The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  Wallander knew that Svedberg was right. During the years he had been a policeman, the force had undergone endless and sweeping changes because of the complex relationship between the police and that vague and threatening entity known as “the public”. This public, which hung like a nightmare over the national police board as well as over the individual officers, was characterised by one thing: fickleness. The latest attempt to satisfy the public was to change the entire Swedish police force to “local police”. Just how this was supposed to be done, no-one knew. The national commissioner had proclaimed how important it was for the police to be seen. But since nobody had ever thought the police were invisible, they couldn’t see how this strategy was to be implemented. They already had policemen walking the beat, officers were also riding bicycles around in small, swift mini-squads. The national commissioner seemed to be talking about some other kind of visibility, something less tangible. “Local police” sounded cosy, like a soft pillow under your head. But how it was actually going to be combined with the fact that crime in Sweden was growing more brutal and violent all the time, no-one could see. In all probability, this new regime would require them to spend time making decisions as to whether it was proper for a home crafts organisation to call itself “Friends of the Axe”.

  Wallander went back to his office with a cup of coffee, closing his door behind him. He tried again to make some headway with the huge amount of material. At first he found it hard to concentrate. His conversation with Baiba kept intruding. But he forced himself to act like a policeman again, and after a few hours he had reviewed the investigation and reached the point where he had left off before he went to Italy. He telephoned a detective in Göteborg with whom he was collaborating, and they discussed some of the issues. By the time he hung up it was midday, and Wallander was hungry. It was still raining. He went out to his car, drove to the centre of town, and ate lunch. He was back at the station within the hour. Just as he sat down, the telephone rang. It was Ebba in reception.

  “You have a visitor,” she said.

  “Who is it?”

  “A man named Tyrén. He wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Somebody who might be missing.”

  “Isn’t there someone else who can handle it?”

  “He says he absolutely has to speak with you.”

  Wallander took a look at the open folders on his desk. Nothing in them was so urgent that he couldn’t take a report on a missing person.

  “Send him in,” he said and hung up.

  He opened the door and began moving the folders off his desk. When he looked up, a man was standing at his door. Wallander had never seen him before. He was dressed in overalls bearing the logo of the O.K. oil company. As he entered, Wallander could smell oil and petrol.

  He shook his hand and asked the man to take a seat. He was in his 50s, unshaven and with thin grey hair. He introduced himself as Sven Tyrén.

  “You wanted to talk to me?” Wallander said.

  “I’ve heard you’re a good policeman,” said Tyrén. His accent sounded like western Skåne, where Wallander himself had grown up.

  “Most of us are good,” Wallander answered.

  Tyrén’s reply surprised him.

  “You know that’s not true. I’ve been locked up for a thing or two in my day. And I’ve met a lot of policemen who were real arseholes, to put it mildly.”

  Wallander was startled by the force of his words.

  “I doubt you came here to tell me that,” he said, changing the subject. “There was something about a missing person?”

  Tyrén fidgeted with his O.K. cap.

  “It’s strange, actually,” he said.

  Wallander had taken out a notebook from a drawer and turned to a blank page.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “Who might have disappeared? And what’s strange about it?”

  “Holger Eriksson.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of my customers.”

  “I’m guessing that you own a petrol station.”

  Tyrén shook his head.

  “I deliver heating oil,” he said. “I take care of the district north of Ystad. Eriksson lives between Högestad and Lödinge. He called the office and said his tank was almost empty. We agreed on a delivery for Thursday morning. But, when I got there, nobody was home.”

  Wallander jotted this down.

  “You’re talking about last Thursday.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when did he call?”

  “Last Monday.”

  Wallander thought for a moment.

  “Could there have been some misunderstanding about the time?”

  “I’ve delivered to Eriksson for more than ten years. There’s never been a misunderstanding before.”

  “So what did you do when you discovered that he wasn’t there.”

  “His oil tank is locked, so I left a message in his letter box.”

  “Then what?”

  “I left.”

  Wallander put down his pen.

  “When you deliver oil,” Tyrén went on, “you tend to notice people’s routines. I couldn’t stop thinking about Holger Eriksson. It didn’t make sense for him to be away. So I went out there again yesterday afternoon after work. My note was still in the letter box, underneath all the other post that had come since last Thursday. I rang the bell. Nobody was home. His car was still in the garage.

  “Does he live alone?”

  “He’s not married. He made a lot of money selling cars. And he writes poems, too. He gave me a book once.”

  Wallander remembered seeing Eriksson’s name on books on a shelf of literature by local writers at the Ystad Bookshop when he’d been looking for something to give Svedberg for his 40th birthday.

  “There was something else that doesn’t make sense,” Tyrén said. “The door was unlocked. I thought maybe he was sick. He’s almost 80. So I went inside. The house was empty, but the coffee maker in the kitchen was on. It smelled bad. The coffee had boiled dry and burned on the bottom. That’s when I decided to come and see you.”

  Wallander could see that Tyrén’s concern was genuine. From experience, however, he knew that most disappearances usually solved themselves. It was very seldom that anything serious happened.

