The Return of the Dancing Master

by Henning Mankell

  He drove west through the autumn and the silence. Occasionally a few drops of rain spattered against the wind-screen. He switched on the radio and half-listened to the news. The New York stock exchange had gone up, or was it down? He couldn’t hear. As he passed Linsell he saw some children with satchels waiting for the school bus. Most house roofs there had satellite dishes. He thought back to his own childhood in Kinna. The past became almost tangible. He looked at the road and thought about all the boring journeys he’d made through central Sweden while he was assistant to the motocross rider who’d hardly ever won a race. He was so lost in thought that he missed the turning to Rätmyren. He went back, and parked in the same place as last time.

  There were fresh tyre marks in the gravel. Perhaps Veronica Molin had changed her mind? He got out of the car and filled his lungs with crisp, chilly air. A wind was gusting through the treetops. This is what Sweden’s all about, he thought. Trees, wind, cold. Grass and moss. A lonely person in the middle of a forest. Only that person doesn’t usually have cancer of the tongue.

  He walked slowly round the house and made a list of all he now knew about the death of Herbert Molin. There was the campsite, the place to which somebody had rowed across the lake, pitched a tent, and then abandoned it. Larsson’s news about the bullet wounds. Lindman stopped in his tracks. What had Larsson said? Two wounds in the chest and one in the left arm. So Molin had been hit from in front. Three shots. He tried to imagine what could have happened, but failed.

  Then there was Berggren, an invisible shadow behind a curtain. If his suspicions were correct, she was on guard. Against what? Johansson had described her as a friendly person who gave dancing lessons for children. That was another link: dancing. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? He continued his circuit round the smashed-up house. Wondered why the police hadn’t made a better job of boarding up the broken windows. Bits of torn plastic flapped in front of the gaping holes. Veronica Molin had turned up unexpectedly. A beautiful woman who’d heard the news of her father’s death, in a hotel room in Cologne, while on her travels around the world. Lindman, who had been all round the house by now, thought back to the time he’d been chasing, with Molin, the escaped murderer from Tidaholm. His fear. “I thought it was somebody else.” Lindman paused again. Unless Molin had been the victim of a madman, there must have been a crucial starting point. Fear. The flight to the forests of Härjedalen. A hiding place at the end of a side road that Lindman had great difficulty in finding.

  That was as far as he got. Molin’s death was a riddle: he’d managed to find a few loose threads that led to a centre that was still a vacuum. He went back to his car. The wind was getting stronger. He was about to open his car door when he had the feeling he was being watched. He spun round. The forest was empty. The dog pen was abandoned. The torn plastic was flapping against the window frames. He got into his car and drove away, certain that he would never return.

  He parked outside the Community Centre and went in. The bear was still glaring at him. He found his way to the police offices and bumped into Johansson, who was on his way out.

  “I was going to have a coffee with the library staff,” he said. “But that can wait. I have news for you.”

  They went to his office. Lindman sat in the visitor’s chair. Johansson had cheered up the décor with a devil-mask hanging on the wall.

  “I bought it in New Orleans ages ago. I was drunk at the time and no doubt paid far too much for it. I thought it would look good hanging here. A reminder of the forces of evil that conspire to make things difficult for the police.”

  “Are you the only one on duty today?”

  “Yes,” said Johansson cheerfully. “There should really be four or five of us, but people are off sick or on study leave or maternity leave. I’m the only one left. It’s impossible to get stand-by staff.”

  “How do you manage?”

  “I don’t. But at least people who phone here during working hours don’t get fobbed off with an answering machine.”

  “But Berggren phoned you in the evening, didn’t she?”

  “There’s a special emergency number. Lots of people in town know it.”

  “Town?”

  “I call Sveg a town. It makes it a bit bigger that way.”

  The telephone rang. Lindman looked at the mask and wondered what the news was that Johansson had promised him. The call was from someone who had found a tractor tyre on a road. Johansson seemed to be a man blessed with a fund of patience. He eventually replaced the receiver.

  “Elsa Berggren rang this morning. I tried to get hold of you at the hotel.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to invite you round for coffee.”

  “That sounds odd.”

  “No more odd than you staking out her house.”

  Johansson stood up. “She’ll be at home now,” he said. “Go round straightaway. She’s going shopping later on. By all means come back here and tell me what she said, if it’s of any interest. But not this afternoon or this evening. I’m off to Funäsdalen. I have a spot of police business to see to, and then I’m going to play poker with some mates. We may be in the middle of a murder investigation, but that doesn’t prevent us from leading as normal a life as possible.”

  Johansson went off for his coffee. Lindman paused to have another look at the bear.

  Then he drove to Ulvkälla and parked outside the white house. He saw Wigren in the street, no doubt looking for somebody he could invite for a cup of coffee in his kitchen.

  She opened the door before he could ring the bell. Lindman didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not the elegantly dressed lady in the doorway. She had long, black hair, obviously dyed, and she was heavily made up around her eyes.

  “I thought you might as well come in,” she said. “Instead of standing out there in the street.”

