The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

“And he spoke to you about this?”

  “He stood up for his beliefs.”

  “Was he in contact with any right-wing organisation?”

  “How should I know?”

  “If you know one thing, you might know something else. Answer the question!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No neo-Nazis?”

  “No idea.”

  “Was he one himself?”

  “I don’t know anything about them. All I know is that he didn’t see any difference between Social Democrats and communists. The People’s Party was probably the most radical one he would accept.”

  Wallander considered the picture of Eriksson that Tyren had created. Poet and ultra-conservative, bird-watcher and advocate of capital punishment.

  “Did he tell you that he had any enemies?”

  “You’ve asked me that already.”

  “I know. I’m asking you again.”

  “He never came right out and said so. But he did lock his doors at night.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he had enemies.”

  “But you don’t know of any?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say why he might have enemies?”

  “He never said he had any. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  Wallander raised a hand in admonition.

  “If I feel like it I can ask you the same question every day for the next five years. No enemies? But he locked his doors at night?”

  “Right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me. How else would I know? I didn’t drive out there and try his door at night! In Sweden today you can’t trust anybody. That’s what he said.”

  Wallander decided to end the interview for now. He’d get back to him soon enough. He had a feeling that Tyren knew more than he was telling him, but he wanted to proceed cautiously. He didn’t want to scare Tyren off completely.

  “That’ll be all for now,” Wallander said.

  “For now? Does that mean I have to come back here again? When am I going to have time to do my job?”

  “We’ll be in touch. Thanks for coming,” Wallander said, getting to his feet. He extended his hand.

  The courtesy surprised Tyren. He had a powerful handshake, Wallander thought.

  “I think you can find your way out.”

  After Tyren left, Wallander called Hansson. He answered him immediately.

  “Sven Tyren,” he said. “The truck driver. The one you thought had been mixed up in an assault case. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “See what you can find out about him.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “No more than anything else, but no less either.”

  Hansson said that he’d take care of it.

  It was 10 a.m. Wallander got some coffee, and wrote a report of his conversation with Tyren. The next time the investigative team met, they would discuss it in detail. Wallander was convinced it was important.

  When he closed his notebook, he discovered the note that he kept forgetting to return to Svedberg. He’d do so now, before he got involved in anything else. He took the sheet of paper and left the office, but once he was out in the hall he heard his telephone ring. He hesitated for a second, then went back and picked it up.

  It was Gertrud. She was crying.

  “You have to come right away,” she said.

  Wallander felt a cold chill.

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “Your father is dead. He’s lying in his studio in the middle of his paintings.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Kurt Wallander’s father was buried in the churchyard in Ystad on 11 October. It was a day of heavy downpours and blustery wind, with the sun showing through the clouds from time to time. Wallander felt unable to come to terms with what had happened. A sense of denial had been with him from the moment he had hung up the phone. It was unthinkable that his father could die. Not now, just after their trip to Rome. Not when they had recaptured the closeness they had lost so many years before.

  Wallander had left the police station without speaking to anyone, convinced that Gertrud was mistaken. He arrived in Loderup and ran to the studio. His father lay prone across the painting he had been working on. He had shut his eyes and held on tight to the paintbrush he had used to add tiny dabs of white to the grouse’s plumage. His father had been finishing the painting he was working on the day before, when they’d walked along the beach at Sandhammaren. Death had come suddenly.

  Later, after Gertrud had calmed down enough to talk coherently, she told him that his father had eaten his breakfast as usual. Everything was normal. At 6.30 a.m. he went out to his studio. When he didn’t come back to the kitchen at 10 a.m. for coffee, she’d gone out to remind him. By then he was already dead. It occurred to Wallander that no matter when death comes, it disrupts everything. Death always arrives at the wrong time — something is left undone.

  They waited for the ambulance. Gertrud stood and held his arm tight. Wallander felt completely empty inside. He didn’t feel anything at all, other than a vague sense that it was unfair. He couldn’t feel sorry for his father.

  Wallander knew the ambulance driver. His name was Prytz and he understood at once that it was Wallander’s father they were collecting.

  “He wasn’t sick,” Wallander said. “Yesterday we were out walking on the beach. He complained about feeling bad, that’s all.”

  “It was probably a stroke,” Prytz said, with compassion in his voice. “That’s what it looks like.”

  That was also what the doctor told Wallander later. It had happened very quickly. His father would have had no idea he was dying. A blood vessel had burst in his brain. For Gertrud the sorrow and the shock were mixed with relief that it had happened so quickly; that he was spared a slow decline into a no-man’s-land of confusion.

