The Man Who Smiled (1994) kw-4

by Henning Mankell

  Wallander was not sure whether he had succeeded in putting across all the things he had wanted to. Hoglund smiled and nodded at him, but when he studied the other faces around the table he still could not tell.

  "This really is something for us to get our teeth into," Akeson said when the silence had lasted long enough. "We must be clear about the fact that Alfred Harderberg has an impeccable reputation in the Swedish business community. We can expect nothing but hostility if we start questioning that reputation. On the other hand, I have to say there are sufficient grounds for us to start taking a special interest in him. Naturally, I find it difficult to believe that Harderberg was personally involved in the murders or the other events, and of course it might be that things happen in his set-up over which he has no control."

  "I've always dreamed of putting one of those gentlemen away," Svedberg suddenly said.

  "A most regrettable attitude in a police officer," Bjork said, unable to control his displeasure. "It shouldn't be necessary for me to remind you all of our status as neutral civil servants - "

  "Let's stick to the point," Akeson interrupted. "And perhaps we should also remind ourselves that in our role as servants of the law we are paid to be suspicious in circumstances in which normally we would not need to be."

  "So we have the go-ahead to concentrate on Harderberg, is that right?" Wallander asked.

  "On certain conditions," Bjork said. "I agree with Per that we have to be very careful and prudent, but I also want to stress that I shall regard it as dereliction of duty if anything we do is leaked outside these four walls. No statements are to be made to the press without their first having been authorised by me."

  "We gathered that," said Martinsson, speaking for the first time. "I'm more concerned to find out how we're going to manage to run a vacuum cleaner over the whole of Harderberg's empire when there are so few of us. How are we going to coordinate our investigation with the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo? How are we going to cooperate with the tax authorities? I wonder if we shouldn't approach it quite differently."

  "How would we do that?" Wallander said.

  "Hand the whole thing over to the national CID," Martinsson said. "Then they can arrange cooperation with whichever squads and authorities they like. I think we have to concede that we're too small to handle this."

  "That thought had occurred to me too," Akeson said. "But at this stage, before we've even made an initial investigation, the fraud squads in Stockholm and Malmo would probably turn us down. I don't know if you realise this, but they're probably even more overworked than we are. There are not many of us, but they are so understaffed they're verging on collapse. We'll have to take charge of this ourselves for the time being at least. Do the best we can. Nevertheless, I'll see if I can interest the fraud squads in helping us. You never know."

  Looking back, Wallander had no doubt that it was what Akeson had to say about the hopeless situation the national CID were in that established once and for all the basis of the investigation. The murder investigation would be centred on Harderberg and the links between him and Lars Borman and him and the dead solicitors. Wallander and his team would also be on their own. It was true that the Ystad police were always having to deal with fraud cases of various kinds, but this was so much bigger than anything they had come across before, and they did not know of any financial impropriety associated with the deaths of the two solicitors.

  In short, they had to start looking for an answer to the question: what were they really looking for?

  When Wallander wrote to Baiba in Riga a few nights later and told her about "the secret hunt", as he had started to call the investigation, he realised that as he wrote to her in English, he would have to explain that hunting in Sweden was different from an English fox hunt. "There's a hunter in every police officer," he had written. "There is rarely, if ever, a fanfare of horns when a Swedish police officer is after his prey. But we find the foxes we are after even so. Without us, the Swedish hen house would long since have been empty: all that remained would have been a scattering of bloodstained feathers blowing around in the autumn breeze."

  The whole team approached their task with enthusiasm. Bjork removed the lid of the box where generally he kept overtime locked away. He urged everybody on, reminding them again that not a word of their activities must leak out. Akeson had removed his jacket, loosened his tie which was usually so neatly knotted, and become one of the workers, even if he never let slip his authority as ultimate leader of the operation that was now getting under way.

  But it was Wallander who called the shots; he could feel that, and it gave him frequent moments of deep satisfaction. Thanks to unexpected circumstances and the goodwill of his colleagues, which he scarcely deserved, he had been given an opportunity to atone for some of the guilt he felt after rejecting the confidence Sten Torstensson had shown in him by coming to Skagen and asking for his help. Leading the search for Sten's murderer and the murderer of his father was enabling Wallander to redeem himself. He had been so preoccupied with his own private woes that he had failed to hear Sten's cry for help, had not allowed it to penetrate the barricades he had built around his all-consuming depression.

  He wrote another letter to Baiba that he never posted. In it he tried to explain to her, and hence also to himself, just what it meant, killing a man last year and now, adding to his guilt, rejecting Sten Torstensson's plea for help. The conclusion he seemed to reach, even though he doubted it deep down, was that Sten's death had started to trouble him more than the events of the previous year on the fog-bound training area, surrounded by invisible sheep.

  But nothing of this was discernible to those around him. In the canteen his colleagues would comment in confidence that Wallander's return to duty and to health was as much a surprise as it would have been if he had taken up his bed and walked when he had been at his lowest. Martinsson, who was sometimes unable to hold his cynicism in check, said: "What Kurt needed was a challenging murder. Not some nervous, carelessly executed manslaughter committed on the spur of the moment. The dead solicitors, a mine in a garden and some Far Eastern explosive mixture in his petrol tank - that was just what he needed to bring him back to the fold."

