The Man Who Smiled (38 page)

"Is there anything else that you think might be of interest to me?"

"How do I know what you're interested in?"

He sensed that there
was
something else, but that she wasn't sure whether to mention it or not. He paused for a moment before going on, cautiously, as if he were feeling his way in the dark.

"Let's go back a bit," he said. "To that man who came to see you in the stables. Did he say anything else?"

"No."

"He didn't say anything about them leaving Farnholm Castle and moving abroad?" "No."

That's true, Wallander thought. She's telling the truth. And I don't need to worry about her remembering wrongly, but there is something else.

"Tell me about the horses," he said.

"They are two really beautiful riding horses," she said. "One of them, Aphrodite, is nine years old. She's light brown. The other, Juno, is seven and black. It's ages since anybody has ridden them, that's for sure."

"How would you know that? I know very little about horses."

"I gathered."

Wallander smiled at her comment. But he didn't say anything, just waited for her to continue.

"They got really excited when I came with the saddles," she said. "You could see they were dying to have a gallop."

"And you gave them their heads?"

"Yes."

"You rode in the estate's grounds, I suppose?" "I'd been told which paths I could go on."

A slight change of tone, barely perceptible, a hint of anxiety made Wallander prick up his ears. He was getting close to what she was wondering whether to mention or not.

"So you rode off."

"I started with Aphrodite," she said. "Meanwhile, Juno was careering round the paddock."

"How long were you out on Aphrodite?" "Half an hour. The grounds are huge." "Then you came back?"

"I let Aphrodite loose and saddled up Juno. Half an hour later I was back."

Wallander knew at once. It was while she was out with the second horse that something had happened. Her answer came much too quickly, as if she had been steeling herself to get past a frightening obstacle. The only thing to do, he decided, was to come straight to the point.

"I'm sure that everything you're telling me is true," he said, sounding as friendly as possible.

"I've nothing else to say. I have to be going now. If I'm late I'll get the sack."

"You can leave in a couple of minutes. Just a few more questions. Let's go back to the stables and that man who came to see you. I don't think you told me quite everything he said. Is that right? Didn't he also say that there were certain places you weren't to go anywhere near?"

"It was Miss Karlén who said that."

"Maybe she did too. But the man in the stables said it in such a way that you were frightened? Am I right?" She looked away and nodded slowly.

"But when you were out with Juno you took a wrong turning. Or maybe out of curiosity you took another path? It hasn't escaped my notice that you like to do whatever you want. Is that what happened?"

"I took a wrong turning." She was now speaking so softly that Wallander had to lean over the table to hear what she was saying.

"I believe you," he said. "Tell me what happened on that path."

"Juno suddenly reared up and threw me off. It was only when I was lying there that I saw what had scared him. It looked as if somebody had fallen on the path. I thought it was a dead body. But when I went to look I saw it was a human-sized doll."

Wallander could see she was still fearful. He recalled what Gustaf Torstensson had said to Mrs Dunér, about Harderberg having a macabre sense of humour.

"I'd have been frightened to death as well," he said. "But nothing's going to happen to you. Not if you keep in touch with me."

"I like the horses," Sofia said. "But not the rest of it."

"Stick to the horses," Wallander said. "And remember which paths you're not supposed to ride on."

He could see she felt relieved, now that she had told him what had happened.

"Go back now," he said, gathering up the papers on the table. "I'll stay here for a while. You're right, you mustn't be late."

She stood up and left. Half a minute later Wallander followed her into the street. He supposed she would have gone down to the harbour to get a taxi from there, but he was just in time to see her get into a taxi next to the newspaper stall. The car drove away, and he waited to make sure it was not followed. Then he went to his own car and drove back to Ystad, thinking about what she had said. He certainly could not, on her evidence, be sure about Harderberg's plans.

The pilots, he thought. And the flight plans. We have to be one step ahead of him if he really is going to move abroad.

It was time for another visit to Farnholm Castle. He wanted to talk to Harderberg himself again.

Wallander was at the police station by 7.45. He bumped into Höglund in the corridor. She nodded at him, curtly, and disappeared into her office. Wallander stopped in mid-stride, bewildered. Why had she been so abrupt? He turned back and knocked on her office door. When she responded he opened the door but did not go in.

