The Return of the Dancing Master

Chapter Twelve

When Aron Silberstein woke up he didn’t know who he was. There was a belt of fog between dream and reality that he had to find his way through to discover if he really was Aron Silberstein, or if at that moment he was Fernando Hereira. In his dreams his two names often switched. Every time he woke up, he experienced a moment of great confusion. This morning was no exception when he opened his eyes and saw light seeping through the canvas. He slid his arm out of his sleeping bag and looked at his watch. It was 9:03. He listened. All quiet. The night before he’d turned off the main road after passing through a town called Falköping. Then he’d driven through a little hamlet with a name something like Gudhem and found a farm road leading into the forest, and there he’d been able to pitch his tent.

And that was where he had just woken up, feeling that he had to force his way out of his dreams. It was raining, a thin drizzle with occasional drops pecking against the canvas. He put his arm back into his sleeping bag to keep warm. Every morning he was overcome by the same yearning for warmth. Sweden was a cold country in the autumn. He’d learned that during his long stay.

Soon it would all be over. He would drive to Malmö. He’d return his rented car, get rid of the tent, and spend a night in a hotel. Early the next day he would make his way to Copenhagen and in the afternoon board a plane that would take him home to Buenos Aires by way of Frankfurt and São Paulo.

He settled down in the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. He didn’t need to get up yet. His mouth was dry and he had a headache. I overdid it last night, he thought. I drank too much, more than I needed to, in order to get to sleep.

He was tempted to open his backpack and take out one of the bottles inside it, but he couldn’t risk being stopped by the police. Before leaving Argentina he’d been to the Swedish Embassy in Buenos Aires to find out about the traffic laws in Sweden. He had discovered that there was zero tolerance when it came to alcohol. That had surprised him since he’d read in a newspaper article some time ago that Swedes were heavy drinkers and were often drunk in public. He resisted the temptation to drink this morning. At least he wouldn’t smell of alcohol if the police were to stop him.

Light trickled in through the canvas. He thought about the dream he’d had during the night. In it he was Aron Silberstein again. He was a child and his father Lukas was still with him. His father was a dancing master and he received his pupils at home in their Berlin apartment. It was during that last horrific year — he knew because in the dream his father had shaved off his mustache. He’d done that a couple of months before the catastrophe. They were sitting in the only room that didn’t have broken windows. Just the two of them, Aron and his father: the rest of the family had disappeared. And they waited. They said nothing, just waited, nothing else. Even now, after fifty-four years, it seemed to him that his childhood was one long, drawn-out wait. Waiting and terror. All the awful things that happened outside in the streets, when the sirens sounded and they scurried down into the shelter, had never affected him. What would come to dominate his life was the waiting.

He crawled out of his sleeping bag. Took out an aspirin and the water bottle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He put the pill in his mouth and washed it down. Then he crawled out of the tent to pee. The ground was cold and wet under his bare feet. One more day and I’ll be away from all this, he thought. All this cold, the long nights. He crawled back into the tent, down into the sleeping bag and pulled it up to his chin. The temptation to take a swig from one of the bottles was there all the time, but he would wait. Now that he’d come as far as this he was determined not to take any unnecessary risks.

The rain grew heavier. Everything went as it was destined to go, he told himself. I waited for more than fifty years for that moment to come. I’d almost, but only almost, given up the hope of finding the explanation for what had ruined my life, and how to avenge it. Then the unexpected happened. By some totally incredible coincidence somebody turned up and was able to supply the piece of the jigsaw that enabled me to discover what had happened. A chance meeting that should have been inconceivable.

He decided that as soon as he got back to Buenos Aires he would go to the cemetery where Höllner was buried and put a flower on his grave. If not for him he would never have been able to carry out his mission. There was some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to meet Höllner before he died, and find out the answers to the questions he’d been asking for so long. Discovering what happened that day when he was only a child had put him in a state of shock. Never before had he drunk as much as he did for some time after that meeting. But then, when Höllner died, he’d forced himself to sober up and reduce his drinking so that he could go to work again and devise a plan.

And now it was all over.

As the rain pattered on the canvas, he ran through what had happened. First, the meeting with Höllner, whom he’d met by pure chance in La Cãbana. That was two years ago. Even then Höllner was showing signs of the stomach cancer that would soon kill him. It was Filip Monteiro, the old waiter with the glass eye, who had asked him if would consider sharing a table one night when the restaurant was very full. He’d been seated at a table with Höllner.

They knew immediately that they were both immigrants from Germany — they had similar accents. He had expected to discover that Höllner was one of the large group of Germans who came to Argentina via the well-organized lifelines that helped Nazis flee the Third Reich, which was supposed to last for a thousand years but now lay in ruins. At first Silberstein hadn’t given his real name. Höllner might easily have been one of those who entered the country on false papers; perhaps he’d landed in Argentina from one of the U-boats that were sailing up and down the coast of Argentina in the spring of 1945. He might also have been assisted by one of the Nazi groups that operated out of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Or he might have come later, when Juan Perón opened his political arms to welcome German immigrants without asking any questions about their past. Silberstein knew that Argentina was full of Nazis who had gone to ground, war criminals who lived in constant fear of being arrested. People who had never renounced their beliefs and still had a bust of Hitler in a prominent position at home. But Höllner was not one of those. He’d referred to the war as the catastrophe it was. His father had been a high-ranking Nazi, but Höllner himself was one of the many German immigrants who had come to Argentina in search of a future they thought they could never find in the ruins of Europe.

They had shared a table at La Cãbana. Silberstein could still remember that they’d ordered the same meal — a meat stew the chefs at La Cãbana made better than anybody else. Afterwards they’d walked home together since they lived in the same neighborhood, Silberstein in Avenida Corrientes and Höllner a few blocks further on. They arranged to meet again. Höllner explained that he was a widower whose children had returned to Europe. Until recently he had been running a printing business, but now he’d sold it. Silberstein invited him to visit the workshop where he restored old furniture. Höllner accepted the invitation, and then it became the norm for him to visit Silberstein in the mornings. He seemed never to tire of watching Silberstein painstakingly reupholster an old chair brought in by some member of the Argentinean upper classes. They would occasionally go out to the courtyard for coffee and a smoke.

They had compared their lives, as old people do. And it was while they were doing so that Höllner asked in passing if Silberstein happened to be related to a certain Herr Jacob Silberstein from Berlin, who had escaped being deported with his fellow Jews in the 1930s and then avoided all other forms of persecution during the war because he was the only person who could give Hermann Goering a satisfactory massage to ease his back pain. Feeling that history had caught up with him in one stroke, Silberstein told him that the masseur Jacob Silberstein was his uncle. And that it was thanks to the special privileges enjoyed by Jacob that his brother Lukas, Silberstein’s father, had also evaded deportation. Höllner explained that he himself had met Jacob Silberstein because his own father had also been massaged by him.

Silberstein had immediately closed his workshop and posted a notice on the door stating that he wouldn’t be back until the following day. Then he’d accompanied Höllner to his home, not far from the harbor in a badly maintained block of apartments. Höllner had a small apartment overlooking the rear courtyard. Silberstein could remember the strong scent of lavender and all the awful watercolors of the Pampas painted by Höllner’s wife. They had talked long into the night about the amazing coincidences, how their paths had crossed in Berlin so many years ago. Höllner was three years younger than Silberstein. He was only nine in 1945, and his memories were fuzzy. But he remembered the man who was fetched by car once a week to give his father a massage. He even remembered thinking that there was something remarkable about it, something remarkable and also a little dangerous, in that a Jew (whose name he didn’t know at that time) was still there in Berlin. And, moreover, a man being protected by no less a person than the terrifying Reichsmarschall Goering. But when he recounted what he remembered about Jacob Silberstein’s appearance and his gait, Silberstein knew that there could have been no misunderstanding: Höllner was talking about his uncle.

The key reference was to an ear, his left ear, that Jacob Silberstein had disfigured as a child, cutting himself on a shattered window pane. Silberstein broke into a sweat when Höllner described the ear he remembered so vividly. There was no doubt at all, and Silberstein was so touched that he felt obliged to embrace Höllner.

Now, lying in his tent, he remembered all that as if it had happened only yesterday. Silberstein checked his watch. 10:15. He changed identity again in his thoughts. Now he was Fernando Hereira. He had landed in Sweden as Hereira. He was an Argentinean citizen on vacation in Sweden. Nothing else. Least of all Aron Silberstein, who arrived in Buenos Aires one spring day in 1953 and had never been back to Europe since. Not until now, when he finally had an opportunity to do what he’d been longing to do all those years.

He dressed, broke camp, and drove back to the main road. He stopped for lunch outside Varberg. His headache had cleared up by now. Two more hours and he’d be in Malmö. The car rental company was next to the train station. That was where he’d gotten the car forty days earlier, and that was where he would return it. No doubt he’d be able to find a hotel nearby. Before then he would have to get rid of the tent and the sleeping bag. He’d dumped the camping stove, saucepans, and plates in a dumpster at a rest stop in Dalarna. He’d thrown all the cutlery into a river he’d driven over. He would keep a lookout for a suitable place to offload the rest of his stuff before he got to Malmö.

He found what he was looking for a few kilometers north of Helsingborg: a dump behind a gas station where he’d stopped to fill up for the last time. He buried the tent and the sleeping bag under the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles that already filled the dump. Then he took out a plastic bag lying at the top of his backpack. It contained a bloodstained shirt. Although he’d been wearing coveralls that he’d burned while still up there in the forest, Molin had managed to cover his shirt in blood. How it had happened was still a mystery. Just as big a mystery as why he hadn’t burned the shirt when he’d disposed of the coveralls.

Deep down, though, he knew the answer. He’d kept the shirt so that he could look at it and convince himself that what had happened was real, not simply a dream. Now he didn’t need it any longer. The time for remembering was in the past. He dug the plastic bag as deep into the dump as he could. As he did so, his mind turned again to Höllner, the pale man that he’d met at La Cãbana. Had it not been for him, he wouldn’t be here now, shedding the last physical traces of a journey to Sweden during which he’d taken a person’s life, and sent a final horrific greeting to the equally horrific past by means of some blood-soaked footprints he’d left behind on a wooden floor.

From now on the only traces would be inside his head.

He returned to his car and sat at the wheel without starting the engine. A question was nagging away at the back of his mind. It had been there ever since the night he’d attacked Molin’s house. A question regarding an unexpected discovery he’d made about himself. He had felt frightened on the way to Sweden. He’d spent the whole of the long flight wondering how he would manage to complete the mission he’d set himself. A mission comprising a single task: killing a man. So far in his life he had never been anywhere even close to harming another human being. He hated violence, he was scared stiff of being assaulted himself. But there he was, on his way to another continent to kill a man in cold blood. A man he’d met six or seven times before, when he was twelve years old.

As it turned out, it was not at all difficult.

That was what he couldn’t understand. It frightened him, and forced him to think back to all that had happened over fifty years ago, the starting point that led to the deed he had now performed. Why had it been so easy? It should have been the hardest thing there is, killing another human being. The thought depressed him. He’d been convinced that it would be difficult. All the time he’d worried that when the moment came, he would hesitate, and afterwards be overcome by remorse; but his conscience had remained at peace.

He sat in the car for ages, trying to understand. In the end, when his urge to drink something very strong got the better of him, he started the engine and drove away.

He continued towards Malmö. After a while he could see on his right a long bridge linking Sweden to Denmark. He drove into the city and had no difficulty finding the car rental company. When he paid the bill, he was surprised at how much they’d charged him. He said nothing, of course, and paid in cash, though he’d left them his credit card number when he rented the car. He hoped the documentation recording that Fernando Hereira had rented a car in Sweden would disappear into the depths of some archive.

Back on the street, he found that there was a cold wind blowing in from the sea, but it had stopped raining. He set off towards the city center and stopped at a hotel in a side street off the first square he came to. No sooner had he entered his room than he stripped down and took a shower. While he was living in the forest he’d forced himself to take a dip in the freezing lake once a week and try to rinse all the filth away. Now, as he stood under his shower in Malmö, he thought that at last he could wash off all the ingrown dirt.

Afterwards, he wrapped himself in a bath towel and sat down with the last of the bottles in his backpack. Freedom! He took three large swigs, and felt the warmth spreading over his body. The previous night he’d drunk too much. That had annoyed him. Tonight the only thing he needed to worry about was getting to the airport the next day.

He stretched out on the bed. He was thinking more clearly now that he had brandy flowing through his veins. What had happened was rapidly becoming a memory. His aim now was to get home to his workshop. His whole life revolved around that. The cramped workshop behind the house in Avenida Corrientes was the cathedral he attended every morning. And his family, of course. His children had left the nest. His daughter Dolores had moved to Montevideo and would soon give him his first grandchild. Then there was Rakel, who was still studying to be a doctor. And Marcus, the restless dreamer of the family, who longed to become a poet, although he was earning his living at the moment as a researcher for a radical program on Argentinean television. He loved his wife, Maria, and his children. Nevertheless, it was his workshop that was the mainspring of his life. He would soon be back there. August Mattson-Herzén was dead. Now there was a chance that all the events that had been haunting him since 1945 might leave him in peace.

He stayed on the bed for a while. Occasionally he reached out for the brandy bottle. Every time he took a swig he made a silent toast to Höllner. But for him, nothing of this would have happened. But for Höllner, he would never have been able to find out who killed his father. He stood up and tipped the contents of his backpack onto the floor. He bent down and picked up the diary he’d been keeping for the forty-three days he’d spent in Sweden, one page for every day. In fact he had gotten as far as page 45. He’d started writing on the flight to Frankfurt, and then on the flight to Copenhagen. He went back to the bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and leafed through the pages. Here was the whole story. He’d written it thinking he might give it to his children, but they wouldn’t get it until after his death. What he’d written was the history of his family. And he’d tried to explain why he’d done what he had done. He’d told his wife he was going on a journey to Europe to meet some furniture makers who could teach him something new. In fact, he had embarked on a journey into his past. In the diary he described it as a door that had to be closed.

Now, as he lay thumbing through what he’d written, he began to have doubts. His children might not understand why their father had made such a long journey to take the life of an old man who lived in seclusion in a remote forest.

He dropped the book on the floor and took another swig of brandy. That was the last one before he dressed and prepared to go out for a meal. He would have something to drink with his food. What was left in the bottle would see him through the night and the next day.

He was feeling drunk now. If he’d been at home in Buenos Aires, Maria would not have said anything, but would have looked accusingly at him. He didn’t need to worry about that now. Tomorrow he’d be on his way home. This evening was for him alone, and his private thoughts.

He left the hotel at 6:30. The strong cold wind almost bowled him over. He had been thinking of going for a walk, but the weather forced him to abandon that idea. He looked around. Further down the street was a restaurant sign, swaying in the wind. He set off in that direction, but hesitated when he got there. There was a television set high in a corner showing an ice hockey match. He could hear the commentary from the street. Some men were sitting at a table, drinking beer, watching the game. He suspected the food wouldn’t be especially good, but on the other hand, he couldn’t face more of the cold.

He sat at an empty table. At the next table was a man staring in silence at his almost empty beer glass. The waitress came with a menu, and he ordered beef steak with béarnaise sauce and fries. And a bottle of wine. Red wine and brandy was what he drank. Never beer, never anything else at all.

“I hear that you speak English,” said the man with the beer glass.

Silberstein nodded. He hoped very much the man at the next table wouldn’t start talking to him. He wanted to be at peace with his thoughts.

“Where do you come from?” the man said.

“Argentina,” Silberstein said.

The man looked at him, his eyes glassy. “Entonces, debe hablar español,” he said.

His pronunciation was almost perfect. Silberstein looked at him in surprise.

“I used to be a sailor,” the man said, still speaking Spanish. “I lived in South America for some years. That was a long time ago, but when you learn a language properly, it stays with you.”

Silberstein agreed.

“I can see you want to be left in peace,” the man said. “That suits me fine. So do I.”

He ordered another beer. Silberstein tasted his wine. He’d ordered the house wine. That was an error. But he didn’t have the energy to send it back. All he was really interested in was staying drunk.

A loud roar filled the premises. Something had happened in the ice hockey match. Players dressed in blue and yellow embraced each other. The food arrived. To his surprise, it was good. He drank more wine. He felt calm now. All the tension had faded away, and was being replaced by a vast and liberating vacuum. Molin was dead. He had achieved what he had set out to do.

He’d finished eating when he glanced at the television screen. There was evidently a break in the match. A woman was reading the news. He almost dropped his glass when the dead man’s face appeared on the screen. He couldn’t understand what the woman said. He sat motionless, and could feel his heart pounding. For a moment, he half-expected his own face to appear there as well. But the face that did appear was not his own, but another old man. A face he recognized.

He turned to the man at the next table, who seemed to be lost in thought.

“What are they saying on the news?” he said.

The man turned to the television and listened. “Two men have been murdered,” he said. “First one, and then another. Up in Norrland. One was a policeman, the other played the violin. They think they were killed by the same murderer.”

The picture on the screen disappeared, but he knew now that his eyes had not deceived him. The first man was Mattson-Herzén, or Molin, and the second one was the man he’d once seen visiting him. He’d also been murdered.

Silberstein put down his glass and tried to think straight. The same murderer. That wasn’t true. He had killed the man who called himself Molin, but not the other man.

He sat quite still. The ice hockey match had started again.

Chapter Thirteen

The night of November 3, 1999, was one of the longest Stefan Lindman had ever endured. When dawn finally broke, faint light creeping over the wooded hills, it felt as though he were in a weightless vacuum. He’d stopped thinking long ago. Everything happening around him seemed surreal, a nightmare. A nightmare that began when he’d walked around the trees and found Andersson’s body.

He had forced himself to feel for traces of a pulse, which he knew had stopped forever. The body was still warm — at any rate, rigor mortis had not yet set in. That could mean that whoever shot him was still in the vicinity. The light from Lindman’s flashlight had shown where the shot blast had hit him, just over his heart. He’d almost fainted. It was a big hole. Andersson had been executed at close range, with a shotgun.

The dog had started howling as soon as Lindman tied it up. His first thought was that it might have found the scent of the killer, who could be very close. Lindman had raced back to it, scratching his face badly on tree branches. Somewhere along the way he’d also lost his cell phone, which had been in his shirt pocket. He’d taken the dog back to the house and called the emergency number. Lindman had mentioned Larsson’s name, and from then on, the man on duty in Östersund had asked no unnecessary questions. He’d asked if Lindman had a cell phone, was told he’d dropped it somewhere, and said he would call the number to help him find it. Now it was beginning to turn light; his telephone was still lost, and he had not heard it ringing. He had the feeling the whole time that the killer was close by. He’d crouched low as he ran to his car, and reversed into a garbage can as he turned to drive to the main road and give directions to the first of the police cars. The man in Östersund said they would be coming from Sveg.

The first to arrive was Johansson. He had a colleague with him, Sune Hodell. Lindman led them to Andersson’s body, and both officers drew back in horror. Then time had dragged as they waited for daylight. They set up their base in Andersson’s house. Johansson had been in constant telephone contact with Östersund. At one point he’d come into the living room where Lindman was lying down on the sofa with a nosebleed, and announced that Larsson was on his way from Östersund. The cars from Jämtland showed up soon after midnight, and were closely followed by the doctor. Johansson had gotten through to him in a hunting lodge north of Funäsdalen. He’d contacted colleagues in the neighboring provinces of Hälsingland and Dalarna to tell them what had happened. Once during the night Lindman had heard him talking to the Norwegian police in Rorös. The forensic team had rigged up a floodlight in the forest, but the investigation had been marking time, waiting for the light of morning.

At 4 A.M. Larsson and Lindman were alone in the kitchen.

“Rundström will be here as soon as it becomes light,” Larsson said. “Plus three dog handlers. We’ll bring them in by helicopter, that’s the easiest way. But he’s bound to wonder what you’re doing here. I need to have a good explanation to give him.”

“Not you,” Lindman said. “I need a good explanation myself.”

“Well, what is it?”

Lindman thought for a while before answering. “Maybe it was that I wanted to know if he’d remembered anything,” he said, eventually. “Concerning Molin.”

“And you stumbled upon a murder? Rundström will understand that, but he’s going to think it odd even so.”

“I’m getting out of here very soon,” Lindman said.

“Okay. But not before we’ve talked through what happened here.”

Then one of Larsson’s colleagues had appeared and reported that the Helsinborg police had informed Andersson’s wife what had happened. Larsson went off to talk to somebody, possibly Mrs. Andersson, on one of the many cell phones that seemed to be ringing constantly. Lindman wondered how it had been possible to conduct a criminal investigation in the days before cell phones, and then he wondered about what mechanisms come into play when a murder investigation gets under way. There are set routines that have to be followed, procedures where everybody knows exactly what to do. But beyond the routines, what happens then?

Lindman thought he could see what was going on inside Larsson’s mind, and he was having similar thoughts himself. Or at least, trying to have. He was handicapped by the image that kept recurring in his mind’s eye. Andersson tied to a tree trunk with a rope. The enormous entry wound. A blast or more than one blast from a shotgun at close range.

Andersson had been executed. An execution squad had appeared in the darkness, held a court martial, carried out the sentence, and then disappeared as discreetly as it had arrived. This is no straightforward little murder either, Lindman thought several times as the night progressed. But if it isn’t, what is it? There must have been a link between Molin and Andersson. They form the base of a triangle. At its missing tip is somebody who shows up under cover of night, not once but twice, and kills two old men who, on the face of it, have nothing in common.

At that point all the doors slammed shut. This is the heart of the investigation, he thought. There is some invisible connection between the two men, a link that is so fundamental that somebody kills both of them. This is what Larsson is thinking about while he’s going through the routines and waiting for the dawn that never seems to come. He’s trying to see what is hidden under the stones.

Lindman stayed close to Larsson throughout the night. He followed him when they hurried back and forth between the scene of the crime and the house they had made their headquarters. He’d been surprised by how lightly Larsson seemed to be approaching his work. Despite the horrific image of a man messily shot and tied to a tree, he heard Larsson’s cheerful laughter several times. There wasn’t a trace of callousness or cynicism about him, just that liberating laughter that helped him to endure all the horror.

Morning came at last, and a helicopter sank down onto the patch of grass behind the house. Out jumped Rundström and three dog handlers with Alsatians tugging eagerly at their leashes. The helicopter took off again at once and was soon out of sight.

In the morning light, all the activities that had gone so slowly during the hours of darkness changed character. The officers who had been working nonstop since they arrived on-site were tired and their faces as gray as the sky, but now their tempo increased. After giving Rundström a brief summary, Larsson and the dog handlers gathered around a map of the area and divided the search between the three of them. Then they left for the place where the body was now being released from the tree.

The first dog found Lindman’s cell phone right away. Somebody had stepped on it during the night and the battery wasn’t functioning. Lindman put it in his pocket and the thought struck him: who would inherit it if he didn’t survive the cancer?

After an hour or so of silent and steady work, Rundström summoned all the police officers to the house to go through the case so far. By then two more cars had arrived from Östersund with more equipment for the forensic team. Then the helicopter had returned and collected Andersson’s body. Later it would be taken by car from Östersund to the coroner’s office in Umeå.

Before the meeting started, Rundström had gone over to where Lindman was sitting in his car and asked him to join them. So far he hadn’t inquired how Lindman had been the one to discover Andersson’s body.

The officers huddled in the sizable kitchen. They were tired and cold. Larsson was leaning against a wall, pulling hairs out of one of his nostrils. Lindman thought he looked older than his forty-three years. His cheeks were sunken, his eyelids heavy. He sometimes gave the impression of not being with it, but Lindman thought it was more likely that his mind was working overtime. His concentration was directed inwards. Lindman supposed that Larsson was looking for the answer to the question every investigation leader asks himself over and over: what is it that we can’t see?

Rundström opened the meeting by talking about roadblocks. They had been set up on all the major access roads. Before the police had arrived in Särna, there had been a report of a car driving south at high speed, towards Idre. This was an important sighting. Rundström asked Johansson to talk to their colleagues in Dalarna.

Then he turned to Lindman. “I don’t know if everyone present knows who you are,” he said. “We have a colleague from Borås here who used to work with Herbert Molin. I think it will be best if you explain the circumstances in which you came to discover Abraham Andersson’s body.”

Lindman described what had happened when he’d driven to Dunkärret from Sveg. Rundström asked him a few questions. What he wanted to know was the timing of various points. Lindman had been experienced enough and had the presence of mind to check his watch both when he arrived at the house and when he discovered the body. The meeting was short. The forensic team was anxious to get back to work because the weather forecast threatened sleet later in the day. Lindman went outside with Larsson.

“There’s something that doesn’t fit,” Larsson said. “You have suggested that the reason for Molin’s death may well be found in his past. That sounded reasonable to me. But where do we stand now? Andersson has never been a police officer. He and Molin didn’t know each other until they happened to settle in the same remote spot. That sinks your theory, I would have thought.”

“It has to be checked out, though, don’t you think? Molin and Andersson may have had something in common that we don’t yet know about.”

Larsson shook his head. “Of course we shall check into it. But I don’t buy it even so.” He burst out laughing. “Police officers shouldn’t believe anything, I know. But we do. From the very first moment we arrive at the scene of a crime we start forming possible conclusions. We make nets without knowing how big the mesh should be. Or what fish we are hoping to catch, not even what kind of water we’re going to put them in. The sea or a mountain lake? A river or a tarn?”

Lindman had some difficulty following Larsson’s imagery, but it sounded convincing.

One of the dog handlers emerged from the forest. Lindman could see from the state of the dog that it had really been stretching itself.

“Nothing,” said the handler. “And besides, I think Stamp’s ill.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He brought up his food. He’s probably caught a virus.”

Lindman turned to look at Andersson’s Norwegian elkhound: it was standing motionless on its lead, staring at the place where the voices of the forensic officers could be heard.

“What’s going on here in the forest?” Larsson said. “I don’t like it. It reminds me of a shadow moving in the dusk. You don’t know if its real or imagined.”

“What kind of a shadow?”

“The kind we’re not used to up here. Molin was the victim of a well-planned attack. Andersson was executed. I don’t get it.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Johansson. “We can forget about the car at Särna. It was a man in a hurry to get his wife to the maternity hospital.”

Larsson muttered something inaudible in reply. Johansson went back to the house.

“What do you think?” Larsson said. “What really happened?”

“I’d use the same word you did. An execution. Why take a man into the forest, tie him to a tree, and then shoot him?”

“If it happened in that order. But of course, that’s what I’ve been wondering,” Larsson said. “Why go to that trouble? There’s also a similarity with the murder of Molin. Why go to the trouble of planting those bloodstained tango steps on the floor?” He provided the answer himself. “A message. But to whom? We’ve talked about this before. The murderer sends a greeting. To us or to somebody else? And why does he do it? Or why do they do it? We don’t know if there’s more than one murderer.” Larsson looked up at the overcast sky. “And are we dealing with a madman? And is this the last? Or will there be more?”

