Faceless Killers: A Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  Somewhere there’s something I’m not seeing, he thought.

  A connection, a detail, which is exactly the key I have to turn. But should I turn it to the right or the left?

  He often called Göran Boman in Kristianstad to complain about his plight.

  On his own authority, Boman had carried out intensive investigations of Nils Velander and other conceivable suspects. Nowhere did the rock crack. For two whole days Wallander sat with Lars Herdin without advancing a single meter.

  He still didn’t want to believe that the crime would never be solved.

  In the middle of March he managed to entice Anette Brolin to make an opera trip with him to Copenhagen. During the night she embraced his desolation. But when he told her that he loved her, she shied away.

  It was what it was. Nothing more.

  On the weekend of March seventeenth and eighteenth his daughter came to visit. She came alone, without the Kenyan medical student, and Wallander met her at the train station. Ebba had sent a friend of hers over the day before to give his apartment on Mariagatan a major cleaning. And he finally felt that he had his daughter back. They took a long walk along the beach by Osterleden, ate lunch at Lilla Vik, and then stayed up talking till five in the morning. They visited Wallander’s father, and he surprised them both by telling funny stories about Kurt as a child.

  On Monday morning he took her to the train.

  He seemed to have regained some of her trust.

  When he was back in his office, poring over the investigative material, Rydberg suddenly came in. He sat down on the spindle-backed chair by the window and told Wallander straight out that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now he was going in for cytotoxin and radiation therapy, which could last a long time and might not do any good. He wouldn’t permit any sympathy. He had merely come to remind Wallander about Maria Lövgren’s last words. And the noose. Then he stood up, shook Wallander’s hand, and left.

  Wallander was left alone with his pain and his investigation. Björk thought that for the time being he ought to work alone, since the police were swamped.

  Nothing happened in March. Or in April either.

  The reports on the status of Rydberg’s health varied. Ebba was the unflagging messenger.

  On one of the first days in May, Wallander went into Björk's office and suggested that someone else take over the investigation. But Björk refused. Wallander would have to continue at least until the summer and vacation period were over. Then they would reevaluate the situation.

  Time after time Wallander started over. Retreated, prying and twisting at the material, trying to make it come alive. But the stones he was walking on remained cold.

  At the beginning of June he traded in his Peugeot on a Nissan. On June eighth he went on vacation and drove up to Stockholm to see his daughter.

  Together they drove all the way to the North Cape. Herman Mboya was in Kenya but would be coming back in August.

  On Monday, July ninth, Wallander was back on duty.

  A memo from Björk informed him that he was to continue with his investigation until Björk returned in early August. Then they would decide what to do next.

  He also received a message from Ebba that Rydberg was doing much better. The doctors might be able to control his cancer after all.

  Tuesday, July tenth, was a beautiful day in Ystad. At lunchtime Wallander went downtown and strolled around. He went into the store by the square and decided to buy a new stereo.

  Then he remembered that he had some Norwegian bills in his wallet that he had forgotten to exchange. He had been carrying them around since the trip to the North Cape. He went down to the Union Bank and got in line for the only window that was open.

  He didn’t recognize the woman behind the counter. It wasn’t Britta-Lena Bodén, the young woman with the good memory, or any of the other tellers he had met before. He thought it must be a summer temp.

  The man in front of him in line made a large withdrawal. Distractedly, Wallander wondered what he was going to use such a large amount of cash for. While the man counted up his bills, Wallander absentmindedly read his name on the driver’s license he had placed on the counter.

  Then it was his turn, and he exchanged his Norwegian money. Behind him in the line he heard a summer tourist speaking Italian or Spanish.

  As he emerged onto the street, an idea suddenly occurred to him.

  He stood there motionless, as if he were frozen solid in his inspiration.

  Then he went back inside the bank. He waited until the tourists had exchanged their money.

  He showed his police ID to the teller.

  “Britta-Lena Bodén,” he said, smiling. “Is she on vacation?”

  “She’s probably with her parents in Simrishamn,” said the teller. “She has two weeks of vacation left.”

  “Bodén,” he said. “Is that her parents’ name too?”

  “Her father runs a gas station in Simrishamn. I think it’s the one called Statoil nowadays.”

  “Thank you,” said Wallander. “I just have some routine questions to ask her.”

  “I recognize you,” said the teller. “So you haven’t been able to solve that awful crime yet?”

  “No,” said Wallander. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  He practically ran back to the police station, jumped into his car, and drove to Simrishamn. From Britta-Lena Bodén’s father he learned that she was spending the day with friends at the beach at Sandhammaren. He searched a long time before he found her, well hidden behind a sand dune. She was playing backgammon with her friends, and all of them gave Wallander an astonished look as he came tramping through the sand.

  “I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t important,” he said.

