The Troubled Man

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 Håkan 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 realized 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 recognized the tablecloth. He remembered it from his childhood, then from his father’s house in Löderup, 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 dialed 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 Håkan? 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 crib. 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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 pedophile 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, Niklasgården, 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 realized 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 Håkan 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 vacation 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 Niklasgården. 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 neighbors, 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 annex 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 windshield. 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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 there was either a natural explanation or there were grounds for being worried. But in the case of Håkan 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 Niklasgården, attractively located on the shore of a lake that his map told him was called Vångsjön. 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 Södermanland 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.

“April tenth,” 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 Håkan 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 Niklasgården and drove to Stockholm. He parked outside the building in Grevgatan and unlocked the apartment with the keys Linda had given him.

He realized 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 neighbors suspicious. He went through Håkan’s study and Louise’s two chests of drawers. He also searched the big bookcase in the living room, and any closets 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 third-floor apartment in the slow-moving elevator, he wondered where he should sleep. There was a sofa in Håkan’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 Niklasgården. 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 Håkan 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 color, 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 café 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 Riddarfjärden. Wallander moved his chair into the shade.

“I thought of going back to Niklasgården,” 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 Niklasgården, 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 Niklasgården about an hour later. When he entered the reception area he was received by an elderly man who introduced himself as Artur Källberg — 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 Källberg 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?”

Källberg 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 Håkan 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 Källberg. “It was on Lidingö, 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 Källberg. “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.”

Källberg 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 June 6, 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 Lidingö. When it became necessary to expand the home, the neighbors 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?”

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

“She has never been here. I’ve been working at Niklasgården 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?”

Källberg 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 Källberg. “She sees very badly. She perceives people as a sort of blur against a gray background. At least, that’s what the doctors say.”

“So she recognized her father by his voice?” Wallander wondered.

“Presumably, yes. That seemed to be the case, judging by her body language.”

Wallander stood up, but Källberg 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. Källberg 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 Källberg 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 Håkan 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 Håkan had done it himself. And if it had been him, where could he have hidden something but in this room? Among 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. Källberg was poking a finger into the soil of a potted 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 Källberg. “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 favor 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 sidewalk, 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 store 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 anymore, 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 cancellation — but when was that? Wallander noted the dentist’s name: Sköldin. 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 Håkan von Enke had hidden in his daughter’s room. It was clear after only a few minutes that he was faced with a hodgepodge of documents. There were short haiku poems, photocopied extracts from the Swedish supreme commander’s war diary from the fall of 1982, more or less obscure aphorisms Håkan von Enke had formulated, and much more — including press clippings, photographs, and some smudged watercolors. 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 Håkan had told him about the submarines. Wallander felt sure that even then there were documents hidden among Signe’s Babar books. It was Håkan’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 farther, 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 Hårsfjärden. 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, September 24, 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 farther 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 Utö, 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 whiskey. The West European designation of the submarine in question. He had underlined in red the last few lines on the page. Snap shots 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 snap shots 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 September 28. That was when Ljung had talks with the head of the navy, who had been on a visit to Yugoslavia. From then on Håkan von Enke was no longer interested. No more notes, no matchstick men, no exclamation points. But farther 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 Utö. Wallander recalled having heard about that during the party in Djursholm. That was when it all began, he seemed to remember Håkan 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 October 5 to October 15, 1982. That was the big gala performance, Wallander thought. Sweden was at the center 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 nonsubmarines. 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 Thorbjörn Fälldin 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 Hårsfjärden. The supreme commander wasn’t allowed a moment’s rest. He was traveling 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. Håkan 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 Håkan 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.

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 Håkan 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 drumroll. 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 Håkan 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 realized 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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 gray overalls with the Swedish navy emblem when he met Wallander. On the backseat of his car was a large basket with food and thermoses. They drove out toward 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 anymore. 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 take a look at Hårsfjärden.”

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 Mälaren. But now he could see that he was looking out toward Utö and the Baltic Sea, as Nordlander pointed out their location on a sea chart. To the northwest were Mysingen and Hårsfjärden, and the legendary Muskö 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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.”

“Muskö?”

“Hårsfjärden. 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 Utö.

“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 Whiskey 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 coast guard 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.

“Håkan 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 Wennerström affair, but there were a lot of rumors 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 Hårsfjärden 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 rumors about a spy even better placed than Wennerström. 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 Håkan was looking into these matters. I just didn’t realize 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 realized 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 Håkan 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 Håkan. 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 Småland. Just being in her engine room was one of the greatest experiences of my life. There were two de Laval turbines that produced almost sixty thousand horsepower. She was a thirty-five-hundred-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 sailboat 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 memorized both sentences.

Nordlander started the engine again and revved up to ten knots, heading for Mysingen and Hårsfjärden. Wallander stood beside him. Over the next few hours Sten Nordlander took him on a guided tour of Muskö and Hårsfjärden. 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 Hårsfjärden 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 Ornö and Utö. Beyond was the open sea. He skillfully 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. Practicing 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.

“Fifty-two 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 capsized 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, gray, 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 gray stone that had been lying on Håkan 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?” Håkan 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 Håkansson. Beside that name von Enke had written a cross, an exclamation point, 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. Håkan 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 Håkan 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 Håkan 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 smoke screen. 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 Strandvägen and then turned left toward the bridge to Djurgården. 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 Gröna 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 Skåne by midafternoon 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. Håkan von Enke was a careful and very dedicated hunter.

