He stayed there for a long time. Mona’s sudden visit had tired him out. This was not the way he wanted things to be; he didn’t want her turning his life upside down by making new demands on him. He would have to make this clear to her if she turned up on his doorstep again, and he must persuade Linda to be his ally. He was prepared to help Mona - that wasn’t a problem - but the past was the past. It no longer existed.
Wallander walked down the hill to a sausage stand across from the hospital. A lump of mashed potato fell off his tray, and a jackdaw swooped down immediately to steal it.
He suddenly had the feeling that he’d forgotten something. He felt around for his service pistol. Or could he have forgotten something else? He wasn’t sure if he’d come to the sausage stand by car, or walked down the hill from the police station.
He dumped the half-eaten sausage and mashed potatoes into a rubbish bin and looked around one more time. No sign of a car. He slowly started to trudge back up the hill. About halfway there, his memory returned. He broke into a cold sweat and his heart was racing. He couldn’t put off consulting his doctor any longer. This was the third time it had happened within a short period, and he wanted to know what was going on inside his head.
He called the doctor he had consulted earlier when he’d returned to duty. He was given an appointment shortly after midsummer. When he put the receiver down, he checked to make sure that his gun was locked up where it should be.
He spent the rest of the day preparing for his court appearance. It was six o’clock when he closed the last of his files and threw it onto his guest chair. He had stood up and picked up his jacket when a thought suddenly struck him. He had no idea where it came from. Why hadn’t von Enke taken his secret diary away with him when he visited Signe for the last time? Wallander could see only two possible explanations. Either he intended to go back, or something had happened to make a return impossible.
He sat down at his desk again and looked up the number for Niklasgarden. It was the woman with the melodious foreign voice who answered.
‘I just wanted to check that all is well with Signe,’ he said.
‘She lives in a world where very little changes. Apart from that which affects all of us - growing older.’
‘I don’t suppose her dad has been to visit her, has he?’
‘I thought he went missing. Is he back?’
‘No. I was just wondering.’
‘Her uncle was here yesterday on a visit. It was my day off, but I noticed it in the ledger where we keep a record of visits.’
Wallander held his breath.
‘An uncle?’
‘He signed himself in as Gustaf von Enke. He came in the afternoon and stayed for about an hour.’
‘Are you absolutely certain about this?’
‘Why would I make it up?’
‘No, as you say, why would you? If this uncle comes back to visit Signe, could you please give me a call?’
She suddenly sounded worried.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No, not at all. Thanks for your time.’
Wallander replaced the receiver but remained seated. He was not mistaken; he was sure of that. He had studied the von Enke family tree meticulously, and he was certain there was no uncle.
Whoever the man was that had visited Signe, he had given a false name and relationship.
Wallander drove home. The worry he had felt earlier had now returned in spades.
18
The following morning, Wallander had a temperature and a sore throat. He tried hard to convince himself that it was his imagination, but in the end he got a thermometer, which registered 102. He called the police station and told them he was ill. He spent most of the day either in bed or in the kitchen, surrounded by the books from the library he still hadn’t read.
During the night he’d had a dream about Signe. He’d been visiting Niklasgarden, and suddenly noticed that it was in fact somebody else curled up in her bed. It was dark in the room; he tried to switch the light on, but it didn’t work. So he took out his mobile phone and used it as a torch. In the pale blue glow he discovered that it was Louise lying there. She was an exact copy of her daughter. He was overcome by fear, but when he tried to leave the room he found that the door was locked.
That was when he woke up. It was four o’clock and already light. He could feel a pain in his throat, but he felt warm and soon dropped off to sleep again. When he eventually woke up he tried to interpret his dream, but he didn’t reach any conclusions. Apart from the fact that everything seemed to be a cover-up for everything else when it came to the disappearance of Hakan and Louise von Enke.
Wallander got out of bed, wrapped a towel around his neck, and looked up Gustaf von Enke on the Internet. There was nobody by that name. At eight o’clock he called Ytterberg, who would be going on holiday the following day. He was on his way to what he expected to be an extremely unpleasant interrogation of a man who had tried to strangle his wife and his two children, probably because he had found another woman he wanted to live with.
‘But why did he have to kill the children?’ he wondered. ‘It’s like a Greek tragedy.’
Wallander didn’t know much about the dramas written more than two thousand years ago. Linda had once taken him to a production of
He told Ytterberg about his call to Niklasgarden the previous day.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ said Wallander. ‘There is no uncle. There’s a cousin in England, but that’s it.’
‘It certainly sounds odd.’
‘I know you’re about to go away. Maybe you can send somebody else out to Niklasgarden to try to get a description of the man?’
‘I have a very good cop named Rebecka Andersson,’ he said. ‘She’s phenomenal with assignments like this, even though she’s very young. I’ll speak to her.’
Wallander was just about to end the call when Ytterberg asked him a question.
‘Do you ever feel like I do?’ he asked. ‘An almost desperate longing to get away from all this shit that we’re chest-deep in?’
‘It happens.’
‘How do we manage to survive it all?’
‘I don’t know. Some sort of feeling of responsibility, I suspect. I once had a mentor, an old detective named Rydberg. That’s what he always used to say. It was a matter of responsibility, nothing more.’
Rebecka Andersson called at about two o’clock from Niklasgarden.
‘I understood that you wanted the information as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I’m sitting on a bench on the grounds. It’s lovely weather. Do you have a pencil handy?’
‘Yes, I’m ready to go.’
‘A man in his fifties, neatly dressed in suit and tie, very friendly, light curly hair, blue eyes. He spoke what is usually called standard Swedish, in other words, no particular dialect and certainly without any trace of a foreign accent. One thing was obvious from the start: he’d never been here before. They had to show him which room she was in, but nobody seems to have thought that was at all remarkable.’
‘What did he have to say?’
‘Nothing, really. He was just very friendly.’
‘And the room?’
‘I asked two members of the staff, separately, to check the room and see if anything had been moved. They couldn’t find any changes. I had the impression that they were very sure about that.’
‘But even so, he stayed for as long as an hour?’
‘That’s not definite. Assessments varied. They’re evidently not all that strict when it comes to entering visits and times in their ledger. I’d say he was there for at least an hour, an hour and a half at most.’
