The Troubled Man

‘I didn’t mean to turn up without warning,’ he said. ‘But I got the arrival time in Copenhagen wrong. I called you at home and on your cell phone and didn’t get a reply, so I came here.’

‘This is a surprise,’ said Wallander. ‘But you are most welcome, of course. Am I right in thinking that this is your first visit to Sweden?’

‘Yes. My dear friend Hakan was always inviting me to come visit, but I never got around to it.’

They had lunch at the restaurant in town that Wallander considered to be the best. Atkins was a friendly man who took an interest in his surroundings. He asked questions that were genuine and not just polite, and he listened carefully to the answers. At first Wallander found it hard to imagine that Atkins had been in command of a submarine, especially one of the biggest nuclear-powered types in the US Navy. He seemed much too jovial. But of course, Wallander had no idea what kind of person made a good submarine commander.

What motivated Atkins to travel to Sweden was purely and simply his concern about what had happened to his friend. Wallander was touched when he saw how worried Atkins was. An old man missing another old man - a friendship that was obviously very close.

Atkins had checked in to the Hilton at Kastrup Airport, then rented a car and driven to Ystad.

‘I had to see what it was like, driving over that incredibly long bridge,’ he said with a laugh.

Wallander was jealous of the man’s glistening white teeth. After the meal he called the police station and informed them that he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day. Then they drove out to Wallander’s house. Atkins turned out to be very fond of dogs, and got on with Jussi like a house on fire. They went for a long walk with Jussi on his leash, following paths around the fields with occasional stops to admire the sea views and the undulating countryside. Atkins suddenly turned to face Wallander, and bit his lip.

‘Is Hakan dead?’

Wallander understood his intention. Atkins had fired off his question so that Wallander wouldn’t be able to hide behind an evasive or not fully truthful response. He wanted a clear and definite answer. He was the submarine commander demanding to know whether a ship had been lost.

‘We don’t know. He vanished without a trace.’

Atkins stared at him for quite a while, then nodded slowly. They resumed walking and were back at the house half an hour later. Wallander made coffee. They sat down at the kitchen table.

‘You told me about the last phone conversation you and Hakan had,’ said Wallander. ‘Why would anyone say he had reached a conclusion if the person he was talking to had no idea what he was talking about?’

‘Sometimes people believe that others know what they’re thinking,’ said Atkins. ‘Perhaps Hakan thought I knew what he meant.’

‘You must have had a lot of conversations. Was there a theme that kept cropping up? Something more important than the rest?’

Wallander hadn’t prepared his questions. They simply tumbled out on their own, as if they were inevitable.

‘We were roughly the same age,’ said Atkins, ‘both children of the Cold War. I was twenty-three when the Russians launched their Sputnik. I remember I was scared to death, frightened they were going to aim it at us. Hakan told me once that he’d had similar thoughts, but more innocent, not so hair-raising. The Russians were there all right, but they weren’t quite the monsters for him that they were for me. We were affected by all kinds of things in those days. I remember Hakan was worried because Sweden wasn’t a member of NATO. He saw that as a catastrophic error of judgement. In his opinion, neutrality wasn’t only wrong and dangerous, but outright hypocrisy. We were on the same side. Sweden wasn’t in some sort of neutral no-man’s-land, no matter what the politicians maintained. When Wennerstrom was unmasked, Hakan called me - I can still remember it clearly. It was June 1963. I was second in command on a submarine that was about to be deployed in the Pacific Ocean. He wasn’t indignant at the fact that Wennerstrom was guilty of treason and had been spying for the Russians. He was exultant about that! At long last the Swedish people would realise what had been going on. The Russians had infiltrated the whole Swedish defence system. There were defectors wherever you looked, and when the day came for Russia to move in and occupy his country, the only thing that could save Sweden would be NATO membership. You asked if there was a theme that kept cropping up in our conversations. Yes, we always talked about politics. Including about how politicians reduced the possibility of maintaining the balance of power between us and the Russians. I can’t recall a single conversation we had that didn’t contain some kind of political discussion.’

‘If your conversations were always dominated by politics,’ Wallander wondered, ‘what could have been the conclusion he reached? Were there any previous occasions when he reached a conclusion that made him exultant?’

‘Not as far as I can recall. But we’ve known each other for nearly fifty years. A lot of memories have faded away.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘In the way that all important meetings take place. By pure and peculiar coincidence.’

It had started raining when Atkins told the story of his first meeting with Hakan von Enke. He was a much better storyteller than the man Wallander had listened to in the windowless room in Djursholm during the birthday party. But perhaps it has to do with the language, Wallander thought. I’m used to thinking that stories in English are so much richer or more important than stories I hear in my own language.

‘It was nearly fifty years ago,’ said Atkins in his low voice. ‘August 1961, to be precise. In a place where you might least expect to find two young naval officers. I had flown to Europe with my father, who was a colonel in the US Army. He wanted to show me Berlin, that little isolated fortress in the middle of the Russian Zone. We flew Pan Am from Hamburg, I recall; the plane was full of military servicemen - there were hardly any civilians on board, apart from some priests dressed in black. The situation was tense, but at least there were no lines of tanks from east and west, confronting each other like deer in heat. But one evening, not far from Friedrichstrasse, my father and I suddenly found ourselves in a crowd of people. Across from us a group of East German soldiers was busy setting up a barbed-wire fence that would eventually become a wall built of cinder blocks and cement. Standing next to me was a man of about my own age, dressed in a uniform. I asked where he was from, and he said he was Swedish. Of course it was Hakan. That was our first meeting. We stood there watching Berlin be divided by a wall - a world was amputated, you might say. Ulbricht, the East German leader, claimed that it was a measure “to protect freedom and lay the foundation of the socialist state that would continue to flourish”. But that day, as the Berlin Wall began to be built, we saw an old woman standing on the other side, weeping. She was shabbily dressed and had a big scar on her face; she might have had some kind of false plastic ear, but neither of us was sure. But what we both saw, and would never forget, was that she stretched out a hand in a sort of helpless gesture toward those soldiers who were building a wall before her very eyes. That poor woman was not nailed to a cross, but she was reaching out toward us. I think that was the moment when we both realised what our duty was: to keep the free world free, and to make sure that no other countries ended up within prison-like walls. We became even more convinced a few weeks later when the Russians resumed nuclear weapons testing. By then I had returned to Groton, where I was stationed, and Hakan was on a train back to Sweden. But we had each other’s addresses in our pockets, and that was the beginning of a friendship that still continues. Hakan was twenty-eight at the time, and I had just celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday. Forty-seven years is a very long time.’

‘Did he ever visit you in America?’

‘Oh yes, often. He must have come over fifteen times, maybe more.’

The reply surprised Wallander. He had been under the impression that Hakan von Enke made only the occasional visit to the USA. Wasn’t that what Linda said? Or did he misremember?

‘That’s about one trip every three years,’ said Wallander.

‘He was a big fan of America.’

‘Did he usually stay long?’

‘Rarely less than three weeks. Louise was always with him. She and my wife got along well. We looked forward to their visits.’

‘Perhaps you know that their son, Hans, works in Copenhagen?’

‘I’ve arranged to meet him this evening.’

‘I take it you know that he lives with my daughter?’

‘Yes, I know. But I’ll have to meet her another time. Hans is very busy. We’re going to meet after ten this evening in my hotel. I’m flying to Stockholm tomorrow to see Louise.’

It had stopped raining. An aeroplane on its descent into Sturup flew low over the house, making the windows rattle.

‘What do you think happened?’ Wallander asked. ‘You knew him better than I did.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Atkins. ‘I don’t like saying that. I’m not the kind of person who avoids giving a straight answer. But I can’t believe he would leave of his own free will, abandoning his wife and son, and now even a grandchild, leaving them to fret and worry. I have to throw up my hands, even though I don’t want to.’

Atkins emptied his cup and stood. It was time for him to return to Copenhagen. Wallander explained the best way of getting to the main road into Ystad and then to Malmo. Just as Atkins was about to leave, he took a little stone out of his pocket and handed it to Wallander.

‘A present,’ he said. ‘An old Indian once told me about a tradition in his tribe; I think it was the Kiowa. If a person has a problem, he carries a stone - preferably a heavy one - in his clothes, and lugs it around until he has solved his difficulties. Then he can get rid of the stone and continue on his way through life more easily. Pop this stone in your pocket. Leave it there until we know what has happened to Hakan.’

It’s just an ordinary granite pebble, Wallander thought after he had waved goodbye to Atkins as he drove away down the hill. He thought about what Atkins had said about his first meeting with Hakan von Enke. Wallander couldn’t remember anything about those days in August 1961. That was the year he celebrated his thirteenth birthday, and all he could recall was the battering he received from his hormones, which resulted in his life consisting of dreams - dreams about women, real or imagined.

Wallander belonged to the generation that grew up in the 1960s. But he had never been involved in any of the political movements, had never joined any of the protest rallies in Malmo, never really understood what the Vietnam War was all about or had any interest in freedom movements in countries he had barely heard of. Linda often reminded him how poorly informed he was. He usually dismissed politics as a higher authority that restricted the ability of the police to enforce law and order, and that was it. He generally voted in elections but was never sure about whom to vote for. His father had been a dyed-in-the-wool Social Democrat, and that was the party he usually supported. But rarely with any real conviction.

The meeting with Atkins had unsettled him. He searched for a Berlin Wall inside himself, but failed to find one. Was his life really so restricted that major events taking place in the outside world never had much effect on him? What aspects of life had upset him? Pictures of children who had been badly treated, of course - but he had never been sufficiently moved to do anything about it. His excuse was always that he was too busy with work. I sometimes manage to help people by making sure that criminals are removed from the streets, he thought. But aside from that? He gazed out over the fields where nothing was yet growing, but he failed to find what he was looking for.

That evening he straightened his desk, and dumped onto it all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle Linda had given him as a birthday present the previous year. It was a painting by Degas. He sorted the pieces methodically, and managed to complete the bottom left-hand corner of the puzzle.

The whole time, he continued to wonder what had happened to Hakan von Enke. But it was mainly his own fate he was thinking about.

He kept searching for the Berlin Wall that didn’t exist.

10

One afternoon at the beginning of June, Wallander drove to the marina in Ystad and walked to the bench furthest out on the jetty. It was one of his favourite retreats, a confessional without a priest, a place he often went when he wanted to be left alone to come to terms with something that was troubling him. It had been a cold spring, wet and windy, but now the first ridge of high pressure had drifted in over Skane. Wallander took off his jacket, looked up at the sun and closed his eyes. But he opened them again immediately. He was remembering the words of one of his father’s neighbours. You had a father who was very fond of you. He had often asked himself if that was true. The fact that he had become a police officer was something his father could never get over. But there must have been so much more to his life. Mona thought her father-in-law was awful and refused to accompany Wallander when he went to visit him. He and Linda ended up being the only ones in the car whenever he drove to Loderup. His father was always friendly towards his granddaughter. He displayed a degree of patience with Linda that neither Wallander nor his sister, Kristina, had experienced when they were young.

He was an elusive man, somebody you could never pin down, Wallander thought. Am I becoming like him?

A man about his own age was sitting on the rail of his little fishing boat, cleaning a net. He was concentrating, and humming to himself as he worked. As Wallander contemplated him, it occurred to him that he would love to change places - from the bench to the net, from the police station to a handsome boat made of varnished wood.

His father was an unsolved riddle as far as he was concerned. Was he himself just as much of a riddle to Linda? What would Wallander’s granddaughter say about her grandfather? Would he be no more than a shadowy and silent old police officer who sat alone in his house, visited less and less often by fewer and fewer people? That’s what I’m afraid of, Wallander thought. And I have every reason in the world to be afraid. I certainly haven’t cherished and taken good care of my friendships.

In many cases it was too late now. Some of the people who had been close to him were dead. Rydberg above all, but also his old friend the racehorse trainer Sven Widen. Wallander had never understood those who claimed you didn’t need to lose touch with people simply because they were dead, that you could keep on talking to them in their graves. He had never managed to do that. The dead were faces he barely remembered any more, and their voices no longer spoke to him.

Reluctantly he stood up from the bench. He would have to go back to the police station. The investigation into the assault on the ferry was closed and a man had been found guilty, although Wallander was convinced that there had been two men involved in the attack. It was half a victory: one person was found guilty, one got justice, if that was possible after having your face smashed in. But another person had slipped through the net.

It was three in the afternoon by the time Wallander returned from his excursion to the bench on the jetty. There was a note on his desk saying Ytterberg had called and wanted to speak to him. Whoever had taken the call had noted that it was urgent. Everything was always urgent in Wallander’s life as a policeman. He had never received a non-urgent message. So he didn’t return the call right away, but first read a memo from the National Police Board that Lennart Mattson had asked him to comment on. It was about one of the reorganisations that were constantly being imposed on various local police forces. This time it was about setting up a system to ensure a bigger police presence in the streets on holidays and weekends, not only in the big cities but also in towns like Ystad. Wallander read through the document and was annoyed by the pompous and bureaucratic language in which it was couched. When he finished he was aware that he didn’t really understand what it had said. He wrote a few meaningless comments and put it all in an envelope that he would deposit in the chief’s in-box when he left for the day.

Then he called Ytterberg, who answered immediately.

‘You called,’ said Wallander.

‘Now she’s disappeared too.’

‘Who?’

‘Louise. Louise von Enke. She’s vanished as well.’

Wallander held his breath. Were his ears deceiving him? He asked Ytterberg to repeat himself.

‘Louise von Enke has disappeared.’

‘What happened?’

Wallander could hear paper rustling. Ytterberg was searching through his notes. He wanted to give an exact report.

‘These last few years the von Enkes have had a cleaning woman from Bulgaria. She has a residence permit. Her name’s the same as the capital, Sofia. She works for them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, three hours in the morning. She was there on Monday and everything seemed to be as usual. When she left the apartment at about twelve o’clock on Monday, Louise said she was looking forward to seeing her again on Wednesday. When Sofia turned up at nine o’clock on Wednesday the apartment was deserted, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Louise wasn’t always at home, and Sofia thought no more about it. But when she arrived this morning she realised something was wrong. She is certain that Louise has not been home since Wednesday. Everything was exactly as she left it. Louise has never before gone away for this long without giving advance warning. But there was no message, nothing, only the empty apartment. Sofia called the son in Copenhagen, who said he last spoke to his mother on Sunday - in other words, five days ago. So he called me next. Incidentally, do you know what line of business he’s in?’

‘Money,’ said Wallander. ‘He deals exclusively with money.’

‘That sounds like a fascinating job,’ said Ytterberg thoughtfully.

Then he returned to his notes.

‘Hans gave me Sofia’s number and we worked our way through the apartment together. The Bulgarian lady knew exactly what was in all the cabinets and drawers. And she said what I least wanted to hear. I assume you know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Wallander. ‘That nothing was missing.’

‘Precisely. No suitcase, no clothes, no handbags, not even her passport. That was still in the drawer where Sofia knew she kept it.’

‘What about her mobile phone?’

‘That was charging in the kitchen. When I discovered that, I became really worried.’

Wallander thought it all over. He would never have thought that Hakan von Enke’s disappearance would be followed by another one.

‘It’s worrying,’ he said eventually. ‘Is there a plausible explanation?’

‘Not as far as I can see. I called all her closest friends, but nobody has seen or heard from her since Sunday, when she called a friend named Katarina Linden and asked about her experience at a mountain hotel in Norway where she’d stayed. According to Katarina Linden, she sounded exactly the same as she always does. Nobody’s spoken to her since then. We’ll consult the team dealing with her husband’s disappearance. I just wanted to call you first. To get your reaction, to be honest.’

‘My first thought is that she knows where Hakan is and went to join him. But of course the passport and the mobile phone tend to argue against that.’

‘I thought something similar myself. But I’m doubtful, just like you.’

‘Could there be a plausible explanation despite everything? Could she be ill? Could she have collapsed in the street?’

The hospitals were the first places I checked. According to what Sofia has told us, and we have no reason to doubt her, Louise always carried an ID in her jacket or overcoat. Since we haven’t found it in the apartment, there’s no reason to believe she didn’t have it with her when she went out, so the hospitals should be able to identify her.’

Wallander wondered why Louise hadn’t told him that she had a cleaning woman come in three times a week. Hans hadn’t mentioned her either. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The von Enke family belonged to the upper class, and to them household help were taken for granted. You didn’t need to talk about them; they were simply there.

Ytterberg promised to keep him informed. They were just about to end their conversation when Wallander asked if Ytterberg had contacted Atkins, whom he had met in Stockholm.

‘Does he have any useful information?’ Ytterberg sounded doubtful.

Wallander thought it was odd that Ytterberg evidently didn’t know how close the two families were. Or had Atkins told him a different story?

‘What time is it in California?’ Ytterberg asked. ‘There’s not much point in waking people up in the middle of the night.’

‘The difference between us and the east coast of the USA is six hours,’ said Wallander, ‘but I don’t know about California. I can find out and give him a call.’

