Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  Wallander was instantly annoyed by the man’s uncooperative attitude. Sweden had turned into a country where people more than anything else seemed to be afraid of being bothered. Nothing was holier than ingrained routine.

  “It can’t be helped,” said Wallander, taking out the documents that Anette Brolin had drawn up.

  The man read them carefully.

  “Is this really necessary?” he asked. “The whole point of a safe-deposit box is that it’s protected from inspection by outsiders.”

  “It’s necessary,” said Wallander. “And I haven’t got all day.”

  With a sigh the man got up from his desk. Wallander realized that he had prepared himself for a visit from the police.

  They passed through a barred doorway and entered the safe-deposit vault. Johannes Lövgren’s box was at the bottom in one corner. Wallander unlocked it, pulled out the drawer, and set it on the table.

  Then he raised the lid and started going through the contents. There were some papers for burial arrangements and some title deeds to the farm in Lenarp. Some old photographs and a pale envelope with old stamps on it. That was all.

  Nothing, he thought. Nothing of what I had hoped for.

  The bank man stood to the side watching him. Wallander wrote down the number of the title deed and the names on the burial documents. Then he closed the box.

  “Will that be all?” asked the bank official.

  “For the time being,” said Wallander. “Now I’d like to take a look at the accounts he had here at the bank.”

  On the way out of the vault something occurred to him. “Did anyone else besides Johannes Lövgren have access to his safe-deposit box?” he asked.

  “No,” replied the bank official.

  “Do you know whether he opened the box recently?”

  “I looked at the visitor register,” the official replied. “It has to be many years since he last opened the box.”

  The farmer was still complaining when they returned to the bank lobby. Now he had started in on a tirade about the declining price of grain.

  “I have all the information in my office,” said the man.

  Wallander sat down by his desk and went through two full sheets of printouts. Johannes Lövgren had four different accounts. Maria Lövgren was a joint signatory on two of them. The total amount in these two accounts was 90,000 kronor. Neither of the accounts had been touched in a long time. In the past few days interest had been posted. The third account was left over from Lövgren’s days as an active farmer. The balance in that one was 132 kronor and 97 öre.

  There was one more account. Its balance was almost a million kronor. Maria Lövgren was not a signatory to it. On January 1, interest of more than 90,000 kronor had been posted to the account. On January 4, Johannes Lövgren had withdrawn 27,000 kronor.

  Wallander looked up at the man sitting on the other side of the desk.

  “How far back can you trace this account?” he asked.

  “In principle, for ten years. But it’ll take some time, of course. We’ll have to run a computer search.”

  “Start with last year. I want to see all activity in this account during 1989.”

  The bank official rose and left the room. Wallander started studying the other document. It showed that Johannes Lövgren had almost 700,000 kronor in various mutual funds that the bank administered.

  So far Lars Herdin’s story seems to check out, he thought.

  He recalled the conversation with Nyström, who had sworn that his neighbor didn’t have any money.

  That’s how much you know about your neighbors, he thought.

  After about five minutes the man came back from the lobby. He handed Wallander another printout.

  On three occasions in 1989 Johannes Lövgren had withdrawn a total of 78,000 kronor. The withdrawals were made in January, July, and September.

  “May I keep these papers?” he asked.

  The man nodded.

  “I’d very much like to speak with the teller who paid out the money to Johannes Lövgren the last time,” he said.

  “Britta-Lena Bodén,” said the man.

  The woman who entered the office was quite young. Wallander thought she was hardly more than twenty years old.

  “She knows what it’s all about,” said the man.

  Wallander nodded and introduced himself. “Tell me what you know.”

  “It was quite a lot of money,” said the young woman. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it.”

  “Did he seem uneasy? Nervous?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “How did he want the money?”

  “In thousand-krona bills.”

  “Just thousands?”

  “He took a few five hundreds too.”

  “What did he put the money in?”

  The young woman had a good memory.

  “A brown briefcase. One of those old-fashioned ones with a strap around it.”

  “Would you recognize it if you saw it again?”

  “Maybe. The handle was ragged.”

  “What do you mean by ragged?”

  “The leather was cracked.”

  Wallander nodded. The woman’s memory was excellent. “Do you remember anything else?”

  “After he got the money, he left.”

  “And he was alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t see whether anyone was waiting for him outside?”

  “I wouldn’t be able to see that from the teller’s window.”

  “Do you remember what time it was?”

  The woman thought before she replied. “I went to lunch right afterwards. It was around noon.”

  “You’ve been a great help. If you remember anything else, please let me know.”

  Wallander got up and went out to the bank lobby. He stopped for a moment and looked around. The young woman was right. From the tellers’ windows it was impossible to see whether anyone was waiting on the street outside.

  The hard-of-hearing farmer was gone, and new customers had arrived. Someone speaking a foreign language was changing money at one of the tellers’ windows.

  Wallander went outside. The Merchants’ Bank was on Hamngatan close by.

