Faceless Killers

Chapter five

Kurt Wallander turned off the E14 where a sign pointed toward the ruins of Stjärnsund Castle. He got out of the car and unzipped to take a leak. Through the noise of the wind he could hear the sound of accelerating jet engines at Sturup airport. Before he got back in the car, he scraped off the mud that had stuck to his shoes. The change in the weather had been abrupt. The thermometer in his car that showed the outside temperature indicated -5 °Celsius. Ragged clouds were racing across the sky as he continued down the road.

Right outside the castle ruin the gravel road forked, and he kept to the left. He had never driven this route before, but he was positive it was the right way. Despite the fact that almost ten years had passed since the road had been described to him, he remembered the route in detail. He had a mind that seemed programmed for landscapes and roads.

After about a kilometer the road deteriorated. He crept forward, wondering how large vehicles ever managed to negotiate it.

The road suddenly sloped sharply downward, and a large farm with long wings of stables lay spread out before him. He drove into the large farmyard and stopped. A flock of crows was cawing overhead as he climbed out of the car.

The farm seemed strangely deserted. A stable door stood flapping in the wind. For a brief moment he wondered whether he had taken the wrong road after all.

What desolation, he thought.

The Scanian winter with its screeching flocks of black birds.

The clay that sticks to the soles of your shoes.

A teenage blonde girl suddenly emerged from one of the stable doors. For a moment he thought she looked like Linda. She had the same hair, the same thin body, the same ungainly movements as she walked. He watched her intently.

The girl started tugging at a ladder that led to the stable loft.

When she caught sight of him she let go of the ladder and wiped her hands on her gray riding pants.

“Hi,” said Wallander. “I’m looking for Sten Widen. Is this the right place?”

“Are you a cop?” asked the girl.

“Yes,” Wallander replied, surprised. “How did you know?”

“I could hear it in your voice,” said the girl, once more pulling at the ladder, which seemed to be stuck.

“Is he home?” asked Wallander.

“Help me with the ladder,” the girl said.

He saw that one of the rungs had caught on the wainscoting of the stable wall. He grabbed hold of the ladder and twisted it until the rung came free.

“Thanks,” said the girl. “Sten is probably in his office.”

She pointed to a red brick building a short distance from the stable.

“Do you work here?” asked Wallander.

“Yes,” said the girl, climbing quickly up the ladder. “Now move!”

With surprisingly strong arms she began heaving bales of hay out through the loft doors. Wallander walked over toward the red building. Just as he was about to knock on the heavy door, a man came walking around the end of the building.

It was at least ten years since Wallander had seen Sten Widen, yet the man did not seem to have changed. The same tousled hair, the same thin face, the same red eczema near his lower lip.

“Well, this is a surprise,” said the man with a nervous laugh. “I thought it was the blacksmith. And it’s you instead. How long has it been, anyway?”

“Eleven years,” said Wallander. “Summer of seventy-nine.”

“The summer all our dreams fell apart,” said Sten Widen. “Would you like some coffee?”

They went inside the red brick building. Wallander noticed a smell of oil coming from the walls. A rusty combine harvester stood inside in the darkness. Widen opened another door. A cat ran out as Wallander entered a room that seemed to be a combination of office and residence. An unmade bed stood along one wall. There were a TV and a VCR, and a microwave stood on a table. An old armchair was piled high with clothes. The rest of the room was taken up by a large desk. Sten Widen poured coffee from a thermos next to a fax machine in one of the wide window recesses.

Kurt Wallander was thinking about Widén’s lost dreams of becoming an opera singer. About how in the late seventies the two of them had imagined a future for themselves that neither of them would be able to achieve. Wallander was supposed to become the impresario, and Sten Widén’s tenor would resound from the opera stages of the world.

Wallander had been a cop back then. And he still was.

When Widen realized that his voice wasn’t good enough, he had taken over his father’s run-down stables for training race horses. Their earlier friendship had not been able to withstand the shared disappointment. At one time they had seen each other every day, but now eleven years had passed since their last meeting. Although they lived no more than fifty kilometers apart.

“You’ve put on weight,” said Widen, moving a stack of newspapers from a spindle-backed chair.

“And you haven’t,” said Wallander, aware of his own annoyance.

