The Return of the Dancing Master

  “It couldn’t be helped,” Lindman said. “That’s the way it goes sometimes. But it’s over now. It’s all over.”

  The church door opened. A verger was staring at them in horror. Lindman patted Johansson on the shoulder, then went to the verger to explain what had happened.

  Half an hour later Lindman arrived at the Berggren house and found Rundström there. Larsson was on his way to hospital, but no Hereira. The ambulance man said Larsson had told him that Hereira had melted into thin air.

  “We’ll get him,” Rundström said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” Lindman said. “We don’t know his real name, he might have several different passports. He’s been very good at hiding so far.”

  “Wasn’t he wounded?”

  “Just a scratch on his forehead.”

  A man in overalls appeared. He was carrying a dripping wet shotgun that he put on the table. “I found it straightaway. Has there been a shoot-out in the church?”

  Rundström brushed aside the question. “I’ll fill you in later,” he said. Rundström eyed the shotgun. “I wonder if the prosecutor will be able to nail Berggren for all the lies she’s told us,” he said. “Even if it was this Holmström who killed Andersson and threw the shotgun into the river. He’s obviously the arsonist as well. Molin’s house has been well and truly torched.”

  “Hereira told me he had started the fire. To confuse the police,” Lindman said.

  “So much has happened that’s beyond me,” Rundström said. “Larsson’s in hospital, and Erik’s in the church, having killed Molin’s daughter. It seems to me that you, Stefan Lindman, the police officer from Borås, are the only person who can bring me up to speed on what’s been happening on my patch this morning.”

  Lindman spent the rest of the day in Johansson’s office. The conversations he had with Rundström lasted for hours, thanks to the continual interruptions. At 1.45 Rundström received a call informing him that Holmström had been arrested in Arboga, still in the Ford Escort they’d put a marker on. It was 5 p.m. by the time Rundström declared that he felt sufficiently in the picture. He accompanied Lindman to his hotel. They said their goodbyes in reception.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow. The morning flight to Landvetter.”

  “I’ll arrange for somebody to drive you to the airport.”

  They shook hands.

  “It’s all been very peculiar,” Rundström said, “but I reckon that somehow or other I’ve come round to understanding most of what’s been going on. Not everything. You never do understand everything. There are always gaps. But most of it. Enough to solve the murders.”

  “Something tells me you’ll have problems in catching Hereira,” Lindman said.

  “He smoked French cigarettes,” Rundström said. “Do you remember the butts you found down by the lake, and gave to Larsson?”

  Lindman remembered. “I agree,” he said. “There are always gaps. Not least this mysterious person named ‘M.’, in Scotland.”

  Rundström left. Lindman took it that Rundström hadn’t read Molin’s diary. The girl in reception was ashen.

  “Did I do the wrong thing?” she asked.

  “Yes. But it’s all finished now. I’m off tomorrow. I’ll leave you to your test drivers and Baltic orienteering specialists.”

  That evening he had dinner in the hotel, then phoned Elena and said he’d be coming home. He was on his way to bed when Rundström phoned to say that Larsson was doing pretty well in the circumstances. The wound was serious, but not life-threatening. Johansson was in a much worse state. He’d had a nervous collapse. Rundström ended by telling Lindman that Special Branch was now involved.

  “This is going to be splashed all over the media,” he said. “We’ve turned over a very large stone. It’s already obvious that this Nazi network is far more extensive than anybody ever dreamt of. Think yourself lucky that the reporters won’t be gunning for you.”

  Lindman lay awake for ages after that. He wondered how the funeral had gone. Most of all it was memories of his father flooding through his mind. I’ll never understand him, he thought. I won’t ever be able to forgive him either, even if he is dead and buried. He never showed his true face to me and my sisters. I had a father who worshipped evil.

  The following morning Lindman was taken to the airport in Frösön. Just before 11 a.m. his plane touched down at Landvetter. Elena was there to meet him, and he was extremely pleased to see her.

  Two days later, on November 19, sleet was falling in Borås as Lindman walked up the hill to the hospital. He felt calm, and was confident of coping with whatever was in store for him.

  He had coffee in the cafeteria. Copies of last night’s evening papers were piled up on a chair. The front pages were full of what had been going on in Härjedalen, and about the Swedish branch of a world-wide network of Nazi organisations. The head of Special Branch had made a statement. “This is a shocking exposure of something that goes much deeper and is much more dangerous than the neo-Nazis, all those tiny groups dominated by skinheads that have been associated with Fascist aspirations hitherto.”

  Lindman put the newspapers down. It was 8.10 a.m. Time for him to go to the people who were waiting for him.

  Hereira was still at large. Lindman wondered where he had got to, and hoped the man would get back to Buenos Aires. Smoke a few more French cigarettes in peace and quiet. The crime he’d committed had been atoned for long ago.

  EPILOGUE

  Inverness / April 2000

  On Sunday, April 9, Stefan collected Elena early in the morning. On the way from Allégatan to Norrby he’d started humming. He couldn’t remember when he’d last done that. Nor did he know at first what it was he was humming. A tune of somewhere far from Sweden, he seemed to recall, as he drove through the empty streets. Then it dawned on him that it was something his father used to play on the banjo. “Beale Street Blues”. Stefan also remembered his father saying that it was a street that really did exist, possibly in several North American cities, but certainly in Memphis.

