“I thought Martinson was at the hospital,” said Wallander, surprised.
“He traded with Svedberg.”
“So where the hell is he now?”
No one knew where Martinson was. Wallander called the switchboard and found out that Martinson had left an hour earlier.
“Call him at home,” said Wallander.
Then he looked at his watch.
“We’ll meet again in the morning at ten o’clock,” he said. “Thanks for coming, see you then.”
Everyone else had left by the time the switchboard connected him with Martinson.
“Sorry,” said Martinson. “I forgot we had a meeting.”
“How’s it going with the children?”
“Damned if Rickard doesn’t have chicken pox.”
“I mean the Lövgrens’ children. The two daughters.”
Martinson sounded surprised when he answered. “Didn’t you get my message?”
“I didn’t get any message.”
“I gave it to one of the girls at the switchboard.”
“I’ll take a look. But tell me first.”
“One daughter, who’s fifty years old, lives in Canada. Winnipeg, wherever that is. I completely forgot that it was the middle of the night over there when I called. She refused to believe what I was saying. Not until her husband came to the phone did it dawn on them what had happened. He’s a cop, by the way. A real Canadian Mountie. I’m going to call them back tomorrow. But she’s flying over, of course. The other daughter was harder to reach, even though she lives in Sweden. She’s forty-seven, the manager of the buffet at the Ruby Hotel in Göteborg. Evidently she’s training a handball team in Skien, in Norway. But they promised that they’d get word to her about what happened. I gave the switchboard a list of the Lövgrens’ other relatives. There are lots of them. Most of them live in Skane. Some of them will probably call tomorrow when they see the story in the papers.”
“Good work,” said Wallander. “Can you relieve me at the hospital tomorrow morning at six? If she doesn’t die by then.”
“I’ll be there,” said Martinson. “But is it such a good idea for you to take that shift?”
“Why not?”
“You’re the one heading the investigation. You ought to get some sleep.”
“I can handle it for one night,” replied Wallander and hung up.
He sat completely still and stared into space.
Are we going to figure this one out? he thought. Or do they already have too much of a head start?
He put on his overcoat, turned off the desk lamp, and left his office. The corridor leading to the reception area was deserted. He stuck his head in the glass cubicle where the operator on duty sat leafing through a magazine. He noticed that it was a racing form. Is everyone playing the ponies these days? he thought.
“Martinson supposedly left some papers for me,” he said.
The operator, who was named Ebba and had been with the police department for more than thirty years, gave a friendly nod and pointed at the counter.
“We have a girl here from the youth employment bureau,” she said, smiling. “Sweet and nice but completely incompetent. Maybe she forgot to give them to you.”
Wallander nodded.
“I’m leaving now,” he said. “I’ll probably be home in a couple of hours. If anything happens, call me at my father’s place.”
“You’re thinking of that poor woman at the hospital,” said Ebba.
Wallander nodded.
“What a terrible thing to happen.”
“Yes, it is,” said Wallander. “Sometimes I wonder what’s happening to this country anyway.”
When he went out through the glass doors of the police station the wind hit him in the face. It was cold and biting, and he hunched over as he hurried to the parking lot. As long as it doesn’t snow, he thought. Not until we catch whoever it was who paid the visit in Lenarp.
He crawled into his car and spent a long time looking through the cassettes he kept in the glove compartment. Without really making a decision, he shoved Verdi’s Requiem into the tape deck. He had expensive speakers in the car, and the magnificent tones surged against his eardrums. He drove off and turned right, down Dragongatan toward Osterleden. A few leaves whirled across the road, and a bicyclist strained against the wind. The clock on the dashboard said it was six. Hunger was gnawing at him again, and he crossed the main road and turned in at OK’s Cafeteria. I’ll change my eating habits tomorrow, he thought. If I get to Dad’s place a minute past seven, he’ll accuse me of abandoning him.
He ate a hamburger special.
He ate so fast that it gave him diarrhea.
As he sat on the toilet he noticed that he ought to change his underwear.
Suddenly he realized how tired he was.
He didn’t get up until someone banged on the door.
He filled the tank with gas and drove east, through Sandskogen, and turned off at the road toward Kåseberga. His father lived in a little house that seemed to have been flung onto a field between Löderup and the sea.
It was four minutes to seven when he swung onto the gravel driveway in front of the house.
That gravel driveway had been the cause of the latest and most lengthy of his quarrels with his father. Before, it had been a lovely cobblestone courtyard as old as the farmhouse where his father lived. Suddenly one day he got the idea of covering the courtyard with gravel. When Wallander had protested, his father was outraged. “I don’t need a guardian!” he had shouted.
“Why do you have to destroy the beautiful cobblestone courtyard?” Wallander had asked.
Then they had quarreled.
And now the courtyard was covered with gray gravel that crunched under the car’s tires.