  Wallander was thinking completely different thoughts. His father had been alone when he died. No-one should be alone in their final moments. He felt guilty that he hadn’t responded to his father’s complaint. It was something that might indicate an impending heart attack or stroke. But even worse was that it had happened now. Even though his father had been 80, it was too soon. It should have happened later. Not now. Not like this. Wallander had tried to shake life back into his father. But there was nothing he could do. The grouse would never be finished.

  In the midst of the chaos that death always creates, Wallander retained his ability to act calmly and rationally. Gertrud went in the ambulance. Wallander stood there in the studio, engulfed in the silence and the smell of turpentine, and wept to think how his father would have hated to leave the grouse unfinished. As a gesture towards the invisible border between life and death, Wallander took the paintbrush and filled in the two white points that were still missing in the grouse’s plumage. It was the first time in his life that he had touched any of his father’s paintings with a brush. Then he cleaned the brush and put it with the others in an old jam jar.

  He went back to the house and called Ebba. She was upset and sad, and Wallander found that he could hardly speak. With difficulty, he asked her to tell the others what had happened. They should go on without him. All they had to do was keep him informed if anything important happened in the investigation. He wouldn’t be coming back to work that day. He didn’t know what he was going to do tomorrow.

  Next he called his sister Kristina and told her the news. They talked for a long time. It seemed as though she had prepared already herself for the possibility that their father might die suddenly. She said she would help him get hold of Linda, since he didn’t have the number of the restaurant where she worked.

  Finally he called Mona at the beauty shop in Malmo where she worked. She was surprised to hear from him, at first thinking that something had happened to Linda. When Wallander told her that it was his father who had died, he could hear that she was slightly relieved. That made him angry, but he didn’t say anything. He
knew that Mona and his father had got along well. It was only natural that she would be worried about Linda. He remembered the morning that the Estonia had sunk.

  “I know what you’re going through,” she said. “You’ve been afraid of this moment your whole life.”

  “We had so much to talk about,” he replied. “We were finally seeing eye to eye. And now it’s too late.”

  “It’s always too late,” she said.

  She promised to come to the funeral and help out if he needed her. After they hung up he felt a lingering emptiness. He dialled Baiba’s number in Riga, but she didn’t answer. He called back again and again, but she wasn’t home.

  He went back out to the studio, and sat down on the old rickety toboggan where his father had sat, a coffee cup always in his hand. It was raining again. Wallander felt that he was holding his own fear of death in his hands. The studio had become a crypt. He got up quickly and went back to the kitchen. The phone rang. It was Linda, and she was crying. Wallander started crying too. She wanted to come as soon as possible. Wallander asked if he should call her employer and talk to him, but Linda had already arranged to take time off. She would take a bus to Arlanda and try to get on a plane that afternoon. He offered to pick her up from the airport, but she told him to stay with Gertrud. She would get to Ystad and out to Loderup on her own.

  That evening they gathered in the house in Loderup. Gertrud was very calm. They began to discuss the funeral arrangements. Wallander doubted that his father would have wanted a religious ceremony, but he let Gertrud decide. She was his widow, after all.

  “He never talked about death,” she said. “I can’t tell you if he was afraid of it or not. He didn’t talk about where he wanted to be buried. But I want to have a vicar.”

  They agreed that it would be at the churchyard in Ystad. A simple funeral. His father hadn’t had a lot of friends. Linda said she would read a poem, Wallander agreed that he wouldn’t give a eulogy, and they chose “Wondrous Is the Earth” as the hymn they would sing.

  Kristina arrived the next day. She stayed with Gertrud, and Linda stayed with Wallander. It was a time in which death brought them together. Kristina said that now that their father had passed on, the two of them were next in line. Wallander noticed the whole time that his fear of death was growing, but he didn’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not to Linda, not even to his sister. Maybe he could with Baiba sometime. She had reacted with deep feeling when he finally managed to get hold of her and tell her what had happened. They talked for almost an hour. She told him about her feelings when her own father had passed away ten years before, and she also talked about how she had felt when her husband Karlis was murdered. Afterwards Wallander felt comforted. She was there and she wasn’t going away.

  The day the obituary was printed in Ystad’s Allehanda, Sten Widen called from his farm outside Skurup. It had been a few years since Wallander last talked to him. Once they had been close friends. They had shared an interest in opera and had high hopes for the future together. Widen had a beautiful voice, and Wallander would be his impresario. But everything changed when Widen’s father died suddenly and he was forced to take over the farm, where they trained race-horses. Wallander became a policeman, and gradually they had drifted apart. After their conversation, Wallander wondered whether Widen had ever even met his father. But he was grateful that he had called. Someone outside the immediate family hadn’t forgotten him.

