The Fifth Woman

by Henning Mankell

  What was it he found down there? For a long time he was unsure whether she was insane or not, whether all she said about herself were confused dreams and sick, deformed fantasies. He didn’t trust his own judgement during this time, and he could hardly disguise his wariness of her. But somehow he sensed that she was telling him the truth. Yvonne Ander was that rare type of person who couldn’t lie.

  In the last bundle of letters from her mother was one from a police officer in Africa named Françoise Bertrand. At first couldn’t decipher its contents. It was with a number of unfinished letters from her mother. They were all from the same North African country, written the year before. Françoise Bertrand had sent her letter to Yvonne Ander in August 1993. Finally he understood. Yvonne Ander’s mother Anna had been murdered by mistake, and the police had covered the whole thing up. Politics were clearly behind the killing, although Wallander felt incapable of fully understanding what was involved. But Françoise Bertrand had in all confidence written the letter, outlining what had really happened. Without any help from Ander at this point, he discussed with Chief Holgersson what had happened to the mother. The chief listened and then contacted the national police. The matter was thus removed from Wallander’s responsibility. But he read through all the letters one more time.

  Wallander conducted his meetings with Yvonne Ander in jail. She slowly came to understand that he was a man who wasn’t hunting her. He was different from the others, the men who populated the world. He was introverted, seemed to sleep very little, and was also tormented by worry. For the first time in her life Ander discovered that she could trust a man. She told him this at one of their last meetings.

  She never asked him straight out, but she still believed she knew the answer. He had probably never struck a woman. If he had, it happened only once. No more, never again.

  On 3 November Ann-Britt underwent the last of the three operations. Everything went well, and her convalescence could finally begin. During this entire month Wallander set up a routine. After his talks with Ander he would drive straight to the hospital. He seldom stayed long, but Ann-Britt became the discussion partner he needed in order to help him understand how to penetrate the depths he had begun to plumb.

  His first question to Ander was about the events in Africa. Who was Françoise Bertrand? What had actually happened? A pale light was falling through the window into the room. They sat facing each other at a table. In the distance a radio could be heard. The first sentences she uttered he didn’t catch. It was like a powerful roar when her silence finally broke. He just listened to her voice. Then he started to listen to what she was saying. He seldom took notes during their meetings, and he didn’t use a tape recorder.

  “Somewhere there’s a man who killed my mother. Who’s looking for him?”

  “Not me,” he had replied. “But if you tell me what happened, and if a Swedish citizen has been killed overseas, we will take steps to see that justice is done.”

  He didn’t mention the conversation he had had a few days before with Chief Holgersson, that her mother’s death was already being investigated.

  “Nobody knows who killed my mother,” she continued. “Fate selected her as a victim. Her killer didn’t even know her. He thought he was justified. He believed he could kill anybody he wanted to. Even an innocent woman who spent her retirement taking all the trips she never had the time or the money to take before.”

  She made no attempt to conceal her bitter rage.

  “Why was she staying with the nuns?” he asked.

  Suddenly she looked up from the table, straight into his eyes.

  “Who gave you the right to read my letters?”

  “No-one. But they belong to you, a person who has committed several atrocious murders. Otherwise I never would have read them.”

  She turned away again.

  “The nuns,” Wallander repeated. “Why was she staying with them?”

  “She didn’t have much money. She stayed wherever it was cheap. She never imagined it would lead to her death.”

  “This happened more than a year ago. How did you react when the letter arrived?”

  “There was no reason for me to wait any longer. How could I justify doing nothing when no-one else seemed to care?”

  “Care about what?”

  She didn’t reply. He waited. Then he changed the question.

  “Wait to do what?”

  She answered without looking at him.

  “To kill them.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones who went free in spite of all they had done.”

  He realised he had guessed correctly. It was when she received Françoise Bertrand’s letter that a force locked inside her had been released. She had harboured thoughts of revenge, but she could still control herself. Then the dam broke. She decided to take the law into her own hands.

  Later Wallander came to see that there really wasn’t much difference from what had happened in Lödinge. She had been her own citizen militia. She had placed herself outside the law and dispensed her own justice.

  “Is that how it was?” he asked. “You wanted to dispense justice? You wanted to punish those who should have been brought before a court of law but never were?”

  “Who’s looking for the man who killed my mother? Who?”

  She fell silent again. Wallander could see how it had all begun. Some months after the letter came from Africa she broke into Holger Eriksson’s house. That was the first step. When he asked her point blank if it was true, she didn’t even act surprised. She took it for granted that he knew.

  “I heard about Krista Haberman,” she said. “That it was the car dealer who killed her.”

  “Who did you hear it from?”

  “A Polish woman in the hospital in Malmö. That was many years ago.”

  “You were working at the hospital then?”

