The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “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 Tyren.

  “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,” Tyren 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,” Tyren 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 Tyren not to tell the truth.

  “Where are you?” Wallander asked.

  “I’m on the road from Malmo. 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,” Tyren 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 Tyren’s concern was warranted. He had already 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 Tyren.

  “He’s not here,” he said.

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

  “I have nothing more to say,” said Tyren 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 Tyren’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 Tyren. “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?”

  Tyren 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?”

  Tyren 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,” Tyren said.

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

  Sven Tyren 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 Vastra Vallgatan either.

  “Tha
t’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. The 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 Hoglund 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 Tyren had come back and identified the man impaled on the stakes. It was Eriksson, all right, Tyren told them. No doubt about it. The search for the missing man had ended even before it had begun. Tyren 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.

  Down in the ditch Wallander felt like a rat drowning in a trap. His colleagues were having a hard time. Both Svedberg and Hansson had left the ditch several times because of acute nausea. But Hoglund, the person he most wanted to send home early, appeared unperturbed.

  Chief Holgersson had come out as soon as the discovery had been reported. She organised the murder scene so that people wouldn’t slip and fall on top of each other, but a young police trainee stumbled in the clay and fell into the ditch, injuring his hand on one of the stakes. The wound was patched up by a doctor who was trying to work out how to remove the corpse. Wallander happened to see the trainee slip and got a glimpse of what must have happened when Eriksson fell.

  Almost the first thing he had done with Nyberg, their forensic technician, was examine the rough planks. Tyren had confirmed that they had formed a bridge. Eriksson had placed them there. He told them that he’d once been invited to the tower. Eriksson had been a passionate bird-watcher. It wasn’t a hunting tower, but a viewing tower. The missing binoculars were hanging around Eriksson’s neck. It took Nyberg only a few minutes to determine that the planks had been sawed through. After hearing this, Wallander climbed up out of the ditch and went off to think. He tried to assemble the sequence of events. When Nyberg discovered that the binoculars had night vision, he began to have some idea. At the same time he found it difficult to accept his interpretation. If he was right, then they were dealing with a murder that had been planned and prepared with such ghastly and cruel perfection as to be almost unbelievable.

  Late in the evening they started removing Eriksson’s corpse from the ditch. Along with the doctor and Chief Holgersson, they had to decide whether to dig out the bamboo poles, saw them off, or choose the gruesome option of hoisting the body free from the stakes. On Wallander’s recommendation they chose the last option. They needed to see the murder scene exactly as it was before Eriksson stepped on the planks and fell to his death. Wallander felt compelled to take part in this grisly final act as Eriksson was lifted upwards and then taken away. It was past midnight when they finished; the rain had eased but showed no sign of stopping, and all that could be heard was a generator and the sound of gumboots squelching through the mud.

  There was a momentary lull. Somebody had brought coffee. Weary faces glowed eerily in the white light. Wallander thought he ought to formulate an overview. What had actually happened? How were they going to proceed? Everyone was exhausted now, anxious, soaking wet, and hungry.

  Martinsson stood with a phone pressed to his ear. Wallander wondered if he was talking to his wife, who often worried about him. But when he hung up he told them that a meteorologist had forecast that the rain would stop during the night. Wallander decided that the best thing to do was wait until dawn. They hadn’t yet begun to hunt for the killer; they were still looking for leads to give them a starting point. The dog units hadn’t picked up any scents. Wallander and Nyberg had been up in the tower but had found no clues. Wallander turned to Chief Holgersson.

  “We’re getting nowhere,” he said. “I suggest we meet again at dawn. The best thing we can
do now is rest.”

  No-one had any objection. They all wanted to go home. All except Sven Nyberg, of course. Wallander knew he’d want to stay. He’d keep at it through the night, and he’d be there when they returned. As the others started to head up towards the cars by the farmhouse, Wallander hung back.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t think anything,” Nyberg said. “Except that I’ve never in my life seen anything remotely like this.”

  They stood looking into the ditch. Plastic sheeting had been spread across it.

  “What exactly are we looking at?” asked Wallander.

  “A copy of an Asian trap for large predators,” Nyberg said, “which is also used in wars. They call them pungee stakes.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “Bamboo doesn’t grow this thick in Sweden,” Nyberg went on. “We import it to use for fishing rods and furniture.”

  “Besides, there aren’t any large predators in Skane,” Wallander said thoughtfully. “And we’re not at war. So what exactly are we looking at?”

  “Something that doesn’t belong here,” Nyberg said. “Something that doesn’t fit. Something that gives me the creeps.”

  Wallander watched him attentively. Nyberg was seldom this loquacious. His expression of both personal revulsion and fear was entirely out of character.

  “Don’t work too late,” Wallander said as he left, but there was no answer.

  Wallander climbed over the barricade, nodded to the officers who would be guarding the scene of the crime overnight, and continued up to the farmhouse. Lisa Holgersson had stopped halfway up the path to wait for him. She had a torch in her hand.

  “We’ve got reporters up there,” she said. “What are we going to tell them?”

  “Not much,” Wallander said.

  “We can’t even give them Eriksson’s name?” she said.

  Wallander pondered this before he replied.

  “I think we can. I’ll assume that the oil-truck driver knows what he’s talking about. He told me Eriksson had no relatives. If we don’t have anyone to inform of his death, we might as well release his name. It might help us.”