The Return of the Dancing Master (11 page)

“What do you remember about Molin?”

The reply surprised Lindman.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I never met him.”

“I don't follow.”

“It's very simple. Somebody else took care of the matter for him. Got in touch with me, took a look at a few houses, and eventually made the decision. As far as I know, Molin was never here.”

“Who was the middleman?”

“A woman by the name of Elsa Berggren. With an address in Sveg.” Marklund handed the file over. “Here's the authorization. She had the right to make decisions and sign the deal on Molin's behalf.”

Lindman examined the signature. He remembered it from the Borås days. It was Molin's signature.

“So you never met Herbert Molin?”

“I never even spoke to him on the phone.”

“How did you come into contact with this woman?”

“The usual way. She phoned me.”

Marklund leafed through the file, then pointed.

“Here's her address and telephone number,” he said. “She's no doubt the person you should talk to. Not me. That's what I'll tell Giuseppe Larsson. Incidentally, I wonder if I'll be able to resist the temptation to ask him how he came by his name. Do you happen to know?”

“No.”

Marklund closed the file.

“Isn't it a bit unusual? Not meeting the person with whom you were doing business?”

“I was doing business with Elsa Berggren, and I did meet her. But I never met Molin. It's not all that unusual. I sell quite a lot of vacation cottages in the mountains to Germans and Dutchmen. They have people who take care of the details for them.”

“So there was nothing unusual about this transaction.”

“Nothing at all.”

Marklund accompanied him as far as the front gate.

“Maybe there was, though,” he said, as Lindman was walking through the gate.

“Maybe there was what?”

“I remember Elsa Berggren saying on one occasion that her client didn't want to use any of the big real estate agencies. I recall thinking that was a bit odd.”

“Why?”

“If you're looking for a house you wouldn't as a rule start off with a small firm.”

“How do you interpret that?”

Hans Marklund smiled. “I don't interpret it at all. I'm merely telling you what I remember.”

 

 

Lindman drove back towards Ostersund. After ten kilometers or so he turned off onto a forest road and switched off the engine.

The Berggren woman, whoever she might be, had been asked by Molin to avoid the big real estate agents. Why? Lindman could only think of one reason. Molin had wanted to buy his house as discreetly as possible.

The impression he'd had from the very start had turned out to be correct. The house in which Molin had spent the last years of his life wasn't really a house at all. It was a hiding place.

T
hat evening Lindman wandered through the life of Herbert Molin. Reading between the lines of all the notes and reports, statements and forensic details that had already been collected in Larsson's files, despite the fact that the investigation hadn't been going for very long, Lindman was able to compile a picture of Molin that was new to him. He discovered circumstances that sometimes made him thoughtful and at others surprised. The man he thought he'd known turned out to be a quite different person, a complete stranger.

It was midnight when he closed the last of the files. Larsson had occasionally stopped by during the course of the evening. You could hardly say they indulged in conversation; they drank coffee and exchanged a few words about how the evening was going for the police emergency service in Ostersund. Everything had been quiet for the first few hours, but soon after 9 P.M. Larsson had to investigate a burglary in Häggenås. When he eventually returned, Lindman had just reached the end of the last of the files.

 

 

What had he found? A map, it seemed to him, with large blank patches. A man with a history with large gaps. A man who sometimes strayed from the marked path and disappeared, only to turn up again when least expected. Molin was a man whose past was elusive and in places very difficult to follow.

Lindman had made notes as the evening progressed. When he'd finished the last file and put it on one side, he looked through his notebook and summarized what he'd discovered.

The most surprising thing as far as Lindman was concerned was that, according to the documents the Ostersund police had requested from the tax authorities, Herbert Molin had been born with a different name. On March 10, 1923, he had come into this world at the hospital in Kalmar and been baptized August Gustaf Herbert. His parents were cavalry officer Axel Mattson-Herzén and his wife Marianne. That name had disappeared in June 1951 when the Swedish Patent and Registration Office allowed him to change his surname to Molin. At the same time he had changed his Christian name from August Gustaf Herbert to Herbert.

Lindman sat staring at the name. Two questions occurred to him immediately. Why had Mattson-Herzén changed his surname and his Christian name? And why Molin, which must be about as common as Mattson? So many people in Sweden had the same surname that changing it was not unusual. But most people who changed their surname did so to escape from a common one and acquire one that nobody else had, or at least one that was not always being mixed up with somebody else's.

August Mattson-Herzén was twenty-eight years old in 1951. At the time he'd been serving in the regular army, an infantry lieutenant in Boden. It seemed to Lindman that something must have happened then, that the early 1950s were important years in Molin's life. There was a series of significant changes. In 1951 he changed his name. The following year, in March 1952, he applied for and received an honorable discharge from the army. He married when he left the army, and had children in 1953 and 1955, first a son christened Herman, and then a daughter, Veronica. He and his wife Jeanette moved from Boden in 1952 to an address in Solna outside Stockholm, Råsundavägen 132. Nowhere could Lindman find any information about what Molin did to earn a living. Five years passed before he appeared again as an employee, in October 1957, in the local authority offices in Alingsas. He was posted from there to Borås, and after the police force was nationalized in the 1960s, he became a police officer. In 1981 his wife filed for divorce. The following year he remarried, but wife number two, Kristina Cedergren, divorced him in 1986.

