‘Hardly. But it’s not up to me.’
‘But your guess would be … ?’
‘I’m not going to guess. You’ll have to wait and see.’
Holmgren began collecting his papers and placing them carefully in his briefcase. He suddenly paused.
‘It’s obviously an advantage if this business doesn’t get into the hands of the media,’ he said. Things always take a turn for the worse when we can’t hush up this sort of thing and keep it inside the police force.’
‘I think we’ll be OK,’ Wallander said. ‘There’s been no mention of it so far, so that’s an indication that nothing has been leaked.’
But Wallander was wrong. That same day there was a knock on his door. He had been lying down, but he got up because he thought it was one of his neighbours. When he opened the door, a photographer took a flash picture of Wallander’s face. Standing next to the cameraman was a reporter who introduced herself as Lisa Halbing, with a smile Wallander immediately classified as fake.
‘Can we talk?’ she asked aggressively.
‘What about?’ wondered Wallander, who already had a pain in his stomach.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think anything.’
The cameraman took a whole series of pictures. Wallander’s first instinct was to punch him, but he did no such thing, of course. Instead he demanded that the cameraman promise not to take any photographs inside the house; that was his private domain. When both the cameraman and Lisa Halbing promised to respect his privacy, he let them in and invited them to sit down at his kitchen table. He served them coffee and the remains of a sponge cake he’d been presented with a few days earlier by one of his neighbours who was an avid baker.
‘Which newspaper?’ he asked when he had finished serving coffee. ‘I forgot to ask.’
‘I should have said.’ Lisa Halbing was heavily made up and was trying to conceal her excess weight beneath a loose-fitting tunic shirt. She was in her thirties, and looked a bit like Linda - although his daughter would never have worn so much make-up.
‘I work for various papers,’ Halbing said. ‘If I have a good story, I sell it to the one that pays best.’
‘And right now you think I’m a good story, is that it?’
‘On a scale of one to ten you might just about scrape into four. No more than that.’
‘What would I have been if I’d shot the waiter in the restaurant?’
‘Then you’d have been a perfect ten. That would obviously have been worth a front-page headline.’
‘How did you find out about this?’
The photographer was itching to pick up his camera, but he kept his promise. Lisa Halbing was still wearing her forced smile.
‘You realise of course that I’m not going to answer that question.’
‘I assume it was the waiter who tipped you off.’
‘It wasn’t, in fact. But I’m not going to say anything more about that.’
Looking back, it was clear to Wallander that one of his colleagues must have leaked the details. It could have been anyone, even Lennart Mattson himself. Or the investigating officer from Malmo. How much would they have earned? All the years he had been a police officer, leaks had been a continuing problem, but he had never been affected himself until now. He had never contacted a journalist, nor had he ever heard the slightest suggestion that any of his close colleagues had done so either. But then, what did he know? Precisely nothing.
Later that evening he called Linda and warned her about what she could expect to read in the following day’s paper.
‘Did you tell them the honest truth?’
‘At least nobody can accuse me of lying.’
‘Then you’ll be OK. Lies are what they’re after. They’ll make a meal of it, but I don’t think there’ll be any repercussions.’
Wallander slept badly that night. The following day he was waiting for the phone to ring, but he had only two calls. One was from Kristina Magnusson, who was angry about the way the incident had been blown out of proportion. Shortly afterwards, Lennart Mattson called.
‘It’s a pity you made a statement to the press,’ he said disapprovingly.
Wallander was furious.
‘What would you have done if you’d been confronted by a journalist and a cameraman on your front doorstep? People who knew every detail of what had happened? Would you have shut the door in their face, or lied to them?’
‘I thought it was you who had contacted them,’ said Mattson lamely.
‘Then you are even more stupid than I thought you were.’
Wallander slammed down the phone and unplugged it. Then he called Linda on his mobile phone and said she should use that number if she wanted to talk to him.
‘Come with us,’ she said.
‘Come with you where?’
She seemed surprised.
‘Didn’t I tell you? We’re off to Stockholm. It’s Hakan’s seventy-fifth birthday. Come with us!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m staying here. I’m not in a party mood. I’ve had enough of that after my evening at the restaurant.’
‘We’re leaving the day after tomorrow. Think about it.’
When Wallander went to bed that night he was convinced that he wasn’t going anywhere. But by the next morning he had changed his mind. The neighbours could take care of Jussi. It might be a good idea to make himself scarce for a few days.
