Faceless Killers kw-1

by Henning Mankell

  "Yes, it is," said Wallander. "Sometimes I wonder what's happening to this country"

  When he went out through the glass doors of the police station the wind hit him in the face. It was cold and biting, and he hunched his shoulders as he hurried to the car park. As long as it doesn't snow, he thought. Not until we catch whoever paid the visit to Lunnarp.

  He clambered into his car and spent a long time looking through the cassettes he kept in the glove compartment. Without really making a decision, he shoved Verdi's Requieminto the tape deck. He had expensive speakers in the car, and the magnificent sounds surged in his ears. He set off, turning right, down Dragongatan towards Österleden. A few leaves whirled across the road, and a cyclist strained against the wind. Hunger gnawed at him again, and he crossed the main road and turned in at OK's Cafeteria. I'll change my eating habits tomorrow, he thought. If I get to Dad's place a minute past 7 p.m., he'll accuse me of abandoning him.

  He ate a hamburger special. He ate it so fast that it gave him diarrhoea. As he sat on the toilet he noticed that he ought to change his underwear. He realised how exhausted he was. He didn't get up until someone banged on the door.

  He filled the petrol tank, and drove east, through Sandskogen, turning off onto the road to Kaseberga. His father lived in a little farmhouse that seemed to have been flung onto a field between Loderup and the sea. It was just before 7 p.m. when he swung onto the gravel drive in front of the house. The drive had been the cause of the latest and most drawn-out of his arguments with his father. It had been a lovely cobblestone courtyard as old as the farmhouse itself. One day his father had got the idea of covering it with gravel. When Wallander had protested, he was outraged."I don't need a guardian!" he had shouted.

  "Why do you have to destroy the beautiful cobblestone courtyard?" Wallander had asked.

  Then they had quarrelled. And now the courtyard was covered with grey gravel that crunched under the car's tyres. He could see that a light was on in the shed. Next time it could be my father, he thought. The night-time killers might pick him out as a suitable old man to rob, maybe even to murder.

  No-one would hear him scream for help. Not in this wind, half a kilometre from the nearest neighbour, an old man himself.

  He listened to the end of "Dies Irae" before he climbed out of the car and stretched. He went over to the shed, which was his father's studio where he painted his pictures, as he had always done. This was one of Wallander's earliest childhood memories. The way his father had smelled of turpentine and oil. And the way he stood in front of his sticky easel in his dark-blue overalls and cut-off rubber boots.

  Not until Wallander was 5 or 6 years old did he realise that his father wasn't working on the same painting year after year. It was just that the motif never changed. He painted a melancholy autumn landscape, with a shiny mirror of a lake, a crooked tree with bare branches in the foreground, and, far off on the horizon, mountain ranges surrounded by clouds that shimmered in an improbably colourful sunset. Now and then he would add a grouse standing on a stump at the far left edge of the painting.

  At regular intervals men in silk suits with heavy gold rings on their fingers would visit the house. They came in rusty vans or shiny American gas-guzzlers, and they bought the paintings, with or without the grouse.

  His father had been painting that same motif all his life. The family had lived off the sale of his paintings, which were sold at fairs and auctions. They had lived in Klagshamm outside Malmö, in a converted smithy. Wallander had grown up there with his sister Kristina, and their childhood had been wrapped in the pungent odour of turpentine.

  When his father was widowed he sold the smithy and moved out to the country. Wallander had never really understood why, since his father was continually complaining about the loneliness.

  He opened the door to the shed and saw that his father was working on a painting without the grouse. Just now he was painting the tree in the foreground. He muttered a greeting and continued dabbing with his brush. Wallander poured a cup of coffee from a dirty pot that stood on a smoking spirit stove.

  He looked at his father, who was almost 80, short and stooped, but still radiating energy and strength of will. Am I going to look like him when I'm old? he thought. As a boy I took after my mother. Now I look like my grandfather. Maybe I'll be like my father when I get old.