They went back to the house. Rundström was on the phone. The forensic unit had started searching Andersson’s house. Rundström put the phone down and pointed at Lindman.

“We should have a word,” he said. “Let’s go outside.”

They went to the back of the house. The clouds scuttling across the sky were getting darker.

“How long are you thinking of staying?” Rundström said.

“I had intended on leaving today. Now I suppose it will have to be tomorrow.”

Rundström looked at him quizzically. “I have a feeling there’s something you haven’t told me. Am I right?”

Lindman shook his head.

“There wasn’t anything between you and Molin that you need to tell us about?”

“Nothing.”

Rundström kicked at a stone.

“It’s probably best for you to let us look after the investigation now. Best for you to keep out of it.”

“I haven’t the slightest intention of getting involved in your work.”

Lindman could feel himself getting annoyed. Rundström wrapped his words in a sort of casual friendliness. Lindman was irritated because he didn’t speak plainly.

“Let’s leave it at that, then,” Rundström said. “It’s good that you found him, of course. So that he didn’t need to be tied up there until someone else found him.”

Rundström walked off. Lindman noticed Larsson standing in a window, watching him. Lindman beckoned to him.

“You’re leaving, then?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll get in touch with you later today.”

“Call me at the hotel. My cell’s not working.”

Lindman drove off. After a very few kilometers he felt sleepy. He turned onto a forestry track, turned off the engine, and reclined the seat.

When he woke up, he was enclosed by silent, white walls. It had started snowing while he was asleep, and the car windows were already covered. He sat and held his breath. Could this be what death is like? A white room with pale light filtering through the walls? He readjusted his seat and felt stiff all over. He’d had a dream, he knew that, but he couldn’t remember what it had been about. Something about Andersson’s dog, perhaps? Hadn’t it started to chew one of its own legs? He shuddered at the thought. Whatever it was he’d dreamed, he’d rather forget about it. He looked at his watch: 11:15. He’d been asleep for more than two hours. He opened the door and got out to urinate. The ground was white, but it had stopped snowing already. There was no movement in the trees. No wind. Nothing, he thought. If I stood still I’d soon turn into a tree.

He drove back to the main road. He would return to Sveg, have something to eat, then wait for Larsson to phone. Nothing more. He’d tell Larsson about his visit to Berggren. About the Nazi uniform in her wardrobe. He hadn’t had an opportunity to do so during the night, and he wasn’t going to leave until he’d passed on everything that might help Larsson in his investigation.

He came to the turnoff to Molin’s house. He had no intention of stopping. Even so, he stamped so hard on the brakes that he skidded on the slippery surface. Why did he stop? One last visit, he thought. One final short visit, that’s all. He drove up to the house and got out. There were animal tracks on the white ground. A hare, he thought. He searched his memory to recall the pattern of those bloodstained footprints. He reproduced them on the white ground. Tried to picture Molin and his doll. A man and a doll dancing the tango in the snow. At the edge of the forest an Argentinean orchestra is playing. What instruments make up an Argentinean tango orchestra? Guitar and violin? Bass? Accordion, perhaps? He didn’t know. It wasn’t important. Molin had been dancing with death without knowing it. Or maybe he did know that death was there in the forest, waiting for him? He kept an eye on movements in the shadows even when I knew him, or at least thought I knew him. An elderly policeman who had never particularly distinguished himself. Even so he made time to talk to me, a raw young police officer who knew nothing about what it was like having a drunk throw up all over you, or a drunken woman spitting at you, or a raving psychopath trying to kill you.

Lindman looked hard at the house. It seemed different, now that the ground was white. He turned his attention to the shed. He’d been in there the first time, but then he’d been more interested in the house. He opened the door. It was one room with a concrete floor. He turned on the light. There was a stack of firewood along one wall. On the opposite wall was a bench, shelves full of tools, and a metal locker. Lindman opened it, thinking that there might be a police uniform inside, but there was only a set of dirty coveralls and a pair of rubber boots. He closed the locker and looked around the room again. What does it have to say? he asked himself. The stack of firewood tells us that Molin knew how to build the perfect woodpile, but not much else. He turned his attention to the shelves of tools. What did they have to say for themselves? Nothing unexpected.

Lindman recalled that when he was a child his father had a toolshed in Kinna. It looked just like this one. Molin had everything he needed for minor repairs to the house and his car. There was nothing that didn’t fit the pattern, no tool that suggested an unexpected story. He resumed his tour of the shed.

In one corner was a pair of skis with poles. Lindman took one of the skis to the doorway. The binding was worn. So Molin had used them. Maybe he’d skied over the lake when it was covered in ice and the weather was good? Because he enjoyed it? Or because he needed the exercise? Or to go fishing through the ice? He put the ski back. What was this? Something unexpected. Another pair of skis, shorter, possibly ladies’ skis. Now he could envisage two people gliding over the frozen lake, in glitteringly clear winter weather. Molin and Berggren. What did they talk about when they were out skiing? Or perhaps you didn’t talk when you were skiing? Lindman didn’t know because he hadn’t skied since he was a child. He continued his search. In another corner was a broken sled, some coils of steel wire, and some roof tiles.

Something caught his eye. He looked more closely. It took him almost a minute to realize what it was. The tiles were lying haphazardly. Here was something that didn’t fit into the pattern. Molin solved jigsaw puzzles, he stacked firewood with a feeling for symmetry and order. The same applied to the tools. They were all neatly arranged. But not the tiles. They weren’t orderly in the same way as the rest. He bent down and removed them, one by one.

Underneath was a sheet of metal sunk into the concrete floor. A lid, locked. Lindman stood up and fetched a crowbar from among the tools. He forced it into the crack between the floor and the edge of the lid, and used all his strength to lever it open. It gave way suddenly, and Lindman fell over, banging his head against the wall. His hand was bloodstained when he rubbed his head. There was a box of rags under the tool shelves. He wiped his forehead and pressed a rag against his head until the bleeding stopped.

Then he looked into the hole in the floor. There was a package inside. When he lifted it, he could see it was something wrapped in an old black raincoat. Molin was very close to him now. He had hidden something under the floor that he didn’t want anyone else to see. Lindman put the package on the bench, apologizing silently to Molin, then moved the tools out of the way. The package was tied with thick string. Lindman untied the knots and removed the raincoat.

There were three objects: a black notebook, some letters tied with red ribbon, and an envelope.

He started by opening the envelope. It contained three photographs. He was not surprised by what he saw. He’d known, ever since that visit to Berggren’s. Deep down, he’d known, and here was the confirmation. There were three black-and-white photographs. The first was of four young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They were looking straight at the camera. One of the four was Herbert Molin, at that time August Mattson-Herzén. The background was unclear, but it could have been a house wall. The second photograph was of Molin alone. It was taken in a studio, the name of which was at the bottom of the picture.

The third photograph was also of Molin as a young man. Here he was standing beside a motorcycle and sidecar. He was holding a rifle. He was smiling at the camera. Lindman laid the photographs side by side. They also had this in common: Molin’s clothes. His uniform. It was the same as the one in Berggren’s wardrobe.

Chapter Fourteen

There was a story about Scotland.

It was in the middle of the diary, slotted like an unexpected parenthesis into the account Molin had written of his life. In May 1972, Molin has two weeks’ vacation. He takes a ferry from Göteborg to Immingham on the east coast of England. He takes a train to Glasgow and arrives late in the afternoon of May 11. He checks into Smith’s Hotel, which, according to his description of it, is “close to some museums and a university,” but he doesn’t visit the museums. The next day he rents a car and continues his journey northwards. His diary says that he passes through Kinross, Dunkeld, and Spean Bridge. He drives for a long way that day, as far as Drumnadrochit on the western shore of Loch Ness, where he stays the night. He doesn’t look for the monster, however.

Early on the morning of May 13, he drives on along the lochside and reaches his destination in the afternoon: the town of Dornoch, situated on a peninsula east of the Highlands. He checks into the Rosedale Hotel near the harbor, and notes in his diary that “the air here is different from that in Västergötland.” He doesn’t explain in what way it is different. Now he has reached Dornoch, it’s the middle of May 1972, and so far he has made no mention of why he’s here. Just that he will meet “M.” And he does in fact meet “M.” that same evening. “Long walk through the town with M.,” he writes. “Strong wind, but no rain.” He makes the same note for each of the next seven days. “Long walk through the town with M.” Nothing more. The only thing he finds worth remembering is that the weather changes. It seems always to be windy in Dornoch, but sometimes it’s “pouring down,” sometimes the weather is “threatening,” and just once, on Thursday, May 18, “the sun is shining” and it’s “rather warm.” A few days later he drives back the same way as he came. It is not clear whether it’s the same rental car, or whether he has dropped off the first one and rented another. On the other hand, when he comes to pay his bill at the Rosedale Hotel, he’s surprised that “it didn’t cost more.” After a few more days, having been forced to spend an extra twenty-four hours in Immingham due to “the ferry’s engine breaking down,” he returns to Göteborg and then Borås. By May 26 he’s back at work.

The passage about Scotland was a mysterious insertion in the middle of a diary with large time gaps. Sometimes several years pass without Molin applying pen to paper, usually a fountain pen, although occasionally he used a pencil to write his journal. The trip to Scotland, to the town of Dornoch, is an exception. He goes there to meet somebody called “M.” They go for walks. Always in the evening. It is not clear who “M.” is, nor what they talk about. They go for walks, that’s all. On one occasion, Wednesday, May 17, Molin allows himself to make one of the extremely few personal comments to be found in his diary. “Woke up this morning fully rested. Realize I should have made this journey years ago.” That’s all. “Woke up this morning fully rested.” It is a significant comment in many ways, because elsewhere in the diary there are many references to how difficult he finds it to sleep. But in Dornoch he sleeps soundly, and realizes he should have come here years ago.

It was afternoon by the time Lindman had read this far. When he found the package in the shed, his first thought was to take the diary to his hotel in Sveg. Then he changed his mind, and for the second time he entered Molin’s house by climbing in through the window. He brushed the jigsaw puzzle pieces to one side of the table in the living room and replaced them with the diary. He wanted to read it there, in the ruined house, with the spirit of Herbert Molin close at hand. He set out the three photographs beside the diary. Before opening it, he untied the red ribbon around the letters. There were nine of them. They were from Molin to his parents in Kalmar, dated between October 1942 and April 1945. All of them were written in Germany. Lindman decided to work his way through the diary first.

It started with notes from Oslo on June 3, 1942. Molin recorded the fact that he’d bought the diary in a stationery shop in Stortingsgatan, Oslo, with the intention of “noting down significant events in my life.”

He’d crossed the border into Norway to the west of Idre in northern Dalarna, on a road passing through Flötningen. The road had been recommended by a certain “Lieutenant W. from Stockholm whose job it is to ensure that those who wish to join the German army can find the way there through the mountains.” It was not explained how he traveled from the border to Oslo, but the fact is that he’s there now, it’s June 1942, he buys a notebook and starts to keep his diary.

Lindman paused at this point. It was 1942, and Molin was nineteen. In fact, his name at that time was August Mattson-Herzén. He started keeping his diary when he was passing through a life-changing phase. Nineteen years of age, and he decides to enlist in the German army. He wants to fight for Hitler. He’s left Kalmar, and one way or another he got in touch with a Lieutenant W. in Stockholm who has something to do with recruitment for the German military. But does young August go off to war with or without the blessing of his parents? What are his motives? Is he fighting Bolshevism? Or is he just a mercenary bent on adventure? It is not clear. All that emerges is that he is nineteen years of age and is in Oslo.

Lindman read on. On June 4 Molin records the date, then starts writing something that he crosses out. Nothing more until June 28. He notes in capital letters, in bold, that he’s “been enlisted,” and that he was to be taken to Germany as early as July 2. His notes exude triumph. He’s been accepted by the German army! Then he records that he buys an ice cream cone. Walks down the main street and looks at pretty girls who “embarrass me when I catch their eye.” This is the first comment of a personal nature in the diary. He licks an ice cream cone and eyes the girls. And is embarrassed.

The next note is hard to decipher. After a while Lindman realizes why. Molin is on a train, which is shaking. He’s on his way to Germany. He writes that he is tense but confident. And that he’s not alone. He’s accompanied by another Swede who has joined the Waffen-SS, Anders Nilsson from Lycksele. He notes that “Nilsson doesn’t have much to say for himself, and that suits me. I’m pretty reserved myself.” They are accompanied by some Norwegians, but he doesn’t record their names. The rest of the page is empty — apart from a large brown stain. Lindman imagined Molin spilling coffee onto his diary, then putting it away in his bag so as not to spoil it.

His next note is from Austria. It’s October by now.

Lindman turned to the pile of letters. The first one was dated October 11, from Klagenfurt. He noted that it had been written with the same pen Molin is using for his diary — a fountain pen that occasionally produced large blots. Lindman went over to one of the windows to read it. A bird flew off through the trees.

The paper had turned yellow and become brittle. Lindman held it up to the light. The watermark, the German eagle, was very obvious. He stayed at the window. August Molin leaves Sweden, sneaks over the border into Norway, and joins the Waffen-SS. His motive is clear from the letter he sent to his parents. August is no mercenary. He joins the German war effort, fights for Nazism, in order to contribute to the emergence of a new Europe that requires the elimination of Bolshevism. At the age of nineteen, the boy is already a convinced Nazi.

Lindman returned to the diary. By the beginning of January 1943, Molin finds himself deep in Russia, on the eastern front. The optimism that had been in the diary to start with has changed into doubt, then despair, and finally fear. Lindman was struck by an extract from the winter:

He’s dancing, Lindman thought. He’s in some trench or another and he survives by dreaming about how he might be gliding around a dance floor.

Lindman examined the photographs. Molin is smiling. No sign of fear there. His smile is that of a real smooth operator. The fear is hidden behind these pictures, in photographs that were never taken. Unless he’d chosen not to keep any that betrayed his fear. So as not to remember.

Molin’s life can be split down the middle, Lindman thought. There is a decisive watershed, before the fear and with the fear. It creeps up on him in the winter of 1943 when he tries to survive on the Eastern front. He’s twenty at the time. It could be the same fear that I’d detected in the forest near Borås. The same fear, more than forty years later.

Lindman read his way through the book. It was starting to grow dark. The chill seeped in through the broken windows. He took the book into the kitchen, closed the door, covered the windows with a blanket from the bedroom, and continued reading.

In April 1943, Molin writes for the first time that he wants to go home. He’s afraid of dying. The soldiers are engaged in a remorseless and depressing retreat, not only from an impossible war, but also from an ideology that has collapsed. The circumstances are horrendous. Occasionally, he writes about the corpses on all sides, body parts shot to pieces, the eyeless faces, the slit throats. He is constantly searching for a way out, but he can’t find one. On the other hand, he realizes what is not a solution. Later in the spring he is given execution duties. They are going to shoot a Norwegian and two Belgian deserters who had been captured. This is one of the longer diary entries.

Lindman could feel the young man’s fear resonating from the text. He shoots deserters, considers it to be a fair sentence, is given a glass of brandy, and dreams of the Baltic Sea. But fear is creeping up on him all the time, forcing its way into his brain and giving him no peace. Lindman tried to imagine what it must have been like, lying in a trench somewhere on the Eastern front. Sheer hell, no doubt. In less than a year his naive enthusiasm had turned to terror. Nothing now about the new Europe: now it’s a question of survival. And hoping he’ll get back to Kalmar one day.

But it goes on until the spring of 1945. Molin has returned to Germany from Russia. He’s wounded. In the entry for October 19, 1944, Lindman finds the explanation for the bullet wounds found by the pathologists in Umeå. It is not exactly clear what had happened, but at some point in August 1944 he is shot. He survives by some kind of miracle, but the message that emerges from his diary notes is not one of gratitude. Lindman observes that something new is starting to happen to Molin. What characterizes the contents of his diary is no longer fear. Another emotion has crept in. Hate. He expresses his anger at what is happening, and speaks of the necessity to be “ruthless” and to have no hesitation in “allotting punishment.” Although he recognizes that the war is lost, he does not lose belief in the righteousness of the cause, the justification of the aims. Hitler may have let them down, but not as much as all those people who failed to understand that the war was a crusade against Bolshevism. These are the people Molin starts to hate in the course of 1944. This emerges very clearly from one of the letters he writes to Kalmar. It is dated January 1945, and as usual there is no sender’s address. He evidently had received a letter from his parents, anxious about his welfare. Lindman wondered why Molin hadn’t saved the letters he’d received, only the ones he’d sent. Perhaps the explanation was that his own letters were a sort of complement to the diary. It was always his own voice doing the talking, his own hand holding the pen.

Now promoted to Unterscharfűhrer.

Molin’s motives were now clearer than ever. He’d been encouraged by his parents to fight for Hitler against Bolshevism. When he went to Norway, it was not as some kind of adventurer. He had set himself a mission. Towards the end of 1944, possibly in connection with the wounds he had suffered, he had been promoted. What was an “Unterscharführer”? What was the Swedish equivalent? Was there an equivalent?

Lindman read on. The entries became less frequent and shorter, but Molin stayed in Germany until the end of the war. He is in Berlin as the city falls, street by street. He describes how he saw a Russian tank at close range for the first time. He notes that on several occasions he was close to “falling into the clutches of the Russians, in which case I would have had to rely on the mercy of the good Lord.” No Swedish names crop up by now, nor are there any Danish or Norwegian ones. He is now the only Swede among German comrades. The last wartime entry in his diary is dated April 30.

It is not clear what happened next, but Molin did survive and did manage to get back to Sweden. A year passes before he makes the next entry in his diary. He is in Kalmar by then. His mother died on April 8, 1946. He writes on the day of her funeral: “I shall miss Mother. She was a good woman. The funeral was beautiful. Father fought to hold back his tears, but managed to keep composed. I think about the war all the time. Shells whistle past my ears even when I’m sailing in Kalmar Bay.”

Lindman read on. The entries became shorter and sparser still. He notes that he has gotten married. That his wife gives birth to children. But he writes nothing about changing his name. Nor is there any mention of the music shop in Stockholm. One day in July 1955, for no apparent reason, he starts a poem. He crosses it out, but it is still possible to read the words:

Perhaps he couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with “trees,” Lindman thought. “Bees” would have worked. Or “breeze.” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote in a notepad: “With white clouds scudding in the breeze.” It would have been a very bad poem. Perhaps Molin had enough sense to realize the limits of his poetic gifts.

Molin — he is now Molin — moves to Alingsås, and then to Borås. Ten days in Scotland produce an unexpected outburst of writing. To find anything like it Lindman would have to go back to the first months in Germany when Molin’s optimism was intact.

After Scotland everything reverts to normal. He seldom takes up his pen, and then merely notes individual events, with no personal comment.

Lindman became more attentive as he came to the end of the diary. Before that, Molin had noted when he did his last day’s work at the police station, and when he moved to Härjedalen. One particular entry aroused Lindman’s curiosity:

On May 2, 1999, he makes his last entry:

That is all. The diary is far from full. The book Molin bought in a stationer’s in Oslo in June 1942 was with him for the rest of his life but is incomplete. If a diary can ever be finished. When he started writing he was young, a convinced Nazi, on his way from Norway to Germany and the war. He eats ice cream and is embarrassed when Norwegian girls look him in the eye. Fifty-seven years later he writes about the death of a jigsaw puzzle maker in Barcelona. Six months later, he is dead himself.

Lindman closed the book. It was almost pitch-black outside. Is the solution in this diary or elsewhere? he asked himself. I can’t answer that question. I don’t know what he left out, only what he wrote. But I now know a few things about Molin that I didn’t know before. He was a Nazi, he fought for Hitler’s Germany in World War II. He also traveled to Scotland and went for a lot of long walks with somebody he called “M.”

Lindman packed the letters, photographs, and the diary into the raincoat again. He left the house the same way he’d come in, through the window. Just before opening the car door he paused. A vague feeling of sorrow had come over him. About the life Herbert Molin had led. But he realized that some of the sorrow was directed at himself. He was thirty-seven years old, childless, and was carrying an illness that could send him to his grave before he reached forty.

He drove back to Sveg. There was little traffic on the roads. Shortly before Linsell he was overtaken by a police car heading for Sveg, then another. What had occurred the previous night seemed strangely distant and unreal. Yet it was less than twenty-four hours since he’d made the horrific discovery. Molin had made no mention of Abraham Andersson in his diary. Nor Elsa Berggren. His two wives and two children he mentions only in passing, briefly and factually.

The lobby was deserted when he entered the hotel. He leaned over the desk and took his key. When he came up to his room he examined his suitcase. Nobody had touched it. He must have imagined it.

He went down to the dining room shortly after seven. Larsson still hadn’t called. The girl emerged from the swinging doors and smiled as she produced the menu.

“I saw you’d taken your key,” she said. Then she became serious. “I hear something else has happened. That another old man has been killed somewhere near Glöte.”

“That’s right.”

“This is awful. What’s going on?”

She shook her head in resignation, not expecting an answer, and gave him the menu.

“We’ve changed today,” she said. “I wouldn’t recommend the veal cutlets.”

Lindman chose elk fillet with béarnaise sauce and boiled potatoes. He had just finished eating when the girl came through the swinging doors and announced that he was wanted on the telephone. He went up the steps to the lobby. It was Larsson.

“I’ll be staying overnight at the hotel,” he said.

“How’s it going?”

“Nothing tangible to go on.”

“The dogs?”

“They haven’t found a thing. I expect to be there in an hour. Will you keep me company while I have supper?”

Lindman said he would.

At least I have something I can give him, he thought when the call was finished. I have no idea what the relationship was between Molin and Andersson, but I can open a door for Larsson even so. In Berggren’s house there was a Nazi uniform. And Molin had been very careful to withhold his past from the world. There is a possibility, Lindman thought, that the uniform in Berggren’s wardrobe belonged to Molin. Even if he had exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes to escape from the burning ruins of Berlin.

Chapter Fifteen

Larsson was exhausted by the time he arrived at the hotel. Even so, he laughed happily as he sat down at the dining room table. The kitchen would be closing shortly. The girl who alternated between the dining room and the reception desk was setting tables for breakfast. There was only one other guest, a man at a table next to the wall. Lindman supposed he must be one of the test drivers, although he looked rather old to be test driving cars in hostile conditions.

“When I was younger, I often used to go out for meals,” Larsson said, by way of explanation for his laughter. “Now it only happens when I’m forced to spend the night away from home. When there’s some violent crime or something similarly unpleasant to figure out.”

As he ate, he told Lindman what had happened during the day. What he had to say could be summed up in a single word. Nothing.

“We’re marking time,” he said. “We can find no tracks. Nobody saw anything, although we’ve traced four or five people who drove past that evening. What Rundström and I are wondering now is if there really is a link between Andersson and Molin. And if there is, what could it be?”

When he’d finished eating he ordered a pot of tea. Lindman ordered coffee. Then he told Larsson about his visit to Berggren’s, how he’d broken into her house, and his discovery of the diary in Molin’s shed. He moved his coffee cup to one side and set out the letters, the photographs, and the diary for Larsson to see.

“You’ve really overstepped your mark,” Larsson said, clearly irritated. “I thought we’d agreed that you wouldn’t continue poking around.”

“I can only say I’m sorry.”

“What do you think would have happened if Berggren had caught you?”

Lindman had no answer to that.

“It mustn’t happen again,” Larsson said after a while. “But it’s better if we don’t say anything to Rundström about your evening visit to the lady in question. He tends to be a bit touchy about things like that. He wants everything to go by the book. And as you have already seen, he is not that pleased when outsiders start interfering in his investigations. I say ‘his investigations’ because he insists on regarding cases of violent crime as his own personal business.”

“Johansson might tell him about it? Even though he said he would keep it to himself?”

Larsson shook his head. “Erik’s not all that fond of Rundström,” he said. “One should never underestimate antagonisms between individuals and also between provinces. Being junior to big brother Jämtland doesn’t go down well in Härjedalen. That kind of problem afflicts the police force as well.”

He poured himself another cup of tea from the pot, and examined the photographs.

“What you have uncovered makes for a very mysterious story,” he said. “So Molin belonged to the Nazi party and went to fight for Hitler. Unterscharführer? What on earth was that? Was he mixed up with the Gestapo? Concentration camps? What was it they put over the entrance to Auschwitz? ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ Horrific stuff.”

“I don’t know much about Nazism,” Lindman said. “but I imagine that if you were a Hitler supporter you didn’t shout it from the rooftops. Molin changed his name. This might tell us why. He was covering his tracks.”

Larsson had asked for his bill, and paid it. He took out a pen and wrote “Herbert Molin” on the back of it.

“I think better when I write things down,” he said. “August Mattson-Herzén becomes Herbert Molin. You’ve spoken of his fear. It could be that he was scared that something in his past would catch up with him. You talked to his daughter, I suppose?”

“She said nothing about her father having been a Nazi. But then I didn’t ask her about that, of course.”

“It’s like having a criminal in the family. You’d rather not talk about them.”

“That was my thinking. Do you wonder if Andersson was another person with a past?”

“Let’s see what we find in his house,” Larsson said, writing down “Abraham Andersson.” “The forensic unit were going to take a few hours’ rest, then continue through the night.”

Larsson drew a line with two arrows between the two names, Andersson and Molin. Then he drew a swastika followed by a question mark next to Andersson’s name.

“We’ll have a serious chat with Mrs. Berggren first thing tomorrow morning,” he said, writing her name and drawing an arrow between it and the other two. Then he crumpled the bill up and put it in the ashtray.

“We?”

“We can say that you are in attendance as my extremely private assistant, unauthorized.” Larsson laughed aloud, then turned serious again. “We have two horrific murders to deal with,” he said. “I couldn’t care less about Rundström. Nor do I care whether everything goes by the book. I want you to be there. Two people listen better than one.”

They left the dining room. The man was still sitting at his table. They parted in the lobby, agreeing to meet the next morning at 7:30.

That night Lindman slept like a log. When he woke he realized he’d been dreaming about his father. They had been looking for each other in the woods. When the young Stefan finally found him in his dream, he had felt boundlessly relieved and happy.

Larsson had slept badly, however. He’d got up as early as 4 A.M. and by the time he wished Lindman good morning in the lobby, he’d already been to Andersson’s house. Nothing had changed. They had no clues to point to who had killed Andersson, and perhaps also Molin.

As they were about to leave the hotel, Larsson turned to the girl at the reception desk and asked if she’d seen his bill from last night’s dinner. It was only when he’d gotten into bed that he’d realized he would need it for his expense report. She said she hadn’t seen it.

“Didn’t I leave it on the table?” Larsson said.