  “I worked there several different times. I often talked to women who had been abused. She had a friend who used to know Krista Haberman.”

  “Why did you break into Eriksson’s house?”

  “I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible, and I was looking for signs that Krista Haberman had been there.”

  “Why did you dig the pit? Why the stakes? Did the woman who knew Krista Haberman suspect that the body was buried near that ditch?”

  She didn’t answer. But Wallander understood anyway. Despite the fact that the investigation had always been hard to grasp, Wallander and his colleagues had been on the right track without knowing it. Ander had echoed the men’s brutality in her methods of killing them.

  During the five or six meetings Wallander had with Ander, he went methodically through the three murders, clearing up details and piecing together the connections that had previously been so vague. He continued to talk to her without a tape recorder. After the meetings he would sit in his car and make notes from memory. Then he would have them typed up. A copy went to Per Åkeson, who was preparing the indictment, which would inevitably lead to a conviction on three counts. Yet the whole time, Wallander knew he was just scraping the surface. The real descent hadn’t even started yet. The evidence would send her to prison. But he wouldn’t find the actual truth he sought until he reached the deepest depths of the pit.

  She had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, of course. Wallander knew it was unavoidable, but he insisted that it be postponed. Right now the most important thing was that he be able to talk to her in peace. No-one objected to this. They understood that she would probably clam up again if she was upset. She was ready to talk to him and him alone.

  They went further, slowly, step by step, day by day. Outside the jail the autumn was deepening and drawing them towards winter. Wallander never found out why Eriksson had driven up to get Krista Haberman in Svenstavik and then killed her. Presumably it was because she had denied him something he was used to getting. Maybe an argument turned violent.

  He moved on to Gösta Runfeldt. She was convinced that Runfeldt had murdered hi
s wife, drowned her in Stång Lake. And even if he hadn’t done it, he still deserved his fate. He had abused her so severely that she actually wanted to die. Höglund was right when she sensed that Runfeldt had been attacked in the florist’s shop. Ander had found out that he would be leaving for Nairobi and lured him to the shop by telling him that she had to buy flowers for a reception early the next morning. Then she knocked him to the ground. The blood on the floor was indeed his. The broken window was a diversion to fool the police into believing it was a break-in.

  Then came a description of what for Wallander was the most terrifying element. Until that point he had tried to understand her without letting his emotional reactions take over. But then he couldn’t go any further. She recounted with utter calm how she had undressed Gösta Runfeldt, tied him up, and forced him into the baking oven. When he could no longer control his bodily functions she took away his underwear and laid him on a plastic sheet.

  Later she led him out to the woods. By that time he was quite powerless. She tied him to the tree and strangled him. It was at that moment that she turned into a monster in Wallander’s eyes. It didn’t matter if she was a man or a woman. She became a monster, and he could only be thankful that they had stopped her before she killed Tore Grundén or anyone else on the list she had made.

  The list was also her only mistake – she hadn’t destroyed the notebook in which she drew up her plans before she copied them into the ledger she kept in Vollsjö. Wallander never asked her why. Even she admitted it was a mistake. That was the only one of her actions she couldn’t explain. Later Wallander pondered whether she had actually wanted to leave a clue, that deep inside she wanted to be discovered and stopped. Sometimes he thought this was true, sometimes he didn’t.

  She didn’t have much to say about Eugen Blomberg. She described how she shuffled the slips of paper. She let chance decide who would be next, just as chance had killed her mother. This was one of the times he interrupted her. Normally he let her speak freely, prompting her with questions when she couldn’t decide how to go on. But now he stopped her.

  “So you did the same thing as the men who killed your mother,” he said. “You let chance select your victim.”

  “It’s not comparable,” she replied. “All those men whose names I had written down deserved their death. I gave them time with my slips of paper. I prolonged their lives.”

  He pursued it no further, since he realised that in an obscure way she was right. Reluctantly he admitted to himself that she had her own peculiar sort of truth.

  When he read through the transcripts of the notes he made from memory, he could see that what he had was a confession, but it was also an exceedingly incomplete account. Did he succeed with what he intended? Afterwards, Wallander found it difficult to speak about Yvonne Ander. He always referred people who questioned him to the notes.

  As it turned out, what became Yvonne Ander’s last will and testament was her story of the terrifying experiences of her childhood. Wallander was almost the same age as Ander, and he thought time after time that the era he was living in was concerned with one single decisive question: what are we actually doing with our children? She had told him how her mother was frequently abused by her stepfather, who had replaced her biological father. The stepfather had forced her mother to have an abortion. She had never had the chance to have the sister her mother was carrying. She couldn’t have known if it really was a sister – maybe it was a brother – but to her it was a sister, brutally ripped from her mother’s womb against her will one night in the early 1950s. She remembered that night as a bloody hell. When she was telling Wallander about it, she raised her eyes from the table and looked straight into his. Her mother had lain on a sheet on the kitchen table, the abortionist was drunk, her stepfather locked in the cellar, probably drunk too. That night she was robbed of her sister and for all time learned to view the future as darkness, with threatening men lurking round every corner, violence lurking behind every friendly smile, every word.