 

 

Lindman studied his notes. Between March 1952 and October 1957, Herbert Molin earned his living in some way unexplained in the files.
That is a relatively long time, more than five years. And he had changed his name. Why?

When Larsson returned from the break-in in Häggenås, he found Lindman standing by the window looking at the deserted street below. Larsson briefly explained the burglary, no big deal in fact: somebody had stolen two power saws from a garage.

“We'll get them,” he said. “We have a pair of brothers in Järpen who specialize in jobs of that kind. We'll nail them. What about you? What have you found out?”

“It's quite remarkable,” Lindman said. “I find a man I thought I knew, but he turns out to be somebody else altogether.”

“How so?”

“The change of name. And the strange gap between 1952 and 1957.”

“Obviously. I've thought about that name change as well,” Larsson said. “But we haven't really gotten that far into the investigation yet, if you see what I mean.”

Lindman understood. Murder investigations followed a certain pattern. In the beginning there was always the hope that they would catch the murderer at an early stage. If that didn't happen, they would set out on the long and often tedious gathering and then sorting of material.

Larsson yawned. “It's been a long day,” he said. “I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be just as long. When are you thinking of going back to Västergötland?”

“I haven't decided.”

Larsson yawned again. “I gathered that you had something to tell me. It was obvious from what you said and how you reacted when Rundström was here. The question is: can it wait until tomorrow?”

“It can wait.”

“You can't produce a murderer from out of a hat, I take it?”

“No.”

Larsson got to his feet. “I'll come to your hotel tomorrow morning. Perhaps we can have breakfast together? 7:30?”

Lindman agreed. They put the files back on a shelf and switched off the desk lamp. They walked together through the dimly-lit reception area. An officer was sitting in an inside room, taking a call.

“It always boils down to motive,” Larsson said. “Somebody wanted to murder Molin. That's for sure. He was a specifically targeted victim. Somebody saw in him a motive to commit murder.”

He yawned again. “But we can talk about that tomorrow.”

Larsson walked to his car, which was parked down the street. Lindman waved to him as he drove off and walked up the hill to the hotel. The town was deserted. He felt cold. He thought about his illness.

 

 

When Lindman came down to breakfast at precisely 7:30 A.M., Larsson was already waiting for him. He'd picked a corner table where they would be undisturbed. As they ate, Lindman told him about meeting Abraham Andersson and his walk along the shore of the lake that led him to the site where the tent had been. At that point Larsson pushed his half-eaten omelette to one side. Lindman produced the little parcel with the cigarette butt and the piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

“I can only assume the dogs didn't get that far,” he said. “I don't know whether it might still be worth sending a handler there now.”

“There was nothing to go on,” Larsson said. “We brought in three dogs by helicopter the day after we found him, but they didn't find a single scent.”

He picked up his briefcase from the floor and produced a xerox of a map of the area around Molin's house. Lindman took a toothpick and indicated the spot where the tent had been pitched. Larsson put on his reading glasses and examined the map.

“There are some snowmobile tracks marked,” he said, “but there's no road that could take a car to that part of the shore. Whoever set up camp there must have walked for at least two kilometers over quite difficult ground. Unless he used the road to Molin's house, and that seems unlikely.”

“What about the lake?”

“That's a possibility. There are several forestry roads on the other side with turnoffs at the edge of the lake. It would obviously be possible to paddle over in a canoe or an inflatable raft.”

He scrutinized the map for a few more minutes. Lindman waited.

“You might be right,” Larsson said, pushing the map aside.

“I wasn't following a road. I just happened to end up there.”

“It's not often that police officers just happen to stumble onto something. You could have been searching for something without realizing it,” Larsson said. He turned his attention to the bits of tobacco and the jigsaw puzzle piece.

“I'll take these and get forensic to give them the once-over,” he said. “Your campsite must also be examined, of course.”

“What's Rundström going to have to say about this?”

Larsson smiled. “There's nothing to stop me from telling him that I was the one who found the place.”

They both went for more coffee. Larsson was still limping.

“What did the real estate agent have to say?”

Lindman told him. Again, Larsson was all ears.

“Elsa Berggren?”

“I've got her address and telephone number.”

Larsson peered at him. “Have you spoken to her already?”

“No.”

“You'd better leave that to me.”

“Of course.”

“You've weighed in with some very useful observations,” Larsson said. “But Rundström's right of course when he says that this is something we have to figure out ourselves. I wanted to give you the opportunity to see how far we've gotten, but I can't let you get further involved than that.”

“I never expected you to.”

Larsson slowly drained his coffee.

“Tell me, why did you really come to Sveg?”

“I'm on sick leave. I had nothing else to do. And, after all, I knew Molin quite well.”

“Or you thought you did.”

Lindman was aware that the man sitting opposite him was somebody he didn't know at all. Even so, he had an urge to tell him about his illness. It was as if he could no longer bear the burden alone.