Authors: Henning Mankell
“Not according to Hans, no.”
“But you say he hasn’t been open with you about this money?”
“There’s no reason why he should have been. Until a couple of months ago it was up to his parents to decide what to do with their savings.”
“What did they do?”
“They asked Hans to invest it for them. Cautiously, no risky ventures.”
Wallander thought for a moment. Something told him that what he had just heard could be of considerable significance. Throughout his life as a police officer he had been reminded over and over again that money was the cause of the worst and most serious crimes people could commit. No other motive cropped up so often.
“Who oversaw their financial affairs? Both of them, or just Håkan?”
“Hans will know.”
“Then we must talk to him.”
“Not we. I. If I discover anything, I’ll let you know.”
Klara was yawning. Linda nodded to Wallander. He picked her up and laid her carefully on the garden hammock. She smiled at him.
“I try to picture myself in your arms,” said Linda. “But it’s hard.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t mean it negatively.”
A pair of swans came flying over the fields toward them. Father and daughter followed their progress and listened to the swishing sound they made.
“Is it really possible that Louise was murdered?” Linda wondered.
“The investigation will have to continue, of course. But I think there’s a lot of evidence now that suggests it is true.”
“But why? By whom? All that stuff about her having Russian secrets in her purse surely must be nonsense.”
“She had
Swedish
secrets in her purse. Intended for Russia. Listen properly to what I say.”
He expected her to be angry, but she merely nodded, acknowledging that he was right.
“There’s still an unanswered question,” said Wallander. “Where’s Håkan?”
“Dead or alive?”
“As far as I’m concerned, Håkan has become more alive now that Louise has been found dead. It’s not logical, I know; there’s no plausible explanation for my thinking that. Possibly my considerable experience as a police officer. But the indications are not clear, not even in that context. Nevertheless, I believe he’s alive.”
“Is he the one who killed Louise?”
“There’s nothing to suggest that.”
“But nothing to suggest that he didn’t, either?”
Wallander nodded. That was exactly what he had been thinking. She was following his train of thought.
Linda drove off with Klara half an hour later.
Wallander felt that
one
thing at least had become crystal clear. No matter what had happened, it had all begun with Håkan von Enke. And it was with him that everything would eventually come to a conclusion. Louise was a side issue.
But what it all meant, he had no idea. The only thing that struck him right now as being an incontestable fact was that Håkan von Enke had stood face-to-face with him in a side room during a birthday party on Djursholm, and seemed to be deeply troubled.
That’s where it all began, Wallander thought. It began with the troubled man.
One night in July
.
Wallander sat there, pen in hand. The first line of the letter he had begun writing sounded like a bad film from the 1950s. Or perhaps a much better novel from a few decades earlier. The kind he recalled from his childhood home. From the library that had belonged to his maternal grandfather, who had died long before he was born.
Otherwise, the description was correct. It was now July, and it was nighttime. Wallander had gone to bed, then suddenly remembered that it would be his sister Kristina’s birthday in a few days’ time. It had become his custom to enclose with the birthday card the one letter he sent her every year. So he got out of bed—he wasn’t tired, after all, and this was a good excuse to avoid tossing and turning. He sat down at the kitchen table with stationery and a fountain pen, the latter a present from Linda for his fiftieth birthday. The opening words could stay as they were—“One night in July”—he wasn’t going to change a thing. It was a short letter. Once he had described his delight at Klara’s birth, he didn’t think he had much else to write about. His letters became shorter and shorter every year, he noticed grimly. It wasn’t much of a letter, but it was the best he could do. His contact with Kristina had culminated during the last few years of their father’s life. Since then they had never met, apart from once when he was in Stockholm and remembered to call her. They were totally different people, and had totally different memories of their childhood. After a short time the conversation would dry up and they’d stare at each other uncomprehendingly: did they really have nothing more to say to each other?
