Faceless Killers: A Mystery

  Wallander sat quite still, his expression blank.

  Then he stood up. “What field?” he asked.

  “It sounded like your father was walking down by the main highway.”

  “I’ll handle this myself. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Tell them to give me a car with a radio, so you can call me if anything happens.”

  “Do you want me or somebody else to go along?”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “My father is senile,” he said. “I have to see about getting him into a home somewhere.”

  Svedberg saw to it that Wallander was given the keys to a squad car with a radio.

  Just as Wallander was going out the main doors, he noticed a man standing in the shadows outside. He recognized him as a reporter on one of the afternoon papers.

  “I don’t want him following me,” he told Svedberg.

  Svedberg nodded. “Wait till you see me back out and stall my engine in front of his car. Then you can leave.”

  Wallander got into his car and waited.

  He saw the reporter quickly run over to his own car. Thirty seconds later, Svedberg drove up. He switched off the ignition.

  The car was blocking the reporter from backing out. Wallander drove away.

  He drove fast. Much too fast. He ignored the speed limit through Sandskogen. Besides, he was almost alone on the road. Terrified hares fled across the rain-slick asphalt.

  When he reached the town where his father lived, he didn’t even have to look for him. His headlights caught the old man, in his blue-trimmed pajamas, squishing barefoot through a field. He was wearing his old hat and carrying a big suitcase. When the headlights blinded him, his father held his hand in front of his eyes in annoyance. Then he kept on walking. Energetically, as if he were on his way to some specific destination.

  Kurt Wallander turned off his engine but left the headlights on.

  Then he walked out into the field.

  “Dad!” he yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  His father didn’t answer but kept going. Wallander followed him. He tripped and fell and got wet up to his belt.

  “Dad!” he shouted again. “Stop! Where are you going?”

  No response. His father seemed to pick up speed. Soon they would be down by the main highway. Wallander ran and stumbled to catch up to him, grabbing him by the arm. But his father pulled away and kept going.

  Then Kurt Wallander got mad. “Police,” he yelled. “If you don’t stop, we’ll fire a warning shot.”

  His father stopped short and turned around. Wallander saw him blinking in the glare of the headlights.

  “What did I tell you?” the old man screamed. “You want to kill me!”

  Then he flung his suitcase at Wallander. The lid flew open and revealed the contents: dirty underwear, tubes of paint, and brushes.

  Wallander felt a huge sorrow well up inside him. His father had tramped out into the night with the bewildered notion that he was on his way to Italy.

  “Calm down, Dad,” he said. “I just thought I’d drive you down to the station. Then you won’t have to walk.”

  His father gave him a skeptical look. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “Of course I’d drive my own dad to the station if he’s going on a trip.”

  Wallander picked up the suitcase, closed the lid, and started for the car. He put the bag in the trunk and stood waiting. His father looked like a wild animal caught in the headlights out in the field. An animal that has been chased to exhaustion and was now merely waiting for the fatal shot.

  Then he started to walk toward the car. Wallander couldn’t decide whether what he saw was an expression of dignity or humiliation. He opened the rear door and his father crawled in. Wallander had taken a blanket from the trunk, and now he wrapped it around his father’s shoulders.

  He gave a start when a man suddenly stepped out of the shadows. An old man, dressed in dirty overalls.

  “I’m the one who called,” said the man. “How’s it going?”

  “Everything’s fine,” replied Wallander. “Thanks for calling.”

  “It was pure chance that I saw him at all.”

  “I understand. Thanks again.”

  He got behind the wheel. When he turned his head he could see that his father was so cold he was shaking underneath the blanket.

  “Now I’ll take you to the station, Dad,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

  He drove straight to the emergency entrance of the hospital. He was lucky enough to run into the young doctor he had met earlier by Maria Lövgren’s death bed. He explained what had happened.

  “We’ll admit him overnight for observation,” said the doctor. “He may be suffering from exposure tonight. Tomorrow the social worker will try to find a place for him.”

  “Thank you,” said Wallander. “I’ll stay with him a while.”

  His father had been dried off and was lying on a gurney.

  “Sleeping car to Italy,” he said. “I’m finally on my way.”

  Wallander sat on a chair next to the gurney.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Now you’ll get to Italy.”

  It was past two o’clock in the morning when he left the hospital. He drove the short distance to the police station. Everyone except Hanson had gone home for the night. He was watching the taped discussion program with the chief of the National Police.

  “Anything going on?” asked Wallander.

  “Not a thing,” said Hanson. “A few tips, of course. But nothing earthshaking. I took the liberty of sending people home to get a few hours’ sleep.”

  “That’s good. Funny that nobody has called about the car.”

