Authors: Henning Mankell
What’s he afraid of? Wallander thought. Who is he hiding from?
The surging of the sea could no longer be heard. Wallander contemplated the man who had been missing for such a long time.
They sat down and said nothing for a while. Eventually they began talking, hesitantly. Slowly, approaching each other with maximum caution.
It was a long night. Several times it seemed to Wallander that it was a direct continuation of the conversation he and von Enke had had nearly six months previously, in a windowless room off a banquet hall just outside Stockholm. What he was now beginning to understand surprised him, but it was a more than sufficient explanation of why von Enke had been so worried on that occasion.
Wallander felt nothing like a Stanley who had now found his Livingstone. He had guessed right, that was all. Once again, his intuition had shown him the path to follow. If von Enke was surprised at his hideaway being discovered, he didn’t show it. Wallander thought the old submarine commander was displaying his cold-blooded nature. He didn’t allow himself to be surprised, no matter what happened.
The hunting lodge that seemed so primitive from the outside gave quite a different impression once Wallander had crossed the threshold. There were no inside walls, just one large room with an open kitchenette. A small extension containing a bathroom was the only space with a door. In one corner of the room was a bed. It’s on the small side, Wallander observed, more like a hammock, or the little bunk that even a commander has to make do with on board a submarine. In the middle of the room was a large table covered in books, files, and documents. On one of the short walls was a shelf containing a radio, and there was a television set and a record player on a little table. Next to it was a dark red old-fashioned armchair.
“I didn’t think you’d have electricity here,” said Wallander.
“There’s a generator sunk in a little basement blasted out of the rock. You can’t hear the engine even when the water is dead calm.”
Von Enke stood by the stove, making coffee. Neither of them spoke, and Wallander tried to prepare himself for the conversation that would follow. But now that he’d found the man he’d spent so much time looking for, he didn’t know what to ask him. All his previous thoughts seemed to be a blurred jumble of unfinished conclusions.
“If I remember correctly,” said von Enke, interrupting Wallander’s thoughts, “you take neither milk nor sugar?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any bread or cookies to offer you. Are you hungry?”
“No.”
Von Enke cleared off part of the big table. Wallander noted that most of the books were about modern warfare and contemporary politics. One that seemed to have been read more than any of the others was titled simply
The Submarine Threat
.
The coffee was strong. Von Enke was drinking tea. Wallander regretted not having chosen the same.
It was ten minutes to one.
“Naturally I understand that you have a lot of questions you want answers to,” said von Enke. “I may not be able or willing to answer all of them, but before we come to that I must ask you a few questions. First and foremost: Did you come here alone?”
“Yes.”
“Who else knows where you are?”
“Nobody.”
Wallander could see that von Enke wasn’t sure whether to believe him. “Nobody,” he repeated. “This trip was entirely my own idea. Nobody else has been involved.”
“Not even Linda?”
“Not even Linda.”
“How did you get here?”
“In a little boat with an outboard motor. If you want I can give you the name of the firm I rented it from. But the man had no idea where I was going. I told him I was going to surprise an old friend for his birthday. I’m sure he believed me.”
“Where is the boat?”
Wallander pointed over his shoulder.
“On the other side of the island. Beached, and tied up to some alder trees.”
Von Enke sat there silently, staring at his teacup. Wallander waited.
“How did you find me?”
Von Enke seemed tired when he asked the question. Wallander could understand that being on the run was strenuous, even if you weren’t on the move all the time.
“When I visited Bokö, Eskil Lundberg mentioned in passing that this cottage was perfect for anybody who wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. We were on the way to the mainland when we sailed past. You
know I’ve been to see him, of course. What he said stayed at the back of my mind, nagging away at me. And then when I heard that you were particularly fond of islands, I realized that this might be where you were.”
“Who told you about me and my islands?”
Wallander decided on the spot not to say anything about Sten Nordlander for the time being. He could give von Enke an answer that would be impossible to check.
“Louise.”
