The Man Who Smiled (1994) kw-4

by Henning Mankell

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

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

  He stood stock-still.

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

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

  He walked slowly back to his car.

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

  Niklasson emerged from his caravan.

  "Can I get you a coffee?" he said.

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

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

  Wallander frowned. "Why?"

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

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

  Niklasson shook his head. "Not a soul."

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Bjork turned to Martinsson.

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

  Bjork sighed and turned to Hoglund.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Everyone round the table sat up and took notice.

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

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

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

  Nobody spoke. Martinsson eventually broke the silence.

  "By whom?"

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

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

  When they got there dusk was settling in.

  Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "That's true," Wallander said.

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

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

  They made their way back to the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Sounds like an exciting job."

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

  He drew up outside her house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He lay on the living-room sofa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Afraid so," Wallander said.

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

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