“You crumpled it up and put it in the ashtray,” Lindman said.

Larsson shrugged. They decided to walk to Berggren’s house. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and the clouds had melted away. It was still dark as they walked to the bridge that would take them over the river to Ulvkalla. Larsson pointed to the white-painted district courthouse.

“There was a nasty incident here a few years ago that wasn’t widely reported. A violent assault. Two of those found guilty boasted of being neo-Nazis. I can’t remember what they said their organization was called. ‘Keep Sweden Swedish,’ something like that. Maybe it doesn’t exist any longer?”

“Nowadays they call themselves ‘WAR,’” Lindman said.

“What does that stand for?”

“White Aryan Resistance.”

Larsson grimaced. “Very nasty stuff. I suppose we thought we’d buried Nazism once and for all, but apparently it’s alive and kicking, even if most of ’em are shaven-headed urchins running wild in the streets.”

They crossed over the bridge.

“There used to be trains here when I was little,” Larsson said. “The National Railway. You could get from Östersund to Orsa via Sveg. You transferred there. Or was it Mora? I did that trip with Grandma when I was little. Nowadays the train only runs in the summer. The Italian singer Mom saw in the People’s Park came here on that train. No planes or limousines in those days. She was at the station to wave goodbye to him. She even has a picture of it. Blurred and wobbly. Taken with a box camera. She guards it like the crown jewels. She must have been madly in love with him.”

They had reached Berggren’s house.

“Have you warned her that we were coming?” Lindman said.

“I thought we’d give her a surprise.”

They went through the gate. Larsson rang the bell. The door opened almost immediately, as if she’d been expecting them.

“Giuseppe Larsson, Östersund CID. I think you’ve already met Stefan. We have quite a few questions to ask you. It has to do with the investigation into the death of Herbert Molin. You knew him, I believe?”

“We” indeed, Lindman thought. I don’t intend to ask any questions. He looked at Larsson, who winked at him as they stepped into the hall.

“I suppose this must be important, since you’ve come so early in the morning?”

“It certainly is,” Larsson said. “Where can we sit down? This is going to take quite a while.”

Lindman noticed that Larsson was much more brusque than he’d expected. He wondered what his own approach would have been if he’d been the one asking the questions. They went into the living room. Berggren didn’t ask them if they’d like coffee. Larsson proved to be a man who didn’t beat around the bush.

“You have a Nazi uniform in one of your closets,” he said, as an opening gambit.

Berggren stiffened. Then she looked at Lindman. Her eyes were cold. Lindman could see that she immediately suspected him, without being able to understand how he’d managed to get into her bedroom.

“I don’t know if it’s against the law to possess a Nazi uniform,” Larsson said. “I am pretty sure it’s illegal to appear in public wearing it. Can you get it for us?”

“How do you know that I have a uniform in my closet?”

“That’s a question I have no intention of answering, but you must understand that it’s relevant to two current murder investigations.”

She looked at them in astonishment. It seemed to Lindman that her surprised expression was genuine. He could see that she knew nothing about the murder at Glöte. He was surprised by this. Almost two days had passed, but still she knew nothing about it. She can’t have been watching television, he thought. Or listening to the radio. Such people do exist, I suppose, although there aren’t many of them.

“Who else has been killed — besides Herbert Molin?”

“Abraham Andersson. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Yes, he lived not far from Herbert. What has happened?”

“All I can tell you so far is that he’s been murdered.”

She stood up and left the room.

“No harm in being direct,” Larsson said softly. “But she obviously didn’t know that Andersson was dead.”

“The news was released a while ago, surely?”

“I don’t think she’s making it up.”

She came back with the uniform and cap. She put them down on the sofa. Larsson leaned forward to examine them.

“Who do they belong to?”

“Me.”

“But I hardly think you were the one who wore them?”

“I don’t think I need answer that question. Not merely because it’s idiotic.”

“Not just at the moment, but we could take you to Östersund for a quite different kind of questioning. It’s up to you.”

She thought for a while before answering. “It belonged to my father. Karl-Evert Berggren. He’s been dead for many years now.”

“So he fought in World War II, in the German army, is that right?”

“He was a member of the volunteer corps known as the Swedish Company. He was awarded two medals for bravery. I can show them to you if you wish.”

Larsson shook his head. “That’s not necessary. I take it you know that Molin used to be a Nazi in his youth, and was a volunteer in the Waffen-SS during the war?”

She sat up straight, but she didn’t ask how they knew that. “Not ‘used to be.’ Herbert was just as convinced a National Socialist the day he died as he was as a young man. He and my father fought side by side. Even if my father was much older than Herbert, they remained good friends all their lives.”

“And you?”

“I don’t think I need to answer that question. There is no law that requires one to declare one’s political persuasion.”

“If that persuasion, as you call it, involves an association with a group that can be linked with violence and a crime known as racial agitation, it is a question that can be justified.”

“I am not a member of any organization,” she said, obviously angered. “What would it be? That band of idiots who run around the streets with shaven heads and desecrate the Hitler salute?”

“Let me rephrase the question. Were you of the same political views as Herbert Molin?”

Her reply came with no hesitation. “Of course. I grew up in a family well aware of race. My father was one of the founders of the National Socialist Workers’ Party in 1933. Sven-Olof Lindholm, our leader, often came to visit us. My father was a doctor and an officer in the territorial army. We lived in Stockholm in those days. I still remember my mother taking me with her on demonstrations in support of the National Socialist women’s organizations. I have been giving the Hitler salute since I was ten. My parents could see what was happening. Jews flocking into the country, degeneration, moral decay. And the threat of Communism. Nothing has changed. Now Sweden is being undermined by indiscriminate immigration. The very thought of mosques being built on Swedish soil makes me sick. Sweden is a society that is rotting away. And nobody is doing anything about it.”

Her outburst had set her trembling. Lindman was sickened, and wondered where all this hatred could have come from.

“What you have just said was not exactly uplifting,” Larsson said.

“I stand by every single word. Sweden is a social concept that barely exists any longer. One has to feel nothing but loathing for the people who have allowed this to come to pass.”

“So Molin’s moving up here was no coincidence?”

“Of course not. In times like this when everything is falling apart, those of us who maintain the old ideals have a responsibility to help one another.”

“So there is an organization, despite what you said?”

“No. But we know who our real friends are.”

“You keep it all secret, though?”

She snorted with disgust as she answered. “Being faithful to the land of our fathers seems to be a criminal offense nowadays. If we are to be left in peace, we have to keep quiet about our views.”

“Nevertheless, somebody tracked down your friend and killed him, isn’t that so?”

“What has that got to do with his patriotic views?”

“You said it yourself. You are forced to hide away and conceal your idiotic ideals.”

“There must have been some other reason for Herbert’s death.”

“What, for instance?”

“I didn’t know him well enough to know.”

“But you must have wondered?”

“Of course, but I find it impossible to understand.”

“These last few months. Did anything unexpected happen? Did he behave differently in any way?”

“He was just the same as he always was. I used to visit him once every week.”

“He didn’t mention anything that was worrying him?”

“No, nothing.”

Larsson paused. It seemed to Lindman that Berggren was telling the truth.

“What happened to Abraham Andersson?” she said.

“He was shot. It seems to have been an execution. Did he belong to your organization — which isn’t an organization, of course?”

“No. Herbert used to talk to him occasionally, but they never discussed politics. Herbert was very cautious. He had very few real friends.”

“Do you have any idea who might have killed Abraham Andersson?”

“I didn’t know the man.”

“Can you tell me who was closest to Molin?”

“I suppose that must have been me. And his children. His daughter at least. His relationship with his son had been broken off.”

“By the father or by the son?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anybody else? Have you ever heard of anybody by the name of Wetterstedt, from Kalmar?”

She hesitated before answering. Larsson and Lindman exchanged glances. She had been surprised to hear the name Wetterstedt.

“He sometimes referred to a person by that name. Herbert was born and grew up in Kalmar. Wetterstedt was related to a former minister of justice, I believe, the one who was murdered some years ago. He may have been a portrait painter, but I’m not sure.”

Larsson had taken out his notebook and written down what she said. “Is that all?”

“Yes. But Herbert was not a man to say anything more than the bare essentials. People have their integrity, don’t you agree?”

Larsson looked up at Lindman.

Then he said, “I have one more question. Did you and Molin do an occasional twirl when you visited him?”

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

“I wondered if you used to dance together?”

For the third time she looked startled. “We did, as a matter of fact.”

“Tango?”

“Not only that. But often, yes. We also did some of the old-fashioned dances, ones that are dying out. The ones that require some technique and a certain elegance. How do they dance nowadays? Like monkeys?”

“I suppose you know that Molin had a sort of doll that he used to dance with?”

“He was a passionate dancer. Very skilled. He practised a lot. When he was young, I believe he dreamed of becoming a professional dancer, but instead he did his duty and answered the call to arms.”

Lindman was struck by her high-flown language. It was as if she were trying to make time go backwards, to the 1930s and 1940s.

“May I take it that there were not many people who knew that Molin was a dancer?”

“He did not have many friends. How many times do I need to tell you that?”

“How far back do you remember his interest in dancing going?”

“I think it was aroused during the war. Perhaps shortly before.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He once said so.”

“What did he say?”

“What I’ve just told you. Nothing more. The war was harrowing, but he did have leave occasionally. The German armed forces took good care of their troops. They were granted leave whenever possible, and everything was paid for them.”

“Did he often talk about the war?”

“No. But my father did. They once had a week’s leave at the same time. They went to Berlin together. My father told me that Herbert wanted to go out dancing every evening. I believe that Herbert went to Berlin to go dancing whenever he was allowed to leave the front.”

“Do you have anything to say to us that you think could be of assistance in apprehending his murderer?”

“No, I do not, but I want you to find the guilty person, even if they will not receive any punishment worthy of the name. In Sweden the powers that be protect the criminal, not the victim. Naturally, it will emerge that Herbert remained faithful to his old ideals and he will be condemned, despite the fact that he is dead.”

“That will be all for the time being. But you will be called for further talks.”

“Am I suspected of some crime?”

“No.”

“Will you kindly tell me how you knew about my father’s uniform?”

“Some other time,” Larsson said, getting up. “I have to say that your opinions verge on the unacceptable.”

“Sweden is already beyond redemption,” she said. “When I was young one often came across police officers who were politically aware and who shared our beliefs. That is now a thing of the past.”

She closed the door behind them. Larsson couldn’t get away from her house fast enough.

“That’s what I call a really nasty person,” he said when they came to the gate. “I was sorely tempted to slap her.”

“There are more people than you would imagine who share her views,” Lindman said.

They walked back to the hotel in silence. Larsson suddenly stopped short.

“What did she actually say? About Molin?”

“That he’d always been a Nazi.”

“And what else?”

Lindman shook his head.

“What she actually said was that Molin remained a person with the same views until the day he died. I haven’t read his diary in detail, but you have. One might well ask what he actually did during the war. And one might well wonder if there are not a lot of people who would have been glad to see him dead.”

“I doubt that,” Lindman said. “The war ended fifty-four years ago. That’s an awful long time to wait.”

“Maybe,” Larsson said. “Maybe.”

They set off again. As they were passing the district court, Lindman said, “What happens if we turn the whole business upside down? We are assuming everything started with Molin since he was murdered first. What if we approach it from the other side? If we started concentrating on Andersson?”

“Not ‘we,’” Larsson said. “‘I.’ Obviously I’ll keep that possibility open. But it’s very unlikely. Andersson moved here for reasons very different from Molin’s. He didn’t hide himself away. He mixed with his neighbors and was a completely different personality.”

They returned to the hotel. Lindman had been annoyed by Larsson’s remark. He was excluded again.

“What are you going to do now?” Larsson said.

Lindman shrugged. “I have to get out of here.”

Larsson hesitated before asking, “How are you?”

“I was in pain one day, but I’m okay now.”

“I try to imagine what it must be like, but I can’t.”

They were standing outside the hotel entrance. Lindman watched a house sparrow pecking away at a dead worm. I can’t imagine it myself either, he thought. I still think the whole business is a nightmare, and that I won’t in fact have to show up at the hospital in Borås on November 19 to start radiation therapy.

“Before you leave, I’d like you to show me that place where the tent was pitched.”

Lindman thought that he would prefer to leave Sveg as soon as possible, but he could hardly say no.

“When?” he asked.

“How about now?”

They got into Larsson’s car and set off in the direction of Linsell.

“There’s no end to the forests in this part of the country,” Larsson said, suddenly breaking the silence. “If you stop here and walk ten meters into the trees, you’re in a different world. Perhaps you know that already?”

“I’ve tried it.”

“Somebody like Molin would find it easier to live with his memories in the forest,” Larsson said. “Where there’s nothing to disturb him. Where time stands still, if you like. Was there really no uniform where you found that diary? He might have gotten all dressed up and gone into the depths of the forest to make the Hitler salute, then goose-stepped along the paths.”

“He wrote in his diary that he deserted. Exchanged his uniform for civvies that he took off a corpse, with Berlin in flames all around him. If I understand his diary correctly, he became a deserter the day Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. But we can assume that Molin didn’t know anything about that.”

“I think they withheld news of his suicide for some days,” Larsson said. “Then somebody broke the news on the radio that the Fuhrer had fallen in action. But it could be that my memory is a bit hazy.”

They turned onto the road to Molin’s house. Pieces of the police tape used to cordon off the scene of crime were fluttering from low branches.

“We ought to clean up when we leave a place,” Larsson said, not pleased by what he saw. “We’ve handed the house over to Molin’s daughter now. Have you met her?”

“Not since we spoke at the hotel the other evening.”

“A very self-confident young lady,” Larsson said, disapprovingly. “I wonder how much she really knows about her father’s past. That’s something I intend on discussing with her, in any case.”

“Surely she can’t not know.”

“I expect she’s ashamed of it. Who wouldn’t be if their father was a Nazi?”

They got out of the car. Listened to the rustling of the trees. Then Lindman led the way down to the lake and along the shore to the campsite. He saw right away that somebody had been there. He stopped in his tracks. Larsson stared at him in surprise.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think somebody’s been here since I was here last.”

“Has something changed?”

“I can’t tell yet.”

Lindman studied the place where the tent had been pitched. Superficially, everything seemed the same. Even so, he was certain somebody had been there since. Something was different. Larsson said nothing. Lindman walked around the clearing in the trees, examining the site from different angles. He walked around a second time. Then the penny dropped. He had sat on the fallen tree trunk. As he looked around, he’d had a broken twig in his hand. He’d left it on the ground in front of him when he’d stood up to leave, but it wasn’t there anymore. It was lying by the side of the path down to the water.

“Somebody has been here,” Lindman said. “Somebody has been sitting on this log.” He pointed to the twig. “Can you take fingerprints from a twig?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Larsson said, taking a plastic bag from his pocket. “We can always try. Are you sure?”

Lindman was certain. He remembered where he’d left the twig. It had definitely been moved. He could picture somebody sitting there on the log, just as he’d done, bending down to pick up the twig, then tossing it away.

“In that case we’ll call in a dog team,” Larsson said, taking out his cell phone.

Lindman turned to look into the forest. He had the feeling that there might be somebody there, very close. Somebody keeping an eye on them. He also had the nagging feeling that there was something he should remember. Something to do with Larsson. But what? He couldn’t put a finger on it.

Larsson was listening to what they were saying on the phone. Asking questions, asking for a dog team to be mobilized, and then finishing the call.

“Very odd,” Larsson said.

“What is?”

“Andersson’s dog has disappeared.”

“What do you mean disappeared?”

“What I say. Vanished. There’s no sign of it. And the place is crawling with police.”

They looked at each other, amazed. A bird clattered up from a branch and flew off over the lake. They watched it until it was gone from view.

Chapter Sixteen

Silberstein lay on top of a hill with a view of Abraham Andersson’s house, aiming his binoculars down at the surrounding area. He counted three police cars, two vans, and three private cars. From time to time, somebody wearing a uniform would come out of the forest. He gathered that it was there, among the trees, that Andersson had been killed; but he hadn’t been able to go there yet. He would make that excursion after nightfall, if possible.

He scanned the house and cars again. A dog, of the same breed as the one he’d been forced to kill at Molin’s place, was tied to a line running between the house and a tree at the edge of the forest. He wondered if the dogs might have come from the same litter, or at least have the same parents. Thinking of the dog whose throat he’d slit made him feel sick. He put the binoculars down, lay on his back, and breathed deeply. He could smell the damp moss. Clouds sailed overhead.

I’m insane, he thought. I could have been in Buenos Aires instead of here in the Swedish wilderness. Maria would have been glad to see me. We might even have made love? In any case, I’d have slept soundly that night, and the following morning I’d have been able to open my workshop again. No doubt Don Antonio has been phoning, getting more annoyed by the day that the chair he sent me three months ago still isn’t ready.

If he hadn’t happened to sit down at a table with a Swedish sailor in a restaurant in Malmö, a sailor who understood and could speak Spanish, and if that damned television set hadn’t been on and shown the face of an old man who’d been murdered, he wouldn’t have needed to abandon his plan. He would have been looking forward to an evening at La Cãbana.

Above all, he wouldn’t have needed to be reminded of what had happened. He’d thought it was all over, at long last, the business that had dogged him all his life. When he’d returned to his hotel room he’d sat on the edge of the bed until he’d reached a decision. He didn’t drink a drop that night. At dawn he took a taxi to the airport some way out of town, where a friendly woman had helped him buy a ticket to Östersund. A rental car was waiting for him. He drove into town and once again bought a tent and a sleeping bag, a camping stove and the other things he needed for making meals, some more warm clothes, and a flashlight. At the System wine shop he bought enough wine and brandy to last him a week. Finally he went to the bookstore in the square and bought a map — he’d thrown away the one he’d had before, just as he’d dumped his pans, stove, tent, and sleeping bag. It was as if the nightmare were starting over. In Dante’s purgatory there was a level where men were tortured by everything repeating itself. He tried to remember what sins they had committed, but he couldn’t.

Then he drove out of town and stopped at a gas station where he bought every local paper he could find. He sat in the car and looked for everything they’d written about the dead man. It was front-page news in all the local papers. He didn’t understand the words, but there was a name mentioned after a reference to Abraham Andersson. Glöte. He guessed that must be the place where Andersson had lived, and where he’d been murdered. There was another name, Dunkärret, but that wasn’t on the map. He got out of the car and spread the unwieldy map over the hood and set about making a plan. He didn’t want to get too close. There was also a risk that the police might have set up roadblocks.

He decided on a place called Idre. He judged it to be far enough from Andersson’s house. He was tired when he arrived, and pitched his tent at the end of a forest road where he felt safe. He left the tent, after covering it with leaves and branches he’d laboriously gathered. Then he drove north toward Sörvattnet, turned off for Linsell, and had no difficulty in finding the road marked by a sign saying “Dunkärret 2.” But he didn’t take that road; instead, he continued towards Sveg.

Just before the road leading to Molin’s house he’d passed a police car. About a kilometer further on he drove into the trees along a road that was almost completely overgrown. He’d surveyed the area thoroughly during the three weeks he’d spent observing Molin. He had compared himself to an animal that needed many exits from its den.

Now he parked his car and walked along the familiar track. He didn’t think the place would be guarded, but even so he kept stopping and listening. Eventually, he could glimpse the house through the trees. He waited for twenty minutes. Then he walked up to the house and the spot where he’d left Molin’s dead body. The forest floor was trodden down. The remains of red-and-white police tape hung from trees. He wondered if the man he’d killed had been buried yet. Perhaps the pathologists were still examining the body? He wondered if they would realize that the lashes on Molin’s back had been made by a bullwhip used by cowboys on the Pampas. He approached the house and heaved himself up until he could see into the living room. The bloodstained footsteps had dried onto the floor but could still be made out. The woman who came to clean for Molin had obviously not been back.

He took his usual path to the lake. That was the path he’d used the night he decided he’d been waiting long enough. The other woman, the one who used to visit Molin and dance with him, had been there the previous day. If they followed their usual custom, it would be a week more before she came again. Moreover, the other man, the one called Andersson, had also been there the day before. He’d followed Andersson home, and had watched from behind some trees as he closed all the shutters and locked the shed and gave every sign of preparing to go away. He could still remember the feeling of having decided that the time had come. It had been raining that day. The clouds had dispersed by evening and he’d gone to the lake for a swim in the cold water, so that his head would be clear when he made the fateful decision. Afterwards he’d snuggled up in his sleeping bag in order to restore his body heat. All the weapons he’d acquired when he’d made his break-in on the way to Härjedalen were spread out on a plastic sheet beside him.

The time had come. Even so he was held back by a strange reluctance. It was as if he’d been waiting so long, he didn’t know what would happen when the waiting was over. As so often before, his mind went back to the events of the last year of the war, when his life fell to pieces and could never wholly be restored. He’d often thought of himself as a sailboat with a broken mast and shredded sails. That was how his life had been, and nothing would be fundamentally changed by what he was about to do. He’d harbored the thought of revenge all his adult life, and he sometimes hated that feeling more than he hated the man responsible. Still, it was too late now. He couldn’t return to Buenos Aires without doing what he’d come here to do. He made up his mind after swimming in the dark lake. That night he launched his attack, carried out his plan.

He walked along the undulating shore of the lake, keeping his ears pricked all the time. The only sound was the rustling of the wind through the trees around him. When he came to the place where he’d pitched his tent, he decided that violence had not warped him, despite everything. He was basically a kind man who couldn’t bear to see suffering. Violence to another human being would be unthinkable in any other circumstances. What he’d done to Molin was a closed book the moment he’d left his naked body at the edge of the forest.

Violence has not poisoned me, he thought. All the hatred that built up inside me over those years deadened my senses. I was the one who lashed Molin’s skin into bloody strips, but at the same time, it wasn’t me.

He sat down on the fallen trunk and fiddled with a pine twig. Had the hatred left him now? Would he be in peace for the years he had left to live? He had no way of knowing, but that was his hope. He would even light a candle for August Mattson-Herzén in the little church he passed every time he went to his workshop. Might he even drink a toast to him now that he was dead?

He stayed in the forest until the light faded. A thought he’d had when living in his tent here, that the forest was a cathedral and the trees were columns supporting an invisible roof, had returned. He felt cold, but he felt serenely calm. If he’d had a towel with him, no doubt he’d have jumped into the cold water and swum out until he could no longer touch the bottom.

He walked back to his car through the gloaming and drove into Sveg. Something remarkable happened then: he had dinner in a hotel dining room, and at another table were two men talking about Molin and Andersson. At first he thought he was imagining things. He couldn’t understand Swedish, but the names had cropped up over and over again. After a while he went out to the lobby and, because there was nobody around, he looked in the hotel ledger and found that two of the hotel guests were described as “CID Inspectors.” He returned to the dining room, but neither of them evidenced the slightest interest in him. He listened intently and picked up some other names, including “Elsa Bergén” or something like that. Then he watched one of the policemen write something on the back of his bill; when they left, he crumpled the bill up and dropped it in the ashtray. Silberstein waited until the waitress was in the kitchen, then picked up the crumpled bill and left the hotel. In the light of his flashlight, he tried to decipher what was written on the back of the bill. The most important thing was the name of the third person, Berggren, called Elsa, obviously a woman. Linking the three names — Molin, Andersson and Berggren — were arrows forming a triangle. Next to Andersson’s name was a swastika and a large question mark.

He drove to Linsell and then continued as far as Glöte. He parked the car behind some stacks of logs and picked his way through the trees until he came to the vicinity of Andersson’s house, then climbed up the hill where he was now lying. He had no idea what he thought he might discover, but he realized that he had to be very close to the place where it had happened if he were ever going to get an answer to the question he kept asking himself: who killed Andersson? And was it indirectly his fault because he’d killed Molin? He needed the answers to those questions before he could return to Buenos Aires. If he didn’t have them, he would be haunted by the anxiety for the rest of his life. Molin would have had the last laugh after all. His mission to cleanse himself from all hatred would have turned back on him with full force.

He used his binoculars to watch the police officers coming and going between the edge of the forest and the house. They would assume that it was the same person who had killed both Molin and Andersson. There are only two people who know that is not true, he thought. One of them is me, and the other is whoever killed Andersson. They are looking for one person when they should be looking for two.

He realized now he’d come back to make clear, somehow, that he wasn’t the one who had killed Andersson. The police officers he’d been observing through his binoculars were following a trail that would lead them astray. Of course, he couldn’t be certain what the men around the edge of the forest were thinking, but there is always a certain logic to fall back on, it seemed to him. I don’t know, but I suspect there aren’t very many violent crimes up here. People are few and far between, they don’t say much, and they seem to get along well with one another. Like Molin and Andersson, for instance: they appeared to have gotten along okay. Now they were both dead. He had killed Molin. But who killed Andersson? And why? The man who was his closest neighbor?

He put down his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. The effects of the alcohol had started to leave his body now. His mouth was still dry, and his throat hurt every time he swallowed, but he seemed to be able to think clearly again. He stretched out in the damp moss. His back ached. Clouds sailed over his head. A car engine came to life below, and he heard it reverse, turn, then drive away.

He relived again what had happened. Could there be a connection between Molin and Andersson that he didn’t know about? There were a lot of unanswered questions. Was it a coincidence that Molin had chosen to live in the vicinity of Andersson? Who had arrived there first? Did Andersson come from those parts? Had Andersson too fought for Hitler? Was he too one of those people who had done terrible things and escaped punishment? The thought struck him as very unlikely, but not impossible.

He heard a car approaching, and sat up. Through his binoculars he watched a man emerge from a car that wasn’t painted blue and white and didn’t have POLICE written on its sides. He tried to hold the binoculars steady. It was the policeman he’d seen in the restaurant, the one who’d written on the back of the bill. So he was right so far. This man was involved in both cases — he wasn’t looking only for the killer of Abraham Andersson, he was hunting the man who’d killed Herbert Molin.

It was a strange experience, using his binoculars to observe a police officer who was trying to find him. He felt an impulse to run away, but his desire to find out what had happened to Andersson was stronger than the urge to save his own skin. He couldn’t leave until he knew if he was indirectly responsible for the murder.

He put down the binoculars and rubbed the back of his neck, which was feeling stiff. This was a very strange situation, it seemed to him. No matter who had killed Andersson, the murderer must have had a motive that had nothing to do with him. If he’d gone to a different restaurant, if there hadn’t been a television set or a sailor who spoke Spanish, he wouldn’t have made this long journey back to where — a few kilometers down the road — he himself had committed murder. He raised his binoculars again and watched the man walk over to the dog and pat it on the head. Then he disappeared into the forest.

Silberstein focused on the dog. A thought started to evolve in his mind. He put down the binoculars and lay on his back. I must tell them they are on the wrong track, he thought. I can only do that by announcing that I’m still here. Not tell them who I am, nor that I killed Molin, nor why. I have to indicate only that it was somebody else who killed Andersson. My only chance is to throw a wrench in their works, to make them stop and think about what actually happened.

