The Troubled Man (2011)

by Henning Mankell

  Before leaving, Wallander asked if there were any other potential buyers. There was one, said the agent, looking distinctly worried, as if he really wanted Wallander to get the house but at the same time implying that he had better make his mind up fast. But Wallander had no intention of rushing in blindly. He spoke to one of his colleagues whose brother was a surveyor and managed to arrange for the expert to inspect the house the very next day. He found nothing wrong apart from what Wallander had already noticed. That same day Wallander spoke to his bank manager and was informed that he could rely on a mortgage big enough to buy the house. During all his years in Ystad, Wallander had saved up a lot of money without ever thinking much about it. Enough for the down payment.

  That evening he sat at his kitchen table and made detailed financial calculations. He found the occasion solemn and significant. By midnight he had made up his mind: he would buy the house, which had the dramatic-sounding name of Black Heights. Despite the late hour, he called his daughter, Linda, who lived in a new development just off the main road to Malmo. She was still awake.

  ‘You must come over,’ said Wallander excitedly. ‘I’ve got news for you.’

  ‘What? In the middle of the night?’

  ‘I know it’s your day off tomorrow.’

  It had been a complete surprise to him a few years earlier when, during a walk along the beach at Mossby Strand, Linda told him she had decided to follow in his footsteps and join the police force. It cheered him up instantly. In a way it was as if she was giving new meaning to all the years he had been a police officer. When she finished her training, she was assigned to the Ystad force. The first few months, she lived with him in the apartment in Mariagatan. It was not an ideal arrangement; he was set in his ways, and he also found it hard to accept that she was grown up now. But their relationship was saved when she managed to find an apartment of her own.

  When she arrived in the early hours, he told her what he was planning to do. The next day she accompanied him to the house and said immediately that it was perfect. No other house would do, only this one at the end of a dirt road at the top of a gentle slope down to the sea.

  ‘Grandad will haunt you,’ she said. ‘But you don’t need to be afraid. He’ll be a sort of guardian angel.’

  It was a significant and happy moment in Wallander’s life when he signed the contract of sale and suddenly found himself standing there with a bunch of keys in his hand. He moved in on 1 November, having redecorated two rooms but having refrained from buying a new stove. He left Mariagatan without the slightest doubt that he was doing the right thing. A south-easterly gale was blowing the day he moved in.

  That first evening, with the storm raging, he lost electricity. Wallander sat in his new home in pitch darkness. There was groaning and creaking coming from the rafters, and he discovered a leak in the ceiling. But he had no regrets. This was where he was going to live.

  There was a dog kennel outside the house. Ever since he was a little boy Wallander had dreamed of having a dog. By the time he was thirteen he had given up hope, but out of the blue he got one as a present from his parents. He loved that dog more than anything else in the world. Looking back, it felt like the dog, Saga, had taught him what love could be. When she was three years old, she was run over by a truck. The shock and sorrow were worse than anything he had experienced in his young life. More than forty years later, Wallander had no difficulty recalling all those chaotic emotions. Death strikes, he sometimes thought. It has a powerful and unforgiving fist.

  Two weeks later he acquired a dog, a black Labrador puppy. He wasn’t quite a pure-bred, but he was nevertheless described by the owner as top class. Wallander had decided in advance that the dog would be called Jussi, after the world-famous Swedish tenor who was one of Wallander’s greatest heroes.

  Nearly four years after he bought the house, on 12 January 2007, Wallander’s whole life changed in an instant.

  As he stepped out into the hall a few paces behind Kristina Magnusson, whom he liked viewing from behind when nobody was looking, the phone rang in his office. He considered ignoring it, but instead he turned and went back in. It was Linda. She had a few days off, having worked on New Year’s Eve, during which Ystad had been unusually lively, with lots of cases of domestic violence and assaults.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘Not really. We’re on the verge of identifying some crooks in a big case.’

  ‘I need to see you.’

  Wallander thought she sounded tense. He started to worry, as he always did, that something might have happened to her.

  ‘Is it anything serious?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I can meet you at one o’clock.’

  ‘Mossby Strand beach?’

  Wallander thought she was joking.

  ‘Should I bring my swimming costume?’

  ‘I’m serious. Mossby Strand. But no swimming costume.’

  ‘Why do we have to go out there in the cold with this icy wind blowing?’

  ‘I’ll be there at one o’clock. So will you.’

  She hung up before he could ask anything else. What did she want? He stood there, trying in vain to think of an answer. Then he went to the conference room with the best television set and sat for two hours going through CCTV footage for the case he was working on, the brutal attack and robbery of an elderly arms dealer and his wife. As twelve thirty approached, they were still only halfway through. Wallander stood up and announced that they could review the rest of the tapes after two o’clock. Martinsson, one of the officers Wallander had worked with longest in Ystad, looked at him in surprise.

  ‘You mean we should stop now? With so much still to do? You don’t usually break for lunch.’

  ‘I’m not going to eat. I have an appointment.’