“Race-horse trainers seldom get fat,” said Widen, giving his nervous laugh once more. “Skinny legs and skinny wallets. Except for the big-time trainers, of course. Khan or Strasser. They can afford it.”

“So how’s it going?” asked Wallander, sitting down in the chair.

“So-so,” said Widen. “I get by. I’ve always got some horse in training that does well. I get in a few new colts and manage to keep the whole place going. But actually—” He broke off without finishing his sentence.

Then he stretched, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

“You want some?” he asked.

Wallander shook his head. “It wouldn’t look good if a cop got caught for DWI,” he replied. “Even though it does happen once in a while.”

“Well, skål, anyway,” said Widen, drinking from the bottle.

He took a cigarette from a crumpled pack and rummaged through the papers and racing forms before he found a lighter.

“How’s Mona doing?” he asked. “And Linda? And your dad? And your sister, what’s her name, Kerstin?”

“Kristina.”

“That’s it. Kristina. I’ve never had a very good memory, you know that.”

“You never forgot the music.”

“Didn’t I?”

He drank from the bottle again, and Wallander noticed that something was eating him. Maybe he shouldn’t have dropped by. Maybe Sten didn’t want to be reminded of what once had been.

“Mona and I broke up,” Wallander said, “and Linda’s got her own place. Dad is the same as always. He keeps painting that picture of his. But I think he’s becoming a little senile. I don’t really know what to do with him.”

“Did you know that I got married?” said Widen.

Wallander got the feeling he hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “I didn’t know that.”

“I took over these goddamn stables, after all. When Dad finally realized that he was too old to take care of the horses, he started doing some serious drinking. Before, he always had control over how much he guzzled down. I realized that I couldn’t handle him and his drinking buddies. I married one of the girls who worked here at the stables. Mostly because she was so good with Dad, I guess. She treated him like an old horse. Refused to go along with his habits, and set limits for him. Took the rubber hose and rinsed him off when he got too filthy. But when Dad died, it seemed as if she started to smell like him. So I got a divorce.”

He took another slug from the bottle, and Wallander could see that he was beginning to get drunk.

“Every day I think about selling this place,” he said. “I own the farm itself. I could probably get a million kronor for the whole thing. After the mortgage is paid off, I might have four hundred thousand left over. Then I’ll buy an RV and hit the road.”

“Where to?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. There’s nowhere I want to go.”

Kurt Wallander felt uncomfortable listening to all this. Even though Widen was outwardly the same as ten years ago, inwardly he had gone through some big changes. It was the voice of a ghost talking to him, cracked and despairing. Ten years ago Sten Widen had been happy and high-spirited, the first one to invite you to a party. Now all his joy in life seemed to be gone.

The girl who had asked if Wallander was a cop rode past the window.

“Who’s she?” he asked. “She could tell I was a cop.”

“Her name is Louise,” said Widen. “She could probably smell that you’re a cop. She’s been in and out of institutions since she was twelve years old. I’m her guardian. She’s good with the horses. But she hates cops. She claims she was raped by a cop once.”

He took another hit from the bottle and gestured toward the unmade bed.

“She sleeps with me sometimes,” he said. “At least that’s how it feels. That she’s the one taking me to bed, and not the other way around. I suppose that’s against the law, right?”

“Why should it be? She isn’t a minor, is she?”

“She’s nineteen. But do guardians have the right to sleep with their wards?”

Wallander thought he heard a hint of aggression in Widén’s voice.

All of a sudden he was sorry he had come.

Even though he actually had a reason for the visit that was connected with the investigation, he now wondered whether it was merely an excuse. Had he come to visit Widen to talk about Mona? To seek some sort of consolation?

He no longer knew.

“I came here to ask you about horses,” he said. “Maybe you saw in the paper that there was a double murder in Lenarp last night?”

“I don’t read the papers,” said Widen. “I read racing forms and starting lists. That’s all. I don’t give a damn about what’s happening in the world.”

“An old couple was killed,” Wallander continued. “And they had a horse.”

“Was it killed too?”

“No. But I think the killers gave it some hay before they left. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. How fast does a horse eat an armload of hay?”

Widen emptied the bottle and lit another cigarette.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “You came all the way out here to ask me how long it takes a horse to eat a load of hay?”

“Actually, I was thinking about asking you to come with me and take a look at the horse,” said Wallander, making a quick decision. He could feel himself starting to get mad.

