The Return of the Dancing Master Read online

  He stopped short. Next to the trunk of a pine tree was a pile that had clearly been made by a human. Faeces and paper. His heart started beating faster. He was right. Somebody had camped by the side of the lake. A person who smoked cigarettes and didn’t trouble to bury his excreta.

  Even so, there was nothing to link the camper with Herbert Molin. He went back to where the tent must have been. There had to be some connection with the main road, or a track where the man in the tent might have left his car.

  The shortcomings of his argument were immediately obvious to him. The camping site could well have been a meticulously arranged hiding place. The idea of a car parked near the main road didn’t fit in with that. What were the alternatives? A motorbike or an ordinary bicycle would be easier to hide than a car. Or perhaps somebody else had driven the camper here.

  He looked over the lake. There was another possibility, of course. The camper could have come that way. But where’s the boat?

  Larsson, he thought, is the man I have to talk to. There’s no reason why I should be playing the private detective here. It’s the police in Jämtland and Härjedalen that have to sort this out. He sat on the fallen tree again. It was colder. The sun was setting. There was a flapping noise in the trees. When he turned to look, the bird had already disappeared. He started retracing his steps. A brooding silence prevailed around Molin’s house. The chill emanating from the events that had taken place here was getting to him.

  He drove back to Sveg. He stopped at the Spar shop in Linsell and bought the local newspaper, Härjedalen, published every Thursday (except public holidays). The man behind the counter gave him a friendly smile. Lindman could see he was curious.

  “We don’t get very many visitors here in the autumn,” the man said. His identity disk said that his name was Torbjörn Lundell. Lindman thought he might as well tell him the truth. “I knew Herbert Molin,” he said. “We worked together before he retired.”

  Lundell looked doubtfully at him. “You’re police,” he said. “Can’t our own force cope with this, then?”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with the investigation.”

  “But even so, you’ve come here, from as far away as … Halland, was it?”

  “Västergötland. I’m on holiday. But Herbert told you that, did he? That he came from Borås?”

  Lundell shook his head. “It was the police said that. But he used to shop here. Every other week. Always on a Thursday. Never said a word unless he had to. Always bought the same things. He was a bit choosy when it came to coffee, though. I had to order it specially for him. French coffee.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Thursday, the week before he died.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about him?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Was he different at all?”

  “He was the same as ever. Didn’t say a word more than he had to.”

  Lindman hesitated. He ought not to have lapsed so easily into his role as a police officer. Rumours would get out that there was a policeman from some distant place, asking awkward questions. Nevertheless there was one question he simply couldn’t resist asking.

  “Have you had any other customers lately? Ones you don’t usually have?”

  “That’s what the fuzz from Östersund asked me. And the officer from Sveg. I told ’em the way it was – apart from a few Norwegians and some berry pickers from Belgium last week, I haven’t seen a soul here that I didn’t know.”

  Lindman thanked him, left the shop and continued towards Sveg. It was dark by now. He was feeling distinctly hungry.

  He’d got an answer to one of his questions, though. There was a police presence in Sveg. Even if the investigation was based in Östersund.

  Shortly before he came to Glissjöberg an elk ran over the road into his headlights. He managed to brake in time. The animal disappeared into the trees at the side of the road. He waited to see if others would follow it, but none did.

  He parked outside his hotel. There was a group of men in overalls chatting away in reception. He went up to his room and sat on the bed. Before he knew where he was, he had visions of himself lying in bed with tubes attached to his body and face. Elena was in a chair at the side of his bed, crying.

  He jumped up and slammed his fist hard into the wall. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Another of the test drivers.

  “Did you want something?” the man said.

  “What on earth would I want?”

  “You knocked on the wall.”

  “It must have been from somewhere else.”

  Lindman slammed the door in the driver’s face. I’ve made my first enemy in Härjedalen, he thought. Just when I should be concentrating on making friends. That set him thinking. Why did he have so few friends? Why didn’t he move in with Elena and start living the life he really yearned for? Why did he lead a life that left him all on his own, now that he was faced with a serious illness? He had no answer to that.

  He thought about phoning Elena, but decided to eat first. He went down to the dining room and chose a window table. He was the only customer. He could hear the sound from a television set coming from the bar. To his surprise he found that the girl in reception had been reincarnated as a waitress. He ordered a steak and a beer. As he ate, he thumbed through the newspaper he’d bought in Linsell. He read all the deaths column, and tried to imagine his own obituary. He ordered a coffee after the meal, and stared out into the darkness.

  He left the dining room and paused in reception, wondering whether to go for a walk or to return to his room. He chose the latter course. He rang Elena’s number. She picked up immediately. Lindman had the impression she’d been sitting by the phone, waiting for him to ring.

  “Where are you?”

  “In Sveg.”

  “What’s it like there?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Cold, and I feel lonely.”