"It's customary to say 'hello' in this police station," he said.

She went on poring over a file.

"What's the matter?"

She looked up at him. "I wouldn't have thought you needed to ask me that," she said.

Wallander stepped inside her office. "I don't understand," he said. "What have I done?"

"I thought you were different," she said, "but now I see that you're the same as all the rest of them."

"I still don't get it," Wallander said. "Would you mind explaining?"

"I've nothing else to say. I'd prefer you to leave."

"Not until I've had an explanation."

Wallander was not sure if she was about to throw a fit of rage, or burst into tears.

"I thought we were well on the way to becoming friends," he said, "not just colleagues."

"So did I," she said. "But no longer." "Explain!"

"I'll be honest with you," she said, "even though that's the very opposite of what you've been with me. I thought you were someone I could trust, but you're not. It may take me some time to get used to that."

Wallander flung his arms out wide. "Do please explain."

"Hanson came back today," she said. "You must know that because he came to my office and told me about a conversation he had just had with you."

"What did he say?"

"That you were glad he was back."

"So I am. We need every officer we can get."

"The more so since you're disappointed in me."

Wallander stared at her in bewilderment. "He said that? That I was disappointed in you? He said I'd told him that?"

"I only wish you'd said it to me first."

"But it's not true. I said exactly the opposite. I told him you'd already proved yourself to be a good police officer." "He sounded very convincing."

Wallander was furious. "That bloody Hanson!" he almost shouted. "If you like I'll phone him and tell him to get himself in here this minute. Surely you accept that not a word of what he said is true?"

"Why did he say it then?"

"Because he's nervous."

"Of me?"

"Why do you think he's away on courses all the time? Because he's afraid you'll overtake him. He hates to think that you are going to prove to be a better police officer than he is."

He could tell that she was beginning to believe him. "It's true," he said. "Tomorrow you and I are going to have a little talk with Mr Hanson. And it's not going to be a pleasant little talk as far as he's concerned, I can promise you that."

She looked up at him. "In that case, I apologise," she said.

"He's the one who needs to apologise," Wallander said. "Not you."

But the following day, Friday, November 26, the frost white on the trees outside the police station, Höglund asked Wallander not to say anything to Hanson. After sleeping on it, she had decided that she would prefer to speak to him herself, at some stage in the future, when she had had a chance to distance herself from it. Wallander was persuaded that she believed him now, so he raised no objection. Which did not mean that he would forget what Hanson had done. Later in the morning, with everybody seeming to be frozen stiff" and out of sorts, apart from Åkeson who was fighting fit again, Wallander called a meeting. He told the team about his meeting with Sofia in Simrishamn, but it did not seem to improve the mood of his colleagues. On the other hand, Svedberg produced a map of the Farnholm Castle estate. It was very big. Svedberg told them that the extensive grounds had been acquired in the late nineteenth century when the castle belonged to a family with the strikingly unnoble name of Mårtensson. The head of the household had made a fortune building houses in Stockholm and then he had built what some would call a folly. Apparently, he was not only obsessed with grandeur, but may even have been close to actual lunacy. When Svedberg had exhausted all he had discovered about the castle, they continued to cross off their list aspects of the investigation that either had proved to be insignificant, or at the least could be put to one side for the present, being of little importance. Höglund had finally managed to have a detailed conversation with Kim Sung-Lee, the cleaner at the Torstensson offices. As anticipated, she had nothing of significance to say, and her papers had proved to be in order and her presence in Sweden totally legal. Höglund had also on her own initiative talked to the clerk, Sonia Lundin. Wallander could not help being pleased to note that Hanson was unable to conceal his disapproval of the way she had acted on her own initiative. Unfortunately, Sonia Lundin had nothing helpful to say either. One more possible lead could be crossed off. Eventually, when everybody appeared to be still more out of sorts and inert, and a grey fog seemed to have settled over the conference table, Wallander tried to bring them back to life by urging them to concentrate on the flight plans of
Harderberg's Gulfstream. He also suggested that Hanson should make discreet enquiries about the two pilots. But he failed to blow away the fog, the inertia that had started to worry him, and it now seemed to him that their only hope was that the financial experts with all their computer expertise might be able to breathe new life into the investigation. They had undertaken a thorough investigation into the Harderberg empire, but they had been forced to ask for an extension of the deadline, and the meeting had been postponed until the following Monday, November 29.

