The Return of the Dancing Master

by Henning Mankell

  “Simmons.”

  “My name’s Stefan Lindman. I’d like to speak to Margaret Simmons.”

  “What about?”

  “I’m from Sweden. She visited Sweden in the 1970s. I never met her, but a colleague of mine who’s a police officer talked about her.”

  “My mother’s not at home. Where are you calling from?”

  “Inverness.”

  “She’s at Culloden today.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Culloden is a battlefield not far from Inverness. The site of the last battle to take place on British soil. 1745. Don’t you learn any history in Sweden?”

  “Not much about Scotland.”

  “It was all over in half an hour. The English slaughtered everybody who got in their way. Mum likes to wander around the battlefield. She goes there three or four times a year. She goes to the museum first. They sometimes show films. She says she likes to listen to the voices of the dead coming from under the ground. She says it prepares her for her own death.”

  “When’s she due home again?”

  “This evening. But she’ll go straight to bed. How long does a Swedish policeman stay in Inverness?”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Call tomorrow morning. What did you say your name was? Steven?”

  “Stefan.”

  That concluded the call. Stefan decided not to wait until the next day. He went down to reception and asked for directions to Culloden. The man smiled.

  “Today’s a good time to go there. The weather’s the same as when the battle was fought. Mist, rain, and a breeze.”

  Stefan drove out of Inverness. It was easier this time, coping with the roundabouts. He followed the signs off the main road. There were two coaches and a few cars in the car park. Stefan gazed over the moor. There were poles with red and yellow flags a few hundred metres apart. He assumed they marked the lines of the opposing armies. He could see the sea and the mountains in the distance. It seemed to him that the generals had chosen an attractive place for their soldiers to die in.

  He bought a ticket for the museum. There were school classes wandering here and there, looking at the dolls dressed up as soldiers and arranged in violent scenes of battle. He looked around for Margaret. The photograph he’d seen was taken almost 30 years ago, but even so, he was sure he would recognise her. He couldn’t see her in the museum, though. He went out into the gusting wind to the battlefield. The moor was deserted. Nothing but the red and yellow flags smacking against the poles. He went back inside. The children were on their way into a lecture room. He followed them. Just as he got in the lights went out and a film started. He groped his way to a seat in the front row. The film lasted half an hour, with scary sound effects. He stayed put when the lights came on again. The children jostled their way out, frequently being urged by their teachers to calm down.

  Stefan looked round. He recognised her immediately. She was in the back row, wearing a black raincoat. When she stood up, she leaned on her umbrella and was careful where she placed her feet. She walked past him and glanced in his direction. Stefan waited until she’d left the lecture room before following her. There was no sign of the children now. A woman, knitting behind a counter, was selling postcards and souvenirs. There was the sound of the radio and the clatter of china from the nearby café.

  Margaret Simmons was making for the wall encircling the battlefield. It was raining, but she hadn’t raised her umbrella. The wind was too strong. Stefan waited until she’d passed through the gate and disappeared behind the wall. He wondered where all the children had got to. She was heading for one of the paths that meandered through the battlefield. He kept his distance, thinking that he’d made the right decision. He wanted to know why Molin had written about her in his diary. She’d been the exception. Molin had described how he’d crossed over the border and entered Norway, enjoyed an ice cream and eyed the girls in Oslo; and then the awful years in the Waffen-SS. The years that had warped his nature and turned him into a henchman of Waldemar Lehmann. Then came the journey to Scotland. If he remembered rightly, it was the longest section in the diary, longer even than the letters he’d sent home from the war.

  He would soon catch up with her and be able to place the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was Herbert Molin. At regular intervals along the path were gravestones. Not for individual lost soldiers, but for the clans whose men had been massacred by the English artillery. Margaret Simmons is walking through a battlefield, he thought. Molin spent some years in a battlefield, but he escaped the machine-gun and rifle fire. He was murdered by somebody who traced him to his cottage in Härjedalen.

  The old woman leant on one of the gravestones beside the path. Stefan stopped as well. She looked at him, then continued along the path. He followed her to the middle of the battlefield; a Swedish police officer who still hadn’t reached his fortieth birthday, 30 metres behind a Scottish lady who had also been a police officer and now spent her time preparing for death.

  They came to a point between the red and yellow flags. She stopped and turned to look at him. He didn’t look away. She waited. He saw that she was heavily made up, short and thin. She tapped the ground with her umbrella.

  “Are you following me? Who are you?”

  “My name is Stefan Lindman, I’m from Sweden. I’m a police officer. As you used to be.”

  She brushed aside her hair, that had blown into her face. “You must have spoken to my son. He’s the only one who knows where I am.”

  “He was most helpful.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You once visited a town in Sweden called Borås. It’s not a very big place – two churches, two squares, a dirty river. You were there 28 years ago, in the autumn of 1971. You met a policeman by the name of Herbert Molin. The following year he came to see you in Dornoch.”