Von Enke nodded, silently. Then he straightened his back, as if steeling himself for battle.
“We can do this in two ways,” Wallander said. “Either you tell me all about it, or I ask questions and you answer them.”
“Am I accused of anything?”
“No. But your wife is dead, so you are automatically a suspect.”
“I can understand that completely.”
Suicide or murder, Wallander thought. You seem to be well aware of the score. Wallander knew he had to proceed cautiously. After all, the man he was talking to was somebody he knew very little about.
“Let’s hear it, then,” said Wallander. “I’ll interrupt you if anything is unclear. You can start at Djursholm, when you had your birthday party.”
Von Enke shook his head demonstratively. His tiredness seemed to have evaporated. He walked over to the stove, refilled his cup with hot water, and added a new tea bag. He remained standing, cup in hand.
“I need to begin earlier than that. There can be only one starting point,” he said. “It’s simple, but absolutely true. I loved my wife, Louise, more than anything else in the world. God forgive me for saying it, but I loved her more than I did my son. Louise embodied the happiness in my life—seeing her come into a room, seeing her smile, hearing her moving around in the next room.”
He fell silent and gave Wallander a look that was both piercing and challenging. He demanded an answer, or at least a reaction from Wallander’s side.
“Yes,” said Wallander. “I believe you.”
Von Enke began his story.
“We need to go back a long way. There’s no need for me to go into detail. It would take too much time, and it isn’t necessary. But we have to go back to the 1960s and ’70s. I was still active on board naval vessels then, often in command of one of our most modern minesweepers. Louise was working as a teacher. She spent her free time coaching young divers, and once in a while visited Eastern Europe, mainly East Germany, which in those days was very
successful in producing champions. Nowadays we know that this was due to a combination of fanatical, almost slavish training techniques and an advanced use of various drugs. At the end of the 1970s I was transferred to staff duties and promoted to the top operations command of the Swedish navy. That involved a lot of work, much of it done at home. Several evenings every week I used to take home secret documents. I had a gun closet because I occasionally used to go hunting, mainly for deer, but sometimes I used to take part in the annual elk hunt. I had my rifles and ammunition locked away in that closet, and I also used to put my secret documents in there overnight, or when Louise and I went out, either to the theater or to some dinner party.”
He paused, carefully removed the tea bag from his cup and put it on a saucer, then continued.
“When exactly do you notice that something is not as it should be? The almost invisible signs that suggest something has been changed, or moved? You are a police officer—I assume you must often find yourself in situations where you catch on to these vague signals. One morning, when I opened the gun closet, I noticed that something was wrong. I can still recall how I felt. I was just going to take out my briefcase when I paused. Had I really left it the way it was now? There was something about the lock, and the position of the handle. My doubts bothered me for about five seconds, no more. Then I dismissed them. I always used to check that all the documents were where they should be, and that morning was no exception. I didn’t think any more about it. I think I’m pretty observant and have a good memory. Or at least, that was the case when I was younger. As you grow older, all your faculties deteriorate bit by bit, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You are considerably younger than I am, but maybe you’ve noticed this?”
“Eyesight,” Wallander said. “I have to buy new reading glasses every couple of years. And I don’t think I hear as well as I used to.”
“It’s your sense of smell that lasts best as you grow older. That’s the only one of my senses that I think is unaffected. The smell of flowers is just as clear and subtle as it ever was.”
They sat there in silence. Wallander noticed a rustling sound in the wall behind him.
“Mice,” said von Enke. “It was still cold when I first came here. At times there was a hellish rustling and rattling inside the walls. But one of these days I’ll no longer be able to hear the mice scampering around under the floorboards.”
“I don’t want to interrupt your story,” Wallander said. “But when you vanished that morning, did you come straight here?”
“I was picked up.”
“By whom?”
Von Enke shook his head, didn’t want to answer. Wallander didn’t press him.