The following day he flew to Stockholm. Linda and her family drove. He checked into a hotel across from the Central Station. When he leafed through the evening newspapers, he noted that the gun story had already been relegated to an inside page. The big news story of the day was an unusually audacious bank robbery in Gothenburg, carried out by four robbers wearing Abba masks. Reluctantly, he sent the robbers his grateful thanks.
That night he slept unusually soundly in his hotel bed.
Hakan von Enke’s birthday party was held in a rented party facility in Djursholm, the upmarket suburb of Stockholm. Wallander had never been there before. Linda assured him that a business suit would be appropriate - von Enke hated dinner jackets and tails, although he was very fond of the various uniforms he had worn during his long naval career. Wallander could have worn his police uniform if he’d wanted to, but he had taken his best suit with him. Under the circumstances, it didn’t feel right for him to use his uniform.
Why on earth had he agreed to go to Stockholm? Wallander asked himself as the express train from Arlanda Airport came to a halt in the Central Station. Perhaps it would have been better to go somewhere else. He occasionally used to take short trips to Skagen in Denmark, where he liked to stroll along the beaches, visit the art gallery, and lounge around in one of the guest houses he had been using for the past thirty years. It was to Skagen that he had retreated many years ago when he had toyed with the idea of resigning from the police forcce. But here he was in Stockholm to attend a birthday party.
When Wallander arrived in Djursholm, Hakan von Enke went out of his way to make him welcome. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Wallander, who was placed at the head table, between Linda and the widow of a rear admiral. The widow, whose name was Hok, was in her eighties, used a hearing aid, and eagerly refilled her wine glass at every opportunity. Even before they had finished the soup course she had started telling slightly smutty jokes. Wallander found her interesting, especially when he discovered that one of her six children was an expert in forensic medicine in Lund - Wallander had met him on several occasions and had a good impression of him. Many speeches were delivered, but they were all blessedly short. Good military discipline, Wallander thought. The toastmaster was a Commander Tobiasson, who made a series of witty remarks that Wallander found highly amusing. When the admiral’s wife fell silent for a little while due to the malfunctioning of her hearing aid, Wallander wondered what he could expect when he celebrated his own seventy-fifth birthday. Who would come to the party, assuming he had one? Linda had told him that it had been Hakan von Enke’s own idea to rent the party rooms. If Wallander understood the situation correctly, his wife, Louise, had been surprised. Usually her husband was dismissive of his birthdays, but he had suddenly changed his mind and set up this lavish spread.
Coffee was served in an adjacent room with comfortable easy chairs. When everyone had finished eating, Wallander went out into a conservatory to stretch his legs. The restaurant was surrounded by spacious grounds - the estate had previously been the home of one of Sweden’s first and richest industrialists.
He gave a start when Hakan von Enke appeared by his side out of nowhere, clutching something as un-PC as an old-fashioned pipe and a packet of tobacco. Wallander recognised the brand: Hamilton’s Blend. For a short period in his late teens he had been a pipe smoker himself, and used the same tobacco.
‘Winter,’ said von Enke. ‘And we’re in for a snowstorm, according to the forecast.’
Von Enke paused for a moment and gazed out at the dark sky.
‘When you’re on board a submarine at a sufficient depth, the climate and weather conditions are totally irrelevant. Everything is calm; you’re in a sort of ocean basement. In the Baltic Sea, twenty-five metres is deep enough if there isn’t too much wind. It’s more difficult in the North Sea. I remember once leaving Scotland in stormy conditions. We were listing fifteen degrees at a depth of thirty metres. It wasn’t exactly pleasant.’
He lit his pipe and eyed Wallander keenly.
‘Is that too poetic a thought for a police officer?’
‘No, but a submarine is a different world as far as I’m concerned. A scary one, I should add.’
The commander sucked eagerly at his pipe.
‘Let’s be honest,’ he said. ‘This party is boring both of us stiff. Everybody knows that I arranged it. I did it because a lot of my friends wanted me to. But now we can hide ourselves away in one of the little side rooms. Sooner or later my wife will come looking for me, but we can talk in peace until then.’
‘But you’re the star of this show,’ said Wallander.
‘It’s like in a good play,’ said von Enke. ‘In order to increase the excitement, the main character doesn’t need to be onstage all the time. It can be advantageous if some of the most important parts of the plot take place in the wings.’
