The Troubled Man (2011)

by Henning Mankell

  ‘His overcoat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there must be thousands of overcoats that look like his?’

  ‘Not Hakan’s overcoat. It’s a thin, dark blue coat sort of like a sailor’s raincoat. I can’t describe it any better than that. But that’s what I saw.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Just imagine! A concert with Madonna, two old friends, dinner, a summer night, no squealing baby, no boyfriend - and suddenly I catch sight of Hakan. I sat there transfixed for about fifteen seconds, then I hurried after him. But it was too late. There was no sign of him. There were people everywhere, side streets, taxis, restaurants. I walked all the way along Stroget as far as the city hall at Radhuspladsen, and then back again. But I couldn’t find him.’

  Wallander emptied his glass of water. Even if what he’d just heard sounded implausible, he knew that Linda was sharp-eyed and was rarely wrong when it came to identifying people.

  ‘Let’s take a step back,’ he said. ‘If I understood you correctly he’d already passed by the bench where you were sitting before you noticed him. But you said you caught a glimpse of his face. So he must have turned round?’

  ‘Yes, he looked over his shoulder.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  She frowned.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘It’s a simple question. Did he expect to find somebody following him? Was he worried? Did he do it automatically, or had he heard something?’

  ‘I think he was checking to make sure he wasn’t being followed.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I can’t know for sure. But yes, I think he was checking to make sure there wasn’t somebody behind him.’

  ‘Did he seem scared? Worried?’

  ‘I can’t answer that.’

  Wallander considered her answer. He still had questions.

  ‘Could he have seen you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘If he had, he’d have looked at the bench. But he didn’t.’

  ‘Have you told Hans?’

  ‘Yes. He was upset and said that I must have been imagining things.’

  ‘Will you make sure that he hasn’t been meeting his father in secret?’

  She nodded, without speaking.

  The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and there was a rumble of thunder in the distance. They went inside. Wallander wanted Linda to stay for a meal, but she said she needed to go home. She was just about to leave when the clouds opened, and it started pouring. The parking area in front of the house was transformed into a mudbath. Wallander decided that before the week was out he would order several loads of gravel so that nobody would need to wade through the mud whenever it rained.

  ‘I’m positive,’ she said. ‘It was Hakan. Very much alive in Copenhagen.’

  ‘So we know one thing,’ Wallander said. ‘Hakan hasn’t suffered the same fate as his wife. He’s alive. That changes everything.’

  Linda nodded. They both knew they could no longer rule out the possibility that Hakan had killed his wife. But they shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe there was some other reason he had gone into hiding. Was he on the run from something or somebody?

  They stood there in silence, each of them lost in thought. The rain died away as quickly as it had started.

  ‘What was he doing in Copenhagen?’ Wallander asked. ‘For me there’s only one plausible answer to that question.’

  ‘To meet Hans. That’s what you’re thinking. Maybe to solve money problems? But I’m convinced that Hans isn’t lying to me.’

  ‘I believe you. But there’s no reason to think they’ve had contact already. That might happen tomorrow.’

  ‘In that case he’ll tell me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Wallander thoughtfully.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Loyalty. What if his father says he can’t breathe a word to anybody, not even to you, about their meeting? And that he gives Hans a reason that he dare not question?’

  ‘I’ll notice if he’s hiding something from me.’

  ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned,’ said Wallander, testing the wet and soggy ground with one foot, ‘it’s that you should never believe you know all that much about other people’s thoughts and ideas.’

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘Say nothing for the moment. Ask nothing. I have to think about what this implies. So do you. But I’ll talk to Ytterberg.’

  He accompanied her to the car. She held on to his arm so as not to slip.

  ‘You should do something about this parking area,’ she said. ‘Have you thought about spreading some gravel around?’

  ‘It had occurred to me,’ said Wallander.

  She had already got into her car when she began talking about Baiba again.

  ‘Is it really that bad? That she’s going to die?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘Early this morning.’

  ‘Will you see her again?’

  ‘She came here to say goodbye. She has cancer and will die before long. I think you can work out how that feels without any help from me.’

  ‘It must have been awful.’

  Wallander turned away and walked round the corner of the house. He didn’t want to burst out crying - not because he didn’t want to display weakness in front of his daughter, but for his own sake. He simply didn’t want to think about his own death, which was basically the only thing that frightened him. He remained there until he heard her start the car and drive away. She had realised that he wanted to be left alone.

  When he went back into the kitchen, he sat in the chair opposite where he usually sat at mealtimes.

  He thought about what Linda had said about Hakan von Enke. They were back to square one.

  28

  Wallander clambered up the rickety ladder leading to the attic. A musty smell of damp and mould hit him hard. He was aware that one of these days he would have to have the whole roof removed and replaced. But not yet. Maybe in a year or, with a bit of luck, two.

