Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  “Ambulance,” he said, swallowing. “Hurry up.”

  Then they bent over the woman, half-lying on the floor, tied to a chair. Whoever tied her up had rigged a noose around her scrawny neck. She was breathing feebly, and Wallander yelled at Peters to find a knife. They cut off the thin rope that was digging deep into her wrists and neck, and laid her gently on the floor. Wallander held her head on his knee.

  He looked at Peters and realized that they were both thinking the same thing. Who could have been cruel enough to do this? Tying a noose on a helpless old woman.

  “Wait outside,” said Wallander to the sobbing old man standing in the doorway. “Wait outside and don’t touch anything.”

  He could hear that his voice sounded like a roar.

  I’m yelling because I’m scared, he thought. What kind of world are we living in?

  Almost twenty minutes passed before the ambulance arrived. The woman’s breathing grew more and more irregular, and Wallander was starting to worry that it might come too late.

  He recognized the ambulance driver, who was named Antonson.

  His assistant was a young man he had never seen before.

  “Hi,” said Wallander. “He’s dead. But the woman here is alive. Try to keep her that way.”

  “What happened?” asked Antonson.

  “I hope she’ll be able to tell us, if she makes it. Hurry up now!”

  When the ambulance had vanished down the gravel road, Wallander and Peters went outside. Norén was wiping his face with a handkerchief. The dawn was slowly approaching. Wallander looked at his wristwatch. Seven twenty-eight.

  “It’s a slaughterhouse in there,” said Peters.

  “Worse,” replied Wallander. “Call in and request a full team. Tell Norén to seal off the area. I’m going to talk to the old man.”

  Just as he said that, he heard something that sounded like a scream. He jumped, and then the scream came again.

  It was a horse whinnying.

  They went over to the stable and opened the door. Inside in the dark a horse was rustling in its stall. The place smelled of warm manure and urine.

  “Give the horse some water and hay,” said Wallander. “Maybe there are other animals here too.”

  When he emerged from the stable he gave a shudder. Black birds were screeching in a lone tree far out in a field. He sucked the cold air into his throat and noticed that the wind was picking up.

  “Your name is Nyström,” he said to the man, who by now had stopped weeping. “You have to tell me what happened here. If I understand correctly, you live in the house next door.”

  The man nodded. “What happened here?” he asked in a quavering voice.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me,” said Wallander. “Maybe we could go into your house.”

  In the kitchen a woman in an old-fashioned dressing gown sat slumped on a chair crying. But as soon as Wallander introduced himself she got up and started to make coffee. The men sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander saw the Christmas decorations still hanging in the window. An old cat lay on the windowsill, staring at him without blinking. He reached out his hand to pet it.

  “He bites,” said Nyström. “He’s not much used to people. Except for Hanna and me.”

  Kurt Wallander thought of his wife who had left him and wondered where to begin. A bestial murder, he thought. And if we’re really unlucky, it’ll soon be a double murder.

  Suddenly he had an idea. He knocked on the kitchen window to get Norén’s attention.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up.

  “The horse had both water and hay,” said Norén. “There weren’t any other animals.”

  “See that someone goes over to the hospital,” said Wallander. “In case she wakes up and says something. She must have seen everything.”

  Norén nodded.

  “Send somebody with good ears,” said Wallander. “Preferably someone who can read lips.”

  When he came back into the kitchen he took off his overcoat and laid it on the kitchen sofa.

  “Now tell me,” he said. “Tell me, and don’t leave anything out. Take your time.”

  After two cups of weak coffee he could see that neither Nyström nor his wife had anything significant to tell. He got some of the chronology and the life story of the couple who had been attacked.

  He had two questions left.

  “Do you know if they kept any large sums of money in the house?” he asked.

  “No,” said Nyström. “They put everything in the bank. Their pensions too. And they weren’t rich. When they sold off the fields and the animals and the machinery, they gave the money to their children.”

  The second question seemed meaningless to him. But he asked it anyway. In this situation he had no choice.

  “Do you know if they had any enemies?” he asked.

  “Enemies?”

  “Anybody who could have possibly done this?”

  They didn’t seem to understand his question.

  He repeated it.

  The two old people looked at each other, uncomprehending.

  “People like us don’t have any enemies,” the man replied. Wallander noticed that he sounded offended. “Sometimes we quarrel with each other. About maintaining a wagon path or the location of the pasture boundaries. But we don’t kill each other.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “I’ll be in touch again soon,” he said, getting up with his coat in his hand. “If you think of anything else, don’t hesitate to call the police. Ask for me, Inspector Wallander.”

  “What if they come back...?” asked the old woman.

  Wallander shook his head.

  “They won’t be back,” he said. “It was most likely robbers. They never come back. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  He thought that he ought to say something more to reassure them. But what? What security could he offer to people who had just seen their closest neighbor brutally murdered? Who had to wait and see whether a second person was going to die?

  “The horse,” he said. “Who will give it hay?”