  “I was just thinking about that. Maybe he just drove out E14 a little way and then took off on one of the back roads. I’ve looked at the maps. There’s a whole maze of little roads in that area. Plus a big nature preserve for taking country walks, where no one goes in the winter. The patrols that check the camps are running a fine-tooth comb over those roads tonight.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “We’ll send in a helicopter when it gets light,” he said. “The car might be hidden somewhere in that nature preserve.”

  He poured a cup of coffee.

  “Svedberg told me about your dad,” said Hanson. “How did it go?”

  “It went all right. The old man is turning senile. He’s at the hospital. But it went well.”

  “Go home and sleep for a few hours. You look beat.”

  “I’ve got some things to write up.”

  Hanson turned off the video.

  “I’ll stretch out on the sofa for a while,” he said.

  Wallander went into his office and sat down at the typewriter. His eyes stung with fatigue.

  And yet the weariness brought with it an unexpected clarity. A double murder was committed, he thought. And the manhunt triggers another murder. Which we have to solve fast, so we won’t be saddled with more murders.

  All this had happened within the past five days.

  Then he wrote his memo to Björk. He decided to make sure that it was delivered to him by hand at the airport.

  He yawned. It was quarter to four. He was too tired to think about his father. He was just afraid that the social worker at the hospital wouldn’t be able to come up with a good solution.

  The note with his sister’s name on it was still stuck to the telephone. In a few hours, when it was morning, he would have to call her.

  He yawned again and sniffed his armpits. He stank. Just then Hanson appeared in the half-open door.

  Wallander saw at once that something had happened.

  “We’ve got something,” said Hanson.

  “What?”

  “A guy from Malmö just called and said his car has been stolen.”

  “A Citroën?”

  Hanson nodded.

  “How come he discovers it at four in the morning?”

  “He said he was on his way to some trade fair in Göt
eborg.”

  “Did he report it to our colleagues in Malmö?”

  Hanson nodded. Wallander grabbed the phone.

  “Then let’s get moving,” he said.

  The police in Malmö promised to hurry their interrogation of the man. The license number of the stolen car, the model, year, and color were already being sent all over the country.

  “BBM 160,” said Hanson. “A dove-blue turtle with a white roof. How many of those can there be in this country? A hundred?”

  “If the car isn’t buried, we’ll find it,” said Wallander. “When does the sun come up?”

  “Around eight or nine o’clock,” replied Hanson.

  “As soon as it gets light we need a chopper over the preserve. You take care of that.”

  Hanson nodded. He was just leaving the room when he remembered something he had forgotten to say because he was so tired.

  “Damn it! There was one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “The guy who called and said that his car was stolen. He was a cop.”

  Wallander gave Hanson a puzzled look.

  “A cop? What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean he was a cop. Like you and me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kurt Wallander went into one of the holding cells in the police station and lay down for a nap. After a great deal of effort, he managed to set the alarm function on his watch. He was going to allow himself two hours of sleep. When the beeping sound on his wrist woke him up, he had a slight headache. The first thing he thought about was his father. He took a few headache tablets out of the first-aid kit he found in a cupboard and washed them down with a cup of lukewarm coffee. Then he stood there for a long time, trying to decide whether he should take a shower first or call his sister in Stockholm. Finally he went down to the officers’ locker room and got into the shower. His headache slowly faded. But he felt weighed down with weariness as he sank onto the chair behind his desk. It was seven fifteen. He knew that his sister was always up early. And she picked up the phone almost as soon as it started ringing. As gently as possible he told her about what had happened.

  “Why didn’t you call me before?” she asked indignantly. “You must have noticed what was going on.”

  “I guess I noticed too late,” he replied evasively.

  They agreed that she would wait to hear about his talk with the hospital social worker before she decided when to come to Skåne.

  “How are Mona and Linda?” she asked as the conversation was drawing to a close.

  He realized that she didn’t know about the separation.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll call you back later.”

  Then he drove over to the hospital. The temperature had dropped below freezing again. An icy wind was blowing through the town from the southwest.

  A nurse, who had just received a report from the night staff, told Wallander that his father had slept fitfully during the night. But apparently he had not suffered any physical harm from his nighttime promenade through the fields.

  Wallander decided to put off facing his father until he had met with the social worker.

  Wallander mistrusted social workers. All too often in his experience he had seen various social-welfare people who were called in when the police had caught juvenile offenders and who had misguided views about what should actually be done. Social workers were too soft and yielding when, in his opinion, they ought to make specific demands instead. More than once he had raged at the welfare authorities because he felt that their lax attitude encouraged young criminals to continue their activities.

  But maybe the hospital social worker is different, he thought.

  After a short wait he met with a woman in her fifties. Wallander described his father’s sudden decline. How unexpected it was, how helpless he felt.

  “It might be temporary,” said the social worker. “Sometimes elderly people suffer from periods of confusion. If it passes, it might be enough to see that he gets regular home care. If it turns out that he really is chronically senile, then we’ll have to come up with some other solution.”