  Britta-Lena Bodén seemed to grasp his serious mood and stood up. She was dressed in a minuscule bathing suit, and Wallander averted his eyes. They sat down a little way from the others, so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “That day in January,” said Wallander. “I wanted to ask you about it again. I’d like you to think back to that day. And I want you to try and remember whether there was anyone else in the bank when Johannes Lövgren made his big withdrawal.”

  Her memory was still excellent.

  “No,” she said. “He was alone.”

  He knew that what she said was true.

  “Keep going,” he continued. “Lövgren went out the door. The door closed behind him. What happened then?”

  Her reply was quick and firm. “The door didn’t close.”

  “Another customer came in?”

  “Two of them.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “No.”

  The next question was crucial.

  “Because they were foreigners?”

  She looked at him in astonishment.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I didn’t know until now. Keep thinking.”

  “There were two men. Quite young.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They wanted to exchange money.”

  “Do you remember what currency?”

  “Dollars.”

  “Did they speak English? Were they Americans?”

  She shook her head. “Not English. I don’t know what language they were speaking.”

  “Then what happened? Try to picture it in your mind.”

  “They came up to the window.”

  “Both of them?”

  She thought carefully before she answered. The warm wind was ruffling her hair.

  “One of them came up and put the money on the counter. I think it was a hundred dollars. I asked him if he wanted to exchange it. He nodded.”

  “What was the other man doing?”

  She thought again.

  “He dropped something on the floor, which he bent over and picked up. A mitten, I think.”

  He backed up a step with his questions.

  “Johannes Lövgren had just left,” he said. “He had received a
large amount of cash which he put into his briefcase. Did he receive anything else?”

  “He got a receipt for his money.”

  “Which he put in the briefcase?”

  For the first time she was hesitant.

  “I think so.”

  “If he didn’t put the receipt in his briefcase, then what happened to it?”

  She thought again.

  “There was nothing lying on the counter. I’m sure of that. Otherwise I would have picked it up.”

  “Could it have slipped off onto the floor?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the man who bent over for the mitten could have picked it up?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was on the receipt?”

  “The amount. His name and address.”

  Wallander held his breath.

  “All that was on it? Are you sure?”

  “He filled out his withdrawal slip in big letters. I know that he wrote down his address too, even though it wasn’t required.”

  Wallander backtracked again. “Lövgren takes his money and leaves. In the doorway he runs into two unknown men. One of them bends down and picks up a mitten, and maybe the withdrawal slip too. It says that Johannes Lövgren has just withdrawn twenty-seven thousand kronor. Is that correct?”

  Suddenly she understood. “Are they the ones that did it?”

  “I don’t know. Think back again.”

  “I exchanged their money. He put the bills in his pocket. They left.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Three, four minutes. No more.”

  “The bank has a copy of their exchange receipt, I suppose?”

  She nodded.

  “I exchanged money at the bank today. I had to give my name. Did they give any address?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember.”

  Kurt Wallander nodded. Now something was starting to burn.

  “Your memory is phenomenal,” he said. “Did you ever see those two men again?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Would you recognize them?”

  “I think so. Maybe.”

  Wallander thought for a few moments.

  “You might have to interrupt your vacation for a few days,” he said.

  “We’re supposed to drive to Öland tomorrow!”

  Wallander made a decision on the spot. “I’m sorry, you can’t,” he said. “Maybe the next day. But not before then.”

  He stood up and brushed off the sand.

  “Be sure to tell your parents where we can reach you,” he said.

  She stood up and got ready to rejoin her friends.

  “Can I tell them?” she asked.

  “Make up something,” he replied. “I’m sure you can do that.”

  Just after four o’clock that afternoon they found the exchange receipt in the Union Bank’s files.

  The signature was illegible. No address was given.

  To his surprise, Wallander was not disappointed. He thought this was because now at least he understood how the whole thing might have happened.

  From the bank he drove straight to Rydberg’s place, where he was convalescing.

  Rydberg was sitting on his balcony when Wallander rang the doorbell. He had grown thin and was very pale.

  Together they sat on the balcony, and Wallander told him about his discovery.

  Rydberg nodded thoughtfully.

  “You’re probably right,” he said when Wallander finished. “That’s probably how it happened.”

  “The question now is how to find them,” said Wallander. “Some tourists who happened to be visiting Sweden more than six months ago.”

  “Maybe they’re still here,” said Rydberg. “As refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants.”

  “Where do I start?” asked Wallander.

  “I don’t know,” said Rydberg. “But you’ll figure out something.”

  They sat for a couple of hours on Rydberg’s balcony.

  Just before seven o’clock Wallander went back to his car.

  The stones were no longer as cold under his feet.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kurt Wallander would always remember the following days as the time when the chart was drawn. He started with what Britta-Lena Bodén remembered and an illegible signature. A conceivable scenario existed, and the last word Maria Lovgren spoke before she died was a puzzle piece that had finally fallen into place. He also had the oddly knotted noose to take into account. Then he drew the chart. On the same day he had talked with Britta-Lena Bodén in the warm sand dunes at Sandhammaren he had gone over to Björk’s house, pulled him away from the dinner table, and extracted an immediate promise to assign Hanson and Martinson full-time to the investigation, which was once again given top priority and put into high gear.