“I don’t have time,” said Widen. “The blacksmith is coming today. I’ve got sixteen horses that need vitamin shots.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

Widen gave him a glazed look. “Is there money involved?”

“You’ll be paid.”

Widen wrote his telephone number on a dirty scrap of paper.

“Maybe,” he said. “Call me early in the morning.”

When they stepped outside, Wallander noticed that the wind had picked up.

The girl came riding up on her horse.

“Nice horse,” he said.

“Masquerade Queen,” said Widen. “She’ll never win a race in her life. The rich widow of a contractor in Trelleborg owns her. I was actually honest enough to suggest that she sell the horse to a riding school. But she thinks the horse can win. And I get my training fee. But there’s no way in hell this horse will ever win a race.”

They said goodbye at the car.

“You know how my dad died?” asked Widen suddenly.

“No.”

“He wandered off to the castle ruin one autumn night. He used to sit up there and drink. Then he stumbled into the moat and drowned. The algae are so thick there that you can’t see a thing. But his cap floated to the surface. ‘Live Life,’ it said on the cap. It was an ad for a travel bureau that sells sex trips to Bangkok.”

“It was nice to see you,” said Wallander. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Whatever,” said Widen and went off toward the stable.

Wallander drove away. In the rearview mirror he could see Sten Widen talking with the girl on the horse.

Why did I come here? he thought again.

Once a long time ago we were friends. We shared an impossible dream. When the dream burst like a phantom there was nothing left. It may be true that we both loved opera. But maybe that was just our imagination too.

He drove fast, as if he were letting his agitation control the pressure he put on the gas pedal.

Just as he braked for the stop sign at the main road, his car phone rang. The connection was so bad that he could hardly make out that it was Hanson on the line.

“You’d better come in,” yelled Hanson. “Can you hear what I’m saying?”

“What happened?” Wallander yelled back.

“There’s a farmer from Hagestad sitting here who says he knows who killed them,” Hanson shouted.

Wallander could feel his heart beating faster.

“Who?” he shouted. “Who?”

The connection was abruptly cut off. The receiver hissed and squealed.

“Damn,” he said out loud.

He drove back to Ystad. And much too fast, he thought. If Norén and Peters had been on traffic duty today, I would have kept to the speed limit.

On the way down the hill into the center of town, the engine suddenly started coughing.

He had run out of gas.

The dashboard light that was supposed to warn him was evidently on the blink.

He managed to make it to the gas station across from the hospital before the engine died completely. Getting out to put some money in the pump, he discovered that he didn’t have any cash on him. He went next door to the locksmith shop in the same building and borrowed twenty kronor from the owner, who recognized him from an investigation of a break-in a few years back.

He pulled into his parking spot and hurried into the police station. Ebba tried to tell him something, but he dismissed her with a wave.

The door to Hanson’s office was ajar, and Wallander went in without knocking.

It was empty.

In the hall he ran into Martinson, who was holding a stack of printouts.

“Just the man I’m looking for,” said Martinson. “I dug up some stuff that might be interesting. I’ll be damned if some Finns might not be behind this.”

“When we don’t have a lead, we usually say it’s Finns,” said Wallander. “I don’t have time right now. You know where Hanson is?”

“He never leaves his office, you know that.”

“Then we’ll have to put out an APB on him. Anyway, he’s not there now.”

He poked his head in the lunchroom, but there was only an office clerk in there making an omelet.

Where the hell is that Hanson? he thought, flinging open the door to his own office.

Nobody there either. He called Ebba at the switchboard.

“Where’s Hanson?” he asked.

“If you hadn’t been in such a rush, I could have told you when you came in,” said Ebba. “He told me he had to go down to the Union Bank.”

“What was he going there for? Was anyone with him?”

“Yes. But I don’t know who it was.”

Wallander slammed down the phone.

What was Hanson up to?

He picked up the phone again.

“Can you page Hanson for me?” he asked Ebba.

“At the Union Bank?”

“If that’s where he is.”

He very seldom asked Ebba for help in tracking people down. He could never get used to the idea of having a secretary. If he needed something done, he was the one who had to do it. In the past he had thought it was a bad habit he carried with him from his upbringing. It was only rich, arrogant people who sent others out to do their footwork. Not being able to look up a number in the phone book and pick up the receiver was indefensible laziness.

