Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers

The frozen gravel crunched under the car tires. Kurt Wallander followed the police car. They passed the turnoff toward Trunnerup and continued up some steep hills until they came to Lenarp. They swung onto a narrow dirt road that was hardly more than a tractor rut. After a kilometer they were there. Two farms next to each other, two whitewashed farmhouses, and carefully tended gardens.

An elderly man came hurrying toward them. Wallander saw that he was limping, as if one knee was bothering him.

When Wallander got out of the car he noticed that the wind had started to blow. Maybe the snow was on the way after all.

As soon as he saw the old man he knew that something truly unpleasant awaited him. In the man’s eyes shone a horror that could not be imaginary.

“I broke open the door,” he repeated feverishly, over and over. “I broke open the door because I had to see. But she’ll be dead soon too.”

They went in through the broken door. Wallander was met by a pungent old-man smell. The wallpaper was old-fashioned, and he was forced to squint to be able to see anything in the dim light.

“So what happened here?” he asked.

“In there,” replied the old man.

Then he started to cry.

The three policemen looked at each other.

Wallander pushed open the door with one foot.

It was worse than he had imagined. Much worse. Later he would say that it was the worst he had ever seen. And he had seen plenty.

The old couple’s bedroom was soaked in blood. It had even splashed onto the porcelain lamp hanging from the ceiling. Prostrate across the bed lay an old man with no shirt on and his long underwear pulled down. His face was crushed beyond recognition. It looked as though someone had tried to cut off his nose. His hands were tied behind his back and his left thigh was shattered. The white bone shone against all that red.

“Oh shit,” he heard Norén moan behind him, and Wallander felt nauseated himself.

“Ambulance,” he said, swallowing. “Hurry up.”

Then they bent over the woman, half-lying on the floor, tied to a chair. Whoever tied her up had rigged a noose around her scrawny neck. She was breathing feebly, and Wallander yelled at Peters to find a knife. They cut off the thin rope that was digging deep into her wrists and neck, and laid her gently on the floor. Wallander held her head on his knee.

He looked at Peters and realized that they were both thinking the same thing. Who could have been cruel enough to do this? Tying a noose on a helpless old woman.

“Wait outside,” said Wallander to the sobbing old man standing in the doorway. “Wait outside and don’t touch anything.”

He could hear that his voice sounded like a roar.

I’m yelling because I’m scared, he thought. What kind of world are we living in?

Almost twenty minutes passed before the ambulance arrived. The woman’s breathing grew more and more irregular, and Wallander was starting to worry that it might come too late.

He recognized the ambulance driver, who was named Antonson.

His assistant was a young man he had never seen before.

“Hi,” said Wallander. “He’s dead. But the woman here is alive. Try to keep her that way.”

“What happened?” asked Antonson.

“I hope she’ll be able to tell us, if she makes it. Hurry up now!”

When the ambulance had vanished down the gravel road, Wallander and Peters went outside. Norén was wiping his face with a handkerchief. The dawn was slowly approaching. Wallander looked at his wristwatch. Seven twenty-eight.

“It’s a slaughterhouse in there,” said Peters.

“Worse,” replied Wallander. “Call in and request a full team. Tell Norén to seal off the area. I’m going to talk to the old man.”

Just as he said that, he heard something that sounded like a scream. He jumped, and then the scream came again.

It was a horse whinnying.

They went over to the stable and opened the door. Inside in the dark a horse was rustling in its stall. The place smelled of warm manure and urine.

“Give the horse some water and hay,” said Wallander. “Maybe there are other animals here too.”

When he emerged from the stable he gave a shudder. Black birds were screeching in a lone tree far out in a field. He sucked the cold air into his throat and noticed that the wind was picking up.

“Your name is Nyström,” he said to the man, who by now had stopped weeping. “You have to tell me what happened here. If I understand correctly, you live in the house next door.”

The man nodded. “What happened here?” he asked in a quavering voice.

“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me,” said Wallander. “Maybe we could go into your house.”

In the kitchen a woman in an old-fashioned dressing gown sat slumped on a chair crying. But as soon as Wallander introduced himself she got up and started to make coffee. The men sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander saw the Christmas decorations still hanging in the window. An old cat lay on the windowsill, staring at him without blinking. He reached out his hand to pet it.

“He bites,” said Nyström. “He’s not much used to people. Except for Hanna and me.”

Kurt Wallander thought of his wife who had left him and wondered where to begin. A bestial murder, he thought. And if we’re really unlucky, it’ll soon be a double murder.

Suddenly he had an idea. He knocked on the kitchen window to get Norén’s attention.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up.

“The horse had both water and hay,” said Norén. “There weren’t any other animals.”

“See that someone goes over to the hospital,” said Wallander. “In case she wakes up and says something. She must have seen everything.”

Norén nodded.

“Send somebody with good ears,” said Wallander. “Preferably someone who can read lips.”

When he came back into the kitchen he took off his overcoat and laid it on the kitchen sofa.

“Now tell me,” he said. “Tell me, and don’t leave anything out. Take your time.”

After two cups of weak coffee he could see that neither Nyström nor his wife had anything significant to tell. He got some of the chronology and the life story of the couple who had been attacked.

He had two questions left.

“Do you know if they kept any large sums of money in the house?” he asked.

“No,” said Nyström. “They put everything in the bank. Their pensions too. And they weren’t rich. When they sold off the fields and the animals and the machinery, they gave the money to their children.”

The second question seemed meaningless to him. But he asked it anyway. In this situation he had no choice.

“Do you know if they had any enemies?” he asked.

“Enemies?”

“Anybody who could have possibly done this?”

They didn’t seem to understand his question.

He repeated it.

The two old people looked at each other, uncomprehending.

“People like us don’t have any enemies,” the man replied. Wallander noticed that he sounded offended. “Sometimes we quarrel with each other. About maintaining a wagon path or the location of the pasture boundaries. But we don’t kill each other.”

Wallander nodded.

“I’ll be in touch again soon,” he said, getting up with his coat in his hand. “If you think of anything else, don’t hesitate to call the police. Ask for me, Inspector Wallander.”

“What if they come back...?” asked the old woman.

Wallander shook his head.

“They won’t be back,” he said. “It was most likely robbers. They never come back. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

He thought that he ought to say something more to reassure them. But what? What security could he offer to people who had just seen their closest neighbor brutally murdered? Who had to wait and see whether a second person was going to die?