The photo, which was in black and white, had been taken at some sort of harbor. 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 neighborhood of Norrköping. 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 blond 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 dialed 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 Bokö 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 cell phone number of that same person. This time he got through.

“Hans-Olov.”

Wallander recognized 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 thing. 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 U.S.A.”

“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, sympathized 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 Växjö. 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, Smålandsposten, 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 rumor 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 figure 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 déjà 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 Värmdö 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 materialized 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 yard. A plastic tent had been erected over an old ax. 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 neighbors 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 swiveling back and forth in his desk chair, then dialed 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 Söderköping.”

“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 anymore. 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 cell 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 anymore. Sun and warm weather made everything more tolerable.

He had lunch in a café 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 Håkan 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. Håkan 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 Bokö 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 Håkan 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. Tønsberg, 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 Håkan von Enke?”

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

“What do you mean, ‘that crowd’?”

“Noblemen.”

“Håkan 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 ahold 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 apologized to Lundberg for disturbing him, and remained sitting with his cell phone in his hand. The drunken man on the other end of the bench had fallen asleep. It suddenly dawned on Wallander that he recognized 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 ax. 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 around?”

“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 cell phone gave a chime: he had received a text. It was short and precise. Both stones Swedish. Neither from U.S.A.’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 farther 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 Västervik 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 café 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 café 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 café, 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 harbor 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 harbor was now full of pleasure boats. Wallander parked outside the red-painted coast guard building, paid the required entrance fee at the chandler’s, and wandered out to the farthest 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 Skåne 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 cell 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 dialed 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 café, where he had a view of the harbor, the islands, and in the distance the open sea. He had consulted a sea chart in a glass case on one of the café walls and established that Bokö 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 harbor entrance at what Wallander thought was far too fast a speed. A man in the cockpit of a berthed sailboat 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 recognized from the map on the wall of the café as Halsösundet, 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 pants, 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-story 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 coffeepot 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 fall, if I remember correctly.”

“I found it among Håkan 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 coast guard. Our neighbor Lasse Åman found him. He was lying in the boat and drifting toward Björkskär. But I figure 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. Håkan 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 traveled 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. Mom 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 maneuvers. 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 September 19, 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 fall 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 capsized. 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 realized 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 toward himself and leafed forward a few days, to September 27. 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 maneuver — 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 figured 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 fall and on until December. Then the last of the ships moved away. There were rumors 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 gotten 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 fit 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 gotten 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 wash 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 lightbulb 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 gray 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 realize 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 Bokö and Björkskär. 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 into the backseat.

“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. Håkan 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 good-bye, and the boat shot off at high speed toward the strait and Halsö.

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

When he arrived he was tired and hungry, and he didn’t pick up Jussi from the neighbor’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 Dumpster, 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 trash 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 neighboring 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 neighbor 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 soccer 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 realize 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 took 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 Hells 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 Håkan 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 café in Sandhamn.

“I’m on my way north,” he said. “My vacation route is going to take me up to Härnösand, then across the gulf to the Finnish coast, then back home via Åland. 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 Håkan 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 Håkan’s basement, and where he got ahold 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 harbor.

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 Hells 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 center of town. The risk is, of course, that he will continue writing sick notes for these poor motorcyclists 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 classmate of Linda’s, produced a large pile of books. Just before he left he also asked her for Stig Wennerström’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 pummeling 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 partway to work, and parked at the railroad 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 pants 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 pants.”

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 pants 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 cell 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 vacation.

But things didn’t turn out as planned. When he got home he found an unknown car parked outside his house, a beat-up Ford covered in rust. Wallander didn’t recognize 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 at 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 makeup. The girl Wallander had fallen in love with forty years ago used hardly any makeup; 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 apologized, 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 bureau, 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 whiskey 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, busting 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 nonstop complaints and threats. She of course thought that was exactly how he was behaving toward 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 Malmö, 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 realized 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 realized 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 naïve enough to wish that was possible. It was not possible to take even one step backward.

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 anymore, 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, apologizing 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 neighbor’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 Bokö 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 Malmö. 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 mom 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. Mom 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 Mom. 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 Mom 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 Västerås. 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 Håkan 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 nonstop 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 hot dog stand by car, or walked down the hill from the police station.

He dumped the half-eaten sausage and mashed potatoes into a trash can 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 Niklasgården. 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 fever 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 sick. 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 Niklasgården, 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 cell phone and used it as a flashlight. 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 Håkan 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 vacation 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 Malmö. 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 Niklasgården 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 Niklasgården 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 Niklasgården.

“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 anymore.”

Wallander thought it all over, but he had no more questions, so he thanked her for her help. He looked out the window and caught a glimpse of the yellow mail 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 Åkerblom. 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 Åkerblom’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?”

“Mom.”

“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 whiskey 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 realized. Maybe she had a little bottle hidden in her purse. Wallander said nothing at first, merely listened to what she had to say. But there came a point when he couldn’t stand it anymore. 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 realization 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 realize 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 favorite “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 Bokö. 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 U.S. 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 rumor 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 U.S. 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 fulfill 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 Håkan 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 Gävle, in the Gävlebukten. Southwesterly 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 Håkan’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 Gävle.”

It was six o’clock when Nordlander called back. He’d gotten as far as Arlanda, and would be catching a flight from Stockholm to Malmö an hour later.