‘Do that,’ said Ytterberg. ‘Order the call and we’ll pay for it.’

‘My official telephone hasn’t been blocked yet,’ said Wallander. ‘I don’t think the police lose money on unpaid phone bills. Things haven’t gone quite that far yet.’

Wallander called directory assistance and was informed that the time difference was nine hours. That meant it was six in the morning in San Diego, so he decided to wait a couple of hours before calling Atkins. Instead he called Linda. She had already had a long conversation with Hans in Copenhagen.

‘Come over,’ she said. ‘I’m just sitting around, and Klara is asleep in her pushchair.’

‘Klara?’

Linda laughed lightly at his confusion.

‘We decided last night. She’s going to be named Klara. She’s already named Klara.’

‘Like my mother? Your grandma?’

‘I never met her, as you know. Don’t get upset, but we chose it basically because it’s a nice name. And it goes well with both last names. Klara Wallander and Klara von Enke.’

‘What will her full name be?’

‘For now it will be Klara Wallander. She can make up her own mind eventually. Are you coming? You can have a cup of coffee and we can have a provisional baptism celebration.’

‘Are you going to have her baptised? Properly?’

She didn’t answer that. And Wallander was sensible enough not to push the issue.

Fifteen minutes later he pulled up outside Linda’s house. The garden was aflame with colour. Wallander thought about his own neglected garden, in which he planted almost nothing. When he lived in Mariagatan he had always envisioned an entirely different environment, with him crawling around on his hands and knees inhaling all the earthy smells, weeding the flower beds.

Klara was asleep in her pushchair in the shade of a pear tree. Wallander observed her little face behind the mosquito net.

‘Klara’s a pretty name,’ he said. ‘What made you think of it?’

‘We saw it in a newspaper. Someone named Klara behaved heroically in connection with a major fire in Ostersund. We made up our minds more or less on the spot.’

They wandered around the garden talking about what had happened. The disappearance of Louise was as big a surprise for Linda and Hans as for everybody else. There had been no indications, nothing to suggest that Louise had been hatching a plan.

‘Could it be another act of violence?’ Wallander wondered. ‘If we assume that Hakan was attacked in some way?’

‘You mean someone wanted to get rid of the pair of them?’ Linda said. ‘But why? What could the motive possibly be?’

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ said Wallander, contemplating a bush covered in flame-red roses. ‘Could they both have been involved in something the rest of us know nothing about?’

They continued their tour of the garden in silence. Linda was considering his question.

‘We know so little about people,’ she said in the end, when they had returned to the front of the house and she had checked on Klara behind the net.

Klara was fast asleep, her hands gripping a quilt.

‘You could say that I know no more about that couple than this little girl does,’ she said.

‘Did you find Louise and Hakan mysterious?’

‘Not at all. On the contrary! They were always frank and straightforward with me.’

‘Some people can leave false tracks,’ Wallander said thoughtfully. ‘Frankness and straightforwardness could be a sort of invisible lock protecting a reality they’d prefer not to reveal.’

They sat in the garden drinking coffee until Wallander checked his watch and saw that it was time for him to call Atkins. He went back to the police station and dialled the number from his office. After four rings Atkins answered with a grunt that sounded as if he were waiting to receive an order. Wallander told him what had happened. When he finished there was such a long silence that he began to wonder if they had been cut off. Then Atkins reacted in a loud voice.

‘It’s not possible,’ he said.

‘Nevertheless, she’s been missing since Monday or Tuesday.’

Wallander could hear that Atkins was shocked. He was breathing heavily. Wallander asked when he had last spoken to her. There was a pause while Atkins thought it over.

‘Friday afternoon. Her afternoon, my morning.’

‘Who made the call?’

‘She did.’

Wallander frowned. That was not the answer he had expected.

‘What did she want?’

‘She wanted to wish my wife a happy birthday. Both my wife and I were surprised. Neither of us bothers about birthdays.’

‘Could there have been some other reason why she called?’

‘We had the impression that she was feeling lonely, and wanted to talk to somebody. That’s not so difficult to understand.’

‘If you think carefully, looking back, was there anything she said that could be tied to her disappearance?’

Wallander didn’t trust his bad English, but Atkins understood what he meant. There was a pause before he answered.

‘Nothing,’ he said eventually. ‘She sounded exactly the same as always.’

‘But there must be something going on,’ said Wallander. ‘First he disappears, and then she does.’

‘It’s sort of like the poem about the ten little Indians,’ said Atkins. ‘They disappear one after the other. Half the family has vanished now. There’s only the two children left.’

Wallander gave a start. Had he heard wrong?

‘But there’s only one who could disappear,’ he said tentatively. ‘You’re not including Linda, surely?’

‘We shouldn’t forget the sister,’ said Atkins.

‘Sister? Does Hans have a sister?’

‘Oh yes. She’s named Signe. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. I can spell it if you like. She didn’t live with her parents. I don’t know why. You shouldn’t dig into other people’s lives unnecessarily. I’ve never met her. But Hakan told me he had a daughter.’

Wallander was too astonished to ask any more questions, and they hung up. He stood by the window and contemplated the water tower. There was a sister named Signe. Why had nobody said anything about her?

That evening Wallander sat at his kitchen table and worked through all his notes from the day Hakan von Enke had disappeared. But nowhere did he discover any hint at all of a daughter in the family. There was no mention of a Signe. It was as if she had never existed.

PART 2

Incidents Under the Surface

11

Wallander was annoyed. So, unusually for him, he decided to launch a direct attack. He felt duped by this family in which two members had disappeared and a third had just been discovered. He thought he’d been a victim of the lies that come naturally to the upper classes, concerning family details that must be hidden at any cost from the rest of the world, which probably wouldn’t be particularly interested anyway. After the phone call to Atkins and the long evening spent going over yet again everything that had happened and been said since Hakan von Enke’s seventy-fifth birthday party, he slept soundly until shortly after seven the next morning, when he called Linda. He had hoped to talk to Hans, but Hans had already left, at about six.

‘What can he find to do at that time?’ Wallander asked, irritated. ‘Surely there aren’t any banks open now, nor any dealers buying and selling shares.’

‘What about Japan?’ Linda suggested. ‘Or New Zealand? There’s a lot of movement in the exchanges all over Asia. It’s not unusual for Hans to leave for work this early. But it’s unusual for you to call at seven o’clock. Don’t take it out on me. Did something happen?’

‘I want to talk about Signe,’ Wallander said.

‘Who’s she?’

‘Your boyfriend’s sister.’

He could hear her heavy breathing. Every breath a new thought.

‘But he doesn’t have a sister.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

Linda knew her father, and she realised right away that he was serious. He wouldn’t call her this early to play a cruel joke.

Klara started crying.

‘You’d better come over,’ Linda said. ‘Klara just woke up. She tends to be difficult in the morning. I wonder if she inherited that from you?’

An hour later Wallander pulled up on the gravel drive outside her house. By then Klara had been fed and was content, and Linda was up and dressed. Wallander thought she still looked pale and out of sorts, and he wondered if she was ill. But he didn’t ask. She took after him, and didn’t like people interfering in her affairs.

They sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander recognised the tablecloth. He remembered it from his childhood, then from his father’s house in Loderup, and now here it was again. As a small boy he had often traced the complicated pattern in the border, running his finger over the red thread.

‘Explain,’ she said. ‘I repeat what I said before: Hans doesn’t have a sister.’

‘I believe you,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m sure you’re not aware of any sister, just as I wasn’t. Until now.’

He told her about his conversation with Atkins and the sudden reference to a sister called Signe. Presumably it was pure coincidence that the secret sister was mentioned. If the conversation had been slightly different, her existence would still be totally unknown. Linda listened intently to what he had to say, her frown growing more pronounced the whole time.

‘Hans has never said anything to me about a sister,’ she said when Wallander had finished.

Wallander pointed at the phone.

‘Call him and ask a simple question: Why haven’t you told me that you have a sister?’

‘Is she older or younger?’

Wallander thought for a moment. Atkins had said nothing about that. Nevertheless he felt sure that she must be an older sister. If she’d been born after Hans it would have been more difficult to keep her secret.

‘I don’t want to call him,’ Linda said. ‘I’ll take it up with him when he gets home.’

‘No,’ said Wallander. ‘We have two missing persons we have to track down. This is not a private matter, but police business. If you don’t call him, I will.’

‘That might be best,’ she said.

Wallander dialled the number she gave him for the office in Copenhagen. Classical music was playing when he got through. Linda leaned forward in order to listen.

‘It’s his direct line,’ she said. ‘I chose the music. Before, he had some awful American country junk. Somebody named Billy Ray Cyrus. I forced him to change it by threatening to stop calling. He’ll probably answer soon.’

She had hardly finished the sentence when Wallander heard Hans’s voice. He sounded harassed, almost out of breath. Wallander wondered what on earth had been happening on the Asian stock exchanges.

‘I have a question for you that can’t wait,’ he said. ‘I’m sitting at your kitchen table, by the way.’

‘Louise,’ said Hans. ‘Or Hakan? Have you found them?’

‘I wish we had. But this is about an entirely different person. Can you guess who?’

Wallander could see that Linda was annoyed by what she probably saw as an unnecessary cat-and-mouse game. He conceded that she was right. He should get straight to the point.

‘It’s about your sister,’ he said. ‘Your sister, Signe.’

There was silence at the other end of the line, and a pause before Hans spoke again.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of joke?’

Linda had leaned forward over the table, and Wallander held up the receiver so she could hear. He could tell that Hans was telling the truth.

‘It’s not a joke,’ he said. ‘Are you seriously telling me you don’t know anything about a sister called Signe?’

‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters. Can I speak to Linda?’

Wallander handed the receiver over to Linda, who repeated what her father had told her.

‘When I was a kid I used to ask my parents why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters,’ Hans said. ‘They always told me they thought one child was enough. I’ve never heard of anyone named Signe, never seen any photographs of her. I’ve always been an only child.’

‘It’s difficult to believe,’ said Linda.

Hans exploded and yelled at the phone.

‘What the hell do you think it’s like for me?’

Wallander took the receiver out of Linda’s hand.

‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘So does Linda. But you must understand that it’s important to find out how this fits in, assuming it does. Your parents vanish. And now an unknown sister suddenly turns up.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Hans. ‘I feel sick.’

‘Whatever the explanation is, I’ll find it.’

Wallander handed the receiver back to Linda. He listened to her trying to calm Hans down. He didn’t want to hear exactly what they said to each other. Since the conversation seemed set to continue for a while, he scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and put it on the kitchen table in front of her. She nodded and handed him a bunch of keys from the windowsill. He left the house after taking a look at Klara, lying asleep on her stomach in her cot. He gently stroked her cheek with one of his fingers. Her face twitched, but she didn’t wake up.

When Wallander got back to the police station he called Sten Nordlander even before he had taken off his jacket. He immediately received the confirmation he had been hoping for.

‘Oh yes, there’s certainly another child,’ Nordlander said. ‘A girl who was severely handicapped from birth. Completely helpless, if I understood Hakan correctly. There was no possibility of them keeping her at home; she needed special care from the very first day of her life. They never spoke about her, and I thought I had to respect that.’

‘Is her name Signe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know when she was born?’

Nordlander thought for a moment before answering.

‘She must be nearly ten years older than her brother. I think her handicap was such a shock to them that it was a long time before they dared to try again.’

‘So she must be over forty now,’ said Wallander. ‘Do you know where she lives? The name of the home or institution?’

‘I think Hakan once said it was somewhere near Mariefred, but I never heard a name.’

Wallander rushed to end the call. Finding Signe felt urgent, despite the fact that the case was none of his business. He knew that he should contact Ytterberg first, but his curiosity got the better of him. He searched through his hopelessly messy address book until he found the phone number he was looking for. It belonged to a woman who worked for the Ystad Social Welfare Board. She was the daughter of a former civilian secretary at the police station. Wallander had met her in connection with a paedophile ring a few years back. Her name was Sara Amander, and she answered almost immediately. They exchanged a few pleasantries before Wallander came to the point.

‘I’m looking for an institution for the handicapped not far from Mariefred. Maybe there’s more than one? I need addresses and phone numbers.’

‘Can you give me any more information? Are you talking about congenital brain damage, for instance?’

‘It’s mainly physical, as I understand it. A child who needed care from the day she was born. But it’s also possible that she has mental limitations. No doubt it would be an advantage for a person that handicapped not to be fully aware of what an awful life she was condemned to lead.’

‘We have to be careful when we talk about other people’s lives,’ said Sara Amander. ‘There are severely handicapped people whose lives are filled with much happiness. But I’ll see what I can find out.’

Wallander hung up, went to get some coffee, and exchanged a few words with Kristina Magnusson, who reminded him that her colleagues were going to have a casual summer party in her garden the following evening. Wallander had forgotten all about it, of course, but he said he’d be there. He went back to his office and wrote a reminder in large letters that he placed by the phone.

A couple of hours later Sara Amander called back. She had two possibilities for him. One was a private care home called Amalienborg, on the very edge of Mariefred. The other was a state-run home, Niklasgarden, not far from Gripsholm Castle. Wallander made a note of the addresses and phone numbers and was about to call the first one when Martinsson appeared in the half-open door. Wallander replaced the receiver and waved him in. Martinsson pulled a face.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘A poker party that ran off the rails. An ambulance just took a man to the hospital with stab wounds. We have a car there, but you and I should go too.’

Wallander grabbed his jacket and followed Martinsson out of the room. It took the rest of the day and part of the night for them to figure out what caused the poker party to collapse into chaos and violence. It was only when Wallander returned to the police station at about eight o’clock that he was able to call the numbers from Sara Amander. He began with Amalienborg. A friendly woman answered the phone. Even as he asked his question about Signe von Enke he realised his mistake. He wouldn’t get an answer, of course. An institution that took care of severely handicapped people naturally couldn’t hand out information to any old Tom, Dick or Harry. And that was the reply he was given. He didn’t even receive a reply to his other questions about whether they had residents of varying ages or if the home was only for adults. The friendly woman continued to inform him patiently that she wasn’t allowed to tell him anything. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help him at all, no matter how much she would like to. Wallander hung up and thought he should give Ytterberg a call. But he decided against it. There was no reason to disturb his evening. The conversation could wait until the following day.

Since it was a pleasant evening, warm and calm, he ate dinner outside in the garden. Jussi lay at his feet, and snapped up everything that fell off Wallander’s fork. In the surrounding fields the oilseed rape was now a sea of gleaming yellow.

But the thought of that sister wouldn’t go away. He tried to understand the silence that surrounded her, and thought about how he and Mona would have reacted if they’d had a child that needed the expert care of outsiders from birth. He shuddered at the thought, which was impossible for him to come to grips with. He was sitting lost in thought when eventually he noticed that the phone was ringing. Jussi pricked up his ears. It was Linda. She spoke in a low voice and explained that Hans was asleep.

‘He’s completely shattered,’ she said. ‘The worst thing, he says, is that now he has nobody he can ask about her.’

‘I’m trying to track her down,’ said Wallander. ‘Give me another couple of days and I should know where she is.’

‘Do you understand how Hakan and Louise could do something like this?’

‘No. But maybe it’s the only way they could cope with having such a severely handicapped child - to pretend she simply didn’t exist.’

Then Wallander described the view of the oilseed rape fields and the distant horizon for her.

‘I’m looking forward to when Klara can run around here,’ he said eventually.

‘You should get yourself a woman.’

‘You don’t “get yourself” a woman!’

‘You won’t find one if you don’t make an effort! Loneliness will eat you up from the inside. You’ll become an unpleasant old man.’

Wallander sat outside until after ten o’clock, thinking about what Linda had said. But despite everything, he slept soundly and woke up fully rested soon after five. He was in his office by six thirty. A thought had begun to develop in his mind. He checked his calendar for the period between now and midsummer, and established that nothing compelled him to stay in Ystad. Somebody else could take charge of the poker case. Since Lennart Mattson was an early bird, Wallander knocked on his door. Mattson had just arrived when Wallander came to ask for four days’ leave, starting the next day.

‘I’m aware that this request comes out of the blue,’ he said. ‘But I have a personal reason. And I can make myself available during the midsummer holiday, even though I’m down for a week’s break then.’

Mattson didn’t protest. Wallander was granted four days off. He went back to his office and looked up on the Internet the exact locations of Amalienborg and Niklasgarden. The information he found about the two institutions wasn’t enough to help him decide which was the right one. Both of them seemed to care for people with a wide variety of serious disabilities.

He handed Jussi over to his neighbours, who would look after him for the next few days. The dog’s kennel was deserted. Wallander lay down on top of the bed, set the alarm clock for three and slept for a few hours. It was four o’clock when he got into his car and set off northward. Dawn was enveloped by a diaphanous mist, but that meant it would be a fine day. He arrived in Mariefred shortly after noon. After lunch in a roadside restaurant, he dozed in his car for a while, then set off for Amalienborg, a former college with an annexe that had been turned into a nursing home. At the front desk Wallander produced his police ID and hoped that would be sufficient for him to find out whether he had come to the right place. The receptionist wasn’t sure what to do and got her supervisor, who studied Wallander’s ID carefully.