  “Doesn’t he have any neighbours?” asked Wallander.

  “The farmhouse is pretty isolated.”

  “What do you think might have happened?”

  Tyrén’s reply came at once, quite firmly.

  “I think he’s dead. I think somebody killed him.”

  Wallander said nothing. He was waiting for Tyrén to continue. But he didn’t.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He had ordered heating oil. He was always home when I came. He wouldn’t have left the coffee machine on. He wouldn’t have gone out without locking the door. Even if he was just taking a little walk around his property.”

  “Did you get the impression the house had been broken into?”

  “No, everything seemed the same as usual. Except for that coffee machine.”

  “So you’ve been in his house before?”

  “Every time I delivered oil. Usually he offered me some coffee and read me some of his poems. He was probably a pretty lonely man, and I think he looked forward to my visits.”

  Wallander paused to think about it.

  “You said you think he’s dead, but you also said you think someone killed him. Why would anyone do that? Did he have any enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But he was wealthy.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  Wallander let the question pass.

  “We’ll look into it,” he said. “There’s probably an ordinary explanation. There usually is.”

  Wallander wrote down the address. The name of the farm was “Seclusion”.

  Wallande
r walked out to reception with Tyrén.

  “I’m sure something has happened,” Tyrén said as he was leaving. “He’d never go out when I was coming with oil.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Wallander said.

  Just then Hansson came into reception.

  “Who the hell is blocking the driveway with an oil truck?” he fumed.

  “Me,” Tyrén said calmly. “I’m leaving now.”

  “What was he doing here?” asked Hansson after Tyrén had gone.

  “He wanted to report a missing person,” said Wallander. “Have you ever heard of a writer named Holger Eriksson?”

  “A writer?”

  “Or a car dealer.”

  “Which?”

  “He seems to have been both. And according to this truck driver, he’s disappeared.”

  They went to get coffee.

  “Seriously?” said Hansson.

  “The man seems worried.”

  “I thought I recognised him,” Hansson said.

  Wallander had great respect for Hansson’s memory. Whenever he forgot a name, it was to Hansson that he went for help.

  “His name is Sven Tyrén,” Wallander said. “He said he’d done time for a thing or two.”

  Hansson searched his memory.

  “He might have been mixed up in some assault cases,” he said after a while. “Quite a few years ago.”

  Wallander listened thoughtfully.

  “I think I’ll drive out to Eriksson’s place,” he said after a while. “I’ll log him in as reported missing.”

  Wallander went into his office, grabbed his jacket, and stuffed the address of “Seclusion” in his pocket. He should have begun by filling out a missing-person form, but he skipped it for the time being. It was 2.30 p.m. when he left the police station. The heavy rain had eased to a steady drizzle. He shivered as he walked to his car.

  Wallander drove north and had no problem finding the farmhouse. As the name implied, it lay quite isolated, high up on a hill. Brown fields sloped down towards the sea, but he couldn’t see the water. A flock of rooks cawed in a tree. He raised the lid of the letter box. It was empty. Tyrén must have taken in the post. Wallander walked into the courtyard. Everything was well kept. He stood there and listened to the silence. The farmhouse consisted of three wings, and he could see that it had once formed a complete square. He admired the thatched roof. Tyrén was right. Anyone who could afford to maintain a roof like that was a wealthy man.

  Wallander walked up to the door and rang the bell. Then he knocked. He opened the door and stepped inside, listening. The letters lay on a stool next to an umbrella stand. There were several binocular cases hanging on the wall. One was open and empty. Wallander moved slowly through the house. It still smelled of burnt coffee. The large living room was split-level with an exposed-beam ceiling. He stopped at the wooden desk and looked at a sheet of paper lying on it. Since the light was poor, he picked it up carefully and went over to a window.

  It was a poem about a bird. At the bottom a date and time was written. 21 September 1994. 10.12 p.m. On that evening Wallander and his father had eaten dinner at a restaurant near the Piazza del Popolo. As he stood in the silent house, Rome felt like a remote, surreal dream.

  He put the paper back on the desk. On Wednesday night Eriksson had written a poem, even noting down the time. The next day Tyrén was supposed to deliver oil. By then he was gone, leaving the door unlocked. Wallander went outside and found the oil tank. The meter showed that it was almost empty. He went back inside the house. He sat down in an old Windsor chair and looked around. Instinct told him that Sven Tyrén was right. Holger Eriksson had truly disappeared. He wasn’t just away from home.

  After a while Wallander stood up and searched through several cupboards until he found a set of spare keys. He locked the house and left. The rain had picked up again. He was back in Ystad just before 5 p.m. He filled out the form on Holger Eriksson. Early the next morning they would start looking for him in earnest.

  Wallander drove home. On the way he stopped and bought a pizza. He ate it while he watched TV. Linda still hadn’t called. Just after 11 p.m. he went to bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  At 4 a.m. Wallander sat up abruptly in bed feeling ill. He was going to throw up. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. At the same time he realised he had diarrhoea. He didn’t know whether it was the pizza or a stomach bug he had brought home from Italy. By 7 a.m. he was so exhausted that he called the police station to report in sick. He got hold of Martinsson.