Wallander got ready to pick him up. He let Jussi stay in the house — his presence would no doubt deter any possible intruders.

The flight landed on time. Wallander was waiting in the arrivals hall when Nordlander emerged. They drove back to Wallander’s house to examine the mysterious steel cylinder.

19

Sten Nordlander recognized immediately the steel cylinder Wallander had lifted up onto the kitchen table. He hadn’t seen the genuine article before, but he had seen a lot of sketches, plans, and pictures that enabled him to identify it.

He made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was astonished. Wallander decided there was no longer any reason to maintain the cat-and-mouse game with him. If Nordlander had been Håkan von Enke’s best friend while he was alive, and if the worst-case scenario turned out to be reality, he could also be his best friend in death. Wallander served coffee and told his guest the full story of how he had obtained the cylinder. He left nothing out, beginning with the photo of the two men and the fishing boat and finishing only when he explained how he had been able to identify the cylinder they had dragged out of the dark shed on Bokö.

“I don’t know what you think,” Wallander said in the end. “Whether it was worth the trip from Gävle.”

“It certainly was,” said Nordlander. “I’m as mystified as you are. This isn’t a dummy. Maybe I can see some sort of connection.”

It was past eleven. Nordlander declined the offer of a full meal and said he’d be satisfied with a cup of tea and some cookies. Wallander had to spend some time ransacking the pantry before he finally found a packet of oatcakes. Most of them had crumbled and were not much more than a heap of crumbs.

“It’s tempting to keep talking now,” said Nordlander, “but my doctor tells me I must go to bed at a decent hour, whether or not alcohol is involved. I’m afraid we’ll have to continue tomorrow. Let me just have a look through the book where you found the photograph before I go to sleep.”

The next day was warm, with no wind. A hawk hovered over the edge of a neighboring field. Jussi was fascinated and sat motionless, watching the bird. Wallander had been up since five o’clock, impatient to hear what Sten Nordlander had to say.

At seven-thirty Nordlander emerged from the guest room. He gazed out the window at the garden and the vista beyond, obviously impressed.

“The myth is that Skåne is a flat and rather lifeless landscape,” he said. “But this strikes me as much more than that. It feels to me like a gentle swell out at sea. And beyond it the waves.”

“I see it in much the same way,” Wallander said. “Dark, dense forests scare me to death. This openness makes it hard to hide. We all need to hide sometimes, no doubt, but some people do it too often.”

“Have you been thinking along the same lines as I have? That maybe, for reasons we know nothing about, Håkan and Louise have gone into hiding?”

“That is always a possibility when you are looking for missing persons.”

After breakfast Nordlander suggested they go for a walk.

“I have to do some exercise every morning. It’s the only way to get my digestive juices flowing.”

Jussi raced off in a flash toward the trees, where little pools always seemed to have something interesting for a dog to sniff at.

“There were times at the beginning of the seventies when we seriously thought the Russians were as strong from a military point of view as they appeared to be,” Nordlander began. “Their October parades were telling the truth, or so it seemed. Thousands of military experts sat watching television images of armored vehicles rolling past the Kremlin, and the most important question they were asking themselves was: What is it that we can’t see? That was when the Cold War was at its height, you could say. Before the spell broke.”

They stopped at a ditch where an improvised footbridge had collapsed. Wallander found another plank that was less rotten, and put it in place so that they could continue on their way.

“ ‘The spell broke,’ ” Wallander repeated. “My old colleague Rydberg used to say that when a line of inquiry turned out to be completely wrong.”

“In this case it was our realization that the Russian defense forces were not as strong as we’d thought. It was a worrying insight that gradually dawned on those whose job it was to solve jigsaw puzzles using all the pieces of information gathered from spies, U-2 planes, or even everyday television. The Russian military, at all levels, was worn-out and in many cases nothing more than an impressive-looking but empty shell. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, there was a very real and powerful threat of a possible nuclear attack. But just as the whole economic setup was rotting away, so was the incompetent bureaucracy. The party no longer believed in what it was doing, and the defense forces were also disintegrating. That naturally gave the top brass in the Pentagon and NATO, and even in Sweden, a lot to think about. What would happen if it became public knowledge that the Russian bear was in fact no more than an aggressive little polecat?”

“Presumably the threat of doomsday would be reduced?”

Nordlander seemed almost impatient when he answered.

“Military men have never been especially philosophical by nature. They are practical people. Hiding inside every competent general or admiral is nearly always a pretty good engineer. Doomsday wasn’t the most important question as far as they were concerned. What do you think it was?”

“Defense expenditure?”

“Right. Why should the Western world continue to be on a war footing if their main enemy was no longer a threat? You can’t find a new enemy of similar proportions just like that. China and to some extent India were next in line. But at that time China was still a nonstarter in military terms. The core of their armed forces was still an apparently endless supply of soldiers to deploy at any given moment. But that wasn’t sufficient motivation for the Western world to continue developing advanced weapons designed exclusively for the arms race with Russia. So there was suddenly a major problem. It simply wasn’t appropriate to reveal what everybody knew, that the Russian bear was now limping badly. It was essential to make sure the spell didn’t break.”

They came to a little hillock with a view of the sea. The previous year Wallander and Linda had carried there an old wooden bench she had bought at an auction for practically nothing. Now he and Nordlander sat down. Wallander shouted for Jussi, who clearly didn’t want to join them.

