The Man Who Smiled (34 page)

"I take it that's a pretty risky business."

"Maybe not here, and maybe not for me," she said. "But I know personally one of the American journalists involved, Gary Becker from Minneapolis. He went to Brazil to look into rumours about a gang said to be operating in Sao Paulo. He wasn't just threatened - one night as his taxi stopped outside his hotel someone fired a whole magazine at it. He booked the next flight and got the hell out of there."

"Have you come across any suggestion that Swedes could be involved in the trafficking?"

"No. Should I have done?"

"I was only asking," Wallander said.

She studied him without speaking, then leaned across the table towards him. "If you and I are going to have a conversation, you have to be honest with me," she said. "Don't forget that I'm a journalist. You don't have to pay for this visit because you're a police officer, but the least I can ask is that you tell me the truth."

"You're right," Wallander said. "There is a slight possibility that there might be a connection. That's the nearest I can go to telling you the truth."

"OK," she said. "Now we understand each other. But I want just one more thing from you. If in fact there does turn out to be a connection, I want to be the first journalist who knows about it."

"I can't promise you that," Wallander said. "It's against our regulations."

"No doubt it is. But killing people to take their body parts goes against something much more important than regulations."

Wallander considered what she had said. He was citing regulations that he had long since ceased to observe uncritically himself. In recent years his experiences as a police officer had taken place in a no man's land where any good he might have been able to do had always involved his having to decide which regulations to abide by, and which not. Why should he change now?

"You'll be the first to know," he said. "But you'd better not quote me. I'll have to remain anonymous."

"That's good," she said again. "Now we understand each other even better."

When Wallander looked back over all the hours he spent in that hushed kitchen, with the cat asleep among the pot plants and the rays of the sun moving slowly over the plastic tablecloth before disappearing altogether, he was surprised at how quickly the time had passed. They had started talking at 10 a.m. and it was evening by the time they finished. They had had a few breaks, she had prepared lunch for him, and her father had entertained Wallander with stories about his life as captain of various ships plying the Baltic coast, with occasional voyages to Poland and the Baltic States. Otherwise they had been alone in the kitchen, and she had talked about her research. Wallander envied her. They both worked on investigations, they both spent their time constantly up against crime and human suffering. The difference was that she was trying to expose crime to prevent it happening, while Wallander was always occupied in clearing up crimes that had already been committed.

What he remembered most from his time in that kitchen was a journey into an unimagined world where human beings and body parts had been reduced to market commodities, with no sign of any moral consideration. If she was correct in her assumptions, the trade in body parts was so vast that it was almost beyond comprehension. What shook him most, however, was her claim that she could understand the people who killed healthy human beings in order to sell parts of their bodies.

"It's a reflection of the world," she said. "This is how things are, whether we like it or not. When a person is sufficiently poor, he's ready to do anything at all to keep body and soul together, no matter how squalid his life might be. How can we presume to make moral judgments about what they do? When their circumstances are so far beyond our understanding? In the slums on the edge of cities like Rio or Lagos or Calcutta or Madras, you can hold up 30 dollars and announce that you want to meet somebody who's prepared to kill another human being. Within a minute you have a queue of willing assassins. And they don't ask who they're going to be required to kill, nor do they wonder why. And they're prepared to do it for 20 dollars. Maybe even ten. I'm aware of a sort of abyss in the middle of what I'm working on. I get shocked, I feel desperate, but as long as the world continues as it is, I recognise that everything I do could be regarded as meaningless."

Wallander had sat in silence for most of the time. From time to time he asked a question the better to understand what she was saying. But he could see that she really was trying to pass on everything she knew - or suspected, because there was so little anybody could be 100 per cent certain about.

And then, hours later, they had come to a stop.

"I don't know any more," she said. "But if what I've said is of help to you, I'm glad of it."

