that she had hardly slept a wink.
She had a message to pass on, from Chief Inspector Ytterberg, who was in charge of the investigation into von Enke’s disappearance. Could Wallander please give him a call. She handed him a cordless phone, then stood up and went into the kitchen. Wallander could see her reflection in a wall mirror; she was standing in the middle of the floor, motionless, with her back to him.
Ytterberg spoke with an unmistakable northern accent.
‘It’s a full-scale investigation now,’ he began. ‘We’re pretty sure something must have happened to him. I gathered from his wife you were going to work through his papers.’
‘Haven’t you done that already?’
‘His wife has been through them without finding anything. I assume she wants you to double-check.’
‘Do you have any leads at all? Has anyone seen him?’
‘Only one unreliable witness who claims to have seen him in Lill-Jansskogen. That’s all.’
There was a pause, and Wallander heard Ytterberg telling someone to go away and come back later.
‘I’ll never get used to this,’ said Ytterberg when he resumed the conversation. ‘People seem to have stopped knocking on doors and just barge in.’
‘One of these days the national police commissioner will tell us all to sit in open-plan offices in order to increase our efficiency,’ said Wallander. ‘We’ll be able to hear one another’s witnesses and help out in other people’s investigations.’
Ytterberg chuckled. Wallander decided that he had found an excellent contact in the Stockholm police force.
‘One more thing,’ said Ytterberg. ‘In his active days, Hakan von Enke was a high-ranking naval officer. So it’s routine that the Sapo crowd will shove an oar in. Our security service colleagues are always on the lookout for a possible spy.’
Wallander was surprised.
‘Are you saying he’s under suspicion?’
‘Of course not. But they have to have something to show when next year’s budget comes under discussion.’
Wallander moved further away from the kitchen.
‘Just between you and me,’ he said in a low voice, ‘what do you think happened? Forget all the facts - what does your experience tell you?’
‘It looks pretty serious. He might have been ambushed in the woods and abducted. That’s what I think is most likely at the moment.’
Ytterberg asked for Wallander’s mobile phone number before hanging up. Wallander returned to his cup of tea, thinking he would have much preferred coffee. Louise returned from the kitchen and looked enquiringly at him. Wallander shook his head.
‘Nothing new. But they are taking his disappearance extremely seriously.’
She remained standing by the sofa.
‘I know he’s dead,’ she said out of the blue. ‘I’ve refused to think the worst so far, but now I can’t put it off any longer.’
‘There must be some basis for that conviction,’ said Wallander cautiously. ‘Is there anything in particular that makes you think that way right now?’
‘I’ve lived with him for forty years,’ she said. ‘He would never do this to me. Not to me and not to the rest of the family either.’
She hurried out of the room. Wallander heard the bedroom door close. He waited for a moment, then stood up and tiptoed into the hall and listened outside. He could hear her crying. Although he wasn’t an emotional type, he could feel a lump in his throat. He drank the rest of his tea, then went to von Enke’s study, where he had been the previous evening. The curtains were still drawn. He opened them and let in the light. Then he started searching through the desk, one drawer at a time. It was all very neat, with a place for everything. One of the drawers contained several old pipes, pipe cleaners and something that looked like a duster. He turned his attention to the other pedestal. Everything was just as neatly filed - old school reports, certificates, a pilot’s licence. In March 1958 Hakan von Enke had passed a test enabling him to pilot a single-engine plane, conducted at Bromma Airport. So he didn’t spend all his life down in the depths, Wallander thought. He imitated not only the fish, but the birds as well.
Wallander took out von Enke’s reports from the Norra Latin grammar school. He had top marks in history and Swedish, and also in geography. But he only just scraped by in German and religious studies. The next drawer contained a camera and a pair of earphones. When Wallander examined the camera, an old Leica, more closely, he noticed that it still had film. Either twelve pictures had been taken, or there were twelve exposures still available. He put the camera on the desktop. The earphones were also old. He guessed that they might have been state-of- the-art some fifty years ago. Why had von Enke kept them? There was nothing in the bottom drawer apart from a comic book with coloured pictures and speech bubbles retelling the story of
He didn’t hear Louise approaching. Suddenly she was there, in the doorway. She had removed all trace of her emotional breakdown, and her face was newly powdered. He held up the comic.
‘Why did he keep this?’
‘I think he got it from his father on a special occasion. He never told me any details.’
She left him to his own devices again. Wallander opened the remaining large drawer, at waist height between the two pedestals. Here the contents were anything but neatly ordered - letters, photographs, old airline tickets, a doctor’s certificate, a few bills. Why was everything jumbled up here, but not anywhere else? He decided to leave the contents of this drawer untouched for the time being, and left it open. The only thing he removed was the doctor’s certificate.
The man he was trying to track down had been vaccinated many times. As recently as three weeks ago he had been vaccinated against yellow fever, and also tetanus and jaundice. Stapled to the certificate was a prescription for antimalarial drugs. Wallander frowned. Yellow fever? Where might you be travelling to if you needed to be vaccinated against that? He returned the document to the drawer without having answered the question.
Wallander stood up and turned his attention to the bookcases. If the books told the truth, Hakan von Enke was very interested in English history and twentieth-century naval developments. There were also books on general history and a lot of political memoirs. Wallander noted that Tage Erlander’s memoirs were standing next to Stig Wennerstrom’s autobiography. To his surprise Wallander also discovered that von Enke had been interested in modern Swedish poetry. There were names Wallander didn’t recognise, others of poets he knew a little about - such as Sonnevi and Transtromer. He took out some of the books and noted that they showed signs of having been read. In one of Transtromer’s books somebody had made notes in the margin, and at one point had written: ‘Brilliant poem.’ Wallander read it, and he agreed. It was about the sighing of coniferous forests. There were what appeared to be the complete works of Ivar Lo-Johansson, and also of Vilhelm Moberg. Wallander’s image of the missing man was changing all the time, deepening. Nothing gave him the impression that the commander was vain and merely wanted to demonstrate to the world that he was interested in the arts. Wallander hated those types.
Wallander left the bookcases and turned his attention to the tall filing cabinet, opening drawer after drawer. Files, letters, reports, several private diaries, drawings of submarines labelled ‘Types commanded by me’. Everything was neat and tidy, apart from that desk drawer. Nevertheless, something was nagging at Wallander without his being able to put his finger on it. He sat down at the desk again, and contemplated the open filing cabinet. There was a brown leather armchair in one corner of the room, a table and a reading lamp with a red shade. Wallander moved from the desk chair to the reading chair. There were two books on the table, both of them open. One was old, Rachel Carson’s