  They decided that his father should stay through the weekend. Then she would talk to the doctors about what to do next.

  Wallander stood up. This woman seemed to know what she was talking about.

  “It’s hard to be sure what to do,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Nothing is as troublesome as when we’re forced to become parents to our own parents,” she said. “I know. My mother finally became so difficult that I couldn’t keep her at home.”

  Kurt Wallander went to see his father, who was in a room with four beds. All of them were occupied. One man was in a cast, another was curled up as if he had severe stomach pains. Wallander’s father was lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

  “How are you doing, Dad?” he asked.

  It took a moment before his father answered. “Leave me alone.”

  He spoke in a low voice. There was no hint of ill-humored petulance. Wallander had the impression that his father’s voice was full of sorrow.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for a while. Then he left.

  “I’ll be back, Dad. And Kristina says hello.”

  Wallander hurried out of the hospital, filled with a sense of powerlessness. The icy wind bit into his face. He didn’t feel like going back to the police station, so he called Hanson on the screechy car phone.

  “I’m driving over to Malmö,” he said. “Have we gotten a chopper in the air?”

  “It’s been searching for half an hour,” replied Hanson. “Nothing yet. We have two canine patrols out too. If that damned car is anywhere in the preserve, we’ll find it.”

  Wallander drove to Malmö. The morning traffic was fierce and intense.

  He was constantly forced over toward the shoulder by drivers who were passing without enough room.

  I should have taken a marked squad car, he thought. But maybe that doesn’t make any difference these days.

  It was nine fifteen when he entered the room in the Malmö police station where the man who had had his car stolen was waiting for him. Before Wallander went in to see the man, he talked to the officer who had taken the report of the theft.

  “Is it true that he’s a cop?” Wallander asked.

  “He was,” the officer replied. “But he took early retirement.”

  “Why was that?”

  The officer shrugged. “Nerve problems. I don’t really know.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “He kept mostly to himself. Even though we worked together for ten years, I can’t say that I really knew him. To be honest, I don’t think anybody did.”

  “But surely someone knows him?”

  The police officer shrugged again. “I’ll find out,” he said. “But anybody could have his car stolen.”

  Wallander went into the room and said hello to the man, whose name was Rune Bergman. He was fifty-three years old and had been retired for four years. He was thin, with nervous, flitting eyes. Along one side of his nose he had a scar from a knife wound.

  Wallander immediately sensed that the man sitting in front of him was on guard. He couldn’t say why. But the feeling was quite clear, and it grew stronger as the conversation progressed.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said. “At four in the morning you discovered your car was missing.”

  “I was going to drive to Göteborg. I like to start out before dawn when I’m taking a long drive. When I went outside, the car was gone.”

  “From the garage or from a parking spot?”

  “From the street outside my house. I have a garage. But there’s so much junk in it that there’s no room for the car.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In a row-house neighborhood near Jägersrö.”

  “Do you think any of your neighbors saw anything?”

  “I asked them. But no one heard or saw anything.”

  “When did you last see your car?”
>
  “I stayed inside all day. But the car was there the night before.”

  “Locked?”

  “Of course it was locked.”

  “Did it have a lock on the steering wheel?”

  “Unfortunately, no. It was broken.”

  His answers came easily. But Wallander couldn’t rid himself of the notion that the man was on guard.

  “What kind of trade show were you going to?” he asked.

  The man sitting across from him looked surprised. “What does that have to do with the case?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered.”

  “An air show, if you want to know.”

  “An air show?”

  “I’m interested in old planes. I build a lot of model planes myself.”

  “Is it true that you took early retirement?”

  “What the hell does that have to do with my stolen car?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why don’t you start looking for my car instead of poking around in my personal life?”

  “We’re already on it. As you know, we think that the person who stole your car may have committed a murder. Or maybe I should say an execution.”

  The man looked him straight in the eye. The nervous flitting had suddenly stopped.

  “That’s what I heard,” he said.

  Wallander had no more questions. “I thought we’d go over to your place. So I can see where the car was parked.”

  “I can’t invite you in for coffee. The place is a mess.”

  “Are you married?”

  “I’m divorced.”

  They took Wallander’s car. The row-house neighborhood was an old one, located just beyond the trotting track at Jägersrö. They stopped outside a yellow brick house with a small front lawn.

  “This is where the car was, right where you’re parked,” said the man. “Right here.”

  Wallander backed up a few meters and they got out. Wallander noticed that the car must have been parked between two streetlights.

  “Are there a lot of cars parked on this street at night?” he asked.

  “There’s usually one parked in front of every house. A lot of people who live here have two cars. Their garages only hold one.”

  Wallander pointed at the streetlights. “Do they work?” he asked.