Faceless Killers (32 page)

"Another customer came in?"

"Two of them."

"Did you know them?"

"No."

The next question was crucial.

"Because they were foreigners?"

She looked at him in astonishment.

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I didn't until now. Keep thinking."

"There were two men. Quite young."

"What did they want?"

"They wanted to change some money."

"Do you remember what currency?"

"Dollars."

"Did they speak English? Were they Americans?"

She shook her head. "Not English. I don't know what language they were speaking."

"Then what happened? Try to picture it in your mind." "They came up to the counter." "Both of them?"

She thought carefully before she answered. The warm wind was ruffling her hair.

"One of them came up and put the money on the counter. I think it was 100 dollars. I asked him if he wanted to change it. He nodded."

"What was the other man doing?"

She thought again.

"He dropped something on the floor, which he bent over and picked up. A glove, I think."

He went back a step with his questions.

"Johannes Lövgren had just left," he said. "He had received a large amount of cash which he put into his briefcase. Did he receive anything else?"

"He got a receipt for his money."

"Which he put in the briefcase?"

For the first time she was hesitant.

"I think so."

"If he didn't put the receipt in his briefcase, then what happened to it?" She thought again.

"There was nothing lying on the counter. I'm sure of that. Otherwise I would have picked it up." "Could it have slipped onto the floor?" "Possibly."

"And the man who bent over for the glove could have picked it up?" "Perhaps."

"What was on the receipt?

"The amount. His name and address."

Wallander held his breath.

"All that was on it? Are you sure?"

"He filled out his withdrawal slip in big letters. I know that he wrote down his address too, even though it wasn't required."

Wallander went back again. "Lövgren takes his money and leaves. In the doorway he runs into two unknown men. One of them bends down and picks up a glove, and maybe the withdrawal slip too. It says that Johannes Lövgren has just withdrawn 27,000 kronor. Is that correct?"

Suddenly she understood. "Are they the ones that did it?"

"I don't know. Think back again."

"I exchanged the money. He put the notes in his pocket. They left."

"How long did it take?"

"Three, four minutes. No more."

"The bank has a copy of their receipt, I suppose?" She nodded.

"I exchanged money at the bank today. I had to give my name. Did they give an address?" "Perhaps. I don't remember."

Kurt Wallander nodded. Now something was starting to spark. "Your memory is phenomenal," he said. "Did you ever see those two men again?"

"No. Never."

"Would you recognise them?" "I think so. Maybe."

Wallander thought for a few moments. "You might have to interrupt your holiday for a few days," he said.

"We're supposed to drive to Oland tomorrow!"

Wallander made a decision on the spot. "I'm sorry, you can't," he said. "Maybe the next day. But not before then."

He stood up and brushed off the sand. "Be sure to tell your parents where we can reach you," he said. She stood up and got ready to rejoin her friends. "Can I tell them?" she asked.

"Invent something," he replied. "I'm sure you can do that."

Late that afternoon they found the exchange receipt in the Union Bank's files.

The signature was illegible. No address was given.

Wallander was not disappointed, because now at least he understood how the whole thing might have happened. From the bank he drove straight to Rydberg's place, where he was convalescing.

Rydberg was sitting on his balcony when Wallander rang the doorbell. He had grown thin and was very pale. Together they sat on the balcony, and Wallander told him about his discovery. Rydberg nodded thoughtfully.

"You're probably right," he said when Wallander finished. "That's probably how it happened."

"The question now is how to find them," said Wallander. "Some tourists who happened to be visiting Sweden more than six months ago.

"Maybe they're still here," said Rydberg. "As refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants."

"Where do I start?" asked Wallander.

"I don't know," said Rydberg. "But you'll figure out something."

They sat for a couple of hours on Rydberg's balcony. In the early evening Wallander went back to his car. The stones under his feet were no longer so cold.

CHAPTER 15

Wallander would always remember the following days as the time when the chart was drawn. He started with what Britta-Lena Bodén remembered and an illegible signature. A possible scenario existed, and the last word Maria Lövgren spoke before she died was a piece of the puzzle that had finally fallen into place. He also had the oddly-knotted noose to consider.

He drew the chart. On the day he had talked with Britta-Lena Bodén in the warm sand dunes at Sandhammaren he had gone to Björk's house, interrupted his dinner, and extracted from him a promise there and then to assign Hansson and Martinsson back to the investigation, which was once again given top priority.

On Wednesday, 11 July, before the bank opened for business, they reconstructed the scene. Britta-Lena Bodén took her place behind the window, Hansson assumed the role of Lövgren, and Martinsson and Björk played the two men who came in to change their money. Wallander insisted that everything should be exactly as it was on that day six months earlier. The anxious bank manager eventually agreed to allow Britta-Lena Bodén to hand over 27,000 kronor notes of mixed, large denominations to Hansson, who had borrowed an old briefcase from Ebba.

Wallander stood to one side, watching everything. Twice he ordered them to begin again when Britta-Lena Bodén remembered some detail that didn't seem right.

Wallander set up this reconstruction in order to trigger her memory. He was hoping that she could open a door to yet another room in her exceptional memory.

When it was over, she shook her head. She had told him everything she could remember. There was nothing more she could say. Wallander asked her to postpone her journey to Oland another couple of days and then left her in an office where she could look through photographs of foreign criminals who, for one reason or another, had been caught in the net of the Swedish police. When this produced no results, she was put on a flight to Norrkoping to go through the extensive photo archives at the Immigration Service. After 18 hours spent studying countless pictures, she returned to Sturup, where Wallander himself went to meet her. The results were negative.

