The Fifth Woman

by Henning Mankell

  At 4.30 p.m. Wallander called Malmö. Bergstrand came to the phone. They would be able to fax over the names and other information Wallander had requested shortly.

  The waiting continued. A reporter called and asked what they were digging for at Eriksson’s farm. Wallander told him that the enquiry was progressing, but that he wasn’t able to provide details at this stage. He was as friendly as possible. Chief Holgersson sat with them for most of the time. She also drove out to Lödinge with Åkeson. Unlike their former chief, Björk, she didn’t say much. The two of them were quite different. Björk would have taken the opportunity to complain about the latest memo from the national police board, managing to connect it with the investigation that was under way. Lisa Holgersson was different. Wallander decided that they were both good in their own ways.

  Hamrén was doing a crossword, Svedberg was searching for any remaining hairs on his scalp, and Höglund was sitting with her eyes closed. Now and then Wallander got up and took a walk down the hall. He was very tired. He wondered why Katarina Taxell hadn’t made contact. Should they start to search for her? He was afraid they would scare off the woman who had come to get her. He heard the phone ringing in the conference room, and hurried back to stand in the door. Svedberg had picked it up.

  Wallander mouthed the question “Malmö?” Svedberg shook his head. It was Hansson again.

  “A rib this time,” Svedberg said when he’d hung up. “Does he have to call here every time they find a bone?”

  Wallander sat down at the table. The phone rang again. Svedberg picked it up. He listened briefly and then handed it to Wallander.

  “You’ll have it by fax in a few minutes,” Bergstrand said. “I think we’ve found all the information you wanted.”

  “Then you’ve done a good job,” Wallander said. “If there is any additional information I’ll call you back.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Bergstrand said. “I get the impression you aren’t the type to give up.”

  They all gathered around the fax machine. After a few minutes pages started to be transmitted. Wallander saw instantly that there were many more names than he had imagined. When the transmission was completed he made copies for everyone. Back in the conference room they studied them in silence. Wallander counted 32 names, 17 of them women. He didn’t recognise any of them. The lists of hours of service and the various combinations seemed endless. He searched for a long time before he found the week when Margareta Nystedt’s name wasn’t included. Eleven women conductors had been on duty on the days that Katarina Taxell was working as a waitress.

  For a moment Wallander felt his powerlessness return. Then he forced it aside and tapped his pen on the table.

  “There are a lot of people listed here,” he said. “We have to concentrate on the eleven female conductors. Does anyone recognise any of the names?”

  They bent their heads over the pages. No-one could remember any of the names from other parts of the investigation. Wallander missed Hansson’s presence. He was the one with the best memory. He asked one of the detectives from Malmö to make a copy and see to it that someone drove it out to him.

  “Then let’s get started,” he said when the detective left the room. “Eleven women. We have to look at every one of them. Let’s hope that somewhere we’ll find a point of connection with this investigation. We’ll divide them up. And we’ll start now. It’s going to be a long night.”

  They divided up the names. Wallander knew the hunt was on. The waiting was finally over.

  Many hours later, when it was almost 11 p.m., Wallander started to despair again. They had got no further than eliminating two of the names from the list. One of the women had died in a car accident long before they found Eriksson’s body, and the other had already transferred to an administrative job in Malmö. Bergstrand had discovered the mistake and called Wallander at once. They were searching for points of intersection but found none. Höglund came into Wallander’s office.

  “What should I do with this one?” she asked, shaking a paper she had in her hand.

  “What about her?”

  “Anneli Olsson, 39 years old, married with four children. She lives in Ängelholm with her husband who is a vicar. She’s deeply religious. She works on trains, takes care of her family, and spends the little free time she has on handicrafts and various efforts for the mission. What should I do with her? Call her in for an interview? Ask her if she killed three men in the past month? If she knows where Katarina Taxell and her newborn baby are?”

  “Put her aside,” Wallander said. “That’s a step in the right direction too.”

  Hansson had come back from Lödinge when the rain and wind made it impossible to keep working. He told Wallander that from tomorrow he’d need more people on the job. Then he set to work on the eight remaining women. Wallander tried in vain to send him home, at least to change out of his wet clothes. But he refused, and Wallander could see that he wanted to shake off the unpleasant experience of standing out in the mud digging for Krista Haberman’s remains as soon as possible.

  Just after 11 p.m., Wallander was on the phone trying to track down a relative of a female conductor named Wedin. She had moved five times in the past year. She had gone through a messy divorce and was on the sick list often. He was just dialling Information when Martinsson appeared at the door. Wallander could see by Martinsson’s face that something had happened and he hung up quickly.

  “I think I’ve found her,” he said softly. “Yvonne Ander.”

  “Why do you think she’s the one?”

  “She actually lives here in Ystad. She has an address on Liregatan.”

  “What else?”

  “She seems strange in many ways. Elusive, like this whole investigation. But she has a background that should interest us. She has worked both as an assistant nurse and an ambulance medic.”

  Wallander looked at him for a moment in silence. Then he got up quickly.

  “Get the others,” he said. “Now, right away.”

  In a few minutes they were gathered in the conference room.

