Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

But now I’m going to leave Sveg. Giuseppe Larsson is a very experienced police officer. He and his team will solve the case eventually. He wondered if he would live long enough to learn the solution. He found this hard to cope with now. The treatment he would start receiving in a week or so might not suffice. The doctor had said they could try cytoxins if radiation therapy and operative treatment didn’t achieve the desired result. There were lots of other drugs they could try. Having cancer was no longer a death sentence, she insisted. Okay, he thought, but it’s not the same as being cured. I might be dead a year from now. I have to cope with that, no matter how hard it might be.

He was overwhelmed by fear. If only he could, he’d run away.

Larsson came over to him.

“I’m leaving now,” Lindman said.

Larsson looked hard at him. “You’ve been a big help,” he said. “And obviously, I wonder how you feel.”

Lindman shrugged, but said nothing. Larsson held out his hand.

“Would you like me to keep in touch and let you know how things are progressing?” he said.

What did he really want? Apart from getting well again? “I think it’s better if I get in touch with you,” he said. “I don’t know how I’ll feel once the radiation therapy starts.”

They shook hands. It seemed to Lindman that Giuseppe Larsson was a very likable man. Although he didn’t really know anything about him.

Then it dawned on him that his car was in Sveg.

“Obviously, it ought to be me driving you to your hotel,” Larsson said. “But I feel I better hang around here for a while and wait for Näsblom to come back. I’ll ask Persson to take you.”

Persson didn’t have much to say for himself. Lindman contemplated the trees through the car windows, and thought that he would have quite liked to meet Veronica Molin one more time. He’d have liked to ask her some questions about her father’s diary. What had she known about her father’s past? And where was Molin’s son? Why hadn’t he put in an appearance?

Persson dropped him off outside the hotel. The girl at the reception desk smiled when he walked in.

“I’m leaving now.”

“It can get cold as evening draws near,” she said. “Cold and quite slippery.”

“I’ll drive carefully.”

He went up to his room and packed his things. The moment he closed the door, he couldn’t remember what the room looked like. He paid his bill without checking the details.

“Welcome back,” she said when he’d handed over the money. “How’s it going? Are you going to catch the murderer?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Lindman left the hotel. He put his suitcase in the trunk and was just about to get behind the wheel when he saw Veronica Molin come out of the hotel entrance. She walked up to him.

“I heard you were about to leave.”

“Who told you that?”

“The receptionist.”

“That must mean you asked for me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to hear how things were going, of course.”

“I’m not the one to ask about that.”

“Inspector Larsson thought you were. I spoke to him on the phone a few minutes ago. He said you might still be around. I guess I got lucky.”

Lindman locked the car and accompanied her back to the hotel. They sat down in the dining room, which was empty.

“Inspector Larsson said he’d found a diary. Is that right?”

“That’s correct,” Lindman said. “I’ve glanced through it. But it belongs to you and your brother, of course. Once they release it. At the moment it’s an important piece of evidence.”

“I didn’t know my father kept a diary. It surprises me.”

“Why’s that?”

“He wasn’t the type to write anything when it wasn’t strictly necessary.”

“Lots of people keep a secret diary. I bet practically everybody has done so at some stage in their lives.”

He watched her taking out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then looked him in the eye.

“Inspector Larsson said the police are still struggling to find any leads. They haven’t found anything specific. Everything seems to suggest that the man who killed my father also murdered the other man.”

“Who you didn’t know?”

She looked up at him. “How could I have known him? You’re forgetting that I hardly even knew my father.”

It seemed to Lindman that he might as well not beat around the bush. He should ask her the questions he’d already formulated.

“Did you know your father was a Nazi?”

He couldn’t tell if the question had come as a surprise or not.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Can that mean so very many different things? I read in his diary that as a young man he left Kalmar and crossed the border into Norway in 1942 to enlist with the German army. He then fought for Hitler until the end of the war in 1945. Then he returned to Sweden. Married, then your brother and you were born. He changed his name, divorced, remarried, and then divorced again — but all the time he was a Nazi. If I’m not mistaken, he remained a convinced Nazi until his dying day.”

“Is that what he wrote in his diary?”

“There were some letters as well. And photographs. Your father in uniform.”

She shook her head. “This comes as a hideous shock.”

“He never spoke about the war?”

“Never.”

“Nor about his political views?”

“I didn’t even know he had any. There was never any talk of politics when I was growing up.”

“You can express your views even when you’re not discussing specific political questions.”

“How?”

“You can reveal your view of the world and your fellow men in a lot of different ways.”

She thought for a while, then shook her head. “I can remember from when I was a child that he said several times that he wasn’t interested in politics. I had no idea he held extremist views. He concealed them pretty well — if what you say is right, that is.”

“It’s all crystal-clear in his diary.”

“Is that all it’s about? Didn’t he write anything about his family?”

“Very little.”

“That doesn’t really surprise me. I grew up with the impression that we children were nothing more than a nuisance as far as Father was concerned. He never really bothered about us, he just pretended to.”

“By the way, your father had a woman friend here in Sveg. I don’t know if she was his mistress. I don’t know what people do to keep themselves occupied when they’re turned seventy.”

“A woman here in Sveg?”

He regretted having mentioned that. It was information she should have learned from Larsson, not from him, but it was too late now.

“Her name is Elsa Berggren and she lives on the south bank of the river. She was the one who found his house for him. She shares his political views too. If you can call Nazi views political, that is.”

“What else could they be?”

“Criminal.”

It seemed as if it had suddenly dawned on her why he was asking these questions.

“Do you think my father’s opinions might have had something to do with his death?”

“I don’t think anything. But the police have to keep all options open.”

She lit another cigarette. Her hand was shaking.

“I don’t understand why nobody’s told me this before now,” she said. “Why haven’t I heard that my father was a Nazi, nor about that woman?”

“They would have told you sooner or later. A murder investigation can sometimes take a long time. Now they have two dead men for whom they have to find a murderer. Plus a vanished dog.”

“I was told the dog was dead?”

“That was your father’s dog, but now Abraham Andersson’s dog has gone missing.”