The Troubled Man

by Henning Mankell

  11

  Wallander was annoyed. So, unusually for him, he decided to launch a direct attack. He felt duped by this family in which two members had disappeared and a third had just been discovered. He thought he’d been a victim of the lies that come naturally to the upper classes, concerning family details that must be hidden at any cost from the rest of the world, which probably wouldn’t be particularly interested anyway. After the phone call to Atkins and the long evening spent going over yet again everything that had happened and been said since Håkan von Enke’s seventy-fifth birthday party, he slept soundly until shortly after seven the next morning, when he called Linda. He had hoped to talk to Hans, but Hans had already left, at about six.

  ‘What can he find to do at that time?’ Wallander asked, irritated. ‘Surely there aren’t any banks open now, nor any dealers buying and selling shares.’

  ‘What about Japan?’ Linda suggested. ‘Or New Zealand? There’s a lot of movement in the exchanges all over Asia. It’s not unusual for Hans to leave for work this early. But it’s unusual for you to call at seven o’clock. Don’t take it out on me. Did something happen?’

  ‘I want to talk about Signe,’ Wallander said.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Your boyfriend’s sister.’

  He could hear her heavy breathing. Every breath a new thought.

  ‘But he doesn’t have a sister.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  Linda knew her father, and she realised right away that he was serious. He wouldn’t call her this early to play a cruel joke.

  Klara started crying.

  ‘You’d better come over,’ Linda said. ‘Klara just woke up. She tends to be difficult in the morning. I wonder if she inherited that from you?’

  An hour later Wallander pulled up on the gravel drive outside her house. By then Klara had been fed and was content, and Linda was up and dressed. Wallander thought she still looked pale and out of sorts, and he wondered if she was ill. But he didn’t ask. She took after him, and didn’t like people interfering in her affairs.

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander recognised the tablecloth. He remembered it from his childhood, then from his father’s house in Löderup, and now here it was again. As a small boy he had often traced the complicated pattern in the border, running his finger over the red thread.

  ‘Explain,’ she said. ‘I repeat what I said before: Hans doesn’t have a sister.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m sure you’re not aware of any sister, just as I wasn’t. Until now.’

  He told her about his conversation with Atkins and the sudden reference to a sister called Signe. Presumably it was pure coincidence that the secret sister was mentioned. If the conversation had been slightly different, her existence would still be totally unknown. Linda listened intently to what he had to say, her frown growing more pronounced the whole time.

  ‘Hans has never said anything to me about a sister,’ she said when Wallander had finished.

  Wallander pointed at the phone.

  ‘Call him and ask a simple question: Why haven’t you told me that you have a sister?’

  ‘Is she older or younger?’

  Wallander thought for a moment. Atkins had said nothing about that. Nevertheless he felt sure that she must be an older sister. If she’d been born after Hans it would have been more difficult to keep her secret.

  ‘I don’t want to call him,’ Linda said. ‘I’ll take it up with him when he gets home.’

  ‘No,’ said Wallander. ‘We have two missing persons we have to track down. This is not a private matter, but police business. If you don’t call him, I will.’

  ‘That might be best,’ she said.

  Wallander dialled the number she gave him for the office in Copenhagen. Classical music was playing when he got through. Linda leaned forward in order to listen.

  ‘It’s his direct line,’ she said. ‘I chose the music. Before, he had some awful American country junk. Somebody named Billy Ray Cyrus. I forced him to change it by threatening to stop calling. He’ll probably answer soon.’

  She had hardly finished the sentence when Wallander heard Hans’s voice. He sounded harassed, almost out of breath. Wallander wondered what on earth had been happening on the Asian stock exchanges.

  ‘I have a question for you that can’t wait,’ he said. ‘I’m sitting at your kitchen table, by the way.’

  ‘Louise,’ said Hans. ‘Or Håkan? Have you found them?’

  ‘I wish we had. But this is about an entirely different person. Can you guess who?’

  Wallander could see that Linda was annoyed by what she probably saw as an unnecessary cat-and-mouse game. He conceded that she was right. He should get straight to the point.

