The Troubled Man (10 page)

She fell silent. Wallander listened to the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece above an open fire and the distant hum of traffic in the street outside.

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

‘The day he disappeared, was there anything that felt unusual? Did he behave any differently from the way he usually did?’

‘No. Everything was the same as it always was. Hakan has his routines, even if he’s not a pedant.’

‘What about the previous days? The week before?’

‘He had a cold. One day he skipped his morning walk. That was all.’

‘Did he have any post? Did anyone call him? Did he have any visitors?’

‘He spoke once or twice to Sten Nordlander, his closest friend.’

‘Was he at the party in Djursholm?’

‘No, he was away then. Hakan and Sten met when they worked in the same submarine - Hakan was in command and Sten was chief engineer. That must have been the end of the sixties.’

‘What does he have to say about Hakan’s disappearance?’

‘Sten is just as worried as everyone else. He can’t explain it either. He said he’d be pleased to talk to you while you’re here.’

She was sitting on a sofa opposite Wallander. The evening sun suddenly illuminated her face. She moved into the shade. Wallander thought she was one of those women who try to hide their beauty behind a mask of plainness. As if she had read his mind, she gave him a hesitant smile. Wallander took out his notebook and wrote down Sten Nordlander’s telephone number. He noticed that she knew it by heart, and his mobile number as well.

They spoke for an hour without Wallander feeling that he’d learned anything he didn’t know already. Then she showed him her husband’s study. Wallander examined the desk lamp.

‘So this is the lamp he used to have on all night.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Linda mentioned it. This lamp and others.’

She closed the thick curtains as she responded. Wallander could detect a faint smell of tobacco.

‘He was afraid of the dark,’ she said, brushing some dust off one of the heavy, dark-coloured curtains. ‘He thought it was embarrassing. It probably started while he was in his submarines, but it was much later that he became really afraid, long after he’d stopped going to sea. I had to promise never to mention it to a soul.’

‘But your son knows about it? And he in turn told Linda …’

‘Hakan must have mentioned it to Hans without my knowing.’

The phone rang in the distance.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she said as she disappeared through the tall double doors.

Wallander found himself eyeing her in the same way he observed Kristina Magnusson. He sat down on the desk chair made of rust-brown wood with a green leather back and seat. He looked slowly around the room. He switched on the desk lamp. There was dust around the switch. Wallander ran his finger over the polished mahogany desktop, then lifted up the blotter. That was a habit he had acquired from his early days as an apprentice of Rydberg’s. Whenever they came to a crime scene containing a desk, that was always the first thing Rydberg did. As a rule there was nothing underneath it. But he had explained, in a way that indicated a mysterious subtext, that even blank space could be an important clue.

There were a few pens and pencils on the desk, a magnifying glass, a porcelain vase in the shape of a swan, a small stone and a box full of drawing pins. That was all. He swivelled slowly around on the chair and scanned the room. The walls were covered in framed photographs - of submarines and other naval vessels; of Hans wearing the white cap all Swedes get when they pass their graduation exams; of Hakan in his dress uniform, he and Louise walking through a ceremonial arch of swords raised by the honour guard at their wedding; of old people, nearly all the men in uniform. There was also a painting on one of the walls. Wallander went to study it more closely. It was a Romanic depiction of the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson dying, leaning against a cannon, surrounded by sailors on their knees, all of them crying. The painting surprised him. It was a piece of kitsch in an apartment characterised by good taste. Why had Hakan displayed it? Wallander carefully removed the picture and examined the back. There was nothing written on it. It’s too late to start making a thorough search of the whole room, he thought. It’s nearly eight thirty, and it would take several hours. It would make more sense to start tomorrow morning. He went back to one of the two connected living rooms. Louise emerged from the kitchen. Wallander thought he could detect a faint whiff of alcohol, but he wasn’t sure. They agreed that he would come back the following day at nine o’clock. Wallander put on his jacket in the hall and prepared to leave, but suddenly he had second thoughts.

‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’

‘I manage the odd hour here and there. How can I sleep soundly when I don’t know anything?’

‘Would you like me to stay overnight?’

‘It’s kind of you to offer, but it’s not necessary. I’m used to being on my own. Don’t forget, I’m a sailor’s wife.’

He walked back to his hotel, stopping for dinner at an Italian restaurant that looked cheap. The food confirmed that assumption. In the hope of avoiding a sleepless night, he took half of one of his sleeping pills. Sadly, this seemed to be one of the few pleasures left to him: beckoning the onset of sleep by unscrewing the lid of the white bottle.

The next day began like his visit the previous evening: with Louise offering him a cup of tea. He could see that she had hardly slept a wink.

She had a message to pass on, from Chief Inspector Ytterberg, who was in charge of the investigation into von Enke’s disappearance. Could Wallander please give him a call. She handed him a cordless phone, then stood up and went into the kitchen. Wallander could see her reflection in a wall mirror; she was standing in the middle of the floor, motionless, with her back to him.

Ytterberg spoke with an unmistakable northern accent.

‘It’s a full-scale investigation now,’ he began. ‘We’re pretty sure something must have happened to him. I gathered from his wife you were going to work through his papers.’

‘Haven’t you done that already?’

‘His wife has been through them without finding anything. I assume she wants you to double-check.’

‘Do you have any leads at all? Has anyone seen him?’

‘Only one unreliable witness who claims to have seen him in Lill-Jansskogen. That’s all.’

There was a pause, and Wallander heard Ytterberg telling someone to go away and come back later.

‘I’ll never get used to this,’ said Ytterberg when he resumed the conversation. ‘People seem to have stopped knocking on doors and just barge in.’

‘One of these days the national police commissioner will tell us all to sit in open-plan offices in order to increase our efficiency,’ said Wallander. ‘We’ll be able to hear one another’s witnesses and help out in other people’s investigations.’

Ytterberg chuckled. Wallander decided that he had found an excellent contact in the Stockholm police force.

‘One more thing,’ said Ytterberg. ‘In his active days, Hakan von Enke was a high-ranking naval officer. So it’s routine that the Sapo crowd will shove an oar in. Our security service colleagues are always on the lookout for a possible spy.’

Wallander was surprised.

‘Are you saying he’s under suspicion?’

‘Of course not. But they have to have something to show when next year’s budget comes under discussion.’

Wallander moved further away from the kitchen.

‘Just between you and me,’ he said in a low voice, ‘what do you think happened? Forget all the facts - what does your experience tell you?’

‘It looks pretty serious. He might have been ambushed in the woods and abducted. That’s what I think is most likely at the moment.’

Ytterberg asked for Wallander’s mobile phone number before hanging up. Wallander returned to his cup of tea, thinking he would have much preferred coffee. Louise returned from the kitchen and looked enquiringly at him. Wallander shook his head.

‘Nothing new. But they are taking his disappearance extremely seriously.’

She remained standing by the sofa.

‘I know he’s dead,’ she said out of the blue. ‘I’ve refused to think the worst so far, but now I can’t put it off any longer.’

‘There must be some basis for that conviction,’ said Wallander cautiously. ‘Is there anything in particular that makes you think that way right now?’

‘I’ve lived with him for forty years,’ she said. ‘He would never do this to me. Not to me and not to the rest of the family either.’

She hurried out of the room. Wallander heard the bedroom door close. He waited for a moment, then stood up and tiptoed into the hall and listened outside. He could hear her crying. Although he wasn’t an emotional type, he could feel a lump in his throat. He drank the rest of his tea, then went to von Enke’s study, where he had been the previous evening. The curtains were still drawn. He opened them and let in the light. Then he started searching through the desk, one drawer at a time. It was all very neat, with a place for everything. One of the drawers contained several old pipes, pipe cleaners and something that looked like a duster. He turned his attention to the other pedestal. Everything was just as neatly filed - old school reports, certificates, a pilot’s licence. In March 1958 Hakan von Enke had passed a test enabling him to pilot a single-engine plane, conducted at Bromma Airport. So he didn’t spend all his life down in the depths, Wallander thought. He imitated not only the fish, but the birds as well.

