“We’re with the police,” he said. “We’re looking for your husband, Valfrid Ström.”
The woman, who was in her forties and had a harried expression, looked scared.
Then she stepped aside and let the policemen in.
Suddenly Valfrid Ström was standing in front of them. He was dressed in a green jogging suit.
“Police,” said Wallander. “We need to ask you to come with us.”
The man with the half-moon-shaped bald spot looked at him tensely. “Why?”
“For questioning.”
“About what?”
“You’ll find out at the station.”
Then Wallander turned to the woman. “You’d better come along too. Put on some clothes.”
The man facing him seemed completely calm. “I’m not going anywhere if you don’t tell me why,” he said. “Perhaps you could start by showing me some ID?”
When Kurt Wallander put his right hand in his inside pocket, he couldn’t hide the fact that he was carrying a pistol. He switched it over to his left hand and fumbled for his billfold, where he kept his ID.
At the same instant Ström leaped straight at him. He butted Wallander right in the forehead, smack in the middle of his swollen wound. Wallander went sailing backward, and the pistol flew out of his hand. Kalle Enberg didn’t have time to react before the man in the green jogging suit had disappeared out the door. The woman shrieked, and Wallander fumbled for his pistol. Then he dashed down the stairs after the man, yelling a warning to the two officers posted farther down.
Ström was fast. He gave the policeman standing inside the door an elbow to the chin. The man outside was rammed by the front door when Ström flung himself out into the street. Wallander, who could hardly see with the blood streaming into his eyes, stumbled over the unconscious policeman lying in the stairwell. He pulled at the safety on his pistol, which was stuck.
Then he was out on the street.
“Which way did he go?” he called to the bewildered policeman who had gotten entangled in the sacking.
“To the left.”
Wallander ran. He could see Ström’s green jogging suit just as he ducked under a viaduct. He tore off his cap and wiped his face. Several elderly women, who looked like they were on their way to church, jumped aside in fright. He ran under the viaduct just as a train rumbled by overhead.
When he reached the street level again, he saw how Ström stopped a car, dragged out the driver, and drove off.
The only vehicle in the vicinity was a large horse van. The driver was pulling a pack of condoms out of a vending machine on the wall of the building. When Wallander came racing up, his pistol drawn and blood running down his face, the man dropped the condoms and ran off.
Wallander climbed into the driver’s seat. Behind him he heard a horse whinny. The engine was running, and he threw it into first gear.
He thought he had lost sight of the car Valfrid Ström had stolen, but then he saw it again. The car drove through a red light and continued down a narrow street that led straight toward the cathedral. Wallander was shifting gears fast, trying not to lose sight of the car. Horses were whinnying behind him, and he smelled the odor of warm manure.
In a tight curve he almost lost control of the van. He caromed off two cars parked by the curb, but finally managed to straighten out the van again.
The chase proceeded toward the hospital and then through an industrial area. Wallander suddenly discovered that the van was equipped with a cellular phone. He tried to dial the emergency number with one hand while struggling to keep the heavy vehicle on the road.
Just as the emergency operator answered, he had to negotiate a curve.
The phone fell out of his hand, and he realized that he wouldn’t be able to reach it without stopping.
This is crazy, he thought in desperation. Totally nuts.
At the same time he remembered his sister. Right now he was supposed to be meeting her at Sturup airport.
In the roundabout by the entrance to Staffanstorp the chase ended.
Ström was forced to screech to a stop for a bus that had already entered the roundabout. He lost control of the car and ran straight into a cement column. Wallander, who was about a hundred meters behind him, saw the flames shooting out of the car. He braked so hard that the van slid into the ditch and tipped over. The back gates flew open and three horses jumped out and galloped away across the fields.
Ström was flung out of the car on impact. One foot was sliced off. His face had been gashed by shards of glass.
Even before Wallander reached him he could tell that he was dead.
People came running out of the nearby houses. Cars pulled over to the side of the road.
Suddenly he noticed that he was still holding his pistol.
A few minutes later the first squad car arrived. Then an ambulance. Kurt Wallander showed his ID and made a call from the squad car. He asked to talk to Björk.
“Did it go all right?” asked Björk. “Rune Bergman has been picked up and is on the way here. Everything went without a hitch. And the Yugoslavian woman is waiting here with her interpreter.”
“Send them over to the morgue at Lund General Hospital,” said Wallander. “Now she’ll have to identify a corpse. By the way, she’s Romanian.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” said Björk.
“Just what I said,” replied Wallander and hung up.
At that moment he saw one of the horses come galloping across the field. It was a beautiful white horse.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen such a beautiful horse.
When he got back to Ystad the news of Valfrid Ström’s death had already made the rounds. The woman who was his wife had collapsed, and a doctor refused to let the police interrogate her.
Rydberg told Wallander that Rune Bergman denied everything. He hadn’t stolen his own car and then ditched it. He hadn’t been at Hageholm. He hadn’t visited Valfrid Ström the night before.
