The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

  Wallander switched off the phone and shook his head. “He’s right, of course,” he said. “It sounds ridiculous—we’re on the E65 in the middle of the night and I think there might be a bomb in the car.”

  “Is there?”

  “I don’t know,” Wallander said. “I’m not sure.”

  It took Nyberg an hour to reach them. By then Wallander and Höglund were frozen to the bone. Wallander expected Nyberg to be annoyed, being woken up by Martinsson for reasons that must have seemed dubious, to say the least, but to his surprise Nyberg was friendly and prepared to believe that something serious had happened. Despite her protests, Wallander insisted that Höglund should get into Nyberg’s car and warm up.

  “There’s a thermos in the passenger seat,” Nyberg said. “I think the coffee’s still hot.”

  Then he turned to Wallander, who could see that he was still in his pajamas under his overcoat. “What’s wrong with the car?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me that,” Wallander said. “There’s a real possibility that there’s nothing wrong at all.”

  “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “I don’t know. All I can tell you is an assumption. The car was left unwatched for about half an hour. It was locked.”

  “Do you have an alarm?” Nyberg said.

  “I’ve got nothing,” Wallander said. “It’s an old car. A piece of junk. I’ve always assumed nobody would want to steal it.”

  “Go on,” Nyberg said.

  “Half an hour,” Wallander repeated. “When I started the engine, nothing happened. Everything was normal. From Helsingborg to here is about a hundred kilometers. We stopped on the way and had a cup of coffee. I’d filled the tank in Helsingborg. It must be about three hours since the car was left unattended.”

  “I wouldn’t touch it,” Nyberg said. “Not if you suspect it might blow up.”

  “I thought that happened when you started the engine,” Wallander said.

  “Nowadays you can set explosions to go off whenever you like,” Nyberg said. “They could be anything from built-in, self-triggering delay mechanisms to radio-controlled ignition devices that can be set off from miles away.”

  “Maybe it’s best just to leave it,” Wallander said.

  “Could be,” Nyberg said. “But I’d like to take a look at it even so. Let’s say I’m doing it of my own free will. You’re not ordering me to do it.”

  Nyberg went back to his car and came back with a powerful flashlight. Wallander accepted a mug of coffee from Höglund, who had now gotten out of the car. They watched Nyberg as he lay down beside the car and shone his flashlight underneath. Then he started to walk around it, slowly.

  “I think I’m dreaming,” Höglund murmured.

  Nyberg had stopped by the open door on the driver’s side. He peered inside and shone his flashlight inside. An overloaded Volkswagen van with a Polish license plate drove past on its way to the ferry in Ystad. Nyberg switched off his flashlight and came back toward them.

  “Did I hear wrongly?” he asked. “Didn’t you say you’d filled up with gas on the way to Helsingborg?”

  “I filled up in Lund,” Wallander said. “Right to the top.”

  “Then you drove to Helsingborg? And to here?”

  Wallander thought a moment. “It can’t have been more than about a hundred and fifty kilometers,” he said.

  Nyberg frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” Wallander asked.

  “Have you ever had reason to think there was something wrong with your gas gauge?”

  “Never. It’s always been correct.”

  “How many liters does the tank hold?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Then explain to me why the indicator suggests you’ve only got a quarter of a tank left,” he said.

  It didn’t sink in at first. Then Wallander realized the significance of what Nyberg had said. “Somebody must have drained the tank,” he said. “The car uses less than one liter per ten kilometers.”

  “Let’s move further back,” Nyberg said. “I’m going to move my own car further back as well.”

  They watched him drive further away. The hazard lights were still flashing on Wallander’s car. The wind was still gusty. Another overfull car with a Polish license plate passed them going east. Nyberg came to join them. They all looked at Wallander’s car.

  “If somebody drains gas from a tank, they do it to make room for something else,” Nyberg said. “Somebody might have planted explosives with some kind of delayed ignition that is gradually eaten away by the gas. Eventually it blows up. Does your gas gauge usually go down when the car’s in neutral?”

  “No.”

  “Then I think we should leave the car here till tomorrow,” Nyberg said. “In fact, we should close off the E65 altogether.”

  “Björk would never agree to that,” Wallander said. “Besides, we don’t know for sure that anybody’s put anything in the gas tank.”

  “I think we should call people out to cordon the area off, no matter what,” Nyberg said. “This is the Malmö police district, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Wallander said. “But I’ll phone them even so.”

  “My handbag’s still in the car,” Höglund said. “Can I get it?”

  “No,” Nyberg said. “It’ll have to stay there. And the engine can keep running.”

  Höglund got back into Nyberg’s car. Wallander called the police in Malmö. Nyberg had wandered off to the side of the road to urinate. Wallander looked up and contemplated the stars while he waited to be connected.

  It was 3:04 in the morning.

  Malmö answered. Wallander saw Nyberg zipping up his fly.

  Then the night exploded in a flash of white. The telephone was ripped from Wallander’s hand.

  8

  The painful silence.

