The Man Who Smiled (1994) kw-4

by Henning Mankell

  "What was the name again?"

  Wallander spelled it out.

  "I don't know how many suicides we get per year," Roslund said. "I don't recall this one. But I'll look for the documents and see if one of the officers called out is in today."

  Wallander gave him his mobile number.

  "I'll drive to Klagshamn in the meantime," he said.

  It was 2.00. He tried in vain to shake off his exhaustion, but was forced to give in and turned off on to a road that he knew led to an old quarry. He switched off the engine and pulled his jacket tightly around him. A minute later he was asleep.

  He woke up with a start. He was freezing cold and didn't know where he was at first. Something had strayed into his consciousness, something he had dreamed, but he couldn't remember what it was. A feeling of depression gripped him when he looked around at the grey landscape on every side. It was 2.35, so he had been asleep for half an hour. He felt as if he had been roused from a long period of unconsciousness.

  That is about as close as one can get to the greatest loneliness of all, he thought. Being all alone in the world. The final human being, forgotten about.

  He was roused from his thoughts by the phone ringing. It was Roslund.

  "You sound half asleep," he said. "Have you been having a snooze in the car?"

  "Not at all," Wallander said. "I have a bit of a cold."

  "I've found the stuff you asked for," Roslund said. "I have the papers here on my desk. I also have the name of the police officer: Magnus Staffansson. He was in the car that was called out when a jogger found a body hanging from a birch tree. No doubt he can explain how a man can hang himself in a birch, of all trees. Where would you like to meet him?"

  Wallander could feel his exhaustion slipping away. "At the slip road for Klagshamn," he said.

  "He'll be there in a quarter of an hour," Roslund said. "By the way, I spoke to Sven Nyberg a few minutes ago. He hasn't found anything in your car."

  "I'm not surprised," Wallander said.

  "You won't have to see the wreck when you drive back home," Roslund said. "We've just arranged for it to be taken away."

  "Thanks for your help."

  He drove straight to Klagshamn and parked at the meeting place. After a few minutes a police car drove up. Wallander had got out of his car and was walking up and down; Magnus Staffansson was in uniform, and saluted. Wallander responded with an awkward wave. They sat in Wallander's car. Staffansson handed over a plastic file containing photocopies.

  "I'll have a glance through this," Wallander said. "Meanwhile, you can try to remember what happened."

  "Suicide is something you'd prefer to forget," Staffansson said, in a thick Malmo accent. Wallander smiled to hear how he too used to speak, before his move to Ystad had changed his dialect.

  He read swiftly through the terse reports, the postmortem document and the record of the decision to abandon the investigation. There were no suspicious circumstances.

  I wonder, Wallander thought. Then he put the file on the shelf on the dashboard and turned to Staffansson.

  "I think it would be a good idea to take a look at the place where it happened. Can you remember how to get there?"

  "Yes," he said. "It's a few kilometres outside the village. I'll go ahead."

  They left Klagshamn and drove south along the coast. A container ship was on its way through the Sound. A bank of cloud hovered over Copenhagen. The housing estates petered out and soon they were surrounded by fields. A tractor made its way slowly over one of them.

  They were there almost before he knew it. There was a stretch of deciduous woods to the left of the road. Wallander pulled up behind Staffansson's police car and got out. The path was wet and he thought he ought to put on his Wellingtons, but on his way to the boot to collect them he realised they had been in his car.

  Staffansson pointed to a birch tree, bigger than the rest. "That's where he was hanging," he said.

  "Tell me about it," Wallander said.

  "Most of it's in the report," Staffansson said.

  "It's always better from the horse's mouth."

  "It was a Sunday morning," Staffansson began. "About 8.00. We'd been called out to calm down an angry passenger on the morning ferry from Dragor who claimed he had got food poisoning from the breakfast during the crossing. That was when we got the emergency call: a man hanging from a tree. We got a location and headed there. A couple of joggers had come across him. They were in shock, of course, but one of them had run to the house on the hill over there and phoned the police. We did what we're trained to do and took him down, as it sometimes happens that they're still alive. Then the ambulance arrived, the CID took over, and eventually it was put down as a suicide. That's all I can remember. Oh, I forgot to say he had got there on a bike. It was lying here among the bushes."

  Wallander examined the tree while listening to what Staffansson had to say. "What kind of a rope was it?" he said.

  "It looked like a hawser from a boat, about as thick as my thumb."

  "Do you remember the knot?"

  "It was an ordinary running noose."

  "How did he do it?"

  Staffansson stared at him, bewildered.

  "It's not all that easy to hang yourself," Wallander said. "Did he stand on something? Had he climbed up the tree?"

  Staffansson pointed at the trunk. "He probably pushed off from that bulge in the trunk," he said. "That's what we supposed. There was nothing he could have stood on."

  Wallander nodded. The post-mortem made it clear Borman had choked to death. His neck was not broken. He had been dead for an hour at most when the police arrived.

  "Can you remember anything else?" he asked.

  "Such as what?"

  "Only you can answer that."

  "You do what you have to do," Staffansson said. "You write your report and then you try to forget it as soon as you can."

