Faceless Killers kw-1 Read online

  Herdin was sitting erect and silent on a wooden chair. Wallander guessed that the man had put on his Sunday best before coming to the police station. Even if it was only a worn suit and a shirt with a frayed collar.

  "We'd better start at the beginning," said Wallander, picking up a pad.Herdin gave Hansson a bewildered look."Should I start all over again?" he asked."That would probably be best," said Hansson."It's a long story," Herdin began hesitantly.

  "What's your name?" asked Wallander. "Let's start with that."

  "Lars Herdin. I have a farm of 40 acres near Hagestad. I'm trying to make ends meet raising livestock. But things are pretty tight."

  "I've got all his personal data," Hansson interrupted, and Wallander guessed that Hansson was in a hurry to get back to his form guides.

  "If I understand correctly, you came here because you think you may have information relating to the murder of Mr and Mrs Lövgren," said Wallander, wishing he had expressed himself more simply."It's obvious that it was the money," Lars Herdin said."What money?""All the money they had!""Could you clarify that a little?""The German money."

  Wallander looked at Hansson, who shrugged slightly. Wallander took this to mean that he had to be patient.

  "I think we're going to need a little more detail on this," he said. "Do you think you could be more specific?"

  "Lövgren and his father made money during the war," said Herdin. "They kept livestock in secret on some forest pastures up in Smaland. And they bought up worn-out old horses. Then they sold them on the black market to

  Germany. They made an obscene amount of money on the meat. And nobody ever caught them. Lövgren was both greedy and clever. He invested the money, and it's been growing over the years." "You mean Lövgren's father?"

  "His father died straight after the war. I mean Lövgren himself.""So you're telling me that the Lövgrens were wealthy?"

  "Not the family. Just Lövgren. She didn't know a thing about the money."

  "Would he have kept his fortune a secret from his own wife?"

  Herdin nodded. "Nobody has ever been as foully cheated as my sister."Wallander raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  "Maria Lövgren was my sister. She was killed because he had stashed away a fortune."

  Wallander heard the barely concealed bitterness. So maybe it wasa hate crime, he thought.

  "And this money was kept at home?""Only sometimes," replied Herdin."Sometimes?""When he made the large withdrawals.""Could you give me a little more detail?"

  Suddenly something seemed to boil over inside the man in the worn-out suit.

  "Johannes Lövgren was a brute," he said. "It's better now that he's gone. But that Maria had to die, that I can never forgive."

  Lars Herdin's outburst came so suddenly that neither Hansson nor Wallander had time to react. He grabbed a solid glass ashtray from the table beside him and flung it full force at the wall, where it smashed close to Wallander's head. Splinters of glass flew in every direction, and Wallander felt a shard strike his upper lip.The silence after the outburst was deafening.

  Hansson had sprung out of his chair and seemed ready to throw himself at the rangy Herdin, but Wallander raised his hand to stop him, and Hansson sat back down.

  "I beg your pardon," said Herdin. "If you have a broom and dustpan I'll clean up the glass. I'll pay for it."

  "The cleaners will take care of it," said Wallander. "I think we should go on with our talk."Herdin now seemed perfectiy calm.

  "Johannes Lövgren was a beast," he repeated. "He pretended to be like everybody else. But the only thing he thought about was the money he and his father made from the war. He complained that everything was so expensive, and the farmers so poor. But he had his money, and it kept on growing and growing.""And he kept this money in the bank?"

  Herdin shrugged. "In the bank, in shares and bonds, who knows what else.""Why did he keep the money at home sometimes?"

  "Lövgren had a mistress," said Herdin. "There was a woman in Kristianstad whom he had a son with in the 1950s. Maria knew nothing about that either - not the woman, not the child. He gave his mistress more money every year than he spent on Maria in her whole life.""How much money are we talking about?"

  "Two or three times a year he gave her 25 or 30 thousand. He withdrew the money in cash. Then he would think up some excuse and go to Kristianstad."

