Authors: Henning Mankell
He had no doubt that Hermann Eber was right. Louise von Enke had not committed suicide. She had been murdered.
Wallander took a piece of meat out of the refrigerator. Together with half a head of cauliflower, that would be his meal. When he sat down at the table and opened the newspaper he’d bought on the way home, he thought how, for as long as he could remember as an adult, he had always derived deep satisfaction from eating undisturbed while leafing through a newspaper. But on this occasion he had barely opened the paper when an enlarged photograph stared him in the face, with a dramatic headline. He wondered if he was imagining it—but no, it really was a picture of the hitchhiker he’d picked up. His astonishment increased as he read that the previous day she had killed her parents in the center of Malmö, in a residential block just off Södra Förstadsgatan, and had been on the run ever since. The police had no idea of her motive. But there was no doubt that she was the killer—her name was not Carola at all, but Anna-Lena. A police officer whose name Wallander thought he recognized described the murder as exceptionally
violent, a frenzied attack culminating in a bloodbath in the little apartment the family had lived in. The police were now searching for the woman and had issued an APB. Wallander slid both the newspaper and his plate to one side. He asked himself once again if it could possibly be the same woman. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Martinsson’s home number.
“Come right away,” Wallander said. “To my house.”
“I’m bathing my grandchildren,” said Martinsson. “Can’t it wait?”
“No. It can’t wait.”
Exactly thirty minutes later Martinsson drove up to Wallander’s house. Wallander was standing at the gate, waiting for him. It had stopped raining and was looking much brighter. Martinsson was well acquainted with Wallander’s methods and had no doubt that something serious had happened. Jussi had been let out of his kennel and was leaping around Martinsson’s feet. With considerable difficulty, Wallander succeeded in making him lie down.
“I see you’ve taught him how to behave at last,” said Martinsson.
“Not really. Let’s go and sit in the kitchen.”
They went inside. Wallander pointed at the picture in the newspaper.
“I picked her up and drove her to Höör this morning,” he said. “She said she was on her way to Småland, but that might not be true, of course. The probability is that with a picture like this in the newspapers, somebody will have recognized her already. But the police should start looking there.”
Martinsson stared at Wallander.
“I seem to recall that as recently as last year we talked about the fact that we never pick up hitchhikers, you and I.”
“I made an exception this morning.”
“On the way to Höör?”
“I have a good friend there.”
“In Höör?”
“It’s possible that you don’t know where all my friends live. Why shouldn’t I have a good friend there? Don’t you have a good friend in the Hebrides? Every word I say is true.”
Martinsson nodded. He took a notebook out of his pocket. His pen wouldn’t write. Wallander gave him one that did, and placed a towel over his plate—several flies had settled on his food. Martinsson made a note of what the woman had been wearing, what she’d said, the exact times. He already had his cell phone in his hand when Wallander held him back.
“Maybe it would be best to say that the police received an anonymous tip?”
“I’ve already thought of that. We’d better not say that it was a well-known police officer from Ystad who gave a woman a lift and helped her to escape.”
“I didn’t know who she was.”
“But you know as well as I do what the papers will write. If the truth comes out. You’d be an excellent news item to liven up the summer.”
Wallander listened as Martinsson called the police station.
“The call was anonymous,” Martinsson said in conclusion. “I have no idea how he got my home number, but the man who called was sober and very credible.”
He hung up.
“Who isn’t sober at lunchtime?” wondered Wallander sarcastically. “Was that necessary?”
“When we catch that woman she’ll say that she thumbed a ride with an unknown man. That’s all. She won’t know it was you. Nor will anybody else.”
Wallander suddenly remembered something else his passenger had said.
“She said the driver of the car that had taken her to where I picked her up had been making a nuisance of himself. I forgot to mention that.”
Martinsson pointed at the photo in the newspaper.
“She looks good, even if she’s a murderer. Did you say she was wearing a short yellow skirt?”
“She was very attractive,” said Wallander. “Apart from her bitten nails. I can’t think of a bigger turnoff than that.”