‘Signe von Enke,’ he said in a friendly tone. ‘That’s all I need to know. Is she here or not? It’s really about her parents, who have disappeared.’

The supervisor’s badge indicated that her name was Anna Gustafsson.

She listened to Wallander, then studied him for a moment before answering.

A naval commander?’ she said. ‘Is that him?’

‘Yes, that’s him,’ said Wallander, making no attempt to conceal his surprise.

‘I’ve read about him in the newspapers.’

‘I’m talking about his daughter,’ said Wallander. ‘Is she here?’

Anna Gustafsson shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We don’t have anyone named Signe. None of our patients is the daughter of a naval commander. I can promise you that.’

On the way to his next port of call, Wallander ran into a violent thunderstorm. The rain was so heavy that he was forced to stop, unable to see anything through the windscreen. He drove down a side road and switched off the engine. As he sat there, enclosed in a kind of bubble, with the rain pelting against the car roof, he tried yet again to work out what had happened to the two missing persons. Even if Hakan von Enke was the first to run away, or to be the victim of a crime or an accident, that didn’t necessarily mean that Louise’s disappearance was a direct consequence of what had happened to him. That was an elementary pearl of wisdom from Rydberg during his time as Wallander’s mentor. Often an incident that happened or was discovered last was actually the beginning rather than the conclusion of a sequence of events. He thought about the messy state of one of Hakan von Enke’s desk drawers. The compass inside his head was whirling around without settling on a direction in which to point.

The bottom line was that anything was possible. Not even the perception that Hakan von Enke was worried was necessarily fact. Wallander had seen ghosts before, even if he usually managed to stay immune to illusions. He had also tried to trace lots of missing persons during his career. Nearly always there were indications from the very beginning that either there was a natural explanation or there were grounds for being worried. But in the case of Hakan and Louise, he simply didn’t know. Everything was very unclear, he thought as he sat in his car, waiting for the cloudburst to subside. A state of mental fog to match the lack of real-life visibility.

When the rain eventually stopped, he made his way to Niklasgarden, attractively located on the shore of a lake that his map told him was called Vangsjon. The white-painted wood buildings were on a slope dotted with clumps of tall trees, and beyond them extensive cornfields and pastureland. Wallander got out of the car and took deep breaths of air made invigorating after the rain. It was like looking at one of the old posters that decorated the walls of his classroom at school in Limhamn: biblical landscapes, always Palestine with shepherds and flocks of sheep, and Swedish agricultural landscapes in all their variations. For a moment he was overcome by a nostalgic longing to be back in the days when those posters had dominated his thoughts, but he shrugged it off. He knew that sentimentality about the past only drew attention to the fact that he was getting old, and made the process even more painful and frightening.

He took a pair of binoculars from his backpack and scanned the buildings and their park-like grounds. Wallander couldn’t help smiling at the thought that he was surveying this pretty, summery scene as a sort of periscope in the guise of an old, scratched Peugeot. He noticed several wheelchairs standing in the shade of some trees. He adjusted the focus and tried to hold the binoculars steady. There were people sitting in the wheelchairs with their heads drooping. One of them, a woman whose age he found impossible to guess, was resting her chin on her chest. In another wheelchair was a man, a young man as far as Wallander could make out, with his head leaning back as if his neck was incapable of supporting it. Wallander lowered his binoculars. He felt uneasy about what lay in store for him. He returned to his car and drove up to the main building, where signs informed him that the Sodermanland county council welcomed him and told visitors where various paths led. Wallander went into the reception area. He rang a bell and waited. He could hear a radio somewhere in the background. A woman emerged from an adjacent room. She was in her forties, and Wallander was immediately struck by her beauty. She had short black hair and dark eyes, and she greeted him with a smile. When she spoke, he could hear that she had a foreign accent. Wallander guessed that she came from an Arab country. He showed her his ID and asked his question. He didn’t receive a direct answer. The beautiful woman continued to smile at him.

‘This is the first time a police officer has visited us,’ she said. ‘And you’ve come from so far away! But I’m afraid I can’t give you any names. Everybody living here has a right to privacy.’

‘I understand that, of course,’ said Wallander. ‘But if necessary I will get a warrant that will give me the right to go through every single room you have here and all your records, for every single patient. I would rather not do that. It would be sufficient for you to simply nod or shake your head. Then I promise to go away and never come back.’

She thought for a moment before answering. Wallander was still taken by how beautiful she was.

‘Ask your question,’ she said eventually. ‘I see your point.’

‘Is there somebody living here named Signe von Enke? She’s about forty years old and handicapped from birth.’

She nodded. Just once, but that was enough. Now Wallander knew where Signe was. Before going any further he must talk to Ytterberg.

He had managed to tear his eyes away from the woman and turn away, when it occurred to him that there was another question she might be prepared to answer. He looked at her again.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘When did Signe last have a visitor?’

She thought for a moment before answering. With words this time, not a movement of the head.

‘That was a few months ago,’ she said. ‘Sometime in April. I can check if it’s important.’

‘It’s extremely important,’ Wallander said. ‘It would be a great help.’

She disappeared into the room she had emerged from earlier. A few minutes later she came back with a sheet of paper in her hand.

‘Tenth of April’ she said. ‘That was her latest visit. Nobody has been here since then. She has become a very lonely person.’

Wallander thought for a moment. The tenth of April. The day before Hakan von Enke set out on his walk. And never came back.

‘I assume it was her father who visited her on that occasion,’ he said slowly.

She nodded.

Wallander left Niklasgarden and drove to Stockholm. He parked outside the building in Grevgatan and unlocked the apartment with the keys Linda had given him.

He realised he would have to go back to the beginning. But the beginning of what?

He stood in the middle of the living room for a long time, trying to understand. But he couldn’t think of anything that would further his understanding of the case.

He was surrounded by silence. At submarine depth, where the restless movement of the ocean was undetectable.

12

Wallander spent the night in the empty apartment.

Because it was warm, almost oppressively so, he left some windows ajar and watched the thin curtains swaying gently. He could occasionally hear people shouting in the street below. Wallander had the feeling that he was listening to phantoms, as you always do in recently vacated houses or apartments. But it wasn’t to save the cost of a hotel room that he had asked Linda for the keys to the apartment. Wallander knew from experience that first impressions are often the most important ones in a criminal investigation. A return visit rarely produces anything new. But this time he knew what he was looking for.

Wallander tiptoed around in his socks to avoid making the neighbours suspicious. He went through Hakan’s study and Louise’s two chests of drawers. He also searched the big bookcase in the living room, and any cupboards and shelves he could find. By about ten o’clock, when he slipped cautiously out of the apartment to find somewhere to eat, he was as sure as he could be. All trace of the handicapped daughter had been carefully removed.

Wallander ate at what claimed to be a Hungarian restaurant, despite the fact that all the waiters and other staff in the open-plan kitchen spoke Italian. As he returned to the second-floor apartment in the slow-moving lift, he wondered where he should sleep. There was a sofa in Hakan’s study, but he eventually lay down under a tartan blanket on a couch in the living room, where he had drunk tea with Louise.

He was woken up at about one by a particularly noisy group of merrymakers, and as he lay in the dark room, he was suddenly wide awake. It was absurd for there to be absolutely nothing at all in the apartment to mark the existence of the woman who was now living at Niklasgarden. It almost made him physically ill not to find any pictures or even documents, the bureaucratic identification indicators that surround all Swedes from birth. He got up and tiptoed around once more. He was carrying a penlight, and he occasionally used it to illuminate the darkest corners. He avoided turning on more than a single lamp here and there in case someone in the apartment building across the street might react, but at the same time he also thought of the lamps that Hakan von Enke always used to leave burning all night. Wasn’t the invisible line between reality and lies in the von Enke family unusually easy to cross? He stood in the middle of the kitchen and thought it over yet again. Then he carried on indefatigably, becoming the bloodhound he could sometimes arouse within himself, and resolved not to allow it to rest until it picked up the trail of Signe; it had to be here somewhere.

He succeeded at about four in the morning. In the bookcase, hidden behind some big art books, he found a photo album. It did not contain many pictures, but they were carefully mounted, most of them in faded colour, a few in black and white. There was no written commentary, only pictures. There was no picture of the two siblings together, but then he hadn’t expected to find one. When Hans was born, Signe had already vanished, been whisked away, rubbed out. Wallander counted less than fifty photos. Signe was alone in most of them, lying in various positions. But in the last picture Louise was holding her, looking away from the camera. Wallander felt sad to note that the picture made it clear that Louise would have preferred not to have to sit there, holding the child in her arms. The photograph exuded an atmosphere of intense desolation. Wallander shook his head, feeling very uncomfortable.

He lay down on the sofa again. He was exhausted but also relieved, and he fell asleep immediately. He woke up with a start at about eight o’clock when a car in the street below sounded its horn loudly. He had been dreaming about horses. A herd had come galloping over the sand dunes at Mossby and raced straight into the water. He tried to figure out what the dream meant, but he failed. It hardly ever worked; he had no idea how to do it. He ran a bath, drank some coffee and called Ytterberg at about nine. He was in a meeting. Wallander asked the receptionist to pass on a message and received a text in response saying that Ytterberg could meet him at ten thirty at city hall, on the side overlooking the water. Wallander was waiting there when Ytterberg arrived on his bicycle. There was a cafe nearby, and before long they were sitting at a table, each with a cup of coffee.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Ytterberg. ‘I thought you preferred little towns or rural areas.’

‘I do. But sometimes you have no choice.’

Wallander told him about Signe. Ytterberg listened intently without interrupting. Wallander finished by mentioning the photo album he had discovered during the night. He had brought it with him in a plastic bag, and he placed it on the table. Ytterberg slid his coffee cup to one side, wiped his hands on a paper napkin and leafed carefully through the album.

‘How old is she now?’ he asked. ‘About forty?’

‘Yes, if I understood Atkins correctly.’

‘There aren’t any pictures of her in here after the age of two, or three at the most.’

‘Exactly,’ said Wallander. ‘Unless there’s another album. But I don’t think so. After the age of two she’s been expunged.’

Ytterberg pulled a face and carefully slid the album back into the plastic bag. A white-painted passenger boat chugged past along Riddarfjarden. Wallander moved his chair into the shade.

‘I thought of going back to Niklasgarden,’ Wallander said. ‘After all, I’m now a member of this girl’s family. But I need the go-ahead from you. You should be aware of what I’m doing.’

‘What good do you think it would do, meeting her?’

‘I don’t know. But her father visited her the day before he disappeared. And she hasn’t had any visitors since then.’

Ytterberg thought for a while before replying.

‘It’s remarkable that Louise hasn’t been to see her the entire time since he disappeared. What do you make of that?’

‘I don’t make anything of it. But I wonder just as much as you do. Maybe we should go there together?’

‘No, you go on your own. I’ll give them a call and tell them you have the right to see her.’

Wallander walked down to the edge of the quay and gazed out over the water while Ytterberg made his call. The sun was high in the clear blue sky. It’s full summer now, he thought. After a while Ytterberg came and stood beside him.

‘All set,’ he said. ‘But there’s something you should know. The woman I spoke to said that Signe von Enke doesn’t speak. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because she can’t. I don’t know if I understood everything correctly, but she seems to have been born without vocal cords. Among other things.’

Wallander turned to look at him.

‘Among other things?’

‘She’s evidently extremely handicapped. Lots of essential parts are missing. I have to say I’m glad it’s not me going there. Especially not today.’

‘What’s special about today?’

‘It’s such lovely weather,’ said Ytterberg. ‘One of the first summer days this year. I’d rather not be upset if I can avoid it.’

‘Did she speak with a foreign accent?’ Wallander asked as they walked away from the quay. ‘The woman at Niklasgarden, I mean.’

‘Yes, she did. She had a lovely voice. She said her name was Fatima. I would guess she’s from Iraq or Iran.’

Wallander promised to get in touch later that day. He had parked outside the main entrance to city hall, and he just managed to drive off before an alert parking attendant turned up. He drove out of town and pulled up outside Niklasgarden about an hour later. When he entered the reception area he was received by an elderly man who introduced himself as Artur Kallberg - he was on duty in the afternoons until midnight.

‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ Wallander said. ‘Tell me about Signe’s condition.’

‘She’s one of our most severely affected patients,’ Artur Kallberg informed him. ‘When she was born, nobody thought she would live very long. But some people have a will to live that few ordinary mortals can begin to comprehend.’

‘Can you be more precise?’ Wallander asked. ‘What exactly is wrong with her?’

Kallberg hesitated before answering, as if weighing whether Wallander would be able to cope with hearing all the facts; or possibly if he was worthy of hearing the full truth. Wallander became impatient.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘She’s missing both arms. And there’s something wrong with her vocal cords, which means that she can’t talk, plus congenital brain damage. She also has a malformation of the spine. That means her movements are incredibly limited.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘She has a small amount of mobility in her neck and head. For instance, she can blink.’

Wallander tried to envisage the horrific possibility that Linda might have given birth to a child with such severe disabilities. How would he have reacted? Could he imagine what this tragedy must have meant for Hakan and Louise? Wallander was unable to decide how he would have coped with it.

‘How long has she been here?’ he asked.

‘During the early years of her life she was cared for in a home for severely handicapped children,’ said Kallberg. ‘It was on Lidingo, but it closed in 1972.’

Wallander raised his hand.

‘Let’s be exact,’ he said. ‘Assume that the only thing I know about this girl is her name.’

‘Then perhaps we should stop calling her a girl,’ said Kallberg. ‘She’s about to turn forty-one years old. Guess when.’

‘How on earth should I know?’

‘It’s her birthday today. Under normal circumstances, her father would have come and spent the afternoon here with us. But as things stand, no one is coming.’

Kallberg seemed troubled by the thought that Signe von Enke might be forced to endure a birthday without a visit.

One question was more important than any other, but Wallander decided to wait and do everything in order. He took his battered notebook out of his pocket.

‘So,’ said Wallander, ‘she was born on 6 June 1967, is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Did she ever spend any time at home with her parents?’

‘According to the case notes I’ve been through, she was taken directly from the hospital to the Nyhaga home on Lidingo. When it became necessary to expand the home, the neighbours were scared that their properties would go down in value. I don’t know exactly what they did in order to put a wrench in the works, but they not only prevented the expansion, they managed to get the home closed down completely.’

‘So where was she transferred?’

‘She ended up on a sort of nursing-home merry-go-round. She went from one place to another, and spent a year in a home on Gotland, just outside Hemse. But she came here twenty-nine years ago, and she’s been here ever since.’

Wallander noted it all down. The image of Klara without any arms kept cropping up in his mind’s eye with macabre obstinacy.

‘Tell me about her capabilities,’ Wallander said. ‘You’ve done that already to an extent, but I’m thinking about how much she understands. Just how much is she aware of?’

‘We don’t know. She only expresses herself by means of basic reactions, and even that is done via body language that can be hard to interpret for anyone who isn’t used to her. We regard her as a sort of infant with a long experience of life.’

‘Is it possible to figure out what she’s thinking?’

‘No. But nothing suggests that she’s aware of how great her suffering is. She never gives any indication of pain or despair. And if that is a reflection of the facts, it’s obviously something we can be grateful for.’

Wallander nodded. He thought he understood. But now he was ready to ask the most important question.

‘Her father came to visit her,’ he said. ‘How often?’

‘At least once a month. Sometimes more. They weren’t short visits - he never stayed for less than several hours.’

‘What did he do? If they couldn’t talk?’

‘She can’t talk. He sat there and talked to her. It was very moving. He would sit there and tell her about everything, about everyday things, about life in their own little world and also in the world at large. He spoke to her just as you would speak to another adult, without ever tiring.’

‘What about when he was at sea? For many years he was in charge of submarines and other naval vessels.’

‘He would always explain that he was going to be away. It was touching to hear him telling her all about it.’

‘And who came to visit Signe when he was away? Her mother?’

Kallberg’s answer was clear and cold, and it came without hesitation.

‘She has never been here. I’ve been working at Niklasgarden since 1994. She has never been to visit her daughter during that time. The only visitor Signe ever had was her father.’

‘Are you saying that Louise never came here to see her daughter?’

‘Never.’

‘Surely that must be unusual?’

Kallberg shrugged.

‘Not necessarily. Some people simply can’t cope with the sight of suffering.’

Wallander put his notebook back in his pocket. He wondered if he would be able to interpret what he had scribbled down.

‘I’d like to see her,’ he said. ‘Assuming that wouldn’t upset her, of course.’

‘There’s something I forgot to mention,’ said Kallberg. ‘She sees very badly. She perceives people as a sort of blur against a grey background. At least, that’s what the doctors say.’

‘So she recognised her father by his voice?’ Wallander wondered.

‘Presumably, yes. That seemed to be the case, judging by her body language.’

Wallander stood up, but Kallberg remained seated.

‘Are you absolutely certain you want to see her?’

