Authors: Henning Mankell
Wallander arrived in Malmö shortly after midday, picked up his car, and headed for Ystad. As he came to the exit, he found himself at a police checkpoint. He showed his ID and blew into the Breathalyzer.
“How’s it going?” he asked, in an attempt to cheer up his colleague. “Are people sober?”
“On the whole, yes. But we just started. No doubt we’ll nail one or two victims. How are things in Ystad?”
“Pretty quiet at the moment. But August usually produces more work than July.”
Wallander wished him good luck, then rolled up his window and drove on. Only a few hours ago I was sitting with two dead men at my feet, he thought. But that’s not something that anybody else can see. Our memories don’t pop up next to us in Technicolor.
He went to the store to buy a few groceries, collected Jussi, and eventually pulled into the parking area outside his house.
After putting his purchases in the fridge, he sat down at his kitchen table. Everything was quiet and calm.
He tried to figure out what he would tell Linda.
But he didn’t call her that day, not even in the evening.
He simply had no idea what to say to her.
One night in May 2009 Wallander woke up from a dream. That was happening more and more often. All the memories of the night lived on when he opened his eyes. Until recently he rarely remembered his dreams. Jussi, who had been ill, was asleep on the floor by his bed. The clock on the bedside table said four-fifteen. Perhaps it wasn’t just the dream that had woken him up. Perhaps the calling of an owl had drifted in through the open window and into his consciousness—it wouldn’t be the first time.
But now there was no owl calling. He had dreamed about Linda and the conversation they should have had the day he returned from Blue Island. In his dream he had in fact called her and told her what had happened. She had listened without saying anything. And that was all. The dream had broken off abruptly, like a rotten branch.
He woke up feeling very uncomfortable. He hadn’t called her at all, in fact. He hadn’t had the strength to do it. His excuse was simple. He hadn’t played a part in the tragedy, and calling her would only have led to an unbearable situation as far as he was concerned; if he gave her an exact version of events, he would be suspected of having been involved. Only when the tragedy became public knowledge would she and Hans discover what had happened. And with a bit of luck, he would be able to stay out of it.
Wallander thought that this case was among the worst experiences of his life. The only thing he could compare it to was the incident many years ago when he killed a man for the first time in the line of duty, and seriously wondered if he could continue as a police officer. He considered doing what Martinsson had now done: throw in the towel as a policeman and devote himself to something entirely different.
Wallander leaned carefully over the side of the bed and checked on his dog. Jussi was asleep. He was also dreaming, scratching in the air with his front paws. Wallander leaned back in bed again. The air drifting in through the window was refreshing. He kicked off the duvet. His thoughts wandered to the bundle of papers lying on the kitchen table. He had started writing a report last September, noting down everything that had happened and culminating in the tragedy in the hunting lodge on Blue Island.
· · ·
It was Eskil Lundberg who found the dead bodies. Ytterberg had immediately called in the CID in Norrköping to assist. Since it was a matter for the security police and the military intelligence service, an embargo had been immediately imposed on all aspects of the investigation, and everything was shrouded in secrecy. Wallander was informed by Ytterberg of whatever he was allowed to pass on, in strict confidence. The whole time, Wallander worried about the possibility of his own presence at the scene being discovered. What concerned him most was whether Nordlander had told his wife about the trip he was going to make, but evidently he hadn’t. With great reluctance Wallander read in the newspapers about Mrs. Nordlander’s despair over her husband’s death and her refusal to believe that he had killed his old friend and then shot himself.
Ytterberg occasionally complained to Wallander about the fact that not even he, the man in charge of the police investigation, knew what was going on behind the scenes. But there was no doubt that Sten Nordlander had killed Håkan von Enke using two shots to the head, and had then shot himself. What was mysterious and what nobody could explain was how Sten Nordlander had come to Blue Island. Ytterberg said on several occasions that he suspected a third party had been involved, but who that could have been and what role he or she played he had no idea. The real motive for the tragedy was also something that nobody could work out.
The newspapers and other media were full of speculation. They wallowed in the bloody drama played out in the hunting lodge. Linda and Hans and Klara had almost been forced to move in order to avoid all the inquisitive journalists and their intrusive questions. The wildest of the conspiracy theorists maintained that Håkan von Enke and Sten Nordlander had taken to their graves a secret linked to the death of Olof Palme.
Occasionally during his conversations with Ytterberg, Wallander had asked cautiously, almost out of politeness, how things were going with regard to the suspicions that Louise von Enke could have been a Russian spy. Ytterberg had only extremely meager information to give him.
“I have the impression that everything is at a standstill as far as she is concerned,” he said. “What facts the security police are looking for, or trying to suppress, I have no idea. We might have to wait until some investigative journalist goes to town on that.”
Wallander never heard a word about the possibility of Håkan von Enke’s being a spy for the U.S.A. There were no suspicions, no rumors, no speculations
that this might be the cause of what had happened. Wallander once asked Ytterberg point-blank if there were any such theories. Ytterberg had been totally incredulous.
“Why in God’s name should he have been a U.S. spy?”
“I’m just trying to think of any possible explanation for what happened,” Wallander said. “Given there have been suspicions that Louise was spying for the Russians, why not try a different possibility?”
“I think I’d have heard if the security police or military intelligence had any suspicions of that sort.”
“I was only thinking aloud,” said Wallander.
“Do you know something I don’t?” Ytterberg suddenly asked with an unexpected edge to his voice.
“No,” said Wallander. “I don’t know anything you don’t.”
It was after that conversation that Wallander began writing. He collected all his thoughts, all his notes, and invented a system of Post-its that he stuck up on one of the living room walls. But every time Linda came to visit him, with or without Hans and Klara, he took them down. He wanted to write his story without the involvement of anybody else, and without anyone’s even suspecting what he was doing.