  She eyed him up and down, saying nothing.

  “I’d like to continue my walk if you don’t mind,” she said eventually. “I’m getting used to the idea of being dead.”

  She started walking again. Stefan walked beside her.

  “The other side,” she said. “I don’t want anybody on my left.”

  He changed sides.

  “Is Herbert dead?” she said, out of the blue.

  “Yes, he’s dead.”

  “That’s the way it goes when you’re old. People think the only news you want to hear is that old acquaintances are dead. You can really put your foot in it if you don’t know.”

  “Herbert Molin was murdered.”

  She gave a start and stopped in her tracks. For a moment Stefan thought she was going to fall over.

  “What happened?” she asked after a while.

  “His past caught up with him. He was killed by a man who wanted to avenge something he’d done during the war.”

  “Have you caught the murderer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He got away. We don’t even know his real name. He has an Argentinian passport in the name of Hereira, and we think he lives in Buenos Aires. But we assume that that is not his real name.”

  “What had Herbert done?”

  “He murdered a Jewish dancing master in Berlin.”

  She’d stopped again. She looked round at the battlefield.

  “The battle they fought here was a very strange one. It wasn’t really a battle. It was all over in a very short time.”

  She pointed. “We were over there, the Scots, and the English were on that side. They fired their cannons. The Scots died like flies. When they finally got round to attacking the English it was too late. There were thousands of dead and wounded here in less than half an hour. They’re still here.” She started walking again.

  “Molin kept a diary,” Stefan said. “Most of it’s about the war. He was a Nazi, and fought as a volunteer for Hitler. But maybe you knew about that?”

  She didn’t answer, but rapped her umbrella hard onto the ground.

 
“I found the diary, wrapped in a raincoat in the house where he was murdered. A diary, a few photographs and some letters. The only thing in his diary that he took the trouble to write up properly was the visit he made to Dornoch. It says that he went for long walks there with ‘M.’.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Didn’t he write my name in full?”

  “All he put was ‘M.’. Nothing else.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That you went for long walks.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  She walked on without speaking. Then she stopped again.

  “One of my ancestors died on this very spot,” she said. “I’m partly descended from the McLeod clan, even if my married name is Simmons. I can’t really be certain that it was just here that Angus McLeod died, of course, but I’ve decided it was.”

  “I have wondered,” Stefan said. “About what happened.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “He’d fallen in love with me. Pure stupidity, of course. What else could it have been? Men are hunters, whether they’re after an animal or a woman. He wasn’t even good-looking. Flabby. And in any case I was married. I nearly died of shock when he phoned out of the blue and announced that he was in Scotland. It was the only time in my life that I lied to my husband. I told him I was working overtime whenever I met Herbert. He tried to talk me into going back to Sweden with him.”

  They had come to the edge of the battlefield. She started back on a path alongside a stone wall. It wasn’t until they’d returned to their starting point, the gate in the wall, that she turned to look at Stefan.

  “I usually have a cup of tea at this time. Then I go out again. Would you join me?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Herbert always wanted coffee. That would have been enough in itself. How could I live with a man who didn’t like tea?”

  In the cafeteria some young men in kilts were sitting at one table, talking in low voices. Margaret chose a window table from where she could see the battlefield, and beyond it Inverness and the sea.

  “I didn’t like him,” she said firmly. “I couldn’t shake him off, even though I’d made it clear from the start that his journey was a waste of time. I already had a husband. He might have been a bit of a handful, and he drank too much, but he was the father of my son and that was the most important thing. I told Herbert to come to his senses and go back to Sweden. I thought he’d done that and left. Then he phoned me at the police station. I was afraid he might come to my home, so I agreed to meet him again. That was when he told me.”

  “That he was a Nazi?”

  “That he’d been a Nazi. He had enough sense to realise that I’d experienced Hitler’s brutality during the air raids here in Britain. He claimed to regret it all.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. I was only interested in getting rid of him.”

  “But you still went for walks with him?”

  “He started using me as a mother confessor. He insisted it had been a youthful mistake. I remember being afraid that he might go down on his knees. It was pretty awful in point of fact. He wanted me to forgive him. As if I were a priest or a messenger from all those who’d suffered in the Hitler period.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I could listen, but that his conscience had nothing to do with me.”

  The men in kilts stood up and left. The rain was now beating against the window pane.

  She looked at him. “But it wasn’t true, is that it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he regretted it.”

  “I believe that he was a Nazi until the day he died. He was terrified about what had happened in Germany, but I don’t think he gave up his Nazi beliefs. He even handed them down to his daughter. She’s dead too.”

  “How come?”

  “She was shot in an exchange of fire with the police. She damn nearly killed me.”

  “I’m an old woman,” she said. “I have time. Or maybe I don’t. But I want to hear the whole story from the start. Herbert Molin is starting to interest me, and that’s something new.”