The telephone rang, interrupting his thoughts. It was Hanson calling from the Union Bank.

“I thought I’d get back before you did,” said Hanson. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.”

“You can say that again.”

“We were taking a look at Lövgren’s bank account.”

“Who’s we?”

“His name is Herdin. But you’d better talk to him yourself. We’ll be back in half an hour.”

It was almost an hour and a quarter later before Wallander got to meet the man called Herdin. He was almost six foot six, thin and wiry, and when Wallander was introduced it was like shaking hands with a giant.

“It took a while,” said Hanson. “But we got results. You’ve got to hear what Herdin has to say. And what we discovered at the bank.”

Herdin was sitting erect and silent in a captain’s chair.

Wallander had a feeling that the man had dressed up in his Sunday best before coming to the police station. Even if it was only a worn suit and a shirt with a frayed collar.

“It’s probably best if we start at the beginning,” said Wallander, grabbing a notebook.

Herdin gave Hanson a bewildered look.

“Should I start all over?” he asked.

“That would probably be best,” said Hanson.

“It’s a long story,” Herdin began hesitantly.

“What’s your name?” asked Wallander. “Let’s start with that.”

“Lars Herdin. I have a farm of forty acres near Hagestad. I’m trying to make ends meet by raising livestock. But things are a little slim.”

“I’ve got all his personal data,” Hanson interjected, and Wallander guessed that Hanson was in a hurry to get back to his racing forms.

“If I understand the matter correctly, you came here because you think you may have information relating to the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Lövgren,” said Wallander, wishing he had expressed himself more simply.

“It’s obvious it was the money,” said Lars Herdin.

“What money?”

“All the money they had!”

“Could you clarify that a little?”

“The German money.”

Wallander looked at Hanson, who shrugged discreetly. Wallander interpreted that as meaning he had to be patient.

“I think we’re going to need a little more detail on this,” he said. “Do you think you could be more specific?”

“Lövgren and his father made money during the war,” said Herdin. “They secretly kept livestock on some forest pastures up in Småland. And they bought up worn-out old horses. Then they sold them on the black market to Germany. They made an obscene amount of money on the meat. And nobody ever caught them. Lövgren was both greedy and clever. He invested the money, and it’s been growing over the years.”

“You mean Lövgren’s father?”

“He died right after the war. I mean Lövgren himself.”

“So you’re telling me that the Lövgrens were wealthy?”

“Not the family. Just Lövgren. She didn’t know a thing about the money.”

“Would he have kept his fortune a secret from his own wife?”

Lars Herdin nodded. “Nobody has ever been as badly deceived as my sister.”

Wallander raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Maria Lövgren was my sister. She was killed because he had stashed away a fortune.”

Wallander heard the barely concealed bitterness. So maybe it was a hate murder, he thought.

“And this money was kept at home?”

“Only sometimes,” replied Herdin.

“Sometimes?”

“When he made his large withdrawals.”

“Could you try and give me a little more detail?”

Suddenly something seemed to spill over inside the man in the worn-out suit.

“Johannes Lövgren was a brute,” he said. “It’s better now that he’s gone. But that Maria had to die, I can never forgive that.”

Lars Herdin’s outburst came so suddenly that neither Hanson nor Wallander had time to react. Herdin grabbed a thick glass ashtray that was on the table near him and flung it full force against the wall, right next to Wallander’s head. Splinters of glass flew in every direction, and Wallander felt a shard strike his upper lip.

The silence after the outburst was deafening.

Hanson had sprung out of his chair and seemed ready to throw himself at the rangy Lars Herdin. But Wallander raised his hand to stop him, and Hanson sat back down.

“I beg your pardon,” said Herdin. “If you have a broom and dustpan I’ll clean up the glass. I’ll pay for it.”

“The cleaning women will take care of it,” said Wallander. “I think we should continue talking.”

Herdin now seemed totally calm.

“Johannes Lövgren was a beast,” he repeated. “He pretended to be like everybody else. But the only thing he thought about was the money he and his father had made off the war. He complained that everything was so expensive and the farmers were so poor. But he had his money, which kept on growing and growing.”

“And he kept this money in the bank?”

Herdin shrugged. “In the bank, in stocks and bonds, who knows what else.”