“What we’re talking about took place when Russia was still a very real enemy,” Nordlander went on. “It wasn’t only at ice hockey that we Swedes were convinced we’d never be able to beat them. We were certain that our enemies always came from the east, and hence we needed to be very aware of whatever they were up to in the Baltic Sea. It was around that time, at the end of the 1960s, that rumors started flying.”

Nordlander looked around, as if he were afraid that somebody might be listening to their conversation. A combine was busy close to the main road to Simrishamn. Now and then the distant buzz of traffic drifted up to the hillock.

“We knew that the Russians had a big naval base in Leningrad. And they had quite a few more bases, more or less secret, dotted around the Baltic Sea and in East Germany. We in Sweden weren’t the only ones blasting our way down into the rocks underneath the Baltic Sea. The Germans had been doing it even during the Hitler period, and the Russians continued in the same tradition after the swastika had been replaced by the red flag. A rumor spread that there was a cable over the bottom of the Baltic Sea, between Leningrad and their Baltic satellites, that handled most of their important electronic messages. It was considered safer to lay your own cables than to risk your messages being intercepted by others listening in to radio traffic. We shouldn’t forget that Sweden was deeply involved in what was going on. One of our reconnaissance planes was shot down at the beginning of the fifties, and nowadays nobody has any doubt that they were spying on the Russians.”

“You say the cable was a rumor?”

“It was supposedly laid at the beginning of the 1960s, when the Russians really believed that they could match the Americans and maybe even outdo them. Don’t forget how put out we were when the first Sputnik started cruising around up there in space and everybody was amazed that it wasn’t the Yanks who had launched it. There was some justification for the Russian view. It was a time when they nearly caught up with the West. Looking back, if you want to be cynical, you could say that was when they should have attacked. If they had wanted to start a war and bring about the doomsday scenario you talked about. In any case, it’s rumored that there was a defector from the East German security forces, a general with a chest full of medals who had acquired a taste for the good life in London, and he is supposed to have revealed the existence of the cable to his British counterpart. The British then sold the information for a staggering amount to their American friends, who were always sitting at the ready with their hand held out. The problem was that they couldn’t send the really advanced U.S. submarines through the Öresund because the Russians would have detected them immediately. So they had to find less conspicuous methods — mini-submarines and so on. But they didn’t have precise information. Where exactly was the cable? In the middle of the Baltic Sea, or had they chosen the shortest route from the Gulf of Finland? Perhaps the Russians had been even more cunning and laid it near Gotland, where nobody would have expected to find it. But they kept on looking, and the intention was to attach to it the sister of that bugging cylinder they had already placed off Kamchatka.”

“You mean the one that’s now lying on my kitchen table?”

“But is that the one? There could well be several.”

“Even so, it’s all so strange. Russia no longer exists as a great power. The Baltic states are free again; the former East Germans are now united with the West Germans. Shouldn’t a bugging device like that be relegated to some museum of the Cold War?”

“You would think so. I’m not capable of answering that question. All I can do is confirm what the thing is that’s come into your possession.”

They continued their walk. It was only when they were back in the garden again that Wallander asked the most important question.

“Where does this leave us with regard to the disappearance of Håkan and Louise?”

“I don’t know. For me, it’s just becoming odder and odder. What are you going to do with the cylinder?”

“Get in touch with the CID in Stockholm. The bottom line is that they are in charge of the investigation. What they do next in conjunction with Säpo has nothing to do with me.”

At eleven o’clock Wallander drove Nordlander back to Sturup Airport. They said their good-byes outside the yellow-painted terminal building. Yet again, Wallander tried to pay Nordlander’s travel expenses. But Sten Nordlander shook his head.

“I want to know what happened. Never forget that Håkan was my best friend. I think about him every day. And about Louise.”

He picked up his bag and went into the terminal. Wallander walked back to his car and drove home.

When he entered the house he felt exhausted and wondered if he was getting sick again. He decided to take a shower.

The last thing he remembered was having difficulty closing the plastic shower curtain.

When he woke up he was in a hospital room. Linda was standing at the foot of the bed. Fixed to the back of his hand was an IV supplying him with fluid. He had no idea why he was there.

“What happened?”

Linda told him, objectively, as if she were reading from a police report. Her words awoke no memories, merely filled the vacuum in his mind. She had called him at about six o’clock but there was no answer, even when she tried again repeatedly. By ten o’clock she was so worried that she left Klara with Hans, who was at home for once, and drove out to Löderup. She had found him in the shower, soaking wet and unconscious. She had called an ambulance, and was able to give the doctor who examined him some background information. It wasn’t long before it was established that Wallander had gone into insulin shock. His blood sugar level had become so low that he had lost consciousness.

“I remember being hungry,” he said slowly when Linda finished her account. “But I didn’t actually eat anything.”

“You could have died,” said Linda.

He could see that she had tears in her eyes. If she hadn’t driven to his house, hadn’t suspected that something was wrong, his life could have ended there, with him naked on a tiled floor. He shuddered.

“You neglect yourself, Dad,” she said. “One of these days you’ll do it once too often. I want you to let Klara have a grandfather for at least another fifteen years. Then you can do whatever you want with your life.”

“I don’t understand how it could have happened. It’s not the first time my blood sugar has been too low.”

“You’ll have to discuss that with your doctor. I’m talking about something different. Your duty to stay alive.”