  Afterward, Wallander recalled the explosion as a large space with all the oxygen squeezed out, the sudden arrival of a strange vacuum on the E65 in the middle of a November night, a black hole in which even the blustery wind had been silenced. It happened very quickly, but memory has the ability to stretch things out and in the end he remembered the explosion as a series of events, each one rapidly replacing the other but nevertheless distinct.

  What surprised him most was that his telephone was lying on the wet asphalt just a few meters away. That was the most incomprehensible part, not the fact that his car was enveloped by intense flames and seemed to be melting away.

  Nyberg had reacted quickest. He grabbed hold of Wallander and dragged him away, possibly afraid there would be another explosion from the blazing car. Höglund had flung herself out of Nyberg’s car and sprinted to the other side of the road. Perhaps she had screamed, but it seemed to Wallander he might have been the one to scream, or Nyberg, or none of them; perhaps he had imagined it.

  On the other hand, he thought he should have screamed. He should have screamed and yelled and cursed the fact that he had gone back to duty, that Sten Torstensson had been to see him in Skagen and dragged him into a murder investigation he should never have been involved in. He should never have gone back, he should have signed the documents Björk had prepared for him, attended the press conference and allowed himself to be interviewed for a feature in Swedish Police magazine, on the back page no doubt, and gotten out of it all.

  In the confusion following the explosion there had been a moment of painful silence when Wallander had been able to think perfectly clearly as he looked at the telephone lying in the road and his old Peugeot going up in flames on the hard shoulder. His thoughts had been lucid and he had been able to reach a conclusion: the first indication that the double murder of the lawyers, the mine in Mrs. Dunér’s garden, and now the attempted murder of himself had a pattern, not itself clear as of yet and with many locked doors still to open.

  But a conclusion had been possible and unavoidable, amid the chaos, and it had been a terrifying one: somebody thought Wallander knew somet
hing they did not want him to know. He was convinced that whoever had put the explosives in the gas tank had not planned to kill Ann-Britt Höglund. That merely revealed another aspect of the people who lurked in the shadows: they didn’t care about human life.

  Wallander recognized, with a mixture of fear and despair, that these people who hid in cars with stolen license plates were wrong. He could have made an honest public statement that it was all based on a mistake and that he knew nothing about what lay behind the murders, or the mine, or even the suicide of the accountant Lars Borman, if indeed it was suicide.

  The truth was that he knew nothing. But while his car was still ablaze and Nyberg and Höglund were directing inquisitive late-night drivers away from the scene and calling the police and firefighters, he had continued to stand in the middle of the road, thinking things through to their conclusion. There was only one starting point for the awful mistake of thinking he knew something, and that was Sten’s visit to Skagen. The postcard from Finland had not been sufficient. They had followed Sten to Jutland, they had been there among the dunes, hidden in the fog. They had been watching the art museum where Wallander had drunk coffee with Sten, but they had not been close enough to hear what was said, for if they had been, they would have known that Wallander knew nothing, since Sten knew nothing either; the whole business was no more than suspicions. But they had not been able to take the risk. That’s why his old Peugeot was burning by the side of the road; and that’s why the neighbor’s dog had been barking while they had been talking to the Forsdahls.

  The painful silence, he thought. That’s what’s enveloping me, and there is one more conclusion to draw, perhaps the most vital one of all. For it means we have made a breakthrough in this awful case, we have found a point around which we can all gather and say: this is our starting point. It might not take us to the Holy Grail, but it might lead to something else that we need to find.

  The chronology was right, he thought. It started with that muddy field where Gustaf Torstensson met his end almost a month ago. Everything else, including the execution of his son, must derive from what happened that night, when he was on his way home from Farnholm Castle. We know that now, which means we now know what we should be doing.

  He bent to retrieve his telephone. The emergency number for the Malmö police was staring him in the face. He turned off the phone and established that it had not been damaged by the blast or by being dropped on the road.

  The fire engine had arrived. He watched as they put out the flames, covering the car with white foam. Nyberg appeared at his side. Wallander could see that he was sweating and afraid.

  “That was a close call,” he said.

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “But not close enough.”

  Nyberg looked at him in surprise.

  At that moment a senior officer from the Malmö police came up to Wallander. They had met before but Wallander could not remember the man’s name.

  “I gather it was your car that got torched,” he said. “Rumor had it you’d left the force. But you come back, and your car gets set on fire.”

  Wallander was not sure if the man was being ironic, but he decided he wasn’t, that it was a natural reaction. At the same time he wanted to ensure that there were no misunderstandings.

  “I was on my way home with a colleague,” he said.

  “Ann-Britt Höglund,” said the man from Malmö. “I’ve just spoken to her. She passed me on to you.”

  Well done, Wallander thought. The fewer people who comment, the easier it is to keep the thing under control. She’s learning fast.

  “I had the feeling something wasn’t as it should be,” Wallander said. “We stopped and got out. I called my colleague Nyberg here. The car blew up almost as soon as he got here.”

  The senior officer from Malmö eyed him skeptically. “This is the official version, I assume,” he said.

  “Well, the car will have to be examined,” Wallander said. “But nobody’s been hurt. For the moment you can report just what I said. I’ll ask Björk to get in touch with you—he’s the chief of police in Ystad. Forgive me, but I’m afraid I can’t remember your name.”

