Henning Mankell - The Troubled Man

Von Enke put his glass down on the table and leaned forward toward Wallander.

“But I haven’t forgotten it, of course. I still keep trying to understand what happened — not just on that day when we allowed a submarine to give us the slip. I keep rehashing everything that happened during those years. And I think that now, at long last, I’m beginning to get some idea of what was really going on.”

“You mean, why you weren’t allowed to force that submarine to surface?”

He nodded slowly, lit his pipe again, but said nothing. Wallander wondered if the story he had heard was destined to remain unfinished.

“I’m curious, of course. What was the explanation?”

Von Enke made a dismissive gesture.

“It’s too early for me to say anything about it. I still haven’t come to the end of the road. So right now I have nothing more to say. Perhaps we’d better go and join the other guests.”

They stood up and left the room. Wallander went back to the conservatory, and bumped into the woman who had disturbed them. Only now did he reflect on the way von Enke had moved his right hand when she had burst into the room — at first very decisively, but then slowing down and eventually dropping it back onto his knee.

Even if it seemed almost inconceivable, Wallander could think of only one explanation. Von Enke was carrying a gun. Was that really possible? he thought as he stared out through the window at the deserted garden. A retired naval commander carrying a gun at his seventy-fifth birthday party?

Wallander simply couldn’t believe it. He dismissed the thought. He must have been imagining things. One bewildering experience must have led to another. First the idea that von Enke was scared, and then that he was carrying a gun. Wallander wondered if his intuition was fading, just as he was beginning to grow more forgetful.

Linda came into the conservatory.

“I thought you must have left.”

“Not yet. But soon.”

“I’m sure both Håkan and Louise are glad you came.”

“He’s been telling me about the submarines.”

Linda raised an eyebrow.

“Really? That surprises me.”

“Why?”

“I’ve tried to get him to tell me about that lots of times. But he always refuses, says he doesn’t want to. He seems to get annoyed.”

Hans shouted for her, and Linda left. Wallander thought about what she had said. Why had Håkan von Enke chosen to tell him his story?

Later, when Wallander had returned to Skåne and thought about the evening, there was another thing that intrigued him. Obviously there was a lot in what von Enke had said that was unclear, vague, difficult for Wallander to understand. But with regard to the way in which it had been served up, as Wallander put it, there was something he couldn’t figure out. Had von Enke planned to tell him all that during the short time he knew that the father of his son’s girlfriend was going to attend the party? Or had it happened at much shorter notice, sparked by the man under the lamppost on the other side of the fence? And who was that man?

Three months later — on April 11, to be more precise — something happened that forced Wallander to think back yet again to that evening in January.

It happened without warning and was totally unexpected by everyone involved. Håkan von Enke disappeared without a trace from his home in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. Every morning, von Enke went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. On that particular day, it was drizzling all over Stockholm. He got up early, as usual, and shortly after six was enjoying his breakfast. At seven o’clock he knocked on the bedroom door in order to wake up his wife, and announced that he was going out for his usual walk. It generally lasted about two hours, except when it was very cold; then he would shorten it to one hour, since he used to be a heavy smoker, and his lungs had never recovered. He always took the same route. From his home in Grevgatan he would walk to Valhallavägen and from there turn off into the Lill-Jansskogen woods, following an intricate sequence of paths that eventually took him back to Valhallavägen, then southward along Sturegatan before turning left into Karlavägen and back home again. He would walk fast, using various walking sticks he had inherited from his father, and was always sweaty by the time he arrived back home and tumbled into a hot bath.

This particular morning had been like all the others, apart from one thing: Håkan von Enke never came home. Louise was very familiar with his route — she used to accompany him sometimes, but she stopped when she could no longer keep up with his pace. When he didn’t turn up, she started to worry. He was in good shape, no doubt about that; but nevertheless he was an old man and something might have happened to him. A heart attack, or a burst blood vessel perhaps? She went out to look for him, having first established that he hadn’t taken his cell phone, in spite of their agreement that he always would. It was lying on his desk. She came back at one o’clock, having retraced his footsteps. The whole time, she was half expecting to find him lying dead by the side of the road. But there was no sign of him. He had vanished. She called two, maybe three friends he might conceivably have visited, but nobody had seen him. Now she was sure that something had happened. It was about two when she called Hans at his office in Copenhagen. Although she was very worried and wanted to report Håkan’s absence to the police, Hans tried to calm her down. Louise reluctantly agreed to wait a few more hours.

But Hans called Linda immediately, and from her Wallander heard what had happened. He was trying to teach Jussi to sit still while he cleaned his paws — he had been taught what to do by a dog trainer he knew in Sturup. He was just about to give up on the grounds that Jussi had no ability whatsoever to learn new habits when the phone rang. Linda told him about Louise’s worries and asked for his advice.

“You’re a police officer yourself,” Wallander said. “You know the routine. Wait and see. Most of them come back.”

“But this is the first time he’s deviated from his routine in many years. I understand why Louise is worried. She’s not the hysterical type.”

“Wait until tonight,” said Wallander. “He’ll come back; you’ll see.”

Wallander was convinced that Håkan von Enke would turn up and that there would be a perfectly logical explanation for his absence. He was more curious than worried, and wondered what the explanation would be. But von Enke never did return, not that evening or the next one. Late in the evening of April 11 Louise reported her husband missing. She was then driven around the narrow labyrinthine roads in the Lill-Jansskogen woods in a police car, but they failed to find him. The following day her son traveled up from Copenhagen. It was then that Wallander began to realize something serious must have happened.

At that point he had still not returned to work. The internal investigation had dragged on and on. And to make matters worse, in the beginning of February he had fallen badly on the icy road outside his house and broken his left wrist. He had tripped over Jussi’s leash because the dog still hadn’t learned to stop pulling and dragging, or to walk on the correct side. His wrist was put in a cast and Wallander was given sick leave. It had been a period of short temper and frequent outbursts of anger, aimed at himself and Jussi and also at Linda. As a result, Linda had avoided seeing him any more than was necessary. She thought he had become like his father — surly, irritable, impatient. Reluctantly, he accepted that she was right. He didn’t want to turn into his father; he could cope with anything else, but not that. He didn’t want to be a bitter old man who kept repeating himself, both in his paintings and in his opinions about a world that grew increasingly incomprehensible to him. It was a time when Wallander strode around and around his house like a bear in a cage, no longer able to ignore the fact that he was now sixty years old and hence inexorably on his way into old age. He might live for another ten or twenty years, but he would never be able to experience anything but growing older and older. Youth was a distant memory, and now middle age was behind him. He was standing in the wings, waiting for his cue to go onstage to begin the third and final act, in which everything would be explained, the heroes placed in the spotlight while the villains died. He was fighting as hard as he could to avoid being forced to play the tragic role. He would prefer to leave the stage with a laugh.