Fanny Klarstrom had wavy blue hair, and was tastefully made up - perhaps she was always ready to receive an unexpected visitor. When she smiled she displayed a beautiful set of teeth that made Wallander jealous. His own teeth had begun to need filling when he was twelve, and since then he had been fighting a constant battle with dental hygiene and dentists who seemed always to be tearing a strip off him. He still had most of his own teeth, but his dentist had warned him that they would soon start to fall out if he didn’t brush them more often and more efficiently. At the age of eighty-four, Fanny Klarstrom had all her teeth, and they shone brightly as if she were still a teenager. She didn’t ask who he was or what he wanted, but invited him in to her little living room, where the walls were covered in framed photographs. Well-tended pot plants and climbers stood on windowsills and shelves. There’s not a single grain of dust in this apartment, Wallander thought. He sat down on the sofa she had gestured towards, and said he would be delighted to accept a cup of coffee.
While she was in the little kitchen he wandered around the room, examining all the photographs. There was a wedding photo dated 1942: Fanny with a man with slicked-down hair in a formal suit. Wallander thought he recognised the same man in another photo, this time in overalls and standing on a ship, the picture being taken from the quay. He deduced from other photos that Fanny had only one child. When he heard the clinking of china approaching, he sat down on the sofa again.
Fanny served coffee with a steady hand; she retained the skill she had acquired during many years as a waitress and didn’t spill a drop. She sat down opposite him in a rather worn armchair. A speckled grey cat appeared from nowhere and settled on her knee. She raised her cup, and Wallander did the same before tasting the coffee, which was very strong. It went down the wrong way and made him cough so violently that tears came to his eyes. When he recovered, she handed him a napkin. He dried his eyes and noticed that ‘Billingen Hotel’ was embroidered on it.
‘Perhaps I should begin by telling you why I’m here,’ he said.
‘Friendly people are always welcome,’ said Fanny Klarstrom.
She spoke with an unmistakable Stockholm accent. Wallander wondered why she had chosen to grow old in a place as far off the beaten track as Markaryd.
Wallander placed a printout of the newspaper article on the embroidered cloth that covered the table. She didn’t bother to read it, merely glanced at the two pictures. But she seemed to remember even so. Wallander didn’t want to jump in at the deep end, and began by expressing a polite interest in all the photos hanging on the walls. She had no hesitation in telling him about them, and in doing so summarised her whole life in a few words.
In 1941, Fanny - whose surname then was Andersson - met a young sailor by the name of Arne Klarstrom.
‘We were madly in love,’ she said. ‘We met on one of the Djurgarden ferries, on the way back from the Grona Lund amusement park. As I was going ashore at Slussen, I stumbled and fell. He helped me up. What would have happened if I hadn’t fallen? Anyway, you could say that I literally stumbled into the love of my life. Which lasted for exactly two years. We got married, I became pregnant, and Arne dithered and dallied and wondered if he dared to continue working on the convoy traffic, given the circumstances. It’s easy to forget how many Swedish sailors died when their ships were mined during those years, even though we were not directly involved in the war. But Arne no doubt felt he was invulnerable, and I could never imagine that anything would happen to him. Our son, Gunnar, was born in January 1943 - the twelfth, at six thirty in the morning. Arne was on shore leave at the time, and so he saw his son just the once. Nine days later his ship was blown up by a mine in the North Sea. Nothing was ever found - no wreckage of the ship and no bodies of those on board.’
She paused, and looked at the photographs on the wall.
‘Anyway,’ she began again after a while, ‘there I was on my own, with a son to look after and the love of my life gone forever. I suppose I tried to find another man to live with. I was still young. But nobody could compare with Arne. He was my true love, my husband, no matter whether he was alive or dead. Nobody could ever replace him.’
She suddenly started crying, almost silently. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. He slid the napkin she had just given him towards her.
‘I sometimes long to have somebody to share my sorrow with,’ she said, still with tears in her eyes. ‘Maybe that’s why loneliness can feel so oppressive. Just think, having to invite a total stranger into your house so that you have somebody to cry with.’
‘What about your son?’ Wallander asked tentatively.
‘He lives in Abisko. That’s a long way from here. He comes to see me once a year, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife and some of his children. He keeps trying to persuade me to move there, but it’s too far north for me, too cold. Old waitresses get swollen feet and can’t cope with cold temperatures.’
‘What does he do in Abisko?’
‘Something to do with forestry. I think he counts trees.’
‘But you have settled here in Markaryd?’
‘I used to live here when I was a child, before we moved to Stockholm. I didn’t really want to leave. I moved back here to prove that I’m still just as obstinate as I always was. And it’s cheap. A waitress isn’t in a position to save up a fortune.’
‘And you were a waitress for a long time, weren’t you?’
‘For all those years, yes. Cups, glasses, plates, in and out, a conveyor belt that never stopped. Restaurants, hotels, and once even a Nobel Prize banquet. I remember having the great honour of serving Ernest Hemingway his meal. He actually looked at me once. I longed to tell him that he should write a book about the terrible fate of so many sailors during the Second World War, but of course I didn’t say a word. I think it was 1954. In any case, Arne had been dead for a long time by then. Gunnar was practically a teenager.’
‘But sometimes you also worked in private banqueting halls, is that right?’
‘I liked to have a bit of variety. And I wasn’t the type to keep quiet when a restaurateur didn’t behave as he should. I used to speak out on behalf of my fellow workers, not just for myself, and of course, that meant I got the sack now and then. I was very active as a trade unionist in those days.’
‘Let’s talk about this particular private party facility,’ said Wallander, judging that the right moment had now arrived.
He pointed to the newspaper article. She put on a pair of glasses that had been hanging on a ribbon around her neck, glanced through the article, then slid it to one side.
‘Let me start by defending myself,’ she said with a laugh. ‘We were paid very well to serve those unpleasant officers. A poor waitress like me could earn as much for one evening there as I was normally paid for a whole month, if things turned out well. They were all drunk by the time they went home, and some of them used to hand out hundred-krona notes like a farmer spreading muck in his fields. It could add up to a considerable sum.’
‘Where was this place?’
‘On Ostermalm - doesn’t it say that in the article? It was owned by a man who had previously been associated with Per Engdahl’s Nazi movement. Despite his disgusting political views, he was a very good cook. He’d made a small fortune working as a chef for some high-ranking German officers who had fled to Argentina. They paid him well, he served them whatever food they asked for, said “Heil Hitler” now and again, and at the end of the 1950s returned home and was able to buy that place on Ostermalm. Everything I’ve just told you is what I was told by reliable sources.’
‘And who might they be?’
She hesitated for a moment before answering.
‘People who had been members of the Engdahl movement, but left,’ she said.
Wallander was beginning to realise that he had not really understood Fanny Klarstrom’s background properly.
‘Would I be correct in thinking that you weren’t only active in trade union circles, but that you also had political interests?’
‘I was an active Communist. I suppose I still am, in a way. The idea of a world in which everybody has a common cause with everybody else is still the only ideal I can believe in. The only political truth that can’t be questioned, in my opinion.’
‘Did that have anything to do with you applying for a job waiting on those officers?’
‘I was asked to apply by the party. It was of some interest to know what conservative naval officers talked about among themselves. Nobody suspected that a waitress with swollen legs would remember what they