Wallander sealed the envelope and went back to bed. The window was ajar. In the distance he could hear the faint sound of music and a party in progress. There was a rustling sound from the grass outside the window. He had done the right thing in leaving Mariagatan, he thought. Out here in the countryside he could hear sounds he had never heard before. And smell country smells, even more of a novelty.
He lay awake, thinking about his visit to the police station earlier that
evening. He hadn’t planned to go in, but since his computer wasn’t working he drove into Ystad at about nine o’clock. In the hope of avoiding on-duty colleagues, he used the basement entrance. He tapped in the entry code and reached his office without bumping into anybody. Voices could be heard from one of the offices he sneaked past. One of the speakers sounded very drunk. Wallander was glad he wasn’t the officer doing the interrogating.
Just before going on vacation he had made a big effort and reduced the piles of paper on his desk. It now looked almost inviting. He threw his jacket onto the guest chair and switched on the computer. While he waited for it to boot up he took out two folders he’d locked away in one of the desk drawers. One was labeled “Louise,” the other “Håkan.” The pen he’d used was faulty, and the names were smudged and unclear. He slid the first file to one side and concentrated on the second. He also thought about the conversation he’d had with Linda a few hours earlier. She had called while Klara was asleep and Hans had gone out to buy some diapers. Without going into unnecessary detail she had reported on what Hans had said when she asked him about his parents’ money, about his mother’s links with East Germany, and whether there was anything else he hadn’t told her about. He had been offended at first, thinking she didn’t trust him. She eventually succeeded in convincing him that all she was interested in was trying to find out what had happened to his parents. After all, it was looking very much as if murder might be involved. Hans had calmed down, understood her motivation, and answered as best he could.
Wallander took a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket and smoothed it out to look over his notes.
It was only when Hans had started his present job that his parents had asked him to oversee their financial affairs. The amount of money involved was a bit less than 2 million kronor, which had now grown to more than 2.5 million. He was told that the money was their savings plus an inheritance from one of Louise’s relatives. He didn’t know how much was inherited and how much was saved. The relative in question was Hanna Edling, who died in 1976 and had owned a chain of ladies’ clothing shops in the west of Sweden. There were no tax irregularities, even though Håkan had moaned and groaned about what he considered to be the Social Democrats’ outrageous capital gains tax. Now that it had been abolished, Hans regretted that he hadn’t been able to tell Håkan that a few more kronor had been saved.
“Hans said his parents had a philosophy about money,” Linda had explained. “ ‘You shouldn’t talk about money, it should simply be there.’ ”
“If only,” Wallander had said. “That sounds like something well-heeled upper-class folk would say.”
“They
are
upper-class,” said Linda. “You know that. We don’t need to waste time discussing it.”
Hans used to give them an investment report twice a year, informing them about gains and any losses. Occasionally Håkan would read something in the newspapers about attractive investment options, and he’d call Hans to pass on the tip. But he never checked on whether Hans had followed up. Louise displayed even less interest in what Hans was doing with their money—but on one occasion the previous year she had asked to withdraw 200,000 kronor from the invested capital. Hans was surprised, since it was very unusual for them to take out such a large sum. And it was mostly Håkan who wanted to withdraw money, for such things as a cruise, or a trip to the French Riviera for a few weeks. Hans asked what she wanted the money for, but she didn’t tell him, merely insisted that he do what she had requested.
“She also told Hans not to say anything about it to Håkan,” Linda added. “That was the strangest part. I mean, he’d have been bound to notice it sooner or later.”
“But there might not necessarily have been anything sinister about it,” Wallander suggested. “Maybe she wanted to surprise him?”
“Could be. But Hans also said it was the only time she ever spoke to him in a threatening tone of voice.”
“Is that the word he used? ‘Threatening’?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that a bit odd? Such a strong word?”
“I have no doubt that he chose the word carefully.”
Wallander made a note:
threatening
. If it was true, it threw new light on the woman who was always smiling.
“What did Hans have to say about East Germany?”
