"Not any more. I"ve started work again."
"When?"
"Yesterday."
"Yesterday?"
Wallander could tell that this conversation was going to be a very long one if he did not manage to cut it short. "I owe you an explanation, I know," he said, "but I just haven"t time at the moment. I"ll come and see you tomorrow evening, and tell you what"s happened."
"I haven"t seen you for ages," his father said, and hung up.
Wallander sat for a moment with the receiver in his hand. His father would be 75 next year, and invariably managed to arouse in him contradictory emotions. Their relationship had been complicated for as long as he could remember. Not least on the day he told his father he intended to join the police. More than 25 years had pa.s.sed since then and the old man never missed an opportunity of criticising that decision. Nevertheless, Wallander had a guilty conscience about the time he devoted to him. The previous year, when he had heard the astonishing news that his father was going to marry a woman 30 years younger than himself, a home help who came to his house three times a week, he had reckoned his father would not lack for company any more. Now, sitting there with the receiver in his hand, he realised that nothing had really changed.
He replaced the receiver, picked up the cup and wiped his trouser leg with a sheet torn from his notepad. Then he remembered he was supposed to get in touch with keson, the prosecutor. keson"s secretary put him straight through. Wallander explained that he had been held up and keson suggested a time for the next morning instead.
Wallander went to fetch another cup of coffee. In the corridor he b.u.mped into Hoglund carrying a pile of files. "How"s it going?" Wallander said.
"Slowly," she said. "And I can"t shake off the feeling that there"s something fishy about those two dead lawyers."
"That"s exactly how I feel," Wallander said. "What makes you think so?"
"I don"t know."
"Let"s talk about it tomorrow," Wallander said. "Experience tells me you should never underestimate the significance of what you can"t put into words, can"t put your finger on."
He went back to his office, unhooked the phone and pulled over his notepad. He went back in his mind to the freezing cold beach at Skagen, Sten Torstensson walking towards him out of the fog. That"s where this case started for me, he thought. It started while Sten was still alive.
He went over everything he knew about the two solicitors. He was like a soldier cautiously retreating, keeping a close watch to his left and his right. It took him an hour to work his way through every one of the facts he and his colleagues had so far a.s.sembled.
What is it I can see and yet do not see? He asked himself this over and over as he sifted through the case notes. But when he tossed aside his pen all he had managed to achieve was a highly decorative and embellished question mark.
Two lawyers dead, he thought. One killed in a strange accident that was in all probability not an accident. Whoever killed Gustaf Torstensson was a cold, calculating murderer. That lone chair leg left in the mud was an uncharacteristic mistake. There"s a why why and a and a who, who, but there may well be something else. but there may well be something else.
It came to him that there was something he could and should do. He found Mrs Duner"s telephone number in his notes.
"I"m sorry to trouble you," he said. "Inspector Wallander here. I have a question I"d be grateful for an answer to right away."
"I"d be pleased to help if I can," she said.
Two questions in fact, Wallander thought, but I"ll save the one about the Asian woman for another time.
"The night Gustaf Torstensson died he had been to Farnholm Castle," he said. "How many people knew he was going to visit his client that evening?"
There was a pause before she replied. Wallander wondered whether that was in order to remember, or to give herself time to think of a suitable answer.
"I knew, of course," she said. "It"s possible I might have mentioned it to Miss Lundin, but n.o.body else knew."
"Sten Torstensson didn"t know, then?"
"I don"t think so. They kept separate engagement diaries."
"So most probably you were the only one who knew," Wallander said.
"Yes."
"Thank you. I apologise for disturbing you," Wallander said, and hung up.
He returned to his notes. Gustaf Torstensson drives out to see a client, and is attacked on the way home, murder disguised as a road accident.
He thought about Mrs Duner"s reply. I"m sure she was telling the truth, he thought, but what interests me is what lies behind that truth. What she said means that apart from herself the only other person who knew what Gustaf Torstensson was going to do that evening was the man at Farnholm Castle.
He continued his walk through the case. The landscape of the investigation constantly shifted. The cheerless house with its sophisticated security systems. The collection of icons hidden in the bas.e.m.e.nt. When he thought he"d walked as far as he could go he switched to Sten Torstensson. The landscape shifted yet again and became almost impenetrable. Sten"s unexpected appearance in Wallander"s windswept haven, against a background of melancholy foghorns, and then the deserted cafe at the Art Museum - they seemed to Wallander like the ingredients of an unconvincing operetta. But there were moments in the plot when life was taken seriously. Sten had found his father restless and depressed. And the postcard from Finland, sent by an unknown hand but arranged by Sten: clearly there was a threat and a false trail was required. Always a.s.suming that the false trail wasn"t in fact the right trail.
Nothing takes us on to a next stage, Wallander thought, but these are facts that one can categorise. It"s harder to know what to do with the mystery ingredients, the Asian woman, for example, who doesn"t want anybody to see her visiting Berta Duner"s pink house. And Mrs Duner herself, who"s a good liar, but not good enough to deceive a detective inspector from the Ystad police - or, at least, for him not to notice that something isn"t quite right.
