Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

He remembered that incident as he watched Larsson walk off through the trees.

Larsson turned. “Aren’t you coming?”

Lindman drew his jacket tighter around him, and hurried after him.

“I thought you might prefer me not to be there. What with Rundström.”

“Forget Rundström. As long as you’re here, you’re my personal assistant.”

They left Rätmyren behind. Larsson was driving fast. When they arrived at Dunkärret, Larsson immediately started shouting at one of the police officers there. He was a man in his fifties, small and very thin, by the name of Näsblom. Lindman gathered that he was stationed at Hede. Larsson was furious when he couldn’t get a straight answer to his question about precisely when the dog had disappeared. Nobody seemed to be sure.

“We gave it some food last night,” Näsblom said. “I keep dogs myself, so I brought some dog food from home.”

“Obviously you can get a refund for that if you submit an invoice,” Larsson said. “But when did the dog disappear?”

“It must have been after then.”

“Even I can work that out. When did you realize it was no longer there?”

“Just before I called you.”

Larsson looked at his watch. “Okay, you gave the dog some food last night. When?”

“About 7.”

“It’s now 1:30 in the afternoon. Don’t you feed dogs in the morning as well?”

“I wasn’t here then. I went home this morning, and didn’t come back until this afternoon.”

“But you must have seen if the dog was still there when you left?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“But you keep dogs yourself...”

Näsblom looked at the empty running line. “Obviously, I should have noticed. But I didn’t. I suppose I thought it must have been in its kennel.”

Larsson shook his head in resignation.

“What’s easier to notice?” he said. “A dog that’s disappeared, or one that hasn’t?”

He turned to Lindman. “What do you think?”

“If a dog is there, maybe you don’t think about it, but if it isn’t there, I suppose you should notice.”

“I’ll go along with that. What do you think?”

The last question was directed at Näsblom.

“I don’t know, but I think the dog was gone by this morning.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No.”

“You’ve talked to your colleagues, no doubt. None of them saw it disappear, or heard anything?”

“Nobody noticed anything at all.”

They walked over to the running line, with no dog attached.

“How can you be certain that it didn’t just break loose?”

“I looked at the leash and the way it was attached to the running line when I fed it. It was a very sophisticated system. It couldn’t possibly have broken loose.”

Larsson studied the running line.

“It was dark by 7 last night,” he said. “How come you could see anything at all?”

“There was enough light from the kitchen window,” Näsblom said. “I could see.”

Larsson turned his back firmly on Näsblom.

“What do you have to say about this?” he said to Lindman.

“Somebody came here during the night and took the dog away.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know a lot about dogs, but if it didn’t start barking, it must have been somebody it recognized. Assuming it was a guard dog, that is.”

Larsson nodded, absentmindedly. He was studying the forest that surrounded the house.

“It must have been important,” he said after a while. “Somebody comes here in the dark and fetches the dog. A murder has been committed here, the place is sealed off. Even so, somebody takes the dog away. Two questions occur to me right away.”

“Who and why?”

Larsson agreed.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “Who apart from the killer could have taken the dog away? Andersson’s family lives in Helsingborg. His wife is in a state of shock and has said she isn’t going to come here. Have any of Andersson’s children been here? We’d have known if they had, surely. If it wasn’t a lunatic or a crazy animal rights supporter or somebody who makes a living from selling dogs, it must have been the murderer. That means he’s still here somewhere. He stayed around after murdering Molin, and didn’t leave after killing Andersson. You could draw several conclusions from that.”

“He might have come back, of course,” Lindman said

Larsson looked at him in surprise. “Why should he come back? Because he’d forgotten there was somebody else he needed to kill? Or because he’d forgotten the dog? It doesn’t add up. The man we’re dealing with — always assuming it is a man and that he’s operating on his own — plans what he does, detail by detail.”

Lindman could see that Larsson was thinking along the right lines. Even so, there was something nagging away at him.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“You always know what you’re thinking. It’s just that you’re sometimes too lazy to spell it out.”

“I suppose the bottom line is that we don’t know for sure that the same person murdered Molin and Andersson,” Lindman said. “We think it was, but we don’t know.”

“It goes against common sense and all my experience to think that two incidents like this would take place at almost the same time and in the same place without there being a common murderer and a common motive.”

“I agree. But even so, the unexpected does happen occasionally.”

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” Larsson said. “We’ll dig deep into the lives of both these men. We’ll eventually find a link between them.”

While they were talking Näsblom had slunk away into the house. He came back now, and approached hesitantly. Lindman could see that he had great respect for Giuseppe Larsson.

“I thought I might suggest that I could fetch one of my own dogs and put him on the scent.”

“Is it a police dog?”

“It’s a hunting dog. A mongrel. But it might be able to pick up a scent.”

“Shouldn’t we bring in one of our own dogs from Östersund instead?”

“They say no.”

Larsson looked at Näsblom in astonishment.

“Who says no?”

“Chief Inspector Rundström. He thought it was unnecessary. ‘The stupid dog has run away, no doubt,’ he said.”

“Go and fetch your Fido,” Larsson said. “It’s a good idea. But you should have had it the moment you noticed that Andersson’s dog had gone for a walk.”

The dog Näsblom fetched picked up a scent immediately. It set off at full speed from the running line between the house wall and the tree, dragging Näsblom along behind it, and the two of them disappeared into the forest.

Larsson was discussing the house-to-house operation currently being undertaken in the district with one of the officers whose name Lindman didn’t know. Lindman listened at first, but then moved away. He could see it was time for him to leave. His trip to Härjedalen was over. It started when he opened a newspaper in the hospital café in Borås and saw the photograph of Herbert Molin. Now he’d been in Sveg for a week. Neither he nor anybody else knew yet who had killed Molin and probably also Andersson. Perhaps Larsson was right in thinking there was a link between the two murders? Lindman wasn’t convinced. On the other hand he knew now that at one time in his life Molin had fought for the Germans on the Eastern front, that he had been a Nazi, maybe was to the very last moment of his life, and that there was a woman who shared his opinions, Elsa Berggren, who had helped him to find the house in the forest.

Molin had been on the run. He had retired from his post in Borås and crept into a lair where someone had finally found him. Lindman was certain that Molin knew somebody was looking for him. Something happened in Germany during the war, he was sure of that. Something not recorded in the diary. Or it could be in a code that I can’t read. Then there’s the week in Scotland and the long walks with “M.” One way or another this all must be linked with what happened in Germany.