The Man Who Smiled Part 4

"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 Nikla.s.son's Sc.r.a.pyard. 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 sc.r.a.pyard in his life. Over and over again Nikla.s.son 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 Nikla.s.son had invariably been set free to return to the two caravans welded together that const.i.tuted 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. Nikla.s.son 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!" Nikla.s.son said with a grin. "Long time no see. Here to arrest me?"

"Should I be?" Wallander said.

Nikla.s.son 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," Nikla.s.son 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," Nikla.s.son said. "Incidentally, I've always wondered what it feels like, killing somebody."

Wallander was put out. "It feels b.l.o.o.d.y awful," he said. "What did you think it would feel like?"

Nikla.s.son 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?

Nikla.s.son 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," Nikla.s.son 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.

Nikla.s.son 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 half-hearted, 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 n.o.body heard anything unusual, n.o.body 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."

n.o.body had any quarrel with that a.s.sessment. 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 a.s.sume 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."

n.o.body 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 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 Nikla.s.son'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."

n.o.body spoke. Wallander had seen this before, many times. A veil is peeled away to reveal something n.o.body 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 two years 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."