Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  The door opened and Näslund stuck his head in.

  “Hi,” he said. “Should I show him in?”

  “Show who in?”

  Naslund looked at his watch.

  “It’s nine o’clock. You told me yesterday that you wanted Klas Månson here for interrogation at nine.”

  “Who’s Klas Månson?”

  Naslund looked at him quizzically. “The guy who robbed the store on Osterleden. Did you forget about him?”

  Then he remembered, and at the same time he realized that Naslund obviously hadn’t heard about the murder that had been committed in the night.

  “You take over Månson,” he said. “We had a murder last night out in Lenarp. Maybe a double murder. An old couple. You can take over Månson. But put it off for a while. The first thing we have to do is plan the investigation at Lenarp.”

  “Månson’s lawyer is already here,” said Naslund. “If I send him away, he’s going to raise hell.”

  “Do a preliminary questioning,” said Wallander. “If the lawyer makes a fuss later, it can’t be helped. Set up an investigation meeting in my office for ten o’clock. Make sure everyone comes.”

  Suddenly he was in motion. Now he was a cop again. The anguish about his daughter and his wife who had left him would have to wait. Right now he had to begin the arduous hunt for a murderer.

  He moved the piles of paper off his desk, tore up a soccer lottery form he wouldn’t get around to filling out anyway, and went out to the lunchroom and poured a cup of coffee.

  At ten o’clock everyone gathered in his office. Rydberg had been called in from the crime scene and was sitting on a Windsor chair by the window. A total of seven police officers, sitting and standing, filled the room. Wallander phoned the hospital and managed to extract the information that the old woman’s condition was still critical.

  Then he told all of them what had happened.

  “It was worse than you could imagine,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say so, Rydberg?”

  “That’s right,” replied Rydberg. “Like an American movie. It even smelled like blood. It doesn’t usually do that.”

  “We have to catch whoever did this,” Wallander concluded his presentation. “We can’t just let maniacs like this run around loose.”

  The whole room fell silent. Rydberg was drumming his fingertips on the arm of the chair. A woman was heard laughing in the corridor outside.

  Kurt Wallander looked around. They were all his colleagues. None of them was his close friend. And yet they were a team.

  “Well,” he said, “what are we waiting for? Let’s get started.”

  It was twenty minutes to eleven.

  Chapter Three

  At four in the afternoon Kurt Wallander discovered that he was hungry. He hadn’t had a chance to eat lunch all day.

  After the investigation meeting that morning he had spent all his time organizing the hunt for the murderers in Lenarp. He kept thinking about the murderer in the plural. He had a hard time imagining that one person could have carried out that bloodbath.

  It was dark outside when he sank into his chair behind his desk to try and put together a statement for the press. There was a stack of phone messages on his desk, left by one of the women from the switchboard. After searching in vain for his daughter’s name among the slips, he put the whole pile in his in-box. To avoid subjecting himself to the unpleasantness of standing in front of the TV cameras of News South and telling them that at present the police had no leads regarding the criminal or criminals who had perpetrated the heinous murder of the old man, Wallander had appealed to Rydberg to take on that task. But he had to write the press release himself. He took a sheet of paper out of a desk drawer. But what would he write? The day’s work had hardly involved more than collecting a large number of question marks.

  It had been a day of waiting. In the intensive-care unit the old woman who had survived the noose was fighting for her life.

  Would they ever find out what she had seen on that appalling night in the isolated farmhouse? Or would she die before she could tell them anything?

  Wallander looked out the window, into the darkness.

  Instead of a press release he started writing a summary of what had been done that day and what the police actually had to go on.

  Nothing, he thought when he was finished. Two old people with no enemies, no hidden cash, were brutally attacked and tortured. The neighbors heard nothing. Not until the perpetrators were gone did they notice that a window had been smashed and hear the old woman’s cry for help. Rydberg had not yet found any clues. That was it.

  Old people on isolated farms have always been subjected to robbery. They have also been bound, beaten, and sometimes killed.

  But this is something else, thought Wallander. A noose tells its gruesome story of viciousness and hate, maybe even revenge.

  There was something about this attack that didn’t make sense.

  Now all they could do was hope. Several police patrols had been talking to the inhabitants of Lenarp all day long. Perhaps someone had seen something? When old people living in isolated locations were attacked, the perpetrators had often cased the place in advance. Maybe Rydberg would find some clues at the crime scene in spite of everything.

  Wallander looked at the clock.

  How long has it been since I last called the hospital? Forty-five minutes? An hour?

  He decided to wait until after he had written his press release.

  He put on the headphones of his Walkman and popped in a cassette of Jussi Björling. The scratchy sound of the ’30s recordings could not detract from the magnificence of the music from Rigoletto.

