The Man Who Smiled

THE MAN WHO SMILED

Henning Mankell has received international acclaim for his Inspector Wallander series, dominating bestseller lists throughout Europe. He devotes much of his time to working with charities to help victims of HIV/Aids in Africa, where he is also the head of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo.

Laurie Thompson is the translator into English of four other books by Henning Mankell, as well as novels by Ake Edwardson, Hakan Nesser and Mikael Niemi.

BY HENNING MANKELL

The Kurt Wallander Mysteries

Faceless Killers

The Dogs of Riga

The White Lioness

The Man Who Smiled

Sidetracked

The Fifth Woman

One Step Behind

Firewall

The Return of the Dancing Master

Before the Frost

I Die, But the Memory Lives On

Chronicler of the Winds

HENNING MANKELL

The Man Who

Smiled

TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY

Laurie Thompson

It is not so much the sight of immorality of the great that is to be feared as that of immorality leading to greatness.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America

Chapter 1

Fog.

A silent, stealthy beast of prey. Even though I have lived all my life in Skane, where fog is forever closing in and shutting out the world, I'll never get used to it.

9 p.m., October 11, 1993.

Fog came rolling in from the sea. He was driving home to Ystad and had just passed Brosarp Hills when he found himself in the thick of the white mass.

Fear overcame him straight away.

I'm frightened of fog, he thought. I ought rather to be scared of the man I have just been to see at Farnholm Castle. The friendly man whose menacing staff always lurk in the background, their faces in the shadows. I ought to be thinking about him and what I now know is hidden behind that friendly smile. His impeccable standing in the community, above the very least suspicion. He is the one I ought to be frightened of, not the fog drifting in from Hano Bay. Not now that I have discovered that he would not hesitate to kill anyone who gets in his way.

He turned on the wipers to try to clear the windscreen. He did not like driving in the dark. He particularly disliked it when rabbits scurried this way and that in the headlights.

Once, more than 30 years ago, he had run over a hare. It was on the Tomelilla road, one evening in early spring. He could still remember stamping his foot down on the brake pedal, but then a dull thud against the bodywork. He had stopped and got out. The hare was lying on the road, its back legs kicking. The upper part of its body was paralysed, but its eyes stared at him. He had had to force himself to find a heavy stone from the verge, and had shut his eyes as he threw it down on to the hare's head. He had hurried back to the car without looking again at the animal.

He had never forgotten those eyes and those wildly kicking legs. The memory kept coming back, again and again, usually at the most unexpected times.

He tried now to put the unpleasantness behind him. A hare that died all of 30 years ago can haunt a man, but it can't harm him, he thought. I have more than enough worries about people still in the land of the living.

He noticed that he was checking his rear-view mirror more often than usual.

I'm frightened, he thought again, and I have only just realised that I am running away. I am running from what I know is hidden behind the walls of Farnholm Castle. And they know that I know. But how much? Enough for them to be afraid that I'll break the oath of silence I once took as a newly qualified solicitor? A long time ago that was, when an oath was just that: a sacred commitment to professional secrecy. Are they nervous about their old lawyer's conscience?

Nothing in the rear-view mirror. He was alone in the fog, but in under an hour he would be back in Ystad.

The thought cheered him, if only for a moment. So they weren't following him after all. He had made up his mind what he was going to do tomorrow. He would talk to his son, who was also his colleague and a partner in the legal practice. There was always a solution, that was something life had taught him. There had to be one this time too.

He groped on the unlit dashboard for the radio. The car filled with a man's voice talking about the latest research in genetics. Words passed through his brain without his taking them in. He checked his watch: nearly 9.30. Still no-one behind him, but the fog seemed to be getting even thicker. Nevertheless, he squeezed the accelerator a little harder. The further he was from Farnholm Castle, the calmer he felt. Perhaps, after all, he had nothing to fear.

He forced himself to think clearly.

It had begun with a perfectly ordinary telephone call, a message on his desk asking him to contact a man about a contract that urgently needed verifying. He did not recognise the name, but had taken the initiative and made the call: a small solicitors' practice in an insignificant Swedish town could not afford to reject a potential client. He could recall even now the voice on the phone: polite, with a northern accent, but at the same time giving the impression of a man who measured out his life in terms of what each minute cost. He had explained the task, a complicated transaction involving a shipping line registered in Corsica and a number of cement cargoes to Saudi Arabia, where one of his companies was acting as an agent for Skanska. There had been some vague, passing reference to an enormous mosque that was to be built in Khamis Mushayt. Or maybe it was a university building in Jeddah.

They had met a few days later at the Continental Hotel in Ystad. He had got there early, and the restaurant was not yet open for lunch; he had sat at a table in the corner and watched the man arrive. The only other person there was a Yugoslav waiter staring gloomily out of the window. It was the middle of January, a gale was blowing in from the Baltic and it would soon be snowing. But the man approaching him was suntanned. He wore a dark blue suit and was definitely no more than 50. Somehow, he did not belong either in Ystad or in the January weather. He was a stranger, with a smile that did not belong to that suntanned face.

That was the first time he had set eyes on the man from Farnholm Castle. A man without baggage, in a discrete world of his own, in a blue, tailor-made suit, everything centring on a smile, and an alarming pair of shadowy satellites buzzing attentively but in the background.

Oh yes, the shadows had been there even then. He could not recall either of them being introduced. They sat at a table on the other side of the room, and rose without a word when their master's meeting was over.

Golden days, he thought, bitterly, and I was stupid enough to believe in it. A solicitor's vision of the world should not be influenced by the illusion of a paradise to come, not here on earth at least. Within six months the suntanned man had come to be responsible for half of the practice's turnover, and in a year the firm's income had doubled. Bills were paid promptly, it was never necessary to send a reminder. They had been able to afford to redecorate their offices. The man at Farnholm Castle seemed to be managing his business in every corner of the world, and from places that seemed to be chosen more or less at random. Faxes and telephone calls, even the occasional radio transmission, came from the strangest-sounding towns, some he could only with difficulty find on the globe next to the leather sofa in the reception area. But everything had been above board, albeit complex.

The new age has dawned, he remembered thinking. So this is what it's like. As a solicitor, I have to be grateful that the man at Farnholm picked my name from the telephone book.

His train of recollections was cut short. For a moment he thought he was imagining it, but then he clearly made out the headlights in the rear-view mirror.

They had crept up on him.

Fear struck him immediately. They had followed him after all. They were afraid he would betray his oath of silence.

His first reaction was to accelerate away through the fog. Sweat broke out on his forehead. The headlights were on his tail. Shadows that kill, he thought. I'll never get away, just as none of the others did.

The car passed him. He caught a glimpse of the driver's face, an old man. Then the red rear lights vanished into the fog.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and neck.

I'll soon be home, he thought. Nothing is going to happen. Mrs Duner has recorded in my diary that I was to be at Farnholm today. Nobody, not even he, would send his henchmen to kill off his own elderly lawyer on the way home from a meeting. It would be far too risky.

It was nearly two years before he first realised that something untoward was going on. It was an insignificant assignment, checking contracts that involved the Swedish Trade Council as guarantors for a considerable sum of money. Spare parts for turbines in Poland, combine harvesters for Czechoslovakia. It was a minor detail, some figures that didn't add up. He thought it was probably a misprint, maybe somewhere two digits had been muddled. He had gone through it all again and realised that it was no accident, it was all intentional. Nothing was missing, everything was correct, but the upshot was horrifying. His first instinct had been not to believe it. He had leaned back in his chair - it was late in the evening, he recalled - taking in that there was no doubt that he had uncovered a crime. It was dawn before he had set out to walk the streets of Ystad, and by the time he reached Stortorget he had reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative explanation: the man at Farnholm Castle was guilty of a gross breach of trust regarding the Trade Council, of tax evasion and of a whole string of forgeries.

There after he had been constantly on the lookout for the black holes in every document emanating from Farnholm. And he found them - not every time, but more often than not. The extent of the criminality had slowly dawned on him. He tried not to acknowledge the evidence he could not avoid registering, but in the end he had to face up to the facts. But on the other hand he had done nothing about it. He had not even told his son. Was this because, deep down, he preferred to believe it wasn't true? Nobody else, apparently not even the tax authorities, had noticed anything. Perhaps he had uncovered a secret that was purely hypothetical? Or was it that it was all too late anyway, now that the man from Farnholm Castle was the principal source of income for the firm?

The fog was more or less impenetrable now. He hoped it might lift as he got nearer to Ystad.

He couldn't go on like this, that was certain. Not now that he knew that the man had blood on his hands.

He would talk to his son. The rule of law still applied in Sweden, for heaven's sake, even though it seemed to be undermined and diluted day by day. His own complaisance had been a part of that process. His having for so long turned a blind eye was no reason now for remaining silent.

He would never bring himself to commit suicide.

Suddenly he saw something in the headlights. He slammed on the brakes. At first he thought it was a hare. Then he realised there was something in the road.

He turned his headlights on full beam.

It was a chair, in the middle of the road. A simple kitchen chair. Sitting on it was a human-sized effigy. Its face was white.

Or could it be a real person made up like a tailor's dummy?

He felt his heart starting to pound. Fog swirled in the light of his headlamps. There was no way he could shut out the chair and the effigy. Nor could he ignore his mounting fear. He checked his rear-view mirror. Nothing. He drove slowly forward until the chair and the effigy were no more than ten metres from the car. Then he stopped again.

The dummy looked impressively like a human being. Not just some kind of hastily got-up scarecrow. It's for me, he thought. He switched off the radio, his hand trembling, and pricked up his ears. Fog, and silence. He didn't know what to do next.

What made him hesitate was not the chair out there in the fog, nor the ghostly effigy. There was something else, something in the background, something he couldn't make out. Something that probably existed only inside himself.

I'm very frightened, he said to himself, and fear is undermining my ability to think straight.

Finally, he undid his safety belt and opened the door. He was surprised by how cool it felt outside. He got out, his eyes fixed on the chair and the dummy lit up by the car's headlights. His last thought was that it reminded him of a stage set with an actor about to make his entrance.

He heard a noise behind him, but he didn't turn. The blow caught him on the back of his head.

He was dead before his body hit the damp asphalt.

It was 9.53 p.m. The fog was now very dense.

Chapter 2

The wind was gusting from due north.

The man, a long way out on the freezing cold beach, was suffering in the icy blasts. He kept stopping and turning his back to the wind. He would stand there, motionless, staring at the sand, his hands deep in his pockets; then he would go on walking, apparently aimlessly, until he would be lost from sight in the grey twilight.

A woman who every day walked her dog on the sands had grown anxious about the man who seemed to patrol the beach from dawn to dusk. He had turned up out of the blue a few weeks ago, a species of human jetsam washed ashore. People she came across on the beach normally greeted her. It was late autumn, the end of October, so in fact she seldom came across anybody at all. But the man in the black overcoat never acknowledged her. At first she thought he was shy, then rude, or perhaps a foreigner. Gradually she came to feel that he was weighed down by some appalling sorrow, that his beach walks were a pilgrimage taking him away from some unknowable source of pain. His gait was decidedly erratic. He would walk slowly, almost dawdling, then suddenly come to life and break into what was almost a trot. It seemed to her that what dictated his movements was not so much physical as his disturbed spirit. She was convinced that his hands were clenched into fists inside his pockets.

After a week she thought she had worked it out. This stranger had landed on this strand from somewhere or other in order to come to terms with a serious personal crisis, like a vessel with inadequate charts edging its way through a treacherous channel. That must be the cause of his introversion, his restless walking. She had mentioned the solitary wanderer on the beach every night to her husband, whose rheumatism had forced him into early retirement. Once he had even accompanied her and the dog though his condition caused him a great deal of pain and he was much happier staying indoors. He had thought that his wife was right, though he'd found the man's behaviour so strikingly out of the ordinary that he had phoned a friend in the Skagen police and confided in him his own and his wife's observations. Possibly the man was on the run, wanted for some crime, or had absconded from one of the few mental hospitals left in the country? But the police officer had seen so many odd characters over the years, most of them having made the pilgrimage to the furthest tip of Jutland only in search of peace and quiet, that he counselled his friend to be wise: just leave the man alone. The strand between the dunes and the two seas that met there was a constantly changing no man's land for whoever needed it.

The woman with her dog and the man in the black overcoat went on passing each other like ships in the night for another week. Then one day - on October 20, 1993, in point of fact - something happened which she would later connect with the man's disappearance.

It was one of those rare days when there was not a breath of wind, when the fog lay motionless over both land and sea. Foghorns had been sounding in the distance like lost, invisible cattle. The whole of this strange setting was holding its breath. Then she had caught sight of the man in the black overcoat and stopped dead.

He was not alone. He was with a shortish man in a light-coloured windcheater and cap. She noticed that it was the new arrival who was doing the talking, and seemed to be trying to convince the other about something. Occasionally he took his hands from his pockets and gestured to underline what he was saying. She could not hear what they were saying, but there was about the smaller man's manner something that told her he was upset.

After a while they set off along the beach and were swallowed up by the fog.

The following day the man was alone again. Five days later he was gone. She walked the dog on the beach every morning until well into November, expecting to come across the man in black; but he did not reappear. She never saw him again.

For more than a year Kurt Wallander, a detective chief inspector with the Ystad police, had been on sick leave, unable to carry out his duties. During that time a sense of powerlessness had come to dominate his life and affected his actions. Time and time again, when he could not bear to stay in Ystad and had some money to spare, he had gone off on pointless journeys in the vain hope of feeling better, perhaps even of recovering his zest for life, if only he were somewhere other than Skane. He had taken a package holiday to the Caribbean, but had drunk himself silly on the outward flight and had not been entirely sober for any of the fortnight he spent in Barbados. His general state of mind was one of increasing panic, a sense of being totally alienated. He had skulked in the shade of palm trees, and some days had not even set foot outside his hotel room, unable to overcome a primitive need to avoid the company of others. He had bathed just once, and then only when he'd stumbled on a jetty and fallen into the sea.

Late one evening when he had forced himself to go out and mix with other people, but also in order to replenish his stock of alcohol, he had been solicited by a prostitute. He wanted to wave her away and yet somehow encouraged her at the same time, and was only later overwhelmed by misery and self-disgust. For three days, of which he afterwards had no clear memory, he spent all his time with the girl in a shack stinking of vitriol, in a bed with sheets smelling of mould and cockroaches crawling over his sweaty face. He could not even remember the girl's name or if he had ever discovered what it was. He had taken her in what could only have been a fit of unbridled lust. When she had extracted the last of his money two burly brothers appeared and threw him out. He went back to the hotel and survived by forcing down as much as he could of the breakfast included in the price, eventually arriving back at Sturup airport in a worse state than when he had left.

His doctor, who gave him regular check-ups, forbade him any more such trips as there was a real danger that Wallander would drink himself to death. But two months later, at the beginning of December, he was off again, having borrowed money from his father on the pretext of buying some new furniture in order to raise his spirits. Ever since his troubles started he had avoided his father, who had just married a woman 30 years his junior who used to be his home help. The moment he had the money in his hand, he made a beeline for the Ystad Travel Agency and bought a three-week package holiday in Thailand. The pattern of the Caribbean repeated itself, the difference being that catastrophe was narrowly averted because a retired pharmacist who had sat next to him on the flight and who happened to be at the same hotel took pity on him and stepped in when Wallander began drinking at breakfast and generally acting strangely. The pharmacist's intervention resulted in Wallander's being sent home a week earlier than planned. On this holiday, too, he had surrendered to his self-disgust and thrown himself into the arms of prostitutes, each one younger than the last. There followed a nightmarish winter when he was in constant dread of having contracted the fatal disease.

By the end of April, when he had been off work for ten months, it was confirmed that he was not in fact infected; but he seemed not to react to the good news. That was about the time his doctor began to wonder if Wallander's days as a police officer were over, whether indeed he would ever be fit to work again, or was ready for immediate early retirement on the grounds of ill health.

That was when he went - perhaps "ran away" would be more accurate - to Skagen the first time. By then he had managed to stop drinking, thanks not least to his daughter Linda coming back from Italy and discovering the mess both he and his flat were in. She had reacted in exactly the right way: emptied all the bottles scattered about the flat, and read him the riot act. For the two weeks she stayed with him in Mariagatan, he at last had somebody to talk to. Together they were able to lance most of the abscesses eating into his soul, and by the time she left she felt that she might be able to give a little credence to his promise to stay off the booze. On his own again and unable to face the prospect of sitting around in the empty flat, he had seen an advertisement in the newspaper for an inexpensive guest house in Skagen.

Many years before, soon after Linda was born, he had spent a few weeks in the summer at Skagen with his wife Mona. They had been among the happiest weeks of his life. They were short of money and lived in a tent that leaked, but it seemed to them that the whole universe was theirs. He telephoned that very day and booked himself a room starting in the first week of May.

The landlady was a widow, Polish originally, and she left him to his own devices. She lent him a bicycle. Every morning he went riding along the endless sands. He took a plastic carrier bag with a packed lunch, and did not come back to his room until late in the evening. His fellow guests were elderly, singles and couples, and it was as quiet as a library reading room. For the first time in over a year he was sleeping soundly, and he had the feeling his insides were shedding the effects of his heavy drinking.

During that first stay at the guest house in Skagen he wrote three letters. The first was to his sister Kristina. She had often been in contact during the past year, asking how he was. He had been touched by her concern, but he had scarcely been able to bring himself to write to her, or to telephone. Things were made worse by a vague memory of having sent her a garbled postcard from the Caribbean when he was far from sober. She had never mentioned it, he had never asked; he hoped he had been so drunk that he had got the address wrong, or forgotten to put a stamp on the card. Now he sat in bed one night and wrote to her, resting the paper on his briefcase. He tried to describe the feeling of emptiness, of shame and guilt that had dogged him ever since he had killed a man last year. He had unquestionably acted in self-defence, and not even the most aggressive and police-hating of reporters had taken him to task, but he felt that he would never manage to shake off the burden of guilt. His only hope was that he might one day learn to live with it.

"I feel as if part of my soul has been replaced by an artificial limb," he wrote. "It still doesn't do what I want it to do. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I'm afraid it might never again obey me, but I haven't given up hope altogether."

The second letter was to his colleagues at the police station in Ystad, and by the time he was about to put it in the red letter box outside the post office in Skagen, he realised that a good part of what he had written was untrue, but that he had to send it even so. He thanked them for the hi-fi system they had clubbed together to give him last summer, and asked them to forgive his not having done so earlier. He meant all that sincerely, of course. But when he ended the letter by saying he was getting better and hoped to be back at work soon, those were just meaningless words: the polar opposite was nearer the truth.