Linda stressed that she had tried in several ways to jog his memory, but without success. He vaguely remembered that when he was very young his mother had brought him some wooden toys from East Berlin. Nothing else. He couldn’t recall how long she had been away, nor why she had gone abroad. In those days they had a housekeeper, Katarina, and he often spent a lot more time with her than he did with his parents. Håkan had been at sea, and Louise had been teaching German at the French School and at one of Stockholm’s grammar schools—he couldn’t remember which one. It could well have been that they had occasionally been guests at a dinner party in a home where German was the first language. He had a vague memory of a man in uniform singing drinking songs in a foreign language at the dinner table.
“He really doesn’t remember anything else,” Linda said. “Which either means that there was nothing else for him to remember, or that Louise went out of her way to hide her East German adventures from him. But why would she want to do that?”
“Why indeed,” said Wallander. “It was never against the law for Swedes to visit East Germany. We did business with them just as we did with every other country. But on the other hand, it was much harder for East German citizens to visit Sweden. The Berlin Wall was built to prevent defections.”
“That was before my time. I can remember the wall being pulled down, but not when it was built.”
That was the end of the call. Wallander heard a door opening and closing somewhere in the background. He began working his way methodically through the material he had gathered concerning the disappearance of Håkan von Enke, and it seemed to him there was one conclusion. Experience indicated that von Enke had been missing for so long that in all probability he was dead, like his wife. But Wallander decided nevertheless to regard him as still alive, at least for the time being.
After a while Wallander slid the file to one side and leaned back in his chair. Perhaps when we were talking in that windowless room in Djursholm he already knew that he would soon go missing. Did he hope that I would read between the lines of what he said?
Wallander sat up straight. Everything was standing still. He was impatient; he wanted to move forward. He opened an Internet browser and began searching. He wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. He scrolled through all the information on the navy Web site. Step-by-step he followed Håkan von Enke’s career. He had climbed the ladder steadily, but more slowly than many of his contemporaries. After about an hour of surfing, Wallander came across a photograph taken at a reception at the office for foreign military attachés. There were a number of young officers in the picture, including Håkan. He was smiling directly at the camera. A confident, open smile. Wallander contemplated the old picture, trying to see something that would tell him who the troubled man he had met in Djursholm really was.
He stood up and opened the window slightly, then resumed his Internet research. He tried to use his imagination to find unexpected ways of getting information about Håkan von Enke’s life: he read about East Germany, and their naval maneuvers in the southern Baltic Sea that both Sten Nordlander
and Håkan von Enke had talked about. He spent the most time on submarine incidents in the early 1980s. He occasionally noted down a name, an event, a thought; but he was unable to find any blots on Håkan von Enke’s record. Nor did he find anything out of the ordinary about Louise when he visited the Web site of the French School in Stockholm. Linda had chosen a man whose parents were prime examples of bourgeois decency and uprightness. On the surface, at least.
It was almost eleven-thirty when he started yawning. His surfing had taken him to the very limits of what might be interesting. But he suddenly paused and leaned toward the screen. There was an article from one of the evening papers, dating from early 1987. A journalist had dug up information about a private location in Stockholm where parties and receptions often took place, frequented by high-ranking naval officers. The parties were evidently shrouded in secrecy; only a few people were allowed to attend, and none of the officers the journalist had contacted was prepared to comment. But one of the waitresses, Fanny Klarström, had. She talked about the unpleasant, hate-filled conversations about Olof Palme that had taken place, and about the arrogance of the officers, and said that she had stopped working there because she was not prepared to put up with it any longer. Among those who used to attend the gatherings was Håkan von Enke.
Wallander printed out the two newspaper pages. There was also a photograph of Fanny Klarström. Wallander judged her to be about sixty at the time, which meant that she could still be alive. He also wrote down the name of the journalist, and noted that this was the second banquet hall he had come across in connection with Håkan von Enke. He folded the article and put it in his pocket.