"There's only one or perhaps two persons who could answer that question," Martinsson said.

"We'll catch them," Wallander said. "I think I'll go there and have a look around."

"Mrs Duner is pretty shaken, naturally," Martinsson said. "In less than a month the whole fabric of her life has collapsed. First old man Torstensson dies. Hardly has she got over sorting out the funeral arrangements than his son is murdered. She's in shock, but even so it's surprisingly easy to talk to her. Her address is on the transcript of the conversation Svedberg had with her."

"Stickgatan 26," Wallander read. "That's just behind the Continental Hotel. I sometimes park there."

"Isn't that an offence?" Martinsson said.

Wallander collected his jacket and left the station. He had never seen the girl in reception before. He thought that perhaps he ought to have introduced himself. Not least to find out whether Ebba, who had been there for years, had stopped working evenings. But he let it pa.s.s. The time he had spent in the station so far today had seemed on the face of it to be nothing dramatic, but that did not reflect the tension inside him. He felt he needed to be on his own. For some considerable time now he had spent most of his days alone. He needed time to make the transformation. He drove down the hill towards the hospital, and just for a moment felt a vague yearning for the solitariness of Skagen, for his isolated sentry duty and his beach patrols that were guaranteed not to be disturbed.

But that was all in the past. He was back at work now.

I'm not used to it, he thought. It'll pa.s.s, even if it takes time.

The solicitors' offices were in a yellow-painted stone building in Sjomansgatan, not far from the old theatre that had been getting a facelift. A patrol car was parked outside, and on the opposite pavement a handful of onlookers were discussing what had happened. The wind was gusting in from the sea, and Wallander shuddered as he clambered out of his car. He opened the heavy front door and almost collided with Svedberg on his way out.

"I thought I'd get a bite to eat," he said.

"Go ahead," Wallander said. "I expect to be here for a while."

A young clerk was sitting in the front office with nothing to do. She looked anxious. Wallander remembered from the reports that her name was Sonia Lundin, and that she had been working there only a few months. She had not been able to provide the investigation with any useful information.

Wallander shook hands with her and introduced himself.

"I'm just going to take a look around," he said. "Mrs Duner's not here, I suppose?"

"She's at home, crying," the girl said.

Wallander had no idea what to say.

"She'll never survive all this," Lundin said. "She'll die too."

"Oh, I don't think so," Wallander said, conscious of how hollow his response sounded.

The Torstensson legal practice had been a workplace for solitary people, he thought. Gustaf Torstensson had been a widower for more than 15 years and so his son Sten had been without a mother all that time and was a bachelor to boot. Mrs Duner had been divorced since the early '70s. Three solitary people who came into contact with each other day after day. And now two of them were gone, leaving the third more alone than ever.

Wallander had no difficulty in understanding why Mrs Duner was at home crying.

The door to the meeting room was closed. Wallander could hear murmuring from inside. The lawyers' nameplates were on the doors on either side of the meeting room, fancily printed on highly polished bra.s.s plates.

On the spur of the moment he opened first the door to Gustaf Torstensson's office. The curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness. There was a faint aroma of cigar smoke. Wallander looked around and had the feeling that he had gone back to an earlier age. Heavy leather sofas, a marble table, paintings on the walls. It occurred to him that he had overlooked one possibility: that whoever murdered Sten Torstensson was there to steal the objets d'art. He walked up to one of the paintings and tried to decipher the signature, trying also to establish whether it was a copy or an original. Without having been successful on either count, he moved on. There was a large globe next to the solid-looking desk, which was empty, apart from some pens, a telephone and a Dictaphone. He sat in the comfortable desk chair and continued to look around the room, thinking again about what Sten Torstensson had said to him in the cafe at the Art Museum in Skagen.

A car accident that wasn't a car accident. A man who had spent the last months of his life trying to hide something that was worrying him.

