Faceless Killers: A Mystery

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Faceless Killers: A Mystery Page 25

by Henning Mankell

Next to the living room was a small dining room. Wallander nudged the half-open door with his foot. To his undisguised amazement, one of his father’s paintings hung on the wall.

  It was the autumn landscape without the grouse.

  He stood looking at the picture until he heard the rattle of a tray behind him.

  It was as if he were looking at his father’s motif for the first time.

  Rydberg had sat down on a chair by the window. Wallander thought that someday he would have to ask him why he always sat by a window.

  Where do our habits come from? he thought. What secret factory produces our habits, both good and bad?

  Ellen Magnusson served him coffee.

  He figured he’d better begin.

  “Göran Boman from the Kristianstad police was here and asked you a number of questions,” he said. “Please don’t be surprised if we ask you some of the same questions.”

  “Just don’t be surprised if you get the same answers,” said Ellen Magnusson.

  At that moment Wallander realized that the woman sitting across from him was the mystery woman with whom Johannes Lövgren had had a child.

  Wallander knew it without knowing how he knew.

  In a rash moment he decided to lie his way to the truth. If he wasn’t mistaken, Ellen Magnusson was a woman who had very little experience with the police. She no doubt assumed that they searched for the truth by using the truth themselves. She was the one who would be lying, not the police.

  “Mrs. Magnusson,” said Wallander. “We know that Johannes Lövgren is the father of your son Erik. There’s no use denying it.”

  She looked at him, terrified. The absent look in her eyes was suddenly gone. Now she was fully present in the room again.

  “It’s not true,” she said.

  A lie begs for mercy, thought Wallander. She’s going to break soon.

  “Of course it’s true,” he said. “You and I both know it’s true. If Johannes Lövgren hadn’t been murdered, we would never have had to worry about asking these questions. But now we have to know. And if we don’t find out now, you’ll be forced to answer these questions under oath in court.”

  It went more quickly than he thought.

  Suddenly she broke.

  “Why do you want to know?” she shrieked. “I haven’t done anything. Why can’t a person be allowed to keep her secrets?”

  “No one is forbidding secrets,” said Wallander deliberately. “But as long as people are murdered, we have to search for the perpetrators. This means we have to ask questions. And we have to get answers.”

  Rydberg sat motionless on his chair by the window. His tired eyes stared at the woman.

  Together they listened to her story. Wallander thought it inexpressibly dreary. Her life, as it was laid out before him, was just as hopeless as the frosty landscape he had driven through that same morning.

  She had been born the daughter of an elderly farming couple in Yngsjö. She had torn herself free from the land and had eventually become a clerk in a pharmacy. Johannes Lövgren had come into her life as a customer at the pharmacy. She told Wallander and Rydberg that they first met when he was buying bicarbonate of soda. Then he had returned and started to court her.

  His story was that of the lonely farmer. Not until the baby was born did she find out that he was married. Her feelings had been resigned, never spiteful. He had bought her silence with money, which was paid several times a year.

  But she had raised the son alone. He was hers.

  “What did you think when you found out that he had been murdered?” asked Wallander when she fell silent.

  “I believe in God,” she said. “I believe in righteous vengeance.”

  “Vengeance?”

  “How many people did Johannes betray?” she asked. “He betrayed me, his son, his wife, and his daughters. He betrayed everyone.”

  And now she will sc learn that her son is a murderer, thought Wallander. Will she imagine that he was an archangel who was carrying out a divine decree for vengeance? Will she be able to stand it?

  He continued asking his questions. Rydberg shifted his position on the chair by the window. A bell went off in the kitchen.

  When they finally left, Wallander felt that he had gotten the answers to all his questions.

  He knew who the mystery woman was. The secret son. He knew that she was expecting money from Johannes Lövgren. But Lövgren had never shown up.

  Another question, however, proved to have an unexpected answer.