He merely nodded. Every word he uttered was a strain. He was filled with a strange feeling of echoing exhaustion.

“What’s in the fluid I’m getting?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How long am I going to have to lie here?”

“I don’t know that either.”

She stood up. He could see how tired she was, and realized with a sort of misty insight that she might have been sitting at his bedside for a long time.

“Go home now,” he said. “I’ll manage.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’ll manage. This time.”

She leaned over him and looked him in the eye.

“Greetings from Klara. She also thinks it’s good that you survived.”

Wallander was left alone in the room. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. What he wanted most of all was to wake up with the feeing that what had happened was not his fault.

But later in the day Wallander was visited by his own doctor, who was not on duty but had come to the hospital to see him anyway, and told him that the time was now past when he could be careless about keeping tabs on his blood sugar readings. Wallander had been Dr. Hansén’s patient for nearly twenty years, and there were no excuses that would impress this decidedly unsentimental physician. Dr. Hansén told him over and over again that as far as he was concerned, Wallander was welcome to walk the tightrope and not take his illness seriously, but the next time anything like this happened he should expect consequences that he was really too young to suffer.

“I’m sixty years old,” Wallander said. “Isn’t that old?”

“A couple of generations ago that was old. But not now. The body gets older; there’s nothing we can do about that. But nowadays we can expect to live for another fifteen or twenty years.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“You’ll stay in the hospital until tomorrow so that my colleagues can make sure that your blood sugar readings have stabilized, and that you haven’t suffered any damage. Then you can go home and continue in your sinful ways.”

“But I don’t lead a sinful life, do I?”

Dr. Hansén was a few years older than Wallander and had been married no less than six times. Local gossip in Ystad suggested that his maintenance payments to his former wives forced him to spend his vacations working in Norwegian hospitals way up inside the Arctic circle, where nobody would volunteer unless they had to.

“Maybe that’s what’s missing from your life. A little pinch of refreshing sinfulness — a detective breaking the rules.”

It was only after Dr. Hansén had left that it really dawned on him how close to death he had been. For a brief moment he was overcome by panic and fear, stronger than ever before. In situations not connected with his professional duties, that is. There was a sort of fear that police officers felt, and a different sort that was experienced by a civilian.

He was reminded yet again of the time he had been stabbed when he was a young constable on foot patrol in Malmö. On that occasion the final darkness had been only a hair’s breadth away. Now death had been breathing down his neck once again, and this time it was Wallander himself who had opened the door and let him in.

That evening, lying in his hospital bed, Wallander made a series of decisions that he knew he would probably never be able to stick to. They were about eating habits, exercise, new interests, a renewed battle with loneliness. Above all he must make the most of his vacation, not work, not keep hunting for Hans’s missing parents. He must take it easy, rest, catch up on sleep, go for long walks along the beach, play with Klara.

He made a plan. Over the next five years he would walk the whole length of the Skåne coastline, from the end of Hallandsåsen in the west to the Blekinge border in the east. He doubted he would ever make it happen, but it made him feel a bit better, letting a dream form then watching it slowly fade away again.

A few years earlier he had attended a dinner party at Martinsson’s house and spoken to a retired high school teacher, who told him about his experiences walking to Santiago de Compostela, the classic pilgrimage. Wallander had immediately wanted to make that pilgrimage himself, divided into installments, perhaps over a five-year period. He even started to train, carrying a backpack full of stones — but he overdid it and succumbed to bone spurs in his left foot. His pilgrimage came to an end before it had even started. The bone spurs were cured now, thanks to treatment that included painful cortisone injections into his heel. But perhaps a number of well-planned walks along Scanian beaches might be within the bounds of possibility.

The following day he was discharged and sent home. He picked up Jussi, who had once again been looked after by his neighbor, and declined Linda’s offer to drive to Löderup to make him dinner. He felt he needed to come to terms with his situation without her help. He was on his own, so he had to accept personal responsibility.

Before going to bed that night he wrote a long e-mail to Ytterberg. He didn’t mention having been ill, merely that he had to take a vacation since he was feeling burned out, and he needed to give Håkan and Louise von Enke a rest for a while. For the first time, I have to acknowledge the limitations imposed by my age and my depleted strength, he ended the message. I’ve never done that before. I’m not forty years old anymore, and I have to reconcile myself to the fact that time past will never return. I think that’s an illusion I share with more or less everyone — that it’s possible to step into the same river twice.

He read through what he had written, clicked on Send, then switched off his computer. As he went to bed, he could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.

The storm was approaching, but the summer evening sky was still light.

20

Wallander woke the next day to find that the thunderstorm had moved on without affecting his house. The front had veered away to the east. Wallander felt fully rested when he got up at about eight o’clock. It was chilly, but even so he took his breakfast with him into the garden and ate it at the white wooden table. As a way of celebrating his vacation, he snipped a few roses from one of the bushes and laid them on the table. He had just sat down again when his cell phone rang. It was Linda, wanting to know how he was feeling.

“I’ve had my warning,” he said. “Everything’s fine at the moment. But I’m going to make sure my cell phone is always within reach.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to advise you to do.”

“How are you all?”

“Klara has a bit of a cold. Hans took this week off.”

“Because he wanted to, or against his will?”

“Because I wanted him to! He didn’t dare do anything else. I gave him an ultimatum.”

“What?”

“Me or his work. We don’t negotiate where Klara is concerned.”

