The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell Page A

identity card. "I'd like to have a chat with you, if I may."
    Mrs Dunér 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 glass-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 Dunér 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 passed by. It was clear to Wallander that he ought to have waited before coming to see Mrs Dunér. 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