  I remember his music, Stefan thought; but my father, his face, his lunatic political opinions, have all started to fade into oblivion. He emerged from the shadows to tell me who he really was. Now I’ve kicked him back. The only way I’m going to remember him now and in future is by the bits of tunes that have stuck in my head. Maybe that provides him with a redeeming feature. As far as Nazis were concerned, the Africans, their music, their traditions, their way of life – everything was barbaric. Africans were sub-human creatures. Although the black American athlete Jesse Owens was the star of the 1936 Olympics, Hitler refused to shake his hand. But my father loved the music of black men, the blues. He made no attempt to hide it either. Perhaps that’s where I can find a crack in his defences, a reason for thinking that he hadn’t given himself entirely to evil and to contempt for his fellow men. I’ll never know if I’m right, but I have the right to believe what I want to believe.

  Elena was waiting for him at her front door. On the way to the airport they talked about which of them was looking forward more to the trip. Elena who had seldom been even a few kilometres from Borås, or Stefan whose doctor had given him hope that he’d overcome his cancer, thanks to the radiotherapy and the subsequent operation. They didn’t agree on the answer, but it was only a game.

  They left for London Gatwick on a British Airways flight at 7.35 a.m. Elena was afraid of flying and clutched Stefan’s hand as the aircraft took off and flew out to sea north of Kungsbacka. As they carved their way through the clouds, Stefan experienced a feeling of liberation. For six months he’d lived with a fear that hardly left him. Now it had gone. It wasn’t absolutely certain that he was or would ever be fully fit: his doctor had told him he would have to have tests for five years, but to lead a normal life again, not be forever on the lookout for symptoms, not to nourish the fear he had harboured for so long. Now that he was in the aeroplane, he felt that at last he’d really taken that vital step
away from the fear, and back to something he’d long been waiting for.

  Elena looked at him.

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “What I haven’t dared to think for half a year.”

  She said nothing, but took hold of his hand. He thought he would burst out crying, but he managed to keep control of himself.

  They landed at Gatwick, and after passing through passport control they went their different ways. Elena to spend two days in London visiting a distant relative from Krakow who had a grocer’s shop in one of London’s suburbs. Stefan would be continuing his journey on a domestic flight.

  “I still don’t understand why you have to make this extra trip,” Elena said.

  “Don’t forget that I’m a police officer. I want to follow things through to the bitter end.”

  “But you’ve arrested the murderer, haven’t you? Or one of them, at least. And the woman is dead. You know why it all happened. What more is there to find out?”

  “There are always gaps. Perhaps it’s only curiosity, something only indirectly linked.”

  She eyed him severely. “It said in the newspapers that an officer had been wounded and another one had been in extreme danger. I wonder when you’re going to admit to me that you were the one in danger? How long do I have to wait?”

  Stefan said nothing, merely flung wide his arms.

  “You don’t know why you have to make this extra journey,” Elena said. “Is that it? Or is there something you don’t want to tell me? Why can’t you just tell me the truth?”

  “I’m trying to learn how to do that. But I have told you the truth. It’s just that there’s one last door I want to open, and find out what’s behind it.”

  He watched her melt into the crowd heading towards the exit, then made for the transit desk. The tune he’d had in his head earlier came back to him.

  If he’d managed to understand rightly what they said over the loudspeakers, the flight would take an hour. He fell asleep and didn’t wake up until they landed at Inverness airport. He walked towards the ancient terminal and registered that the air was fresh and clear – just as he remembered it from Härjedalen. In Sveg, the wooded hillsides surrounding the little town had been a dark, threatening circle. The countryside was different here. High, sharply outlined mountains in the distance to the north, elsewhere fields and heaths, and the sky seemed to be low, almost touchable. He collected the key to his rented car, and felt a vague worry about having to drive on the left-hand side of the road. The road was narrow. He was annoyed by the sluggishness of the gear box. He wondered if he would do better to go back and upgrade, but soon gave up on that thought. He wasn’t going far, only to Inverness and back, with perhaps the occasional excursion.

  The travel agent had booked him into a hotel called Old Blend for two nights, in the town centre. It took him a while to find it. He caused chaos at two roundabouts, but could breathe a sigh of relief when he eventually parked outside the hotel, a three-storey, dark red brick building. Yet another hotel, but the last one in his quest to find out why Herbert Molin had been murdered. He now knew the circumstances, and he’d met the man who killed him. He didn’t know the whereabouts of the presumed murderer, Fernando Hereira.

  Giuseppe had phoned from Östersund a few days ago and told him that the Swedish police and Interpol had drawn a blank. Presumably he was back in South America by now, using a different name – his real one. Giuseppe didn’t think they would ever find him. Even if they did, the Swedish authorities would never manage to have him extradited. Giuseppe promised to keep Stefan informed. He’d also asked about Stefan’s state of health, and been pleased about the latest diagnosis.