  Ellen Magnusson never gave any of Lövgren’s money to her son. She put it into a savings account. He wouldn’t inherit the money until she was gone. Maybe she was afraid he would gamble it away.

  But Erik Magnusson knew that Johannes Lövgren was his father. On that point he had lied. And did he also know that Lövgren, who was his father, had vast financial assets?

  Rydberg was silent during the entire interrogation. Just as they were about to leave, he had asked her how often she saw her son. Whether they got along well with each other. Did she know about his fiancee?

  Her reply was evasive. “He’s grown now,” she said. “He lives his own life. But he’s good about coming to visit. And of course I know that he has a fiancee.”

  Now she’s lying again, thought Wallander. She didn’t know about the fiancee.

  They stopped at the inn at Degeberga and ate. Rydberg seemed to have revived.

  “Your interrogation was perfect,” he said. “It should be used as a training exercise at the police academy.”

  “Still, I did lie,” said Wallander. “And that’s not considered kosher.”

  During the meal they took stock of their strategy. Both of them agreed that they should wait for the background investigation of Erik Magnusson. Not until that was compiled and ready would they pick him up for questioning.

  “Do you think he’s the one?” asked Rydberg.

  “Of course he is,” replied Wallander. “Alone or with an accomplice. What do you think?”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  They arrived back at the police station in Ystad at quarter past three. Näslund was sitting in his office, sneezing. He had been relieved by Hanson at noon.

  Erik Magnusson had spent the morning buying new shoes and turning in some betting coupons at a tobacco shop. Then he had returned home.

  “Does he seem on guard?” asked Wallander.

  “I don’t know,” said Naslund. “Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I think I’m imagining things.”

  Rydberg drove home, and Wallander locked himself in his office.

  He leafed absentmindedly through a new stack of papers that someone had put on his desk.

  He was having a hard time concentrating.

  Ellen Magnusson’s story had made him uneasy.

  He imagined that his own life wasn’t that far from her reality. His own dubious life.

  I’m going to take some time off when this is over, he thought. With all my overtime I could probably be gone for a week. I’m going to devote seven whole days to myself. Seven days like seven lean years. Then I’ll emerge a new man.

  He pondered whether he ought to go to some health spa where he could get help losing some weight. But he found the thought disgusting. He would rather get in his car and drive south.

  Maybe to Paris or Amsterdam. In Arnhem he knew a cop he had met once at a narcotics seminar. Maybe he could visit him.

  But first we’ve got to solve the murder in Lenarp, he thought. We’ll do that next week.

  Then I’ll decide where I’m going to go.

  On Thursday, January twenty-fifth, Erik Magnusson was picked up by the police for questioning. They nabbed him right outside the building where he lived. Rydberg and Hanson took care of it while Wallander sat in the car and watched. Erik Magnusson went along to the squad car without protest. They had scheduled it for morning, when he was on his way to work. Since Kurt Wallander was anxious for the first interrogations with the man to take place without arousing any
attention, he let Magnusson call his workplace and explain why he wasn’t coming in. Björk, Wallander, and Rydberg were present in the room when Magnusson was interrogated. Björk and Rydberg stayed in the background while Wallander asked the questions.

  During the days before Erik Magnusson was taken to Ystad for the first interrogations, the police grew even more certain that he was guilty of the double murder in Lenarp. Various investigations had shown that Magnusson was a man with heavy debts. On several occasions he had barely managed to avoid being physically beaten because he had not paid off his gambling debts. In a visit to Jägersrö, Hanson had seen Magnusson wagering large sums. His financial situation was catastrophic.

  The year before, he had been the object of attention by the Eslöv police for some time as the suspect in a bank robbery. It was never possible to connect him to the crime, however. It did seem conceivable, on the other hand, that Magnusson was mixed up in narcotics smuggling. His fiancée, who was now unemployed, had on several occasions been sentenced for various narcotics violations, and in one instance for postal fraud. So Erik Magnusson had large debts. At times, however, he had amazing amounts of money. In comparison, his salary from the county council was insignificant.

