'The man at Farnholm Castle,' Wallander said slowly.
They sat in silence for a while.
'In other words, he also controlled STRUFAB, via Smeden,' she said eventually.
Wallander looked hard at her. 'Well done,' he said. 'Very well done.'
'Thank my fellow student,' she said. 'He's a police officer in Eskilstuna. But there's something else as well. I don't know if it's important, but while I was waiting for you I came to think about something. Torstensson Senior died on the way home from Farnholm Castle. Borman hanged himself. But it might be that both of them, in different ways, had discovered the same thing. What can that have been?'
'You could be right,' Wallander said. 'But I think we can draw one other conclusion. We might regard it as unproven but definite even so. Borman did not commit suicide. Just as Torstensson was not killed in a car accident.'
They sat in silence again for a while.
'Alfred Harderberg,' she said at last. 'Can he really be the man behind everything that's happened?'
Wallander stared into his coffee mug. He had never asked himself that question, but he had suspected something of the kind. Yes, he could see that now.
He looked at her. 'Of course it could be Harderberg,' he said.
Chapter 10
Wallander would always think of the following week as a time in which the police surrounded the difficult murder investigation with invisible barricades. It was like making preparation for a complicated military campaign - in a very short time and under great pressure. It was not so outrageous a comparison, since they had designated Harderberg their enemy - a man who was not only a living legend but also a man whose power was not unlike that of a medieval prince, and this before he had even reached the age of 50.
It had all started on the Friday night, when Hoglund had revealed the link with the English contact man, Robert Maxwell, and his crooked share dealings; and also the fact that the owner of the investment company Smeden was the man at Farnholm Castle, who thus took an enormous step out of the shadows of anonymity and into centre stage of the murder investigation. Wallander would afterwards agonise about not having suspected Harderberg much earlier. He would never find a satisfactory answer as to why. Whatever explanation he found, it was no more than an excuse for carelessly and negligently granting Harderberg exemption from suspicion in the early stages of the inquiry, as if Farnholm Castle had been a sovereign territory with some kind of diplomatic immunity.
The next week changed all that. But they had been forced to proceed cautiously, not just because Bjork insisted on it, with some support from Akeson, but mainly because the facts they had to go on were very few. They knew that Gustaf Torstensson had acted as financial adviser to Harderberg, but they could not know exactly what he had done, what precisely his remit had been. And in any case, there was no evidence to suggest that Harderberg's business empire was involved in illegal activities. But now they had discovered another link: Borman and the fraud to which Malmohus County Council had been subjected and which had been hushed up and quietly buried. On the night of Friday, November 5, Wallander and Hoglund had discussed the situation until the small hours, but it had been mostly speculation. Even so, they had begun to evolve a plan for how the investigation should proceed, and it was clear to Wallander from the start that they would have to move discreetly and circumspectly. If Harderberg really was involved, and Wallander kept repeating that if during the next week, it was clear that he was a man with eyes and ears wherever they turned, all round the clock, no matter what they did or where they were. They had to bear in mind that the existence of links between Borman, Harderberg and one of the murdered solicitors did not necessarily amount to a beginning of a solution to the case.
Wallander was also doubtful for quite different reasons. He had spent his life in the loyal and unhesitating belief that Swedish business practices were as above reproach as the emperor's wife. The men and women at the top of the big Swedish concerns were the bedrock of the welfare state. The Swedish export industry was at the heart of the country's prosperity, and as such was simply above suspicion. Especially now, now that the whole edifice of the welfare state was showing signs of crumbling, its floorboards teeming with termites. The bedrock on which it all rested must be protected from irresponsible interference, irrespective of where it came from. But even if he had his doubts, he was still aware that they might be on the track to the solution, no matter how unlikely it might seem at first glance.
'We don't have anything substantial,' he said to Hoglund that Friday night at the police station. 'What we do have is a link, a connection. We shall investigate it. And we'll do that with all the stops out. But we can't take it for granted that doing so will lead us to the person responsible for our murders.'
They were ensconced in Wallander's office. He was surprised she had not wanted to go home as soon as possible: it was late, and unlike him she had a family to get back to. They were not going to solve anything then, it would have been better to get a good night's rest and start fresh the next morning. But she had insisted on continuing their discussions, and he was reminded of what he had been like at her age. So much police work is dull routine, but there could occasionally be moments of inspiration and excitement, an almost childish delight in playing around with feasible alternatives.
'I know it doesn't necessarily mean anything,' she said. 'But remember that a master criminal like Al Capone was caught out by an accountant.'
'That's hardly a fair comparison,' Wallander said. 'You're talking about a gangster known by one and all to have built his fortune on theft, smuggling, blackmail, bribery and murder. In this case all we know is that a successful Swedish businessman has a majority shareholding in an apparently fraudulent investment company which has many activities, just one of which is that it controls a consultancy employing certain individuals who have swindled a county council. We
'They used to say that concealed behind every fortune was a major crime,' she said. 'Why just 'used to'? Whenever you open your newspaper nowadays it looks more like the rule than the exception.'
'You can find a quotation for every situation,' Wallander said. 'The Japanese say that business is a form of warfare. But that doesn't justify somebody in Sweden killing people to put a few accounts into the clear. If that's what they were trying to do.'
'This country is also awash with sacred cows,' Hoglund said. 'Such as the idea that we don't need to chase up criminals with names that tell us they come from noble families, and who belong to some ancient line in Skane with a family castle to maintain. We would rather not haul them into the courts when they've been caught with their fingers in the till.'
'I've never thought like that,' Wallander said, realising at once that he was not telling the truth. And what was it he was trying to defend? Or was it just that he could not allow Hoglund to be right, not when she was so much younger than he was and a woman?
'I think that's how everybody thinks,' she insisted. 'Police officers are no different. Or prosecutors. Sacred cows must graze in peace.'
They had been sailing around hidden rocks without finding a clear channel. It seemed to Wallander that their differing views indicated something he had been thinking for a long time, that the police force was being split by a generation gap. It wasn't so much that Hoglund was a woman, but rather that she brought with her quite different experiences. We are both police officers, but we do not have the same view of the world, Wallander thought. We may live in the same world, but we see it differently.
Another thought occurred to him, and he did not like it one bit. What he had been saying to Hoglund could just as easily have been said by Martinsson. Or Svedberg. Even Hanson, for all his non-stop further-education courses. He sat there on the Friday night talking not just with his own voice, but with that of the others. He was speaking for a whole generation. The thought annoyed him, and he blamed Hoglund, who was all too self-confident, all too definite in her views. He did not enjoy being reminded of his own laziness, his own very vague views about the world and the age he was living in.
It was as if she were describing an unknown land to him. A Sweden that she was not making up, unfortunately, but one which really existed just outside the confines of the police station, filled with real people.
But the discussion petered out in the end, when Wallander had poured enough water on the fire. They went