  Wallander thought for a moment about what he had heard. He tried to decide which questions were the most important. It would take hours to work out all the details.

  "What did they say at the bank?" he asked Hansson.

  "If you don't have the search warrants all in order, the bank doesn't say anything," said Hansson. "They wouldn't let me look at his bank statements. But I did get the answer to one question: Had he been to the bank recently?""Well?"

  Hansson nodded. "Last Thursday. Three days before he was killed.""Are they sure?""One of the clerks recognised him.""And he withdrew a large sum of money?"

  "They wouldn't say exactly. But the clerk nodded when the bank manager turned his back."

  "We'll have to talk to the prosecutor when we have written up this statement," said Wallander. "Then we can look into his assets and see where we are.""Blood money," said Herdin.

  Wallander wondered whether he was going to start throwing things again.

  "There are plenty of questions left," he said. "But one is more important than all the others right now. How do you know about all this? You say that Lövgren kept it secret from his wife. So how come you know?"

  Herdin didn't answer the question. He stared mutely at the floor.Wallander looked at Hansson, who shook his head."You really have to answer the question," said Wallander.

  "I don't have to answer at all," said Herdin. "I'm not the one who killed them. Would I murder my own sister?"

  Wallander tried to approach the question from another angle. "How many other people know what you just told us?"Herdin didn't answer.

  "Whatever you say won't go beyond this room," Wallander said.

  Herdin stared at the floor. Wallander knew instinctively that he must wait.

  "Would you get us some coffee?" he asked Hansson. "And see if you can find some pastries."

  While Hansson was gone, Herdin kept staring at the floor, and Wallander waited. Hansson brought in the coffee, and Herdin ate a stale pastry.

  Wallander thought it was time to ask the question again. "Sooner or later you'll have no choice but to answer," he said.Herdin raised his head and looked him straight in the eye.

  "When they got married I already had a feeling that there was another person behind Johannes Lövgren's friendly yet taciturn exterior. I thought there was something fishy about him. Maria was my little sister. I wanted the best for her. I was suspicious of Lövgren from the first time he came to our parents' house to court her. It took me 30 years to work out who he was. How I did it is my business.""Did you tell your sister what you found out?"

  "Never. Not a word.""Did you tell anyone else? Your own wife?" "I'm not married."

  Wallander looked at the man sitting in front of him. There was something hard and dogged about him. Like a man who had been brought up eating gravel.

  "One last question," said Wallander. "Now we know that Lövgren had plenty of money. Maybe he also had a large sum of money at home the night he was murdered. We'll have to find that out. But who would have known about it? Besides you."

  Herdin looked at him. Wallander saw a glint of fear in his eyes.

  "I didn't know about it," said Herdin. Wallander nodded.

  "We'll stop here," he said, shoving aside the pad on which he had been taking notes. "But we're going to be needing your help again.""Can I go now?" said Herdin, getting up.

  "You can go," replied Wallander. "But don't leave the district without talking to us first. And if you think of anything else, we'd like to hear from you."

  As he was leaving, Herdin hesitated as if there was something more he wanted to say. Then he pushed open the door and was gone.
r />   "Tell Martinsson to run a check on him," said Wallander. "Probably we won't find anything. But it's best to make sure."

  "What do you think about what he said?" Hansson wondered.Wallander thought before replying.

  "There was something convincing about him. I don't think he was lying or making things up. I believe he did discover that Johannes Lövgren was living a double life. I think he was protecting his sister.""Do you think he could have been involved?"

  Wallander was certain when he answered. "Herdin didn't kill them. Nor do I think he knows who did. I believe he came to us for two reasons. He wanted to help us find the people responsible so he can both thank them and spit in their faces. As far as he's concerned, whoever murdered Lövgren did him a favour. And whoever murdered Maria ought to be beheaded in the public square."

