Wallander went to fetch another cup of coffee. In the hallway he bumped into Höglund carrying a pile of files.
“How’s it going?” Wallander said.
“Slowly,” she said. “And I can’t shake off the feeling that there’s something fishy about those two dead lawyers.”
“That’s exactly how I feel,” Wallander said. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Wallander said. “Experience tells me you should never underestimate the significance of what you can’t put into words, can’t put your finger on.”
He went back to his office, unhooked the phone, and pulled his notepad toward him. He went back in his mind to the freezing cold beach at Skagen, Sten Torstensson walking toward him out of the fog. That’s where this case started for me, he thought. It started while Sten was still alive.
He went over everything he knew about the two lawyers. He was like a soldier cautiously retreating, keeping a close watch to his left and his right. It took him an hour to work his way through every one of the facts he and his colleagues had so far assembled.
What is it I can see and yet do not see? He asked himself this over and over as he sifted through the case notes. But when he tossed aside his pen all he had managed to achieve was a highly decorative and embellished question mark.
Two lawyers dead, he thought. One killed in a strange accident that was in all probability not an accident. Whoever killed Gustaf Torstensson was a cold, calculating murderer. That lone chair leg left in the mud was an uncharacteristic mistake. There’s a why and a who, but there may well be something else.
It came to him that there was something he could and should do. He found Mrs. Dunér’s telephone number in his notes.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said. “Inspector Wallander here. I have a question I’d be grateful for an answer to right away.”
“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 apologize 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. Dunér’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 café 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 categorize. 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 Dunér’s pink house. And Mrs. Dunér 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 gray building with dilapidated facades in Riga, in that apartment 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 magician’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. At the reception desk, Ebba was busy on the telephone. When she signaled 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 afterward. He watered the five plants he had on his window ledges, filled the washing machine with clothes that had been strewn around the apartment, discovered he had no laundry detergent, 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 a 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 4° Celsius outside. Driven by a feeling of unrest he did not have the strength to analyze or fight, he left the apartment 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 cup of 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 two years 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.