The Troubled Man

Epilogue

One night in May 2009 Wallander woke up from a dream. That was happening more and more often. All the memories of the night lived on when he opened his eyes. Until recently he rarely remembered his dreams. Jussi, who had been ill, was asleep on the floor by his bed. The clock on the bedside table said four-fifteen. Perhaps it wasn’t just the dream that had woken him up. Perhaps the calling of an owl had drifted in through the open window and into his consciousness — it wouldn’t be the first time.

But now there was no owl calling. He had dreamed about Linda and the conversation they should have had the day he returned from Blue Island. In his dream he had in fact called her and told her what had happened. She had listened without saying anything. And that was all. The dream had broken off abruptly, like a rotten branch.

He woke up feeling very uncomfortable. He hadn’t called her at all, in fact. He hadn’t had the strength to do it. His excuse was simple. He hadn’t played a part in the tragedy, and calling her would only have led to an unbearable situation as far as he was concerned; if he gave her an exact version of events, he would be suspected of having been involved. Only when the tragedy became public knowledge would she and Hans discover what had happened. And with a bit of luck, he would be able to stay out of it.

Wallander thought that this case was among the worst experiences of his life. The only thing he could compare it to was the incident many years ago when he killed a man for the first time in the line of duty, and seriously wondered if he could continue as a police officer. He considered doing what Martinsson had now done: throw in the towel as a policeman and devote himself to something entirely different.

Wallander leaned carefully over the side of the bed and checked on his dog. Jussi was asleep. He was also dreaming, scratching in the air with his front paws. Wallander leaned back in bed again. The air drifting in through the window was refreshing. He kicked off the duvet. His thoughts wandered to the bundle of papers lying on the kitchen table. He had started writing a report last September, noting down everything that had happened and culminating in the tragedy in the hunting lodge on Blue Island.

It was Eskil Lundberg who found the dead bodies. Ytterberg had immediately called in the CID in Norrköping to assist. Since it was a matter for the security police and the military intelligence service, an embargo had been immediately imposed on all aspects of the investigation, and everything was shrouded in secrecy. Wallander was informed by Ytterberg of whatever he was allowed to pass on, in strict confidence. The whole time, Wallander worried about the possibility of his own presence at the scene being discovered. What concerned him most was whether Nordlander had told his wife about the trip he was going to make, but evidently he hadn’t. With great reluctance Wallander read in the newspapers about Mrs. Nordlander’s despair over her husband’s death and her refusal to believe that he had killed his old friend and then shot himself.

Ytterberg occasionally complained to Wallander about the fact that not even he, the man in charge of the police investigation, knew what was going on behind the scenes. But there was no doubt that Sten Nordlander had killed Håkan von Enke using two shots to the head, and had then shot himself. What was mysterious and what nobody could explain was how Sten Nordlander had come to Blue Island. Ytterberg said on several occasions that he suspected a third party had been involved, but who that could have been and what role he or she played he had no idea. The real motive for the tragedy was also something that nobody could work out.

The newspapers and other media were full of speculation. They wallowed in the bloody drama played out in the hunting lodge. Linda and Hans and Klara had almost been forced to move in order to avoid all the inquisitive journalists and their intrusive questions. The wildest of the conspiracy theorists maintained that Håkan von Enke and Sten Nordlander had taken to their graves a secret linked to the death of Olof Palme.

Occasionally during his conversations with Ytterberg, Wallander had asked cautiously, almost out of politeness, how things were going with regard to the suspicions that Louise von Enke could have been a Russian spy. Ytterberg had only extremely meager information to give him.

“I have the impression that everything is at a standstill as far as she is concerned,” he said. “What facts the security police are looking for, or trying to suppress, I have no idea. We might have to wait until some investigative journalist goes to town on that.”

Wallander never heard a word about the possibility of Håkan von Enke’s being a spy for the U.S.A. There were no suspicions, no rumors, no speculations that this might be the cause of what had happened. Wallander once asked Ytterberg point-blank if there were any such theories. Ytterberg had been totally incredulous.

“Why in God’s name should he have been a U.S. spy?”

“I’m just trying to think of any possible explanation for what happened,” Wallander said. “Given there have been suspicions that Louise was spying for the Russians, why not try a different possibility?”

“I think I’d have heard if the security police or military intelligence had any suspicions of that sort.”

“I was only thinking aloud,” said Wallander.

“Do you know something I don’t?” Ytterberg suddenly asked with an unexpected edge to his voice.

