The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell

but they hadn’t found anything new at the scene of the crime yet. Mrs. Tunberg was in Ostersund, talking to Artur Nyman, a detective sergeant and Larsson’s closest colleague. The chief of police was able to inform Larsson that Molin’s daughter, who was in Germany, would soon be on her way to Sweden. They’d also been in touch with Molin’s son, who worked as a steward on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
    â€œAny news about his second wife?” Larsson wondered.
    The first wife, the mother of his two children, had died some years ago. Larsson had spent several hours looking into her death, but she’d died of natural causes. Besides, Molin and his first wife had been divorced for nineteen years. His second wife, a woman Molin had been married to while living in BorÃ¥s, was proving difficult to trace.

    Larsson went back into the house. He stood just inside the door and scrutinized the dried bloodstains on the floor. Then he took a couple of steps sideways and looked hard at them again. He frowned. There was something about the marks that puzzled him. He took out his notebook, borrowed a pencil from one of the forensic officers, and made a sketch. There were nineteen footprints in all, ten made by a right foot and nine by a left foot.
    He went outside. A crow was disturbed and flew off. Larsson studied his sketch. Then he fetched a rake he knew was in the shed, and smoothed out the gravel in front of the house. He pressed his feet down into the gravel to reproduce the pattern he’d sketched in his notebook. Stepped to one side and studied the result. Walked all the way around, examining the marks from different angles. Then he carefully stepped into the footprints, one after the other, moving slowly. He did it again, faster now, with his knees slightly bent. The penny dropped.
    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?”
    â€œTesting a theory. What can you see here?”
    â€œFootprints in the gravel. A replica of the ones we have inside the house.”
    â€œNothing else?”
    â€œNo.”
    The other officer came out. He had a thermos flask in his hand.
    â€œWasn’t there a disc in the CD player?” Larsson asked.
    â€œThat’s right,” said the man with the flask.
    â€œWhat kind of music was it?”
    The technician handed the flask to his colleague and went inside. He was back in a flash.
    â€œArgentinean 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.
    â€œDoes either of you dance the tango?” he said.
    â€œNot normally. Why?”
    It was the man with the thermos flask who answered.
    â€œBecause 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œTango,” said Larsson. “That’s all it is. Whoever killed Molin invited him to dance a tango.”
    They contemplated the footprints in silence.
    â€œThe question,” Larsson said, when he spoke again, “is who? Who invites a dead man to dance with him?”

Chapter Four
    L indman began to have the feeling that his body was being drained completely of blood. Even though the