Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers

“Is he sick?” wondered Wallander.

“It’s probably his rheumatism,” said Ebba. “Haven’t you noticed how he’s been limping this winter?”

Wallander decided not to wait for Rydberg. He put on his coat, went out to his car, and drove to Tågarp.

The hardware store was in the middle of town.

At the moment there was a sale on wheelbarrows.

The man who came out of the back room when the doorbell rang was indeed short and hefty. Wallander was the only one in the store, and he decided to get right to the point. He took out his police ID. The man called the Junkman studied it carefully but seemed totally unaffected.

“Ystad,” he said. “What can the police from Ystad want with me?”

“Do you know a man named Erik Magnusson?”

The man behind the counter was much too experienced to lie.

“Could be. Why?”

“When did you first meet him?”

Wrong question, thought Wallander. It gives him the chance to retreat.

“I don’t remember.”

“But you do know him?”

“We have a few common interests.”

“Such as the sport of harness racing and tote betting?”

“That’s possible.”

Wallander felt provoked by the man’s overbearing self-confidence.

“Now you listen to me,” he said. “I know that you lend money to people who can’t control their gambling. Right now I’m not thinking of asking about the interest rates you charge on your loans. I don’t give a damn about your involvement in an illegal money-lending operation. I want to know something else entirely.”

The man called the Junkman looked at him with curiosity.

“I want to know whether Erik Magnusson owes you money,” he said. “And I want to know how much.”

“Nothing,” replied the man.

“Nothing?”

“Not a single öre.”

A dead end, thought Wallander. Hanson’s lead was a dead end.

The next second he realized that he was wrong. They were finally on the right track.

“But if you want to know, he did owe me money,” said the man.

“How much?”

“A lot. But he paid up. Twenty-five thousand kronor.”

“When?”

The man made a swift calculation. “A little over a week ago. The Thursday before last.”

Thursday, January eleventh, thought Wallander.

Three days after the murder in Lenarp.

“How did he pay you?”

“He came over here.”

“In what denominations?”

“Thousands. Five hundreds.”

“Where did he have the money?”

“What do you mean?”

“In a bag? A briefcase?”

“In a plastic grocery bag. From ICA, I think.”

“Was he late with the payment?”

“A little.”

“What would have happened if he hadn’t paid?”

“I would have been forced to send him a reminder.”

“Do you know how he got hold of the money?”

The man called the Junkman shrugged. At that moment a customer came into the store.

“That’s none of my business,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”

“No, thanks. Not at the moment. But you may hear from me again.”

Wallander went out to his car.

The wind had picked up.

Okay, he thought. Now we’ve got him.

Who would have thought that something good would come out of Hanson’s lousy gambling?

Wallander drove back to Ystad, feeling as if he had drawn a winning number in the lottery.

He was on the scent of the solution.

Erik Magnusson, he thought.

Here we come.

After intensive work that dragged on until late into the night on Friday, January nineteenth, Kurt Wallander and his colleagues were ready for battle. Björk had sat in on the long meeting of the investigative team, and at Wallander’s request he had let Hanson put aside work on the murder in Hageholm so he could join the Lenarp group, as they now called themselves. Näslund was still sick, but he called in and said he’d be there the next day.

In spite of the weekend, the work had to continue with undiminished effort. Martinson had returned with a canine patrol from a detailed inspection of the dirt road that led from Veberödsvägen to the rear of Lövgren’s stable. He had made a meticulous examination of the road, which ran for 1.912 kilometers through a couple of patches of woods, divided two pieces of pasture land as the boundary line, and then ran parallel to an almost dry creek bed. He hadn’t found anything unusual, even though he returned to the police station with a plastic bag full of objects. Among other things, there was a rusty wheel from a doll’s baby buggy, a greasy sheet of plastic, and an empty cigarette pack of a foreign brand. The objects would be examined, but Wallander didn’t think they would produce anything of use to the investigation.

The most important decision during the meeting was that Erik Magnusson would be placed under round-the-clock surveillance. He lived in a rented house in the old Rosengård area. Since Hanson reported that there were harness races at Jägersrö on Sunday, he was assigned the surveillance during the races.

“But I’m not authorizing any tote receipts,” said Björk, in a dubious attempt at a joke.

“I propose that we all go in on a regular v5 ticket,” replied Hanson. “There’s a unique possibility that this murder investigation could pay off.”

But it was a serious mood that dominated the group in Björk’s office. There was a feeling that a decisive moment was approaching.

The question that aroused the longest discussion concerned whether Erik Magnusson should be told that a fire had been lit under his feet. Both Rydberg and Björk were skeptical. But Wallander thought that they had nothing to lose if Magnusson discovered that he was the object of police interest. The surveillance would be discreet, of course. But beyond that, no measures would be taken to hide the fact that the police had mobilized.

“Let him get nervous,” said Wallander. “If he has anything to be nervous about, then I hope we discover what it is.”

It took three hours to go through all the investigative material to look for threads that indirectly could be tied to Erik Magnusson. They found nothing, but they also found nothing to contradict the idea that it could have been Magnusson who was in Lenarp that night, despite the alibi his fiancée gave him. Now and then Wallander felt a vague uneasiness that they were traipsing around in yet another blind alley after all.

It was mostly Rydberg who showed signs of doubt. Time after time he asked himself whether a lone individual could have carried out the double murder.

“There was something that hinted at teamwork in that slaughterhouse,” he said. “I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Nothing is preventing Erik Magnusson from having an accomplice,” replied Wallander. “We have to take one thing at a time.”

“If he committed the murder to cover up a gambling debt, he wouldn’t want an accomplice,” Rydberg objected.

“I know,” said Wallander. “But we have to keep at it.”

Thanks to some quick work by Martinson, they obtained a photograph of Erik Magnusson, which was dug up from the county council’s archives. It was taken from a brochure in which the county council presented its comprehensive activities for a populace that was assumed to be ignorant. Björk was of the opinion that all national and municipal governmental institutions needed their own ministries of defense, which when necessary could drum into the uninformed public the colossal significance of precisely that institution. He thought the brochure was excellent. In any case, Erik Magnusson was standing next to his yellow forklift truck, dressed in dazzling white overalls. He was smiling.

The police officers looked at his face and compared it with some black-and-white photos of Johannes Lövgren. One of the pictures showed Lövgren standing next to a tractor in a newly plowed field.