The third letter he wrote during that stay in Skagen was to Baiba Liepa. He had written to her every other month or so over the past year, and she had replied every time. He had begun to think of her as his private patron saint, and his fear of upsetting her so that she might stop replying led him to suppress his feelings for her. Or at least he thought he had. The long, drawn-out process of being undermined by inertia had made him unsure of anything any more. He had brief interludes of absolute clarity, usually when he was on the beach or sitting among the dunes sheltering from the biting cold winds blowing off the sea, and it sometimes seemed to him the whole thing was pointless. He had met Baiba for only a few days in Riga. She had been in love with her murdered husband, Karlis, a captain in the Latvian police force - why in God's name should she suddenly transfer her affections to a Swedish police officer who had done no more than was demanded of him by his profession, even if it had happened in a somewhat unorthodox fashion? But he had no great difficulty dismissing those moments of insight. It was as if he did not dare risk losing what deep down he knew was something he did not even have. Baiba, his dream of Baiba, was his last line of defence. He would defend it to the bitter end, even if it was only an illusion.

He stayed ten days at the guest house, and when he went back to Ystad he had already made up his mind to return as soon as he could. By mid July he was in his old room again. Again the widow lent him a bicycle and he spent his days by the sea. Unlike the first time, the beach was now full of holidaymakers, and he felt as if he was wandering like an invisible shadow among all these people as they laughed, played and paddled. It was as if he had established a territory on the beach where the two seas met, an area under his personal control invisible to everyone else, where he could patrol and keep an eye on himself as he tried to find a way out of his misery. His doctor thought he could detect some improvement in Wallander after his first spell in Skagen, but the indications were still too weak for him to assert that there had been a definite change for the better. Wallander asked if he could stop taking the medication he had been on for more than a year, since it made him feel tired and sluggish, but the doctor urged him to be patient for a little longer.

Every morning he wondered if he would have the strength to get out of bed, but it was easier when he was at the guest house in Skagen. There were moments when he felt he could forget the awful events of the previous year, and there were glimmerings of hope that he might after all have a future.

As he wandered the beach for hour after hour, he began slowly to go through what lay behind it all, searching for a way to overcome and cast off the burden, maybe even to find the strength to become a police officer again, a police officer and a human being.

It was during that visit that he had stopped listening to opera. He would often take his little cassette player on his walks along the beach, but one day it came to him that he had had enough. When he got back to the guest house that evening he packed all his opera cassettes away into his suitcase and put it in the wardrobe. The next day he cycled into Skagen and bought some recordings of pop artists he had barely heard of. What surprised him most was that he did not miss the music that had kept him going for so many years.

I have no space left, he thought. Something inside me has filled up to the brim, and soon the walls will burst.

*

He was back in Skagen in the middle of October. He was firmly resolved this time to work out what he would do with the rest of his life. His doctor had encouraged him to return to the guest house, which obviously did his patient good. There were signs of a gradual return to health, a tentative withdrawal from the depths of depression. Without betraying his oath of confidentiality, he also intimated to Bjork, Wallander's boss, that there might just possibly be a chance of the invalid coming back to work at some point.

So Wallander went to Denmark again and set out once more on his walks along the beach. It was late autumn and the sands were deserted. He seldom encountered another human being, and the ones he did see were mostly old, apart from the occasional sweat-stained jogger; and there was a busybody regularly walking her dog. He resumed his patrols, watching over his lonely territory, marching with gathering confidence towards the just visible and constantly shifting line where the beach met the sea.

He was well into middle age now, and the milestone of 50 was not far off. During the last year he had lost so much weight he found himself having to hunt in his wardrobe for clothes he had been unable to get into for the past seven or eight years. He was in better physical shape than he had enjoyed for ages, especially now that he had stopped drinking. That seemed to him a possible starting point for his future plans. Barring accidents, he could have at least 20 more years to live. What exercised him most was whether he would be able to return to police duties, or whether he would have to find something else to do. He refused even to consider early retirement on health grounds. That was a prospect he didn't think he could cope with. He spent his time on the beach, usually enveloped in drifting fog but with occasional days of fresh, clear air, glittering seas and gulls soaring up above. Sometimes he felt like the clockwork man who had lost the key that normally stuck out of his back, and hence lacked the possibility of being wound up, of finding new sources of energy. He pondered his options were he forced to leave the police force. He might become a security guard or the like with some firm or other. He could not see what his service as a police officer actually qualified him for, apart from chasing criminals. His options were limited, unless he decided to make a clean break and put behind him his many years of police work. But who would be willing to employ a former officer approaching 50, whose only expertise was unravelling more or less confused crime scenes?

When he felt hungry he would leave the beach and find a sheltered spot in the dunes. He tucked into his packed lunch and used the plastic carrier bag to sit on, protecting himself from the cold sand. As he ate, he tried hard - without much success - to think of something other than his future. He made every effort to be realistic, but always he had to fend off unrealistic dreams.

Like all other police officers, he was sometimes tempted to go over to the other side. He never ceased to be amazed by the officers who had turned criminals and yet failed to use their knowledge of fundamental police procedures that would have helped them to avoid being caught. He often toyed with schemes which would instantly make him rich and independent, but usually it did not take long to come to his senses and banish any such thoughts with a shudder. What he wanted least of all was to follow in the steps of his colleague Hanson, who seemed to him obsessed, spending so much of his time betting on horses that hardly ever won. Wallander could not imagine himself ever wasting time like that.

He kept coming back to the question of whether he was duty-bound to return to the police force. Start work again, fight off the memories of what happened a year ago, and maybe one day manage to live with them. The only realistic option was for him to go on as before. That was the nearest he came to finding a glimmer of a meaning in life: helping people to lead as secure an existence as possible, removing the worst criminals from the streets. To give up on that would not only mean turning his back on a job he knew he did well - perhaps better than most of his colleagues - it would also mean undermining something deep inside him, the feeling of being a part of something greater than himself, something that made his life worth living.

But eventually, when he had been in Skagen a week, and autumn was showing signs of turning into winter, he was forced to admit that he would not now be up to the job. His career as a police officer was over, the wounds inflicted by what happened the previous year had changed him irrevocably. It was an afternoon when the beach was shrouded in thick fog when he decided that the arguments for and against were exhausted. He would talk to his doctor and to Bjork. He would not return to duty.

Deep down he felt a vague sense of relief. Now at least he knew the score. The man he had killed last year in the field with all the sheep hidden in the fog had his revenge.

He cycled in to Skagen that night and got drunk in a little, smoke-filled bar, where the customers were few and far between and the music too loud. He knew that for once he would not be carrying on his binge the next day. This was merely a way of confirming the fateful conclusion he had reached, that his life as a policeman had come to an end. Riding back to the guest house at the dead of night, he fell off and grazed his cheek. The landlady had noticed his absence and was sitting up, waiting for him. Despite his protests, she insisted on cleaning the blood off his face and on taking his filthy clothes to wash. Then she helped him to unlock the door of his room.

"There was a man here this evening, asking for Mr Wallander," she said, handing him back the key.

He looked blankly at her.

"Nobody asks for me," he said. "Nobody even knows I'm here."

"This man did," she said. "He was anxious to find you."

"Did he give you his name?"

"No, but he was Swedish."

Wallander shook his head and tried to put it out of his mind. He did not want to see anybody, and nobody wanted to see him either, he was sure of that.

The next day he was full of regrets and went back to the beach, never giving a thought to what the landlady had told him. The fog was thick, and he felt very tired. For the first time he asked himself what he thought he was doing on the beach. After only a kilometre or so he wondered if he had the strength to go on, and sat down on the upturned hulk of a large rowing boat half-buried in the sand.

It was then that he noticed a man approaching through the fog. It was as if somebody had intruded on the privacy of his office out there on the boundless sands.

His first impression was of a blurred stranger, wearing a windcheater and a cap that seemed too small for his head. Then he seemed vaguely familiar, but it was not until he had come closer and Wallander had stood up that he realised who it was. They shook hands, and Wallander wondered how on earth his refuge had been discovered. He tried to remember when he had last seen Sten Torstensson, and thought that it must have been in connection with some court proceedings that last fateful spring.

"I came to see you last night at the guest house," Torstensson said. "I don't want to disturb you, of course, but I must talk to you."

Once upon a time I was a police officer and he was a solicitor, Wallander thought, that's all there was to it. We used to sit on either side of criminals, and occasionally but not very often we might argue about whether or not an arrest was justified. We got to know each other a bit better during the difficult period of my divorce from Mona, when he took care of my interests. One day we realised something had clicked, something that might be the beginnings of a friendship. Friendship often develops out of a meeting at which nobody had expected any such miracle to happen. But friendship is a miracle, that's something life has taught me. He invited me out sailing one weekend. It was blowing a gale, and I vowed I would never set foot on a sailing boat again. Then we started meeting, not all that often, not regularly. And now he's tracked me down and wants to talk.

"I heard that somebody had been asking for me," Wallander said. "How the hell did you find me here?"

He knew he was making it clear he resented being disturbed in his refuge among the dunes.

"You know me," Torstensson said, "I'm not the sort to make a nuisance of myself. My secretary claims I'm sometimes frightened of being a nuisance to myself, whatever she means by that. But I phoned your sister in Stockholm. Or rather, I got in touch with your father and he gave me her number. She knew the name of the guest house, and where it was. And so here I am. I stayed the night at the hotel next to the Art Museum."

They had started walking along the beach, the wind behind them. The woman who was always out with her dog had stopped and was staring at them, and Wallander was sure she would be surprised to see he had a visitor. They walked in silence, and Wallander waited for Torstensson to speak, feeling how odd it was to have someone by his side.

"I need your help," Torstensson said, eventually. "As a friend and as a police officer."

"As a friend," Wallander said. "If I can. Which I doubt. But not as a police officer."

"I know you're still off work," Torstensson said.

"Not only that. You can be the first to know that I'm packing it in altogether."

Torstensson stopped in his tracks.

"That's how it is," Wallander said. "But tell me why you're here."

"My father's dead."

Wallander had known him. He, too, was a solicitor, although he only occasionally appeared in court. As far as Wallander could remember, the older Torstensson spent most of his time advising on financial matters. He tried to work out how old he must have been. Getting on for 70, he supposed, an age by which quite a lot of people are dead already.

"He died in a road accident some weeks ago," Torstensson said. "Just south of Brosarp Hills."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Wallander said. "What happened?"

"That's a good question. That's why I'm here."

Wallander looked at him blankly.

"It's cold," Torstensson said. "They serve coffee at the Art Museum. I have the car with me."

Wallander nodded. His bicycle was sticking out of the boot as they drove through the dunes. There were not many customers in the Art Museum cafe at that time in the morning. The girl behind the counter was humming a tune Wallander was surprised to recognise from one of his new cassettes.

"It was late in the evening," Torstensson began. "October 11, to be precise. Dad had been to see one of our most important clients. According to the police he'd been driving too fast, lost control, the car had overturned and he was killed."

"It can happen in a flash," Wallander said. "Lose concentration for just a second, and the result can be catastrophic."

"It was foggy that evening," Torstensson said. "Dad never drove fast. Why would he have done so when it was foggy? He was obsessed by the fear of running over a hare."

Wallander studied him. "What's on your mind?"

"Martinsson was in charge of the case."

"He's good," Wallander said. "If Martinsson says that's what happened, there's no reason to think otherwise."

Torstensson looked gravely at him. "I've no doubt Martinsson is a good police officer," he said. "Nor do I doubt they found my father dead in his car, which was upside down and badly knocked about in a field beside the road. But there's too much that doesn't add up. Something more must have happened."

"What?"

"Something else."

"Such as?"

"I don't know."

Wallander went to the counter to refill his cup.

Why don't I tell him the truth? he wondered. That Martinsson is both imaginative and energetic, but can on occasions be careless.

"I've read the police report," Torstensson said, when Wallander had sat down again. "I've taken it with me and read it at the spot where my father died. I've read the post-mortem notes, I've spoken to Martinsson, I've done some thinking and I've asked again. Now I'm here."

"What can I do?" Wallander said. "You're a solicitor, you know that in every case there are a few loose ends that we can never manage to tie up. I take it your father was alone in the car when it happened. If I understand you rightly, there were no witnesses. Which means the only person who could tell us exactly what happened was your father."

"Something happened," Torstensson said. "Something's not right and I want to know what it is."

"I can't help you, although I'd like to."

Torstensson seemed not to hear him. "The keys," he said. "Just to give you one example. They weren't in the ignition. They were on the floor."

"They could have been knocked out," Wallander said. "When a car crashes, anything can happen."

"The ignition was undamaged," Torstensson said. "The ignition key was not even bent."

"There could be an explanation even so."

"I could give you other examples," Torstensson insisted. "I know that something happened. My dad died in a car accident that was really something else."

Wallander thought before replying. "Might he have committed suicide?"

"That possibility did occur to me, but I'm sure it can be discounted. I knew my father well."

"The majority of suicides are unexpected," Wallander said. "But, of course, you know best what you want to believe."

"There's another reason why I cannot accept the accident theory," Torstensson said.

Wallander looked at him sharply.

"My father was a cheerful, outgoing man," Torstensson said. "If I hadn't known him so well, I might not have noticed the change. Little things, barely noticeable, but very definitely a change in his mood during the last six months."

"Can you be more precise?"

Torstensson shook his head. "Not really," he said. "It was just a feeling I had. Something was worrying him. Something he was very keen to make sure I wouldn't notice."

"Did you ever speak to him about it?"

"Never."

Wallander put his empty cup down. "I'd like to help you, but I can't," he said. "As your friend, I can listen to what you have to say. But I no longer exist as a police officer. I don't even feel flattered by the fact that you've come all the way here to talk to me. I just feel numb and tired and depressed."

Torstensson opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.

They stood up and left the cafe.

"I respect what you say, of course," Torstensson said as they stood outside the Art Museum.

Wallander went with him to the car and recovered his bicycle.

"We never know how to handle death," Wallander said in a clumsy attempt to convey his sympathy.

"I'm not asking you to," Torstensson said. "I just want to know what happened. That was no ordinary car accident."

"Have another word with Martinsson," Wallander said. "But it might be best if you don't mention that I suggested that."

They said goodbye, and Wallander watched the car drive off through the dunes.

He was struck by the feeling that matters were getting urgent. He couldn't keep dragging things out any longer. That afternoon he telephoned his doctor and Bjork and informed them that he had decided to resign from the police force.

He stayed at Skagen for five more days. The feeling that his soul was a devastated bomb site was as strong as ever. But he felt relieved nevertheless, having had the strength to make up his mind despite everything.

He came back to Ystad on Sunday, October 31, in order to sign the various forms that would draw the line under his police career.

On the Monday morning, November 1, he lay in bed with his eyes wide open after the alarm went off at 6.00. Apart from brief periods of restless dozing, he had been awake all night. Several times he had got out of bed and stood at the window overlooking Mariagatan, thinking that he had made yet another wrong decision. Perhaps there was no obvious path for him to follow for the rest of his life. Without finding any satisfactory answer to that, he had sat on the sofa in the living room listening to the radio. Eventually, just before the alarm rang, he had accepted that he had no choice. He was running away, no doubt about that; but everybody runs away sooner or later, he told himself. Invisible forces get the better of all of us in the end. Nobody escapes.

He got up, dressed, went out for the morning paper, came home, put on the water for coffee and took a shower. It felt odd, going back to the old routine just for a day. As he dried himself down, he tried to recall his last working day almost 18 months ago. It was summer when he cleared his desk and then went to the harbour cafe to write a gloomy letter to Baiba. He found it hard to decide whether it felt like an age ago, or just yesterday.

He sat at the kitchen table and stirred his coffee.

Then it had been his last day at work for who knew how long. Now it was his last day at work, ever.

He had been in the police force for more than 25 years. No matter what happened in the years to come, those years would be the backbone of his life, nothing could change that. Nobody can ask to have their life declared invalid, and demand that the dice be thrown afresh. There is no going back. The question was whether there was any way forward.

He tried to identify his emotions this cold morning, but all he felt was emptiness. It was as if the autumn mists had penetrated his consciousness.

He gave a sigh, and turned to his newspaper. He leafed through it and had the distinct impression that he had seen all the photographs and read all the articles any number of times before.

He was about to put it down when a death announcement caught his eye. Sten Torstensson, solicitor, born March 3, 1947, died October 26, 1993.

He stared hard at the notice. Surely it was the father, Gustaf Torstensson, who was dead? He had talked to Sten just over a week ago, on the sands at Skagen.

He tried to work out what it meant. It must be somebody else. Or the names had got mixed up. He read it again. There was no mistake. Sten Torstensson, the man who'd come to see him in Denmark five days ago, was dead.

He sat there, motionless.

Then he stood up, checked in the phone book and dialled a number. The person he was calling was an early riser.

"Martinsson."

Wallander resisted an urge to put the receiver down. "It's me, Kurt," he said. "I hope I didn't wake you up."

There was a long silence before Martinsson responded. "Is it really you?" he said. "Now there's a surprise!"

"I can imagine," Wallander said. "But there is something I need to ask you."

"It can't be true that you're packing it in."

"That's the way it goes," Wallander said. "But that's not why I'm calling. I want to know what happened to Sten Torstensson, the lawyer."

"Haven't you heard?"

"I only got back to Ystad yesterday. I haven't heard anything."

There was a pause. "He was murdered," Martinsson said at last.

Wallander was not surprised. The moment he had seen the notice in the paper, he had known it was not death by natural causes.

"He was shot in his office last Tuesday night," Martinsson said. "It's beyond belief. And tragic. It's only a few weeks since his father was killed in a car accident. But maybe you didn't know that either?"

"No," Wallander lied.

"You've got to come back to work," Martinsson said. "We need you to sort this out. And much more besides."

"No. My mind's made up. I'll explain when we meet. Ystad's a little town. You bump into everybody sooner or later."

Then Wallander said goodbye and hung up.

As he did so, he realised that what he had just said to Martinsson was no longer true. In just a few seconds, everything had changed.

He stood by the phone for more than five minutes. Then he drank his coffee, dressed and went down to his car. At 7.30 he walked through the police-station door for the first time in 18 months. He nodded to the security guard in reception, made a beeline for Bjork's office and knocked on the door. Bjork stood up as he came in, and Wallander noticed that he was thinner. He could see, too, that Bjork was uncertain as to how to deal with the situation.

I'm going to make it easy for him, Wallander thought. He won't understand a thing at first, but then, neither do I.

"Naturally we're pleased to hear you seem to be better," Bjork began, hesitantly. "But, of course, we'd prefer you to be coming back to work rather than leaving us. We need you." He gestured towards his desk, piled high with papers. "Today I have to respond to important matters such as a proposed new design for police uniforms, and yet another incomprehensible draft for a change in the system involving relations between the county constabulary and the county police chiefs. Have you kept up with this?"