  The press release turned out to be eight lines long. Wallander took it to one of the clerks and asked her to type it up and then make copies. At the same time he was reading through a questionnaire that was supposed to be mailed out to everyone who lived in the area around Lenarp. Had anyone seen anything unusual? Anything that could be tied to the brutal attack? He didn’t have much faith that the questionnaire would produce anything but inconvenience. He knew that the telephones would ring incessantly and two officers would have to be assigned full time to listen to useless reports.

  Still, it has to be done, he thought. At least we can ascertain that no one saw anything.

  He went back to his office and phoned the hospital again. But nothing had changed. The old woman was still fighting for her life.

  Just as he put down the phone, Naslund came in.

  “I was right,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Månson’s lawyer hit the roof.”

  Wallander shrugged. “We’ll just have to live with it.”

  Naslund scratched his forehead and asked how the investigation was going.

  “Not a thing so far. We’ve gotten started. That’s about it.”

  “I noticed that the preliminary forensic report came in.”

  Wallander raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t I get it?”

  “It was in Hanson’s office.”

  “Well, that’s not where it’s supposed to be, damn it!”

  Wallander got up and went out in the hall. It was always the same, he thought. Papers didn’t wind up where they were supposed to go. Even though more and more police work was recorded on computers, important papers had a tendency to get lost.

  Hanson sat talking on the phone when Wallander knocked and went in. He saw that Hanson’s desk was covered with poorly concealed betting slips and racing forms from various tracks around the country. At the police station it was common knowledge that Hanson spent the major part of his working day calling around to various trotting-horse trainers begging for stable tips. Then he spent his evenings figuring out innumerable betting systems that would guarantee him the greatest winnings. It was also rumored that Hanson had hit it big on one occasion. But no one knew for sure. And Hanson wasn’t exactly living high on the hog.

  When Wallander came in, Hanson put his hand over the mouthpiece.<
br />
  “The forensic report,” said Wallander. “Have you got it?”

  Hanson pushed aside a racing form from Jägersrö.

  “I was just about to take it over to you.”

  “Number four in the seventh race is a sure thing,” said Wallander, taking the plastic folder from the desk.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean it’s a sure thing.”

  Wallander walked out, leaving Hanson gaping behind him. He saw by the clock in the hall that there was half an hour left until the press conference. He went back to his office and carefully read through the doctor’s report.

  The brutal nature of the murder was thrown into even sharper relief, if possible, than when he had arrived in Lenarp that morning.

  In the first preliminary examination of the body, the doctor was not able to pinpoint the actual cause of death.

  There were just too many to choose from.

  The body had received eight deep stab or chopping wounds with a sharp, serrated implement. The doctor suggested a compass saw. In addition, the right femur was broken, as were the left upper arm and wrist. The body showed signs of burn wounds, the scrotum was swollen up, and the forehead was bashed in. The actual cause of death could not yet be determined.

  The doctor had made a note beside the official report. “An act of madness,” he wrote. “This man was subjected to enough violence to kill four or five individuals.”

  Wallander put down the report.

  He was feeling worse and worse.

  Something didn’t add up.

  Robbers who attacked old people were hardly full of hate. They were after money.

  Why this insane violence?

  When Wallander realized that he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to the question, he again read through the summary he had written. Had he forgotten something? Had he overlooked some detail that would later turn out to be significant? Even though police work was largely a matter of patiently searching for facts that could be combined with each other, he had also learned from experience that the first impression of a crime scene was important. Especially when the officer was one of the first to arrive at a scene after the crime had been committed.

  There was something in his summary that puzzled him. Had he left out some detail after all?

  He sat for a long time without coming up with what it might be.

  A woman opened the door and handed him the typed press release and the copies. On the way to the press conference he stepped into the men’s room and looked in the mirror. He noticed that he needed a haircut. His brown hair was sticking out around his ears. And he ought to lose some weight too. In the three months since his wife had so unexpectedly left him, he had put on fifteen pounds. In his apathetic loneliness he had eaten nothing but fast food and pizza, greasy hamburgers, and donuts.

  “You flabby piece of shit,” he said out loud to himself. “Do you really want to look like a pitiful old man?”

  He made a decision to change his eating habits at once. If it would help him lose weight, he might even consider taking up smoking again.

  He wondered what the real reason was. Why almost every cop was divorced. Why the wives left their husbands. Sometimes, when he read a crime novel, he discovered with a sigh that it was just as bad in fiction.

  Cops were divorced. That’s all there was to it.

  The room where the press conference was being held was full of people. He recognized most of the reporters. But there were a few unfamiliar faces too, and an adolescent girl with a pimply face was casting amorous glances at him as she adjusted her tape recorder.

  Wallander passed out the brief press release and sat down on a little dais at one end of the room. Actually, the Ystad chief of police should have been there too, but he was on his winter vacation in Spain. If Rydberg managed to finish with the TV crews, he had promised to attend. But otherwise Kurt Wallander was on his own.