He demanded to be taken back to Malmö at once.
“What a goddamned weasel,” said Wallander. “I’ll crack him.”
“Nobody is doing any cracking here,” said Björk. “That ridiculous high-speed chase through Lund has caused enough trouble already. I don’t understand why four full-grown policemen can’t manage to bring in an unarmed man for questioning. By the way, do you know that one of those horses was run over? Its name was Super Nova, and its owner put a value of a hundred thousand kronor on it.”
Wallander felt anger rise up inside him.
Why couldn’t Björk grasp that it was support he needed? Not this officious whining.
“Now we’re going to wait for the Romanian woman’s identification,” said Björk. “Nobody talks to the press or the media except me.”
“Thank heaven for that,” said Wallander.
He went back to his office with Rydberg and closed the door.
“Do you have any idea how you look?” Rydberg asked.
“Don’t tell me, please.”
“Your sister called. I asked Martinson to drive out and pick her up at the airport. I assumed that you had forgotten. He said he’d take care of her until you had time.”
Wallander nodded gratefully.
A few minutes later, Björk stormed in.
“The ID is positive,” he said. “We’ve got the murderer we were looking for.”
“Did she recognize him?”
“Without a doubt. It was the same man who was eating the apple out in the field.”
“Who was he?” asked Rydberg.
“Valfrid Ström called himself a businessman,” replied Björk. “Forty-seven years old. But the Security Police in Stockholm didn’t take long to answer our inquiry. Ström has been engaged in nationalist movements since the sixties. First in something called the Democratic Alliance, later in much more militant factions. But how he ended up a cold-blooded murderer—that’s something Rune Bergman may be able to tell us. Or his wife.”
Wa
llander stood up. “Now we’ll tackle Bergman,” he said.
All three of them went into the room where Rune Bergman sat smoking.
Kurt Wallander led the interrogation.
He went on the offensive at once.
“Do you know what I was doing last night?” he asked.
Bergman gave him a look of contempt. “How would I know that?”
“I tailed you to Lund.”
Wallander thought he caught a fleeting shift in the man’s face.
“I followed you to Lund,” repeated Wallander. “And I climbed up on the scaffolding outside the building where Ström lived. I saw you exchange your shotgun for another one. Now Ström is dead. But a witness has identified him as the murderer at Hageholm. What do you have to say to all this?”
Bergman didn’t say a word. He lit a new cigarette and stared into space.
“Okay, we’ll take it from the top,” said Wallander. “We know how everything happened. There are only two things we don’t know. First, what did you do with your car? Second, why did you shoot the Somali?”
Rune Bergman wasn’t talking.
Right after three that afternoon he was formally put under arrest and assigned a public defender. The charge was murder or accessory to murder.
At four o’clock Wallander questioned Valfrid Ström’s wife briefly. She was still in shock, but she answered his questions. He found out that Ström dealt in importing exclusive automobiles.
She also told him that Ström hated the Swedish refugee policy.
She had only been married to him for a little over a year.
Wallander had the distinct impression that she would get over her loss quite soon.
After the interrogation he talked with Rydberg and Björk. Then they released the woman with a warning not to leave town, and she was taken back to Lund.
Just before they left, Wallander and Rydberg made another attempt to get Rune Bergman to talk. The public defender, who was young and ambitious, claimed that there were no grounds for submission of evidence, and he was of the opinion that the arrest was equivalent to a preliminary miscarriage of justice.
At about the same time Rydberg had an idea.
“Where was Ström trying to escape to?” he asked Wallander.
He pointed at a map.
“The chase ended at Staffanstorp. Maybe he had a warehouse there or somewhere in the vicinity. It’s not far from Hageholm, if you know all the back roads.”
A conversation with Ström’s wife confirmed that Rydberg was on the right track. The man did indeed have a warehouse between Staffanstorp and Veberöd where he kept his imported cars. Rydberg drove over there in a squad car and soon called Wallander back.
“Bingo,” he said. “There’s a pale-blue Citroen here.”
“Maybe we ought to teach our children to identify cars by their sound,” said Wallander.
He tackled Rune Bergman again. But the man said nothing.
Rydberg returned to Ystad after a preliminary examination of the Citroen. In the glove compartment he found a box of shotgun shells. In the meantime the police in Malmö and Lund searched Bergman’s and Ström’s apartments.
“It seems as though these two gentlemen were members of some sort of Swedish Ku Klux Klan movement,” said Björk. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a knotty problem to untangle. There might be more people involved.”
Rune Bergman still wasn’t talking.
Wallander was greatly relieved that Björk was back and could take charge of dealing with the media. His face was stung and burned, and he was very tired. By six o’clock he finally had time to call Martinson and talk to his sister. Then he drove over and picked her up. She was startled when she saw his battered face.
“It might be best if Dad didn’t see me,” said Wallander. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
His sister had already visited their father in the hospital that day. The old man was still tired, but he brightened up a little when he saw his daughter.
