This time she paused before answering.
“Maybe,” she said. “Now that you mention it, there was something distant about him in the last months of his life.”
“Have you any explanation for that?”
“No.”
“Nothing unusual that happened?”
“No, nothing.”
“Please think carefully. This could be very important.”
She poured another cup of tea while she was thinking. Wallander waited. Then she looked up at him.
“I can’t say,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
Wallander knew she was not telling the truth, but he decided not to press her. Everything was still too vague and uncertain. The time wasn’t ripe.
He pushed his cup to one side and rose to his feet. “I won’t disturb you any longer,” he said. “But I’ll be back, I’m afraid.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunér said.
“If you think of anything you’d like to say, just give me a ring,” Wallander said as he left. “Don’t hesitate. The slightest detail could be significant.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said as she closed the door behind him.
Wallander sat in his car without starting the engine. He felt very uneasy. Without being able to say exactly why, he had the feeling there was something very serious and disturbing behind the deaths of the two lawyers. They were still only scratching the surface.
Something is pointing us in the wrong direction, he thought. The postcard from Finland might not be a red herring, might be the thing we really should be looking into. But why?
He was about to start the engine and drive off when he noticed that somebody was standing on the sidewalk across the street, watching him.
It was a young woman, hardly more than twenty, of some Asian origin. When she saw that Wallander had noticed her, she hurried away. Wallander could see in his rearview mirror that she had turned right onto Hamngatan without looking back.
He was certain he had never seen her before.
That didn’t mean she had not recognized him. Over the years as a police officer he had often come up against refugees and asylum seekers in various contexts.
He drove back to the police station. The wind was still gusty, and clouds were building up from the east. He had just turned onto Kristianstadvägen when he slammed his foot on the brake. A truck behind him sounded its horn.
I’m reacting far too slowly, he thought. I’m not seeing the forest for the trees.
He made an illegal U-turn, parked outside the post office on Hamngatan, and made his way swiftly onto the side street that led into Stickgatan from the north. He positioned himself so that he could see the pink building where Mrs. Dunér lived.
It was getting chilly, and he started walking up and down while keeping an eye on the building. After an hour he wondered whether he should give up. But he was sure he was right. He kept on watching the building. By now Åkeson was waiting for him, but he would wait in vain.
At 3:43 p.m. the door to the pink building suddenly opened. Wallander hid behind a wall. He was right. He watched that woman with the vaguely Asian appearance leave Berta Dunér’s house. Then she turned the corner and was gone.
It had started raining.
Chapter 5
The meeting of the investigation team started at 4 p.m. and finished exactly seven minutes later. Wallander was the last to arrive and flopped down on his chair. He was out of breath, and sweating. His colleagues around the table observed him in surprise, but no one made any comment.
It took Björk a few minutes to establish that no one had any significant progress to report or matters to discuss. They had reached a point in the investigation where they had become “tunnel diggers,” as they used to say. They were all trying to break through the surface layer to find what might be concealed underneath. It was a familiar phase in criminal investigations, and no discussion was needed. The only one who came up with a question at the end of the meeting was Wallander.
“Who is Alfred Harderberg?” he asked, after consulting a scrap of paper on which he’d written down the name.
“I thought everybody knew that,” Björk said. “He’s one of Sweden’s most successful businessmen just now. Lives here in Skåne. When he’s not flying all over the world in his private jet, that is.”
“He owns Farnholm Castle,” Svedberg said. “It’s said that he has an aquarium with genuine gold dust at the bottom instead of sand.”
“He was a client of Gustaf Torstensson’s,” Wallander said. “His principal client, in fact. And his last. Torstensson had been to see him the night he met his death in the field.”
“He organizes charity for the needy in parts of the Balkans ravaged by war,” Martinsson said. “But maybe that’s not so extraordinary when you have the limitless amounts of money he does.”
“Alfred Harderberg is a man worthy of our respect,” Björk said.
Wallander could see he was getting annoyed. “Who isn’t?” he wondered aloud. “I intend to pay him a visit even so.”
“Phone first,” Björk said, getting to his feet.
The meeting was at an end. Wallander fetched a cup of coffee and repaired to his office. He needed time on his own to think over the significance of Mrs. Dunér being visited by a young Asian woman. Maybe there was nothing to it at all, but Wallander’s instinct told him otherwise. He put his feet on his desk and leaned back in his chair, balancing his coffee cup between his knees.
The telephone rang. Wallander stretched to answer it, lost his grip on the cup, and coffee spilled all over his pant leg as the cup fell to the floor.
“Shit!” he shouted, the receiver halfway to his ear.
“No need to be rude,” said his father. “I only wanted to ask why you never get in touch.”
Wallander was instantly assailed by his bad conscience, and that in turn made him angry. He wondered if there would ever be a time when dealings with his father could be conducted on a less tense footing.
“I spilled a cup of coffee,” he said, “and scalded my leg.”
His father seemed not to have heard what he said. “Why are you in your office?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be on sick leave.”
“Not anymore. I’ve started work again.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
Wallander could tell that this conversation was going to be a very long one if he did not manage to cut it short. “I owe you an explanation, I know,” he said, “but I just don’t have time right now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow evening, and tell you what’s happened.”
“I haven’t seen you for ages,” his father said, and hung up.
Wallander sat for a moment with the receiver in his hand. His father would be seventy-five next year, and invariably managed to arouse in him contradictory emotions. Their relationship had been complicated for as long as he could remember. Not least on the day he told his father he intended to join the police. More than twenty-five years had passed since then and the old man never missed an opportunity for criticizing that decision. Nevertheless, Wallander had a guilty conscience about the time he devoted to him. The previous year, when he had heard the astonishing news that his father was going to marry a woman thirty years younger than himself, a home help who came to his house three times a week, he had figured his father would not lack for company anymore. Now, sitting there with the receiver in his hand, he realized that nothing had really changed.
He replaced the receiver, picked up the cup, and wiped his pant leg with a sheet torn from his notepad. Then he remembered he was supposed to get in touch with Åkeson, the prosecutor. Åkeson’s secretary put him through right away. Wallander explained that he had been held up and Åkeson suggested a time for the next morning instead.