Faceless Killers: A Mystery
Page 16
“In December 1958 you gave birth to a son who was christened Nils,” said Wallander. “You listed the father as unknown.”
The instant he mentioned the name of her son, she started to cry.
The coffee cup tipped over and fell to the floor.
“What has he done?” she asked. “What has he done now?”
They waited until she calmed down before they continued their questioning.
“We’re not here to bring you bad news,” Wallander assured her. “But we’d like to know whether Johannes Lövgren is the name of Nils’s father.”
“No.”
Her answer was not exactly convincing.
“Then we’d like you to tell us the name of his father.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“It’s important for our investigation.”
“I’ve already told you that I don’t know anybody named Johannes Lövgren.”
“What’s the name of Nils’s father?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“It won’t go any further than this room.”
She paused a little too long before she answered. “I don’t know who Nils’s father was.”
“Women usually know things like that.”
“I was sleeping with more than one man at the time. I don’t know who it was. That’s why I listed the father as unknown.”
She stood up quickly.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. “The old ladies are going to be boiled alive under those dryers.”
“We can wait.”
“But I don’t have anything else to tell you!”
She seemed more and more upset.
“We have some more questions.”
Ten minutes later she was back. She was holding some bills that she stuffed into her purse, which was hanging on the back of a chair. She now seemed composed and ready for an argument.
“I don’t know anyone named Lövgren,” she said.
“And you insist that you don’t know who the father was of your son who was born in 1958?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you realize that you may have to answer these questions under oath?”
“I’m not lying.”
“Where can we find your son Nils?”
“He travels a lot.”
“According to our records, his place of residence is in Sölvesborg.”
“So go out there then!”
“That’s what we plan to do.”
“I have nothing more to say.”
Wallander hesitated for a moment. Then he pointed at the blurry, faded photograph pinned up on the wall.
“Is that Nils’s father?” he asked.
She had just lit a cigarette. When she exhaled, it sounded like a hiss.
“I don’t know any Lövgren. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All right then,” said Göran Boman, bringing the conversation to a close. “We’ll be going now. But you may be hearing from us again.”
“I have nothing more to say. Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Nobody gets left alone when the police are looking for a double murderer,” said Boman. “That’s the way it goes.”
When they came outdoors, the sun was shining. They stood next to the car for a moment.
“What do you think?” asked Boman.
“I don’t know. But there’s something there.”
“Shall we try to locate the son before we move on to the third woman?”
“I think so.”
They drove over to Solvesborg and with great difficulty located what was supposedly the right address. A dilapidated wooden house outside the center of town, surrounded by junked cars and pieces of machinery. A furious German shepherd was yanking and pulling on its iron chain. The house looked deserted. Boman leaned forward and looked at a nameplate with sloppy lettering that was nailed to the door.
“Nils Velander,” he said. “This is the place.”
He knocked several times. But no one answered. They walked all the way around the house.
“What a damn rat hole,” said Boman.
When they got back to their starting point, Wallander tried the door handle.
The house wasn’t locked.
Wallander looked at Boman, who shrugged.
“If it’s open, it’s open,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
They stepped into a musty entryway and listened. There wasn’t a sound, until they both jumped when a hissing cat leaped out of a dark corner and vanished up the stairs to the second floor. The room on the left seemed to be some sort of office. There were two battered file cabinets and an exceedingly messy desk with a phone and an answering machine. Wallander lifted the top of a box sitting on the desk. Inside was a set of black leather underwear and a mailing label.
“Fredrik Åberg of Dragongatan in Alingsås ordered this stuff,” he said with a grimace. “Plain brown wrapper, no doubt.”
They moved on to the next room, which was a storeroom for Nils Velander’s specialty underwear. There were also a number of whips and dog collars.
Everything was jumbled up in the storeroom, with no sign of organization.
The next room was the kitchen, with dirty dishes on the counter. A half-eaten chicken lay on the floor. The whole room smelled of cat piss.
Wallander threw open the door to the pantry.
There was a home distillery and two large carboys.
Boman snickered and shook his head.
They went upstairs and peeked into the bedroom. The sheets were dirty and clothing was heaped on the floor. The curtains were drawn, and together they counted seven cats scurrying off as they approached.
“What a pigsty,” repeated Boman. “How can anybody live like this?”
The house looked as if it had been vacated in a hurry.
“Maybe we’d better go,” said Wallander. “We’ll need a search warrant before we can give the place a thorough going-over.”
They went back downstairs. Boman stepped into the office and punched the button on the answering machine.
Nils Velander, assuming it was him, stated that no one was in the Raff-Sets office at the moment, but you were welcome to leave your order on the answering machine.
The German shepherd jerked on its chain as they came out into the yard.
Right at the corner, on the left-hand side of the house, Wallander discovered a basement door almost hidden behind the remains of an old mangle.