  ‘It’s about your sister,’ he said. ‘Your sister, Signe.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line, and a pause before Hans spoke again.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of joke?’

  Linda had leaned forward over the table, and Wallander held up the receiver so she could hear. He could tell that Hans was telling the truth.

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ he said. ‘Are you seriously telling me you don’t know anything about a sister called Signe?’

  ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters. Can I speak to Linda?’

  Wallander handed the receiver over to Linda, who repeated what her father had told her.

  ‘When I was a kid I used to ask my parents why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters,’ Hans said. ‘They always told me they thought one child was enough. I’ve never heard of anyone named Signe, never seen any photographs of her. I’ve always been an only child.’

  ‘It’s difficult to believe,’ said Linda.

  Hans exploded and yelled at the phone.

  ‘What the hell do you think it’s like for me?’

  Wallander took the receiver out of Linda’s hand.

  ‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘So does Linda. But you must understand that it’s important to find out how this fits in, assuming it does. Your parents vanish. And now an unknown sister suddenly turns up.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Hans. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘Whatever the explanation is, I’ll find it.’

  Wallander handed the receiver back to Linda. He listened to her trying to calm Hans down. He didn’t want to hear exactly what they said to each other. Since the conversation seemed set to continue for a while, he scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and put it on the kitchen table in front of her. She nodded and handed him a bunch of keys from the windowsill. He left the house after taking a look at Klara, lying asleep on her stomach in her cot. He gently stroked her cheek with one of his fingers. Her face twitched, but she didn’t wake up.

  When Wallander got back to the police station he called Sten Nordlander even before he had taken off his jacket. He immediately received the confirmation he had been hoping for.

  ‘Oh yes, there’s certainly another child,’ Nordlander said. ‘A girl who was severely handicapped from birth. Completely helpless, if I understood Håkan correctly. There was no possibility of them keeping her at home; she needed special care from the very first day of her life. They never spoke about her, and I thought I had to respect that.’

  ‘Is her name Signe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know when she was born?’

  Nordlander thought for a moment before answering.

  ‘She must be nearly ten years older than her brother. I think her handicap was such a shock to them that it was a long time before they dared to try again.’

  ‘So she must be over forty now,’ said Wallander. ‘Do you know where she lives? The name of the home or institution?’

  ‘I think Håkan once said it was somewhere near Mariefred, but I never heard a name.’

  Wallander rushed to end the call. Finding Signe felt urgent, despite the fact that the case was none of his busi
ness. He knew that he should contact Ytterberg first, but his curiosity got the better of him. He searched through his hopelessly messy address book until he found the phone number he was looking for. It belonged to a woman who worked for the Ystad Social Welfare Board. She was the daughter of a former civilian secretary at the police station. Wallander had met her in connection with a paedophile ring a few years back. Her name was Sara Amander, and she answered almost immediately. They exchanged a few pleasantries before Wallander came to the point.

  ‘I’m looking for an institution for the handicapped not far from Mariefred. Maybe there’s more than one? I need addresses and phone numbers.’

  ‘Can you give me any more information? Are you talking about congenital brain damage, for instance?’

  ‘It’s mainly physical, as I understand it. A child who needed care from the day she was born. But it’s also possible that she has mental limitations. No doubt it would be an advantage for a person that handicapped not to be fully aware of what an awful life she was condemned to lead.’

  ‘We have to be careful when we talk about other people’s lives,’ said Sara Amander. ‘There are severely handicapped people whose lives are filled with much happiness. But I’ll see what I can find out.’

  Wallander hung up, went to get some coffee, and exchanged a few words with Kristina Magnusson, who reminded him that her colleagues were going to have a casual summer party in her garden the following evening. Wallander had forgotten all about it, of course, but he said he’d be there. He went back to his office and wrote a reminder in large letters that he placed by the phone.

  A couple of hours later Sara Amander called back. She had two possibilities for him. One was a private care home called Amalienborg, on the very edge of Mariefred. The other was a state-run home, Niklasgården, not far from Gripsholm Castle. Wallander made a note of the addresses and phone numbers and was about to call the first one when Martinsson appeared in the half-open door. Wallander replaced the receiver and waved him in. Martinsson pulled a face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘A poker party that ran off the rails. An ambulance just took a man to the hospital with stab wounds. We have a car there, but you and I should go too.’