"I don't even know if I'm on the right track," Wallander said. "But if I am, I know we've identified a Swedish link to this abominable trade. And if we can put a stop to it, that surely has to be a good thing."

"Of course it does," she said. "One plundered corpse fewer in a South American ditch - that makes it all worthwhile."

It was almost 7 p.m. by the time Wallander left Malmö. He knew he ought to have phoned Ystad and told them what he was doing, but he had been too taken up by his conversation with Norin.

She had accompanied him to the car park where they had said their goodbyes.

"You've given me an awful lot to think about," Wallander said. "I can't thank you enough."

"Who knows," she said, "perhaps I'll get payment in kind one of these days."

"You'll be hearing from me."

"I'm counting on that. You'll normally find me in Gothenburg. Unless I'm on my travels."

Wallander stopped at a grill bar near Jagersro for something to eat. He was thinking all the time about what she had told him, and how he could fit Harderberg into that picture. But he couldn't.

He wondered if they would ever find an answer to the question of why the two solicitors had been killed. In all his years as a police officer, he had so far been spared the experience of being involved in an unsolved murder case. Was he standing now outside a door that would never open?

He drove home to Ystad that evening feeling the weariness seep through his body. The only thing he had to look forward to was phoning Linda when he got in.

But the moment Wallander stepped into his flat he knew that something was not as it had been when he left that morning. He paused in the hall, listening intently. Maybe it was his imagination. Yet the feeling would not go away. He switched on the light in the living room, sat down on a chair and looked around him. Nothing was missing, nothing seemed to have been moved. He went into the bedroom. The unmade bed was exactly as he had left it. The half-empty coffee cup was still on his bedside table next to the alarm clock. He went into the kitchen.

Only when he opened the refrigerator to get out the margarine and a piece of cheese was he sure that he was right. He looked hard at the opened packet of blood pudding. He had an almost photographic memory and he knew he had put it on the third of the four shelves. It was on the second shelf now.

The packet of blood pudding had been at the very edge and could easily have fallen out on to the floor - it had happened to him before. Then somebody had put it back on the wrong shelf.

He had no doubt at all that he remembered it rightly. Somebody had been in his flat during the day. And whoever had been there had opened his refrigerator, either to look for something or to hide something.

His first reaction was to laugh. Then he closed the fridge door and walked quickly out of the flat. He was scared. He had to force himself to think clearly. They're not far away, he thought. I'll let them think I'm still in the flat.

He went down the stairs to the basement. There was a door at the back leading to the rubbish room. He unlocked and opened it. He looked out at the parking places lined up along the back of the building. There was no-one about. He closed the door behind him and edged his way through the shadows along the wall. When he came to where it opened out into Mariagatan, he kneeled down and peered at waist height from behind the drainpipe.

The car was parked about ten metres behind his own. The engine was not running and the lights were off. He could make out a man behind the wheel, but could not be sure if there was anybody else in the car.

He pulled back his head and stood up. From somewhere he could hear the sound of a TV set. He wondered feverishly what to do next. Then he made up his mind.

He started running across the empty car park, turned left at the first corner and was gone.

CHAPTER
14

He was gasping for breath before he had got as far as Blekegatan. Once more Wallander thought he was about to die. He had taken Oskarsgatan from Mariagatan, it was not very far, and he had not been running flat out. Even so, the raw autumn air was tearing at his lungs and his pulse was racing. He forced himself to slow down, fearful that his heart would stop. The feeling of lacking the strength to do anything worried him more than the discovery that someone had been in his flat and was now sitting in a car in the street, keeping watch on him. He struggled to suppress the thought, but what was upsetting him was really his fear, the fear he recognised so clearly from the previous year, and he did not want it back. It had taken him almost twelve months to shake it off, and he thought he had succeeded in burying it once and for all on the beaches at Skagen - but here it was, back to haunt him.