  “Martinsson may have found her,” Wallander said. “And she lives here in Ystad.”

  Martinsson went over everything he had managed to find out about Yvonne Ander.

  “She’s 47 years old,” he began. “She was born in Stockholm and came to Skåne 15 years ago. The first few years she lived in Malmö before moving here to Ystad. She’s worked for Swedish Railways for the past ten years. But before that, when she was younger, she studied to be an assistant nurse and worked for many years in health care. She has also worked as an ambulance medic. And for long periods she doesn’t seem to have worked at all.”

  “What was she doing then?” Wallander asked.

  “There are big gaps.”

  “Is she married?”

  “She’s single.”

  “Divorced?”

  “There are no children in the picture. I don’t think she’s ever been married. But the times that she was working on the trains match Katarina Taxell’s.”

  Martinsson had been reading from his notebook. Now he dropped it on the table.

  “There’s one more thing. She’s active in the Swedish Railways Recreational Association in Malmö. I think a lot of people are. But what surprised me was that she was interested in weight training.”

  It got very quiet in the room.

  “So she’s presumably strong,” Martinsson continued. “And isn’t it a woman with great physical strength that we’re looking for?”

  Wallander made a quick decision.

  “We’ll put all the other names aside for the time being and work on Yvonne Ander. Take it from the beginning one more time. Slowly.”

  Martinsson repeated his summary. They came up with new questions. Many of the answers were missing. Wallander looked at his watch. It was just before midnight.

  “I think we should talk to her tonight.”

  “If she’s not working,” Höglund said. “She works on the night
train occasionally. The other conductors work days or nights, never both.”

  “Either she’s home or she’s not,” Wallander said.

  “What are we actually going to talk to her about?”

  The question came from Hamrén. It was legitimate.

  “I think it’s possible that Katarina Taxell might be there,” Wallander said. “If nothing else, we can use that as an excuse. Her mother is worried. We can start with that. We have no evidence against her. We don’t have a thing. But I want to get some fingerprints.”

  “So we’re not sending a whole team,” Svedberg said.

  Wallander nodded at Höglund.

  “I thought the two of us should visit her. We can have another car follow as backup. In case something happens.”

  “Like what?” Martinsson asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t that a little irresponsible?” Svedberg said. “We do suspect she’s involved in murder.”

  “We’ll be armed,” Wallander said.

  They were interrupted by a man from the dispatch centre knocking on the door.

  “There’s a message from a doctor in Lund,” he said. “He did a preliminary examination of the skeletal remains you found. He thinks they’re from a woman. And they’ve been in the ground a long time.”

  “So we know that,” Wallander said. “If nothing else, we’re on our way to solving a 27-year-old case.”

  The officer left the room.

  “I don’t anticipate any trouble,” Wallander said.

  “How are we going to explain it if Taxell isn’t there? After all, we’re thinking of knocking on her door in the middle of the night.”

  “We’ll ask for Katarina,” Wallander said. “We’re looking for her. That’s all.”

  “What happens if she’s not home?”

  Wallander didn’t have to think it over.

  “Then we go in. And the officers acting as backup will watch in case she’s on her way home. In the meantime I’d like to ask the rest of you to wait here. I know it’s late, but it can’t be helped.”

  No-one had any objections.

  They left the police station just after midnight. The wind was now at gale force. Wallander and Höglund took her car. Martinsson and Svedberg were in the backup car. Liregatan was right in the middle of Ystad. They parked a block away. The streets were almost deserted. They met only one other car, one of the police night patrols. Wallander wondered if the planned new cycle commando unit would be able to handle patrol duty when it was blowing as hard as it was now.

  Yvonne Ander lived in a flat in a restored wood and brick building. Hers was the middle of three flats, with her door facing the street. Apart from a light on in a window to the far left, the whole building was in darkness.

  “Either she’s asleep or she’s not home,” Wallander said. “But we have to assume she’s there.”

  The wind was blowing hard.

  “Is she the one?” Höglund asked.

  Wallander was freezing cold and out of sorts. Was it because they were now hunting a woman?

  “Yes,” he replied, “I think she is.”

  They crossed the street. To their left was Martinsson and Svedberg’s car, the headlights turned off. Höglund rang the bell. Wallander pressed his ear to the door and could hear the bell ringing inside. They waited tensely. He nodded to her to ring again. Still nothing. Then a third time, with the same result.

  “Do you think she’s asleep?” Höglund asked.

  “No,” Wallander said, “I don’t think she’s home.”

  He tried the door. It was locked. He took a step into the street and waved at the car. Martinsson came walking up. He was the best at opening locked doors without using force. He had a torch and a bundle of tools with him. Wallander held the light while Martinsson worked. It took him more than ten minutes. Finally he got the lock to open. He took the torch and went back to the car.

  Wallander looked around. There was no-one about. He and Höglund went inside. They stood listening to the silence. There was no window in the hall. Wallander turned on a lamp. To the left was a living room with a low ceiling, to the right a kitchen. Straight ahead a narrow staircase led to an upper floor. It creaked under their feet. There were three bedrooms, all empty. There was no-one in the flat.

