The Troubled Man (2011)

excited journalists; but nobody had met him at Kastrup Airport and accompanied him on the last leg of the flight.

During the days that followed, Erlander came very close to resigning as prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats. Never before had he been so disappointed in his colleagues in government. And Olof Palme, who had already emerged as Erlander’s chosen successor, naturally shared his mentor’s anger at the nonchalance that had resulted in Erlander’s humiliation. Palme watched over his master like a savage bloodhound, as they used to say in circles close to the government.

He could never forgive Sven Andersson for what he had done to Tage Erlander.

Subsequently, a lot of people wondered why Palme included Andersson in his governments. However, it was not particularly difficult to understand why. Of course Palme could have refused; but in practice it simply wasn’t possible. Andersson had a lot of power and a lot of influence among the grass roots of the party. He was the son of a labourer, unlike Palme, who had direct links to Baltic nobility, had officers in his family - indeed, he was a reserve officer himself - and had come from the well-to-do Swedish upper class. He had no grass-roots support in the party. Olof Palme was a defector who was no doubt serious about his political allegiance to the Social Democrats, but, nevertheless, he was an outsider, a political pilgrim who had wandered into the party.

*

Now Palme could no longer contain his fury. He turned to face Sven Andersson, who was sitting hunched up on the grey sofa in the prime minister’s office. Palme was bright red in the face, and his arms were twitching in the strange way they did when he lost his temper.

‘There is no proof,’ he roared. ‘Only claims, insinuations, nods and winks from disloyal navy officers. This investigation has shed light on nothing at all. On the contrary, it has left us wallowing in political swamps.’

A couple of years before, in the early hours of 28 October 1981, a Soviet submarine had run aground in Gasefjarden Bay off Karlskrona. The bay was not only Swedish territorial water, but also a military restricted area. The submarine was labelled U-137, and the captain on board, Anatoli Michailovitch Gushchin, maintained that his craft had gone off course because of an unknown defect in its gyrocompass. Swedish naval officers and local fishermen were convinced that only an extremely drunk captain could have managed to penetrate that far into the archipelago without running aground earlier.

On 6 November, U-137 was towed out into international waters and disappeared. But on that occasion there had been no doubt at all that it was a Russian submarine in Swedish territorial waters. However, it was never established if it had been an intentional violation of Swedish sovereignty or a case of drunkenness at sea. No respectable navy would admit, of course, that their commanding officer had been drunk while on duty.

So their denial was regarded as proof that he had been. But where was the proof now?

No one knows what former minister of defence Andersson had to say in his own defence and that of his investigation. He made no notes, and Olof Palme was assassinated a year or so afterwards; he left no witness accounts either.

So it all began with a fit of rage. This story about the realities of politics, this journey into the swamps where truth and lies are indistinguishable and nothing is clear.

PART 1

Invasion of the Swamps

1

The year Kurt Wallander celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday, he fulfilled a long-held dream. Ever since his divorce from Mona fifteen years earlier, he had intended to leave his apartment in Mariagatan, where so many unpleasant memories were etched into the walls, and move out to the country. Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing workday, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion.

He could never reconcile himself to living there until he became so old that he might not be able to look after himself any more. Although he had not yet reached the age of sixty, he reminded himself over and over again of his father’s lonely old age, and he knew he had no desire to follow in his footsteps. He needed only to look into the bathroom mirror in the morning when he was shaving to see that he was growing more and more like his father. When he was young, his face had resembled his mother’s. But now it seemed as if his father was taking him over - like a runner who has been lagging a long way behind but is slowly catching up the closer he gets to the invisible finishing line.

Wallander’s world view was fairly simple. He did not want to become a bitter hermit growing old in isolation, being visited only by his daughter and perhaps now and then by a former colleague who had suddenly remembered that Wallander was still alive. He had no religious hopes of there being something in store for him on the other side of the black River Styx. There would be nothing but the same darkness that he had once emerged from. Until his fiftieth birthday, he had harboured a vague fear of death, something that had become his own personal mantra - that he would be dead for such a long time. He had seen far too many dead bodies in his life. There was nothing in their expressionless faces to suggest that their souls had been absorbed into some kind of heaven. Like so many other police officers, he had experienced every possible variation of death. Just after his fiftieth birthday had been celebrated with a party and cake at the police station, marked by a speech full of empty phrases by the former chief of police, Liza Holgersson, he had bought a new notebook and tried to record his memories of all the dead people he had come across. It had been a macabre exercise and he had no idea why he had been tempted to pursue it. When he got as far as the tenth suicide, a man in his forties, a drug addict with more or less every problem it was possible to imagine, he gave up. The man had hanged himself in the attic of the condemned apartment building where he lived, hanging in such a way that he was guaranteed to break his neck and hence avoid being slowly choked to death. His name was Welin. The pathologist had told Wallander that the man had been successful - he had proved to be a skilful executioner. At that point Wallander had abandoned his suicide cases and instead stupidly devoted several hours in an attempt to recall the young people or children he had found dead. But he soon gave that up as well. It was too repugnant. Then he felt ashamed of what he had been trying to do and burned the notebook, as if his efforts were both perverted and illegal. In fact, he was basically a cheerful person - it was just that he had allowed another side of his personality to take over.

Death had been his constant companion. He had killed people in the line of duty - but after the obligatory investigation he had never been accused of unnecessary violence.

Having killed two people was the cross he had to bear. If he rarely laughed, it was because of what he had been forced to endure.

But one day he made a critical decision. He had been out near Loderup, not far from the house where his father used to live, to talk to a farmer who had been the target of a very nasty robbery. On the way back to Ystad he noticed an estate agent’s sign picturing a little dirt road where there was a house for sale. He reacted automatically, stopped the car, turned round and found his way to the address. Even before he got out of the car it was obvious to him that the property was in need of repair. It had originally been a U-shaped building, the bottom half clad in wood. But now one of the wings was missing - perhaps it had burned down. He walked round the house. It was a day in early autumn. He could still remember seeing a skein of geese migrating south, flying directly above his head. He peered in through the windows and soon established that only the roof badly needed to be fixed. The view was enchanting; he could just make out the sea in the far distance, and possibly even one of the ferries on the way to Ystad from Poland. That afternoon in September 2003 marked the beginning of a love story with this remote house.

He drove straight to the estate agent’s office in the centre of Ystad. The asking price was low enough that he would be able to manage the mortgage payments. The very next day he returned to negotiate with the agent, a young man who spoke at breakneck speed and gave the impression of living in a parallel universe. The previous