Henning Mankell - The Troubled Man

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

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

“What does Hans say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dead had taken their secrets with them.

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

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

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

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

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