The Troubled Man (2011)

by Henning Mankell

  He looked at the chair next to the window. The chair Hakan von Enke usually sat in when he visited his daughter. He moved over to the bookcase and squatted down. There were children’s books, picture books. Signe von Enke had not developed at all; she was still a child. Wallander went carefully through the bookcase, taking out books and making sure there was nothing hidden behind them.

  He found what he was looking for behind a row of Babar the Elephant books. Not a photo album this time, but then he hadn’t expected to find that. He hadn’t been at all sure of what exactly he was looking for, but there was something missing from the apartment in Grevgatan, he was convinced of that. Either somebody had weeded out documents, or Hakan had done it himself. And if it had been him, where could he have hidden something but in this room? Behind the Babar books, which he and Linda had both read when they were children, was a thick file with hard black covers, held closed by two thick rubber bands. Wallander hesitated: should he open it here and now? Instead he slipped off his jacket and fit the book into the capacious inside pocket. Signe was still lying there with her eyes open wide, motionless.

  Wallander opened the door. Kallberg was poking a finger into the soil of a pot plant that badly needed watering.

  ‘It’s very sad,’ said Wallander. ‘Just looking at her makes me break into a cold sweat.’

  They went back to reception.

  ‘A few years ago we had a visit from a young art-school student,’ said Kallberg. ‘Her brother lived here, but he’s dead now. She asked permission to sketch the patients. She was very good - she had brought drawings with her to show what she could do. I was in favour of it, but the board of trustees decided it would be a breach of the patients’ privacy.’

  ‘What happens when a patient dies?’

  ‘Most of them have a family. But one or two are buried quietly with no family present. On such occasions as many of us as possible try to attend. There’s not a lot of turnover among the staff here. We become a sort of new family for patients like that.’

  After taking his leave, Wallander drove to Mariefred and had a meal in a pizzeria. There were a few tables on the pavement, and he sat outside over a cup of coffee after he had finished eating. Thunderclouds were building up on the horizon. A man was playing an accordion in front of a little shop not far away. His music was hopelessly out of tune - he was obviously a beggar, not a street musician. When Wallander couldn’t put up with it any more, he drained his coffee and returned to Stockholm. He had just stepped in through the door of the apartment in Grevgatan when the phone rang. The ringing echoed through the empty rooms. Nobody left a message on the answering machine. Wallander listened to the earlier messages, from a dentist and a seamstress. Louise had been given a new appointment after a canmobileation - but when was that? Wallander noted the dentist’s name: Skoldin. The seamstress simply said, ‘Your dress is ready.’ But she left no name, no time.

  It suddenly started pelting down rain. Wallander stood by the window, looking into the street. He felt like an intruder. But the disappearance of the von Enkes had significance for other people’s lives, people close to him. That was why he was standing there now.

  After an hour or more the rain eased up - it had been one of the heaviest downpours to affect the capital that summer. Basements were flooded, traffic lights were out of order due to shorts in the electric cables. But Wallander noticed none of that. He was fully occupied with the ledger Hakan von Enke had hidden in his daughter’s room. It was clear after only a few minutes that he was faced with a hotchpotch of documents. There were short haiku poems, photocopied extracts from the Swedish supreme commander’s war diary from the autumn of 1982, more or less obscure aphorisms Hakan von Enke had formulated, and much more - including press clippings, photographs and some smudged watercolours. Wallander turned page after page of this remarkable diary, if you could call it that, with the growing feeling that it was the last thing he would have expected of von Enke. He started by leafing through the book, trying to get an overall sense of it. Then he started again at the beginning, reading more carefully this time. When he finally closed it and stretched his back, it struck him that it had thrown no new light on anything at all.

  He went out for dinner. The heavy rain had passed. It was nine o’clock by the time he returned to the empty apartment. He turned once again to the pages inside the black covers, and started working his way through the contents for the third time.

  He told himself he was searching for the other contents, the invisible writing between the lines.

  It must be there somewhere. He was sure of that.

  13

  It was nearly three in the morning when Wallander got up from the sofa and walked over to the window. It had started raining again, but only a drizzle now. He forced his weary brain to return to that party in Djursholm when Hakan had told him about the submarines. Wallander felt sure that even then there were documents hidden among Signe’s Babar books. It was Hakan’s secret room, safer than a bank vault. What made Wallander so sure was that von Enke had dated some of the papers. The last date was the day before his seventy-fifth birthday party. He had visited his daughter at least once more after that, the day before he disappeared. But he hadn’t written anything then.

  I can’t go any further, he had written that last time. But I’ve come far enough. Those were his last words. Apart from one final word that had evidently been added later, written with a different pen. Swamp. That was all. Just one word.

  That was probably the last word he ever wrote, Wallander thought. He couldn’t be sure, and for the moment he had no suspicion that it might be important. Other things he had found in the collection of documents said much more about the man behind the pen.

