Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers

They sat in silence for a moment, each lost in his own thoughts. They could no longer hear the drunk out in the hall.

It was nineteen minutes to nine.

“You can just picture it,” Wallander said after a while. “The only clue the police have to the double murder in Lenarp is that the perpetrators are probably foreigners.”

“I can think of something much worse,” replied Rydberg.

Wallander knew what he meant.

Twenty kilometers from Lenarp there was a big refugee camp that on several occasions had been the object of attacks against foreigners. Crosses had been burned at night in the courtyard, rocks had been thrown through windows, buildings had been spray-painted with slogans. The refugee 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 among the fiercest opponents of taking in refugees, so it was possible to hush up the whole affair. The two men who had committed the break-in were no longer in Sweden either, since they had been denied asylum.

But Wallander and Rydberg had on several occasions discussed what might have happened if the incident had been made public.

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

Rydberg gave Wallander a circumspect look. “You remember what I told you about the noose?”

“Something about the knot?”

“I didn’t recognize it. And I know quite a bit about knots, since I spent my summers sailing when I was young.”

Wallander looked at Rydberg attentively. “What are you getting at?” he mused.

“What I’m getting at is that this knot wasn’t tied by anyone 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 lunchroom to get some coffee.

“Go home and get some rest if you can,” she said. “By the way, reporters keep calling and 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 had picked up, but the sky was still cloudless. It was going to be another cold night.

“We can hardly avoid mentioning what happened,” he said. “The fact 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 till tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll have a meeting, just you and me, tomorrow morning at eight. Then we’ll decide.”

Rydberg nodded and limped toward 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 seeking asylum 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’ll put an end to this arbitrary, sloppy attitude that anyone at all, for any reason at all, can come across the Swedish border.

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 heavy wind out to his car.

Even though he was tired, he had no desire to drive home.

Every evening the loneliness would set in.

He turned on the ignition and changed the cassette. The overture to Fidelio filled the darkness inside the car.

His wife’s sudden departure had come as a complete surprise. But deep inside he realized, 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 they realized 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 thought that he had actually been waiting for this to happen. But since the thought involved a threat, he had pushed it aside and blamed it on the fact that he was working so hard. Too late he realized 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 apartment 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, all his feelings numbed, he had slapped her in the 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 in her entire past for a life that did not include him, even as a memory.

He had telephoned her. Late in the evenings their voices had met. Devastated by jealousy, he had tried to find out whether she had left him for another man.

“Another life,” she had replied. “Another life, before it’s too late.”

He had appealed to her. He had tried to give the impression that he was indifferent. He had begged her forgiveness for all the attention he had denied her. But nothing he said was able to alter her decision.

Two days before Christmas Eve the divorce papers had arrived in the mail.

When he opened the envelope and realized that it was all over, something had burst inside him. As if in an attempt to flee, he had called in sick over the Christmas holidays and had taken off on an aimless trip that had led him to Denmark. In northern Sjælland a sudden storm had left him snowbound, and he had spent Christmas in Gilleleje, in a freezing room at a pension near the beach. There he had written long letters to her, which he later tore to bits and strewed out over the sea in a symbolic gesture, signifying that in spite of everything he had begun to accept what had happened.

Two days before New Year’s he had returned to Ystad and gone back to work. He spent New Year’s Eve working on a serious case involving spousal abuse in Svarte, and he had a frightening revelation that he might just as well have been abusing Mona physically himself.

The music from Fidelio broke off with a screech.

The machine had eaten the tape.

The radio came on automatically, and he heard the play-byplay of a hockey game.

He pulled out of the parking lot and decided to head home to Mariagatan.

But he drove in the opposite direction instead, out along the coast road heading west to Trelleborg and Skanör. When he passed by the old prison he stepped on the gas. Driving had always distracted his thoughts...