Faceless Killers (20 page)

"There was a call from Ystad," she said. "They want Inspector Wallander to call back."

"Let's go to my office," said Boman.

Full of foreboding, Wallander dialled the number while Boman went to get some coffee. Without a word Ebba connected him to Rydberg.

"You'd better come back," said Rydberg. "Some idiot has shot a Somali refugee at Hageholm."

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I said. This Somali was out taking a stroll. Someone blasted him with a shotgun. I've had a hell of a time tracking you down. Where have you been?"

"Is he dead?"

"His head was blown off."

Wallander felt sick to his stomach. "I'm on my way," he said.

He hung up the phone just as Boman came in, balancing two mugs of coffee. Wallander gave him a rundown of what had happened.

"I'll get you emergency transport," said Boman. "I'll send your car over later with one of the boys."

Everything happened fast. In a few minutes Wallander was on his way to Ystad in a car with sirens wailing. Rydberg met him at the station and they drove at once to Hageholm.

"Do we have any leads?" asked Wallander.

"None. But the newsroom at
Sydsvenskan
got a call only a few minutes after the murder. A man said that it was revenge for the murder of Johannes Lövgren. And that next time they would take a woman for Maria Lövgren."

"This is insane," said Wallander. "We don't have foreign suspects any more, do we?"

"Somebody seems to have a different opinion. Thinks that we're shielding some foreigners."

"But I've already denied that."

"Whoever did this doesn't give a shit about your denials. They see a perfect case for pulling out a gun and shooting foreigners."

"This is crazy!"

"You're damn right it's crazy. But it's true!"

"Did the newspaper tape the phone conversation?"

"Yes."

"I want to hear it. To see if it's the same person who's been calling me."

The car raced through the landscape of Skåne.

"What are we going to do now?" asked Wallander.

"We've got to catch the Lunnarp killers," said Rydberg. "And damned fast."

At Hageholm everything was in chaos. Distressed and weeping refugees had gathered in the dining hall, reporters were interviewing people, and phones were ringing. Wallander stepped out of the car onto a muddy dirt road several hundred metres from the residential buildings. The wind was blowing again, and he turned up the collar of his jacket. An area near the road had been cordoned off. The dead man was lying face down in the mud.

Wallander cautiously lifted the sheet covering the body.

Rydberg hadn't been exaggerating. There was almost nothing left of the head.

"Shot at close range," said Hansson who was standing nearby. "Whoever did this must have jumped out of hiding and fired the shots from a few metres away." "Shots?" said Wallander.

"The camp director says that she heard two shots, one after the other." Wallander looked around.

"Car tracks?" he asked. "Where does this road go?" "Two kilometres further along you come out on the E65. "And no-one saw anything?"

"It's hard to question refugees who speak 15 different languages. But we're working on it."

"Do we know who the dead man is?"

"He had a wife and nine children."

Wallander stared at Hansson in disbelief. "Nine children?"

"Just imagine the headlines tomorrow morning," said Hansson. "Innocent refugee murdered taking a walk. Nine children left without a father."

Svedberg came running from one of the police cars.

"The police chief is on the phone," he said.

Wallander looked surprised.

"I thought he wasn't due back from Spain until tomorrow."

"Not him. The chief of the national police."

Wallander got into the car and picked up the phone. The chief's voice was emphatic, and Wallander was immediately annoyed by what he said.

"This looks very bad," said the chief. "We don't need racist murders in this country."

"No," said Wallander.

"This investigation must be given top priority." "Yes. But we already have the murders in Lunnarp on our hands."

"Are you making any progress there?" "I think so. But it takes time."

"I want you to report to me personally. I'm going to take part in a discussion programme on TV tonight, and I need all the information I can get."

‘I’ll see to it."

He hung up.

Wallander remained sitting in the car. Näslund will have to handle this, he thought. He'll have to feed the paperwork to Stockholm. He felt depressed. His hangover was gone, and he remembered what had happened the night before, as he saw Peters approaching from a police car that had just arrived.

He thought about Mona and the man who had picked her up. And Linda laughing, the black man at her side. His father, painting his everlasting landscape. He thought about himself too.

A time to live, and a time to die.

Wallander forced himself out of the car to take charge of the criminal investigation. Nothing else had better happen, he thought. We can't handle anything else.

It was still raining.

CHAPTER 10

Wallander stood in the driving rain, freezing. It was late afternoon, and the police had rigged floodlights around the murder scene. He watched two ambulance attendants squishing through the mud with a stretcher. They were taking away the dead Somali. When he looked at the sea of mud he wondered whether even as skilful a detective as Rydberg would be able to find any tracks.

Still, he felt slightly relieved. Until ten minutes ago the officers had been surrounded by a hysterical woman and nine howling children. The wife of the dead man had thrown herself down in the mud, and her wails were so piercing that several of the policemen couldn't tolerate the sound and had moved away. To his surprise, Wallander saw that the only one who was able to handle the grieving woman and the anguished children was Martinsson. The youngest policeman on the force, who so far in his career had never even been forced to notify someone of a relative's death. He had held the woman, kneeling in the mud, and in some way the two were able to understand each other across the language barrier. A priest who had been called out was unable to do anything, of course. But gradually Martinsson succeeded in getting the woman and the children back to the main building, where a doctor was ready to take care of them.

Rydberg came tramping through the mud. His trousers were splattered all the way up his thighs.

