The Troubled Man (2011) kw-10

by Henning Mankell

  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.

  ‘Bad mood?’

  ‘Wet trousers.’

  Nyberg nodded and replied with his own personal mixture of jollity and gloom.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean. We can all cope with getting our feet wet. But getting your trousers wet is much worse. It’s like pissing yourself. You feel pleasantly warm but then it gets uncomfortably cold.’

  Wallander went to his office and called Ytterberg, who was out and hadn’t said when he would be back. Wallander had already tri
ed calling his mobile phone, without getting an answer. When he went to get a cup of coffee, he bumped into Martinsson, who felt he needed some fresh air. They went to sit down on a bench outside the police station. Martinsson talked about an arsonist who was still on the run.

  ‘Are we going to catch him this time?’ Wallander asked.

  ‘We always catch him,’ said Martinsson. ‘The question is whether we can keep him or if we’ll have to let him go. But we have a witness I believe in. This time we might be able to nail him at last.’

  They went back inside, each to his own office. Wallander stayed for several hours. Then he went home, still not having managed to contact Ytterberg. But he had scribbled down the most important points on a scrap of paper and intended to keep on trying to make contact during the evening. Ytterberg was the man in charge of the investigation. Wallander would hand over the material he had, the file inside the black covers and the steel cylinder. Then Ytterberg could draw the necessary and the possible conclusions. The investigation had nothing to do with Wallander. He was not a member of the investigating team, he was merely a father who didn’t like the idea of his daughter’s future parents-in-law disappearing without a trace. Now Wallander would concentrate on celebrating midsummer, and then taking a holiday.

  But things didn’t turn out as planned. When he got home he found an unknown car parked outside his house, a beaten-up Ford covered in rust. Wallander didn’t recognise it. He wondered whose it could be. As he approached the house he saw that on one of the white chairs, the one he had dozed on the night before, there was a woman.

  There was an open bottle of wine on the table in front of her. Wallander could see no trace of a glass.

  Reluctantly he went up to her and said hello.

  17

  It was Mona, his ex-wife. It had been many years since they last met - fleetingly, when Linda graduated from the police academy. Since then they had spoken briefly on the phone a few times, but that was it.

  Late that night, when Mona had fallen asleep in the bedroom and he had become the first person to make up the bed in his own guest room, he felt ill at ease. Mona’s emotional state had been changing from one minute to the next, and she had boiled over several times, angry and emotional outbursts that he found difficult to deal with. She was already drunk by the time he arrived home. When she stood up to give him a hug, she stumbled and nearly fell over, but he managed to catch her at the last moment. He could see that she was tense and nervous at the prospect of seeing him again, and had put on far too much make-up. The girl Wallander had fallen in love with forty years ago used hardly any make-up; she didn’t need it.

  She had come to visit him that evening because she was wounded. Somebody had treated her so badly that Wallander was the only person she felt she could turn to. He had sat down beside her in the garden, swallows swooping down over their heads, and he’d had a strange feeling that the past had caught up with him and was repeating itself. At any moment a five-year-old Linda would come bounding up out of nowhere and demand their attention. But he managed to come up with only a few words of greeting before Mona burst into tears. He felt embarrassed. This was exactly how it had been during their last awkward times together. He had found it impossible to take her emotional outbursts seriously. She became more and more of an actress, and cast herself in a role for which she was unsuited. Her talents were not appropriate for tragedy, perhaps not for comedy either: she embodied a normality that didn’t accommodate emotional outbursts. Nevertheless, there she was, weeping copiously, and all Wallander could think to do was bring her a roll of toilet paper to dry her tears. After a while she stopped crying and apologised, but she had trouble talking without slurring her words. He wished Linda were there; she had a different way of dealing with Mona.

  At the same time, he was affected by another emotion, one he had trouble acknowledging, but which kept nagging at him. He had a desire to take her by the hand and lead her into the bedroom. Her very presence excited him, and he was close to testing how genuine the feeling was. But of course, he did nothing. She staggered over to the dog kennel, where Jussi was jumping up and down in excitement. Wallander followed her, more like a bodyguard than a consort, ready to pick her up if she fell over. Soon the dog was no longer of interest to her, and they went inside since she was feeling cold. She made a tour of the house, and asked him to show her everything, stressing the word, as if she were visiting an art gallery. He had decorated the place magnificently, she said; she couldn’t find words to express how fabulous it was, even if he should have thrown out long ago that awful sofa they’d had in their apartment just after they were married. When she noticed their wedding photo on a chest of drawers, she burst out crying again, this time in such an obviously fake way that he was tempted to throw her out. But he let her indulge herself, made a pot of coffee, hid a bottle of whisky that had been sitting out, and eventually persuaded her to sit down at the kitchen table.

