Faceless Killers

Chapter three

At four in the afternoon Kurt Wallander discovered that he was hungry. He hadn’t had a chance to eat lunch all day.

After the investigation meeting that morning he had spent all his time organizing the hunt for the murderers in Lenarp. He kept thinking about the murderer in the plural. He had a hard time imagining that one person could have carried out that bloodbath.

It was dark outside when he sank into his chair behind his desk to try and put together a statement for the press. There was a stack of phone messages on his desk, left by one of the women from the switchboard. After searching in vain for his daughter’s name among the slips, he put the whole pile in his in-box. To avoid subjecting himself to the unpleasantness of standing in front of the TV cameras of News South and telling them that at present the police had no leads regarding the criminal or criminals who had perpetrated the heinous murder of the old man, Wallander had appealed to Rydberg to take on that task. But he had to write the press release himself. He took a sheet of paper out of a desk drawer. But what would he write? The day’s work had hardly involved more than collecting a large number of question marks.

It had been a day of waiting. In the intensive-care unit the old woman who had survived the noose was fighting for her life.

Would they ever find out what she had seen on that appalling night in the isolated farmhouse? Or would she die before she could tell them anything?

Wallander looked out the window, into the darkness.

Instead of a press release he started writing a summary of what had been done that day and what the police actually had to go on.

Nothing, he thought when he was finished. Two old people with no enemies, no hidden cash, were brutally attacked and tortured. The neighbors heard nothing. Not until the perpetrators were gone did they notice that a window had been smashed and hear the old woman’s cry for help. Rydberg had not yet found any clues. That was it.

Old people on isolated farms have always been subjected to robbery. They have also been bound, beaten, and sometimes killed.

But this is something else, thought Wallander. A noose tells its gruesome story of viciousness and hate, maybe even revenge.

There was something about this attack that didn’t make sense.

Now all they could do was hope. Several police patrols had been talking to the inhabitants of Lenarp all day long. Perhaps someone had seen something? When old people living in isolated locations were attacked, the perpetrators had often cased the place in advance. Maybe Rydberg would find some clues at the crime scene in spite of everything.

Wallander looked at the clock.

How long has it been since I last called the hospital? Forty-five minutes? An hour?

He decided to wait until after he had written his press release.

He put on the headphones of his Walkman and popped in a cassette of Jussi Björling. The scratchy sound of the ’30s recordings could not detract from the magnificence of the music from Rigoletto.

The press release turned out to be eight lines long. Wallander took it to one of the clerks and asked her to type it up and then make copies. At the same time he was reading through a questionnaire that was supposed to be mailed out to everyone who lived in the area around Lenarp. Had anyone seen anything unusual? Anything that could be tied to the brutal attack? He didn’t have much faith that the questionnaire would produce anything but inconvenience. He knew that the telephones would ring incessantly and two officers would have to be assigned full time to listen to useless reports.

Still, it has to be done, he thought. At least we can ascertain that no one saw anything.

He went back to his office and phoned the hospital again. But nothing had changed. The old woman was still fighting for her life.

Just as he put down the phone, Naslund came in.

“I was right,” he said.

“About what?”

“Månson’s lawyer hit the roof.”

Wallander shrugged. “We’ll just have to live with it.”

Naslund scratched his forehead and asked how the investigation was going.

“Not a thing so far. We’ve gotten started. That’s about it.”

“I noticed that the preliminary forensic report came in.”

Wallander raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t I get it?”

“It was in Hanson’s office.”

“Well, that’s not where it’s supposed to be, damn it!”

Wallander got up and went out in the hall. It was always the same, he thought. Papers didn’t wind up where they were supposed to go. Even though more and more police work was recorded on computers, important papers had a tendency to get lost.

Hanson sat talking on the phone when Wallander knocked and went in. He saw that Hanson’s desk was covered with poorly concealed betting slips and racing forms from various tracks around the country. At the police station it was common knowledge that Hanson spent the major part of his working day calling around to various trotting-horse trainers begging for stable tips. Then he spent his evenings figuring out innumerable betting systems that would guarantee him the greatest winnings. It was also rumored that Hanson had hit it big on one occasion. But no one knew for sure. And Hanson wasn’t exactly living high on the hog.

When Wallander came in, Hanson put his hand over the mouthpiece.

“The forensic report,” said Wallander. “Have you got it?”

Hanson pushed aside a racing form from Jägersrö.

“I was just about to take it over to you.”

“Number four in the seventh race is a sure thing,” said Wallander, taking the plastic folder from the desk.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean it’s a sure thing.”

Wallander walked out, leaving Hanson gaping behind him. He saw by the clock in the hall that there was half an hour left until the press conference. He went back to his office and carefully read through the doctor’s report.

