The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

They divided the work between them. Martinsson and Höglund would go to the lawyers’ offices and begin sifting through the Gustaf Torstensson files. Svedberg would do a thorough search into the cars that had been following them to Helsingborg. Wallander would concentrate on Borman.

  “For some days now I have had the feeling that this is all very urgent,” he said. “I don’t know why. But let’s get a move on.”

  The meeting broke up and they went their different ways. Wallander could sense the resolve in everybody’s attitude, and he noted that Höglund was coping well with her exhaustion.

  He got another cup of coffee and went back to his office to work out what to do next. Nyberg stuck his head in the door and announced that he was about to set off for the burned-out car at Svedala.

  “I take it you want me to see if there’s any similarity to the explosion in Mrs. Dunér’s garden,” he said.

  “Yes,” Wallander said.

  “I don’t expect to be able to establish that,” Nyberg said, “but I’ll give it a try.”

  Nyberg went on his way and Wallander called reception.

  “It’s awful, these terrible things happening,” Ebba said.

  “Nobody was hurt,” Wallander said. “That’s the main thing.” He came raight to the point.

  “Can you get hold of a car for me, please? I have to go to Malmö in a few minutes. Then I’d like you to phone Farnholm Castle and get them to send me a copy of their overview of Alfred Harderberg’s business empire. I did have a file but it got burned up in the car.”

  “I’d better not tell them that,” Ebba said.

  “Maybe not. But I need that file as quickly as they can manage it.”

  He hung up. Then a thought struck him. He went down the corridor to Svedberg’s office, and found him just starting to go through Martinsson’s notes about the cars from the previous night.

  “Kurt Ström,” he said. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Svedberg thought for a moment. “A police officer in Malmö? Or am I wrong?”

  “That’s right,” Wallander said. “I’d like you to do something for me when you’ve finished with the cars. Ström left the force many years ago. There was a rumor that he resigned before he was going to be fired. Try and find out what happened. Be discreet.”

  Svedberg made a note of the name. “Could I ask why? Does it have anything to do with the lawyers? The car that got blown up? The mine in the garden?”

  “Everything has to do with that,” Wallander said. “Ström is working now as a top security guard at Farnholm Castle. Gustaf Torstensson had been there the night he died.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Svedberg said.

  Wallander went back to his office and sat down at his desk. He was very tired. He didn’t even have the strength to think about how close he and Höglund had been to getting killed. Later, he thought. Not now. Borman dead is more important just now than Wallander alive.

  He looked up the Malmöhus county offices in the phone book. He knew from past experience that it was located in Lund. He dialed the number and got an answer immediately. He asked the operator to put him through to one of the bosses in the finance department.

  “They’re not available today,” the operator said.

  “Surely there must be somebody available?”

  “They’re in a budget meeting all day,” the girl explained patiently.

  “Where?”

  “At the conference center in Höör,” the girl said. “But there’s no point calling there.”

  “What’s the name of the man in charge of auditing? Is he there as well?”

  “His name’s Thomas Rundstedt,” the girl said. “Yes, he’s in Höör too. Perhaps you could try again tomorrow?”

  “Many thanks for your help,” Wallander said, and hung up.

  He had no intention of waiting until the next day. He got yet another cup of coffee and thought through all he knew about Lars Borman. He was interrupted by Ebba, who called to say there was a car waiting for him outside the police station.

  It was 9:15. A clear autumn day, blue skies, and Wallander noted that the wind had died down. He found himself looking forward to his drive.

  It was just 10:00 when he drove up to the conference center near Höör. He parked the car and went to the reception desk. A notice on a blackboard and easel informed him that the big conference hall was occupied by the County Offices Budget Conference. A red-haired man behind the desk gave Wallander a friendly smile.

  “I’m trying to get hold of some people taking part in the budget conference,” he said.

  “They’ve just had their coffee break,” the receptionist replied. “They’ll be in session until lunch at 12:30. I’m afraid it’s not possible to disturb them before then.”

  Wallander produced his police ID. “I’m afraid it’s sometimes necessary to disturb people,” he said. “I’ll write a note for you to take in.”

  He pulled over a notepad and started writing.

  “Has something happened?” the receptionist said, sounding worried.

  “Nothing too serious. But it can’t wait, I’m afraid.” He tore off the page. “It’s for a man called Thomas Rundstedt, the chief auditor,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

  The receptionist went out. Wallander yawned. He felt hungry. He could see a dining room through a half-open door. He went to investigate. There was a plate of cheese sandwiches standing on a table. He took one and ate it. Then another. Then he went back to the sofa in reception.

  It was another five minutes before the receptionist reappeared. He was accompanied by a man Wallander assumed was the person he was looking for, Mr. Rundstedt.

  The man was tall and broad-shouldered. It occurred to Wallander that he had always thought accountants were short and thin. The man facing him could have been a boxer. He was also bald, and eyed Wallander up and down suspiciously.

