"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 nobody 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 basement. 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 assuming 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 dilapidated 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 4degC outside. Driven by a feeling of unrest he did not have the strength to analyse 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 passed the military training ground on his right where 18 months 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 passed the place where Gustaf Torstensson had died. When he came to Skane-Tranas 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 generaclass="underline" 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."