“Let me go back to the gun closet,” von Enke continued. “A few months later I had the impression yet again that my briefcase had been moved. I decided I was imagining it. The documents inside the briefcase hadn’t been jumbled up or interfered with in any other way. But since this was the second occasion, I was worried. The keys to the gun closet were underneath some letter scales on my desk. The only person who knew where the keys were was Louise. So I did what you have to do when there’s something worrying you.”
“What?”
“I asked her outright. She was in the kitchen, having breakfast.”
“What did she say?”
“She said no. And asked the obvious question: why on earth would she be interested in what was in my gun closet? I don’t think she ever liked the idea of my keeping guns in the apartment, even if she never said anything about it. I remember feeling ashamed when I walked down the stairs to the car waiting to take me to general staff headquarters. The job I had then gave me the right to have a chauffeur.”
“What happened next?”
Wallander noticed that his questions were disturbing von Enke, who wanted to dictate the pace of his revelations himself. He raised his hands as a sort of apology, indicating that he wouldn’t interrupt anymore.
“I’m convinced that Louise told me the truth. But even after that I still had the feeling that my briefcase and my documents had been interfered with. I started to set little traps: I purposely put some of the papers in the wrong order, I left a strand of hair over the lock of my briefcase, a blob of grease on the handle. What was hardest to grasp was why Louise would be interested in my papers. I couldn’t believe it had to do with pure curiosity or jealousy. She knew there was no reason at all to suspect anything like that. It was at least a year before I first began to wonder if the unthinkable really was a possibility.”
Von Enke paused briefly before continuing.
“Could Louise be in touch with a foreign power? It seemed highly improbable for a very simple reason. The documents I took home with me were rarely anything that could be of the slightest interest to a foreign intelligence service. But I couldn’t help feeling worried. I was starting to distrust my wife, to suspect her of treachery for no reason other than a strand of hair that had been disturbed. In the end—and by then it was the late 1970s—I
decided to establish once and for all whether or not my suspicions of Louise were justified.”
He stood up and rummaged around in a corner of the room full of maps. He came back with a scroll, which he spread out over the table—a sea chart of the central area of the Baltic Sea. He placed pebbles on the corners to weigh it down.
“Fall 1979,” he said. “To be more precise, August and September. We were due for our usual fall maneuvers involving nearly all our naval vessels. There was nothing special about this particular exercise. It was while I was attached to the general staff, and my role was to be an observer. About a month before the maneuvers were to take place, when all the plans and timetables were already drawn up, the navigation routes established, and the vessels assigned to specific areas, I made my own plan. I created a document and labeled it Secret. It was even signed by the supreme commander—although he knew nothing about it, of course. I introduced into the exercise a top secret element featuring one of our submarines being refueled in very advanced fashion by a remotely controlled tanker. It was all a complete fabrication, but something that could just about be regarded as possible. I noted the exact location and the precise time when the exercise would take place. I knew that the destroyer
Småland
, with the observers on board, would be close to that location at that time. I took the document home with me, locked it in the gun closet overnight, then hid it in my desk when I went to staff headquarters the following day. I repeated the same procedure for several days. The next week I placed the document in a secure bank vault I had rented for this very purpose. I considered tearing it up, but I knew I might need it someday as proof. The month that passed before the maneuvers took place was the worst I have ever endured. I had to make sure that Louise didn’t suspect anything, but I had set a trap for her that would shatter both of us if my suspicions turned out to be well founded.”
He pointed to a spot on the sea chart. Wallander leaned forward and saw that it was a point just northeast of Gotska Sandön.
“This is where the alleged meeting between the submarine and the nonexistent tanker was supposed to happen. It was on the periphery of the area where the maneuvers would be held. There was nothing unusual about the fact that Russian vessels were keeping track of us. We did the same when Warsaw Pact countries’ maneuvers were under way. We used to keep at a discreet distance, avoiding provocation. I chose this location for the fictitious meeting because the supreme commander was due to be dropped off at Berga that same morning, so the destroyer would be in the right place, on its way to where the exercises were in full swing, when my fictional refueling operation was to happen.”