The Troubled Man (25 page)

‘Yes. Hakan von Enke disappeared in April, and his wife only a few weeks ago.’

‘That’s strange. The fact that there’s no trace of them at all. Where could he have gone to? Or they?’

‘We simply don’t know. They might be alive, they might be dead.’

Lundberg shook his head.

‘There’s still the question about the photograph,’ said Wallander.

‘I don’t have an answer for you.’

Was it because Lundberg’s reply came too quickly? Wallander wasn’t sure, but he did wonder, purely intuitively, if what Lundberg said was true. Was there something he didn’t want to tell Wallander about, despite everything?

‘Maybe it will come to you,’ said Wallander. ‘You never know. A memory might rise to the surface one of these days.’

Wallander watched him backing away from the quay, then they both raised their hands to say goodbye, and the boat shot off at high speed towards the strait and Halso.

Wallander took a different route home. He wanted to avoid passing that little cafe again.

When he arrived he was tired and hungry, and he didn’t pick up Jussi from the neighbour’s. He could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It had been raining; he could smell it in the grass under his feet.

He unlocked the door and went into the house, took off his jacket and kicked off his shoes.

He paused in the hall, held his breath, listened intently. Nobody there. Nothing had been disturbed, but even so he knew that somebody had been in the house while he was away. He went into the kitchen in his socks. No message on the table. If it had been Linda, she would have scribbled a note and left it there. He went into the living room and looked around.

He’d had a visitor. Somebody had been there and had left.

Wallander pulled on his boots and walked around the outside of the house.

When he was sure that nobody was observing him, he went to the dog kennel and squatted down.

He felt around inside. What he had stashed was still there.

He had inherited the tin box from his father. Or rather, he had found it among all the discarded paintings, tins of paint and paintbrushes. When Wallander cleared out the studio after his father’s death, it brought tears to his eyes. One of the oldest paintbrushes had a maker’s mark indicating that it had been manufactured during the war, in 1942. This had been his father’s life, he thought: a constantly growing heap of discarded paintbrushes in the corner of the room. When he was cleaning up and throwing everything into big paper bags before losing patience and ordering a skip, he had come across the tin box. It was empty and rusty, but Wallander could vaguely remember it from his childhood. At one time in the distant past his father had used it to store his old toys - well made and beautifully painted tin soldiers, parts of a Meccano set.

Where all these toys had disappeared to he had no idea. He had looked in every nook and cranny of both the house and the studio without finding them. He even searched through the old rubbish heap behind the house, dug into it with a spade and a pitchfork without finding anything. The tin box was empty, and Wallander regarded it as a symbol, something he had inherited and could fill with whatever he pleased. He cleaned it up, scraped away the worst of the rust, and put it in the storeroom in the basement in Mariagatan. It was only when he moved into his new house that he rediscovered it. And now it had come in handy, when he was wondering where to hide the black file he had found in Signe’s room. In a way it was her book, he thought; it was Signe’s book and might contain an explanation for her parents’ disappearance.

He decided the best place to hide the tin box was under the wooden floor of the kennel in which Jussi slept. He was relieved to find that the book was still there. He decided to pick up Jussi without further ado. The neighbouring farm was at the other side of several oilseed-rape fields that had been harvested while he was away. He walked until he came to where his neighbour was repairing a tractor and collected Jussi, who was leaping around and straining at his chain at the back of the house. When they arrived home he dragged in the cylinder, spread some newspapers out on the kitchen table and started to examine it. He was being very cautious since alarm bells were ringing deep down inside him. Perhaps there was something dangerous inside it? He carefully disentangled all the cords and disconnected the various relays and plugs and switches. He could see that some sort of fastening device on the underside of the cylinder had been torn off. There was no serial number or any other indication of where the cylinder had been made, or who its owner had been. He took a break to make dinner, an omelette that he filled with the contents of a can of mushrooms and ate in front of the television while failing to be enthused by a football match as he tried to forget all about the cylinder and missing persons. Jussi came and lay down on the floor in front of him. Wallander gave him the rest of the omelette, then took him for a walk. It was a lovely summer evening. He couldn’t resist sitting down on one of the white wooden chairs on the western side of the house, where he had a superb view of the setting sun as it sank below the horizon.

He woke with a start, surprised to realise that he had fallen asleep. He had been oblivious to the world for nearly an hour. His mouth was dry, and he went back inside to measure his blood sugar. It was much higher than normal, 274. That worried him. The only conclusion he could draw was that it was time to increase yet again the amount of insulin he injected into his body at regular intervals.

He remained seated for a while at the kitchen table, where he had pricked his finger when checking his blood sugar level. Once again he was overcome by feelings of dejection, resignation, awareness of the curse of old age. And by worry about the blackouts when his memory and sense of time and place disappeared completely. I’m sitting here, he thought, messing around with a steel cylinder when I should be visiting my daughter and getting to know my grandchild.

He did what he always did when he was feeling dejected. He poured himself a substantial glass of schnapps and downed it in one go. Just one big glass, no more, no refill, no topping up. Then he messed around with the cylinder one more time before deciding that enough was enough. He had a bath, and was asleep before midnight.

Early the next day he called Sten Nordlander. He was out in his boat but said he should be on land in an hour and promised to call back then.

‘Has anything happened?’ he shouted in an attempt to make himself heard above all the interference.

‘Yes,’ shouted Wallander in return. ‘We haven’t found the missing persons, but I’ve found something else.’

Martinsson called at seven thirty and reminded Wallander of the meeting due to take place later in the morning. A member of a notorious Swedish gang of Hell’s Angels was in the process of buying a property just outside Ystad, and Lennart Mattson had called a meeting. Wallander promised to be there at ten o’clock.