Wallander ate the rest of his breakfast, thinking that it was becoming more and more obvious how much Linda took after her grandfather. The same caustic tone of voice, the same ironic, slightly mocking attitude to the world around her. But also a tendency to anger lurking just under the surface.

Wallander put his feet up on a chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. At last his vacation had begun.

The phone rang.

“Ytterberg here. Did I wake you?”

“You’d have had to call a few hours ago to do that.”

“We found Louise von Enke. She’s dead.”

Wallander held his breath, and slowly rose to his feet.

“I wanted to call you right away,” said Ytterberg. “We might be able to keep the news quiet for another hour or so, but we need to inform her son. Am I right in thinking the only other family member is the cousin in England?”

“You’re forgetting the daughter at Niklasgården. The staff there should be informed. But I can take care of that.”

“I suspected you would want to — but if you’d rather not, which I would understand perfectly, I’ll call them myself.”

“I’ll do it,” said Wallander. “Just tell me the most important details that I need to know.”

“The whole thing is absurd, to be honest,” said Ytterberg. “Last night a senile woman went missing from a nursing home on Värmdö island. She usually went out for walks in the evening — they’d fitted her with some sort of GPS tag that would make it easier to track her down, but she somehow managed to take it off. So the police had to organize a search party. They eventually found her; she wasn’t in too bad a state. But two of the searchers got lost — can you believe it? The batteries in their cell phones were so low that another search party had to be sent out to find them. Which they did. But on the way back they happened to come across somebody else.”

“Louise?”

“Yes. She was lying at the side of a woodland path, a couple of miles from the nearest road. The path went through a clear-cut area, and I just got back from there.”

“Was she murdered?”

“There’s no sign of violence. In all probability she committed suicide. We found an empty bottle of sleeping pills. If the bottle was full, she would have swallowed a hundred tablets. We’re waiting to see what the forensic boys have to say.”

“What did she look like?”

“She was lying on her side, a bit hunched up, wearing a skirt, socks, a gray blouse, and an overcoat. Her shoes were next to her body. There was also a purse with various papers and keys. Some animal or other had been sniffing around, but the body hadn’t been nibbled at.”

“No sign of Håkan?”

“None at all.”

“But why would she choose that particular place? An open area where all the trees had been cut down?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t to die in idyllic surroundings. The spot is full of dry twigs and dead tree stumps. I’ll send you a map. Call if you have any comments.”

“What about your vacation?”

“It’s not the first time in my life that a vacation has been shot down.”

The map arrived a few minutes later. With his hand on the phone, it occurred to Wallander that this was something he shared with every other police officer he knew: the reluctance to be the one to inform relatives about a death. That was never routine.

Death always causes havoc, no matter when it comes.

He dialed the number, and noticed that his hand was shaking. Linda answered.

“You again? We just hung up. Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine. Are you alone?”

“Hans is busy changing a diaper. Didn’t I tell you I gave him an ultimatum?”

“Yes, you did. Listen carefully now — you might want to sit down.”

She could hear from his voice that this was serious. She knew he never exaggerated.

“Louise is dead. She committed suicide several days ago. She was found last night or this morning at the side of a woodland path where they’d been clear-cutting in the Värmdö forests.”

She was dumbstruck.

“Really?” she asked eventually.

“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt. But there’s no trace of Håkan.”

“This is awful.”

“How will Hans take it?”

“I don’t know. Are they completely certain?”

“I wouldn’t have called if Louise hadn’t been identified, obviously.”

“I mean that she committed suicide. She wasn’t like that.”

“Go and talk to Hans now. If he wants to speak to me he can call me direct. I can also give him the number of the police in Stockholm.”

Wallander was about to hang up, but Linda wasn’t finished.

“Where has she been all this time? Why did she take her life only now?”

“I know as little about that as you do. Let’s hope, in the midst of all the tragedy, that this can help us to find Håkan. But we can talk about that later.”

Wallander hung up, then called Niklasgården. Artur Källberg was on vacation, and so was the receptionist, but Wallander eventually managed to get ahold of a temp. She knew nothing about Signe von Enke’s background, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to a brick wall. But maybe that was an advantage under the circumstances.

Wallander had barely finished the conversation when Hans von Enke called. He was shaken, and close to tears. Wallander answered all his questions patiently, and promised to let him know as soon as any more information became available. Linda took the phone.

“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet,” she said quietly.

“That goes for all of us.”

“What did she take?”

“Sleeping pills. Ytterberg didn’t say what kind. Maybe Rohypnol? Isn’t that what it’s called?”

“She never took sleeping pills.”

“Women often use sleeping pills when they want to take their own life.”

“There’s something you said that makes me wonder.”

“What?”

“Did she really take her shoes off?”

“According to Ytterberg, yes.”

“Don’t you think that sounds odd? If she was indoors I could have understood it. But why take your shoes off if you’re going to lie down and die outside?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he say what kind of shoes they were?”

“No. But I didn’t ask.”

“You have to tell us absolutely everything,” she said after a pause.

“Why would I hold anything back?”

“You sometimes forget to mention things, possibly because you’re trying to be considerate when you don’t need to be. When will the press get ahold of this?”

“At any moment. Check teletext — they’re usually the first to know.”

Wallander waited, phone in hand. She came back a minute later.

“They’ve got it already. ‘Louise von Enke found dead. No trace of her husband.’ ”

“We can talk again later.”