The brutal nature of the murder was thrown into even sharper relief, if possible, than when he had arrived in Lenarp that morning.

In the first preliminary examination of the body, the doctor was not able to pinpoint the actual cause of death.

There were just too many to choose from.

The body had received eight deep stab or chopping wounds with a sharp, serrated implement. The doctor suggested a compass saw. In addition, the right femur was broken, as were the left upper arm and wrist. The body showed signs of burn wounds, the scrotum was swollen up, and the forehead was bashed in. The actual cause of death could not yet be determined.

The doctor had made a note beside the official report. “An act of madness,” he wrote. “This man was subjected to enough violence to kill four or five individuals.”

Wallander put down the report.

He was feeling worse and worse.

Something didn’t add up.

Robbers who attacked old people were hardly full of hate. They were after money.

Why this insane violence?

When Wallander realized that he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to the question, he again read through the summary he had written. Had he forgotten something? Had he overlooked some detail that would later turn out to be significant? Even though police work was largely a matter of patiently searching for facts that could be combined with each other, he had also learned from experience that the first impression of a crime scene was important. Especially when the officer was one of the first to arrive at a scene after the crime had been committed.

There was something in his summary that puzzled him. Had he left out some detail after all?

He sat for a long time without coming up with what it might be.

A woman opened the door and handed him the typed press release and the copies. On the way to the press conference he stepped into the men’s room and looked in the mirror. He noticed that he needed a haircut. His brown hair was sticking out around his ears. And he ought to lose some weight too. In the three months since his wife had so unexpectedly left him, he had put on fifteen pounds. In his apathetic loneliness he had eaten nothing but fast food and pizza, greasy hamburgers, and donuts.

“You flabby piece of shit,” he said out loud to himself. “Do you really want to look like a pitiful old man?”

He made a decision to change his eating habits at once. If it would help him lose weight, he might even consider taking up smoking again.

He wondered what the real reason was. Why almost every cop was divorced. Why the wives left their husbands. Sometimes, when he read a crime novel, he discovered with a sigh that it was just as bad in fiction.

Cops were divorced. That’s all there was to it.

The room where the press conference was being held was full of people. He recognized most of the reporters. But there were a few unfamiliar faces too, and an adolescent girl with a pimply face was casting amorous glances at him as she adjusted her tape recorder.

Wallander passed out the brief press release and sat down on a little dais at one end of the room. Actually, the Ystad chief of police should have been there too, but he was on his winter vacation in Spain. If Rydberg managed to finish with the TV crews, he had promised to attend. But otherwise Kurt Wallander was on his own.

“You’ve received the press release,” he began. “I don’t have anything else to say at present.”

“May we ask questions?” said a reporter Wallander recognized as the local stringer for Labor News.

“That’s why I’m here,” replied Wallander.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, this is an unusually poor press release,” said the reporter. “You must be able to tell us more than this.”

“We have no leads to the perpetrators,” said Wallander.

“So there were more than one?”

“Possibly.”

“Why do you think so?”

“We think there were. But we don’t know.”

The reporter grimaced, and Wallander nodded to another reporter he recognized.

“How was he killed?”

“By external force.”

“That can mean a lot of different things!”

“We don’t know yet. The doctors aren’t finished with the forensic examination. It’ll take a couple of days.”

The reporter had more questions, but he was interrupted by the pimply girl with the tape recorder. Wallander could see by the call letters on the lid that she was from the local radio station.

“What did the robbers take?”

“We don’t know,” replied Wallander. “We don’t even know if it was a robbery.”

“What else could it be?”

“We don’t know.”

“Is there anything that leads you to believe that it wasn’t a robbery?”

“No.”

Wallander could feel that he was sweating in the stuffy room. He remembered how as a young policeman he had dreamed of holding press conferences. But it had never been stuffy and sweaty in his dreams.

“I asked a question,” he heard one of the reporters say from the back of the room.

“I didn’t hear it,” said Wallander.

“Do the police regard this as an important crime?” asked the reporter.

Wallander was surprised at the question.

“Naturally it’s important that we solve this murder,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Will you be needing extra resources?”

“It’s too early to comment on that. Of course we’re hoping for a quick solution. I guess I still don’t understand your question.”

The very young reporter with the thick glasses pushed his way forward. Wallander had never seen him before.

“In my opinion, no one in Sweden cares about old people any longer.”

“We do,” replied Wallander. “We will do everything we can to apprehend the perpetrators. In Skane there are many old people living alone on isolated farms. We would like to reassure them, above all, that we are doing everything we can.”

He stood up. “We’ll let you know when we have more to report,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

The young woman from the local radio station blocked his path as he was leaving the room.

“I have nothing more to say,” he told her.

“I know your daughter Linda,” she said.

