Free The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell Page A

seats everywhere and Björk's car is littered with fishing rods."
    Wallander nodded. They were the last to leave. They drove in silence for several kilometres. It felt odd to Wallander to have somebody sitting beside him. He realised he had not spoken properly to anybody apart from his daughter since the day two years ago when he had lapsed into his long silence.
    She was the one who finally started talking. "I think you're right," she said. "There must be a connection between the two deaths."
    "It's a possibility we'll have to look into in any case," Wallander said.
    They could see a patch of sea to the left. There were white horses riding on the waves.
    "Why does anybody become a police officer?" Wallander wondered aloud.
    "I can't answer for others," she said, "but I know why I became one. I remember from Police Training College that hardly anybody had the same dreams as the other students."
    "Do police officers have dreams?" Wallander said, in surprise.
    She turned to him. "Everybody has dreams," she said. "Even police officers. Don't you?"
    Wallander didn't know what to say, but her question was a good one, of course. Where have my dreams gone to? he thought. When you're young, you have dreams that either fade away or develop into a driving force that spurs you on. What have I got left of all my ambitions?
    "I became a police officer because I decided not to become a vicar," she said. "I believed in God for a long time. My parents are Pentecostalists. But one day I woke up and found it had all gone. I agonised for ages over what to do, but then something happened that made my mind up for me, and I resolved to become a police officer" "Tell me," he said. "I need to know why people still want to become police officers."
    "Some other time," she said. "Not now."
    They were approaching Ystad. She told him how to get to where she lived, to the west of the town, in one of the newly built brick houses with a view over the sea.
    "I don't even know if you have a family," Wallander said, as they turned into a road that was still only half finished.
    "I have two children," she said. "My husband's a service mechanic. He installs and repairs pumps all over the world, and is hardly ever at home. But he's earned enough for us to buy the house."
    "Sounds like an exciting job."
    "I'll invite you round one evening when he's at home. He can tell you himself what it's like."
    He drew up outside her house.
    "I think everybody's pleased you've come back," she said as a parting shot.
    Wallander felt immediately that it wasn't true, that it was more of an attempt to cheer him up, but he muttered his appreciation.
    Then he drove straight home to Mariagatan, flung his wet jacket over the back of a chair, and lay on the bed, still in his dirty shoes. He dozed off and dreamed that he was asleep among the sand dunes at Skagen.
    When he woke up an hour later, he did not know where he was at first. Then he took his shoes off and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He could see through the window how the street light beyond was swaying in the gusting wind.
    Winter is almost upon us, he thought. Snow and storms and chaos. And I am a police officer again. Life tosses us all hither and thither. Is there anything we can truly decide for ourselves?
    He sat for a long time staring into his coffee cup. It was cold by the time he got up to fetch a notepad and pencil from a kitchen drawer.
    Now I really must become a police officer again, he told himself. I get paid for thinking constructive thoughts, investigating and sorting out cases, not for worrying about my own petty problems.
    It was gone midnight by the time he put down his pen and stretched his back. Then he pored over the summary he had written in his notepad. All about his feet the floor was littered with crumpled-up sheets of paper.
    I can't see any pattern, he admitted. There are no obvious connections between the accident that wasn't an accident and the fact that a few weeks later Sten Torstensson