‘Don’t call my mum that,’ said Linda, her face darkening.
‘She’s lying, whether you like it or not. I welcomed her, I let her in, I dried her tears, and I even made up the bed with clean sheets for her.’
‘She wasn’t lying about her new man, at least. I’ve met him. He’s just as charming as psychopaths usually are. Mum has an odd talent for choosing the wrong man.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t mean you, of course. But that lunatic golf player wasn’t much better than the guy she’s with now.’
‘The question is: what can I do about it?’
Linda thought for a moment before answering. She rubbed her nose with the index finger of her left hand. Just like her grandfather used to do, Wallander thought. He’d never noticed that before, and now he burst out laughing. She looked at him in surprise. He explained. Then it was her turn to laugh.
‘I have Klara in the car,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to have a quick word about this business with Mum. We can talk later.’
‘You mean you left the baby alone in the car?’ Wallander was upset. ‘How could you do such a thing?’
‘I have a friend with me; she’s looking after Klara. How could you think I’d leave her alone?’
She paused in the doorway.
‘I think Mum needs our help,’ she said.
‘I’m always here,’ said Wallander. ‘But I’d prefer her to be sober when she visits. And she should call in advance.’
‘Are you always sober? Do you always call before you visit somebody? Have you never felt sick?’
She didn’t wait for a reply but vanished into the hallway. Wallander had just started reading his report again when Ytterberg called.
‘I’m taking a few days off,’ he said. ‘I forgot to mention that.’
‘Going anywhere interesting?’
‘I’ll be staying in an old cottage in a lovely location by a lake just outside Vasteras. But I wanted to tell you a few of my thoughts about the von Enkes. I was a bit curt when we spoke a few minutes ago.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Let me put it like this. I have two theories about their disappearance, and my colleagues agree with me. Let’s see if you’re thinking along the same lines. One possibility is that they planned their disappearance in advance, but for some reason they decided to vanish at different times. There could be various explanations for that. For instance, if they wanted to change their identity, he might have gone ahead to some unknown place in order to prepare for her arrival. Meet her on a road filled with palm fronds and roses, to use a biblical image. But there could be other reasons, of course. There’s really only one other plausible possibility: that they’ve been subjected to some sort of attack. In other words, that they’re dead. It’s hard to find a reason why they might have been exposed to violence, and if so, why it should happen at different times. But apart from those two alternatives, we have no idea. There’s just a black hole.’
‘I think I’d have reached the same conclusions as you.’
‘I’ve consulted the leading experts in the country about possible circumstances associated with missing persons, and our job is simple in the sense that there’s only one way for us to approach this.’
‘Find them, you mean.’
‘Or at least understand why we can’t find them.’
‘Have there been any new details at all?’
‘None. But there is one other person we have to take into account.’
‘You mean the son?’
‘Yes. We can’t avoid it. If we assume that they engineered their disappearance, we have to ask why they’d subject him to such horrors. It’s inhuman, to put it mildly. Our impression is that they are not cruel people. You know that yourself; you’ve met them. What we’ve dug up about Hakan von Enke indicates that he was a well-liked senior officer, unassuming, shrewd, fair, never temperamental. The worst we’ve heard about him is that he could occasionally be impatient. But can’t we all? As a teacher, Louise was well liked by her pupils. Uncommunicative, quite a few said. But refraining from speaking non-stop is hardly grounds for suspicion - you have to listen now and then too. Anyway, it doesn’t seem credible that they could have lived double lives. We’ve even consulted experts in Europol. I’ve had several phone conversations with a French policewoman, Mlle Germain in Paris, who had a lot of sensible things to say. She confirmed my own thought, that we also need to look at the matter in a radically different light.’
Wallander knew what he was getting at.
‘You mean what role Hans might have played?’
‘Exactly. If there was a large fortune at stake, that might have provided us with a lead. But there isn’t. All in all, the Enkes have about a million kronor - plus their apartment, which is probably worth seven or eight million. You could argue that it’s a lot of money for an ordinary mortal. But given contemporary circumstances, you could say that a person with no debts and the assets I’ve referred to is well off, but hardly rich.’
‘Have you spoken to Hans?’
‘About a week ago he was in Stockholm for a meeting with the Financial Supervisory Authority. He was the one who took the initiative and got in touch with me, and we had a chat. I have to say that he seemed genuinely worried, and that he simply couldn’t understand what had happened. Besides, he earns a pretty substantial salary.’
‘So that’s where we are, is it?’
‘Not exactly a strong position to be in. But we’ll keep digging, even if the ground seems very hard.’
Ytterberg suddenly put down the receiver. Wallander could hear him cursing in the background. Then he picked up the receiver again.
‘I’m leaving in two days,’ said Ytterberg. ‘But you can always contact me if there’s an emergency.’
‘I promise to call only if it’s important,’ said Wallander, and hung up.
After that phone call Wallander went down to sit on the bench outside the entrance to the station. He thought through what Ytterberg had said.
He stayed there for a long time. Mona’s sudden visit had tired him out. This was not the way he wanted things to be; he didn’t want her turning his life upside down by making new demands on him. He would have to make this clear to her if she turned up on his doorstep again, and he must persuade Linda to be his ally. He was prepared to help Mona - that wasn’t a problem - but the past was the past. It no longer existed.
Wallander walked down the hill to a sausage stand across from the hospital. A lump of mashed potato fell off his tray, and a jackdaw swooped down immediately to steal it.