Wallander stopped. “You do? How?”

“We’ve met a few times. Here and there.”

Wallander tried to think whether he knew her. Had the girls been schoolmates?

She shook her head as if reading his mind.

“We’ve never met,” she said. “You don’t know me. Linda and I ran into each other in Malmö.”

“I see,” said Wallander. “That’s nice.”

“I think she’s great. Could I ask you some questions now?”

Wallander repeated into her microphone what he had said earlier. Most of all he wanted to talk about Linda, but he didn’t have a chance.

“Say hi to her,” she said, packing up her tape recorder. “Say hi from Cathrin. Or Cattis.”

“I will,” said Wallander. “I promise.”

When he went back to his office he could feel a gnawing in his stomach. But was it hunger or anxiety?

I’ve got to stop this, he thought. I’ve got to realize that my wife has left me. I’ve got to admit that all I can do is wait for Linda to contact me herself. I’ve got to take life as it comes...

Just before six the investigative team gathered for another meeting. There was no news from the hospital. Wallander quickly drew up a shift schedule for the night.

“Is that necessary?” wondered Hanson. “Just put a tape recorder in the room, then any nurse can turn it on if the old lady wakes up.”

“It is necessary,” said Wallander. “I can take midnight to six myself. Any volunteers until midnight?”

Rydberg nodded. “I can sit at the hospital just as well as anywhere,” he said.

Wallander looked around. Everyone seemed pale in the glare from the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

“Did we get anywhere?” he asked.

“We’ve checked out Lenarp,” said Peters, who had led the door-to-door inquiry. “Everybody says they didn’t see a thing. But it usually takes a few days before people really think about it. People are pretty scared up there. It’s damned unpleasant. Almost nothing but old folks. And a terrified young Polish family that is probably here illegally. But I didn’t bother them. We’ll have to keep trying tomorrow.”

Wallander nodded and looked at Rydberg.

“There were plenty of fingerprints,” he said. “Maybe that will produce something. But I doubt it. It’s mostly the knot that interests me.”

Wallander gave him a searching look. “What knot?”

“The knot on the noose.”

“What about it?”

“It’s unusual. I’ve never seen a knot like that before.”

“Have you ever seen a noose before?” interrupted Hanson, who was standing in the doorway, wanting to leave.

“Yes, I have,” replied Rydberg. “We’ll see what this knot can tell us.”

Wallander knew that Rydberg didn’t want to say any more. But if the knot interested him, it might be important.

“I’m driving back out to see the neighbors tomorrow morning,” said Wallander. “Has anyone tracked down the Lövgrens’ children yet, by the way?”

“Martinson’s working on it,” said Hanson.

“I thought Martinson was at the hospital,” said Wallander, surprised.

“He traded with Svedberg.”

“So where the hell is he now?”

No one knew where Martinson was. Wallander called the switchboard and found out that Martinson had left an hour earlier.

“Call him at home,” said Wallander.

Then he looked at his watch.

“We’ll meet again in the morning at ten o’clock,” he said. “Thanks for coming, see you then.”

Everyone else had left by the time the switchboard connected him with Martinson.

“Sorry,” said Martinson. “I forgot we had a meeting.”

“How’s it going with the children?”

“Damned if Rickard doesn’t have chicken pox.”

“I mean the Lövgrens’ children. The two daughters.”

Martinson sounded surprised when he answered. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“I didn’t get any message.”

“I gave it to one of the girls at the switchboard.”

“I’ll take a look. But tell me first.”

“One daughter, who’s fifty years old, lives in Canada. Winnipeg, wherever that is. I completely forgot that it was the middle of the night over there when I called. She refused to believe what I was saying. Not until her husband came to the phone did it dawn on them what had happened. He’s a cop, by the way. A real Canadian Mountie. I’m going to call them back tomorrow. But she’s flying over, of course. The other daughter was harder to reach, even though she lives in Sweden. She’s forty-seven, the manager of the buffet at the Ruby Hotel in Göteborg. Evidently she’s training a handball team in Skien, in Norway. But they promised that they’d get word to her about what happened. I gave the switchboard a list of the Lövgrens’ other relatives. There are lots of them. Most of them live in Skane. Some of them will probably call tomorrow when they see the story in the papers.”

“Good work,” said Wallander. “Can you relieve me at the hospital tomorrow morning at six? If she doesn’t die by then.”

“I’ll be there,” said Martinson. “But is it such a good idea for you to take that shift?”

“Why not?”

“You’re the one heading the investigation. You ought to get some sleep.”

“I can handle it for one night,” replied Wallander and hung up.

He sat completely still and stared into space.

Are we going to figure this one out? he thought. Or do they already have too much of a head start?