‘Yes,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m absolutely certain.’

That wasn’t true, of course. What he really wanted to see was her room.

They went out through the glass doors, which closed silently behind them. Kallberg opened the door to a room at the end of a hallway. It was a bright room with a plastic mat on the floor. It held a couple of chairs, a bookcase and a bed, on which Signe von Enke lay hunched up.

‘Leave me alone with her,’ Wallander requested. ‘Wait outside.’

After Kallberg left, Wallander took a quick look around the room. Why is there a bookcase here when the occupant is blind and unaware of what is going on around her? He took a step closer to the bed and looked at Signe. She had fair, short-cropped hair and looked a bit like Hans, her brother. Her eyes were open but staring vacantly out into the room. She was breathing irregularly, as if every breath caused her pain. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. Why did a human being have to suffer like this? With no hope of a life with even an illusory glimmer of meaning? He continued looking at her, but she seemed unaware of his presence. Time stood still. He was in a strange museum, he thought, a place where he was forced to look at an immured person. The girl in the tower. Immured inside herself.

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

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

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

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

They went back to reception.

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

‘What happens when a patient dies?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incidents under the surfaceNobody noticesWhat is happening.Incidents under the surfaceThe submarine sneaks awayNobody wants it to be forced up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I can supply everything. Where are you?’

‘In Grevgatan.’

‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sten Nordlander raised a hand demonstratively.

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

‘I won’t say another word about her.’

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

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

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

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

‘Why? What surprises you about it?’

‘That Hakan kept a diary. He wasn’t the writing type. We went on a trip to England once, and he didn’t send any postcards - he said he had no idea what to write. His logbooks weren’t exactly compelling reading either.’

‘He even seems to have written what look like poems.’

‘I find that very hard to believe.’

‘You’ll see for yourself.’

‘What’s it all about?’

‘Most of it is about the place we’re heading for.’

‘Musko?’

‘Harsfjarden. The submarines. He seems to have been obsessed with all those events at the beginning of the eighties.’

Nordlander stretched out an arm and pointed in the direction of Uto.

‘That’s where they were searching for submarines in 1980,’ he said.

‘In September,’ Wallander elaborated. ‘They thought it was one of the so-called Whisky class, as NATO calls them. Probably Russian, but it could also have been Polish.’

Nordlander gave him an appraising look.

‘You’ve been doing your homework, haven’t you?’

Nordlander gave Wallander control of the wheel and produced coffee cups and a Thermos. Wallander maintained their course by aiming at a spot on the horizon that the skipper had pointed out to him. A coastguard ship heading in the opposite direction caused a swell as it passed by. Nordlander switched off the engine and allowed the boat to drift while they drank coffee and ate sandwiches.

‘Hakan wasn’t the only one who was upset,’ he said. ‘A lot of us wondered what on earth was going on. It was several years after the Wennerstrom affair, but there were a lot of rumours going around.’

‘About what?’

Nordlander cocked his head, challenging Wallander to say what he should already know.

‘Spies?’

‘It simply wasn’t plausible for the submarines that were definitely present under the surface of Harsfjarden always to be one step ahead of us. They acted like they knew what tactics we were adopting, and where our mines were laid. It was as if they could hear all the discussions our superiors were having. There were rumours about a spy even better placed than Wennerstrom. Don’t forget that this was the time when a spy in Norway, Arne Treholt, was moving in Norwegian government circles, and Willy Brandt’s secretary was spying for East Germany. The suspicions didn’t lead anywhere. Nobody was exposed. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t somebody high up in the Swedish military who was spying.’

Wallander thought about the letters X, Y and Z in von Enke’s margin notes.

‘There must have been individuals you suspected?’

‘There were naval officers who thought a lot of facts suggested that Palme himself was a spy. I always thought that was nonsense. But the truth is, nobody was above suspicion. And we were being attacked in different ways.’

‘Attacked?’

‘Cutbacks. All the available money was being spent on guided missiles and on the air force. The navy was being squeezed more and more. Quite a few journalists at the time spoke dismissively about our “budget submarines”. They figured the alleged invaders had been invented as part of a plan for the navy to get more and better resources.’

‘Were you ever doubtful?’

‘What about?’

‘About the existence of the submarines.’

‘Never. Of course the Russian submarines existed.’

Wallander produced the black file from its plastic bag. He felt sure Sten Nordlander had never seen it before. His surprised expression didn’t seem put on. He dried his hands and placed the open file on his knee. There was hardly any wind, barely a ripple on the surface of the sea.

Nordlander leafed slowly through the pages. He occasionally looked up to check where the boat was drifting, then looked back down at the file. When he came to the end, he closed it, handed it back to Wallander and shook his head.

‘I’m astonished,’ he said. ‘But then, I knew Hakan was looking into these matters. I just didn’t realise he was doing it in so much detail. What would you call it? A diary? A private memoir?’

‘I think it can be read in two ways,’ said Wallander. ‘Partly just as it stands. But also as an incomplete investigation into what happened.’

‘Incomplete?’

He’s right, Wallander thought. Why did I say that? The book is presumably just the opposite. Something completed and closed.

‘You’re probably right,’ Wallander said. ‘He must have finished it. But what did he think he would achieve?’

‘It was a long time before I realised how much time he was spending in archives, reading reports, investigation accounts, books. And he spoke to everybody you could think of. Sometimes people would call me and ask what Hakan was up to. I just told them I thought he wanted to know the truth about what had happened.’

‘And what he was doing wasn’t popular, I gather? That’s what he told me.’

‘I think that in the end he was seen as unreliable. That was tragic. Nobody in the navy was more honest and conscientious than Hakan. He must have been deeply hurt, even if he never said anything.’

Nordlander lifted the hatch and took a look at the engine.

‘A real beauty, like a beating heart,’ he said as he closed the hatch again. ‘I once worked as chief engineer on one of our two Halland-class destroyers, the Smaland. Just being in her engine room was one of the greatest experiences of my life. There were two de Laval turbines that produced almost 60,000 horsepower. She was a 3,500-ton vessel, but we could shift her through the water at thirty-five knots max. That was something special. It was good to be alive.’

‘I have a question,’ Wallander said. ‘It’s extremely important. Is there anything in the stuff you’ve just looked through that shouldn’t be there?’

‘Something secret, you mean?’ said Nordlander, frowning. ‘Not that I could see.’

‘Did anything surprise you?’

‘I didn’t read in detail. I could barely decipher the margin comments. But nothing gave me pause.’

‘Then can you explain to me why he hid the stuff away?’

Nordlander hesitated before answering. He contemplated a sailing boat passing some distance away.

‘I don’t understand what could have been secret about it,’ he said eventually. ‘Who was he hiding it from?’

Wallander pricked up his ears. Something the man sitting beside him had said was important. But he couldn’t pin it down. He memorised both sentences.

Nordlander started the engine again and revved up to ten knots, heading for Mysingen and Harsfjarden. Wallander stood beside him. Over the next few hours Sten Nordlander took him on a guided tour of Musko and Harsfjarden. He pointed out where the depth charges had been sunk, and where the submarines might have been able to escape through minefields that had not been activated. The whole time, Wallander was following their route on a sea chart, noting all the deep and hidden depressions. He understood that only a very well-trained crew could negotiate Harsfjarden under the surface.

When Nordlander decided they had seen enough, he changed course and headed for a cluster of islets and skerries in the narrows between Orno and Uto. Beyond was the open sea. He skilfully guided the boat into an inlet in one of the skerries, and moored at the bottom of a cliff.

‘Not many people know about this inlet,’ he said as he shut down the engine. ‘So I always have it to myself. Enjoy!’

Wallander jumped ashore and secured the mooring rope, then collected the basket and placed it on a convenient rock. It smelled like the sea and the vegetation that filled the crevices. He felt like a child again, on a journey of exploration on an unknown island.

‘What’s the island called?’ he asked.

‘It’s not much more than a rocky outcrop. It doesn’t have a name.’

Without further ado Nordlander undressed and jumped into the water. Wallander watched his head bobbing up before disappearing again under the surface. He’s like a submarine, Wallander thought. Practising diving and surfacing. He’s not worried about how cold the water is.

Nordlander clambered back up onto the rocks and took a large red towel from the picnic basket.

‘You should give it a try,’ he said. ‘It’s cold, but it does you good.’

‘Some other time perhaps. What’s the water temperature?’

‘There’s a thermometer behind the compass. You can take a measurement while I get dried off and serve up the food.’

Wallander found the thermometer attached to a little rubber ball. He let the ball float in the water, then pulled it out and took the reading.

‘Eleven degrees,’ he said when he came back to where Nordlander was laying out the food. ‘Too cold for me. Do you go swimming in the winter as well?’

‘No. But I’ve thought about it. We can eat in ten minutes. Go for a walk around the little island. You might find a message in a bottle from a capsised Russian submarine.’

Wallander wondered if there was something behind Nordlander’s words, but he didn’t think so. Sten Nordlander wasn’t a man who dealt in obscure subtexts.

He sat down on a large flat rock with an unobstructed view of the horizon, picked up a few stones and threw them into the water. When had he last played ducks and drakes? He recalled a visit to Stenshuvud with Linda when she was a teenager and reluctant to take trips with him. They had played ducks and drakes then, and she was much better at it than he was. And now she’s as good as married, he thought. She found the right man. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here on this rocky outcrop, staring out to sea and wondering about his vanished parents.

One day he would teach Klara to skim flat stones over the water and watch them jump along like frogs before sinking.

He was just about to stand up and go - Sten Nordlander had shouted for him - but he remained seated with the last stone in his hand. Small, grey, a fragment of Swedish rock. A thought struck him, vague at first, but becoming clearer all the time.

He remained seated for so long that Nordlander had to shout for him again. Then he stood up and walked over to the picnic, but with the thought firmly lodged in his mind.

After he had been dropped off back at Grevgatan that evening by Sten Nordlander and watched him drive away, he hurried up the stairs to the apartment.

His suspicion was confirmed. The little grey stone that had been lying on Hakan von Enke’s desk was missing.

14

The sea trip had tired Wallander out. It had also stimulated many thoughts. Not just about why the stone was missing. Something inside him had clicked when Sten Nordlander said: ‘Who was he hiding it from?’ Hakan von Enke could have had only one reason for hiding his book. There was still something going on. He wasn’t simply rooting around in the past; he wasn’t trying to bring a sleeping or mummified truth to life. What had happened in the 1980s was linked to what was happening today.

It must have something to do with people. People who were still alive. At one point in the book von Enke had written a list of names that had meant nothing to Wallander - with one exception, that of a man who often appeared in the media during the hunt for the submarines, a man highly placed in the Swedish navy: Sven-Erik Hakansson. Beside that name von Enke had written a cross, an exclamation mark, and a question mark. What could that mean? The notes were not haphazard; everything was calculated, even if much of it was in a secret language that Wallander had only partially been able to interpret.

He took out the file again and examined the names once more, wondering if they were people involved somehow or other in the battle against the intruders, or if they were suspects. And if so, suspected of what?

He took a deep breath. Hakan von Enke had been on the trail of a Russian spy. Somebody who had given the Russian submarines sufficient information for them to fool their pursuers, even to dictate what weaponry they would need. Somebody who was still out there, who still hadn’t been exposed. That was the person from whom von Enke had concealed his notes, the person he was afraid of.

The man outside the fence in Djursholm, Wallander thought. Was that someone who didn’t like the idea of Hakan von Enke hunting down a spy?

Wallander adjusted the floor lamp next to the sofa and worked his way through the thick file yet again. He paused every time he came to notes that could possibly indicate traces of a spy. Perhaps that was also the answer to another question, the feeling that somebody had removed documents from the archive in von Enke’s study. The person responsible for removing the papers was probably Hakan von Enke himself. It was all like some sort of Russian nesting doll. He had not only hidden his notes, but he had also hidden from outsiders what they actually meant. He had laid a smokescreen. Or perhaps rather a minefield that could be activated whenever he wanted, if he noticed that someone was getting close to him, someone who had no business being there.

Wallander eventually turned off the light and went to bed. But he couldn’t get to sleep. On a sudden impulse, he got up, dressed and went out. Earlier in his life when he was feeling especially lonely he had tried to improve the situation by going for long nocturnal walks. There wasn’t a single street in Ystad that he hadn’t become familiar with. Now he walked along Strandvagen and then turned left towards the bridge to Djurgarden. It was a warm summer night and there were still people out and about, many of them drunk and boisterous. Wallander felt like a furtive stranger as he wandered through the shadows. He continued past the amusement park at Grona Lund, and didn’t turn back until he came to the Thielska art gallery. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, just strolling around in the night instead of sleeping. When he arrived back at the apartment he fell asleep right away; his excursion had achieved its desired effect.

The following day he drove home. He was back in Skane by mid-afternoon and stopped to stock up on provisions before tackling the final stretch and picking up Jussi, who was overjoyed to see him and left muddy paw prints on his clothes. After eating and sleeping for an hour or two, he sat down at the kitchen table with the file in front of him. He had taken out his strongest magnifying glass. His father had given it to him many years ago, when he had displayed a sudden interest in tiny insects crawling around in the grass. It was one of the few presents he had ever received, apart from the dog, Saga, and he treasured it. Now he used it to examine the photographs between the black covers, leaving the texts and margin notes in peace for a change.

One of the photos seemed to stick out like a sore thumb. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but there was something too civilian about the picture. He was quite sure that nothing in the book was there by accident. Hakan von Enke was a careful and very dedicated hunter.

The photo, which was in black and white, had been taken at some sort of harbour. In the background was a building with no windows, presumably a warehouse. With the aid of the magnifying glass, Wallander was able to make out two trucks and some stacks of fish crates in a blurred area at the edge of the picture. The photographer had aimed the camera at two men standing by a fishing boat, an old-fashioned trawler. One of the men was old, the other very young, no more than a boy. Wallander guessed that the picture had been taken sometime in the sixties. The fashion was still wool sweaters and leather jackets, sou’westers and oilskins. The boat was white, and scraped up. Behind and between the older man’s legs Wallander could just make out the registration plate. The last letter was G. The first letter was almost completely hidden, but the middle one could be an R or a T. The numbers were easier to read: 123. Wallander sat down at his computer and googled various search words in an attempt to find out where the trawler was registered. He soon established that there was only one possibility: the combination of letters had to be NRG. The trawler was based on the east coast, in the neighbourhood of Norrkoping. After a little more searching Wallander found the home pages of the National Administration of Shipping and Navigation and the National Board of Fisheries. He noted down the phone numbers on a scrap of paper and returned to the kitchen table. The phone rang. It was Linda, wondering why he hadn’t been in touch.

‘You just vanished into thin air,’ she said. ‘I think we have enough missing persons to contend with.’

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ said Wallander. ‘I came home an hour or so ago. I was planning to call you tomorrow.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘now! I - not to mention Hans - want to know what you’ve found out.’

‘Is he at home?’

‘He’s at work. I told him off this morning because he’s never here. I tried to hammer it into him that one of these days I’ll start working again. What will happen then?’

‘Well, what will happen?’

‘He’ll have to help. Anyway, tell me all about it.’

Wallander started to describe his visit to Signe, the lonely, hunched-up creature with the blonde hair, but before he had hit his stride, Klara started crying and Linda was forced to hang up. He promised to call her the following day.

The first thing he did when he arrived at the police station the next morning was to find Martinsson and figure out whether or not he would be on duty over the midsummer holiday. Martinsson was, of all his colleagues, best acquainted with the constantly changing work schedule, and he was able to answer within a couple of minutes. Despite so many officers being on leave, Wallander would not be required to work over Midsummer. As for Martinsson, he had arranged to take his youngest daughter to a yoga camp in Denmark.

‘I don’t really know what it involves,’ he said, trying to hide his concern. ‘Is it normal for a thirteen-year-old to be so crazy about yoga?’

‘Better that than a lot of other things.’

‘My two older children were into horses. Much less stressful. But this girl is different.’

‘We’re all different,’ said Wallander mysteriously, and left the room.

He dialled the number he had tracked down the previous evening and soon discovered that NRG123 belonged to a fisherman by the name of Eskil Lundberg on Boko in the Gryt southern archipelago. He made another call and, when an answering machine came on, he left a message saying it was urgent.

Then he called Linda and finished the conversation they had begun the previous evening. She had spoken to Hans, and as soon as possible they would go visit Signe. Wallander wasn’t surprised, but he wondered if they really understood what was in store for them. What had he himself expected to find?

‘We’ve decided to celebrate midsummer,’ she said. ‘In spite of everything that’s happened, and all the anguish over his parents’ disappearance. We thought we’d cheer you up by coming to visit you.’

‘By all means,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m looking forward to it. What a nice surprise!’

He got a cup of coffee from the machine, which was actually working for once, and exchanged a few words with one of the forensic officers who had spent the night in a swamp where a confused woman appeared to have committed suicide. When the officer eventually arrived home at dawn, he had produced a frog from one of the many pockets in his uniform. His wife had been less than overjoyed.

