Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers

His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone.

The hospital, he thought at once.

Now they’re calling to say that Maria Lövgren is dead.

But did she manage to wake up? Did she say anything?

He stared at the ringing telephone.

Damn, he thought. Damn.

Anything but that.

But when he picked up the receiver, it was his daughter. He gave a start and almost dropped the phone on the floor.

“Papa,” she said, and he heard the coin dropping into the pay phone.

“Hi,” he said. “Where are you calling from?”

Just so it’s not Lima, he thought. Or Katmandu. Or Kinshasa.

“I’m here in Ystad.”

He was suddenly happy. That meant he’d get to see her.

“I came to visit you,” she said. “But I’ve changed my plans. I’m at the train station. I’m leaving now. I just wanted to tell you that at least I thought about seeing you.”

Then the conversation was cut off, and he was left sitting there with the receiver in his hand.

It was like holding something dead, something hacked off in his hand.

That damn kid, he thought. Why does she do things like this?

His daughter Linda was nineteen. Until she was fifteen their relationship had been good. She came to him rather than to her mother whenever she had a problem or when there was something she really wanted to do but didn’t quite dare. He had seen her metamorphose from a chubby little girl to a young woman with a defiant beauty. Before she was fifteen, she never gave any hint that she was carrying around some secret demons that one day would drive her into a precarious and inscrutable landscape.

One spring day, soon after her fifteenth birthday, Linda had suddenly and without warning tried to commit suicide. It happened on a Saturday afternoon. Wallander had been fixing one of the garden chairs and his wife was washing the windows. He had put down his hammer and gone into the house, driven by a sudden uneasiness. Linda was lying on the bed in her room, and she had used a razor to cut both her wrists and her throat. Afterwards, when it was all over, the doctor told Wallander that she would have died if he hadn’t come in when he did and had the presence of mind to apply pressure bandages.

He never got over the shock. All contact between him and Linda was broken. She pulled away, and he never managed to understand what had driven her to attempt suicide. When she finished school she took a string of odd jobs, and would abruptly disappear for long periods of time. Twice his wife had pressed him to report her missing. His colleagues had seen his pain when Linda became the object of his own investigation. But one day she would turn up again, and the only way he could follow her journeys was to go through her pockets and leaf through her passport on the sly.

Hell, he thought. Why didn’t you stay? Why did you change your mind?

The telephone rang again and he snatched up the receiver.

“This is Papa,” Wallander said without thinking.

“What do you mean?” said his father. “What do you mean by picking up the phone and saying Papa? I thought you were a cop.”

“I don’t have time to talk to you right now. Can I call you back later?”

“No, you can’t. What’s so important?”

“Something serious happened this morning. I’ll call you later.”

“So what happened?”

His elderly father called him almost every day. On several occasions Wallander had told the switchboard not to put through any calls from him. But then his father saw through his ruse and started making up phony identities and disguising his voice to fool the operators.

Wallander saw only one possibility of evading him.

“I’ll come out and see you tonight,” he said. “Then we can talk.”

His father reluctantly let himself be persuaded. “Come at seven. I’ll have time to see you then.”

“I’ll be there at seven. See you.”

Wallander hung up and pushed the button to block incoming calls.

For a moment he considered taking the car and driving down to the train station to try and find his daughter. Talk to her, try to rekindle the contact that had been so mysteriously lost. But he knew that he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to risk her running away from him for good.

The door opened and Näslund stuck his head in.

“Hi,” he said. “Should I show him in?”

“Show who in?”

Naslund looked at his watch.

“It’s nine o’clock. You told me yesterday that you wanted Klas Månson here for interrogation at nine.”

“Who’s Klas Månson?”

Naslund looked at him quizzically. “The guy who robbed the store on Osterleden. Did you forget about him?”

Then he remembered, and at the same time he realized that Naslund obviously hadn’t heard about the murder that had been committed in the night.

“You take over Månson,” he said. “We had a murder last night out in Lenarp. Maybe a double murder. An old couple. You can take over Månson. But put it off for a while. The first thing we have to do is plan the investigation at Lenarp.”

“Månson’s lawyer is already here,” said Naslund. “If I send him away, he’s going to raise hell.”

“Do a preliminary questioning,” said Wallander. “If the lawyer makes a fuss later, it can’t be helped. Set up an investigation meeting in my office for ten o’clock. Make sure everyone comes.”

Suddenly he was in motion. Now he was a cop again. The anguish about his daughter and his wife who had left him would have to wait. Right now he had to begin the arduous hunt for a murderer.

He moved the piles of paper off his desk, tore up a soccer lottery form he wouldn’t get around to filling out anyway, and went out to the lunchroom and poured a cup of coffee.

At ten o’clock everyone gathered in his office. Rydberg had been called in from the crime scene and was sitting on a Windsor chair by the window. A total of seven police officers, sitting and standing, filled the room. Wallander phoned the hospital and managed to extract the information that the old woman’s condition was still critical.

Then he told all of them what had happened.

“It was worse than you could imagine,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say so, Rydberg?”

“That’s right,” replied Rydberg. “Like an American movie. It even smelled like blood. It doesn’t usually do that.”

“We have to catch whoever did this,” Wallander concluded his presentation. “We can’t just let maniacs like this run around loose.”

The whole room fell silent. Rydberg was drumming his fingertips on the arm of the chair. A woman was heard laughing in the corridor outside.

Kurt Wallander looked around. They were all his colleagues. None of them was his close friend. And yet they were a team.

“Well,” he said, “what are we waiting for? Let’s get started.”

It was twenty minutes to eleven.

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.