Wallander asked himself what would be the characteristics of a solicitor's life. Supplying legal advice. Defending when a prosecutor prosecutes. A solicitor was always receiving confidential information. Lawyers were under a strict oath of confidentiality. It dawned on him that solicitors had a lot of secrets to keep. He hadn't thought of that before.

He got to his feet after a while. It was too soon to draw any conclusions.

Lundin was still sitting motionless on her chair. He opened the door to Sten Torstensson's office. He hesitated for a second, as if half expecting to see the dead man's body lying there on the floor, as it was in the photographs he had seen in the case reports, but all that was left was a plastic sheet. The technical team had taken the dark green carpet away with them.

The room was not unlike the one he had just left. The only obvious difference was a pair of visitors' chairs in front of the desk. This time Wallander refrained from sitting down. There were no papers on the desk.

I'm still only sc.r.a.ping at the surface, he thought. I feel as if I'm listening as much as I am trying to get my bearings by looking.

He went out to the reception area, closing the door behind him. Svedberg was back and was trying to persuade the girl to have one of his sandwiches. Wallander shook his head on being offered one as well. He pointed to the meeting room.

"In there are two worthy gentlemen from the Bar Council," Svedberg said. "They're working their way through all the doc.u.ments in the place. They record, seal and wonder what to do about them. Clients will be contacted and other solicitors will take over their business. Torstensson Solicitors to all intents and purposes no longer exists."

"We must have access to all the material, of course," Wallander said. "The truth about what happened might well lie somewhere in their relationships with their clients."

Svedberg raised his eyebrows and looked at Wallander. "Their?" he said. "I expect you mean the son's clients."

"You're right. I do mean Sten Torstensson's clients."

"It's a pity really that it's not the other way round."

Wallander almost missed Svedberg's comment. "Why, what do you mean?"

"It would appear that old man Torstensson had very few clients," Svedberg said. "Sten Torstensson, on the other hand, was mixed up in all kinds of things." He nodded in the direction of the meeting room. "They think they'll need a week or more to get through it."

"I'd better not interrupt them, then," Wallander said. "I think I'd rather be having a word with Mrs Duner."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"No need, I know where she lives."

Wallander went back to his car and started the engine. He was in two minds. Then he forced himself to come to a decision. He would start with the lead that n.o.body except him knew about. The lead Sten Torstensson had given him in Skagen.

They have to be connected, Wallander thought as he drove slowly eastwards, pa.s.sed the courthouse and Sandskogen and soon left the town behind. These two deaths are linked. There is no other rational explanation.

He contemplated the grey landscape he was travelling through. It was drizzling. He turned up the heater.

How can anybody fall in love with all this mud? he wondered. But that's exactly what I have done. I am a police officer whose existence is forever hemmed in by mud. And I wouldn't change this countryside for all the tea in China.

It took him a little more than half an hour to get to the place where Gustaf Torstensson had died on the night of October 11. Wallander had the accident report with him, and stepped out on to the windy road with it in his pocket. He took out his Wellingtons and changed into them before he started scouting around. The wind was getting stronger, as was the rain, and he felt cold. A buzzard perched on a crooked fencing pole, watching him.

The scene of the accident was unusually desolate even for Sk&ne. There was no sign of a farmhouse, nothing but undulating brown fields as far as the eye could see. The road was straight, then started to climb a hundred metres or so ahead before turning sharply left. Wallander unfolded the sketch of the scene of the accident, and compared the map with the ground itself. The wrecked car had been lying upside down to the left of the road, 20 metres into the field. There were no skid marks on the road. It had been thick fog when the accident occurred.

Wallander put the report back into the car before it got soaked. He walked to the crown of the road, and looked around. Not one car had gone past. The buzzard was still on its pole. Wallander jumped over the ditch and squelched his way across muddy clay that immediately clung to the soles of his boots. He paced out 20 metres and looked back towards the road. A butcher's van drove past, and then two cars. The rain was getting heavier all the time. He tried to envisage what had happened. A car with an old man driving is in the midst of a patch of thick fog. The driver loses control, the car leaves the road, spins round once or twice and ends up on its roof. The driver is dead, held into his seat by his safety belt. Apart from some grazing on his face, he has smashed the back of his head against some hard, projecting metallic object. In all probability death was instantaneous. He is not discovered until dawn the next day when a farmer pa.s.sing on his tractor sees the car.