Wallander shook his head.

"I wonder where we're heading?" said Bjork, glumly. "If the new uniform design goes through, it's my belief that in future police officers will look like something between a carpenter and a ticket collector."

He looked at Wallander, inviting a comment, but Wallander said nothing.

"The police were nationalised in the 1960s," Bjork said. "Now they're going to do it all over again. Parliament wants to abolish local constabularies and create something entirely new and call it the National Police Force. But the police has always been a national force. What else could it be? The sovereign legal systems of independent provinces were lost in the Middle Ages. How do they think anybody can get on with a day's work when they're buried under an avalanche of woolly memoranda? To cap it all I have to prepare a lecture for a totally unnecessary conference on what they call 'refusal-of-entry techniques'. What they mean is what to do when aliens who can't get a visa have to be loaded on to buses and ferries and deported without too much kerfuffle and protest."

"I realise you're very busy," Wallander said, thinking that Bjork hadn't changed an atom. He'd never got his role as Chief of Police under control. The job controlled him.

"I've got all the papers here," Bjork went on. "All we need is your signature, and you're an ex-policeman. I have to accept your decision, even if I don't like it. By the way, I hope you don't mind, but I've called a press conference for 9 a.m. You've become a famous police officer in the last few years, Kurt. Even if you've acted a little strangely every now and again, there's no denying you've done a lot for our good name and reputation. They do say that there are police cadets who claim to have been inspired by you."

"I'm sure that's not true," Wallander said. "And you can cancel the press conference."

He could see that this annoyed Bjork.

"Out of the question," he said. "It's the least you can do for your colleagues. Besides, Swedish Police magazine is going to run a feature on you."

Wallander walked up to Bjork's desk.

"I'm not packing it in," he said. "I've come here today to start work again."

Bjork stared at him in astonishment.

"There won't be a press conference," Wallander said. "I'm starting work again as of now. I'm going to get the doctor to sign a certificate to say I'm fit. I feel good. I want to work."

"I hope you're not pulling my leg," said Bjork, uneasily.

"No," Wallander said. "Something's happened that's changed my mind."

"This is very sudden."

"For me as well. To be precise it's just over an hour since I changed my mind. But I have one condition. Or rather, a request."

Bjork waited.

"I want to be in charge of the Sten Torstensson case," Wallander said. "Who's in charge at the moment?"

"Everybody's involved," Bjork said. "Svedberg and Martinsson are in the main team, together with me. Akeson is the prosecutor in charge."

"Young Torstensson was a friend of mine," Wallander said.

Bjork nodded and rose to his feet. "Is this really true?" he said. "Have you really changed your mind?"

"You heard what I said."

Bjork walked round his desk and stood face to face with Wallander. "That's the best piece of news I've heard for a very long time," he said. "Let's tear these documents up. Your colleagues are in for a surprise."

"Who's got my old office?" Wallander said.

"Hanson."

"I'd like it back, if possible."

"Of course. Hanson's on a course in Halmstad this week anyway. You can move in straight away."

They walked down the corridor together until they came to Wallander's old office. His nameplate had been removed. That threw him for a moment.

"I need an hour to myself," Wallander said.

"We have a meeting at 8.30 about the Torstensson murder," Bjork said. "In the little conference room. You're sure you're serious about this?"

"Why shouldn't I be?"

Bjork hesitated before continuing. "You have been known to be a bit whimsical, even injudicious," he said. "There's no getting away from that."

"Don't forget to cancel the press conference," Wallander said.

Bjork reached out his hand. "Welcome back," he said.

"Thanks."

Wallander closed the door behind Bjork and immediately took the phone off the hook. He looked round the room. The desk was new. Hanson had brought his own. But the chair was Wallander's old one.

He hung up his jacket and sat down.

Same old smell, he thought. Same furniture polish, same dry air, same faint aroma of the endless cups of coffee that get drunk in this station.

He sat for a long time without moving.

He'd agonised for a year and more, searched for the truth about himself and his future. A decision had gradually formed and broken through the indecision. Then he had started reading a newspaper and everything had changed.

For the first time in ages he felt a glow of satisfaction.

He had reached a decision. Whether it was the right one he could not say. But that didn't matter any more.

He reached for a notepad and wrote: Sten Torstensson. He was back on duty.

Chapter 3

At 8.30, when Bjork closed the door of the conference room, Wallander felt as if he had never been away. The year and a half that had passed since his last investigation meeting had been erased. It was like waking up from a long slumber during which time had ceased to exist.

They were sitting around the oval table, as so often before. As Bjork had still not said anything, Wallander assumed his colleagues were expecting a short speech to thank them for their friendship and cooperation over the years. Then he would take his leave and the rest would concentrate on their notes and get on with the search for the killer of Sten Torstensson.

Wallander realised that he had instinctively taken his usual place, on Bjork's left. The chair on the other side was empty. It was as if his colleagues did not want to intrude too closely on somebody who did not really belong any more. Martinsson sat opposite him, sniffing loudly. Wallander wondered when he had ever seen Martinsson without a cold. Next to him sat Svedberg, rocking backwards and forwards on his chair and scratching his bald head with a pencil, as usual.

Everything would have been just as before, it seemed to Wallander, had it not been for the woman in jeans and a blue blouse sitting on her own at the opposite end of the table. He had never met her, but he knew who she was, and even knew her name. It was almost two years since they had started talking about strengthening the Ystad force, and that was when the name Ann-Britt Hoglund had cropped up for the first time. She was young, had graduated from Police Training College barely three years before, but had already made a name for herself. She had received one of two prizes awarded on the basis of final examinations and general achievements in the assessment of her fellow cadets. She came from Svarte originally, but had grown up in the Stockholm area. Police forces all over the country had tried to enrol her, but she made it clear she would like to return to Skane, the province of her birth, and took a job with the Ystad force.

Wallander caught her eye, and she smiled fleetingly at him.

So, it is not the same as it was before, he thought. With a woman among us, nothing can stay as it used to be.

That was as much as he had time to think. Bjork had risen to his feet, and Wallander sensed that he was nervous. Perhaps it had been too late. Perhaps his contract had already been terminated without his knowing?

"Monday mornings are normally hard going," Bjork said. "Especially when we have to deal with the particularly unpleasant and incomprehensible murder of one of our colleagues, Mr Torstensson. But today I am able to commence our meeting with some good news. Kurt has announced that he is back to good health, and is starting work again as of now. I am the first to welcome him back, of course, but I know all my colleagues feel the same. Including Ann-Britt Hoglund, whom you haven't met yet."

There was silence. Martinsson stared at Bjork in disbelief, and Svedberg put his head to one side, gaping at Wallander as if he couldn't believe his ears. Ann-Britt Hoglund looked as if what Bjork had just said hadn't sunk in.

Wallander felt bound to say something. "It's true," he said. "I'm starting work again today."

Svedberg stopped rocking to and fro and slammed the palms of his hands down on the table with a thud. "That's terrific news, Kurt. We couldn't have managed another damned day without you."

Svedberg's spontaneous comment made the whole room burst out laughing. One after another they stood up in a queue to shake Wallander by the hand. Bjork tried to organise coffee and pastries, and Wallander had difficulty in hiding the fact that he was moved.

It was all over in a few minutes. There was no more time for emotional outpourings for which Wallander was grateful, at least for now. He opened the notebook he had brought with him from his office, containing nothing but Sten Torstensson's name.

"Kurt has asked me if he can join the murder investigation without more ado," Bjork said. "Of course he can. I think the best way to kick off is by making a summary of how things stand. Then we can give Kurt a little time to familiarise himself with the particulars."

He nodded to Martinsson, who had obviously been the one to take on Wallander's role as team leader.

"I'm still a bit confused," Martinsson said, leafing through his papers. "But basically this is how it looks. On the morning of Wednesday, October 27, in other words five days ago, Mrs Berta Duner - secretary to the firm of solicitors - arrived for work as usual, a few minutes before 8 a.m. She found Sten Torstensson shot dead in his office. He was on the floor between the desk and the door. He had been hit by three bullets, each one of which would have been enough to kill him. As nobody lives in the building, which is an old stone-built house with thick walls, and located on a main road as well, nobody heard the shots. At least, nobody has come forward as yet. The preliminary post-mortem results indicate he was shot at around 11 p.m. That would fit in with Mrs Duner's statement to the effect that he often worked late at night, especially after his father died in such tragic circumstances."

Martinsson paused at this point and looked questioningly at Wallander.

"I know his father died in a road accident," Wallander said.

Martinsson nodded and continued: "That's more or less all we know. In other words, we know next to nothing. We don't have a motive, no murder weapon, no witness."

Wallander wondered if he ought to say something about Torstensson's visit to Skagen. All too often he had committed what was a cardinal sin for a police officer and held back information that he should have passed on to his colleagues. On each occasion, it's true, he reckoned that he had good grounds for keeping quiet, but he had to concede that his explanations had almost always been unconvincing.

I'm making a mistake, he thought. I'm starting my second life as a police officer by disowning everything previous experience has taught me. Nevertheless, something told him it was important in this particular case. He treated his instinct with respect. It could be one of his most reliable messengers, as well as his worst enemy. He was certain he was doing the right thing this time.

Something Martinsson had said made him prick up his ears. Or perhaps it was something he had not said.

His train of thought was interrupted by Bjork slamming his fist on the table. This normally meant that the Chief of Police was annoyed or impatient.

"I've asked for pastries," he said, "but there's no sign of them. I suggest we break off at this point and that you fill Kurt in on the details. We'll meet again this afternoon. We might even have something to go with our coffee by then."

When Bjork had left the room, they all gathered round the end of the table he had vacated. Wallander felt he had to say something. He had no right simply to barge in on the team and pretend nothing had happened.

"I'll try to start at the beginning," he said. "It's been a rough time. I honestly didn't think I'd ever be able to get back to work. Killing a man, even if it was in self-defence, hit me hard. But I'll do my best."

Nobody said a word.

"You mustn't think we don't understand," Martinsson said, at last. "Even if police work trains you to get used to just about everything, making you think there's no end to how awful life can be, it really strikes home when adversity lands on somebody you know well. If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you that we've missed you just as much as we missed Rydberg a few years ago."

Dear old Chief Inspector Rydberg, who died in the spring of 1991, had been their patron saint. Thanks to his enormous abilities as a police officer, and his willingness to treat everybody in a way that was both straightforward and personal, he had always been right at the heart of every investigation.

Wallander knew what Martinsson meant.

Wallander had been the only one who had grown so close to Rydberg that they had been good friends. Behind Rydberg's surly exterior was a person whose knowledge and experience went far beyond the criminal cases they investigated together.

I've inherited his status, Wallander thought. What Martinsson is really saying is that I should take on the mantle that Rydberg had, but never displayed publicly. Even invisible mantles exist.

Svedberg stood up.

"If nobody has any objection I'm going over to Torstensson's offices," he said. "Some people from the Bar Council have turned up and are going through his papers. They want a police officer to be present."

Martinsson slid a pile of case documents over to Wallander.

"This is all we've got so far," he said. "I expect you'd like a bit of peace and quiet to work your way through them."

Wallander nodded. "The road accident. Gustaf Torstensson."

Martinsson looked up at him in surprise. "That's finished and done with," he said. "The old fellow drove into a field."

"If you don't mind, I'd still like to see the reports," Wallander said, tentatively.

Martinsson shrugged. "I'll drop them off in Hanson's office."

"Not any more," Wallander said. "My old room is mine again."

Martinsson got to his feet. "You disappeared one day, and now you're back just as suddenly. Forgive the slip of the tongue."

Martinsson left the room. Only Wallander and Ann-Britt Hoglund were left now.

"I've heard a lot about you," she said.

"I'm sure what you've heard is absolutely true, I regret to say."

"I think I could learn a lot from you."

"I very much doubt that."

Wallander got hurriedly to his feet to cut short the conversation, gathering the papers he had been given by Martinsson. Hoglund held open the door for him. When he was back in his office and had closed the door behind him, he noticed he was running with sweat. He took off his jacket and shirt, and started drying himself on one of the curtains. Just then Martinsson opened the door without knocking. He hesitated when he caught sight of the half-naked Wallander.

"I was just bringing you the reports on Gustaf Torstensson's car accident," Martinsson said. "I forgot it wasn't Hanson's door any longer."

"I may be old-fashioned," Wallander said, "but please knock in future."

Martinsson put a file on Wallander's desk and beat a hasty retreat. Wallander finished drying himself, put on his shirt, then sat at his desk and started reading.

It was gone 10.30 by the time he finished the reports.

Everything felt unfamiliar. Where should he start? He thought back to Sten Torstensson, emerging out of the fog on the Jutland beach. He asked me for help, Wallander thought. He wanted me to find out what had happened to his father. An accident that was really something else, and not suicide. He talked about how his father's state of mind had seemed to change. A few days later he himself was shot in his office late at night. He had talked about his father being on edge, but he was not on edge himself.

Deep in thought, Wallander pulled towards him the notebook in which he had previously written Torstensson's name. He added another: Gustaf Torstensson. Then he wrote them again in the reverse order.

He picked up the phone and dialled Martinsson's number. No answer. He tried again, still no answer. Then it dawned on him that the numbers must have been changed while he was away. He walked down the corridor to Martinsson's office. The door was open.

"I've been through the investigation reports," he said, sitting down on Martinsson's rickety visitor's chair.

"Nothing much to go on, as you'll have noted," Martinsson said. "One or more intruders break into Torstensson's offices and shoot him. Apparently nothing was stolen. His wallet still in his inside pocket. Mrs Duner's been working there for more than 30 years and she is sure that nothing is missing."

Wallander nodded. He still hadn't unearthed what it was that Martinsson had said or not said earlier which had made him react.

"You were first on the scene, I suppose?" he said.

"Peters and Noren were there first, in fact," Martinsson said. "They sent for me."

"One usually gets a first impression on occasions like this," Wallander said. "What did you think?"

"Murder with intent to rob," Martinsson said without hesitation.

"How many of them were there?"

"We've found no evidence to suggest whether there was just one, or more than one. But only one weapon was used, we can be pretty sure of that, even if the technical reports are not all in yet."

"So, was it a man who broke in?"

"I think so," Martinsson said. "But that's just a gut feeling with nothing to support or reject it."

"Torstensson was hit by three bullets," Wallander said. "One in the heart, one in the stomach just below the navel, and one in his forehead. Am I right in thinking that that suggests a marksman who knew what he was doing?"

"That struck me too," Martinsson said. "But of course it could have been pure coincidence. They say death is caused just as often by random shots as by shots from a skilled marksman. I read that in some American report."

Wallander got to his feet. "Why should anybody want to break into a solicitor's office?" he asked. "Presumably because lawyers are said to earn huge amounts of money. But would anybody really expect to find the money piled up in their office?"

"There's only one or perhaps two persons who could answer that question," Martinsson said.

"We'll catch them," Wallander said. "I think I'll go there and have a look around."

"Mrs Duner is pretty shaken, naturally," Martinsson said. "In less than a month the whole fabric of her life has collapsed. First old man Torstensson dies. Hardly has she got over sorting out the funeral arrangements than his son is murdered. She's in shock, but even so it's surprisingly easy to talk to her. Her address is on the transcript of the conversation Svedberg had with her."

"Stickgatan 26," Wallander read. "That's just behind the Continental Hotel. I sometimes park there."

"Isn't that an offence?" Martinsson said.

Wallander collected his jacket and left the station. He had never seen the girl in reception before. He thought that perhaps he ought to have introduced himself. Not least to find out whether Ebba, who had been there for years, had stopped working evenings. But he let it pass. The time he had spent in the station so far today had seemed on the face of it to be nothing dramatic, but that did not reflect the tension inside him. He felt he needed to be on his own. For some considerable time now he had spent most of his days alone. He needed time to make the transformation. He drove down the hill towards the hospital, and just for a moment felt a vague yearning for the solitariness of Skagen, for his isolated sentry duty and his beach patrols that were guaranteed not to be disturbed.

But that was all in the past. He was back at work now.

I'm not used to it, he thought. It'll pass, even if it takes time.

The solicitors' offices were in a yellow-painted stone building in Sjomansgatan, not far from the old theatre that had been getting a facelift. A patrol car was parked outside, and on the opposite pavement a handful of onlookers were discussing what had happened. The wind was gusting in from the sea, and Wallander shuddered as he clambered out of his car. He opened the heavy front door and almost collided with Svedberg on his way out.

"I thought I'd get a bite to eat," he said.

"Go ahead," Wallander said. "I expect to be here for a while."

A young clerk was sitting in the front office with nothing to do. She looked anxious. Wallander remembered from the reports that her name was Sonia Lundin, and that she had been working there only a few months. She had not been able to provide the investigation with any useful information.

Wallander shook hands with her and introduced himself.

"I'm just going to take a look around," he said. "Mrs Duner's not here, I suppose?"

"She's at home, crying," the girl said.

Wallander had no idea what to say.

"She'll never survive all this," Lundin said. "She'll die too."

"Oh, I don't think so," Wallander said, conscious of how hollow his response sounded.

The Torstensson legal practice had been a workplace for solitary people, he thought. Gustaf Torstensson had been a widower for more than 15 years and so his son Sten had been without a mother all that time and was a bachelor to boot. Mrs Duner had been divorced since the early '70s. Three solitary people who came into contact with each other day after day. And now two of them were gone, leaving the third more alone than ever.

Wallander had no difficulty in understanding why Mrs Duner was at home crying.

The door to the meeting room was closed. Wallander could hear murmuring from inside. The lawyers' nameplates were on the doors on either side of the meeting room, fancily printed on highly polished brass plates.

On the spur of the moment he opened first the door to Gustaf Torstensson's office. The curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness. There was a faint aroma of cigar smoke. Wallander looked around and had the feeling that he had gone back to an earlier age. Heavy leather sofas, a marble table, paintings on the walls. It occurred to him that he had overlooked one possibility: that whoever murdered Sten Torstensson was there to steal the objets d'art. He walked up to one of the paintings and tried to decipher the signature, trying also to establish whether it was a copy or an original. Without having been successful on either count, he moved on. There was a large globe next to the solid-looking desk, which was empty, apart from some pens, a telephone and a Dictaphone. He sat in the comfortable desk chair and continued to look around the room, thinking again about what Sten Torstensson had said to him in the cafe at the Art Museum in Skagen.

A car accident that wasn't a car accident. A man who had spent the last months of his life trying to hide something that was worrying him.

Wallander asked himself what would be the characteristics of a solicitor's life. Supplying legal advice. Defending when a prosecutor prosecutes. A solicitor was always receiving confidential information. Lawyers were under a strict oath of confidentiality. It dawned on him that solicitors had a lot of secrets to keep. He hadn't thought of that before.

