Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“Stefan Lindman,” he said. “From Borås. I hope this isn’t too late.”

“Not quite. Another half hour and I’d have been asleep. Where are you?”

“In Sveg.”

“Just down the road, then.” Larsson roared with laughter. “A couple of hundred kilometers is nothing to us up here. Where do you get to if you drive two hundred kilometres from Borås?”

“Almost to Malmö.”

“There you go, you see.”

“I thought I might visit you in Östersund tomorrow.”

“You’re welcome to come. I’ll be there quite early in the morning. The police station is behind the National Rural Agency building. It’s a small town. You’ll have no trouble in finding it. When had you thought of coming?”

“I can fit into your schedule. Whenever you’ve got time.”

“How about eleven? We have a nine o’clock meeting of our little murder squad.”

“Have you got a suspect?”

“We’ve got nothing at all,” said Larsson, cheerfully. “But we’ll solve this one in the end, we hope. We’ll be discussing tomorrow if we need any help from Stockholm. Somebody who can draw up a profile of the person we’re looking for would be useful. Could be interesting. Up here, we’ve never been faced with anything like this before.”

“They’re good at that,” Lindman said. “We’ve had some help from them in Borås now and then.”

“See you tomorrow, then. Eleven o’clock.”

Then he went out. The driver next door was snoring. Lindman went down the stairs as quietly as he could. His room key also fitted the front door. The lights were out in the lobby, the door to the restaurant closed. It was 10:30. When he emerged onto the street he found that a wind had started up. He pulled his jacket tightly around him and started walking through the empty streets. He came to the train station, which was dark and locked. He read a sign and learned that trains no longer came here. The old “National Railway,” he thought. That’s what the line used to be called, if I remember correctly. Nothing left but rusting rails. He continued on his nocturnal ramble, passed a park with swings and tennis courts, and came to the church. The main door was locked. In front of the school was a statue of a lumberjack. He tried to make out the features of the man. In the poor light of the streetlights they seemed to be expressionless.

He hadn’t seen a single person. When he got back to the hotel, he lay down on the bed for a while and watched the television with the sound turned down. He could still hear the man next door snoring through the paper-thin wall.

It was 4:30 before he fell asleep. His head was a vacuum.

He was up again at 7 A.M. His head throbbed with tired thoughts. He sat at a table alone in the dining room, which was teeming with earlybird test drivers. The receptionist was playing the part of waitress again.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, and wondered if she believed him.

It was raining by the time he came to Östersund. He drove around the town until he discovered the gloomy building with a red sign for the “National Rural Agency.” He wondered what on earth an organization like that actually did. Was its function just to facilitate the abandonment of Swedish rural communities?

He found a parking place on a side street and stayed in the car. Still forty-five minutes to go before his meeting with Larsson. He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. I have death in my body, he thought. I have to take that seriously, but I can’t get my head around it. You can’t pin down death — not your own, at least. I can understand that Molin is dead. I’ve seen the traces of his death struggle. But my own death? I can’t deal with imagining that. It’s like the elk that ran across the road just before I came to Linsell. I’m still not sure that it really existed, or whether I just imagined it.

At 11 A.M. precisely, Lindman walked through the front door of the police station. To his surprise, the woman in reception looked very much like one of the receptionists in Borås. He wondered if the National Police Board had passed a motion requiring all police receptionists to look alike.

He explained who he was.

“Larsson told us to expect you,” she said, pointing to the nearest corridor. “His office is down there, the second room on the left.”

Lindman knocked on the door with DETECTIVE INSPECTOR LARSSON on it. The man who opened it was tall and very powerfully built. His reading glasses were pushed up over his forehead.

“You’re punctual,” he said, almost hustling him into the room and closing the door behind them.

Lindman sat in the visitor’s chair. He recognized the way the office was furnished from the police station in Borås. We don’t just wear uniforms, he thought. Our offices are uniform as well.

Larsson sat an his desk and crossed his hands over his stomach. “Have you been up in this part of the world before?” he asked.

“Never. Uppsala once, when I was a child, but that’s as far north as I’ve been before.”

“Uppsala is southern Sweden. Here in Östersund you still have half of Sweden to go as you travel north. It used to be a very long way from here to Stockholm. Not anymore. Flights can take you wherever you like in Sweden in just a few hours. In the space of a few decades Sweden has turned from a big country into a little one.”

Lindman pointed to the large wall map.

“How big is your police district?”

“Big enough and more besides.”

“How many police officers are there in Härjedalen?”

Larsson thought for a moment. “Five, maybe six in Sveg, a couple in Hede. And there a few more here and there — in Funäsdalen, for instance. Possibly fifteen in all, depending on how many are on duty at a given time.”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. It opened before Larsson could react. The man in the doorway was the polar opposite of Larsson, short and very thin.

“I thought Nisse should sit in on this,” Larsson said. “We are the ones in charge of the investigation.”

Lindman stood up to shake hands. The man who’d joined them was reserved and serious. He spoke very softly and Lindman had difficulty gathering that his surname was Rundström. Larsson seemed to be affected by his presence. He sat up straighter in his chair, and his smile disappeared. The mood had changed.

“We thought we ought to have a little talk,” Larsson said, cautiously. “About this and that.”

Rundström had not sat down, although there was a spare chair. He leaned against the door frame and avoided looking Lindman in the eye.

“We received a call this morning,” he said. “From a man who reported that a police officer from Borås was conducting an investigation in the region of Linsell. He was a bit upset, and wondered if the local police had handed the investigation over to outsiders.” Before going on he paused to examine his hands. “He was quite upset,” Rundström repeated. “And it would be fair to say that we were upset as well.”

Lindman had broken out in a sweat. “I can think of two possibilities,” he said. “The man who phoned was either Abraham Andersson — he lives in a farmhouse called Dunkrret — or it was the owner of the shop in Linsell.”

“I expect it was Lundell,” Rundström said. “But we don’t like police officers from faraway places coming here and poking their noses into our investigations.”

Lindman saw red. “I’m not conducting my own investigation,” he said. “I’ve already spoken to Larsson. I told him I’d worked with Molin for quite a few years. I’m on vacation, and so I came here. It doesn’t seem all that strange that I would have visited the scene of the murder.”

“It creates confusion,” Rundström said, in his soft, barely audible voice.