Authors: Henning Mankell
“You did. I was usually the one who got up to comfort you.”
“That’s not how Mona remembers it.”
“She has never been too concerned about the truth.”
“Klara hardly ever wakes us up.”
“Then you are truly blessed. You used to give us some absolutely awful nights with all your screaming and yelling.”
“And you were the one who used to carry me around and hush me?”
“Sometimes with cotton balls in my ears. But yes, I was the one who used to carry you around. Any other suggestion is untrue, no matter what Mona says.”
Hans slammed his cup onto the table so hard that coffee sloshed over onto the cloth. He didn’t seem to have been listening.
“Where has Mom been all this time? And where is Håkan?”
“What do you think? What’s the first thought that comes into your mind? Now, when everything is changing?”
It was Linda who asked the questions. Wallander looked at her in surprise. He had been formulating the same words, but she got them out first.
“I can’t answer that. But something tells me my father is alive. Strangely enough, at the same time I was told my mother is dead, I had a strong feeling that he’s alive.”
Wallander took over and asked more questions.
“Why? Something must make you think that.”
“I don’t know.”
Wallander hadn’t really expected Hans to have much to say this soon after hearing the shattering news. He had come to see that the distance between individual members of the von Enke family was vast.
Wallander paused, since it struck him that this in itself was something to think more closely about. What had Håkan and Louise actually known about each other? Had there been just as much secrecy between them as in their relations with other members of the family? Or was it just the opposite? Was it possible that the relationship between the two of them was extremely close?
He couldn’t answer those questions at the moment. Hans stood up and went into the house.
“He needs to call Copenhagen,” Linda said. “We had just made the decision when you arrived.”
“What decision?”
“That he should stay home another day.”
“Does that man never have any time off?”
“Stock exchanges all over the world are very restless at the moment. Hans is worried. That’s why he works all the time.”
“With Icelanders?”
She looked doubtfully at him.
“Are you trying to be funny? Don’t forget you’re talking about the father of my child.”
“When he showed me his office there were Icelanders sitting around. Why should my recalling that be funny?”
Linda waved her hand dismissively. Hans returned to the hammock. They spoke briefly about Louise’s funeral. Wallander was unable to tell them when they could expect to receive the body after the pathologists had completed their work.
“It’s odd,” said Hans. “Only yesterday I received a large envelope with photographs from Håkan’s seventy-fifth birthday party.”
“Do you want us to look at them?” Linda asked.
“Not right now.” Hans shrugged.
“I’ve put them together with the lists of guests and other papers connected with the party. Including copies of all the bills.”
Wallander had been lost in his own thoughts and only heard, as if from a distance, what Hans said to Linda. He suddenly woke up.
“Did I hear right? Did you mention guest lists?”
“Everything was very efficiently organized. My father wasn’t an officer for nothing. He checked off the names of all those who actually attended, those who sent their apologies, and those who went against convention and neither turned up nor explained why they couldn’t come.”
“How is it that you have the lists?”
“Because neither my father nor my mother was much good when it came to computers. I helped them create the documents. The idea was that I should write in my father’s comments. God only knows why. But it never happened.”
Wallander bit his lip as he thought that over. Then he stood up.
“I’d like to see those lists, if I may. And the photographs. I can take them home with me if you have other plans.”
“How can we have other plans when we have a little baby?” Linda wondered aloud. “Have you forgotten that? She’ll wake up soon. And that will put an end to the heavenly peace we’re enjoying now. In any case, I think it would be best if you went home now and took the stuff with you.”
Hans went indoors and soon reappeared with several files full of papers and photographs. Linda accompanied Wallander to his car. They could hear thunder in the distance. She stood in front of the car door as he was about to open it.
“Could they have gotten it wrong? Could it be murder?”
“There’s nothing to suggest that. Ytterberg is a competent police officer, very experienced. He sees what there is to see. He would react if there was the slightest trace of a suspicion.”
“Tell me again what she looked like when they found her.”
“Her shoes were standing neatly beside the body. She was lying on her side, in her stocking feet. Her clothes were all in place—in other words, she hadn’t fallen down, she’d lain down.”
“But her shoes?”
“Isn’t that something that used to be normal, but we don’t think about it anymore nowadays? You always take your shoes off before you die.”
Linda shook her head.
“What was she wearing?”
Wallander tried to remember what Ytterberg had said. Skirt, blouse, knee socks.