  She had barricaded her memories into a secret interior room. She had been educated, become a nurse, and she had always harboured the vague notion that someday she would avenge the sister she never had, and the mother who wasn’t allowed to give birth to her. She collected the stories from abused women, she tracked down the dead women in muddy fields and Småland lakes, she entered names in a ledger, shuffled her slips of paper.

  And then her mother had been murdered.

  She described it almost poetically to Wallander. Like a silent tidal wave, she said. No more than that. I knew that it was time. I let a year pass. I planned, completed the timetable that had kept me alive all those years. Then I dug in a ditch at night.

  Precisely those words. Then I dug in a ditch at night. Maybe they best summed up Wallander’s experience of his many conversations with Yvonne Ander that autumn. It was like a picture of the time he was living in. What ditch was he digging?

  One question was never answered: why she suddenly, in the mid-1980s, changed professions and became a conductor. Wallander had understood that the train timetable was the liturgy she lived by, her handbook. But the trains remained her private world. Maybe the only one; maybe the last one.

  Did she feel guilt? Åkeson asked him about that many times. Lisa Holgersson asked less often, his colleagues almost never. The only person besides Åkeson who really insisted on knowing was Ann-Britt Höglund. Wallander told her the truth: he didn’t know.

  “Ander reminds me of a coiled spring,” he told her. “I can’t express it better than that. I can’t say whether guilt is part of it, or whether it’s gone.”

  On 4 December it was over. Wallander had nothing more to ask, and Yvonne Ander had nothing more to say. The confession was complete. Wallander knew he had reached the end of the long descent. Now he could return to the surface. The psychiatric examination could begin, the defence lawyer could sharpen his pencils, and only Wallander had any idea what would happen.

  He knew that Yvonne Ander would fall silent again, with the determined will of someone who has nothing more to say. Just before he left, he asked her about two more things he didn’t have answers to. The first was a detail that no longer had any significance, but he needed to satisfy his own curiosity.

  “When Katarina Taxell called her mother from the house in Vollsjö, something was making a banging noise,” he said. “We couldn’t work out where that sound was coming from.”

  She gave him a baffled look. Then her face broke open in a smile, the only one Wallander saw in all his talks with her.

  “A farmer’s tractor had broken down in the field next to us. He was hitting it with a big hammer to get something loose from the undercarriage. Could you really hear that on the phone?”

  Wallander nodded. He was already thinking of his last question.

  “I think we actually met once,” he said. “On a train.”

  She nodded.

  “South of Älmhult? I asked you when we would get to Malmö.”

  “I recognised you from the newspapers. From last summer.”

  “Did you already know then that we’d catch you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “A policeman from Ystad gets on a train in Älmhult. What’s he doing there? Unless he’s following the trail of what happened to Gösta Runfeldt’s wife?”

  She shook her head. “I never thought about that. I should have.”

  Wallander had nothing more to ask. He had found out everything he wanted to know. He stood up, muttered goodbye, and left.

  That afternoon Wallander visited the hospital as usual. Ann-Britt was asleep when he arrived, but he spoke to a doctor who told him that in six months she could return to work. He left the hospital just after 5 p.m. It was already dark, just below freezing, no wind. He drove out to the cemetery and went to his father’s grave. Withered flowers had frozen solid to the ground. It was still less than three months since they had come back from Rome. The holiday was vivid in his mind as he stood by the grave, wond
ering what his father had actually been thinking when he took his night-time walk to the Spanish Steps, to the fountain, with that gleam in his eyes.

  It was as if Yvonne Ander and his father could have stood on either side of a river and waved to each other, even though they had nothing in common. Or did they? Wallander wondered what he himself had in common with her. He had no answer.

  That night, out by the grave in the dark cemetery, the investigation came to an end for him. There would still be papers he would have to read over and sign, but the case was finished. The psychiatric examination would declare that she was in full possession of her faculties. Then she would be convicted and hidden away at Hinseberg. The investigation of the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death in Africa would also continue. But that had nothing to do with his own work.

  The night of 4 December he slept badly. The next day he decided to look at a house just north of town. He was also going to visit a kennel in Sjöbo where they had a litter of black Labrador puppies for sale. The next day he had to go to Stockholm and speak at the police academy. Why he had given in when Chief Holgersson asked him again, he didn’t know. Now he lay awake wondering what the hell he was going to say.