Authors: Henning Mankell
“You’re suspected of more important things. But answer the question!”
“About half a million Swedish kronor.”
“Why did you choose to have an account in a Danish bank?”
“The Danish krone seemed stable.”
“And there was no other reason for going to Copenhagen?”
“No.”
“How did you get there?”
“By train from Norrköping. I went there by taxi. Eskil, whom you’ve met, took me to Fyrudden. And he picked me up when I came back.”
Wallander found no reason to doubt what he had heard, at least for the time being.
“And Louise knew all about your undeclared money?”
“She had the same access to the account as I did. Neither of us had a bad conscience. We both thought that Swedish taxation rates were disgracefully high.”
“Why did you need the money now?”
“Because I’d run out of cash. Even if you live frugally, you’re always spending money.”
Wallander left Copenhagen for the time being and returned to Djursholm.
“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering about that only you can answer. When we were standing in the conservatory, you noticed a man in the street, behind my back. I’ll admit that I’ve spent ages wondering about this. Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you seemed worried when you noticed him.”
“I was scared.”
The admission came out like a roar. Wallander was on his guard. Perhaps being on the run for such a long time had, after all, taken its toll on the man sitting opposite him. He decided to tread carefully.
“Who do you think it was?”
“I’ve already said I don’t know. And it’s not important. He was there to remind me. That’s what I think, at least.”
“Remind you of what? Don’t make me drag every answer out of you.”
“Somehow or other Louise’s contacts must have realized that I suspected her. Maybe it was she herself who told them I’d discovered her. It wasn’t the first time I’d had the feeling I was being watched. But the other occasions were not as clear-cut as that one at Djursholm.”
“Are you saying that somebody was shadowing you?”
“Not all the time. But I sometimes noticed that I was being followed.”
“How long had that been going on?”
“I don’t know. It might have been happening for a long time without my noticing. For many years.”
“Let’s move on from that conservatory to the windowless room,” Wallander said. “You wanted us to be away from the rest of the guests so that we could talk. But I don’t know why you picked me to be your confessor.”
“It wasn’t planned at all; I acted on the spur of the moment. I sometimes surprise myself with the sudden decisions I make. I expect that happens to
you as well. I thought the whole celebration was unpleasant. It was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I was throwing a party that I didn’t really want. I was pretty close to panic.”
“It seemed to me afterward that there was a hidden message in what you told me. Was I right to suspect that?”
“No. I simply wanted to talk. I suppose I might have wanted to see if I could confide my secret in you later on—the probability that I was married to a traitor.”
“Wasn’t there anybody else you could talk to? Sten Nordlander, for instance? Your best friend?”
“I was ashamed at the mere thought of revealing my misery to him.”
“What about Steven Atkins? You had told him about your daughter, after all.”
“I was drunk at the time. We had drunk lots of whiskey. I regretted saying anything afterward. I thought he had forgotten about it. But evidently not.”
“He assumed that I knew about her.”
“What do my friends say about my disappearance?”
“They’re worried. Shaken. The day they discover you’ve been hiding away, they will be very upset. I suspect you will lose them. Which leads me to the question of why you disappeared.”
“I felt I was under threat. The man on the other side of that fence was just a sort of prologue. I suddenly began noticing shadows everywhere, no matter where I went. It wasn’t like that before. I received strange phone calls. It was as if they always knew where I was. One day when I was visiting the National Maritime Museum a guard came to tell me there was a phone call for me. A man speaking broken Swedish issued a warning. He didn’t say precisely what for, just that I should watch my step. It started to become intolerable. I had never been so scared in all my life. I came very close to approaching the police and reporting Louise. I considered sending an anonymous letter. In the end I couldn’t keep going any longer. I made arrangements to rent this hunting lodge. Eskil drove to Stockholm and picked me up when I was outside the stadium on my morning walk. Since then I’ve been here the whole time, apart from that trip to Copenhagen.”
