The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  At the same time he knew that the picture he was drawing was incomplete. Among young people the interest in police jobs had risen sharply in the past few years, and the increase seemed to be steady.

  Back in the early 1990s he had often sat on Rydberg’s balcony on warm, summer evenings and talked of the future. They continued their discussions even during Rydberg’s illness and his last days. They never reached any conclusions, but one thing they did agree on was that police work ultimately had to do with being able to decipher the signs of the times. To understand change and interpret trends in society. And for this reason perhaps the younger generation of police officers were better equipped to deal with modern society.

  Now Wallander knew that he had been mistaken about one essential fact. It was no harder being a police officer today than it was in the past. It was harder for him, but that was not the same thing.

  Wallander’s thoughts were interrupted when he heard steps in the hall. He stood up and greeted Bo Runfeldt. He was a tall, well-built man of about 27 or 28. He had a strong handshake. Wallander invited him to sit down, realising that as usual he had forgotten to bring his notebook. It was doubtful whether he even had a pen. He considered going out to the front desk to borrow some from Björk’s son, but decided against it. He would have to rely on his memory. His carelessness was inexcusable, and it annoyed him.

  “Let me start by offering my condolences,” Wallander began.

  Bo Runfeldt nodded. He didn’t say anything. His eyes were an intense blue, his gaze rather squinting. Wallander wondered if he was short-sighted.

  “I know you’ve had a long conversation with my colleague, Inspector Hansson,” Wallander continued. “But I need to ask you a few questions myself.”

  Runfeldt remained silent behind his piercing gaze.

  “You live in Arvika,” said Wallander. “And you’re an accountant.”

  “I work for Price Waterhouse,” said Runfeldt. His voice indicated a person who was used to expressing himself.

  “That doesn’t sound Swedish.”

  “It’s not. Price Waterhouse is one of the world’s largest accounting firms. It’s easier to list the countries where we don’t do business than where we do.”

  “But you work in Sweden?”

  “Not all the time. I often have assignments in Africa and Asia.”

  “Do they need accountants from Sweden?”

  “Not just from Sweden, but from Price Waterhouse. We audit many relief projects. To ensure the money has ended up where it’s supposed to.”

  “And does it?”

  “Not always. Is this really relevant to what happened to my father?”

  Wallander could see that Bo Runfeldt was finding it difficult to hide his feeling that talking to a policeman was beneath his dignity. Under normal circumstances Wallander would have reacted angrily, but something made him hold back. He wondered fleetingly whether it was because he had inherited the submissiveness that his father had so often exhibited in his life, especially towards the men who had come in their shiny American cars to buy his paintings. Maybe that was his inheritance: a feeling of inferiority.

  He regarded the man with the blue eyes.

  “Your father was murdered,” he said. “Right now I’m the one who decides which questions are relevant.”

  Bo Runfeldt shrugged. “I have to admit that I don’t know much about police work.”

  “I spoke to your sister earlier,” Wallander continued. “One question I asked her may have great significance, and I’m going to ask you too. Did you know that your father, besides being a florist, worked as a private detective?”

  Runfeldt burst out laughing.

  “That’s got to be the most idiotic thing I’ve heard in a long time,” he said.

  “Idiotic or not, it’s true.”

  “A private detective?”

  “Private investigator, if you prefer. He had an office. He took on various assignments. He’d been doing it for at least ten years.”

  Runfeldt saw that Wallander was serious. His surprise was genuine.

  “He must have started his business about the same time that your mother died.”

  Wallander noticed an almost imperceptible shift in his features, as though he had encroached on an area that he really should have kept out of. It was the same reaction that the daughter had had.

  “You knew that your father was due to go to Nairobi,” he continued. “When one of my colleagues spoke to you, you seemed incredulous that he hadn’t turned up at Kastrup Airport.”

  “I talked to him the day before.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “The same as usual. He talked about his trip.”

  “He didn’t seem apprehensive?”

  “No.”

  “You must have been worried about his disappearance. Can you come up with any explanation for why he would miss his trip? Or mislead you?”

  “There’s no reasonable explanation for it.”

  “It looks as if he packed his suitcase and left the flat. That’s where the trail ends.”

  “Someone must have picked him up.”

  Wallander paused before asking the next question.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did your father have any enemies?”

  “None that I know of. Not any more.”

  “What do you mean by that? Not any more?”

  “Exactly what I said. I don’t think he’s had any enemies for a long time.”

  “Could you explain what you mean?”

  Runfeldt took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Wallander noticed that his hand was shaking slightly.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all.”

  Wallander waited. He knew there would be more. He also had a feeling that he was closing in on something important.

  “I don’t know if my father had any enemies,” he said. “But I do know there’s one person who had reason to hate him.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  Runfeldt waited for Wallander to ask him a question. But it didn’t come. He kept on waiting.