The dog. The dog can help me, he thought.

He stood up, did some exercises to ease the stiffness in his body, then set off into the forest. He had always lived in cities, but even so, he had a good sense of direction and was good at finding his way in the countryside. It took him less than an hour to find his way back to his car. He had taken with him some food and some bottles of water. He was tempted by the thought of a glass of wine or brandy, but he knew he was capable of resisting the temptation. There was a job to be done. He couldn’t put that at risk by getting drunk. He ate enough to satisfy his hunger, then curled up in the backseat of the car. He could rest for an hour before going back and still get there before midnight. To ensure that he woke up in time, he set the alarm on his watch.

He closed his eyes and immediately he was back in Buenos Aires. He wondered whether to choose the bed in which Maria was already asleep or the mattress at the back of his workshop. He chose the latter. The sounds that filled his ears were no longer those from the trees. Now he was hearing the noise from the streets of Buenos Aires.

The alarm on his wristwatch was ringing. He switched it off, got out of the car, opened the trunk, and took out his newly acquired flashlight, then set off.

The last part of the way, he was guided by the beams from the spotlights mounted in the forest. The light shining up from the trees reminded him of the war. One of his earliest memories was peeping out through cracks in the blackout curtains, when nobody was around to see him, and watching the anti-aircraft defenses searching for enemy bombers flying over Berlin at night. He’d always been terrified that a bomb would fall on their house and kill his parents. In his imagination, he himself always survived, but that only made his fear more acute. How would he be able to go on living if his parents and brothers and sisters were no longer alive?

He banished any such thoughts and, being careful to shield the light, used his flashlight to locate his binoculars, which were in a plastic bag to protect them from the damp. He sat on the moss, leaning against a tree trunk, and focused on the house. There was light coming from all the windows on the ground floor. The door opened occasionally and someone went in or came out. There were only two cars parked outside now. Before long two men got into one of the cars and drove off. By then somebody had also turned off some of the lights in the forest. He continued scanning the house with his binoculars until he found what he was looking for. The dog was sitting quietly at the edge of the light coming from one of the windows. Somebody had placed a food bowl beside it.

He looked at his watch. 10:30. He should be on his way home from La Cãbana, where he’d dined with a customer. That is what Maria believed, at least. He made a face at the thought. Now that he was so far from home, it worried him that he lied so often to Maria. He had never dined with any of his customers at La Cãbana nor at any other restaurant. He didn’t dare tell her the truth: that he didn’t want to eat with her, answer her questions, listen to her voice. My life has slowly grown narrower and become a path strewn with lies. That is another price I’ve had to pay. The question is, will I be honest with Maria in the future, now that I’ve killed Molin? I love Maria, but at the same time, I recognize that I actually prefer to be on my own. There’s a split inside me between what I do and what I want to do. That split has been there since the catastrophe happened in Berlin. What can I do but accept that most things have already been lost and will never be recovered?

Time passed. A snowflake floated from the sky. He held his breath and waited. A snowfall was the last thing he wanted. It would make it impossible for him to carry out his plan. Luckily, there was only the occasional solitary snowflake.

At 11:15 one of the policemen came out onto the steps to pee. He whistled to the dog, but it didn’t react. Just as he was finishing another man came out with a cigarette in his hand. It dawned on him that there were only two officers in the house, two men keeping guard.

Still, he waited until it turned midnight. The house was quiet. Sometimes he thought he could hear the sound of a television or perhaps a radio, but he wasn’t sure. He shone his flashlight on the ground and made sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he started making his way down the back of the hill. He really should carry out his plan now, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to see the place where Andersson had been murdered. There could be somebody there standing guard, somebody he hadn’t seen. It was a risk. But he felt he had to take it.

When he came close to the edge of the trees he turned off his flashlight. He moved very slowly, feeling his way forward on hands and knees, half-expecting the dog to bark at any moment. He went back into the trees at the other side of the house. Now he was assisted by the light from the spotlights.

There was no guard. There was nothing at all, in fact. Just a tree on which the police had attached various markers. He plucked up his courage and walked right up to the trunk. At about chest height some of the bark had been split open. He frowned. Had Andersson been standing by a tree trunk when he was murdered? In that case he must have been tied to it? And that meant it was an execution. He broke out into a cold sweat and swung around, but there was nobody there. I was after Molin, he thought. Then somebody appeared behind Andersson, and now I have the feeling there is somebody behind me as well. He moved out of the light and made himself invisible. Tried to think straight. Had he set in motion a struggle between different forces over which he had no control? Had he stumbled into something he knew nothing about when he decided to take his revenge? His head was filled with questions and fear. For several minutes he came very close to doing exactly the same thing the man who became Molin had done: running away, disappearing, hiding, and forgetting what had happened — not to some forest in his case, but to Buenos Aires. He should never have come back, but it was too late now. He wouldn’t go home until he’d found out what happened to Andersson. This is Molin’s revenge on me, he thought, and he felt furious. If it had been possible, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him all over again.

Then he forced himself to be calm. He took a few deep breaths and imagined waves breaking on a beach. After a while he checked his watch. 1:15 A.M. It was time now. He went back towards the house. He could hear music coming from inside, and the sound of voices conducting a quiet conversation. Presumably the radio was on, and two weary police officers were talking to stay awake. He walked towards the dog and called to it in a low voice. It growled but wagged its tail. He stopped short of the light coming from the window. The dog came up to him in the shadows. He stroked it. It seemed worried, but was still wagging its tail.

Then he released the leash from the running line and led the dog away. They left no tracks in the darkness.

Chapter Seventeen

Lindman had seen it many times before. A police officer receives some unexpected information and reacts instinctively by reaching for the telephone. But Larsson was already holding a telephone, and it wasn’t necessary to call anybody in any case. Both of them realized that the first thing to do was to work out the significance of the dog. It could lead to some kind of breakthrough in the investigation, but it could also be a red herring — the most likely explanation.

“I suppose there’s no chance that it simply ran away?” Lindman said.

“Evidently not.”

“Isn’t it possible that somebody stole it?”

Larsson shook his head doubtfully. “From under the noses of several police officers? I don’t think that’s what happened.”

“It’s hardly likely that the murderer has returned to get the dog.”

“Unless we’re dealing with a lunatic. Let’s face it, we can’t rule that out.”

They sat quietly, exploring the various possibilities.

“We’ll have to wait,” Larsson said eventually. “We must be careful not to get carried away by this dog business. In any case, it might turn up again before long. Dogs usually do.”

Larsson put his cell phone back in his jacket pocket and started walking to Molin’s house. Lindman stayed where he was. It was several hours since he’d last thought about his illness, felt the creeping terror about when the severe pains might return. As he watched Larsson walking away, he felt as if he’d been abandoned.

Once when he was very young he’d been taken by his father to a football match at Ryavallen in Borås. It was a Swedish Premier League match, very important in one way or another, maybe crucial for the championship. He remembered that the opposition was IFK Göteborg. His father had said, “We’ve got to win this one,” and as they drove from Kinna to Borås he kept repeating the mantra, “We’ve got to win this one.” When they parked outside the ground, his father bought him a yellow-and-black scarf. It sometimes seemed to Stefan that his interest in football had been awoken by that yellow-and-black scarf rather than by the match itself. The teeming mass of people had frightened him, and he’d clung onto his father’s hand as they walked towards the turnstiles. In the middle of that seething crowd, he’d concentrated on just one thing: holding his father’s hand tightly. That was the difference between life and death. If he let go, he’d be hopelessly lost among all these expectant would-be spectators lining up to get in. And then, just before they came to the turnstiles, he’d glanced up at his father and seen a face he didn’t recognize. He didn’t recognize the hand either, now that he looked closely. Without realizing, he’d let go of his father’s hand for a couple of seconds and taken hold of the wrong one. He was panic-stricken, and burst into tears. People looked around to see what had happened. The stranger didn’t seem to have noticed that a boy in a yellow-and-black scarf had taken hold of his hand, and now snatched it away, as if the boy were about to pick his pocket. At the same moment, his father appeared again. The panic subsided, and they passed through the turnstile. They had seats at the top of the stand on one of the long sides, giving an overall view of the playing field, and they watched the yellow-and-blacks battling with the blue-and-whites over the light brown ball. He couldn’t remember the result. IFK Göteborg had probably won, in view of his father’s silence all the way home to Kinna. But Stefan had never forgotten that brief moment when he’d let go of his father’s hand and felt utterly lost.

He remembered that incident as he watched Larsson walk off through the trees.

Larsson turned. “Aren’t you coming?”

Lindman drew his jacket tighter around him, and hurried after him.

“I thought you might prefer me not to be there. What with Rundström.”

“Forget Rundström. As long as you’re here, you’re my personal assistant.”

They left Rätmyren behind. Larsson was driving fast. When they arrived at Dunkärret, Larsson immediately started shouting at one of the police officers there. He was a man in his fifties, small and very thin, by the name of Näsblom. Lindman gathered that he was stationed at Hede. Larsson was furious when he couldn’t get a straight answer to his question about precisely when the dog had disappeared. Nobody seemed to be sure.

“We gave it some food last night,” Näsblom said. “I keep dogs myself, so I brought some dog food from home.”

“Obviously you can get a refund for that if you submit an invoice,” Larsson said. “But when did the dog disappear?”

“It must have been after then.”

“Even I can work that out. When did you realize it was no longer there?”

“Just before I called you.”

Larsson looked at his watch. “Okay, you gave the dog some food last night. When?”

“About 7.”

“It’s now 1:30 in the afternoon. Don’t you feed dogs in the morning as well?”

“I wasn’t here then. I went home this morning, and didn’t come back until this afternoon.”

“But you must have seen if the dog was still there when you left?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“But you keep dogs yourself...”

Näsblom looked at the empty running line. “Obviously, I should have noticed. But I didn’t. I suppose I thought it must have been in its kennel.”

Larsson shook his head in resignation.

“What’s easier to notice?” he said. “A dog that’s disappeared, or one that hasn’t?”

He turned to Lindman. “What do you think?”

“If a dog is there, maybe you don’t think about it, but if it isn’t there, I suppose you should notice.”

“I’ll go along with that. What do you think?”

The last question was directed at Näsblom.

“I don’t know, but I think the dog was gone by this morning.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No.”

“You’ve talked to your colleagues, no doubt. None of them saw it disappear, or heard anything?”

“Nobody noticed anything at all.”

They walked over to the running line, with no dog attached.

“How can you be certain that it didn’t just break loose?”

“I looked at the leash and the way it was attached to the running line when I fed it. It was a very sophisticated system. It couldn’t possibly have broken loose.”

Larsson studied the running line.

“It was dark by 7 last night,” he said. “How come you could see anything at all?”

“There was enough light from the kitchen window,” Näsblom said. “I could see.”

Larsson turned his back firmly on Näsblom.

“What do you have to say about this?” he said to Lindman.

“Somebody came here during the night and took the dog away.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know a lot about dogs, but if it didn’t start barking, it must have been somebody it recognized. Assuming it was a guard dog, that is.”

Larsson nodded, absentmindedly. He was studying the forest that surrounded the house.

“It must have been important,” he said after a while. “Somebody comes here in the dark and fetches the dog. A murder has been committed here, the place is sealed off. Even so, somebody takes the dog away. Two questions occur to me right away.”

“Who and why?”

Larsson agreed.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “Who apart from the killer could have taken the dog away? Andersson’s family lives in Helsingborg. His wife is in a state of shock and has said she isn’t going to come here. Have any of Andersson’s children been here? We’d have known if they had, surely. If it wasn’t a lunatic or a crazy animal rights supporter or somebody who makes a living from selling dogs, it must have been the murderer. That means he’s still here somewhere. He stayed around after murdering Molin, and didn’t leave after killing Andersson. You could draw several conclusions from that.”

“He might have come back, of course,” Lindman said

Larsson looked at him in surprise. “Why should he come back? Because he’d forgotten there was somebody else he needed to kill? Or because he’d forgotten the dog? It doesn’t add up. The man we’re dealing with — always assuming it is a man and that he’s operating on his own — plans what he does, detail by detail.”

Lindman could see that Larsson was thinking along the right lines. Even so, there was something nagging away at him.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“You always know what you’re thinking. It’s just that you’re sometimes too lazy to spell it out.”

“I suppose the bottom line is that we don’t know for sure that the same person murdered Molin and Andersson,” Lindman said. “We think it was, but we don’t know.”

“It goes against common sense and all my experience to think that two incidents like this would take place at almost the same time and in the same place without there being a common murderer and a common motive.”

“I agree. But even so, the unexpected does happen occasionally.”

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” Larsson said. “We’ll dig deep into the lives of both these men. We’ll eventually find a link between them.”

While they were talking Näsblom had slunk away into the house. He came back now, and approached hesitantly. Lindman could see that he had great respect for Giuseppe Larsson.

“I thought I might suggest that I could fetch one of my own dogs and put him on the scent.”

“Is it a police dog?”

“It’s a hunting dog. A mongrel. But it might be able to pick up a scent.”

“Shouldn’t we bring in one of our own dogs from Östersund instead?”

“They say no.”

Larsson looked at Näsblom in astonishment.

“Who says no?”

“Chief Inspector Rundström. He thought it was unnecessary. ‘The stupid dog has run away, no doubt,’ he said.”

“Go and fetch your Fido,” Larsson said. “It’s a good idea. But you should have had it the moment you noticed that Andersson’s dog had gone for a walk.”

The dog Näsblom fetched picked up a scent immediately. It set off at full speed from the running line between the house wall and the tree, dragging Näsblom along behind it, and the two of them disappeared into the forest.

Larsson was discussing the house-to-house operation currently being undertaken in the district with one of the officers whose name Lindman didn’t know. Lindman listened at first, but then moved away. He could see it was time for him to leave. His trip to Härjedalen was over. It started when he opened a newspaper in the hospital café in Borås and saw the photograph of Herbert Molin. Now he’d been in Sveg for a week. Neither he nor anybody else knew yet who had killed Molin and probably also Andersson. Perhaps Larsson was right in thinking there was a link between the two murders? Lindman wasn’t convinced. On the other hand he knew now that at one time in his life Molin had fought for the Germans on the Eastern front, that he had been a Nazi, maybe was to the very last moment of his life, and that there was a woman who shared his opinions, Elsa Berggren, who had helped him to find the house in the forest.

Molin had been on the run. He had retired from his post in Borås and crept into a lair where someone had finally found him. Lindman was certain that Molin knew somebody was looking for him. Something happened in Germany during the war, he was sure of that. Something not recorded in the diary. Or it could be in a code that I can’t read. Then there’s the week in Scotland and the long walks with “M.” One way or another this all must be linked with what happened in Germany.

But now I’m going to leave Sveg. Giuseppe Larsson is a very experienced police officer. He and his team will solve the case eventually. He wondered if he would live long enough to learn the solution. He found this hard to cope with now. The treatment he would start receiving in a week or so might not suffice. The doctor had said they could try cytoxins if radiation therapy and operative treatment didn’t achieve the desired result. There were lots of other drugs they could try. Having cancer was no longer a death sentence, she insisted. Okay, he thought, but it’s not the same as being cured. I might be dead a year from now. I have to cope with that, no matter how hard it might be.

He was overwhelmed by fear. If only he could, he’d run away.

Larsson came over to him.

“I’m leaving now,” Lindman said.

Larsson looked hard at him. “You’ve been a big help,” he said. “And obviously, I wonder how you feel.”

Lindman shrugged, but said nothing. Larsson held out his hand.

“Would you like me to keep in touch and let you know how things are progressing?” he said.

What did he really want? Apart from getting well again? “I think it’s better if I get in touch with you,” he said. “I don’t know how I’ll feel once the radiation therapy starts.”

They shook hands. It seemed to Lindman that Giuseppe Larsson was a very likable man. Although he didn’t really know anything about him.

Then it dawned on him that his car was in Sveg.

“Obviously, it ought to be me driving you to your hotel,” Larsson said. “But I feel I better hang around here for a while and wait for Näsblom to come back. I’ll ask Persson to take you.”

Persson didn’t have much to say for himself. Lindman contemplated the trees through the car windows, and thought that he would have quite liked to meet Veronica Molin one more time. He’d have liked to ask her some questions about her father’s diary. What had she known about her father’s past? And where was Molin’s son? Why hadn’t he put in an appearance?

Persson dropped him off outside the hotel. The girl at the reception desk smiled when he walked in.

“I’m leaving now.”

“It can get cold as evening draws near,” she said. “Cold and quite slippery.”

“I’ll drive carefully.”

He went up to his room and packed his things. The moment he closed the door, he couldn’t remember what the room looked like. He paid his bill without checking the details.

“Welcome back,” she said when he’d handed over the money. “How’s it going? Are you going to catch the murderer?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Lindman left the hotel. He put his suitcase in the trunk and was just about to get behind the wheel when he saw Veronica Molin come out of the hotel entrance. She walked up to him.

“I heard you were about to leave.”

“Who told you that?”

“The receptionist.”

“That must mean you asked for me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to hear how things were going, of course.”

“I’m not the one to ask about that.”

“Inspector Larsson thought you were. I spoke to him on the phone a few minutes ago. He said you might still be around. I guess I got lucky.”

Lindman locked the car and accompanied her back to the hotel. They sat down in the dining room, which was empty.

“Inspector Larsson said he’d found a diary. Is that right?”

“That’s correct,” Lindman said. “I’ve glanced through it. But it belongs to you and your brother, of course. Once they release it. At the moment it’s an important piece of evidence.”

“I didn’t know my father kept a diary. It surprises me.”

“Why’s that?”

“He wasn’t the type to write anything when it wasn’t strictly necessary.”

“Lots of people keep a secret diary. I bet practically everybody has done so at some stage in their lives.”

He watched her taking out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then looked him in the eye.

“Inspector Larsson said the police are still struggling to find any leads. They haven’t found anything specific. Everything seems to suggest that the man who killed my father also murdered the other man.”

“Who you didn’t know?”

She looked up at him. “How could I have known him? You’re forgetting that I hardly even knew my father.”

It seemed to Lindman that he might as well not beat around the bush. He should ask her the questions he’d already formulated.

“Did you know your father was a Nazi?”

He couldn’t tell if the question had come as a surprise or not.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Can that mean so very many different things? I read in his diary that as a young man he left Kalmar and crossed the border into Norway in 1942 to enlist with the German army. He then fought for Hitler until the end of the war in 1945. Then he returned to Sweden. Married, then your brother and you were born. He changed his name, divorced, remarried, and then divorced again — but all the time he was a Nazi. If I’m not mistaken, he remained a convinced Nazi until his dying day.”

“Is that what he wrote in his diary?”

“There were some letters as well. And photographs. Your father in uniform.”

She shook her head. “This comes as a hideous shock.”

“He never spoke about the war?”

“Never.”

“Nor about his political views?”

“I didn’t even know he had any. There was never any talk of politics when I was growing up.”

“You can express your views even when you’re not discussing specific political questions.”

“How?”

“You can reveal your view of the world and your fellow men in a lot of different ways.”

She thought for a while, then shook her head. “I can remember from when I was a child that he said several times that he wasn’t interested in politics. I had no idea he held extremist views. He concealed them pretty well — if what you say is right, that is.”

“It’s all crystal-clear in his diary.”

“Is that all it’s about? Didn’t he write anything about his family?”

“Very little.”

“That doesn’t really surprise me. I grew up with the impression that we children were nothing more than a nuisance as far as Father was concerned. He never really bothered about us, he just pretended to.”

“By the way, your father had a woman friend here in Sveg. I don’t know if she was his mistress. I don’t know what people do to keep themselves occupied when they’re turned seventy.”

“A woman here in Sveg?”

He regretted having mentioned that. It was information she should have learned from Larsson, not from him, but it was too late now.

“Her name is Elsa Berggren and she lives on the south bank of the river. She was the one who found his house for him. She shares his political views too. If you can call Nazi views political, that is.”

“What else could they be?”

“Criminal.”

It seemed as if it had suddenly dawned on her why he was asking these questions.

“Do you think my father’s opinions might have had something to do with his death?”

“I don’t think anything. But the police have to keep all options open.”

She lit another cigarette. Her hand was shaking.

“I don’t understand why nobody’s told me this before now,” she said. “Why haven’t I heard that my father was a Nazi, nor about that woman?”

“They would have told you sooner or later. A murder investigation can sometimes take a long time. Now they have two dead men for whom they have to find a murderer. Plus a vanished dog.”

“I was told the dog was dead?”

“That was your father’s dog, but now Abraham Andersson’s dog has gone missing.”

She gave a shudder, as if she were starting to feel cold.

“I want to get away from here,” she said. “Even more than before. I’ll get around to reading that diary eventually, but first I must take care of the funeral. Then I’ll leave. And I’ll have to get used to the idea that not only did my father only pretend to care about me, he was also a Nazi.”

“What’ll happen to the house?”

“I’ve spoken to a real estate agent. Once the estate inventory has been drawn up it will be sold. That’s if anybody will have it.”

“Have you been there?”

She nodded. “I went there, in spite of everything. It was worse than I could ever have imagined. Most especially those footprints.”

Lindman looked at his watch. He ought to leave now, before it was too late.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving.”

“Why?”

“I’m not used to being all by myself in a little hotel in the middle of nowhere. I wonder what it’s like to live here.”

“Your father chose to do so.”

She accompanied him out into the lobby.

“Thank you for making the effort,” she said.

Before leaving Lindman called Larsson to ask whether they’d found the dog. He heard that Näsblom had tagged behind the excited dog for half an hour through the forest, but the trail had disappeared on a dirt track in the middle of the forest.

“Somebody will have picked it up in a car that was waiting there,” Larsson said. “But who? And where did they go?”

He drove south, over the river and into the forest. Occasionally he would ease back on the accelerator when he realized he was driving too fast. His head was empty. The only thought that arose sporadically in his mind was what had happened to Andersson’s dog. Shortly after midnight he stopped at a hot dog stand in Mora that was just about to close. When he’d finished eating, he felt too tired to go any further. He drove into a nearby parking lot and curled up on the backseat. When he woke up his watch said 3 A.M. He went out into the dark to urinate. Then he continued driving south through the night. After a few hours he stopped again to sleep.

By the time he woke up it was 9 A.M. He walked around and around the car to stretch his legs. He would be home in Borås by nightfall. When he’d gotten as far as Jönköping, he would phone Elena and give her a surprise. An hour or so later, he’d be pulling up outside her house.

But after passing Örebro, he turned off again. He was thinking straight now, and he’d started thinking back to his conversation with Veronica Molin the night before. She hadn’t been telling the truth.

There was that business about her father. Whether she’d known he was a Nazi or not. She had only pretended to be surprised. She’d known, but tried to hide the fact. He couldn’t put his finger on how he knew she wasn’t telling the truth. And there was another question he couldn’t answer either: had she known about Berggren, for all that she claimed she hadn’t?

Lindman pulled up and got out of the car. This has nothing to do with me, he thought: I have my illness to worry about. I’ll go back to Borås and admit that I’ve been missing Elena all the time I’ve been away. Then, when I feel like it, I’ll call Larsson and ask how the case is going. That’s all.

Then he made up his mind to go to Kalmar. Where Molin had been born, under the name of Mattson-Herzén. That’s where it had all begun, in a family that had been adherents of Hitler and National Socialism. There should be a man there by the name of Wetterstedt. A portrait painter. Who knew Molin.

He rummaged around in the trunk and came up with a tattered map of Sweden. This is madness, he thought; even so, he worked out the best route to Kalmar. I’m supposed to be going to Borås. But he knew he couldn’t let go now. He wanted to know what had happened to Molin. And Andersson. Perhaps also what lay behind the disappearance of the dog.

He reached Kalmar by evening. It was November 6. Two weeks from today he would start his radiation therapy. It had started raining a few miles north of Västervik. The water glistened in the beams from his headlights as he drove into the town and looked around for somewhere to stay.

Chapter Eighteen

Early the following day Lindman walked down to the sea. He could just make out the Öland Bridge through the fog that had settled over the Kalmarsund. He went to the water’s edge and stood contemplating the sea as it lapped against the shore. The long car journey was still taking its toll on his body. Twice he’d dreamed that big trucks were heading straight for him. He’d tried to get out of the way, but it had been too late and he’d woken up. His hotel was in the middle of town. The walls were like cardboard, and he’d been forced to listen to a woman blathering away on the telephone. After an hour of that, he’d felt justified in thumping on the wall; soon afterwards the conversation came to an end. Before dropping off to sleep, he’d lain in bed and stared up at the ceiling, wondering why he’d to come to Kalmar. Could it be that he was trying to put off his return to Borås for as long as possible? Had he grown tired of being with Elena but didn’t want to admit it? He didn’t know, but he was not sure that his detour to Kalmar was exclusively due to curiosity about Herbert Molin’s past.

The forests of Härjedalen were already a part of his own past. All that mattered now was himself, his illness, and the thirteen days remaining until he was due to start his therapy. Nothing else had any importance. Stefan Lindman’s thirteen days in November. How will I look back on them ten or twenty years from now, always assuming I live that long? He tried to avoid answering the question, and wandered back towards town, leaving the water and the fog behind him. He found a café, went in, ordered a cup of coffee, and borrowed a telephone directory.

There was only one Wetterstedt in the Kalmar district. Emil Wetterstedt, artist. He lived in Lagmansgatan. Lindman turned the pages until he found a map of the area: he located the street straight away. In the center of town, only a couple of blocks from the café. He took out his cell phone — then he remembered that it didn’t work. If I can get hold of a new battery, I should be able to use it again, he thought. Or I could go to his apartment. Ring the doorbell. But what would I say? That I was a friend of Herbert Molin’s? That would be a lie: we were never friends. We worked together at the same police station in the same police district. We once went looking for a murderer together. That’s all. He gave me some useful advice now and then, but whether that advice really was as good as I’m claiming it to be, I can’t possibly say. I can hardly arrive and announce that I’ve come to have my portrait painted. Another thing: Wetterstedt is no doubt an old man, about the same age as Molin. An old man who doesn’t much care about the world any longer.

He kept sipping his coffee. When he’d finished working his way through his ideas one by one, he’d ring Wetterstedt’s doorbell, say that he was a policeman, and say that he would like to talk to him about Herbert Molin. What happened next would depend on how Wetterstedt reacted.

He drained his cup and left the café. The air felt different from the air he’d been breathing in Härjedalen. It had felt dry up there, whereas the air he was breathing now was damp. All the shops were still closed, but as he walked to the house where Wetterstedt lived, he saw one that sold cell phones. Perhaps the old portrait painter was a late riser.