  Hansson got up. "I'll tell Martinsson. Anything else you need right now?"Wallander looked at his watch."Let's have a meeting in my office in an hour. See if you can get hold of Rydberg. He was supposed to go to Malmö to find a man who makes sails."Hansson gave him a questioning look."The noose. The knot. I'll fill you in later."

  Hansson left, and Wallander was alone. A breakthrough, he thought. All successful criminal investigations reach a point where we break through the wall. We don't know what we're going to find. But there's always a solution somewhere.

  He went over to the window and looked out into the twilight. A cold draught was seeping through the window frame, and he could see from the way a streetlight was swaying that the wind was blowing harder.

  He thought about Nyström and his wife. For a lifetime they had lived in close contact with a man who had not been the man he pretended to be at all.

  How would they react when the truth came out? With denial? Bitterness? Amazement?

  He went back to the desk and sat down. The first feeling of relief that followed a breakthrough like this one often faded quite rapidly. Now there was a possible motive, the most common of all: money. But so far there was no invisible finger pointing in a specific direction. No murderer yet.

  Wallander cast another glance at his watch. If he hurried, he could drive down to the hot dog stand at the railway station and get a bite to eat before the meeting. This day too was going to pass without a change in his eating habits.

  He was just about to put on his jacket when the phone rang. At the same time there was a knock on the door. The jacket fell to the floor as he grabbed the phone and shouted, "Come in."

  Rydberg stood in the doorway. He was holding a large plastic bag.

  He heard Ebba's voice on the phone."The TV people insist on speaking to you," she said.

  He quickly decided to talk to Rydberg before he had to deal with the media again.

  "Tell them I'm in a meeting and won't be available for half an hour," he said."Are you sure?""Sure of what?"

  "That you'll talk to them in half an hour? Swedish TV doesn't like to be kept waiting. They take it for granted that everyone will fall to their knees when they call."

  "That I will not do. But I can talk to them in half an hour."He hung up.

  Rydberg had sat down on the chair by the window. He was busy drying off his hair with a paper napkin."I've got good news," said Wallander.Rydberg went on drying his hair.

  "I think we've got a motive. Money. And I think we should look for the killers among people who were close to the Lövgrens."Rydberg tossed the wet napkin into the wastebasket.

  "I've had a miserable day," he said. "Good news is welcome."

  Wallander spent 5 minutes recounting the meeting with the farmer, Lars Herdin. Rydberg stared gloomily at the shards of glass on the floor.

  "Strange story," said Rydberg when Wallander was finished. "It's strange enough to be true."

  "I'll try to sum it up," Wallander went on. "Someone knew that Johannes Lövgren from time to time kept large sums of money at home. This gives us robbery as a motive. And the robbery developed into a murder. If Herdin's description of Lövgren is right, that he was an unusually stingy man, he would naturally have refused to reveal where he had hidden the money. Maria Lövgren, who can't have understood much of what was happening on the last night of her life, was forced to accompany Johannes on his final journey. So the question is who besides Herdin knew about the irregular but substantial cash withdrawals. If we can answer that, we can probably answer everything."Rydberg sat there thinking after Wallander fell silent."Did I leave anything out?" asked Wallander.

  "I'm thinking about what she said before she died," said Rydberg. "Foreign. And I'm thinking about what I've got in this plastic bag."

  He stood up and dumped the contents of the bag onto the desk. A heap of pieces of rope. Each one artfully tied in a knot.

  "I've been with an old sail maker in a flat that smells worse than anything you can imagine," said Rydberg with a grimace. "It turns out that this man is almost 90, and practically senile. I wonder whether I shouldn't contact the social services. He was so confused he thought I was his son. Later one of the neighbours told me that his son has been dead for 30 years. But he certainly knows about knots. When I finally got out of there, it was four hours later. These pieces of rope were a present.""Did you find out what you wanted to know?"

  "The old man looked at the noose and said he thought the knot was ugly. Then it took me three hours to get him to tell me something about this ugly knot. In the meantime he managed to nod off for a while."

