Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

He looked around the room again. It was so quiet he could hear his own pulse beating. He really ought to get in touch with the Östersund police officer with the unusual first name. Maybe he should drive there on Monday and have a talk with him? Then again, the murder investigation had nothing to do with him. He had better be quite clear about that. He hadn’t come to Härjedalen to carry out some kind of private investigation into who had killed Herbert Molin. No doubt there was a straightforward explanation. There generally was. Murder nearly always had something to do with money or revenge. Alcohol was generally involved. And the culprit usually came from a circle of close contacts — family and friends.

It could be that Larsson and his colleagues had pinpointed a motive already and been able to point the finger at a possible suspect. Why not?

Lindman took another look around. Asked himself what the room had to say about what had happened in it. But he heard no answers. He looked at the bloodstained footprints. They formed a pattern. What surprised him was that they were so clear, suggesting they’d been put there in that form intentionally, and were not the accidental traces of a struggle or the staggering steps of a dying man. He wondered what the forensic team and Giuseppe Larsson had made of that.

Then he walked over to the big broken window in the living room. Stopped in his tracks, and ducked down. There was a man standing outside. Holding a rifle. Motionless, staring straight at the window.

Lindman had no time to be afraid. When he saw the man with the gun outside, he took a step back and crouched by the side of the window. At once he heard a key in the front door lock. If he had thought for a second that the man outside was the murderer, he shed it now. The man who had killed Molin would hardly have his frontdoor key.

The door opened. The man paused in the entrance to the living room. He was holding the gun pointing down at his side. Lindman saw that it was a shotgun.

“There’s not supposed to be anybody here,” the man said. “But there is.”

He spoke slowly and distinctly, but not like the girl at the hotel reception desk. His dialect was different. Lindman couldn’t tell what it was.

“I knew the dead man.”

The stranger nodded. “I believe you,” he said. “I just wonder who you are.”

“Herbert Molin and I worked together for several years. He was a police officer, and I still am.”

“That’s about all I know about Herbert,” said the man. “That he’d been a police officer.”

“Who are you?” The man gestured to Lindman, suggesting that they should go outside. He nodded towards the empty dog pen. “I think I knew Shaka better than I knew Herbert,” he said. “Nobody knew Herbert.”

Lindman looked at the dog pen, then at the man. He was bald, in his sixties, tall, thin, and dressed in bib overalls, a jacket, and rubber boots. He turned his gaze from the dog pen and looked at Lindman.

“You wonder who I am,” he said. “Why I have a key. And a shotgun.”

Lindman nodded.

“In these parts distances are long. I don’t suppose you met many cars on the way here. I bet you didn’t see many people either. I live about ten kilometers away, but even so I was one of Herbert’s nearest neighbors.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

The man smiled. “Isn’t it usual to ask a man first his name,” he said, “and then what he does?”

“My name’s Stefan Lindman, police officer in Borås. Where Herbert used to work.”

“Abraham Andersson. But around here they call me Dunkärr, because I live at a farm called Dunkärret.”

“So are you a farmer?”

The man laughed and spat into the gravel. “No,” he said. “I don’t care for agriculture. Nor forestry. Well, I go into the forest, but not to cut down trees. I play the violin. I was in the symphony orchestra in Helsingborg for twenty years. Then one day I simply felt I’d had enough. And moved up here. I still play sometimes. Mostly to keep my fingers moving. Old violinists can have problems with their joints if they stop just like that. In fact, that was how I met Herbert.”

“How so?”

“I take my violin into the forest. I settle down where the trees are densest. The violin sounds different there. At other times I go up a mountain, or to a lakeside. The sound is always different. After all those years in a concert hall it’s as if I’ve got a new instrument in my hands.” He pointed at the lake that was just visible through the trees. “I was standing down there, playing away. Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, I think it was, the second movement. Then Herbert appeared with his dog. Wondered what the hell was going on. I can understand him. Who expects to find an old fellow in a forest playing a violin? Plus he was upset because I was trespassing on his land. But we became friends after that. Or whatever you would call it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t suppose anybody became a friend of Herbert’s.”

“Why?”

“He bought this house in order to be in peace. But you can’t entirely cut yourself off from other people. After a year or so, he told me that there was a spare key on a hook in the shed. I don’t know why.”

“But you used to see a little of each other socially?”

“No. He let me play down by the lake whenever I wanted. To tell you the truth, I never set foot in this house before today. He never came around to visit me either.”

“Was there anybody else who visited him?”

The man’s reaction was almost imperceptible, but Lindman noticed the slight hesitation before he answered. “Not as far as I know.”

So he did have visitors, Lindman thought. But he said: “So, in other words, you’re a retiree as well. And you’ve hidden yourself away in the forest, just like Herbert.”

The man started laughing again. “Not at all,” he said. “I’m not a retiree, and I haven’t hidden myself away in the forest. I write a little bit for a few dance bands.”

“Dance bands?”

“The occasional song. Light hearts, broken hearts. Mostly crap, but I’ve had some hits. Not as Abraham Andersson, of course. I use what’s known as a pseudonym.”

“What do you call yourself?”

“Siv Nilsson.”

“A woman’s name?”

“I once knew a girl at school I was in love with. It was her name. I thought it was a rather nice way of declaring my affection for her.”

Lindman wondered if Andersson was pulling his leg, but decided that he was telling the truth. He looked at the man’s hands. His fingers were long and slim. He could indeed be a violinist.

“You have to ask yourself what on earth happened here,” the man said. “Who could have come out here and finished Herbert off. The place has been crawling with police until yesterday. There have been folks coming in helicopters and roaming around with dogs, police knocking on doors for miles around. But nobody knows a thing.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. Herbert came here from somewhere else and wanted to be left in peace. But somebody didn’t want to leave him in peace, and now he’s dead.”

“When did you last see him?”

“You’re asking the same questions as the police.”

“I am the police.”

Andersson looked at him quizzically. “But you’re not from the local police. That means you can’t be on the case.”

“I knew Herbert. I’m on vacation. I came here.”

Andersson nodded, but Lindman was sure he hadn’t been believed.

“I leave here for one week every month. I go to Helsingborg to see my wife. It’s odd that it should happen when I wasn’t here.”

“Why?”

“Because I never go away at the same time. It could be in the middle of a month from Sunday until the following Saturday, but it might just as easily be from Wednesday to Tuesday. Never the same. And yet it happens when I’m away.”