“No,” said Wallander. “I don’t know anything you don’t.”

It was after that conversation that Wallander began writing. He collected all his thoughts, all his notes, and invented a system of Post-its that he stuck up on one of the living room walls. But every time Linda came to visit him, with or without Hans and Klara, he took them down. He wanted to write his story without the involvement of anybody else, and without anyone’s even suspecting what he was doing.

He began by trying to tie up the remaining loose ends. It wasn’t difficult to check that “USG Enterprises,” whose name he had seen in the entrance hall of the building where George Talboth lived, was the name of a consultancy firm. There was no indication that it wasn’t aboveboard. But he couldn’t work out who had broken into his house while he was away, nor who could have visited Niklasgården. It was obvious that they were people who had assisted Håkan von Enke in some way, but Wallander never established why they did it. Even if the most likely explanation was that they were looking for what Wallander called Signe’s book. It was lying on the kitchen table as he wrote, but otherwise he continued to hide it in Jussi’s kennel.

It wasn’t long before it dawned on him what he was really doing. He was writing about himself and his own life just as much as about Håkan von Enke. When he returned in his thoughts to everything he had heard about the Cold War, the divided attitude of the Swedish armed forces to neutrality and not joining alliances or the necessity of being an integrated part of NATO, he realized how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in. It was impossible to catch up on the knowledge he hadn’t bothered to acquire earlier. What he could learn now about that world obviously had to be from the perspective of somebody in the present looking back in time. He wondered grimly if that might be typical of his generation. An unwillingness to care about the real world they lived in, the political circumstances that were shifting all the time. Or had his generation been split? Between those who cared, and those who didn’t?

His father had often been better informed than Wallander on all kinds of events, he could see that now. It wasn’t only the episode with Tage Erlander and his speech in the People’s Park in Malmö. He also recalled a time in the early 1970s when his father had told him off for not bothering to vote in the election that had taken place a few days earlier. Wallander could still remember his father’s fury, how he had called him “an idle idiot when it comes to politics” before throwing a paintbrush at him and telling him to get out of his sight. Which he had done, of course. At the time he just thought his father was weird. Why should Wallander care about the way Swedish politicians were always arguing with one another? The only things that were of any interest to him were lower taxes and higher wages, nothing else.

He often sat at his kitchen table and wondered if his closest friends thought the same way. Not interested in politics, only worried about their own circumstances. On the few occasions he ever talked about politics it was mainly a matter of attacking individual politicians, complaining about their idiotic shenanigans without moving on to the next stage and wondering what the alternatives were.

There had been only one short period when he thought seriously about the political situation in Sweden, Europe, and perhaps even the world. That was nearly twenty years ago, in connection with the brutal double murder of an elderly farming couple in Lenarp. Fingers were pointed at illegal immigrants or asylum-seekers, and Wallander had been forced to face up to his own opinions on the massive immigration into Sweden. He realized that behind his usual peaceful and tolerant exterior lurked dark, even racist, views. The realization had surprised and scared him. He had eliminated all such thoughts. But after that investigation, which had come to its remarkable conclusion in the market square at Kivik, where the two murderers had been arrested, he sank back into his political apathy.

He visited the Ystad library several times during the fall and borrowed books about Swedish postwar history. He read about all the discussions concerning whether or not Sweden should acquire nuclear weapons or join NATO. Despite the fact that he was reaching adulthood when some of these debates were taking place, he had no recollection of reacting to what the politicians were talking about. It was as if he had been living in a glass bubble.

On one occasion he told Linda about how he had started to examine his past. It turned out that she had much more interest in political matters than he did. He was surprised — he’d never noticed it before. She merely commented that a person’s political awareness wasn’t something that necessarily showed on the surface.

“When did you ever ask me a political question?” she asked. “Why would I discuss politics with you when I know you’re not interested?”

“What does Hans say?”

“He knows a lot about the world. But we don’t always agree.”

Wallander often thought about Hans. In the late fall of 2008, in the middle of October, Linda had called him, obviously upset, and told him that the Danish police had raided Hans’s office in Copenhagen. Some of the brokers, including two Icelanders, had rigged the increase in value of certain stocks and shares in order to secure their own commissions and bonuses. When the financial crisis hit, the bubble burst. For a while, all employees, including Hans, were under suspicion of having been involved in the scam. It was as recently as March that Hans had been informed that he was no longer suspected of shady dealings. It had been a heavy burden for him to bear when he was also mourning the death of another parent. He had frequently visited Wallander and asked him to explain what had actually happened. Wallander told him as much as he could, but was careful not to even imply what really lay behind it all.