He suddenly had the feeling that he’d forgotten something. He felt around for his service pistol. Or could he have forgotten something else? He wasn’t sure if he’d come to the sausage stand by car, or walked down the hill from the police station.
He dumped the half-eaten sausage and mashed potatoes into a rubbish bin and looked around one more time. No sign of a car. He slowly started to trudge back up the hill. About halfway there, his memory returned. He broke into a cold sweat and his heart was racing. He couldn’t put off consulting his doctor any longer. This was the third time it had happened within a short period, and he wanted to know what was going on inside his head.
He called the doctor he had consulted earlier when he’d returned to duty. He was given an appointment shortly after midsummer. When he put the receiver down, he checked to make sure that his gun was locked up where it should be.
He spent the rest of the day preparing for his court appearance. It was six o’clock when he closed the last of his files and threw it onto his guest chair. He had stood up and picked up his jacket when a thought suddenly struck him. He had no idea where it came from. Why hadn’t von Enke taken his secret diary away with him when he visited Signe for the last time? Wallander could see only two possible explanations. Either he intended to go back, or something had happened to make a return impossible.
He sat down at his desk again and looked up the number for Niklasgarden. It was the woman with the melodious foreign voice who answered.
‘I just wanted to check that all is well with Signe,’ he said.
‘She lives in a world where very little changes. Apart from that which affects all of us - growing older.’
‘I don’t suppose her dad has been to visit her, has he?’
‘I thought he went missing. Is he back?’
‘No. I was just wondering.’
‘Her uncle was here yesterday on a visit. It was my day off, but I noticed it in the ledger where we keep a record of visits.’
Wallander held his breath.
‘An uncle?’
‘He signed himself in as Gustaf von Enke. He came in the afternoon and stayed for about an hour.’
‘Are you absolutely certain about this?’
‘Why would I make it up?’
‘No, as you say, why would you? If this uncle comes back to visit Signe, could you please give me a call?’
She suddenly sounded worried.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, not at all. Thanks for your time.’
Wallander replaced the receiver but remained seated. He was not mistaken; he was sure of that. He had studied the von Enke family tree meticulously, and he was certain there was no uncle.
Whoever the man was that had visited Signe, he had given a false name and relationship.
Wallander drove home. The worry he had felt earlier had now returned in spades.
The following morning, Wallander had a temperature and a sore throat. He tried hard to convince himself that it was his imagination, but in the end he got a thermometer, which registered 102. He called the police station and told them he was ill. He spent most of the day either in bed or in the kitchen, surrounded by the books from the library he still hadn’t read.
During the night he’d had a dream about Signe. He’d been visiting Niklasgarden, and suddenly noticed that it was in fact somebody else curled up in her bed. It was dark in the room; he tried to switch the light on, but it didn’t work. So he took out his mobile phone and used it as a torch. In the pale blue glow he discovered that it was Louise lying there. She was an exact copy of her daughter. He was overcome by fear, but when he tried to leave the room he found that the door was locked.
That was when he woke up. It was four o’clock and already light. He could feel a pain in his throat, but he felt warm and soon dropped off to sleep again. When he eventually woke up he tried to interpret his dream, but he didn’t reach any conclusions. Apart from the fact that everything seemed to be a cover-up for everything else when it came to the disappearance of Hakan and Louise von Enke.
Wallander got out of bed, wrapped a towel around his neck, and looked up Gustaf von Enke on the Internet. There was nobody by that name. At eight o’clock he called Ytterberg, who would be going on holiday the following day. He was on his way to what he expected to be an extremely unpleasant interrogation of a man who had tried to strangle his wife and his two children, probably because he had found another woman he wanted to live with.
‘But why did he have to kill the children?’ he wondered. ‘It’s like a Greek tragedy.’
Wallander didn’t know much about the dramas written more than two thousand years ago. Linda had once taken him to a production of
Medea
in Malmo. He had been moved by it, but not so much that he became a regular theatergoer. His last visit hadn’t exactly increased his interest either.
He told Ytterberg about his call to Niklasgarden the previous day.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ said Wallander. ‘There is no uncle. There’s a cousin in England, but that’s it.’
‘It certainly sounds odd.’
‘I know you’re about to go away. Maybe you can send somebody else out to Niklasgarden to try to get a description of the man?’
‘I have a very good cop named Rebecka Andersson,’ he said. ‘She’s phenomenal with assignments like this, even though she’s very young. I’ll speak to her.’
Wallander was just about to end the call when Ytterberg asked him a question.
‘Do you ever feel like I do?’ he asked. ‘An almost desperate longing to get away from all this shit that we’re chest-deep in?’
‘It happens.’
‘How do we manage to survive it all?’
‘I don’t know. Some sort of feeling of responsibility, I suspect. I once had a mentor, an old detective named Rydberg. That’s what he always used to say. It was a matter of responsibility, nothing more.’
Rebecka Andersson called at about two o’clock from Niklasgarden.
‘I understood that you wanted the information as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I’m sitting on a bench on the grounds. It’s lovely weather. Do you have a pencil handy?’
‘Yes, I’m ready to go.’
‘A man in his fifties, neatly dressed in suit and tie, very friendly, light curly hair, blue eyes. He spoke what is usually called standard Swedish, in other words, no particular dialect and certainly without any trace of a foreign accent. One thing was obvious from the start: he’d never been here before. They had to show him which room she was in, but nobody seems to have thought that was at all remarkable.’
‘What did he have to say?’
‘Nothing, really. He was just very friendly.’