He got to his feet after a while. It was too soon to draw any conclusions.

Lundin was still sitting motionless on her chair. He opened the door to Sten Torstensson's office. He hesitated for a second, as if half expecting to see the dead man's body lying there on the floor, as it was in the photographs he had seen in the case reports, but all that was left was a plastic sheet. The technical team had taken the dark green carpet away with them.

The room was not unlike the one he had just left. The only obvious difference was a pair of visitors' chairs in front of the desk. This time Wallander refrained from sitting down. There were no papers on the desk.

I'm still only scraping at the surface, he thought. I feel as if I'm listening as much as I am trying to get my bearings by looking.

He went out to the reception area, closing the door behind him. Svedberg was back and was trying to persuade the girl to have one of his sandwiches. Wallander shook his head on being offered one as well. He pointed to the meeting room.

"In there are two worthy gentlemen from the Bar Council,'' Svedberg said. "They're working their way through all the documents in the place. They record, seal and wonder what to do about them. Clients will be contacted and other solicitors will take over their business. Torstensson Solicitors to all intents and purposes no longer exists."

"We must have access to all the material, of course," Wallander said. "The truth about what happened might well lie somewhere in their relationships with their clients."

Svedberg raised his eyebrows and looked at Wallander. "Their?" he said. "I expect you mean the son's clients."

"You're right. I do mean Sten Torstensson's clients."

"It's a pity really that it's not the other way round."

Wallander almost missed Svedberg's comment. "Why, what do you mean?"

"It would appear that old man Torstensson had very few clients," Svedberg said. "Sten Torstensson, on the other hand, was mixed up in all kinds of things." He nodded in the direction of the meeting room. "They think they'll need a week or more to get through it."

"I'd better not interrupt them, then," Wallander said. "I think I'd rather be having a word with Mrs Duner."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"No need, I know where she lives."

Wallander went back to his car and started the engine. He was in two minds. Then he forced himself to come to a decision. He would start with the lead that nobody except him knew about. The lead Sten Torstensson had given him in Skagen.

They have to be connected, Wallander thought as he drove slowly eastwards, passed the courthouse and Sandskogen and soon left the town behind. These two deaths are linked. There is no other rational explanation.

He contemplated the grey landscape he was travelling through. It was drizzling. He turned up the heater.

How can anybody fall in love with all this mud? he wondered. But that's exactly what I have done. I am a police officer whose existence is forever hemmed in by mud. And I wouldn't change this countryside for all the tea in China.

It took him a little more than half an hour to get to the place where Gustaf Torstensson had died on the night of October 11. Wallander had the accident report with him, and stepped out on to the windy road with it in his pocket. He took out his Wellingtons and changed into them before he started scouting around. The wind was getting stronger, as was the rain, and he felt cold. A buzzard perched on a crooked fencing pole, watching him.

The scene of the accident was unusually desolate even for Skane. There was no sign of a farmhouse, nothing but undulating brown fields as far as the eye could see. The road was straight, then started to climb a hundred metres or so ahead before turning sharply left. Wallander unfolded the sketch of the scene of the accident, and compared the map with the ground itself. The wrecked car had been lying upside down to the left of the road, 20 metres into the field. There were no skid marks on the road. It had been thick fog when the accident occurred.

Wallander put the report back into the car before it got soaked. He walked to the crown of the road, and looked around. Not one car had gone past. The buzzard was still on its pole. Wallander jumped over the ditch and squelched his way across muddy clay that immediately clung to the soles of his boots. He paced out 20 metres and looked back towards the road. A butcher's van drove past, and then two cars. The rain was getting heavier all the time. He tried to envisage what had happened. A car with an old man driving is in the midst of a patch of thick fog. The driver loses control, the car leaves the road, spins round once or twice and ends up on its roof. The driver is dead, held into his seat by his safety belt. Apart from some grazing on his face, he has smashed the back of his head against some hard, projecting metallic object. In all probability death was instantaneous. He is not discovered until dawn the next day when a farmer passing on his tractor sees the car.

He need not have been going fast, Wallander thought. He might have lost control and hit the accelerator in panic. The car sped out into the field. What Martinsson wrote up about the scene of the accident was probably comprehensive and correct.

He was about to call it a day when he noticed something half buried in the mud. He bent down and saw that it was the leg of one of those brown wooden kitchen chairs. He threw it away, and the buzzard flew off from its pole, flapping away with its heavy wings.

There's still the wrecked car, Wallander thought, but I don't expect I'll find anything startling there that Martinsson has not noted already.

He went back to his car, scraped as much of the mud off his boots as he could, and changed into his shoes. As he drove back to Ystad he wondered whether he ought to take advantage of the opportunity to call in on his father and his new wife at Loderup, but decided against it. He needed to talk to Mrs Duner, and if possible also look at the wreck before returning to the police station.

He stopped at the service station just outside Ystad for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and looked about him. Dour Swedish gloom was nowhere more strikingly in evidence than in cafes attached to petrol stations, he decided. He left his coffee almost untasted, keen to escape the atmosphere. He drove through the rain into town, turned right at the Continental Hotel and then right again into narrow Stickgatan. He parked semi-legally outside the pink house where Berta Duner lived, both near-side wheels on the pavement. He rang the bell and waited. It was nearly a minute before the door opened. He could just see a pale face through the narrow gap.

"My name's Kurt Wallander and I'm a police officer," he said, searching in vain through his pockets for his identity card. "I'd like to have a chat with you, if I may."

Mrs Duner opened the door and let him in. She handed him a coat hanger, and he hung up his wet jacket. She invited him into the living room, which had a polished wooden floor and a large picture window looking over a small garden behind the house. He looked around the room and noted that he was in a flat where everything had its place: furniture and ornaments were arranged in orderly fashion, down to the most minuscule detail.

No doubt she ran the solicitors' offices in the same way. Watering the plants and making sure that engagement diaries were impeccably maintained might be two sides of the same coin. A life in which there is no room for chance.

"Please, do sit down," she said in an unexpectedly gruff voice. Wallander had expected this unnaturally thin, grey-haired woman to speak in a soft or feeble voice. He sat on an old-fashioned rattan chair that creaked as he made himself comfortable.

"Can I offer you a cup of coffee?" she said.

Wallander shook his head.

"Tea?"

"No, thank you," Wallander said. "I just want to ask you a few questions. Then I'll be away."

She sat on the edge of a flower-print sofa on the other side of the glass-topped coffee table. Wallander realised he had with him neither pen nor notebook. Nor had he prepared even the opening questions, which had always been his routine. He had learned at an early stage that there is no such thing as an insignificant interview or conversation in the course of a criminal investigation.

"May I first say how much I regret the tragic incidents that have taken place," he began tentatively. "I had only occasionally met Gustaf Torstensson, but I knew Sten Torstensson well."

"He looked after your divorce nine years ago," Berta Duner said.

As she spoke it came to Wallander that he recognised her. She was the one who had received Mona and himself whenever they had gone to the solicitor's for what usually turned out to be harrowing and annihilating meetings. Her hair had not been so grey then, and perhaps she was not quite so thin. Even so, he was surprised that he had not recognised her straight away.

"You have a good memory," he said.

"I sometimes forget a name," she said, "but never a face."

"I'm the same," Wallander said.

There was an awkward silence. A car passed by. It was clear to Wallander that he ought to have waited before coming to see Mrs Duner. He did not know what to ask her, did not know where to start. And he had no desire to be reminded of the bitter and long, drawn-out divorce proceedings.

"You have spoken already to my colleague Svedberg," he said after a while. "Unfortunately, it is often necessary to continue asking questions when a serious crime has been committed, and it might not always be the same officer."

He groaned inwardly at the clumsy way he was expressing himself. He very nearly made his excuses and left. Instead, he forced himself to get his act together.

"I don't need to ask about what I already know," he said. "We don't need to go over again how you turned up for work that morning and discovered that Sten Torstensson had been murdered. Unless of course you have since remembered something that you did not mention before."

Her reply was firm and unhesitating. "Nothing. I told Mr Svedberg precisely what happened."

"The previous evening, though?" Wallander said. "When you left the office?"

"It was around 6 p.m. Perhaps five minutes past, but not later. I had been checking some letters that Miss Lundin typed. Then I rang through to Mr Torstensson to check whether there was anything else he wanted me to do. He said there wasn't, and bade me good evening. I put on my coat and went home."

"You locked the door behind you? And Mr Torstensson was all by himself?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what he had in mind to do that evening?"

She looked at him in surprise. "Carry on working, of course. A solicitor with as much work on his hands as Sten Torstensson cannot just go home when it suits him."

"I understand that he was working," Wallander said. "I was just wondering if there had been some special job, something urgent?"

"Everything was urgent," she said. "As his father had been killed only a few weeks before, his workload was immense. That's pretty obvious."

Wallander raised his eyebrows at her choice of words. "You're referring to the car accident, I assume?"

"What else would I be referring to?"

"You said his father had been killed. Not that he'd lost his life in an accident."

"You die or you are killed," she said. "You die in your bed of what is generally called natural causes, but if you die in a car accident, surely you have to accept that you were killed?"

Wallander nodded slowly. He understood what she meant. Nevertheless, he wondered if she had inadvertently said something that might be along the same lines as the suspicions that had led Sten Torstensson to find him at Skagen.

A thought struck him. "Can you remember off the top of your head what Mr Torstensson was doing the previous week?" he said. "Tuesday, October 20, and Wednesday, October 21."

"He was away," she said, without hesitation.

So, Sten Torstensson had made no secret of his visit, he thought.

"He said he needed to get away for a couple of days, to shake off all the sorrow he was feeling after the death of his father," she said. "Accordingly, I cancelled his appointments for those two days."

And then, without warning, she burst into tears. Wallander was at a loss how to react. His chair creaked as he shifted in embarrassment.

She stood up and hurried out to the kitchen. He could hear her blowing her nose. Then she returned.

"It's hard," she said. "It's so very hard."

"I understand."

"He sent me a postcard," she said with a very faint smile. Wallander was sure she would start crying again at any moment, but she was more self-possessed than he had supposed.

"Would you like to see it?"

"Yes, I would," Wallander said.

She went to a bookshelf on one of the long walls, took a postcard from a porcelain dish and handed it to him.

"Finland must be a beautiful country," she said. "I have never been there. Have you?"

Wallander stared at the card in confusion. The picture was of a seascape in evening sunshine.

"Yes," he said slowly. "I've been to Finland. And as you say, it's very beautiful."

"Please forgive me for getting upset," she said. "You see, the postcard arrived the day I found him dead."

Wallander nodded absent-mindedly. It seemed to him there was a lot more he needed to ask Berta Duner than he had suspected. At the same time, he recognised that this was not the right moment.

So Torstensson had told his secretary that he had gone to Finland. A postcard had arrived from there, apparently as proof. Who could have sent it? Torstensson was in Jutland.

"I need to hang on to this card for a couple of days, in connection with the investigation," he said. "You'll get it back. I give you my word."

"I understand," she said.

"Just one more question before I go," Wallander said. "Did you notice anything unusual those last few days before he died?"

"In what way unusual?"

"Did he behave at all differently from normal?"

"He was very upset and sad about the death of his father."

"Of course, but no other reason for anxiety?"

Wallander could hear how awkward the question sounded, but he waited for her answer.

"No," she said. "He was the same as usual."

Wallander got to his feet. "I'm sure I'll need to talk to you again," he said.

She did not get up from the sofa. "Who could have done such a horrible thing?" she asked. "Walk in through the door, shoot a man and then walk out again, as if nothing had happened?"

"That's what we're going to find out," Wallander said. "I suppose you don't know if he had any enemies?"

"Enemies? How could he have had enemies?"

Wallander paused a moment, then asked one last question. "What do you yourself think happened?"

"There was a time when you could understand things, even things that seemed incomprehensible," she said. "Not now, though. It's just not possible in this country nowadays."

Wallander put on his jacket, which was still wet and heavy. He paused when he went out into the street. He thought about a slogan going the rounds at the time he graduated from Police Training College, sentiments he had adopted as his own. "There's a time for life, and a time for death."

He also thought about what Mrs Duner had said as he was leaving. He felt that she had said something significant about Sweden, something he ought to come back to. But for now he banished her words to the back of his mind.

I must try to understand the minds of the dead, he thought. A postcard from Finland, postmarked the day when Torstensson was drinking coffee with me in Skagen, makes it clear that he wasn't telling the truth. Not the whole truth, at least. A person can't lie without being aware of it.

He got into his car and tried to make up his mind what to do. For himself, what he wanted most of all was to go back to his flat in Mariagatan, and lie down on the bed with the curtains drawn. As a police officer, however, he must think otherwise.

He checked his watch: 1.45 p.m. He would have to be back at the station by 4.00 at the latest, for the meeting of the investigation team. He thought for a moment before deciding. He started the engine, turned into Hamngatan and bore left to emerge on to the Osterleden highway again. He continued along the Malmo road until he came to the turning off to Bjaresjo. The rain had become drizzle, but the wind was gusting. A few kilometres further on he left the main road and stopped outside a fenced-in yard with a rusty sign announcing that this was Niklasson's Scrapyard. The gates were open so he drove in among the skeletons of cars piled on top of each other. He wondered how many times he had been to the scrapyard in his life. Over and over again Niklasson had been suspected of receiving, and been prosecuted for the offence on many occasions. He was legendary in the Ystad police force: he had never once been convicted, in spite of overwhelming evidence of his guilt. But in the last resort there had always been one little spanner that had got stuck in the works, and Niklasson had invariably been set free to return to the two caravans welded together that constituted both his home and his office.

Wallander switched off the engine and got out of the car. A grubby-looking cat studied him from the bonnet of an ancient, rusty Peugeot. Niklasson emerged from behind a pile of tyres. He was wearing a dark-coloured overcoat and a filthy hat pulled down over his long hair. Wallander had never seen him in any other attire.

"Kurt Wallander!" Niklasson said with a grin. "Long time no see. Here to arrest me?"

"Should I be?" Wallander said.

Niklasson laughed. "Only you can say," he said.

"You have a car I'd like to take a look at," Wallander said. "A dark blue Opel that used to be owned by Gustaf Torstensson, the solicitor."

"Oh, that one. It's over here," he said, starting in the direction he was pointing. "What do you want to see that for?"

"Because a person in it died when the accident took place."

"People drive like idiots," Niklasson said. "The only thing that surprises me is that more of them aren't killed. Here it is. I haven't started cutting it up yet. It's exactly as it was when they brought it here."

Wallander nodded. "I can manage on my own now," he said.

"I've no doubt you can," Niklasson said. "Incidentally, I've always wondered what it feels like, killing somebody."

Wallander was put out. "It feels bloody awful," he said. "What did you think it would feel like?"

Niklasson shrugged. "I just wondered."

When he was on his own, Wallander walked round the car twice. He was surprised to see that there was hardly any superficial damage. After all, it had gone through a stone wall and then turned over at least twice. He squinted into the driving seat. The car keys were lying on the floor next to the accelerator. With some difficulty he managed to open the door, pick up the keys and fit them into the ignition. Sten had been quite right. Neither the keys nor the ignition were damaged. Thinking hard, he walked once more round the car. Then he climbed inside and tried to work out where Gustaf Torstensson had hit his head. He searched thoroughly, without finding a solution. Although there were stains here and there that he supposed must be dried blood, he could not see anywhere where the dead man could have hit the back of his head.

He crawled out of the car again, the keys still in his hand. Without really knowing why, he opened the boot. There were a few old newspapers and the remains of a broken kitchen chair. He remembered the chair leg he had found in the field. He took out one of the newspapers and checked the date. More than six months old. He shut the boot again.

Then it dawned on him what he had seen without it registering. He remembered clearly what it said in Martinsson's report. It had been quite clear on one matter. All the doors apart from the driver's door had been locked, including the boot.

He stood stock-still.

There's a broken chair locked in the boot. A leg from that chair is lying half buried in the mud. A man is dead in the car.

His first reaction was to get angry about the slipshod examination and the unimaginative conclusions reached. Then he remembered that Sten had not found the chair leg either, and hence had not noticed anything odd about the boot.

He walked slowly back to his car.

So Sten had been right. His father had not lost his life in a car accident. Even though he couldn't envisage what, he was certain that something had happened that night in the fog, on that deserted stretch of road. There must have been at least one other person there. But who?

Niklasson emerged from his caravan.

"Can I get you a coffee?" he said.

Wallander shook his head. "Don't touch that car," he said. "We'll need to take another look at it."

"You'd better be careful," Niklasson said.

Wallander frowned. "Why?"

"What's his name? The son? Sten Torstensson? He was here and had a look at the car. Now he's dead as well. That's all. I'll say no more."

A thought struck Wallander. "Has anybody else been here and examined the car?" he said.

Niklasson shook his head. "Not a soul."

Wallander drove back to Ystad. He felt tired. He could not work out the significance of what he had discovered. But the bottom line was not in doubt: Sten had been right. The accident was a cover for something entirely different.

It was 4.07 p.m. when Bjork closed the meeting-room door. Wallander immediately felt that the mood was halfhearted, uninterested. He could sense that none of his colleagues was going to have anything to report which would have a decisive, not to say a dramatic, effect on the investigation. This is one of those moments in the everyday life of a police officer that inevitably ends up on the cutting-room floor. Nevertheless, it's times like this when nothing's happening, when everybody's tired, maybe even hostile towards one another, that are the foundation on which the course of the investigation is built. We have to tell one another that we do not know anything in order to inspire us to move on.

At that point he made up his mind. Whether it was an attempt to find himself an excuse for returning to duty and asking for his job back he could never afterwards be sure. But that half-hearted atmosphere gave him the inspiration to perform again; it was a background against which he could show that he was still a police officer, despite everything, not a burned-out wreck who ought to have had the wit to fade away in silence.

His train of thought was broken by Bjork, who was looking at him expectantly. Wallander shook his head, a barely noticeable gesture. He had nothing to say as yet.

"What have we got to report?" Bjork said. "Where do we stand?"

"I've been knocking on doors," Svedberg said. "All the surrounding buildings, every single flat. But nobody heard anything unusual, nobody saw anything. Oddly enough we haven't had one single tip-off from the general public. The whole investigation seems to be in limbo."

Bjork turned to Martinsson.

"I've been through his flat in Regementsgatan," he said. "I don't think I've ever been so unsure of what I was looking for. What I can say for sure is that Sten Torstensson had a liking for fine cognac, and that he owned a collection of antiquarian books which I suspect must be very valuable. I've also been putting pressure on the technical boys in Linkoping about the bullets, but they say they'll be in touch tomorrow."