“I don’t think he remembers much about that night,” she said as they drove up to the hospital. “Maybe that’s just as well.”
Wallander sat in the car and waited while she visited their father again. He closed his eyes and listened to a Rossini opera. When she opened the car door, he jumped. He had fallen asleep.
Together they drove to the house in Löderup.
Wallander could see that his sister was shocked at their father’s decline. They helped each other clean up the stinking garbage and filthy clothes.
“How could this happen?” she asked, and Wallander felt that she was blaming him.
Maybe she was right. Maybe he could have done more. At least discovered his father’s decline in time.
They stopped and bought groceries and then returned to Mariagatan. At dinner they talked about what would happen to their father.
“He’ll die if we put him in a retirement home,” she said.
“What’s the alternative?” asked Wallander. “He can’t live here. He can’t live with you. The house in Löderup won’t work either. What’s left?”
They agreed that it would be best, all the same, if their father could keep on living in his own house, with regular home-care visits.
“He has never liked me,” said Wallander as they were drinking coffee.
“Of course he does.”
“Not since I decided to be a cop.”
“You think maybe he had something else in mind for you?”
“Yes, but what? He never says anything.”
Wallander made up the sofa for his sister.
When they had no more to say about their father, Wallander told her about everything that had happened. Suddenly he realized that the old sense of intimacy, which had always bound them before, was gone.
We haven’t gotten together often enough, he thought. She doesn’t even dare ask me why Mona and I went our separate ways.
He brought out a half-empty bottle of cognac. She shook her head, so he just filled his own glass.
The evening news was dominated by the story of Valfrid Strom. Rune Bergman’s identity was not revealed. Wallander knew that it was because he had a past as a policeman. He assumed that the chief of the National Police was hard at work setting out the necessary smoke screens so they could keep Rune Bergman’s identity a secret for as long as possible.
But sooner or later, of course, the truth would have to come out.
When the news broadcast was over, the telephone rang.
Wallander asked his sister to answer it. “Find out who it is and say you’ll check to see if I’m home,” he told her.
“It’s someone named Brolin,” she said when she came back from the hall.
He laboriously got up from his chair and took the telephone.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” said Anette Brolin.
“Not at all. My sister is visiting.”
“I just thought I’d call and say that I think all of you did an extraordinary job.”
“Mostly we were lucky.”
Why is she calling? he wondered. He made a quick decision.
“How about a drink?” he suggested.
“Great. Where?” He could hear that she was surprised.
“My sister is just going to bed. How about your place?”
“That’s fine.”
He hung up the phone and went back into the living room.
“I wasn’t planning to go to bed at all,” said his sister.
“I have to go out for a while. Don’t wait up for me. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
The cool evening made it easy to breathe. He turned down Regementsgatan and felt a sudden sense of relief. They had solved the brutal murder in Hageholm within forty-eight hours. Now they had to turn their attention back to the double murder in Lenarp.
He knew that he’d done a good job.
He had trusted his intuition, acted without hesitation, and it had produced results.
The thought of the crazy chase with the hor
se van gave him the shakes. But the relief was still there.
He called up from the intercom and Anette Brolin answered. She lived on the third floor in a building from the turn of the century. The apartment was large but sparsely furnished. Leaning against one wall were several paintings still waiting to be hung up.
“Gin and tonic?” she asked. “I’m afraid I don’t have much of a selection.”
“Please,” he said. “Right now anything is fine. Just so it’s strong.”
She sat down across from him on a sofa and pulled her legs up under her. He thought she was extremely beautiful.
“Do you have any idea how you look?” she asked with a laugh.
“Everybody asks me that,” he replied.
Then he remembered Klas Månson. The man who robbed the store, whom Anette Brolin refused to detain. He really didn’t think he could talk about work. Yet he couldn’t help it.
“Klas Månson,” he said. “Do you remember that name?”
She nodded.
“Hanson complained that you thought our investigation was poor. That you didn’t intend to remand Månson into further custody unless the investigation was done more carefully.”
“The investigation was poor. Sloppily written. Insufficient evidence. Vague testimony. I’d be committing dereliction of duty if I demanded further detention based on material like that.”
“The investigation was no worse than most. Besides, you forgot one important fact.”
“What was that?”
“That Klas Månson is guilty. He robbed stores before.”
“Then you’ll have to come up with better investigative work.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the report. If we let that damned Månson loose, he’ll just commit more crimes.”
“You can’t just put people in jail willy-nilly.”
Wallander shrugged. “Will you hold off releasing him if I rustle up some more exhaustive testimony?” he asked.
“That depends on what the witness says.”
“Why are you so stubborn? Månson is guilty. If we just hold him for a while, he’ll confess. But if he has the slightest inkling that he can get out, he’ll clam up.”
“Prosecutors have to be stubborn. Otherwise what do you think would happen to law and order in this country?”
Faceless Killers: A Mystery Page 21