  Wallander grabbed his jacket and followed Martinsson out of the room. It took the rest of the day and part of the night for them to figure out what caused the poker party to collapse into chaos and violence. It was only when Wallander returned to the police station at about eight o’clock that he was able to call the numbers from Sara Amander. He began with Amalienborg. A friendly woman answered the phone. Even as he asked his question about Signe von Enke he realised his mistake. He wouldn’t get an answer, of course. An institution that took care of severely handicapped people naturally couldn’t hand out information to any old Tom, Dick or Harry. And that was the reply he was given. He didn’t even receive a reply to his other questions about whether they had residents of varying ages or if the home was only for adults. The friendly woman continued to inform him patiently that she wasn’t allowed to tell him anything. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help him at all, no matter how much she would like to. Wallander hung up and thought he should give Ytterberg a call. But he decided against it. There was no reason to disturb his evening. The conversation could wait until the following day.

  Since it was a pleasant evening, warm and calm, he ate dinner outside in the garden. Jussi lay at his feet, and snapped up everything that fell off Wallander’s fork. In the surrounding fields the oilseed rape was now a sea of gleaming yellow.

  But the thought of that sister wouldn’t go away. He tried to understand the silence that surrounded her, and thought about how he and Mona would have reacted if they’d had a child that needed the expert care of outsiders from birth. He shuddered at the thought, which was impossible for him to come to grips with. He was sitting lost in thought when eventually he noticed that the phone was ringing. Jussi pricked up his ears. It was Linda. She spoke in a low voice and explained that Hans was asleep.

  ‘He’s completely shattered,’ she said. ‘The worst thing, he says, is that now he has nobody he can ask about her.’

  ‘I’m trying to track her down,’ said Wallander. ‘Give me another couple of days and I should know where she is.’

  ‘Do you understand how Håkan and Louise could do something like this?’

  ‘No. But maybe it’s the only way they could cope with having such a severely handicapped child – to pretend she simply didn’t exist.’

  Then Wallander described the view of the oilseed rape fields and the distant horizon for her.

  ‘I’m looking forward to when Klara can run around here,’ he said eventually.

  ‘You should get yourself a woman.’

  ‘You don’t “get yourself” a woman!’

  ‘You won’t find one if you don’t make an effort! Loneliness will eat you up from the inside. You’ll become an unpleasant old man.’

  Wallander sat outside until after ten o’clock, thinking about what Linda had said. But despite everything, he slept soundly and woke up fully rested soon after five. He was in his office by six thirty. A thought had begun to develop in his mind. He checked his calendar for the period between now and midsummer, and established that nothing compelled him to stay in Ystad. Somebody else could take charge of the poker case. Since Lennart Mattson was an early bird, Wallander knocked on his door. Mattson had just arrived when Wallander came to ask for four days’ leave, starting the next day.

  ‘I’m aware that this request comes out of the blue,’ he said. ‘But I have a personal reason. And I can make myself available during the midsummer holiday, even though I’m down for a week’s break then.’

  Mattson didn’t protest. Wallander was granted four days off. He went back to his office and looked up on the Internet the exact locations of Amalienborg and Niklasgården. The information he found about the two institutions wasn’t enough to help him decide which was the right one. Both of them seemed to care for people with a wide variety of serious disabilities.

  He handed Jussi over to his neighbours, who would look after him for the next few days. The dog’s kennel was deserted. Wallander lay down on top of the bed, set the alarm clock for three and slept for a few hours. It was four o’clock when he got into his car and set off northward. Dawn was enveloped by a diaphanous mist, but that meant it would be a fine day. He arrived in Mariefred shortly after noon. After lunch in a roadside restaurant, he dozed in his car for a while, then set off for Amalienborg, a former college with an annexe that had been turned into a nursing home. At the front desk Wallander produced his police ID and hoped that would be sufficient for him to find out whether he had come to the right place. The receptionist wasn’t sure what to do and got her supervisor, who studied Wallander’s ID carefully.