  Lindman stepped into the hall. He’d got further than Wigren had managed in 40 years. She led him into the living room that was at the back of the house, facing the garden. In the background Lindman could see the wooded hills rising towards Orsa Finnmark.

  The room was expensively furnished. There were no prints of bare-breasted gypsy girls on Berggren’s walls. She had original oil paintings instead, and it seemed to Lindman that she had good taste. She excused herself and disappeared into the kitchen. He sat on the sofa to wait.

  He stood up again immediately. There were several photographs in frames in a bookcase. One of the pictures was of two girls sitting on a park bench. It had been taken several decades ago. In the background was a house with a sign outside. Lindman peered to see if he could make out what was on it. It didn’t look like Swedish, but it wasn’t clear enough to be sure. He sat down again. Berggren came in with coffee and biscuits.

  “A man appears and stands staring at my house,” she said. “Naturally, I’m surprised. And worried as well. After what happened to Herbert things will never be the same again in Sveg.”

  “I’ll tell you why I was there,” Lindman said. “I used to work with Herbert Molin. I’m also a police officer.”

  “Erik told me that.”

  “I’m on sick leave and was kicking my heels. So I came here. I happened to speak to an estate agent in Krokom who told me you had bought Herbert’s house on his behalf.”

  “He asked me to. He phoned before he retired. He wanted me to help him.”

  “So you knew each other?”

  She looked dismissively at him. “Why else would he ask me to help him?”

  “I’m trying to understand who he was. I’ve realised that the man I used to work with was not who I thought he was.”

  “In what way?”

  “In many ways.”

  She stood up and adjusted a curtain in one of the windows.

  “I knew Herbert’s first wife,” she said. “We were at school together. So I also got to know Herbert, to some extent. That was when he lived in Stockholm. Then I lost contact with her after they divorced.
But not with Herbert.” She returned to her chair. “That’s all there is to it. And now he’s dead. And I’m sad about that.”

  “Did you know that his daughter Veronica’s here?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I didn’t know that. But I don’t expect her to pay me a visit. It was Herbert I knew, not his children.”

  “Did he move here because you were here?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “That is something that concerned only him and me. And now it concerns only me.”

  “Of course.”

  Lindman took a sip of coffee. Berggren was not telling him the truth. The disappearing wife was plausible, but there was something about what she said that didn’t add up. Something he ought to be able to work out. He put down his cup, which was blue with a gold edge.

  “Have you any idea who could have killed him?”

  “No. Have you?”

  Lindman shook his head.

  “An old man who wanted to live in peace,” she said. “Who on earth would want to kill him?”

  Lindman looked at his hands. “There must have been somebody who did,” he said.

  There was only one other question he wanted to ask.

  “I find it strange that you haven’t spoken to the police in Östersund. The ones who are in charge of the investigation.”

  “I’ve been waiting for them to contact me.”

  Lindman was now certain. The woman was not telling him the whole truth.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about why Herbert came here,” he said. “Why would anybody want to live such a lonely life?”

  “It’s not lonely up here,” Berggren said. “There’s lots you can do if you want to. For instance, I’m going to a concert in the church tonight. There’s an organist coming here from Sundsvall.”

  “I heard from Erik Johansson that you give dancing lessons.”

  “Children should learn how to dance. If nobody else teaches them, I can. But I don’t know if I’ve got the strength to go on for much longer.”

  Lindman decided not to ask any questions about Molin’s interest in dancing. Larsson was the man to ask those questions, nobody else.

  A telephone rang somewhere in the house. She excused herself and left the room. Lindman stood up and made a rapid choice between the balcony door and a window, then unfastened the catch on a window, making sure it held tight and didn’t open. Then he sat down again. She returned a minute later.

  “I won’t impose on you any longer,” Lindman said, getting to his feet. “Thank you for the coffee. It’s not often you get coffee as strong as that.”

  “Why should everything have to be weak?” she said. “Everything is weak nowadays. Coffee, and people as well.”

  Lindman had left his jacket in the hall. As he put it on, he looked round to see if the house had a burglar alarm. He could see no sign of one.

  He drove back to the hotel, thinking over what Berggren had said about weak coffee and weak people. The girl in reception seemed to be her cheerful self again. There was a notice board next to the desk. On it was a yellow poster advertising an organ concert in the church that evening, starting at 7.30. The programme consisted exclusively of music by Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Shortly after 7.00 that evening Lindman went to the church. He took up a position beyond the church wall. He could hear the organist rehearsing. At 7.25, Berggren arrived and walked into the church.

  Lindman hurried back to the hotel and got into his car. He drove to the river and parked on the other side of the bridge. Then he approached Berggren’s house from the back. He was counting on the concert lasting for at least an hour. He checked his watch: 7.41. There was a narrow path around the back of the white house. He had no torch with him, but he felt his way cautiously forward in the dark. There was a light on in the room where he had had his coffee. He paused when he came to the garden fence and listened. Then he jumped over and ran to the house wall, crouching low. He stood up and felt the underside of the window. Berggren had failed to notice that he had unhooked the catch. He opened it carefully, hoisted himself up and, taking careful stock of its position, lifted down the vase of flowers on the windowledge.