  The others agreed that there was more than a grain of truth in what Martinsson said.

  It took them a week to complete the exhaustive survey of Harderberg's empire that would be the platform for the rest of the investigation. During that week neither Wallander nor any of his colleagues slept for more than five hours at a time. They would later look back at that period and conclude that a mouse really could roar if it had to. Even Akeson, who was rarely impressed by anything, had to doff his non-existent hat to what the team had achieved.

  "Not a word of this must get out," he said to Wallander one evening when they had gone outside for a breath of fresh autumn air, trying to drive away their tiredness. Wallander did not at first understand what he meant.

  "If this gets out, the Central Police Bureau and the Ministry of Justice will set up an inquiry that will eventually lead to something called the 'Ystad Model' being presented to the Swedish public: how to achieve outstanding results with minimal resources. We'll be used as proof that the Swedish police force is not undermanned at all. We'll be used as evidence to show that in fact there are too many police officers. So many that they keep getting in each other's way and that gives rise to a great waste of money and deteriorating clear-up rates."

  "But we haven't achieved any results at all yet," Wallander said.

  "I'm talking about the Central Police Bureau," Akeson said. "I'm talking about the mysterious world of politics. A world where masses of words are used to camouflage the fact that they're doing nothing but straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. Where they go to bed every night and pray that the next day they'll be able to turn water into wine. I'm not talking about the fact that we haven't yet discovered who killed the two solicitors. I'm talking about the fact that we now know that Alfred Harderberg is not the model c
itizen, superior to all others, that we thought he was."

  That was absolutely true. During that hectic week they had managed to build a bird's-eye view of Harderberg's empire that naturally was by no means comprehensive, but they could see that the gaps - indeed, the black holes - indicated quite clearly that the man who lived in Farnholm Castle should not be allowed out of their sight for one minute.

  When Akeson and Wallander stood outside the police station that night, on November 14 to be exact, they had got far enough to be able to draw certain conclusions. The first phase was over, the beaters had done their work and the hunters could prepare to move in. Nothing had leaked out, and they had begun to discern the shape and nature of the leviathan in which Lars Borman and more especially Gustaf Torstensson must have discovered something it would have been safer for them not to have seen.

  The question was: what?

  It had been a hectic time, but Wallander had organised his troops well and had not hesitated to take on the most boring work himself - which often proved to produce the most interesting information. They had gone through the story of Harderberg's life, from the day he was born, the son of an alcoholic timber merchant in Vimmerby, when he was known as Hansson, to the present day when he was the driving force of an enterprise with a turnover of billions in Sweden and abroad. At one point during the laborious exercise, wading through company reports and accounts, tax returns and share brochures, Svedberg said: "It's simply not possible for a man who owns as much as this to be honest." In the end it was Sven Nyberg, the surly and irritable forensic specialist, who gave them the information they needed. As so often happens, it was pure coincidence that he stumbled upon the tiny crack in Harderberg's immaculately rendered wall, the barely visible fault they had craved. And if Wallander, despite his exhaustion, had not picked up on a remark Nyberg made as he was on his way out of Wallander's office late one night, the opportunity might have slipped away.

  It was nearly midnight on Wednesday and Wallander was poring over a resume Hoglund had drawn up on Harderberg's worldly possessions when Nyberg belted on the door. Nyberg was not a discreet person; he stamped down corridors and he belted on doors, as if he were about to make an arrest, when he visited his fellow officers. That night he had just completed the forensic lab's preliminary report on the mine in Mrs Duner's garden and the blowing up of Wallander's car.

  "I thought you would want the results right away," he said after flopping down on one of Wallander's visitors' chairs.

  "What have you got?" Wallander said, peering at Nyberg with red-rimmed eyes.

  "Nothing," Nyberg said.

  "Nothing?"

  "You heard." Nyberg was irritated. "That's also a result. It's not possible to say for certain where the mine was manufactured. We think it might be from a factory in Belgium, a company called Poudreris Reunie de Belgique or however you pronounce it. The explosive used suggests that. And we didn't find any splinters, which means that the force of the mine was upwards. That also suggests Belgian in origin. But it could also have been from somewhere else entirely. As for your car, we can't say definitely that there was explosive material in your petrol tank. In other words we can't say anything at all for sure. So the result is nothing."

  "I believe you," Wallander said, searching through his pile of papers for a note he had made about what he wanted to ask Nyberg.

  "And that Italian pistol, the Bernadelli, we don't know any more about that either," Nyberg said while Wallander made notes. "There's no report of one having been stolen. All the people registered in Sweden as owning one have been able to produce it. Now it's up to you and Per Akeson to decide whether we should call them all in and give them a test firing."

  "Do you think that would be worth it?"

  "Yes and no," Nyberg said. "Personally, I think we ought to run a check on stolen Smith & Wessons first. That'll take a few more days."

  "We'll do as you suggest, then," Wallander said, making a note. Then they went on going through Nyberg's points.

