thinking the only other family member is the cousin in England?”
“You’re forgetting the daughter at Niklasgården. The staff there should be informed. But I can take care of that.”
“I suspected you would want to—but if you’d rather not, which I would understand perfectly, I’ll call them myself.”
“I’ll do it,” said Wallander. “Just tell me the most important details that I need to know.”
“The whole thing is absurd, to be honest,” said Ytterberg. “Last night a senile woman went missing from a nursing home on Värmdö island. She usually went out for walks in the evening—they’d fitted her with some sort of GPS tag that would make it easier to track her down, but she somehow managed to take it off. So the police had to organize a search party. They eventually found her; she wasn’t in too bad a state. But two of the searchers got lost—can you believe it? The batteries in their cell phones were so low that another search party had to be sent out to find them. Which they did. But on the way back they happened to come across somebody else.”
“Louise?”
“Yes. She was lying at the side of a woodland path, a couple of miles from the nearest road. The path went through a clear-cut area, and I just got back from there.”
“Was she murdered?”
“There’s no sign of violence. In all probability she committed suicide. We found an empty bottle of sleeping pills. If the bottle was full, she would have swallowed a hundred tablets. We’re waiting to see what the forensic boys have to say.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was lying on her side, a bit hunched up, wearing a skirt, socks, a gray blouse, and an overcoat. Her shoes were next to her body. There was also a purse with various papers and keys. Some animal or other had been sniffing around, but the body hadn’t been nibbled at.”
“No sign of Håkan?”
“None at all.”
“But why would she choose that particular place? An open area where all the trees had been cut down?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t to die in idyllic surroundings. The spot is full of dry twigs and dead tree stumps. I’ll send you a map. Call if you have any comments.”
“What about your vacation?”
“It’s not the first time in my life that a vacation has been shot down.”
The map arrived a few minutes later. With his hand on the phone, it occurred to Wallander that this was something he shared with every other police officer he knew: the reluctance to be the one to inform relatives about a death. That was never routine.
Death always causes havoc, no matter when it comes.
He dialed the number, and noticed that his hand was shaking. Linda answered.
“You again? We just hung up. Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine. Are you alone?”
“Hans is busy changing a diaper. Didn’t I tell you I gave him an ultimatum?”
“Yes, you did. Listen carefully now—you might want to sit down.”
She could hear from his voice that this was serious. She knew he never exaggerated.
“Louise is dead. She committed suicide several days ago. She was found last night or this morning at the side of a woodland path where they’d been clear-cutting in the Värmdö forests.”
She was dumbstruck.
“Really?” she asked eventually.
“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt. But there’s no trace of Håkan.”
“This is awful.”
“How will Hans take it?”
“I don’t know. Are they completely certain?”
“I wouldn’t have called if Louise hadn’t been identified, obviously.”
“I mean that she committed suicide. She wasn’t like that.”
“Go and talk to Hans now. If he wants to speak to me he can call me direct. I can also give him the number of the police in Stockholm.”
Wallander was about to hang up, but Linda wasn’t finished.
“Where has she been all this time? Why did she take her life only now?”
“I know as little about that as you do. Let’s hope, in the midst of all the tragedy, that this can help us to find Håkan. But we can talk about that later.”
Wallander hung up, then called Niklasgården. Artur Källberg was on vacation, and so was the receptionist, but Wallander eventually managed to
get ahold of a temp. She knew nothing about Signe von Enke’s background, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to a brick wall. But maybe that was an advantage under the circumstances.
Wallander had barely finished the conversation when Hans von Enke called. He was shaken, and close to tears. Wallander answered all his questions patiently, and promised to let him know as soon as any more information became available. Linda took the phone.
“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet,” she said quietly.
“That goes for all of us.”
“What did she take?”
“Sleeping pills. Ytterberg didn’t say what kind. Maybe Rohypnol? Isn’t that what it’s called?”
“She never took sleeping pills.”
“Women often use sleeping pills when they want to take their own life.”
“There’s something you said that makes me wonder.”
“What?”
“Did she really take her shoes off?”
“According to Ytterberg, yes.”
“Don’t you think that sounds odd? If she was indoors I could have understood it. But why take your shoes off if you’re going to lie down and die outside?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he say what kind of shoes they were?”
“No. But I didn’t ask.”
“You have to tell us absolutely everything,” she said after a pause.
“Why would I hold anything back?”
“You sometimes forget to mention things, possibly because you’re trying to be considerate when you don’t need to be. When will the press get ahold of this?”
“At any moment. Check teletext—they’re usually the first to know.”
Wallander waited, phone in hand. She came back a minute later.
“They’ve got it already. ‘Louise von Enke found dead. No trace of her husband.’ ”
“We can talk again later.”
Wallander switched on his own television and saw that the news had been given prominence. But if nothing else happened to change or complicate the situation, Louise von Enke’s death would no doubt soon fade into the background again.
Wallander tried to devote the rest of the day to his garden. He had bought a pair of hedge clippers on sale in a DIY store, but he soon discovered
that they were more or less unusable. He trimmed a few bushes and cut back some branches on various old, parched fruit trees, well aware that they shouldn’t be pruned in the middle of summer. But the whole time, he was thinking about Louise. He’d never gotten close to her. What did he actually know about who she was? That woman who listened to the conversations taking place around the dinner table with the trace of a smile on her lips, but very rarely said anything herself? She taught German, and maybe other foreign languages as well. He couldn’t remember offhand, and had no desire to go inside and search through his notes.
And she gave birth to a daughter, he thought. When she was still in the maternity ward she had been told about the child’s severe handicaps. The daughter they named Signe would never lead a normal life. She was their first child. What effect does something like that have on a mother? He wandered around with his useless hedge clippers in his hand and failed to find an answer. But he didn’t feel much genuine sorrow. You couldn’t feel sorry for the dead. He could understand what Hans and Linda felt. And there was also Klara, who would never get to know her grandmother.
Jussi limped up with a thorn in one of his front paws. Wallander sat down at the garden table, put on his glasses, and with the aid of a pair of tweezers managed to pull it out. Jussi displayed his thanks by racing off like a flash of black lightning into the fields. A glider flew low over Wallander’s house. He watched its progress, squinting. He simply couldn’t feel like he was on vacation. He could see Louise in his mind’s eye, lying on the ground next to a path that meandered through a clear-cut area of the forest. And by her side a pair of shoes, neatly on parade.
He threw the clippers into the shed and lay down on the garden hammock. Tractors were hard at work in the distance. The buzz from the main road came and went in waves. Then he sat up. This was pointless. He wouldn’t be able to relax until he had seen it all with his own eyes. He would have to go to Stockholm again.