The Troubled Man (2011) kw-10

by Henning Mankell

  ‘Your wife said there weren’t any eels left to catch,’ Wallander said. ‘Are things really that bad?’

  ‘Even worse,’ said Lundberg. ‘Soon there won’t be any fish left at all. Didn’t she say that?’

  The red-painted two-storey house could just be seen in a dip about a hundred yards from the water’s edge. Plastic toys were scattered about in front. Lundberg’s wife, Anna, seemed just as cautious when they shook hands as she had on the phone.

  The kitchen smelled of boiled potatoes and fish, and a radio was playing almost inaudible music. Anna Lundberg put a coffee pot on the table, then left the room. She was about the same age as her husband, and in a way they were quite similar in appearance.

  A dog came bounding into the kitchen from some other room. A handsome cocker spaniel, Wallander thought, and stroked it while Lundberg was serving coffee.

  Wallander laid the photo on the table. Lundberg took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket. He glanced at the picture, then slid it to one side.

  ‘That must have been 1968 or 1969. In the autumn, if I remember correctly.’

  ‘I found it among Hakan von Enke’s papers.’

  Lundberg looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘I don’t know who that man is.’

  ‘He was a high-ranking officer in the Swedish navy. A commander. Could your father have known him?’

  ‘It’s possible. But I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He wasn’t all that fond of military men.’

  ‘You’re in the picture as well.’

  ‘I can’t answer your questions. Even if I’d like to.’

  Wallander decided to try a different tack and started again from the beginning.

  ‘Were you born here on the island?’

  ‘Yes. So was my dad. I’m the fourth generation.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘In 1994. He had a heart attack while he was out in the boat, dealing with the nets. When he didn’t come home, I called the coastguard. Our neighbour Lasse Aman found him. He was lying in the boat and drifting towards Bjorkskar. But I reckon that was how the old man would have preferred to go.’

  Wallander thought he could detect a tone of voice that suggested the father-son relationship was less than perfect.

  ‘Have you always lived here on the island? While your father was alive?’

  ‘That would never have worked. You can’t be a hired hand for your own father. Especially when he makes all the decisions, and is always right. Even when he’s completely wrong.’

  Eskil Lundberg burst out laughing.

  ‘It wasn’t only when we were out fishing that he was always right,’ he said. ‘I remember we were watching a TV show one evening, some kind of quiz show. The question was: Which country shares a border with the Rock of Gibraltar? He said it was Italy and I said it was Spain. When it turned out that I was right, he switched off the television and went to bed. That’s the way he was.’

  ‘And so you moved away?’

  Eskil Lundberg pulled a face.

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Tell me again, one more time, so that I understand. Somebody disappeared, is that right?’

  ‘Two people, a man and his wife. Hakan and Louise von Enke. I found this photo in a diary belonging to the husband, the naval commander.’

  ‘They live in Stockholm, you said? And you’re from Ystad? What’s the connection?’

  ‘My daughter is going to marry the son of the missing couple. They have a child. The couple who have vanished are her future parents-in-law.’

  Lundberg nodded. He suddenly seemed to be looking at Wallander less suspiciously.

  ‘I left the island as soon as I finished school,’ he said. ‘I found a job in a factory just outside Kalmar. I lived there for a year. Then I came back home and worked with my dad as a fisherman. But we couldn’t get along. If you didn’t do exactly as he said, he was furious. I left again.’

  ‘Did you go back to the factory?’

  ‘Not that one. I travelled east, to the island of Gotland. I worked in the cement factory at Slite for twenty years, until Dad got sick. It was on Gotland that I met my wife. We had two children. We came back here when Dad couldn’t keep the business going any longer. Mum had died and my sister lives in Denmark, so we were the only ones who could help out. We own farmland, fishing waters, thirty-six little islands, countless rocky outcrops.’

  ‘So that means you weren’t here in the early 1980s?’

  ‘The occasional week in the summer, but that’s all.’

  ‘Could it be that around that time your father was in touch with a naval officer?’ Wallander asked. ‘Without you knowing about it?’

  Lundberg shook his head energetically.

  ‘That wouldn’t fit at all with the way he was. He thought there should be a bounty on the head of every member of the Swedish navy. Especially if they were captains.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were far too gung-ho during their manoeuvres. We have a jetty on the other side of the island where the trawler used to be berthed. Two years in a row the swell from the navy boats wrecked it - the stone caissons were dragged loose. And they refused to pay for repairs. Dad wrote letters, protested, but nothing happened. And the crew often threw slops from the kitchen into wells on the islands - if you know what a freshwater well means to island dwellers, you don’t do things like that. There were other things too.’

  Lundberg seemed to hesitate again. Wallander waited, didn’t nudge him.

  ‘Shortly before he died, he told me about something that happened at the beginning of the 1980s,’ Lundberg said eventually. ‘You could say that he’d become less malevolent, finally reconciled to the fact that I was going to take over everything, no matter what.’

  Lundberg stood up and left the room. Wallander was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to say any more when he came back, carrying a few old diaries.

  ‘September 1982,’ he said. ‘These are his diaries. He noted down catches, and the weather. But also anything unusual that happened. And something unusual happened on 19 September 1982.’