  “You heard what happened, I guess,” Martinsson said.

  “All I know is I’m puking and shitting,” Wallander replied.

  “A ferry boat sank last night,” Martinsson went on. “Somewhere off the coast of Tallinn. Hundreds of people died, they think. And most of them were Swedes. There seem to have been quite a few police officers on board.”

  Wallander was about to throw up again. But he stayed on the line.

  “Police from Ystad?” he asked.

  “No. But it’s terrible, what happened.”

  Wallander could hardly believe what Martinsson was saying. Several hundred people dead in a ferry accident? That just didn’t happen. At least not around Sweden.

  “I don’t think I can talk,” he said. “I’m going to be sick again. But there’s a note on my desk about a man named Holger Eriksson. He’s missing. One of you will have to look into it.”

  He put down the receiver and made it to the bathroom just in time. As he was on his way back to bed, the phone rang again. This time it was Mona, his ex-wife. He felt on edge at once. She never called unless something was wrong with Linda.

  “I talked to Linda,” she said. “She wasn’t on the ferry.”

  It took a moment before Wallander grasped what she meant.

  “You mean the ferry that sank?”

  “What did you think I meant? When hundreds of people die in an accident, at least I call my daughter to see if she’s all right.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Wallander said. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little slow today, but I’m sick. I’m throwing up. I’ve got a stomach bug. Maybe we can talk another time.”

  “I just didn’t want you to worry,” she said.

  Wallander said goodbye and went back to bed. He was worried about Holger Eriksson, and about the ferry disaster that had occurred during the night, but he was feverish, and soon he was asleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  He began to gnaw on the rope again.

  The feeling that he was about to go insane had been with him the whole time. He couldn’t see; something was tied over his eyes and made the world dark. He couldn’t hear either. Something had been forced into his ears, and was pressing on his eardrums. There were sounds, but they came from inside. An internal rushing that wanted to force its way out. But what bothered him most was that he couldn’t move. That was what was driving him insane. Despite the fact that he was lying down, stretched out on his back, he had the constant feeling that he was falling. A dizzy plummeting, without end. Maybe it was just a hallucination, a manifestation of the fact that he was falling apart from within. Madness was about to shatter his mind into pieces.

  He tried to cling to reality. He forced himself to think. Reason and the ability to remain calm might give him some possible explanation for what had happened. Why can’t I move? Where am I? And why?

  For the longest time he had fought against the panic and madness by forcing himself to keep track of time. He counted minutes and hours, trying to keep to an impossible, endless routine. The darkness never changed, and he had woken up where he lay, fettered on his back. He had no memory of being moved, so there was no beginning. He could have been born right where he lay. For the brief moments when he succeeded in keeping the panic at bay and thinking clearly, he tried to cling to anything that seemed related to reality.

  What could he start from? What he was lying on. That wasn’t his imagination. He was on his back and what he was lyin
g on was hard. His shirt had ridden up just over his left hip and his skin lay against the hard, rough surface. He could feel that he had scraped his skin when he tried to move. He was lying on a cement floor.

  He thought back to the last moment of normality before the darkness had fallen over him, but even that was beginning to seem vague. He knew what had happened, and yet he didn’t. It was when he started to doubt what was his imagination, and what had actually happened, that panic would seize him. Then he would begin to sob. A brief outburst that stopped as quickly as it began, since no-one could hear him anyway. There are people who cry only when they’re out of earshot of others, but he wasn’t one of them.

  Actually that was the one thing he was sure of. That no-one could hear him. Wherever he was, wherever this cement floor of terror had been poured, even if it was floating freely in a universe totally unknown to him, there was no-one close by. Nobody could hear him.

  Beyond the growing madness, these were the only things he had left to hold on to. Everything else had been taken from him, not merely his identity but also his trousers.

  It was the evening before he was supposed to leave for Nairobi. It was almost midnight, he had closed his suitcase and sat down at his desk to go over his travel plans one last time. He could see it all quite clearly. Without knowing it, he was waiting in death’s anteroom, which some unknown person had prepared for him. His passport lay on the left side of his desk, and he held his plane tickets in his hand. The plastic pouch with the dollar notes, credit cards, and traveller’s cheques was on his lap, waiting for him to check them too. Then the telephone rang. He put everything to one side, lifted the receiver, and answered.

  Since that was the last living voice he had heard, he clung to it. It was his only link to the reality that held madness at bay. It was a lovely voice, soft and pleasant, and he knew at once that he was speaking to a stranger – a woman he had never met. She asked if she could buy some roses. She apologised for calling him at home and disturbing him so late, but she was in desperate need of those roses. She didn’t say why. But he trusted her at once. Who would lie about needing roses? He couldn’t remember whether he actually asked her or even wondered why she had discovered she didn’t have the roses she needed so late at night, when there were no florists open. But he hadn’t hesitated. He lived close to his shop, and he wasn’t going to bed yet. It would take him no more than ten minutes to solve her problem.