Faceless Killers: A Mystery by Henning Mankell
“I didn’t know about it,” said Herdin.
Wallander nodded.
“We’ll stop here,” he said, shoving aside the pad on which he had been taking notes the whole time. “But we’re going to be needing your help again.”
“Can I go now?” said Herdin, getting up.
“You can go,” replied Wallander. “But don’t leave the area without talking to us first. And if you think of anything else, let’s hear from you.”
At the door Herdin stopped as if there was something more he wanted to say.
Then he pushed open the door and was gone.
“Tell Martinson to run a check on him,” said Wallander. “We probably won’t find anything. But it’s best to make sure.”
“What do you think about what he said?” Hanson wondered.
Wallander thought about it before he answered.
“There was something convincing about him. I don’t think he was lying or imagining things or making things up. I believe he did discover that Johannes Lövgren was living a double life. I think he was protecting his sister.”
“Do you think he could have been involved?”
Wallander was certain when he replied. “Lars Herdin didn’t kill them. I don’t think he knows who did, either. I think he came to us for two reasons. He wanted to help us find one or more individuals so he can both thank them and spit in their face. As far as he’s concerned, whoever murdered Johannes did him a favor. And whoever murdered Maria ought to be beheaded in the public square.”
Hanson got up. “I’ll tell Martinson. Anything else you need right now?”
Wallander looked at his watch.
“Let’s have a meeting in my office in an hour. See if you can get hold of Rydberg. He was supposed to go into Malmö and find a guy who mends sails.”
Hanson gave him a quizzical look.
“The noose,” said Wallander. “The knot. You’ll understand later.”
Hanson left, and he was alone.
A breakthrough, he thought. All successful criminal investigations reach a point where we break through the wall. We don’t know what we’re actually going to find. But there’s always a solution somewhere.
He went over to the window and looked out into the twilight. A cold draft was seeping through the window frame, and he could see from a swaying streetlight hanging on a wire over the street that the wind had picked up some more.
He thought about Nyström and his wife.
For a whole lifetime they had lived in close contact with a man who had not been the man he pretended to be at all.
How would they react when the truth was revealed?
With denial? Bitterness? Amazement?
He went back to the desk and sat down. The first feeling of relief that followed a breakthrough in a crime investigation often faded quite rapidly. Now there was a conceivable motive, the most common of all: money. But as yet there was no invisible finger pointing in a specific direction.
There was no murderer.
Wallander cast another glance at his watch. If he hurried, he could drive down to the hot-dog kiosk at the railway station and grab a bite to eat before the meeting. This day too was going to pass without a change in his eating habits.
He was just about to put on his jacket when the phone rang.
At the same time there was a knock on the door.
The jacket landed on the floor as he grabbed the phone and shouted, “Come in.”
Rydberg stood in the doorway. He was holding a large plastic bag.
He heard Ebba’s voice on the phone.
“The TV people absolutely have to get hold of you,” she said.
He quickly decided to talk to Rydberg first before he had to deal with the media again.
“Tell them I’m in a meeting and won’t be available for half an hour,” he said.
“Sure?”
“What?”
“That you’ll talk to them in half an hour? Swedish TV doesn’t like to be kept waiting. They presume that everyone’s going to fall to their knees whenever they call.”
“I’m not going to fall to my knees for their cameras. But I can talk to them in half an hour.”
He hung up.
Rydberg had sat down in the chair by the window. He was busy drying off his hair with a paper napkin.
“I’ve got good news,” said Wallander.
Rydberg kept on drying his hair.
“I think we’ve got a motive. Money. And I think we should look for the killers among people who were close to the Lövgrens.”
Rydberg tossed the wet napkin into the wastebasket.
“I’ve had a miserable day,” he said. “Good news is welcome.”
Wallander spent five minutes recounting the meeting with Lars Herdin, the farmer. Rydberg stared gloomily at the glass shards on the floor.
“Strange story,” said Rydberg when Wallander was finished. “It’s strange enough to be completely true.”
“I’ll try to sum it all up,” Wallander went on. “Someone knew that Johannes Lövgren occasionally kept large sums of money at home. This gives us robbery as a motive. And the robbery developed into a murder. If Lars Herdin’s description of Johannes Lövgren is right, that he was an unusually stingy man, he would naturally have refused to reveal where he hid the money. Maria Lövgren, who can’t have understood much of what was happening on the last night of her life, was forced to accompany Johannes on his final journey. So the question is who, besides Lars Herdin, knew about these irregular but large cash withdrawals. If we can answer that, we can probably answer everything.”
Rydberg sat there thinking after Wallander fell silent.
“Did I leave anything out?” asked Wallander.
“I’m thinking about what she said before she died,” said Rydberg. “Foreign. And I’m thinking about what I’ve got in this plastic bag.”
He got up and dumped the contents of the bag onto the desk.
It was a pile of pieces of rope. Each one with an artfully tied knot in it.
