Still no sign of the Audi. They drove into a housing estate. There was no one about. Wallander parked at number twelve, and they got out of the car. The wind threatened to blow the doors off their hinges. The house was a red-brick bungalow with an attached garage and a modest garden. Wallander thought he could see the outline of a boat under a tarpaulin.
The door opened before he had chance to ring the bell. An elderly white-haired man in a tracksuit eyed them up and down with an inquisitive smile.
Wallander produced his ID.
“My name’s Wallander,” he said. “I’m a detective inspector, and this is Ann-Britt Höglund, a colleague. We’re from the Ystad police.”
The man took Wallander’s ID and scrutinized it—he was obviously short-sighted. His wife appeared in the hall, and welcomed them inside. Wallander had the impression he was standing on the threshold of a contented couple’s home. They invited them into their living room, where coffee and cakes were prepared. Wallander was about to sit down when he noticed a picture on one of the walls. He could not believe his eyes at first—it was one of his father’s paintings, one without a grouse. He saw that Höglund had noticed what he was looking at, and she gave him a questioning look. He shook his head, and sat down. This was the second time in his life he had gone into a strange house and discovered one of his father’s paintings. Four years ago he had found one in an apartment in Kristianstad, but there had been a grouse in the foreground of that one.
“I apologize for visiting you so late,” Wallander said, “but I’m afraid we have some questions that simply can’t wait.”
“I hope you have time for a cup of coffee,” said the lady of the house.
They said that of course they did. It occurred to Wallander that Höglund had been eager to accompany him so that she could find out how he conducted an interview of this nature, and he felt insecure. There’s been a lot of water under this bridge, he thought. It’s not a case of me teaching her, but of me relearning how to do it, trying to remember all that I had written off as the end of an era in my life, until a couple of days ago.
His mind went back to those limitless beaches at Skagen. His private territory. Just for a moment, he wished he were back there. But that was history. More water under the bridge.
“Until a year ago you ran a hotel, the Linden Hotel,” he began.
“For forty years,” Bertil Forsdahl said, and Wallander could hear he was proud of what he had achieved.
“That’s a long time,” he said.
“I bought it in 1952,” Forsdahl said. “It was called the Pelican Hotel in those days, a bit on the scruffy side—it didn’t have a good reputation. I bought it from a man called Markusson. He was an alcoholic, and just didn’t want to be bothered. The last year of his tenancy the rooms were used mainly by his drunken cronies. I have to admit I got the hotel cheaply. Markusson died the following year. His wake was a drunken orgy in Elsinore. We renamed the hotel. In those days there was a linden tree outside. It was next to the old theater—that’s been demolished now, of course, like everything else. The actors used to stay with us sometimes. Inga Tidblad was our overnight guest on one occasion. She wanted an early-morning cup of tea.”
“I expect you’ve kept the ledger with her name in it,” Wallander said.
“I’ve kept all of them,” Forsdahl said. “I’ve got forty years of history tucked away downstairs.”
“We sometimes sit down after dinner,” Forsdahl’s wife said, “and we leaf through them all, remembering the good old days. You see the names and you remember the people.”
Wallander exchanged glances with Höglund. They already had the answer to one of their key questions.
A dog started barking in the street outside.
“Next door neighbor’s guard dog,” Forsdahl explained apologetically. “He keeps an eye on the whole street.”
Wallander took a sip of the coffee, and noticed that it said Linden Hotel on the cup.
“I’ll explain why we’re here,” he said. “You have the name of your hotel on the coffee cups, and you had printed letterheads and envelopes. In July and August last year, two letters were mailed from here in Helsingborg. One was in one of your printed envelopes. That must have been during the last few weeks you were open.”
“We closed on September 15,” Forsdahl said. “We made no charge for the final night.”
“Might I ask why you closed down?” Höglund said.
Wallander was irritated by her intervention, but he hoped she would not notice his reaction. As if it were natural for a woman to be answered by another woman, it was Forsdahl’s wife who responded.
“What else could we do?” she said. “The building was condemned, and the hotel wasn’t making any money. No doubt we could have kept going for another year or two if we’d wanted, and if we’d been allowed. But that wasn’t how it turned out.”
“We tried to maintain the highest standards for as long as we could,” Forsdahl said. “But in the end it was just too expensive for us. Color TV in every room and that kind of thing. It was just too much outlay.”
“It was a very sad day, September 15,” his wife said. “We still have all the room keys. We had number seventeen. The site’s a parking lot now. And they’ve cut the linden tree down. They said it was rotten. I wonder if a tree can die of a broken heart.”
The dog was still barking. Wallander thought about the tree that no longer existed.
“Lars Borman,” he said eventually. “Does that name mean anything to you?”
The response was a complete surprise. “Poor man,” Forsdahl said.
“A very sad story,” his wife said. “Why are the police interested in him now?”
“So you know who he is?” Wallander said. He saw that Höglund had produced a notebook from her handbag.
“Such a nice man,” Forsdahl said. “Calm, quiet. Always friendly, always polite. They don’t make them like him anymore.”
“We’d very much like to get in touch with him,” Wallander said.
Forsdahl exchanged looks with his wife. Wallander had the impression they were ill at ease.
“Lars Borman’s dead,” Forsdahl said. “I thought the police knew that.”
Wallander thought for a while before answering. “We know next to nothing about Borman,” he said. “All we do know is that last year he wrote two letters, and one of them was in one of your hotel’s envelopes. We wanted to get in touch with him. Obviously that isn’t possible now. But we’d like to know what happened. And who he was.”
“A regular customer,” Forsdahl said. “He stayed with us about every four months for many years. Usually two or three nights.”
“What was his line of work? Where was he from?”
“He worked at the county offices,” Mrs Forsdahl said. “Something to do with finance.”
“An accountant,” Forsdahl said. “A very conscientious and honest civil servant at the Malmöhus county offices.”
“He lived in Klagshamn,” his wife added. “He had a wife and children. It was a terrible tragedy.”
“What happened?” Wallander said.
“He committed suicide,” Forsdahl said. Wallander could see it pained him to revive the memory. “If there was one person we never would have expected to take his own life it was Lars Borman. Evidently he had some kind of secret we never imagined.”
“What happened?” Wallander asked again.
“He’d been in Helsingborg,” Forsdahl said. “It was a few days before we closed down. He did whatever he had to do during the day and spent the evenings in his room. He would read a lot. That last morning he paid his bill and checked out. He promised to keep in touch even though the hotel was closing. Then he drove away. A few weeks later we heard that he’d hanged himself in a clearing outside Klagshamn, a few kilometers from his house. There was no explanation, no letter to his wife and children. It came as a shock to us all.”