  “My name’s Kurt Wallander and I’m a detective inspector with the Ystad police,” he said, reaching out his hand. “I take it you’re Thomas Rundstedt and auditor-in-chief at the Malmöhus county offices.”

  The man nodded abruptly. “What’s this all about?” he said. “We specifically asked not to be disturbed. The financial affairs of the county offices are not to be treated lightly. Especially just now.”

  “I’m sure they’re not,” Wallander said. “I won’t keep you long. Does the name Lars Borman mean anything to you?”

  Rundstedt raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That was before my time,” he said. “Borman was an accountant at the county offices, but he’s dead. I’ve only been working there for six months.”

  Shit, Wallander thought. I’ve come here for nothing.

  “Was there anything else?” Rundstedt said.

  “Who did you replace?” Wallander asked.

  “Martin Oscarsson,” Rundstedt said. “He retired.”

  “And he was Lars Borman’s boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where can I get hold of him?”

  “He lives in Limhamn. On the Sound. In Möllevägen. I can’t remember the number. I assume he’ll be in the phone book.”

  “That’s all, thank you very much,” Wallander said. “I apologize for disturbing you. Do you know how Borman died, by the way?”

  “They say it was suicide,” Rundstedt said.

  “Good luck with the budget,” Wallander said. “Will you be raising the council tax?”

  “Who knows?” Rundstedt said, and went back to his meeting.

  Wallander waved a salute to the receptionist and went back to his car. He called directory assistance and wrote down Martin Oscarsson’s address, Möllevägen 32.

  He was there before noon.

  The house was stone-built, around the turn of the century—it said 1912 over the big entrance. He went through the gate and rang the doorbell. The door was opened by an old man in a tracksuit. Wallander explained who he was, showed his ID, and was invited in. In contrast to the dreary facade, the house inside was f
illed with light-colored furniture, had pretty curtains in pastel shades, and had large, uncluttered spaces. Music could be heard from another room. Wallander thought he recognized the voice of Ernst Rolf, the popular variety artist. Oscarsson showed him into the living room and asked if Wallander might like a cup of coffee. He declined.

  “I’ve come to talk to you about Lars Borman,” he said. “I was given your name by Thomas Rundstedt. About a year ago, shortly before you retired, Borman died. The official explanation was suicide.”

  “Why do you want to talk about Lars Borman?” Oscarsson said, and Wallander noted the unfriendly tone in his voice.

  “His name has come up in a criminal investigation we’re dealing with,” Wallander said.

  “What sort of criminal investigation?”

  Wallander decided that he might as well not beat around the bush. “You’ll have seen in the newspapers that a lawyer in Ystad was murdered a few days ago,” he said. “The questions I need to ask are about Borman’s connection with that investigation.”

  Oscarsson stared at him for some time before replying. “Although I’m an old man, tired but perhaps not yet quite finished, I admit to being curious. I’ll answer your questions, if I can.”

  “Borman was an accountant at the county offices,” Wallander said. “What exactly did he do? And how long had he been working there?”

  “An accountant is an accountant,” Oscarsson said. “The job title tells you what he did. He kept the books, in this case the county council books. He checked that all the regulations were being observed, that budgets laid down by the appropriate authority were not exceeded. He also checked to make sure people were paid what they should be paid. You have to remember that a county office is like a large business, or rather an industrial empire associated with a small duchy. Its main responsibility is health spending, but it oversees a lot of other things as well. Education, culture, and so on. Borman wasn’t our only accountant, of course. He came to the county offices from the municipal corporation at the beginning of the Eighties.”

  “Was he a good accountant?”

  “He was the best accountant I ever came across.”

  “Why so?”

  “He worked quickly but with no loss of accuracy. He was very involved in his work and was always coming up with suggestions for how we could save money for the council.”

  “I’ve heard it said that he was a particularly honest man,” Wallander said.

  “Of course he was,” Oscarsson said. “But that’s not exactly earthshattering—accountants are mostly honest. There are exceptions, of course, but they could never survive in the kind of environment you get at county offices.”

  Wallander thought for a moment before continuing.

  “And out of the blue he committed suicide,” he said. “Was that unexpected?”

  “It certainly was unexpected,” Oscarsson said.

  Looking back, Wallander was never quite sure what had happened when those words were spoken. There was a slight change of tone in Oscarsson’s voice, a faint trace of doubt, perhaps reluctance, that made itself felt in the way he replied. As far as Wallander was concerned, the conversation changed character at that moment, and straightforward questions and answers were replaced by alertness.

  “You worked closely with Borman,” Wallander said. “You must have known him well. What was he like as a man?”

  “We were never friends. He lived for his work and for his family. He had an integrity that nobody ever questioned. And if anybody came too close, he would withdraw into his shell.”

  “Could he have been seriously ill?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “You must have thought about his death a lot.”

  “It was a very unpleasant time. It cast a shadow over my final months at work before I retired.”

  “Can you tell me about his last day at work?”

  “He died on a Sunday, so the last time I saw him was on the Friday afternoon. There was a meeting of the financial heads of the county council. It was quite a lively meeting, unfortunately.”