Wallander stood up, stretched his back and stood at the window. It was 6 p.m., and it had grown dark. Noises could be heard from the corridor, footsteps approaching and then fading away. He remembered something Rydberg had said during the last year of his life: "A police station is essentially like a prison. Police officers and criminals live their lives as mirror images of each other. It"s not really possible to decide who"s incarcerated and who isn"t."
Wallander suddenly felt listless and lonely. He resorted to his only consolation: an imagined conversation with Baiba Liepa in Riga, as though she were standing there in front of him, and as if his office were a room in a grey building with delapidated facades in Riga, in that flat with the dimmed lighting and the thick curtains permanently drawn. But the image became blurred, faded like the weaker of two wrestlers. Instead, Wallander pictured himself crawling on his muddy hands and knees through the Scanian fog with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other, like a pathetic copy of some unlikely film idol, and then suddenly the illusion was ripped to shreds and reality imposed itself through the slits, and death and killing were not rabbits plucked out of a conjuror"s hat. He watches himself witnessing a man being shot by a bullet through the head, and then he also shoots and the only thing he can be sure of is that his only hope is for the man he"s aiming at to die.
I"m a man who doesn"t laugh enough, he thought. Without my noticing, middle age has marooned me on a coast with too many dangerous submerged rocks.
He left all his papers on his desk. In reception, Ebba was busy on the telephone. When she signalled to him to wait, he shook his head and waved to indicate he was in a hurry.
He drove home and cooked a meal he would have been incapable of describing afterwards. He watered the five plants he had on his window ledges, filled the washing machine with clothes that had been strewn around the flat, discovered he had no washing powder, then sat on the sofa and cut his toenails. Occasionally he looked around the room, as if he expected to find that he wasn"t alone after all. Shortly after 10.00 he went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
Outside the rain had eased off and become light drizzle.
When Wallander woke up the next morning it was still dark. The alarm clock with the luminous hands indicated that it was barely 5.00. He turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but found it impossible. His long stay out in the cold was still making itself felt. Whatever has changed, whatever is still the same, I will spend the rest of my life in two timescales, "before" and "after". Kurt Wallander exists and doesn"t exist.
He got up at 5.30, made coffee, waited for the newspaper to arrive and saw from the outside thermometer that it was 4C outside. Driven by a feeling of unrest he did not have the strength to a.n.a.lyse or fight, he left the flat at 6 a.m. He got into his car and started the engine, thinking he might just as well pay a visit to Farnholm Castle. He could stop somewhere on the way, have a coffee and telephone to warn them he was coming. He drove east out of Ystad, averting his gaze as he pa.s.sed the military training ground on his right where two years earlier he had fought the old Wallander"s last battle. Out there in the fog he had discovered that there are people who would not shrink from any form of violence, who would not hesitate to commit murders in cold blood. Out there, on his knees in the mud, he had fought desperately for his own life and somehow, thanks to an incredibly accurate shot, he had killed a man. It was a point of no return, a birth and a burial at the same time.
He drove along the road to Kristianstad and slowed down as he pa.s.sed the place where Gustaf Torstensson had died. When he came to Skne-Trans he stopped at the cafe and went in. It was getting windy: he ought to have put on a thicker jacket. In fact, he ought to have given more thought to his clothes in general: the worn Terylene trousers and dirty windcheater he had on were perhaps not ideal for visiting a lord of the manor. As he entered the cafe he wondered what Bjork would have worn for a visit to a castle, supposing it had been on business.
He was the only customer. He ordered coffee and a sandwich. It was 6.45, and he leafed through a well-thumbed magazine on a shelf. He soon tired of that, and tried to think instead about what he was going to say to Alfred Harderberg, or whoever might be able to tell him about Gustaf Torstensson"s last visit to his client. He waited until 7.30, then asked to use the telephone on the counter next to the old-fashioned cash register, and first called the police station in Ystad. The only one of his colleagues there that early was Martinsson. He explained where he was, and said that he expected the visit to take an hour or two.
"Do you know the first thing that entered my head when I woke up this morning?" Martinsson said. "No."
"That it was Sten Torstensson who killed his father." "How do you explain what then happened to the son?" Wallander said.
"I don"t," Martinsson said. "But what seems to me to be clearer and clearer is that the explanation has to do with their professional rather than their private lives."
"Or a combination of the two."
"What do you mean?"
"Just something I dreamed last night," Wallander said, ducking the question. "Anyway, I"ll be back at the station in due course."
He hung up, lifted the receiver again and dialled the number of Farnholm Castle. It was answered on the very first ring. "Farnholm Castle," said a woman"s voice. She had a slight foreign accent.
"This is Detective Chief Inspector Wallander of the Ystad police. I"d like to speak to Mr Harderberg."
"He"s in Geneva," the voice said.