Wallander returned to his office and managed to find yet another number in his overloaded address book. It was the last call he planned to make that morning before abandoning the missing von Enkes and returning to his routine police work. Earlier he had left a message on an answering machine. Now he was about to dial the mobile phone number of that same person. This time he got through.

‘Hans-Olov.’

Wallander recognised the almost childish voice of the young professor of geology he had met in the course of duty several years ago. He could hear an announcement in the background about a flight departure.

‘Wallander here. I gather you’re at an airport?’

‘Yes, Kastrup. I’m on my way back home after a geology congress in Chile, but my suitcase seems to have been lost.’

‘I need your help,’ said Wallander. ‘I’d like you to compare some stones.’

‘Sure. But can it wait until tomorrow? I’m always a wreck after a long flight.’

Wallander remembered that Uddmark had no less than five children, despite his youth.

‘I hope your presents for the children weren’t in the missing bag.’

‘It’s worse than that. It contains some beautiful stones I brought home with me.’

‘Is your office address the same as it was the last time we worked together? If it is I can send you the stones later today.’

‘What do you want me to do with them, apart from establishing what kind of rock they are?’

‘I want to know if any of them might have originated in the USA.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘In the vicinity of San Diego in California, or somewhere on the east coast, near Boston.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, but it sounds difficult. Do you have any idea how many different species of rock there are?’

Wallander told him that he didn’t know, sympathised with him once again about the missing suitcase, hung up and then hurried to join a meeting he should have been at. Someone had left a note on his desk saying it was important. He was the last person to enter the conference room, where the window was wide open because the forecast said it was going to be a hot day. He couldn’t help thinking about all the times he had been in charge of these kinds of meetings. During all the years when it had been his responsibility, he had often dreamed of the day when the burden would no longer be on his shoulders. But now, when it was often somebody else in charge of investigations, he sometimes missed not being the driving force sorting through proposals and telling people what to do.

The man in charge today was a detective by the name of Ove Sunde. He had arrived in Ystad only the previous year, from Vaxjo. Somebody had whispered in Wallander’s ear that a messy divorce and a less than successful investigation that led to a heated debate in the local newspaper, Smalandsposten, had induced him to request a transfer. He came from Gothenburg originally, and never made any attempt to disguise his dialect. Sunde was considered to be competent, but a bit on the lazy side. Another rumour suggested that he had found a new companion in Ystad, a woman young enough to be his daughter. Wallander distrusted men his own age who chased after women far too young for them. It rarely ended happily, but often led to new, heart-rending divorces.

It was doubtful, though, that his own constant loneliness was a better alternative.

Sunde began his presentation. It was about the case of the woman in the swamp, which was probably not just a suicide but also a murder. Her husband was found lying dead in their home in a little village not far from Marsvinsholm. The situation was complicated by the fact that a few days earlier the man had gone to the police station in Ystad and said that he thought his wife was planning to kill him. The officer who spoke to him hadn’t taken him seriously because the man seemed confused and made a lot of contradictory claims. They needed to work out as quickly as possible what had actually happened, before the media caught on to the fact that the man’s complaint had been shelved. Wallander was annoyed by Sunde’s excessively officious tone. He considered this fear of the opinion of the mass media sheer cowardice. If a mistake was made, it should be acknowledged and the consequences accepted.

He thought he should point that out, calmly and objectively, firmly but without losing his temper. But he said nothing. Martinsson was sitting at the other side of the table, watching him. He knows exactly what’s going on inside my head at the moment, Wallander thought, and he agrees with me, whether I speak up now or hold my tongue.

After the meeting they drove out to the house where the dead man had been found. With photographs in their hands and plastic bags over their shoes, he and Martinsson went from room to room in the company of a forensic officer. Wallander suddenly experienced deja vu, feeling like he had already visited this house at some point in the past and made an ‘ocular inspection’ (as Lennart Mattson would no doubt have described it) of the crime scene. He hadn’t, of course; it was simply that he had done the same thing so many times before. A few years ago he bought a book about a crime committed on the island of Varmdo off Stockholm in the early nineteenth century. As he read it, he became increasingly involved, and had the distinct feeling that he could have entered the story and together with the county sheriff and prosecutor worked out how the victims, man and wife, had been murdered. People have always been the same, and the most common crimes are more or less repeats of what happened in earlier times. They are nearly always due to arguments about money, or jealousy, sometimes revenge. Before him, generations of police officers, sheriffs and prosecutors had made the same observations. Nowadays they had superior technical means of establishing evidence, but the ability to interpret what you see with your own eyes was still the key to police work.

Wallander stopped dead and broke off his train of thought. They had entered the couple’s bedroom. There was blood on the floor and on one side of the bed. But what had caught Wallander’s attention was a painting hanging on the wall above the bed. It depicted a capercaillie in a woodland setting. Martinsson materialised by his side.

‘Painted by your father, right?’

Wallander nodded, but also shook his head in disbelief.

‘I never cease to be amazed.’

‘Well, at least he didn’t need to worry about forgeries,’ said Martinsson thoughtfully.

‘Of course not,’ said Wallander. ‘From an artistic point of view, it’s crap.’

‘Don’t say that,’ protested Martinsson.

‘I’m only calling a spade a spade,’ said Wallander. ‘Where’s the murder weapon?’

They went out into the garden. A plastic tent had been erected over an old axe. Wallander could see blood high up on the shaft.

‘Is there a plausible motive? How long had they been married?’

‘They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary last year. They have four grown children and goodness knows how many grandchildren. Nobody can understand what happened.’

‘Is there money involved?’

‘According to the neighbours they were both thrifty and stingy. I don’t know yet how much they have stashed away. The bank’s looking into it. But we can assume that there’s a fair amount.’

‘It looks as if there was a fight,’ Wallander said after a few minutes’ thought. ‘He resisted. Until we recover the body, we can’t say what sort of injuries she had.’

‘It’s not a big swamp,’ said Martinsson. ‘They expect to pull her out today.’

They drove back from the depressing scene of the crime to the police station. It seemed to Wallander that just for a moment, the summer landscape had been transformed into a black-and-white photograph. He spent some time swivelling back and forth in his desk chair, then dialled Eskil Lundberg’s number. His wife answered, and she said her husband was out in his boat. Wallander could hear young children playing in the background. He guessed that Eskil Lundberg was the boy he had seen in the photograph.

‘I assume he’s out fishing,’ said Wallander.

‘What else? He has nearly a mile of nets out there. Every other day he delivers fish to Soderkoping.’

‘Eel?’

She sounded almost offended when she replied.

‘If he’d been after eels he’d have taken eel traps with him,’ she said. ‘But there are no eels any more. Before long there won’t be any fish left at all.’

‘Does he still have the boat?’

‘Which boat?’

‘The big trawler. NRG123.’

Wallander noticed that she was becoming less and less cooperative, almost suspicious.

‘He tried to sell it ages ago. Nobody wanted it, it was such a wreck. It rotted away. He sold the engine for a hundred kronor. What exactly do you want?’

‘I want to speak to him,’ Wallander said, in as friendly a tone as he could manage. ‘Does he have a mobile phone with him?’

‘There’s not much of a signal out there. You’d be better off calling him when he gets back home. He should be here in about two hours.’

‘I’ll do that.’

He managed to bring the call to a close before she had another chance to ask him what he wanted. He leaned back and put his feet on his desk. Now he had no meetings, no tasks that required his immediate attention. He grabbed his jacket and left the police station - to be on the safe side, he left via the basement garage, so that nobody could catch him at the last moment. He walked down the hill into town, and felt a spring in his step. He wasn’t yet so old that nothing affected him any more. Sun and warm weather made everything more tolerable.

He had lunch in a cafe just off the square, read Ystads Allehanda and one of the evening newspapers. Then he sat on a bench in the square. He had another quarter of an hour to kill. He wondered where Hakan and Louise were at that moment. Were they still alive, or were they dead? Had they made some kind of pact regarding their disappearance? He was reminded of the turmoil caused by the spy Stig Bergling, but he had trouble finding any similarities between the serious submarine commander and the conceited Bergling.

Wallander also considered another factor that he reluctantly conceded could be of vital significance. Hakan von Enke had visited his daughter regularly. Was he really prepared to let her down by going underground? The inevitable conclusion was that von Enke must be dead.

There was an alternative, of course, Wallander thought as he watched people rummaging through old LP records at one of the market stands. Von Enke had been scared. Could it be that whoever he was afraid of had caught up with him? Wallander had no answers, only questions that he must try to formulate as clearly and precisely as possible.

When the time came he called Boko just as a somewhat drunk man sat down on the other end of the bench. A man’s voice eventually answered. Wallander decided to put all his cards on the table. He said his name, and explained that he was a police officer.

‘I found a photograph in a file that belongs to a man called Hakan von Enke. Do you know him?’

‘No.’

The answer came quickly and firmly. Wallander had the impression that Lundberg was on his guard.

‘Do you know his wife? Louise?’

‘No.’

‘But your paths must have crossed somehow. Why else would he have a photo of you and a man I assume is your father. And of the boat NRG123. That’s your boat, isn’t it?’

‘My father bought it in Gothenburg sometime in the early 1960s. Around the time when they started building bigger boats and no longer used wood as the main material. He got it cheap. There was no shortage of herring in those days.’

Wallander described the photo, and wondered where it had been taken.

‘Fyrudden,’ said Lundberg. ‘That’s where the boat was berthed. Helga, she was named. She was built in a yard in the south of Norway. Tonsberg, I think.’

‘Who took the picture?’

‘It must have been Gustav Holmqvist. He ran a marine joinery business and was always taking pictures when he wasn’t working.’

‘Could your father have known Hakan von Enke?’

‘My father’s dead. He never mixed with that crowd.’

‘What do you mean, “that crowd”?’

‘Noblemen.’

‘Hakan von Enke is also a seafarer. Like you and your father.’

‘I don’t know him. Neither did my dad.’

‘Then how did he get hold of that photograph?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe I should ask Gustav Holmqvist. Do you have his phone number?’

‘He doesn’t have a phone number. He’s been dead for fifteen years. And his wife is dead. Their daughter too. They’re all dead.’

Wallander obviously wasn’t going to get any further. There was nothing to suggest that Eskil Lundberg wasn’t telling the truth. Yet at the same time, Wallander had the feeling that something didn’t add up. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

Wallander apologised to Lundberg for disturbing him, and remained sitting with his mobile phone in his hand. The drunken man on the other end of the bench had fallen asleep. It suddenly dawned on Wallander that he recognised him. Several years ago Wallander had arrested him and some accomplices for a series of burglaries. The man had spent some years in jail, and then left Ystad. Evidently he was back again.

Wallander stood up and began walking to the police station. He repeated the conversation to himself, word for word. Lundberg hadn’t displayed any curiosity at all. Was he really as uninterested as he seemed to be? Or did he know what I was going to ask about? Wallander continued rehashing the conversation until he was back in his office. He hadn’t reached any clear conclusion.

His thoughts were interrupted by Martinsson, who appeared in the doorway.

‘We’ve found the old woman,’ he said.

Wallander stared at him. He didn’t know what Martinsson was talking about.

‘Who?’

‘The woman who killed her husband with an axe. Evelina Andersson. The woman in the swamp. I’m going to drive out there again. Do you want to come with me?’

‘Yes, I’ll come.’

Wallander racked his memory in vain. But he didn’t have the slightest idea what Martinsson was talking about.

They took Martinsson’s car. Wallander still didn’t know where they were going, or why. He was feeling increasingly desperate. Martinsson glanced at him.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

It was only after they had left Ystad that his memory became unblocked. It’s that shadow inside my head, Wallander thought, furious with himself. Everything came back to him now, with full force.

‘Something just occurred to me,’ he said. ‘I forgot that I have a dentist appointment.’

Martinsson braked.

‘Should I turn round?’

‘No. One of the others can drive me back.’

Wallander didn’t bother to take a look at the woman they had just lifted out of the swamp. A patrol car took him back to Ystad. He got out at the police station and thanked the driver for the lift, then sat in his own car. He felt cold and worried. The gaps in his memory were scaring him.

After a while he went up to his office. He had decided to talk to his doctor about the sudden spells of darkness that filled his head. He had just sat down when his mobile phone gave a chime: he had received a text. It was short and precise. Both stones Swedish. Neither from USA’s coasts. Hans-Olov.

Wallander sat motionless in his chair. He couldn’t decide immediately what that meant, but now he knew for sure that something didn’t add up.

He felt that this was a sort of breakthrough. But exactly what the implications were he didn’t know.

He couldn’t decide if the von Enkes were gliding further away from him or if they were slowly getting closer.

15

A few days before midsummer, Wallander drove north along the coast road. Shortly after Vastervik he nearly ran into an elk. He pulled onto the shoulder, his heart racing, and thought of Klara before he could bring himself to continue. His journey took him past a cafe where, many years ago, he had stopped, exhausted, and been allowed to sleep in a back room. Several times over the years he had thought with a sort of melancholy longing about the waitress who had been so kind to him. When he came to the cafe he slowed down and drove into the parking area. But he didn’t leave the car. He sat there, hesitating, his hands clamped to the steering wheel. Then he continued on his way.

He knew why he didn’t go in, of course. He was afraid of finding somebody else behind the counter, and being forced to accept that here too, in that cafe, time had moved on and that he would never be able to return to what now lay so far away in the past.

He came to the harbour at Fyrudden at eleven o’clock. When he got out of the car he saw that the warehouse in the photo was still there, even though it had been converted and now had windows. But the fish boxes were gone, as was the big trawler alongside the quay. The harbour was now full of pleasure boats. Wallander parked outside the red-painted coastguard building, paid the required entrance fee at the chandler’s, and wandered out to the furthest of the jetties.

He acknowledged to himself that the whole journey was like a game of roulette. He hadn’t warned Eskil Lundberg that he would be coming. If he’d called from Skane he had no doubt that Lundberg would have refused to meet him. But if he was standing here on the quay? He sat on a bench outside the chandler’s shop and took out his mobile phone. Now it was sink or swim. If he had been a von Wallander, with a coat of arms and a family motto, those were the words he would have chosen: sink or swim. That’s the way it had always been throughout his life. He dialled the number and hoped for the best.

Lundberg answered.

‘It’s Wallander. We spoke about a week ago.’

‘What do you want?’

If he was surprised, he concealed it well, Wallander thought. Lundberg was evidently one of those enviable people who are always prepared for anything to happen, for anybody at all to call them out of the blue, a king or a fool - or a police officer from Ystad.

‘I’m in Fyrudden,’ Wallander informed him, and took the bull by the horns. ‘I hope you have time to meet me.’

‘Why do you think I’d have any more to tell you now than I did when we last spoke?’

That was the moment when Wallander’s long experience as a police officer told him that Lundberg did have more to tell him.

‘I have the feeling we should talk,’ he said.

‘Is that your way of telling me that you want to interrogate me?’

‘Not at all. I just want to talk to you, and show you the photo I found.’

Lundberg thought for a few moments.

‘I’ll pick you up in an hour,’ he said eventually.

Wallander spent the time eating in the cafe, where he had a view of the harbour, the islands and in the distance the open sea. He had consulted a sea chart in a glass case on one of the cafe walls and established that Boko was to the south of Fyrudden; so it was boats coming from that direction he kept an eye on. He assumed that a fisherman would have a boat at least superficially reminiscent of Sten Nordlander’s wooden gig, but he was completely wrong. Lundberg came in an open plastic boat with an outboard motor. It was filled with plastic buckets and net baskets. He berthed at the jetty and looked around. Wallander made himself known. It was only when he had clambered awkwardly down into the boat and almost fallen over that they shook hands.

‘I thought we could go to my place,’ said Lundberg. ‘There are far too many strangers around here for my taste.’

Without waiting for an answer, he pulled away from the jetty and headed for the harbour entrance at what Wallander thought was far too fast a speed. A man in the cockpit of a berthed sailing boat stared at them in obvious disapproval. The engine noise was so loud that conversation was impossible. Wallander sat in the bow and watched the tree-clad islands and barren rocks flashing past. They passed through a strait that Wallander recognised from the map on the wall of the cafe as Halsosundet, and continued south. The islands were still numerous and close together; only occasionally was it possible to glimpse the open sea. Lundberg was wearing calf-length trousers, turned-down boots and a top with the somewhat surprising logo ‘I burn my own trash’. Wallander guessed he was about fifty, possibly slightly older. That could well fit in with the age of the boy in the photograph.

They turned into an inlet lined with oaks and birches and berthed by a red-painted boathouse smelling of tar, with swallows flying in and out. Next to the boathouse were two large smoking ovens.

‘Your wife said there weren’t any eels left to catch,’ Wallander said. ‘Are things really that bad?’

‘Even worse,’ said Lundberg. ‘Soon there won’t be any fish left at all. Didn’t she say that?’

The red-painted two-storey house could just be seen in a dip about a hundred yards from the water’s edge. Plastic toys were scattered about in front. Lundberg’s wife, Anna, seemed just as cautious when they shook hands as she had on the phone.