Bjork sighed and turned to Hoglund.

"I've been trying to piece together his private life," she said. "His family, friends. But I haven't turned anything up that you could say takes us any further. He didn't exactly put himself about, and you could say he lived almost exclusively for his work as a solicitor. He used to do a fair bit of sailing in the summer, but he had given that up, for reasons I'm unsure about. He doesn't have many relatives. One or two aunts, a couple of cousins. He seems to have been a bit of a hermit, so far as I can understand."

Wallander kept his eye on her while she was talking, without making it obvious. There was something thoughtful and straightforward about her, almost a lack of imagination. But he decided he would reserve judgment. He didn't know her as a person, he was just aware of her reputation as an unusually promising police officer.

The new age, he thought. Perhaps she is the new type of police officer, the type I have often wondered about, what would they look like?

"In other words, we're marking time," Bjork said, in a clumsy attempt to sum up. "We know young Torstensson has been shot, we know where and we know when. But not why, nor by whom. Unfortunately, we have to accept that this is going to be a difficult case. Time-consuming and demanding."

Nobody had any quarrel with that assessment. Wallander could see through the window that it was raining again.

He recognised that his moment had come. "As far as Sten Torstensson is concerned, I have nothing to add," he said. "There is not a lot we know. We have to approach it from another angle. We have to look at what happened to his father."

Everyone round the table sat up and took notice.

"Gustaf Torstensson did not die in a road accident," he said. "He was murdered, just as his son was. We can assume that the two cases are linked. There is no other satisfactory explanation."

He looked at his colleagues, who were all staring fixedly at him. The Caribbean island and the endless sands at Skagen were now far, far away. He was aware that he had sloughed off that skin, and returned to the life he thought he had abandoned for good.

"In short, I have only one more thing to say," he said, thoughtfully. "I can prove he was murdered."

Nobody spoke. Martinsson eventually broke the silence.

"By whom?"

"By somebody who made a bad mistake." Wallander rose to his feet.

Soon afterwards they were in three cars in a convoy on their way to that fateful stretch of road near Brosarp Hills.

When they got there dusk was settling in.

Chapter 4

In the late afternoon of November 1, Olof Jonsson, a Scanian farmer, had a strange experience. He was walking his fields, planning ahead for the spring sowing, when he caught sight of a group of people standing in a semicircle up to their ankles in mud, as if looking down at a grave. He always carried binoculars with him when he was inspecting his land - he sometimes saw deer along the edge of one of the copses that here and there separated the fields - so he was able to get a good view of them. One of them he thought he recognised - something familiar about the face - but he could not place him. Then he realised that the four men and one woman were in the place where the old man had died in his car the previous week. He did not want to intrude, so he lowered his binoculars. Presumably they were relatives who had come to pay their respects by visiting the scene of his death. He turned and walked away.

When they came to the scene of the accident Wallander started to wonder, just for a moment, if he had imagined it all. Perhaps it wasn't a chair leg he had found in the mud and thrown away. As he strode into the field the others stayed on the road, waiting. He could hear their voices, but not what they said.

They think I've lost my grasp, he thought, as he searched for the leg. They wonder if I am fit to be back in my old job after all.

But there was the chair leg, at his feet. He examined it quickly, and now he was certain. He turned and beckoned to his colleagues. Moments later they were grouped round the chair leg lying in the mud.

"You could be right," Martinsson said, hesitantly. "I remember there was a broken chair in the boot. This could be a piece of it."

"I think it's very odd, even so," Bjork said. "Can you repeat your line of reasoning, Kurt?"

"It's simple," Wallander said. "I read Martinsson's report. It said that the boot had been locked. There's no way that the boot could have sprung open and then reclosed and locked itself. In that case the back of the car would have been scored or dented when it hit the ground, but it isn't."

"Have you been to look at the car?" Martinsson said, surprised.

"I'm simply trying to catch up with the rest of you," Wallander said, and felt as if he were making excuses, as if his visit to Niklasson's had implied that he didn't trust Martinsson to conduct a simple accident investigation. Which was true, in fact, but irrelevant. "It just seems to me that a man alone in a car that rolls over and over and lands up in a field doesn't then get out, open the boot, take out a leg of a broken chair, shut the boot again, get back into the car, fasten his safety belt and then die as a result of a blow to the back of the head."

Nobody spoke. Wallander had seen this before, many times. A veil is peeled away to reveal something nobody expected to see.

Svedberg took a plastic bag from his overcoat pocket and carefully slotted the chair leg into it.

"I found it about five metres from here," Wallander said, pointing. "I picked it up, and then tossed it away."

"A bizarre way to treat a piece of evidence," Bjork said.

"I didn't know at the time that it had anything to do with the death of Gustaf Torstensson," Wallander said. "And I still don't know what the chair leg is telling us exactly."

"If I understand you rightly," Bjork said, ignoring Wallander's comment, "this must mean that somebody else was there when Torstensson's accident took place. But that doesn't necessarily mean he was murdered. Somebody might have stumbled upon the crashed car and looked to see if there was anything in the boot worth stealing. In that case it wouldn't be so odd if the person concerned didn't get in touch with the police, or if he threw away a leg from the broken chair. People who rob dead bodies very rarely publicise their activities."

"That's true," Wallander said.

"But you said you could prove he was murdered," Bjork said.

"I was overstating the case," Wallander said. "All I meant was that this goes some way towards changing the situation."

They made their way back to the road.

"We'd better have another look at the car," Martinsson said. "The forensic boys will be a bit surprised when we send them a broken kitchen chair, but that can't be helped."

Bjork made it plain that he would like to put an end to this roadside discussion. It was raining again, and the wind was getting stronger.

"Let's decide tomorrow where we go from here," he said. "We'll investigate the various leads we've got, and unfortunately we don't have very many. I don't think we're going to get any further at the moment."

As they returned to their cars, Hoglund hung back. "Do you mind if I go in your car?" she said. "I live in Ystad itself, Martinsson has child seats everywhere and Bjork's car is littered with fishing rods."

Wallander nodded. They were the last to leave. They drove in silence for several kilometres. It felt odd to Wallander to have somebody sitting beside him. He realised he had not spoken properly to anybody apart from his daughter since the day 18 months ago when he had lapsed into his long silence.

She was the one who finally started talking. "I think you're right," she said. "There must be a connection between the two deaths."

"It's a possibility we'll have to look into in any case," Wallander said.

They could see a patch of sea to the left. There were white horses riding on the waves.

"Why does anybody become a police officer?" Wallander wondered aloud.

"I can't answer for others," she said, "but I know why I became one. I remember from Police Training College that hardly anybody had the same dreams as the other students."

"Do police officers have dreams?" Wallander said, in surprise.

She turned to him. "Everybody has dreams," she said. "Even police officers. Don't you?"

Wallander didn't know what to say, but her question was a good one, of course. Where have my dreams gone to? he thought. When you're young, you have dreams that either fade away or develop into a driving force that spurs you on. What have I got left of all my ambitions?

"I became a police officer because I decided not to become a vicar," she said. "I believed in God for a long time. My parents are Pentecostalists. But one day I woke up and found it had all gone. I agonised for ages over what to do, but then something happened that made my mind up for me, and I resolved to become a police officer."

"Tell me," he said. "I need to know why people still want to become police officers."

"Some other time," she said. "Not now."

They were approaching Ystad. She told him how to get to where she lived, to the west of the town, in one of the newly built brick houses with a view over the sea.

"I don't even know if you have a family," Wallander said, as they turned into a road that was still only half finished.

"I have two children," she said. "My husband's a service mechanic. He installs and repairs pumps all over the world, and is hardly ever at home. But he's earned enough for us to buy the house."

"Sounds like an exciting job."

"I'll invite you round one evening when he's at home. He can tell you himself what it's like."

He drew up outside her house.

"I think everybody's pleased you've come back," she said as a parting shot.

Wallander felt immediately that it wasn't true, that it was more of an attempt to cheer him up, but he muttered his appreciation.

Then he drove straight home to Mariagatan, flung his wet jacket over the back of a chair, and lay on the bed, still in his dirty shoes. He dozed off and dreamed that he was asleep among the sand dunes at Skagen.

When he woke up an hour later, he did not know where he was at first. Then he took his shoes off and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He could see through the window how the street light beyond was swaying in the gusting wind.

Winter is almost upon us, he thought. Snow and storms and chaos. And I am a police officer again. Life tosses us all hither and thither. Is there anything we can truly decide for ourselves?

He sat for a long time staring into his coffee cup. It was cold by the time he got up to fetch a notepad and pencil from a kitchen drawer.

Now I really must become a police officer again, he told himself. I get paid for thinking constructive thoughts, investigating and sorting out cases, not for worrying about my own petty problems.

It was gone midnight by the time he put down his pen and stretched his back. Then he pored over the summary he had written in his notepad. All about his feet the floor was littered with crumpled-up sheets of paper.

I can't see any pattern, he admitted. There are no obvious connections between the accident that wasn't an accident and the fact that a few weeks later Sten Torstensson was shot dead in his office. It doesn't even necessarily follow that Sten's death was a direct result of what happened to his father. It could be the other way round.

He remembered something Rydberg had said in the last year of his life, when he was stuck in the middle of an apparently insoluble investigation into a string of arson cases. "Sometimes the effect can come before the cause," he had said. "As a police officer you have always to be prepared to think back to front."

He lay on the living-room sofa.

An old man is found dead in his car in a field on a morning in October, he thought. He was on his way home from a meeting with a client. After a routine investigation, the case is written off as a car accident. But the dead man's son starts to question the accident theory. For two crucial reasons: first, that his father would never have been driving fast in the fog; second, that for some time he had been worried or upset, but had kept whatever it was to himself.

Wallander sat bolt upright. His instinct told him he had hit upon a pattern, or rather, a non-pattern, a pattern falsified so that the true facts would not come to light.

He continued his train of thought. Sten had not been able to prove that his father's death had not been a straightforward accident. He had not seen the chair leg in the field, nor had he thought about the broken chair itself in the boot of his father's car. Precisely because he had not been able to find any proof, he had turned to Wallander. He had gone to the trouble of tracking him down, of coming to see him.

At the same time he had laid a false trail. A postcard from Finland. Five days later he was shot. No-one could doubt that it was murder.

Wallander had lost the thread. What he thought he had sensed - a pattern created to cover up another one - had drifted off into no man's land.

He was tired. He wasn't going to get any further tonight. He knew, too, from experience that if his suspicions had any basis they would come back.

He went to the kitchen, washed the dishes and cleared up the crumpled papers lying all over the floor. I have to start all over again, he told himself. But where is the start? Sten or Gustaf Torstensson?

He went to bed, but could not sleep despite being so tired. He wondered vaguely about what had happened to make Ann-Britt Hoglund decide to become a police officer.

The last time he looked at the clock it was 2.30 a.m.

He woke up shortly after 6.00, still feeling tired; but he got up, with a sense that he had slept in. It was almost 7.30 by the time he walked through the police-station door and was pleased to see that Ebba was in her usual chair in reception. When she saw him she came to greet him. He could see that she was moved, and a lump came into his throat.

"I couldn't believe it!" she said. "Are you really back?"

"Afraid so," Wallander said.

"I think I'm going to cry," she said.

"Don't do that," Wallander said. "We can have a chat later."

He got away as quickly as he could and hurried down the corridor. When he got to his office he noticed that it had been thoroughly cleaned. There was also a note on his desk asking him to phone his father. Judging by the obscure handwriting, it was Svedberg who had taken the message the previous evening. He reached for the telephone, then changed his mind. He took out the summary he had prepared and read through it. The feeling he had had of being able to detect an obscure but nevertheless definite pattern linking the various incidents would not resurrect itself. He pushed the papers to one side. It's too soon, he decided. I come back after 18 months in the cold, and I've got less patience than ever. Annoyed, he reached for his notepad and found an empty page.

It was clear that he would have to start again from the beginning. Apparently nobody could say with any certainty where the beginning was, so they would have to approach the investigation with no preconceived ideas. He spent half an hour sketching out what needed to be done, but all the time he was nagged by the idea that it was really Martinsson who ought to be leading the investigation. He himself had returned to duty, but he did not want to take on the whole responsibility right away.

The telephone rang. He hesitated before answering.

"I hear we've had some great news." It was Per Akeson. "I have to say I'm delighted." Akeson was the public prosecutor with whom Wallander had, over the years, established the best working relationship. They had often had heated discussions about the best way of interpreting case data, and Wallander had many times been angry because Akeson had refused to accept one of his submissions as sufficient grounds for an arrest. But they had more or less always seen eye to eye. And they shared a particular impatience at cases being carelessly handled.

"I have to admit it all seems a bit strange," Wallander said.

"Rumour had it that you were about to retire on health grounds," Akeson said. "Somebody ought to tell Bjork to put a stop to all these rumours that keep flying around."

"It wasn't just a rumour," Wallander said. "I had made my mind up to chuck it in."

"Might one ask why you changed your mind?"

"Something happened," Wallander said evasively. He could tell that Akeson was waiting for him to continue, but he did not oblige.

"Anyway, I'm pleased you've come back," Akeson said, after an appropriately long silence. "I'm also certain that I'm expressing the sentiments of my colleagues in saying that."

Wallander began to feel uncomfortable about all the goodwill that was flowing in his direction, but which he found hard to believe. We go through life with one foot in a rose garden and the other in quicksand, he thought.

"I assume you'll be taking over the Torstensson case," Akeson said. "Maybe we ought to get together later today and work out where we stand."

"I don't know about 'taking over'," Wallander said. "I'll be involved, I asked to be. But I suppose that one of the others will be leading the investigation."

"Hmm, none of my business," Akeson said. "I'm just pleased you're back. Have you had time to get into the details of the case?"

"Not really."

"Judging by what I've heard so far, there doesn't seem to have been any significant development."

"Bjork thinks it's going to be a long haul."

"What do you think?"

Wallander hesitated before replying. "Nothing at all as yet."

"Insecurity seems to be on the increase," Akeson said. "Threats, often in the form of anonymous letters, are more common. Public buildings which used to keep open house are now barricading themselves like fortresses. No question, you'll have to go through his clients with a fine-tooth comb. You might find a clue there. Someone among them might have a grudge."

"We've already started on that," Wallander said.

They agreed to meet in Akeson's office that afternoon.

Wallander forced himself to return to the investigation plan he had started to sketch out, but his concentration wandered. He put his pen down in irritation and went to fetch a cup of coffee. He hurried back to his office, not wanting to meet anybody. It was 8.15 by now. He drank his coffee and wondered how long it would be before he lost his fear of being with people. At 8.30 he gathered his papers together and went to the conference room. On the way there it struck him that unusually little had been achieved during the five or six days that had passed since Sten Torstensson had been found murdered. All murder investigations are different, but there always used to be a mood of intense urgency among the officers involved. Something had changed while he had been away. What?

They were all present by 8.40, and Bjork tapped the table as a sign that work was about to commence. He turned at once to Wallander.

"Kurt," he said, "you've just come into this case and can view it with fresh eyes. What do you think we should do now?"

"I hardly think I'm the one to decide that," Wallander said. "I haven't had time to get into it properly."

"On the other hand, you're the only one who's so far come up with anything useful," Martinsson said. "If I know you, you'll have sat up last night and sketched out an investigation plan. Am I right?"

Wallander nodded. He realised that in fact he had no objection to taking over the case.

"I have tried to write a summary," he began. "But first let me tell you about something that happened just over a week ago, when I was in Denmark. I ought to have mentioned it yesterday, but it was all a bit hectic for me, to say the least."

Wallander told his astonished colleagues about Sten Torstensson's trip to Skagen. He tried hard to leave out no detail. When he finished, there was silence. Bjork eventually spoke, making no attempt to conceal the fact that he was cross.

"Very odd," he said. "I don't know why it is that you always seem to find yourself in situations that are out of normal procedures."

"I did refer him to you," Wallander objected, and could feel his anger rising.

"It's nothing for us to get excited about now," Bjork said impassively. "But it is a bit strange, you must agree. What is of course clear is that we have to reopen the investigation into Gustaf Torstensson's accident."

"It seems to me both natural and necessary that we advance on two fronts," Wallander said. "The assumption being that two people have been murdered, not one. It's a father and a son, moreover. We have to think two thoughts at the same time. There may be a solution to be found in their private lives, but it might also be something to do with their work, two lawyers working for the same firm of solicitors. The fact that Sten came to see me to talk about his father being on edge might suggest that the key concerns Gustaf Torstensson. But that is not a foregone conclusion - for one thing, there's the postcard Sten sent to Mrs Duner from Finland when at the time he was in Denmark."

"That tells us something else as well," Hoglund said.

Wallander nodded. "That Sten also thought that he was under threat. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," Hoglund said. "Why else would he have laid a false trail?"

Martinsson put his hand up, indicating he wanted to say something. "It would be simplest if we split into two groups," he said. "One to concentrate on the father, and the other on the son. Then let's see if we come up with anything that points in the same direction."

"I agree with that," Wallander said. "At the same time I can't help thinking there's something odd about all this. Something we ought to have discovered already."

"All murder cases are odd, surely," Svedberg said.

"Yes, but there's something more," Wallander said. "And I can't put my finger on it."

Bjork indicated it was time to conclude the meeting.

"As I've already started delving into what happened to Gustaf Torstensson, I might as well go on," Wallander said. "If nobody has any objections."

"The rest of us can devote ourselves to Sten Torstensson, then," Martinsson said. "Can I assume that you'll want to work on your own to start with, as usual?"

"Not necessarily. But if I understand it rightly, the Sten case is much more complicated. His father didn't have so many clients. His life seems to be more transparent."

"Let's do that then," Bjork said, shutting his diary with a thud. "We'll meet every day at 4.00, as usual, to see how far we've got. Oh, and I need help with a press conference later today."

"Not me," Wallander said. "I haven't got the strength."

"I thought Ann-Britt might do it," Bjork said. "It won't do any harm for people to know she's here with us now."

"That's fine by me," she said, to the others' surprise. "I need to learn about such things."

After the meeting Wallander asked Martinsson to stay behind. When the others had left, he closed the door.

"We need to have a few words," Wallander said. "I feel as though I'm barging in and taking over, when what I was really supposed to be doing was confirming my resignation."

"We're all a bit surprised, certainly," Martinsson said. "You must accept that. You're not the only one who's a bit unsure of what's going on."

"I don't want to stand on anybody's toes."

Martinsson burst out laughing. Then blew his nose. "The Swedish police force is full of officers suffering from sore toes and heels," he said. "The more bureaucratic the force becomes, the more people get obsessed about their careers. All the regulations and the paperwork - it gets worse every day - result in misunderstandings and a lack of clarity, so it's no wonder people stand on each other's toes and kick their heels. Sometimes I think I understand why Bjork is worried about the way things are going. What's happening to ordinary straightforward police work?"

