The Man Who Smiled - Wallander 04

by Henning Mankell

  When he had finished, the atmosphere in the conference room was tense. We're close to making significant progress, Wallander thought. "We have to find the link between Borman and the Torstensson firm of solicitors. What upset Borman so much that he sent threatening letters to the Torstenssons and even involved Mrs Dunér? He accused them of what he called a serious injustice. We can't be certain that it had anything to do with the scam inflicted on the County Council, but I think we would do well to assume that, for the time being, this is what it was. In any case, this is the black hole in our investigation, and we must dredge our way into it with as much energy as we can muster."

  The discussion was tentative at first. Everybody needed time for what Wallander had described to sink in.

  "I'm thinking about those threatening letters," Martinsson said hesitantly. "I can't get away from the feeling that they are so naive. So childish, almost innocent. I can't get a clear sense of Borman's nature."

  "We'll have to find out more," Wallander said. "Let's start by tracing his children. We should also telephone his widow in Marbella."

  "I'd be happy to do that," Martinsson said. "Borman interests me."

  "The whole business of that investment firm Smeden will have to be thoroughly looked into," Björk said. "I suggest we contact the fraud squad in Stockholm. Or maybe it would be better for Åkeson to do that. There are people there who know as much about the business world as the most skilful investment analysts."

  "I'll speak to Per," Wallander said.

  They went backwards and forwards through the case all morning. Eventually they reached a point where everybody was losing their sharpness, and nobody seemed to have anything else to say. Björk had already left for one of his countless meetings with the District Chief of Police. Wallander decided it was time to bring the meeting to an end.

  "Two solicitors murdered," he said. "Plus Lars Borman's suicide, if that is what it was. We have the mine in Mrs Dunér's garden, and we have my car. Let no-one forget that we're dealing with extremely dangerous people, people who are keeping a close watch on everything we do. That means we all have to be tirelessly watchful ourselves."

  They gathered their papers and left.

  Wallander drove to a restaurant nearby for lunch. He needed to be on his own. He was back at the police station just after 1.00, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to the national CID and their fraud specialists. At 4.00 he went over to the prosecutor's offices and spoke at length to Åkeson. Then he returned to his own office, and did not leave until nearly 10.00.

  He felt the need for fresh air. He was missing his long walks at Skagen, so he left his car at the station and walked home to Mariagatan. It was a mild evening, and he occasionally paused to look in shop windows. He was home by 11.00.

  Half an hour later he was surprised by the phone ringing. He had just poured himself a glass of whisky and settled to watch a film on the television. He went out to the hall and answered. It was Höglund.

  "Am I disturbing you?" she said.

  "Not in the least."

  "I'm at the station," she said. "I think I'm on to something." Wallander did not hesitate. She would not have rung if it hadn't been very important. "I'll be there in ten minutes," he said.

  She was in the corridor, waiting for him.

  "I need a cup of coffee," she said. "There's nobody in the canteen just now. Peters and Norén left a few minutes ago. There's been an accident at the Bjäresjö crossroads."

  They sat down at a table with their mugs of coffee.

  "There was a fellow student at college who paid his way through his studies by dealing on the Stock Exchange," she said. Wallander looked at her in surprise.

  "I phoned him," she said, almost apologetically. "It can be quicker to do things through personal contacts, if you've got any. Anyway, I told him about STRUFAB, Sisyphus and Smeden. I gave him the names Fjällsjö and Holmberg. He phoned me at home an hour ago. I came straight here."

  Wallander could hardly wait to hear what was coming next.

