Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

The man frowned.

  “My dad?” he said. “I don’t have any dad.”

  “Everybody has a father.”

  “Not one that I know about, at any rate.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Mom wasn’t married when I was born.”

  “And she never told you who your father was?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever ask her?”

  “Of course I’ve asked her. I bugged her about it my whole childhood. Then I gave up.”

  “What did she say when you asked her about it?”

  Erik Magnusson stood up and pressed the button for a cup of coffee. “Why are you asking about my dad? Does he have something to do with the murder?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Wallander. “What did your mother say when you asked her about your father?”

  “It varied.”

  “It varied?”

  “Sometimes she would say that she didn’t really know. Sometimes that it was a salesman she never saw again. Sometimes something else.”

  “And you were satisfied with that?”

  “What the hell was I supposed to do? If she won’t tell me, she won’t tell me.”

  Wallander thought about the answers he was getting. Was it really possible to be so uninterested in who your father was?

  “Do you get along well with your mother?” he asked.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Do you see each other often?”

  “She calls me now and then. I drive over to Kristianstad once in a while. I got along better with my stepfather.”

  Wallander gave a start. Göran Boman had said nothing about a stepfather.

  “Is your mother remarried?”

  “She lived with a man while I was growing up. They probably weren’t ever married. But I still called him my dad. Then they split up when I was about fifteen. I moved to Malmö a year later.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Was his name. He’s dead. He was killed in a car crash.”

  “And you’re sure that he wasn’t your real father?”

  “You’d have to look hard to find two people as unlike each other as we were.”

  Wallander tried a different tack. “The man who was murdered at Lenarp was named Johannes Lövgren,” he said. “Isn’t it possible that he might have been your father?”

  The man sitting across from Wallander gave him a look of surprise.

  “How the hell would I know? You’ll have to ask my mother.”

  “We’ve already done that. But she denies it.”

  “So ask her again. I’d like to know who my father is. Murdered or not.”

  Kurt Wallander believed him. He wrote down Erik Magnusson’s address and personal ID number and then stood up.

  “You may hear from us again,” he said.

  The man climbed back into the cab of the forklift.

  “That’s fine with me,” he said. “Say hello to my mom if you see her.”

  Wallander returned to Ystad. He parked near the square and headed down the pedestrian street to buy some gauze bandages at the pharmacy. The clerk gazed sympathetically at his battered face. He bought food for dinner in the supermarket on the square. On his way back to the car he changed his mind and retraced his steps to the state liquor store. There he bought a bottle of whiskey. Even though he couldn’t really afford it, he chose malt whiskey.

  By four thirty Wallander was back at the station. Neither Rydberg nor Martinson was around. He went over to the prosecutor’s office. The girl at the reception desk smiled.

  “She loved the flowers,” she said.

  “Is she in her office?”

  “She’s in district court until five o’clock.”

  Wallander headed back. In the corridor he ran into Svedberg.

  “How’s it going with Bergman?” asked Wallander.

  “He’s still not talking,” said Svedberg. “But he’ll soften up eventually. The evidence is piling up. The crime lab technicians think they can connect the weapon to the crime.”

  “What else have we got on this?”

  “It looks as if both Ström and Bergman were active in various anti-immigrant groups. But we don’t know whether they were operating on their own or as entrepreneurs working for some organization.”

  “In other words, everybody is perfectly happy?”

  “I’d hardly say that. Björk’s talking about how he was so anxious to catch the murderer, but then it turned out to be a cop. I suspect they’re going to play down Bergman’s importance and dump it all on Valfrid Ström, who has nothing more to say about it. Personally, I think Bergman was just as involved in the whole thing.”

  “I wonder whether Ström was the one who called me at home,” said Wallander. “I never heard him say enough to tell for sure.”

  Svedberg gave him a searching look. “Which means?”

  “That in the worst case, there are others who are prepared to take over the killing from Bergman and Ström.”

  “I’ll tell Björk that we have to continue our patrols of the camps,” said Svedberg. “By the way, we’ve gotten a lot of tips indicating that it was a gang of kids who set the fire here in Ystad.”

  “Don’t forget the old man who got a sack of turnips in the head,” said Wallander.

  “How’s it going with Lenarp?”

  Wallander hesitated with his answer. “I’m not really sure,” he said. “But we’re doing some serious work on it again.”

  At ten minutes past five Martinson and Rydberg were in Wallander’s office. He thought that Rydberg still looked tired and worn-out. Martinson was in a bad mood.

  “It’s a mystery how Lövgren got to Ystad and back again on Friday, January fifth,” he said. “I talked to the bus driver on that route. He said that Johannes and Maria used to ride with him whenever they went into town. Either together or separately. He was absolutely certain that Johannes Lövgren did not ride his bus any time after New Year’s. And no cab had a fare to Lenarp. According to Nyström, they took the bus when they had to go anywhere. And we know that Lövgren was tight-fisted.”