He didn’t intend to tell Sten Nordlander exactly where he’d found the cylinder. After discovering that somebody had invaded his house while he was away, he had decided not to trust anyone - at least not without reservations. Obviously, whoever the intruder was might have had reasons for breaking in that had nothing to do with Hakan and Louise von Enke, but what could they possibly be? The first thing he did that morning was make a thorough search of the house. One of the windows facing east, in the room where he had a guest bed that was never used, was ajar. He was quite certain he hadn’t left it open. A thief could easily have entered through that window and left again the same way without leaving much in the way of traces. But why hadn’t he taken anything? Nothing was missing, Wallander was sure of that. He could think of only two possibilities. Either the thief hadn’t found what he was looking for, or he had left something behind. And so Wallander didn’t simply look for something that was missing, but also for something that hadn’t been there before. He crawled around, looking under chairs, beds and sofas, and searched among his books. After almost an hour, just before Nordlander called, he concluded his search without having discovered anything at all. He wondered if he should talk to Nyberg, the forensic expert attached to the Ystad police force, and ask him to look for possible hidden microphones. But he decided not to - it would raise too many questions and give rise to too much gossip.

Sten Nordlander explained that he was sitting with a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe in Sandhamn.

‘I’m on my way north,’ he said. ‘My holiday route is going to take me up to Harnosand, then across the gulf to the Finnish coast, then back home via Aland. Two weeks alone with the wind and the waves.’

‘So a sailor never gets tired of the sea?’

‘Never. What did you find?’

Wallander described the steel cylinder in great detail. Using a yardstick - his father’s old one, covered in paint stains - he had measured the exact length, and he’d used a piece of string to establish the diameter.

‘Where did you find it?’ Nordlander asked when Wallander had finished.

‘In Hakan and Louise’s basement storeroom,’ Wallander lied. ‘Do you have any idea what it might be?’

‘No, not a clue. But I’ll think about it. In their basement, you said?’

‘Yes. Have you ever seen anything like it?’

‘Cylinders have aerodynamic qualities that make them useful in all kinds of circumstances. But I can’t recall having seen anything like what you describe. Did you open up any of the cables?’

‘No.’

‘You should. They could provide some clues.’

Wallander found an appropriate knife and carefully split open the black outer casing of one of the cords. Inside were even thinner wires, no more than threads. He described what he had found.

‘Hmm,’ said Nordlander. ‘They can hardly be live electricity cables. They seem more likely to have some kind of communications function. But exactly what, I can’t say. I’ll have to mull it over.’

‘Let me know if you figure it out,’ said Wallander.

‘It’s odd that it doesn’t say where it was made. The serial number and place of manufacture are usually engraved in the steel. I wonder how it came to be in Hakan’s basement, and where he got hold of it.’

Wallander glanced at his watch and saw that he had to head to the police station or he would be late for the meeting. Nordlander ended the call by describing in critical terms a large yacht on its way into the harbour.

The meeting about the motorbike gang lasted for nearly two hours. Wallander was frustrated by Lennart Mattson’s inability to steer the meeting efficiently and his failure to reach any practical conclusions. In the end, Wallander became so impatient that he interrupted Mattson and said that it should be possible to stop the purchase of the house by directly contacting the present owner. Once that was done they could develop strategies to put obstacles in the way of the gang’s activities. Mattson refused to be put off. However, Wallander had information that nobody else in the room knew about. He had been given a tip by Linda, who had heard about it from a friend in Stockholm. He requested permission to speak, and spelled it out.

‘We have a complication,’ he began. ‘There is a notorious medical practitioner whose contribution to the well-being of Swedish citizenry includes providing doctor’s certificates for no less than fourteen members of one of these Hell’s Angels gangs. All of them have been receiving state benefits because they are suffering from severe depression.’

A titter ran through the room.

‘That doctor has now retired, and unfortunately he’s moved down here,’ he went on. ‘He bought a pretty little house in the centre of town. The risk is, of course, that he will continue writing sick notes for these poor motor-cyclists who are so depressed that they are unable to work. He’s being investigated by the social services crowd, but as we all know, they can’t be relied on.’

Wallander stood up and wrote the doctor’s name on a flip chart.

‘We should be keeping an eye on this fellow,’ he said, and left the room.

As far as he was concerned, the meeting was now over.

He spent the rest of the morning brooding over the cylinder. Then he drove to the library and asked for help looking up all the literature they had about submarines, naval ships in general and modern warfare. The librarian, who had been a school friend of Linda’s, produced a large pile of books. Just before he left he also asked her for Stig Wennerstrom’s memoirs.

Wallander went home, stopping on the way to do some shopping. When he left the house that morning he had fixed little pieces of tape discreetly on doors and windows. None had been disturbed. He ate his fish stew and then turned to the books he had piled up on the kitchen table. He read until he couldn’t go on any longer. When he went to bed at about midnight, heavy rain was pummelling the roof. He fell asleep immediately. The sound of rain had always put him to sleep, ever since he was a child.

When Wallander arrived at the police station the next morning he was soaking wet. He had decided to walk part of the way to work, and hence parked at the railway station. The high blood sugar reading of the other night was a challenge. He must get more exercise, more often. Halfway there he had been caught in a heavy shower. He went to the locker room, hung up his wet trousers and took another pair out of his locker. He noticed that he had put on weight since he wore them last. He slammed the door in anger, just as Nyberg entered the room. He raised an eyebrow at Wallander’s extreme reaction.