"The police force has always reflected society at large," Wallander said. "But I know what you mean. Rydberg used to say the same thing. What's Hoglund going to say?"

"She's good," Martinsson said. "Hanson and Svedberg are both frightened of her precisely because she's so good. Hanson especially is worried that he might get left behind. That's why he spends most of his time on courses nowadays, picking up extra qualifications."

"The new-age police officer," Wallander said, getting to his feet. "That's what she is." He paused in the doorway. "You said something yesterday that rang a bell. Something about Sten Torstensson. I'm not sure what, but I have the feeling it was more important than it sounded."

"I was reading aloud from my notes," Martinsson said. "You can have a copy."

"I dare say I'm imagining things," Wallander said.

When he got back to his office and had closed the door, he knew that he had experienced something he had almost forgotten existed. It was as if he had rediscovered his drive. Not everything, it seemed, had been lost during the time he had been away.

He sat at his desk, feeling that he could now examine himself at arm's length: the man staggering around in the West Indies, the miserable trip to Thailand, all those days and nights when everything seemed to have ground to a halt apart from his automatic bodily functions. He was looking at himself, but he realised that that person was somebody he no longer knew. He had been somebody else.

He shuddered to contemplate the catastrophic consequences that some of his actions could have had. He thought hard about his daughter Linda. It was only when Martinsson knocked on the door and delivered a photocopy of his notes from the previous day that Wallander succeeded in banishing all the memories. Everybody had within himself a secret room, it seemed to him, where memories and recollections were all jumbled up together. Now he had bolted the door, and attached a strong padlock. Then he went to the toilet and flushed away the antidepressants he had been carrying around in a tube in his pocket.

He returned to his office and started work. It was 10 a.m. He read carefully through Martinsson's notes without identifying what it was that had caught his attention. It's too soon, he thought. Rydberg would have advised patience. Now I have to remember to advise myself.

He wondered briefly where to begin. Then he looked up Gustaf Torstensson's home address in the file for the car accident. Timmermansgatan 12. That was in one of Ystad's oldest and most affluent residential districts, beyond the army barracks, near Sandskogen. He telephoned the solicitors' and spoke to Sonia Lundin, who told him that the house keys were in the office. He left the station and noted that the rain clouds had dispersed, the sky was clear. He had the feeling he was breathing in the first of the cold winter air that was slowly advancing. As he drew up outside the solicitors' offices, Lundin came out and handed him the keys.

He took two wrong turnings before he reached the correct address. The big, brown-painted wooden house was a long way back in a large garden. He swung open the creaking gate and started along the gravel drive. It was quiet, and the town seemed a long way away. A world inside a world, he thought. The Torstensson firm of solicitors must have been a very profitable business. He doubted if there were many more expensive houses in Ystad than this one. The garden was well tended but strangely lifeless. A few deciduous trees, some neatly clipped bushes, some dull flower beds. Perhaps an elderly lawyer needed to surround himself with straight lines, a traditional garden with no surprises or improvisations. Someone had told him that as a solicitor Torstensson had the reputation of dragging out court proceedings to an unprecedented level of boredom. One spiteful opponent claimed that Torstensson could get a client off by driving the prosecutor to distraction with his plodding, colourless presentation of the case for the defence. He should ask Per Akeson what he thought of Gustaf Torstensson. They must have dealt with each other many times over the years.

He went up the steps to the front door and found the right key. It was an advanced Chubb lock of a type he had not come across before. He let himself into a large hall with a broad staircase at the back leading to the upper floor. Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. He opened one set and saw that the window was barred. An elderly man living alone, experiencing the fear that inevitably goes with age. Was there something here he needed to protect, apart from himself? Or was his fear something that originated beyond these walls? He made his way round the house, starting on the ground floor with its library lined with sombre portraits of family ancestors, and the large open-plan living room and dining room. Everything, from furniture to wallpaper, was dark, giving him a feeling of melancholy and silence. Nowhere even a small patch of light colour, no trace of a light touch that could raise a smile.

He went upstairs. Guest rooms with neatly made beds, deserted like a hotel closed for the winter. The door to Torstensson's own bedroom had a barred inner door. He went back downstairs, oppressed by the gloom. He sat at the kitchen table and rested his chin on his hands. All he could hear was a clock ticking.

Torstensson was 69 when he died. He had been living alone for the last 15 years, since his wife died. Sten was their only child. Judging by one of the portraits in the library, the family was descended from Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson. Wallander's vague memory from his schooldays was that during the Thirty Years' War the man had a reputation for exceptional brutality towards the peasants wherever his army had set foot.

Wallander stood up and went down the stairs to the basement. Here, too, everything was pedantically neat. Right at the back, behind the boiler room, Wallander discovered a steel door that was locked. He tried the various keys until he found the right one. Wallander had to feel his way until he located the light switch.

The room was surprisingly big. The walls were lined with shelves laden with icons from Eastern Europe. Without touching them, Wallander scrutinised them from close up. He was no expert, nor had he ever been particularly interested in antiques, but he reckoned that this collection was extremely valuable. That would explain the barred windows and the lock, if not the wrought-iron safety door to the bedroom. Wallander's uneasiness grew. He felt he was intruding on the privacy of a rich old man whom happiness had abandoned, who had barricaded his house, and who was watched over by greed in the shape of all these Madonna figures.

He pricked up his ears. There were footsteps upstairs, then a dog barking. He hurried out of the room, up the steps and into the kitchen.

He was astonished to be confronted by Peters, his colleague, who had drawn his pistol and was pointing it at him. Behind him was a security guard with a growling dog tugging at a lead. Peters lowered his gun. Wallander could feel his heart racing. The sight of the gun had momentarily revived the memories he had spent so long trying to banish.

Then he was furious. "What the hell's going on here?" he snarled.

"The alarm went off at the security company, and they called the police," Peters said, clearly worried. "So we came rushing here in a hurry. I had no idea it was you."

Peters' partner Noren entered on cue, also wielding a pistol.

"There's a police investigation going on here," Wallander said, noting that his anger had subsided as quickly as it had broken out. "Torstensson, the solicitor who died in the car accident, lived here."

"If the alarm goes off, we turn out," the man from the security company said, bluntly.

"Turn it off," Wallander said. "You can turn it on again in a few hours' time. But let's all work our way through the house first."

"This is Chief Inspector Wallander," Peters explained. "I expect you recognise him."

The security man was very young. He nodded, but Wallander could tell that he had not recognised him.

"We don't need you any more. And get that dog out of here," Wallander said.

The guard withdrew, taking the reluctant Alsatian with him. Wallander shook Peters and Noren by the hand.

"I'd heard you were back," Noren said. "It's good to see you again."

"Thank you."

"Things haven't been the same since you were on sick leave," Peters said.

"Well, I'm in harness again now," Wallander said, hoping to steer the conversation back to the investigation.

"The information we get isn't exactly reliable," Noren said. "We'd been told you were going to retire. After that we didn't expect to find you in a house when the alarm went off."

"Life is full of surprises," Wallander said.

"Anyway, welcome back," Peters said.

Wallander had the feeling for the first time that the friendliness was genuine. There was nothing artificial about Peters: his words were straightforward and clear.

"It's been a difficult time," Wallander said. "But it's over now. I think so, at least."

He walked down to the car with them and waved as they drove off. He wandered around the garden, trying to sort out his thoughts. His personal feelings were intertwined with thoughts about what had happened to the two lawyers. In the end he decided to go and talk again to Mrs Duner. Now he had a few questions to put to her which needed answering.

It was almost noon when he rang her doorbell and was let in. This time he accepted her offer of a cup of tea.

"I'm sorry to disturb you again so soon," he began, "but I do need help in building up a picture of both of them, father and son. Who were they? You worked with the older man for 30 years."

"And 19 years with Sten Torstensson," she said.

"That's a long time," Wallander said. "You get to know people as time goes by. Let's start with the father. Tell me what he was like."

"I can't," she said.

"And why not?"

"I didn't know him."

Her reply astonished him, but it sounded genuine. Wallander decided to feel his way forward, to take all the time his impatience told him he did not have.

"You will not mind my saying that your response is a bit odd," Wallander said. "I mean, you worked with him for a very long time."

"Not with him," she said. "For him. There's a big difference."

Wallander nodded. "Even if you didn't know the man, you must know a lot about him. Please, tell me what you can. If you don't I'm afraid we may never be able to solve the murder of his son."

"You're not being honest with me, Inspector Wallander," she said. "You haven't told me what really happened when he died in that car crash."

She was evidently going to go on surprising him. He made his mind up on the spot to be straight with her.

"We don't know yet," he said. "But we suspect it was more than just an accident. Something might have caused it, or happened afterwards."

"He'd driven along that road lots of times," she said. "He knew it inside out. And he never drove fast."

"If I understand it rightly, he'd been to see one of his clients," Wallander said.

"The man at Farnholm," was all she said.

"The man at Farnholm?"

"Alfred Harderberg. The man at Farnholm Castle."

Wallander knew that Farnholm Castle was in a remote area to the south of the Linderod Ridge. He had often driven past the turning, but had never been there.

"He was our biggest client," Mrs Duner went on. "For the last few years he'd been in effect Gustaf Torstensson's only client."

Wallander wrote the name on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket.

"I've never heard of him," he said. "Is he a farmer?"

"He's the man who owns the castle," Mrs Duner said. "But he's a businessman. Big business, international."

"I'll be in touch with him, obviously," Wallander said. "He must be one of the last people to see Mr Torstensson alive."

A packet of mail suddenly dropped through the letter box. Wallander noticed that Mrs Duner gave a start.

Three scared people, he thought. Scared of what?

"Gustaf Torstensson," he started again. "Let's try again. Tell me what he was like."

"He was the most private person I have ever met," she said, and Wallander detected a hint of aggression. "He never allowed anybody to get close to him. He was a pedant, never varied his routine. He was one of those people folk say you could set your watch by. That was absolutely true in Gustaf Torstensson's case. He was a sort of bloodless, cut-out silhouette, neither nice nor nasty. Just boring."

"According to Sten Torstensson, he was also cheerful," Wallander said.

"You could have fooled me," Mrs Duner said.

"How did the two of them get on?"

She did not hesitate, she answered directly to the point. "Gustaf Torstensson was annoyed that his son was trying to modernise the business," she said. "And naturally enough, Sten Torstensson thought his father was a millstone round his neck. But neither of them revealed their true feelings to the other. They were both afraid of fighting."

"Before Sten Torstensson died he said something had been upsetting and worrying his father for several months," Wallander said. "Can you comment on that?"

This time she paused before answering.

"Maybe," she said. "Now that you mention it, there was something distant about him in the last months of his life."

"Have you any explanation for that?"

"No."

"Nothing unusual that happened?"

"No, nothing."

"Please think carefully. This could be very important."

She poured another cup of tea while she was thinking. Wallander waited. Then she looked up at him.

"I can't say," she said. "I can't explain it."

Wallander knew she was not telling the truth, but he decided not to press her. Everything was still too vague and uncertain. The time wasn't ripe.

He pushed his cup to one side and rose to his feet. "I won't disturb you any longer," he said. "But I'll be back, I'm afraid."

"Of course," Mrs Duner said.

"If you think of anything you'd like to say, just give me a ring," Wallander said as he left. "Don't hesitate. The slightest detail could be significant."

"I'll bear that in mind," she said as she closed the door behind him.

Wallander sat in his car without starting the engine. He felt very uneasy. Without being able to say exactly why, he had the feeling there was something very serious and disturbing behind the deaths of the two lawyers. They were still only scratching the surface.

Something is pointing us in the wrong direction, he thought. The postcard from Finland might not be a red herring, might be the thing we really ought to be looking into. But why?

He was about to start the engine and drive off when he noticed that somebody was standing on the opposite pavement, watching him.

It was a young woman, hardly more than 20, of some Asiatic origin. When she saw that Wallander had noticed her, she hurried away. Wallander could see in his rear-view mirror that she had turned right into Hamngatan without looking back.

He was certain he had never seen her before.

That didn't mean she had not recognised him. Over the years as a police officer he had often come up against refugees and asylum seekers in various contexts.

He drove back to the police station. The wind was still squally, and clouds were building up from the east. He had just turned into Kristianstadsvagen when he slammed his foot on the brake. A lorry behind him sounded its horn.

I'm reacting far too slowly, he thought. I'm not seeing the wood for the trees.

He made an illegal U-turn, parked outside the post office in Hamngatan and made his way swiftly into the side street that led into Stickgatan from the north. He positioned himself so that he could see the pink building where Mrs Duner lived.

It was getting chilly, and he started walking up and down while keeping an eye on the building. After an hour he wondered whether he ought to give up. But he was sure he was right. He kept on watching the building. By now Akeson was waiting for him, but he would wait in vain.

At 3.43 p.m. the door to the pink building suddenly opened. Wallander hid behind a wall. He was right. He watched that woman with the vaguely Asiatic appearance leave Berta Duner's house. Then she turned the corner and was gone.

It had started raining.

Chapter 5

The meeting of the investigation team started at 4 p.m. and finished exactly seven minutes later. Wallander was the last to arrive and flopped down on his chair. He was out of breath, and sweating. His colleagues around the table observed him in surprise, but no-one made any comment.

It took Bjork a few minutes to establish that no-one had any significant progress to report or matters to discuss. They had reached a point in the investigation where they had become "tunnel diggers", as they used to say. They were all trying to break through the surface layer to find what might be concealed underneath. It was a familiar phase in criminal investigations, and no discussion was needed. The only one who came up with a question at the end of the meeting was Wallander.

"Who is Alfred Harderberg?" he asked, after consulting a scrap of paper on which he'd written down the name.

"I thought everybody knew that," Bjork said. "He's one of Sweden's most successful businessmen just now. Lives here in Skane. When he's not flying all over the world in his private jet, that is."

"He owns Farnholm Castle," Svedberg said. "It's said that he has an aquarium with genuine gold dust at the bottom instead of sand."

"He was a client of Gustaf Torstensson's," Wallander said. "His principal client, in fact. And his last. Torstensson had been to see him the night he met his death in the field."

"He organises collections for the needy in parts of the Balkans ravaged by war," Martinsson said. "But maybe that's not so extraordinary when you have the limitless amounts of money he does."

"Alfred Harderberg is a man worthy of our respect," Bjork said.

Wallander could see he was getting annoyed. "Who isn't?" he wondered aloud. "I intend to pay him a visit even so."

"Phone first," Bjork said, getting to his feet.

The meeting was at an end. Wallander fetched a cup of coffee and repaired to his office. He needed time on his own to think over the significance of Mrs Duner being visited by a young Asian woman. Maybe there was nothing to it at all, but Wallander's instinct told him otherwise. He put his feet on his desk and leaned back in his chair, balancing his coffee cup between his knees.

The telephone rang. Wallander stretched to answer it, lost his grip on the cup, and coffee spilled all over his trouser leg as the cup fell to the floor.

"Shit!" he shouted, the receiver halfway to his ear.

"No need to be rude," said his father. "I only wanted to ask why you never get in touch."

Wallander was instantly assailed by his bad conscience, and that in turn made him angry. He wondered if there would ever be a time when dealings with his father could be conducted on a less tense footing.

"I spilled a cup of coffee," he said, "and scalded my leg."

His father seemed not to have heard what he said. "Why are you in your office?" he asked. "You're supposed to be on sick leave."

"Not any more. I've started work again."

"When?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday?"

Wallander could tell that this conversation was going to be a very long one if he did not manage to cut it short. "I owe you an explanation, I know," he said, "but I just haven't time at the moment. I'll come and see you tomorrow evening, and tell you what's happened."

"I haven't seen you for ages," his father said, and hung up.

Wallander sat for a moment with the receiver in his hand. His father would be 75 next year, and invariably managed to arouse in him contradictory emotions. Their relationship had been complicated for as long as he could remember. Not least on the day he told his father he intended to join the police. More than 25 years had passed since then and the old man never missed an opportunity of criticising that decision. Nevertheless, Wallander had a guilty conscience about the time he devoted to him. The previous year, when he had heard the astonishing news that his father was going to marry a woman 30 years younger than himself, a home help who came to his house three times a week, he had reckoned his father would not lack for company any more. Now, sitting there with the receiver in his hand, he realised that nothing had really changed.

He replaced the receiver, picked up the cup and wiped his trouser leg with a sheet torn from his notepad. Then he remembered he was supposed to get in touch with Akeson, the prosecutor. Akeson's secretary put him straight through. Wallander explained that he had been held up and Akeson suggested a time for the next morning instead.

Wallander went to fetch another cup of coffee. In the corridor he bumped into Hoglund carrying a pile of files.

"How's it going?" Wallander said.

"Slowly," she said. "And I can't shake off the feeling that there's something fishy about those two dead lawyers."

"That's exactly how I feel," Wallander said. "What makes you think so?"

"I don't know."

"Let's talk about it tomorrow," Wallander said. "Experience tells me you should never underestimate the significance of what you can't put into words, can't put your finger on."

He went back to his office, unhooked the phone and pulled over his notepad. He went back in his mind to the freezing cold beach at Skagen, Sten Torstensson walking towards him out of the fog. That's where this case started for me, he thought. It started while Sten was still alive.

He went over everything he knew about the two solicitors. He was like a soldier cautiously retreating, keeping a close watch to his left and his right. It took him an hour to work his way through every one of the facts he and his colleagues had so far assembled.

What is it I can see and yet do not see? He asked himself this over and over as he sifted through the case notes. But when he tossed aside his pen all he had managed to achieve was a highly decorative and embellished question mark.

Two lawyers dead, he thought. One killed in a strange accident that was in all probability not an accident. Whoever killed Gustaf Torstensson was a cold, calculating murderer. That lone chair leg left in the mud was an uncharacteristic mistake. There's a why and a who, but there may well be something else.

It came to him that there was something he could and should do. He found Mrs Duner's telephone number in his notes.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," he said. "Inspector Wallander here. I have a question I'd be grateful for an answer to right away."

"I'd be pleased to help if I can," she said.

Two questions in fact, Wallander thought, but I'll save the one about the Asian woman for another time.

"The night Gustaf Torstensson died he had been to Farnholm Castle," he said. "How many people knew he was going to visit his client that evening?"

There was a pause before she replied. Wallander wondered whether that was in order to remember, or to give herself time to think of a suitable answer.

"I knew, of course," she said. "It's possible I might have mentioned it to Miss Lundin, but nobody else knew."

"Sten Torstensson didn't know, then?"

"I don't think so. They kept separate engagement diaries."

"So most probably you were the only one who knew," Wallander said.