  “They always drank coffee together,” said Wallander. “In the afternoon. The Nyströms must have noticed if Lövgren went off to Ystad or not.”

  “That’s exactly what’s such a mystery,” said Martinson. “Both of them claim that he didn’t go into town that day. And yet we know that he went to two different banks between eleven thirty and one fifteen. He must have been away from home at least three or four hours that day.”

  “Strange,” said Wallander. “You’ll have to keep working on it.”

  Martinson referred to his notes. “At any rate, he doesn’t have any other safe-deposit boxes in town.”

  “Good,” said Wallander. “At least we know that much.”

  “But he might have one in Simrishamn,” Martinson objected. “Or Trelleborg. Or Malmö.”

  “Let’s concentrate on his trip to Ystad first,” said Wallander, turning to Rydberg.

  “Lars Herdin stands by his story,” he said after glancing at his worn notebook. “By coincidence he ran into Lövgren and that woman in Kristianstad in the spring of 1979. And he claims that it was from an anonymous letter that he found out they had a child together.”

  “Could he describe the woman?”

  “Vaguely. In the worst case we could line up all the ladies and have him point out the right one. If she’s one of them, that is,” he added.

  “You sound like you have some doubt.”

  Rydberg closed his notebook with an irritable snap.

  “I can’t get anything to fit,” he said. “You know that. Obviously we have to follow up the leads we have. But I’m not at all sure that we’re on the right track. What bothers me is that I can’t figure out any alternative path to take.”

  Wallander told them about his meeting with Erik Magnusson.

  “Why didn’t you ask him for an alibi for the night of the murder?” wondered Martinson in surpr
ise when he was done.

  Wallander felt himself starting to blush behind his black and blue marks.

  It had slipped his mind.

  But he didn’t tell them that.

  “I decided to wait,” he said. “I wanted to have an excuse to visit him again.”

  He could hear how lame that sounded. But neither Rydberg nor Martinson seemed to react to his explanation.

  The conversation came to a halt. Each was wrapped up in his own thoughts.

  Wallander wondered how many times he had found himself in exactly this same situation. When an investigation suddenly ceases to breathe. Like a horse that refuses to budge. Now they would be forced to tug and pull at the horse until it started to move.

  “How should we continue?” asked Wallander at last, when the silence became too oppressive.

  He answered his own question. “For your part, Martinson, it’s a matter of finding out how Lövgren could go to Ystad and back without anyone noticing. We have to figure that out as soon as possible.”

  “There was a jar full of receipts in one of the kitchen cupboards,” said Rydberg. “He might have bought something in a shop on that Friday. Maybe some clerk would remember seeing him.”

  “Or maybe he had a flying carpet,” said Martinson. “I’ll keep working on it.”

  “His relatives,” said Wallander. “We have to go through all of them.”

  He pulled out a list of names and addresses from the thick folder and handed it to Rydberg.

  “The funeral is on Wednesday,” said Rydberg. “In Villie Church. I don’t care much for funerals. But I think I’ll go to this one.”

  “I’m going back to Kristianstad tomorrow,” said Wallander. “Göran Boman was suspicious about Ellen Magnusson. He didn’t think she was telling the truth.”

  It was a few minutes before six when they finished their meeting.

  They decided to meet again on the following afternoon.

  “If Näslund is feeling better, he can work on the stolen rental car,” said Wallander. “By the way, did we ever find out what that Polish family is doing in Lenarp?”

  “The husband works at the sugar refinery in Jordberga,” said Rydberg. “All his papers are in order. Even though he wasn’t fully aware of it himself.”

  Wallander sat in his office for a while after Rydberg and Martinson left. There was a stack of papers on his desk that he was supposed to go through, including all the investigative material from the assault case he had been working on over New Year’s. There were also countless reports pertaining to everything from missing bull calves to trucks that had tipped over during the last stormy night. At the bottom of the stack he found a paper informing him that he had been given a raise. He swiftly calculated that he would be taking home an extra 39 kronor per month.

  By the time he had made his way through the pile of papers, it was almost half past seven. He called Löderup and told his sister that he was on his way.

  “We’re starving,” she said. “Do you always work late?”

  Wallander selected a cassette tape of a Puccini opera and went out to his car. He had wanted to make sure that Anette Brolin had really forgotten all about what had happened the night before. But he put it out of his mind. It would have to wait.

  Kristina told him that the home-care help for their father had turned out to be a resolute woman in her fifties who would have no trouble taking care of him.

  “He couldn’t ask for anyone better,” she said when she came out to the driveway and met him in the dark.

  “What’s Dad doing?”

  “He’s painting,” she said.

  While his sister made dinner, Wallander sat on the sled in the studio and watched the autumn motif emerge. His father seemed to have completely forgotten about what had happened a few days before.

  I have to visit him more regularly, thought Wallander. At least three times a week, and preferably at specific times.

  After dinner they played cards with their father for a couple of hours. At eleven o’clock he went to bed.

  “I’m going home tomorrow,” said Kristina. “I can’t be away any longer.”

