No doubt she ran the lawyers’ offices in the same way. Watering the plants and making sure that appointment books were impeccably maintained might be two sides of the same coin. A life in which there is no room for chance.
“Please, do sit down,” she said in an unexpectedly gruff voice. Wallander had expected this unnaturally thin, gray-haired woman to speak in a soft or feeble voice. He sat on an old-fashioned rattan chair that creaked as he made himself comfortable.
“Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” she said.
Wallander shook his head.
“Tea?”
“No, thank you,” Wallander said. “I just want to ask you a few questions. Then I’ll leave.”
She sat on the edge of a flower-print sofa on the other side of the glass-topped coffee table. Wallander realized he had neither pen nor notebook with him. Nor had he prepared even the opening questions, which had always been his routine. He had learned at an early stage that there is no such thing as an insignificant interview or conversation in the course of a criminal investigation.
“May I first say how much I regret the tragic incidents that have taken place,” he began tentatively. “I had only occasionally met Gustaf Torstensson, but I knew Sten Torstensson well.”
“He looked after your divorce nine years ago,” Berta Dunér said.
As she spoke it came to Wallander that he recognized her. She was the one who had received Mona and himself whenever they had gone to the lawyer’s for what usually turned out to be harrowing and annihilating meetings. Her hair had not been so gray then, and perhaps she was not quite so thin. Even so, he was surprised that he had not recognized her immediately.
“You have a good memory,” he said.
“I sometimes forget a name,” she said, “but never a face.”
“I’m the same,” Wallander said.
There was an awkward silence. A car passed by. It was clear to Wallander that he should have waited before coming to see Mrs. Dunér. He did not know what to ask her, did not know where to start. And he had no desire to be reminded of the bitter and long drawn-out divorce proceedings.
“You have spoken already to my colleague Svedberg,” he said after a while. “Unfortunately, it is often necessary to continue asking questions when a serious crime has been committed, and it might not always be the same officer.”
He groaned inwardly at the clumsy way he was expressing himself. He very nearly made his excuses and left. Instead, he forced himself to get his act together.
“I don’t need to ask about what I already know,” he said. “We don’t need to go over again how you showed up for work that morning and discovered that Sten Torstensson had been murdered. Unless of course you have since remembered something that you did not mention before.”
Her reply was firm and unhesitating. “Nothing. I told Mr. Svedberg precisely what happened.”
“The previous evening, though?” Wallander said. “When you left the office?”
“It was around 6 p.m. Perhaps five minutes past, but not later. I had been checking some letters that Miss Lundin typed. Then I buzzed Mr. Torstensson to check whether there was anything else he wanted me to do. He said there wasn’t, and wished me good evening. I put on my coat and went home.”
“You locked the door behind you? And Mr. Torstensson was all by himself?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what he had in mind to do that evening?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Continue working, of course. A lawyer with as much work on his hands as Sten Torstensson cannot just go home when it suits him.”
“I understand that he was working,” Wallander said. “I was just wondering if there had been some special job, something urgent?”
“Everything was urgent,” she said. “Since his father had been killed only a few weeks before, his workload was immense. That’s pretty obvious.”
Wallander raised his eyebrows at her choice of words. “You’re referring to the car accident, I assume?”
“What else would I be referring to?”
“You said his father had been killed. Not that he’d lost his life in an accident.”
“You die or you are killed,” she said. “You die in your bed of what is generally called natural causes, but if you die in a car accident, surely you have to accept that you were killed?”
Wallander nodded slowly. He understood what she meant. Nevertheless, he wondered if she had inadvertently said something that might be along the same lines as the suspicions that had led Sten Torstensson to find him at Skagen.
A thought struck him. “Can you remember off the top of your head what Mr. Torstensson was doing the previous week?” he said. “Tuesday, October 26, and Wednesday, October 27.”
“He was away,” she said, without hesitation.
So, Sten Torstensson had made no secret of his visit, he thought.
“He said he needed to get away for a couple of days, to shake off all the sorrow he was feeling after the death of his father,” she said. “Accordingly, I canceled his appointments for those two days.”
And then, without warning, she burst into tears. Wallander was at a loss how to react. His chair creaked as he shifted in embarrassment.
She stood up and hurried out to the kitchen. He could hear her blowing her nose. Then she returned.
“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s so very hard.”
“I understand.”
“He sent me a postcard,” she said with a very faint smile. Wallander was sure she would start crying again at any moment, but she was more self-possessed than he had supposed.
“Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, I would,” Wallander said.
She went to a bookshelf on one of the long walls, took a postcard from a porcelain dish and handed it to him.
“Finland must be a beautiful country,” she said. “I have never been there. Have you?”
Wallander stared at the card in confusion. The picture was of a seascape in evening sunshine.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’ve been to Finland. And as you say, it’s very beautiful.”
“Please forgive me for getting upset,” she said. “You see, the postcard arrived the day I found him dead.”
Wallander nodded absentmindedly. It seemed to him there was a lot more he needed to ask Berta Dunér than he had suspected. At the same time, he recognized that this was not the right moment.
So Torstensson had told his secretary that he had gone to Finland. A postcard had arrived from there, apparently as proof. Who could have sent it? Torstensson was in Jutland.
“I need to hang on to this card for a couple of days, in connection with the investigation,” he said. “You’ll get it back. I give you my word.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Just one more question before I go,” Wallander said. “Did you notice anything unusual those last few days before he died?”
“In what way unusual?”
“Did he behave at all differently from normal?”
“He was very upset and sad about the death of his father.”
“Of course, but no other reason for anxiety?”
Wallander could hear how awkward the question sounded, but he waited for her answer.
“No,” she said. “He was the same as usual.”
Wallander got to his feet. “I’m sure I’ll need to talk to you again,” he said.
She did not get up from the sofa. “Who could have done such a horrible thing?” she asked. “Walk in through the door, shoot a man, and then walk out again, as if nothing had happened?”