The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  One message was from Per Åkeson. Wallander phoned him at the prosecutor’s office, but was told that Åkeson would be in Malmö all day. He went to get a cup of coffee, then he leaned back in his chair and tried to devise a new strategy for the car-smuggling investigation. In almost all organised crime there was some weak point, a link that could be broken if leaned on hard enough.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone. It was Lisa Holgersson, their new chief, welcoming him home.

  “How was the holiday?” she asked.

  “Very successful.”

  “You rediscover your parents by doing these things,” she said.

  “And they might acquire a different view of their children,” Wallander said.

  She excused herself abruptly. Wallander heard someone come into her office and say something. Björk would never have asked him about his holiday. She came back on the line.

  “I’ve been in Stockholm for a few days,” she said. “It wasn’t much fun.”

  “What are they up to now?”

  “I’m thinking about the Estonia. All of our colleagues who died.”

  Wallander sat in silence. He should have thought about that himself.

  “I think you can imagine the mood,” she went on. “How could we just sit there, discussing organisational problems between the national police and the districts all over the country?”

  “We’re probably just as helpless in the face of death as everyone else,” Wallander said. “Even though we shouldn’t be, since we’ve seen so much of it. We think we’re used to it, but we aren’t.”

  “A ferry sinks one stormy night and suddenly death is visible in Sweden again,” she said. “After it’s been hidden away and ignored for so long.”

  “You’re right, I suppose. Although I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  He heard her clearing her throat. After a pause she returned.

  “We discussed organisational problems,” she said, “and the eternal question of what should take priority.”

  “We ought to spend our time catching criminals,” said Wallander. “Bringing them to justice and making sure we have enough evidence to get them convicted.”

  “If only it was that simple,” she sighed.

  “I’m glad I’m not the chief,” Wallander said.

  “I sometimes wonder myself,” she said, and left the rest of her sentence unfinished. Wallander thought she was going to say goodbye, but she had more to say.

  “I promised that you would come up to the police academy in early December,” she said. “They want you to give a talk on the investigation of last summer. The trainee officers requested it.”

  Wallander was shocked.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “I just can’t stand up in front of a group of people and pretend I’m teaching. Somebody else can do it. Martinsson’s a good speaker. He ought to be a politician.”

  “I promised you’d come,” she said, laughing. “It’ll be fine, really.”

  “I’ll call in sick,” Wallander said.

  “December is a long way off,” she said. “We can talk more about this later. I really called to hear how your holiday was. Now I can tell it turned out fine.”

  “And everything’s quiet here,” Wallander said. “All we have is a missing person. But my colleagues are handling it.”

  “A missing person?”

  Wallander recounted his conversation with Sven Tyrén.

  “How often is it something serious when people go missing?” she asked. “What do the statistics say?”

  “I don’t know about the statistics,” said Wallander. “But I do know that there’s very seldom a crime or even an accident involved. When it comes to old or senile people, they may have simply wandered off. With young people there’s usually a rebellion against their parents or a longing for adventure behind it. It’s rare that anything serious is involved.”

  They said goodbye and hung up. Wallander was dead set against giving lectures at the police academy. It was flattering that they had asked for him, but his aversion was stronger. He would try to talk Martinsson into taking his place.

  He went back to the smuggling operation. Just after 8 a.m. he went to get some more coffee. Since he felt hungry, he also helped himself to a few biscuits. His stomach no longer seemed upset. Martinsson knocked on the door and came in.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “I feel fine,” Wallander said. “How’s it going with Holger Eriksson?”

  Martinsson gave him a baffled look.

  “Who?”

  “Holger Eriksson. The man I wrote a report on, who might be missing? The one I talked to you about?”

  Martinsson shook his head.

  “When did you tell me? I can’t have heard you. I was pretty upset about the ferry accident.”

  Wallander got up from his chair.

  “Is Hansson here yet? We have to get started on this immediately.”

  “I saw him in the hall,” Martinsson said. They went to Hansson’s office. He was sitting staring at a lottery ticket. He tore it up and dropped the pieces in his waste-paper basket.

  “Holger Eriksson,” Wallander said. “The man who may have disappeared. Do you remember the oil truck blocking the driveway here? On Tuesday?”

  Hansson nodded.

  “The driver, Sven Tyrén,” Wallander went on. “You remembered that he’d been mixed up in some assaults?”

  “I remember,” Hansson said.

  Wallander was concealing his impatience with difficulty.

  “He came here to report a missing person. I drove out to the farmhouse where Holger Eriksson lives. I wrote a report. Then I called here yesterday morning and asked the rest of you to take on the case. I considered it serious.”

  “It must be lying around here somewhere,” said Martinsson. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Wallander knew he couldn’t be angry about it.

  “Things like this shouldn’t happen, you know,” he said. “But we can blame it on bad timing. I’ll go out to the farm one more time. If he’s not there, we’ll have to start looking for him. I hope we don’t find him dead somewhere, considering we’ve wasted a whole day already.”

  “Should we call in a search party?” Martinsson asked.

  “Not yet. I’ll go there first. But I’ll let you know what I find.”