The next step was to link up with Interpol. The scenario of how the crime might have occurred was fed into their computers, which then made comparative studies at European headquarters. Again, nothing turned up to change the situation significantly.

While Britta-Lena Bodén was sitting puzzling over the endless rows of photographs, Wallander conducted three long interviews with Arthur Lundin, the chimney sweep from Slimminge. The drives between Lunnarp and Ystad were reconstructed, clocked, and repeated. Wallander continued to draw up his chart.

Now and then he went to see Rydberg, who sat on his balcony, weak and pale, and went over the investigation with him. Rydberg insisted that these visits were not a burden for him. But Wallander left him each time with a nagging feeling of guilt.

Anette Brolin returned from her holiday, which she had spent with her husband and children in a summerhouse in Grebbestad on the west coast. Her family came back to Ystad with her, and Wallander adopted his most formal tone when he called to report his breakthrough in the hitherto stalled investigation.

After a week of intensive activity, everything came to a standstill. Wallander stared at his chart. They were stuck again.

"We'll just have to wait," said Björk. "Interpol's dough rises slowly."

Wallander winced at the strained metaphor, but realised that Björk was right.

When Britta-Lena Bodén came back from Oland, Wallander asked the bank to give her a few more days off. He took her to the refugee camps around Ystad. They also visited the floating camps on ships in Malmö's Oil Harbour. But nowhere did she see a face that she recognised. Wallander arranged for a police artist to come down from Stockholm, but after coundess sketches, Britta-Lena Bodén was not satisfied with any of the faces the artist produced.

Wallander began to have doubts. Björk forced him to give up Martinsson and make do with Hansson as his only colleague on the case.

On Friday, 20 July, Wallander was once more ready to give up. Late in the evening he sat down and wrote a memo suggesting that the investigation be put on hold for the time being because no pertinent material that would move the case forward could be found.

He put the paper on his desk and decided to leave the decision to Björk and Anette Brolin on Monday morning.

He spent Saturday and Sunday on the Danish island of Bornholm. It was windy and rainy, and something he ate on the ferry made him ill. He spent Sunday night in bed. At regular intervals he had to get up and vomit.

When he woke on Monday morning, he was feeling better, but he was still undecided about whether to stay in bed or not. At last he got up and left the flat. A few minutes before 9 a.m. he was at the station. Since it was Ebba's birthday, they all had cake in the canteen. It was almost 10 a.m. before Wallander finally had a chance to read through his memo to Björk. He was about to deliver it when the phone rang. It was Britta-Lena Bodén.

Her voice was barely a whisper.

"They've come back. Get here as fast as you can!"

"Who's come back?" asked Wallander.

"The men who changed the money. Don't you understand?"

In the corridor he ran into Norén, just come back from traffic duty.

"Come with me!" shouted Wallander.

"What the hell's going on?" said Norén biting into a sandwich.

"Don't ask. Just come!"

When they reached the bank Norén was still clutching the half-eaten sandwich. On the way over, Wallander had gone through a red light and driven over a flower bed. He left the car right in the middle of some market stalls in the square by the town hall. But still they got there too late. The two men had disappeared. Britta-Lena Bodén had been so shaken to see them again that it hadn't occurred to her to ask anyone to follow them. But she had had the presence of mind to activate the security camera.

Wallander studied the signature on the receipt. The name was again illegible, but the signature was the same. No address was given this time either.

"Good," said Wallander to Britta-Lena Bodén, who was standing in the bank manager's office, shaking. "What did you say when you left to call me?"

"That I had to go and get a stamp." "Do you think they suspected anything?" She shook her head.

"Good," Wallander repeated. "You did exactly the right thing."

"Do you think you'll catch them now?" she asked.

"Yes," said Wallander. "This time we're going to get them."

The video tape from the camera showed two men who did not look particularly Mediterranean. One of them had short blond hair, the other was balding. The first was at once dubbed Lucia and the other Skinhead.

Britta-Lena Bodén listened to samples of recorded languages and finally decided that the men had spoken to each other in Czech or Bulgarian. The $50 note they had exchanged was immediately sent to the laboratory for examination.

Björk called a meeting in his office.

"After six months they turn up again," said Wallander. "Why did they go back to the same small bank? First, because they live somewhere in the region. Second they made a lucky catch after their earlier visit. This time they weren't so lucky. The man ahead of them in line was depositing money, not making a withdrawal. But he was an old man like Johannes Lövgren. Maybe they think that old men who look like farmers always make large cash withdrawals."

"Czechs?" asked Björk. "Or Bulgarians?"

"That's not positively confirmed," said Wallander. "The girl could have been mistaken. But it fits with their appearance."

They watched the video four times and decided which pictures to copy and enlarge.

"Every Eastern European who lives in town and the surrounding area will have to be investigated," said Björk. "It's not going to be pleasant. It will be regarded as discrimination, but we'll have to say to hell with that. They've got to be here somewhere. I'll talk to the police chiefs in Malmö and Kristianstad and see what they think we should do on the county level."

"Show the video to every police officer," said Hansson. "They might turn up on the streets."

Wallander had a vision of the slaughterhouse that had been the Lövgren's farm.

"After what they did in Lunnarp," he said, "we have to treat them as dangerous."

"If they were the ones," said Björk. "We don't know that yet."

"That's true," said Wallander. "But even so."

"We're going to move into high gear now," said Björk. "Kurt is in charge and will divide up the work as he sees fit. Anything that doesn't have to be done straight away should be put aside. I'll call the prosecutor; she'll be glad to hear that something's happening."