The kitchen smelled of boiled potatoes and fish, and a radio was playing almost inaudible music. Anna Lundberg put a coffee pot on the table, then left the room. She was about the same age as her husband, and in a way they were quite similar in appearance.

A dog came bounding into the kitchen from some other room. A handsome cocker spaniel, Wallander thought, and stroked it while Lundberg was serving coffee.

Wallander laid the photo on the table. Lundberg took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket. He glanced at the picture, then slid it to one side.

‘That must have been 1968 or 1969. In the autumn, if I remember correctly.’

‘I found it among Hakan von Enke’s papers.’

Lundberg looked him straight in the eye.

‘I don’t know who that man is.’

‘He was a high-ranking officer in the Swedish navy. A commander. Could your father have known him?’

‘It’s possible. But I doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘He wasn’t all that fond of military men.’

‘You’re in the picture as well.’

‘I can’t answer your questions. Even if I’d like to.’

Wallander decided to try a different tack and started again from the beginning.

‘Were you born here on the island?’

‘Yes. So was my dad. I’m the fourth generation.’

‘When did he die?’

‘In 1994. He had a heart attack while he was out in the boat, dealing with the nets. When he didn’t come home, I called the coastguard. Our neighbour Lasse Aman found him. He was lying in the boat and drifting towards Bjorkskar. But I reckon that was how the old man would have preferred to go.’

Wallander thought he could detect a tone of voice that suggested the father-son relationship was less than perfect.

‘Have you always lived here on the island? While your father was alive?’

‘That would never have worked. You can’t be a hired hand for your own father. Especially when he makes all the decisions, and is always right. Even when he’s completely wrong.’

Eskil Lundberg burst out laughing.

‘It wasn’t only when we were out fishing that he was always right,’ he said. ‘I remember we were watching a TV show one evening, some kind of quiz show. The question was: Which country shares a border with the Rock of Gibraltar? He said it was Italy and I said it was Spain. When it turned out that I was right, he switched off the television and went to bed. That’s the way he was.’

‘And so you moved away?’

Eskil Lundberg pulled a face.

‘Is it important?’

‘It might be.’

‘Tell me again, one more time, so that I understand. Somebody disappeared, is that right?’

‘Two people, a man and his wife. Hakan and Louise von Enke. I found this photo in a diary belonging to the husband, the naval commander.’

‘They live in Stockholm, you said? And you’re from Ystad? What’s the connection?’

‘My daughter is going to marry the son of the missing couple. They have a child. The couple who have vanished are her future parents-in-law.’

Lundberg nodded. He suddenly seemed to be looking at Wallander less suspiciously.

‘I left the island as soon as I finished school,’ he said. ‘I found a job in a factory just outside Kalmar. I lived there for a year. Then I came back home and worked with my dad as a fisherman. But we couldn’t get along. If you didn’t do exactly as he said, he was furious. I left again.’

‘Did you go back to the factory?’

‘Not that one. I travelled east, to the island of Gotland. I worked in the cement factory at Slite for twenty years, until Dad got sick. It was on Gotland that I met my wife. We had two children. We came back here when Dad couldn’t keep the business going any longer. Mum had died and my sister lives in Denmark, so we were the only ones who could help out. We own farmland, fishing waters, thirty-six little islands, countless rocky outcrops.’

‘So that means you weren’t here in the early 1980s?’

‘The occasional week in the summer, but that’s all.’

‘Could it be that around that time your father was in touch with a naval officer?’ Wallander asked. ‘Without you knowing about it?’

Lundberg shook his head energetically.

‘That wouldn’t fit at all with the way he was. He thought there should be a bounty on the head of every member of the Swedish navy. Especially if they were captains.’

‘Why?’

‘They were far too gung-ho during their manoeuvres. We have a jetty on the other side of the island where the trawler used to be berthed. Two years in a row the swell from the navy boats wrecked it - the stone caissons were dragged loose. And they refused to pay for repairs. Dad wrote letters, protested, but nothing happened. And the crew often threw slops from the kitchen into wells on the islands - if you know what a freshwater well means to island dwellers, you don’t do things like that. There were other things too.’

Lundberg seemed to hesitate again. Wallander waited, didn’t nudge him.

‘Shortly before he died, he told me about something that happened at the beginning of the 1980s,’ Lundberg said eventually. ‘You could say that he’d become less malevolent, finally reconciled to the fact that I was going to take over everything, no matter what.’

Lundberg stood up and left the room. Wallander was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to say any more when he came back, carrying a few old diaries.

‘September 1982,’ he said. ‘These are his diaries. He noted down catches, and the weather. But also anything unusual that happened. And something unusual happened on 19 September 1982.’

He passed the diary over the table to Wallander and pointed out the appropriate place. It said, in very neat handwriting: Almost pulled down.

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘He told me about it once. At first I thought he was confused and sinking into senility, but what he said was too detailed to be imagined.’

‘Tell me all about it, from the beginning,’ said Wallander. ‘I’m especially interested in what happened in the autumn of 1982.’

Lundberg moved his cup to one side, as if he needed the extra space in order to tell his story.

‘He was drifting off the east coast of Gotland, fishing, when it happened. The boat seemed to come to a sudden stop. Something was tugging at the nets, and the boat nearly capsised. He had no idea what had happened, apart from the obvious fact that something heavy had become caught in the nets. He was very careful because in his younger days he had occasionally fished up gas shells. He and the two assistants he had on board tried to cut themselves loose - but then they realised that the boat had turned and the trawl had worked itself free. They managed to haul it in, and found they had caught a steel cylinder about three feet long. It wasn’t a shell or a mine; it looked more like a part of a ship’s engine. It was heavy, and it didn’t seem to have been lying in the water very long. They tried to decide what it was, but to no avail. When they got back home Dad continued examining the cylinder, but he couldn’t work out what it had been used for. He put it aside and continued repairing the trawl. He had always been cheap, and it went against the grain to throw anything away. But there’s a sequel to the story.’

Lundberg slid the diary back towards himself and leafed forward a few days, to 27 September. Once again he showed Wallander the open page. They are searching. Three words, no more.

‘He’d almost forgotten about the cylinder when navy vessels suddenly started turning up at the precise spot where he’d found it. He often used to fish there, off the east coast of Gotland. He knew it wasn’t a routine manoeuvre - the ships were moving in such strange ways. They would stay still for a while, then start moving in ever-decreasing circles. It wasn’t long before he worked out what was going on.’

Lundberg closed the diary and looked at Wallander.

‘They were looking for something they had lost. But Dad didn’t have the slightest intention of returning the steel cylinder. It had ruined his trawl. He continued fishing and took no notice of them.’

‘What happened then?’

‘The navy had ships and divers deployed there during the autumn and on until December. Then the last of the ships moved away. There were rumours that a submarine had sunk there. But the place where they were searching wasn’t deep enough for a submarine. The navy never got its cylinder back, and Dad never really understood what it was. But he was pleased to have got back at them for destroying his jetty. I honestly can’t believe that he was in close touch with a naval officer.’

They sat there without speaking. Wallander was trying to work out how von Enke could have fitted in to what he had just been told.

‘I think it’s still there,’ said Lundberg.

Wallander thought he must have misheard, but Eskil Lundberg had already got to his feet.

‘The cylinder,’ he said. ‘I think it’s still in the shed.’

They left the house, the dog scampering around at their feet sniffing for tracks. A wind was blowing up. Anna Lundberg was hanging washing on a line suspended between two old cherry trees. The white pillowcases were smacking in the wind. Behind the boathouse was a shed balancing precariously on the uneven rocks. There was just one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Wallander entered a space full of smells. An ancient-looking eel spear hung from one of the walls. Lundberg squatted down and rummaged around in one corner of the shed among tangled ropes, broken bailers, old cork floats and tattered nets. He poked and prodded with a degree of violence that suggested he shared his father’s anger at the trouble caused by the navy. He eventually stood up, took a step to one side and pointed. Wallander could see a cylindrical object, in grey steel, like a large cigar case with a diameter of about eight inches. At one end was a half-open lid, revealing a mass of electric cords and switching relays.

‘We can take it outside,’ said Lundberg, ‘if you give me a hand.’

They lifted it down onto the jetty. The dog ran up immediately to examine it. Wallander tried to imagine what the cylinder’s function could be. He doubted it was part of an engine. It might have something to do with radar equipment, or with the launching of torpedoes or mines.

Wallander squatted down and searched for a serial number or a place of manufacture, but found nothing. The dog was licking his face until Lundberg shooed her away.

‘What do you think it is?’ he asked when he stood up again.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lundberg. ‘Neither did my dad. He didn’t like that. That’s one way in which I’m like him. We want answers to our questions.’

Lundberg paused for a few moments before continuing.

‘I don’t need it. Maybe it’s of some use to you?’

Wallander didn’t realise at first that Lundberg was referring to the steel cylinder at their feet.

‘Yes, I’d be happy to take it,’ he said, thinking that Sten Nordlander might be able to explain what the cylinder was used for.

They put it in the boat and Wallander unfastened the line. Lundberg turned east and headed for the strait between Boko and Bjorkskar. They passed a small island with a building at the edge of a clump of trees.

‘An old hunting lodge,’ said Lundberg. ‘They used to use it as a base when they were out shooting seabirds. My dad sometimes stayed there for a few nights when he wanted to spend some time drinking and be on his own. It’s a good hiding place for anybody who wants to disappear from the face of the earth for a while.’

They docked at the pier. Wallander reversed the car to the water’s edge, and they lifted the steel cylinder onto the back seat.

‘There’s one thing I’m wondering about,’ said Lundberg. ‘You said that both husband and wife vanished. Am I right in thinking that they didn’t disappear at the same time?’

‘Yes. Hakan von Enke disappeared in April, and his wife only a few weeks ago.’

‘That’s strange. The fact that there’s no trace of them at all. Where could he have gone to? Or they?’

‘We simply don’t know. They might be alive, they might be dead.’

Lundberg shook his head.

‘There’s still the question about the photograph,’ said Wallander.

‘I don’t have an answer for you.’

Was it because Lundberg’s reply came too quickly? Wallander wasn’t sure, but he did wonder, purely intuitively, if what Lundberg said was true. Was there something he didn’t want to tell Wallander about, despite everything?

‘Maybe it will come to you,’ said Wallander. ‘You never know. A memory might rise to the surface one of these days.’

Wallander watched him backing away from the quay, then they both raised their hands to say goodbye, and the boat shot off at high speed towards the strait and Halso.

Wallander took a different route home. He wanted to avoid passing that little cafe again.

When he arrived he was tired and hungry, and he didn’t pick up Jussi from the neighbour’s. He could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It had been raining; he could smell it in the grass under his feet.

He unlocked the door and went into the house, took off his jacket and kicked off his shoes.

He paused in the hall, held his breath, listened intently. Nobody there. Nothing had been disturbed, but even so he knew that somebody had been in the house while he was away. He went into the kitchen in his socks. No message on the table. If it had been Linda, she would have scribbled a note and left it there. He went into the living room and looked around.

He’d had a visitor. Somebody had been there and had left.

Wallander pulled on his boots and walked around the outside of the house.

When he was sure that nobody was observing him, he went to the dog kennel and squatted down.

He felt around inside. What he had stashed was still there.

16

He had inherited the tin box from his father. Or rather, he had found it among all the discarded paintings, tins of paint and paintbrushes. When Wallander cleared out the studio after his father’s death, it brought tears to his eyes. One of the oldest paintbrushes had a maker’s mark indicating that it had been manufactured during the war, in 1942. This had been his father’s life, he thought: a constantly growing heap of discarded paintbrushes in the corner of the room. When he was cleaning up and throwing everything into big paper bags before losing patience and ordering a skip, he had come across the tin box. It was empty and rusty, but Wallander could vaguely remember it from his childhood. At one time in the distant past his father had used it to store his old toys - well made and beautifully painted tin soldiers, parts of a Meccano set.

Where all these toys had disappeared to he had no idea. He had looked in every nook and cranny of both the house and the studio without finding them. He even searched through the old rubbish heap behind the house, dug into it with a spade and a pitchfork without finding anything. The tin box was empty, and Wallander regarded it as a symbol, something he had inherited and could fill with whatever he pleased. He cleaned it up, scraped away the worst of the rust, and put it in the storeroom in the basement in Mariagatan. It was only when he moved into his new house that he rediscovered it. And now it had come in handy, when he was wondering where to hide the black file he had found in Signe’s room. In a way it was her book, he thought; it was Signe’s book and might contain an explanation for her parents’ disappearance.

He decided the best place to hide the tin box was under the wooden floor of the kennel in which Jussi slept. He was relieved to find that the book was still there. He decided to pick up Jussi without further ado. The neighbouring farm was at the other side of several oilseed-rape fields that had been harvested while he was away. He walked until he came to where his neighbour was repairing a tractor and collected Jussi, who was leaping around and straining at his chain at the back of the house. When they arrived home he dragged in the cylinder, spread some newspapers out on the kitchen table and started to examine it. He was being very cautious since alarm bells were ringing deep down inside him. Perhaps there was something dangerous inside it? He carefully disentangled all the cords and disconnected the various relays and plugs and switches. He could see that some sort of fastening device on the underside of the cylinder had been torn off. There was no serial number or any other indication of where the cylinder had been made, or who its owner had been. He took a break to make dinner, an omelette that he filled with the contents of a can of mushrooms and ate in front of the television while failing to be enthused by a football match as he tried to forget all about the cylinder and missing persons. Jussi came and lay down on the floor in front of him. Wallander gave him the rest of the omelette, then took him for a walk. It was a lovely summer evening. He couldn’t resist sitting down on one of the white wooden chairs on the western side of the house, where he had a superb view of the setting sun as it sank below the horizon.

He woke with a start, surprised to realise that he had fallen asleep. He had been oblivious to the world for nearly an hour. His mouth was dry, and he went back inside to measure his blood sugar. It was much higher than normal, 274. That worried him. The only conclusion he could draw was that it was time to increase yet again the amount of insulin he injected into his body at regular intervals.

He remained seated for a while at the kitchen table, where he had pricked his finger when checking his blood sugar level. Once again he was overcome by feelings of dejection, resignation, awareness of the curse of old age. And by worry about the blackouts when his memory and sense of time and place disappeared completely. I’m sitting here, he thought, messing around with a steel cylinder when I should be visiting my daughter and getting to know my grandchild.

He did what he always did when he was feeling dejected. He poured himself a substantial glass of schnapps and downed it in one go. Just one big glass, no more, no refill, no topping up. Then he messed around with the cylinder one more time before deciding that enough was enough. He had a bath, and was asleep before midnight.

Early the next day he called Sten Nordlander. He was out in his boat but said he should be on land in an hour and promised to call back then.

‘Has anything happened?’ he shouted in an attempt to make himself heard above all the interference.

‘Yes,’ shouted Wallander in return. ‘We haven’t found the missing persons, but I’ve found something else.’

Martinsson called at seven thirty and reminded Wallander of the meeting due to take place later in the morning. A member of a notorious Swedish gang of Hell’s Angels was in the process of buying a property just outside Ystad, and Lennart Mattson had called a meeting. Wallander promised to be there at ten o’clock.

He didn’t intend to tell Sten Nordlander exactly where he’d found the cylinder. After discovering that somebody had invaded his house while he was away, he had decided not to trust anyone - at least not without reservations. Obviously, whoever the intruder was might have had reasons for breaking in that had nothing to do with Hakan and Louise von Enke, but what could they possibly be? The first thing he did that morning was make a thorough search of the house. One of the windows facing east, in the room where he had a guest bed that was never used, was ajar. He was quite certain he hadn’t left it open. A thief could easily have entered through that window and left again the same way without leaving much in the way of traces. But why hadn’t he taken anything? Nothing was missing, Wallander was sure of that. He could think of only two possibilities. Either the thief hadn’t found what he was looking for, or he had left something behind. And so Wallander didn’t simply look for something that was missing, but also for something that hadn’t been there before. He crawled around, looking under chairs, beds and sofas, and searched among his books. After almost an hour, just before Nordlander called, he concluded his search without having discovered anything at all. He wondered if he should talk to Nyberg, the forensic expert attached to the Ystad police force, and ask him to look for possible hidden microphones. But he decided not to - it would raise too many questions and give rise to too much gossip.

Sten Nordlander explained that he was sitting with a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe in Sandhamn.

‘I’m on my way north,’ he said. ‘My holiday route is going to take me up to Harnosand, then across the gulf to the Finnish coast, then back home via Aland. Two weeks alone with the wind and the waves.’

‘So a sailor never gets tired of the sea?’

‘Never. What did you find?’

Wallander described the steel cylinder in great detail. Using a yardstick - his father’s old one, covered in paint stains - he had measured the exact length, and he’d used a piece of string to establish the diameter.

‘Where did you find it?’ Nordlander asked when Wallander had finished.

‘In Hakan and Louise’s basement storeroom,’ Wallander lied. ‘Do you have any idea what it might be?’

‘No, not a clue. But I’ll think about it. In their basement, you said?’