  “My father sincerely loved orchids,” Runfeldt said. “He was a knowledgeable man, a self-taught botanist. But he was also something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He was a brutal man. He abused my mother throughout their marriage. Sometimes so badly that she had to be hospitalised. We tried to get her to leave him, but she wouldn’t. He beat her. Afterwards he would be contrite, and she would give in. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end. The brutality didn’t stop until she drowned.”

  “As I understand it, she fell through a hole in the ice?”

  “That’s as much as I know, that’s what my father told us.”

  “You don’t sound totally convinced.”

  Runfeldt stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray.

  “Maybe she went out there beforehand and sawed a hole in the ice. Maybe she decided to put an end to it all.”

  “Is that a possibility?”

  “She talked about committing suicide. Not often; a few times during the last years of her life. But we didn’t believe her. People usually don’t. Suicides are fundamentally inexplicable to those who should have paid attention and understood what was happening.”

  Wallander thought about the pungee pit. The partially sawed-through planks. Gösta Runfeldt had been a brutal man. He had abused his wife. He tried to measure the significance of what Bo Runfeldt was telling him.

  “I don’t grieve for my father,” Runfeldt continued. “I don’t think my sister does either. He was a cruel man. He tortured the life out of our mother.”

  “He was never cruel towards the two of you?”

  “Never. Only towards her.”

  “Why did he mistreat her?”

  “I don’t know. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was a monster.”

  Wallander thought for a moment.
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  “Has it ever crossed your mind that your father might have killed your mother? That it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Many times. But there is no way to prove it. There were no witnesses. They were alone on the ice on that winter day.”

  “What’s the name of the lake?”

  “Stång Lake. It’s not far from Älmhult. In southern Småland.”

  Wallander thought for a moment. Did he really have any other questions? It felt as if the investigation had taken a stranglehold on itself. There ought to be plenty of questions. And there were. But there was no-one to ask.

  “Does the name Harald Berggren mean anything to you?”

  Runfeldt gave it careful thought before he answered.

  “No. Nothing. But I could be mistaken. It’s a common name.”

  “Has your father ever had contact with mercenaries?”

  “Not as far as I know. But I remember that he often talked about the Foreign Legion when I was a child. Never to my sister, only to me.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Adventure stories. Maybe joining the Foreign Legion was some kind of teenage dream he’d had. But I’m pretty sure that he never had anything to do with them. Or with mercenaries.”

  “Holger Eriksson? Have you ever heard that name?”

  “The man who was murdered the week before my father? I saw it in the newspapers. As far as I know, my father never had anything to do with him. I could be wrong, of course. We didn’t keep in close contact.”

  “How long are you staying in Ystad?”

  “The funeral will be as soon as we can make the necessary arrangements. We have to decide what to do with the shop.”

  “It’s very possible that you’ll hear from me again,” Wallander said, getting to his feet.

  He left the hotel. He was hungry. The wind tugged and pulled at his clothes. He stood in the shelter of a building and tried to decide what to do. He should eat, he knew that, but he also knew that he had to sit down soon and try to collect his thoughts. He was still looking for the point where the lives of Eriksson and Runfeldt intersected. It’s there somewhere, in the dim background, he told himself. Maybe I’ve even seen it already, or walked past it without seeing.

  He got his car and drove over to the station. On the way he called Höglund on her mobile phone. She told him that they were still going through the office, but they had sent Nyberg home because his foot was hurting badly.

  “I’m on my way to the station. I’ve just had an interesting conversation with Runfeldt’s son,” Wallander said. “I need some time to go over it.”

  “It’s not enough for us to shuffle our papers,” Höglund replied. “We also need someone to do the thinking.”

  He wasn’t sure if she meant this last remark to be sarcastic, but he pushed the thought aside.

  Hansson was sitting in his office going through the reports that were starting to pile up. Wallander stood in the door. He had a coffee cup in his hand.

  “Where are the pathologists’ reports?” he asked. “They must have come in by now. At least the one on Holger Eriksson.”

  “It’s probably in Martinsson’s office. I seem to recall he mentioned something about it.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “He went home. He copied a file to a disk and was going to keep working on it at home.”

  “Is that really allowed?” Wallander wondered absentmindedly. “Taking investigative material home?”

  “I don’t know,” Hansson replied. “For me, it’s never come up. I don’t even have a computer at home. But maybe that’s a breach of regulations these days.”

  “What’s a breach of regulations?”

  “Not having a computer at home.”

  “In that case, we’re both guilty,” Wallander said. “I’d like to see those reports early tomorrow morning.”

  “How did it go with Bo Runfeldt?”

  “I have to write up my notes tonight, but he said some things that may prove important. And now we know for sure that Gösta Runfeldt spent some of his time working as a private detective.”