“Why did he keep the money at home sometimes?”

“Johannes Lövgren had a mistress,” said Herdin. “There was a woman in Kristianstad he had a child with in the fifties. Maria knew nothing about that either — the woman or the child. He probably spent more money on her every year than he gave Maria in her whole life.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Twenty-five, thirty thousand. Two or three times a year. He withdrew the money in cash. Then he would think up some excuse and go to Kristianstad.”

Wallander thought for a moment about what he had heard.

He tried to decide which questions were the most important. It would take hours to figure out all the details.

“What did they say at the bank?” he asked Hanson.

“If you don’t have all the search warrants in order, the bank usually doesn’t say anything,” said Hanson. “They wouldn’t let me look at his account balances. But I did get the answer to one question: Whether he had been to the bank recently.”

“And he had?”

Hanson nodded. “Last Thursday. Three days before someone slaughtered him.”

“Are you sure?”

“One of the tellers recognized him.”

“And he withdrew a large sum of money?”

“They wouldn’t say exactly. But the teller nodded when the bank director turned his back.”

“We’ll have to talk to the prosecutor after we write up this deposition,” said Wallander. “Then we can look into his assets and get an idea of the situation.”

“Blood money,” said Lars Herdin.

Wallander wondered for a moment whether he was going to start throwing things again.

“There are plenty of questions left,” he said. “But one is more important than all the others right now. How come you know about all this? You claim that Johannes Lövgren kept all this secret from his wife. So how do you know about it?”

Herdin didn’t answer the question. He stared mutely at the floor.

Wallander looked at Hanson, who shook his head.

“You really have to answer the question,” said Wallander.

“I don’t have to answer at all,” said Herdin. “I’m not the one who killed them. Would I murder my own sister?”

Wallander tried to approach the question from another angle. “How many people know about what you just told us?”

Herdin didn’t answer.

“Whatever you say won’t go beyond this room,” Wallander continued.

Herdin stared at the floor.

Wallander knew instinctively that he ought to wait.

“Would you get us some coffee?” he asked Hanson. “See if you can find some pastries too.”

Hanson vanished out the door.

Lars Herdin kept staring at the floor, and Wallander waited.

Hanson brought in the coffee, and Herdin ate a stale pastry.

Wallander thought it was time to ask the question again. “Sooner or later you’ll be forced to answer,” he said.

Herdin raised his head and looked him straight in the eye.

“When they got married I already had a feeling that there was somebody else behind Johannes Lövgren’s friendly and taciturn front. I thought there was something fishy about him. Maria was my little sister. I wanted the best for her. I was suspicious of Johannes Lövgren from the first time he started coming around and courting her at our parents’ house. It took me thirty years to figure out who he was. How I did it is my business.”

“Did you tell your sister what you found out?”

“Never. Not a word.”

“Did you tell anyone else? Your own wife?”

“I’m not married.”

Wallander looked at the man sitting in front of him. There was something hard and dogged about him. Like a man who had been brought up eating gravel.

“One last question for now,” said Wallander. “Now we know that Johannes Lövgren had plenty of money. Maybe he also had a large sum of money at home the night he was murdered. We’ll have to find that out. But who would have known about it? Besides you.”

Lars Herdin looked at him. Wallander suddenly noticed a glint of fear in his eyes.

“I didn’t know about it,” said Herdin.

Wallander nodded.

“We’ll stop here,” he said, shoving aside the pad on which he had been taking notes the whole time. “But we’re going to be needing your help again.”

“Can I go now?” said Herdin, getting up.

“You can go,” replied Wallander. “But don’t leave the area without talking to us first. And if you think of anything else, let’s hear from you.”

At the door Herdin stopped as if there was something more he wanted to say.

Then he pushed open the door and was gone.

“Tell Martinson to run a check on him,” said Wallander. “We probably won’t find anything. But it’s best to make sure.”

“What do you think about what he said?” Hanson wondered.

Wallander thought about it before he answered.

“There was something convincing about him. I don’t think he was lying or imagining things or making things up. I believe he did discover that Johannes Lövgren was living a double life. I think he was protecting his sister.”

“Do you think he could have been involved?”

