Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers

“Good work,” said Wallander. “Can you relieve me at the hospital tomorrow morning at six? If she doesn’t die by then.”

“I’ll be there,” said Martinson. “But is it such a good idea for you to take that shift?”

“Why not?”

“You’re the one heading the investigation. You ought to get some sleep.”

“I can handle it for one night,” replied Wallander and hung up.

He sat completely still and stared into space.

Are we going to figure this one out? he thought. Or do they already have too much of a head start?

He put on his overcoat, turned off the desk lamp, and left his office. The corridor leading to the reception area was deserted. He stuck his head in the glass cubicle where the operator on duty sat leafing through a magazine. He noticed that it was a racing form. Is everyone playing the ponies these days? he thought.

“Martinson supposedly left some papers for me,” he said.

The operator, who was named Ebba and had been with the police department for more than thirty years, gave a friendly nod and pointed at the counter.

“We have a girl here from the youth employment bureau,” she said, smiling. “Sweet and nice but completely incompetent. Maybe she forgot to give them to you.”

Wallander nodded.

“I’m leaving now,” he said. “I’ll probably be home in a couple of hours. If anything happens, call me at my father’s place.”

“You’re thinking of that poor woman at the hospital,” said Ebba.

Wallander nodded.

“What a terrible thing to happen.”

“Yes, it is,” said Wallander. “Sometimes I wonder what’s happening to this country anyway.”

When he went out through the glass doors of the police station the wind hit him in the face. It was cold and biting, and he hunched over as he hurried to the parking lot. As long as it doesn’t snow, he thought. Not until we catch whoever it was who paid the visit in Lenarp.

He crawled into his car and spent a long time looking through the cassettes he kept in the glove compartment. Without really making a decision, he shoved Verdi’s Requiem into the tape deck. He had expensive speakers in the car, and the magnificent tones surged against his eardrums. He drove off and turned right, down Dragongatan toward Osterleden. A few leaves whirled across the road, and a bicyclist strained against the wind. The clock on the dashboard said it was six. Hunger was gnawing at him again, and he crossed the main road and turned in at OK’s Cafeteria. I’ll change my eating habits tomorrow, he thought. If I get to Dad’s place a minute past seven, he’ll accuse me of abandoning him.

He ate a hamburger special.

He ate so fast that it gave him diarrhea.

As he sat on the toilet he noticed that he ought to change his underwear.

Suddenly he realized how tired he was.

He didn’t get up until someone banged on the door.

He filled the tank with gas and drove east, through Sandskogen, and turned off at the road toward Kåseberga. His father lived in a little house that seemed to have been flung onto a field between Löderup and the sea.

It was four minutes to seven when he swung onto the gravel driveway in front of the house.

That gravel driveway had been the cause of the latest and most lengthy of his quarrels with his father. Before, it had been a lovely cobblestone courtyard as old as the farmhouse where his father lived. Suddenly one day he got the idea of covering the courtyard with gravel. When Wallander had protested, his father was outraged. “I don’t need a guardian!” he had shouted.

“Why do you have to destroy the beautiful cobblestone courtyard?” Wallander had asked.

Then they had quarreled.

And now the courtyard was covered with gray gravel that crunched under the car’s tires.

He could see that a light was on in the shed.

Next time it could be my father, he thought suddenly.

The moonlight killer who might pick him out as a suitable old man to rob, maybe even murder.

No one would hear him scream for help. Not in this wind, with five hundred meters to the nearest neighbor. Who was an old man himself.

He listened to the end of “Dies irae” before he climbed out of the car and stretched.

He went over to the shed, which was his father’s studio. That’s where he painted his pictures, as he had always done.

It was one of Wallander’s earliest childhood memories. The way his father had always smelled of turpentine and oil. And the way he was always standing in front of his sticky easel in his dark-blue overalls and cut-off rubber boots.

Not until Kurt Wallander was five or six years old did he realize that his father wasn’t working on the exact same painting year after year.

It was the motif that never changed.

He painted a melancholy autumn landscape, with a shiny mirror of a lake, a crooked tree with bare branches in the foreground, and, far off on the horizon, mountain ranges surrounded by clouds that shimmered in an improbably colorful setting sun.

Now and then he would add a wood grouse standing on a stump at the far left edge of the painting.

At regular intervals their home was visited by men in silk suits with heavy gold rings on their fingers. They came in rusty vans or shiny American gas-guzzlers, and they bought the paintings, with or without the grouse.

His father had been painting the same motif all his life. The family had lived off his paintings, which were sold at fairs and auctions.

They had lived in Klagshamm outside Malmö, in an old converted smithy. Kurt Wallander had grown up there with his sister Kristina, and their childhood had always been wrapped in the intense smell of turpentine.

Not until his father was widowed did he sell the old smithy and move out to the country. Wallander had never really understood why, since his father was continually complaining about the loneliness.

He opened the door to the shed and saw that his father was working on a painting without the grouse. Just now he was painting the tree in the foreground. He muttered a greeting and continued dabbing with his brush.

Wallander poured a cup of coffee from a dirty pot that stood on a smoking spirit stove.

He looked at his father, who was almost eighty years old, short and stooped, but still radiating energy and strength of will.

Am I going to look like him when I get old? he thought.

As a boy I took after my mother. Now I look like my grandfather. Maybe I’ll be like my father when I get old.

“Have a cup of coffee,” said his father. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“I got one,” said Wallander.

“Then have another,” said his father.

He’s in a bad mood, thought Wallander. He’s a tyrant with his changeable moods. What does he want with me, anyway?

“I’ve got a lot to do,” said Wallander. “Actually I have to work all night. I thought there was something you wanted.”

“Why do you have to work all night?”

“I have to sit at the hospital.”

“How come? Who’s sick?”

Wallander sighed. Even though he had carried out hundreds of interrogations himself, he would never be able to match his father’s persistence in questioning him. And his father didn’t even give a damn about his career as a cop. Wallander knew that his father had been deeply disappointed when he had decided, at eighteen, to become a policeman. But he was never able to find out what sort of hopes his father had actually had for him.

He had tried to talk about it, but never with any success.

On the few occasions when he had spent time with his sister Kristina, who lived in Stockholm and owned a beauty salon, he had tried to ask her, since he knew that she and his father were on good terms. But even she had no idea.