“Is that what he wrote in his diary?”
“There were some letters as well. And photographs. Your father in uniform.”
She shook her head. “This comes as a hideous shock.”
“He never spoke about the war?”
“Never.”
“Nor about his political views?”
“I didn’t even know he had any. There was never any talk of politics when I was growing up.”
“You can express your views even when you’re not discussing specific political questions.”
“How?”
“You can reveal your view of the world and your fellow men in a lot of different ways.”
She thought for a while, then shook her head. “I can remember from when I was a child that he said several times that he wasn’t interested in politics. I had no idea he held extremist views. He concealed them pretty well — if what you say is right, that is.”
“It’s all crystal-clear in his diary.”
“Is that all it’s about? Didn’t he write anything about his family?”
“Very little.”
“That doesn’t really surprise me. I grew up with the impression that we children were nothing more than a nuisance as far as Father was concerned. He never really bothered about us, he just pretended to.”
“By the way, your father had a woman friend here in Sveg. I don’t know if she was his mistress. I don’t know what people do to keep themselves occupied when they’re turned seventy.”
“A woman here in Sveg?”
He regretted having mentioned that. It was information she should have learned from Larsson, not from him, but it was too late now.
“Her name is Elsa Berggren and she lives on the south bank of the river. She was the one who found his house for him. She shares his political views too. If you can call Nazi views political, that is.”
“What else could they be?”
“Criminal.”
It seemed as if it had suddenly dawned on her why he was asking these questions.
“Do you think my father’s opinions might have had something to do with his death?”
“I don’t think anything. But the police have to keep all options open.”
She lit another cigarette. Her hand was shaking.
“I don’t understand why nobody’s told me this before now,” she said. “Why haven’t I heard that my father was a Nazi, nor about that woman?”
“They would have told you sooner or later. A murder investigation can sometimes take a long time. Now they have two dead men for whom they have to find a murderer. Plus a vanished dog.”
“I was told the dog was dead?”
“That was your father’s dog, but now Abraham Andersson’s dog has gone missing.”
She gave a shudder, as if she were starting to feel cold.
“I want to get away from here,” she said. “Even more than before. I’ll get around to reading that diary eventually, but first I must take care of the funeral. Then I’ll leave. And I’ll have to get used to the idea that not only did my father only pretend to care about me, he was also a Nazi.”
“What’ll happen to the house?”
“I’ve spoken to a real estate agent. Once the estate inventory has been drawn up it will be sold. That’s if anybody will have it.”
“Have you been there?”
She nodded. “I went there, in spite of everything. It was worse than I could ever have imagined. Most especially those footprints.”
Lindman looked at his watch. He ought to leave now, before it was too late.
“I’m sorry you’re leaving.”
“Why?”
“I’m not used to being all by myself in a little hotel in the middle of nowhere. I wonder what it’s like to live here.”
“Your father chose to do so.”
She accompanied him out into the lobby.
“Thank you for making the effort,” she said.
Before leaving Lindman called Larsson to ask whether they’d found the dog. He heard that Näsblom had tagged behind the excited dog for half an hour through the forest, but the trail had disappeared on a dirt track in the middle of the forest.
“Somebody will have picked it up in a car that was waiting there,” Larsson said. “But who? And where did they go?”
He drove south, over the river and into the forest. Occasionally he would ease back on the accelerator when he realized he was driving too fast. His head was empty. The only thought that arose sporadically in his mind was what had happened to Andersson’s dog. Shortly after midnight he stopped at a hot dog stand in Mora that was just about to close. When he’d finished eating, he felt too tired to go any further. He drove into a nearby parking lot and curled up on the backseat. When he woke up his watch said 3 A.M. He went out into the dark to urinate. Then he continued driving south through the night. After a few hours he stopped again to sleep.
By the time he woke up it was 9 A.M. He walked around and around the car to stretch his legs. He would be home in Borås by nightfall. When he’d gotten as far as Jönköping, he would phone Elena and give her a surprise. An hour or so later, he’d be pulling up outside her house.
But after passing Örebro, he turned off again. He was thinking straight now, and he’d started thinking back to his conversation with Veronica Molin the night before. She hadn’t been telling the truth.
There was that business about her father. Whether she’d known he was a Nazi or not. She had only pretended to be surprised. She’d known, but tried to hide the fact. He couldn’t put his finger on how he knew she wasn’t telling the truth. And there was another question he couldn’t answer either: had she known about Berggren, for all that she claimed she hadn’t?
Lindman pulled up and got out of the car. This has nothing to do with me, he thought: I have my illness to worry about. I’ll go back to Borås and admit that I’ve been missing Elena all the time I’ve been away. Then, when I feel like it, I’ll call Larsson and ask how the case is going. That’s all.
Then he made up his mind to go to Kalmar. Where Molin had been born, under the name of Mattson-Herzén. That’s where it had all begun, in a family that had been adherents of Hitler and National Socialism. There should be a man there by the name of Wetterstedt. A portrait painter. Who knew Molin.
He rummaged around in the trunk and came up with a tattered map of Sweden. This is madness, he thought; even so, he worked out the best route to Kalmar. I’m supposed to be going to Borås. But he knew he couldn’t let go now. He wanted to know what had happened to Molin. And Andersson. Perhaps also what lay behind the disappearance of the dog.
He reached Kalmar by evening. It was November 6. Two weeks from today he would start his radiation therapy. It had started raining a few miles north of Västervik. The water glistened in the beams from his headlights as he drove into the town and looked around for somewhere to stay.
Chapter Eighteen
Early the following day Lindman walked down to the sea. He could just make out the Öland Bridge through the fog that had settled over the Kalmarsund. He went to the water’s edge and stood contemplating the sea as it lapped against the shore. The long car journey was still taking its toll on his body. Twice he’d dreamed that big trucks were heading straight for him. He’d tried to get out of the way, but it had been too late and he’d woken up. His hotel was in the middle of town. The walls were like cardboard, and he’d been forced to listen to a woman blathering away on the telephone. After an hour of that, he’d felt justified in thumping on the wall; soon afterwards the conversation came to an end. Before dropping off to sleep, he’d lain in bed and stared up at the ceiling, wondering why he’d to come to Kalmar. Could it be that he was trying to put off his return to Borås for as long as possible? Had he grown tired of being with Elena but didn’t want to admit it? He didn’t know, but he was not sure that his detour to Kalmar was exclusively due to curiosity about Herbert Molin’s past.