One of the forensic officers came out onto the steps and lit a cigarette. He stared at the footprints in the gravel. “What are you doing?”
“Testing a theory. What can you see here?”
“Footprints in the gravel. A replica of the ones we have inside the house.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
The other officer came out. He had a thermos flask in his hand.
“Wasn’t there a disc in the CD player?” Larsson asked.
“That’s right,” said the man with the flask.
“What kind of music was it?”
The technician handed the flask to his colleague and went inside. He was back in a flash.
“Argentinean stuff. An orchestra. I can’t pronounce the name.”
Larsson walked around the footprints in the gravel once again. The two forensic officers watched him as they smoked and drank their coffee.
“Does either of you dance the tango?” he said.
“Not normally. Why?”
It was the man with the thermos flask who answered.
“Because what we have here are tango steps. It’s kind of like when you were little and went to dancing classes. The teacher used to tape footprints onto the floor, and you had to follow them. The steps are tango steps.”
To prove his theory Larsson started to hum a tango tune that he didn’t know the name of. At the same time he followed the footprints in the gravel. The steps fitted.
“What we have on the floor in there is a set of tango steps. Somebody dragged Molin around and placed his blood-soaked feet on the floor as if he’d been attending a dancing class.”
The forensic officers stared at him incredulously, but knew he was right. They all went back into the house.
“Tango,” said Larsson. “That’s all it is. Whoever killed Molin invited him to dance a tango.”
They contemplated the footprints in silence.
“The question,” Larsson said, when he spoke again, “is who? Who invites a dead man to dance with him?”
Chapter Four
Lindman began to have the feeling that his body was being drained completely of blood. Even though the laboratory assistants were very gentle with him, he felt increasingly weary. He spent many hours at the hospital every day, having blood drawn for testing. He also talked to the doctor on two more occasions. Each time he had lots of questions, but never got around to asking any of them. In fact, there was only one question he really wanted answered: was he going to survive? And if that question couldn’t be answered with any degree of certainty, how much time did he, for sure, have left? He’d read somewhere that death was a tailor who measured people for their final suit, invisibly and in silence. Even if he did survive, he had the feeling that his lifespan had already been measured out. It was much too early for that.
The second night he went to Elena’s in Dalbogatan. He hadn’t phoned in advance as he usually did. The moment she saw him in the doorway, she knew something was wrong. Lindman had tried to make up his mind whether or not to tell her, but he wasn’t sure right up to the moment he rang the doorbell. He barely had time to hang up his jacket before she asked him what was wrong.
“I’m sick,” he’d said.
“Sick?”
“I’ve got cancer.”
That left him with no more defenses. He might as well tell the truth now. He needed somebody to confide in, and Elena was his only choice. They sat up long into the night, and she was sensible enough not to try to console him. What he needed was courage. She brought him a mirror and said, Look, the man on her sofa was very much alive, not a corpse, that was how he should approach the situation. He stayed the night, and lay awake long after she had gone to sleep.
He got up at dawn, quietly, so as not to wake her, and left the building as discreetly as possible. But he didn’t go straight back to Allégatan: instead he made a long detour around Ramna Lake and turned towards home only after he’d reached Druvefors. The doctor had said that they would finish all the necessary tests today. He’d asked if he could go away, possibly abroad, before the treatment started, and she said he could do whatever he liked. He had a cup of coffee when he got home, and played back his answering machine. Elena had been worried when she woke up and found that he’d left.
Shortly after ten he went to the travel agent’s in Vasterlanggatan. He sat down and started going through the brochures. He’d more or less made up his mind that it would be Mallorca when the thought of Herbert Molin came to him. He knew then and there what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to fly to Mallorca. If he did, all he would do was wander around a place where he knew no one, worrying about what had happened and what was going to happen. If he went to Harjedalen, he would be no less alone—since he didn’t know anybody up there either—but he would be able to devote his attention to something other than himself and his problems. What he might be able to do, he wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, he left the travel agent’s, went to the bookshop in the square, and bought a map of the neighboring provinces of Jamtland and Harjedalen. When he got home he spread it out over the kitchen table. He figured it would take him twelve to fifteen hours to drive there. If he got too tired, he could always spend the night somewhere on the way.