Wallander had just decided to declare the meeting closed when Åkeson
put his hand up. "We must talk about the state of play in the investigation," he said. "I've allowed you to concentrate on Alfred Harderberg for another month, but at the same time I can't ignore the fact that we have only extremely thin evidence to justify it. It's as if we're drifting further from something crucial with every day that passes. I think we'd all benefit from making one more clear and simple summary of where we've got to, based exclusively on the facts. Nothing else."

Everybody looked at Wallander. Åkeson's comments came as no surprise, even if Wallander would have rather not been confronted by them.

"You're right," he said. "We need to see where we are. Even without any results from the fraud squads' analyses."

"Unravelling a financial empire doesn't necessarily identify a murderer, let alone several," Åkeson
said.

"I know that," Wallander said, "but nevertheless, the picture is not complete without their information."

"There is no complete picture," Martinsson said glumly. "There's no picture at all."

Wallander could see he would need to get a grip on the situation before it slid out of control. To give himself time to gather his thoughts he suggested they should have a short break and air the room. When they reassembled, he was firm and decisive.

"I can see a possible pattern," he began, "just as you all can. But let's approach it from a different angle and begin by taking a look at what this case
isn't.
There's nothing to convince us that we're dealing with a madman. It's true, of course, that a clever psychopath could have planned a murder disguised as a car accident, but there are no apparent motives, and what happened to Sten Torstensson doesn't seem to hang together with what happened to his father, from a psychopathic point of view. Nor do the attempts to blow up Mrs Dunér and me. I say me rather than Höglund because I think that's the way it was. Which brings me to the pattern that revolves around Farnholm Castle and Alfred Harderberg. Let's go back in time. Let's start with the day about five years ago when Gustaf Torstensson was first approached by Alfred Harderberg."

At that moment Björk came into the conference room and sat at the table. Wallander suspected that Åkeson had spoken to him during the short pause and asked him to be there for the rest of the meeting.

"Gustaf Torstensson starts working for Harderberg," Wallander began again. "It's an unusual arrangement - one wonders how on earth a provincial solicitor can be of use to an international industrial magnate. One might suspect that Harderberg intended to use Torstensson's shortcomings for his own advantage, expecting that he would be able to manipulate him if necessary. We don't know that, it's guesswork on my part. But somewhere along the line something unexpected happens. Torstensson starts to appear uneasy, or maybe I should say he appears to be depressed. His son notices, and so does his secretary. She even talks about him seeming to be afraid. Something else happens at about the same time. Torstensson and Lars Borman have got to know each other through a society devoted to the study of icons. Their relationship suddenly becomes strained, and we may assume that this has a connection with Harderberg because he's somehow in the background of the fraud executed on the Malmöhus County Council. But the key question is: why did old man Torstensson start behaving in unexpected ways?

"I suspect that he discovered in the work he was doing for Harderberg something that upset him. Perhaps it was the same thing that upset Borman. We don't know what it was. Then Torstensson is killed in a stage-managed accident. Thanks to what Kurt Ström has told us, we can picture roughly what happened. Sten Torstensson comes to see me at Skagen. A few days later, he too is dead. He, no doubt, felt that he was in danger because he tries to set a false trail in Finland when in fact he's gone to Denmark. I'm convinced that somebody followed him to Denmark. Somebody watched our meeting on the beach. The people who killed Gustaf Torstensson were snapping at the heels of Sten Torstensson. They could not have known whether the father had discussed his discoveries with his son. Nor could they know what Sten said to me. Or what Mrs Dunér knew. That's why Sten dies, that's why they try to kill Mrs Dunér and why my car is torched. It's also the reason why I am being watched and not the rest of you. But everything leads us back to the question of what old man Torstensson had discovered. We are trying to establish whether it has anything to do with the plastic container we found on the back seat of his car. It could also be something else that the financial analysts will be able to tell us. Come what may, there is a pattern here that starts with the cold-blooded killing of Gustaf Torstensson. Sten Torstensson sealed his fate when he came to see me in Skagen. In the background of the pattern all we have is Alfred Harderberg and his empire. Nothing else - not that we can see, at least."