The block of apartments in Lagmansgatan was three stories high, with a gray façade. No balconies. The front door was unlocked. From the names next to the bells, he saw that Wetterstedt lived on the top floor. There was no elevator. The old man must have strong legs, he thought. A door slammed somewhere. It echoed through the stairwell. By the time he reached the top of the three flights he was out of breath. He was surprised that his condition seemed to have deteriorated so much.

He rang the bell and silently counted to twenty. Then he rang again. He couldn’t hear any ringing noise inside the flat. He rang a third time. Still no reply. He knocked on the door, waited, then hammered on it really hard. The door behind him opened. In the doorway was an elderly man in a dressing gown.

“I’m looking for Mr. Wetterstedt,” Lindman said. “It seems he’s not at home.”

“He spends the autumn at his summer place. That’s when he takes his vacation.”

The man in the doorway looked at Lindman with an expression of utter contempt. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to take a vacation in November. And that an old man on a pension still had a job to take a vacation from.

“Where is his summer place?”

“Who are you? We like to keep an eye on people who come sauntering around this building. Are you going to commission a portrait?”

“I want to speak to him about an urgent matter.”

The man eyed Lindman up and down.

“Emil’s summer place is on Öland. In the south of the island. When you’ve gone past Alvaret you see a sign that says Lavender. And another sign informing you that it’s a private road. That’s where he lives.”

“Is that the name of the house? Lavender?”

“Emil talks about a shade of blue tending towards lavender. In his opinion it’s the most beautiful shade of blue there is. Impossible for a painter to reproduce. Only nature can create it.”

“Thank you for your help.”

“You’re welcome.”

Lindman started for the stairs, but stopped.

“Just one more thing. How old is Mr. Wetterstedt?”

“He’s eighty-eight, but he’s pretty spry.”

The man closed his door. Lindman walked slowly down the stairs. So I have a reason to cross over the bridge into the fog, he thought. I too am on a sort of involuntary vacation, with no aim other than filling in time until November 19.

He went back the way he’d come. The shop selling cell phones was open. A young man yawned and diffidently produced a battery that fitted Lindman’s cell phone. He paid, and even as he did so the phone beeped to indicate that he had messages. Before leaving Kalmar, he sat in his car and listened to them. Elena had called three times, sounding increasingly resigned and curt. There was a message from his dentist, reminding him it was time for his annual checkup. That was all. Larsson hadn’t phoned. Lindman hadn’t really expected him to, although he’d hoped he would. None of his colleagues had tried to contact him, but he hadn’t expected that either. He had virtually no close friends.

He put the phone on the passenger seat, drove out of the parking lot, and started looking for a road leading to the bridge. The fog was thick as he drove over the water. Perhaps this is what it’s like to die, he thought. In the old days people imagined a ferryman coming with a boat to row you over the river Styx. Now it might be a bridge you have to cross, into the fog, and then oblivion.

He came to Öland, turned right, passed some sort of zoo, and continued southwards. He drove slowly. Very few cars were coming in the opposite direction. He could see no countryside, only fog. At one point he stopped in a rest area and got out. He heard a foghorn sounding in the distance and what may have been the sound of waves. Apart from that, it was silent. It felt as if the fog had seeped into his head and blanketed his mind. He held one hand in front of his face. It too was white.

He drove on, and almost missed the sign for “Lavender 2.” It reminded him of another sign he’d been looking for recently, “Dunkärret 2.” Sweden is a country where people live two kilometers from the main road, he thought.

The dirt road he turned onto was full of potholes and evidently little-used. It was absolutely straight, and disappeared into the fog. Eventually he came to a closed gate. On the other side was an ancient Volvo 444 and a motorcycle. Lindman switched off his engine and clambered out. The bike was a Harley-Davidson. Lindman knew a little about motorcycles, thanks to the time he’d chauffeured the motocross buff around Sweden. This wasn’t one of the standard Harley-Davidson models. It was homemade and unique, a valuable specimen. But did a man aged eighty-eight really ride around on a Harley-Davidson? He’d have to be very fit to manage that. Lindman opened the gate and continued along the path. There was still no sign of a house. A figure emerged from the mist, walking towards him. A young man with close-cropped hair, nattily dressed in a leather jacket and a light-blue open-necked shirt. Obviously he had been working out.

“What are you doing here?” The voice was shrill, almost a shriek.

“I’m looking for Emil Wetterstedt.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to him.”

“Who are you? What makes you think he wants to talk to you?”

Lindman bristled at the cross-examination. The youth’s voice was hurting his eardrums.

“I want to talk to him about Herbert Molin. Perhaps I should mention that I’m a police officer.”

The boy stared at him. His jaws worked away at a wad of chewing gum. “Wait here,” he said. “Don’t move from this spot.”

He was swallowed up by the fog. Lindman followed him, slowly. After only a few meters a house came into view. The boy disappeared through the front door. It was a whitewashed house, long and narrow, with a wing jutting out from one of the gable ends. Lindman waited. He wondered what the countryside was like here, how far it was from the sea. The door opened again and the boy approached.

“I thought I told you to stay put!” he shrieked in that shrill voice of his.

“You can’t always have what you want, sonny,” Lindman said. “Is he going to receive me or isn’t he?”

The boy gestured to Lindman that he should follow him. There was a smell of paint in the house. All the lights were on. Lindman had to bow his head when he entered through the door. The boy showed him into a room at the back of the house. One of the long walls was a picture window.

Emil Wetterstedt was sitting in an armchair in a corner. He had a blanket over his knees, and on a table next to his chair was a pile of books and a pair of glasses. The boy positioned himself behind the armchair. The old man had thin white hair and a wrinkled face, but the eyes he directed at Lindman were very bright.

“I don’t like being disturbed when I’m on vacation,” he said.

His voice was the very opposite of the boy’s. Wetterstedt spoke very softly.

“I won’t take much of your time.”

“I don’t accept commissions for portraits anymore. In any case, your face is too round to inspire me. I prefer longer, thinner faces.”

“I haven’t come here to ask you to paint my portrait.”

Wetterstedt shifted his position. The blanket over his legs fell to the floor. The boy darted forward to put it back.

“Why have you come, then?”

“My name’s Stefan Lindman. I’m a police officer. I spent some years working alongside Herbert Molin in Borås. I don’t know if you’ve been informed that he’s dead.”

“I have been told that he’s dead. Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet.”

Wetterstedt gestured towards a chair. Somewhat reluctantly, the boy moved it into place.

“Who told you that Molin was dead?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“No. Just a talk.”

“I’m too old for talks. I gave that up when I turned sixty. I’d done enough talking in my life by then. Nowadays I neither speak nor listen to what anybody else has to say. Apart from my doctor. And a few young people.”

He smiled and nodded at the boy standing guard behind his chair. Lindman started to wonder what was going on. Who was this boy whose assignment seemed to be to guard over the old man?

“You say you’ve come here to talk to me about Herbert Molin. What do you want to know? And as for that, what really happened? Was Herbert murdered, can that be right?”

Lindman decided not to beat around the bush. As far as Wetterstedt was concerned, it didn’t matter that Lindman was not officially connected to the murder investigation.

“We don’t have any specific clues pointing either to a motive or to a killer,” he said. “That means we have to dig deep. Who was Herbert Molin? Can we find a motive hidden in his past? Those are the sort of questions we’re asking ourselves, and others. People who knew him.”

Wetterstedt did not react. The boy made no secret of his dislike of Lindman.

“It was actually Herbert’s father I knew. I was younger than he was, but older than Herbert.”

“And Axel Molin was a captain in the cavalry?”

“An honorable rank that ran in the family. One of his ancestors fought in the battle of Narva. The Swedes won, but the forefather fell. That tragedy gave rise to a family tradition. Every year, they celebrated the victory at Narva. I remember the family had a big bust of King Karl XII on a table. There were always fresh flowers in a vase next to it. I still remember that clearly.”

“You were not related?”

“Not directly. But I did have a brother who also got into hot water because of all this.”

“The minister of justice?”

“Exactly right. I always advised him against going into politics. Especially since his views were way out there.”

“He was a Social Democrat.”

Wetterstedt looked Lindman in the eye. “I said his views were way out there. Perhaps you know that he was murdered by a madman. They found his body on a beach somewhere near Ystad. I never had any truck with him. We had no contact at all for the last twenty years of his life.”

“Was there any other bust on that table? Alongside the one of Karl XII?”

“What do you mean? Who?”

“Hitler.”

The boy standing behind the chair came to life. It was a momentary reaction, but Lindman noticed. Wetterstedt remained calm.

“What are you trying to suggest?”

“Molin volunteered to fight in Hitler’s army during the war. We’ve also discovered that his family were Nazis. Is that right?”

Wetterstedt responded without hesitation. “Of course it’s right. I too was a Nazi,” he said. “We don’t need to play games, Mr. Policeman. How much do you know about my past?”

“Only that you were a portrait painter, and were in contact with Molin.”

“I was very fond of him. He displayed great courage during the war. Everybody with a grain of common sense sided with Hitler. The choice was between watching the relentless advance of Communism or putting up some resistance. We had a government in Sweden we could trust only so far. Everything was set up.”

“Set up for what?”

“For a German invasion.” It was the boy who answered. Lindman looked at him in astonishment.

“But not everything was in vain,” Wetterstedt said. “I’ll soon paint my last portrait and be gone, but there’s a younger generation that applies common sense to what is going on in Sweden, in Europe, indeed in the world at large. We can be happy that Eastern Europe has collapsed. Not a pretty sight, but uplifting even so. On the other hand, the situation here in Sweden is worse than ever. Everything going to the dogs. No discipline. We don’t have borders anymore. Anybody can get in wherever they like, whenever they like, no matter what their motives. I fear the national character of Sweden has been lost forever. Nevertheless, one has to keep plugging away.”

Wetterstedt paused and turned to Lindman with a smile.

“As you have seen, I stand up for my opinions. I’ve never attempted to conceal them, nor have I ever had any regrets. Obviously, there have been folks who’ve preferred not to acknowledge me in the street, and some who have even spat at me. But they were insignificant beings. My brother, for instance. I’ve never been short of commissions for portraits. More to the contrary, in fact.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“That there has never been a shortage of people in this country of ours who have respected me for standing up for my opinions. People with the same views as mine, but who have preferred not to make their opinions public, for various reasons. I could understand them, at times. At others, I’ve thought they were cowards. But I’ve painted their portraits, even so.”

Wetterstedt indicated that he wanted to stand up. The boy moved smartly to assist him, and gave him a walking stick. Lindman wondered how Wetterstedt coped with the stairs at his apartment in Kalmar.

“There’s something I’d like to show you.”

They went out into the corridor, paved with stone flags. Wetterstedt paused and looked at Lindman.

“Did you say your name was Lindman?”

“Stefan Lindman.”

“If I’m not mistaken, your accent suggests you come from Västergötland?”

“I was born in Kinna, not far from Borås.”

Wetterstedt nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never been to Kinna,” he said. “I’ve been through Borås. But I feel most at home on Öland or in Kalmar. I’ve never understood why folks want to travel around so much.” Wetterstedt tapped his walking stick hard on the floor.

It occurred to Lindman that only a few days earlier he’d heard another old man, Björn Wigren, say something similar about not wanting to travel. They kept walking until they came to a room with no furniture at all. There was a curtain on one of the walls. Wetterstedt moved it to one side with his walking stick. Behind it were three oil paintings in gilded oval frames. The one in the middle was of Hitler, in profile. On the left was a portrait of Goering, and on the right one of a woman.

“This is where I keep my gods,” Wetterstedt said. “I painted this one of Hitler in 1944, when everybody, including his generals, had started to turn their backs on him. This is the only portrait I’ve ever painted exclusively from photographs.”

“So you actually met Goering?”

“In Sweden and in Berlin as well. For some time in the interwar years he was married to a Swede by the name of Karin. I met him then. In May 1941 I was called by the German Legation in Stockholm. Goering wanted to have his portrait painted, and I’d been chosen to do it. That was a great honor. I’d painted Karin, and he’d been pleased with that. So I went to Berlin and did a portrait of him. He was very kind. On one occasion it was the intention that I should meet Hitler at some reception, but something cropped up and got in the way. That is the biggest regret of my life. I was so close, but in fact I never got near enough to shake his hand.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“My wife. Teresa. I painted her portrait the year we married, 1943. If you have eyes to see, you’ll appreciate that the picture is full of love. We had ten years together. She died of an inflamed heart muscle. If that had happened today, she’d have survived.”

Wetterstedt signaled to the boy, who drew the curtain shut. They returned to the studio.

“Now you know who I am,” Wetterstedt said, having settled in the armchair again and had the blanket spread over his knees. The boy had resumed his position behind the old man.

“You must have had some reaction to the news that Herbert Molin was dead. A retired police officer, murdered in the forests of Härjedalen. You must have wondered what happened?”

“I thought it had to be the work of a madman, obviously. Perhaps one of the many criminals who enter Sweden and commit crimes they are never punished for.”

Lindman was getting impatient with the views that Wetterstedt kept expressing.

“It was no madman. The murder was carefully planned.”

“Then I really don’t know.”

The answer came quickly and firmly. A little too quickly, Lindman thought. Too quickly and too firmly. He continued his line of questioning, cautiously.

“Something might have happened a long time in the past, something that took place during the war.”

“Such as?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“Herbert Molin was a soldier. That’s it. He would have told me if anything exceptional had happened. But he never did.”

“Did you meet often?”

“We haven’t met at all for the last thirty years. We kept in touch through letters. He wrote letters, and I replied with postcards. I’ve never liked letters. Neither receiving them nor writing them.”

“Did he ever mention that he was scared?”

Wetterstedt drummed his fingers in irritation on his armrest.

“Of course he was scared. Just as I’m scared. Scared at what’s happening to this country of ours.”

“But there wasn’t anything else he was frightened of? Something that had to do with him personally?”

“What could that have been? He chose to conceal his political identity. I can understand that, but I don’t think he was afraid of being exposed. He wasn’t fearful of papers winding up in the wrong hands.”

The boy coughed and Wetterstedt shut up immediately. He’s said too much, Lindman thought. The boy is his watcher.

“What papers are you referring to?”

Wetterstedt shook his head in vexation. “There are so many papers in the world nowadays,” he said, avoiding the question. Lindman waited for more, but nothing came. Wetterstedt started drumming his fingers on the armrest again.

“I’m an old man. Conversations tire me. I live in an extended twilight zone. I don’t expect anything. I’d like you to leave now, and leave me in peace.”

The boy behind the chair grinned cheekily. It was clear to Lindman that most of the questions he had would be left unanswered. The audience Wetterstedt had granted him was at an end.

“Magnus will see you out,” Wetterstedt said. “You don’t need to shake hands. I’m more frightened of bacteria than I am of people.”

The boy whose name was Magnus opened the front door. The thick layer of fog was still enveloping the landscape.

“How far is it to the sea?” Lindman said, as they walked to the car.

“That’s not a question I’m required to answer, is it?”

Lindman stopped in his tracks. He could feel the anger rising inside him.

“I always thought that little Swedish Nazis had shaven heads and Doc Martens boots. I now realize they can look exactly like normal people. You, for example.”

The boy smiled. “Emil has taught me how to deal with provocation.”

“Just what are your fantasies? That there’s a future for Nazism in Sweden? Are you going to hunt down every immigrant who sets foot in Sweden? That would mean kicking out several million Swedes. Nazism is dead; it died with Hitler. Just what do you think you’re doing? Kissing an old man’s ass? A man who had the doubtful privilege of shaking Goering by the hand? What do you think he can teach you?”

They had come to the car and the motorcycle. Lindman was so angry, he’d broken out into a sweat.

“What do you think he can teach you?” he asked again.

“Not to make the same mistake they made. Not to lose faith. Now get out.”

Lindman turned his car and drove away. In his rearview mirror he saw the boy watching him.

He drove slowly back to the bridge, thinking over what Wetterstedt had said. He could be dismissed as a political idiot. His views were not dangerous anymore. They were but vague memories of a terrible time that was history. He was an old man who’d chosen never to understand, just like Molin and Berggren. The boy Magnus was something else. He plainly believed that Nazi doctrines were still very much alive.

Lindman reached the bridge. He was about to cross it when his cell phone rang. He pulled onto the side, switched on his hazard lights, and answered.

“Giuseppe here. Are you back in Borås yet?”

Lindman wondered if he should say something about his meeting with Wetterstedt, but decided to say nothing for the time being.

“I’m almost there. The weather’s been pretty awful.”

“I wanted to phone you to say that we’ve found the dog.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere we’d never have guessed.”

“Where?”

“Guess.”

Lindman tried to think. But he couldn’t raise a thought.

“I don’t know.”

“In Molin’s dog pen.”

“Are you saying it was dead?”

“No, as lively as they come. Hungry, though.”

Larsson laughed merrily at the other end of the line. “Somebody takes Andersson’s dog during the night, and our men on duty are so tired they don’t notice anything. Then whoever was responsible for kidnapping this dog dumps the animal in Molin’s pen. Of course, it wasn’t tied to the line. What do you have to say about that?”

“That there is somebody not a thousand miles away from where you are who’s trying to tell you something.”

“Quite right. The question is: what? The dog is a message. A sort of bottle thrown into the sea with a message inside it. But what? To whom? Think about that, and get back to me. I’m going home to Östersund now.”

“It’s pretty remarkable.”

“I’ll say it’s pretty remarkable. And frightening. Now I’m convinced that what we’ve gotten to so far is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“And you still think you’re looking for the same murderer?’

“Yes, that’s certain. Keep in touch. And drive carefully!”

There was a crackling noise in the telephone, then it went dead. A car passed. Then another. I’m going home now, he thought. Emil Wetterstedt had nothing new to tell me. But he did confirm what I already knew. Molin was a Nazi who never reformed. One of the incurables.

He drove onto the bridge, intending to go back home to Borås, and before he reached the mainland, he had changed his mind.

Chapter Nineteen

He dreamed that he was walking through the forest to Molin’s house. The wind was blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his balance. He had an axe in his hand and was frightened of something behind him. When he came to the house he stopped at the dog pen. The strong wind had dropped altogether, as if somebody had snipped an audio track in his dream. In the pen were two dogs, both hurling themselves in a frenzy at the wire mesh.

He gave a start and was jerked out of his dream. It wasn’t the dogs breaking through the wire mesh, but a woman standing in front of him, tapping him on the shoulder.

“We don’t like people to be asleep in here,” she said sternly. “This is a library, not a sunporch.”

“I’m very sorry.”

Lindman looked dozily around the reading room. An elderly man with a pointy mustache was reading Punch. He looked like a caricature of a British gentleman. He was glaring disapprovingly at Lindman. Lindman pulled towards him the book he had fallen asleep over, and checked his watch. 6:15. How long had he been asleep? Ten minutes, perhaps, surely no more. He shook his head, forced the dogs out of his mind, and pored over the book again.

He had made up his mind coming back over the bridge. He would make a nocturnal visit to Wetterstedt’s apartment. He couldn’t bear the thought of another night at the hotel, though. He would simply wait until night fell, then go into the apartment. Until then, all he could do was wait. He parked his car within walking distance of Lagmansgatan and found a hardware store, where he’d bought a screwdriver and the smallest jimmy he could find. Then he’d picked out a cheap pair of gloves at a men’s department store. He wandered around the town until he felt hungry, ate at a pizzeria, and read the local newspaper, the Barometer. After two cups of coffee he’d tried to make up his mind whether to go back to his car and sleep for an hour or two or to continue his walk. Then it occurred to him that he might do best by going to the local library. He’d asked for assistance, and in the section devoted to history he’d found what he was looking for. A fat volume on the history of German Nazism, and a thinner book on the Hitler period in Sweden. He soon discarded the big tome, but the smaller one had captured his attention.

It was lucidly written, and after less than an hour’s reading he realized something that he hadn’t grasped before. Something Wetterstedt had said, and maybe also Berggren: that in the 1930s and up to around 1943 or 1944, Nazism had been much more widespread in Sweden than most people nowadays were aware of. There had been various branches of Nazi parties that squabbled between themselves, but behind the men and women in the parades there had been a gray mass of anonymous people who had admired Hitler and would have liked nothing more than a German invasion and the establishment of a Nazi regime in Sweden. He found astonishing information about the government’s concessions to the Germans, and how exports of iron ore from Sweden had been crucial in enabling the German munitions industry to satisfy Hitler’s constant demand for more tanks and other war materials. He wondered what had happened to all that history when he was a schoolboy. What he vaguely remembered from his history classes was a very different picture: a Sweden that had succeeded — by means of extremely clever policies and by skillfully walking a tightrope — in staying out of the war. The Swedish government had remained strictly neutral and thus saved the country from being crushed by the German military machine. He’d heard nothing about groups of homegrown Nazis. What he was now discovering was an entirely different picture, one which explained Molin’s actions, his delight at crossing the border into Norway and looking forward to going on to Germany. He could envisage young Mattson-Herzén, his father and mother, and Wetterstedt and the gray mass of people hovering between the lines of the text, or in the blurred background of the photographs of demonstrations by Nazis in Swedish streets.

That was when he must have fallen asleep and started dreaming about the frenzied dogs.

The Punch man stood up and left the reading room. Two girls, heads almost touching, sat whispering and giggling. Lindman guessed that they probably came from the Middle East. That made him think about what he’d been reading: about how Uppsala students had protested against Jewish doctors who’d been persecuted in Germany and were seeking asylum in Sweden. They had been refused entry.

He went downstairs to the circulation desk. There was no sign of the woman who’d woken him up. He found a restroom, and washed his face in cold water. Then he returned to the reading room. The giggling girls had left. There was a newspaper lying on the table where they’d been sitting. He went to investigate what they’d been reading. It was in Arabic script. They’d left behind a faint perfume. It reminded him that he should call Elena. Then he sat down to read the last chapter: “Nazism in Sweden after the War.” He read about all the factions and various more or less clumsily organized attempts to establish a Swedish Nazi party that would carry real political weight. Behind all those small groups and local organizations that kept coming and going, changing their names and symbolically scratching out each other’s eyes, he could still sense the gray mass assembling at the blurred periphery. They had nothing to do with the little neo-Nazi boys with shaven heads. They were not the ones who robbed banks, murdered police officers, or beat up innocent immigrants. He was clear about the difference between them and the weirdos who demonstrated in the streets and shouted the praises of Karl XII.

He put the book to one side, and wondered where the boy who kept watch over Wetterstedt fitted in. Was there in fact some kind of organization that nobody knew about, where people like Molin, Berggren, and Wetterstedt could make propaganda for their views? A secret room where a new generation — to which the boy standing behind Wetterstedt’s chair belonged — could be admitted? He thought about what Wetterstedt had said about “papers winding up in the wrong hands.” The boy had reacted, and Wetterstedt had clammed up immediately.

He returned the books to their places on the shelves. It was dark when he left the library. He went to his car and called Elena. He couldn’t put it off any longer. She sounded pleased when she heard his voice, but also cautious.

“Where are you?” she said.

“I’m on my way.”

“Why is it taking so long?”

“Trouble with the car.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Something with the transmission. I’ll be back by tomorrow.”

“Why do you sound so irritable?”

“I’m tired.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I don’t have the strength to go into that now. I just wanted to call and tell you that I was on my way.”

“You must realize that I am worried.”

“I’ll be in Borås tomorrow, I promise.”

“Can’t you tell me why you sound so irritable?”

“I’ve already said that I’m tired.”

“Don’t drive too fast.”

“I never do.”

“You always do.”

The connection was cut off. Lindman sighed, but made no attempt to call again. He switched his cell phone off. The clock on the dashboard suggested it was 7:25 P.M. He wouldn’t dare to break into Wetterstedt’s apartment before midnight. I ought to go home, he thought. What will happen if I’m caught? I’ll be fired and disgraced. A police officer breaking into a property is not something a prosecutor would turn a blind eye to. I wouldn’t only be putting my own future on the line, I’d be creating trouble for all my colleagues. Larsson would think he’d been visited by a lunatic. Olausson in Borås would never be able to laugh again.

He wondered if what he really wanted was to be caught. If he was intent on an act of self-destruction. He had cancer, so he had nothing to lose. Was that the way it was? He didn’t know. He drew his jacket closer around him, and closed his eyes.

When he woke up it was 8:30. He hadn’t dreamed about the dogs again. Again he tried to convince himself that he should get out of Kalmar as quickly as possible. But in vain.

The last lights in the windows of the apartments in Lagmansgatan went out. Lindman stood in the shadows under a tree, looking up at the façade of the block of apartments. It had started raining and a wind was starting up. He hurried across the street and tried the front door. To his surprise, it was still open. He slipped into the dark entrance hall and listened. He had his tools in his pocket. He turned on his flashlight and crept up the stairs to the top floor. He shone his flashlight onto the door of Wetterstedt’s apartment. He’d remembered correctly. Earlier in the day when he’d been waiting for somebody to answer the door, he’d noticed the locks. There were two, but neither of them was a deadbolt. That surprised him. Shouldn’t a man like Wetterstedt take as many safety precautions as possible? If Lindman’s luck had run out, it would have an alarm, but that was a risk he would have to take.

He pushed the mailbox open and listened. He couldn’t be absolutely certain that there was nobody in the apartment. It was all quiet. He took out the jimmy. The flashlight was small enough for him to hold it in his teeth. He knew he could only make one attempt. If he didn’t manage to open the door right away he would have to leave. In the first few months of his police career he had learned the basic techniques used by burglars to force open a door. Just one try, no more. One single unexpected noise would generally pass unnoticed, but if it happened again there was a serious risk that somebody would hear and become suspicious. He crouched down, put the jimmy on the floor, and pushed the screwdriver as far into the crack between the door and the frame as it would go. He worked it back and forth, and the crack widened. He pressed the screwdriver further in, then pulled it up as far as the lower of the two locks. He picked up the jimmy and forced it in at a point between the two locks, and pressed his knee against the screwdriver to widen the opening as far as possible. He was starting to sweat from the effort. He still wasn’t satisfied. If he forced it now there was a risk that only the frame would split and the locks would hold fast. He pressed hard against the screwdriver once more and this time managed to push the jimmy further in between the door and the frame. He got his breath back before testing the jimmy again. It was impossible to push it in any further.

He wiped his brow. Then he forced the jimmy with all his might, simultaneously pressing hard against the screwdriver with his knee. The door gave way. The only noise was a creaking and the thud of the screwdriver landing on his shoe. He turned off his flashlight and listened, ready to flee if necessary. Nothing happened. He opened the door carefully and pulled it shut behind him. There was a stuffy, closed-in smell in the apartment. He had a vague feeling that it reminded him of his aunt’s house near Värnamo, where he’d been to visit several times as a child. A smell of old furniture. He switched on his flashlight, careful not to point it at a window. He had no plan and didn’t know what he was looking for. If he’d been an ordinary burglar it would have been easier. He’d have been looking for objects of value, and trying to find likely hiding places. He examined a pile of newspapers on a table. Nothing suggested that Wetterstedt subscribed to a morning paper that would be delivered in the early hours.