  Wallander knew how it was. There's an atmosphere of depression about a suicide unlike anything else. He thought of all the occasions when he himself had been forced to deal with suicides.

  He went over what Staffansson had said. It lay like a sort of filter over what he had already read in the report. But he knew that there was something that did not add up.

  He thought of all he had heard about Borman: even if the descriptions were incomplete, even if there had been some murky areas, it seemed clear that Borman had been in every way a well-organised sort of person. And yet when he had decided to take his own life he had cycled out to some woods and chosen a tree that was highly unsuitable for what he planned to do. That already told Wallander there was something fishy about Borman's death. But there was something else. He could not put his finger on it at first, but then he stared down at the ground a few metres from the tree.

  The bicycle, he thought. That's telling quite a different story.

  Staffansson had lit a cigarette and was pacing up and down to keep warm.

  "The bicycle," Wallander said. "There are no details about it in your reports."

  "It was a very good one," Staffansson said. "Ten gears, good condition. Dark blue, as I remember."

  "Show me exactly where it was."

  Staffansson pointed straight at the spot.

  "How was it lying?" Wallander asked.

  "Well, what can one say? It was just lying on the ground."

  "It hadn't fallen over?"

  "There was a stand, but it hadn't been opened."

  "Are you sure?"

  He thought for a moment. "Yes," he said, "I'm certain."

  "So he had just let the bike fall down any old how? More or less like a kid does when he's in a hurry?"

  "Exactly," Staffansson said. "It had been flung down. As if he was in a hurry to get it all over with."

  Wallander nodded thoughtfully. "Just one more thing," he said. "Ask your colleague if he can confirm that the stand hadn't been opened up."

  "Is that so important?"

  "Yes," Wallander said. "It's much more im
portant than you think. Phone me if your colleague disagrees."

  "The stand wasn't opened," Staffansson said. "I'm absolutely certain."

  "Call me anyway," Wallander said. "Now let's get out of here. Many thanks for your help."

  Wallander started the drive back to Ystad, thinking about Borman. An accountant at the County Council. A man who would never have just tossed his bicycle to the ground, not even in extremis.

  One more step forward, Wallander thought. I am on to something without knowing quite what it is. Somewhere between Borman and the solicitors' offices in Ystad there is a link. I need to find it.

  He had passed the spot where his car had blown up before he noticed. He turned off at Rydsgard and had a late lunch at the local inn. He was the only person in the dining room. He really must ring Linda that night, no matter how tired he was. Then he would write to Baiba.

  He was back at the station in Ystad by 5.00. Ebba informed him that there was not going to be a meeting - everybody was busy and didn't have time to advise their colleagues that they had nothing of significance to advise them about. They would meet the following morning instead, at 8.00.

  "You look dreadful," she said.

  "Thank you," he said. "I'll get some sleep tonight."

  He went to his office and shut the door behind him. There were several notes on his desk, but nothing so important that it could not wait until morning.

  He hung up his jacket and spent half an hour writing a summary of what he had done during the day. Then he dropped his pen and leaned back in his chair.

  We really must break through now, he thought. We just have to find the missing link.

  He had just put on his jacket when there was a knock on the door and Svedberg came in. Wallander could see right away that something had happened. Svedberg seemed worried.

  "Have you got a moment?" he said.

  "What's happened?"

  Svedberg looked uneasy, and Wallander could feel the last of his patience dwindling away.

  "I assume there's something you want to say seeing as you've come here," he said. "I was just going home."

  "I'm afraid you'll have to go to Simrishamn," Svedberg said.

  "Why must I?"

  "They phoned."

  "Who did?"

  "Our colleagues."

  "The police in Simrishamn? What did they want?"

  Svedberg seemed to make sure both feet were planted firmly on the ground before replying.

  "They've had to arrest your father," he said.

  "The Simrishamn police have arrested my father? What for?"

  "Apparently he's been involved in a violent fight," Svedberg said.

  Wallander stared at him for quite a while without speaking. Then he sat down at his desk.

  "Tell me again," he said. "Slowly."

  "They rang about an hour ago," Svedberg said. "As you were out they spoke to me. A few hours ago they arrested your father. He had started fighting in the off-licence in Simrishamn. It was evidently pretty violent. Then they discovered he was your father. So they phoned here."

  Wallander sighed, but said nothing. He got slowly to his feet.

  "I'll drive over then," he said.

  "Would you like me to come with you?"

  "No thanks."

  Wallander left the station. He didn't know whether he was coming or going.

  An hour later he walked into the police station in Simrishamn.

  Chapter 9

  On the way to Simrishamn Wallander had thought about the Silk Knights. It was many years since he had needed to remind himself that they had once been real.

  The last time his father had been arrested by the police was when Wallander was eleven. He could remember it very clearly. They were still living in Malmo, and his reaction to his father's arrest had been a strange mixture of shame and pride.

  That time, however, his father had not been arrested in an off-licence, but in a public park in the centre of town. It was a Saturday in the early summer of 1956, and Wallander had been allowed to accompany his father and some of his friends on a night out.

