The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell

got around to it. When Hans was little we used to spend every summer on the island of Utö. In recent years we’ve gone to the Riviera and rented an apartment.”
    “Is there anywhere else he might keep a gun?”
    “No. Why are you asking?”
    “Perhaps he has some kind of store somewhere. Do you have an attic? Or a basement?”
    “We keep some old furniture and souvenirs from his childhood in a room in the basement. But I can’t believe there could be a gun there.”
    She left the room and came back with a key to a padlock. Wallander put it in his pocket. Louise asked him if he’d like more tea, but Wallander said no. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he would love a cup of coffee.
    He went back to the study and continued leafing through the report on Cambodia.
Why had it been lying on top of the filing cabinet?
There was a footstool beside the easy chair. Wallander placed it in front of the filing cabinet and stood on tiptoe so that he could see the top of the cabinet. It was covered in dust, except for where the folder had been lying. Wallander replaced the stool and remained standing. It suddenly dawned on him what had attracted his attention. There seemed to be papers missing, especially in the filing cabinet. To make sure, Wallander worked his way through everything one more time, both the things in the desk drawers and those in the filing cabinet. Everywhere, he found traces of documents having been removed. Could Håkan have done it himself? That was a possibility; or it could have been Louise.
    Wallander went back to the living room. Louise was sitting on a chair that Wallander suspected was very old. She was staring at her hands. She stood up when he came into the room and asked again if he would like a cup of tea. He accepted this time. He waited until she had poured his tea, and noticed that she didn’t take a cup herself.
    “I can’t find anything,” Wallander said. “Could someone have been through his papers?”
    She looked quizzically at him. Her tiredness made her face look gray, almost twisted.
    “I’ve been searching through them, of course. But who else could have?”
    “I don’t know, but it looks as if some papers are missing, as if disorder has been introduced into all those neat and tidy files. I could be wrong.”
    “No one has been in his study since the day he disappeared. Except for me, naturally.”
    “I know we’ve talked about this already, but let me ask you again. Was he neat by nature?”
    “He hated untidiness.”
    “But he wasn’t a pedant, I seem to remember you saying.”
    “When we have visitors for dinner, he always helps me set the table. He checks to make sure the cutlery and glasses are where they should be. But he doesn’t use a ruler to get the lines exactly right. Does that answer your question?”
    “It certainly does,” said Wallander gracefully.
    Wallander drank his tea, then went down to the basement to take a look at the family’s storeroom. It contained a few old suitcases, a rocking horse, plastic boxes full of toys used by earlier generations, not just Hans. Leaning against the wall were some skis and a dismantled device for developing photographic negatives.
    Wallander sat down cautiously on the rocking horse. The thought struck him as suddenly and relentlessly as the thugs had attacked him only a few days ago: Håkan von Enke was dead. There was no other possible explanation. He was dead.
    That realization not only made him feel sad, it also troubled him.
    Håkan von Enke was trying to tell me something, he thought. But unfortunately, in that bunker in Djursholm, I didn’t understand what.

7
    Wallander was woken up as dawn was breaking by a young couple arguing in the room next door. The walls were so thin that he could hear clearly the harsh words they were exchanging. He got out of bed and rummaged through his toiletry bag for a pair of earplugs, but he had evidently left them at home. He banged on the wall, two heavy blows followed by