  He knew roughly where he had put the cardboard box he was looking for, but another one caught his eye first. In a box supplied by the moving company in Helsingborg was his collection of LPs. During all the years he had lived in Mariagatan, he had a record player on which he could listen to them, but it had finally broken, and he hadn’t been able to find anybody to repair it. It had been taken away with the rest of the rubbish when he moved, but he had kept the records and stored them in the attic. He sat down and thumbed through his old albums. Every sleeve contained a memory, sometimes clear and comprehensive, just as often a flickering image of faces, smells, emotions. In his late teens he had been an almost fanatical fan of the Spotnicks. He had their first four records, and he recognised the title of every song. The music and the electric guitars echoed inside him. Also in the box was a record featuring Mahalia Jackson, which he had once been astonished to receive as a present from one of the silk knights who bought his father’s paintings. The man probably spent his life peddling paintings and gramophone records. Wallander remembered carrying a canvas to the man’s car and being given the record in return. The gospel songs had made a big impression on him. Go down, Moses, he thought, and he could see in his mind’s eye his first record player, with the speaker in the lid making a rasping sound.

  He suddenly found himself sitting there with an Edith Piaf record in his hands. The album cover, in black and white, was a close-up of her face. Mona, who hated the Spotnicks, had given him that LP - she preferred other Swedish groups such as Streaplers and Sven-Ingvars, but her great favourite was the French chanteuse. Neither she nor Wallander understood a word of what Piaf sang, but her voice fascinated them both.

  After Piaf came a record featuring the jazz musician John Coltrane; where had he got that one? He couldn’t remember. When he took it out of the sleeve he saw that it had barely been played. He tried hard, bu
t the record didn’t speak to him. He couldn’t hear a single note from Coltrane’s saxophone.

  Right at the back of the box were two opera LPs: La Traviata and Rigoletto. Unlike the Coltrane, these records were almost worn out.

  He remained there, sitting on the attic floor, wondering if he should take the box downstairs and buy a new record player so that he could listen to them. But in the end he slid the box to one side. The music he listened to nowadays was on cassette or CD. He didn’t need those scratchy vinyl LPs any more. They belonged to the past, and they could stay there in the darkness of the attic.

  He found the box he was looking for and brought it down to the kitchen. He took out of it a large number of Lego pieces, and spread them out over the table. He had given the Lego to Linda when she was a little girl - he’d won them in a raffle.

  He’d got the idea from Rydberg. They’d been sitting at his kitchen table late one evening in spring, not long before Rydberg died. Ystad and the surrounding area had been subjected to a series of robberies by a masked man with a sawn-off shotgun. In order to organise the incidents and in the hope of finding a pattern, Rydberg had produced a pack of cards and used it to trace the robber’s movements. The unknown villain had been the jack of spades. It had taught Wallander a way of seeing how a criminal went about his business, possibly even how he thought. When he had tried out the Rydberg method himself a few years later, he used Lego pieces instead of playing cards. But he had never told Rydberg.

  He arranged figures to represent Hakan and Louise, various dates, places and events. A fireman in a red helmet was Hakan; Louise was a little girl Linda had called Cinderella. He placed a group of marching Lego soldiers on one side; they were the unanswered questions he now considered the most important. Who was pretending to be Signe’s uncle? Why had her father emerged from the shadows? Where had he been and why had he hidden himself away?

  He remembered that he needed to call Niklasgarden. He did so and was informed that nobody had been to visit Signe. Neither her father nor some unknown uncle.

  He sat there at the kitchen table with a piece of Lego in his hand. Somebody isn’t telling the truth, he thought. Of all the people I’ve spoken to about Hakan and Louise von Enke, there’s one who’s not being straight with me. He or she is either lying or distorting the truth by holding back information. Who? And why?

  *

  The phone rang. He took it out into the garden. It was Linda. She came straight to the point.

  ‘I talked to Hans. He felt like I was pressuring him. He got annoyed and stormed out. When he comes back, I’ll apologise.’

  ‘That’s something Mona never did.’

  ‘What? Storm out or apologise?’

  ‘She often stormed out. That was always the last card she played whenever we had an argument. A slammed door. When she came back she never apologised.’

  Linda laughed. She’s on edge, Wallander thought. They probably argue a lot more often than she wants me to know.

  ‘According to Mona it was the other way round,’ she said. ‘It was you who slammed the door, you who never apologised.’

  ‘I thought we’d already agreed that Mona sometimes says things that aren’t true,’ Wallander said.

  ‘You do exactly the same. Neither of my parents is a thoroughly honest person.’

  Wallander reacted angrily.

  ‘Are you? Thoroughly honest?’

  ‘No. But I’ve never claimed to be.’

  ‘Get to the point!’

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’

  Wallander decided on the spur of the moment, not without a certain amount of pleasure, to tell a lie.

  ‘I’m cooking.’

  She saw through him right away.

  ‘In the garden? I can hear birds singing.’

  ‘I’m having a barbecue.’

  ‘You hate barbecues.’

  ‘You don’t know everything I hate and don’t hate. What is it you want to tell me?’

  ‘Hans has had no contact with his father. Nor have there been any transactions in the family bank accounts apart from the withdrawals made by Louise before she disappeared. Hans is dealing with all the post now. No money has been taken out at the bank, nor in any other way.’