  “I don’t understand why you’ve gone there.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “Come back home, then.”

  “If I could, I’d start back right away. But I’ll be here for a few more days.”

  “Can’t you tell me you miss me, at least?”

  “You know I do.”

  He gave her the hotel telephone number, and hung up. Neither of them liked talking on the phone. Their conversations were often short. Even so, Lindman had the feeling she was close by his side.

  He was tired. It had been a long day. He untied his laces and kicked his shoes away from the side of the bed. Then he lay down and stared at the ceiling. I must make up my mind what I’m doing here, he thought. I came here to try to understand what had happened, to understand what Molin had been so frightened of. Now I’ve seen the house where he was murdered, and I’ve found a camping site that might have been a hiding place.

  He wondered what to do next. The obvious thing would be to drive up to Östersund and meet this Larsson.

  But then what?

  Maybe the journey here was pointless. He should have gone to Mallorca. The Jämtland police would do what they had to do. One day he’d find out what had happened. Somewhere out there was a murderer waiting to be arrested.

  He lay on his side and looked at the blank television screen. He could hear some young people laughing in the street below. Had he laughed at all during the day that had just passed? He searched his memory, but couldn’t even remember a smile. Just at the moment I’m not the person I usually am, he thought. A man who’s always laughing. At the moment I’m a man with a malignant lump on his tongue who’s scared to death about what’s going to happen next.

  Then he looked at his shoes. Something had stuck to one of the soles, he discovered, trapped in the pattern of the rubber sole. A stone from the gravel path, he thought. He reached to winkle it out.

  But it wasn’t a stone. It was part of a jigsaw puzzle piece. He sat up and adjusted the bedside lamp. The piece was soft and discoloured by soil. He was certain he hadn’t stood
on any pieces inside the house. It might have been outside the house. Nevertheless, his intuition told him that the jigsaw piece had stuck to the sole of his shoe at the place where the tent had been pitched. Whoever killed Herbert Molin had been camping at the lakeside.

  CHAPTER 6

  The discovery of the broken jigsaw puzzle piece livened him up somewhat. He sat at the table and started making notes about all that had happened in the course of the day. It took the form of a letter. At first, he couldn’t think to whom it ought to be addressed. It occurred to him that it should go to the doctor who was expecting to see him in Borås in the morning of November 19. Was there nobody else to write to? Perhaps it was that Elena wouldn’t understand what he was talking about? At the top of the page he wrote: The fear of Herbert Molin, and underlined the words with forceful strokes of his pen. Then he noted one by one the observations he’d made in and around the house, and where the tent had been. He tried to draw some conclusions, but the only thing that seemed to him definite was that Molin’s murder had long been planned.

  It was 10 p.m. He hesitated, but decided to phone Larsson at home and tell him he would come and see him in Östersund the following day. He looked for the number in the phone book. There were a lot of Larssons, but predictably only one Giuseppe, a police officer. His wife answered. Lindman explained who he was. She sounded friendly. While he was waiting, he wondered what Larsson’s hobby might be. Why didn’t he have a hobby himself, apart from football? He hadn’t managed to find an answer before Larsson came to the phone.

  “Stefan Lindman,” he said. “From Borås. I hope this isn’t too late.”

  “Not quite. Another half-hour and I’d have been asleep. Where are you?”

  “In Sveg.”

  “Just down the road, then.” Larsson roared with laughter. “A couple of hundred kilometres is nothing to us up here. Where do you get to if you drive two hundred kilometres from Borås?”

  “Almost to Malmö.”

  “There you are, you see.”

  “I thought I might visit you in Östersund tomorrow.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll be there from quite early in the morning. The police station is behind the National Rural Agency building. It’s a small town. You’ll have no trouble in finding it. When had you thought of coming?”

  “I can fit in with you. Whenever you’ve got time.”

  “How about 11 a.m.? We have a meeting at 9.00 of our little murder squad.”

  “Have you got a suspect?”

  “We’ve got nothing at all,” said Larsson, cheerfully. “But we’ll solve this one in the end, we hope. We’ll be discussing tomorrow if we need any help from Stockholm. Somebody who can draw up a profile of the fellow we’re looking for would be useful. Could be interesting. Up here, we’ve never been faced with anything like this before.”

  “They’re good at that,” Lindman said. “We’ve had some help from them in Borås now and then.”

  “See you tomorrow, then. 11 a.m.”

  Then he went out. The driver next door was snoring. Lindman went down the stairs as quietly as he could. His room key also fitted the front door. The lights were out in reception, the door to the restaurant closed. It was 10.30. When he emerged into the street he found that a wind had blown up. He pulled his jacket tightly round him and started walking through the empty streets. He came to the railway station, which was dark and locked. He read a notice and learned that trains no longer came here. The old “Inland Railway”, he thought. That’s what the line used to be called, if I remember rightly. Nothing left but rusting rails. He continued on his nocturnal ramble, passed a park with swings and tennis courts and came to the church. The main door was locked. In front of the school was a statue of a lumberjack. He tried to make out the features of the man. In the poor light of the street lamps they seemed to be expressionless.

