Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

He woke up with a start and checked his watch. 4:45. He’d been dreaming. Somebody was chasing him. Then he was surrounded by a pack of dogs that were tearing at his clothes and biting him all over his body. His father was there somewhere, and Elena. He went to the bathroom and rinsed his face in cold water. It wasn’t difficult to interpret the dream. The illness I have, the cells multiplying out of control, they are like a pack of wild dogs careering around inside me. He undressed and burrowed into the sheets, but didn’t manage to get back to sleep.

It was always in the early morning, before dawn, that he felt most defenseless. He was thirty-seven, a police officer trying to lead a decent life. Nothing remarkable, a life that was never more than ordinary. Then again, what was ordinary? He was rapidly approaching middle age and didn’t have any children. Now he had to fight an illness that might overcome him. In which case the end of his life wouldn’t even be ordinary. It would mean that he would never be able to demonstrate his true worth.

He got up at 6 A.M. They wouldn’t start serving breakfast for another half-hour. He took some clean clothes from his suitcase. Thought that he should shave, but didn’t bother. By 6:30 he was in the lobby. The dining room door was ajar. When he peeped in he was surprised to see that the receptionist was sitting on a chair, drying her eyes with a napkin. Hastily, he withdrew. She’d obviously been crying. He went back up the stairs and waited. The doors were opened. The girl was smiling.

“You’re early,” she said.

As he ate his breakfast, he wondered why she’d been crying, but it was none of his business. We all have our private miseries, he thought. Our packs of dogs to battle.

By the time he’d finished, he’d made up his mind. He would go back to Molin’s house. Not because he thought he might find anything new, but to go through again in his mind what he now knew. Or didn’t know. Then he’d leave everything to figure itself out. He wouldn’t stay in Sveg waiting for a funeral that he didn’t want to go to anyway. Just now, this was the last thing he wanted to submit himself to. He would go back to Borås, repack his bag, and hope to find a cheap package trip to Mallorca. I need a plan, he thought. If I don’t have a plan, I won’t be able to cope with what’s in store for me.

He left the hotel at 7:15. There had been no sign of Molin’s daughter. The receptionist smiled as she always did when he handed in his room key. Something must have happened, but it wasn’t likely that she’d been told she had cancer.

He drove west through the autumn and the silence. Occasionally a few drops of rain spattered against the windscreen. He switched on the radio and half-listened to the news. The New York Stock Exchange had gone up, or was it down? He couldn’t hear. As he passed Linsell he saw some children with book bags waiting for the school bus. Most roofs there had satellite dishes. He thought back to his own childhood in Kinna. The past became almost tangible. He looked at the road and thought about all the boring journeys he’d made through central Sweden while he was assistant to the motocross rider who hardly ever won a race. He was so lost in thought that he missed the turn for Rätmyren. He went back, and parked in the same place as last time.

There were fresh tire marks in the gravel. Perhaps Veronica Molin had changed her mind? He got out of the car and filled his lungs with crisp, chilly air. A wind was gusting through the treetops. This is what Sweden’s all about, he thought. Trees, wind, cold. Grass and moss. A lonely person in the middle of a forest. Only that person doesn’t usually have cancer of the tongue.

He walked slowly around the house and made a list of all he now knew about the death of Herbert Molin. There was the campsite, the place to which somebody had rowed across the lake, pitched a tent, and then abandoned it. Larsson’s news about the bullet wounds. Lindman stopped in his tracks. What had Larsson said? Two wounds in the chest and one in the left arm. So Molin had been hit from the front. Three shots. He tried to imagine what could have happened but failed.

Then there was Berggren, an invisible shadow behind a curtain. If his suspicions were correct, she was on guard. Against what? Johansson had described her as a friendly person who gave dancing lessons for children. That was another link: dancing. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? He continued his circuit around the smashed-up house. Wondered why the police hadn’t done a better job of boarding up the broken windows. Bits of torn plastic flapped in front of the gaping holes. Veronica Molin had turned up unexpectedly. A beautiful woman who’d heard the news of her father’s death in a hotel room in Cologne, while on her travels around the world. Lindman, who had been all around the house by now, thought back to the time he’d been chasing, with Molin, the escaped murderer from Tidaholm. His fear. “I thought it was somebody else.” Lindman paused again. Unless Molin had been the victim of a madman, there must have been a crucial starting point. Fear. The flight to the forests of Härjedalen. A hiding place at the end of a side road that Lindman had great difficulty in finding.

That was as far as he got. Molin’s death was a riddle: he’d managed to find a few loose threads that led to a center that was still a vacuum. He went back to his car. The wind was getting stronger. He was about to open his car door when he had the feeling he was being watched. He spun around. The forest was empty. The dog pen was abandoned. The torn plastic was flapping against the window frames. He got into his car and drove away, certain that he would never return.

He parked outside the community center and went in. The bear was still glaring at him. He found his way to the police office and bumped into Johansson, who was on his way out.

“I was going to have coffee with the library staff,” he said. “But that can wait. I have news for you.”

They went to his office. Lindman sat in the visitor’s chair. Johansson had cheered up the decor with a devil mask hanging on the wall.

“I bought it in New Orleans ages ago. I was drunk at the time and no doubt paid far too much for it. I thought it would look good hanging here. A reminder of the forces of evil that conspire to make things difficult for the police.”

“Are you the only one on duty today?”

“Yes,” said Johansson cheerfully. “There should really be four or five of us, but people are out sick or on educational leave or maternity leave. I’m the only one left. It’s impossible to get standby staff.”

“How do you manage?”

“I don’t. But at least people who call here during working hours don’t get fobbed off with an answering machine.”

“But Berggren called you in the evening, didn’t she?”

“There’s a special emergency number. Lots of people in town know it.”

“Town?”

“I call Sveg a town. It makes it a bit bigger that way.”

The telephone rang. Lindman looked at the mask and wondered what the news was that Johansson had promised him. The call was from someone who had found a tractor tire on a road. Johansson seemed to be a man blessed with a fund of patience. He eventually replaced the receiver.

“Elsa Berggren called this morning. I tried to reach you at the hotel.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to invite you over for coffee.”

“That sounds odd.”

“No more odd than you staking out her house.”

Johansson stood up. “She’ll be at home now,” he said. “Go there right away. She’s going shopping later. By all means come back here and tell me what she said if it’s of any interest. But not this afternoon or this evening. I’m going to Funäsdalen. I have some police business to take care of, and then I’m going to play poker with some buddies. We may be in the middle of a murder investigation, but that doesn’t prevent us from leading as normal a life as possible.”