Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man Who Smiled

They made their way back to the road.

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

Björk 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, Höglund hung back. “Do you mind if I go in your car?” she said. “I live in Ystad itself, Martinsson has car seats everywhere, and Björk’s car is littered with fishing rods.”

Wallander nodded. They were the last to leave. They drove in silence for several kilometers. It felt odd to Wallander to have somebody sitting beside him. He realized he had not really spoken to anybody apart from his daughter since the day two years 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 the police academy 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 do I have 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 away. I agonized for a long time 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 over 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 directly 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 off his shoes and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He could see through the window how the streetlight 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 figuring out cases, not for worrying about my own petty problems.

It was past 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 around.

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 always have 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 trunk 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 Höglund 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 the lobby. 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.