Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

There were two forensic officers, both of them young. Larsson liked working with them. They were full of energy, meticulous, and efficient. Larsson watched them enter the house they were destined to investigate and try to take in the blood splattered over the walls and floor. As the young men donned their coveralls, Larsson began once more to think about what had happened.

He was clear about the main outline. It started with the death of the dog. Then the windows had been smashed, and tear gas canisters shot in. It wasn’t the tear gas canisters that had broken the windows. They had found some cartridges from a hunting rifle outside the house. The man who carried out the attack had been methodical. Molin was asleep when it all started — at least, it looked as if he’d been in bed at the time. He was naked when his body was found at the edge of the forest, but his sweater and pants were found soaked in blood at the bottom of the steps leading down from the front door. From the remnants they had found of the tear gas canisters it would seem that the place must have been filled with gas. Molin had run out of the house with his shotgun. He’d also managed to fire a few shots. Then he’d been stopped in his tracks. The gun was discarded on the ground. Larsson knew that Molin must have been more or less blind when he left the house. He would also have had great difficulty breathing. So Molin had been hounded out of his house, and had been incapable of defending himself as he staggered from the door.

Larsson picked his way carefully into the room leading off the living room. It contained the biggest riddle of all. In a bed lay a bloodstained doll, life-size. He thought at first it was some kind of sex toy used by lonely Molin, but the doll had no orifices. The loops on its feet suggested that it was used as a dancing partner. The big question was: why was it covered in blood? Had Molin moved into this room before the tear gas made it impossible for him to stay in the house? Even so, that wouldn’t have explained the blood. Larsson and the other detectives who had spent six days going through the house with a fine-toothed comb still hadn’t come up with a plausible explanation. Larsson was going to spend this day trying to work out once and for all why the doll was covered in blood. There was something about the doll that worried him. It concealed a secret and he wanted to know what it was.

He left the house to get some fresh air. His cell phone rang. It was the chief of police in Östersund. Larsson told him the current state of affairs: that they were hard at work, but they hadn’t found anything new at the scene of the crime yet. Mrs. Tunberg was in Östersund, talking to Artur Nyman, a detective sergeant and Larsson’s closest colleague. The chief of police was able to inform Larsson that Molin’s daughter, who was in Germany, would soon be on her way to Sweden. They’d also been in touch with Molin’s son, who worked as a steward on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

“Any news about his second wife?” Larsson wondered.

The first wife, the mother of his two children, had died some years ago. Larsson had spent several hours looking into her death, but she’d died of natural causes. Besides, Molin and his first wife had been divorced for nineteen years. His second wife, a woman Molin had been married to while living in Borås, was proving difficult to trace.

Larsson went back into the house. He stood just inside the door and scrutinized the dried bloodstains on the floor. Then he took a couple of steps sideways and looked hard at them again. He frowned. There was something about the marks that puzzled him. He took out his notebook, borrowed a pencil from one of the forensic officers, and made a sketch. There were nineteen footprints in all, ten made by a right foot and nine by a left foot.

He went outside. A crow was disturbed and flew off. Larsson studied his sketch. Then he fetched a rake he knew was in the shed, and smoothed out the gravel in front of the house. He pressed his feet down into the gravel to reproduce the pattern he’d sketched in his notebook. Stepped to one side and studied the result. Walked all the way around, examining the marks from different angles. Then he carefully stepped into the footprints, one after the other, moving slowly. He did it again, faster now, with his knees slightly bent. The penny dropped.

One of the forensic officers came out onto the steps and lit a cigarette. He stared at the footprints in the gravel. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory. What can you see here?”

“Footprints in the gravel. A replica of the ones we have inside the house.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

The other officer came out. He had a thermos flask in his hand.

“Wasn’t there a disc in the CD player?” Larsson asked.

“That’s right,” said the man with the flask.

“What kind of music was it?”

The technician handed the flask to his colleague and went inside. He was back in a flash.

“Argentinean stuff. An orchestra. I can’t pronounce the name.”

Larsson walked around the footprints in the gravel once again. The two forensic officers watched him as they smoked and drank their coffee.

“Does either of you dance the tango?” he said.

“Not normally. Why?”

It was the man with the thermos flask who answered.

“Because what we have here are tango steps. It’s kind of like when you were little and went to dancing classes. The teacher used to tape footprints onto the floor, and you had to follow them. The steps are tango steps.”

To prove his theory Larsson started to hum a tango tune that he didn’t know the name of. At the same time he followed the footprints in the gravel. The steps fitted.

“What we have on the floor in there is a set of tango steps. Somebody dragged Molin around and placed his blood-soaked feet on the floor as if he’d been attending a dancing class.”

The forensic officers stared at him incredulously, but knew he was right. They all went back into the house.

“Tango,” said Larsson. “That’s all it is. Whoever killed Molin invited him to dance a tango.”

They contemplated the footprints in silence.

“The question,” Larsson said, when he spoke again, “is who? Who invites a dead man to dance with him?”

Lindman began to have the feeling that his body was being drained completely of blood. Even though the laboratory assistants were very gentle with him, he felt increasingly weary. He spent many hours at the hospital every day, having blood drawn for testing. He also talked to the doctor on two more occasions. Each time he had lots of questions, but never got around to asking any of them. In fact, there was only one question he really wanted answered: was he going to survive? And if that question couldn’t be answered with any degree of certainty, how much time did he, for sure, have left? He’d read somewhere that death was a tailor who measured people for their final suit, invisibly and in silence. Even if he did survive, he had the feeling that his lifespan had already been measured out. It was much too early for that.

The second night he went to Elena’s in Dalbogatan. He hadn’t phoned in advance as he usually did. The moment she saw him in the doorway, she knew something was wrong. Lindman had tried to make up his mind whether or not to tell her, but he wasn’t sure right up to the moment he rang the doorbell. He barely had time to hang up his jacket before she asked him what was wrong.

“I’m sick,” he’d said.

“Sick?”

“I’ve got cancer.”

That left him with no more defenses. He might as well tell the truth now. He needed somebody to confide in, and Elena was his only choice. They sat up long into the night, and she was sensible enough not to try to console him. What he needed was courage. She brought him a mirror and said, Look, the man on her sofa was very much alive, not a corpse, that was how he should approach the situation. He stayed the night, and lay awake long after she had gone to sleep.