The Man Who Smiled

Chapter 3

At 8:30, when Björk 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. Since Björk 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 realized that he had instinctively taken his usual place, on Björk’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 anymore. Martinsson sat opposite him, sniffing loudly. Wallander wondered when he had ever seen Martinsson without a cold. Next to him sat Svedberg, rocking backward and forward 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 by herself 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 Höglund had cropped up for the first time. She was young, had graduated from the police academy 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 recruit her, but she made it clear she would like to return to Skåne, 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. Björk 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 tough,” Björk 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 in 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 Höglund, whom you haven’t met yet.”

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

Wallander felt obligated 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 line to shake Wallander by the hand. Björk tried to organize coffee and pastries, and Wallander had difficulty 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,” Björk 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 familiarize 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 Dunér—secretary to the law firm—arrived for work as usual, a few minutes before eight 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. Since 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 of yet. The preliminary postmortem results indicate he was shot at around eleven p.m. That would fit in with Mrs. Dunér’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 should 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 figured 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 Björk 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 Björk had left the room, they all gathered around 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-defense, 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 have so far,” he said. “I expect you’d like a little 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 man 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 Höglund 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 hurriedly got to his feet to cut short the conversation, gathering the papers he had been given by Martinsson. Höglund held open the door for him. When he was back in his office and had closed the door behind him, he noticed he was dripping 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 the 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 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 Sten 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 toward him the notebook in which he had previously written Torstensson’s name. He added another: Gustaf Torstensson. Then he wrote them again in reverse order.

He picked up the phone and dialed 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 office and shoot him. Apparently nothing was stolen. His wallet still in his inside pocket. Mrs. Dunér’s been working there for more than thirty 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 Norén 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 lawyer’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. Dunér is pretty shaken, naturally,” Martinsson said. “In less than a month the whole fabric of her life has collapsed. First old man Torstensson dies. She has hardly finished making the funeral arrangements when 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 offense?” Martinsson said.

Wallander picked up his jacket and left the station. He had never seen the receptionist before. He thought that perhaps he should 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 by himself. 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 toward 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 law firm was located in a yellow-painted stone building on Sjömansgatan, not far from the old theater that was being renovated. 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. Dunér’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 fifteen years and so his son Sten had been without a mother all that time and was a bachelor to boot. Mrs Dunér had been divorced since the early 1970s. 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. Dunér 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 café at the 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 an lawyer’s life. Supplying legal advice. Defending when a prosecutor prosecutes. An attorney was always receiving confidential information. Lawyers were under a strict oath of confidentiality. It dawned on him that they 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 in 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 when he was 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 lawyers will take over their business. Torstensson and Torstensson 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 around.”

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 talk to Mrs. Dunér.”

“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 of 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 eastward, 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 gray landscape he was traveling 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 onto the windy road with it in his pocket. He took out his rubber boots 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 fence post, watching him.

The scene of the accident was unusually desolate even for Skåne. 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 meters 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, twenty meters into the field. There were no skid marks on the road. There had been a thick fog when the accident occurred.

Wallander put the report back into the car before it got soaked. He walked to the top of the road, and looked around. Not one car had gone past. The buzzard was still on its post. Wallander jumped over the ditch and squelched his way across muddy clay that immediately clung to the soles of his boots. He counted twenty meters as he walked and looked back toward 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 around once or twice, and ends up on its roof. The driver is dead, held in his seat by his seat 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 a brown wooden kitchen chair. He threw it away, and the buzzard flew off from its post, 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 should take advantage of the opportunity to visit his father and his new wife at Löderup, but decided against it. He needed to talk to Mrs. Dunér, 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 around him. Dour Swedish gloom was nowhere more strikingly in evidence than in cafés attached to gas stations, he decided. He left his coffee almost untasted, eager to escape the atmosphere. He drove through the rain into town, turned right at the Continental Hotel and then right again onto narrow Stickgatan. He parked semi-legally outside the pink house where Berta Dunér lived, with two 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 ID. “I’d like to have a chat with you, if I may.”

Mrs. Dunér 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 an apartment where everything had its place: furniture and ornaments were arranged in orderly fashion, down to the most minuscule detail.

No doubt she ran the lawyers’ offices in the same way. Watering the plants and making sure that appointment books 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, gray-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 leave.”

She sat on the edge of a flower-print sofa on the other side of the glass-topped coffee table. Wallander realized he had neither pen nor notebook with him. 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 Dunér said.

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

“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 should have waited before coming to see Mrs. Dunér. 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 showed 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 buzzed Mr. Torstensson to check whether there was anything else he wanted me to do. He said there wasn’t, and wished 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. “Continue working, of course. A lawyer 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. “Since 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 26, and Wednesday, October 27.”

“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 canceled 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 absentmindedly. It seemed to him there was a lot more he needed to ask Berta Dunér than he had suspected. At the same time, he recognized 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 around at the time he graduated from the police academy, sentiments he had adopted as his own. “There’s a time for life, and a time for death.”

He also thought about what Mrs. Dunér had said as he was leaving. He felt that she had said something significant about Sweden, something he should 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 apartment on 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 onto Hamngatan, and bore left to emerge onto the Österleden highway again. He continued along the Malmö road until he came to the turnoff to Bjäresjö. The rain had become drizzle, but the wind was gusting. A few kilometers 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 smuggling, and been prosecuted for the offense 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 at the very last minute there had always been one little spanner that would get stuck in the works, and Niklasson had invariably been set free to return to the two trailers welded together that constituted both his home and his office.

Wallander switched off the engine and got out of the car. A dirty-looking cat studied him from the hood of an ancient, rusty Peugeot. Niklasson emerged from behind a pile of tires. He was wearing a dark-colored 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 lawyer.”

“Oh, that one. It’s over here,” he said, heading 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 the same as it was when they brought it here.”

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

“I have no doubt you can,” Niklasson said. “Incidentally, I’ve always wondered what it feels like, killing somebody.”

Wallander was annoyed. “It feels goddamned awful,” he said. “What did you think it would feel like?”

Niklasson shrugged. “I just wondered.”

When he was by himself, Wallander walked around 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 flipped 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 right. Neither the keys nor the ignition were damaged. Thinking hard, he walked around the car once more. Then he climbed inside and tried to figure 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 trunk. 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 closed the trunk.

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 trunk.

He stood stock-still.

There’s a broken chair locked in the trunk. 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 trunk.

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 trailer.

“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 took 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 figure 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-up for something entirely different.

It was 4:07 p.m. when Björk 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 mention 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 toward 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 afterward be sure. But that halfhearted 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 should have had the wits to fade away in silence.

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

“What have we got to report?” Björk said. “Where do we stand?”

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

Björk turned to Martinsson.

“I’ve been through his apartment on 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 guys in Linköping about the bullets, but they say they’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

Björk sighed and turned to Höglund.

“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 out there, and you could say he lived almost exclusively for his work as a lawyer. He used to do a fair amount 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,” Björk 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 objection to that assessment. Wallander could see through the window that it was raining again.

He recognized 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 around 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 afterward they were in three cars in a convoy on their way to that fateful stretch of road near Brösarp Hills.

When they got there dusk was settling in.