Martinsson smiled at Wallander.
“We’ve more or less stopped all that,” he said. “Discussing women. There was a time when we never stopped talking about them.”
Wallander offered Martinsson coffee, but he declined. Wallander saw him off, then resumed his interrupted meal. It tasted good, but it didn’t fill him. He took Jussi for a long walk, trimmed a hedge at the back of the house, and reattached his mailbox to the gatepost, where it had been hanging askew. The whole time, he was chewing over what Hermann Eber had said. He was tempted to call Ytterberg but decided to wait until the following day. He needed time to think. A suicide was developing into a murder, in a way he didn’t understand. He began to feel once again that there was something he’d overlooked. Not only him, but all the others who were involved in the investigation. He couldn’t put his finger on it. It was just his intuition at work yet again, and he had become increasingly skeptical about its reliability.
Until now he had assumed that Håkan was the main character. But what if it was Louise? That’s where I have to start, he thought. I need to go through everything again, this time from a different perspective. But first he needed
to sleep for a few hours in order to clear his mind. He undressed and got into bed. A spider scuttled along a beam in the ceiling. Then he fell asleep.
He had just finished breakfast at eight o’clock when Linda drove up to the gate. She had Klara with her. Wallander was annoyed at her coming so early in the morning. Now that he was on vacation, a rare occurrence, he wanted to spend his morning in peace.
They sat down in the garden. Wallander noticed that she had blue streaks in her hair.
“Why the blue streaks?”
“I think they’re attractive.”
“What does Hans say?”
“He also thinks they’re pretty.”
“Allow me to disagree. Why can’t he look after the baby if he’s home from work?”
“He felt compelled to go to the office today.”
She suddenly looked anxious; a shadow passed quickly over her face.
“Why is he worried?”
“There are things going on in the global finance sector that he doesn’t understand.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying either. ‘Things going on in the global finance sector’? But I don’t need to know any more about things that are beyond me.”
Wallander got up to pour a glass of water. Klara was crawling around happily on the grass.
“How’s Mona?”
“She’s lying low, doesn’t answer the phone. And when I ring her doorbell she doesn’t open up, even though I know she’s at home.”
“Is she still drinking?”
“I don’t know. Right now I don’t think I can take on responsibility for another child. I have enough on my plate with this one.”
A low-flying plane came roaring overhead, descending into Sturup Airport. When the noise had subsided, Wallander told Linda about his visit to Hermann Eber. He repeated their conversation in detail, and the thoughts that had occurred to him as a result. While he was becoming more convinced than ever that Louise had been murdered, he was at a complete loss as to why anyone would want to kill her. Could this quiet, retiring woman have had some sort of link with East Germany? A country that was dead and buried now?
Wallander paused. Klara was crawling around her mother’s legs. Linda shook her head slowly.
“I don’t doubt any of what you’ve told me—but what does it mean?”
“I don’t know. Right now I have only one question: Who was Louise von Enke? What is there about her that I don’t know?”
“What does anybody ever know about another person? Isn’t that what you’re always reminding me of? Telling me never to be surprised? Anyway, there is a connection with the former East Germany,” Linda said thoughtfully. “Haven’t I mentioned it?”
“You’ve only said that she was interested in classical German culture, and taught German.”
“What I’m thinking of goes further back than that,” Linda said. “Nearly fifty years. Before Hans was born, before Signe. You really should speak to Hans about this.”
“Let’s start with what you know,” said Wallander.
“It’s not a lot. But Louise was in East Germany at the beginning of the 1960s with a group of promising young Swedish swimmers and divers. It was some kind of sporting exchange. Louise used to coach up-and-coming young girls. Apparently she was a diver herself in her younger days, but I don’t know much about that. I think she went to East Berlin and Leipzig several times over a few years. Then it suddenly stopped. Hans thinks there’s a reason why.”
“What is it?”
“Håkan simply made it clear to her that the trips to East Germany had to stop. It wasn’t good for his military career to have a wife who kept visiting a country regarded as an enemy. You can well imagine that the Swedish top brass and politicians regarded East Germany as one of Russia’s nastiest vassals.”