Linda shook her head.
“I never saw her in knee socks. She either wore tights or nothing at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely certain. She would wear special thick socks when she went skiing, but that’s irrelevant in this context.”
Wallander tried to assess the significance of this. He had no doubt that Linda knew what she was talking about. When she was as sure as she seemed to be now, she was nearly always right.
“I have no sensible answer. I’ll pass your comments on to the police in Stockholm.”
She moved to one side and closed the door once he had settled in behind the wheel.
“Louise wasn’t the type of woman who would commit suicide,” Linda said.
“But that’s what she did.”
Linda shook her head without speaking. Wallander realized she had told him something that she wanted him to take into account. They didn’t need to discuss it right now. He started the engine and drove away. When he came to the main road, he surprised himself by turning away from Ystad and instead taking the coast road toward Trelleborg. He felt the need to get some fresh air. He came to Mossby Strand, where several mobile homes and campers enjoyed sea views. He parked at the side of the road and walked down to the beach. Every time he came back to this place he had the feeling that this stretch of coast, not very remarkable in itself, certainly not all that pretty, was nevertheless one of the central points in his life. This was where he had taken Linda for walks when she was a little girl; this was where he had tried to make peace with Mona when she told him she wanted a divorce. This was also where, ten years ago, Linda had told him about her ambition to become a police officer, and that she had already been offered a place at the police academy. And it was here that Linda had told him she was pregnant.
Wallander set off along the beach, banishing the stiffness that had possessed his body after all that sitting around. He thought about what Linda had said. But people do commit suicide, whether we believe it or not, he told himself. Several people who I would never have imagined would take their own lives had in fact done so, in most cases after careful planning. How many people have I watched being taken down from nooses they used to hang themselves, how many bits and pieces have I gathered together after somebody placed the barrel of a shotgun in their mouth and pulled the trigger? And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of relatives who told me they
weren’t
surprised.
Wallander walked so far that he was tired when he got back to his car. He
sat behind the wheel and opened one of the files. He picked out several photographs at random. He thought he recognized some of the faces, but others he couldn’t remember at all. He put the photos back into the file and drove home. If the material was going to be of any use, he needed to work his way through it carefully, not haphazardly.
It was evening before he sat down at the kitchen table with the files. This is where I’ll begin, he thought. With the pictures of a large and well-organized party for a man celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday. He examined the photos one at a time. The dining tables could almost always be seen in the background, so he could judge, roughly, if the picture had been taken before, during, or after the meal. There were 104 in total, many of them blurred and with no obvious focus. Either Håkan or Louise was in 64 of them, and both were in 12. In 2 of the pictures they were looking at each other; she was smiling. Wallander laid the photos out in a row, grouped according to when they were probably taken. He was struck by how serious Håkan looked in all the pictures. Is he just being an austere naval officer, or is it a reflection of the worry he will soon begin talking to me about? Wallander wondered.
On the other hand, Louise was smiling virtually all the time. He found one exception, but then she was unaware that her picture was about to be taken. Only one true picture, Wallander thought—or was it just a coincidence? He moved on to the pictures containing a large number of guests. Friendly, elderly people, giving an impression of general well-being. No down-and-outs had come to celebrate Håkan von Enke’s birthday, he muttered to himself. These people can afford to look happy and contented.
Wallander slid the photos to one side and moved on to the two lists of guests. He counted 102. The names were in alphabetical order, and a lot of the guests were married couples.
The phone rang while he was studying the first list. It was Linda.
“I’m curious,” she said. “Have you found anything?”
“Nothing that I didn’t know already. Louise is smiling. Håkan looks serious. Did he never smile?”
“Not very often. But Louise’s smile is genuine. She never pretended to be something she wasn’t. And I think she was also pretty good at judging other people.”
“I’ve just started looking at the guest lists. A hundred and two names. Nearly all of them unknown to me. Alvén, Alm, Appelgren, Berntsius—”
“I remember him,” Linda said. “Sten Berntsius. A high-ranking naval officer. A couple of years ago, I went to an unpleasant dinner party at Håkan and Louise’s place when he was a guest. He had his wife with him, a timid
little creature who just sat there blushing, and she drank too much wine as well. But Berntsius was awful.”
“How?”
“Palme hatred.”
“Are you seriously telling me that you attended a dinner party at which the guests said bad things about a Swedish prime minister who had been murdered twenty years earlier?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Hatred lives on for a long time. Sten Berntsius started going on about how Palme was a spy for the Soviet Union, a cryptocommunist, a traitor, and God only knows what else.”