He could see that a light was on in the shed.
Next time it could be my father, he thought suddenly.
The moonlight killer who might pick him out as a suitable old man to rob, maybe even murder.
No one would hear him scream for help. Not in this wind, with five hundred meters to the nearest neighbor. Who was an old man himself.
He listened to the end of “Dies irae” before he climbed out of the car and stretched.
He went over to the shed, which was his father’s studio. That’s where he painted his pictures, as he had always done.
It was one of Wallander’s earliest childhood memories. The way his father had always smelled of turpentine and oil. And the way he was always standing in front of his sticky easel in his dark-blue overalls and cut-off rubber boots.
Not until Kurt Wallander was five or six years old did he realize that his father wasn’t working on the exact same painting year after year.
It was the motif that never changed.
He painted a melancholy autumn landscape, with a shiny mirror of a lake, a crooked tree with bare branches in the foreground, and, far off on the horizon, mountain ranges surrounded by clouds that shimmered in an improbably colorful setting sun.
Now and then he would add a wood grouse standing on a stump at the far left edge of the painting.
At regular intervals their home was visited by men in silk suits with heavy gold rings on their fingers. They came in rusty vans or shiny American gas-guzzlers, and they bought the paintings, with or without the grouse.
His father had been painting the same motif all his life. The family had lived off his paintings, which were sold at fairs and auctions.
They had lived in Klagshamm outside Malmö, in an old converted smithy. Kurt Wallander had grown up there with his sister Kristina, and their childhood had always been wrapped in the intense smell of turpentine.
Not until his father was widowed did he sell the old smithy and move out to the country. Wallander had never really understood why, since his father was continually complaining about the loneliness.
He opened the door to the shed and saw that his father was working on a painting without the grouse. Just now he was painting the tree in the fore
ground. He muttered a greeting and continued dabbing with his brush.
Wallander poured a cup of coffee from a dirty pot that stood on a smoking spirit stove.
He looked at his father, who was almost eighty years old, short and stooped, but still radiating energy and strength of will.
Am I going to look like him when I get old? he thought.
As a boy I took after my mother. Now I look like my grandfather. Maybe I’ll be like my father when I get old.
“Have a cup of coffee,” said his father. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I got one,” said Wallander.
“Then have another,” said his father.
He’s in a bad mood, thought Wallander. He’s a tyrant with his changeable moods. What does he want with me, anyway?
“I’ve got a lot to do,” said Wallander. “Actually I have to work all night. I thought there was something you wanted.”
“Why do you have to work all night?”
“I have to sit at the hospital.”
“How come? Who’s sick?”
Wallander sighed. Even though he had carried out hundreds of interrogations himself, he would never be able to match his father’s persistence in questioning him. And his father didn’t even give a damn about his career as a cop. Wallander knew that his father had been deeply disappointed when he had decided, at eighteen, to become a policeman. But he was never able to find out what sort of hopes his father had actually had for him.
He had tried to talk about it, but never with any success.
On the few occasions when he had spent time with his sister Kristina, who lived in Stockholm and owned a beauty salon, he had tried to ask her, since he knew that she and his father were on good terms. But even she had no idea.
He drank the lukewarm coffee and thought that maybe his father had wanted him to take over the brush one day and continue to paint the same motif for yet another generation.
Suddenly his father put down his brush and wiped his hands on a dirty rag. When he came over to him and poured a cup of coffee, Wallander could smell the stink of dirty clothes and his father’s unwashed body.
How do you tell your father that he smells bad? he thought.
Maybe he has gotten so old that he can’t take care of himself any longer.
And then what do I do?
I can’t have him at my place, that would never work. We’d murder each other.
He watched his father rub his nose with one hand as he slurped his coffee.
“You haven’t come out to see me in a long time,” his father said reproachfully.
“I was here the day before yesterday, wasn’t I?”
“For half an hour!”
“Well, I was here, anyway.”
“Why don’t you want to visit me?”
“I do! It’s just that I have a lot to do sometimes.”
His father sat down on an old rickety sled that creaked under his weight.
“I just wanted to tell you that your daughter came to visit me yesterday.”
Wallander was astounded.
“You mean Linda was here?”
“Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”
“Why did she come?”
“She wanted a painting.”
“A painting?”
“Unlike you, she actually appreciates what I do.”
Wallander had a hard time believing what he was hearing.
Linda had never shown any interest in her grandfather, except when she was very small.
“What did she want?”
“A painting, I told you! You’re not listening!”
“I am listening! Where did she come from? Where was she going? How the hell did she get out here? Do I have to drag everything out of you?”
“She came in a car,” said his father. “A young man with a black face drove her.”
“What do mean by black?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of Negroes? He was very polite and spoke excellent Swedish. I gave her the painting and then they left. I thought you’d like to know, since you have such poor contact with each other.”