  "I made notes of everything he said. The investment company Smeden has undergone a lot of changes in recent years. Boards of directors have come and gone, and on several occasions their shares have been suspended because of suspicions of insider trading and other infringements of Stock Exchange regulations. Substantial shareholdings have been changing hands with bewildering frequency, and it's difficult to keep track of them. Smeden seems to have been a prime example of the irresponsible goings-on in the financial world. Until a few years ago. Then a number of foreign brokers, including firms in Britain, Belgium and Spain, started buying shares, very discreetly. At first there was nothing to suggest that the same purchaser was acting through these various brokerage firms. It was all done stealthily, and the brokers did nothing to attract attention to themselves. By this time everybody was so fed up with Smeden that nobody was taking the company seriously any more, least of all the mass media. Every time the Secretary-General of the Stockholm Stock Exchange met reporters, he would begin by asking them not to put questions about Smeden because he was so irritated by everything to do with the company. Then one day such substantial holdings were acquired by the same group of brokers that it was no longer possible to avoid wondering who was so interested in this dodgy company with such a bad reputation. It transpired that Smeden had fallen into the hands of a not exactly unknown Englishman called Robert Maxwell."

  "The name means nothing to me," Wallander said. "Who is he?"

  "Was. He's dead. He fell overboard from his luxury yacht off the Spanish coast a couple of years ago. There were rumours that he had been murdered. Something to do with Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and shadowy but large-scale arms deals. He owned newspapers and publishing houses, all registered in Liechtenstein, but when he died his empire collapsed like a house of cards. It was all built on borrowings, borrowings and embezzled pension funds. The bankruptcy was instantaneous and set off a tremendous crash."

  "An Englishman?" Wallander said in astonishment. "What does that tell us?"

  "That it didn't end there. The shares were passed on to somebody else." "Who?"

  "There was something going on behind the scenes," Höglund said. "Maxwell had been acting on behalf of somebody else who preferred to remain invisible. And that person was a Swede. A mysterious circle was finally closed." She stared intently at him. "Can you guess who that person is?"

  "No."

  "Have a guess."

  The penny dropped. "Alfred Harderberg." She nodded.

  "The man at Farnholm Castle," Wallander said slowly. They sat in silence for a while.

  "In other words, he also controlled STRUFAB, via Smeden," she said eventually.

  Wallander looked hard at her. "Well done," he said. "Very well done."

  "Thank my fellow student," she said. "He's a police officer in Eskilstuna. But there's something else as well. I don't know if it's important, but while I was waiting for you I came to think about something. Torstensson Senior died on the way home from Farnholm Castle. Borman hanged himself. But it might be that both of them, in different ways, had discovered the same thing. What can that have been?"

  "You could be right," Wallander said. "But I think we can draw one other conclusion. We might regard it as unproven but definite even so. Borman did not commit suicide. Just as Torstensson was not killed in a car accident."

  They sat in silence again for a while.

  "Alfred Harderberg," she said at last. "Can he really be the man behind everything that's happened?"

  Wallander stared into his coffee mug. He had never asked himself that question, but he had suspected something of the kind. Yes, he could see that now.

  He looked at her. "Of course it could be Harderberg," he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  Wallander would always think of the following week as a time in which the police surrounded the difficult murder investigation with invisible barricades. It was like making preparation for a complicated military campaign - in a very
short time and under great pressure. It was not so outrageous a comparison, since they had designated Harderberg their enemy - a man who was not only a living legend but also a man whose power was not unlike that of a medieval prince, and this before he had even reached the age of 50.

  It had all started on the Friday night, when Höglund had revealed the link with the English contact man, Robert Maxwell, and his crooked share dealings; and also the fact that the owner of the investment company Smeden was the man at Farnholm Castle, who thus took an enormous step out of the shadows of anonymity and into centre stage of the murder investigation. Wallander would afterwards agonise about not having suspected Harderberg much earlier. He would never find a satisfactory answer as to why. Whatever explanation he found, it was no more than an excuse for carelessly and negligently granting Harderberg exemption from suspicion in the early stages of the inquiry, as if Farnholm Castle had been a sovereign territory with some kind of diplomatic immunity.