  “In what way?”

  “There were arguments about how a particular problem should be resolved.”

  “Which problem was that?”

  Oscarsson looked hard at Wallander. “I’m not sure I should answer that question,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “In the first place I’m retired now. And also there are laws regarding those aspects of public administration that are confidential.”

  “We have a right-of-access principle in Sweden,” Wallander said.

  “But that doesn’t apply to specific cases which for various reasons are deemed unsuitable to be made public.”

  “On the last day Borman was at work, he was at a meeting with the finance heads of the county council,” he said. “Is that right?”

  Oscarsson nodded.

  “And at that meeting a problem was discussed, sometimes heatedly, which was later designated unsuitable, et cetera. In other words, the minutes of that meeting are locked away somewhere. Correct?”

  “No, not correct,” Oscarsson said. “There were no minutes.”

  “In which case it can’t have been an official meeting,” Wallander said. “If it had been, minutes would have to have been taken and kept, and in due course submitted for approval and signed.”

  “It was a confidential discussion,” Oscarsson said. “But it’s all water under the bridge now, and I don’t think I’m going to answer any more questions. My memory isn’t what it was. I’ve forgotten what happened.”

  Wallander thought, Oscarsson has forgotten nothing. What was it they were discussing that Friday?

  “I can’t oblige you to answer my questions, of course,” Wallander said. “But I can resort to a public prosecutor who can. Or I can go to the executive committee of the county council. I can do all kinds of things to find out what the problem was, it’s just that they would all take time and I don’t have that luxury.”

  “I’m not going to answer any more questions,” Oscarsson said, getting to his feet.

  Wallander remained seated. “Sit down,” he said firmly. “I have a suggestion.”

  Oscarsson hesitated, but then sat down again.

  “Let’s do what you did that Friday afternoon,” Wallander said. “I’m not going to make any notes. Let’s call this a confidential conversation. There are no witnesses to say that it ever took place. I can give you my word that I shall never refer to you, regardless of what you’re going to say.”

  Oscarsson thought over the proposal. “Rundstedt knows you’ve come to see me.”

  “He doesn’t know what about,” Wallander said.

  He waited while Oscarsson struggled with his conscience. But he knew what would happen. Oscarsson was a wise old bird.

  “I’ll go along with your suggestion,” he said eventually, “but I won’t guarantee I’ll be able to answer all your questions.”

  “Be able to or be willing to?”

  “That’s a matter for me and me alone,” Oscarsson said.

  Wallander nodded. They had a deal.

  “The problem,” Wallander said. “What was it?”

  “Malmöhus County Council had been swindled,” Oscarsson said. “We didn’t know at the time how much money was involved, but we do now.”

  “How much?”

  “Four million kronor. Of taxpayers’ money.”

  “What had happened?”

  “So that it makes sense, I’ll start by sketching in how a county council works,” Oscarsson said. “Our annual budget runs to several million kronor, handled by a variety of departments and activities. Financial supervision is centralized and computerized. Safety devices are built in at various levels to protect against embezzlement and other illegal practices. There are even precautions checking what the top executives do, but I don’t need to go into detail about them in this case. What it’s important to understand, though, is that there is a constant, continuous audit of all pa
yments. Anyone who wants to defraud a county council is going to have to be very familiar with methods of juggling sums of money between accounts. Anyway, that’s the background in brief.”

  “I think I understand,” Wallander said.

  “What happened made it clear that our precautions were inadequate,” Oscarsson said. “They’ve been radically altered since then. A similar fraud wouldn’t be possible now.”

  “Take your time,” Wallander said. “I’d like to have as much detail as possible about what happened.”

  “There are things we still don’t know,” Oscarsson said. “But what we do know is this: as you may be aware, the whole administration of public services in Sweden has undergone far-reaching changes in recent years. In many ways you could say it’s undergone an operation without quite enough anesthetic. Those of us civil servants from the older generation especially have found it hard to cope with the enormous changes. The reforms are still not finished, and it will be some time before we can make a judgment on all the consequences. The bottom line is that public authorities should be managed in the same way as business enterprises, taking market forces and competition into account. Some public authorities have been turned into limited companies, and others have been sent out to tender from the private sector. All of them have had to satisfy increased demands for efficiency. One of the outcomes, as far as we were concerned, was that a company had to be formed in order to handle all the purchases made by the council. Having the county council as a customer is one of the best things that can happen to a private enterprise, whether it’s lawnmowers or laundry detergent they’re manufacturing or selling. In connection with the formation of that company we hired a firm of consultants with a wide-ranging mandate, one item being to evaluate the applications for the newly established top executive posts that had been advertised. And that is where the fraud took place.”

  “What is the name of the firm of consultants?”

  “They’re called STRUFAB. I can’t remember what the acronym stands for.”

  “Who was behind the firm?”

  “It belonged to a division of the investment company Smeden, which is a listed company.”

  “Is there one principal owner?”