Wallander was particularly concerned about how to make sure that the summary of his thoughts and the knowledge he had acquired would become public. Should he send his text anonymously to the authorities? Would anybody take it seriously? Who wanted to destroy the good relationship between Sweden and the U.S.A.? Perhaps the silence surrounding Håkan von Enke’s espionage was best for everybody involved?

He had started writing at the end of September, and now he had been going for more than eight months. He didn’t want what had happened to be buried in silence. That possibility made him feel indignant.

While writing he also continued his work as a police officer. Two depressing investigations into cases of aggravated assault occupied him throughout the fall. Then in April 2009 he started looking into a series of arson attacks in the Ystad area.

What worried Wallander more than anything else during this period was that his sudden losses of memory kept recurring. The worst incident was during the Christmas break. It had snowed during the night. He had dressed and gone out to shovel the driveway and the parking area. When he had finished, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t even recognize Jussi. It was quite a while before it dawned on him whose house he was standing in front of. He never did what he should have done. He didn’t see a doctor, because he was simply too scared.

He tried to convince himself that he was working too hard, that he was burning himself out. Sometimes he succeeded. But he was constantly afraid that his forgetfulness would get worse. He was terrified of succumbing to dementia, that he might be suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Wallander stayed in bed. It was Sunday morning; he wasn’t on duty. Linda was due to visit him after lunch, with Klara. Hans might come too, if he felt up to it.

When he eventually got up, he let Jussi out and made breakfast. He devoted the rest of the morning to his papers. For the first time, this very morning, he believed that what he was writing was in fact a sort of “life story,” a testament. This is what his life had been like. Even if he lived for another ten or fifteen years, nothing would change very much. But he did wonder, with an empty feeling deep inside himself, what he would do after retiring as a police officer.

There was only one answer, and that was Klara. Her presence always cheered him up. She would be there for him when everything else was over.

He finished his story that morning in May. He had nothing more to say. A printout was lying on the table in front of him. Laboriously, one word at a time, he had reconstructed the story of the man who had tricked him into thinking that his wife was a spy. Wallander too was a part of the story, not just the person who had written it down.

He had never found explanations for some of the loose ends. What he had perhaps spent most time thinking about was the question of Louise’s shoes. Why were they standing neatly next to her body on Värmdö? Wallander eventually came to believe that she had been killed somewhere else and didn’t have her shoes on at the time. Whoever placed them by her side hadn’t really thought about what he was doing. Wallander also didn’t have an answer to where Louise had been during the time she was missing. She had presumably been held prisoner until somebody decided she had to die for the sake of Håkan von Enke.

The other continuing mystery as far as Wallander was concerned was the question of the stones. The stone he had seen on Håkan von Enke’s desk, the stone he had been given by Atkins, and the one he had noticed on George Talboth’s balcony table. He gathered they were some sort of souvenirs, taken from the Swedish archipelago by people who shouldn’t have been there among the little islands and rocks. But he couldn’t explain why von Enke’s had eventually disappeared from his desk. There were several possibilities, but he was reluctant to choose any of them.

He had occasionally spoken to Atkins on the phone. Listened to him crying when he talked about his lost friend. Or rather, friends, as he always corrected himself. He didn’t forget Louise. Atkins had said he would come to the funeral, but when it actually took place, in the middle of August, he never showed up. And he never contacted Wallander again after that. Wallander sometimes wondered what Atkins and Håkan von Enke had talked about the many times they’d met. But he would never know.

There was another question he would have liked to ask Håkan and Louise. Why had one of his desk drawers been such a mess? Did he intend to go to Cambodia if he was forced to flee? Nor did he know why Louise had withdrawn 200,000 kronor from the bank. He didn’t find the money when the Stockholm apartment was cleaned out. It had simply disappeared, without a trace.

And why had Sten Nordlander decided to kill Håkan von Enke and then himself?

The dead had taken their secrets with them.

At the end of November, when Wallander was at a conference in Stockholm, he rented a car and drove out to Niklasgården. He was accompanied by Hans, who still hadn’t been able to bring himself to visit his unknown sister. It was a moving moment for Wallander, watching Hans at the side of Signe’s bed. He also thought about the fact that Håkan von Enke had always visited his daughter regularly. He could rely on her, Wallander thought. He had dared to trust her with his most secret documents.