"Yes."

"Thank you. I apologise for disturbing you," Wallander said, and hung up.

He returned to his notes. Gustaf Torstensson drives out to see a client, and is attacked on the way home, murder disguised as a road accident.

He thought about Mrs Duner's reply. I'm sure she was telling the truth, he thought, but what interests me is what lies behind that truth. What she said means that apart from herself the only other person who knew what Gustaf Torstensson was going to do that evening was the man at Farnholm Castle.

He continued his walk through the case. The landscape of the investigation constantly shifted. The cheerless house with its sophisticated security systems. The collection of icons hidden in the basement. When he thought he'd walked as far as he could go he switched to Sten Torstensson. The landscape shifted yet again and became almost impenetrable. Sten's unexpected appearance in Wallander's windswept haven, against a background of melancholy foghorns, and then the deserted cafe at the Art Museum - they seemed to Wallander like the ingredients of an unconvincing operetta. But there were moments in the plot when life was taken seriously. Sten had found his father restless and depressed. And the postcard from Finland, sent by an unknown hand but arranged by Sten: clearly there was a threat and a false trail was required. Always assuming that the false trail wasn't in fact the right trail.

Nothing takes us on to a next stage, Wallander thought, but these are facts that one can categorise. It's harder to know what to do with the mystery ingredients, the Asian woman, for example, who doesn't want anybody to see her visiting Berta Duner's pink house. And Mrs Duner herself, who's a good liar, but not good enough to deceive a detective inspector from the Ystad police - or, at least, for him not to notice that something isn't quite right.

Wallander stood up, stretched his back and stood at the window. It was 6 p.m., and it had grown dark. Noises could be heard from the corridor, footsteps approaching and then fading away. He remembered something Rydberg had said during the last year of his life: "A police station is essentially like a prison. Police officers and criminals live their lives as mirror images of each other. It's not really possible to decide who's incarcerated and who isn't."

Wallander suddenly felt listless and lonely. He resorted to his only consolation: an imagined conversation with Baiba Liepa in Riga, as though she were standing there in front of him, and as if his office were a room in a grey building with dilapidated facades in Riga, in that flat with the dimmed lighting and the thick curtains permanently drawn. But the image became blurred, faded like the weaker of two wrestlers. Instead, Wallander pictured himself crawling on his muddy hands and knees through the Scanian fog with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other, like a pathetic copy of some unlikely film idol, and then suddenly the illusion was ripped to shreds and reality imposed itself through the slits, and death and killing were not rabbits plucked out of a conjuror's hat. He watches himself witnessing a man being shot by a bullet through the head, and then he also shoots and the only thing he can be sure of is that his only hope is for the man he's aiming at to die.

I'm a man who doesn't laugh enough, he thought. Without my noticing, middle age has marooned me on a coast with too many dangerous submerged rocks.

He left all his papers on his desk. In reception, Ebba was busy on the telephone. When she signalled to him to wait, he shook his head and waved to indicate he was in a hurry.

He drove home and cooked a meal he would have been incapable of describing afterwards. He watered the five plants he had on his window ledges, filled the washing machine with clothes that had been strewn around the flat, discovered he had no washing powder, then sat on the sofa and cut his toenails. Occasionally he looked around the room, as if he expected to find that he wasn't alone after all. Shortly after 10.00 he went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Outside the rain had eased off and become light drizzle.

When Wallander woke up the next morning it was still dark. The alarm clock with the luminous hands indicated that it was barely 5.00. He turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but found it impossible. His long stay out in the cold was still making itself felt. Whatever has changed, whatever is still the same, I will spend the rest of my life in two timescales, "before" and "after". Kurt Wallander exists and doesn't exist.

He got up at 5.30, made coffee, waited for the newspaper to arrive and saw from the outside thermometer that it was 4degC outside. Driven by a feeling of unrest he did not have the strength to analyse or fight, he left the flat at 6 a.m. He got into his car and started the engine, thinking he might just as well pay a visit to Farnholm Castle. He could stop somewhere on the way, have a coffee and telephone to warn them he was coming. He drove east out of Ystad, averting his gaze as he passed the military training ground on his right where 18 months earlier he had fought the old Wallander's last battle. Out there in the fog he had discovered that there are people who would not shrink from any form of violence, who would not hesitate to commit murders in cold blood. Out there, on his knees in the mud, he had fought desperately for his own life and somehow, thanks to an incredibly accurate shot, he had killed a man. It was a point of no return, a birth and a burial at the same time.

He drove along the road to Kristianstad and slowed down as he passed the place where Gustaf Torstensson had died. When he came to Skane-Tranas he stopped at the cafe and went in. It was getting windy: he ought to have put on a thicker jacket. In fact, he ought to have given more thought to his clothes in general: the worn Terylene trousers and dirty windcheater he had on were perhaps not ideal for visiting a lord of the manor. As he entered the cafe he wondered what Bjork would have worn for a visit to a castle, supposing it had been on business.

He was the only customer. He ordered coffee and a sandwich. It was 6.45, and he leafed through a well-thumbed magazine on a shelf. He soon tired of that, and tried to think instead about what he was going to say to Alfred Harderberg, or whoever might be able to tell him about Gustaf Torstensson's last visit to his client. He waited until 7.30, then asked to use the telephone on the counter next to the old-fashioned cash register, and first called the police station in Ystad. The only one of his colleagues there that early was Martinsson. He explained where he was, and said that he expected the visit to take an hour or two.

"Do you know the first thing that entered my head when I woke up this morning?" Martinsson said.

"No."

"That it was Sten Torstensson who killed his father."

"How do you explain what then happened to the son?" Wallander said.

"I don't," Martinsson said. "But what seems to me to be clearer and clearer is that the explanation has to do with their professional rather than their private lives."

"Or a combination of the two."

"What do you mean?"

"Just something I dreamed last night," Wallander said, ducking the question. "Anyway, I'll be back at the station in due course."

He hung up, lifted the receiver again and dialled the number of Farnholm Castle. It was answered on the very first ring. "Farnholm Castle," said a woman's voice. She had a slight foreign accent.

"This is Detective Chief Inspector Wallander of the Ystad police. I'd like to speak to Mr Harderberg."

"He's in Geneva," the voice said.

Wallander ought to have foreseen the possibility that an international businessman might be abroad.

"When will he be back?"

"He hasn't said."

"Do you expect him tomorrow or next week?"

"I can't give you that information over the telephone. His schedule is strictly confidential."

"Maybe so, but I am a police officer," Wallander said, his anger rising.

"How am I to know that?" the woman said. "You could be anybody."

"I'll be at Farnholm Castle in half an hour," Wallander said. "Who shall I ask for?"

"That's for the guards at the main gate to decide," the woman said. "I hope you have some acceptable form of identification with you."

"What do you mean by 'acceptable'?" Wallander shouted, but she had hung up.

Wallander slammed down the receiver. The powerfully built waitress was putting buns out on a plate, and looked up at him with displeasure. He put some coins on the counter, and left without a word.

Fifteen kilometres further north he turned to the west and was soon swallowed up by the dense forest to the south of Linderod Ridge. He braked when he came to the turning for Farnholm Castle and a granite plaque with gold lettering told him he was on course. Wallander thought the plaque looked like an expensive gravestone.

The castle road was asphalted and in good condition. Tucked discreetly into the trees was a high fence. He stopped and wound down his window to get a better view. It was a double fence with about a metre gap. He drove on. Another kilometre or so and the road swung sharply to the right. Just beyond the turn were the gates. Next to them was a grey building with a flat roof looking more like a pillbox than anything else. He drove forward and waited. Nothing happened. He sounded his horn. Still no reaction. He got out of the car, he was getting annoyed. He had a vague feeling of being humiliated by all these fences and closed gates. Just then a man emerged through one of the steel doors in the pillbox. He was wearing a dark red uniform Wallander had never seen before. He still had not familiarised himself with these new security companies that were popping up all over the country.

The man in the uniform came up to him. He was about the same age as Wallander.

Then he recognised him.

"Kurt Wallander," said the guard. "Long time no see."

"Indeed," Wallander said. "How long ago was it we last met? Fifteen years?"

"Twenty," the guard said. "Maybe more."

Wallander had dug out the man's name from his memory. Kurt Strom. They had been colleagues on the Malmo police force. Wallander was young then and inexperienced, and Strom was a year or so older. They had never had more than professional contact with each other, but Wallander had moved to Ystad and many years later he had heard that Strom had left the force. He had a vague memory that Strom had been sacked, something had been hushed up, possibly excessive force on a prisoner, or stolen goods vanishing from a police storeroom. He didn't know for sure.

"I was warned you were on your way," Strom said.

"Lucky for me," Wallander said. "I was told I'd have to produce an 'acceptable form of identification'. What do you find acceptable?"

"We have a high level of security at Farnholm Castle," Strom said. "We're pretty careful about who we let in."

"What kind of treasure do you have hidden away here?"

"No treasure, but there's a man with very big business interests."

"Harderberg?"

"That's the one. He has something a lot of people would like to get their hands on."

"What's that?"

"Knowledge, know-how. Worth more than owning your own mint."

Wallander had no patience with the servile manner Strom was displaying as he spoke of the great man.

"Once upon a time you were a police officer," Wallander said. "I still am. Perhaps you understand why I'm here?"

"I read the papers," Strom said. "I suppose it's got something to do with that lawyer."

"Two lawyers have died, not just one," Wallander said. "But if I understand it right, only the elder one worked with Harderberg."

"He came here a lot," Strom said. "A nice man. Very discreet."

"He was last here on October 11, in the evening," Wallander said. "Were you on duty then?"

Strom nodded.

"I take it you make notes on all the cars and people that come in and out?"

Strom laughed out loud. "We stopped that a long time ago," he said. "It's all done by computer nowadays."

"I'd like to see a printout for the evening of October 11," Wallander said.

"You'll have to ask them up at the castle," Strom said. "I'm not allowed to do things like that."

"But I dare say you're allowed to remember," Wallander said.

"I know he was here that evening," Strom said. "But I can't remember when he arrived and when he left."

"Was he on his own in the car?"

"I can't say."

"Because you're not allowed to say?"

Strom nodded again.

"I've sometimes thought about applying for a job with a security company," Wallander said, "but I think I'd find it hard to get used to not being allowed to answer questions."

"Everything has its price," Strom said.

Wallander thought he could say "hear, hear" to that. He watched Strom for a few moments. "Harderberg," he said eventually. "What's he like as a person?"

The reply surprised him.

"I don't know," Strom said.

"You must have some sort of an opinion, surely? Or aren't you allowed to comment on that either?"

"I've never met him," Strom said.

"And you have been working for him how long?"

"Nearly five years."

"You've never once seen him?"

"Never."

"He's never passed through these gates?"

"His car has one-way glass in the windows."

"I take it that's part of the security system?" Wallander thought for a moment. "In other words, you are never completely sure whether he's here or not. You don't know if he's in the car when it passes in or out through the gates?"

"No. It's all to do with security," Strom said.

Wallander went back to his car. Strom disappeared through the steel door, and shortly afterwards the gates opened without a sound. It's like entering a different world, Wallander thought.

After about a kilometre the forest opened up. The castle stood on a hill, surrounded by extensive and well-tended grounds. The large main building, like the freestanding outbuildings surrounding it, was in dark red brick. The castle had towers and steeples, balustrades and balconies. The only thing to break the mood of another world, another age, was a helicopter on a concrete pad. Wallander had the impression of a large insect with its wings half folded, a wild beast at rest but liable to come back to life with a jerk.

He drove slowly up to the main entrance. Peacocks strolled leisurely around on the road, in front of the car. He parked behind a black BMW and got out. It was very quiet all around. The tranquillity reminded him of the previous day when he'd walked up the gravel drive to Gustaf Torstensson's house. Perhaps tranquillity is what distinguishes the environment in which wealthy people live, he thought. It's not the orchestral fanfares, but the tranquillity.

Just then one of the double doors at the main entrance to the castle opened. A woman in her thirties, dressed in well-fitting and, Wallander guessed, expensive clothes emerged on to the steps.

"Please come in," she said with a ready smile, a smile that seemed to Wallander just as cold and unwelcoming as it was correct.

"I don't know if I have any identification papers you would regard as acceptable," he said, "but the guard who goes by the name of Strom recognised me."

"I know," said the woman.

It was not the woman who'd answered the phone when he rang from the cafe. He went up the steps, held out his hand and introduced himself. She ignored his hand but simply reproduced the same distant smile. He followed her in through the doors. They walked across a large entrance hall. Modernistic sculptures on stone pedestals were dotted around, illuminated by invisible spotlights. In the background, by the wide staircase leading to the upper floor, he detected two men lurking in the shadows. Wallander could sense their presence, but could not make out their faces. Tranquillity and shadows, he thought. The world of Harderberg, as I know it so far. He followed her through a door on the left, leading into a large oval room that was also decorated with sculptures. But as a reminder of the fact that they were in a castle with a history going back deep into the Middle Ages, there were also some suits of armour keeping watch over him. In the centre of the highly polished oak parquet floor was a desk and a single visitor's chair. There was no paper on the desk, only a computer and an advanced telephone exchange that was hardly any bigger than an ordinary telephone. The woman invited him to sit down, then keyed a command into the computer. She handed him a sheet from a printer invisible somewhere under the desk.

"I gather you wanted a printout of the gate-control data for the evening of October 11," the woman said. "You can see from this when Mr Torstensson arrived, and when he left Farnholm."

Wallander took the printout and put it on the floor beside him.

"That's not the only reason why I've come," he said. "I have several other questions."

"Fire away."

The woman had sat down behind the desk. She pressed various buttons on the telephone exchange. Wallander assumed she was switching all incoming calls to another exchange somewhere in the huge building.

"The information I've received informs me that Gustaf Torstensson had Alfred Harderberg as a client," Wallander said. "If I understand it rightly, he's out of the country at present."

"He's in Dubai," the woman said.

Wallander frowned. "An hour ago he was in Geneva," he said.

"That's right," the woman said without batting an eyelid. "But he's now left for Dubai."

Wallander took a notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket.

"May I ask your name and what you do here?"

"I'm one of Alfred Harderberg's secretaries," she said. "My name's Anita Karlen."

"Does Mr Harderberg have many secretaries?" Wallander wondered.

"That depends on how you look at it," Anita Karlen replied. "Is that really relevant?"

Once again Wallander started to get annoyed at the way in which he was being treated. He decided he would have to change his approach if the whole visit to Farnholm were not to be a waste of time.

"I shall decide if the question is relevant or not," he said. "Farnholm Castle is a private property and you have a legal right to surround it with as many fences as you like, as high as you like. Provided you have planning permission and are not contravening any laws or regulations. You also have the right to deny entry to whoever you like. With one exception: the police. Is that understood?"

"We haven't denied you entry, Mr Wallander," she said, still without batting an eyelid.

"Let me express myself more clearly," Wallander said, noting that the woman's indifference was making him feel insecure. Perhaps he was also distracted by the fact that she was strikingly beautiful.

Just as he opened his mouth to continue, a door opened and a woman came in with a tray. To his surprise Wallander saw that she was black. Without saying a word she put the tray down on the desk, then disappeared again just as noiselessly as she'd appeared.

"Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr Wallander?"

He said he would. She poured and then handed him the cup and saucer. He examined the china.

"Let me ask you a question that's relevant," he said. "What will happen if I drop this cup on the floor? How much will I owe you?"

For the first time her smile seemed genuine.

"Everything's insured, of course," she said. "But that's a classic Rorstrand special edition."

Wallander put the cup and saucer gingerly down by the side of the printout on the oak parquet floor, and started again.

"I'll express myself very precisely," he said. "That same evening, October 11, barely an hour after Mr Torstensson had been here, he died in a car accident."

"We sent flowers to the funeral," she said. "One of my colleagues attended the service."

"But not Alfred Harderberg, of course?"

"My employer avoids appearing in public whenever possible."

"I've gathered that," Wallander said. "But the fact is that we've reason to believe this wasn't in fact a car accident. Many things suggest Mr Torstensson was murdered. And to make matters worse, his son was shot dead in his office a few weeks later. Perhaps you sent flowers to his funeral as well?"

She stared at him uncomprehendingly.

"We only dealt with Gustaf Torstensson," she said.

Wallander nodded, and went on: "Now you know why I've come. And you still haven't told me how many secretaries there are working here."

"And you haven't understood that it depends on how you look at it, Inspector Wallander," she said.

"I'm all ears."

"Here at Farnholm Castle there are three secretaries," she said. "Then there are two more who accompany him on his travels. In addition Dr Harderberg has secretaries stationed in various places around the world. The number can vary, but it's rarely fewer than six."

"I make it eleven," Wallander said.

She agreed.

"You referred to your employer as Dr Harderberg," Wallander said.

"He has several honorary doctorates," she said. "You can have a list if you'd like one."

"Yes, I would," Wallander said. "I also want an overview of Dr Harderberg's business empire. But you can let me have that later. What I want now is to know what happened that evening when Gustaf Torstensson was here for the last time. Which one of all those secretaries can tell me that?"

"I was on duty that evening."

Wallander thought for a moment. "That's why you're here," he said. "That's why you are receiving me. But what would have happened if this had been your day off? You couldn't know the police were going to come this day of all days."

"Of course not."

Even as he spoke Wallander realised he was wrong. And he also realised how it would be possible for people at Farnholm Castle to know. The thought worried him. He had to force himself to concentrate before continuing.

"What happened that evening?" he asked.

"Mr Torstensson arrived shortly after 7 p.m. He had a private conversation with Dr Harderberg and some of his closest colleagues, lasting an hour. Then he had a cup of tea. He left Farnholm at exactly 8.14."

"What did they talk about that evening?"

"I can't answer that."

"But you said a moment ago that you were on duty."

"It was a conversation with no secretary present. No notes were taken."

"Who were the colleagues?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said Mr Torstensson had a private conversation with Dr Harderberg and some of his closest colleagues."

"I can't answer that."

"Because you're not allowed to?"

"Because I don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"Who those colleagues were. I'd never seen them before. They had arrived that day and they left the following day."

Wallander didn't know what to ask next. It seemed as if all the answers he was getting were peripheral. He decided to approach matters from a different angle.

"You said a moment ago that Dr Harderberg has eleven secretaries. Might I ask how many solicitors he has?"

"Presumably at least as many."

"But you're not allowed to say exactly how many?"

"I don't know."

Wallander nodded. He could see he was entering another cul-de-sac.

"How long had Mr Torstensson been working for Dr Harderberg?"

"Ever since he bought Farnholm Castle and made it his headquarters. About five years ago."