  What impressed him most of all were the photocopies of Supreme Commander Lennart Ljung’s war diaries. It wasn’t the diary itself that was important, but von Enke’s margin notes. They were often written in red ink, sometimes crossed out or corrected, with additions sometimes many years after the first notes were written, containing completely new lines of thought. Sometimes he also drew little matchstick men between the lines, little devils with axes or red-hot pokers in their hands. At one point he had pasted in a reduced-size sea chart of Harsfjarden. He had marked various points in red, sketched in the progress of unknown vessels, and then crossed everything out again and started from the beginning once more. He had also noted down the number of depth charges laid, various underwater minefields, and sonar contacts. At times everything merged to form an incomprehensible mush before Wallander’s weary eyes. So he would go into the kitchen, rinse his face in cold water and start again.

  Von Enke had often pressed so hard that he made holes in the paper. The notes suggested an entirely different temperament, almost an obsession, in the old submarine commander. There was none of the calm he had displayed in delivering his monologue in that windowless room.

  Wallander remained at his post by the window, listening to a group of young men yelling out obscenities as they staggered home through the night. The ones shouting are the ones who failed to pick up a partner, he thought, the ones forced to go home alone. That’s what often happened to me forty years ago.

  Wallander had read the extracts from the war diaries so carefully that he thought he could probably recite every sentence by heart. Wednesday, 24 September 1980. The supreme commander visited an air force regiment not far from Stockholm, noted that they were still having difficulty in recruiting officers despite the investment of large sums of money in refurbishing the barracks to make them more attractive. Von Enke hadn’t made a single margin note in this section. It wasn’t until much further down on the page that his red pen leaped into action, a sort of bayonet charge on the document. The question of foreign submarines in Swedish territorial waters has arisen once more today. Last week a submarine was discovered off Uto, well inside Swedish territory. Parts of the submarine were seen on the surface and identified it beyond doubt as a Misky class vessel. The Soviet Union and Poland have
submarines of this type.

  The notes suddenly became difficult to read. Wallander borrowed a magnifying glass from von Enke’s desk and eventually managed to work out what the notes said. He wondered what ‘parts’ they claimed had been seen. Periscope? Conning tower? How long had the submarine been visible? Who saw it? What was its course? He was irritated by the lack of detail in the diary. Von Enke had commented on the term ‘Misky class’: NATO and whisky. The West European designation of the submarine in question. He had underlined in red the last few lines on the page. Snapshots and depth charges were fired, but the submarine could not be forced to surface. It is assumed that it then left Swedish territorial waters. Wallander sat for a while wondering what snapshots were, but he could find no explanation from either his own experience or the book he had in front of him. A margin note announced: You don’t force a submarine up to the surface with warning shots, only with volleys for effect. Why did they let the submarine get away?

  The notes continued until 28 September. That was when Ljung had talks with the head of the navy, who had been on a visit to Yugoslavia. From then on Hakan von Enke was no longer interested. No more notes, no matchstick men, no exclamation marks. But further down the page Ljung is dissatisfied with a press release from the navy’s information service. He calls on the head of the navy to take whoever was responsible to task. The red pen comments in the margin: It would be more appropriate to clamp down on other blunders.

  The submarine off Uto. Wallander recalled having heard about that during the party in Djursholm. That was when it all began, he seemed to remember Hakan von Enke saying. Or something like that. He didn’t remember the exact words.

  The other extract from the war diaries was significantly longer. It covered the period from 5 October to 15 October 1982. That was the big gala performance, Wallander thought. Sweden was at the centre of the world’s attention. Everybody was watching as the Swedish navy and its helicopters tried to pin down the foreign submarines or possible submarines or non-submarines. And while all this was happening, there was a change of government in Sweden. The supreme commander had great difficulty keeping both the outgoing and incoming governments informed. At one point Thorbjorn Falldin seemed to forget that he was on his way out, and Olof Palme angrily expressed his surprise that he had not been kept fully informed of what was happening out at Harsfjarden. The supreme commander wasn’t allowed a moment’s rest. He was travelling back and forth like a yo-yo between Berga and the two governments that were treading on each other’s toes. And in addition, he had to answer sarcastic questions from the leader of the Swedish Conservative Party, Ulf Adelsohn, about why it had not been possible to make the intruding submarines surface. Hakan von Enke commented ironically that for once a politician was asking the same questions he was.

  Wallander now started writing names and times in his battered notebook. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps just to keep the mass of details in some sort of order so that he could try to begin to understand von Enke’s increasingly bitter notes more clearly.

  He sometimes had the impression that von Enke was trying to rewrite history. He’s like that lunatic in the asylum who spent forty years reading the classics and changing the endings when he thought they were too tragic. Von Enke writes what he thinks should have happened. And in doing so asks the question: Why didn’t it happen?

  Wallander had long since taken off his shirt and, sitting half naked on the sofa, eventually began to wonder if Hakan von Enke was paranoid. But he soon dismissed the thought. The notes in the margins and between the lines were angry, but at the same time clear and logical, as far as Wallander could understand.

