“Can you do any better, then?” she said, her voice shrill again.
She’s thin-skinned, he thought. No doubt it’s a lot harder than I think to be a lone woman among the Ystad detectives.
“I don’t really mean your summary was poor,” he said. “But I do think you’re overlooking a few things.”
“I’m listening,” she said. “I know I’m good at that.”
Wallander slid his plate to one side and went to get a cup of coffee. The Danish truck drivers had left, leaving the two police officers as the only customers. A radio could be heard faintly from the kitchen.
“It’s obviously impossible to draw any reliable conclusions,” Wallander said, “but we can make a few assumptions. We can try fitting a few pieces of the puzzle together and see what they look like, see if we can work out a motive perhaps.”
“I’m with you so far,” she said.
“Borman was an accountant,” Wallander said. “We also know that he seemed to be an honest, upright man. That was the most characteristic thing about him, according to the Forsdahls. Apart from the fact that he was quiet and liked reading. In my experience it’s quite rare for anybody to start by categorizing a man like that. Which suggests he really was a passionately honest man.”
“An honest accountant,” she said.
“This honest man suddenly writes two threatening letters to the Torstenssons’ law firm in Ystad. He signs them with his own name, but he crosses out the name of the hotel on one of the envelopes. This provides us with several assumptions we can deduce.”
“He didn’t want to be anonymous,” Höglund said. “But he didn’t want to involve the hotel in the business. An honest man upset about injustice. The question is, what injustice?”
“Here we can make my last assumption except for one,” Wallander said. “There’s a missing link. Borman wasn’t a client of the Torstenssons’, but there might have been somebody else, somebody who was in contact both with Borman and with the law firm.”
“What does an accountant actually do?” Höglund said. “He checks that money is being used properly. He goes through receipts, he certifies that the proper practices have been adhered to. Is that what you mean?”
“Gustaf Torstensson gave financial advice,” Wallander said. “An accountant makes sure the rules and regulations are obeyed. The emphasis is a bit different, but an accountant and a lawyer in fact do very similar things. Or should do.”
“And your last assumption?” she said.
“Borman writes two threatening letters. He may have written more, but we don’t know that. What we do know is that the letters were simply put away in an envelope.”
“But now both the lawyers are dead,” Höglund said, “and someone tried to kill Mrs. Dunér.”
“And Borman committed suicide,” Wallander said. “I think that’s where we should begin. With his suicide. We have to get in touch with our colleagues in Malmö. There must be a document somewhere that rules out the possibility that the death was murder. There has to have been a doctor’s certificate.”
“There’s a widow living in Spain,” she said.
“The children are presumably still in Sweden. We must talk to them as well.”
They stood up and left the café.
“We should do this more often,” Wallander said. “It’s fun talking to you.”
“Even though I don’t understand anything,” she said, “and make poor summaries?”
Wallander shrugged. “I talk too much,” he said.
They got back into the car. It was almost 1:00. Wallander shuddered at the thought of the empty apartment that awaited him in Ystad. It felt as if something in his life had come to an end a long time ago, long before he knelt in the fog in the military training ground near Ystad. But he hadn’t figured out what it was. He thought about his father’s painting that he had seen in the house in Gjutargatan. In the old days, his father’s paintings had always seemed to him something to be ashamed of, to be taking advantage of people’s bad taste. It now seemed to him there might be another way of looking at it. Perhaps his father painted pictures that gave people a feeling of balance and normality they were looking everywhere for, but only found in those unchanging landscapes.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.
“Not sure,” he said vaguely. “I think I’m just tired.”
Wallander drove on toward Malmö. Even though it was the long way around, he wanted to stick to the main roads back to Ystad. There was not much traffic, and there was no sign of anybody following them. The gusting wind was buffeting the car.
“I didn’t think that kind of thing happened around here,” she said suddenly. “Being followed by some stranger in a car, I mean.”
“I didn’t think so either until a few years ago,” Wallander said. “Then things changed. They say Sweden changed slowly and imperceptibly, but I think it was rather open and obvious. If you only knew where to look.”
“Tell me,” she said, “what it used to be like. And what happened.”
“I don’t know if I can,” he said. “I just see things from the point of view of the man in the street. But in our everyday work, even in an insignificant little town like Ystad, we could see a change. Crime became more frequent and more serious: different, nastier, more complicated. And we started finding criminals among people who’d previously been irreproachable citizens. But what set it all off I have no idea.”
“That doesn’t explain why we have a record for solving crimes worse than practically everywhere else in the world, either,” she said.
“Talk to Björk about that,” Wallander said. “It keeps him awake at night. I sometimes think that his ambition is for the Ystad force to make up for the rest of the country put together.”
“But there must be an explanation,” she insisted. “It can’t just be that the Swedish force is undermanned, and that we don’t have the resources which everybody talks about without anybody being able to say what they actually should be.”
“It’s like two different worlds meeting head-on,” Wallander said. “Many police officers think as I do, that we got our training and experience at a time when everything was different, when crime was more transparent, morals were clearer, and the authority of the police unchallenged. Nowadays, we need a different kind of training and different experiences in order to be as efficient. But we don’t have that. And the ones who come after us, such as you, don’t as yet have much chance to influence what we do, to decide where our priorities should lie. It often feels as if there’s nothing to stop criminals getting even further ahead of us than they are already. And all society does in response is to manipulate the statistics. Instead of giving the police rein to solve every crime committed, a lot of them are just written off. What used to be considered a crime ten years ago is now judged a noncrime. Things change by the day. What people were punished for yesterday can be something nobody thinks about twice today. At best it might spark off a report that then disappears in some invisible shredder. All that’s left is something that never happened.”
“That can’t be good,” she said hesitantly.
Wallander glanced at her. “Who said that it was?”
They had passed Landskrona and were approaching Malmö. An ambulance passed them at high speed, blue light flashing. Wallander was tired. Without really knowing why, just for a moment he felt sorry for the woman sitting beside him. Over the coming years she would constantly have to reassess her work as a police officer. Unless she was an exceptional person, she would experience an unbroken sequence of disappointments, and very little joy.
He had no doubt about that. But he also thought that the reputation that had preceded her seemed to be true. He could remember Martinsson’s first year when he’d just graduated from the police academy and joined the Ystad force. He had not been much use then, but now he was one of their best detectives.