The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

  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.