  The next week changed all that. But they had been forced to proceed cautiously, not just because Björk insisted on it, with some support from Åkeson, but mainly because the facts they had to go on were very few. They knew that Gustaf Torstensson had acted as financial adviser to Harderberg, but they could not know exactly what he had done, what precisely his remit had been. And in any case, there was no evidence to suggest that Harderberg's business empire was involved in illegal activities. But now they had discovered another link: Borman and the fraud to which Malmöhus County Council had been subjected and which had been hushed up and quietly buried. On the night of Friday, November 5, Wallander and Höglund had discussed the situation until the small hours, but it had been mostly speculation. Even so, they had begun to evolve a plan for how the investigation should proceed, and it was clear to Wallander from the start that they would have to move discreetly and circumspectly. If Harderberg really was involved, and Wallander kept repeating that “If" during the next week, it was clear that he was a man with eyes and ears wherever they turned, all round the clock, no matter what they did or where they were. They had to bear in mind that the existence of links between Borman, Harderberg and one of the murdered solicitors did not necessarily amount to a beginning of a solution to the case.

  Wallander was also doubtful for quite different reasons. He had spent his life in the loyal and unhesitating belief that Swedish business practices were as above reproach as the emperor's wife. The men and women at the top of the big Swedish concerns were the bedrock of the welfare state. The Swedish export industry was at the heart of the country's prosperity, and as such was simply above suspicion. Especially now, now that the whole edifice of the welfare state was showing signs of crumbling, its floorboards teeming with termites. The bedrock on which it all rested must be protected from irresponsible interference, irrespective of where it came from. But even if he had his doubts, he was still aware that they might be on the track to the solution, no matter how unlikely it might seem at first glance.

  "We don't have anything substantial," he said to Höglund that Friday night at the police station. "What we do have is a link, a connection. We shall investigate it. And we'll do that with all the stops out. But we can't take it for granted that doing so will lead us to the person responsible for our murders."

  They were ensconced in Wallander's office. He was surprised she had not wanted to go home as soon as possible: it was late, and unlike him she had a family to get back to. They were not going to solve anything then, it would have been better to get a good night's rest and start fresh the next morning. But she had insisted on continuing their discussions, and he was reminded of what he had been like at her age. So much police work is dull routine, but there could occasionally be moments of inspiration and excitement, an almost childish delight in playing around with feasible alternatives.

  "I know it doesn't necessarily mean anything," she said. "But remember that a master criminal like Al Capone was caught out by an accountant."

  "That's hardly a fair comparison," Wallander said. "You're talking about a gangster known by one and all to have built his fortune on theft, smuggling, blackmail, bribery and murder. In this case all we know is that a successful Swedish businessman has a majority shareholding in an apparently fraudulent investment company which has many activities, just one of which is that it controls a consultancy employing certain individuals who have swindled a county council. We know no more than that."

  "They used to say that concealed behind every fortune was a major crime," she said. "Why just 'used to'? Whenever you open your newspaper nowadays it looks more like the rule than the exception."

  "You can find a quotation for every situation," Wallander said. "The Japanese say that business is a form of warfare. But that doesn't justify somebody in Sweden killing people to put a few accounts into the clear. If that's what they were trying to do."

  "This country is also awash with sacred cows," Höglund said. "Such as the idea that we don't need to chase up criminals with names that tell us they come from noble families, and who belong to some ancient line in Skåne with a family castle to maintain. We would rather not haul them into the courts when they've been caught with their fingers in the till."

  "I've never thought like that," Wallander said, realising at once that he was not telling the truth. And what was it he was trying to defend? Or was it just that he could not allow Höglund to be right, not when she was so much younger than he was and a woman?

  "I think that's how everybody thinks," she insisted. "Police officers are no different. Or prosecutors. Sacred cows must graze in peace."