  A considerably friendlier bank officer accompanied him down to the vault. When Wallander opened the steel drawer, he was disappointed at once. The box was completely empty.

  No one but Johannes Lövgren had access to this safe-deposit box either. He had rented it in 1962.

  “When was he here last?” asked Wallander.

  The answer gave him a start.

  “On January fourth,” the official replied after studying the register of visitors. “At one fifteen in the afternoon, to be precise. He stayed for twenty minutes.”

  But even when Wallander asked all the employees, no one remembered whether Lövgren had anything with him when he left the bank. No one remembered his briefcase either.

  The young woman from the Union Bank, he thought. Every bank ought to have someone like her.

  Wallander struggled down windblown back streets to Fridolf’s Bakery, where he drank some coffee and ate a cinnamon roll.

  I would like to know what Johannes Lövgren did between noon and one fifteen, he thought. What did he do between his first and second bank visits? And how did he arrive in Ystad? How did he get back? He didn’t own a car.

  He took out his notebook and brushed some crumbs off the table. After half an hour he had drawn up a summary of the questions that had to be answered as soon as possible.

  On the way back to the car he went into a menswear shop and bought a pair of socks. He was shocked at the price but paid without protesting. Before, it had always been Mona who bought his clothes. He tried to remember the last time he had bought a pair of socks.

  When he got back to his car, a parking ticket had been stuck under one windshield wiper.

  If I don’t pay it, they’ll eventually start legal proceedings against me, he thought. Then acting distric
t attorney Anette Brolin will be forced to stand up in court and take me to task.

  He tossed the parking ticket into the glove compartment and thought once again about how good-looking she was. Good-looking and charming. Then he thought about the roll he’d just eaten. It was three o’clock before Thomas Naslund called in. By that time Wallander had already decided to postpone the trip to Kristianstad to the next day.

  “I’m soaked,” said Naslund on the phone. “I’ve tramped around in the mud after Herdin all over Fyle Valley.”

  “Pump him good,” said Wallander. “Put a little pressure on him. We want to know everything he knows.”

  “Should I bring him in?” asked Naslund.

  “Go home with him. Maybe he’ll talk more freely at home at his own kitchen table.”

  The press conference started at four. Wallander looked for Rydberg, but nobody knew where he was.

  The room was full of reporters. Wallander saw that the female reporter from the local radio was there, and he quickly decided to find out what she really knew about Linda.

  He could feel his stomach churning.

  I’m repressing things, he thought. Along with everything else I don’t have time for. I’m searching for the slayers of the dead and can’t even manage to pay attention to the living.

  For a dizzying instant his entire consciousness was filled with only one urge.

  To take off. Flee. Disappear. Start a new life.

  Then he climbed up on the little dais and welcomed his audience to the press conference.

  After fifty-seven minutes it was over. Wallander thought that he probably came off pretty well by denying all rumors that the police were searching for some foreign citizens in connection with the double murder. He hadn’t been asked any questions that gave him trouble. When he stepped down from the podium, he felt satisfied.

  The young woman from the local radio waited while he was interviewed for television. As always when a TV camera was pointed at his face, he got nervous and stumbled over his words. But the reporter was satisfied and didn’t ask for another take.

  “You’ll have to get yourself some better informants,” said Wallander when it was all over.

  “I might have to at that,” replied the reporter and laughed.

  When the TV crew had left, Wallander suggested that the young woman from the local radio station accompany him to his office.

  He was less nervous in front of a radio microphone than in front of the camera.

  When she was finished, she turned off the tape recorder. Wallander was just about to bring up Linda when Rydberg knocked on the door and came in.

  “We’re almost done,” said Wallander.

  “We’re done now,” said the young woman, getting up.

  Crestfallen, Wallander watched her go. He hadn’t managed to get in one word about Linda.

  “More trouble,” said Rydberg. “They just called from the refugee receiving unit here in Ystad. A car drove into the courtyard and threw a bag of rotten turnips at an old man from Lebanon and hit him in the head.”

  “Damn,” said Wallander. “What happened?”

  “He’s at the hospital getting bandaged up. But the director is nervous.”

  “Did they get the license number?”

  “It all happened too fast.”

  Wallander thought for a moment.

  “Let’s not do anything conspicuous right now,” he said. “In the morning there will be strong denials about the foreigners in all the papers. It’ll be on TV tonight. Then we just have to hope that things calm down. We could ask the night patrols to check out the camp.”

  “I’ll tell them,” said Rydberg.

  “Come back afterwards and we’ll do an update,” said Wallander.

  It was half past eight when Wallander and Rydberg finished.

  “What do you think?” asked Wallander as they gathered up their papers.

  Rydberg scratched his forehead. “It’s obvious that this Herdin lead is a good one. As long as we can get hold of that mystery woman and the boy. There’s a lot to indicate that the solution might be close at hand. So close that it’s hard to see. But at the same time...” Rydberg broke off his sentence.

  “At the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” Rydberg went on. “There’s something funny about all this. Especially that noose. I don’t know what it is.”

  He shrugged and stood up.