  "We didn't find any fingerprints in the solicitors' offices," Nyberg said. "Whoever shot Sten Torstensson didn't press his thumb helpfully on the window pane. An inspection of the threatening letters from Lars Borman produced negative results as well. But we did establish that it was his handwriting. Svedberg has samples from both of his children."

  "What did they say about the language?" Wallander asked. "I forgot to ask Svedberg."

  "What do you mean, the language?"

  "The letters were very oddly phrased."

  "I have a vague memory from one of our meetings that Svedberg said that Borman was word blind."

  "Word blind?" Wallander frowned. "I don't remember hearing that."

  "Maybe you'd left the room to fetch more coffee?"

  "Could be. I'll have a word with Svedberg. Have you got anything else?"

  "I went to give Gustaf Torstensson's car the onceover," Nyberg said. "No fingerprints there either. I examined the ignition and the boot, and I've spoken to the pathologist in Malmo. We're almost certain that he didn't get the fatal blow to the back of his head by hitting it against the car roof. There's nothing anywhere in the bodywork that matches the wound. So it's more probable that somebody hit him. He must have been outside the car when it happened. Unless there was somebody in the back seat."

  "I thought about that," Wallander said. "The likelihood is that he stopped on the road and got out of the car. Somebody came up behind him and hit him. Then the accident was faked. But why did he stop in the fog? Why did he get out?"

  "I couldn't say," Nyberg said.

  Wallander put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. His back ached, and he needed to go home and get some sleep.

  "The only thing of note we found in the car was a plastic container made in France," Nyberg said.

  "What was in it?"

  "Nothing."

  "Why is it interesting, then?"

  Nyberg shrugged and got up to leave. "I've seen a similar one before. Four years ago. When I was on a study visit at the hospital in Lund."

  "The hospital?"

  "I have a good memory. It was identical."

  "What was it used for?"

  Nyberg was already at the door. "How should I know?" he said. "But the container we found in Torstensson's car was chemically clean. Only a container that's never contained anything could be as clean as that one."

  Nyberg left. Wallander could hear him stamping down the corridor.

  Then he pushed the heap of paper to one side and stood up to go home. He put on his jacket, then paused. There was something Nyberg had said. Just before he left the room. Something about the plastic container.

  Then it came to him, and he sat down again.

  There's something funny there, he thought. Why would there be a plastic container that has never been used in Torstensson's car? An empty container, but evidently a very special one? There was only one possible answer.

  When Torstensson left Farnholm Castle, the container had not been empty. There had been something in it. Which meant that this was not the same container. It had been exchanged for the other one. On the road in the fog. When Torstensson stopped and got out of his car. And was killed.

  Wallander checked his watch. After midnight. He waited for a quarter of an hour, then he phoned Nyberg at home.

  "What the hell do you want now?" Nyberg said as soon as he recognised Wallander's voice.

  "Get yourself over here," Wallander said. "Now, right away."

  He expected Nyberg to explode in fury, but he said nothing, just put down the receiver.

  At 12.40 a.m., Nyberg was back in Wallander's office once more.

  Chapter 11

  That conversation with Nyberg in the middle of the night was crucial. It seemed to Wallander that yet again he had confirmation of the fact that criminal investigations achieve a breakthrough when it is least expected. Many of Wallander's colleagues thought this proved that even police officers needed a bit of luck now and again to find their way ou
t of a cul-de-sac. Wallander said nothing, but he thought that what it really proved was that Rydberg was right to maintain that a good police officer must always listen to what his intuition tells him - without discarding his critical faculties, of course. He had known - without knowing why he knew - that the plastic container in Torstensson's wrecked car was important. And although he was exhausted, he also knew that he could not wait until the next day to have his suspicions confirmed. That's why he had phoned Nyberg, who had just walked into his office. He had anticipated an angry outburst from his temperamental colleague, but none had been forthcoming. Nyberg had simply sat down in the visitor's chair, and Wallander noted to his surprise that he was wearing pyjamas under his overcoat. He had Wellingtons on as well.

  "You must have gone straight to bed," Wallander said. "If I'd known that I wouldn't have phoned."

  "Are you telling me you've called me out for nothing?"

  Wallander shook his head. "It's the plastic container," he said. "Tell me more about it."

  "I've no more to say than I have already," Nyberg said.

  Wallander sat down at his desk and looked hard at Nyberg. He knew that Nyberg was not only a good forensic officer, but that he had imagination too, and was blessed with an exceptional memory.

  "You said you'd seen a similar container before," he said.

  "Not a similar one," Nyberg said. "An identical one."

  "That means it must be special," Wallander said. "Can you describe it for me?"

  "Wouldn't it be better if I fetched it?"

  "Let's go and look at it together," Wallander said, getting up.

  The police station was deserted as they walked down the corridor. A radio could be heard in the distance. Nyberg unlocked the room where the police kept objects material to ongoing investigations. The container was on a shelf. Nyberg took it down and handed it to Wallander. It was rectangular, and reminded Wallander of a cool box. He put it on a table and tried to open the lid.