  Wallander suddenly realised that this was more important than he’d first thought.

  ‘So what has Hakan been living on while he’s been hidden away? He turns up in Copenhagen, but obviously he doesn’t need any money because he doesn’t contact his son, nor does he make any withdrawals. That seems to suggest that somebody is helping him. Or could he have bank accounts that Hans doesn’t know about?’

  ‘That’s possible. Hans has lots of contacts in the banking world; he’s looked into it and hasn’t found anything. But there are lots of ways of hiding money.’

  Wallander said nothing. He didn’t have any more questions. But he was now beginning to wonder seriously if Hakan von Enke’s not needing money might be a significant clue. Klara started crying.

  ‘I have to go now,’ Linda said.

  ‘I can hear that. So you believe we can rule out any secret contacts between Hans and his father, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She hung up. Wallander put down the phone and moved over to the garden hammock. He rocked back and forth, with one foot on the ground. In his mind’s eye he could see Hakan von Enke walking along Stroget. He was walking fast, stopping now and then to turn round before continuing on his way. And then he disappeared, possibly down a side street, or into the mass of people on Stroget.

  Wallander woke up with a start. It had begun raining, and drops were falling on his bare foot that was resting on the ground. He stood up and went inside. He closed the door behind him, but then he paused. He could sense some sort of connection, still very vague, but nevertheless something that could shed light on where Hakan von Enke had been since he disappeared. An escape hatch, Wallander thought. When he vanished, he knew what he was going to do. He fled from his walk along Valhallavagen to a place where nobody would be able to find him. Wallander now felt quite sure that Louise had not been prepared for her husband’s disappearance; her worry had been genuine. No proof had come to light, no facts, only this feeling that he found persuasive.

  Wallander went to the kitchen. The stone floor felt cold under his bare feet. He was moving slowly, as if he was afraid that the thoughts might disappear. The Lego pieces were on the table. He sat down. An escape hatch, he thought again. Everything planned, well organised - a submarine commander knows how to arrange his environment down to the last detail. Wallander tried to envisage the escape hatch. He had the feeling that he knew where Hakan von Enke was hiding. He had been close by, without noticing.

  He leaned over the table and arranged a line of Lego. Everybody who had ever had anything to do with Hakan and Louise. Sten Nordlander; their daughter, Signe; Hans; Steven Atkins in his house near San Diego. But also the others who had been more peripheral. He arranged them in a line, one after the other, and thought about who could have helped von Enke, who might have been able to supply everything needed, including money.

  This is what I’m looking for, Wallander thought. An escape hatch. The question is, is Ytterberg thinking along the same lines, or is he playing with different pieces of Lego? He picked up his mobile phone and dialled the number. It was raining harder now, pelting against the tin-plate windowsills. Ytterberg answered. It was a bad connection. Ytterberg was outside, in the street.

  ‘I’m at an outdoor cafe,’ Ytterberg said. ‘I’m just about to pay. Can I call you back?’

  He did so twenty minutes later when he had returned to his office in Bergsgatan.

  ‘I’m the type that thinks it’s easy to get back to work again after a holiday,’ Ytterberg said in response to Wallander’s question about how he felt, after being off.

  ‘I can’t say I share that view,’ said Wallander. ‘Going back to work means being faced with a desk overloaded with files passed on by others who have left cheerful little
Post-it notes about how pleased they are to be going on holiday.’

  He started by reporting on his meeting with Hermann Eber. Ytterberg listened carefully and had several questions. Then Wallander told him about Hakan von Enke’s return. He passed on what Linda had told him; he was even more convinced now that she really saw him.

  ‘Could your daughter have been mistaken?’

  ‘No. But I understand why you ask. It’s astonishing.’

  ‘So there’s no doubt at all that it was him?’

  ‘No. I know my daughter. If she says it was him, it was him. Not a doppelganger, not somebody who looked like him - it was Hakan von Enke.’

  ‘What does your future son-in-law have to say?’

  ‘That his father hadn’t gone to Copenhagen in order to visit him. There’s no reason not to believe him.’

  ‘But is it really plausible to think that he wouldn’t make contact with his son?’

  ‘Whether it’s plausible or not I can’t say. But I don’t think Hans is stupid enough to try to mislead Linda.’

  ‘Mislead his partner, or mislead your daughter?’

  ‘The mother of his child. If that makes a difference.’

  They talked for a while about what von Enke’s reappearance could imply. As far as Ytterberg was concerned, it meant above all else that he would have to reconsider what role Hakan von Enke might have played in the death of his wife.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been thinking,’ said Ytterberg, ‘but I always assumed that he was dead as well. Ever since his wife’s body was discovered on Varmdo, at least.’

  ‘I’ve had my doubts,’ said Wallander. ‘But if I’d been in charge of the investigation I’d probably have thought the same thing.’

  Wallander told him briefly, but nevertheless in detail, his thoughts about von Enke’s escape hatch.

  ‘Those secret documents we found in Louise’s handbag made me think,’ Ytterberg said. ‘Since von Enke was in hiding, it was reasonable to think that he was involved as well, that they were working together.’