  “We’ll have to continue tomorrow,” he said.

  “Do you remember seeing a brown briefcase at Lövgren’s house?” Wallander asked.

  Rydberg shook his head.

  “Not that I can recall,” he said. “But a whole bunch of old junk fell out of the wardrobes. I wonder why old people turn into such pack rats?”

  “Send someone out there tomorrow morning to look for an old brown briefcase,” said Wallander. “With a cracked handle.”

  Rydberg left. Wallander could see that his lame leg was bothering him a lot. He thought he’d better find out whether Ebba had gotten hold of Sten Widen. But he didn’t bother. Instead he looked up Anette Brolin’s home address in a department directory. To his surprise he discovered that she was almost his neighbor.

  I could ask her to dinner, he thought.

  Then he remembered that she wore a wedding ring.

  He drove home through the storm and took a bath. Then he lay down on his bed and leafed through a book about the life of Giuseppe Verdi.

  He woke up with a start a few hours later because he was cold.

  His watch showed a few minutes to midnight.

  He felt dejected about waking up. Now he’d have another sleepless night.

  Driven by his despondency, he got dressed. He thought he might as well spend a few nighttime hours at his office.

  Outside he noticed that the wind had died down. It had started to get cold again.

  Snow, he thought. It’ll be here soon.

  He turned onto Osterleden. A lone taxi was headed in the opposite direction. He drove slowly through the empty town.

  Suddenly he decided to drive past the refugee camp on the west side of town.

  The camp consisted of a number of barracks in long rows in an open field. Bright floodlights lit up the green-painted buildings.

  He stopped at a parking lot and got out of the car. The waves breaking on the beach were not far away.

  He looked at the refugee camp.

  Put a fence around it and it’d be a concentration camp, he thought.

  He was just about to get back in his car when he heard a faint crash of glass breaking.

  In the next instant there was a dull boom.

  Then tall flames were shooting out of one of the barracks.

  Chapter Seven

  He had no idea how long he stood there, stunned by the flames blazing in the winter night. Maybe it was several minutes, maybe only a few seconds. But when he managed to break through his paralysis, he had enough presence of mind to grab the car phone and call in the alarm.

  The static on the phone made it difficult to hear the man who answered.

  “The refugee camp in Ystad is on fire!” shouted Wallander. “Get the fire department out here! The wind is blowing hard.”

  “Who am I speaking with?” asked the man at the emergency switchboard.

  “This is Wallander of the Ystad police. I just happened to be driving past when the fire started.”

  “Can you identify yourself?” continued the voice on the phone, unmoved.

  “Damn it! Four-seven-one-one-two-one! Move your butt!”

  He hung up the phone to avoid answering any more questions. Besides, he knew that the emergency switchboard could identify all the police officers on duty in the district.

  Then he ran across the road toward the burning barracks. The fire was sizzling in the wind. He wondered fleetingly what would have happened if the fire had started the night before, during the heavy storm. But right now the flames were already getting a firm grip on the barracks next door.


  Why didn’t someone sound the alarm? he thought. But he didn’t know whether there were refugees living in all the barracks. The heat of the fire hit him in the face as he pounded on the door of the barracks that had so far only been licked by the flames.

  The barracks where the fire had started was now completely engulfed. Wallander tried to approach the door, but the fire drove him back. He ran around to the other side of the building. There was only one window. He banged on the glass and tried to look inside, but the smoke was so thick that he found himself staring straight into a white haze. He looked around for something to break the glass with but found nothing. Then he tore off his jacket, wrapped it around his arm, and smashed his fist through the windowpane. He held his breath to keep from inhaling the smoke and groped for the window latch. Twice he had to leap back to catch his breath before he managed to open the window.

  “Get out!” he shouted into the fire. “Get out! Get out!”

  Inside the barracks were two bunk beds. He hauled himself up onto the window ledge and felt the splinters of glass cutting into his thigh. The upper bunks were empty. But someone was lying on one of the lower bunks.

  Wallander yelled again but got no response. Then he heaved himself through the window, hitting his head on the edge of a table as he landed on the floor. He was almost suffocating from the smoke as he fumbled his way toward the bed. At first he thought he was touching a lifeless body. Then he realized that what he had taken for a person was merely a rolled-up mattress. At the same moment his jacket caught fire and he threw himself headfirst out the window. From far off he could hear sirens, and as he stumbled away from the fire he saw crowds of half-dressed people milling around outside the barracks. The fire had now ignited two more of the low buildings. Wallander threw open doors and saw that people were living in these barracks. But those who had been asleep inside were already out. His head was pounding and his thigh hurt, and he felt sick from the smoke he had inhaled into his lungs. At that moment the first fire truck arrived, followed closely by an ambulance. He saw that the fire captain on duty was Peter Edler, a thirty-five-year-old man who flew kites in his spare time. Wallander had heard only favorable things about him. He was a man who was never bothered by uncertainty. Wallander staggered over to Edler, noting at the same time that he had burns on one arm.