The Troubled Man (14 page)

The phone rang again. He wondered if he should answer, but after a pause, he did. There was a crackling noise in the background, as if the call was coming from far away. Eventually he heard a voice.

It was speaking English.

It was a man who asked if he was talking to the right person: he was hoping to reach Kurt, Kurt Wallander.

‘That’s me,’ shouted Wallander in an attempt to make himself heard through all the background noise. ‘Who are you?’

It seemed as if contact had been lost. Wallander was just about to replace the receiver when the voice became audible again, more clearly now, nearer.

‘Wallander?’ he said. ‘Is that you, Kurt?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Steven Atkins here. Do you know who I am?’

‘Yes, I know,’ Wallander shouted. ‘Hakan’s friend.’

‘Has he been found yet?’

‘No.’

‘Did you say “no”?’

‘Yes, I said “no.”’

‘So he’s been missing for a week now?’

‘Yes, more or less.’

The line started crackling again. Wallander assumed Atkins was using a mobile phone.

‘I’m getting worried,’ Atkins shouted. ‘He’s not the kind of man who simply vanishes.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘On Sunday last week. In the afternoon. Swedish time.’

The day before he disappeared, Wallander thought.

‘Was it you who called, or did he call you?’

‘He called me. He said he’d reached a conclusion.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

‘Is that all? A conclusion? Surely he must have said something else?’

‘Not at all. He was always very careful when he spoke on the phone. Sometimes he called from a public phone.’

The line crackled and faded again. Wallander held his breath; he didn’t want to lose the call.

‘I want to know what’s going on,’ said Atkins. ‘I’m worried.’

‘Did he say anything about going away?’

‘He sounded happier than he had been in a while. Hakan could be very gloomy. He didn’t like growing old; he was afraid of running out of time. How old are you, Kurt?’

‘I’m sixty.’

‘That’s nothing. Do you have an email address, Kurt?’

Wallander spelled out his address with some difficulty, but he didn’t mention that he hardly ever used it.

‘I’ll send you a message, Kurt,’ Atkins shouted. ‘Why don’t you come over and visit? But find Hakan first!’

His voice grew fainter again, and then the connection was broken. Wallander stood there with the receiver in his hand.
Why don’t you come over?
He replaced the receiver and sat down at the kitchen table, notepad and pencil in hand. Steven Atkins had given him new information, straight into his ear, from distant California. He thought back through the conversation with Atkins, line by line, point by point. The day before he disappeared, Hakan von Enke called California - not Sten Nordlander or his son. Was that a conscious choice? Had that particular call come from a public phone? Had von Enke gone out into the streets of Stockholm in order to make that call? It was a question with no answer. He continued writing until he had worked his way meticulously through the whole conversation. Then he stood up, stood some six feet away from the table, and stared at his notebook, like a painter studying what was on his easel from a distance. It was Sten Nordlander, of course, who had given Steven Atkins Wallander’s phone number. That wasn’t especially surprising. Atkins was just as worried as everybody else. Or was he? Wallander suddenly had the feeling that Hakan von Enke had been standing next to Steven Atkins when he made that call to Sweden. Then he dismissed the thought.

Wallander was growing tired of this case. It wasn’t his job to track down the missing person or to speculate about the various circumstances. He was filling his inactivity with spectres. Perhaps this was a test run for all the misery he would be bound to endure once he had also gone into retirement?

He prepared a meal, did some cleaning, then tried to read a book he had been given by Linda - about the history of the police force in Sweden. He was dozing off over the book when the phone woke him.

It was Ytterberg.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he began.

‘Not at all. I was reading.’

‘We’ve made a discovery,’ said Ytterberg. ‘I thought you should know.’

‘A dead body?’

‘Burned to a cinder. We found him a few hours ago in a burned-out boarding house on Lidingo. Not that far from Lill-Jansskogen. The age is about right, but there’s no firm evidence that it’s him. We’re not saying anything to his wife or to anybody else right now.’

‘What about the press?’

‘We’re saying nothing at all to them.’

Wallander slept badly again that night. He kept getting out of bed, starting to read his book then putting it down again almost immediately. Jussi was lying in front of the open fire, watching him. Wallander sometimes allowed him to sleep indoors.

Shortly after six the next morning Ytterberg called. The body they found wasn’t Hakan von Enke. A ring on a charred finger had led to the identification. Wallander felt relieved, and went back to sleep until nine. He was having his breakfast when Lennart Mattson called.

‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘The Employee Administration Board has decided to dock you five days’ pay for forgetting your pistol.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Aren’t you pleased?’

‘I’m more than pleased. So I assume I can come back to work. On Monday.’

And he did. Early Monday morning Wallander was at his desk once more.

But there was still no trace of Hakan von Enke.

The missing person remained missing. Wallander went back to work and was surrounded by smiling faces as his colleagues realised how mild his punishment had been. It was even suggested that they should start a collection to cover his fine, but nothing came of that. Wallander suspected that one or two of those welcoming him back with open arms were in fact concealing considerable
Schadenfreude
, but he made up his mind to ignore that. He was not going to go around looking for potential hypocrites; he didn’t have the time. He would only sleep even worse at night if he lay in bed working himself up about colleagues sneering at him behind his back.

His first serious case was an assault that had taken place on a ferry between Ystad and Poland. It was an exceptionally brutal attack, and a classic situation: no reliable witnesses and everybody blaming everybody else. The assault had occurred in a cramped cabin; the victim was a young woman from Skurup who was making the unfortunate trip with her boyfriend, whom she knew was prone to jealousy and couldn’t hold his drink. During the crossing they had joined up with a group of young men from Malmo who had only one goal in mind: to drink themselves silly.

