Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  Maybe that’s what happens if you take early retirement.

  At five minutes to two a car drove past. Immediately followed by another one. Then it was quiet again.

  The light was on upstairs. Wallander was freezing.

  At five minutes to three the light was turned off. Wallander listened for the radio. But everything was quiet. He flapped his arms to keep warm.

  In his head he was humming the melody of a Strauss waltz.

  The sound was so slight that he almost missed it.

  The click of a door latch. That was all. Wallander stopped flapping his arms at once and listened.

  Then he noticed the shadow.

  The man must have been moving very quietly. Even so, Wallander caught a glimpse of Rune Bergman as he silently disappeared through the backyard of the yellow house. Wallander waited a few seconds. Then he cautiously climbed over the fence. It was hard to get his bearings in the dark, but he could vaguely make out a narrow passageway between a shed and the yard opposite Bergman’s house. He moved quickly. Much too quickly, considering he could hardly see a thing.

  Then he emerged onto the street running parallel to Rosenallé.

  If he had arrived one second later, he would not have seen Rune Bergman vanish down a cross street on the right.

  For a moment Wallander hesitated. His car was parked only fifty meters away. If he didn’t get it now, and Bergman had a car parked somewhere in the vicinity, he would have no chance of following him.

  He ran like a madman for his car. His frozen joints cracked and he was out of breath after only a few meters. He yanked open the door, fumbled with his keys, and swiftly decided to try to intercept Rune Bergman.

  He turned down the street that he thought was the right one. Too late he realized that it was a dead end. He swore and backed up. Bergman probably had a lot of streets to choose from. There was also a park nearby.

  Make up your mind, he thought furiously. Make up your mind, damn it.

  He headed toward the big parking lot, which lay between the Jägersrö trotting track and some large department stores. He was just about to give up when he caught sight of Bergman. He was in a phone booth by a newly built hotel near the entrance to the track stables.

  Wallander slammed on the brakes and turned off his engine and headlights.

  The man in the phone booth hadn’t noticed him.

  Several minutes later a cab pulled up near the hotel. Rune Bergman got into the back seat, and Wallander turned on his engine.

  The cab took the freeway heading toward Göteborg. Wallander had to let a semi go by before he took up the chase.

  He glanced at the gas gauge. He wasn’t going to be able to follow the cab farther than Halmstad.

  Suddenly he noticed that the cab was blinking to turn right. He was going to take the exit for Lund. Wallander followed.

  The cab stopped at the train station. As Wallander drove past, he saw Rune Bergman paying his fare. He turned onto a side street and carelessly parked in the middle of a crosswalk.

  Bergman was walking fast. Wallander followed him in the shadows.

  Rydberg had been right. The man was on his guard.

  Suddenly he stopped short and looked around.

  Wallander threw himself headlong into an entryway. He struck his forehead on the protruding edge of a step and could feel the lump above his eye split open. Blood ran down his face. He wiped it off with his glove, counted to ten, and continued his pursuit. The blood over his eye was sticky.

  Bergman stopped outside a building covered with scaffolding and protective sacking. Again he looked around, and Wallander crouched down behind a parked car.

  Then he was gone.

  Wallander waited until he heard the door shut. Soon afterward the lights went on in a room on the third floor.

  He ran across the street and pushed his way behind the sacking. Without hesitating, he climbed up onto the scaffold’s first platform.

  It creaked and groaned under his feet. He had to keep wiping away the blood trickling into his eye. Then he heaved himself up onto the second platform. The illuminated windows were now only a little more than a meter above his head. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped it around his head as an improvised bandage.

  Then he cautiously hauled himself up onto the next platform. The effort left him so exhausted that he had to lie on the scaffolding for over a minute before he could go on. Carefully he crept forward along the cold planks, which were covered with scraped-off stucco. He didn’t dare think about how far above the ground he was. He would just get dizzy instantly.

  Cautiously he peeked over the window ledge outside the first lighted room. Through the thin curtains he could see a woman sleeping in a double bed. The covers next to her had been thrown back, as if someone had gotten out of bed in a hurry.

  He crawled farther.

  When he peeked over the next window ledge, he saw Rune Bergman talking to a man wearing a dark-brown bathrobe.

  Wallander felt as if he had actually seen this man before. That’s how well the young Romanian woman had described the man who was standing in a field eating an apple.

  He felt his heart pounding.

  So he had been right after all. It had to be the same man.

  The two men were talking in low voices. Wallander couldn’t hear what they were saying. Suddenly the man in the bathrobe disappeared through a door. At the same moment Rune Bergman looked straight at Wallander.

  Caught, he thought, as he pulled back his head.

  Those bastards won’t hesitate to shoot me.

  He was paralyzed with fear.

  I’m going to die, he thought desperately. They’re going to shoot my head off.

  But no one came to shoot him in the head. Finally he got up the nerve to peek inside again.

  The man in the bathrobe was standing there, eating an apple.

  Bergman was holding two shotguns. He put one of them down on a table. The other one he stuffed under his coat. Wallander realized that he had seen more than enough. He turned around and crept back the same way he had come.