“It’s still incomprehensible to me that you never confronted Louise with your suspicions, which had become convictions. How could you live with somebody who was a spy?”
“I did confront her. Twice. The first time was the year Palme was killed. That had nothing to do with it, of course, but they were unsettled times. I was sitting with my colleagues, drinking coffee and talking about my suspicions that there was a spy in our ranks. It was a terrible situation, nibbling on
a cookie and talking about a possible spy who I thought might well be my wife.”
Wallander had a sudden attack of sneezing. Von Enke waited until it had passed.
“I confronted her in the summer of 1986,” he said. “We had gone to the Riviera with some friends of ours, a Commander Friis and his wife—we used to play bridge with them. We were staying at a hotel in Menton. One evening Louise and I went for a walk through the town. Suddenly, I stopped dead in my tracks and asked her outright. I hadn’t planned to; I suppose you could say that something snapped inside me. I stood in front of her and asked her. Was she a spy or wasn’t she? She was upset, refused to answer at first, and raised a hand as if to hit me. Then she recovered her self-control and replied calmly that of course she wasn’t a spy. How on earth could such a ridiculous thought have entered my head? What did she have to say that could be of any interest to a foreign power? I remember her smiling. She didn’t take me seriously, and as a result I couldn’t do so either. I simply couldn’t believe that she was so convincing as a dissembler. I apologized, and made the excuse that I was tired. For the rest of that summer I was convinced I’d been wrong. But in the fall my suspicions returned.”
“What happened?”
“The same thing again. Papers in the gun closet, a feeling that somebody had disturbed my briefcase.”
“Did you notice any changes in her after you revealed your suspicions in Menton?”
He thought before answering.
“I’ve asked myself the same question. I sometimes thought she was acting differently, but at other times not. I’m still not sure.”
“What happened the second time you put her on the spot?”
“It was the winter of 1996, exactly ten years later. We were at home. We were having breakfast, and it was snowing outside. She suddenly asked me about something I’d shouted at her during the night, while I was asleep. She claimed that I’d accused her of being a spy.”
“Had you?”
“I don’t know. I do sometimes talk in my sleep, but I never remember anything about it.”
“What did you say?”
“I turned her question on its head. I asked her if what I’d been dreaming was true.”
“What did she say?”
“She threw her napkin at me and stormed out of the kitchen. It was ten
minutes before she came back. I remember checking the clock. Nine minutes and forty-five seconds, to be exact. She apologized and insisted,
once and for all
, as she put it, that she didn’t want to hear any more talk about my suspicions. They were absurd. If I ever repeated the accusations, she would be forced to conclude that I was either out of my mind or going senile.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing. But my misgivings were not allayed. And rumors were still circulating about a spy in the Swedish military. Two years later things came to a point when I really did begin to think that I was going out of my mind.”
“What happened?”
“I was summoned to an interrogation by the military security services. They didn’t make any direct accusations, but it seems that for a while I was one of those suspected of being a spy. It was a grotesque situation. But I recall thinking that if Louise
had
sold military secrets to the Russians, she had found a perfect cover.”
“You?”
“Exactly. Me.”
“So then what happened?”
“Nothing. The rumors kept circulating, sometimes stronger than at others. Many of us were interrogated, even after we had retired. And as I said, I had the feeling I was being watched.”
Von Enke stood up, switched off the lamps that were still on, and opened some of the curtains. A gray dawn and an equally gray sea could be glimpsed through the trees. Wallander went over to one of the windows. A storm was brewing. He was worried about the boat. Von Enke accompanied him when he went to check that the painter was secure. A few eiders bobbed up and down on the choppy waves. The sun was beginning to disperse the night mist. The boat seemed safe enough, but the two men used their combined strength to drag it farther up the pebbly beach.
“Who killed Louise?” Wallander asked when they had finished with the boat.
Von Enke turned to face him. It occurred to Wallander that he must have confronted Louise in Menton in more or less the same way.
“Who killed her? You’re asking me? All I know is that it wasn’t me. But what do the police think? What do you think?”