  This Thursday morning in January would mean the final breakthrough in the investigation. Now the double murder in Lenarp would be cleared up. Kurt Wallander had awakened early this morning with a great sense of tension in his body.

  The next day, Friday, January twenty-sixth, he realized that he was wrong.

  The assumption that Erik Magnusson was the guilty party, or at least one of the guilty parties, was completely obliterated. The track they had been following was a blind alley. On Friday afternoon they realized that Magnusson could never be tied to the double murder, for the simple reason that he was innocent.

  His alibi for the night of the murder had been corroborated by his fiancée’s mother, who was visiting. Her credibility was beyond reproach. She was an elderly lady who suffered from insomnia. Erik Magnusson had snored all night long the night that Johannes and Maria Lövgren were so brutally murdered.

  The money with which he had paid his debt to the hardware store owner in Tågarp came from the sale of a car. Magnusson was able to produce a receipt for the Chrysler he had sold. And the buyer, a cabinetmaker in Lomma, told them that he had paid cash, with thousand-krona and five-hundred-krona bills.

  Magnusson was also able to give a believable explanation for the fact that he lied about Johannes Lövgren being his father. He had done it for his mother’s sake, since he thought she would want it that way. When Wallander told him that Lövgren was a wealthy man, he had looked truly astonished.

  In the end there was nothing left.

  When Björk asked whether anyone was opposed to sending Erik Magnusson home and dropping him from the case until further notice, no one had any objections. Wallander felt a crushing guilt over having steered the entire investigation in the wrong direction. Only Rydberg seemed unaffected. He was also the one who had been the most skeptical from the beginning.

  The investigation had run aground. All that was left was a wreck.

  There was nothing to do but start over again.

  At the same time the snow arrived.

  In the wee hours of Saturday, January twenty-seventh, a violent snowstorm came in from the southwest. After a few hours, E14 was blocked. The snow fell steadily for six hours. The heavy wind made the efforts of the snowplows futile. As fast as they scraped the snow off the roads, it would collect in drifts again.

  For twenty-four hours the police were busy preventing the mess from developing into chaos. Then the storm moved off, as quickly as it had come.

  January thirtieth was Kurt Wallander’s forty-third birthday. He celebrated by reforming his eating habits and starting to smoke again. To his great delight, his daughter Linda called him that evening. She was in Malmö and had decided to enroll at a college outside Stockholm. She promised to come and see him before she left.

  Wallander arranged his schedule so that he could visit his father at least three times a week. He wrote a letter to his sister in Stockholm, telling her that the new home-care worker had done wonders with their father. The confusion that had driven him out on that desolate nighttime promenade toward Italy had dissipated. Having a woman come regularly to his house had been his salvation.

  One evening several days after his birthday, Wallander called up Anette Brolin and offered to show her around wintry Skane. He again apologized for the night at her apartment. She thanked him and said yes, and the following Sunday, February fourth, he took her out to see the ancient stones at Ales Stenar and the medieval castle of Glimmingehus. They ate dinner in Hammenhög at the inn, and Wallander started to think that she really had decided that he was someone other than the man who had pulled her down on his knee.

  The weeks passed with no new breakthrough in their investigation. Martinson and Naslund were transferred to new assignments. Wallander and Rydberg, however, were allowed to concentrate exclusively on the double murder for the time being.

  One cold, clear day in the middle of February, a day with absolutely no wind, Wallander was visited in his office by the Lövgrens’ daughter, who lived and worked in Göteborg.

  She had returned to Skane to oversee the placement of a headstone on her parents’ grave in Villie cemetery. Wallander told her the truth—that the police were still fumbling around for some definite clue. The day after her visit, he drove out to the cemetery and stood there for a while, meditating by the black stone with the gold inscription.

  The month of February was spent in broadening and deepening the investigation.