  "Have a cup of coffee," said his father. "I'll be ready in a minute.""I've got one," said Wallander."Then have another," said his father.

  He's in a bad mood, thought Wallander. He's a tyrant with his changeable moods. What does he want with me, anyway?

  "I've got a lot to do," said Wallander. "Actually I have to work all night. I thought there was something you wanted.""Why do you have to work all night?""I have to sit at the hospital.""How come? Who's sick?"

  Wallander sighed. Even though he had carried out hundreds of interrogations himself, he would never be able to match his father's persistence in questioning him. And his father didn't even give a damn about his career. Wallander knew that his father had been deeply disappointed when he had decided, at 18, to become a policeman. But he was never able to find out what aspirations his father had actually had for him. He had tried to talk to him about it, but without success.

  On the few occasions that he had spent time with his sister Kristina, who lived in Stockholm and owned a beauty salon, he had tried to ask her, since he knew that she and his father were close. But even she had no idea. He drank the lukewarm coffee, wondering whether his father had wanted him to take up the brush and continue to paint the same motif for another generation.

  His father put down his brush and wiped his hands on a dirty rag. When he came over to him and poured a cup of coffee, Wallander could smell the stink of dirty clothes and his father's unwashed body.

  How do you tell your father that he smells bad? he thought. Maybe he can't take care of himself any longer. And then what do I do? I can't have him at my place, that would never work. We'd murder each other. He watched his father rub his nose with one hand as he slurped his coffee.

  "You haven't come out to see me in a long time," his father said reproachfully."I was here the day before yesterday, wasn't I?""For half an hour!""Well, I was here, anyway.""Why don't you want to visit me?""I do! It's just that I have a lot to do sometimes."

  His father sat down on a rickety, ancient toboggan that creaked under his weight.

  "I just wanted to tell you that your daughter came to visit me yesterday."Wallander was astounded."Linda was here?""Aren't you listening to what I'm telling you?" "Why did she come?" "She wanted a painting." "A painting?""Unlike you, she actually appreciates what I do."

  Wallander had a hard time believing what he was hearing. Linda had never shown any interest in her grandfather, except when she was very small."What did she want?""A painting, I told you! You're not listening!"

  "I am listening! Where did she come from? Where was she going? How the hell did she get out here? Do I have to drag everything out of you?"

  "She came in a car," said his father. "A young man with a black face drove her.""What do you mean by black?""Haven't you heard of Negroes? He was very polite and

  spoke excellent Swedish. I gave her the painting and then they left. I thought you'd like to know, since you have so litde contact with each other.""Where did they go?""How should I know?"

  Wallander realised that neither of them knew where Linda actually lived. Occasionally she slept at her mother's house. But then she would quickly disappear again, off on her own mysterious paths. I've got to talk to Mona, he thought. Separated or not, we have to talk to each other. I can't stand this any more."Do you want a drink?" his father asked.

  The last thing Wallander wanted was a drink. But he knew it was useless to say no."All right, thanks," he said.

  A path connected the shed with the house, which was low-ceilinged and sparsely furnished. Wallander noticed at once that it was messy and dirty. He doesn't even see the mess, he thought. And why didn't I notice it
before? I've got to talk to Kristina about it. He can't keep living alone like this. At that moment the telephone rang. His father picked it up.

  "It's for you," he said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.

  Linda, he thought. It's got to be her. But it was Rydberg calling from the hospital. "She's dead," he said. "Did she wake up?"

  "As a matter of fact, she did. For 10 minutes. The doctors thought the crisis was over. Then she died." "Did she say anything?"

  Rydberg sounded thoughtful when he answered. "I think you'd better come back to town."

  "What did she say?""Something you won't want to hear.""I'll come to the hospital."

  "It's better if you go to the station. She's dead, I told you."Wallander hung up. "I've got to go," he said.His father glared at him. "You don't like me," he said.