  His father's friends, who came to their house at irregular intervals and always unexpectedly, were great adventurers in his young eyes. They rolled up in shiny American cars, always wore silk suits, and they often had broad-brimmed hats and heavy gold rings on their fingers. They came to call at the little studio that smelled of turps and oil paint, to view and perhaps to buy some of the pictures his father had painted. Sometimes he ventured into the studio himself and hid behind the pile of junk in the darkest corner, old canvases that mice had been nibbling at, and he would shudder as he listened to the bargaining that always ended with a couple of swigs from a bottle of brandy. He had realised that it was thanks to these great adventurers - the Silk Knights, as he used to call them in his secret diaries - that the Wallanders had food on the table. It was one of those supreme moments in life when he witnessed a bargain being struck, and the unknown men peeling banknotes from enormous bundles with their ring-adorned fingers and handing over rather smaller bundles which his father would stuff into his pocket before giving a little bow.

  He could still recall the conversations, the terse, almost stuttering repartee, often followed by lame protests from his father and chuckling noises from the visitors.

  "Seven landscapes without grouse and two with," one of them would say. His father rummaged among the piles of finished paintings, had them approved, and then the money would land on the table with a gentle thud. Wallander was eleven years old, standing in his dark corner, almost overcome by the turpentine fumes, and thinking that what he was observing was the grownup life that also lay in store for him, once he had crossed the river formed by Class Seven - or was it Class Nine in those days? He was surprised to find that he could not remember. Then he would emerge from the shadows when it was time to carry the canvases out to the shiny cars, where they were to be loaded into the boot or on to the back seat. This was a moment of great significance, because now and then one of the Knights would notice the boy helping with the carrying and covertly slip him a five-kronor note. Then he and his father would stand at the gate and watch the car roll away, and once it was gone his father would go through a metamorphosis: the obsequious manner would be gone in a flash, and he would spit after the man who had just driven off and say with contempt in his voice that yet again he had been swindled.

  This was one of the great childhood mysteries. How could his father think he had been swindled when every time he had collected a wad of banknotes in exchange for those boring paintings, all identical, with a landscape illuminated by a sun that was never allowed to set?

  Just once he had been present at a visit of these unknown men when the ending turned out otherwise. There were two of them, and he had never seen them before - as he skulked in the shadows behind the remains of an old mangle, he gathered from the conversation that they were new business contacts. It was an important moment, for it was not a foregone conclusion that they would approve of the paintings. He had helped to carry the canvases to the car, a Dodge on this occasion (he had learned how to open the boot of all the different makes of car). Then the two men had suggested they should all go out for something to eat. He remembered that one of them was called Anton and the other something foreign, possibly Polish. He and his father had squeezed in among the canvases on the back seat; the fantastic men even had a gramophone in the car, and they had listened to Johnny Bohde as they drove to the park. His father had gone to one of the restaurants with the two men, and Wallander had been given a handful of one-krona pieces and sent to play on the roundabouts. It was a warm day in early summer, a gentle breeze was blowing in from the Sound, and he worked out in great detail what he would be able to buy for his money. It would have been unfair to save the money, it had been given to him for spending, to help him enjoy that afternoon and evening in the park. He had been on the roundabouts and taken two rides on the big wheel which took you so high you could see as far as Copenhagen. Occasiona
lly he checked to make sure that his father, Anton and the Pole were still there. He could see even from a distance that lots of glasses and bottles were being carried to their table, and plates of food and white napkins that the men tucked into their shirt collars. He remembered thinking how, when he had crossed that river after Class Seven or Nine or whatever, he would be like one of those men who drove in a shiny car and rewarded artists by peeling off banknotes and dropping them on a table in a dirty studio.

  The afternoon had turned into evening, and rain threatened. He decided to have one more ride on the big wheel, but he never did. Something had happened. The big wheel and the roundabouts and the rifle range suddenly lost all their attraction, and people started hurrying towards the restaurant. He had gone along with the tide, elbowed his way to the front and seen something he could never forget. It had been a rite of passage, something he had not realised existed, but it taught him that life is made up of a series of rites of passage of whose existence we are unaware until we find ourselves in the midst of them.

  When he pushed and shoved his way to the front he found his own father in a violent fight with one of the Silk Knights and several security guards, waiters and other complete strangers. The dining table had been overturned, glasses and bottles were broken, a beefsteak dripping with gravy and dark brown onion rings was dangling from his father's arm, his nose was bleeding and he was throwing punches left, right and centre. It had all happened so quickly. Wallander shouted his father's name, in a mixture of fear and panic - but then it was all over. Burly, red-faced bouncers intervened; police officers appeared from nowhere, and his father was dragged away along with Anton and the Pole. All that was left was a battered broad-brimmed hat. He tried to run after them and grab hold of his father, but he was pulled back. He stumbled to the gate, and burst into tears as he watched his father driven away in a police car.

  He walked all the way home, and it started raining before he got there. Everything was in turmoil, his universe had crumbled away and he only wished he could have erased everything that had happened. But you cannot erase reality. He hurried on through the downpour and wondered whether he would ever see his father again. He sat all night in the studio, waiting for him. The smell of turps almost choked him, and every time he heard a car he would run out to the gate. He fell asleep in the end, curled up on the floor.