  He hadn’t seen a single person. When he got back to the hotel, he lay down on the bed for a while and watched the television with the sound turned down. He could still hear the man next door snoring through the paper-thin wall.

  It was 4.30 before he got to sleep. His head was a vacuum.

  He was up again at 7 a.m. His head throbbed with tired thoughts. He sat at a table alone in the dining room, which was teeming with early-bird test drivers. The girl from reception was playing the part of waitress again.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said.

  It was raining by the time he came to Östersund. He drove around the town until he discovered the gloomy building with a red sign for the “National Rural Agency”. He wondered what on earth an organisation like that actually did. Was its function just to facilitate the abandonment of Swedish rural communities?

  He found a parking place in a side street and stayed in the car. Still 45 minutes to go before his meeting with Larsson. He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. I have death in my body, he thought. I have to take that seriously, but I can’t get my head round it. You can’t pin down death – not your own, at least. I can understand that Molin is dead. I’ve seen the traces of his death struggle. But my own death? I can’t cope with imagining that. It’s like the elk that ran across the road just before I came to Linsell. I’m still not sure that it really existed, or whether I just imagined it.

  At 11 a.m. precisely, Lindman walked through the front door of the police station. To his surprise, the woman in reception looked very like one of the receptionists in Borås. He wondered if the National Police Board had passed a motion requiring all police receptionists to look alike.

  He explained who he was.

  “Larsson told us to expect you,” she said, pointing to the nearest corridor. “His office is down there, the second room on the left.”

  Lindman knocked on the door with Detective Inspector Larsson on it. The man who opened it was tall and very powerfully built. His reading glasses were pushed up over his forehead.

  “You’re punctual,” he said, almost hustling him into the room and closing the door behind them.

  Lindman sat in the visitor’s chair. He recognised the way the office was furnished from the police station in Borås. We don’t only wear uniforms, he thought. Our offices are uniform as well.

  Larsson sat in his desk chair and crossed his hands over his stomach. “Have you been up in this part of the world before?” he asked.

  “Never. Uppsala once, when I was a child, but that’s as far north as I’ve been before.”

  “Uppsala is southern Sweden. Here in Östersund you still have half of Sweden to go as you travel north. It used to be a very long way from here to Stockholm. Not any more. Flights can take you to wherever you like in Sweden in just a few hours. In the space of a few decades Sweden has turned from a big country into a little one.”

  Lindman pointed to the large wall map.

  “How big is your police district?”

  “Big enough and more besides.”

  “How many police officers are there in Härjedalen?”

  Larsson thought for a moment. “Five, maybe six in Sveg, a couple in Hede. And the odd one more here and there, in Funäsdalen, for instance. Possibly 15 in all, depending on how many are on duty at a given time.”

  They were interrupted by a knock on the door. It opened before Larsson could react. The man in the doorway was the polar opposite of Larsson, short and very thin.

  “I thought Nisse should sit in on this,” Larsson said. “We are the ones in charge of the investigation.”

  Lindman stood up to shake hands. The man who’d joined them was reserved and serious. He spoke very softly and Lindman had difficulty gathering that his surname was Rundström. Larsson seemed to be affected by his presence. He sat up straighter in his chair, and his smile disappeared. The mood had changed.

  “We thought we ought to have a little chat,” Larsson said, cautiously. “About this and that.”

  Rundström had not sat down, although there was a spare chair. He leaned against the door fr
ame and avoided looking Lindman in the eye.

  “We had a call this morning,” he said. “From a man who reported that a police officer from Borås was conducting an investigation in the region of Linsell. He was a bit upset, and wondered if the local police had handed the investigation over to outsiders.” Before going on he paused to examine his hands. “He was a bit upset,” Rundström repeated. “And it would be fair to say that we were upset as well.”

  Lindman had broken out in a sweat. “I can think of two possibilities,” he said. “The man who phoned was either Abraham Andersson – he lives in a farmhouse called Dunkärret – or it was the owner of the Spar shop in Linsell.”

  “I expect it was Lundell,” Rundström said. “But we don’t like police officers from faraway places coming here and poking their noses into our investigations.”

  Lindman saw red. “I’m not conducting my own investigation,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Larsson here. I told him I’d worked with Molin for quite a few years. I’m on holiday, and so I came here. It doesn’t seem all that strange that I would have visited the scene of the murder.”

  “It creates confusion,” Rundström said, in his soft, barely audible voice.

  “I bought the local paper,” Lindman said, no longer bothering to conceal his anger. “I told the man who I was and asked if Molin did his shopping there.”