“The man in Stockholm who’s in charge of the case seems to be good. But he doesn’t know. Not yet, perhaps I should say. We tend not to jump to conclusions.”
They returned to the hunting lodge in silence, sat down at the kitchen table again, and continued their conversation.
“We must begin at the beginning,” said Wallander. “Why did she go missing? The obvious conclusion for third-party observers like me was that the two of you had a pact of some sort.”
“That wasn’t the case. The first I knew of her disappearance was when I read about it in the papers. It was a shock.”
“So she didn’t know where you were?”
“No.”
“How long did you intend to remain in hiding?”
“I needed to be left in peace, to think. And I’d received death threats. I needed to find a way out.”
“I met Louise on several occasions. She was genuinely and deeply concerned about what might have happened to you.”
“She fooled you just as she’d fooled me.”
“I’m not sure. Could she not have loved you just as much as you loved her?”
Von Enke said nothing, merely shook his head.
“Did you do it?” Wallander asked. “Was that the escape route you hit upon?”
“No.”
“You must have spent hours thinking, brooding, lying sleepless in this hunting lodge. I believe you when you say you loved Louise. Nevertheless, you didn’t leave your hideaway when she died. One would have thought that the danger to your life was over now that she was dead. But you still stayed in hiding. I can’t make sense of that.”
“I’ve lost twenty pounds since she died. I can’t eat; I can hardly sleep. I try to understand what has happened, but I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s as if Louise has become a stranger to me. I don’t know who she used to meet, or what led to her death. I don’t have any answers.”
“Did she ever give you the impression that she was afraid?”
“Never.”
“I can tell you something that hasn’t appeared in the newspapers, something the police haven’t yet released for public consumption.”
Wallander told him about the suspicions that Louise had been killed by a poison that had previously been used in East Germany.
“It seems likely that you’ve been right all along,” Wallander concluded. “Somewhere along the way your wife, Louise, became an agent for the Russian intelligence service. She was who you suspected she was. She was the spy the Russians talked about.”
· · ·
Von Enke stood up and stormed out of the house. Wallander waited. After a while he began to worry, and he went out to investigate. He eventually found von Enke lying in a gully on the side of the island facing the open sea. Wallander sat down on a rock by his side.
“You must come back,” he said. “Nothing will ever be solved if you continue to hide here.”
“Perhaps the same poison is lying in wait for me. What will be gained if I die as well?”
“Nothing. But the police have resources to protect you.”
“I have to get used to the idea. That I was right after all. I have to try to understand why and how she did what she did. I can’t return until I’ve done that.”
“You’d better not take too long,” said Wallander, standing up.
He returned to the hunting lodge. Now he was the one making the coffee. He was feeling the strain of the long night. When von Enke returned, he had already emptied his second cup.
“Let’s talk about Signe,” Wallander said. “I went to see her, and I discovered a folder you’d hidden among her books.”
“I loved my daughter. But I made my visits in secret. Louise never knew I’d been there.”
“So you’re the only one who ever visited her?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wrong. Since you went missing, somebody else has been there at least once. He claimed to be your brother.”
Håkan von Enke shook his head in disbelief.
“I don’t have a brother. I have a relative who lives in England, but that’s all.”
“I believe you,” said Wallander. “We don’t know who visited your daughter. Which might suggest that everything is even more complicated than either you or I could have foreseen.”
Wallander could see that Håkan von Enke’s demeanor had suddenly changed. Nothing they had talked about had worried him as much as the news that somebody else had visited Signe at Niklasgården.
It was nearly six o’clock. Their long nocturnal conversation was over. Neither of them had the strength to continue.
“I will leave now,” said Wallander. “At the moment, I’m the only one who knows you are here. But you can’t wait forever before returning to civilization.
Besides, I’ll keep on pestering you with questions. Think about who it might have been who visited Niklasgården. Someone must have been on your trail. Who? Why? We must keep this conversation going.”