you’d have discovered that one of the trains catches up with the other one after exactly fifty-nine minutes. I make that happen now and then, to check that the sand in the hourglass isn’t running more slowly, or that the transformer doesn’t need adjusting.’
As a child Wallander had always dreamed of owning a model train set, but his father was never able to afford it. Trains like the ones in front of him now still seemed an unattainable luxury.
They sat down on the balcony. It was a hot summer’s day. Talboth had brought out a jug of iced water and two glasses. Wallander decided that there was no reason to beat around the bush. His first question formulated itself.
‘What did you think when you heard that Louise had disappeared?’
Talboth’s bright eyes were firmly fixed on Wallander.
‘I suppose I wasn’t all that surprised,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t need to tell you what you already know. Hakan’s increasingly intolerable suspicions - I suppose we can call it a certainty now - that he was married to a traitor. Is that what you say? My Swedish isn’t always perfect.’
‘That’s correct,’ said Wallander. ‘If you’re a spy, you are usually a traitor. Unless you deal in more specific things, such as industrial espionage.’
‘Hakan ran away because he couldn’t put up with it any more,’ Talboth said. ‘He needed time to think. Before Louise disappeared he had more or less made a decision. He was going to hand over the proof he had to the military intelligence services. Everything would be done according to the rule book. He didn’t intend to spare himself or his own reputation. He realised that Hans would also be affected, but that couldn’t be helped. It boiled down to a question of honour. When she disappeared, he was dumbfounded. He became increasingly scared. I began to worry after some of the phone conversations I had with him. He almost seemed to be suffering from paranoia. The only explanation he could think of for Louise’s disappearance was that she had managed to read his thoughts. He was afraid she would find out where he was. If not her, one of her employers in the Russian intelligence service. Hakan was convinced that Louise had been and still was so important that they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her in order to prevent any revelations. Even if she was too old now to be an active spy, it was important that she not be unmasked. Naturally, the Russians didn’t want to reveal what they knew. Or didn’t know.’
‘What did you think when you heard that she had committed suicide?’
‘I never believed that. I thought it was obvious she had been murdered.’
‘Why?’
‘Let me answer by asking a question. Why would she commit suicide?’
‘Perhaps she was overwhelmed by guilt. Perhaps she realised the torture she had inflicted on her husband. There are lots of possible reasons. In my police work I’ve come across a lot of people who committed suicide for much less serious reasons.’
Talboth considered what Wallander had said.
‘You may be right. But I haven’t told you my overall impression of Louise. I knew her well. Even though she concealed large parts of her identity, I got to know her intimately. She wasn’t the kind of person who commits suicide.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Certain people simply don’t commit suicide. It’s as straightforward as that.’
Wallander shook his head.
‘That’s not my experience,’ he said. ‘My feeling is that, under unfortunate circumstances, anybody at all can take their own life.’
‘I’m not going to start arguing with you. You can interpret my view however you like. I’m convinced that your experience as a police officer is important. But you shouldn’t just shrug off the experience I have from working for many years in the American security services.’
‘We know now that she was in fact murdered. And we also know that there was incriminating evidence in her handbag.’
Talboth had raised his glass of water. He frowned and put it down again without having drunk. Wallander thought he detected a different kind of alertness in him.
‘I didn’t know that. I had no idea they’d confiscated secret material.’
‘You’re not supposed to know. I shouldn’t have told you. But I did so for Hakan’s sake. I trust it will go no further.’
‘I won’t say anything to anybody. You learn how to do that when you work in the intelligence service. The day you resign, nothing is left in your head. You clear out your memory just as other employees clear out their lockers or desks.’
‘What would you say if I were to tell you that Louise was probably poisoned using methods patented by the East Germans in the good old days? In order to conceal executions and make them look like suicides?’
Talboth nodded slowly. Once again he raised his glass of iced water to his mouth; this time he drank some.
‘That also happens in the CIA,’ he said. ‘Needless to say, we have often found ourselves in a position that made it necessary to liquidate somebody. In such a way that convinced everybody it was suicide.’
Wallander wasn’t surprised by Talboth’s unwillingness to talk about things not directly connected to Hakan or Louise von Enke; but he’d made up his mind to take this as far as possible.
‘Anyway, we can assume that Louise was murdered,’ Wallander said.
‘Could it be the Swedish secret service that liquidated her?’
‘That’s not the way things work in Sweden. Besides, there’s no reason to assume she’d been unmasked. In other words, we don’t have a potential perpetrator with a plausible motive.’
Talboth moved his wicker chair into the shade. He said nothing for a while, chewing his bottom lip.
‘It’s tempting to think that it’s a sort of crime of passion,’ he said eventually.
He sat upright on his chair.
‘Working in Sweden was naturally never the same as being behind the Iron Curtain, for as long as it existed,’ he said. ‘Anybody who was caught there was almost always executed. Assuming you weren’t so important that you could be used in exchange deals. One traitor swapped for another. Spies can get careless when they’ve been out in the field, always in danger of being exposed. The pressure can become too much. That’s why spies sometimes turn against one another. The violence turns in on itself. Somebody’s success can give rise to jealousy, and the competitive urge replaces cooperation and loyalty. That is a distinct possibility in Louise’s case. For a very special reason.’
Now it was Wallander’s turn to move his chair into the shade. He leaned forward to pick up his glass of water. The ice had melted.
‘As Hakan has already told you, rumours about a Swedish spy had been circulating for a while,’ said Talboth. ‘The CIA had known about it for ages. When I worked at the Stockholm embassy, we put a lot of resources into trying to solve this problem. The fact that somebody was selling Swedish military secrets to the Russians was a problem for us and for NATO. Sweden’s arms industry was at the cutting edge when it came to technical innovations. We used to have regular meetings with our Swedish colleagues about this worrying situation. And with colleagues from England, France and Norway, among others. We were faced with an incredibly skilful agent. We also realised that there must be an intermediary, an “informer”, in Sweden. Somebody passing on information to the agent, who in turn sent it on to Russia. We were surprised that we - or rather, our Swedish colleagues - could never find any clues as to who it was. The Swedes had a shortlist of twenty names, all of them officers in one service or another. But the Swedish investigators got nowhere. And we didn’t manage to help them either. It was as if we were hunting a phantom. Some genius hit on the idea of calling the person we were looking for “Diana”. Like the Phantom’s girlfriend. I thought it was idiotic. Mainly because there was nothing to suggest that a woman was involved. But it would eventually transpire that the nitwit responsible had unknowingly but devastatingly stumbled onto something very relevant. In any case, that was the situation until late March 1987. The eighteenth, to be precise. Something happened on that day that changed the whole situation, sent several Swedish intelligence officers out into the cold, and forced us all to start thinking differently. Has Hakan told you about this?’
‘No.’
‘It began outside Amsterdam at Schiphol, the big airport, early in the morning. A man appeared outside the