"What a hell of a mess," he said. "But Hansson and Svedberg have done a fantastic job. They managed to find two refugees and an interpreter who actually think they saw something."

"What did they see?"

"How should I know? I don't speak either Arabic or Swahili. But they're on their way to Ystad right now. The Immigration Service has promised us some interpreters. I thought it would be best if you handled the interviews."

Wallander nodded. "Have we got anything to go on?"

Rydberg took out his grimy notebook.

"He was killed at 1 p.m. precisely," he said. "The director was listening to the news on the radio when she heard the noise. There were two shots. But you know that already. He was dead before he hit the ground. It seems to have been regular buckshot. Gyttorp brand, I think. Nytrox 36, probably. That's about all."

"That's not much."

"It's absolutely nothing. But maybe the eyewitnesses will have something to tell us."

"I've authorised overtime for everyone," said Wallander. "Now we'll have to bust our guts night and day if necessary."

Back at the station, the first interview almost drove him to despair. The interpreter, who was supposed to know Swahili, could barely understand the dialect spoken by the witness, a young man from Malawi. It took him almost 20 minutes to discover that the man for some strange reason knew Luvale, a language spoken in parts of Zaire and Zambia. One of the Immigration Service people knew a former missionary who spoke fluent Luvale. She was close to 90 and lived in sheltered accommodation in Trelleborg. After calling his colleagues there, he was promised that the missionary would be given police transport to Ystad. Wallander suspected that a 90-year-old missionary might not be very sharp, but he was wrong. A little white-haired lady with lively eyes appeared at the door of his office, and before he knew it she was involved in an intense conversation with the young man.

But, it turned out that the man hadn't seen a thing. "Ask him why he volunteered as a witness," Wallander said wearily.

The missionary and the young man went off into a lengthy exchange.

"He just thought it was rather exciting," she said at last. "And that's understandable."

"It is?" Wallander wondered.

"You must have been young once yourself," said the woman.

The young man from Malawi was sent back to Hageholm, and the missionary returned to Trelleborg. The next witness actually had something to tell them. He was an Iranian who worked as an interpreter and who spoke fluent Swedish. Like the murdered Somali, he had been walking close to Hageholm when the shots were fired.

Wallander picked out a section of the map that showed the area around Hageholm. He put an X at the scene of the murder, and the Iranian was able to point at once to where he had been when he heard the shots. Wallander calculated the distance as about 300 metres.

"After the shots I heard a car," said the man.

"But you didn't see it?"

"No. I was in the woods. I couldn't see the road." The Iranian pointed again. To the south. Then he really surprised Wallander. "It was a Citroen," he said. "A Citroen?"

"The kind you call a turtle here in Sweden." "How can you be sure of that?"

"I grew up in Tehran. When we were boys we learned to recognise the makes of cars by the sound of the engine. Citroens are easy. Most of all the turtle."

Wallander had a hard time believing what he heard. "Come out to the car park with me, and when you get outside, turn your back and shut your eyes."

Outside in the rain he started his Peugeot and drove around the car park. He watched the Iranian carefully the whole time.

"All right," he said when he returned. "What was that?" "A Peugeot," replied the Iranian with the utmost confidence.

"Good," said Wallander. "Damned amazing."

He sent the man home and gave the instruction that an APB be issued on a Citroen that might have been seen between Hageholm and the E65 to the west. The wire service was also advised that the police were looking for a Citroen that was believed to be linked to the murder.

The third witness was a young woman from Romania. She sat in Wallander's office nursing her baby during the interview. Her interpreter spoke poor Swedish, but Wallander still had a good idea of what the woman was saying.

She had walked the same way as the Somali, and she had passed him on her way back to the camp.

"How long?" asked Wallander. "How long was it from when you passed him to when you heard the shots?"

"Maybe three minutes."

"Did you see anyone else?"

The woman nodded, and Wallander leaned over the desk in suspense.

"Where?" he asked. "Show me on the map!"

The interpreter held the baby while the woman searched on the map.

"There," she said, pressing the pen to the map. Wallander saw that the spot was very near the scene of the murder.

"Tell me about it," he said. "There's no hurry. Think carefully."

The woman thought for a while.

"A man in blue overalls," she said. "He was standing out in the field."

"What did he look like?"

"He didn't have much hair."

"How tall was he?"

"Normal height."

"Am I a man of normal height?" Wallander stood up straight. "He was taller." "How old was he?"

"He wasn't young. Not old either. Maybe 45." "Did he see you?" "I don't think so."

"What was he doing out in the field?"

"He was eating."

"Eating?"

"He was eating an apple."

Wallander thought for a moment. "A man in blue overalls standing in a field near the road and eating an apple. Did I understand you correctly?"

"Yes."

"Was he alone?"

"I didn't see anyone else. But I don't think he was alone." "Why not?"

"He seemed to be waiting for someone."

"Did this man have a weapon of any kind?"

The woman thought again. "There might have been

a brown package at his feet. Maybe it was just mud." "What happened after you saw the man?" "I hurried home as fast as I could." "Why in a hurry?"

"It's not a good idea to run into strange men in the woods." Wallander nodded. "Did you see a car?" he asked. "No. No car."

"Can you describe the man in more detail?"

She thought for a long time before she replied.

"He looked strong," she said. "I think he had big hands."

"What colour was his hair? What little he had."