  Here he was, breaking into Berggren’s house just as he had into Molin’s house a few days earlier.

  He wiped the soles of his shoes with a handkerchief. It was 7.45. He looked round the room. He had no idea what he was looking for. Perhaps some indication that he had been right, that Berggren hadn’t been telling the truth. He knew that a lie could be exposed by an object. He left the living room, glanced into the kitchen and then continued into what appeared to be a study. This is the last place I’ll search, he decided. First he wanted to look in the upper floor. He ran up the stairs. The first room seemed to be a guest room. He walked into Berggren’s bedroom. She slept in a large double bed. There was a pale blue, fitted carpet. He looked into the bathroom. Bottles were lined up in neat rows in front of the mirror.

  He was about to go downstairs to the study when he had the idea of opening the double doors of the wardrobe. The hangers were tightly packed. He ran his hand over the clothes. They all seemed to be of high quality. At the furthest left of the hangers, something caught his eye. He pulled some dresses to one side to get a closer look.

  A uniform. It was several seconds before he realised what it was – a German army uniform. On the shelf above was an army hat. He took it down and saw the skull. Hanging in Berggren’s wardrobe was an SS officer’s uniform.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lindman didn’t bother to search Berggren’s study. He left the house in Ulvkälla as he’d entered it, replacing the vase exactly as it had been, closing the window carefully behind him. It had started snowing – heavy, wet flakes. He drove back to the hotel, poured himself a glass of wine and tried to make up his mind whether or not to phone Larsson right away. He hesitated to do so. He’d promised not to contact Berggren. Now he’d not only spoken to her, he’d broken into her house. This was not the kind of thing to discuss on the telephone, he thought. Larsson will understand that. We need to be sitting face to face, with plenty of time.

  He switched on the television and zapped his way through the channels. Eventually opted for an old Western with faded colours. A man with a rifle was crawling around among some rocks in a studio landscape, trying to avoid some other men coming towards him on horseback. Lindman turned the sound down and took out his notepad. He tried to make a summary of what had happened since he came to Sveg. What did he know now that he hadn’t known before? He tried to construct a plausible hypothesis of the reason for Molin’s death. He made it simple, as if he were reading a story to himself.

  At some point a man called Herbert Molin – probably at that point called Mattson-Herzén – is shot three times. He survives. At some point this man also runs a music shop. He also has a particular association with dancing. Perhaps it’s just that dancing has been a passion for him all his life? The way that other people are mad about picking mushrooms or fishing for salmon in Norwegian rivers?

  There’s a woman called Elsa Berggren in his life. When Molin retires he asks her to find him a house deep in the forests of Härjedalen, not far from where she lives herself. He never goes to visit her, however. That is confirmed by the best possible witness – an inquisitive neighbour. In Elsa Berggren’s wardrobe, deep in a corner, is an SS uniform.

  And somebody may have come paddling over a lake of water and set up camp not far from Molin’s house, perhaps with the intention of taking his life.

  In Lindman’s head that’s where the story ended. With a man paddling over a lake who then disappears without trace.

  But there were other bricks to build into the story. The bloodstained footprints that formed the basic steps of the tango. Molin’s fear. The fact that he’d changed his name. A downmarket move, it seemed to Lindman. In all probability there were very few people in Sweden called Mattson-Herzén. But plenty called Molin. He thought that there could only be one explanation. The
change of name was a hiding place. The man was covering his tracks. But what tracks? And why? If he’d thought that Mattson-Herzén was too long and awkward, he could simply have called himself Mattson.

  He read through what he’d written, then turned over the page and wrote down two dates. Born 1923, died 1999. Then he returned to the notes he’d made when he’d been shut away in Larsson’s office. In 1941, when Molin is 18, he does his military service. War is raging all around neutral Sweden. He’s posted to the coastal defence forces. Lindman’s notes were not complete, but he remembers that Molin had been stationed on a small island in the Östergötland archipelago, guarding one of the main sea channels to Sweden. Lindman assumed he’d remained with the coastal defences until the end of the war, by which time he’d been commissioned. Seven years later he applies for a discharge, tries his hand at being a shop owner, and is then employed first in some council offices and subsequently in the police force.

  From a military family, Lindman had noted. His father was a cavalry officer based in Kalmar, his mother a housewife. So to start with, Molin does not stray far from the family tradition. He tries a career as an army officer, but then changes course.

  Lindman put down his pad and filled his wine glass. The man crawling around in the rocks not far from Hollywood had now been captured by the men on horseback. They were about to hang him. The man with the rope round his neck seemed strangely unconcerned about his fate. The colours were still very pale.

  If the circumstances surrounding Molin’s death had been a film, Lindman thought, it would now be necessary for something to happen. Otherwise the audience would become bored. Even police officers can become bored. But that doesn’t mean they give up the search for an explanation and a murderer.

  He reached for his pad again. As he did so the man in the film was getting away in highly improbable circumstances. Lindman tried to develop a few plausible theories. The first, the most obvious one, was that Molin had been the victim of a madman. Where he’d come from and why he’d been equipped with a tent and some tear gas was impossible to explain, of course. The madman scenario was bad, but it had to be formulated even so.