He started running again. It wasn't far to the block of flats in Lilla Norregatan where Svedberg lived. He had the hospital on his right, then he turned downhill towards the town centre. A torn poster outside the kiosk in Stora Norregatan caught his eye, then he turned right and almost immediately left and could see that the lights were on in the top-floor flat where Svedberg lived.

Wallander knew the lights were often on all night. Svedberg was afraid of the dark; indeed, that might have been why he chose to become a police officer, to try to cure his fear. But he still left the lights on in his flat at night, so his career had not been any help.

Everyone is frightened of something, Wallander thought, police officers or not. He stumbled through the front door and ran up the stairs, then paused when he reached the top floor to get his breath back. He rang Svedberg's bell. The door was opened almost immediately. Svedberg had a pair of reading glasses pushed up on to his forehead, and was holding a newspaper. Wallander knew he would be surprised to see him. During all the years they had known each other, Wallander had only been in Svedberg's flat two or three times, and then only after making an arrangement to meet there.

"I need your help," Wallander said when the astonished Svedberg had let him in and closed the door.

"You look shattered," Svedberg said. "What's happened?"

"I've been running. I want you to come with me. It won't take long. Where's your car?"

"It's right outside the front door."

"Drive me back to my place in Mariagatan," Wallander said. "Let me get out shortly before we get there. You know the car I'm using at the moment, a police Volvo?"

"The dark blue one or the red one?"

"The dark blue one. Turn into Mariagatan. There's another car parked behind my Volvo, you can't miss it. I want you to drive past and see whether there's anybody in the car apart from the driver. Then come back to where you've dropped me off. That's all. Then you can go home to your paper."

"You don't want to arrest somebody?"

"That's exactly the last thing I want to do. I just want to know how many there are in the car."

Svedberg had taken off his glasses and put down the newspaper. "What's going on?" he said.

"I think somebody's watching my flat," Wallander said. "I only want to know how many of them there are. That's all. But I want whoever it is in the car to think I'm still in my flat. I came out by the back door."

"I'm not sure I understand all this. Wouldn't it be best to make an arrest? We can ask for help."

"You know what we've decided," Wallander said. "If it's anything to do with Harderberg we should pretend we're not very wide awake."

Svedberg shook his head. "I don't like this," he said.

"All you need to do is to drive to Mariagatan and make an observation," Wallander said. "Then I'll go back to my flat. I'll phone you if I need help."

"I suppose you know best," Svedberg said, sitting on a stool in order to tie his shoelaces.

They went down to the street and got into Svedberg's Audi, then drove past Stortorget, down Hamngatan and left into Österleden. When they got to Borgmästaregatan they turned left again. Wallander asked Svedberg to stop when they came to Tobaksgatan.

"I'll wait here," he said. "The car's ten metres behind."

Minutes later Svedberg was back. Wallander got into the car again.

"There was only the driver."

"Thanks for your help. You can go home now. I'll walk from here."

Svedberg gave him a worried look. "Why is it so important to know how many there are in the car?" he asked.

Wallander had forgotten to prepare for that question. He was so focused on what he had decided to do that he had not taken Svedberg's natural curiosity into account.

"I've seen that car before," he lied. "There were two men in it then. If there's only the driver in it now, it could mean the other man isn't far away."

This explanation was pretty feeble, but Svedberg raised no objections.

"FHC 803," he said. "But I expect you've noted that down already."

"Yes," Wallander said. "I'll look it up in the register. You don't need to bother about that. Just go home now. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for your help."

He got out of the car and waited until Svedberg had disappeared down Österleden, then he started walking towards Mariagatan. Now that he was on his own again he could feel himself getting agitated, the nagging worry that his fear was making him weak.

He went in by the back door and left the stair lights off when he returned to his flat. If he stood on tiptoe on the toilet seat and looked through the little bathroom window, he could see the street below. The car was still there. Wallander went to the kitchen. If they had meant to blow me up, they'd have done that already, he thought. They must be waiting for me to go to bed, and for the lights to go out.