  Rydberg, who was silent and uncommunicative and was suffering greatly from the pain in his leg, did most of his work by phone, while Wallander was often out in the field. They checked out every single bank in Skane, but found no additional safe-deposit boxes. Wallander talked with over two hundred people who were either relatives or acquaintances of Johannes and Maria Lövgren. He made numerous return forays into the bulging investigative material, went back to points he had covered long ago, and ripped up the floorboards in old, played-out reports and scrutinized them anew. But he found no opening anywhere.

  One icy and windy February day he picked up Sten Widen at his farm and they visited Lenarp. Together they inspected the horse that might be concealing a secret and watched the mare eat an armload of hay. Old Nyström was at their heels wherever they went. Nyström had been given the mare by the two daughters.

  But the property itself, which stood silent and closed up, had been turned over to a real estate agent in Skurup for sale. Kurt Wallander stood in the wind looking at the broken kitchen window, which had never been fixed, just boarded up with a piece of masonite. He tried to reestablish the contact with Sten Widen that had been lost for the past ten years, but the racehorse trainer and former friend appeared uninterested. After Wallander had driven him home, he realized that their contact was broken permanently.

  The preliminary investigation of the murder of the Somali refugee was concluded, and Rune Bergman was brought before the district court in Ystad. The court building was filled with a large crowd from the media. By now it had been established that it was Valfrid Ström who had fired the fatal shots. But Rune Bergman was indicted for complicity in the murder, and the psychiatric evaluation declared him fit to stand trial.

  Kurt Wallander testified in court, and on several occasions he sat in and listened to Anette Brolin’s appeals and cross-examinations. Rune Bergman didn’t say much, even though his silence was no longer unbroken. The court proceedings revealed a racist underground landscape in which political views similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan were prevalent. Bergman and Ström had acted on their own at the same time as they were connected to various racist organizations.

  The thought again occurred to Wallander that something decisive was about to happen in Sweden. For brief moments he could also detect contradictory sympathies in himself for some of the
anti-immigrant arguments that came up in discussions and the press while the trial was in progress. Did the government and the Immigration Service have any real control over which individuals sought to enter Sweden? Who was a refugee and who was an opportunist? Was it possible to differentiate at all?

  How long would the principle of the generous refugee policy be able to hold without leading to chaos? Was there any upper limit?

  Kurt Wallander had made halfhearted attempts to study the questions thoroughly. He realized that he harbored the same vague apprehension that so many other people did. Anxiety about the unknown, about the future.

  At the end of February the sentence was pronounced, giving Rune Bergman a long prison term. To everyone’s undisguised astonishment, he did not appeal the verdict, which took effect immediately.

  No more snow fell on Skåne that winter. One early morning at the beginning of March, Anette Brolin and Kurt Wallander took a long walk along Falsterbo Spit. Together they watched the early flocks of birds returning from the distant lands of the Southern Cross. Wallander suddenly took her hand, and she didn’t pull it away, at least not at once.

  He managed to lose four kilos, but he realized that he would never get back to what he had weighed when Mona had suddenly left him.

  Occasionally their voices would meet on the telephone. Wallander noticed that his jealousy was gradually crumbling away. The black woman who used to visit him in his dreams no longer showed up either.

  March began with Svedberg repeating his desire to move back to Stockholm. At the same time Rydberg was admitted to the hospital for two weeks. At first everyone thought it was for his bad leg. But one day Ebba told Wallander in confidence that Rydberg was apparently suffering from cancer. She didn’t say how she knew, or what type of cancer it was. When Wallander visited Rydberg at the hospital, he told him it was only a routine check of his stomach. A spot on an X-ray plate had revealed a possible lesion on his large intestine.

  Wallander felt a burning pain inside at the thought that Rydberg might be seriously ill. With a growing sense of hopelessness he trudged on with his investigation. One day, in a fit of rage, he threw the thick folders at the wall. The floor was covered with paper. For a long time he sat looking at the havoc. Then he crawled around sorting the material again and started from the beginning.

 

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