  ‘Signe von Enke,’ he said in a friendly tone. ‘That’s all I need to know. Is she here or not? It’s really about her parents, who have disappeared.’

  The supervisor’s badge indicated that her name was Anna Gustafsson.

  She listened to Wallander, then studied him for a moment before answering.

  A naval commander?’ she said. ‘Is that him?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ said Wallander, making no attempt to conceal his surprise.

  ‘I’ve read about him in the newspapers.’

  ‘I’m talking about his daughter,’ said Wallander. ‘Is she here?’

  Anna Gustafsson shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We don’t have anyone named Signe. None of our patients is the daughter of a naval commander. I can promise you that.’

  On the way to his next port of call, Wallander ran into a violent thunderstorm. The rain was so heavy that he was forced to stop, unable to see anything through the windscreen. He drove down a side road and switched off the engine. As he sat there, enclosed in a kind of bubble, with the rain pelting against the car roof, he tried yet again to work out what had happened to the two missing persons. Even if Håkan v
on Enke was the first to run away, or to be the victim of a crime or an accident, that didn’t necessarily mean that Louise’s disappearance was a direct consequence of what had happened to him. That was an elementary pearl of wisdom from Rydberg during his time as Wallander’s mentor. Often an incident that happened or was discovered last was actually the beginning rather than the conclusion of a sequence of events. He thought about the messy state of one of Håkan von Enke’s desk drawers. The compass inside his head was whirling around without settling on a direction in which to point.

  The bottom line was that anything was possible. Not even the perception that Håkan von Enke was worried was necessarily fact. Wallander had seen ghosts before, even if he usually managed to stay immune to illusions. He had also tried to trace lots of missing persons during his career. Nearly always there were indications from the very beginning that either there was a natural explanation or there were grounds for being worried. But in the case of Håkan and Louise, he simply didn’t know. Everything was very unclear, he thought as he sat in his car, waiting for the cloudburst to subside. A state of mental fog to match the lack of real-life visibility.

  When the rain eventually stopped, he made his way to Niklasgården, attractively located on the shore of a lake that his map told him was called Vångsjön. The white-painted wood buildings were on a slope dotted with clumps of tall trees, and beyond them extensive cornfields and pastureland. Wallander got out of the car and took deep breaths of air made invigorating after the rain. It was like looking at one of the old posters that decorated the walls of his classroom at school in Limhamn: biblical landscapes, always Palestine with shepherds and flocks of sheep, and Swedish agricultural landscapes in all their variations. For a moment he was overcome by a nostalgic longing to be back in the days when those posters had dominated his thoughts, but he shrugged it off. He knew that sentimentality about the past only drew attention to the fact that he was getting old, and made the process even more painful and frightening.

  He took a pair of binoculars from his backpack and scanned the buildings and their park-like grounds. Wallander couldn’t help smiling at the thought that he was surveying this pretty, summery scene as a sort of periscope in the guise of an old, scratched Peugeot. He noticed several wheelchairs standing in the shade of some trees. He adjusted the focus and tried to hold the binoculars steady. There were people sitting in the wheelchairs with their heads drooping. One of them, a woman whose age he found impossible to guess, was resting her chin on her chest. In another wheelchair was a man, a young man as far as Wallander could make out, with his head leaning back as if his neck was incapable of supporting it. Wallander lowered his binoculars. He felt uneasy about what lay in store for him. He returned to his car and drove up to the main building, where signs informed him that the Södermanland county council welcomed him and told visitors where various paths led. Wallander went into the reception area. He rang a bell and waited. He could hear a radio somewhere in the background. A woman emerged from an adjacent room. She was in her forties, and Wallander was immediately struck by her beauty. She had short black hair and dark eyes, and she greeted him with a smile. When she spoke, he could hear that she had a foreign accent. Wallander guessed that she came from an Arab country. He showed her his ID and asked his question. He didn’t receive a direct answer. The beautiful woman continued to smile at him.