Wallander took out von Enke’s reports from the Norra Latin grammar school. He had top marks in history and Swedish, and also in geography. But he only just scraped by in German and religious studies. The next drawer contained a camera and a pair of earphones. When Wallander examined the camera, an old Leica, more closely, he noticed that it still had film. Either twelve pictures had been taken, or there were twelve exposures still available. He put the camera on the desktop. The earphones were also old. He guessed that they might have been state-of-the-art some fifty years ago. Why had von Enke kept them? There was nothing in the bottom drawer apart from a comic book with coloured pictures and speech bubbles retelling the story of
The Last of the Mohicans
. The comic had been read so often that it almost disintegrated in Wallander’s hands. He recalled what Rydberg had once said to him:
Always look for something that doesn’t fit in with the rest
. What was a copy of Classics Illustrated from 1962 doing in the bottom drawer of Hakan von Enke’s desk?

He didn’t hear Louise approaching. Suddenly she was there, in the doorway. She had removed all trace of her emotional breakdown, and her face was newly powdered. He held up the comic.

‘Why did he keep this?’

‘I think he got it from his father on a special occasion. He never told me any details.’

She left him to his own devices again. Wallander opened the remaining large drawer, at waist height between the two pedestals. Here the contents were anything but neatly ordered - letters, photographs, old airline tickets, a doctor’s certificate, a few bills. Why was everything jumbled up here, but not anywhere else? He decided to leave the contents of this drawer untouched for the time being, and left it open. The only thing he removed was the doctor’s certificate.

The man he was trying to track down had been vaccinated many times. As recently as three weeks ago he had been vaccinated against yellow fever, and also tetanus and jaundice. Stapled to the certificate was a prescription for antimalarial drugs. Wallander frowned. Yellow fever? Where might you be travelling to if you needed to be vaccinated against that? He returned the document to the drawer without having answered the question.

Wallander stood up and turned his attention to the bookcases. If the books told the truth, Hakan von Enke was very interested in English history and twentieth-century naval developments. There were also books on general history and a lot of political memoirs. Wallander noted that Tage Erlander’s memoirs were standing next to Stig Wennerstrom’s autobiography. To his surprise Wallander also discovered that von Enke had been interested in modern Swedish poetry. There were names Wallander didn’t recognise, others of poets he knew a little about - such as Sonnevi and Transtromer. He took out some of the books and noted that they showed signs of having been read. In one of Transtromer’s books somebody had made notes in the margin, and at one point had written: ‘Brilliant poem.’ Wallander read it, and he agreed. It was about the sighing of coniferous forests. There were what appeared to be the complete works of Ivar Lo-Johansson, and also of Vilhelm Moberg. Wallander’s image of the missing man was changing all the time, deepening. Nothing gave him the impression that the commander was vain and merely wanted to demonstrate to the world that he was interested in the arts. Wallander hated those types.

Wallander left the bookcases and turned his attention to the tall filing cabinet, opening drawer after drawer. Files, letters, reports, several private diaries, drawings of submarines labelled ‘Types commanded by me’. Everything was neat and tidy, apart from that desk drawer. Nevertheless, something was nagging at Wallander without his being able to put his finger on it. He sat down at the desk again, and contemplated the open filing cabinet. There was a brown leather armchair in one corner of the room, a table and a reading lamp with a red shade. Wallander moved from the desk chair to the reading chair. There were two books on the table, both of them open. One was old, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
. He knew it was one of the first books warning that the advance of Western civilisation constituted a threat to the future of the planet. The other book was about Swedish butterflies - short blocks of text interspersed with colour photographs. Butterflies and a planet under threat, Wallander thought. And a chaotic desk drawer. He couldn’t see how the various parts fitted together.