  “You’ve received the press release,” he began. “I don’t have anything else to say at present.”

  “May we ask questions?” said a reporter Wallander recognized as the local stringer for Labor News.

  “That’s why I’m here,” replied Wallander.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, this is an unusually poor press release,” said the reporter. “You must be able to tell us more than this.”

  “We have no leads to the perpetrators,” said Wallander.

  “So there were more than one?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “We think there were. But we don’t know.”

  The reporter grimaced, and Wallander nodded to another reporter he recognized.

  “How was he killed?”

  “By external force.”

  “That can mean a lot of different things!”

  “We don’t know yet. The doctors aren’t finished with the forensic examination. It’ll take a couple of days.”

  The reporter had more questions, but he was interrupted by the pimply girl with the tape recorder. Wallander could see by the call letters on the lid that she was from the local radio station.

  “What did the robbers take?”

  “We don’t know,” replied Wallander. “We don’t even know if it was a robbery.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Is there anything that leads you to believe that it wasn’t a robbery?”

  “No.”

  Wallander could feel that he was sweating in the stuffy room. He remembered how as a young policeman he had dreamed of holding press conferences. But it had never been stuffy and sweaty in his dreams.

  “I asked a question,” he heard one of the reporters say from the back of the room.

  “I didn’t hear it,” said Wallander.

  “Do the police regard this as an important crime?” asked the reporter.

  Wallander was surprised at the question.

  “Naturally it’s important that we solve this murder,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Will you be needing extra resources?”

  “It’s too early to comment on that. Of course we’re hoping for a quick solution. I guess I still don’t understand your question.”

  The very young reporter with the thick glasses pushed his way forward. Wallander had never seen him before.

  “In my opinion, no one in Sweden cares about old people any longer.”

  “We do,” replied Wallander. “We will do everything we can to apprehend the perpetrators. In Skane there are many old people living alone on isolated farms. We would like to reassure them, above all, that we are doing everything we can.”

  He stood up. “We’ll let you know when we have more to report,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  The young woman from the local radio station blocked his path as he was leaving the room.

  “I have nothing more to say,” he told her.

  “I know your daughter Linda,” she said.

  Wallander stopped. “You do? How?”

  “We’ve met a few times. Here and there.”

  Wallander tried to think whether he knew her. Had the girls been schoolmates?

  She shook her head as if reading his mind.

  “We’ve never met,” she said. “You don’t know me. Linda and I ran into each other in Malmö.”

  “I see,” said Wallander. “That’s nice.”

  “I think she’s great. Could I ask you some questions now?”

  Wallander repeated into her microphone what he had said earlier. Most of all he wanted to talk about Linda, but he didn’t have a chance.

  “Say hi to her,” she said, packing up her tape recorder. “Say hi from Cathrin. Or Cattis.”

  “I will,” said Wallander. “I promise.”

  When he went back to his office he could feel a gnawing in his stomach. But was it hunger or anxiety?

  I’ve got to stop this, he thought. I’ve got to realize that my wif
e has left me. I’ve got to admit that all I can do is wait for Linda to contact me herself. I’ve got to take life as it comes...

  Just before six the investigative team gathered for another meeting. There was no news from the hospital. Wallander quickly drew up a shift schedule for the night.

  “Is that necessary?” wondered Hanson. “Just put a tape recorder in the room, then any nurse can turn it on if the old lady wakes up.”

  “It is necessary,” said Wallander. “I can take midnight to six myself. Any volunteers until midnight?”

  Rydberg nodded. “I can sit at the hospital just as well as anywhere,” he said.

  Wallander looked around. Everyone seemed pale in the glare from the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

  “Did we get anywhere?” he asked.

  “We’ve checked out Lenarp,” said Peters, who had led the door-to-door inquiry. “Everybody says they didn’t see a thing. But it usually takes a few days before people really think about it. People are pretty scared up there. It’s damned unpleasant. Almost nothing but old folks. And a terrified young Polish family that is probably here illegally. But I didn’t bother them. We’ll have to keep trying tomorrow.”

  Wallander nodded and looked at Rydberg.

  “There were plenty of fingerprints,” he said. “Maybe that will produce something. But I doubt it. It’s mostly the knot that interests me.”

  Wallander gave him a searching look. “What knot?”

  “The knot on the noose.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s unusual. I’ve never seen a knot like that before.”

  “Have you ever seen a noose before?” interrupted Hanson, who was standing in the doorway, wanting to leave.

  “Yes, I have,” replied Rydberg. “We’ll see what this knot can tell us.”

  Wallander knew that Rydberg didn’t want to say any more. But if the knot interested him, it might be important.

  “I’m driving back out to see the neighbors tomorrow morning,” said Wallander. “Has anyone tracked down the Lövgrens’ children yet, by the way?”

  “Martinson’s working on it,” said Hanson.