“What did Louise and Håkan have to say?”
“I’m afraid Håkan at least tended to agree. Louise didn’t say much; she tried to smooth things over. But the atmosphere was unpleasant.”
Wallander tried to think back. For him, Olof Palme was above all else an example of the most dramatic failure of the Swedish police. He could hardly remember him as a politician. A man with a shrill voice and a smile that was occasionally far from friendly? He couldn’t recall which of the memories were genuine. He hadn’t been interested in politics in Palme’s day. That was when he was trying to get his own life in order, and also dealing with his intractable father.
“Palme was prime minister when those submarines were snorkeling in Swedish waters,” he said. “I suppose that’s the context in which his name cropped up?”
“Not really, no. If I remember correctly it was mostly about defense cuts that they claimed had begun during his time. He alone was responsible for the fact that Sweden was no longer capable of defending itself. Berntsius maintained it was a big mistake to believe that Russia would always be as peaceful as it is now.”
“What were the political views of the von Enkes?”
“They were both extremely conservative, of course. Louise always tried to give the impression that she was contemptuous about politics, but that wasn’t true.”
“So she did have a mask, despite what you said earlier.”
“Perhaps. Let us know if you find anything important.”
Wallander went out to feed Jussi. The dog was looking disheveled and tired. Wallander wondered if it was true that dogs and their owners grew to look like each other. If so, old age really had gotten its claws into him. Was he already getting close to his devastating dotage, when he would become increasingly helpless? He shuddered at the thought and went back inside. But, about to sit down at the kitchen table again, he realized that it was
pointless. There was nothing in either the guest lists or the photos that could throw light on the missing persons. There must be some other explanation for what had happened. He was wasting his time. He wasn’t looking for a needle, he was looking for a haystack.
Wallander picked up everything he’d spread out over the kitchen table and put it all on the table in the hall. He would give it back the next day and then try to stop thinking about the dead Louise and the missing Håkan. Soon enough they would all go to Kristberg church, prettily located with a view over Lake Bören in Östergötland. The von Enkes had a family grave there over a century old, and that is where Louise would be buried. Hans had told him that his parents had written a joint will in which they had stated that they did not wish to be cremated. Wallander sat in his armchair and closed his eyes. What did he want to happen to his own body? He didn’t have a family grave, no sepulchral rights. His mother was buried in a memorial grove in Malmö, his father in one of Ystad’s cemeteries. He didn’t know what his sister, Kristina, who lived in Stockholm, planned to do.
He fell asleep in the chair and woke up with a start. He had been dragged out of sleep by a dog barking. He stood up. His shirt was wet through; he must have been dreaming. Jussi didn’t usually bark for no reason. When he started moving, he discovered that his legs were numb. He shook them into life while continuing to listen for sounds out there in the darkness of the summer night. Jussi was quiet now. Wallander opened the door and stood on the threshold. Jussi immediately started jumping against the fence of his kennel, yelping. Wallander looked around. Perhaps there’s a fox on the prowl, he thought. He walked over to Jussi. There was a strong smell of grass. But no wind; everything was still. He tickled Jussi behind the ears. “What were you barking at?” he asked quietly. “Can dogs also have nightmares?” He gazed out over the field. Shadows everywhere, a faint hint of morning light in the east. He checked his watch. A quarter to two. He had been asleep for nearly four hours. His sweaty shirt was making him shiver. He went back inside and lay down in bed. But he couldn’t get to sleep. “Kurt Wallander is lying in his bed, thinking of death,” he said aloud to himself. It was true. He really was thinking of death. But he often did that. Ever since he was a young police officer, death had always been present in his life. He saw it in the mirror every morning. But now, when he couldn’t sleep, it crept up very close to him. He was sixty years old, a diabetic, slightly overweight. He didn’t pay as much attention to his health as he should, didn’t exercise enough, drank too much, ate what he shouldn’t, and at irregular times. Sometimes he tried to discipline himself, but it never lasted long. He would lie there in the dark and become panic-stricken. There was no leeway left. Now he had no choice.
Either he must change his lifestyle or die early. Either make an effort to reach at least seventy or assume that death would strike at any moment. Then Klara would be robbed of her maternal grandfather, just as she had been robbed of her paternal grandmother for reasons that were not yet clear.