Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man Who Smiled

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

“What have we got to report?” Björk said. “Where do we stand?”

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

Björk turned to Martinsson.

“I’ve been through his apartment on 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 guys in Linköping about the bullets, but they say they’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

Björk sighed and turned to Höglund.

“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 out there, and you could say he lived almost exclusively for his work as a lawyer. He used to do a fair amount 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,” Björk 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 objection to that assessment. Wallander could see through the window that it was raining again.

He recognized 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 around 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 afterward they were in three cars in a convoy on their way to that fateful stretch of road near Brösarp Hills.

When they got there dusk was settling in.

In the late afternoon of November 1, Olof Jönsson, 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 recognized—something familiar about the face—but he could not place him. Then he realized 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 grip, 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 around the chair leg lying in the mud.

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

“I think it’s very odd, even so,” Björk said. “Can you repeat your line of reasoning, Kurt?”

“It’s simple,” Wallander said. “I read Martinsson’s report. It said that the trunk had been locked. There’s no way that the trunk could have sprung open and then re-closed 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.”

“Did you go 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 trunk, take out a leg of a broken chair, shut the trunk again, get back into the car, fasten his seat 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 meters from here,” Wallander said, pointing. “I picked it up, and then tossed it away.”

“A bizarre way to treat a piece of evidence,” Björk 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,” Björk 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 trunk 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 publicize their activities.”

“That’s true,” Wallander said.

“But you said you could prove he was murdered,” Björk said.

“I was overstating the case,” Wallander said. “All I meant was that this goes some way toward changing the situation.”