  “Svedberg called in. He told me.”

  Wallander took his mobile phone out of his pocket.

  “What did we do before we had these things?” he asked. “I can hardly remember.”

  “We did exactly the same thing,” Hansson replied. “But it took longer. We searched for phone boxes. We spent a lot more time in our cars. But we did exactly the same things that we do now.”

  Wallander walked down the hall to his office, nodding to a few officers as they came out of the canteen. He went into his office and sat down. More than ten minutes passed before he pulled over an unused notebook.

  It took him two hours to put together a thorough summary of the two murders. He had been trying to steer two vessels at the same time, while looking for the point of contact that he knew had to exist. After 11 p.m. he threw down his pen and leaned back in his chair. He had reached a point where he could see nothing more. But he was positive. The contact was there. They just hadn’t found it yet.

  There was something else. Time after time he came back to Höglund’s observation. There’s something blatant about the modus operandi. Both in terms of Eriksson’s death, impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes, and Runfeldt, who was strangled and left tied to a tree. I see something, he thought, I just haven’t managed to see through it. It was almost midnight when he turned off the light in his office. He stood there in the dark. It was still just a hunch, a vague fear deep inside his brain.

  The killer would strike again. He seemed to have detected a signal as he worked at his desk. There was something incomplete about everything that had happened so far. What it was, he didn’t know.

  But still he was sure.

  CHAPTER 18

  She waited until 2.30 a.m. From experience she knew that was when the fatigue would creep up on her. She thought back on all the nights when she had been at work. That’s how it always was. The greatest danger of dozing off was between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

  She had been waiting in the linen-supply room since 9 p.m. Just as on her first visit, she had walked right in through the main entrance of the hospital. No-one had noticed her. A nurse in a hurry. No-one had noticed her because there was nothing unusual about her. She had considered disguising herself, maybe changing her hair. But that would have been an unnecessary caution. She’d had plenty of time to think as she’d sat in the linen room, the scent of newly washed and ironed sheets reminding her of childhood. She sat there in the dark until after midnight, and then she took out her torch, the one she always used at work, and read the last letter her mother had written to her. It was unfinished. But it was in this letter that her mother had begun to write about herself. About the events that lay behind her attempt to take her life. She could see that her mother had never got over her bitterness. I wander around the world like a ship without a captain, she wrote, forced to atone for someone else’s guilt. I thought that age would create enough distance, that the memories would grow dim, fade, and maybe finally vanish altogether. But now I see that won’t happen. Only with death can I put an end to it. And since I don’t want to die, not yet, I choose to remember.

  The letter was dated the day before her mother had moved in with the French nuns, the day before shadows had detached themselves from the darkness and murdered her.

  After she had read the letter she had turned off the torch. Everything had grown quiet. Someone had walked past in the hall only twice. The linen room was located in a wing that was only partly in use.

  She had had plenty of time to think. There were now three free days entered in her timetable. She had some time and she was going to use it. Until now everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Women only made mistakes when they tried to think like men. She had known that for a long time, and in her view she had already proved it.

  But there was something that bothered her, something that had thrown her timetable out of kilter. She had followed ever
ything that had been written in the newspapers closely. She listened to the news on the radio and watched it on various TV channels. It was clear that the police didn’t understand a thing. And that had been her intention, not to leave any traces, to lead the dogs away from the trails they should be following. But now she was impatient with all this incompetence. The police were never going to solve the crimes. She was adding riddles to the story. In their minds the police would be looking for a male killer. She didn’t want it to be that way any longer.

  She sat in the dark closet and devised a plan. She would make some minor changes. Nothing that would reveal her timetable, of course. But she would give the riddle a face.

  At 2.30 a.m. she left the linen closet. The hall was deserted. She straightened her white uniform and headed for the stairs up to the maternity ward. She knew that there were usually only four people on duty. She had been there in the daytime, asking about a woman that she knew had already gone home with her baby. Over the nurse’s shoulder she could see in the log that all the rooms were occupied. She couldn’t imagine why women had babies at this time of year, when autumn was turning to winter. But then she knew that few women chose when to have their children, even now.

  When she reached the glass doors of the maternity ward, she stopped and took a careful look at the nurses’ station. She held the door slightly ajar and heard no voices. That meant the midwives and nurses were busy. It would take her less than 15 seconds to reach the room of the woman she intended to visit. She probably wouldn’t run into anybody, but she had to be careful. She pulled the glove out of her pocket. She had sewn it herself and filled the fingers with lead, shaped to follow the contours of her knuckles. She put it on her right hand, opened the door, and quickly entered the ward. The nurses’ station was empty; there was a radio playing somewhere. She walked rapidly and soundlessly to the room, slipped inside and closed the door behind her.