Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man Who Smiled

A car accident that wasn’t a car accident. A man who had spent the last months of his life trying to hide something that was worrying him.

Wallander asked himself what would be the characteristics of an lawyer’s life. Supplying legal advice. Defending when a prosecutor prosecutes. An attorney was always receiving confidential information. Lawyers were under a strict oath of confidentiality. It dawned on him that they had a lot of secrets to keep. He hadn’t thought of that before.

He got to his feet after a while. It was too soon to draw any conclusions.

Lundin was still sitting motionless in her chair. He opened the door to Sten Torstensson’s office. He hesitated for a second, as if half-expecting to see the dead man’s body lying there on the floor, as it was in the photographs he had seen in the case reports, but all that was left was a plastic sheet. The technical team had taken the dark green carpet away with them.

The room was not unlike the one he had just left. The only obvious difference was a pair of visitors’ chairs in front of the desk. This time Wallander refrained from sitting down. There were no papers on the desk.

I’m still only scraping at the surface, he thought. I feel as if I’m listening as much as I am trying to get my bearings by looking.

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.