The Troubled Man (2011)

‘I wasn’t able to be of much assistance, I’m afraid.’

‘I have another name,’ said Wallander. ‘This one could be more difficult. And there’s a chance she could be dead as well.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Fanny Klarstrom.’

‘Another journalist?’

‘A waitress.’

‘Hmm. As you say, it could be more difficult. But her name isn’t among the most common, neither Fanny nor Klarstrom.’

Wallander waited while Martinsson began the search. He could hear him humming a tune as he tapped away at the keyboard. Martinsson was usually on the melancholy side, but he was obviously in a good mood. Let’s hope he stays that way, Wallander thought.

‘I’ll get back to you,’ Martinsson said. ‘This is going to take a while.’

In fact it took Martinsson less than twenty minutes. When he called back he was able to inform Wallander that eighty-four-year-old Fanny Klarstrom lived in Markaryd in Smaland. She had an apartment of her own in a retirement home called Lillgarden.

‘How did you do it?’ Wallander asked. ‘Are you sure it’s the right person?’

‘Absolutely certain.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I’ve spoken to her,’ said Martinsson, to Wallander’s astonishment. ‘I called her, and she told me she’d been a waitress for nearly fifty years.’

‘Amazing. One of these days you must explain what you do that I can’t do.’

Wallander wrote down Fanny Klarstrom’s address and phone number. According to Martinsson, her voice had sounded old and rough, but she was clear in the head.

After the call he went out. The sun was blazing down from a clear blue sky. Kites were soaring in the upwinds, searching for prey at the edge of the fields. Wallander wondered what he wanted, apart from what he had already. Nothing, he thought. Perhaps to be able to afford to travel south when winter was at its coldest. A little apartment in Spain. But he dismissed that thought immediately. He would never feel comfortable there, surrounded by people he didn’t know speaking a language he would never be able to learn properly. In one way or another, Skane would be his terminus. He would stay in his house for as long as possible. When he couldn’t manage that any more, he hoped the end would come quickly. What scared him more than anything else was an old age spent simply waiting to die, a time when nothing of what had been his life was still possible.

He made a decision. He would drive to Markaryd and pay a visit to the waitress. He didn’t know what good a conversation might do, but he couldn’t shake off the curiosity that had been aroused by that newspaper article. He took out his old school atlas. Markaryd was only a few hours’ drive away.

He set off the next day, after speaking to Linda on the phone. She listened carefully to what he had to say. When he finished, she announced that she would like to go with him. He was annoyed and asked how she thought Klara would be able to cope with a car journey on what seemed set to become one of the summer’s hottest days.

‘Hans is at home today,’ she said. ‘He can look after his daughter. But you don’t want me to come. I can hear it.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘The fact that it’s true.’

It was true. Wallander had been looking forward to a drive all on his own, heading north towards the Smaland forests. It was one of his simple pleasures, going for drives without company. He liked the freedom it gave him, being alone in the car, without the radio on, and with the possibility of stopping whenever it suited him.

He accepted that Linda had seen through him.

‘Are we still on speaking terms?’ he asked.

‘Of course we are,’ she said. ‘But sometimes you’re a bit weird for my taste.’

‘You don’t choose your parents. If I’m weird, it’s because I inherited it from your grandfather, who really was a strange person.’

‘Good luck. Let me know how it went. I must say, in all honesty, that you never give up.’

‘Do you?’

She laughed softly.

‘Never. I don’t even know how to spell those words.’

It was eleven o’clock when Wallander set off. By one he had got as far as Almhult, where he had lunch in a crowded Ikea restaurant. The long line at the counter made him nervous and irritated. He ate far too quickly, and afterwards took a wrong turn, so that he reached Markaryd an hour later than planned. The attendant at a petrol station explained the best route to the sheltered accommodation at Lillgarden. When he got out of the car, he was struck by how similar it looked to Niklasgarden. The thought made him wonder if the man who had claimed to be Signe’s uncle had made another visit. He would find out about that as soon as he had time.

An elderly man in blue overalls was crouching over a lawnmower that had been turned upside down. He was poking at it with a stick, removing large chunks of compressed grass from the blades. Wallander asked about Fanny Klarstrom. The man stood up and stretched his back. He spoke with a broad Smaland accent that Wallander found difficult to understand.

‘Her apartment is right at the far end, on the ground floor.’

‘How is she?’

The man looked at Wallander with an expression that was both searching and suspicious.

‘Fanny is old and tired. Who are you?’

Wallander produced his police ID, and regretted it immediately. Why should he risk exposing Fanny to gossip about a policeman coming to visit her? But it was too late now. The man in the blue overalls studied the ID card carefully.

‘You’re from Skane, I can hear that. Ystad?’

‘As you can see.’

‘And you’ve come all the way here, to Markaryd?’

‘I’m not actually on police business,’ Wallander explained in as friendly a tone as he could muster. ‘It’s more of a personal visit.’

‘That’s good for Fanny. She hardly ever has any visitors.’

Wallander nodded at the lawnmower.

‘You should wear earplugs.’

‘I don’t hear a thing. My ears were ruined when I worked as a miner as a young man.’

Wallander entered the building and set off along the hallway to the left. An old man was standing by a window, staring out at the back of a tumbledown building. Wallander shuddered. He stopped outside a door with a nameplate, beautifully painted with flowers in pastel shades.

Just for a moment he considered turning on his heel and leaving. Then he rang the bell.

25

When Fanny Klarstrom opened the door - immediately, as if she had been standing there for a thousand years, waiting for him - she gave him a broad smile. He was the longed-for visitor, he just had time to think before she ushered him into her room and closed the door.

Wallander felt as if he were entering a lost world.

Fanny Klarstrom smelled as if somebody had just lit a fire of alder wood right next to him. It was a smell Wallander remembered from the short time he had spent as a Boy Scout. His troop had gone for a hike. They had set up camp on the shore of a lake, probably Krageholm Lake, where Wallander had experienced several depressing happenings later in life, and lit a campfire made from newly sawn alder. But then, do alders really grow by lakes in Skane? Wallander thought that was a question to answer later.