He fell silent. Too abruptly, far too abruptly, Wallander thought. Von Enke was staring at something behind Wallander’s back. Wallander turned round. He could see the garden, and beyond it one of the minor roads that eventually joined the main Djursholm-Stockholm highway. Wallander caught a glimpse of a man on the other side of the fence, standing under a lamp post. Next to him was a parked car, with the engine running. The exhaust fumes rose and slowly dispersed in the yellow light. Wallander could tell that von Enke was worried.
‘Let’s get our coffee and then shut ourselves away,’ he said.
Before leaving the conservatory, Wallander turned round again; the car had vanished, and so had the man by the lamp post. Perhaps it was someone von Enke had forgotten to invite to the party, Wallander thought. It couldn’t have been anyone looking for me, surely - some journalist wanting to talk to me about the gun I left in the restaurant.
After they picked up their coffee, von Enke led Wallander into a little room with brown wooden panelling and leather easy chairs. Wallander noticed that the room had no windows. Von Enke had been watching him.
‘There’s a reason for this room being a sort of bunker,’ he said. ‘In the 1930s the house was owned for a few years by a man who owned a lot of Stockholm nightclubs, most of them illegal. Every night his armed couriers would drive around and collect all the takings, which were brought back here. In those days this room contained a big safe. His accountants would sit here, adding up the cash, doing the books, and then stash the money away in the safe. When the owner was arrested for his shady dealings, the safe was cut up. The man was called Goransson, if I remember correctly. He was given a long sentence that he couldn’t handle. He hanged himself in his cell at Langholmen Prison.’
He fell silent, took a sip of coffee, and sucked at his pipe, which had gone out. And that was the moment, in that insulated little room where the only sound was a faint hum from the party guests outside, that Wallander realised Hakan von Enke was scared. He had seen this many times before in his life: a person frightened of something, real or imagined. He was certain he wasn’t mistaken.
The conversation started awkwardly, with von Enke reminiscing about the years when he was still on active duty as a naval officer.
‘The autumn of 1980,’ he said. ‘That’s a long time ago now, a generation back, twenty-eight long years. What were you doing then?’
‘I was working as a police officer in Ystad. Linda was very young. I’d decided to move there in order to be closer to my elderly father. I also thought it would be a better environment for Linda to grow up in. Or at least, that was one of the reasons why we left Malmo. What happened next is a different story altogether.’
Von Enke didn’t seem to be listening to what Wallander said. He continued along his own line.
‘I was working at the east coast naval base that autumn. Two years before I had stepped down as officer in charge of one of our best submarines, one of the Water Snake class. We submariners always called it simply the Snake. My posting at the marine base was only temporary. I wanted to go back to sea, but the powers that be wanted me to become part of the operations command of the whole Swedish naval defence forces. In September the Warsaw Pact countries were conducting an exercise along the East German coast. MILOBALT, they called it. I can still remember that. It was nothing remarkable; they generally had their autumn exercises at about the same time as we had ours. But an unusually large number of vessels were involved, since they were practising landings and submarine recovery. We had succeeded in finding out the details without too much effort. We heard from the National Defence Radio Centre that there was an awful lot of radio communication traffic between Russian vessels and their home base near Leningrad, but everything seemed to be routine; we kept an eye on what they were doing and made a note of anything we thought important in our logbooks. But then came that Thursday - it was 18 September, a date that will be the very last thing I forget. We had a call from the duty officer on one of the fleet’s tugs, HMS
Ajax
, saying that they had just discovered a foreign submarine in Swedish territorial waters. I was in one of the map rooms at the naval base, looking for a more detailed chart of the East German coast, when an agitated national serviceman burst into the room. He never managed to explain exactly what had happened, but I went back to the command centre and spoke to the duty officer on the
Ajax
. He said he’d been scanning the sea with his telescope and suddenly noticed the submarine’s aerials some three hundred yards away. Fifteen seconds later the submarine surfaced. The officer was on the ball, and figured out that the submarine had probably been at periscope depth but had then started to dive when they saw the tug. The
Ajax
was just south of Huvudskar when the incident happened, and the submarine was heading south-west, which meant that she was parallel with the border of Swedish waters but definitely on the Swedish side of the line. It didn’t take long for me to find out if there were any Swedish submarines in the area: there were not. I requested radio contact with the
Ajax
again, and asked the duty officer if he could describe the conning tower or the periscope he had seen. From what he said I realised immediately that it was one of the submarines of the class NATO called Whisky. And at the time they were used only by the Russians and the Poles. I’m sure you’ll understand that my heart started beating faster when I established that. But I had two other questions.’