  He tried to take stock of the situation. Could they count on the woman who lived there coming back during the night? He thought it highly unlikely. Especially since she had Taxell and her baby with her. Would she move them around at night?

  Wallander walked up to a glass door in one of the bedrooms and discovered a balcony outside. Big flowerpots filled almost the entire space. But there were no flowers in them, just soil. The balcony and the empty flowerpots filled him with sudden dismay. He left the room quickly. They returned to the hall.

  “Get Martinsson,” he said. “And ask Svedberg to drive back to the station. They have to keep looking. I think Yvonne Ander has another residence besides this flat. Maybe a house.”

  “Shouldn’t we have some surveillance on the street?”

  “She won’t come back tonight. But you’re right, we should have. Ask Svedberg to take care of it.”

  Höglund was just about to leave when he held her back. Then he looked around. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp over the bench. There were two dirty cups there. He wrapped them in a handkerchief and handed them to her.

  “Prints,” he said. “Get Svedberg to give them to Nyberg. This could be crucial.”

  He went back upstairs, hearing Höglund shut the front door behind her. He stood still in the dark, then did something that surprised even him. He went in the bathroom, picked up a towel, and sniffed it. He smelled the faint scent of a special perfume. But the smell reminded him of something else. He tried to capture the mental image. The memory of a scent. He sniffed the towel again, but he couldn’t pin it down. Even though he knew he was close. He had smelled that scent somewhere else. He couldn’t remember where or when, but it had been quite recently. He jumped when he heard the door open. Martinsson and Höglund appeared on the stairs.

  “Now we have to start looking,” said Wallander. “We’re searching not only for something to connect her to the murders, but for something that indicates where she has another residence.”

  “Why should she have?” Martinsson asked.

  They were whispering, as if the person they were looking for was close by and might hear them.

  “Katarina Taxell,” Wallander said. “Her baby. And we’ve believed all along that Runfeldt was held captive for three weeks. I’m sure that it wasn’t here, in the middle of Ystad.”

  Martinsson and Höglund started work upstairs. Wallander closed the curtains in the living room and turned on some lamps. Then he stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly. The woman who lived here had beautiful furniture. And she smoked. He saw an ashtray on a little table next to a leather sofa. There were no cigarette butts in it, but there were faint traces of ashes. Paintings and photographs hung on the walls. Still lifes, vases of flowers, not very well done. Down in the lower right corner of one was a signature: Anna Ander 1958. A relative. Ander was an unusual surname. It figured in the history of Swedish crime, although he couldn’t recall how. He looked at one of the framed photographs. A Scanian farm. The picture was taken from above at an angle. Wallander guessed that the photographer had been standing on a roof or a tall ladder. He walked around the room, trying to feel her presence. He wondered why it was so difficult. Everything gave an impression of abandonment, he thought. A prim, pedantic abandonment. She isn’t here very often. She spends her time somewhere else.

  He went over to her little desk next to the wall. Through the gap in the curtain he glimpsed a small yard. The window was draughty. He pulled out the chair, sat down and tried the biggest drawer. It was unlocked. A car passed by. Wallander saw the headlights catch a window and disappear. Then only the wind remained.

  In the drawer were bundles of letters. He found his glasses
and took out the top bundle. The sender was A. Ander, and the letter was sent from an address in Spain. He took out the letter and quickly scanned it. It was clear at once that Anna Ander was her mother. She was describing a trip. On the last page she wrote that she was on her way to Africa. The letter was dated April 1993. He put back the letter on the top of the bundle. The floorboards upstairs were creaking. He stuck one hand inside the drawer. Nothing. He started to go through the other drawers. Even paper can feel abandoned, he thought. He found nothing to make him take notice. It was too empty to be natural. Now he was convinced that she lived somewhere else. He kept going through the drawers. The floor upstairs creaked. It was 1.30 a.m.

  She was driving through the night, feeling very tired. She had been listening to Katarina for hours. She often wondered about the weakness of these women. They let themselves be tortured, abused, murdered. Then if they survived, they sat night after night moaning about it. She didn’t understand them. As she drove through the night she actually felt contempt for them. They didn’t fight back.

  It was 1 a.m. Normally she would have been asleep by now. She had to go to work early the next day. She had planned to sleep at Vollsjö, but in the end she dared to leave Katarina alone with her baby. She had convinced her to stay where she was just for a few more days, maybe a week. Tomorrow night they would call her mother again. Katarina would call and she would sit next to her. She didn’t think Katarina would say anything she wasn’t supposed to, but she wanted to be there anyway.

  It was 1.10 a.m. when she drove into Ystad. She sensed the danger as soon as she turned down Liregatan and saw the parked car with its headlights off. She couldn’t turn around, she had to keep going. There were two men in the car, and she thought she could see a light in her flat too. Furious, she accelerated. The car leaped ahead, and she braked just as suddenly when she’d turned the corner. So they had found her. The ones who were watching Katarina’s house were in her flat. She felt dizzy, but she wasn’t afraid. There was nothing there that could lead them to Vollsjö. Nothing that told them who she was, nothing but her name.