  “We will,” replied the old man. “We’ll see that she gets what she needs.”

  Wallander went outside into the cold dawn. The wind had increased, and he hunched his shoulders as he walked toward his car. Actually he ought to stay here and give the crime-scene technicians a hand. But he was freezing and feeling lousy and didn’t want to stay any longer than necessary. Besides, he saw through the window that it was Rydberg who had come with the team’s car. That meant that the techs wouldn’t finish their work until they had turned over and inspected every lump of clay at the crime scene. Rydberg, who was supposed to retire in a couple of years, was a passionate policeman. Although he might appear pedantic and slow, his presence was a guarantee that a crime scene would be treated the way it should be.

  Rydberg had rheumatism and used a cane. Now he came limping across the yard toward Wallander.

  “It’s not pretty,” Rydberg said. “It looks like a slaughterhouse in there.”

  “You’re not the first one to say that,” said Wallander.

  Rydberg looked serious. “Have we got any leads?”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “Nothing at all?” There was something of an entreaty in Rydberg’s voice.

  “The neighbors didn’t hear or see anything. I think it’s ordinary robbers.”

  “You call this insane brutality ordinary?”

  Rydberg was upset, and Wallander regretted his choice of words. “I meant, of course, that it was some particularly fiendish individuals who were at it last night. The type who make their living picking out farms in solitary locations where lonely old people live.”

  “We’ve got to catch these guys,” said Rydberg. “Before they strike again.”

  “You’re right,” said Wallander. “If we don’t catch anyone else this year, we’ve got to catch these guys.”

  He got into his car and drove
off. On the narrow farm road he almost collided with a car coming around a curve toward him at high speed. He recognized the man driving. It was a reporter who worked for one of the big national papers and always showed up whenever something of more than local interest happened in the Ystad area.

  Wallander drove back and forth through Lenarp a few times. There were lights in the windows, but no one was outside.

  What are they going to think when they find out? he wondered to himself.

  He was feeling uneasy. The discovery of the old woman with the noose around her neck had shaken him. The cruelty of it was incomprehensible. Who would do something like that? Why not hit her over the head with an axe so it would all be over in an instant? Why torture her?

  He tried to plan the investigation in his head as he drove slowly through the little town. At the crossroads toward Blentarp he stopped, turned up the heat in the car because he was cold, and then sat completely still, gazing off toward the horizon.

  He was the one who would have to lead the investigation, he knew that. No one else was even likely. After Rydberg, he was the criminal detective in Ystad who had the most experience, despite the fact that he was only forty-two years old.

  Much of the investigative work would be routine. Crime scene examination, questioning people who lived in Lenarp and along the escape routes the robbers may have taken. Had anyone seen anything suspicious? Anything unusual? The questions were already echoing through his mind.

  But Kurt Wallander knew from experience that farm robberies were often difficult to solve.

  What he could hope for was that the old woman would survive.

  She had seen what happened. She knew.

  But if she died, the double murder would be hard to solve.

  He felt uneasy.

  Under normal circumstances the uneasiness would have spurred him on to greater energy and activity. Since those were the prerequisites for all police work, he had imagined that he was a good cop. But right now he felt unsure of himself and tired.

  He forced himself to shift into first gear. The car rolled a few meters. Then he stopped again.

  It was as if he just now realized what he had witnessed on that frozen winter morning.

  The meaninglessness and cruelty of the attack on the helpless old couple scared him.

  Something had happened that shouldn’t have happened here at all.

  He looked out the car window. The wind was rushing and whistling around the car doors.

  I have to get started, he thought.

  It’s just like Rydberg said.

  We’ve got to catch whoever did this.

  He drove straight to the hospital in Ystad and took the elevator up to the intensive-care unit. In the corridor he noticed at once the young police cadet Martinson sitting on a chair outside a room.

  Wallander could feel himself getting annoyed.

  Was there really no one else available to send to the hospital but a young, inexperienced police cadet? And why was he sitting outside the door? Why wasn’t he sitting at the bedside, ready to catch the slightest whisper from the brutalized woman?

  “Hi,” said Wallander, “how’s it going?”

  “She’s unconscious,” replied Martinson. “The doctors don’t seem too hopeful.”

  “Why are you sitting out here? Why aren’t you in the room?”

  “They said they’d tell me if anything happened.”

  Wallander noticed that Martinson was starting to feel unsure of himself.

  I sound like some grumpy old schoolteacher, he thought.

  He carefully pushed open the door and looked in. Various machines were sucking and pumping in death’s waiting room. Hoses undulated like transparent worms along the walls. A nurse was standing there reading a chart when he opened the door.

  “You can’t come in here,” she said sharply.

  “I’m a police inspector,” replied Wallander feebly. “I just wanted to hear how she’s doing.”

  “You’ve been asked to wait outside,” said the nurse.

  Before Wallander could answer, a doctor came rushing into the room. He thought the doctor looked surprisingly young.

