The Troubled Man (29 page)

The next day was warm, with no wind. A hawk hovered over the edge of a neighbouring field. Jussi was fascinated and sat motionless, watching the bird. Wallander had been up since five o’clock, impatient to hear what Sten Nordlander had to say.

At seven thirty Nordlander emerged from the guest room. He gazed out of the window at the garden and the vista beyond, obviously impressed.

‘The myth is that Skane is a flat and rather lifeless landscape,’ he said. ‘But this strikes me as much more than that. It feels to me like a gentle swell out at sea. And beyond it the waves.’

‘I see it in much the same way,’ Wallander said. ‘Dark, dense forests scare me to death. This openness makes it hard to hide. We all need to hide sometimes, no doubt, but some people do it too often.’

‘Have you been thinking along the same lines as I have? That maybe, for reasons we know nothing about, Hakan and Louise have gone into hiding?’

‘That is always a possibility when you are looking for missing persons.’

After breakfast Nordlander suggested they go for a walk.

‘I have to do some exercise every morning. It’s the only way to get my digestive juices flowing.’

Jussi raced off in a flash towards the trees, where little pools always seemed to have something interesting for a dog to sniff at.

‘There were times at the beginning of the seventies when we seriously thought the Russians were as strong from a military point of view as they appeared to be,’ Nordlander began. ‘Their October parades were telling the truth, or so it seemed. Thousands of military experts sat watching television images of armoured vehicles rolling past the Kremlin, and the most important question they were asking themselves was: What is it that we
can’t
see? That was when the Cold War was at its height, you could say. Before the spell broke.’

They stopped at a ditch where an improvised footbridge had collapsed. Wallander found another plank that was less rotten, and put it in place so that they could continue on their way.

‘“The spell broke,”’ Wallander repeated. ‘My old colleague Rydberg used to say that when a line of inquiry turned out to be completely wrong.’

‘In this case it was our realisation that the Russian defence forces were not as strong as we’d thought. It was a worrying insight that gradually dawned on those whose job it was to solve jigsaw puzzles using all the pieces of information gathered from spies, U-2 planes, or even everyday television. The Russian military, at all levels, was worn out and in many cases nothing more than an impressive-looking but empty shell. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, there was a very real and powerful threat of a possible nuclear attack. But just as the whole economic set-up was rotting away, so was the incompetent bureaucracy. The party no longer believed in what it was doing, and the defence forces were also disintegrating. That naturally gave the top brass in the Pentagon and NATO, and even in Sweden, a lot to think about. What would happen if it became public knowledge that the Russian bear was in fact no more than an aggressive little polecat?’

‘Presumably the threat of doomsday would be reduced?’

Nordlander seemed almost impatient when he answered.

‘Military men have never been especially philosophical by nature. They are practical people. Hiding inside every competent general or admiral is nearly always a pretty good engineer. Doomsday wasn’t the most important question as far as they were concerned. What do you think it was?’

‘Defence expenditure?’

‘Right. Why should the Western world continue to be on a war footing if their main enemy was no longer a threat? You can’t find a new enemy of similar proportions just like that. China and to some extent India were next in line. But at that time China was still a non-starter in military terms. The core of their armed forces was still an apparently endless supply of soldiers to deploy at any given moment. But that wasn’t sufficient motivation for the Western world to continue developing advanced weapons designed exclusively for the arms race with Russia. So there was suddenly a major problem. It simply wasn’t appropriate to reveal what everybody knew, that the Russian bear was now limping badly. It was essential to make sure the spell didn’t break.’

They came to a little hillock with a view of the sea. The previous year Wallander and Linda had carried there an old wooden bench she had bought at an auction for practically nothing. Now he and Nordlander sat down. Wallander shouted for Jussi, who clearly didn’t want to join them.

‘What we’re talking about took place when Russia was still a very real enemy,’ Nordlander went on. ‘It wasn’t only at ice hockey that we Swedes were convinced we’d never be able to beat them. We were certain that our enemies always came from the East, and hence we needed to be very aware of whatever they were up to in the Baltic Sea. It was around that time, at the end of the 1960s, that rumours started flying.’

Nordlander looked around, as if he were afraid that somebody might be listening to their conversation. A combine was busy close to the main road to Simrishamn. Now and then the distant buzz of traffic drifted up to the hillock.

‘We knew that the Russians had a big naval base in Leningrad. And they had quite a few more bases, more or less secret, dotted around the Baltic Sea and in East Germany. We in Sweden weren’t the only ones blasting our way down into the rocks underneath the Baltic Sea. The Germans had been doing it even during the Hitler period, and the Russians continued in the same tradition after the swastika had been replaced by the red flag. A rumour spread that there was a cable over the bottom of the Baltic Sea, between Leningrad and their Baltic satellites, that handled most of their important electronic messages. It was considered safer to lay your own cables than to risk your messages being intercepted by others listening in to radio traffic. We shouldn’t forget that Sweden was deeply involved in what was going on. One of our reconnaissance planes was shot down at the beginning of the fifties, and nowadays nobody has any doubt that they were spying on the Russians.’

‘You say the cable was a rumour?’