"Mr Torstensson worked as a solicitor in Ystad all his life," said Wallander. "All of a sudden he's considered to be qualified to advise on international business matters. Doesn't that seem a little remarkable?"

"That's something you'll have to ask Dr Harderberg."

Wallander closed his notebook. "Absolutely right," he said. "I'd like you to send him a message, whether he's in Geneva or Dubai or wherever, and inform him that Inspector Wallander wants to talk to him as soon as possible. The day he gets back here, in other words."

He stood up and gingerly placed the cup and saucer on the desk.

"The Ystad police don't have eleven secretaries," he said, "but our receptionists are pretty efficient. You can leave a message with them saying when he can see me.

He followed her out into the hall. Next to the front door, lying on a marble table, was a thick leather-bound file.

"Here's the overview of Dr Harderberg's business affairs you asked for," Anita Karlen said.

Somebody's been listening in, Wallander thought. Somebody's overheard the whole of our conversation. Presumably a transcript is already on its way to Harderberg, wherever he is. In case he's interested. Which I doubt.

"Don't forget to stress that it's urgent," Wallander said. This time Anita Karlen did shake hands with him.

Wallander glanced at the big unlit staircase, but the shadows had gone.

The sky had cleared. He got into his car. Anita Karlen was standing on the steps, her hair fluttering in the wind. As he drove off he could see her in his rear-view mirror, still on the steps, watching him. This time he didn't need to stop at the gates, which started opening as he approached. There was no sign of Kurt Strom. The gates closed automatically behind him, and he drove slowly back to Ystad. It was only three days since he'd suddenly made up his mind to return to work, but even so, it seemed like a long time. As if he were on his way somewhere while his memories went dashing off at an enormous pace in an entirely different direction.

Just after the turning into the main highway there was a dead hare lying on the road. He drove round it, and thought how he was still no nearer to finding out what had happened to Gustaf Torstensson or his son. It seemed to him highly unlikely that he would find any connection between the dead solicitors and the people in the castle behind that double fence. Nevertheless, he would go through that leather file before the day was out, and try to get some idea of Alfred Harderberg's business empire.

His car phone started ringing. He picked it up and heard Svedberg's voice.

"Svedberg here," he shouted. "Where are you?"

"Forty minutes from Ystad."

"Martinsson said you were going to Farnholm Castle."

"I've been there. Drew a blank."

The conversation was cut off by interference for a few seconds. Then Svedberg's voice returned.

"Berta Duner phoned and asked for you," he said. "She was keen for you to get in touch with her right away."

"Why?"

"She didn't say."

"If you give me her number I'll give her a call."

"It would be better if you drove round there. She seemed very insistent."

Wallander glanced at the clock. It was 8.45 already.

"What happened at the meeting this morning?"

"Nothing special."

"I'll drive straight to her place when I get back to Ystad," Wallander said.

"Do that," Svedberg said.

Wallander wondered what Mrs Duner wanted that was so urgent. He could feel himself growing tense, and increased his speed.

At 9.25 he parked any old how opposite the pink house. He hurried across the street and rang her bell. The moment she opened the door he could see something was amiss. She looked to be in shock.

"You've been asking for me," he said.

She nodded and ushered him in. He was about to take off his shoes when she grasped his arm and dragged him into the living room that overlooked her little garden. She pointed.

"Somebody's been there during the night," she said.

She looked really frightened. Something of her anxiety rubbed off on Wallander. He stood at the French windows and examined the lawn: the flower beds, dug over ready for winter, the climbers on the whitewashed wall between Mrs Duner's garden and her neighbour's.

"I can't see anything," he said.

She had been hovering in the background, as if she did not dare go up to the window. Wallander began to wonder if she was suffering from some temporary mental aberration as a result of the violent events that had shaken her life to its foundations.

She came to his side, and pointed. "There," she said. "There. Somebody's been there during the night, digging."

"Did you see anybody?"

"No."

"Did you hear anything?"

"No. But I know somebody's been there during the night."

Wallander tried to follow where she was pointing. He had the vague impression he could see that a tiny piece of lawn had been trodden down.

"It could be a cat," he said. "Or a mole. Even a mouse."

She shook her head. "No, somebody's been there during the night," she said.

Wallander opened the French windows and stepped out into the garden. He walked on to the lawn. From close up it looked as if a square of turf had been lifted and then put back. He squatted down and ran his hand over the grass. His fingers touched something hard, something plastic or iron, a little spike sticking up out of the turf. Very carefully, he bent back the blades of grass. A greyish-brown object was buried just under the surface.

Wallander stiffened. He pulled his hand back and rose gingerly to his feet. For a moment he thought he had gone mad - it could not possibly be what he thought it was. That was too unlikely, too far-fetched even to be considered.

He walked backwards to the French windows, placing his feet exactly where they had been before. When he got to the house he turned round. He still could not believe it was true.

"What is it?" she said.

"Please go and fetch the telephone directory," Wallander said, and he could hear his voice was tense.

"What do you want the directory for?"

"Do as I say," he said.

She went out into the hall and returned with the directory for Ystad and District. Wallander took it and weighed it in his hand.

"Please go into the kitchen and stay there," he said.

She did as she was told.

Wallander tried to tell himself that this was all in his imagination. If there'd been the slightest possibility that the improbability was in fact true, he ought to have reacted quite differently. He went in through the French windows and positioned himself as far back in the room as he could. Then he aimed the phone book and threw it at the spike sticking up out of the grass.

The explosion deafened him.

Afterwards, he was amazed to find the windows hadn't shattered.

He eyed the crater that had formed in the lawn. Then he hurried into the kitchen where he'd heard Mrs Duner scream. She was standing as if petrified in the middle of the floor, her hands over her ears. He took hold of her and sat her down on one of the kitchen chairs.

"There's no danger," he said. "I'll be back in a second. I must just make a phone call."

He dialled the number to the police station. To his relief it was Ebba who answered.

"Kurt here," he said. "I have to speak to Martinsson or Svedberg. Failing that, anybody will do."

Ebba recognised his voice, he could tell. That's why she asked no questions, just did as he had asked. She had grasped how serious he was.

Martinsson answered.

"It's Kurt," Wallander said. "Any minute now the police are going to get an emergency call about a violent explosion behind the Continental Hotel. Make sure there's no emergency call-out. I don't want fire engines and ambulances rushing here. Get here quick and bring somebody with you. I'm with Mrs Duner, Torstensson's secretary. The address is Stickgatan 26. A pink house."

"What's happened?" Martinsson said.

"You'll see when you get here," Wallander said. "You wouldn't believe me if I tried to explain."

"Try me," Martinsson said.

"If I told you that somebody had planted a landmine in Mrs Duner's back garden, would you believe me?"

"No," Martinsson said.

"I thought not."

Wallander hung up and went back to the French windows.

The crater was still there.

Chapter 6

Kurt Wallander would remember Wednesday, November 3 as a day that he was never entirely convinced had existed. How could he ever have dreamed that he would one day come across a landmine buried in a garden in the middle of Ystad?

When Martinsson arrived at Mrs Duner's house with Hoglund, Wallander still had difficulty in believing it was a mine that had exploded. Martinsson, however, had greater faith in what Wallander had said on the telephone, and on the way out from the police station he had already sent a message to Nyberg, their technical expert. He arrived at the pink house only a few minutes after Martinsson and Hoglund had stood transfixed before the crater in the lawn. As they couldn't be sure there weren't any more mines hidden in the grass, they all stayed close to the house wall. Off her own bat Hoglund then went to the kitchen with Mrs Duner, who was a little calmer by now, to question her.

"What's going on?" Martinsson said, indignantly.

"Are you asking me?" Wallander replied. "I have no idea."

No more was said. They continued contemplating the hole in the ground. Shortly afterwards the forensic team arrived, led by the skilful but irritable Sven Nyberg. He stopped in his tracks when he caught sight of Wallander.

"What are you doing here?" he said, making Wallander feel that he had committed an indecent act by returning to duty.

"Working," he said, going on the defensive.

"I thought you were packing it in?"

"So did I. But then I realised you couldn't manage without me."

Nyberg was about to say something, but Wallander raised a hand to stop him.

"More important is this hole in the lawn," he said, remembering that Nyberg had served several times with Swedish troops for the UN. "From your years of duty in Cyprus and the Middle East you can verify if this was in fact a mine. But first can you tell us if there are any more of them?"

"I'm not a dog," Nyberg said, squatting by the house wall. Wallander told him about the spike he had found with his fingers, and then the telephone book that had triggered the explosion.

Nyberg nodded. "There are very few explosive substances or compounds that are detonated on impact - apart from mines. That's the whole point of them. People or vehicles are supposed to be blown up if they put a foot or a wheel on a landmine. For an anti-personnel mine a pressure of just a few kilos can be enough - a kiddie's foot or a telephone directory will do. If the target's a vehicle, 200 kilos would be the pressure required." He stood up and looked questioningly at Wallander and Martinsson. "But what the hell kind of person lays a mine in somebody's garden? They had better be caught in very short order."

"You're quite certain it was a mine?" Wallander said.

"I'm never certain of anything," Nyberg said, "but I'll send for a mine detector from the regiment. Until it gets here nobody should set foot in this garden."

While they were waiting for the mine detector Martinsson made a few calls. Wallander sat on the sofa, trying to come to terms with what had happened. From the kitchen he could hear Hoglund patiently asking Mrs Duner questions that Mrs Duner answered even more slowly.

Two dead lawyers, Wallander thought. Then somebody lays a mine in their secretary's garden. Even if everything else is still obscure, we can be sure of one thing: the solution must lie somewhere in the activities of the firm of solicitors. It's hardly credible any more that the private or social lives of these three individuals is relevant.

Wallander was interrupted in his train of thought by Martinsson finishing his calls.

"Bjork asked me if I'd taken leave of my senses," he said, pulling a face. "I must admit that I wasn't quite sure at first how I should answer that. He says it's inconceivable that it could be a landmine. Even so, he wants one of us to update him as soon as possible."

"When we've got something to say," Wallander said. "Where's Nyberg disappeared to?"

"He's gone to the barracks himself to fetch a mine detector," Martinsson said.

Wallander looked at the time. 10.15. He thought about his visit to Farnholm Castle, but didn't really know what conclusion to draw.

Martinsson was standing in the doorway, studying the hole in the lawn. "There was an incident about 20 years ago in Soderhamn," he said. "In the municipal law courts. Do you remember?''

"Vaguely," Wallander said.

"There was an old farmer who'd spent countless years bringing just as countless a series of lawsuits against his neighbours, his relatives, anybody and everybody. It ended up by becoming a clinical obsession that nobody diagnosed as such soon enough. He thought he was being persecuted by all his imagined opponents, not least by the judge and his own solicitor. In the end he snapped. He drew a revolver in the middle of a case and shot both the judge and his solicitor. When the police tried to get into his house afterwards, it turned out he'd booby-trapped all the doors and windows. It was sheer luck that nobody was injured once the fireworks started."

Wallander remembered the incident.

"A prosecutor in Stockholm has his house blown up," Martinsson went on. "Lawyers are threatened and attacked. Not to mention police officers."

Wallander nodded without replying. Hoglund emerged from the kitchen, notebook in hand. Somewhat to his surprise, Wallander noticed that she was an attractive woman. It had not occurred to him before. She sat on a chair opposite him.

"Nothing," she said. "She hadn't heard a thing during the night, but she is certain the lawn hadn't been messed with by nightfall. She's an early riser and as soon as it got light she saw that somebody had been in her garden. She says she has no idea why anybody would want to kill her. Or at the very least blow her legs off."

"Is she telling the truth?" Martinsson said.

"It's not easy to tell if a person in shock is telling the truth," Hoglund said, "but I am positive she thinks the mine was put in her lawn during last night. And that she doesn't have a clue why."

"Something about it worries me," Wallander said. "I'm not sure if I can get a handle on it."

"Try," Martinsson said.

"She looks out of the window this morning and sees that somebody has been digging up her lawn. So what does she do?"

"What doesn't she do?" Hoglund said.

"Precisely," Wallander said. "The natural thing for her to do would have been to open the French windows and go out and investigate. But what does she do instead?"

"She phones the police," Martinsson said.

"As if she'd suspected there was something dangerous out there," said Hoglund.

"Or known," Wallander said.

"An anti-personnel mine, for instance," Martinsson said. "She was in quite a state when she phoned the police station."

"She was in a state when I got here," Wallander said. "In fact, I've had the impression that she was nervous every time I've spoken to her. Which could be explained by all that's happened over the last week or two, of course, but I'm not convinced."

The front doorbell rang and in marched Nyberg ahead of two men in uniform carrying an implement that reminded Wallander of a vacuum cleaner. It took the soldiers a quarter of an hour to go over the little garden with the mine detector. The police officers stood at the window watching intently as the men worked. Then they announced that it was all clear, and prepared to leave. Wallander accompanied them out into the street where their car was waiting for them.

"What can you say about the mine?" he asked them. "Size, explosive power? Can you guess where it might have been made? Anything at all could be of use to us."

LUNDQVIST, CAPTAIN, it said on the identity disc attached to the tunic of the older of the two soldiers. He was also the one who replied to Wallander's question.

"Not a particularly powerful mine," he said. "A few hundred grams of explosive at most. Enough to kill a man, though. We usually call this kind of mine a Four."

"Meaning what?" Wallander said.

"Somebody treads on a mine," Captain Lundqvist said. "You need three men to carry him out of battle. Four people removed from active duty."

"And the origin?"

"Mines aren't made the same way as other weapons," Lundqvist said. "Bofors makes them, as do all the other major arms manufacturers. But nearly every industrialised country has a factory making mines. Either they're manufactured openly under licence, or they're pirated. Terrorist groups have their own models. Before you can say anything about where the mine comes from, you have to have a fragment of the explosive and preferably also a bit of the material the casing was made from. It could be iron or plastic. Even wood."

"We'll see what we can find," Wallander said. "Then we'll get back to you."

"Not a nice weapon," Captain Lundqvist said. "They say it's the world's cheapest and most reliable soldier. You put him somewhere and he never moves from the spot, not for a hundred years if that's how you want it. He doesn't require food or drink or wages. He just exists, and waits. Until somebody comes and treads on him. Then he strikes."

"How long can a mine remain active?" Wallander asked.

"Nobody knows. Landmines that were laid in the First World War are still going off now and then."

Wallander went back into the house. Nyberg was in the garden and had already started his meticulous investigation of the crater.

"The explosive and if possible also a piece of the casing," Wallander said.

"What else do you suppose we're looking for?" Nyberg snarled. "Bits of bone?"

Wallander wondered whether he should let Mrs Duner calm down for a few more hours before talking to her, but he was getting impatient again. Impatient at never seeming to be able to see any sign of a breakthrough, or finding any clear starting point for this investigation.

"You two had better go and put Bjork in the picture," he said to Martinsson and Hoglund. "This afternoon we'll go through the whole case in detail, to see where we've got to."

"Have we got anywhere at all?" Martinsson said.

"We've always got somewhere," Wallander said, "but we don't always know exactly where. Has Svedberg been talking to the lawyers going through the Torstensson archives?"

"He's been there all morning," Martinsson said. "But I reckon he'd rather be doing something else. He's not much of a one for reading papers."

"Go and help him," Wallander said. "I have an idea that it's urgent."

He went back into the house, hung up his jacket and went to the toilet in the hall. He gave a start when he saw his face in the mirror. He was unshaven and red-eyed, and his hair was on end. He wondered at the impression he must have made at Farnholm Castle. He rinsed his face in cold water, asking himself where he was going to start in order to get Mrs Duner to understand that he knew she was holding back information - and he did not know why. I must be friendly, he decided. Otherwise she'll put up the shutters.

He went to the kitchen where she was still slumped on a chair. The forensic team were busy in the garden. Occasionally Wallander heard Nyberg's agitated voice. He had the sense of having experienced exactly what he was now seeing, feeling, a moment before, the bewildering sensation of having gone round in a circle and returned to a point way in the distant past. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he sat at the kitchen table and looked at the woman facing him. Just for a moment he thought she reminded him of his long-dead mother. The grey hair, the thin body that seemed to have been compressed inside a tiny frame. He could not conjure up a picture of his mother's face, though: it had faded from his memory.

"You're very upset, I know," he began, "but we have to have a talk."

She nodded without replying.

"Let's see, this morning you discovered that somebody had been in your garden during the night," Wallander said.

"I could see it straight away," she said.

"What did you do then?"

She looked at him in surprise. "I've already told you," she said. "Do I have to go through everything again?"

"Not everything," Wallander said, patiently. "You only need to answer the questions I ask you."

"It was getting light," she said. "I'm an early riser. I looked out at the garden. Somebody had been there. I called the police."

"Why did you call the police?" Wallander said, watching her carefully.

"What else should I have done?"

"You might have gone out to see what damage had been done, for instance."

"I didn't dare."

"Why not? Because you knew there was something out there that could be dangerous?"

She didn't answer. Wallander waited. Nyberg shouted angrily in the garden.

"I don't think you've been completely honest with me," Wallander said. "I think there is something that you ought to be telling me."

She put a hand over her eyes, as if the light in the kitchen was affecting her. Wallander waited. The clock on the kitchen wall showed 11 a.m.

"I've been frightened for so long," she said suddenly, peering up at Wallander as if it were his fault. He waited for more, but in vain.

"People aren't usually frightened unless there is a cause," Wallander said. "If the police are going to be able to find out what happened to Gustaf and Sten Torstensson, you have got to help us."

"I can't help you," she said.

Wallander could see that she was liable to break down at any moment. But he pressed on nevertheless.

"You can answer my questions," he said. "Start by telling me why you're frightened."

"Do you know what's the most scary thing there is?" she said. "It's other people's fear. I'd worked 30 years for Gustaf Torstensson. I wasn't close to him, but I couldn't avoid noticing the change. There came to be a strange smell about him. His fear."

"When did you first notice it?"

"Three years ago."

"Had anything specific happened?"

"Everything was exactly as usual."

"It's very important that you try to remember."

"What do you think I've been trying to do all this time?"

Wallander tried to think how best to keep Mrs Duner going - despite everything she seemed willing to answer his questions now.

"You never spoke to Mr Torstensson about it?"

"Never."

"Not to his son either?"

"I don't think he'd noticed anything."

She could be right, Wallander thought. She was Gustaf Torstensson's secretary, after all.

"Have you really no explanation for what happened today? You realise that you could have been killed if you had gone into the garden. I think you suspected as much and that's why you phoned the police. You've been expecting something to happen. But you have no explanation?"

"People started coming to the office during the night," she said. "Both Gustaf and I noticed. A pen lying differently on a desk, a chair somebody had been sitting on and put back nearly in its proper place but not quite."

"You must have asked him about it," Wallander said.