  Wallander went to his office and looked up the number for O.K. Oil. A girl answered on the first ring. Wallander introduced himself and said he needed to speak to Sven Tyrén.

  “He’s out on a delivery,” the girl said. “But he has a phone in the truck.”

  Wallander dialled his number. The connection was fuzzy.

  “I think you may be right,” Wallander said. “Holger Eriksson is missing.”

  “You’re damn right I’m right,” Tyrén shot back. “Did it take you this long to work that one out?”

  “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about?” Wallander asked.

  “And what would that be?”

  “You know better than I do. Does he have any relatives he visits? Does he ever travel? Who knows him best? Anything that might explain where he’s gone.”

  “There isn’t any reasonable explanation,” Tyrén said. “I already told you that. That’s why I went to the police.”

  Wallander thought for a moment. There was no reason for Sven Tyrén not to tell the truth.

  “Where are you?” Wallander asked.

  “I’m on the road from Malmö. I was at the terminal filling up.”

  “I’ll drive up to Eriksson’s place. Can you stop off there?”

  “I’ll be there within an hour,” Tyrén said. “I have to deliver some oil to a nursing home first. We don’t want the old folks to freeze, do we?”

  Wallander left the station. It was drizzling again. He felt ill at ease as he drove out of Ystad. If he hadn’t been sick, the misunderstanding wouldn’t have happened. He was convinced that Tyrén’s concern was warranted. He had a
lready sensed it on Tuesday, and now it was Thursday.

  By the time he reached the farmhouse the rain was coming down hard. He pulled on the gumboots he kept in the boot of his car. When he opened the letter box he found a newspaper and a few letters. He went into the courtyard and rang the bell, then used the spare keys to open the door. He tried to sense whether anyone else had been there. But everything was just as he had left it. The binocular case in the hall was still empty. The lone sheet of paper lay on the desk.

  Wallander went out to the courtyard, and stood pondering an empty kennel. A flock of rooks cawed out in the fields. A dead hare, he thought absently. He got his torch out of the car and began a methodical search of the entire house. Eriksson had kept everything tidy. Wallander stood and admired an old, well-polished Harley-Davidson in part of one wing that served as a garage and workshop. Then he heard a truck coming down the road, and went out to greet Sven Tyrén.

  “He’s not here,” he said.

  Wallander took Tyrén to the kitchen and told him that he wanted to take a statement.

  “I have nothing more to say,” said Tyrén belligerently. “Wouldn’t it be better if you started looking for him?”

  “People generally know more than they think,” said Wallander, not hiding his irritation at Tyrén’s attitude.

  “So what do you think I know?”

  “Did you talk to him yourself when he ordered the oil?”

  “He called the office. A girl there writes up the delivery slips. I talk to her several times a day.”

  “And he sounded normal when he called?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “I will. What’s her name?”

  “Ruth. Ruth Sturesson.”

  Wallander wrote this down.

  “I stopped here one day in August,” said Tyrén. “That was the last time I saw him. He was the same as always. He offered me coffee and read me some new poems. He was a good storyteller too. But in a crude kind of way.”

  “What do you mean, crude?”

  “His stories made me blush is what I mean.”

  Wallander stared at him. He realised that he was thinking of his father, who liked telling crude stories too.

  “You didn’t have the feeling he was getting senile?”

  “He was as clear-headed as you or I.”

  “Did Eriksson have any relatives?”

  “He never married. He had no children, no girlfriend. Not that I know of, anyway.”

  “No relatives?”

  “He didn’t talk about any. He’d decided that an organisation in Lund would inherit all his property.”

  “What organisation?”

  Tyrén shrugged.

  “Some home crafts society or something. I don’t know.”

  Wallander thought of Friends of the Axe, but then realised that Holger Eriksson must have decided to bequeath his farm to the Cultural Association in Lund.

  “Do you know if he owned other property?”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe another farmhouse? A house in town? Or a flat?”

  Tyrén thought before he replied.

  “No,” he said. “There was just this farmhouse. The rest is in the bank. Handelsbanken.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He paid his bills through Handelsbanken.”

  Wallander nodded. He folded up his papers. He had no more questions. Now he was convinced that something terrible had happened to Eriksson.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Wallander said, getting to his feet.

  “What happens next?”

  “The police have their procedures.”

  They went outside.

  “I’d be happy to stay and help you search,” Tyrén said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Wallander replied. “We prefer to do this our own way.”

  Sven Tyrén didn’t object. Wallander watched the truck leave. Then he stood at the edge of the fields and gazed towards a grove of trees in the distance. The rooks were still cawing. Wallander pulled his phone from his pocket and called Martinsson at the station.

  “How’s it going?” Martinsson asked.

  “We’ll have to start with a complete search,” said Wallander. “Hansson has the address. I want to get started as soon as possible. Send a couple of dog units out here.”

  Wallander was about to hang up when Martinsson stopped him.

  “There’s one more thing. I checked to see if we had anything on Holger Eriksson. And we do.”

  Wallander pressed the phone to his ear and moved under a tree to get out of the rain.

  “About a year ago he reported that he had a break-in at his house. Is the farm called ‘Seclusion’?”