“Where did they go?”
“How should I know?”
Wallander realized that neither of them knew where Linda actually lived. Occasionally she slept at her mother’s house. But then she would quickly disappear again, off on her own mysterious paths.
I’ve got to talk to Mona, he thought. Separated or not, we have to talk to each other. I can’t stand this anymore.
“Do you want a drink?” his father asked.
The last thing Wallander wanted was a drink. But he knew that it was useless to say no.
“All right, thanks,” he said.
A path connected the shed with the house, which was low-ceilinged and sparsely furnished. Wallander noticed at once that it was messy and dirty.
He doesn’t even see the mess, he thought. And why didn’t I notice it before?
I’ve got to talk to Kristina about it. He can’t keep living alone like this.
At that instant the telephone rang.
His father picked it up.
“It’s for you,” he said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.
Linda, he thought. It’s got to be her.
It was Rydberg calling from the hospital.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“Did she wake up?”
“As a matter of fact, she did. For ten minutes. The doctors thought the crisis was over. Then she died.”
“Did she say anything?”
Rydberg sounded thoughtful when he answered. “I think you’d better come back to town.”
“What did she say?”
“Something you won’t want to hear.”
“I’ll come to the hospital.”
“It’s better if you go to the station. She’s dead, I told you.”
Wallander hung up. “I’ve got to go,” he said.
His father glared at him. “You don’t like me,” he said.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” replied Wallander, wondering what to do about the squalor his father was living in. “I’ll come tomorrow for sure. We can sit and talk. We can fix dinner. We can play poker if you want.”
Even though Wallander was a miserable card player, he knew that a game would mollify his father. “I’ll be here at seven,” he said.
Then he drove back to Ystad.
At five minutes to eight he walked back in the same glass doors he had walked out of two hours earlier. Ebba nodded at him.
“Rydberg is waiting in the lunchroom,” she said.
That’s where he was, hunched over a cup of coffee. When Wallander saw the other man’s face, he knew that something unpleasant was in store for him.
Chapter Four
Wallander and Rydberg were alone in the lunchroom. In the distance they could hear the ruckus a drunk was making, protesting loudly about being taken into custody. Otherwise it was quiet. Only the faint whine from the radiator could be heard.
Wallander sat down across from Rydberg.
“Take off your overcoat,” said Rydberg. “Or else you’ll freeze when you go back out in the wind again.”
“First I want to hear what you have to say. Then I’ll decide whether to take off my coat or not.”
Rydberg shrugged. “She died,” he said.
“So I understand.”
“But she woke up for a while right before she died.”
“And then she spoke?”
“That may be putting it too strongly. She whispered. Or wheezed.”
“Did you get it on tape?”
Rydberg shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” he said. “It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. Most of it was just raving. But I wrote down what I’m sure I understood.”
Rydberg took a beat-up notebook out of his pocket. It was held together by a wide rubber band, and a pencil was stuck in between the pages.
“She said her husband’s name,” Rydber
g began. “I think she was trying to find out how he was. Then she mumbled something I couldn’t understand. That’s when I tried to ask her, ‘Who was it that came in the night? Did you know them? What did they look like?’ Those were my questions. I repeated them for as long as she was conscious. And I actually think she understood what I was saying.”
“So what did she answer?”
“I only managed to catch one word. 'Foreign.”’
“‘Foreign’?”
“That’s right. ‘Foreign.’”
“Did she mean that whoever attacked both her and her husband were foreigners?”
Rydberg nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“Do I usually say I’m sure if I’m not?”
“No.”
“Well then. So now we know that her last message to the world was the word ‘foreign.’ As a reply to who committed this insane crime.”
Wallander took off his coat and got a cup of coffee.
“What the hell could she have meant?” he muttered.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking about that while I waited for you,” replied Rydberg. “Maybe they looked un-Swedish. Maybe they spoke a foreign language. Maybe they spoke broken Swedish. There are lots of possibilities.”
“What does an un-Swedish person look like?” asked Wallander.
“You know what I mean,” said Rydberg. “Or rather, you can guess what she thought and what she meant.”
“So it could have been her imagination?”
Rydberg nodded. “That’s quite possible.”
“But not particularly likely?”
“Why should she use the last minutes of her life to say something that wasn’t true? Old people don’t usually lie.”
Wallander took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
“This means we have to start looking for one or more foreigners,” he said. “I wish she’d said something different.”
“It’s damn unpleasant, all right.”
They sat in silence for a moment, each lost in his own thoughts. They could no longer hear the drunk out in the hall.
It was nineteen minutes to nine.
“You can just picture it,” Wallander said after a while. “The only clue the police have to the double murder in Lenarp is that the perpetrators are probably foreigners.”
“I can think of something much worse,” replied Rydberg.
Faceless Killers: A Mystery Page 4