Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

The birds are twittering in the trees

Today will be a lovely day

Perhaps he couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with “trees,” Lindman thought. “Bees” would have worked. Or “breeze.” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote in a notepad: “With white clouds scudding in the breeze.” It would have been a very bad poem. Perhaps Molin had enough sense to realize the limits of his poetic gifts.

Molin — he is now Molin — moves to Alingsås, and then to Borås. Ten days in Scotland produce an unexpected outburst of writing. To find anything like it Lindman would have to go back to the first months in Germany when Molin’s optimism was intact.

After Scotland everything reverts to normal. He seldom takes up his pen, and then merely notes individual events, with no personal comment.

Lindman became more attentive as he came to the end of the diary. Before that, Molin had noted when he did his last day’s work at the police station, and when he moved to Härjedalen. One particular entry aroused Lindman’s curiosity:

March 12, 1993. Greeting card from the old portrait painter Wetterstedt, congratulating me on my birthday.

On May 2, 1999, he makes his last entry:

May 2, 1999. +7 degrees. My master jigsaw puzzle maker Castro in Barcelona has died. Letter from his widow. I realize now that he must have had a hard time these last few years. An incurable kidney disease.

That is all. The diary is far from full. The book Molin bought in a stationer’s in Oslo in June 1942 was with him for the rest of his life but is incomplete. If a diary can ever be finished. When he started writing he was young, a convinced Nazi, on his way from Norway to Germany and the war. He eats ice cream and is embarrassed when Norwegian girls look him in the eye. Fifty-seven years later he writes about the death of a jigsaw puzzle maker in Barcelona. Six months later, he is dead himself.

Lindman closed the book. It was almost pitch-black outside. Is the solution in this diary or elsewhere? he asked himself. I can’t answer that question. I don’t know what he left out, only what he wrote. But I now know a few things about Molin that I didn’t know before. He was a Nazi, he fought for Hitler’s Germany in World War II. He also traveled to Scotland and went for a lot of long walks with somebody he called “M.”

Lindman packed the letters, photographs, and the diary into the raincoat again. He left the house the same way he’d come in, through the window. Just before opening the car door he paused. A vague feeling of sorrow had come over him. About the life Herbert Molin had led. But he realized that some of the sorrow was directed at himself. He was thirty-seven years old, childless, and was carrying an illness that could send him to his grave before he reached forty.

He drove back to Sveg. There was little traffic on the roads. Shortly before Linsell he was overtaken by a police car heading for Sveg, then another. What had occurred the previous night seemed strangely distant and unreal. Yet it was less than twenty-four hours since he’d made the horrific discovery. Molin had made no mention of Abraham Andersson in his diary. Nor Elsa Berggren. His two wives and two children he mentions only in passing, briefly and factually.

The lobby was deserted when he entered the hotel. He leaned over the desk and took his key. When he came up to his room he examined his suitcase. Nobody had touched it. He must have imagined it.

He went down to the dining room shortly after seven. Larsson still hadn’t called. The girl emerged from the swinging doors and smiled as she produced the menu.

“I saw you’d taken your key,” she said. Then she became serious. “I hear something else has happened. That another old man has been killed somewhere near Glöte.”

“That’s right.”

“This is awful. What’s going on?”

She shook her head in resignation, not expecting an answer, and gave him the menu.

“We’ve changed today,” she said. “I wouldn’t recommend the veal cutlets.”

Lindman chose elk fillet with béarnaise sauce and boiled potatoes. He had just finished eating when the girl came through the swinging doors and announced that he was wanted on the telephone. He went up the steps to the lobby. It was Larsson.

“I’ll be staying overnight at the hotel,” he said.

“How’s it going?”

“Nothing tangible to go on.”

“The dogs?”

“They haven’t found a thing. I expect to be there in an hour. Will you keep me company while I have supper?”

Lindman said he would.

At least I have something I can give him, he thought when the call was finished. I have no idea what the relationship was between Molin and Andersson, but I can open a door for Larsson even so. In Berggren’s house there was a Nazi uniform. And Molin had been very careful to withhold his past from the world. There is a possibility, Lindman thought, that the uniform in Berggren’s wardrobe belonged to Molin. Even if he had exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes to escape from the burning ruins of Berlin.

Larsson was exhausted by the time he arrived at the hotel. Even so, he laughed happily as he sat down at the dining room table. The kitchen would be closing shortly. The girl who alternated between the dining room and the reception desk was setting tables for breakfast. There was only one other guest, a man at a table next to the wall. Lindman supposed he must be one of the test drivers, although he looked rather old to be test driving cars in hostile conditions.

“When I was younger, I often used to go out for meals,” Larsson said, by way of explanation for his laughter. “Now it only happens when I’m forced to spend the night away from home. When there’s some violent crime or something similarly unpleasant to figure out.”

As he ate, he told Lindman what had happened during the day. What he had to say could be summed up in a single word. Nothing.

“We’re marking time,” he said. “We can find no tracks. Nobody saw anything, although we’ve traced four or five people who drove past that evening. What Rundström and I are wondering now is if there really is a link between Andersson and Molin. And if there is, what could it be?”

When he’d finished eating he ordered a pot of tea. Lindman ordered coffee. Then he told Larsson about his visit to Berggren’s, how he’d broken into her house, and his discovery of the diary in Molin’s shed. He moved his coffee cup to one side and set out the letters, the photographs, and the diary for Larsson to see.

“You’ve really overstepped your mark,” Larsson said, clearly irritated. “I thought we’d agreed that you wouldn’t continue poking around.”

“I can only say I’m sorry.”

“What do you think would have happened if Berggren had caught you?”

Lindman had no answer to that.

“It mustn’t happen again,” Larsson said after a while. “But it’s better if we don’t say anything to Rundström about your evening visit to the lady in question. He tends to be a bit touchy about things like that. He wants everything to go by the book. And as you have already seen, he is not that pleased when outsiders start interfering in his investigations. I say ‘his investigations’ because he insists on regarding cases of violent crime as his own personal business.”

“Johansson might tell him about it? Even though he said he would keep it to himself?”

Larsson shook his head. “Erik’s not all that fond of Rundström,” he said. “One should never underestimate antagonisms between individuals and also between provinces. Being junior to big brother Jämtland doesn’t go down well in Härjedalen. That kind of problem afflicts the police force as well.”