Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers

The money with which he had paid his debt to the hardware store owner in Tågarp came from the sale of a car. Magnusson was able to produce a receipt for the Chrysler he had sold. And the buyer, a cabinetmaker in Lomma, told them that he had paid cash, with thousand-krona and five-hundred-krona bills.

Magnusson was also able to give a believable explanation for the fact that he lied about Johannes Lövgren being his father. He had done it for his mother’s sake, since he thought she would want it that way. When Wallander told him that Lövgren was a wealthy man, he had looked truly astonished.

In the end there was nothing left.

When Björk asked whether anyone was opposed to sending Erik Magnusson home and dropping him from the case until further notice, no one had any objections. Wallander felt a crushing guilt over having steered the entire investigation in the wrong direction. Only Rydberg seemed unaffected. He was also the one who had been the most skeptical from the beginning.

The investigation had run aground. All that was left was a wreck.

There was nothing to do but start over again.

At the same time the snow arrived.

In the wee hours of Saturday, January twenty-seventh, a violent snowstorm came in from the southwest. After a few hours, E14 was blocked. The snow fell steadily for six hours. The heavy wind made the efforts of the snowplows futile. As fast as they scraped the snow off the roads, it would collect in drifts again.

For twenty-four hours the police were busy preventing the mess from developing into chaos. Then the storm moved off, as quickly as it had come.

January thirtieth was Kurt Wallander’s forty-third birthday. He celebrated by reforming his eating habits and starting to smoke again. To his great delight, his daughter Linda called him that evening. She was in Malmö and had decided to enroll at a college outside Stockholm. She promised to come and see him before she left.

Wallander arranged his schedule so that he could visit his father at least three times a week. He wrote a letter to his sister in Stockholm, telling her that the new home-care worker had done wonders with their father. The confusion that had driven him out on that desolate nighttime promenade toward Italy had dissipated. Having a woman come regularly to his house had been his salvation.

One evening several days after his birthday, Wallander called up Anette Brolin and offered to show her around wintry Skane. He again apologized for the night at her apartment. She thanked him and said yes, and the following Sunday, February fourth, he took her out to see the ancient stones at Ales Stenar and the medieval castle of Glimmingehus. They ate dinner in Hammenhög at the inn, and Wallander started to think that she really had decided that he was someone other than the man who had pulled her down on his knee.

The weeks passed with no new breakthrough in their investigation. Martinson and Naslund were transferred to new assignments. Wallander and Rydberg, however, were allowed to concentrate exclusively on the double murder for the time being.

One cold, clear day in the middle of February, a day with absolutely no wind, Wallander was visited in his office by the Lövgrens’ daughter, who lived and worked in Göteborg.

She had returned to Skane to oversee the placement of a headstone on her parents’ grave in Villie cemetery. Wallander told her the truth — that the police were still fumbling around for some definite clue. The day after her visit, he drove out to the cemetery and stood there for a while, meditating by the black stone with the gold inscription.

The month of February was spent in broadening and deepening the investigation.

Rydberg, who was silent and uncommunicative and was suffering greatly from the pain in his leg, did most of his work by phone, while Wallander was often out in the field. They checked out every single bank in Skane, but found no additional safe-deposit boxes. Wallander talked with over two hundred people who were either relatives or acquaintances of Johannes and Maria Lövgren. He made numerous return forays into the bulging investigative material, went back to points he had covered long ago, and ripped up the floorboards in old, played-out reports and scrutinized them anew. But he found no opening anywhere.

One icy and windy February day he picked up Sten Widen at his farm and they visited Lenarp. Together they inspected the horse that might be concealing a secret and watched the mare eat an armload of hay. Old Nyström was at their heels wherever they went. Nyström had been given the mare by the two daughters.

But the property itself, which stood silent and closed up, had been turned over to a real estate agent in Skurup for sale. Kurt Wallander stood in the wind looking at the broken kitchen window, which had never been fixed, just boarded up with a piece of masonite. He tried to reestablish the contact with Sten Widen that had been lost for the past ten years, but the racehorse trainer and former friend appeared uninterested. After Wallander had driven him home, he realized that their contact was broken permanently.

The preliminary investigation of the murder of the Somali refugee was concluded, and Rune Bergman was brought before the district court in Ystad. The court building was filled with a large crowd from the media. By now it had been established that it was Valfrid Ström who had fired the fatal shots. But Rune Bergman was indicted for complicity in the murder, and the psychiatric evaluation declared him fit to stand trial.

Kurt Wallander testified in court, and on several occasions he sat in and listened to Anette Brolin’s appeals and cross-examinations. Rune Bergman didn’t say much, even though his silence was no longer unbroken. The court proceedings revealed a racist underground landscape in which political views similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan were prevalent. Bergman and Ström had acted on their own at the same time as they were connected to various racist organizations.

The thought again occurred to Wallander that something decisive was about to happen in Sweden. For brief moments he could also detect contradictory sympathies in himself for some of the anti-immigrant arguments that came up in discussions and the press while the trial was in progress. Did the government and the Immigration Service have any real control over which individuals sought to enter Sweden? Who was a refugee and who was an opportunist? Was it possible to differentiate at all?

How long would the principle of the generous refugee policy be able to hold without leading to chaos? Was there any upper limit?

Kurt Wallander had made halfhearted attempts to study the questions thoroughly. He realized that he harbored the same vague apprehension that so many other people did. Anxiety about the unknown, about the future.

At the end of February the sentence was pronounced, giving Rune Bergman a long prison term. To everyone’s undisguised astonishment, he did not appeal the verdict, which took effect immediately.

No more snow fell on Skåne that winter. One early morning at the beginning of March, Anette Brolin and Kurt Wallander took a long walk along Falsterbo Spit. Together they watched the early flocks of birds returning from the distant lands of the Southern Cross. Wallander suddenly took her hand, and she didn’t pull it away, at least not at once.

He managed to lose four kilos, but he realized that he would never get back to what he had weighed when Mona had suddenly left him.

Occasionally their voices would meet on the telephone. Wallander noticed that his jealousy was gradually crumbling away. The black woman who used to visit him in his dreams no longer showed up either.

March began with Svedberg repeating his desire to move back to Stockholm. At the same time Rydberg was admitted to the hospital for two weeks. At first everyone thought it was for his bad leg. But one day Ebba told Wallander in confidence that Rydberg was apparently suffering from cancer. She didn’t say how she knew, or what type of cancer it was. When Wallander visited Rydberg at the hospital, he told him it was only a routine check of his stomach. A spot on an X-ray plate had revealed a possible lesion on his large intestine.