  He left the room, thinking that his tone of voice had been unnecessarily sharp. He and Martinsson were not only colleagues, they were also friends. When Wallander threw his housewarming party out at Loderup it was of course Martinsson who gave a speech in praise of him, the dog and the house. We are like an old hard-working couple, he thought as he left the police station. An old couple who are always bickering, mainly to keep each other on our toes.

  He went to his car, a Peugeot he’d had for the last four years, and drove off. How many times have I driven along this road? How many more times will I drive along it? As he waited for a red light to change, he remembered something his father had told him about a cousin Wallander had never met. His cousin used to be captain of a ferry plying between several islands in the Stockholm archipelago - short trips, no more than five minutes at a time, but year in, year out, the same crossings. One afternoon in October something snapped inside him. The ferry had a full load, but he suddenly changed course and headed straight out to sea. He said later that he knew there was enough diesel in the tank to take him as far as one of the Baltic states. But that was all he said, after he was overpowered by angry passengers and the coast guard raced out to put the ferry back on course. He never explained why he did what he did.

  But in a vague sort of way, Wallander thought he understood him.

  As he drove west along the coast road he could see dark thunderclouds building up on the horizon. The radio had warned that there was a risk of more snow in the evening. Shortly before he passed the side road to Marsvinsholm he was overtaken by a motorcycle. The rider waved at him and made Wallander think of something that frightened him more than anything else: that one of these days Linda would have a motorcycle accident. He had been totally unprepared when, several years earlier, she turned up outside his apartment on her newly bought bike, a Harley-Davidson covered in glittering chrome. His first question when she took off her crash helmet was whether she had lost her mind.

  ‘You don’t know about all my dreams,’ she had said with a broad, happy grin. ‘Just as I’m sure I don’t know all yours.’

  ‘I don’t dream about a motorbike, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Too bad.
We could have gone for rides together.’

  He had gone so far as to promise to buy her a car and pay for all her petrol if she got rid of the motorcycle. But she refused, and he knew that the battle was lost. She had inherited his stubbornness, and he would never be able to take the motorcycle away from her, no matter what temptations he could offer.

  When he turned into the car park at Mossby Strand, which was deserted and windswept, she had taken off her helmet and was standing on top of a sand dune, her hair fluttering in the wind. Wallander switched off the engine and sat looking at her, his daughter in the dark leather outfit and the expensive boots from a factory in California that she had paid nearly a month’s wages for. Once upon a time she was a little girl sitting on my knee, Wallander thought, and I was the biggest hero in her life. Now she is thirty-six, a police officer just like me, with a brain of her own and a big smile. What more could I ask for?

  He stepped out into the wind and ploughed his way through the soft sand until he was standing by her side. She smiled at him.

  ‘Something happened here,’ she said. ‘Do you remember what?’

  ‘You told me that you were going to become a police officer. On this very spot.’

  ‘I’m thinking of something else.’

  Wallander realised what she was getting at.

  ‘A rubber dinghy drifted ashore here, with two dead men inside it,’ he said. ‘So many years ago that I can’t remember exactly when. An incident from a different world, you might say.’

  ‘Tell me about that world.’

  ‘That couldn’t possibly be why you made me come here.’

  ‘Tell me anyway!’

  Wallander stretched out his hand towards the water.

  ‘We didn’t know much about the countries on the other side of the sea. We sometimes pretended the Baltic states didn’t exist. We were cut off from our nearest neighbours. And they were cut off from us. But then that rubber dinghy came ashore, and the investigation took me to Latvia, to Riga. I went behind the Iron Curtain that no longer exists. The world was different then. Not worse, not better, just different.’

  ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ said Linda. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Wallander held his breath, as if he didn’t understand what she’d said. Then he stared at her stomach, hidden behind her leather suit. She burst out laughing.

  ‘There’s nothing to see. I’m only in the second month.’

  Looking back, Wallander remembered every detail of that meeting with Linda, when she told him her staggering news. They walked down to the beach, leaning into the howling wind. She answered his questions. When he arrived back at the police station an hour late, he had almost forgotten all about the investigation he was in charge of.

  Shortly before the end of that day, just as it was beginning to snow again, they finally found pictures of the two men who had probably been involved in the arms theft and brutal murder. Wallander summed up what they all knew: that they had taken a big step towards solving this case.

  When the meeting ended and everybody was gathering together their papers, Wallander felt an almost irresistible urge to tell them about the great joy he had just been gifted with.

  But he said nothing, of course.

  He wouldn’t allow his colleagues to come that close to his private life, not ever.

  2

  On 30 August 2007, shortly after two in the afternoon, Linda gave birth to a daughter, Kurt Wallander’s first grandchild, at Ystad Hospital. The delivery was normal, and also punctual - on the exact day predicted by her midwife. Wallander had taken the precaution of being on holiday at the time, and he spent the day trying to mix a bucket of cement in order to repair cracks under the porch roof next to the front door. It wasn’t all that successful, but at least it kept him occupied. When the phone rang and he was informed that from now on he was entitled to call himself Grandad, he started crying. The feeling took him by surprise, and for a while he was utterly defenceless.