  Rydberg gathered up the bits of rope in his plastic bag as he went on. "When he woke up he started talking about his days at sea. And then he said that he'd seen that knot in Argentina. Argentine sailors used that knot for making leads for their dogs." Wallander nodded.

  "So you were right. The knot was foreign. The question now is how this all fits in with Herdin's story."

  They went out in the corridor, Rydberg went to his office, and Wallander went to see Martinsson and study the print-outs. It turned out that there were exhaustive statistics on overseas-born citizens who had either committed or been suspected of committing crimes in Sweden. Martinsson had also managed to run a check on attacks involving old people. At least four different individuals or gangs were known to have assaulted old, isolated people in Skåne during the past twelve months. But Martinsson had also found out that every one of them was in prison. He was still waiting for word on whether any of them had been granted leave on the day in question.

  They held the case meeting in Rydberg's office, since one of the office clerks had offered to sweep up the glass from Wallander's floor. Wallander's phone rang almost non-stop, but the clerk didn't pick it up.

  The meeting was long. Everyone agreed that Lars Herdin's testimony was a breakthrough. Now they had a direction to go in. At the same time they went over everything that had been gleaned from the interviews with the residents of Lunnarp, and the people who had telephoned the police or responded to the questionnaire they had sent out. A car that had driven through a village a few kilometres from Lunnarp at high speed late on Saturday night attracted special attention. A lorry driver who had set out on a journey to Goteborg at 3 a.m. had almost been hit going around a tight curve. When he heard about the double murder he called the police. He wasn't sure, but after going through pictures of various cars he decided it was probably a Nissan.

  "Don't forget rental cars," said Wallander. "People on the move want to be comfortable these days. Robbers rent cars as often as they steal them."

  It was already 6 p.m. by the time the meeting was over. Wallander realised that all his colleagues were now on the offensive. There was palpable optimism after Lars Herdin's visit.

  He went to his office and typed up his notes of the interview with Herdin. He had Hansson's notes of the earlier interview so he could compare them. He realised at once that Lars Herdin had not been evasive. The information was the same in both.

  Just after 7 p.m. he put the papers aside. He realised that the TV people hadn't called back. He asked the switchboard whether Ebba had left any message before she went ho
me.

  The girl who answered was a temp. "There's nothing here," she said.

  He went to the canteen and switched on the TV, on a whim. The local news had just started: He leaned on a table and distractedly watched a report about how short of funds the city of Malmö was.

  He thought about Sten Widén. And Johannes Lövgren, who had sold meat to the Nazis during the war. He thought about himself, and about his stomach, which was far too big.

  He was just about to turn off the TV when the anchor-woman started talking about the murders in Lunnarp. In astonishment he heard that the police in Ystad were concentrating their search on as-yet-unidentified foreign citizens. The police were convinced that those responsible were foreigners. It could not be ruled out that they might be refugees seeking asylum.

  Finally the reporter talked about Wallander himself. Despite repeated efforts, it had been impossible to get any of the detectives in charge to comment on the information, which had been obtained from anonymous but reliable sources.

  The reporter was speaking in front of a shot of the Ystad police station. Then she moved straight on to the weather report. A storm was approaching from the west. The wind would increase, but there was no risk of snow. The temperature would continue to stay above freezing level.

  Wallander turned off the TV. He couldn't make up his mind whether he was upset or merely tired. Or maybe he was just hungry.

  Someone at the police station had leaked the information. Perhaps nowadays people got paid for passing on confidential information. Did the state-run television monopoly have slush funds too?

  Who? he wondered. It could have been anyone except me. And why? Was there some other explanation besides money? Racial hatred? Fear of refugees? As he walked back to his room, he could hear the phone ringing all the way down the corridor.

  It had been a long day. He would have liked to drive home and cook himself some dinner. With a sigh he sat down and pulled over the phone. I guess I'll have to get started, he thought. Start denying the information on the TV. And hope that nobody burns any wooden crosses in the days to come.