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “Keep going.”

  “His report was filed on 19 October 1993. Svedberg took the message. But when I asked him about it, he’d forgotten.”

  “And?”

  “The report was a little strange,” said Martinsson hesitantly.

  “What do you mean, strange?”

  “Nothing was stolen, but he was certain that someone had broken into his house.”

  “What happened?”

  “The whole thing was dismissed. But the report is here. And it was made by Holger Eriksson.”

  “That’s odd,” said Wallander. “We’ll have to take a closer look at that later. Get those dog units out here as soon as possible.”

  “Isn’t there anything that strikes you about Eriksson’s report?” Martinsson asked.

  “Such as?”

  “It’s the second time in a few days that we’re discussing break-ins where nothing was stolen.”

  Martinsson was right. Nothing had been stolen from the florist’s shop on Västra Vallgatan either.

  “That’s where the similarities end,” said Wallander.

  “The owner of the shop is missing too,” said Martinsson.

  “No, he isn’t,” said Wallander. “He’s on a trip to Kenya. He hasn’t disappeared. But it certainly looks like Holger Eriksson has.”

  Wallander hung up and pulled his jacket tighter around him, moving back to the garage. Nothing serious could be done until the dog units arrived and they could organise the search and start talking to the neighbours. After a while he went back to the house. In the kitchen he drank a glass of water. The pipes clunked when he turned on the tap, another sign that no-one had been in the house for several days. As he emptied the glass he watched the rooks in the distance. He put down the glass and went back outside.

  It was raining steadily. The rooks were cawing. Suddenly Wallander halted. He thought of the empty binocular case hanging on the wall just inside the front door. He looked at the rooks. Just past them, on the hill, was a tower. He stood motionless, trying to think. Then he began walking slowly along the edge of the field. The clay stuck to his gumboots in clumps. He discovered a path leading straight through the field. He could see that it led to the hillock on which the tower stood, a few hundred metres away. He started to walk along the path. The rooks were diving down, vanishing, and then flying up again. There must be a hollow or a ditch there. The tower grew clearer. He guessed that it was used for hunting hares or deer. Below the hill on the opposite side was a patch of woods, probably also part of Eriksson’s property. Then he saw the ditch in front of him. Some rough planks seemed to have fallen into it. As he came closer, the rooks got louder, then they rose up and flew off. Wallander looked down into the ditch.

  He gave a start and took a step back. Instantly he felt sick. Later he would say that it was one of the worst things he had ever seen. And in his years as a policeman he’d encountered plenty of things he would have preferred not to see. As he stood there with the rain soaking him to the skin, he couldn’t tell at first what he was looking at. Something alien and unreal lay in front of him. Something he could never have imagined. The only thing that was completely clear was that there was a dead body in the ditch.

  He squatted down, forcing himself not to look away. T
he ditch was at least two metres deep. A number of sharp stakes were fixed in the bottom of it. On these stakes hung a man. The spearlike tips of the stakes had pierced the body in several places. The man lay prostrate, suspended on them. The rooks had attacked the back of his neck. Wallander stood up, his knees shaking. Somewhere in the distance he could hear cars approaching.

  He looked down again. The stakes seemed to be made of bamboo, like thick fishing rods, with their tips sharpened to points. He looked at the planks that had fallen into the ditch. Since the path continued on the other side, they must have served as a bridge. Why did they break? They were thick boards that should withstand a heavy load, and the ditch was no more than two metres wide.

  When he heard a dog barking he turned and walked back to the farmhouse. Now he really felt sick. And he was scared too. It was one thing to discover someone murdered. But the way this had been done . . .

  Someone had planted sharpened bamboo stakes in the ditch. To impale a man. He stopped on the path to catch his breath. Images from the summer raced through his mind. Was it starting all over again? Were there no limits to what could happen in this country?

  He kept walking. Two officers with dogs were waiting outside the house. He could see Höglund and Hansson there too. When he reached the end of the path and walked into the courtyard, they could see at once that something had happened.

  Wallander wiped the rain off his face and told them. He knew that his voice was unsteady. He turned and pointed down towards the flock of rooks, which had returned as soon as he left the ditch.

  “He’s lying down there,” he said. “He’s dead. It’s a murder. Get a full team out here.”

  They waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t have anything to say.

  CHAPTER 6

  By nightfall on Thursday, 29 September, the police had put a canopy over the ditch where the body of Holger Eriksson hung impaled on nine solid bamboo poles. They had shovelled out the mud and blood at the bottom of the ditch. The macabre work and the relentless rain made the murder scene one of the most depressing and disgusting Wallander and his colleagues had ever witnessed. The clay stuck to their gumboots, they tripped over electrical cables winding through the mud, and the harsh light from the floodlights they had rigged up intensified the surreal impression. Sven Tyrén had come back and identified the man impaled on the stakes. It was Eriksson, all right, Tyrén told them. No doubt about it. The search for the missing man had ended even before it had begun. Tyrén remained unusually composed, as though not fully comprehending what he saw before him. He paced restlessly outside the cordon for several hours without saying a word, and then suddenly he was gone.