Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“What did he say when he left?”

“ ‘Goodbye.’ That’s all. Maybe he tried to kiss me. I can’t remember. I was just glad to see the back of him.”

“Then you heard nothing more of him?”

“Never. Not until now. When you came here and told me your remarkable story.”

They had reached the end of the battlefield for the second time and started walking back again.

“I never believed that Nazism had died with Hitler,” she said. “There are just as many people today who think the same evil thoughts, who despise other people, who are racists. But they’re called different names, and use different methods. There are no fights between hordes of warriors on battlefields nowadays. Hatred of people you despise is expressed in a different way. From underneath, you might say. This country, and indeed the whole of Europe, is being blown apart from the inside by its contempt for weakness, its attacks on refugees, its racism. I see it all around me, and I ask myself if we are able to offer sufficiently firm resistance.”

Lindman opened the gate, but she didn’t follow him out.

“I’ll stay here a bit longer. I haven’t really finished with the dead yet. Your story was remarkable, but I still haven’t had an answer to the question I’ve been asking myself, of course.”

“Which question is that?”

“Why did you come here?”

“Curiosity. I wanted to know who was the person behind the letter ‘M’ in the diary. I wanted to know why he had made that journey to Scotland.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. That’s all.”

She brushed her hair out of her face and smiled.

“Good luck,” she said.

“With what?”

“You might find him one day. Aron Silberstein, who murdered Herbert.”

“So he told you what had happened in Berlin?”

“He told me about his fear. The man called Lukas Silberstein who had been his dancing master had a son called Aron. Herbert was afraid someone would take revenge, and he thought that is where it would come from. He remembered that little boy, Aron. I think Herbert dreamt about him every night. I have an instinct that he was the one who tracked Herbert down in the end.”

“Aron Silberstein?”

“I have a good memory. That was the name he told me. Anyway, it’s time for us to say goodbye. I’m going back to my dead souls. And you’re going back to the living.” She stepped forward and stroked him on the cheek. He watched her marching resolutely back onto the battlefield. He kept watching her until she was out of sight. This marked the end of his thoughts about what had happened last autumn. Somewhere in the Östersund police archives was a diary that had been hidden away with a raincoat. Also in the package were the letters and photographs. Now he had met Margaret Simmons. She’d not only told him about Molin’s journey to Scotland; she’d also given him the name of the man who called himself Fernando Hereira. He went into the museum and bought a postcard. Then he sat down on a bench and wrote to Larsson.

Giuseppe,

It’s raining here in Scotland, but it’s very beautiful. The man who killed Herbert Molin is called Aron Silberstein.

Best wishes,

Stefan

He drove back to Inverness. The man in the hotel reception said he would mail the postcard.

The rest of his time in Inverness was spent waiting. He went for a long walk, he had dinner at the same restaurant as on the previous day, and he talked for a long time on the telephone to Elena in the evening. He was missing her and now no longer had a problem telling her so.

He flew to London the next afternoon. He took a taxi from Gatwick to the hotel where Elena was staying. They spent three more days in London before going home to Borås.

Stefan Lindman started work again on April 17, a Monday. The first thing he did was to go to the archive where the picture of the visiting group of British police officers from 1971 was hanging on the wall. He took it down and put it in a box with other photographs from that visit. Then he returned the box to its place, hidden away in a corner closet.

He took a deep breath, and resumed the work he’d been missing for so long.

This is a novel. In other words, I’m not describing events, people, and places exactly as they are, or have been, in real life. I take liberties, move crossroads, repaint houses, and most of all I construct fictional events where necessary. And it is sometimes necessary. The same applies to the people in this book. I very much doubt if there is a detective inspector in the Östersund police force called Giuseppe, to take one example. This means that nobody should think that any of my characters have been based on her or himself. It is not altogether possible to avoid similarities with living people, however, and if there are any such similarities in this book, they are pure coincidences.

But the sun does rise at about 7:45 A.M. at the beginning of November in Härjedalen. In among all the fiction there may well be quite a number of other convincing truths.

Which was of course the intention.

H.M.

Göteborg

September 2000