‘It was supposedly laid at the beginning of the 1960s, when the Russians really believed that they could match the Americans and maybe even outdo them. Don’t forget how put out we were when the first
Sputnik
started cruising around up there in space and everybody was amazed that it wasn’t the Yanks who had launched it. There was some justification for the Russian view. It was a time when they nearly caught up with the West. Looking back, if you want to be cynical, you could say that was when they should have attacked. If they had wanted to start a war and bring about the doomsday scenario you talked about. In any case, it’s rumoured that there was a defector from the East German security forces, a general with a chest full of medals who had acquired a taste for the good life in London, and he is supposed to have revealed the existence of the cable to his British counterpart. The British then sold the information for a staggering amount to their American friends, who were always sitting at the ready with their hand held out. The problem was that they couldn’t send the really advanced US submarines through the Oresund because the Russians would have detected them immediately. So they had to find less conspicuous methods - mini-submarines and so on. But they didn’t have precise information. Where exactly was the cable? In the middle of the Baltic Sea, or had they chosen the shortest route from the Gulf of Finland? Perhaps the Russians had been even more cunning and laid it near Gotland, where nobody would have expected to find it. But they kept on looking, and the intention was to attach to it the sister of that bugging cylinder they had already placed off Kamchatka.’

‘You mean the one that’s now lying on my kitchen table?’

‘But is that the one? There could well be several.’

‘Even so, it’s all so strange. Russia no longer exists as a great power. The Baltic states are free again; the former East Germans are now united with the West Germans. Shouldn’t a bugging device like that be relegated to some museum of the Cold War?’

‘You would think so. I’m not capable of answering that question. All I can do is confirm what the thing is that’s come into your possession.’

They continued their walk. It was only when they were back in the garden again that Wallander asked the most important question.

‘Where does this leave us with regard to the disappearance of Hakan and Louise?’

‘I don’t know. For me, it’s just becoming odder and odder. What are you going to do with the cylinder?’

‘Get in touch with the CID in Stockholm. The bottom line is that they are in charge of the investigation. What they do next in conjunction with Sapo has nothing to do with me.’

At eleven o’clock Wallander drove Nordlander back to Sturup Airport. They said their goodbyes outside the yellow-painted terminal building. Yet again, Wallander tried to pay Nordlander’s travel expenses. But Sten Nordlander shook his head.

‘I want to know what happened. Never forget that Hakan was my best friend. I think about him every day. And about Louise.’

He picked up his bag and went into the terminal. Wallander walked back to his car and drove home.

When he entered the house he felt exhausted and wondered if he was becoming ill again. He decided to take a shower.

The last thing he remembered was having difficulty closing the plastic shower curtain.

When he woke up he was in a hospital room. Linda was standing at the foot of the bed. Fixed to the back of his hand was an IV supplying him with fluid. He had no idea why he was there.

‘What happened?’

Linda told him, objectively, as if she were reading from a police report. Her words awoke no memories, merely filled the vacuum in his mind. She had called him at about six o’clock but there was no answer, even when she tried again repeatedly. By ten o’clock she was so worried that she left Klara with Hans, who was at home for once, and drove out to Loderup. She had found him in the shower, soaking wet and unconscious. She had called an ambulance, and was able to give the doctor who examined him some background information. It wasn’t long before it was established that Wallander had gone into insulin shock. His blood sugar level had become so low that he had lost consciousness.

‘I remember being hungry,’ he said slowly when Linda finished her account. ‘But I didn’t actually eat anything.’

‘You could have died,’ said Linda.

He could see that she had tears in her eyes. If she hadn’t driven to his house, hadn’t suspected that something was wrong, his life could have ended there, with him naked on a tiled floor. He shuddered.

‘You neglect yourself, Dad,’ she said. ‘One of these days you’ll do it once too often. I want you to let Klara have a grandfather for at least another fifteen years. Then you can do whatever you want with your life.’

‘I don’t understand how it could have happened. It’s not the first time my blood sugar has been too low.’

‘You’ll have to discuss that with your doctor. I’m talking about something different. Your duty to stay alive.’

He merely nodded. Every word he uttered was a strain. He was filled with a strange feeling of echoing exhaustion.

‘What’s in the fluid I’m getting?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How long am I going to have to lie here?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

She stood up. He could see how tired she was, and realised with a sort of misty insight that she might have been sitting at his bedside for a long time.

‘Go home now,’ he said. ‘I’ll manage.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’ll manage. This time.’

She leaned over him and looked him in the eye.

‘Greetings from Klara. She also thinks it’s good that you survived.’

Wallander was left alone in the room. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. What he wanted most of all was to wake up with the feeing that what had happened was not his fault.

But later in the day Wallander was visited by his own doctor, who was not on duty but had come to the hospital to see him anyway, and told him that the time was now past when he could be careless about keeping tabs on his blood sugar readings. Wallander had been Dr Hansen’s patient for nearly twenty years, and there were no excuses that would impress this decidedly unsentimental physician. Dr Hansen told him over and over again that as far as he was concerned, Wallander was welcome to walk the tightrope and not take his illness seriously, but the next time anything like this happened he should expect consequences that he was really too young to suffer.

‘I’m sixty years old,’ Wallander said. ‘Isn’t that old?’

‘A couple of generations ago that was old. But not now. The body gets older; there’s nothing we can do about that. But nowadays we can expect to live for another fifteen or twenty years.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘You’ll stay in the hospital until tomorrow so that my colleagues can make sure that your blood sugar readings have stabilised, and that you haven’t suffered any damage. Then you can go home and continue in your sinful ways.’

‘But I don’t lead a sinful life, do I?’

Dr Hansen was a few years older than Wallander and had been married no less than six times. Local gossip in Ystad suggested that his maintenance payments to his former wives forced him to spend his holidays working in Norwegian hospitals way up inside the Arctic circle, where nobody would volunteer unless they had to.