He put on his overcoat, turned off the desk lamp, and left his office. The corridor leading to the reception area was deserted. He stuck his head in the glass cubicle where the operator on duty sat leafing through a magazine. He noticed that it was a racing form. Is everyone playing the ponies these days? he thought.

“Martinson supposedly left some papers for me,” he said.

The operator, who was named Ebba and had been with the police department for more than thirty years, gave a friendly nod and pointed at the counter.

“We have a girl here from the youth employment bureau,” she said, smiling. “Sweet and nice but completely incompetent. Maybe she forgot to give them to you.”

Wallander nodded.

“I’m leaving now,” he said. “I’ll probably be home in a couple of hours. If anything happens, call me at my father’s place.”

“You’re thinking of that poor woman at the hospital,” said Ebba.

Wallander nodded.

“What a terrible thing to happen.”

“Yes, it is,” said Wallander. “Sometimes I wonder what’s happening to this country anyway.”

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 over as he hurried to the parking lot. As long as it doesn’t snow, he thought. Not until we catch whoever it was who paid the visit in Lenarp.

He crawled 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 Requiem into the tape deck. He had expensive speakers in the car, and the magnificent tones surged against his eardrums. He drove off and turned right, down Dragongatan toward Osterleden. A few leaves whirled across the road, and a bicyclist strained against the wind. The clock on the dashboard said it was six. Hunger was gnawing 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 seven, he’ll accuse me of abandoning him.

He ate a hamburger special.

He ate so fast that it gave him diarrhea.

As he sat on the toilet he noticed that he ought to change his underwear.

Suddenly he realized how tired he was.

He didn’t get up until someone banged on the door.

He filled the tank with gas and drove east, through Sandskogen, and turned off at the road toward Kåseberga. His father lived in a little house that seemed to have been flung onto a field between Löderup and the sea.

It was four minutes to seven when he swung onto the gravel driveway in front of the house.

That gravel driveway had been the cause of the latest and most lengthy of his quarrels with his father. Before, it had been a lovely cobblestone courtyard as old as the farmhouse where his father lived. Suddenly one day he got the idea of covering the courtyard with gravel. When Wallander had protested, his father 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 quarreled.

And now the courtyard was covered with gray gravel that crunched under the car’s tires.

He could see that a light was on in the shed.

Next time it could be my father, he thought suddenly.

The moonlight killer who might pick him out as a suitable old man to rob, maybe even murder.

No one would hear him scream for help. Not in this wind, with five hundred meters to the nearest neighbor. Who was 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. That’s where he painted his pictures, as he had always done.

It was one of Wallander’s earliest childhood memories. The way his father had always smelled of turpentine and oil. And the way he was always standing in front of his sticky easel in his dark-blue overalls and cut-off rubber boots.

Not until Kurt Wallander was five or six years old did he realize that his father wasn’t working on the exact same painting year after year.

It was the motif that 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 colorful setting sun.

Now and then he would add a wood grouse standing on a stump at the far left edge of the painting.

At regular intervals their home was visited by men in silk suits with heavy gold rings on their fingers. 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 the same motif all his life. The family had lived off his paintings, which were sold at fairs and auctions.

They had lived in Klagshamm outside Malmö, in an old converted smithy. Kurt Wallander had grown up there with his sister Kristina, and their childhood had always been wrapped in the intense smell of turpentine.

Not until his father was widowed did he sell the old smithy and move 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 eighty years old, short and stooped, but still radiating energy and strength of will.

Am I going to look like him when I get 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 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 as a cop. Wallander knew that his father had been deeply disappointed when he had decided, at eighteen, to become a policeman. But he was never able to find out what sort of hopes his father had actually had for him.

He had tried to talk about it, but never with any success.

On the few occasions when 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 on good terms. But even she had no idea.

He drank the lukewarm coffee and thought that maybe his father had wanted him to take over the brush one day and continue to paint the same motif for yet another generation.

Suddenly 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 has gotten so old that 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 an old rickety sled that creaked under his weight.

“I just wanted to tell you that your daughter came to visit me yesterday.”

Wallander was astounded.

“You mean Linda was here?”

“Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”

“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 mean by black?”

“Haven’t you ever 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 such poor contact with each other.”

“Where did they go?”

“How should I know?”

Wallander realized 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 anymore.

“Do you want a drink?” his father asked.

The last thing Wallander wanted was a drink. But he knew that 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 instant 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.

It was Rydberg calling from the hospital.

“She’s dead,” he said.

“Did she wake up?”

“As a matter of fact, she did. For ten 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 come 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 fix dinner. We can play poker if you want.”

Even though Wallander was a miserable 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.

At five minutes to eight he walked back in the same glass doors he had walked out of two hours earlier. Ebba nodded at him.

“Rydberg is waiting in the lunchroom,” she said.

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