  I loved her more than any other woman in my life, Wallander thought as they sat there with their cups of coffee. Even if I were to fall head over heels in love with another woman today, Mona will always be the most important woman in my life. That is a fact that can never be changed. New love might replace an earlier love, but the old love is always there, no matter what. You live your life on two levels, probably to avoid falling through without a trace if a hole appears in one of them.

  Mona drank her coffee, and unexpectedly began to sober up. That was another thing Wallander remembered: she had often acted more drunk than she really was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been acting like a fool, bursting in on you. Do you want me to leave?’

  ‘Not at all. I just want to know why you came here.’

  ‘Why are you so dismissive? You can’t claim that I disturb you often.’

  Wallander backed off immediately. The last year with Mona had been a constant battle, with him trying not to be drawn into her non-stop complaints and threats. She of course thought that was exactly how he was behaving towards her, and he knew she was right. They were both culprits and victims in the confusion that could be stopped only by drastic action: divorce, with each of them going their separate ways.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ he said cautiously. ‘Why are you so depressed?’

  What followed was a long, drawn-out lament, a dirge with what seemed to be an endless number of verses. Mona’s own variation of the Lamentations, or of Elvira Madigan, Wallander thought. A year ago she had met a man who, unlike the previous one, was not a golf-playing retiree who Wallander was convinced had acquired his money by plundering shell companies. By contrast, the new man was the manager of a Co-op store in Malmo, about her own age and also divorced. But it was not long before Mona discovered to her horror that even an honest grocer could display psychopathic traits. He had tried to dominate her, made veiled threats, and eventually subjected her to physical violence. Foolishly enough, she had convinced herself that it would pass, that he would get over his jealousy, but that didn’t happen, and now she had cut all ties with him. The only person she could turn to was her former husband, who she thought could protect her from the persecution she was sure the grocer would subject her to. In short, she was scared - and that was why she had come to him.

  Wallander wondered how much of what she told him was true. Mona was not always reliable; she sometimes told lies without any malicious intent. But he thought he should believe her in this case, and he was naturally upset to hear that she had been beaten.

  When she had finished telling her story, she felt sick and rushed to the bathroom. Wallander stood outside the door and heard that she really was sick - it wasn’t just for show. Then she lay down on the sofa she thought he should have thrown out, cried again, and then fell asleep with a blanket over her. Wallander sat in his easy chair and continued reading the books he had borrowed from the library, although he was unable to concentrate, of course. After almost two hours she woke with a start. When she realised that she was in Wal
lander’s house, she almost started crying again, but Wallander told her enough was enough. He could make her some food if she wanted to eat, then she could spend the night and the next day she could talk to Linda, who would doubtless be able to give her better advice than he could. She wasn’t hungry, so he just made some soup and filled his own stomach with many slices of bread. As they were sitting across from each other at the table, she suddenly started talking about all the good times they had enjoyed in the old days. Wallander wondered if this was the real reason for her visit, if she was going to start pursuing him again. If she had tried a year or so earlier, he thought, she might have succeeded. I still felt then that we’d be able to live together again - but later I realised that was an illusion. All of it was behind us, and it wasn’t something I wanted to go through again.

  After the meal she wanted something to drink. But he said no, he wasn’t going to give her another drop as long as she was in his house. If she didn’t like that she could call a taxi and spend the night at a hotel in Ystad. She started to argue, but she gave up when it became clear that Wallander was serious.

  When she went to bed at midnight, she made a tentative effort to embrace him. But he resisted, merely stroked her hair and left the room. He listened outside the door, which was ajar; she was awake for a while, but eventually fell asleep.

  Wallander went out, let Jussi out of his kennel, and sat down on the garden hammock that used to be his father’s. The summer night was bright, windless and filled with scents. Jussi came to sit at his feet. Wallander suddenly felt uneasy. There was no going back in life, even if he were naive enough to wish that was possible. It was not possible to take even one step backwards.