Faceless Killers kw-1

by Henning Mankell

  Then he was out on the street.

  "Which way did he go?" he called to the bewildered policeman who was entangled in the sacking. "Left."

  Wallander ran. He caught sight of Ström's tracksuit just as he disappeared into an underpass. He tore off his cap and wiped his face. Several elderly women, who looked as though they were on their way to church, jumped aside in fright. He ran into the underpass just as a train rumbled overhead.

  When he reached street level again, he just had time to see Ström stop a car, drag the driver out, and drive off.

  The only vehicle nearby was a large horsebox. The driver was pulling a pack of condoms from a vending machine on a shop wall. When Wallander came racing up, his gun drawn and blood streaming down his face, the man dropped the condoms and ran for his life.

  Wallander climbed into the driver's seat. He heard a horse whinny behind him. The engine was still running, and he threw it into first gear.

  He thought he had lost sight of Ström, but then he saw the car again. It drove through a red light and continued down a narrow street straight towards the cathedral. Wallander was changing gears fast, trying not to lose sight of the car. Horses were whinnying behind him, and he smelled the odour of warm manure.

  In a tight curve he almost lost control. He bounced off two parked cars, but finally managed to straighten up.

  The chase proceeded towards the hospital and then through an industrial area. Wallander saw that the horsebox was equipped with a phone. He tried dialling 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 from his grasp, and he realised that he wouldn't be able to recover it without stopping.

  This is crazy, he thought in desperation. Stark raving mad. And then he remembered his sister. He was supposed to be meeting her at Sturup airport right now.

  In the roundabout by the entrance to Staffanstorp the chase ended.

  Ström was forced to brake hard to avoid a bus that was heading across his path. He lost control, and the car ran straight into a concrete pillar. Wallander, about 100 metres behind him, saw flames shooting out of the car. He braked so hard that the horsebox slid into the ditch and toppled over. The back doors flew open and two horses disentangled themselves and galloped away across the fields.

  Ström had been flung out of the car on impact. One foot was sliced off. His face had been gashed by shards of glass. Even before he reached him Wallander could tell that he was dead.

  People came running from the nearby houses. Cars pulled over to the side of the road. Too late he realised that he had his gun in his hand. A few minutes later the first squad car arrived. Then an ambulance. Wallander showed his identity card and made a call from the squad car. He asked to be put through to Björk.

  "Did it go all right?" asked Björk. "Bergman has been picked up and is on the way here. Everything went without a hitch. And the Yugoslav woman is waiting here with her interpreter."

  "Send them over to the morgue at Lund General Hospital," said Wallander. "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 back across the field. It was a beautiful white stallion. He didn't think he'd ever seen such a beautiful horse.

  When he got back to Ystad the news of 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 Bergman denied everything. He hadn't stolen his own car and then ditched it. He hadn't been at Hageholm. He hadn't visited Ström the night before. He demanded to be taken back to Malmö at once."What a damned weasel," said Wallander. "I'll crack him."

  "Nobody is doing any cracking here," said Björk. "That ludicrous high-speed chase through Lund has caused enough trouble already. I don't understand why five full-grown policemen can't manage to bring in one 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 welling 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 heavens 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 Martinsson to drive out and collect her from the airport. I assumed that you had forgotten. He said he'd take care of her until you were free."

  Wallander nodded gratefully. A few minutes later, Björk barrelled in.

  "The identification is positive," he said. "We've got the murderer we were looking for." "She recognised him?"

  "Not a shadow of a doubt. It was the man who was eating the apple out in the field." "Who was he?" asked Rydberg.

  "Ström called himself a businessman," replied Bjdrk. "He was 47. But the Security Police in Stockholm didn't take long to answer our inquiry. He has been engaged in nationalist movements since the 1960s. First in something called the Democratic Alliance, later in much more militant factions. But how he ended up a cold-blooded murderer is something Bergman may be able to tell us. Or his wife."Wallander stood up. "Now we'll tackle Bergman," he said.

  All three of them went into the room where Bergman sat smoking. 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 that?"

  Bergman didn't say anything. He lit another cigarette and stared into space.

  "OK, we'll take it from the top," said Wallander. "We know how everything happened. There are only two things we don't know yet. First, what did you do with your car? Second, why did you shoot the Somali?"

  Bergman wasn't talking. Just after 3 p.m. he was formally put under arrest and assigned a legal aid lawyer. The charge was murder or accessory to murder.

  At 4 p.m. Wallander briefly questioned Valfrid Ström's wife. She was still in shock, but she answered his questions. He learned that Ström imported exclusive cars. She told him that Ström was violently opposed to Sweden's policy on refugees. She had been married to him for just a little over a year. Wallander formed the conviction that she would get over her loss rather quickly.

  After the interrogation he talked with Rydberg and Björk. Then they released the woman with a warning not to leave Lund and she was taken home.

  Wallander and Rydberg made another attempt to get Bergman to talk. The legal aid lawyer was young and ambitious, and he claimed that there were no grounds for submission of evidence, and that in his opinion the arrest was equivalent to a preliminary miscarriage of justice.They talked some more, and 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 the back roads."