  They had been sailing around hidden rocks without finding a clear channel. It seemed to Wallander that their differing views indicated something he had been thinking for a long time, that the police force was being split by a generation gap. It wasn't so much that Höglund was a woman, but rather that she brought with her quite different experiences. We are both police officers, but we do not have the same view of the world, Wallander thought. We may live in the same world, but we see it differently.

  Another thought occurred to him, and he did not like it one bit. What he had been saying to Höglund could just as easily have been said by Martinsson. Or Svedberg. Even Hanson, for all his non-stop further-education courses. He sat there on the Friday night talking not just with his own voice, but with that of the others. He was speaking for a whole generation. The thought annoyed him, and he blamed Höglund, who was all too self-confident, all too definite in her views. He did not enjoy being reminded of his own laziness, his own very vague views about the world and the age he was living in.

  It was as if she were describing an unknown land to him. A Sweden that she was not making up, unfortunately, but one which really existed just outside the confines of the police station, filled with real people.

  But the discussion petered out in the end, when Wallander had poured enough water on the fire. They went out to fetch more coffee, and were offered a sandwich by a patrolman who seemed to be worn out, or just bored stiff, and was sitting in the canteen staring into space. They went back to Wallander's office, and to avoid further discussion about sacred cows, Wallander asserted himself and proposed a session of constructive thinking.

  "I had an elegant leather folder in my car when it went up in flames," he said. "An overview I was given when I went to Farnholm Castle. I had begun reading it. It was a summary of Harderberg's empire and of the man himself, his various honorary doctorates, all his good deeds: Harderberg the patron of the arts, Harderberg the humanist, Harderberg the young people's friend, Harderberg the sports fan, Harderberg the sponsor of our cultural heritage, the enthusiastic restorer of old Oland fishing boats, Harderberg the honorary doctor of archaeology who provides generous funding for digs at what might be Iron Age dwellings in Medelpad, Harderberg the patron of music who sponsors two violinists and a bassoonist in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Founder of the Harderberg Prize for the most gifted young opera singer in the country. Generous donor to peace research i
n Scandinavia. And all the other things I can't remember. It was as if he were being portrayed as a one-man Swedish Academy. Without a drop of blood on his hands.

  "I've asked Ebba to get hold of another copy of the file. It must be studied and investigated. As discreetly as possible we must obtain access to reports and balance sheets for all his companies. We have to find out how many companies he in fact owns. Where they are located. What they do. What they sell. What they buy. We have to examine his tax returns and his tax status. In that respect I accept what you say about Al Capone. We have to find out where Gustaf Torstensson was allowed to poke his nose in. We have to ask ourselves: why him of all people? We have to take a look into every secret room we can find. We have to wriggle our way into Harderberg's mind, not just his bank accounts. We have to talk to eleven secretaries without his noticing. Because if he does notice, a tremor will run through the whole enterprise. A tremor that will result in every door closing simultaneously. We must never forget that no matter how many resources we put into this, he will be able to send yet more troops into battle. It's always easier to close a door than it is to open it again. It's always easier to maintain a cleverly constructed lie than it is to find an unclear truth."

  She listened to what he had to say with what looked to him to be genuine interest. He had set it all out for her as much to clarify things in his own mind, but he could not deny having made some small effort to squash her. He was still the senior officer around here, and she could consider herself just a snotty-nosed kid, albeit a talented one.

  "We have to do all that," he said. "It could be that we end up once more with the magnificent reward of having discovered absolutely nothing. But the most important thing for the moment, and the most difficult thing, is how we are going to do all this without attracting attention. If what we suspect is true, and it's on Harderberg's orders that we're being watched, that efforts are being made to blow us up, and that it was an extension of his hand that planted the mine in Mrs Dunér's garden, then we must keep reminding ourselves all the time that he sees things and hears things. He must not notice that we are repositioning our troops. We must camouflage everything we do in thick fog. And in that fog we have to make sure that we follow the right road and that he goes astray. Where's the investigation going? That is the question we have to keep asking ourselves, and then we have to provide a very good answer."