  “Roslund.”

  Wallander remembered.

  “We’ll cordon the scene off,” Roslund said. “I’ll leave a car here.”

  Wallander checked his watch. It was 4:15.

  “I think it’s time for us to go home to bed.”

  They all got into Nyberg’s car. Nobody had anything to say. They dropped Höglund outside her house, then Nyberg drove Wallander home to Mariagatan.

  “We’ll have to get to grips with this a few hours from now,” Wallander said before getting out. “We can’t put it off.”

  “I’ll be at the station by seven,” Nyberg said.

  “Eight will be soon enough. Thanks for your help.”

  Wallander had a quick shower, then stretched himself out between the sheets. He was still awake at 6:00. He got up again shortly before 7:00. He knew it was going to be a long day. He wondered how he would cope.

  Thursday, November 4, began with a sensation.

  Björk came to work unshaven. This had never happened before. But when the door of the conference room was closed at 8:05, everybody could see that Björk had more stubble than anybody could have imagined. Wallander knew that he was still not going to have the opportunity to talk to Björk about what had happened before his visit to Farnholm Castle. But it could wait: they had more important things to figure out first.

  Björk slapped his hands down on the table and looked around the room.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded to know. “I get a phone call at 5:30 in the morning from a senior officer in Malmö who wants to know if they should send their own forensic people to examine Inspector Wallander’s burned-out car that’s standing near Svedala on the E65, or were we going to send Nyberg and his team? There I am in my kitchen, it’s 5:30 in the morning, wondering what in the world I should say because I haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on. What happened? Has Kurt been injured or even killed in a crash that ended with his car going up in flames? I know nothing at all. But Roslund from Malmö is a sensible man who is able to fill me in. I am grateful to be told roughly what’s been going on. But the fact is that I’m mostly in the dark.”

  “We have a double murder to solve,” Wallander said. “We have an attempted murder on Mrs. Dunér to keep us occupied. Until yesterday we had next to nothing to go on. The investigation was up against a brick wall, we all agree on that, I think. Then we hear about these threatening letters. We discover a name and a link with a hotel in Helsingborg. Ann-Britt and I go there to investigate. That could have waited until today, I admit. We pay a visit to some people who knew Borman. They are able to supply us with useful information. On the way to Helsingborg, Ann-Britt notices that we’re being followed. When we get to Helsingborg we stop, and manage to get one or two relevant license plate numbers. Martinsson starts tracking down those numbers. While Ann-Britt and I are talking to Mr. and Mrs. Forsdahl, who used to run the Linden Hotel, which is closed down now, somebody plants explosives in our gas tank. Purely by chance, on the way home I get suspicious. I get Martinsson to phone Nyberg. Shortly after he gets there the car blows up. Nobody is hurt. This happens outside Svedala, in the Malmö police district. That’s what happened.”

  Nobody spoke when Wallander finished. It seemed to him he might just as well continue. He could give them the whole picture, everything he had thought about as he stood there in the road while his car was burning before his very eyes.

  The moment of painful silence.

  Also the moment of clarity.

  He reported scrupulously on his thoughts, and immediately noticed that his deductions won the meeting’s approval. His colleagues were experienced police officers. They could distinguish between sensible theories, and a fantastic but nevertheless plausible series of events.

  “I can see three lines of attack,” Wallander said in conclusion. “We can conce
ntrate on Gustaf Torstensson and his clients. We must delve deeply but rapidly into just what he was up to those last five years while he devoted himself more or less exclusively to financial advice and similar matters. But to save time we should start off with the last three years during which time, according to Mrs. Dunér, he started to change. I would also like somebody to have a word with the Asian woman who cleans the office. Mrs. Dunér has her address. She might have seen or heard something.”

  “Does she speak Swedish?” Svedberg said.

  “If not we’ll have to arrange for an interpreter,” Wallander said.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Höglund said.

  Wallander took a sip of his cold coffee before going on. “The second line of attack is Lars Borman. I have a suspicion that he can still be of help to us, even though he’s dead.”

  “We’ll need the support of our colleagues in Malmö,” Björk said. “Klagshamn is in their territory.”

  “I would rather not,” Wallander said. “It would be quicker to deal with it ourselves. As you keep pointing out, there are all kinds of administrative problems when police officers from different districts try to help each other.”

  While Björk pondered his response, Wallander took the opportunity to finish what he had to say. “The third line is to find out who’s following us. Perhaps I should ask whether anybody else has had a car trailing them?”

  Martinsson and Svedberg shook their heads.

  “There’s every reason for you to keep your eyes peeled,” Wallander said. “I could be wrong, it might not just be me they’re after.”

  “Mrs. Dunér is being guarded,” Martinsson said. “And in my view you ought to be as well.”

  “No,” Wallander said. “That’s not necessary.”

  “I can’t go along with that,” Björk said firmly. “In the first place you must never go out on duty alone. And furthermore you must be armed.”

  “Never,” Wallander said.

  “You’ll do as I say,” Björk said.

  Wallander didn’t bother to argue. He knew what he was going to do anyway.