  A call to Ström's wife confirmed that Rydberg was on the right track. He did indeed have a warehouse between

  Staffanstorp and Veberod. It was where he kept his imported cars. Rydberg drove there in a squad car. Very soon he called Wallander."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 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 Bjdrk. "I'm afraid this is going to be difficult to untangle. There might be more people involved."And Bergman still wasn't talking.

  Wallander was greatly relieved that Björk was back and could deal with the media. His face stung and burned, and he was very tired. By 6 p.m. he finally had time to call Martinsson 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 said she had already visited their father. 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 Loderup.

  Wallander could see that his sister was shocked at their father's decline. Together they cleaned out the stinking rubbish 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 recognised his father's decline earlier. They stopped and bought groceries and then returned to Mariagatan. Over 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 Loderup 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 visits.

  "He has never liked me," said Wallander as they were drinking coffee."Of course he does.""Not since I decided to be a policeman."

  "You think maybe he had something else in mind for you?""Yes, but what? He's never said."

  Wallander made up the sofa for his sister. When they had no more to say about their father, Wallander told her everything that had happened. And in the telling he realised that the old sense of intimacy, which had always bound them before, was gone. We haven't seen each other 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 poured one for himself.

  The late news was dominated by the story of Ström. Bergman's identity was not revealed. Wallander knew that it was because of his having been 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 Bergman's identity secret for as long as possible. Sooner or later, of course, the truth would have to come out.When the news was finished, 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 called Brolin," she said when she came back from the corridor.Painfully, he 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 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 murder in Hageholm within 48 hours. Now they had to turn their attention back to the murders in Lunnarp.

  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 horsebox gave him the shakes. But the relief was still there.

  Anette Brolin lived on the third floor of a turn-of-the-century building. He called her on the intercom and she answered. The flat was large but sparsely furnished. 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 as long as 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."A lot of people ask me that," he replied.

  Then he remembered Klas Mansön. The man who robbed the shop, whom Anette Brolin had refused to detain. He really didn't think he should talk about work, but he couldn't help it."Klas Mansön," he said. "Do you remember that name?"She nodded.

  "Hansson told me that you thought our investigation was poor. That you didn't intend to apply for Mansön's remand in custody to be extended unless it was done more carefully."

  "The investigation was poor, sloppily written. Insufficient evidence. Vague testimony. I'd be in dereliction of my duty if I sought 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 Mansön is a guilty man. He's robbed shops 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 the man 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? Mansön 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?"

  Wallander could feel that the gin had made him reckless.

  "That question can also be asked by an insignificant, provincial police detective," he said. "Once I believed that being on the force meant that you were involved in protecting the property and safety of ordinary people. Probably I still believe it. But I've seen law and order being eroded away. I've seen young people who commit crimes being almost encouraged to continue. No-one intervenes. No-one cares about the increasing number of victims. It just gets worse and worse."

  "Now you sound like my father," she said. "He's a retired judge. A true old-fashioned, reactionary civil servant."

  "Could be. Maybe I am conservative. But I mean what I say. I actually understand why people sometimes take matters into their own hands."

  "So you probably also understand how some misguided individuals can fatally shoot an innocent asylum seeker?"

  "Yes and no. The insecurity in this country is enormous. People are afraid. Especially in farming communities like this one. You'll soon find out that there's a big hero right now at this end of the country. A man who is applauded behind drawn curtains. The man who saw to it that there was a municipal vote that said no to accepting refugees."

  "So what happens if we put ourselves above the decisions of parliament? We have a policy for refugees in this country and it must be adhere
d to."

  "Wrong. It's precisely the absence of a clear policy on refugees that creates chaos. Right now we're living in a country where anyone for any reason can come across the border in any manner. Control has been eliminated. The customs service is paralysed. There are plenty of unsupervised airfields where the dope and the illegal immigrants are unloaded every night."

  He was aware that he was losing his cool. The murder of the Somali was a crime with many layers.

  "Bergman, of course, must be locked up with the most severe punishment," he went on. "But the Immigration Service and the government have to take their share of the blame.""That's nonsense."

  "Is it? People who belonged to the fascist secret police in Romania are starting to show up here in Sweden. Seeking asylum. Should it be granted to them?""The principle has to apply equally.""Does it really? Always? Even when it's wrong?"

  She got up from the sofa and refilled their glasses. Wallander was starting to feel depressed. We're too different, he thought. We talk for 10 minutes and a chasm opens.

  He felt aggressive. And he looked at her and could feel himself getting aroused. How long was it since the last time he and Mona had made love? A year ago almost. A whole year with no sex.He groaned at the thought."Are you in pain?" she asked.

  He nodded. He wasn't, but he yielded to his desire for sympathy."Maybe it would be best if you went home," she said.

  That was the last thing he wanted to do. He didn't feel that he even had a home since Mona moved out. He finished his drink and held out his glass for a refill. Now he was so intoxicated that he was starting to shed his inhibitions."One more," he said. "I've earned it.""Then you have to go," she said.