  "I'll be back tomorrow," replied Wallander, wondering what to do about the squalor his father was living in. "I'll come tomorrow for sure. We can sit and talk. We can make dinner. We can play poker if you want."

  Even though Wallander was a wretched card player, he knew that a game would mollify his father. "I'll be here at seven," he said.

  Then he drove back to Ystad. He walked back through the same glass doors that he had walked out of not much earlier. Ebba nodded at him."Rydberg is waiting in the canteen," she said.

  He was there, hunched over a cup of coffee. When Wallander saw the other man's face, he knew that something unpleasant was in store for him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wallander and Rydberg were alone in the canteen. In the distance they could hear the ruckus a drunk was making, loudly protesting at his arrest. Otherwise it was quiet. Only the faint whine of the radiator could be heard.Wallander sat down across from Rydberg.

  "Take off your overcoat," said Rydberg. "Or else you'll freeze when you go back out in the wind again."

  "First I want to hear what you have to say. Then I'll decide whether or not to take off my coat."Rydberg shrugged. "She died," he said."So I understand.""But she woke up for a while right before she died." "And she spoke?"

  "That may be putting it too strongly. She whispered. Or wheezed.""Did you get it on tape?"

  Rydberg shook his head. "It wouldn't have worked anyway," he said. "It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. Most of it was just raving. But I wrote down what I'm sure I understood."

  Rydberg took a battered notebook out of his pocket. It was held together by a wide rubber band, and a pencil was stuck in between the pages.

  "She said her husband's name," Rydberg began. "I think she was trying to find out how he was. Then she mumbled something I couldn't understand. That's when I tried to ask her, 'Who was it that came in the night? Did you know them? What did they look like?' Those were my questions. I repeated them for as long as she was conscious. And I actually think she understood what I was saying.""So what did she answer?""I only managed to catch one word. 'Foreign'.""'Foreign'?""That's right. 'Foreign'."

  "Did she mean that the people who attacked her and her husband were foreigners?" Rydberg nodded. "Are you sure?""Do I usually say I'm sure if I'm not?" "No."

  "Well then. So now we know that her last message to the world was the word 'foreign'. In answer to the question: who committed this insane crime?"

  Wallander took off his coat and got himself a cup of coffee."What the hell could she have meant?" he muttered.

  "I've been sitting here thinking about that while I was waiting for you," replied Rydberg. "Maybe they looked un-Swedish. Maybe they spoke a foreign language. Maybe they spoke poor Swedish. There are lots of possibilities."

  "What does an 'un-Swedish' person look like?" asked Wallander.

  "You know what I mean," said Rydberg. "Or rather, you can guess what she thought.""So it could have been her imagination?" Rydberg nodded. "That's quite possible." "But not particularly likely?"

  "Why should she use the last minutes of her life to say something that wasn't true? Elderly people don't usually lie."

  Wallander took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

  "This means we have to start looking for one or more foreigners," he said. "I wish she'd said something different.""It's damned unpleasant, all right."

  They sat in silence for a moment, lost in their own thoughts. They could no longer hear the drunk out in the corridor.

  "You can just picture it," Wallander said after a while. "The only clue the police have to the double murder in Lunnarp is that those responsible are probably foreigners.""I can think of something much worse," replied Rydberg.

  Wallander knew what he meant. Just 20 kilometres from Lunnarp there was a big refugee camp that had been the focus of attacks against foreigners on several occasions. Crosses had been burned at night in the courtyard, rocks had been thrown through windows, buildings had been spray-painted with slogans. The camp, in the old castle of Hageholm, had been established despite vigorous protests from the surrounding communities. And the protests had continued. Hostility to refugees was flaring up.

  But Wallander and Rydberg knew something else that the general public did not know. Some of the asylum seekers being housed at Hageholm had been caught red-handed breaking into a business that rented out farm machinery. Fortunately the owner was not one of those most fiercely opposed to taking in refugees, so it was possible to keep the whole affair quiet. The two men who had committed the break-in were no longer in Sweden either, since they had been denied asylum. Wallander and Rydberg had discussed what might have happened if the incident had been made public on several occasions.