  He passed the diary over the table to Wallander and pointed out the appropriate place. It said, in very neat handwriting: Almost pulled down.

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘He told me about it once. At first I thought he was confused and sinking into senility, but what he said was too detailed to be imagined.’

  ‘Tell me all about it, from the beginning,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m especially interested in what happened in the autumn of 1982.’

  Lundberg moved his cup to one side, as if he needed the extra space in order to tell his story.

  ‘He was drifting off the east coast of Gotland, fishing, when it happened. The boat seemed to come to a sudden stop. Something was tugging at the nets, and the boat nearly capsised. He had no idea what had happened, apart from the obvious fact that something heavy had become caught in the nets. He was very careful because in his younger days he had occasionally fished up gas shells. He and the two assistants he had on board tried to cut themselves loose - but then they realised that the boat had turned and the trawl had worked itself free. They managed to haul it in, and found they had caught a steel cylinder about three feet long. It wasn’t a shell or a mine; it looked more like a part of a ship’s engine. It was heavy, and it didn’t seem to have been lying in the water very long. They tried to decide what it was, but to no avail. When they got back home Dad continued examining the cylinder, but he couldn’t work out what it had been used for. He put it aside and continued repairing the trawl. He had always been cheap, and it went against the grain to throw anything away. But there’s a sequel to the story.’

  Lundberg slid the diary back towards himself and leafed forward a few days, to 27 September. Once again he showed Wallander the open page. They are searching. Three words, no more.

  ‘He’d almost forgotten about the cylin
der when navy vessels suddenly started turning up at the precise spot where he’d found it. He often used to fish there, off the east coast of Gotland. He knew it wasn’t a routine manoeuvre - the ships were moving in such strange ways. They would stay still for a while, then start moving in ever-decreasing circles. It wasn’t long before he worked out what was going on.’

  Lundberg closed the diary and looked at Wallander.

  ‘They were looking for something they had lost. But Dad didn’t have the slightest intention of returning the steel cylinder. It had ruined his trawl. He continued fishing and took no notice of them.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The navy had ships and divers deployed there during the autumn and on until December. Then the last of the ships moved away. There were rumours that a submarine had sunk there. But the place where they were searching wasn’t deep enough for a submarine. The navy never got its cylinder back, and Dad never really understood what it was. But he was pleased to have got back at them for destroying his jetty. I honestly can’t believe that he was in close touch with a naval officer.’

  They sat there without speaking. Wallander was trying to work out how von Enke could have fitted in to what he had just been told.

  ‘I think it’s still there,’ said Lundberg.

  Wallander thought he must have misheard, but Eskil Lundberg had already got to his feet.

  ‘The cylinder,’ he said. ‘I think it’s still in the shed.’

  They left the house, the dog scampering around at their feet sniffing for tracks. A wind was blowing up. Anna Lundberg was hanging washing on a line suspended between two old cherry trees. The white pillowcases were smacking in the wind. Behind the boathouse was a shed balancing precariously on the uneven rocks. There was just one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Wallander entered a space full of smells. An ancient-looking eel spear hung from one of the walls. Lundberg squatted down and rummaged around in one corner of the shed among tangled ropes, broken bailers, old cork floats and tattered nets. He poked and prodded with a degree of violence that suggested he shared his father’s anger at the trouble caused by the navy. He eventually stood up, took a step to one side and pointed. Wallander could see a cylindrical object, in grey steel, like a large cigar case with a diameter of about eight inches. At one end was a half-open lid, revealing a mass of electric cords and switching relays.

  ‘We can take it outside,’ said Lundberg, ‘if you give me a hand.’

  They lifted it down onto the jetty. The dog ran up immediately to examine it. Wallander tried to imagine what the cylinder’s function could be. He doubted it was part of an engine. It might have something to do with radar equipment, or with the launching of torpedoes or mines.

  Wallander squatted down and searched for a serial number or a place of manufacture, but found nothing. The dog was licking his face until Lundberg shooed her away.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ he asked when he stood up again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lundberg. ‘Neither did my dad. He didn’t like that. That’s one way in which I’m like him. We want answers to our questions.’

  Lundberg paused for a few moments before continuing.

  ‘I don’t need it. Maybe it’s of some use to you?’

  Wallander didn’t realise at first that Lundberg was referring to the steel cylinder at their feet.

  ‘Yes, I’d be happy to take it,’ he said, thinking that Sten Nordlander might be able to explain what the cylinder was used for.

  They put it in the boat and Wallander unfastened the line. Lundberg turned east and headed for the strait between Boko and Bjorkskar. They passed a small island with a building at the edge of a clump of trees.

  ‘An old hunting lodge,’ said Lundberg. ‘They used to use it as a base when they were out shooting seabirds. My dad sometimes stayed there for a few nights when he wanted to spend some time drinking and be on his own. It’s a good hiding place for anybody who wants to disappear from the face of the earth for a while.’

  They docked at the pier. Wallander reversed the car to the water’s edge, and they lifted the steel cylinder onto the back seat.

  ‘There’s one thing I’m wondering about,’ said Lundberg. ‘You said that both husband and wife vanished. Am I right in thinking that they didn’t disappear at the same time?’

  ‘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.

  16

  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 o
f 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.