He spent a long time wondering whether he should give a name to what he had written. In the end he left the title page blank. The manuscript amounted to 212 pages in all. He leafed through it one last time, stopping occasionally to check that he hadn’t gotten something wrong. He decided that despite everything, he had come as close to the truth as possible.

He decided to send the material to Ytterberg. He wouldn’t sign it but would mail it to his sister, Kristina, and ask her to forward it to Stockholm. Ytterberg would naturally know that it must have been Wallander who had sent it, but he would never be able to prove it.

Ytterberg is an intelligent man, Wallander thought. He will make the best possible use of what I have written. He’ll also be able to work out why I chose to send it to him anonymously.

But Wallander was aware that even Ytterberg might not be able to convince a higher authority to investigate further. The U.S.A. was still the Great Redeemer as far as many Swedes were concerned. A Europe without the U.S.A. would be more or less defenseless. It could be that nobody would want to face up to the truth that Wallander was convinced he had established.

Wallander thought about the Swedish soldiers who had been sent to Afghanistan. That would never have happened if the Americans hadn’t asked for them. Not openly, but behind the scenes, just as their submarines had hidden themselves in Swedish territorial waters in the early 1980s with the approval of the Swedish navy and Swedish politicians. Or as CIA operatives were allowed to capture two suspected Egyptian terrorists on Swedish territory on December 18, 2001, and have them returned in humiliating circumstances to their home country, where they were imprisoned and tortured. Wallander could imagine that if Håkan von Enke were to be unmasked, he would be hailed as a hero, not as a despicable traitor.

Nothing, he thought, is certain. Not the way in which these events are interpreted, nor what the rest of my life will be like.

The May morning was fine but chilly. Around noon he went for a long walk with Jussi, who seemed to be back in good health. When Linda arrived, without Hans but with Klara, Wallander had finished straightening up the house and checking that there weren’t any papers lying around that he didn’t want her to see. Klara had fallen asleep in the car. Wallander carefully carried her indoors and laid her down on the sofa. Holding her in his arms always gave him the feeling that Linda had returned in another guise.

They sat down at the kitchen table to drink coffee.

“Did you clean?” Linda asked.

“I’ve done nothing else all day.”

She laughed and shook her head. Then she turned serious again. Wallander knew that all the problems Hans had been forced to cope with had been shattering for her as well.

“I want to start work again,” she said. “I can’t go on much longer just being a mom.”

“But there are only four more months of your maternity leave...”

“Four months can be a very long time. I’m getting very impatient.”

“With Klara?”

“With myself.”

“That’s something you inherited from me. Impatience.”

“I thought you always said that patience was the most important virtue for a police officer.”

“But that doesn’t mean that patience is something you’re born with — you have to learn it.”

She took a sip of coffee and thought over what he had said.

“I feel old,” Wallander said. “I wake up every day feeling that everything is going so incredibly fast. I don’t know if I’m running after something or away from something. I just run. To be completely honest, I’m scared stiff of growing old.”

“Think of Granddad! He just kept on going as usual and never worried about the fact that he was growing old.”

“That’s not true. He was scared of dying.”

“Sometimes, maybe. But not all the time.”

“He was a strange man. I don’t think anyone can compare themselves to him.”

“I do.”

“You had a relationship with him that I lost when I was very young. I sometimes think about the fact that he always had a better relationship with Kristina. Maybe it’s just that he found it easier to get along with women? I was born the wrong sex. He never wanted a son.”

“That’s ridiculous, and you know it.”

“Ridiculous or not, that’s what I keep thinking. I’m scared of old age.”

She reached across the table and stroked his arm.

“I’ve noticed that you get worried. But deep down you know there’s no point. You can’t do anything about your age.”

“I know,” said Wallander. “But sometimes it feels like complaining is all you can do.”

Linda stayed for several hours. They talked until Klara woke up, and with a broad smile on her face she ran over to Wallander.

Wallander suddenly felt terrified. His memory had deserted him again. He didn’t know who the girl running toward him was. He knew he’d seen her before, but what her name was or what she was doing in his house he had no idea.

It was as if everything had fallen silent. As if all colors had faded away, and all he was left with was black and white.

The shadow grew more intense. And Kurt Wallander slowly descended into a darkness that some years later transported him into the empty universe known as Alzheimer’s disease.

After that there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all. The years — ten, perhaps more — he has left to live are his own. His and Linda’s, his and Klara’s; nobody else’s.