Wallander was certain when he replied. “Lars Herdin didn’t kill them. I don’t think he knows who did, either. I think he came to us for two reasons. He wanted to help us find one or more individuals so he can both thank them and spit in their face. As far as he’s concerned, whoever murdered Johannes did him a favor. And whoever murdered Maria ought to be beheaded in the public square.”

Hanson got up. “I’ll tell Martinson. Anything else you need right now?”

Wallander looked at his watch.

“Let’s have a meeting in my office in an hour. See if you can get hold of Rydberg. He was supposed to go into Malmö and find a guy who mends sails.”

Hanson gave him a quizzical look.

“The noose,” said Wallander. “The knot. You’ll understand later.”

Hanson left, and he was alone.

A breakthrough, he thought. All successful criminal investigations reach a point where we break through the wall. We don’t know what we’re actually going to find. But there’s always a solution somewhere.

He went over to the window and looked out into the twilight. A cold draft was seeping through the window frame, and he could see from a swaying streetlight hanging on a wire over the street that the wind had picked up some more.

He thought about Nyström and his wife.

For a whole lifetime they had lived in close contact with a man who had not been the man he pretended to be at all.

How would they react when the truth was revealed?

With denial? Bitterness? Amazement?

He went back to the desk and sat down. The first feeling of relief that followed a breakthrough in a crime investigation often faded quite rapidly. Now there was a conceivable motive, the most common of all: money. But as yet there was no invisible finger pointing in a specific direction.

There was no murderer.

Wallander cast another glance at his watch. If he hurried, he could drive down to the hot-dog kiosk at the railway station and grab a bite to eat before the meeting. This day too was going to pass without a change in his eating habits.

He was just about to put on his jacket when the phone rang.

At the same time there was a knock on the door.

The jacket landed on the floor as he grabbed the phone and shouted, “Come in.”

Rydberg stood in the doorway. He was holding a large plastic bag.

He heard Ebba’s voice on the phone.

“The TV people absolutely have to get hold of you,” she said.

He quickly decided to talk to Rydberg first before he had to deal with the media again.

“Tell them I’m in a meeting and won’t be available for half an hour,” he said.

“Sure?”

“What?”

“That you’ll talk to them in half an hour? Swedish TV doesn’t like to be kept waiting. They presume that everyone’s going to fall to their knees whenever they call.”

“I’m not going to fall to my knees for their cameras. But I can talk to them in half an hour.”

He hung up.

Rydberg had sat down in the chair by the window. He was busy drying off his hair with a paper napkin.

“I’ve got good news,” said Wallander.

Rydberg kept on drying his hair.

“I think we’ve got a motive. Money. And I think we should look for the killers among people who were close to the Lövgrens.”

Rydberg tossed the wet napkin into the wastebasket.

“I’ve had a miserable day,” he said. “Good news is welcome.”

Wallander spent five minutes recounting the meeting with Lars Herdin, the farmer. Rydberg stared gloomily at the glass shards on the floor.

“Strange story,” said Rydberg when Wallander was finished. “It’s strange enough to be completely true.”

“I’ll try to sum it all up,” Wallander went on. “Someone knew that Johannes Lövgren occasionally kept large sums of money at home. This gives us robbery as a motive. And the robbery developed into a murder. If Lars Herdin’s description of Johannes Lövgren is right, that he was an unusually stingy man, he would naturally have refused to reveal where he hid the money. Maria Lövgren, who can’t have understood much of what was happening on the last night of her life, was forced to accompany Johannes on his final journey. So the question is who, besides Lars Herdin, knew about these irregular but large cash withdrawals. If we can answer that, we can probably answer everything.”

Rydberg sat there thinking after Wallander fell silent.

“Did I leave anything out?” asked Wallander.

“I’m thinking about what she said before she died,” said Rydberg. “Foreign. And I’m thinking about what I’ve got in this plastic bag.”

He got up and dumped the contents of the bag onto the desk.

It was a pile of pieces of rope. Each one with an artfully tied knot in it.

“I spent four hours with an old sailmaker in an apartment that smelled worse than anything you can imagine,” said Rydberg with a grimace. “It turned out that this man was almost ninety years old and well on his way to senility. I wonder whether I shouldn’t contact one of the social agencies. The old man was so confused that he thought I was his son. Later one of the neighbors told me that his son has been dead for thirty years. But he sure did know about knots. When I finally got out of there, it was four hours later. These pieces of rope were a present.”

“Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

“The old man looked at the noose and said he thought the knot was ugly. Then it took me three hours to get him to tell me something about this ugly knot. In the meantime he managed to nod off for a while.”

Rydberg gathered up the bits of rope in his plastic bag as he went on. “Suddenly he started talking about his days at sea. And then he said that he’d seen that knot in Argentina. Argentine sailors used to tie that knot as a leash for their dogs.”

Wallander nodded.

“So you were right. The knot was foreign. The question now is how this all fits in with Lars Herdin’s story.”

They went out in the corridor. Rydberg went into his office, while Wallander went in to see Martinson and study the printouts. It turned out that there were incredibly exhaustive statistics on foreign-born citizens who had either committed or been suspected of committing crimes in Sweden. Martinson had also managed to run a check of previous attacks on old people. At least four different individuals or gangs had committed assault on old isolated people in Skåne during the past year. But Martinson also found out that all of them were presently incarcerated in various penal institutions. He was still waiting for word on whether any of them had been granted leave on the day in question.

They held the meeting of the investigative team in Rydberg’s office, since one of the office clerks had offered to vacuum the glass from Wallander’s floor. The phone rang almost constantly, but she didn’t feel like picking it up.

The investigative meeting was long. Everyone agreed that Lars Herdin’s testimony was a breakthrough. Now they had a direction to go in. At the same time they went over everything that had been learned from the conversations with the residents of Lenarp, and the people who had telephoned the police or responded to the questionnaire they had sent out. A car that had driven through a town just a few kilometers from Lenarp at high speed late on Sunday night attracted special attention. A truck driver who had started a trip to Göteborg at three o’clock in the morning had encountered the car going around a tight curve and had almost been hit. When he heard about the double murder he started thinking, and then he called the police. He wasn’t sure, but after going through pictures of various cars he decided it was probably a Nissan.

“Don’t forget rental cars,” said Wallander. “People on the move want to be comfortable these days. Robbers rent cars as often as they steal them.”

It was already six o’clock by the time the meeting was over. Wallander realized that all his colleagues were now on the offensive. There was palpable optimism now, after Lars Herdin’s visit.

He went to his office and typed up his notes from the conversation with Herdin. Hanson had turned in his already, so he could compare them. He realized at once that Lars Herdin had not been evasive. The information was the same in both.

Just after seven he put the paper aside. He had suddenly realized that the TV people had never called back. He asked the switchboard whether Ebba had left any message before she went home.

The girl who answered was a temp. “There’s nothing here,” she said.

He went out in the lunchroom and turned on the TV, on a hunch that he himself didn’t understand. The local news had just started. He leaned on a table and distractedly watched a spot about some bad business deals made by the municipality of Malmö.

He thought about Sten Widen.

And Johannes Lövgren, who had sold meat to the Nazis during the war.

He thought about himself, and about his stomach, which was far too big.

He was just about to turn off the TV when the anchorwoman started talking about the double murder in Lenarp.

In astonishment he heard that the police in Ystad were concentrating their search on an as yet unidentified foreign citizen. But the police were convinced that the perpetrators were foreigners. It could not be ruled out that they might be refugees seeking asylum.

Finally the reporter talked about Wallander himself.

Despite repeated urging, it had been impossible to get any of the detectives in charge to comment on the information, which had been obtained from anonymous but reliable sources.

The reporter was speaking in front of a background shot of the Ystad police station.

Then she segued into the weather report.

A storm was approaching from the west. The wind would increase, but there was no risk of snow. The temperature would continue to stay above freezing.

Wallander switched off the TV.

He had a hard time deciding whether he was upset or merely tired. Or maybe he was just hungry.

But someone at the police station had leaked the information.

Perhaps nowadays people got paid for passing on confidential information.

Did the state-run television monopoly have slush funds too?

Who? he thought.

It could have been anyone except me.

And why?

Was there some other explanation besides money?

Racial hatred? Fear of refugees?

As he walked back to his room, he could hear the phone ringing all the way out in the hall.

It had been a long day. Most of all he would have liked to drive home and fix some dinner. With a sigh he sat down in his chair and pulled over the phone.

I guess I’ll have to get started, he thought. Start denying the information on the TV.

And hope that nobody burns another wooden cross in the days to come.