  At one point a few simple words were inserted into the text, almost like a haiku.

  Incidents under the surface

  Nobody notices

  What is happening.

  Incidents under the surface

  The submarine sneaks away

  Nobody wants it to be forced up.

  Is that how it was? Wallander wondered. Had everything been a show? Had there never been any real desire to identify the submarine? But for Hakan von Enke there was another, more important question. He was involved in a different hunt, not for a submarine but for a person. It kept recurring in his notes, like a stubbornly repeated drum roll. Who makes the decisions? Who changes them? Who?

  At another point von Enke makes a comment: In order to identify the person or persons who actually made these decisions, I have to answer the question why. Assuming it hasn’t been answered already. He didn’t sound angry, or agitated, but totally calm. He hadn’t made any holes in the paper here.

  By this stage Wallander no longer found it difficult to understand Hakan von Enke’s version of what had happened. Orders had been given, the chain of command had been followed - but suddenly somebody had intervened, changed course, and before anybody realised what was happening, the submarines had vanished. Von Enke mentioned no names, or at least didn’t point an accusing finger at anybody. But sometimes he referred to people as X or Y or Z. He’s hiding them, Wallander thought. And then he hides his diary among Signe’s Babar books. And disappears. And now Louise has disappeared as well.

  Studying the photocopies of the war diaries took up most of Wallander’s time that night; but he also examined the rest of the material in great detail. There was an overview of Hakan von Enke’s life, from the day he first decided to become a naval officer. Photographs, souvenirs, picture postcards. School reports, military examination results, appointments. There were also wedding photographs of him and Louise, and pictures of Hans at various ages. When Wallander finally stood up and gazed out the window into the summer night and the drizzle, he thought: I know more than I did; but I can’t say that anything has become any clearer. Not why he’s been missing for nearly two months now, or why Louise has vanished as well. But I know more about who Hakan von Enke is.

  Those were his final thoughts before he lay down on the sofa at last, pulled the blanket over himself, and fell asleep.

  When he woke up the next morning he had a slight headache. It was eight o’clock; his mouth was as dry as if he’d been boozing the night before. But as soon as he opened his eyes he knew what he was going to do. He made the phone call before he’d even tasted his coffee. Sten Nordlander answered after the second ring.

  ‘I’m back in Stockholm,’ said Wallander. ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘I was just about to go out for a little trip in my boat - if you’d called a couple of minutes later you would have missed me. If you want to, you can come with me. We could chat to our hearts’ content.’

  ‘I don’t have much in the way of boating gear with me.’

  ‘I can supply everything. Where are you?’

  ‘In Grevgatan.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour.’

  Sten Nordlander was wearing shabby grey overalls with the Swedish navy emblem when he met Wallander. On the back seat of his car was a large basket with food and Thermoses. They drove out towards Farsta, then turned off onto small roads and eventually came to the little marina where Nordlander kept his boat. Nordlander had noticed the plastic bag and the file with the black covers, but he made no comment. And Wallander preferred to wait until they were in the boat.

  They stood on the dock admiring the gleaming, newly varnished wooden boat.

  ‘A genuine Pettersson,’ said Nordlander. ‘Authentic through and through. They don’t make boats like this any more. Plastic means less work when you need to make your boat ready for launching in the spring, but it’s impossible to fall in love with a plastic boat the way you can a wooden boat. One like this smells like a bouquet of flowers. Anyway, let’s go and take a look at Harsfjarden.’

  Wallander was surprised. He had lost his sense of direction once they had left town, and assumed that the boat was moored by an inland lake, or perhaps Lake Malaren. But now he could see that he was looking out towards Uto and the Baltic Sea, as Nordlander pointed out their location on a sea chart. To the north-w
est were Mysingen and Harsfjarden, and the legendary Musko naval base.

  Sten Nordlander gave Wallander a pair of overalls similar to the ones he was wearing, and also a dark blue peaked cap.

  ‘Now you look presentable,’ Nordlander said when Wallander had changed into the borrowed gear.

  The boat had a diesel engine. Wallander started it like a pro. He hoped there wouldn’t be too much of a wind once they came out into the navigable channels.

  Nordlander concentrated on the route ahead, one hand on the attractively carved wooden steering wheel.

  ‘Ten knots,’ he said. ‘That’s about right. Gives you the opportunity to enjoy the sea rather than race off as if you were in a hurry to reach the horizon. What was it you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘I went to see Signe yesterday,’ Wallander said. ‘In her nursing home. She was lying curled up in bed, like a little child, even though she’s forty years old.’

  Sten Nordlander raised a hand demonstratively.

  ‘I don’t want to hear. If Hakan or Louise had wanted to tell me about her, they would have.’

  ‘I won’t say another word about her.’

  ‘Is that why you called me? To tell me about her? I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘I found something. Something I’d like you to take a closer look at when we get a chance.’

  Wallander described the folder, without going into detail about the contents. He wanted Nordlander to discover that for himself.

  ‘That sounds remarkable,’ he said when Wallander had finished.