The Troubled Man
Every morning Hakan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter’s day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace.
Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as Hakan’s son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at Hakan’s 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in mystery. Could this be connected to his disappearance? When Hakan’s wife Louise also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth.
His search leads him down dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage, betrayal and new information about events during the Cold War that threatens to cause a political scandal on a scale unprecedented in Swedish history. The investigation also forces Kurt to look back over his own past and consider his hopes and regrets, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us.
And then an even darker cloud appears on the horizon…
The return of Kurt Wallander, for his final case, has already caused a sensation around the globe.
The Troubled Man
confirms Henning Mankell’s position as the king of crime writing.
ALSO BY HENNING MANKELL
Kurt Wallander Series
Faceless Killers
The Dogs of Riga
The White Lioness
The Man Who Smiled
Sidetracked
The Fifth Woman
One Step Behind
Firewall
Before the Frost
The Pyramid
Fiction
The Return of the Dancing Master
Chronicler of the Winds
Depths
Kennedy’s Brain
The Eye of the Leopard
Italian Shoes
The Man from Beijing
Daniel
Non-fiction
I Die, but the Memory Lives On
Young Adult Fiction
A Bridge to the Stars
Shadows in the Twilight
When the Snow Fell
The Journey to the End of the World
Children’s Fiction
The Cat Who Liked Rain
Troubled Man
HENNING MANKELL
Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409019459
Published by Harvill Secker 2011
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright (c) Henning Mankell 2009
English translation copyright (c) Laurie Thompson 2011
Henning Mankell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published with the title
Den orolige mannen
in 2009 by Leopard Forlag, Stockholm in arrangement with Leonhardt & Hoier Literary Agency, Copenhagen
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
HARVILL SECKER
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846553714 (hardback)
ISBN 9781846553721 (trade paperback)
Part 2
Incidents Under the Surface
Part 3
The Sleeping Beauty’s Slumber
People always leave traces
.
No person is without a shadow
.
You forget what you want to remember
and remember what you would prefer to forget
.
- Graffiti on buildings in New York City
The story begins with a sudden fit of rage.
The cause of it was a report that had been submitted the previous evening, which the prime minister was now reading at his poorly lit desk. But shortly before that, the stillness of morning held sway in the Swedish government offices.
It was 1983, an early-spring day in Stockholm, with a damp fog hovering over the city and trees that had not yet come into leaf.
When Prime Minister Olof Palme finished reading the last page, he stood up and walked over to a window. Seagulls were wheeling around outside.
The report was about the submarines. The accursed submarines that in the autumn of 1982 were presumed to have violated Swedish territorial waters. In the middle of it all there was a general election in Sweden, and Olof Palme had been asked by the Speaker to form a new government since the non-socialist parties had lost several seats and no longer had a parliamentary majority. The first thing the new government did was to set up a commission to investigate the incident with the submarines, which had never been forced to surface. Former defence minister Sven Andersson was chairman of the commission. Olof Palme had now read his report and was none the wiser. The conclusions were incomprehensible. He was furious.
But it should be noted that this was not the first time Palme had got worked up about Sven Andersson. His aversion really dated back to the day in June 1963, just before midsummer, when an elegantly dressed grey-haired fifty-seven-year-old man was arrested on Riksbron in the centre of Stockholm. It was done so discreetly that nobody in the vicinity noticed anything unusual. The man arrested was Stig Wennerstrom, a colonel in the Swedish air force who had been exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union.
When he was arrested, the prime minister at the time, Tage Erlander, was on his way home from a trip abroad, one of his few holidays, to one of Reso’s resorts in Riva del Sole. When Erlander stepped off the plane and was mobbed by a large crowd of journalists, not only was he totally unprepared, he also knew next to nothing about the incident. Nobody had told him about the arrest, and he had heard nothing about a suspicious Colonel Wennerstrom. It is possible that the name and the suspicions had been mentioned in passing when the minister of defence held one of his infrequent information sessions with the prime minister, but not in connection with anything serious, anything specific. There were always rumours circulating about suspected Russian spies in the murky waters that constituted the so-called Cold War. And so Erlander’s response was less than illuminating. The man who had been prime minister without a break for what seemed like an eternity - twenty-three years, to be exact - stood there open-mouthed and had no idea what to say since neither Defence Minister Andersson nor anybody else involved had informed him of what was going on. During the last part of his journey home, from Copenhagen to Stockholm, which barely took an hour, he could have been filled in and thus been prepared to say something to the excited journalists; but nobody had met him at Kastrup Airport and accompanied him on the last leg of the flight.
During the days that followed, Erlander came very close to resigning as prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats. Never before had he been so disappointed in his colleagues in government. And Olof Palme, who had already emerged as Erlander’s chosen successor, naturally shared his mentor’s anger at the nonchalance that had resulted in Erlander’s humiliation. Palme watched over his master like a savage bloodhound, as they used to say in circles close to the government.
He could never forgive Sven Andersson for what he had done to Tage Erlander.
Subsequently, a lot of people wondered why Palme included Andersson in his governments. However, it was not particularly difficult to understand why. Of course Palme could have refused; but in practice it simply wasn’t possible. Andersson had a lot of power and a lot of influence among the grass roots of the party. He was the son of a labourer, unlike Palme, who had direct links to Baltic nobility, had officers in his family - indeed, he was a reserve officer himself - and had come from the well-to-do Swedish upper class. He had no grass-roots support in the party. Olof Palme was a defector who was no doubt serious about his political allegiance to the Social Democrats, but, nevertheless, he was an outsider, a political pilgrim who had wandered into the party.
*
Now Palme could no longer contain his fury. He turned to face Sven Andersson, who was sitting hunched up on the grey sofa in the prime minister’s office. Palme was bright red in the face, and his arms were twitching in the strange way they did when he lost his temper.