He opened the unlocked door and stepped into the darkness. He fumbled his way over to a fuse box. An old oil furnace stood in the corner. The rest of the basement room was filled with empty birdcages. He called to Boman, who joined him down in the basement.
“Leather underpants and empty birdcages,” said Wallander. “What exactly is this guy up to?”
“I think we’d better find out,” replied Boman.
As they were about to leave, Wallander noticed a small steel cabinet behind the furnace. He bent down and pressed on the handle. It was unlocked, like everything else in the house. He put his hand in and grabbed hold of a plastic bag. He pulled it out and opened it.
“Look at this,” he said to Boman.
The plastic bag held a stack of thousand-krona bills.
Wallander counted twenty-three.
“I think we’re going to have to have a talk with this guy,” said Boman.
They stuffed the money back and went outside. The German shepherd was barking.
“We’ll have to talk to our colleagues here in Sölvesborg,” said Boman. “They can check this guy out for us.”
At the Solvesborg police station they met an officer who was quite familiar with Nils Velander.
“He’s probably mixed up in all kinds of illegal activities,” said the policeman. “But the only thing we have on him is suspicion of illegally importing caged birds from Thailand. And operating a home still.”
“He was once sentenced for assault and battery,” said Boman.
“We don’t know,” said Wallander. “But we want to get hold of him.”
They returned to Kristianstad. It had started raining again. They both had a good impression of the police officer in Sölvesborg and were counting on him to find Nils Velander for them.
But Wallander was having doubts.
“We don’t know anything,” he said. “Thousand-krona bills in a plastic bag aren’t proof of anything.”
“But something is going on there,” said Boman.
Wallander agreed. There was something about the beauty-shop owner and her son.
They stopped for lunch at a motel restaurant just outside Kristianstad.
Wallander thought he ought to check in with the police station in Ystad.
The pay phone that he tried was broken.
It was one thirty by the time they got back to Kristianstad. Before they continued on to the third woman, Boman wanted to check in at his office.
The young woman at the reception desk flagged them down.
“There was a call from Ystad,” she said. “They want Kurt Wallander to call back.”
“Let’s go to my office,” said Boman.
Full of foreboding, Wallander punched in the number while Boman went to get some coffee.
Without a word Ebba connected him to Rydberg.
“You’d better come back,” said Rydberg. “Some idiot has shot a Somali refugee at Hageholm.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. This Somali was out taking a little walk. Someone blasted him with a shotgun. I’ve had a hell of a time tracking you down. Where have you been?”
“Is he dead?”
“His head was blown off.”
Wallander felt sick to his stomach. “I’m on my way,” he said.
He hung up the phone just as Boman came in, balancing two mugs of coffee. Wallander gave him a brief rundown on what had happened.
“I’ll get you emergency transport,” said Boman. “I’ll send your car over later with one of the boys.”
Everything happened fast.
In a few minutes Wallander was on his way to Ystad in a car with wailing sirens. Rydberg met him at the police station and they drove at once to Hageholm.
“Do we have any leads?” asked Wallander.
“None. But the newsroom at Sydsvensan got a call only a few minutes after the murder. A man said that it was revenge for the murder of Johannes Lövgren. Next time they struck, they would take a woman for Maria Lövgren.”
“This is insane,” said Wallander. “We don’t suspect foreigners anymore, do we?”
“Somebody seems to have a different opinion. Thinks that we’re shielding some foreigners.”
“But I’ve already denied that.”
“Whoever did this doesn’t give a shit about your denials. They see a perfect opportunity to pull out a gun and start shooting foreigners.”
“This is crazy!”
“You’re damn right it’s crazy. But it’s true!”
“Did the newspaper tape the phone conversation?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hear it. To see if it’s the same person who’s been calling me.”
The car raced through the landscape of Skåne.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Wallander.
“We’ve got to catch the Lenarp killers,” said Rydberg. “And damned fast.”
At Hageholm everything was in chaos. Distressed and weeping refugees had gathered in the dining hall, reporters were conducting interviews, and phones were ringing. Wallander stepped out of the car onto a muddy dirt road several hundred meters from the residential buildings. The wind had started blowing again, and he turned up the collar of his jacket. An area near the road had been cordoned off. The dead man was lying face down in the mud.
Wallander cautiously lifted the sheet covering the body.
Rydberg hadn’t been exaggerating. There was almost nothing left of the head.
“Shot at close range,” said Hanson who was standing nearby. “Whoever did this must have jumped out of hiding and fired the shots from a few meters away.”
“The shots?” said Wallander.
“The camp director says that she heard two shots, close together.”
Wallander looked around.
“Car tracks?” he asked. “Where does this road go?”
“Two kilometers farther along you come out on E14.”