He need not have been going fast, Wallander thought. He might have lost control and hit the accelerator in panic. The car sped out into the field. What Martinsson wrote up about the scene of the accident was probably comprehensive and correct.

He was about to call it a day when he noticed something half buried in the mud. He bent down and saw that it was the leg of one of those brown wooden kitchen chairs. He threw it away, and the buzzard flew off from its pole, flapping away with its heavy wings.

There's still the wrecked car, Wallander thought, but I don't expect I'll find anything startling there that Martinsson has not noted already.

He went back to his car, sc.r.a.ped as much of the mud off his boots as he could, and changed into his shoes. As he drove back to Ystad he wondered whether he ought to take advantage of the opportunity to call in on his father and his new wife at Loderup, but decided against it. He needed to talk to Mrs Duner, and if possible also look at the wreck before returning to the police station.

He stopped at the service station just outside Ystad for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and looked about him. Dour Swedish gloom was nowhere more strikingly in evidence than in cafes attached to petrol stations, he decided. He left his coffee almost untasted, keen to escape the atmosphere. He drove through the rain into town, turned right at the Continental Hotel and then right again into narrow Stickgatan. He parked semi-legally outside the pink house where Berta Duner lived, both near-side wheels on the pavement. He rang the bell and waited. It was nearly a minute before the door opened. He could just see a pale face through the narrow gap.

"My name's Kurt Wallander and I'm a police officer," he said, searching in vain through his pockets for his ident.i.ty card. "I'd like to have a chat with you, if I may."

Mrs Duner opened the door and let him in. She handed him a coat hanger, and he hung up his wet jacket. She invited him into the living room, which had a polished wooden floor and a large picture window looking over a small garden behind the house. He looked around the room and noted that he was in a flat where everything had its place: furniture and ornaments were arranged in orderly fashion, down to the most minuscule detail.

No doubt she ran the solicitors' offices in the same way. Watering the plants and making sure that engagement diaries were impeccably maintained might be two sides of the same coin. A life in which there is no room for chance.

"Please, do sit down," she said in an unexpectedly gruff voice.

Wallander had expected this unnaturally thin, grey-haired woman to speak in a soft or feeble voice. He sat on an old-fashioned rattan chair that creaked as he made himself comfortable.

"Can I offer you a cup of coffee?" she said.

Wallander shook his head.

"Tea?"

"No, thank you," Wallander said. "I just want to ask you a few questions. Then I'll be away."

She sat on the edge of a flower-print sofa on the other side of the gla.s.s-topped coffee table. Wallander realised he had with him neither pen nor notebook. Nor had he prepared even the opening questions, which had always been his routine. He had learned at an early stage that there is no such thing as an insignificant interview or conversation in the course of a criminal investigation.

"May I first say how much I regret the tragic incidents that have taken place," he began tentatively. "I had only occasionally met Gustaf Torstensson, but I knew Sten Torstensson well."

"He looked after your divorce nine years ago," Berta Duner said.

As she spoke it came to Wallander that he recognised her. She was the one who had received Mona and himself whenever they had gone to the solicitor's for what usually turned out to be harrowing and annihilating meetings. Her hair had not been so grey then, and perhaps she was not quite so thin. Even so, he was surprised that he had not recognised her straight away.

"You have a good memory," he said.

"I sometimes forget a name," she said, "but never a face."

"I'm the same," Wallander said.

There was an awkward silence. A car pa.s.sed by. It was clear to Wallander that he ought to have waited before coming to see Mrs Duner. He did not know what to ask her, did not know where to start. And he had no 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 a.s.sume?"

"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 26, and Wednesday, October 27."

"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 embarra.s.sment.

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.