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 turned 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 rang through to Mr Torstensson to check whether there was anything else he wanted me to do. He said there wasn't, and bade 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. 'Carry on working, of course. A solicitor 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. 'As 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 20, and Wednesday, October 21.'
'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 cancelled 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 absent-mindedly. It seemed to him there was a lot more he needed to ask Berta Duner than he had suspected. At the same time, he recognised 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?'
'That's what we're going to find out,' Wallander said. 'I suppose you don't know if he had any enemies?'
'Enemies? How could he have had enemies?'
Wallander paused a moment, then asked one last question. 'What do you yourself think happened?'
'There was a time when you could understand things, even things that seemed incomprehensible,' she said. 'Not now, though. It's just not possible in this country nowadays.'
Wallander put on his jacket, which was still wet and heavy. He paused when he went out into the street. He thought about a slogan going the rounds at the time he graduated from Police Training College, sentiments he had adopted as his own. 'There's a time for life, and a time for death.'
He also thought about what Mrs Duner had said as he was leaving. He felt that she had said something significant about Sweden, something he ought to come back to. But for now he banished her words to the back of his mind.
I must try to understand the minds of the dead, he thought. A postcard from Finland, postmarked the day when Torstensson was drinking coffee with me in Skagen, makes it clear that he wasn't telling the truth. Not the whole truth, at least. A person can't lie without being aware of it.
He got into his car and tried to make up his mind what to do. For himself, what he wanted most of all was to go back to his flat in Mariagatan, and lie down on the bed with the curtains drawn. As a police officer, however, he must think otherwise.
He checked his watch: 1.45 p.m. He would have to be back at the station by 4.00 at the latest, for the meeting of the investigation team. He thought for a moment before deciding. He started the engine, turned into Hamngatan and bore left to emerge on to the Osterleden highway again. He continued along the Malmo road until he came to the turning off to Bjaresjo. The rain had become drizzle, but the wind was gusting. A few kilometres further on he left the main road and stopped outside a fenced-in yard with a rusty sign announcing that this was Niklasson's Scrapyard. The gates were open so he drove in among the skeletons of cars piled on top of each other. He wondered how many times he had been to the scrapyard in his life. Over and over again Niklasson had been suspected of receiving, and been prosecuted for the offence on many occasions. He was legendary in the Ystad police force: he had never once been convicted, in spite of overwhelming evidence of his guilt. But in the last resort there had always been one little spanner that had got stuck in the works, and Niklasson had invariably been set free
