Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“Come when you said you’d come.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“When you were ill you drifted away from me. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m going to have a Polish dinner tonight with relatives I’ve never met before.”

“I wish I could be there.”

She burst out laughing. “You’re a liar. Pass on my greetings to Scotland.”

After his meal he went walking again. Piers, promenades, the town center. He wondered where he was heading. His real destination was inside himself.

He slept deeply that night.

The next morning he rose early. It was still drizzling over Inverness. After breakfast he called the number he’d been given by Evelyn. A man answered.

“Simmons.”

“My name’s Stefan Lindman. I’d like to speak to Margaret Simmons.”

“What about?”

“I’m from Sweden. She visited Sweden in the 1970s. I never met her, but a colleague of mine who’s a police officer talked about her.”

“My mother’s not at home. Where are you calling from?”

“Inverness.”

“She’s at Culloden today.”

“Where’s that?”

“Culloden is a battlefield not far from Inverness. The site of the last battle to take place on British soil. 1745. Don’t you learn any history in Sweden?”

“Not much about Scotland.”

“It was all over in half an hour. The English slaughtered everybody who got in their way. Mum likes to wander around the battlefield. She goes there three or four times a year. She goes to the museum first. They sometimes show films. She says she likes to listen to the voices of the dead coming from under the ground. She says it prepares her for her own death.”

“When’s she due home again?”

“This evening. But she’ll go straight to bed. How long does a Swedish policeman stay in Inverness?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

“Call tomorrow morning. What did you say your name was? Steven?”

“Stefan.”

That concluded the call. Lindman decided not to wait until tomorrow. He went down to the reception desk and asked for directions to Culloden. The man smiled.

“Today’s a good time to go there. The weather’s the same as when the battle was fought. Mist, rain, and a breeze.”

Lindman drove out of Inverness. It was easier this time managing the rotaries. He followed the signs off the main road. There were two buses and a few cars in the parking lot. Lindman gazed over the moor. There were poles with red and yellow flags a few hundred meters apart. He assumed they marked the lines of the opposing armies. He could see the sea and the mountains in the distance. It seemed to him that the generals had chosen an attractive place for their soldiers to die in.

He bought a ticket for the museum. There were school classes wandering here and there, looking at the dolls dressed up as soldiers and arranged in violent scenes of battle. He looked around for Margaret. The photograph he’d seen was taken almost thirty years ago, but even so, he was sure he would recognize her. He couldn’t see her in the museum, though. He went out into the gusting wind to the battlefield. The moor was deserted. Nothing but the red and yellow flags smacking against the poles. He went back inside. The children were on their way into a lecture room. He followed them. Just as he got in the lights went out and a film started. He groped his way to a seat in the front row. The film lasted half an hour, with scary sound effects. He stayed put when the lights came on again. The children jostled their way out, frequently being urged by their teachers to calm down.

Lindman looked around. He recognized her immediately. She was in the back row, wearing a black raincoat. When she stood up, she leaned on her umbrella and was careful where she placed her feet. She walked past him and glanced in his direction. Lindman waited until she had left the lecture room before following her. There was no sign of the children now. A woman, knitting behind a counter, was selling postcards and souvenirs. There was the sound of the radio and the clatter of china from the nearby café.

Margaret Simmons was heading for the wall encircling the battlefield. It was raining, but she hadn’t raised her umbrella. The wind was too strong. Lindman waited until she’d passed through the gate and disappeared behind the wall. He wondered where all the children had gone. She was heading for one of the paths that meandered through the battlefield. He kept his distance, thinking that he’d made the right decision. He wanted to know why Molin had written about her in his diary. She was the exception. Molin had described how he’d crossed over the border and entered Norway, enjoyed some ice cream, and eyed the girls in Oslo — and then the awful years in the Waffen-SS. The years that had warped his nature and turned him into a henchman of Waldemar Lehmann. Then came the journey to Scotland. If he remembered correctly, it was the longest section in the diary, longer even than the letters he’d sent home from the war.

He would soon catch up with her and be able to place the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was Herbert Molin. At regular intervals along the path were gravestones. Not for individual lost soldiers, but for the clans whose men had been massacred by the English artillery. Margaret Simmons is walking though a battlefield, he thought. Molin spent some years in a battlefield, but he escaped the machine-gun and rifle fire. He was murdered by somebody who traced him to his cottage in Härjedalen.

The old woman leaned on one of the gravestones beside the path. Lindman stopped as well. She looked at him, then continued along the path. He followed her to the middle of the battlefield; a Swedish police officer who still hadn’t reached his fortieth birthday, thirty meters behind a Scottish lady who had also been a police officer and now spent her time preparing for death.

They came to a point between the red and yellow flags. She stopped and turned to look at him. He didn’t look away. She waited. He saw that she was heavily made-up, short and thin. She tapped the ground with her umbrella.

“Are you following me? Who are you?”

“My name is Stefan Lindman, I’m from Sweden. I’m a police officer. Like you used to be.”

She brushed aside her hair, which had blown into her face. “You must have spoken to my son. He’s the only one who knows where I am.”

“He was very helpful.”

“What do you want?”

“You once visited a town in Sweden called Borås. It’s not a very big place — two churches, two squares, a dirty river. You were there twenty-eight years ago, in the autumn of 1971. You met a policeman by the name of Herbert Molin. The following year he came to see you in Dornoch.”

She eyed him up and down, saying nothing.

“I’d like to continue my walk if you don’t mind,” she said eventually. “I’m getting used to the idea of being dead.”

She started walking again. Lindman walked beside her.

“The other side,” she said. “I don’t want anybody on my left.”

He changed sides.

“Is Herbert dead?” she said, out of the blue.

“Yes, he’s dead.”

“That’s the way it goes when you’re old. People think the only news you want to hear is that old acquaintances are dead. You can really put your foot in it if you don’t know.”

“Herbert Molin was murdered.”

She gave a start and stopped in her tracks. For a moment Lindman thought she was going to fall over.

“What happened?” she asked after a while.

“His past caught up with him. He was killed by a man who wanted to avenge something he’d done during the war.”

“Have you caught the murderer?”

“No.”

“Why not?”