He walked slowly around the apartment. It was just three rooms, plus the kitchen and the bathroom. Unlike the spartan furniture and fixtures at the summer cottage, Wetterstedt’s apartment in town was overflowing with furniture. He glanced into the bedroom, then continued to the living room, which apparently also served as a studio. There was an empty easel, and a writing desk against one wall. He opened a drawer.

Old pairs of glasses, packs of playing cards, newspaper clips. “The portrait painter Emil Wetterstedt celebrates his fiftieth birthday.” The photograph had faded, but Lindman recognized Wetterstedt’s piercing eyes gazing straight at the photographer. The text was full of deference. “The nationally and internationally well-known portrait painter who never left his hometown of Kalmar, despite many chances to establish himself elsewhere... Rumors abounded of an offer to settle on the Riviera with famous and rich clients.” He replaced the clip, thinking that it wasn’t very well written. Wetterstedt had said that he didn’t like writing letters, only brief messages on postcards. Perhaps he’d written the newspaper article himself, and it had turned out so badly because he wasn’t used to writing. Lindman searched through the drawers. He still didn’t know what he was looking for. He moved on to the third room, a study, and went to the desk. The curtains were drawn. He took off his jacket and hung it over the desk lamp before switching it on.

There were two piles of paper on the desk. He looked through the first one. It consisted of bills and brochures from Tuscany and Provence. He wondered if Wetterstedt in fact enjoyed traveling, despite claiming not to. He replaced the pile, and drew the second one towards him. It was mainly crossword puzzles torn out of newspapers. They were all solved, with no cross-outs or alterations. He might not care for letter-writing, but he knew his words.

At the bottom of the pile was an envelope, already opened. He took out an invitation card printed in a typeface reminiscent of runestones. It was a reminder. “On November 30 we meet as usual at 1300 hours in the Great Hall. After lunch, reminiscences, and music, there will be a lecture given by our comrade, Captain Akan Forbes, on the subject of his years fighting to keep Southern Rhodesia white. This will be followed by our A.G.M.” It was signed by the “Senior Master of Ceremonies.” Lindman looked at the envelope. It was postmarked Hässleholm. He moved the desk lamp closer and read the text again. What exactly was this an invitation to? Where was this Great Hall? He put the card back in its envelope and replaced the pile.

Then he went through the drawers, which were unlocked. All the time he was listening for the slightest noise from the landing. In the bottom left-hand drawer was a brown leather file box. It filled the drawer. Lindman took it out and laid it on the desk. There was a swastika embossed on the leather. He opened it carefully because the side was split. It contained a thick bundle of typewritten sheets. They were carbon copies, not originals. The paper was thin. The text was written on a typewriter with a letter “c” that was slightly higher than the other letters. They seemed to be some kind of accounts. At the top of the first page was a handwritten heading: “Comrades, departed and deceased, who continue to fulfill their commitments.” Then followed long lists of names in alphabetical order. In front of every name was a number. Lindman moved carefully on to the next page: another long list of names. He glanced through them without recognizing any. They were all Swedish names. He turned to the next page.

Under the letter D, after Karl-Evert Danielsson, the same hand as had written on the first page had noted: “Now deceased. Pledged an annual subscription for 30 years.” Annual subscription to what? Lindman wondered. There was no reference to the title of an organization, just this list of names. He could see that many had died. In some places there was a handwritten note that future subscriptions had been specified in a will, in others that “the estate will pay” or “paid by the son or daughter, no name given.” He turned back to the letter B. There she was, Berggren, Elsa. He turned to the letter M. Sure enough, there was Molin, Herbert. He returned to the beginning. The letter A. No Andersson, Abraham. He moved on to the end. The last name was Oxe, Hans, numbered 1,430.

Lindman closed the file and replaced it in the drawer. Were these the papers Wetterstedt had referred to? A Nazi old comrades association, or a political organization? He tried to work out what he had stumbled upon. Somebody should take a look at this, he thought. It should be published. But I can’t take the file with me because there would be no way I could have gotten it without having broken into this apartment. He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark. The air was heavy with the disgust he was feeling. What stank was not the old carpets or the curtains — it was the list of names. All these living and dead individuals paying their subscriptions, in person or via their trustees, their sons or daughters — to some organization that declined to reveal its name — 1,430 persons still adhering to a doctrine that should have been dismissed once and for all. But that wasn’t the way it was. Standing behind Wetterstedt had been a boy, a reminder that everything was still very much alive.

He sat there in the dark, making up his mind that it was time for him to head home. But something held him back. He took out the file once more, opened it, and turned to the letter L. At the bottom of a page was the name “Lennartsson, David. Subscription paid by the wife.” He turned the page.

It was like being on the receiving end of a punch, he reflected afterwards, on his way to Borås, driving far too fast through the darkness. He had been totally unprepared. It was as if somebody had crept up on him from behind. But there was no room for doubt. It was his father’s name there at the top of the page: “Lindman, Evert, deceased, subscriptions pledged for 25 years.” There was also the date of his father’s death seven years ago, and there was something else that removed any possible doubt. He recalled as clear as day sitting with one of his father’s friends, a lawyer, going through the estate. There had been a gift written into the will a year or so before his father died. It was not a large sum, but striking nevertheless. He had left 15,000 kronor to something calling itself the Strong Sweden Foundation. There was a bank transfer number, but no name, no address. Lindman had wondered about that donation, and what kind of a foundation it was. The lawyer assured him that there was no ambiguity, his father had been very firm on this point; Lindman had been devastated by the death of his father, and lacked the strength to think any more about it.

Now, in Wetterstedt’s stuffy apartment, that donation had caught up with him. He couldn’t close his eyes to facts. His father had been a Nazi. One of those who kept quiet about it, didn’t speak openly about their political opinions. It was incomprehensible, but true nevertheless. Lindman now realized why Wetterstedt had asked about his name, and where he came from. He knew something Lindman didn’t know: that his own father was among those Wetterstedt admired above all others. Lindman’s father had been like Molin and Berggren.

He closed the drawer, pushed back the desk lamp, and noticed that his hand was shaking. Then he checked everything meticulously before leaving the room. It was 1:45 A.M. He needed to get away fast, away from what was hidden in Wetterstedt’s desk. He paused in the hall, and listened. Then he opened the door and went out, shutting it behind him as tightly as he could.

At that very moment there came the sound of the front door opening or closing. He stood motionless in the darkness, holding his breath and keeping his ears pricked. No sound of footsteps on the stairs. Someone might be standing down there, hidden in the dark, he thought. He kept on listening, and also checked to make sure he’d remembered to take everything with him. The flashlight, the screwdriver, the jimmy. All present and correct. He went down one floor tentatively. The lunacy of the whole undertaking had now hit him like an ice-cold shower. Not only had he committed a pointless break-in, he’d also unearthed a secret he’d infinitely preferred never to have discovered.

He paused, listened, and then switched on the lights in the staircase. He walked down the last two flights to the front door. He looked around when he emerged onto the street. No one. He hugged the wall of the block of apartments to the end, then crossed the street. When he reached his car he looked around again, but could see no sign of anybody having followed him. Nevertheless, he was quite sure. He wasn’t imagining things. Someone had left the building as he was closing the damaged door to the apartment.

He turned on the engine and backed out of his parking spot. He didn’t see the man in the shadows writing down his registration number.

He drove out of Kalmar, on the Västervik road. There was an all-night diner there. A semi was parked outside. When he went into the café, he noticed the driver immediately, sitting with his head against the wall, sleeping with his mouth open. Nobody here will wake you up, he thought. An all-night diner is not like a library.

The woman behind the counter gave him a smile. She had a nametag: she was called Erika. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Are you a truck driver?” she said.

“Afraid not.”

“Professional drivers don’t need to pay for coffee during the night.”

“Maybe I should change jobs,” he said.

She declined his offer to pay. He took a good look at her and decided she had a pretty face, in spite of the stark light from the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

When he sat down, he realized how exhausted he was. He still couldn’t come to terms with what he’d found in Wetterstedt’s desk drawer. He would have to face up to that later, but not now.

He drank his coffee, decided against a refill. He was in Borås by 9, by way of Jönköping. He’d stopped twice and taken a nap. On both occasions he’d been woken by headlights in his face.

He undressed and stretched out on the bed. I got away with it, he thought. Nobody will be able to prove that I broke into Wetterstedt’s apartment. Nobody saw me. Before going to sleep, he tried to work out how many days he’d been away. He couldn’t make it add up. Nothing added up.

He closed his eyes and thought about the woman who hadn’t charged him for his coffee. He had already forgotten her name.

Chapter Twenty

He had disposed of the tools on the road home, but when he woke up after a few hours of restless sleep, he began to wonder if he’d only imagined it. The first thing he did was to go through his pockets. No sign of the tools. Somewhere not far from Jönköping, at the coldest and darkest time of the night, he had stopped to sleep. Before driving away from the rest stop, he’d buried the jimmy and the screwdriver under the moss. He remembered exactly what he’d done, but even so, he couldn’t help wondering. He seemed to be unsure of everything now.

He stood at the window, looking down over Allégatan. He could hear Mrs. Håkansson playing the piano in the apartment downstairs. This was a regular occurrence, every day except Sunday. She played the piano from 11:15 to 12:15. Always the same piece, over and over again. There was a detective inspector at the police station who was interested in classical music. Once Lindman had tried to hum the tune for him, and the inspector had said without hesitation that it was Chopin. Lindman had later bought a record with that particular mazurka. For some time when he was working nights and sleeping during the day he would try to play the record simultaneously with Mrs. Håkansson’s playing, but he had never managed to get the two versions synchronized.

She was playing now. In my chaotic world, she’s the only thing that is unchanging, he thought. He looked into the street. The self-discipline he had hitherto taken for granted didn’t exist any longer. It had been sheer idiocy to break into Wetterstedt’s apartment. Even if he’d left no trace behind, even if he’d taken nothing other than a piece of knowledge he would have preferred to be without.

He finished his breakfast and gathered the dirty laundry he was going to take to Elena’s. There was a laundry room in the basement of the apartments where he lived, but he hardly ever used it. Then he fetched a photo album he kept in a bureau, and sat with it on the living room sofa. His mother had collected the pictures and given him the album as a twenty-first birthday present. He remembered how, when he was very small, his father had taken photographs with a box camera. After that he’d bought more modern models, and the last pictures in the book had been taken by a Minolta SLR camera. It had always been his father taking the pictures, never his mother, although he’d used the self-timer whenever practical. Lindman studied the pictures, his mother on the left and his father on the right. There was always a hint of stress in his father’s face, as if he had only just come into the picture before it was taken. It often went awry. Lindman remembered once when there was only one exposure left on the film and his father had stumbled as he hurried away from the camera. He leafed through the album. There were his sisters side-by-side, and his mother staring straight at the lens.

What do my sisters know about their father’s political views? Presumably nothing. What did my mother know? And could she have shared his opinions?

He started over again and worked his way slowly through the album, one picture at a time.

1969, he’s seven. His first day at school. Colors starting to fade. He remembered how proud he was of his new dark blue blazer.

1971, he’s nine. It’s summer. They’ve gone to Varberg, and rented a little cottage on the island of Getterön. Beach towels among the rocks, a transistor radio. He could even remember the music being played when the picture was taken: “Sail along, silvery moon.” He remembered because his father had said what it was called just before pressing the self-timer. It was idyllic there among the rocks, his father, mother, himself, and his two teenaged sisters. The sun was bright, the shadows solid, and the colors faded, as usual.

Pictures only show the surface, he thought. Something quite different was going on underneath. I had a father who led a double life. Perhaps there were other families in cottages on Getterön that he would visit and get involved in discussions about the Fourth Reich that he must have hoped would come to pass sooner or later. When Lindman was growing up, in the 1960s and 1970s, there had never been any mention of Nazism. He had a vague memory of classmates at school hissing “Jewish swine” at some unpleasant person who wasn’t in fact Jewish at all. There were swastikas drawn on the bathroom walls at school, and the caretaker would be furious and try to scrub them off. Even so, he certainly couldn’t recall any symptoms of Nazism.

The pictures slowly brought memories to life. The album was made up of stepping stones that he could jump on. In between were other memories that had not been photographed, but which came to mind even so.

He must have been twelve years old. He’d been hoping for a new bike for ages. His father wasn’t stingy, but it took some time to convince him that the old one simply wasn’t much use anymore. In the end his father gave in, and they drove to Borås.

They had to wait their turn in the shop. Another man was buying a bike for his son. He spoke broken Swedish. It took some time to complete the deal, and the man and the boy went off with the new bicycle. The shop owner was about the same age as Stefan’s father. He apologized for the delay.

“Those Yugoslavians. We’re getting more and more of ’em.”

“What are they doing here?” his father said. “They should be sent back. They have no business being in Sweden. Haven’t we got enough problems. with all the Finns? Not to mention the gypsies. We should throw them all out.”

Lindman could remember it well. It wasn’t a wording made up in retrospect: that was exactly what his father said. And the owner didn’t react to the last comment: “We should throw them all out.” He might have smiled or nodded, but he didn’t say anything. Then they had bought the bicycle, tied it to the roof of the car, and driven back to Kinna. The memory was crystal-clear, but how had he reacted at the time? He’d been full of enthusiasm about the long-hoped-for bike. He remembered the smell of the shop — rubber and oil. Nevertheless, he remembered something else he’d felt at the time — not that his father thought the gypsies and Yugoslavs should be thrown out, but the fact that his father had expressed an opinion. A political opinion. That was so unusual.

When he was growing up, nothing had ever been discussed among the family apart from insignificant matters. What to have for dinner, whether the lawn needed mowing, what color they should choose for the kitchen tablecloth they were going to buy. There was one exception: music. That was something they could talk about.

All his father listened to was old-fashioned jazz. Lindman could still remember the names of some of the musicians his father had tried in vain to persuade him to listen to and admire. King Oliver, the cornet player who had inspired Louis Armstrong. He’d played with a handkerchief over his fingers so that other trumpeters wouldn’t be able to work out how he’d managed to produce his advanced solos. And then there was a clarinetist called Johnny Doods. And the outstanding Bix Beiderbecke. Time and time again Lindman had been forced to listen to these scratchy old recordings, and he’d pretended to like what he heard. Pretended to be as enthusiastic as his father wanted him to be. If he did that, he might stand a better chance of getting a new ice hockey set, or something else he badly wanted. In reality, he preferred to listen to the same music as his sisters. Often the Beatles, but more usually the Rolling Stones. His father had accepted that, as far as music was concerned, his daughters were a lost cause; but he thought that his son just might be saved.

When he was younger, his father had played the music he admired. There was a banjo hanging on the living-room wall. Occasionally he would take it down and play. Just a few chords, no more. It was a Levin with a long neck. A real beauty, his father had insisted, dating from the 1920s. There was also a picture of his father playing in the Bourbon Street Band — drums, bass, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone. Plus his father on the banjo.

They’d often discussed music at home — but nothing that might fuel his father’s furious outbursts, which were rare, but real. While Lindman grew up, he was constantly worried about the possibility of his father exploding into a fit of rage.

When they went to Borås to buy the bicycle, his father had expressed an opinion that went a long way beyond deploring the stupidity of listening to pathetic pop music. What he said had to do with people and their right to exist. “We should throw them all out.” The memory grew in Lindman’s consciousness as he recalled the incident.

And there was an epilogue.

He’d been sitting in the passenger seat. In the side mirror, he could see the bike handlebars sticking out from the roof.

“Why do gypsies have to be thrown out?” he’d said.

“Because they’re inadequate as people,” his father had told him. “They’re inferior. They’re not like us. If we don’t keep Sweden for the Swedes, everything will fall apart.”

He could still hear those words, as clear as a bell. He also remembered feeling worried about what his father had said. Not about what might happen to the gypsies if they didn’t have the sense to flee the country on their own. It had more to do with himself. If his father was right, he was destined to think the same thing, that the gypsies ought to be thrown out.

His memories drifted away. There was nothing left of the rest of the journey. It was only when they got back home and his mother came out to admire the new bicycle that his memory started to work again.

The telephone rang. He gave a start, put the album down, and answered.

“Olausson here. How are you?”

He’d expected to hear Elena’s voice. He was instantly on his guard. “I don’t know how I am. I just go through the motions, waiting for the treatment.”

“Can you come to the station? Are you up to it?”

“What about?”

“A minor matter. When can you be here?”

“Five minutes from now.”

“Let’s say half an hour, then. Come straight up to my office.”

Lindman hung up. Olausson hadn’t laughed. Kalmar has caught up with me already, he thought. The forced door, the police in Kalmar asking questions, another policeman, a colleague from Borås paying an unexpected visit. Does he know anything about the break-in? Let’s call our colleagues in Borås and ask.

That’s what must have happened. It was nearly 2 P.M. That meant the police in Kalmar would have had time to search the apartment and talk to Wetterstedt. He was sweating. He was sure there was nothing to link him to the affair, but he’d have to talk to Olausson without being able to mention anything about the contents of the brown leather file box in the desk drawer.

The telephone rang again. This time it was Elena.

“I thought you were going to come here?”

“I have a few things to take care of. Then I’ll come.”

“What sort of things?”

He was tempted to hang up the phone.

“I have to go to the police station. We can talk later. Bye.”

He hadn’t the energy to deal with questions just now. It would be hard enough inventing something plausible enough to convince Olausson.

He stood in the window and rehearsed the story he’d made up about his activities the previous day. Then he put on his jacket and headed for the police station.

He paused to greet the receptionists. Nobody asked him how he was. That convinced him that everybody in the building knew he had cancer. The duty officer, Corneliusson, also came out to the desk for a brief chat. No questions, no cancer, nothing. Lindman took the elevator up to Olausson’s floor. The door to his office was ajar. He knocked. Olausson shouted, “Come in!” Every time Lindman entered his room, he wondered what tie he would have to face. Olausson was notorious for ties with strange patterns and odd color combinations. Today, however, it was an unremarkable dark blue. Lindman sat down. Olausson burst out laughing.

“We caught a burglar this morning. He must be one of the dumbest people alive. You know that stereo shop in Österlånggatan, next to the square? He’d broken in through the back door, but he must have been so sweaty that he took off his coat and hung it up. And he forgot it when he left. In one of the pockets was a wallet with his driver’s license and some business cards. The bastard had his own business cards! ‘Consultant,’ goddammit. All we had to do was go to his address and take him in. He was in bed asleep. Forgotten all about his coat.”

Lindman thought he’d better take the initiative when Olausson said nothing more.

“What did you want?”

Olausson picked up some faxes from his desk.

“Just a trifle. We received this earlier from our colleagues in Kalmar.”

“I’ve just come from there, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“Precisely. I gather you went to see somebody called Wetterstedt on Öland. I seem to recognize that name, incidentally.”

“His brother, one-time Minister of Justice, was murdered several years ago in Skåne.”

“Ah yes, that’s right. What happened?”

“The murderer was a teenager. I remember reading in the paper about a year ago that he committed suicide.”

Olausson looked thoughtful.

“Has something happened?” Lindman said.

“Apparently there’s been a burglary at Wetterstedt’s apartment in Kalmar. During the night. One of the neighbors claims you were there yesterday. His description of you corresponds closely to the one Wetterstedt gave the police.”

“I was there yesterday morning, trying to find Wetterstedt. An old man in the apartment next door told me he was at his summer place on Öland.”

Olausson put the fax down. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“That there’d be a straightforward explanation.”

“Explanation of what? Is somebody suggesting I committed the break-in? I found Wetterstedt and spoke to him at his summer cottage.”

“They were just asking what you were doing there. That’s all.”

“Is that all, then?”

“More or less.”

“Am I under suspicion?”

“Not at all. You were looking for Wetterstedt, and he wasn’t there. Is that it?”

“I thought maybe the doorbell wasn’t working, so I hammered on the door. I also wondered if Wetterstedt might be hard of hearing. He’s well over eighty, after all. The neighbor heard me rapping on the door.”

“And then you went to Öland?”

“Yes.”

“Then you drove home.”

“Not right away. I didn’t leave until that evening. I spent a few hours in the library, then I stopped for an hour or two near Jönköping to get some sleep in the car. Let’s face it, if I’d intended going back that night and breaking into the apartment, I’d hardly have attracted attention to myself by banging on the door, would I?”

“I imagine not.”

Olausson was retreating now. Lindman had managed to steer the conversation his way. Nevertheless, he was worried. Someone might have seen his car. And there was that business with the front door opening as he was about to leave the apartment.

“Obviously, nobody thinks for a minute that you broke into the apartment. We want to answer our colleagues’ questions as soon as possible, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ve answered them.”

“You didn’t notice anything that might give them a lead?”

“Such as what?”

Olausson burst out laughing. “I have no idea.”

“Neither have I.”

Lindman could see that Olausson believed him. He was amazed at how easy it had been to lie. Now it was time to steer the conversation in another direction.

“I hope nothing valuable was stolen from Wetterstedt’s place.”

Olausson picked up the fax. “According to this, nothing at all was stolen. Which seems rather remarkable, given that Wetterstedt claims there was quite a bit of valuable art in the apartment.”

“Not many junkies are au fait with the art market. Prices, and which artists are in demand by the collectors and fences, that’s a little out of their league.”

Olausson continued reading. “There was evidently a fair amount of jewelry and cash lying around. The kind of stuff that would interest your usual burglar. But none of it was taken.”

“Maybe they were frightened?”

“Assuming there was more than one. The way the door was forced suggests a thief who knew what he was doing. Not an amateur.” Olausson leaned back in his chair. “I’ll call Kalmar and tell them I’ve spoken to you. I’ll tell them you couldn’t think of anything that might be of use to them.”

Olausson stood up and opened the window. Until then Lindman hadn’t noticed how stuffy it was in the room.

“There’s something wrong with the ventilation all over the police station,” Olausson said. “Officers are complaining about allergy attacks. Down in the cells they are moaning about headaches. Nothing gets done, though, because there’s no money.”

Olausson sat down again. Lindman noticed that he’d put on weight. His stomach was hanging out over his pants.

“I’ve never been to Kalmar,” Olausson said. “Nor Öland. They say it’s beautiful around there.”

“If you hadn’t asked me to come in, I’d have called you anyway. There was a reason why I went to see Wetterstedt. It had to do with Herbert Molin.”

“What exactly?”

“Herbert Molin was a Nazi.”

Olausson stared at him in astonishment. “A Nazi?”

“Long before he joined the police, when he was a young man, he fought as a volunteer in Hitler’s army. And he never abandoned those opinions. Wetterstedt had known him when he was young, and they stayed in touch. Wetterstedt was a very unpleasant person.”

“You mean to say you went to Kalmar to speak to him about Herbert?”

“It’s not forbidden, is it?”

“No, but I’m pretty surprised to hear it.”

“Did you know anything about Molin’s past? Or his views?”

“Not a thing. I’m flabbergasted.”

Olausson leaned forward over his desk. “Does that have anything to do with his murder?”

“It could.”

“What about the other man, the second person who was murdered up there? The violinist?”

“There’s no apparent connection. At least, there wasn’t when I left. Molin moved to Härjedalen because he knew a woman up there. She helped him buy a house. She’s also a Nazi. Her name’s Elsa Berggren.”

Olausson shook his head. The name meant nothing to him. Lindman could tell that Kalmar was forgotten now. If Olausson had vaguely suspected Lindman of being responsible for the break-in, he’d forgotten all about it.

“The whole thing sounds incredible.”

“I couldn’t agree more. There’s no doubt about it, though: we had an out-and-out Nazi working for the police here in Borås for years.”

“He was a good policeman, all the same, irrespective of his politics.”

Olausson stood up to signal that the interview was at an end. He accompanied Lindman as far as the elevator.

“Needless to say, I wonder how you are. Health-wise.”

“I’m due back at the hospital on the 19th. Then we’ll find out.”

The elevator door slid open.

“I’ll talk to Kalmar,” Olausson said.

Lindman got into the elevator. “I suppose you didn’t know that Molin was a passionate dancer either?”

“Good Lord no. What kind of dancing?”

“Preferably the tango.”

“There’s obviously a lot that I didn’t know about Herbert Molin.”

“I suppose that’s true of all of us. None of us know much more than we find on the surface.”

The elevator door closed. Olausson had no time to comment. Lindman left the police station. When he emerged onto the street, he wasn’t sure what to do next. Kalmar wasn’t going to be a problem. Not unless somebody had seen him that night. That was hardly likely.

He stopped, unable to make up his mind what to do next. For some reason, his reaction was annoyance, and he swore out loud. A woman walking past gave him a wide berth.

Lindman went back to his apartment and changed his shirt. He looked at his face in the mirror. As a child he’d always looked like his mother. The older he became, the more he began to resemble his father. Somebody must know, he thought. Somebody must be able to tell me about my father and his politics. I must get in touch with my sisters. But there’s somebody else who must know. My father’s friend, the lawyer who drew up his will. He didn’t even know if the lawyer was still alive. Hans Jacobi, that was his name. It sounded Jewish, but Lindman recalled that Jacobi was fair-haired, tall, and burly, a tennis player. He looked him up in the phone book. Sure enough, there he was. Jacobi & Brandell, Attorneys.

He dialed the number. A woman answered, reciting the name of the firm.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Hans Jacobi.”

“Who’s speaking, please?”

“My name is Stefan Lindman.”

“Mr. Jacobi has retired.”

“He was a good friend of my father’s.”

“Yes, I remember. But Mr. Jacobi’s an old man now. He retired over five years ago.”

“I called mainly to find out if he is still alive.”

“He’s not well.”

“Does he still live in Kinna?”

“His daughter’s looking after him, at her home near Varberg.”

“I’d like to get in touch with him.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you his address or telephone number. Mr. Jacobi has asked that callers be advised that he wishes to be left in peace. When he finished here, he did exactly what one should do.”

“Which was what?”

“He passed all his work on to his younger colleagues. Mainly to his nephew, Lennart Jacobi. He’s a partner.”

Lindman thanked the woman and hung up. It wouldn’t be difficult to track down the address in Varberg. But was he really justified in pestering an old, ailing man with questions about the past? He couldn’t make up his mind and decided to wait until tomorrow. Right now there was something else that needed doing. Something more important.

Shortly after 7 P.M. he parked outside the block of apartments in Norrby where Elena lived. He looked up at her window. Without Elena, I am nothing at the moment, he thought. Nothing at all.

