Faceless Killers (28 page)

"And you were satisfied with that?"

"What the hell was I supposed to do? If she won't tell me, she won't tell me."

Wallander thought about the answers he was getting. Was it really possible to be so uninterested in who your father was?

"Do you get along well with your mother?" he asked.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Do you see each other often?"

"She calls me now and then. I drive over to Kristianstad once in a while. I got along better with my stepfather."

Wallander gave a start. Boman had said nothing about a stepfather.

"Is your mother remarried?"

"She lived with a man while I was growing up. They probably weren't ever married. But I still called him my dad. Then they split up when I was about 15.
1
moved to Malmö a year later." "What's his name?"

"
Was
his name. He's dead. He was killed in a car crash."

"And you're sure that he wasn't your real father?"

"You'd have to look hard to find two people as unlike each other as we were."

Wallander tried a different tack. "The man who was murdered at Lunnarp was named Johannes Lövgren," he said. "Is it possible that he might have been your father?"

The man sitting across from Wallander gave him a look of surprise.

"How the hell would I know? You'll have to ask my mother."

"We've already done that. But she denies it."

"So ask her again. I'd like to know who my father is. Murdered or not."

Wallander believed him. He wrote down Magnusson's address and personal identity number and then stood up.

"You may hear from us again," he said.

The man climbed back into the cab of the fork-lift.

"That's fine with me," he said. "Say hello to my mum if you see her."

Wallander returned to Ystad. He parked near the square and headed down the street to buy some gauze bandages at the chemist. The salesman gazed sympathetically at his battered face. He bought food for dinner in the supermarket on the square. On his way back to the car he changed his mind and retraced his steps to the state liquor oudet. There he bought a bottle of whisky. Even though he couldn't really afford it, he chose malt.

By late afternoon Wallander was back at the station. Neither Rydberg nor Martinsson was there. He went over to the prosecutor's office. The girl at the reception desk smiled.

"She loved the flowers," she said. "Is she in her office?" "She's in district court."

Wallander headed back. In the corridor he ran into Svedberg.

"How's it going with Bergman?" asked Wallander.

"He's still not talking," said Svedberg. "But he'll soften up eventually. The evidence is piling up. The laboratory technicians think they can connect the weapon to the crime."

"What else have we got on this?"

"It looks as if Ström and Bergman were both active in a number of nationalist groups. But we don't know whether they were operating on their own or were acting under the instruction of an organisation."

"In other words, everybody is perfectly happy?"

"I'd hardly say that. Björk was saying how anxious he was to catch the murderer, but then it turned out to be a policeman. I suspect they're going to play down Bergman's importance and dump it all on Ström, who has nothing more to say about it. Personally, I think Bergman was equally up to his neck in the whole thing."

"I wonder whether Ström was the one who called me at home," said Wallander. "I never heard him say enough to tell for sure."

Svedberg gave him a searching look. "Which means?"

"That in the worst case, there are others who are prepared to take over the killing from Bergman and Ström."

"I'll tell Björk that we have to continue our patrols of the camps," said Svedberg. "By the way, we have a number of tip-offs indicating that it was a gang of youths who set the fire here in Ystad."

"Don't forget the old man who got a sack of turnips in the head," said Wallander.

"How's it going with Lunnarp?"

Wallander hesitated with his answer. "I'm not really sure," he said. "But we're doing some serious work on it again."

At 5.30 p.m. Martinsson and Rydberg were in Wallander's office. He thought that Rydberg still looked tired and worn-out. Martinsson was in a bad mood.

"It's a mystery how Lövgren got to Ystad and back again on Thursday, 4 January," he said. "I talked to the bus driver on that route. He said that Johannes and Maria used to ride with him whenever they went into town. Either together or separately. He was absolutely certain that Johannes Lövgren did not ride in his bus any time after New Year's. And no taxi had a fare to Lunnarp. According to Nyström, they took the bus whenever they had to go anywhere. And we know that Lövgren was tightfisted."

"They always drank coffee together," said Wallander. "In the afternoon. The Nyströms must have noticed if Lövgren went off to Ystad or not."

"That's exactly what's such a mystery," said Martinsson. "Both of them claim that he didn't go into town that day. And yet we know that he went to two different banks between 11.30 a.m. and 1.15 p.m. He must have been gone from home at least three or four hours."

"Strange," said Wallander. "You'll have to keep working on it."

Martinsson referred to his notes. "At any rate, he doesn't have any other safe-deposit boxes in town."

"Good," said Wallander. "At least we know that much."

"But he might have one in Simrishamn," Martinsson said. "Or Trelleborg. Or Malmö."

"Let's concentrate on his trip to Ystad first," said Wallander, turning to Rydberg.

"Herdin stands by his story," he said after glancing at his worn notebook. "Quite by chance he ran into Lövgren and the woman in Kristianstad in the spring of 1979. And he says that it was from an anonymous letter that he found out they had a child together."

"Could he describe the woman?"

"Vaguely. In the worst case we could line up all the ladies and have him point out the right one. If she's one of them, that is," he added.

"You sound as though you have some doubt."

Rydberg closed his notebook with an irritable snap.

"I can't get anything to fit," he said. "You know that. Obviously we have to follow up the leads we have. But I'm not at all sure that we're on the right track. What bothers me is that I can't see an alternative path to take."

Wallander told them about his meeting with Erik Magnusson.

"Why didn't you ask him for an alibi for the night of the murder?" wondered Martinsson in surprise.

Wallander felt himself starting to blush behind his black and blue marks. It had slipped his mind. But he didn't tell them that.

"I decided to wait," he said. "I wanted to have an excuse to visit him again."