  When Stefan was on the flight back to London, where Elena was waiting for him, he thought that it was only when he told the story to Margaret, in the cafeteria at the museum in Culloden, that he grasped the full seriousness of what had happened during those weeks in autumn, in Härjedalen. Now he was able to see everything in a new light, the bloodstained tango steps, the remains of the tent by the black water. Most of all he saw himself, the person he’d been at that time, a man like a quivering shadow at the edge of a remarkable murder investigation. As he told the story to Margaret it was as if he’d become a pawn in the game: it was him, but then again not him, a different person he no longer wanted anything to do with.

  When he came to the end, they sat there in silence for ages, staring out at the rain, which was easing off now. She asked no questions, merely sat there stroking her nose with the tip of a lean finger. There were not many visitors to Culloden that day. The girls behind the counter in the cafeteria had nothing to do, and were reading magazines or travel brochures.

  “It’s stopped raining,” she said eventually. “Time for my second walk among the dead. I’d like you to come with me.”

  The wind had veered from the north to the east. This time she took a different path, apparently wanting to cover the whole of the battlefield in her walks.

  “I was 20 when war broke out,” she said. “I lived in London then. I remember that awful autumn of 1940, when the siren went and we knew somebody would die that night, but didn’t know if it would be us. I remember thinking that it was Evil itself that had broken loose. They weren’t aeroplanes up there in the darkness, they were devils with tails and clawed feet, carrying bombs and dropping them on us. Later, much later, when I’d become a police officer, I realised that there was no such thing as an evil person, people with evil in their soul, if you see what I mean. Only circumstances that induce that evil.”

  “I wonder what Molin thought about himself.”

  “If he was an evil person, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  She pondered before replying. They’d stopped by a tall cairn at the edge of the battlefield so that she could retie a shoelace. He tried to help her, but she refused.

  “Herbert saw himself as a victim,” she said. “At least, he did in his confessions to me. I know now it was all lies. I didn’t see through him at the time, though. I was mainly worried that he’d become so lovesick that he’d stand outside my window howling.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “Thank God, no.”

  “What did he say when he left?”

  “‘Goodbye’. That’s all. Maybe he tried to kiss me. I can’t remember. I was just glad to see the back of him.”

  “Then you heard nothing more of him?”

  “Never. Not until now. When you came here and told me your remarkable story.”

  They’d reached the end of the battlefield for the second time and started walking back again.

  “I never believed that Nazism had died with Hitler,” she said. “There are just as many people today who think the same evil thoughts, who despise other people, who are racists. But they’re called different names, and use different methods. There are no fights between hordes of warriors on battlefields nowadays. Hatred of people you despise is expressed in a different way. From underneath, you might say. This country, and indeed the whole of Europe, is being blown apart from the inside by its contempt for weakness, its attacks on refugees, its racism. I see it all around me, and I ask myself if we are able to offer sufficiently firm resistance.”

  Stefan opened the gate, but she didn’t follow him out.

  “I’ll stay here a bit longer. I haven’t really finished with the dead yet. Your story was remarkable, but I still haven’t had an answer to the question I’ve been asking myself, of course.”

  “Which questio
n is that?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Curiosity. I wanted to know who was the person behind the letter ‘M.’ in the diary. I wanted to know why he had made that journey to Scotland.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. That’s all.”

  She brushed her hair out of her face and smiled.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  “What with?”

  “You might find him one day. Aron Silberstein who murdered Herbert.”

  “So he told you what had happened in Berlin?”

  “He told me about his fear. The man called Lukas Silberstein who had been his dancing master had a son called Aron. Herbert was afraid someone would take revenge, and he thought that is where it would come from. He remembered that little boy, Aron. I think Herbert dreamt about him every night. I have an instinct that he was the one who tracked Herbert down in the end.”

  “Aron Silberstein?”

  “I have a good memory. That was the name he told me. Anyway, it’s time for us to say goodbye. I’m going back to my dead souls. And you’re going back to the living.” She stepped forward and stroked him on the cheek. He watched her marching resolutely back onto the battlefield. He kept watching her until she was out of sight. This marked the end of his thoughts about what had happened last autumn. Somewhere in the Östersund police archives was a diary that had been hidden away, with a raincoat. Also in the package were the letters and photographs. Now he had met Margaret Simmons. She’d not only told him about Molin’s journey to Scotland; she’d also given him the name of the man who called himself Fernando Hereira. He went into the museum and bought a picture postcard. Then he sat down on a bench and wrote to Giuseppe.

  Giuseppe, It’s raining here in Scotland, but it’s very beautiful. The man who killed Herbert Molin is called Aron Silberstein. Best wishes, Stefan.

  He drove back to Inverness. The man in the hotel reception said he would post the card.

  The rest of his time in Inverness was spent waiting. He went for a long walk, he had dinner at the same restaurant as on the previous day, and he talked for an age on the telephone to Elena in the evening. He was missing her and now no longer had a problem telling her so.