Chapter Twenty-One

Something had disturbed Silberstein during the night. At one point he’d been woken by the sound of the dog rubbing against the side of the tent. He’d hissed at it, and it stopped. Then he’d fallen asleep again and dreamed about La Cãbana and Höllner. It was still dark when he woke up next. He lay motionless, listening. The watch he’d hung from one of the tent poles said 4:45. He wondered what had disturbed him, if it was something inside himself, or whether there was something out there in the autumn night. Although there was a long time to go before dawn he couldn’t lie there in his sleeping bag any longer. The darkness was full of questions.

If things turned out badly for him and he was tried for the murder of Herbert Molin, he would be found guilty. He had no intention of denying what he had done. If all had gone according to his original plan, he would have returned to Buenos Aires and would never have been traced. The murder would have been filed away in the Swedish police archives and never solved.

Several times, especially while he was waiting for the right moment in his tent by the lake, he’d considered writing a confession that he would ask a lawyer to send to the Swedish police after his death. It would be a story going back to 1945, and would describe simply and clearly what had happened. If he were arrested now, though, he would also be accused of a murder he hadn’t committed.

He crawled out of the sleeping bag and dismantled the tent while it was still dark. The dog was wagging its tail and tugging at its leash. With the aid of his flashlight he made a thorough search of where the tent had been standing, making sure that he had left no trace. Then he drove off with the dog in the backseat. When he came to a crossroads with a sign pointing to Sörvattnet he stopped. He turned on the interior light and unfolded the map. What he wanted to do most of all was to go back south, leave all the darkness behind, call Maria and tell her he was on his way home. But he knew he couldn’t do that, his life would be intolerable if he didn’t find out what had happened to the man named Andersson. He took a road east to Rätmyren. He parked on one of the forestry roads he knew from before, and cautiously approached Molin’s house. The dog by his side was quiet. When he was sure the house was deserted, he put the dog inside the pen, closed the gate, hung the leash on the fence, and went back into the woods. That will give the police something to worry about, he thought, as he made his way back to where he’d parked the car. It was still dark.

The gravel crunched under the tires when he drove off the main road to study the map again. It wasn’t far to the Norwegian border, but that’s not where he was going. He set off again, heading north, and passed through Funäsdalen before turning onto a smaller road and driving into the darkness to see where it would take him. He was on a steep climb now; perhaps he was in the mountains already. He might well be, if he’d read the map correctly. He pulled up, switched off the engine, and sat back to wait for daylight.

When dawn began to break, he set off again, going uphill the whole time. He noticed several chalets tucked among the rocks and bushes. He must be in some kind of vacation spot. There were no lights anywhere. He kept on going until he came to a gate blocking the road. He got out of the car to open it, and continued along the road after closing the gate behind him. He realized that if they came after him, he’d be cornered. But he didn’t seem to care. All he wanted was to keep on going until the road petered out. Then he would have to make a decision.

Eventually the road came to an end and he could go no further. He got out of the car and filled his lungs with the chilly air. The light seemed to be gray. He looked around: mountaintops, in the distance a long valley, and beyond that more mountains. A path led into the trees. He followed it. After a few hundred meters he came upon an old wooden chalet. Nobody had been along that path for a long time, he could see that. He went up to the chalet and peered in through the windows. The front door was locked. He tried to imagine where he would have hidden a key if the chalet had been his. There was a broken pot in front of one of the flat stones forming part of the steps leading to the front door. He bent down and lifted the pot. No key. Then he felt underneath the stone, and there it was, fastened to a lump of wood by a piece of ribbon. He unlocked the door.

The chalet hadn’t been aired out for a considerable length of time. It comprised a big living room, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen. The furniture was made of light-colored wood. He ran his fingers over one of the chair arms, and thought how attractive some of this light-colored wooden furniture would look in his dingy home in Buenos Aires. Tapestries with embroidered texts that he couldn’t understand were hanging on the walls. He went into the kitchen. The chalet had electricity, and there was a telephone. He picked up the receiver and listened to the dial tone. He looked in the big freezer. It was full of food. What could that mean? Was the chalet only empty for a short time? He had no way of knowing. He took out some packages of frozen hamburgers and put them in the sink. Then he turned on the faucet over the sink, and water came gushing out.

He sat down by the telephone and dialed the long number to Maria in Buenos Aires. He’d never quite managed to work out the time difference. He could hear it ringing at the other end. He wondered who would be paying for this international call from his cottage in the mountains.

Maria answered. As usual, she sounded impatient, as if he’d interrupted her when she was doing something important, like cleaning or preparing food. If she had any time to herself, she used to play complicated games of patience. He’d tried in vain to work out the rules. He had the impression that she cheated. Not to solve the patience, but to make it last as long as possible.

“It’s me,” he said. “Can you hear me all right?”

She spoke loud and quickly, as she always did when she was nervous. I’ve been away for too long, he thought. She’s started to suspect that I’ve left her and will never come back home.

“Where are you?” she said.

“I’m still in Europe.”

“Where?”

He thought about the map he’d been studying in the car, trying to come to a decision.

“Norway.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m looking at furniture. I’ll be coming home soon.”

“Don Batista’s been asking for you. He’s upset. He says you promised to renovate an antique sofa for him. He wanted to give it to his daughter as a wedding present in December.”

“Tell him it will be ready in time. Has anything else happened?”

“What do you expect to have happened? A revolution?”

“I don’t know. I’m only asking.”

“Juan has died.”

“Who?”

“Juan. The old caretaker.”

She was speaking more slowly now, but still far too loudly, as if that was necessary because Norway was so far away. He suspected that she wouldn’t even be able to point to it on a map. It also struck him that she was never closer to him than when she was talking about somebody who’d died. He was not surprised to hear that the old caretaker was dead. He’d had a stroke a few years back, and since then had only been able to shuffle around the courtyard, looking at all the work that needed doing but he no longer had the strength to do.

“When’s the funeral?”

“It’s already happened. I sent flowers from both of us.”

“Thank you.” There was a swishing and crackling in the receiver. “Maria, I’ll be back home soon. I miss you. I haven’t been unfaithful to you, but this journey has been very important. I feel as if I’m moving around in a dream, as if I’m really back in Buenos Aires. I had to make this trip because there was something I needed to see that I’d never seen before. Not just this foreign furniture in such light colors, but also something inside myself. I’m starting to get old, Maria. A man of my age should only make journeys by himself. To find out who he really is. I’ll be a different person when I get back.”

“What do you mean, a different person?” She sounded worried.

He knew that Maria was always worrying in case something changed. He wished he hadn’t said that.

“I’ll be changed for the better. I will have dinner at home in future. I’ll very seldom dine at La Cãbana and leave you alone.”

She didn’t believe him and was silent again.

“I’ve killed a man,” he said. “A man who committed a terrible crime, a long time ago, when I still lived in Germany.”

Why had he said that? A confession made over the phone from a chalet in the mountains in the Swedish province of Härjedalen to a cramped, damp apartment in Buenos Aires. A confession to somebody who didn’t understand what he was talking about, and was even less able to imagine him doing harm to any other person. It was probably because he couldn’t bear anymore not sharing his secret with someone else, even if it was only Maria, who wouldn’t understand what he said.

“When are you coming home?” she said again.

“Soon.”

“They’ve raised the rent again.”

“Think of me in your prayers.”

“Because they’ve raised the rent?”

“Don’t worry about the rent. Just think of me. Every morning and every night.”

“Do you think of me when you say your prayers?”

“I don’t say any prayers, Maria, you know that. You’re the one who does that job in our household. I have to go now. I’ll call again later.”

“When?”

“I can’t say. Goodbye, Maria.”

He put the phone down, and at once it occurred to him that he should have told her he loved her, even if he didn’t. After all, she was the one who was always around, she’d be the one who held his hand when he was dying. He wondered if what he’d told her had sunk in.

He stood up and went over to one of the low windows. It was light outside now. He looked at the mountains, and in his mind’s eye he could also see Maria, sitting in the plush red armchair next to the little table with the telephone.

He needed to get back home.

He made some coffee and opened the front door to let in some air. If anybody were to come along the path to the house, he knew what he would say. He’d tell them he’d killed Molin, but not the other man. But nobody would come, he was convinced of that. He was alone here. He could make this little chalet his base while he tried to find out what had happened to Andersson.

There was a framed photograph on a shelf. Two children were sitting on the stone slab under which he’d found the key, smiling at the camera. He took it down and looked at the back. He could just about make out a date: 1998. It also said “Stockholm.” He searched for the name of the owner of the cabin. He found an invoice from an appliance store in Sveg addressed to a man by the name of Frostengren with a home address in Stockholm. That persuaded him that he need have no fear of being disturbed. The chalet was a long way off the beaten track, and November was not a month for hikers or skiers. The only thing he’d have to avoid was being seen when he got onto the main road. He’d also better keep an eye on the other cottages whenever he left or returned, to make sure that they were closed up for the winter.

He spent the rest of the day in the chalet. He slept a lot, dreamlessly, and woke up without feeling restless. He drank coffee, grilled a hamburger, and occasionally went out to look at the mountains. At about 2 P.M. it started raining. He switched on the light over the table in the living room and sat by the window to work out what to do next.

There was only one obvious and absolutely incontrovertible starting point: Aron Silberstein or Fernando Hereira, whoever he happened to be at the time, had committed murder. If he’d been a believer, like Maria, that would have ensured eternal hell. He was not a believer, however; as far as he was concerned there were no gods, apart from those he occasionally created for himself in moments of weakness, and then only fleetingly. Gods were for the poor and weak. He was neither poor nor weak. Even as a child he’d cultivated a thick skin, which had become part of his nature as the years went by. He was unsure if he was first and foremost a Jew or a German emigrant to Argentina. Neither the Jewish religion and traditions nor the Jewish community had given him any assistance in life.

He had visited Jerusalem once, in the late 1960s. It was after the first of the wars with Egypt, and it was in no sense a pilgrimage. He’d made the journey out of curiosity and perhaps as a penance for his father, an apology for not yet having traced the man who killed him. Staying at the same hotel as Silberstein in Jerusalem was an old Jewish gentleman from Chicago, an orthodox believer, and they’d often eaten breakfast together. Isak Sadler was a friendly man. With a friendly smile that did not disguise the fact that he was still astonished at how it happened, he told Silberstein how he survived a concentration camp. When the U.S. troops arrived to liberate them, Sadler was so emaciated that he’d had to use his last reserves of strength to let the Americans know he was still alive and shouldn’t be buried. After that it seemed only natural that he should go to America and spend the rest of his life there. One morning they’d spoken about Eichmann, and discussed the principle of revenge. It had been a depressing time for Silberstein. He’d grown resigned by the end of the 1960s, and supposed that he would never be able to trace the man who’d killed his father.

However, his conversations with Sadler had given him the inspiration to take up the search once more. Sadler had argued very strongly that the execution of Eichmann had been appropriate. The hunt for German Nazis must continue for as long as there was the slightest hope of finding alive anyone who had been associated with the horrendous crimes.

When he returned from Jerusalem, Silberstein had cared no more about his Jewish origins, but he’d resumed his search and received assistance from Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, although it led to nothing. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would have to wait until Höllner appeared before he found the clue he’d been looking for.

He sat in the chalet belonging to the man named Frostengren, gazing at the mountains and valleys. He’d managed to find a needle in a haystack, and when the moment of truth came, he hadn’t hesitated. Molin was dead. Everything had gone according to plan up to that point. Then they’d found the other man, murdered in the woods outside his own house.

There were similarities between the two deaths, as if whoever killed Andersson had imitated what Silberstein had done with Molin. Two old men who lived on their own. Both had a dog. Both were killed in the open. Yet more important were the differences. He couldn’t tell how much the police had noticed, but he could see the differences because he had had nothing to do with Andersson’s death.

Silberstein looked at the mountains. Clouds of mist drifted down to the valley. He was close now to a decision. Whoever killed Andersson had tried to make it look as if the same murderer had come back to strike again. This raised an intriguing question: who knew so much about the way Molin died? Silberstein did not know what had been in the newspapers, and he had no idea what the police had revealed at the press conferences they’d presumably held.

There was another “why” that he was trying to find an answer to. The person who killed Andersson must have had a motive. A spring had been wound up, it seemed to him. When Molin died, it triggered some mechanism that meant Andersson had to be killed as well. Why, and by whom? He spent the whole day analyzing these questions from different points of view. He made lots of meals, not because he was especially hungry, but to quell his nervousness. He couldn’t help worrying that somehow, he was responsible for what happened to Andersson. Was there a secret between the two men? Was there a risk that Andersson might reveal it after Molin’s death? That must have been it. Something he hadn’t known about. Molin’s death meant that somebody had been put in danger, and therefore Andersson had to die as well to prevent the secret from coming out.

He opened the door and went outside. It smelled of damp moss. Clouds were drifting past, very low. Clouds in complete silence. He walked slowly around the wooden chalet, then once again.

Another person had appeared in the place where Molin and Andersson lived their lives. A woman. He’d seen her three times when she came to visit Molin. He’d followed them when they went for walks on forest tracks. Once, during her second visit, they’d gone towards the lake and he’d been afraid they might discover his tent. Luckily they turned back before they came to the last bend. He’d followed them through the trees, like a Boy Scout or one of those Red Indians he’d read about as a child, in the books by Edward S. Ellis. Sometimes they talked, and very occasionally they laughed.

After their walks they would go back to the house, and the dog would go wild; he would hear the sound of music. The first time he’d scarcely been able to believe his ears when he heard somebody singing in Spanish, Argentinean Spanish, with the characteristic intonation different from that in any other Spanish-speaking country. After the music, which usually lasted between half an hour and an hour, everything had been quiet. He wondered if they’d been making love. Afterwards Molin had accompanied her to where she’d parked her car. They had shaken hands, never embraced. Then she’d driven away.

He guessed that woman must have been Elsa Berggren. That was the name with those of Molin and Andersson on the back of the bill the police officer had crumpled up and dropped into the ashtray. He still wasn’t sure what the implications were. Was Berggren another old Nazi who had withdrawn to Härjedalen?

He gazed over the hills and tried to work out the possibilities. A triangle of Molin, Berggren, and Andersson. He didn’t know if Berggren also knew Andersson. Andersson and Berggren had been mere extras in the drama he’d come into the forests to enact.

He walked around the house one more time. He thought he could hear an airplane in the distance, then only the wind swishing along the sides of the mountains.

There was no other explanation, it seemed to him, but that there was some kind of link, a secret, between the three of them, just as the policeman had written on that bill. Molin was dead, so Andersson had to die as well. That left only the woman. She must be the one with the key to all this.

He went back inside. He’d taken another package of hamburgers out of the freezer, and they were thawing on the draining board. He would have to speak to the Berggren woman to find out what had happened.

In the evening, he worked out his plan. He had drawn the curtains and put the table lamp on the floor so that no light would seep out into the surrounding darkness. He sat at the table until midnight. By then he knew what he was going to do. It would be risky, but he had no choice.

Before going to bed he dialed a telephone number in Buenos Aires. The man who answered was in a hurry. He could hear the hum of conversation in the background.

“La Cãbana,” the man shouted. “Hello?”

Silberstein replaced the receiver. The restaurant was still there. Before long he’d be back at his table, next to the window overlooking the side street leading into Avenida Corrientes.

Next to the telephone was a directory in which he found Elsa Berggren’s number and an address in town. He checked the map of Sveg in the phone book and saw that it was a street on the south side of the river. He breathed a sigh of relief: he wouldn’t need to go looking for her house in the forest. The risk of being seen by someone else would be greater, of course. He wrote the address on a scrap of paper, then put the directory back where he’d found it.

He slept uneasily. He felt shattered when he woke. He stayed in bed all day, only getting up occasionally to eat some of the food he’d taken out of the freezer.

He stayed in Frostengren’s chalet for three more days, by which time he could feel his strength returning. On the morning of the fourth day he cleaned the place and waited until the afternoon before locking up and replacing the key under the stone. When he came to his car, he consulted the map again. Although it was hardly likely that the police would have set up roadblocks, he decided not to take the shortest route to Sveg. Instead, he drove north towards Vålådalen. When he came to Mittådalen he turned towards Hede and came to Sveg just as it was getting dark. He parked on the edge of the little town where there were stores and gas stations, and also an information board and a map. He found his way to Mrs. Berggren’s house. She lived in a white house surrounded by a large garden. There was a light on downstairs. He took a good look around, then returned to his car when he’d seen enough.

He still had a lot of hours to fill. He went into a supermarket, found himself a woollen hat big enough for it to be pulled down over his face, then joined the longest of the checkout lines, where the girl seemed to be the one most under pressure. He gave her exactly the right amount, and was sure as he left the store that nobody would remember what he looked like nor how he was dressed. When he got back to the car he used a knife he’d taken from Frostengren’s chalet to make holes in the hat for him to see through.

By 8 P.M. there wasn’t much traffic. He drove over the bridge and parked where his car was invisible from the road. Then he went on waiting. To pass the time, in his head he reupholstered the sofa that Don Batista wanted to give his daughter as a wedding present.

He headed out at midnight. He took with him a small axe that he had taken from the chalet. He waited until a heavy truck had gone past, then he hurried over the road and along the path down by the river.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lindman stormed out of Elena’s home in a fury at 2 A.M. Even before he reached the street his rage had subsided, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back, for all that he really wanted to. He got into his car and drove into town, but he avoided Allégatan: he didn’t want to go home, at least not yet. He pulled up at the Gustav Adolf Church and switched off the engine. The place was deserted and dark.

What actually had happened? Elena had been pleased to see him. They had sat in the kitchen and shared a bottle of wine. He’d told her about his journey and the sudden pains he’d had in Sveg. He’d told her the bare minimum about Molin and Andersson and Wetterstedt: Elena wanted to know what he’d been doing. She was very concerned about him, and her eyes betrayed her worry. They’d sat up for a long time, but she shook her head when he asked if she was tired. No, she wanted to hear everything about what he’d been up to while he was away. We shouldn’t always insist on sleeping, she said, not when there were more important things to do. Even so, after a while they’d started clearing away the table before going to bed. After washing the glasses, she’d asked him in passing if he couldn’t have called her a little more often, despite everything. Hadn’t he realized how worried she’d been?

“You know I don’t like telephones. We’ve been through that lots of times.”

“There’s nothing to stop you from calling, saying hello, and hanging up.”

“Now you’re annoying me. You’re pressuring me.”

“All I’m asking is why you don’t call me more often.”

He grabbed his jacket and stormed out. He regretted it by the time he was running downstairs. He knew he shouldn’t drive. If he were caught by the police, he would be charged with drunk driving. I’m running away, he thought. All the time I’m running away from November 19. I go wandering around the forests in Härjedalen, I break into an apartment in Kalmar, and now I drive when I’ve been drinking. My illness is dictating my actions, or rather my fear, and it’s so strong that I can’t even be with the person I’m closest to in the whole world, a woman who is totally honest and showing that she loves me.

He took out his cell phone and dialed her number.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know that. Are you coming back?”

“No. I’ll sleep at home.”

He didn’t know why he’d said that. She didn’t say anything.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, trying to sound cheerful.

“We’ll see,” she said wearily and hung up.

He switched off his cell phone and remained sitting there in the darkness. Then he left the car and walked back to Allégatan. He wondered if this is what death looked like, a solitary figure walking through the night.

He slept badly and got up at 6 A.M. No doubt Elena would be awake already. He should call her, but he didn’t feel up to it. He forced himself to eat a substantial breakfast, then went to fetch his car. There was a gusty wind blowing, and he felt the cold. He drove south out of Borås. When he came to Kinna he left the main road and drove into the town itself. He stopped outside the house where he’d grown up. He knew that the man who lived there now was a potter who had made his studio in what used to be his father’s garage and workshop. The house looked deserted in the early morning light. The branches of the tree where Lindman and his sisters used to have a swing were swaying in the strong wind. He suddenly thought that he could see his father come out of the door and walk towards him, but instead of his usual suit and gray overcoat he was wearing the uniform that hung in Berggren’s closet.

Lindman drove back to the main road and didn’t stop again until he came to Varberg. He had coffee at the café opposite the railway station, and borrowed their phone book to look up Anna Jacobi’s number. The address was in a suburb to the south of the town. Perhaps he should call first, but then Anna Jacobi or whoever answered might say that the old man didn’t want to or wasn’t well enough to be visited. He eventually found the place, after several wrong turns.

The house looked as if it had been built around the turn of the century, and stood out from the other houses, which were all modern. He opened the gate and walked down the long gravel path to the front door, which was under a veranda roof. He hesitated before ringing the bell. What am I doing? he thought. What do I expect Jacobi to tell me? He was my father’s friend. Superficially, at least. What my father really thought about Jews I can only imagine, and fear the worst. Nevertheless, he was one of the small group of well-to-do people who lived in Kinna in those days. That must have been the most important thing as far as my father was concerned, keeping the peace in that little group. I’ll never know what he really thought about Jacobi.

He decided to take the Strong Sweden Foundation as his starting point, the reason why his father had made a pledge in his will. He’d asked about it once before. Now he was coming to ask again, and if necessary he would say it had to do with Molin’s death. I’ve already been in Olausson’s office and lied through my teeth to him. I can hardly make matters any worse. He rang the doorbell.

After the second ring, the door was opened by a woman in her forties. She looked at him from behind a pair of thick glasses that magnified her pupils. He introduced himself and explained what he wanted.

“My father doesn’t receive visitors,” she said. “He’s old and ill and wants to be left in peace.”

Lindman could hear the sound of classical music from inside the house.

“My father listens to Bach every morning. In case you’re wondering. Today he asked for the third Brandenburg Concerto. He says it’s the only thing that keeps him going. Bach’s music.”

“I have something important to ask him about.”

“My father stopped dealing with anything remotely connected with work a long time ago.”

“This is personal. He once drew up a will for my father. I spoke to your father about it in connection with my father’s estate. Now the matter of a pledge in the will has come up again, in connection with a difficult legal case. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t have great significance for me personally as well.”

She shook her head. “I’ve no doubt that what you want to ask is important, but the answer has to be no even so.”

“I promise not to stay for more than a couple of minutes.”

“The answer is still no. I’m sorry.”

She took a step back before closing the door.

“Your father is old, and he’ll soon be dead. I’m young, but I might die soon as well. I have cancer. It would make it easier for me to die if I were able to ask my questions.”

Anna Jacobi stared at him from behind her thick glasses. She was using a very strong perfume that irritated Lindman’s nose.

“I assume that people don’t tell lies about fatal illnesses.”

“If you like I can give you the telephone number of my doctor in Borås.”

“I’ll ask my father. If he says no, I shall have to ask you to leave.”

Lindman agreed and she shut the door. He could still hear the music. He waited. He was beginning to think she’d closed the door for good when she came back.

“Fifteen minutes, no more,” she said. “I’ll be timing you.”

She ushered him into the house. The music was still there, but the volume had been turned down. She opened the door of a large room with bare walls, and a hospital bed in the middle.

“Speak into his left ear,” she said. “He can’t hear anything in his right one.”

She closed the door behind him. Lindman suspected he’d heard a trace of weariness or irritation in her voice when she referred to her father’s deafness. He went up to the bed. The man in it was thin and hollow-cheeked. In a way he reminded Lindman of Emil Wetterstedt. Another skeletal figure, waiting to die.

Jacobi turned his head to look at him. He gestured to a chair at the side of the bed.

“The music is nearly finished,” he said. “Please excuse me, but I regard it as a serious crime to interrupt the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

Lindman sat on the chair and waited. Jacobi had turned up the volume with a remote control, and the music echoed round the room. The old man lay listening, with his eyes closed. When the music stopped he pressed the remote control with trembling fingers, and put it on his stomach.

“I shall die soon,” he said. “I think it has been a great blessing to live after Bach. I have my own way of measuring time, and I divide history into the age before Bach and the age after him. An author whose name I’ve forgotten has written poems about that. I am being granted the enormous privilege of spending my last days to the accompaniment of his music.”

He adjusted his head on the pillows.

“Now the music has finished and we can talk. What was it you wanted?”

“My name is Stefan Lindman.”

“My daughter has already told me that,” Jacobi said, impatiently. “I remember your father. I drew up his will. That was what you wanted to discuss, but I don’t know how you can expect me to remember the terms of an individual will. I must have drawn up at least a thousand during my forty-seven years as a practicing attorney.”

“It has to do with a donation to a foundation called Strong Sweden.”

“I might remember. But I might not.”

“It transpires that the foundation is part of a Nazi organization here in Sweden.”

Jacobi drummed his fingers on his quilt. “Nazism died with Hitler.”

“It appears that a lot of people in Sweden still support this organization. And the fact is that young people are joining it.”

Jacobi looked hard at him. “Some people collect stamps. Others collect matchbox labels. I regard it as not impossible that there are some people who collect obsolete political ideals. People have always wasted their lives doing pointless things. Nowadays people drop dead while staring at all those trivial and degrading television series that go on forever.”

“My father pledged money to this organization. You knew him. Was he a Nazi?”

“I knew your father as a proud and patriotic Swede. No more than that.”

“And my mother?”

“I didn’t have much contact with her. Is she still alive?”

“No, she died some time ago.”

Jacobi cleared his throat. “Precisely why have you come here?”

“To ask if my father was a Nazi.”

“What makes you think I could answer that question?”

“There are not many people still alive who can. I don’t know anybody else.”

“I’ve already given you my answer, but of course, I wonder why you have come to disturb me and ask me your question.”

“I discovered his name in a membership list. I didn’t know he’d been a Nazi.”

“What sort of membership list?”

“I’m not sure, but it contained more than a thousand names. Many of them were already dead, but they were continuing to pay their subscriptions by leaving money for that purpose in their wills, or by way of their surviving relatives.”

“But the association or organization... what did you say it was called? Strong Sweden?”

“It seems to be some sort of foundation that is a part of a bigger organization. What that is, I don’t know.”

“Where did you find all this?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that for the time being.”

“But your father was a member?”

“Yes.”

Jacobi licked his lips. Lindman interpreted that as an attempt to smile.

“In the 1930s and ’40s Sweden was teeming with Nazis. Not least in the legal profession. It wasn’t only the great master Bach who came from Germany. In Sweden, ideals — be they literary, musical, or political — have always come from Germany. Until the period following World War II. Things changed then, and all the ideals started coming from the USA. However, just because Hitler led his country to a catastrophic defeat doesn’t mean that ideas about an Aryan superman or hatred of Jews died out. They survived among the generation that had been indoctrinated when they were young. It’s possible that your father was one of them, perhaps your mother also. No one can be certain that those ideals will not rise again, like the phoenix.”

Jacobi fell silent, short of breath after the effort he’d made. The door opened and in came Anna Jacobi. She gave her father a glass of water.

“Your time’s up,” she said.

Lindman stood up.

“Have you received the answer you were looking for?” asked Jacobi.

“I’m trying to work it out,” Lindman said.

“My daughter said you were ill.”

“I’ve got cancer.”

“Terminal?”

