The Return of the Dancing Master(49)

He left the hotel at 6:30. The strong cold wind almost bowled him over. He had been thinking of going for a walk, but the weather forced him to abandon that idea. He looked around. Further down the street was a restaurant sign, swaying in the wind. He set off in that direction, but hesitated when he got there. There was a television set high in a corner showing an ice hockey match. He could hear the commentary from the street. Some men were sitting at a table, drinking beer, watching the game. He suspected the food wouldn’t be especially good, but on the other hand, he couldn’t face more of the cold.

He sat at an empty table. At the next table was a man staring in silence at his almost empty beer glass. The waitress came with a menu, and he ordered beef steak with béarnaise sauce and fries. And a bottle of wine. Red wine and brandy was what he drank. Never beer, never anything else at all.

“I hear that you speak English,” said the man with the beer glass.

Silberstein nodded. He hoped very much the man at the next table wouldn’t start talking to him. He wanted to be at peace with his thoughts.

“Where do you come from?” the man said.

“Argentina,” Silberstein said.

The man looked at him, his eyes glassy. “Entonces, debe hablar español,” he said.

His pronunciation was almost perfect. Silberstein looked at him in surprise.

“I used to be a sailor,” the man said, still speaking Spanish. “I lived in South America for some years. That was a long time ago, but when you learn a language properly, it stays with you.”

Silberstein agreed.

“I can see you want to be left in peace,” the man said. “That suits me fine. So do I.”

He ordered another beer. Silberstein tasted his wine. He’d ordered the house wine. That was an error. But he didn’t have the energy to send it back. All he was really interested in was staying drunk.

A loud roar filled the premises. Something had happened in the ice hockey match. Players dressed in blue and yellow embraced each other. The food arrived. To his surprise, it was good. He drank more wine. He felt calm now. All the tension had faded away, and was being replaced by a vast and liberating vacuum. Molin was dead. He had achieved what he had set out to do.

He’d finished eating when he glanced at the television screen. There was evidently a break in the match. A woman was reading the news. He almost dropped his glass when the dead man’s face appeared on the screen. He couldn’t understand what the woman said. He sat motionless, and could feel his heart pounding. For a moment, he halfexpected his own face to appear there as well. But the face that did appear was not his own, but another old man. A face he recognized.

He turned to the man at the next table, who seemed to be lost in thought.

“What are they saying on the news?” he said.

The man turned to the television and listened. “Two men have been murdered,” he said. “First one, and then another. Up in Norrland. One was a policeman, the other played the violin. They think they were killed by the same murderer.”

The picture on the screen disappeared, but he knew now that his eyes had not deceived him. The first man was Mattson-Herzén, or Molin, and the second one was the man he’d once seen visiting him. He’d also been murdered.

Silberstein put down his glass and tried to think straight. The same murderer. That wasn’t true. He had killed the man who called himself Molin, but not the other man.

He sat quite still. The ice hockey match had started again.





Chapter Thirteen

The night of November 3, 1999, was one of the longest Stefan Lindman had ever endured. When dawn finally broke, faint light creeping over the wooded hills, it felt as though he were in a weightless vacuum. He’d stopped thinking long ago. Everything happening around him seemed surreal, a nightmare. A nightmare that began when he’d walked around the trees and found Andersson’s body.

He had forced himself to feel for traces of a pulse, which he knew had stopped forever. The body was still warm—at any rate, rigor mortis had not yet set in. That could mean that whoever shot him was still in the vicinity. The light from Lindman’s flashlight had shown where the shot blast had hit him, just over his heart. He’d almost fainted. It was a big hole. Andersson had been executed at close range, with a shotgun.

The dog had started howling as soon as Lindman tied it up. His first thought was that it might have found the scent of the killer, who could be very close. Lindman had raced back to it, scratching his face badly on tree branches. Somewhere along the way he’d also lost his cell phone, which had been in his shirt pocket. He’d taken the dog back to the house and called the emergency number. Lindman had mentioned Larsson’s name, and from then on, the man on duty in Ostersund had asked no unnecessary questions. He’d asked if Lindman had a cell phone, was told he’d dropped it somewhere, and said he would call the number to help him find it. Now it was beginning to turn light; his telephone was still lost, and he had not heard it ringing. He had the feeling the whole time that the killer was close by. He’d crouched low as he ran to his car, and reversed into a garbage can as he turned to drive to the main road and give directions to the first of the police cars. The man in Ostersund said they would be coming from Sveg.