“I spent four hours with an old sailmaker in an apartment that smelled worse than anything you can imagine,” said Rydberg with a grimace. “It turned out that this man was almost ninety years old and well on his way to senility. I wonder whether I shouldn’t contact one of the social agencies. The old man was so confused that he thought I was his son. Later one of the neighbors told me that his son has been dead for thirty years. But he sure did know about knots. When I finally got out of there, it was four hours later. These pieces of rope were a present.”
“Did you find out what you wanted to know?”
“The old man looked at the noose and said he thought the knot was ugly. Then it took me three hours to get him to tell me something about this ugly knot. In the meantime he managed to nod off for a while.”
Rydberg gathered up the bits of rope in his plastic bag as he went on. “Suddenly he started talking about his days at sea. And then he said that he’d seen that knot in Argentina. Argentine sailors used to tie that knot as a leash for their dogs.”
Wallander nodded.
“So you were right. The knot was foreign. The question now is how this all fits in with Lars Herdin’s story.”
They went out in the corridor. Rydberg went into his office, while Wallander went in to see Martinson and study the printouts. It turned out that there were incredibly exhaustive statistics on foreign-born citizens who had either committed or been suspected of committing crimes in Sweden. Martinson had also managed to run a check of previous attacks on old people. At least four different individuals or gangs had committed assault on old isolated people in Skåne during the past year. But Martinson also found out that all of them were presently incarcerated in various penal institutions. He was still waiting for word on whether any of them had been granted leave on the day in question.
They held the meeting of the investigative team in Rydberg’s office, since one of the office clerks had offered to vacuum the glass from Wallander’s floor. The pho
The investigative meeting was long. Everyone agreed that Lars Herdin’s testimony was a breakthrough. Now they had a direction to go in. At the same time they went over everything that had been learned from the conversations with the residents of Lenarp, and the people who had telephoned the police or responded to the questionnaire they had sent out. A car that had driven through a town just a few kilometers from Lenarp at high speed late on Sunday night attracted special attention. A truck driver who had started a trip to Göteborg at three o’clock in the morning had encountered the car going around a tight curve and had almost been hit. When he heard about the double murder he started thinking, and then he called the police. He wasn’t sure, but after going through pictures of various cars he decided it was probably a Nissan.
“Don’t forget rental cars,” said Wallander. “People on the move want to be comfortable these days. Robbers rent cars as often as they steal them.”
It was already six o’clock by the time the meeting was over. Wallander realized that all his colleagues were now on the offensive. There was palpable optimism now, after Lars Herdin’s visit.
He went to his office and typed up his notes from the conversation with Herdin. Hanson had turned in his already, so he could compare them. He realized at once that Lars Herdin had not been evasive. The information was the same in both.
Just after seven he put the paper aside. He had suddenly realized that the TV people had never called back. He asked the switchboard whether Ebba had left any message before she went home.
The girl who answered was a temp. “There’s nothing here,” she said.
He went out in the lunchroom and turned on the TV, on a hunch that he himself didn’t understand. The local news had just started. He leaned on a table and distractedly watched a spot about some bad business deals made by the municipality of Malmö.
He thought about Sten Widen.
And Johannes Lövgren, who had sold meat to the Nazis during the war.
He thought about himself, and about his stomach, which was far too big.
He was just about to turn off the TV when the anchorwoman started talking about the double murder in Lenarp.
In astonishment he heard that the police in Ystad were concentrating their search on an as yet unidentified foreign citizen. But the police were convinced that the perpetrators were foreigners. It could not be ruled out that they might be refugees seeking asylum.
Finally the reporter talked about Wallander himself.
Despite repeated urging, it had been impossible to get any of the detectives in charge to comment on the information, which had been obtained from anonymous but reliable sources.
The reporter was speaking in front of a background shot of the Ystad police station.
Then she segued into the weather report.
A storm was approaching from the west. The wind would increase, but there was no risk of snow. The temperature would continue to stay above freezing.
Wallander switched off the TV.
He had a hard time deciding whether he was upset or merely tired. Or maybe he was just hungry.
But someone at the police station had leaked the information.
Perhaps nowadays people got paid for passing on confidential information.
Did the state-run television monopoly have slush funds too?
Who? he thought.
It could have been anyone except me.
And why?
Was there some other explanation besides money?
Racial hatred? Fear of refugees?
As he walked back to his room, he could hear the phone ringing all the way out in the hall.
It had been a long day. Most of all he would have liked to drive home and fix some dinner. With a sigh he sat down in his chair and pulled over the phone.
I guess I’ll have to get started, he thought. Start denying the information on the TV.
And hope that nobody burns another wooden cross in the days to come.
Chapter Six
Overnight a storm moved in over Skåne. Kurt Wallander was sitting in his untidy apartment while the winter wind tore at the roof tiles. He was drinking whiskey and listening to a German recording of Aida when everything suddenly went dark and silent around him. He went over to the window and looked out into the darkness. The wind was howling, and somewhere an advertising sign was banging against the wall of a building.