“And no one saw anything?”
“It’s hard to question refugees who speak fifteen different languages. But we’re working on it.”
“Do we know who the dead man is?”
“He had a wife and nine children.”
Wallander stared at Hanson in disbelief. “Nine children?”
“Just imagine the headlines tomorrow morning,” said Hanson. “Innocent refugee murdered taking a walk. Nine children left without a father.”
Svedberg came running from one of the police cars.
“The police chief is on the phone,” he said.
Wallander looked surprised.
“I thought he wasn’t due back from Spain until tomorrow.”
“Not him. The chief of the National Police.”
Wallander got into the car and picked up the phone. The chief’s voice was emphatic, and Wallander was immediately annoyed by what he said.
“This looks very bad,” said the chief. “We don’t need racist murders in this country.”
“No,” said Wallander.
“This investigation must be given top priority.”
“Yes. But we already have the double homicide in Lenarp on our hands.”
“Are you making any progress?”
“I think so. But it takes time.”
“I want you to report to me personally. I’m going to take part in a discussion program on TV tonight, and I need all the information I can get.”
“I’ll see to it.”
He hung up the phone.
Wallander remained sitting in the car.
Näslund will have to handle this, he thought. He’ll have to feed the paperwork to Stockholm.
Wallander felt depressed. His hangover was gone, and he thought about what had happened the night before. He was also reminded of it because he saw Peters approaching from a police car that had just arrived.
Then he thought about Mona and the man who had picked her up.
And Linda laughing. The black man at her side.
His father, painting his eternal landscape.
He thought about himself too.
A time to live, and a time to die.
Then Wallander forced himself to get out of the car to take charge of the criminal investigation.
Nothing else had better happen, he thought.
We can’t handle anything else.
It was three fifteen. Once again it had started to rain.
Chapter Ten
Kurt Wallander stood freezing in the pouring rain. It was almost five o’clock, and the police had rigged floodlights around the murder scene. He watched two ambulance attendants who came squishing through the mud with a stretcher. They were taking away the dead Somali. When he looked at the sea of mud he wondered whether even as skillful a detective as Rydberg would be able to find any tracks.
Still, at the moment he felt slightly relieved. Until ten minutes ago the officers had been surrounded by a hysterical wife and nine howling children. The wife of the dead man had thrown herself into the mud, and her wails were so piercing that several of the policemen couldn’t stand the sound and had moved away. To his surprise, Wallander had realized that the only one who was able to handle the grieving woman and the dismayed children was Martinson. The youngest cop on the force, who so far in his career had never even been forced to notify someone of a relative’s death. He had held the
woman, kneeling in the mud, and in some way the two were able to understand each other across the language barrier. A minister who had been hurriedly called was unable to do anything, of course. Gradually Martinson succeeded in getting the woman and the children back to the main building, where a doctor was ready to take care of them.
Rydberg came tramping through the mud. His pants were splotched all the way up his thighs.
“What a hell of a mess,” he said. “But Hanson and Svedberg have done a fantastic job. They managed to find two refugees and an interpreter who actually think they saw something.”
“What?”
“How should I know? I don’t speak either Arabic or Swahili. But they’re on their way to Ystad right now. The Immigration Service has promised us some interpreters. I thought it would be best if you handled the interrogations.”
Wallander nodded. “Have we got anything to go on?”
Rydberg took out his grimy notebook.
“He was killed at precisely one o’clock,” he said. “The director was listening to the wire-service news on the radio when she heard the noise. There were two shots. But you know that already. He was dead before he hit the ground. It seems to have been regular buckshot. Gyttorp brand, I think. Nytrox 36, probably. That’s about all.”
“That’s not much.”
“I think it’s absolutely nothing. But maybe the eyewitnesses will have something to tell us.”
“I’ve authorized overtime for everyone,” said Wallander. “Now we’ll have to bust our butts night and day if necessary.”
Back at the station, the first interrogation almost drove him to despair. The interpreter, who was supposed to know Swahili, couldn’t understand the dialect spoken by the witness, a young man from Malawi. It took Wallander almost half an hour before he realized that the interpreter wasn’t translating what the witness said at all. Then it took almost twenty more minutes before he learned that the man from Malawi, for some strange reason, knew Luvale, a language that was spoken in parts of Zaire and Zambia. But then they had a stroke of luck. One of the Immigration Service representatives knew an old missionary who spoke fluent Luvale. She was close to ninety years old and lived in a retirement apartment in Trelleborg. After calling his colleagues there, he received a promise that the missionary would be given police transport to Ystad. Wallander suspected that a ninety-year-old missionary might not be very sharp. But he was wrong. A little white-haired lady with lively eyes suddenly stood on the threshold of his office, and before he knew it she was involved in an intense conversation with the young man.