Wallander ought to have foreseen the possibility that an international businessman might be abroad. "When will he be back?" "He hasn"t said."
"Do you expect him tomorrow or next week?"
"I can"t give you that information over the telephone. His schedule is strictly confidential."
"Maybe so, but I am a police officer," Wallander said, his anger rising.
"How am I to know that?" the woman said. "You could be anybody."
"I"ll be at Farnholm Castle in half an hour," Wallander said. "Who shall! ask for?"
"That"s for the guards at the main gate to decide," the woman said. "I hope you have some acceptable form of identification with you."
"What do you mean by "acceptable"?" Wallander shouted, but she had hung up.
Wallander slammed down the receiver. The powerfully built waitress was putting buns out on a plate, and looked up at him with displeasure. He put some coins on the counter, and left without a word.
Fifteen kilometres further north he turned to the west and was soon swallowed up by the dense forest to the south of Linderod Ridge. He braked when he came to the turning for Farnholm Castle and a granite plaque with gold lettering told him he was on course. Wallander thought the plaque looked like an expensive gravestone.
The castle road was asphalted and in good condition. Tucked discreetly into the trees was a high fence. He stopped and wound down his window to get a better view. It was a double fence with about a metre gap. He drove on. Another kilometre or so and the road swung sharply to the right. Just beyond the turn were the gates. Next to them was a grey building with a flat roof looking more like a pillbox than anything else. He drove forward and waited. Nothing happened. He sounded his horn. Still no reaction. He got out of the car, he was getting annoyed. He had a vague feeling of being humiliated by all these fences and closed gates. Just then a man emerged through one of the steel doors in the pillbox. He was wearing a dark red uniform Wallander had never seen before. He still had not familiarised himself with these new security companies that were popping up all over the country.
The man in the uniform came up to him. He was about the same age as Wallander.
Then he recognised him.
"Kurt Wallander," said the guard. "Long time no see." "Indeed," Wallander said. "How long ago was it we last met? Fifteen years?
"Twenty," the guard said. "Maybe more."
Wallander had dug out the man"s name from his memory. Kurt Strom. They had been colleagues on the Malmo police force. Wallander was young then and inexperienced, and Strom was a year or so older. They had never had more than professional contact with each other, but Wallander had moved to Ystad and many years later he had heard that Strom had left the force. He had a vague memory that Strom had been sacked, something had been hushed up, possibly excessive force on a prisoner, or stolen goods vanishing from a police storeroom. He didn"t know for sure.
"I was warned you were on your way," Strom said.
"Lucky for me," Wallander said. "I was told I"d have to produce an "acceptable form of identification". What do you find acceptable?"
"We have a high level of security at Farnholm Castle," Strom said. "We"re pretty careful about who we let in."
"What kind of treasure do you have hidden away here?"
"No treasure, but there"s a man with very big business interests."
"Harderberg?"
"That"s the one. He has something a lot of people would like to get their hands on." "What"s that?"
"Knowledge, know-how. Worth more than owning your own mint."
Wallander had no patience with the servile manner Strom was displaying as he spoke of the great man.
"Once upon a time you were a police officer," Wallander said. "I still am. Perhaps you understand why I"m here?"
"I read the papers," Strom said. "I suppose it"s got something to do with that lawyer."
"Two lawyers have died, not just one," Wallander said. "But if I understand it right, only the elder one worked with Harderberg."
"He came here a lot," Strom said. "A nice man. Very discreet."
"He was last here on October 11, in the evening," Wallander said. "Were you on duty then?" Strom nodded.
"I take it you make notes on all the cars and people that come in and out?"
Strom laughed out loud. "We stopped that a long time ago," he said. "It"s all done by computer nowadays."
"I"d like to see a printout for the evening of October 11," Wallander said.
"You"ll have to ask them up at the castle," Strom said. "I"m not allowed to do things like that."
"But I dare say you"re allowed to remember," Wallander said.
"I know he was here that evening," Strom said. "But I can"t remember when he arrived and when he left."
"Was he on his own in the car?"
"I can"t say."
"Because you"re not allowed to say?" Strom nodded again.
"I"ve sometimes thought about applying for a job with a security company," Wallander said, "but I think I"d find it hard to get used to not being allowed to answer questions."
"Everything has its price," Strom said.
Wallander thought he could say "hear, hear" to that. He watched Strom for a few moments. "Harderberg," he said eventually. "What"s he like as a person?"
The reply surprised him.
"I don"t know," Strom said.
"You must have some sort of an opinion, surely? Or aren"t you allowed to comment on that either?" "I"ve never met him," Strom said. "And you have been working for him how long?" "Nearly five years." "You"ve never once seen him?" "Never."
"He"s never pa.s.sed through these gates?"
"His car has one-way gla.s.s in the windows."
"I take it that"s part of the security system?" Wallander thought for a moment. "In other words, you are never completely sure whether he"s here or not. You don"t know if he"s in the car when it pa.s.ses in or out through the gates?"