  How it happened, he would never know.

  He lost his footing in the dark. When he reached for the scaffolding, his hand grabbed at empty space.

  Then he fell.

  It all happened so fast that he had barely enough time to think that he was going to die.

  Right above the ground one of his legs got caught in a gap between two planks. The pain was horrendous when he jerked to a stop. But he was hanging upside down with his head barely a meter above the pavement.

  He tried to wriggle loose. But his foot was wedged tight. He was hanging in midair, unable to do anything. The blood was pounding in his temples.

  The pain was so bad that he had tears in his eyes.

  At that moment he heard the door open.

  Rune Bergman had left the apartment.

  Wallander bit his knuckles to keep from screaming.

  Through the sacking he saw the man stop suddenly. Right in front of him.

  He saw a flash.

  The shot, thought Wallander. Now I’m going to die.

  Then he realized that Bergman had lit a cigarette.

  The footsteps moved away.

  Wallander was about to black out from the pressure of the blood in his head. The image of Linda flickered past.

  With enormous effort he managed to grab hold of one of the uprights on the scaffolding. With one hand he pulled himself up far enough to get a grip on the planks where his foot was wedged tight. He gathered all his strength for one final attempt. Then he yanked hard. His foot came loose, and he landed on his back in a mound of gravel. He lay absolutely still, trying to feel if anything was broken.

  Then he stood up, and he had to hold onto the wall so he wouldn’t fall over from dizziness.

  It took him almost twenty minutes to make his way back to the car. He saw the hands of the train station clock pointing to four thirty.

  Wallander sank into the driver’s seat an
d closed his eyes.

  Then he drove back to Ystad.

  I have to get some sleep, he thought. Tomorrow is another day. Then I’ll have to do what has to be done.

  He groaned when he looked at his face in the bathroom mirror. He rinsed his wounds with warm water.

  It was almost six by the time he crawled between the sheets. He set the alarm clock for quarter to seven. He didn’t dare sleep any later than that.

  He tried to find the position that hurt the least.

  Just as he was falling asleep, he was jerked awake by a bang on the front door.

  The morning paper.

  Then he stretched out again.

  In his dreams Anette Brolin was coming toward him.

  Somewhere a horse neighed.

  It was Sunday, January fourteenth. The day arrived with increasing wind from the northeast.

  Kurt Wallander slept.

  Chapter Twelve

  He thought he had slept for a long time. But when he woke up and looked at the clock on the nightstand, he realized that he had been asleep for only seven minutes. It was the telephone that woke him. Rydberg was calling from a phone booth in Malmö.

  “Come on back,” said Wallander. “You don’t have to stand there freezing. Come here, to my place.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely positive.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Kurt Wallander climbed laboriously out of bed. His body ached and his temples were throbbing. While the coffee was brewing he sat at the kitchen table with a pocket mirror and a cotton ball. With great difficulty he succeeded in fastening a gauze pad over the wound on his forehead. He thought his whole face was nothing but shades of blue and purple.

  Forty-three minutes later Rydberg stood in the doorway.

  While they drank coffee, Wallander told him his story.

  “Good,” Rydberg said afterward. “Excellent footwork. Now we’ll bring in those bastards. What was the name of the guy in Lund?”

  “I forgot to look at the name in the entryway. And we’re not the ones who’ll bring them in. That’s Björk’s job.”

  “Is he back?”

  “He was supposed to arrive last night.”

  “Then let’s get him out of bed.”

  “The prosecutor too. And the action will probably have to be coordinated with our colleagues in Malmö and Lund, right?”

  While Wallander was getting dressed, Rydberg was on the phone. With satisfaction Wallander could hear that he wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  He wondered whether Anette Brolin’s husband was visiting this weekend.

  Rydberg stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him knot his tie.

  “You look like a boxer,” he said, laughing. “A punch-drunk boxer.”

  “Did you get hold of Björk?”

  “He seems to have spent the evening catching up with everything that’s happened. He was relieved to hear that we had solved one of the murders, at least.”

  “The prosecutor?”

  “She’ll come right away.”

  “Was she the one who answered the phone?”

  Rydberg looked at him in surprise. “Who else would have answered?”

  “Her husband, for instance.”

  “What difference would that make?”

  Wallander didn’t feel like answering. “Goddamn, I feel like shit,” he said instead. “Let’s go.”

  They went out into the early dawn. A gusty wind was still blowing and the sky was overcast with dark clouds.

  “You think it’s going to snow?” asked Wallander.

  “Not before February,” said Rydberg. “I can feel it. But then it’ll be a hard winter.”

  A Sunday calm prevailed at the police station. Norén had been relieved by Svedberg. Rydberg gave him a brief rundown of what had happened during the night.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Svedberg. “A cop?”

  “An ex-cop.”

  “Where did he hide the car?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Is the case airtight?”

  “I think so.”