  “What did I tell you?” he said with a laugh. “You were succumbing to doom and gloom – I’ve never met anybody as depressed as you were.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t met many people with a death sentence hanging round their neck. Or inside their neck, to be more precise. But you had a bullet in your shoulder.”

  Giuseppe turned serious. “I keep wondering if she shot to kill me. I remember the look on her face. I’d like to think that she shot to wound me, but I don’t really believe it.”

  “How are you now?”

  “A bit stiff in the shoulder, but much better.”

  “What about Johansson?”

  “I’ve heard that he’s thinking of applying for early retirement. This whole business has hit him hard. I saw him the other day. He looked very thin.” Giuseppe sighed. “I suppose things could have been much worse.”

  “One of these days I’ll take Elena to a bowling alley. I’ll knock over a few skittles and think of you.”

  “When Molin was killed, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for,” Giuseppe said. “But what we stumbled upon is something very big. It’s more than a network of Nazi organisations. It’s grounds for facing up to the fact that Fascism is alive and kicking, albeit in a different guise.”

  Giuseppe said that Magnus Holmström’s case would come to court the following week. He had asserted his right to remain silent, but even so there was enough evidence to convict him and earn him a long jail sentence.

  It was over – but there was one connection that Stefan still wanted to look into. He hadn’t mentioned it to Giuseppe. It was to be found in Inverness. Even if Veronica Molin’s attempt to invent an explanation for her father’s death had failed – the only weak move she’d made during those dramatic weeks – there had in fact been a real person hidden behind the letter “M.” in Molin’s diary. Stefan had been helped by a clerical assistant called Evelyn who’d worked for the police in Borås for many years. Together they’d searched for and eventually found the report on the visit to Borås by a party of British police officers in November 1971, with a list of names. They’d even found a photograph on the wall of an archive room. The picture was taken outside the police station. Olausson was there, posing with four British police officers, two of them women. One of those, the older one, was called Margaret Simmons. Stefan sometimes wondered how much Veronica knew about her father’s visit to Scotland. She hadn’t used the name Margaret when she’d tried sending them off on a false trail: she’d said the woman’s name was Monica.

  Molin was not in the picture, but he had been there. It was then, in November 1971, that he’d met this Margaret; and the following year he’d gone to Scotland to see her and written about her in his diary. They had gone for long walks in Dornoch, a coastal town north of Inverness. Stefan thought that maybe he ought to see what it looked like; but Margaret Simmons no longer lived there: she’d moved when she retired in 1980. Without asking his reasons, Evelyn had helped Stefan to trace her. In the end, one day in February, just when he’d started to believe he was going to live and eventually return to work, she phoned him in triumph and supplied him with an address and a telephone number in Inverness.

  And that’s where he now was, and that was as far as his advance planning had gone. He had to decide what to do: should he phone, or find the street and knock on her door? She was 80. She might be ill or tired and not at all willing to receive him.

  He was given a friendly welcome by a man with a loud, powerful voice. His was room number 12 on the top floor. There was no lift, just a creaking staircase and a soft carpet. He could hear a television set somewhere. He climbed to his room, put down his suitcase and went to the window. Traffic was buzzing around down below, but when he lifted his gaze he could see the sea, the mountains and the sky. He took two miniature bottles of whisky from the minibar and emptied them, standing at the window. The feeling of liberation was now even stronger than before. I’m on my way back, he thought. I’m going to survive. When I’m an old man I’ll look on this as a time that changed my life, rather than putting an end to it.

  Afternoon turned into evening. He’d decided to wait until the next day before contacting Margaret Simmons. It was drizzling outside. He walked to the harbour, and wandered from quay to quay. He felt impatient. He wanted to start work again.
All he’d lost was time. But what was time? Anxious breaths, morning turning into evenings and then new days? He didn’t know. He thought of those chaotic weeks in Härjedalen when they’d first been looking for a murderer, and then for two, as almost unreal. Then came the moment after November 19, when he entered his doctor’s surgery on the dot of 8.15, and set in train his radiotherapy course. How would he describe that time if he were to write himself a letter? Time had seemed to stand still. He’d lived as if his body were a prison. It wasn’t until mid-January, when he’d put it all behind him, the radiotherapy and the operation, that he’d recovered his grasp of time as something mobile, something that passed by, without ever returning.

  He had dinner at a restaurant close to the hotel. He’d just been handed a menu when Elena phoned.

  “How’s Scotland?”

  “Good. But it’s hard driving on the left.”

  “It’s raining here.”

  “Here too.”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “I’m just about to have dinner.”

  “How’s it going with your talks?”

  “I’ve done nothing about that today. I’m starting tomorrow.”

  “Come when you said you’d come.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “When you were ill you drifted away from me. I don’t want that to happen again.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’m going to have a Polish dinner tonight with relations I’ve never met before.”

  “I wish I could be there.”

  She burst out laughing. “You’re a liar. Pass on greetings to Scotland.”

  After his meal he went walking again. Quays, promenades, the town centre. He wondered where he was heading for. His real destination was inside himself.

  He slept deeply that night.

  The next morning he rose early. It was still drizzling over Inverness. After breakfast he phoned the number he’d been given by Evelyn. A man answered.