The glow-in-the-dark hands on his wristwatch were pointing at ten minutes to three. Oddly enough, he did not feel in the least tired. It had been almost twelve thirty by the time he got away from the police station that night. The last person to call him had been a man who refused to give his name. He had proposed that the police join forces with the domestic nationalist movements and chase all the foreigners out of the country once and for all. For a moment Wallander had tried to listen to what the anonymous man was saying. Then he had slammed down the receiver, called the switchboard, and had all incoming calls held. He turned off the lights in his office, walked down the silent corridor, and drove straight home. When he unlocked his front door, he had decided to find out who on the police force had leaked the confidential information. It wasn’t really his business at all. If conflicts arose within the police force, it was the duty of the chief of police to intervene. In a few days Björk would be back from his winter vacation. Then he could take over. The truth would have to come out.
But by the time Wallander had drunk his first glass of whiskey, he realized that Björk wouldn’t do a thing. Even though each individual police officer was bound by an oath of silence, it could hardly be considered a criminal offense if an officer called up a contact at Swedish Television and told him what was discussed at an internal meeting in the investigative group. It would hardly be possible to prove any irregularities, either, if Swedish Television had paid its secret informant. Wallander wondered for an instant how Swedish Television entered such an expense in their books.
Then he thought that Björk wouldn’t be inclined to question internal loyalty while they were in the middle of a murder case.
By the second glass of whiskey he was again worrying about who could have been the source of the leak. Apart from himself he felt he could safely eliminate Rydberg. But why was he so sure of Rydberg? Could he see more deeply into him than into any of the others?
Now the storm had knocked out the power and he was sitting alone in the dark.
His thoughts about the murdered couple, about Lars Herdin, and about the strange knot on the noose were mixed with thoughts of Sten Widén and Mona, of Linda and his old father. Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning to him. A grinning face that laughed scornfully at all his vain attempts to manage his life.
He woke up when the power came back on. From his watch he could see that he had slept for over an hour. The record was still spinning on the phonograph. He emptied his glass and went to lie down on his bed.
I’ve got to talk to Mona, he thought. I’ve got to talk to her after all that’s happened. And I’ve got to talk to my daughter. I have to visit my father and see what I can do for him. On top of all that I really ought to catch a murderer too.
He must have dozed off again. He thought he was in his office when the telephone rang. Drowsily he stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. Who could be calling him at a quarter past four in the morning?
Before he answered, the thought crossed his mind that he hoped it was Mona.
At first he thought that the man on the line sounded like Sten Widen.
“Now you’ve got three days to make good,” said the man.
“Who is this?” said Wallander.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” replied the man. “I’m one of the Ten Thousand Redeemers.”
“I refuse to talk to anyone when I don’t know who it is,” said Wallander, now wide awake.
“Don’t hang up,” said the man. “You now have three days to make up for shielding f
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Wallander, feeling ill at ease at the unknown voice.
“Three days to catch the killers and put them on display,” said the man. “Or else we’ll take over.”
“Take over what? Who’s ‘we’?”
“Three days. No more. Then something’s going to burn.”
The connection was broken off.
Wallander turned on the kitchen light and sat down at the table. He wrote down the conversation in an old notebook that Mona used to use for her shopping lists. At the top of the pad it said “bread.” He couldn’t read what she had written below that.
It wasn’t the first time that Wallander had received an anonymous threat during his years as a cop. A man who considered himself unjustly convicted of assault and battery had harassed him with insinuating letters and nighttime phone calls several years earlier. That time it was Mona who finally got fed up and demanded that he do something about it. Wallander had sent Svedberg to the man with a warning that he was risking a long jail sentence if he didn’t stop harassing him. Another time someone had slashed his tires.
But this man’s message was different.
Something’s going to burn, he had said. Wallander realized that it could be anything from refugee camps to restaurants to houses owned by foreigners.
Three days. Seventy-two hours. That meant Friday, or Saturday the thirteenth at the latest.
He went and lay down on top of the bed again and tried to sleep.
The wind tore and ripped at the walls of the houses.
How could he sleep when he kept waiting for the man to call again?
At six thirty he was back at the police station. He exchanged a few words with the duty officer and learned that the stormy night had been peaceful at least. A tractor-trailer rig had tipped over outside Ystad, and a building under construction had blown down in Skårby. That was all.
He got some coffee and went into his office. With an old electric shaver that he kept in a desk drawer he got rid of the stubble on his cheeks. Then he went out for the morning papers. The more he looked through them, the more displeased he became. Despite the fact that he had been on the telephone talking to a number of reporters until late the night before, they printed only vague and incomplete denials that the police were concentrating their investigation on some foreign citizens. It was as though the papers had only reluctantly accepted the truth.