  “We would prefer not to have any unauthorized persons in here,” said the young doctor when he caught sight of Wallander.

  “I’m leaving. But I just wanted to hear how she’s doing. My name is Wallander, and I’m a police inspector. Homicide,” he added, unsure whether that made any difference. “I’m heading the investigation of the person or persons who did this. How is she?”

  “It’s amazing that she’s still alive,” said the doctor, nodding to Wallander to step over to the bed. “We can’t tell yet the extent of the internal injuries she may have suffered. First we have to see whether she survives. But her windpipe has been severely traumatized. As if someone had tried to strangle her.”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” said Wallander, looking at the thin face visible among the sheets and hoses.

  “She should have been dead,” said the doctor.

  “I hope she survives,” said Wallander. “She’s the only witness we’ve got.”

  “We hope all our patients survive,” replied the doctor sternly, studying a monitor where green lines moved in uninterrupted waves.

  Wallander left the room after the doctor insisted that he couldn’t tell him anything. The prognosis was uncertain. Maria Lövgren might die without regaining consciousness. There was no way to know.

  “Can you read lips?” Wallander asked the police cadet.

  “No,” Martinson replied in surprise.

  “That’s too bad,” said Wallander and left.

  From the hospital he drove straight to the brown police station that lay on the road out toward the east end of town.

  He sat down at his desk and looked out the window, over at the old red water tower.

  Maybe the times require another type of cop, he thought. Cops who don’t react when they’re forced to go into a human slaughterhouse on an early January morning in the countryside of southern Sweden. Cops who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone.

  The hospital, he thought at once.

  Now they’re calling to say that Maria Lövgren is dead.

  But did she manage to wake up? Did she say anything?

  He stared at the ringing telephone.

  Damn, he thought. Damn.

  Anything but that.

  But when he picked up the receiver, it was his daughter. He gave a start and almost dropped the phone on the floor.

  “Papa,” she said, and he heard the coin dropping into the pay phone.

  “Hi,” he said. “Where are you calling from?”

  Just so it’s not Lima, he thought. Or Katmandu. Or Kinshasa.

  “I’m here in Ystad.”

  He was suddenly happy. That meant he’d get to see her.

  “I came to visit you,” she said. “But I’ve changed my plans. I’m at the train station. I’m leaving now. I just wanted to tell you that at least I thought about seeing you.”

  Then the conversation was cut off, and he was left sitting there with the receiver in his hand.

  It was like holding something dead, something hacked off in his hand.

  That damn kid, he thought. Why does she do things like this?

  His daughter Linda was nineteen. Until she was fifteen their relationship had been good. She came to him rather than to her mother whenever she had a problem or when there was something she really wanted to do but didn’t quite dare. He had seen her metamorphose from a chubby little girl to a young woman with a defiant beauty. Before she was fifteen, she never gave any hint that she was carrying around some secret demons that one day would drive her into a precarious and inscrutable landscape.

  One spring day, soon after her fifteenth birthday, Linda had suddenly and without warning tried to commit suicide. It happened on a Saturday afternoon. Wallander had been fixing one of the garden chairs and his
wife was washing the windows. He had put down his hammer and gone into the house, driven by a sudden uneasiness. Linda was lying on the bed in her room, and she had used a razor to cut both her wrists and her throat. Afterwards, when it was all over, the doctor told Wallander that she would have died if he hadn’t come in when he did and had the presence of mind to apply pressure bandages.

  He never got over the shock. All contact between him and Linda was broken. She pulled away, and he never managed to understand what had driven her to attempt suicide. When she finished school she took a string of odd jobs, and would abruptly disappear for long periods of time. Twice his wife had pressed him to report her missing. His colleagues had seen his pain when Linda became the object of his own investigation. But one day she would turn up again, and the only way he could follow her journeys was to go through her pockets and leaf through her passport on the sly.

  Hell, he thought. Why didn’t you stay? Why did you change your mind?

  The telephone rang again and he snatched up the receiver.

  “This is Papa,” Wallander said without thinking.

  “What do you mean?” said his father. “What do you mean by picking up the phone and saying Papa? I thought you were a cop.”

  “I don’t have time to talk to you right now. Can I call you back later?”

  “No, you can’t. What’s so important?”

  “Something serious happened this morning. I’ll call you later.”

  “So what happened?”

  His elderly father called him almost every day. On several occasions Wallander had told the switchboard not to put through any calls from him. But then his father saw through his ruse and started making up phony identities and disguising his voice to fool the operators.

  Wallander saw only one possibility of evading him.

  “I’ll come out and see you tonight,” he said. “Then we can talk.”

  His father reluctantly let himself be persuaded. “Come at seven. I’ll have time to see you then.”

  “I’ll be there at seven. See you.”

  Wallander hung up and pushed the button to block incoming calls.

  For a moment he considered taking the car and driving down to the train station to try and find his daughter. Talk to her, try to rekindle the contact that had been so mysteriously lost. But he knew that he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to risk her running away from him for good.