Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online

say no.
"All right, thanks," he said.
    A path connected the shed with the house, which was low-ceilinged and sparsely furnished. Wallander noticed at once that it was messy and dirty. He doesn't even see the mess, he thought. And why didn't I notice it before? I've got to talk to Kristina about it. He can't keep living alone like this. At that moment the telephone rang. His father picked it up.
    "It's for you," he said, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.
    Linda, he thought. It's got to be her. But it was Rydberg calling from the hospital. "She's dead," he said. "Did she wake up?"
    "As a matter of fact, she did. For 10 minutes. The doctors thought the crisis was over. Then she died." "Did she say anything?"
    Rydberg sounded thoughtful when he answered. "I think you'd better come back to town."
"What did she say?"
"Something you won't want to hear."
"I'll come to the hospital."
    "It's better if you go to the station. She's dead, I told you."
Wallander hung up. "I've got to go," he said.
His father glared at him. "You don't like me," he said.
    "I'll be back tomorrow," replied Wallander, wondering what to do about the squalor his father was living in. "I'll come tomorrow for sure. We can sit and talk. We can make dinner. We can play poker if you want."
    Even though Wallander was a wretched card player, he knew that a game would mollify his father. "I'll be here at seven," he said.
    Then he drove back to Ystad. He walked back through the same glass doors that he had walked out of not much earlier. Ebba nodded at him.
"Rydberg is waiting in the canteen," she said.
    He was there, hunched over a cup of coffee. When Wallander saw the other man's face, he knew that something unpleasant was in store for him.
CHAPTER 4
    Wallander and Rydberg were alone in the canteen. In the distance they could hear the ruckus a drunk was making, loudly protesting at his arrest. Otherwise it was quiet. Only the faint whine of the radiator could be heard.
Wallander sat down across from Rydberg.
    "Take off your overcoat," said Rydberg. "Or else you'll freeze when you go back out in the wind again."
    "First I want to hear what you have to say. Then I'll decide whether or not to take off my coat."
Rydberg shrugged. "She died," he said.
"So I understand."
"But she woke up for a while right before she died." "And she spoke?"
    "That may be putting it too strongly. She whispered. Or wheezed."
"Did you get it on tape?"
    Rydberg shook his head. "It wouldn't have worked anyway," he said. "It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. Most of it was just raving. But I wrote down what I'm sure I understood."
    Rydberg took a battered notebook out of his pocket. It was held together by a wide rubber band, and a pencil was stuck in between the pages.
    "She said her husband's name," Rydberg began. "I think she was trying to find out how he was. Then she mumbled something I couldn't understand. That's when I tried to ask her, 'Who was it that came in the night? Did you know them? What did they look like?' Those were my questions. I repeated them for as long as she was conscious. And I actually think she understood what I was saying."
"So what did she answer?"
"I only managed to catch one word. 'Foreign'."
"'Foreign'?"
"That's right. 'Foreign'."
    "Did she mean that the people who attacked her and her husband were foreigners?" Rydberg nodded. "Are you sure?"
"Do I usually say I'm sure if I'm not?" "No."
    "Well then. So now we know that her last message to the world was the word 'foreign'. In answer to the question: who committed this insane crime?"
    Wallander took off his coat and got himself a cup of coffee.
"What the hell could she have meant?" he muttered.
    "I've been sitting here thinking about that while I was waiting for you," replied Rydberg. "Maybe they looked un-Swedish. Maybe they spoke a foreign language. Maybe they spoke poor Swedish. There are lots of possibilities."
    "What does an 'un-Swedish' person look like?" asked Wallander.
    "You know what I