He began by trying to tie up the remaining loose ends. It wasn’t difficult to check that “USG Enterprises,” whose name he had seen in the entrance hall of the building where George Talboth lived, was the name of a consultancy firm. There was no indication that it wasn’t aboveboard. But he couldn’t work out who had broken into his house while he was away, nor who could have visited Niklasgården. It was obvious that they were people who had assisted Håkan von Enke in some way, but Wallander never established why they did it. Even if the most likely explanation was that they were looking for what Wallander called Signe’s book. It was lying on the kitchen table as he wrote, but otherwise he continued to hide it in Jussi’s kennel.
It wasn’t long before it dawned on him what he was really doing. He was writing about himself and his own life just as much as about Håkan von Enke. When he returned in his thoughts to everything he had heard about the Cold War, the divided attitude of the Swedish armed forces to neutrality and not joining alliances or the necessity of being an integrated part of NATO, he realized how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in. It was impossible to catch up on the knowledge he hadn’t bothered to acquire earlier. What he could learn now about that world obviously had to be from the perspective of somebody in the present looking back in time. He wondered grimly if that might be typical of his generation. An unwillingness
to care about the real world they lived in, the political circumstances that were shifting all the time. Or had his generation been split? Between those who cared, and those who didn’t?
His father had often been better informed than Wallander on all kinds of events, he could see that now. It wasn’t only the episode with Tage Erlander and his speech in the People’s Park in Malmö. He also recalled a time in the early 1970s when his father had told him off for not bothering to vote in the election that had taken place a few days earlier. Wallander could still remember his father’s fury, how he had called him “an idle idiot when it comes to politics” before throwing a paintbrush at him and telling him to get out of his sight. Which he had done, of course. At the time he just thought his father was weird. Why should Wallander care about the way Swedish politicians were always arguing with one another? The only things that were of any interest to him were lower taxes and higher wages, nothing else.
He often sat at his kitchen table and wondered if his closest friends thought the same way. Not interested in politics, only worried about their own circumstances. On the few occasions he ever talked about politics it was mainly a matter of attacking individual politicians, complaining about their idiotic shenanigans without moving on to the next stage and wondering what the alternatives were.
There had been only one short period when he thought seriously about the political situation in Sweden, Europe, and perhaps even the world. That was nearly twenty years ago, in connection with the brutal double murder of an elderly farming couple in Lenarp. Fingers were pointed at illegal immigrants or asylum-seekers, and Wallander had been forced to face up to his own opinions on the massive immigration into Sweden. He realized that behind his usual peaceful and tolerant exterior lurked dark, even racist, views. The realization had surprised and scared him. He had eliminated all such thoughts. But after that investigation, which had come to its remarkable conclusion in the market square at Kivik, where the two murderers had been arrested, he sank back into his political apathy.
He visited the Ystad library several times during the fall and borrowed books about Swedish postwar history. He read about all the discussions concerning whether or not Sweden should acquire nuclear weapons or join NATO. Despite the fact that he was reaching adulthood when some of these debates were taking place, he had no recollection of reacting to what the politicians were talking about. It was as if he had been living in a glass bubble.
On one occasion he told Linda about how he had started to examine his past. It turned out that she had much more interest in political matters than
he did. He was surprised—he’d never noticed it before. She merely commented that a person’s political awareness wasn’t something that necessarily showed on the surface.
“When did you ever ask me a political question?” she asked. “Why would I discuss politics with you when I know you’re not interested?”
“What does Hans say?”
“He knows a lot about the world. But we don’t always agree.”
Wallander often thought about Hans. In the late fall of 2008, in the middle of October, Linda had called him, obviously upset, and told him that the Danish police had raided Hans’s office in Copenhagen. Some of the brokers, including two Icelanders, had rigged the increase in value of certain stocks and shares in order to secure their own commissions and bonuses. When the financial crisis hit, the bubble burst. For a while, all employees, including Hans, were under suspicion of having been involved in the scam. It was as recently as March that Hans had been informed that he was no longer suspected of shady dealings. It had been a heavy burden for him to bear when he was also mourning the death of another parent. He had frequently visited Wallander and asked him to explain what had actually happened. Wallander told him as much as he could, but was careful not to even imply what really lay behind it all.
Wallander was particularly concerned about how to make sure that the summary of his thoughts and the knowledge he had acquired would become public. Should he send his text anonymously to the authorities? Would anybody take it seriously? Who wanted to destroy the good relationship between Sweden and the U.S.A.? Perhaps the silence surrounding Håkan von Enke’s espionage was best for everybody involved?
He had started writing at the end of September, and now he had been going for more than eight months. He didn’t want what had happened to be buried in silence. That possibility made him feel indignant.
While writing he also continued his work as a police officer. Two depressing investigations into cases of aggravated assault occupied him throughout the fall. Then in April 2009 he started looking into a series of arson attacks in the Ystad area.
What worried Wallander more than anything else during this period was that his sudden losses of memory kept recurring. The worst incident was during the Christmas break. It had snowed during the night. He had dressed and gone out to shovel the driveway and the parking area. When he had finished,
he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t even recognize Jussi. It was quite a while before it dawned on him whose house he was standing in front of. He never did what he should have done. He didn’t see a doctor, because he was simply too scared.
He tried to convince himself that he was working too hard, that he was burning himself out. Sometimes he succeeded. But he was constantly afraid that his forgetfulness would get worse. He was terrified of succumbing to dementia, that he might be suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Wallander stayed in bed. It was Sunday morning; he wasn’t on duty. Linda was due to visit him after lunch, with Klara. Hans might come too, if he felt up to it.