  On Wednesday, July eleventh, before the bank opened for business, they reconstructed the scene. Britta-Lena Bodén took her place behind the teller’s window, Hanson assumed the role of Johannes Lövgren, and Martinson and Björk played the two men who came in to exchange their dollars. Wallander insisted that everything should be exactly as it was on that day six months earlier. The anxious bank manager finally agreed to allow Britta-Lena Bodén to hand over 27,000 kronor in bills of mixed but large denominations to Hanson, who had borrowed an old briefcase from Ebba.

  Wallander stood to one side, watching everything. Twice he ordered them to start over when Britta-Lena Bodén remembered some detail that didn’t seem right.

  Wallander carried out this reconstruction in order to spark her memory. He hoped that she might be able to open a door to yet another room in her extraordinarily clear memory.

  Afterwards she shook her head. She had told him everything she could remember. She had nothing to add. Wallander asked her to postpone her trip to Oland another couple of days and then left her alone in an office where she could look through photographs of foreign criminals who, for one reason or another, had been caught in the net of the Swedish police. When this search produced no results either, she was put on a plane to Norrköping to go through the extensive photo archives at the Immigration Service. After eighteen hours of staring at countless pictures, she returned to Sturup airport, where Wallander himself went to meet her. The results were negative.

  The next step was to link up with Interpol. The scenario of how the crime might have occurred was fed into their computers, which then made comparative studies at European headquarters. Still, nothing turned up to change the situation in any significant way.

  While Britta-Lena Bodén was sitting and sweating over the endless rows of photographs, Wallander carried out three long interviews with Arthur Lundin, the master chimney sweep from Slimminge. His trips between Lenarp and Ystad were reconstructed, clocked, and repeated. Wallander continued drawing up his chart. Now and then he went to see Rydberg, who sat on his balcony, weak and pale, and went over the investigation with him. Rydberg insisted that Wallander was not bothering him and that these sessions did not tire him. But Wallander left his balcony each time with a nagging feeling of guilt.

  Anette Brolin returned from her vacation, which she had spent with her husband and children in a summer house in Grebbestad on the west coast. She brought her family back to Ystad with her, and Wallander assumed his most formal tone of voice when he called her to report on his breakthrough in the practically lifeless investigation.

  After the first intensive week everything came to a standstill.

  Wallander stared at his chart. They were stuck again.

  “We’ll just have to wait,” said Björk. “Interpol’s dough rises slowly.”

  Wallander groaned inwardly at the strained metaphor.

  At the same time he realized that Björk was right.

  When Britta-Lena Bodén came back from Oland and was about to start work at the bank again, Wallander asked the bank management to give her a few more days off. Then he took her out to the refugee camps around Ystad. They also made a trip to the floating camps on ships in Malmö’
s Oil Harbor. But nowhere did she recognize any faces.

  Wallander arranged for a police artist to fly down from Stockholm.

  In spite of working with the artist on countless sketches, Britta-Lena Bodén was not satisfied with any of the faces the artist produced.

  Wallander began to have doubts. Björk forced him to give up Martinson and make do with Hanson, as his closest and only colleague in the investigative work.

  On Friday, July twentieth, Wallander was again ready to give up.

  Late in the evening he sat down and wrote a memo suggesting that the investigation be put on hold for the time being because of a lack of pertinent material that could move the case forward in any meaningful way.

  He put the paper on his desk and decided to leave the decision to Björk and Anette Brolin on Monday morning.

  He spent Saturday and Sunday on the Danish island of Bornholm. It was windy and rainy, and he got sick from something he ate on the ferry. He spent Sunday night in bed. At regular intervals he had to get up and vomit.

  When he woke up on Monday morning, he was feeling better. But he was still undecided about whether to stay in bed or not.

  At last he got up and left the apartment. A few minutes before nine he was in his office. Since it was Ebba’s birthday, they all had cake in the lunchroom. It was almost ten o’clock when Wallander finally had a chance to read through his memo to Björk. He was just about to deliver it when the phone rang.

  It was Britta-Lena Bodén.

  Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “They’ve come back. Get over here in a hurry!”

  “Who’s come back?” asked Wallander.

  “The men who changed the money. Don’t you understand?”

  Out in the hall he ran into Norén, who had just come back from a traffic shift.

  “Come with me!” shouted Wallander.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said Norén as he bit into a sandwich.

  “Don’t ask. Come on!”

  When they arrived at the bank Norén was still holding the half-eaten sandwich. On the way over, Wallander had gone through a red light and driven over a dividing strip. He left the car in the midst of some market stalls in the square by the city hall. But they still got there too late. The men had already disappeared. Britta-Lena Bodén had been so shocked at seeing them again that she hadn’t thought to ask anyone to follow them.