Wallander switched on his own television and saw that the news had been given prominence. But if nothing else happened to change or complicate the situation, Louise von Enke’s death would no doubt soon fade into the background again.

Wallander tried to devote the rest of the day to his garden. He had bought a pair of hedge clippers on sale in a DIY store, but he soon discovered that they were more or less unusable. He trimmed a few bushes and cut back some branches on various old, parched fruit trees, well aware that they shouldn’t be pruned in the middle of summer. But the whole time, he was thinking about Louise. He’d never gotten close to her. What did he actually know about who she was? That woman who listened to the conversations taking place around the dinner table with the trace of a smile on her lips, but very rarely said anything herself? She taught German, and maybe other foreign languages as well. He couldn’t remember offhand, and had no desire to go inside and search through his notes.

And she gave birth to a daughter, he thought. When she was still in the maternity ward she had been told about the child’s severe handicaps. The daughter they named Signe would never lead a normal life. She was their first child. What effect does something like that have on a mother? He wandered around with his useless hedge clippers in his hand and failed to find an answer. But he didn’t feel much genuine sorrow. You couldn’t feel sorry for the dead. He could understand what Hans and Linda felt. And there was also Klara, who would never get to know her grandmother.

Jussi limped up with a thorn in one of his front paws. Wallander sat down at the garden table, put on his glasses, and with the aid of a pair of tweezers managed to pull it out. Jussi displayed his thanks by racing off like a flash of black lightning into the fields. A glider flew low over Wallander’s house. He watched its progress, squinting. He simply couldn’t feel like he was on vacation. He could see Louise in his mind’s eye, lying on the ground next to a path that meandered through a clear-cut area of the forest. And by her side a pair of shoes, neatly on parade.

He threw the clippers into the shed and lay down on the garden hammock. Tractors were hard at work in the distance. The buzz from the main road came and went in waves. Then he sat up. This was pointless. He wouldn’t be able to relax until he had seen it all with his own eyes. He would have to go to Stockholm again.

Wallander flew to Stockholm that same evening, having handed over Jussi once again to his neighbor, who asked somewhat ironically if Wallander was beginning to get tired of his dog. He called Linda from the airport; she said she wasn’t surprised — she had expected no less of him.

“Take lots of photos,” she said. “There’s something here that doesn’t add up.”

“Nothing adds up,” said Wallander. “That’s why I’m going to Stockholm.”

His flight was ruined by a screeching child in the seat behind him. He spent nearly the entire journey with his fingers in his ears. He managed to find a room in a little hotel not far from the Central Station. As he walked in the door, the skies opened. He looked out the window of his room and watched people scurrying to find shelter from the heavy rain. Can loneliness get any worse than this? he suddenly found himself thinking. Rain, a hotel room, me at sixty years old. If I turn around, there’s nobody else there. He wondered how things were going for Mona. She’s probably just as lonely as I am, he thought. Probably even more so, as she tries to conceal all the turmoil that’s bubbling away inside her.

When the rain stopped, Wallander went back to the Central Station and bought a map of Stockholm. Then he got on the phone and booked a car for the following day. Because it was summer, rental cars were in high demand, and the best deal he could find was much more expensive than he’d hoped for. He ate dinner in the Old Town. He drank red wine, and was reminded of a summer many years ago, shortly after his divorce from Mona, when he had met a woman. Her name was Monika, and she had been visiting friends in Ystad. Their first encounter was at a less than enjoyable dance, and they arranged to see each other again in Stockholm for dinner. Even before they’d finished their appetizers, he realized that it was a disaster. They had nothing to talk about; the silences became longer and longer, and he got very drunk. He now drank a toast to her memory, and hoped that she had achieved happiness in her life. He was tipsy when he left the restaurant and wandered through the alleys and cobbled streets before returning to his hotel. That night he dreamed once again about horses running into the sea. When he woke up the next morning he dug out his blood sugar meter and stuck the needle into his finger: 100. What it should be. The day had begun well.

Thick clouds covered the sky over Stockholm when he reached the place on Värmdö where Louise von Enke’s body had been found. It was ten o’clock. Police tape was still scattered around. The ground was waterlogged, but Wallander could see traces of the marks the police had made where the body had been lying.

He stood there motionless, held his breath, listened. The first impression was always the most important. He looked around in a slow circle. They had found Louise in a shallow depression, with outcrops of rock and low mounds on both sides. If she had lain down here so as not to be seen, she had chosen the right place.

Then he thought about the roses. Linda’s words, the first time she told him about her future mother-in-law. A woman who loves flowers, who always dreamed of having a beautiful garden, a woman with a green thumb. That’s what Linda had said. He remembered very clearly. But this was as far from a beautiful garden as you could get. Was that why she had chosen this place? Because death was not beautiful, had nothing to do with roses and a well-tended garden? He walked around the site, viewing it from different angles. She must have walked a short way, he thought. From the same direction as where my car is. But how did she get there? By bus? By taxi? Had somebody driven her?

He walked over to an old hunting stand in the middle of the cleared area. The steps were slippery. He climbed up cautiously. The floor was littered with a few cigarette butts and some empty beer cans. A dead mouse was lying in one corner. Wallander climbed down again and continued walking around. He tried to imagine himself as the person about to commit suicide. A lonely spot, ugly and covered in scrub, a bottle of sleeping pills. He stopped dead. A hundred sleeping pills. Ytterberg had said nothing about a bottle of water. Was it possible to swallow that many pills without anything to drink? He retraced his steps to see if there was something he’d missed. As he studied the ground, he tried to channel Louise. The silent woman who was always willing to listen to what other people had to say.