  “Thanks for coming,” said Wallander.

  They decided that he would pick her up at eight o’clock the next morning and drive her to the airport.

  “The plane was full out of Sturup airport,” she said. “I’m leaving from Everöd.”

  That suited Wallander just fine, since he had to drive to Kristianstad anyway.

  Just after midnight he walked into his apartment on Mariagatan. He poured himself a big glass of whiskey and took it with him into the bathroom. He lay in the tub for a long time, thawing out his limbs in the hot water.

  Even though he tried to push them out of his mind, Rune Bergman and Valfrid Ström kept popping into his thoughts. He was trying to understand. But the only thing he came up with was the same idea he had had so many times before. A new world had emerged, and he hadn’t even noticed it. As a cop, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live in this new time? How would he deal with the great uncertainty he felt about the great changes, which were happening much too fast?

  The murder of the Somali had been a new kind of murder.

  The double murder in Lenarp, however, was an old-fashioned crime.

  Or was it really? He thought about the brutality and the noose.

  He wasn’t sure.

  It was one-thirty when he finally crawled between the cool sheets.

  His loneliness in bed felt worse than ever.

  For the next three days nothing happened.

  Näslund came back to work and succeeded in solving the problem of the stolen car.

  A man and a woman went on a robbery spree and then left the car in Halmstad. On the night of the murder they had been staying in a boarding house in Bastad. The owner vouched for their alibi.

  Wallander talked to Ellen Magnusson. She firmly denied that Johannes Lovgren was the father of her son Erik.

  He also visited Erik Magnusson again and asked for the alibi he had forgotten to get during their first encounter.

  Erik Magnusson had been with his fiancée. There was no reason to doubt his statement.

  Martinson got nowhere with Lövgren’s trip to Ystad.

  The Nyströms were quite sure about their story, as were the bus drivers and cab owners.

  Rydberg went to the funeral, and he talked to nineteen different relatives of the Lövgrens.

  Nothing came up that gave them any leads.

  The temperature hovered around the freezing point. One day there was no wind, the next day it was gusty.

  Wallander ran into Anette Brolin in the hall. She thanked him for the flowers. But he was still uncertain whether she had really decided to forget about what had happened that night.

  Rune Bergman still refused to talk, even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. Various nationalist extremist movements tried to take credit for the crime. The press and the rest of the media became engulfed in a violent debate about Sweden’s immigration policy. Although it was calm in Skåne, crosses burned in the night outside various refugee camps in other parts of the country.

  Wallander and his colleagues on the investigative team trying to solve the double murder in Lenarp shielded themselves from all of this. Only rarely were any opinions expressed that were not directly related to the deadlocked investigation. But Wallander realized that he was not alone in his feelings of uncertainty and confusion about the new society that was emerging.

  We’re living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it’s questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them.

  On Friday, January nineteenth, everything happened at once.

  The day did not start off well for Kurt Wallander. At seven thirty he had
his Peugeot checked out and barely managed to avoid having his car declared unfit to drive. When he went through the inspection report, he saw that his car needed repairs that would cost thousands of kronor.

  Despondent, he drove to the police station.

  He hadn’t even taken off his overcoat when Martinson came storming into his office.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “Now I know how Johannes Lövgren got to Ystad and back home again.”

  Wallander forgot all about his misery over his car and felt himself instantly seized with excitement.

  “It wasn’t a flying carpet, after all,” continued Martinson. “The chimney sweep drove him.”

  Wallander sat down in his desk chair.

  “What chimney sweep?”

  “Master chimney sweep Arthur Lundin from Slimminge. Hanna Nyström suddenly remembered that the chimney sweep had been there on Friday, January fifth. He cleaned the chimneys at both properties and then took off. When she told me that he cleaned Lövgren’s flues last and that he left around ten thirty, bells started to go off in my head. I just talked to him. I got hold of him while he was cleaning the hospital chimney in Rydsgård. It turned out that he never listens to the radio or watches TV or reads the papers. He cleans chimneys and spends the rest of his time drinking aquavit and taking care of several caged rabbits. He had no idea that the Lövgrens had been murdered. But he told me that Johannes Lövgren rode with him to Ystad. Since he has a van and Lövgren was sitting in the windowless back seat, it’s not so strange that nobody saw him.”

  “But didn’t the Nyströms see the car coming back?”

  “No,” replied Martinson triumphantly. “That’s just it. Lövgren asked Lundin to stop on Veberödsvägen. From there you can walk along a dirt road right up to the back of Lövgren’s house. It’s about a kilometer. If the Nyströms were sitting in the window, it would have looked as if Lövgren were coming in from the stable.”

  Wallander frowned. “It still seems odd.”

  “Lundin was very frank. He said that Johannes Lövgren promised him a bottle of vodka if he would drive him back home. He let Lövgren out in Ystad and then continued on to a couple of houses north of town. Later he picked up Lövgren at the appointed time, dropped him off on Veberödsvägen, and got his bottle of vodka.”