Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“He got away. We don’t even know his real name. He has an Argentinean passport in the name of Hereira, and we think he lives in Buenos Aires. But we assume that that is not his real name.”

“What had Herbert done?”

“He murdered a Jewish dancing master in Berlin.”

She had stopped again. She looked around at the battlefield.

“The battle they fought here was a very strange one. It wasn’t really a battle. It was all over in a very short time.”

She pointed. “We were over there, the Scots, and the English were on that side. They fired their cannons. The Scots died like flies. When they finally got round to attacking the English it was too late. There were thousands of dead and wounded here in less than half an hour. They’re still here.” She started walking again.

“Molin kept a diary,” Lindman said. “Most of it’s about the war. He was a Nazi, and fought as a volunteer for Hitler. But maybe you knew about that?”

She didn’t answer, but rapped her umbrella hard onto the ground.

“I found the diary, wrapped in a raincoat in the house where he was murdered. A diary, a few photographs, and some letters. The only thing in his diary that he took the trouble to write up at any length was the visit he made to Dornoch. It says that he went for long walks there with ‘M.’”

She looked at him in surprise. “Didn’t he write my name in full?”

“All he put was ‘M.’ Nothing else.”

“What did he say?”

“That you went for long walks.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

She walked on without speaking. Then she stopped again.

“One of my ancestors died on this very spot,” she said. “I’m partly descended from the McLeod clan, even if my married name is Simmons. I can’t really be certain that it was just here that Angus McLeod died, of course, but I’ve decided it was.”

“I have wondered,” Lindman said. “About what happened.”

She looked at him in surprise. “He’d fallen in love with me. Pure stupidity, of course. What else could it have been? Men are hunters, whether they’re after an animal or a woman. He wasn’t even good-looking. Flabby. And in any case I was married. I nearly died of shock when he phoned out of the blue and announced that he was in Scotland. It was the only time in my life that I lied to my husband. I told him I was working overtime whenever I met Herbert. He tried to talk me into going back to Sweden with him.”

They had come to the edge of the battlefield. She started back on a path alongside a stone wall. It wasn’t until they’d returned to their starting point, the gate in the wall, that she turned to look at Lindman.

“I usually have a cup of tea at this time. Then I go out again. Would you join me?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Herbert always wanted coffee. That would have been enough in itself. How could I live with a man who didn’t like tea?”

In the cafeteria some young men in kilts were sitting at one table, talking in low voices. Margaret chose a window table where she could see the battlefield, and beyond it Inverness and the sea.

“I didn’t like him,” she said firmly. “I couldn’t shake him off, even though I’d made it clear from the start that his journey was a waste of time. I already had a husband. He might have been a bit of a handful, and he drank too much, but he was the father of my son and that was the most important thing. I told Herbert to come to his senses and go back to Sweden. I thought he’d done that and left. Then he phoned me at the police station. I was afraid he might come to my home, so I agreed to meet him again. That was when he told me.”

“That he was a Nazi?”

“That he’d been a Nazi. He had enough sense to realize that I’d experienced Hitler’s brutality during the air raids here in Britain. He claimed to regret it all.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I don’t know. I was only interested in getting rid of him.”

“But you still went for walks with him?”

“He started using me as a mother confessor. He insisted it had been a youthful mistake. I remember being afraid that he might go down on his knees. It was pretty awful in point of fact. He wanted me to forgive him. As if I were a priest or a messenger from all those who’d suffered in the Hitler period.”

“What did you say?”

“That I could listen, but that his conscience had nothing to do with me.”

The men in kilts stood up and left. The rain was now beating against the window pane.

She looked at him. “But it wasn’t true, is that it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That he regretted it.”

“I believe that he was a Nazi until the day he died. He was terrified about what had happened in Germany, but I don’t think he gave up his Nazi beliefs. He even handed them down to his daughter. She’s dead too.”

“How come?”

“She was shot in an exchange of fire with the police. She damn near killed me.”

“I’m an old woman,” she said. “I have time. Or maybe I don’t. But I want to hear the whole story from the start. Herbert Molin is starting to interest me, and that’s something new.”

When Lindman was on the flight back to London, where Elena was waiting for him, he thought that it was only when he told the story to Margaret, in the cafeteria at the museum in Culloden, that he grasped the full seriousness of what had happened during those autumn weeks in Härjedalen. Now he was able to see everything in a new light, the bloodstained tango steps, the remains of the tent by the black water. Most of all he saw himself, the person he’d been at that time, a man like a quivering shadow at the edge of a remarkable murder investigation. As he told the story to Margaret it was as if he’d become a pawn in the game: it was him, but then again not him, a different person he no longer wanted anything to do with.

When he came to the end, they sat there in silence for the longest time, staring out at the rain, now easing off. She asked no questions, merely sat there stroking her nose with the tip of a lean finger. There were not many visitors to Culloden that day. The girls behind the counter in the cafeteria had nothing to do, and were reading magazines or travel brochures.

“It’s stopped raining,” she said eventually. “Time for my second walk among the dead. I’d like you to come with me.”

The wind had veered from the north to the east. This time she took a different path, apparently wanting to cover the entire battlefield in her walks.

“I was twenty when war broke out,” she said. “I lived in London then. I remember that awful autumn of 1940, when the siren went and we knew somebody would die that night, but didn’t know if it would be us. I remember thinking that it was Evil itself that had broken loose. They weren’t airplanes up there in the darkness, they were devils with tails and clawed feet, carrying bombs and dropping them on us. Later, much later, when I’d become a police officer, I realized that there was no such thing as an evil person, people with evil in their soul, if you see what I mean. Only circumstances that induce that evil.”

“I wonder what Molin thought about himself.”

“If he was an evil person, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She pondered before replying. They had stopped by a tall cairn at the edge of the battlefield so that she could retie a shoelace. He tried to help her, but she refused.

“Herbert saw himself as a victim,” she said. “At least, he did in his confessions to me. I know now it was all lies. I didn’t see through him at the time, though. I was mainly worried that he’d become so lovesick that he’d stand outside my window howling.”

“But he didn’t?”

“Thank God, no.”