  "I have a hard time believing that refugees seeking asylum could commit murder," said Wallander.

  Rydberg gave Wallander a quizzical look. "You remember what I told you about the noose?""Something about the knot?"

  "I didn't recognise it. And I know quite a bit about knots, because I spent my summers sailing when I was young."

  Wallander looked at Rydberg attentively. "What are you saying?" he asked.

  "What I'm saying is that this knot wasn't tied by someone who was a member of the Swedish Boy Scouts.""What the hell do you mean by that?""The knot was made by a foreigner."

  Before Wallander could reply, Ebba came into the canteen to get some coffee.

  "Go home and get some rest if you can," she said. "By the way, reporters keep calling and saying that they want you to make a statement.""About what?" asked Wallander. "About the weather?""They seem to have found out that the woman died."Wallander looked at Rydberg, who shook his head.

  "We're not making a statement tonight," he said. "We're waiting till tomorrow."

  Wallander got up and went over to the window. The wind was blowing hard, but the sky was still cloudless. It was going to be another cold night.

  "We can hardly avoid mentioning what happened," he said. "That she managed to say something before she died. And if we say that much, then we'll have to tell them what she said. And then all hell will break loose."

  "We could try to keep it internal," said Rydberg, getting up and putting on his hat. "For investigative reasons."

  Wallander looked at him in surprise.

  "And risk having it come out later that we withheld important information from the press? That we were shielding foreign criminals?"

  "It's going to affect so many innocent people," said Rydberg. "What do you think will happen at the refugee camp when it gets out that the police are looking for some foreigners?"

  Wallander knew that Rydberg was right. Suddenly he was full of doubt.

  "Let's sleep on it," he said. "We'll have a meeting, just you and me, tomorrow morning at eight. We'll decide then."

  Rydberg nodded and limped towards the door. There he stopped and turned to Wallander again.

  "There is one possibility we shouldn't overlook," he said. "That it really was refugees who did it."

  Wallander rinsed out his coffee cup and put it in the dish rack.

  Actually I hope it was, he thought. I really hope that the killers are at that refugee camp. Then maybe it'l
l put an end to this arbitrary, lax policy that allows anyone at all, for any reason at all, to cross the border into Sweden. But of course he couldn't say that to Rydberg. It was an opinion he intended to keep to himself.

  He fought his way through the strong wind out to his car. Even though he was tired, he had no desire to drive home. In the evenings the loneliness hit him. He turned on the ignition and changed the cassette. The overture to Fideliofilled the darkness inside the car.

  His wife's departure had come as a complete surprise. But deep inside he knew, even though he still had a hard time accepting it, that he should have sensed the danger long before it happened. That he was living in a marriage that was slowly breaking apart because of its own dreariness. They had married when they were very young, and far too late realised that they were growing apart. Of the three of them, maybe it was Linda who had reacted most openly to the emptiness surrounding them.

  On that night in October when Mona had said that she wanted a divorce, he realised that he had seen it coming; but the thought had been too painful for him and he had repeatedly pushed it aside, blaming it on the fact that he was working so hard. Too late, he saw that she had prepared her departure down to the smallest detail. One Friday evening she had talked about wanting a divorce, and by Sunday she had left him and moved into the flat in Malmö, which she had rented in advance. The feeling of being abandoned had filled him with both shame and anger. In an impotent rage he had slapped her face.

  Afterwards there was only silence. She had picked up some of her things during the daytime when he wasn't home. But she left most of her belongings behind, and he had been deeply hurt that she seemed prepared to trade her entire past for a life that did not include him, even as a memory.

  He had telephoned her. Late in the evenings they had spoken. Devastated by jealousy, he had asked whether she had left him for another man.