Wallander conducted the investigation on his own, with occasional help from Martinsson. He didn’t need much in the way of assistance; the perpetrator was no doubt among the men the young woman had met during the crossing - one or more of whom had beaten her up and almost ripped off her left ear.

There were no new developments in the Hakan von Enke case. Wallander spoke almost every day to Ytterberg, who still couldn’t believe that the commander had run away of his own accord. This belief was supported by the facts that von Enke had left his passport at home and that his credit card hadn’t been used. But the main thing was the man’s character, Ytterberg maintained. Hakan von Enke simply wasn’t the kind of man who disappeared. He would never abandon his wife. It didn’t add up.

Wallander spoke frequently to Louise. She was always the one who called, usually at about seven in the evening, when he was at home, eating a sloppily prepared dinner. Wallander could hear that she had reconciled herself to the thought that her husband was dead. In response to a direct question, she told him she was now getting a decent night’s sleep with the aid of sleeping pills. Everybody is waiting, Wallander thought as he replaced the receiver. He seems to be missing without a trace, gone up in the proverbial smoke and disappeared through the chimney of our existence. But is his body really lying hidden somewhere, rotting away? Or is he having dinner at this very moment? On a different planet, under another name, sitting opposite some celebrity we don’t know about?

What did Wallander think? His experience told him that the former submarine commander was dead. Wallander was afraid it would one day be revealed that his death was due to some banal cause, such as a mugging gone wrong. But he wasn’t sure. Perhaps there was still a small chance that von Enke had chosen to disappear, even if they couldn’t see why.

The one who dug in her heels deepest and refused to believe that von Enke had been killed was Linda. He’s not the kind of man anyone can kill, she insisted, indignantly, when she and Wallander met in their usual cafe while the baby slept soundly in her pushchair. But not even Linda could guess why he would want to run away. Hans never called, but listening to Linda’s theories and questions, Wallander had the impression that the two of them were as one in their convictions. But he didn’t ask, didn’t want to interfere; it was their life, nobody else’s.

Steven Atkins started sending long emails to Wallander, page after page. The longer Atkins’s messages became, the shorter the replies Wallander managed to produce. He would have liked to write more, but his English was so shaky that he didn’t dare venture into complicated sentence structure. Nevertheless, he learned that Steven Atkins now lived close to the major naval base just outside San Diego in California, Point Loma. He owned a little house in an area populated almost exclusively by ex-servicemen. On the next block, Atkins claimed, there were ‘enough former sailors to man a submarine, more likely several, right down to the last position’. Wallander asked himself what it would be like to live in a neighbourhood filled exclusively with former police officers. He shuddered at the thought.

Atkins wrote about his life, his family, his children and grandchildren, and he even attached pictures of them. Wallander had to ask Linda for help viewing them. They were sunlit photographs, with naval ships in the background, Atkins himself in uniform, and his large family smiling at Wallander. Atkins was bald and slim, and had his arm wrapped around the shoulders of his equally slim and smiling but not bald wife. Wallander thought the photo looked like an advertisement for dish soap, or some new breakfast cereal. Smiling and waving at him from the computer screen was the ideal, happy American family.

Wallander could see from his calendar that it was now exactly a month since Hakan von Enke had left his apartment in Grevgatan, closed the door behind him and never returned. Wallander had just had a long phone conversation with Ytterberg. It was 11 May, and rain was pouring down over Stockholm. Ytterberg sounded depressed - hard to tell if it was because of the weather or the state of the investigation. Wallander was wondering how he could pin down the right person to charge in connection with that sorry business on board the ferry. In other words, the conversation had been between two tired and distinctly grumpy police officers. Wallander wondered if Sapo was still showing an interest in the disappearance.

‘A man by the name of William comes to see me now and again,’ said Ytterberg. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. And I can’t say I’m all that interested. The last time he was here I had a sudden urge to throttle him. I asked if they had any information they could give me that might make things a bit easier for us. A helping hand from one professional to another, which you might think is a matter of common courtesy in a democratic country like Sweden. But needless to say, they didn’t. Or at least, that’s what William said. You can never know if people in his trade are telling the truth. Their whole way of operating is a sort of game based on lies and deception. Obviously, ordinary police officers like you and me occasionally pull the wool over people’s eyes, but it’s not what you’d call the cornerstone of our professional operations.’

After the call Wallander returned to the file of interrogation notes lying open on the desk in front of him. Next to the file was a photograph of a badly injured woman’s face. That’s why I do what I do, he told himself. Because her face looks like that, because somebody nearly beat her to death.

When Wallander came home that evening, he found that Jussi was ill. He was lying in his kennel, didn’t want to eat or drink. Wallander broke into a cold sweat and immediately called a veterinary surgeon he knew who had once helped him nail a man who had been attacking young horses grazing in their paddocks around Ystad. He lived in Kaseberga and promised to come. His examination suggested that Jussi had eaten something that disagreed with him, and that he would soon be well again. Jussi spent that night on a mat in front of the open fire, and Wallander kept checking to make sure he was all right. The next morning Jussi was back on his feet, albeit unsteadily.

Wallander was relieved. When he arrived at his office and switched on his computer, it occurred to him in passing that he hadn’t heard from Steven Atkins in five days. Perhaps there was nothing else to say, no more photographs to send. But shortly before noon, just as Wallander was starting to think about whether to go home for lunch or to eat somewhere in town, he had a call from reception. He had a visitor.