Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

“Maybe not. What can you tell me about that sale eleven years ago?”

Marklund disappeared into an adjoining room. He came back with a file in his hand. He soon found what he was looking for.

“March 18, 1988,” he said. “The deal was signed and sealed here in this office. The seller was an old forester. The price was 198,000 kronor. No mortgage. The transaction was paid for by check.”

“What do you remember about Molin?”

The reply surprised Lindman.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I never met him.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s very simple. Somebody else took care of the matter for him. Got in touch with me, took a look at a few houses, and eventually made the decision. As far as I know, Molin was never here.”

“Who was the middleman?”

“A woman by the name of Elsa Berggren. With an address in Sveg.” Marklund handed the file over. “Here’s the authorization. She had the right to make decisions and sign the deal on Molin’s behalf.”

Lindman examined the signature. He remembered it from the Borås days. It was Molin’s signature.

“So you never met Herbert Molin?”

“I never even spoke to him on the phone.”

“How did you come into contact with this woman?”

“The usual way. She phoned me.”

Marklund leafed through the file, then pointed.

“Here’s her address and telephone number,” he said. “She’s no doubt the person you should talk to. Not me. That’s what I’ll tell Giuseppe Larsson. Incidentally, I wonder if I’ll be able to resist the temptation to ask him how he came by his name. Do you happen to know?”

“No.”

Marklund closed the file.

“Isn’t it a bit unusual? Not meeting the person with whom you were doing business?”

“I was doing business with Elsa Berggren, and I did meet her. But I never met Molin. It’s not all that unusual. I sell quite a lot of vacation cottages in the mountains to Germans and Dutchmen. They have people who take care of the details for them.”

“So there was nothing unusual about this transaction.”

“Nothing at all.”

Marklund accompanied him as far as the front gate.

“Maybe there was, though,” he said, as Lindman was walking through the gate.

“Maybe there was what?”

“I remember Elsa Berggren saying on one occasion that her client didn’t want to use any of the big real estate agencies. I recall thinking that was a bit odd.”

“Why?”

“If you’re looking for a house you wouldn’t as a rule start off with a small firm.”

“How do you interpret that?”

Hans Marklund smiled. “I don’t interpret it at all. I’m merely telling you what I remember.”

Lindman drove back towards Östersund. After ten kilometers or so he turned off onto a forest road and switched off the engine.

The Berggren woman, whoever she might be, had been asked by Molin to avoid the big real estate agents. Why? Lindman could only think of one reason. Molin had wanted to buy his house as discreetly as possible.

The impression he’d had from the very start had turned out to be correct. The house in which Molin had spent the last years of his life wasn’t really a house at all. It was a hiding place.

That evening Lindman wandered through the life of Herbert Molin. Reading between the lines of all the notes and reports, statements and forensic details that had already been collected in Larsson’s files, despite the fact that the investigation hadn’t been going for very long, Lindman was able to compile a picture of Molin that was new to him. He discovered circumstances that sometimes made him thoughtful and at others surprised. The man he thought he’d known turned out to be a quite different person, a complete stranger.

It was midnight when he closed the last of the files. Larsson had occasionally stopped by during the course of the evening. You could hardly say they indulged in conversation; they drank coffee and exchanged a few words about how the evening was going for the police emergency service in Östersund. Everything had been quiet for the first few hours, but soon after 9 P.M. Larsson had to investigate a burglary in Häggenås. When he eventually returned, Lindman had just reached the end of the last of the files.

What had he found? A map, it seemed to him, with large blank patches. A man with a history with large gaps. A man who sometimes strayed from the marked path and disappeared, only to turn up again when least expected. Molin was a man whose past was elusive and in places very difficult to follow.

Lindman had made notes as the evening progressed. When he’d finished the last file and put it on one side, he looked through his notebook and summarized what he’d discovered.

The most surprising thing as far as Lindman was concerned was that, according to the documents the Östersund police had requested from the tax authorities, Herbert Molin had been born with a different name. On March 10, 1923, he had come into this world at the hospital in Kalmar and been baptized August Gustaf Herbert. His parents were cavalry officer Axel Mattson-Herzén and his wife Marianne. That name had disappeared in June 1951 when the Swedish Patent and Registration Office allowed him to change his surname to Molin. At the same time he had changed his Christian name from August Gustaf Herbert to Herbert.

Lindman sat staring at the name. Two questions occurred to him immediately. Why had Mattson-Herzén changed his surname and his Christian name? And why Molin, which must be about as common as Mattson? So many people in Sweden had the same surname that changing it was not unusual. But most people who changed their surname did so to escape from a common one and acquire one that nobody else had, or at least one that was not always being mixed up with somebody else’s.

August Mattson-Herzén was twenty-eight years old in 1951. At the time he’d been serving in the regular army, an infantry lieutenant in Boden. It seemed to Lindman that something must have happened then, that the early 1950s were important years in Molin’s life. There was a series of significant changes. In 1951 he changed his name. The following year, in March 1952, he applied for and received an honorable discharge from the army. He married when he left the army, and had children in 1953 and 1955, first a son christened Herman, and then a daughter, Veronica. He and his wife Jeanette moved from Boden in 1952 to an address in Solna outside Stockholm, Råsundavägen 132. Nowhere could Lindman find any information about what Molin did to earn a living. Five years passed before he appeared again as an employee, in October 1957, in the local authority offices in Alingsås. He was posted from there to Borås, and after the police force was nationalized in the 1960s, he became a police officer. In 1981 his wife filed for divorce. The following year he remarried, but wife number two, Kristina Cedergren, divorced him in 1986.

Lindman studied his notes. Between March 1952 and October 1957, Herbert Molin earned his living in some way unexplained in the files. That is a relatively long time, more than five years. And he had changed his name. Why?

When Larsson returned from the break-in in Häggenås, he found Lindman standing by the window looking at the deserted street below. Larsson briefly explained the burglary, no big deal in fact: somebody had stolen two power saws from a garage.

“We’ll get them,” he said. “We have a pair of brothers in Järpen who specialize in jobs of that kind. We’ll nail them. What about you? What have you found out?”

“It’s quite remarkable,” Lindman said. “I find a man I thought I knew, but he turns out to be somebody else altogether.”

“How so?”