‘Yes. Have you ever seen anything like it?’

‘Cylinders have aerodynamic qualities that make them useful in all kinds of circumstances. But I can’t recall having seen anything like what you describe. Did you open up any of the cables?’

‘No.’

‘You should. They could provide some clues.’

Wallander found an appropriate knife and carefully split open the black outer casing of one of the cords. Inside were even thinner wires, no more than threads. He described what he had found.

‘Hmm,’ said Nordlander. ‘They can hardly be live electricity cables. They seem more likely to have some kind of communications function. But exactly what, I can’t say. I’ll have to mull it over.’

‘Let me know if you figure it out,’ said Wallander.

‘It’s odd that it doesn’t say where it was made. The serial number and place of manufacture are usually engraved in the steel. I wonder how it came to be in Hakan’s basement, and where he got hold of it.’

Wallander glanced at his watch and saw that he had to head to the police station or he would be late for the meeting. Nordlander ended the call by describing in critical terms a large yacht on its way into the harbour.

The meeting about the motorbike gang lasted for nearly two hours. Wallander was frustrated by Lennart Mattson’s inability to steer the meeting efficiently and his failure to reach any practical conclusions. In the end, Wallander became so impatient that he interrupted Mattson and said that it should be possible to stop the purchase of the house by directly contacting the present owner. Once that was done they could develop strategies to put obstacles in the way of the gang’s activities. Mattson refused to be put off. However, Wallander had information that nobody else in the room knew about. He had been given a tip by Linda, who had heard about it from a friend in Stockholm. He requested permission to speak, and spelled it out.

‘We have a complication,’ he began. ‘There is a notorious medical practitioner whose contribution to the well-being of Swedish citizenry includes providing doctor’s certificates for no less than fourteen members of one of these Hell’s Angels gangs. All of them have been receiving state benefits because they are suffering from severe depression.’

A titter ran through the room.

‘That doctor has now retired, and unfortunately he’s moved down here,’ he went on. ‘He bought a pretty little house in the centre of town. The risk is, of course, that he will continue writing sick notes for these poor motor-cyclists who are so depressed that they are unable to work. He’s being investigated by the social services crowd, but as we all know, they can’t be relied on.’

Wallander stood up and wrote the doctor’s name on a flip chart.

‘We should be keeping an eye on this fellow,’ he said, and left the room.

As far as he was concerned, the meeting was now over.

He spent the rest of the morning brooding over the cylinder. Then he drove to the library and asked for help looking up all the literature they had about submarines, naval ships in general and modern warfare. The librarian, who had been a school friend of Linda’s, produced a large pile of books. Just before he left he also asked her for Stig Wennerstrom’s memoirs.

Wallander went home, stopping on the way to do some shopping. When he left the house that morning he had fixed little pieces of tape discreetly on doors and windows. None had been disturbed. He ate his fish stew and then turned to the books he had piled up on the kitchen table. He read until he couldn’t go on any longer. When he went to bed at about midnight, heavy rain was pummelling the roof. He fell asleep immediately. The sound of rain had always put him to sleep, ever since he was a child.

When Wallander arrived at the police station the next morning he was soaking wet. He had decided to walk part of the way to work, and hence parked at the railway station. The high blood sugar reading of the other night was a challenge. He must get more exercise, more often. Halfway there he had been caught in a heavy shower. He went to the locker room, hung up his wet trousers and took another pair out of his locker. He noticed that he had put on weight since he wore them last. He slammed the door in anger, just as Nyberg entered the room. He raised an eyebrow at Wallander’s extreme reaction.

‘Bad mood?’

‘Wet trousers.’

Nyberg nodded and replied with his own personal mixture of jollity and gloom.

‘I know exactly what you mean. We can all cope with getting our feet wet. But getting your trousers wet is much worse. It’s like pissing yourself. You feel pleasantly warm but then it gets uncomfortably cold.’

Wallander went to his office and called Ytterberg, who was out and hadn’t said when he would be back. Wallander had already tried calling his mobile phone, without getting an answer. When he went to get a cup of coffee, he bumped into Martinsson, who felt he needed some fresh air. They went to sit down on a bench outside the police station. Martinsson talked about an arsonist who was still on the run.

‘Are we going to catch him this time?’ Wallander asked.

‘We always catch him,’ said Martinsson. ‘The question is whether we can keep him or if we’ll have to let him go. But we have a witness I believe in. This time we might be able to nail him at last.’

They went back inside, each to his own office. Wallander stayed for several hours. Then he went home, still not having managed to contact Ytterberg. But he had scribbled down the most important points on a scrap of paper and intended to keep on trying to make contact during the evening. Ytterberg was the man in charge of the investigation. Wallander would hand over the material he had, the file inside the black covers and the steel cylinder. Then Ytterberg could draw the necessary and the possible conclusions. The investigation had nothing to do with Wallander. He was not a member of the investigating team, he was merely a father who didn’t like the idea of his daughter’s future parents-in-law disappearing without a trace. Now Wallander would concentrate on celebrating midsummer, and then taking a holiday.

But things didn’t turn out as planned. When he got home he found an unknown car parked outside his house, a beaten-up Ford covered in rust. Wallander didn’t recognise it. He wondered whose it could be. As he approached the house he saw that on one of the white chairs, the one he had dozed on the night before, there was a woman.

There was an open bottle of wine on the table in front of her. Wallander could see no trace of a glass.

Reluctantly he went up to her and said hello.

17

It was Mona, his ex-wife. It had been many years since they last met - fleetingly, when Linda graduated from the police academy. Since then they had spoken briefly on the phone a few times, but that was it.

Late that night, when Mona had fallen asleep in the bedroom and he had become the first person to make up the bed in his own guest room, he felt ill at ease. Mona’s emotional state had been changing from one minute to the next, and she had boiled over several times, angry and emotional outbursts that he found difficult to deal with. She was already drunk by the time he arrived home. When she stood up to give him a hug, she stumbled and nearly fell over, but he managed to catch her at the last moment. He could see that she was tense and nervous at the prospect of seeing him again, and had put on far too much make-up. The girl Wallander had fallen in love with forty years ago used hardly any make-up; she didn’t need it.

She had come to visit him that evening because she was wounded. Somebody had treated her so badly that Wallander was the only person she felt she could turn to. He had sat down beside her in the garden, swallows swooping down over their heads, and he’d had a strange feeling that the past had caught up with him and was repeating itself. At any moment a five-year-old Linda would come bounding up out of nowhere and demand their attention. But he managed to come up with only a few words of greeting before Mona burst into tears. He felt embarrassed. This was exactly how it had been during their last awkward times together. He had found it impossible to take her emotional outbursts seriously. She became more and more of an actress, and cast herself in a role for which she was unsuited. Her talents were not appropriate for tragedy, perhaps not for comedy either: she embodied a normality that didn’t accommodate emotional outbursts. Nevertheless, there she was, weeping copiously, and all Wallander could think to do was bring her a roll of toilet paper to dry her tears. After a while she stopped crying and apologised, but she had trouble talking without slurring her words. He wished Linda were there; she had a different way of dealing with Mona.

At the same time, he was affected by another emotion, one he had trouble acknowledging, but which kept nagging at him. He had a desire to take her by the hand and lead her into the bedroom. Her very presence excited him, and he was close to testing how genuine the feeling was. But of course, he did nothing. She staggered over to the dog kennel, where Jussi was jumping up and down in excitement. Wallander followed her, more like a bodyguard than a consort, ready to pick her up if she fell over. Soon the dog was no longer of interest to her, and they went inside since she was feeling cold. She made a tour of the house, and asked him to show her everything, stressing the word, as if she were visiting an art gallery. He had decorated the place magnificently, she said; she couldn’t find words to express how fabulous it was, even if he should have thrown out long ago that awful sofa they’d had in their apartment just after they were married. When she noticed their wedding photo on a chest of drawers, she burst out crying again, this time in such an obviously fake way that he was tempted to throw her out. But he let her indulge herself, made a pot of coffee, hid a bottle of whisky that had been sitting out, and eventually persuaded her to sit down at the kitchen table.

I loved her more than any other woman in my life, Wallander thought as they sat there with their cups of coffee. Even if I were to fall head over heels in love with another woman today, Mona will always be the most important woman in my life. That is a fact that can never be changed. New love might replace an earlier love, but the old love is always there, no matter what. You live your life on two levels, probably to avoid falling through without a trace if a hole appears in one of them.

Mona drank her coffee, and unexpectedly began to sober up. That was another thing Wallander remembered: she had often acted more drunk than she really was.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been acting like a fool, bursting in on you. Do you want me to leave?’

‘Not at all. I just want to know why you came here.’

‘Why are you so dismissive? You can’t claim that I disturb you often.’

Wallander backed off immediately. The last year with Mona had been a constant battle, with him trying not to be drawn into her non-stop complaints and threats. She of course thought that was exactly how he was behaving towards her, and he knew she was right. They were both culprits and victims in the confusion that could be stopped only by drastic action: divorce, with each of them going their separate ways.

‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ he said cautiously. ‘Why are you so depressed?’

What followed was a long, drawn-out lament, a dirge with what seemed to be an endless number of verses. Mona’s own variation of the Lamentations, or of Elvira Madigan, Wallander thought. A year ago she had met a man who, unlike the previous one, was not a golf-playing retiree who Wallander was convinced had acquired his money by plundering shell companies. By contrast, the new man was the manager of a Co-op store in Malmo, about her own age and also divorced. But it was not long before Mona discovered to her horror that even an honest grocer could display psychopathic traits. He had tried to dominate her, made veiled threats, and eventually subjected her to physical violence. Foolishly enough, she had convinced herself that it would pass, that he would get over his jealousy, but that didn’t happen, and now she had cut all ties with him. The only person she could turn to was her former husband, who she thought could protect her from the persecution she was sure the grocer would subject her to. In short, she was scared - and that was why she had come to him.

Wallander wondered how much of what she told him was true. Mona was not always reliable; she sometimes told lies without any malicious intent. But he thought he should believe her in this case, and he was naturally upset to hear that she had been beaten.

When she had finished telling her story, she felt sick and rushed to the bathroom. Wallander stood outside the door and heard that she really was sick - it wasn’t just for show. Then she lay down on the sofa she thought he should have thrown out, cried again, and then fell asleep with a blanket over her. Wallander sat in his easy chair and continued reading the books he had borrowed from the library, although he was unable to concentrate, of course. After almost two hours she woke with a start. When she realised that she was in Wallander’s house, she almost started crying again, but Wallander told her enough was enough. He could make her some food if she wanted to eat, then she could spend the night and the next day she could talk to Linda, who would doubtless be able to give her better advice than he could. She wasn’t hungry, so he just made some soup and filled his own stomach with many slices of bread. As they were sitting across from each other at the table, she suddenly started talking about all the good times they had enjoyed in the old days. Wallander wondered if this was the real reason for her visit, if she was going to start pursuing him again. If she had tried a year or so earlier, he thought, she might have succeeded. I still felt then that we’d be able to live together again - but later I realised that was an illusion. All of it was behind us, and it wasn’t something I wanted to go through again.

After the meal she wanted something to drink. But he said no, he wasn’t going to give her another drop as long as she was in his house. If she didn’t like that she could call a taxi and spend the night at a hotel in Ystad. She started to argue, but she gave up when it became clear that Wallander was serious.

When she went to bed at midnight, she made a tentative effort to embrace him. But he resisted, merely stroked her hair and left the room. He listened outside the door, which was ajar; she was awake for a while, but eventually fell asleep.

Wallander went out, let Jussi out of his kennel, and sat down on the garden hammock that used to be his father’s. The summer night was bright, windless and filled with scents. Jussi came to sit at his feet. Wallander suddenly felt uneasy. There was no going back in life, even if he were naive enough to wish that was possible. It was not possible to take even one step backwards.

When he finally went to bed, he took half a sleeping pill in the hope of avoiding a restless night. He simply didn’t want to think any more, neither about the woman asleep in his bed nor the thoughts that had tortured him when he’d been sitting in the garden.

When he woke up the next morning he was astonished to find that she had left. He was normally a very light sleeper, but he hadn’t heard her get up and slip quietly out of the house. There was a note on the kitchen table: ‘Sorry for being here when you came home.’ That was all, nothing about what she actually wanted to be forgiven for. He wondered how many times during their marriage she had left similar notes, apologising for what she’d done to him. A vast number that he neither could nor even wanted to count.

He drank coffee, fed Jussi, and wondered if he should call Linda and tell her about Mona’s visit, but since what he needed to do above all else was talk to Ytterberg, that would have to wait.

It was a breezy morning, with a cold wind blowing from the north; summer had gone away for the time being. The neighbour’s sheep were grazing in their fenced-off field, and a few swans were flying east.

Wallander called Ytterberg in his office. He picked up right away.

‘I heard that you were asking for me. Have you found the von Enkes?’

‘No. How are things going for you?’

‘Nothing new worthy of mention.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No. Do you have anything to report?’

Wallander had been planning to tell Ytterberg about his visit to Boko and the remarkable cylinder he had found, but he changed his mind at the last minute. He didn’t know why. Surely he could rely on Ytterberg.

‘Not really.’

‘I’ll be in touch again.’

When the short and basically pointless call was over, Wallander drove to the police station. He needed to devote the whole day to going through a depressing assault case in connection with which he’d been called as a witness. Everybody blamed everybody else, and the victim, who had been in a coma for two weeks, had no memory of the incident. Wallander had been one of the first detectives to arrive at the scene, and would therefore have to testify in court. He had great difficulty recalling any details. Even the report he’d written himself seemed unfamiliar.

Linda suddenly appeared in his office. It was about noon.

‘I hear you had an unexpected visit,’ she said.

Wallander slid the open files to one side and looked at his daughter. Her face now seemed less puffy than it had been, and she might even have lost a few pounds.

‘Mona’s been knocking on your door, has she?’

‘She called from Malmo. She complained that you’d been nasty to her.’

Wallander reacted in astonishment.

‘What did she mean by that?’

‘She said you only reluctantly let her in despite the fact that she was feeling sick. Then you gave her hardly anything to eat, and locked her in the bedroom.’

‘None of that is true. The bitch is lying.’

‘Don’t call my mum that,’ said Linda, her face darkening.

‘She’s lying, whether you like it or not. I welcomed her, I let her in, I dried her tears, and I even made up the bed with clean sheets for her.’

‘She wasn’t lying about her new man, at least. I’ve met him. He’s just as charming as psychopaths usually are. Mum has an odd talent for choosing the wrong man.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t mean you, of course. But that lunatic golf player wasn’t much better than the guy she’s with now.’

‘The question is: what can I do about it?’

Linda thought for a moment before answering. She rubbed her nose with the index finger of her left hand. Just like her grandfather used to do, Wallander thought. He’d never noticed that before, and now he burst out laughing. She looked at him in surprise. He explained. Then it was her turn to laugh.

‘I have Klara in the car,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to have a quick word about this business with Mum. We can talk later.’

‘You mean you left the baby alone in the car?’ Wallander was upset. ‘How could you do such a thing?’

‘I have a friend with me; she’s looking after Klara. How could you think I’d leave her alone?’

She paused in the doorway.

‘I think Mum needs our help,’ she said.

‘I’m always here,’ said Wallander. ‘But I’d prefer her to be sober when she visits. And she should call in advance.’

‘Are you always sober? Do you always call before you visit somebody? Have you never felt sick?’

She didn’t wait for a reply but vanished into the hallway. Wallander had just started reading his report again when Ytterberg called.

‘I’m taking a few days off,’ he said. ‘I forgot to mention that.’

‘Going anywhere interesting?’

‘I’ll be staying in an old cottage in a lovely location by a lake just outside Vasteras. But I wanted to tell you a few of my thoughts about the von Enkes. I was a bit curt when we spoke a few minutes ago.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Let me put it like this. I have two theories about their disappearance, and my colleagues agree with me. Let’s see if you’re thinking along the same lines. One possibility is that they planned their disappearance in advance, but for some reason they decided to vanish at different times. There could be various explanations for that. For instance, if they wanted to change their identity, he might have gone ahead to some unknown place in order to prepare for her arrival. Meet her on a road filled with palm fronds and roses, to use a biblical image. But there could be other reasons, of course. There’s really only one other plausible possibility: that they’ve been subjected to some sort of attack. In other words, that they’re dead. It’s hard to find a reason why they might have been exposed to violence, and if so, why it should happen at different times. But apart from those two alternatives, we have no idea. There’s just a black hole.’

‘I think I’d have reached the same conclusions as you.’

‘I’ve consulted the leading experts in the country about possible circumstances associated with missing persons, and our job is simple in the sense that there’s only one way for us to approach this.’

‘Find them, you mean.’

‘Or at least understand why we can’t find them.’

‘Have there been any new details at all?’

‘None. But there is one other person we have to take into account.’

‘You mean the son?’