  Björk and Anette Brolin arrived at the police station simultaneously. Björk, who was fifty-four years old and originally from Västmanland, had a nice tan. Wallander had always imagined him to be the ideal chief for a medium-sized police district. He was friendly, not too intelligent, and at the same time extremely concerned with the good name and reputation of the police.

  He gave Kurt Wallander a dismayed look. “You really look terrible.”

  “They beat me up,” said Wallander.

  “Beat you up? Who?”

  “The cops. That’s what happens when you’re acting chief. They let you have it.”

  Björk laughed.

  Anette Brolin looked at him with what seemed to be genuine sympathy.

  “That must hurt,” she said.

  “I’ll be all right,” replied Wallander.

  He turned his face away when he answered, remembering that he had forgotten to brush his teeth.

  They all went into Björk’s office.

  Since there was no written report, Wallander gave a verbal summary of the case. Both Björk and Anette Brolin asked a lot of questions.

  “If it had been anyone but you who dragged me out of bed on Sunday morning with this kind of cops-and-robbers story, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Björk.

  Then he turned to Anette Brolin. “Do we have enough to detain them? Or should we just bring them in for questioning?”

  “I’ll get the detention order on them based on the interrogation results,” said Anette Brolin. “Then, of course, it would be good if that Romanian woman could identify the man in Lund in a line-up.”

  “We’ll need a court order for that,” said Björk.

  “Yes,” said Anette Brolin. “But we could do a provisional identification.”

  Wallander and Rydberg gave her an interested look.

  “We could bring in the woman from the refugee camp,” she went on. “Then they could walk past each other by chance here in the hallway.”

  Wallander nodded in approval. Anette Brolin was a prosecutor who was Per Akeson’s equal when it came to taking a flexible view of the applicable rules.

  “All right,” said Björk. “I’ll get in touch with our colleagues in Malmö and Lund. Then we’ll pick up the suspects in two hours. At ten o’clock.”

  “What about the woman in the bed?” asked Kurt Wallander. “The one in Lund?”

  “We’ll bring her in too,” said Björk. “How should we divide up the interrogations?”

  “I want Rune Bergman,” said Wallander. “Rydberg can talk to the man who munches on apples.”

  “At three o’clock we’ll decide about the detention order,” said Anette Brolin. “I’ll be at home until then.”

  Wallander accompanied her out to the lobby. “I was thinking about asking you to dinner last night,” he said. “But something came up.”

  “There’ll be plenty more evenings,” she said. “I think you’ve done a good job on this case. How did you figure out that he was the one?”

  “I didn’t. It was just a hunch.”

  He watched her as she headed toward town. He realized that he hadn’t thought of Mona at all since the evening they had dinner together.

  Then everything started to move very fast.

  Hanson was wrenched out of his Sunday calm and ordered to bring in the Romanian woman and an interpreter.

  “Our colleagues don’t sound happy,” Björk said with concern. “It’s never popular to bring in someone from your own force. It’s going to be a dismal winter because of this.”

  “What do you mean by dismal?” asked Wallander.

  “New attacks on the police force.”

  “He was retired early, wasn’t he?”

  “Even so. The papers will be screaming about the fact that the murderer was a cop. There will
be new persecution of the force.”

  At ten o’clock Wallander returned to the building that was covered in sacking and construction scaffolding. To assist him he had four plainclothes policemen from Lund.

  “He has weapons,” said Wallander while they were still sitting in the car. “And he has committed a cold-blooded execution. Still, I think we can take it easy. He’s certainly not counting on the fact that we’re on his tail. Two weapons drawn should be enough.”

  Wallander had brought along his service revolver from Ystad.

  On the way to Lund he tried to remember when he had last taken it out. He decided it was over three years earlier, in conjunction with the capture of an escaped convict from Kumla prison who had barricaded himself in a summerhouse near Mossby beach.

  Now they were sitting in a car outside the building in Lund. Wallander realized that he had climbed considerably higher than he had thought. If he had fallen all the way to the ground, he would have crushed his spine.

  That morning the police in Lund had sent out an inspector disguised as a newspaper carrier to case the apartment.

  “Let’s review,” said Wallander. “No back stairs?”

  The officer sitting next to him in the front seat shook his head.

  “No scaffolding on the rear side?”

  “Nothing.”

  According to the officer, the apartment was occupied by a man named Valfrid Ström.

  He wasn’t listed in any police files. No one knew how he made his living either.

  At ten o’clock on the dot they got out of the car and crossed the street. One officer stayed at the outside door of the building. There was an intercom system, but it was out of order. Wallander jimmied the door open with a screwdriver.

  “One man stay in the stairwell,” he said. “You and I will go upstairs. What was your name?”

  “Enberg.”

  “You’ve got a first name, haven’t you?”

  “Kalle.”

  “Okay, let’s go, Kalle.”

  They listened in the darkness outside the door.

  Wallander drew his pistol and nodded to Kalle Enberg to do the same.

  Then he rang the doorbell.

  The door was opened by a woman wearing a housecoat. Wallander recognized her from the night before. It was the same woman who had been asleep in the double bed.

  He hid his pistol behind his back.