Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“Everything okay with the room?” she asked as she put the receiver down.

“All in order,” Lindman said. “I have a question, though. I haven’t come here to see if cars can handle extreme conditions. Nor am I a tourist, or a fisherman. I’m here because a good friend of mine was murdered not far from here last week.”

Her face turned serious.

“The guy who lived out at Linsell? The former policeman?”

“That’s the one.” He showed her his police ID, then pointed to his map. “Can you show me where he lived?”

She turned the map around and took a good look at it. Then she pointed to the spot.

“You have to head for Linsell,” she said. “Then turn off towards Lofsdalen, cross the Ljusnan River, and you’ll come to a signpost directing you to Linkvarnen. Continue past there for another ten kilometers or so. His house is off to the right, but the road isn’t marked on this map.”

She looked at him.

“I’m not really nosy,” she said. “I know lots of people have come here just to gape. But we’ve had some police from Östersund staying here, and I heard them describing how to get there over the telephone. Somebody was supposed to be coming here by helicopter.”

“I don’t suppose you get much of that sort of thing here,” Lindman said.

“I’ve never heard of anything of the kind, and I was born in Sveg. When there was still a maternity hospital here.”

Lindman tried to fold his map together, but made a mess of it.

“Let me help you,” she said, flattening it out before folding it neatly.

When Lindman left the hotel he could see that the weather had changed. There was a clear sky; the morning clouds had dispersed. He breathed in the fresh air.

Suddenly he had the feeling that he was dead, and he wondered who would come to his funeral.

He reached Linsell at around two in the afternoon. To his surprise, he saw a sign advertising an Internet café. The village also boasted a gas station and a general store. He turned left across the bridge and kept going. Between Sveg and Linsell he’d seen a grand total of three cars going in the opposite direction. He drove slowly; there was no hurry. About ten kilometers, she’d said. After seven kilometers he came to an almost invisible side road turning into a dirt road that disappeared into the forest on his right. He followed the badly potholed road for about 500 meters, at which point it petered out. A few homemade signposts indicated that various tracks going off in all directions were for snowmobiles during the winter months. He turned around and returned to the main road. After another kilometer he came to the next turn. It was practically impassable, and after two kilometers came to a stop at a log pile. He’d scratched the bottom of his car several times on stones projecting from the badly maintained road.

When he got to Dravagen, it was obvious that he’d gone too far. He turned around. A truck and two cars passed him in the opposite direction. Then the road was empty again. He was driving very slowly now, with the side windows wide open. He kept thinking about his illness. Wondering what would have happened if he’d gone to Mallorca. He wouldn’t have needed to search for a road there. What would he have been doing instead? Sitting in the depths of some dimly-lit bar, getting drunk?

Then he found the road. Just after a bend. He knew it was right the moment he saw it. It led him uphill and into three bends, one right after the next. The surface was smooth and covered in gravel. After two kilometers he saw a house behind the trees. He drove into the parking area at the front and came to a halt. The police tape closing it off was still there, but the place was deserted. He got out of the car.

There wasn’t a breath of wind. He stood still and looked around. Molin had moved from his house in Bramhultsvagen in Borås to be in this remote spot in the depths of the forest. And somebody had found their way here in order to kill him. Lindman looked at the house. The smashed windows. He approached the front door and tried it. Locked. Then he walked around the building. Every window was broken. From the rear he could see water glittering through the trees. He tried the shed door. It was open. Inside it smelled of potatoes, and he took note of a wheelbarrow and various garden implements. He went out again.

Molin was isolated here, he thought. That must be what he’d been looking for. Even in his Borås days he’d longed to be alone, and that’s what attracted him here.

He wondered how Molin had discovered this house. Who had he bought it from? And why here, in the depths of the Härjedalen forests? He walked up to one of the windows on the short wall. There was a kicksled parked next to the house wall. He used it as a stepladder to open the broken window from the inside. Carefully he removed the protruding bits of glass and clambered into the house. It struck him that there was always a special smell in places where the police had been. Every trade has its own smell. That applies to us as well.

He was in a small bedroom. The bed was made, but it was covered in patches of dried blood. The forensic examination had no doubt been completed, but he preferred not to touch anything. He wanted to see exactly the same things as the forensic officers had seen. He would start where they had left off. But what did he think he was doing? What did he think he might be able to uncover? He told himself he was in Molin’s house as a private citizen. Not as a policeman or a private detective, just a man who had cancer and who wanted to find something other than his illness to think about.

He went into the living room. Furniture had been overturned. There were bloodstains on the walls and on the floor. Only now did he realize how horrific Molin’s death must have been. He hadn’t been stabbed or shot and fallen dead on the spot. He’d been subjected to a violent attack, and it looked as though he’d been chased and had resisted. He walked carefully around the room. Stopped at the CD player that was standing open. No disc in it, but an empty case beside the player. Argentinean tango. He continued his exploration. Molin had lived a life devoid of ornament, it seemed. No pictures, no vases. No family photographs either.

A thought struck him. He went back to the bedroom and looked in the wardrobe. No police uniform. So Molin seemed to have gotten rid of it. Most retired police officers kept their uniforms.

He went back to the living room, and from that into the kitchen. All the time he was trying hard to imagine Molin walking at his side. A lonely man of about seventy-five. Getting up in the morning, making meals, getting through the day. A man is always doing something, it seemed to him. The same must have applied to Molin. Nobody just sits on a chair all day. Even the most passive of people do something. But what had Molin done? How had he spent his days? He went back to the living room and scrutinized the floor. Next to one of the bloodstained footprints was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. There were other pieces strewn over the floor. He stood up, and felt a shooting pain in his back. The cancer, he thought. Or had he just slept awkwardly in his car last night? He waited until the pain had gone. Then he went over to the bookcase with the CD player. Bent down and opened a cabinet. It was full of boxes that he thought at first contained various games. He took out the top one, and saw that it was a jigsaw puzzle. He looked at the picture on the front of the box. A painting by an artist called Matisse. Had he heard that name before, perhaps? He wasn’t sure. The subject was a large garden, with two women dressed in white in the background. He turned to the rest of the pile. Nearly all of them were based on paintings. Big puzzles with lots of pieces. He opened the next cabinet. That was full of jigsaw puzzles too, none of them opened. He stood up gingerly, afraid that the pain might return. So Molin spent a lot of his time doing jigsaw puzzles, he thought. Odd. But then again, maybe no odder than his own hobby, collecting pointless press clippings about the Elfsborg football club.