‘Yes. We can’t avoid it. If we assume that they engineered their disappearance, we have to ask why they’d subject him to such horrors. It’s inhuman, to put it mildly. Our impression is that they are not cruel people. You know that yourself; you’ve met them. What we’ve dug up about Hakan von Enke indicates that he was a well-liked senior officer, unassuming, shrewd, fair, never temperamental. The worst we’ve heard about him is that he could occasionally be impatient. But can’t we all? As a teacher, Louise was well liked by her pupils. Uncommunicative, quite a few said. But refraining from speaking non-stop is hardly grounds for suspicion - you have to listen now and then too. Anyway, it doesn’t seem credible that they could have lived double lives. We’ve even consulted experts in Europol. I’ve had several phone conversations with a French policewoman, Mlle Germain in Paris, who had a lot of sensible things to say. She confirmed my own thought, that we also need to look at the matter in a radically different light.’

Wallander knew what he was getting at.

‘You mean what role Hans might have played?’

‘Exactly. If there was a large fortune at stake, that might have provided us with a lead. But there isn’t. All in all, the Enkes have about a million kronor - plus their apartment, which is probably worth seven or eight million. You could argue that it’s a lot of money for an ordinary mortal. But given contemporary circumstances, you could say that a person with no debts and the assets I’ve referred to is well off, but hardly rich.’

‘Have you spoken to Hans?’

‘About a week ago he was in Stockholm for a meeting with the Financial Supervisory Authority. He was the one who took the initiative and got in touch with me, and we had a chat. I have to say that he seemed genuinely worried, and that he simply couldn’t understand what had happened. Besides, he earns a pretty substantial salary.’

‘So that’s where we are, is it?’

‘Not exactly a strong position to be in. But we’ll keep digging, even if the ground seems very hard.’

Ytterberg suddenly put down the receiver. Wallander could hear him cursing in the background. Then he picked up the receiver again.

‘I’m leaving in two days,’ said Ytterberg. ‘But you can always contact me if there’s an emergency.’

‘I promise to call only if it’s important,’ said Wallander, and hung up.

After that phone call Wallander went down to sit on the bench outside the entrance to the station. He thought through what Ytterberg had said.

He stayed there for a long time. Mona’s sudden visit had tired him out. This was not the way he wanted things to be; he didn’t want her turning his life upside down by making new demands on him. He would have to make this clear to her if she turned up on his doorstep again, and he must persuade Linda to be his ally. He was prepared to help Mona - that wasn’t a problem - but the past was the past. It no longer existed.

Wallander walked down the hill to a sausage stand across from the hospital. A lump of mashed potato fell off his tray, and a jackdaw swooped down immediately to steal it.

He suddenly had the feeling that he’d forgotten something. He felt around for his service pistol. Or could he have forgotten something else? He wasn’t sure if he’d come to the sausage stand by car, or walked down the hill from the police station.

He dumped the half-eaten sausage and mashed potatoes into a rubbish bin and looked around one more time. No sign of a car. He slowly started to trudge back up the hill. About halfway there, his memory returned. He broke into a cold sweat and his heart was racing. He couldn’t put off consulting his doctor any longer. This was the third time it had happened within a short period, and he wanted to know what was going on inside his head.

He called the doctor he had consulted earlier when he’d returned to duty. He was given an appointment shortly after midsummer. When he put the receiver down, he checked to make sure that his gun was locked up where it should be.

He spent the rest of the day preparing for his court appearance. It was six o’clock when he closed the last of his files and threw it onto his guest chair. He had stood up and picked up his jacket when a thought suddenly struck him. He had no idea where it came from. Why hadn’t von Enke taken his secret diary away with him when he visited Signe for the last time? Wallander could see only two possible explanations. Either he intended to go back, or something had happened to make a return impossible.

He sat down at his desk again and looked up the number for Niklasgarden. It was the woman with the melodious foreign voice who answered.

‘I just wanted to check that all is well with Signe,’ he said.

‘She lives in a world where very little changes. Apart from that which affects all of us - growing older.’

‘I don’t suppose her dad has been to visit her, has he?’

‘I thought he went missing. Is he back?’

‘No. I was just wondering.’

‘Her uncle was here yesterday on a visit. It was my day off, but I noticed it in the ledger where we keep a record of visits.’

Wallander held his breath.

‘An uncle?’

‘He signed himself in as Gustaf von Enke. He came in the afternoon and stayed for about an hour.’

‘Are you absolutely certain about this?’

‘Why would I make it up?’

‘No, as you say, why would you? If this uncle comes back to visit Signe, could you please give me a call?’

She suddenly sounded worried.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, not at all. Thanks for your time.’

Wallander replaced the receiver but remained seated. He was not mistaken; he was sure of that. He had studied the von Enke family tree meticulously, and he was certain there was no uncle.

Whoever the man was that had visited Signe, he had given a false name and relationship.

Wallander drove home. The worry he had felt earlier had now returned in spades.

18

The following morning, Wallander had a temperature and a sore throat. He tried hard to convince himself that it was his imagination, but in the end he got a thermometer, which registered 102. He called the police station and told them he was ill. He spent most of the day either in bed or in the kitchen, surrounded by the books from the library he still hadn’t read.

During the night he’d had a dream about Signe. He’d been visiting Niklasgarden, and suddenly noticed that it was in fact somebody else curled up in her bed. It was dark in the room; he tried to switch the light on, but it didn’t work. So he took out his mobile phone and used it as a torch. In the pale blue glow he discovered that it was Louise lying there. She was an exact copy of her daughter. He was overcome by fear, but when he tried to leave the room he found that the door was locked.

That was when he woke up. It was four o’clock and already light. He could feel a pain in his throat, but he felt warm and soon dropped off to sleep again. When he eventually woke up he tried to interpret his dream, but he didn’t reach any conclusions. Apart from the fact that everything seemed to be a cover-up for everything else when it came to the disappearance of Hakan and Louise von Enke.

Wallander got out of bed, wrapped a towel around his neck, and looked up Gustaf von Enke on the Internet. There was nobody by that name. At eight o’clock he called Ytterberg, who would be going on holiday the following day. He was on his way to what he expected to be an extremely unpleasant interrogation of a man who had tried to strangle his wife and his two children, probably because he had found another woman he wanted to live with.

‘But why did he have to kill the children?’ he wondered. ‘It’s like a Greek tragedy.’

Wallander didn’t know much about the dramas written more than two thousand years ago. Linda had once taken him to a production of Medea in Malmo. He had been moved by it, but not so much that he became a regular theatergoer. His last visit hadn’t exactly increased his interest either.

He told Ytterberg about his call to Niklasgarden the previous day.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Wallander. ‘There is no uncle. There’s a cousin in England, but that’s it.’

‘It certainly sounds odd.’

‘I know you’re about to go away. Maybe you can send somebody else out to Niklasgarden to try to get a description of the man?’

‘I have a very good cop named Rebecka Andersson,’ he said. ‘She’s phenomenal with assignments like this, even though she’s very young. I’ll speak to her.’

Wallander was just about to end the call when Ytterberg asked him a question.

‘Do you ever feel like I do?’ he asked. ‘An almost desperate longing to get away from all this shit that we’re chest-deep in?’

‘It happens.’

‘How do we manage to survive it all?’

‘I don’t know. Some sort of feeling of responsibility, I suspect. I once had a mentor, an old detective named Rydberg. That’s what he always used to say. It was a matter of responsibility, nothing more.’

Rebecka Andersson called at about two o’clock from Niklasgarden.

‘I understood that you wanted the information as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I’m sitting on a bench on the grounds. It’s lovely weather. Do you have a pencil handy?’

‘Yes, I’m ready to go.’

‘A man in his fifties, neatly dressed in suit and tie, very friendly, light curly hair, blue eyes. He spoke what is usually called standard Swedish, in other words, no particular dialect and certainly without any trace of a foreign accent. One thing was obvious from the start: he’d never been here before. They had to show him which room she was in, but nobody seems to have thought that was at all remarkable.’

‘What did he have to say?’

‘Nothing, really. He was just very friendly.’

‘And the room?’

‘I asked two members of the staff, separately, to check the room and see if anything had been moved. They couldn’t find any changes. I had the impression that they were very sure about that.’

‘But even so, he stayed for as long as an hour?’

‘That’s not definite. Assessments varied. They’re evidently not all that strict when it comes to entering visits and times in their ledger. I’d say he was there for at least an hour, an hour and a half at most.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘He left.’

‘How did he get there?’

‘By car, I assume. But nobody saw a car. Then suddenly he simply wasn’t there any more.’

Wallander thought it all over, but he had no more questions, so he thanked her for her help. He looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of the yellow post van driving away. He went out to the mailbox in his robe and a pair of wooden clogs. There was just one letter, postmarked Ystad. The sender was somebody by the name of Robert Akerblom. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Wallander couldn’t remember the circumstances in which he had met the man. He sat down at his kitchen table and opened the envelope. It contained a photo of a man and two young women. When Wallander saw the man, he knew immediately who it was. A painful memory, over fifteen years old, rose up to the surface. At the beginning of the 1990s Robert Akerblom’s wife had been brutally murdered, an incident linked to remarkable events in South Africa and an attempt to murder Nelson Mandela. He turned the photo over and read what it said on the reverse side: ‘A reminder of our existence, and a thank-you for all the support you gave us during the most difficult period of our lives.’

Just what I needed, Wallander thought. Proof that despite everything, what we do has significance for a lot of people. He pinned up the photo on the wall.

The following day would be Midsummer’s Eve. Although he didn’t feel great, he decided to go shopping. He didn’t like being in crowded supermarkets, didn’t really like shopping at all; but he had made up his mind that his midsummer table would be full of appropriate goodies. Sensibly, he had already stocked up on alcohol. He wrote out a shopping list and set off.

The following day he felt better, and his temperature was back to normal. It had rained during the night, but Wallander scanned the horizon and decided that they would be able to sit outside. When Linda and her family arrived at five o’clock, everything was ready. She congratulated him on his efficiency, and took him to one side.

‘There’ll be one extra guest.’

‘Who?’

‘Mum.’

‘No. I don’t want her here. You know what happened the last time.’

‘I don’t want her to be alone on a night like this.’

‘You can take her home.’

‘Don’t worry. Try to remember that you’ll be doing your good deed for the day by letting her be here.’

‘When’s she coming?’

‘I said five thirty. She’ll be here any minute.’

‘It’s your responsibility to make sure she doesn’t drink herself silly.’

‘Fair enough. Don’t forget that Hans likes her. Besides, she has a right to see her grandchild.’

Wallander said nothing more. But when he was briefly alone in the kitchen, he took a large swig of whisky to calm himself down.

Mona arrived, and all went well at the beginning. She had dressed up and was in a good mood. They ate, drank moderately and enjoyed the fine weather. Wallander noted how nicely Mona played with her grandchild. It was almost like seeing her with Linda again. But the peace didn’t last. At about eleven o’clock Mona suddenly started going on about all the injustices she had suffered in the past. Linda tried to calm her down, but evidently Mona had drunk more than they had realised. Maybe she had a little bottle hidden in her handbag. Wallander said nothing at first, merely listened to what she had to say. But there came a point when he couldn’t stand it any more. He banged his fist on the table and told her to leave. Linda, who wasn’t completely sober either, yelled at him to calm down, saying it wasn’t a big deal. But for Wallander it was a big deal. Now, after all this time, he finally noticed that he no longer missed Mona, and the realisation turned into an accusation. It was Mona’s fault that all those years had gone by without his being able to find another woman to live with. He left the table, took Jussi and stormed off.

When he came back half an hour later, the party was breaking up. Mona was already in the car. Hans, who had drunk only one glass of wine, would drive.

‘It’s a shame it turned out this way,’ said Linda. ‘It was a lovely evening. But now I know that Mona’s drinking will always lead to something like this.’

‘So I was right after all?’

‘If that’s how you want to put it. Maybe she shouldn’t have come. But now we know that she needs help. I didn’t realise until now that my mother is drinking herself to death.’

She stroked his cheek, and they embraced.

‘I’d never have survived if it hadn’t been for you,’ he said.

‘Klara will soon be able to spend time on her own here with you. In a year or so. Time passes quickly.’

Wallander saw them off and cleared away the leftovers and dirty dishes. Then he did something he did only once or twice a year: he dug out a cigar, sat down in the garden and lit it.

It was starting to get chilly. He began reminiscing. He thought about his former classmates, the ones he’d been at school with in Limhamn. What had they made of their lives? There had been a reunion a few years ago, but he hadn’t made the effort to attend. He regretted it now. It would have put his own life in perspective, seeing what had happened to them.

He sat outside until two. At one point he heard a snatch of music in the distance - it might have been that Swedish midsummer favourite ‘Calle Schewen’s Waltz’, but he wasn’t sure. Then he went to bed and slept until late the next morning. He stayed in bed, reading through the books he’d borrowed from the library. He suddenly sat up with a start. He had come to some black-and-white photographs in a book about American submarines and their constant trials of strength with their Russian counterparts during the Cold War.

He stared at the picture and could feel his heart beating faster. There was no doubt about it. The picture was an exact likeness of the cylinder he had taken home with him from Boko. Wallander leaped out of bed and dragged the cylinder out from behind a bookcase he used for storing old shoes.

He grabbed an English- Swedish dictionary to make sure he didn’t misunderstand anything in the chapter that contained the photograph. It was about James Bradley, who was in charge of submarine command in the US Navy at the beginning of the 1970s. He was known for spending whole nights in his office in the Pentagon, working out new methods of dealing with the Russians. One night, when the building was more or less deserted except for the security guards patrolling the hallways, he had an idea. It was so daring that he knew immediately he would need to go directly to President Nixon’s security adviser, Henry Kissinger. There was a rumour circulating at the time that Kissinger seldom listened to anybody for more than five minutes and never for more than twenty. Bradley spoke for over forty-five minutes. When he drove back to the Pentagon he was convinced he would get the money he needed for the equipment he had in mind. Kissinger had promised nothing, but Bradley had seen that he was deeply impressed.

It was soon decided that the submarine Halibut would be used for this top-secret project. It was one of the biggest in the US submarine fleet. Wallander was astonished when he read about the weight, the length, the armaments and the number of officers and crew. There was no reason it couldn’t be operational year-round, provided it could surface occasionally to load up with fresh air and provisions. The food stores could be refilled in less than an hour in open water, but in order to fulfil its new assignment it needed to be refitted. It had to be provided with a pressure chamber for divers, who would perform the most difficult part of the assignment, deep down at the bottom of the sea.

Bradley’s idea was basically very simple. In order to maintain communications between command bases on the mainland and the submarines armed with nuclear weapons out on patrol from bases in Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Russians had laid a cable over the Okhotsk Sea. Bradley’s plan was to attach a listening device to it.

But there was a big problem. The Okhotsk Sea was over two hundred thousand square miles in area; how would they ever locate the cable? The solution was just as improbably simple as the whole idea.

One night in the Pentagon, Bradley remembered the summers he used to spend as a child by the Mississippi River. That childhood memory solved his problem. At regular intervals along the bank there were notices saying: ‘Anchoring Forbidden. Underwater Cable.’ Apart from the town of Vladivostok, eastern Russia was pure wilderness, so there couldn’t be very many places where an underwater cable could be laid. They have warning notices even in the Soviet Union.

Halibut set off and crossed the Pacific Ocean undersurface. After an adventurous voyage with several sonar contacts with Russian submarines, they managed to enter Russian territory. Then came one of the most risky moments of the operation, when they needed to sneak into one of the channels between the Kuril Islands. Thanks to the fact that the Halibut had been fitted with the most advanced equipment for detecting minefields and sonar links, they succeeded. They located the cable relatively quickly. The problem then was to connect the bugging device to the cable without the Russians’ noticing. After several attempts they finally succeeded, and on board the submarine they could listen in on all messages from the mainland to the Russian submarine captains, and vice versa. As thanks, Bradley was granted an interview with President Nixon, who congratulated him on the success of the operation.

Wallander went outside and sat down in the garden. There was a cold wind blowing, but he found a sheltered spot next to the house. He had released Jussi, who disappeared behind the back of the house. The questions he now asked himself were few and straightforward. How had one of those bugging cylinders found its way into a Swedish shed behind a boathouse? How was it linked with Hakan and Louise von Enke? This whole business is bigger than I ever imagined, he thought. There is something behind their disappearance that I don’t have the information to understand. I need help.

He hesitated, but not for long. He went back inside and called Sten Nordlander. As usual the connection was bad, but with some effort they were able to understand each other.

‘Where are you?’ Wallander asked.

‘Just off Gavle, in the Gavlebukten. South-westerly breeze, light cloud cover - it’s spectacular! Where are you?’

‘At home. You need to come here. I found something you should look at. Take a flight.’

‘It’s that important, is it?’

‘I’m as certain as it’s possible to be. It’s somehow connected with Hakan’s disappearance.’

‘I must say I’m curious.’

‘There’s a chance I’m wrong, of course. But in that case you can be back on your boat tomorrow. I’ll pay for all your tickets.’

‘That’s not necessary. But don’t count on seeing me before late tonight. It’ll take me a while to sail back to Gavle.’