That was the moment Wallander really and truly began to comprehend that he was on the periphery of a world he knew nothing about. It was Håkan and Louise von Enke’s world, a world he had never thought about before. He didn’t know what he saw and felt during the time he spent in the clear-cut area; it wasn’t something tangible, nor was it a kind of revelation. It was more a feeling of being close to something he had no qualifications for understanding.

He left the place, drove back to town, parked in Grevgatan, and walked up the stairs to the apartment. He wandered silently through the deserted rooms, collected the mail lying on the floor next to the door, and picked out the bills Hans would need to pay. The mail forwarding wasn’t yet working. He examined the letters to see if there was anything unexpected among them, but found nothing. The apartment was stuffy and stifling, and he had a headache, probably due to the poor-quality red wine he’d drunk the night before, so he carefully opened a window overlooking the street. He glanced at the answering machine. The red light was flashing, indicating new messages. He listened. Märta Hörnelius wonders if Louise von Enke is interested in joining a book club that will start this fall, to discuss works of classical German literature. That was all. Louise von Enke won’t be joining any book club, Wallander thought. She has closed her last book for good.

He made some coffee in the kitchen, checked that there was nothing in the refrigerator starting to smell, then went into the room where she had two large closets. He didn’t bother with the clothes but took out all the shoes, carried them into the kitchen, and stood them on the table. By the time he had finished there were twenty-two pairs in total, plus two pairs of Wellingtons, and he’d been forced to use a counter and the draining board as well. He put on his glasses and started to work methodically through them all, one shoe at a time. He noticed that she had large feet and bought only exclusive brands. Even the rubber boots were an Italian make that Wallander suspected was expensive. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but both he and Linda had been surprised to hear that she had taken off her shoes before she died. She wanted everything to be neat and tidy, Wallander thought. But why?

It took him half an hour to go through the shoes. Then he called Linda and told her about his visit to Värmdö.

“How many shoes do you have?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Louise has twenty-two pairs, in addition to the ones the police have. Is that a lot or a little?”

“It seems about right. She cared what she looked like.”

“That was all I wanted to know.”

“Do you have anything else to tell me?”

“Not now.”

Despite her protests, he hung up and called Ytterberg. To Wallander’s surprise a small child answered. Then came Ytterberg.

“My granddaughter loves answering the phone. I have her with me in my office today.”

“I don’t want to disturb you, but there’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

“You’re not disturbing me. But aren’t you supposed to be on vacation? Or did I misunderstand?”

“I am on vacation.”

“What do you want to know? I don’t have any new information about Louise von Enke’s death. We’re waiting to see what the pathologist has to tell us.”

Wallander suddenly remembered his doubts about the water.

“I have two questions, basically. The first one is simple. If she swallowed so many pills, surely she must have drunk something as well?”

“There was a half-empty liter bottle of mineral water next to the body. Didn’t I mention that?”

“No doubt you did. I probably wasn’t listening carefully enough. Was it Ramlösa?”

“No, Loka, I think. But I’m not sure. Is it important?”

“Not at all. Then there’s that matter of the shoes.”

“They were standing by the side of the body, very neatly.”

“Can you describe the shoes?”

“Brown, low heels, new, I think.”

“Does it seem reasonable that she would wear shoes like that in the woods?”

“They weren’t exactly party shoes.”

“But they were new?”

“Yes. They looked new.”

“I don’t think I have any more questions.”

“I’ll be in touch as soon as the pathology report is in. But it might take some time, now that it’s summer.”

“Do you have any idea how she got out to Värmdö?”

“No,” said Ytterberg. “We haven’t figured that out yet.”

“I was just wondering. Many thanks yet again.”

Wallander sat in the silent apartment, gripping the phone tightly, as if it were the last thing he possessed in this life. Brown shoes. New. Not party shoes. Slowly, deep in thought, he moved the shoes back into the closets.

Early the next day he flew back to Ystad. That afternoon he returned the faulty hedge clippers to the store he had bought them from, and explained how useless they were. Because he made a fuss, and because one of the managers knew who he was, he was given a better pair at no extra charge.

When he got back home he saw that Ytterberg had called. Wallander dialed his number.

“You made me think,” Ytterberg said. “I had to take another look at those shoes. As I said, they were almost brand-new.”

“You didn’t need to do that for my sake.”

“It’s not really the shoes I’m calling about,” said Ytterberg. “While I was at it I took another look at her purse, and I discovered a sort of inner lining. You could even call it a secret pocket. There was something very interesting in it.”

Wallander held his breath.

“Papers,” said Ytterberg. “Documents. In Russian. And also some microfilm. I don’t know what it is, but it’s remarkable enough for me to phone our Säpo colleagues.”

Wallander found it difficult to grasp what he had just heard.

“You’re saying she was carrying secret material around in her purse?”

“We don’t know that. But microfilm is microfilm, and secret pockets are secret pockets. And Russian is Russian. I thought you should know. It might be best to keep this to ourselves for now. Until we know what it actually means. I’ll call again when I have more to tell you.”

After the call Wallander went out and sat in the garden. It was warm again. It would be a pleasant summer evening.

But he had begun to feel very cold.