Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers

Wallander passed out the brief press release and sat down on a little dais at one end of the room. Actually, the Ystad chief of police should have been there too, but he was on his winter vacation in Spain. If Rydberg managed to finish with the TV crews, he had promised to attend. But otherwise Kurt Wallander was on his own.

“You’ve received the press release,” he began. “I don’t have anything else to say at present.”

“May we ask questions?” said a reporter Wallander recognized as the local stringer for Labor News .

“That’s why I’m here,” replied Wallander.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, this is an unusually poor press release,” said the reporter. “You must be able to tell us more than this.”

“We have no leads to the perpetrators,” said Wallander.

“So there were more than one?”

“Possibly.”

“Why do you think so?”

“We think there were. But we don’t know.”

The reporter grimaced, and Wallander nodded to another reporter he recognized.

“How was he killed?”

“By external force.”

“That can mean a lot of different things!”

“We don’t know yet. The doctors aren’t finished with the forensic examination. It’ll take a couple of days.”

The reporter had more questions, but he was interrupted by the pimply girl with the tape recorder. Wallander could see by the call letters on the lid that she was from the local radio station.

“What did the robbers take?”

“We don’t know,” replied Wallander. “We don’t even know if it was a robbery.”

“What else could it be?”

“We don’t know.”

“Is there anything that leads you to believe that it wasn’t a robbery?”

“No.”

Wallander could feel that he was sweating in the stuffy room. He remembered how as a young policeman he had dreamed of holding press conferences. But it had never been stuffy and sweaty in his dreams.

“I asked a question,” he heard one of the reporters say from the back of the room.

“I didn’t hear it,” said Wallander.

“Do the police regard this as an important crime?” asked the reporter.

Wallander was surprised at the question.

“Naturally it’s important that we solve this murder,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Will you be needing extra resources?”

“It’s too early to comment on that. Of course we’re hoping for a quick solution. I guess I still don’t understand your question.”

The very young reporter with the thick glasses pushed his way forward. Wallander had never seen him before.

“In my opinion, no one in Sweden cares about old people any longer.”

“ We do,” replied Wallander. “We will do everything we can to apprehend the perpetrators. In Skane there are many old people living alone on isolated farms. We would like to reassure them, above all, that we are doing everything we can.”

He stood up. “We’ll let you know when we have more to report,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

The young woman from the local radio station blocked his path as he was leaving the room.

“I have nothing more to say,” he told her.

“I know your daughter Linda,” she said.

Wallander stopped. “You do? How?”

“We’ve met a few times. Here and there.”

Wallander tried to think whether he knew her. Had the girls been schoolmates?

She shook her head as if reading his mind.

“We’ve never met,” she said. “You don’t know me. Linda and I ran into each other in Malmö.”

“I see,” said Wallander. “That’s nice.”

“I think she’s great. Could I ask you some questions now?”

Wallander repeated into her microphone what he had said earlier. Most of all he wanted to talk about Linda, but he didn’t have a chance.

“Say hi to her,” she said, packing up her tape recorder. “Say hi from Cathrin. Or Cattis.”

“I will,” said Wallander. “I promise.”

When he went back to his office he could feel a gnawing in his stomach. But was it hunger or anxiety?

I’ve got to stop this, he thought. I’ve got to realize that my wife has left me. I’ve got to admit that all I can do is wait for Linda to contact me herself. I’ve got to take life as it comes...

Just before six the investigative team gathered for another meeting. There was no news from the hospital. Wallander quickly drew up a shift schedule for the night.

“Is that necessary?” wondered Hanson. “Just put a tape recorder in the room, then any nurse can turn it on if the old lady wakes up.”

“It is necessary,” said Wallander. “I can take midnight to six myself. Any volunteers until midnight?”

Rydberg nodded. “I can sit at the hospital just as well as anywhere,” he said.

Wallander looked around. Everyone seemed pale in the glare from the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

“Did we get anywhere?” he asked.

“We’ve checked out Lenarp,” said Peters, who had led the door-to-door inquiry. “Everybody says they didn’t see a thing. But it usually takes a few days before people really think about it. People are pretty scared up there. It’s damned unpleasant. Almost nothing but old folks. And a terrified young Polish family that is probably here illegally. But I didn’t bother them. We’ll have to keep trying tomorrow.”

Wallander nodded and looked at Rydberg.

“There were plenty of fingerprints,” he said. “Maybe that will produce something. But I doubt it. It’s mostly the knot that interests me.”

Wallander gave him a searching look. “What knot?”

“The knot on the noose.”

“What about it?”

“It’s unusual. I’ve never seen a knot like that before.”

“Have you ever seen a noose before?” interrupted Hanson, who was standing in the doorway, wanting to leave.

“Yes, I have,” replied Rydberg. “We’ll see what this knot can tell us.”

Wallander knew that Rydberg didn’t want to say any more. But if the knot interested him, it might be important.

“I’m driving back out to see the neighbors tomorrow morning,” said Wallander. “Has anyone tracked down the Lövgrens’ children yet, by the way?”

“Martinson’s working on it,” said Hanson.

“I thought Martinson was at the hospital,” said Wallander, surprised.

“He traded with Svedberg.”

“So where the hell is he now?”

No one knew where Martinson was. Wallander called the switchboard and found out that Martinson had left an hour earlier.

“Call him at home,” said Wallander.

Then he looked at his watch.

“We’ll meet again in the morning at ten o’clock,” he said. “Thanks for coming, see you then.”

Everyone else had left by the time the switchboard connected him with Martinson.

“Sorry,” said Martinson. “I forgot we had a meeting.”

“How’s it going with the children?”

“Damned if Rickard doesn’t have chicken pox.”

“I mean the Lövgrens’ children. The two daughters.”

Martinson sounded surprised when he answered. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“I didn’t get any message.”

“I gave it to one of the girls at the switchboard.”

“I’ll take a look. But tell me first.”

“One daughter, who’s fifty years old, lives in Canada. Winnipeg, wherever that is. I completely forgot that it was the middle of the night over there when I called. She refused to believe what I was saying. Not until her husband came to the phone did it dawn on them what had happened. He’s a cop, by the way. A real Canadian Mountie. I’m going to call them back tomorrow. But she’s flying over, of course. The other daughter was harder to reach, even though she lives in Sweden. She’s forty-seven, the manager of the buffet at the Ruby Hotel in Göteborg. Evidently she’s training a handball team in Skien, in Norway. But they promised that they’d get word to her about what happened. I gave the switchboard a list of the Lövgrens’ other relatives. There are lots of them. Most of them live in Skane. Some of them will probably call tomorrow when they see the story in the papers.”