It was nearly two years before he first realized that something untoward was going on. It was an insignificant assignment, checking contracts that involved the Swedish Trade Council as guarantors for a considerable sum of money. Spare parts for turbines in Poland, combine harvesters for Czechoslovakia. It was a minor detail, some figures that didn’t add up. He thought it was probably a misprint, maybe somewhere two digits had been muddled. He had gone through it all again and realized that it was no accident, it was all intentional. Nothing was missing, everything was correct, but the upshot was horrifying. His first instinct had been not to believe it. He had leaned back in his chair—it was late in the evening, he recalled—taking in that there was no doubt that he had uncovered a crime. It was dawn before he had set out to walk the streets of Ystad, and by the time he reached Stortorget he had reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative explanation: the man at Farnholm Castle was guilty of a gross breach of trust regarding the Trade Council, of tax evasion, and of a whole string of forgeries.
Thereafter he had constantly been on the lookout for the black holes in every document emanating from Farnholm. And he found them—not every time, but more often than not. The extent of the criminality had slowly dawned on him. He tried not to acknowledge the evidence he could not avoid registering, but in the end he had to face up to the facts. But on the other hand he had done nothing about it. He had not even told his son. Was this because, deep down, he preferred to believe it wasn’t true? Nobody else, apparently not even the tax authorities, had noticed anything. Perhaps he had uncovered a secret that was purely hypothetical? Or was it that it was all too late anyway, now that the man from Farnholm Castle was the principal source of income for the firm?
The fog was more or less impenetrable now. He hoped it might lift as he got nearer to Ystad.
He couldn’t go on like this, that was certain. Not now that he knew that the man had blood on his hands.
He would talk to his son. The rule of law still applied in Sweden, for heaven’s sake, even though it seemed to be undermined and diluted day by day. His own complaisance had been a part of that process. His having turned a blind eye for so long was no reason for remaining silent now.
He would never bring himself to commit suicide.
Suddenly he saw something in the headlights. He slammed on the brakes. At first he thought it was a hare. Then he realized there was something in the road.
He turned on his brights.
It was a chair, in the middle of the road. A simple kitchen chair. Sitting on it was a human-sized effigy. Its face was white.
Or could it be a real person made up like a tailor’s dummy?
He felt his heart starting to pound. Fog swirled in the light of his headlamps. There was no way he could shut out the chair and the effigy. Nor could he ignore his mounting fear. He checked his rearview mirror. Nothing. He drove slowly forward until the chair and the effigy were no more than ten meters from the car. Then he stopped again.
The dummy looked impressively like a human being. Not just some kind of hastily put-together scarecrow. It’s for me, he thought. He switched off the radio, his hand trembling, and pricked up his ears. Fog, and silence. He didn’t know what to do next.
What made him hesitate was not the chair out there in the fog, nor the ghostly effigy. There was something else, something in the background, something he couldn’t make out. Something that probably existed only inside himself.
I’m very frightened, he said to himself, and fear is undermining my ability to think straight.
Finally, he undid his seat belt and opened the door. He was surprised by how cool it felt outside. He got out, his eyes fixed on the chair and the dummy lit up by the car’s headlights. His last thought was that it reminded him of a stage set with an actor about to make his entrance.
He heard a noise behind him, but he didn’t turn. The blow caught him on the back of his head.
He was dead before his body hit the damp asphalt.
It was 9:53 p.m. The fog was now very dense.
Chapter 2
The wind was gusting from due north.
The man, a long way out on the freezing cold beach, was suffering in the icy blasts. He kept stopping and turning his back to the wind. He would stand there, motionless, staring at the sand, his hands deep in his pockets; then he would go on walking, apparently aimlessly, until he would be lost from sight in the gray twilight.
A woman who walked her dog on the sands every day had grown anxious about the man who seemed to patrol the beach from dawn to dusk. He had turned up out of the blue a few weeks ago, a species of human jetsam washed ashore. People she came across on the beach normally greeted her. It was late autumn, the end of October, so in fact she seldom came across anybody at all. But the man in the black overcoat never acknowledged her. At first she thought he was shy, then rude, or perhaps a foreigner. Gradually she came to feel that he was weighed down by some appalling sorrow, that his beach walks were a pilgrimage taking him away from some unknowable source of pain. His gait was decidedly erratic. He would walk slowly, almost dawdling, then suddenly come to life and break into what was almost a trot. It seemed to her that what dictated his movements was not so much physical as his disturbed spirit. She was convinced that his hands were clenched into fists inside his pockets.
After a week she thought she had worked it out. This stranger had landed on this strand from somewhere or another in order to come to terms with a serious personal crisis, like a vessel with inadequate charts edging its way through a treacherous channel. That must be the cause of his introversion, his restless walking. She had mentioned the solitary wanderer on the beach every night to her husband, whose rheumatism had forced him into early retirement. Once he had even accompanied her and the dog, though his condition caused him a great deal of pain and he was much happier staying indoors. He had thought that his wife was right, though he’d found the man’s behavior so strikingly out of the ordinary that he had phoned a friend in the Skagen police and confided in him his own and his wife’s observations. Possibly the man was on the run, wanted for some crime, or had absconded from one of the few mental hospitals left in the country? But the police officer had seen so many odd characters over the years, most of them having made the pilgrimage to the furthest tip of Jutland only in search of peace and quiet, that he counseled his friend to be wise: just leave the man alone. The strand between the dunes and the two seas that met there was a constantly changing no-man’s-land for whoever needed it.
The woman with her dog and the man in the black overcoat went on passing each other like ships in the night for another week. Then one day—on October 24, 1993, as a matter of fact—something happened which she would later connect with the man’s disappearance.
It was one of those rare days when there was not a breath of wind, when the fog lay motionless over both land and sea. Foghorns had been sounding in the distance like lost, invisible cattle. The whole of this strange setting was holding its breath. Then she had caught sight of the man in the black overcoat and stopped dead.
He was not alone. He was with a shortish man in a light-colored windbreaker and cap. She noticed that it was the new arrival who was doing the talking, and seemed to be trying to convince the other about something. Occasionally he took his hands from his pockets and gestured to underline what he was saying. She could not hear what they were saying, but there was something about the smaller man’s manner that told her he was upset.