“But you say you don’t know this for sure?”
“Louise always did what her husband told her to do. I think the situation in the early sixties simply became untenable. Håkan was on his way to the very top in the navy.”
“Do you know anything about how she reacted?”
“No, not a thing.”
Klara scratched herself on something lying on the ground and started screaming. Wallander couldn’t stand the sound of children screeching and went over to the dog kennel to stroke Jussi. He stayed there until Klara had quieted down.
“What did you used to do when I started crying?” Linda asked.
“My ears were more tolerant in those days.”
They sat in silence watching Klara investigate a dandelion growing in the middle of some stones.
“I’ve obviously been doing some thinking during the time the von Enkes have been missing,” Linda said then. “I’ve been ransacking my memory, trying to recall details of conversations and how they treated each other. I’ve tried to wheedle out of Hans everything he knows, everything he assumed I knew as well. Only a few days ago I had the impression that something didn’t add up, that he hadn’t told me the whole truth.”
“About what?”
“The money.”
“What money?”
“There is presumably a lot more money hidden away than I had known about. Håkan and Louise led a good life without any ostentatious luxury or excesses. But they could have lived in grand style if they’d wanted to.”
“What kind of sums are we talking about?”
“Don’t interrupt me,” she snapped. “I’m coming to that, but I’ll do it at my own speed. The problem is that Hans hasn’t told me everything he should have. That annoys me, and I know I’ll have to have it out with him sooner or later.”
“Does this mean you think the money has become vitally important in some new way?”
“No, but I don’t like Hans not telling me things. We don’t need to discuss it right now.”
Wallander raised his hands to signal an apology and asked no more questions. Linda suddenly discovered that Klara was trying to eat the dandelion and wiped her mouth clean, which set the baby off crying again. Wallander gritted his teeth and stayed where he was. Jussi paced up and down in his kennel, keeping an eye on things and looking as if he felt he’d been abandoned. My family, Wallander thought. We’re all here, apart from my sister, Kristina, and my former wife, who’s drinking herself to death.
The commotion was soon over, and Klara went back to crawling around on the grass. Linda was rocking back and forth on her chair.
“I can’t guarantee that it won’t collapse,” Wallander said.
“Granddad’s old furniture,” she said. “If the chair breaks, I’ll survive. I’ll just fall into your overgrown and untended flower bed.”
Wallander said nothing. He could feel himself getting annoyed at the way she was always scrutinizing what he did and pointing out his shortcomings.
“When I woke up this morning there was one question I couldn’t get out of my head,” she said. “It can’t wait, no matter how important this business of Louise and Håkan is. I don’t understand how I could have avoided asking
it all these years. Not asking either you or Mom. Maybe I was scared of what the answer might be. Nobody wants to be conceived by accident.”
Wallander was on his guard immediately. Linda very rarely used the word “Mom” in connection with Mona. Nor could he remember the last time she had called him “Dad,” apart from when she was angry or being ironic.
“You don’t need to be frightened,” Linda went on. “I can see that I’ve worried you already. I only want to know how you met. The very first time my parents met. I simply don’t know.”
“My memory’s bad,” said Wallander, “but not
that
bad. We met in 1968 on a boat between Copenhagen and Malmö. One of the slow ferries, not a hovercraft, late one evening.”
“Forty years ago?”
“We were both very young. She was sitting at a table. The ferry was crowded, and I asked if I might join her, and she said yes. I’d be happy to tell you more another time. I’m not in the mood to root around in my past. Let’s get back to that money. What kind of sums are we talking about?”
“A few million. But you’re not going to avoid telling me about what happened when the ferry docked in Malmö.”
“Nothing happened then. I promise to tell you, later. Are you saying they had put aside a million or more? Where did they get it from?”
“They saved it.”
He frowned. That was a lot of money to put aside. He could never dream of saving such an amount.
“Could there be tax evasion or some other fraud?”