  It wasn’t Linda who called, but the baby’s father, financier Hans von Enke. Wallander didn’t want to reveal how emotional he was, so he merely thanked von Enke for the news, sent his greetings to Linda and hung up.

  Then he went for a long walk with Jussi. Skane was still luxuriating in the heat of late summer. There had been thunderstorms during the night, and now, after the rain, the air was fresh and easy to breathe. At last Wallander was able to admit to himself that he had often wondered why Linda had never before expressed a desire to have children. Now she was thirty-seven years old, in Wallander’s opinion far too late in life for a woman to be a mother. Mona had been much younger when Linda was born. He had kept an eye on Linda’s relationships from a discreet distance; he had preferred some boyfriends to others. Occasionally he had been convinced that she had finally found the right man - but then it was suddenly all over, and she never told him why. Even though Wallander and Linda were very close, there were certain things they never discussed. One of the taboo subjects was having children.

  That day on the windswept beach at Mossby Strand was the first he had heard about the man she was going to have a child with. It was a complete surprise to Wallander, who had thought his daughter wasn’t even in a steady relationship at the time.

  Linda had met Hans von Enke through mutual friends in Copenhagen, at a dinner to celebrate an engagement. Hans was from Stockholm, but had been living in Copenhagen for the last couple of years, working for a finance company that specialised in setting up hedge funds. Linda had found him somewhat self-important, and had been annoyed by him. She informed him, rather fiercely, that she was a simple police officer, badly paid, and had no idea what a hedge fund was. It ended up with them going for a long evening stroll through the streets of Copenhagen, and deciding to meet again. Hans von Enke was two years younger than Linda, and didn’t have any children either. Both of them had decided from the very start, without saying as much but nevertheless being quite clear about it, that they were going to try and have children together.

  Two days after the revelation, Linda came in the evening to Wallander’s house with the man she had decided to live with. Hans von Enke was tall and thin, balding, with piercing bright blue eyes. Wallander immediately felt uncomfortable in his presence, found his way of expressing himself off-putting, and wondered what on earth had inspired Linda to take a shine to him. When she had told him that Hans’s salary was three times as big as her father’s, and that in addition he received a bonus every year that could be as much as a million kronor, Wallander had concluded depressingly that it must be the money that attracted her. That thought annoyed him so much that the next time he saw Linda he asked her outright. They were sitting in a cafe in the middle of Ystad. Linda had been so angry that she had thrown a roll at him and stormed out. He had hurried after her and apologised. No, it had nothing to do with the money, she explained. It was genuine and all-consuming love, something she had never experienced before.

  Wallander made up his mind to try hard to view his future son-in-law more sympathetically. Via the Internet and with the aid of the bank manager who handled his modest affairs in Ystad, Wallander found out as much as he could about the finance company Hans worked for. He discovered what hedge funds were, and many more details alleged to be the basis of a modern finance company’s activities. Hans von Enke invited him to Copenhagen and took him on a tour of his opulent offices at Rundetarn. Afterwards, Hans invited him to lunch, and when Wallander returned to Ystad he no longer had the feeling of inferiority that had affected him at their first meeting. He called Linda from the car and told her that he had begun to appreciate the man she had chosen.

  ‘He has one fault,’ said Linda. ‘He doesn’t have enough hair. Otherwise he’s OK.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to the day when I can show him my office.’

  ‘I’ve already shown him. Last week when he was here visiting. Didn’t anybody tell you?’

  Needless to say, nobody had said a word about it to Wallander. That evening he
sat at his kitchen table, pencil in hand, and worked out Hans von Enke’s annual salary. He was astonished when he saw the final figure. Once again he had a vague feeling of unease. After all his years in the police force, his own salary was barely 40,000 kronor per month. He regarded that as a high wage. But he wasn’t the one getting married. The money might or might not be what would make Linda happy. It was none of his business.

  In March, Linda and Hans moved in together in a big house outside Rydsgard that the young financier had bought. He started commuting to Copenhagen, and Linda carried on working in Ystad. Once they had settled in, Linda invited Kurt to dinner at their place the following Saturday. Hans’s parents would be there, and obviously they would like to meet Linda’s father.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Mum,’ she said.

  ‘Is she coming too?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Linda shrugged.

  ‘I think she’s unwell.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  Linda looked long and hard at him before answering.

  ‘Too much booze. I think she’s drinking more than ever now.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know.’

  Wallander accepted the invitation to dinner to meet Hans von Enke’s parents. The father, Hakan von Enke, was a former commander in the Swedish navy and had been in command of both submarines and surface vessels that specialised in hunting down submarines. Linda wasn’t sure, but she thought that at one time he had been a member of a team that decided when military units were allowed to open fire on an enemy. Hans von Enke’s mother was named Louise and had been a language teacher. Hans was an only child.