Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell Page B

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