He could hear how lame that sounded. But neither Rydberg nor Martinsson appeared to react to his explanation. The conversation came to a halt. Each was wrapped up in his own thoughts. Wallander wondered how many times he had found himself in exactly this same situation. When an investigation suddenly ceases to breathe. Like a horse that refuses to budge. Now they would be forced to tug and pull at the horse until it started to move.

"How should we continue?" asked Wallander at last, when the silence became too oppressive.

He answered his own question. "For your part, Martinsson, it's a matter of finding out how Lövgren could go to Ystad and back without anyone noticing. We have to work that out as soon as possible."

"There was a jar full of receipts in one of the kitchen cupboards," said Rydberg. "He might have bought something in a shop on that Friday. Maybe a salesman would remember seeing him."

"Or maybe he had a flying carpet," said Martinsson. "I'll keep working on it."

"His relatives," said Wallander. "We have to go through all of them."

He pulled out a list of names and addresses from the thick folder and handed it to Rydberg.

"The funeral is on Wednesday," said Rydberg. "In Villie Church. I don't care much for funerals. But I think I'll go to this one."

"I'm going back to Kristianstad tomorrow," said Wallander. "Boman was suspicious of Ellen Magnusson. He didn't think she was telling the truth."

It was just before 6 p.m. when they finished their meeting. They decided to meet again on the following afternoon.

"If Näslund is feeling better, he can work on the stolen rental car," said Wallander. "By the way, did we ever find out what that Polish family is doing in Lunnarp?"

"The husband works at the sugar refinery in Jordberga," said Rydberg. "All his papers are in order. Even though he wasn't fully aware of it himself."

Wallander sat in his office for a while after Rydberg and

Martinsson left. There was a stack of papers on his desk that he was supposed to go through, including all the material from the assault case he had been working on over New Year's. There were also reports pertaining to everything from missing bullocks to lorries that had tipped over during the last storm. At the bottom of the stack he found a note informing him that he had been given a pay rise. He worked out that he would be taking home an extra 39 kronor per month.

By the time he had made his way through the pile of papers, it was almost 7.30 p.m. He called Loderup and told his sister that he was on his way.

"We're starving," she said. "Do you always work this late?"

Wallander selected a cassette of a Puccini opera and went out to his car. He had wanted to make sure that Anette Brolin had put out of her mind what had happened the night before after all. But this would have to wait.

Kristina told him that the help for their father had turned out to be a solid woman in her 50s who would have no trouble taking care of him.

"He couldn't ask for anyone better," she said when she came out to the driveway and met him in the dark.

"What's Dad doing?"

"He's painting," she said.

While his sister made dinner, Wallander sat on the toboggan in the studio and watched the autumn motif emerge. His father seemed to have completely forgotten about what had happened.

I have to visit him more regularly, thought Wallander. At least three times a week, and preferably at specific times.

After dinner they played cards with their father for a couple of hours. At 11 p.m. he went to bed.

"I'm going home tomorrow," said Kristina. "I can't be away any longer."

"Thanks for coming," said Wallander.

They decided that he would pick her up at 8 a.m. the next morning and drive her to the airport.

"The plane was full out of Sturup," she said. "I'm leaving from Everod."

That suited Wallander just fine, since he had to drive to Kristianstad anyway.

Just after midnight he walked into his apartment on Mariagatan. He poured himself a big glass of whisky and took it with him into the bathroom. He lay in the bath for a long time, thawing out his limbs in the hot water.

He tried to push them away, but Rune Bergman and Valfrid Ström kept popping into his thoughts. He was trying to understand. The only thing he came up with was the same idea he had had so many times before. A new world had emerged, and he hadn't even noticed it. As a policeman, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live in the new? How would he deal with the great uneasiness he felt at these changes, at so much happening so fast?

The murder of the Somali had been a new kind of murder. The double murder in Lunnarp, however, was an old-fashioned crime. Or was it really? He thought about the savagery, and the noose. He wasn't sure.

It was 1.30 a.m. when finally he crawled between the chilly sheets. He felt more lonely there than ever.

For the next three days nothing happened. Näslund came back to work and succeeded in solving the problem of the stolen car. A man and a woman went on a robbery spree and then left the car in Halmstad. On the night of the murder they had been staying in a boarding house in Bastad. The owner vouched for their alibi.

Goran Boman talked to Ellen Magnusson. She resolutely denied that Johannes Lövgren was the father of her son.

Wallander visited Erik Magnusson again and asked for the alibi he had forgotten to get during their first encounter. He had been with his fiancee. There was no reason to doubt him. Martinsson got nowhere with Lövgren's trip to Ystad. The Nyströms were quite sure about their story, as were the bus drivers and taxi companies. Rydberg went to the funeral, and talked to nineteen different relatives of the Lövgrens.

Nothing gave them any leads.

The temperature hovered around freezing point. One day there was no wind, the next day it was gusty. Wallander ran into Anette Brolin in the corridor. She thanked him for the flowers. But he couldn't be certain that she really had decided to forget about what had happened that night.

Bergman still refused to talk, even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. Various extreme nationalist movements tried to take credit for the crime. The press and the rest of the media became involved in a violent debate about Sweden's immigration policy. Although all was calm in Skåne, crosses burned in the night outside various refugee camps in other parts of the country.

Wallander and his colleagues on the investigative team shielded themselves from all of this. Only rarely were any opinions expressed that were not directly related to the deadlocked investigation. But Wallander realised that he was not alone in his feelings of uncertainty and confusion at the new society that was emerging.

We live as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and nor is it certain that they were as idyllic as we remember them.