Jacobi asked the question in an unexpectedly jocular tone, as if, despite everything, he could be happy that death wasn’t the exclusive priority of old men who spent the last of their days listening to Bach.

“I hope not.”

“Of course. Still, death is the shadow we can never get away from. One day that shadow turns into a wild beast that we can no longer keep at bay.”

“I hope to be cured.”

“If not, I recommend Bach. The only medicine worth taking. It provides comfort, eases a bit of the pain, and gives a certain degree of courage.”

“I shall remember that. Thank you for your time.”

Jacobi didn’t answer. He had closed his eyes. Lindman left the room.

“I think he’s in pain,” his daughter said at the front door. “But he refuses to take painkillers. He says he can’t listen to music if he’s not thinking straight.”

“What illness is he suffering from?”

“Old age and despair. That’s all.”

Lindman shook hands and said goodbye.

“I hope things turn out okay for you,” she said. “That you’ll be cured.”

Lindman went back to his car. He had to duck from the wind. What do I do now? he wondered. I go see an old man close to death and try to find out why my father was a Nazi. I discover only that he was a proud and patriotic Swede. I can get in touch with my sisters and ask what they knew, or I can see how they react when I tell them. But then what? What can I do with the answers I get? He got into the car and looked across the street. A woman was struggling to steer a stroller into the wind. He watched her until she was out of sight. This is all that’s left to me, he thought. An isolated moment in my car, parked in a street in a suburb south of Varberg. I’ll never come back here, I’ll soon have forgotten the name of the street and what the house looked like.

He took out his cell phone to call Elena. There was a message for him. Larsson had phoned. He called his number.

“Where are you?” he said.

It struck Lindman that in the age of the cell phone, this had become the standard greeting. You started by asking where people were.

“I’m in Varberg.”

“How are you?”

“Not too bad.”

“I just wanted to tell you about the latest developments. Have you got time?”

“I have all the time in the world.”

Larsson laughed. “Nobody has that. Anyway, we’ve made a little progress regarding the weapons used. In Molin’s case there was a whole arsenal. Shotgun, tear gas canisters, God only knows what else. They must have been stolen from someplace. We’ve been chasing reported cases of weapons thefts, but we still don’t know where they came from. But one thing we do know. It was a different gun that killed Andersson. The forensic boys have no doubt about that. It means we’re now faced with something we weren’t really expecting.”

“Two different murderers?”

“Exactly.”

“It could still be the same one even so.”

“It could. But we can’t ignore the other possibility. And I can tell you something else as well. Somebody reported a burglary in Säter yesterday. The owner had been away for a week. When he got back home he found that he’d been burgled and a gun had been stolen. He reported it to the police, and we found out about it when we started making inquiries. It could have been the gun used to kill Andersson. It’s the right caliber. But we have no tabs on the thief.”

“How was the break-in done? The way they do it always says something about the burglar.”

“A front door forced, neat and tidy. The same applies to the gun cabinet. Not an amateur, in other words.”

“Somebody getting himself a gun, with a specific job in mind?”

“That’s more or less the way I see it.”

Lindman tried to envision the map.

“Am I right in thinking that Säter is in Dalarna?”

“The road from Avesta and Hedemora goes through Säter to Borlänge and then up to Härjedalen.”

“Somebody drives up from the south, gets himself a gun on the way, then keeps on going until he comes to Andersson’s house.”

“That’s what could have happened. We don’t have a motive, though. And the murder of Andersson really worries me if it transpires that we have a different murderer. We might well ask ourselves what on earth is going on. Is this the beginning of something that has some way to go yet before it’s finished?”

“You think there could be more acts of violence in store?”

Larsson roared with laughter again.

“Acts of violence. Police officers do have a special way of expressing themselves. I sometimes think that’s why the criminal is generally one step ahead. He calls a spade a spade, but we have to find some roundabout way of describing it.”

“All right, but what you are expecting is more murders?”

“If we have two different weapons, there’s an increased likelihood that we could have two different murderers. Are you driving or are you standing still, by the way?”

“I’m parked.”

“In that case I’ll tell you a little more about the way we’re thinking. The first thing, of course, is the dog. Who took it and then put it in Molin’s pen? And why? We now know that it was taken from Andersson’s house by car. We haven’t a clue why.”

“It might be a macabre joke.”

“Could be. But the folks up here aren’t all that inclined to partake in what you call macabre jokes. People are really upset and indignant. That’s obvious when we knock on doors and talk to people. They really are eager to help.”

“It’s very strange that nobody seems to have seen anything.”

“We’ve had a few vague reports, a car that somebody might have seen, that sort of thing. Nothing definite. Nothing to give us a clear lead.”

“What about Berggren?”

“Rundström took her to Östersund. Spent a whole day questioning her. She stuck to the same story. The same disgusting opinions, but very clear on key matters. She has no idea who might have killed Molin. She’d only met Andersson once, very briefly, when she was visiting Molin and Andersson happened to stop by. We’ve even given her house the once-over to see if she had any weapons. Nothing. I think she’d tell us if she was frightened of somebody coming after her as well.”

There was a grating noise in the telephone. Lindman shouted “Hello” several times before Larsson’s voice returned.

“I start to think that this is going to take time. I’m worried.”

“Have you found any link between Andersson and Molin?” Lindman asked.

“We’re digging away. According to Andersson’s widow, he only ever mentioned Molin as a neighbor, one of several. We have no reason to suspect that isn’t true. That’s about as far as we’ve got.”

“What about the diary?”

“What about it precisely?”

“His journey to Scotland. The person referred to as ‘M.’ ”

“I can’t see why we should give that priority.”

“I just wondered.”

Larsson sneezed comprehensively. Lindman held his cell phone at arm’s length, as if the germs might fly through the ether and attack him.

“Sorry about that. The usual autumn cold. I always catch one about now.”

Lindman took a deep breath, then told him about his experiences in Kalmar and on Öland. He said nothing about the break-in, but he stressed Wetterstedt’s Nazi views. When he’d finished there was so long a silence at the other end, he started to wonder if he’d been cut off.

“I’ll suggest to Rundström that we should bring in the national criminal investigation department,” Larsson eventually said. “They have a section that specializes in terrorists and neo-Nazis. I can’t believe that what we’re up against here can be traced back to a few skinheads, but you never know.”

Lindman said he thought it was a sensible move, and then he finished up the call. He felt hungry. He drove into Varberg and found a restaurant. When he got back to the car he found it had been burgled. Instinctively he felt in his jacket pocket. His cell phone was still there. But the car radio had been stolen. And the central locking system was broken. He cursed as he climbed into the driving seat. He should report it to the police, but he knew the thief would not be caught and that the police would devote no more than a strictly rationed portion of time to the case. The police were overworked everywhere. He also knew that the excess on his insurance policy was such that he might just as well buy a new radio. There was the problem of the central locking system, but he had a friend who helped the police with car repairs on the side.

He started for Borås. He could feel the wind buffeting the car. The countryside looked gray and desolate. Autumn is setting in, winter is approaching, he thought. And November 19 was approaching too. If only time could be cut off, and he could advance to the day after the beginning of his treatment.

He had just driven into Borås when his phone rang. He wondered if he should answer. It was bound to be Elena. Then again, he couldn’t keep her waiting any longer. One of these days she’d get fed up with the way he was forever running away, always putting his own needs before hers. He pulled onto the side and answered.

It was Veronica Molin.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you. Where are you?”

“In Borås. You’re not disturbing me.”

“Have you got time?”

“I have time. Where are you?”

“In Sveg.”

“Waiting for the funeral?”

Her reply seemed hesitant. “Not only that. I got your number from Inspector Larsson. The policeman who claims to be investigating the murder of my father.”

She made no attempt to conceal her contempt. That made him angry.

“Larsson is one of the best police officers I’ve ever met.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to come here.”

Her response had been swift and definite.

“Why?”

“I think I know what happened, but I don’t want to discuss it over the phone.”

“You shouldn’t be talking to me. You should call Larsson. I have nothing to do with the investigation.”

“Just at the moment you are the only person I know who can possibly help me. I’ll pay for your flight here and all the rest of your costs. But I want you to come. As soon as possible.”

“Are you saying you know who killed your father?”

“I think so.”

“And Andersson?”

“That has to have been somebody else. But there’s another reason why I want you to come. I’m frightened.”

“Why are you frightened?”

“I don’t want to talk about that on the phone either. I want you to come here. I’ll be in touch again in a couple of hours.”

The phone went dead. Lindman drove home and went back to his apartment. He still hadn’t called Elena. He thought over what Veronica Molin had said. Why didn’t she want to talk to Larsson? And what could she possibly be frightened of?

He waited in his apartment. Two hours later, the phone rang again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lindman landed at Östersund Airport at 10:25 A.M. the following day. When Veronica Molin called him the second time he’d been determined to say no. He was not going to come back to Härjedalen and there was nothing he could do to help her. He was also going to inform her tersely and clearly that it was her obligation to talk to the local police, if not to Giuseppe Larsson then to someone else, Rundström perhaps.

When the call came, however, nothing went according to plan. She came straight to the point, asking him if he wanted to go or not. He said yes. Then when he’d started asking his various questions, she’d been evasive and said she didn’t want to discuss it over the telephone. She hung up after they had agreed to meet in Sveg the following day. He had asked her to book a room for him, preferably No. 3 as before.

He went to the window and looked out at the street. He wondered what was making him act the way he did. The fear digging at him, the illness he was trying to keep at bay? Or was it Elena that he couldn’t deal with? He didn’t know. The day he heard he had cancer, everything had been put out of joint. On top of everything else he was thinking about his father all the time. It’s not Molin’s past that I’m tracking down, he told himself. It’s my own past, the truth about something I didn’t know until I broke into Wetterstedt’s apartment in Kalmar.

He’d called Landvetter Airport, checked flight times, and booked a ticket. Then he’d called Elena, who was subdued and noncommittal. He went to her apartment at 7:15 and stayed until the next morning, when he’d been forced to go home, throw some clothes into a bag, and then drive the 40 kilometers to Landvetter. They had made love during the night, but it was as if he hadn’t really been there. Perhaps she had not noticed; she hadn’t said anything. Nor had she asked why he suddenly had to go back to Härjedalen. When they said goodbye in her hall, he could feel her trying to envelop him in her love. He’d tried to suppress his worries, but as he drove back to Allégatan through the deserted streets he didn’t feel that he’d succeeded. Something was happening inside him, like a cloud of mist creeping up on him and threatening to choke him. He was in a panic, afraid that he was losing Elena, forcing her to desert him for her own sake.

When he walked down the airplane steps at Frösön he felt the fierce cold. The ground was white with frost. He rented a car — Veronica Molin would pay for it. He had intended to go straight to Sveg, but changed his mind when he drove onto the bridge from Frösön to Östersund. It was unacceptable not to tell Larsson that he’d come back. What reason should he give? Veronica Molin had contacted him confidentially, but he didn’t want to keep it from Larsson. He had enough problems already.

He parked outside the National Rural Agency but stayed in the car. What should he say to Larsson? He couldn’t tell him the whole truth. On the other hand, he didn’t want to tell a complete lie, even if he had become quite good at it lately. He could come out with a half-truth. Say that he couldn’t handle being in Borås, that he preferred to be somewhere else until the radiation therapy actually started. Someone with his illness had the right to be restless and to change his mind.

He went to the reception desk and asked for Larsson. The girl recognized him from his earlier visit, smiled, and said that Larsson was in a meeting but it would be over soon. Lindman took a seat and thumbed through the local paper. The murder investigation was front-page news. Rundström had held a press conference the previous day. It was largely concerned with the weapon, and there was a new appeal for witnesses. No reference to what the police already knew. Nothing about certain makes of car or individuals moving around in the area. The articles implied that the police were marking time and had nothing to go on. Larsson appeared in reception at 11:30 A.M. He was unshaven and looked tired and worried.

“I should say that I’m surprised to see you, but nothing surprises me at the moment.” He looked more resigned than Lindman had ever seen him before. They went to his office, and he closed the door behind them. Lindman said what he’d made up his mind to say, that he’d come back because he couldn’t settle down in Borås. Larsson eyed him sternly.

“Do you go bowling?” Larsson said.

“Do I go bowling?”

“I do, when I feel restless. I sometimes find it difficult to cope too. Don’t underestimate bowling. It’s best to play with a few friends. The pins you knock over can either be your enemies, or problems you can’t solve that are getting you down.”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Take it as a friendly suggestion. Nothing more.”

“How’s it going?”

“I saw you reading the local rag. We’ve just had a meeting of the investigative team. Wheels are turning, routines are being followed, everybody’s digging away for all they’re worth. Nevertheless, what Rundström told the reporter is true: we’re getting nowhere.”

“Are there two murderers?”

“Presumably. That’s what the evidence suggests.”

“That doesn’t have to mean that the crimes have different motives.”

Larsson agreed. “That’s what we thought. And then there is the business about the dog. I don’t think it’s a macabre joke: I think it’s a conscious effort to tell us something.”

“What, for example?”

“I don’t know. The fact that we realize that somebody is trying to tell us something has created a sort of constructive chaos. We’re forced to accept that there aren’t any simple answers — not that we ever thought there were.”

Someone laughed in the corridor outside. Then it was quiet again.

“There was a sort of fury about it all,” Larsson said. “About both murders. In Molin’s case an insane fury. Somebody drags him around in a bloodstained tango, lashes him to death, and leaves him in the forest. There was anger behind the death of Andersson as well. More controlled. No dead dogs. No bloodstained dance. But an ice-cold execution. I wonder if these two crimes, displaying such different temperaments, can possibly have been hatched in the same brain. Molin’s murder was meticulously planned. Not least your discovery of the campsite makes that clear. But Andersson’s is different. So far I can’t quite work out how.”

It was obvious that Larsson wanted to know Lindman’s opinion.

“If the murders are linked, and if it’s the same murderer, I suppose we have to assume that something happened subsequently that made it necessary for him to kill Andersson.”

“I agree. My colleagues don’t. Or it could be that I haven’t been able to express myself clearly enough. Anyway, I still think the most likely explanation is two different murderers.”

“It’s strange that nobody’s reported anything. The whole community must be as alert as they are fearful.”

“I’ve been playing this game for many years, but I can’t ever remember knocking on so many doors and making so many appeals without hearing so much as a squeak in response. Generally speaking, there’s always somebody peering out from behind their curtains and noticing something different from the usual village routine.”

“Not hearing anything is also significant, of course. You’re dealing with people who know exactly what they’re doing. Even when a plan goes wrong they can still find a way out very fast, in cold blood.”

“You’re saying ‘them.’ ”

“I’m wavering between one murderer and some kind of plot involving more than one.”

There was a knock on the door. A young man in a leather jacket and with highlights in his dark hair marched in before Larsson had time to respond. He nodded to Lindman and put a bundle of papers down on the desk.

“The latest from the house-to-house operation.”

“Well?”

“A crazy old bat from Glöte claims the murderer lives in Visby.”

“Why?”

“Mostly because the Swedish Lottery has its headquarters there. She thinks the Swedish nation is being attacked by insane gamblers. Half the population is running around and killing off the other half to make it easier for them to submit their lottery tickets. That’s your pile.”

The door closed behind him.

“He’s new,” Larsson said. “New, confident, and dyes his hair. He’s a recruit of the type that goes out of his way to stress that he’s young and the rest of us are ancient. He’ll be okay when he grows up.”

He stood up.

“I like talking to you,” he said. “You listen, and you ask the questions I need to hear. I’d like to go on a little longer, but I have an appointment with the forensic boys that can’t wait.”

Larsson went with him as far as reception.

“How long are you thinking of staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“The same hotel in Sveg?”

“Is there another one?”

“A good question. I don’t know. There should be a bed-and-breakfast, I suppose.”

Lindman remembered a question he’d almost let slip. “Have they released Molin’s body for burial yet?”

“I can find out, if you like. I’ll be in touch.”

Driving to Sveg, he remembered what Larsson had said about bowling. He stopped just north of Överberg and got out. It was completely calm and chilly. The ground under his feet was hard. I’m giving way to self-pity, he thought. I’m locking myself up in doom and gloom, and it’s not doing me any good. I’m usually a cheerful type, not at all like the man I seem to be right now. Larsson is quite right when he goes on about bowling. I don’t have to ever aim a single bowling bowl at a row of pins, but I have to take what he’s trying to tell me seriously. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m going to overcome this illness, but at the same time I’m doing my best to play the role of a man on death row, beyond hope.

By the time he got to Sveg, he was wishing he had never come. He had to resist the urge to drive past the hotel, return to Östersund, and fly back to Borås and Elena as quickly as possible. He parked and went into the hotel. The girl at the reception desk seemed pleased to see him.

“I thought you wouldn’t be able to drag yourself away,” she chuckled.

Lindman laughed. It sounded far too shrill and loud. Even my laughter is telling lies, he thought.

“I’ve given you your old room,” the girl said. “Number 3. There’s a message for you from Ms. Molin.”

“Is she in?”

“No. She said she’d be back around 4 P.M.”

He went up to his room. It was as if he’d never left. He went into the bathroom, opened his mouth wide, and stuck out his tongue. Nobody dies of tongue cancer, he thought. It will turn out all right. I’ll take my course of radiation therapy, and I’ll be okay. Everything will be okay. There will come a time when I look back on this period of my life as a mere interlude, a sort of nightmare, nothing more.

He consulted his address book and found the telephone number of his sister in Helsinki. He listened to her recorded message, and left one of his own with his cell phone number. He didn’t have the number of his other sister, who was married and lived in France, and he couldn’t be bothered to track it down. Nor was he sure he would be able to spell her name correctly.

He looked at the bed. If I lie down I’ll die, he thought. He took off his shirt, moved a table out of the way, and started doing push-ups. He felt like giving up when he got as far as twenty-five, but he forced himself to go on to forty. He sat on the floor and took his pulse. 170. Far too high. He decided he’d have to start exercising. Every day, regardless of the weather, regardless of how he felt. He rummaged through his bag. He’d forgotten his sneakers. He put on his shirt and jacket and went out. He found his way to the one sports shop in Sveg. There was a very limited selection of athletic shoes, but he found a pair that fitted him. Then he went to the pizzeria for a meal. He could hear a radio in the background. He pricked up his ears when he heard Larsson’s voice. He was making another appeal, asking the public to get in touch with the police if they had noticed anything unusual or had any information, etc., etc. They really are in a bind, Lindman thought. He wondered if the murders would ever be solved.

He went for a walk after his meal. North this time, past a museum comprising several old houses, and then past the hospital. He walked fast so as to exert himself. He heard music playing in his mind’s ear. It was some time before he realized it was the music he’d heard at Jacobi’s. Johann Sebastian Bach. He kept going until he’d left Sveg far behind him.

He took a shower, then went down to reception. Veronica Molin was waiting for him. He noticed again what a good-looking woman she was.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“The alternative was bowling.”

She looked at him in surprise, then laughed.

“I’m glad you didn’t say golf. I’ve never understood men who play golf.”

“I’ve never touched a golf club in my life.”

She looked around the lobby. Some test drivers had just come in, declaring in loud voices that it was high time for a beer.

“I don’t normally invite men to my room,” she said, “but at least we can be left in peace there.”

Her room was on the ground floor, at the end of the corridor. It was different from Lindman’s — bigger, for a start. He wondered what it must be like for somebody used to staying in five-star hotels all over the world to adjust to the simplicity of a hotel in Sveg. He remembered her saying that she’d heard about her father’s death in a room with a view of the cathedral in Cologne. From the window in this room she could see the Ljusnan River and beyond it the wooded hills of Härjedalen. Perhaps this view is as beautiful, he thought, and in its way as impressive as Cologne Cathedral.

There were two armchairs in the room. She’d switched on the bedside lamp and directed it away from them so that the room was dimly lit. He smelled her perfume. He wondered how she would react if he were to tell her that what he most wanted to do just now was to remove all her clothes and make love to her. Would she be surprised? She was no doubt aware of the effect she had on men.

“You asked me to be here,” he said. “I’d like to hear what you have to tell me. That said, this conversation shouldn’t be taking place. You should be talking to Inspector Larsson, or one of his colleagues. I have nothing to do with the investigation.”

“I know. But I want to talk to you even so.”

Lindman could see that she was agitated. He waited.

“I’ve been trying to understand,” she said. “Who would have had any reason for killing my father? It was beyond all comprehension at first. It seemed as if somebody had raised his hand and brought it crashing down on my father’s head for no reason. I could see no motive at all. I was stunned. I don’t usually react like that. In my work I come up against crises every day, crises that can develop into commercial catastrophes if I don’t stay absolutely calm and make sure I’m influenced by nothing but the facts in whatever I do. The feeling passed. I was eventually able to think rationally again. And I started remembering.” She looked at him. “I read that diary,” she said. “What was in it came as a shock.”

“You mean you knew nothing about his past?”

“Nothing at all. I told you that.”

“Have you spoken to your brother?”

“He didn’t know anything either.”

Her voice was strangely toneless. Lindman felt an odd sensation of uncertainty. He concentrated harder, and leaned forward so that he could see her face more clearly.

“Naturally, it was a bolt from the sky to discover that my father had been a volunteer in Hitler’s army. Not just paying lip service to it, but very much an active Nazi. I was ashamed. I hated him. Mostly because he’d never said anything.”

Lindman wondered if he was ashamed of his own father. He didn’t think he’d come that far yet. He was in a very peculiar situation, though. He and the woman opposite him had made the same discovery about their fathers.

“Anyway, it dawned on me that there might be an explanation in that diary for why he was killed.”

A truck rumbled past in the street outside. Lindman waited eagerly for what was coming next.

“How well do you remember what was in it?” she asked.

“Pretty well. Not all the details and dates, of course.”

“He describes a journey to Scotland.”

Lindman remembered that. The long walks with “M.”

“It was a long time ago. I wasn’t very old, but I do remember my father going to Scotland to see a woman. I think her name was Monica, but I’m not sure. He’d met her in Borås and she was also a police officer, but quite a bit younger, I think. There’d been some kind of an exchange between Sweden and Scotland. They fell in love. My mother knew nothing about it. Not then at least. Anyway, he went to meet her. And he cheated her.”

“How?”

She shook her head impatiently. “I’m telling this at my own pace. It’s difficult enough as it is. He tricked her out of some money. I don’t know what he told her, of course, but he borrowed money from her, large sums of money. And he never paid it back. My father had a weakness. He was a gambler. Mostly on horses. Cards too, I think. Anyway, he lost. All her money went down the drain. She demanded the money back. There was nothing about it in writing, apparently. He refused. She came to Borås once, that’s how I know about this. She appeared at the door one evening; it was winter. My mother was at home, and my father and me. I don’t know where my brother was. Anyway, there she was at the door and, although he tried to prevent her, she forced her way into the house and told my mother everything, and she yelled at my father, threatening to kill him if he didn’t return the money. I’d learned enough English to be able to understand what they were saying. My mother collapsed and my father was wild with rage, or maybe it was fear. She promised she’d kill him in the end, no matter how long it took. I remember distinctly what she said.”

“So you’re suggesting that after all those years she came here to exact vengeance?”

“That must be what happened.”

Lindman shook his head. It seemed to him grossly improbable. In his diary Molin had described the Scotland trip in a way that didn’t fit in at all with what he’d just heard.

“You have to tell the police about your theory. They’ll look into it. As for myself, I can’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“It simply doesn’t sound credible.”

“Aren’t most violent crimes incredible?”

Someone walked past in the corridor. They waited until all was quiet again.

“I have a question that you have to answer,” Lindman said. “Why don’t you want to tell this to Inspector Larsson?”

“I want to and I shall tell him, but I wanted your advice first.”

“Why me?”

“Because I have confidence in you.”

“What kind of advice do you think I can give you?”

“How can I prevent the truth about my father from coming out? That he was a Nazi?”

“If it has nothing to do with the murder, there’s no reason for the police or the prosecution to make any such information public.”

“I’m frightened of reporters. They’ve chased me before and I never want to go through that again. I was involved in the complicated merger of two banks in Singapore and England. Something went wrong. The reporters came after me because they knew that I was one of those most involved.”

“I don’t think you need to worry. That said, I don’t agree with you.”

“About what?”

“That the truth shouldn’t be told about your father. The old form of Nazism is dead. And yet it’s still alive, and growing, in new forms. If you turn over the right rocks, they come teeming out. Racists, ‘supermen.’ All the creatures who look for inspiration from the garbage dumps of history.”

“Can I at least prevent the diary from being published?”

“Presumably. But there may be others who decide to dig deeper.”

“What do you mean, others?”

“Me, perhaps.”

She leaned back in her chair. Her face disappeared in the shadows. Lindman regretted what he’d said.

“But I won’t be digging into it. I’m a police officer, not a journalist. You don’t need to worry about that.”

She stood up. “You made a long journey for my sake,” she said. “And I am afraid it wasn’t necessary. I could have asked you over the telephone. The trouble is that for once, I’ve lost a little of my usual presence of mind. My work is sensitive. My employers might abandon me if I were tainted by rumors. After all, the man lying dead in the forest was my father. My belief is that the woman called M. is behind it all. I have no idea who would have killed the other man.”

Lindman gestured to the phone. “You should call Inspector Larsson.”

He stood up.

“When are you leaving?” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“Can’t we have dinner together? That’s the least I can do for you.”

“I only hope they’ve changed the menu.”

“7:30?”

“That suits me fine.”

She was reserved and distant during dinner. Lindman could feel himself getting testy. Partly because she had persuaded him to make this absurdly unnecessary journey on account of her exaggerated anxiety, and partly because he couldn’t avoid being attracted to her.

They said goodbye in the lobby, with hardly a word exchanged. She said she would send a check to his office in Borås to cover his costs, and went to her room. Lindman fetched his jacket and went out. He’d asked if she’d called Larsson. She said she had but that she couldn’t get through, and would try again.

As he walked through the deserted town, he thought about what she’d said. The story about the woman in Scotland could conceivably be true, but he refused to believe that after all those years she’d come to Sweden to take her revenge. It didn’t make sense.

Without realizing it, he’d reached the old railroad bridge. He thought it was time to return to the hotel, but something made him keep walking. He crossed the bridge and turned onto Berggren’s street. There were lights in two of the ground-floor windows. He was about to walk past when he thought he noticed a shadowy figure disappearing rapidly around one of the gable walls. He frowned. Stood still, peering into the darkness. Then he opened the gate and approached the house. He stopped to listen. Not a sound. He pressed himself against the wall and peered around the corner. Nobody there. He must have been imagining things. He crept around to the back of the house, keeping to the shadows. Nobody there either.

He never heard the footsteps behind him. Something struck the back of his neck. He was on the ground and the last thing he felt was a pair of hands tightening around his throat. Then nothing. Only darkness.