  In the midst of all this, Wallander had to force himself to continue to be a policeman. The day after his father died, Tuesday, 4 October, he had returned to the police station, after spending a sleepless night in the flat. Linda slept in her old room. Mona had also come to visit the night before with supper, trying to take their minds off the old man’s death for a while. For the first time since their devastating divorce, Wallander felt that his marriage was finally over. Somehow his father’s death had shown him that the life he had led with Mona was over for good.

  Despite sleeping badly the whole week before the funeral, he gave his colleagues the impression that he was in command of the situation. They had expressed their condolences and he had thanked them. When Chief Holgersson took him aside in the hall and suggested that he take some time off, he turned down her offer: his grief eased while he was working.

  The investigation moved slowly during that week before the funeral. The other case they were concentrating on, always overshadowed by the murder of Eriksson, was Runfeldt’s disappearance. He had vanished without trace. None of the detectives believed that there was a normal explanation. On the other hand, they hadn’t been able to find any connection between Eriksson and Runfeldt. The only thing that seemed perfectly clear about Runfeldt was that his great passion in life was orchids.

  “We ought to take a look at his wife’s death,” Wallander said at one of the investigative team’s meetings. Hoglund said she would take care of it.

  “How about the mail-order company in Boras?” Wallander asked later. “What’s happening with that? What do our colleagues there say?”

  “They got onto it right away,” Svedberg said. “It obviously wasn’t the first time the company was involved in illegal importing of bugging devices. According to the Boras police, the company would pop up and then vanish, only to reappear with a new name and address. Sometimes even with different owners. They’ve already made some progress there. We’re waiting for a written report.”

  “The most important thing is to find out if Runfeldt had ever bought anything else from them,” Wallander said. “The rest is not our immediate concern.”

  “Their list of customers is incomplete, to say the least. But the Boras police have found prohibited and highly sophisticated equipment at their offices. It sounds as though Runfeldt could practically be a spy.”

  Wallander pondered this for a moment.

  “Why not?” he said finally. “We can’t rule anything out. He must have had some reason for buying the stuff.”

  They had searched for Harald Berggren but hadn’t found the slightest trace of him. The museum in Stockholm confirmed that the shrunken head was definitely human, and probably came from the Congo. So far so good. But who was this Berggren? They had already spoken with people who had known Eriksson during different periods of his life, but none had ever heard him speak of Berggren. No-one had heard that he’d had contact with the underworld in which mercenaries moved like wary rats and wrote their contracts with messengers of the Devil, either. It was Wallander who came up with the idea that got the investigation moving again.

  “There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Eriksson,” he said. “Particularly the fact that there isn’t a woman in his life. Not anywhere, not ever. That made me start to wonder whether there was a homosexual relationship between Eriksson and this Harald Berggren. There are almost no women in Berggren’s diary either.”

  There was silence in the conference room. No-one seemed to have considered this possibility.

  “It sounds a little strange that homosexual men would choose such a macho occupation as being soldiers,” Hoglund said.

  “Not at all,” Wallander replied. “It’s not unusual for gay men to become soldiers. They do it to hide their preference. Or just to be around other men.”

  Martinsson studied the photograph of the three men.

  “I get a feeling you might be right,” he said. “These men have something feminine about them.”

  “Like what?” Hoglund asked.

  “I don’t know,” Martinsson said. “Maybe the way they’re leaning against the termite mound. Or is their hair?”

  “It doesn’t do us any good to sit here guessing,” Wallander interrupted. “I’m only pointing out one more possibility. We should keep it in mind, just like everything else.”

  “In other words, we’re looking for a gay mercenary,” Martinsson said dourly. “Where would we find one of those?”

  “That’s not exactly what we’re doing,” Wallander said. “But we have to weigh this possibility alongside
the rest of the material.”

  “Nobody I spoke to so much as intimated that Eriksson might have been gay,” said Hansson, who had been sitting in silence.

  “It’s not something people talk about openly,” Wallander said. “At least not the older generation. If Eriksson was gay, then he can remember the time when blackmail was used against people of that persuasion in this country.”

  “So you mean we have to start asking people if Eriksson may have been homosexual?” Svedberg asked.

  “You have to decide how you want to proceed,” Wallander said. “I don’t even know if this is the right track, but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility.”

  It was as if they all suddenly understood that there wasn’t anything simple or easily understandable about the murder of Holger Eriksson. They were dealing with one — or maybe more — cunning killers, and it was possible that the motive for the murder lay hidden in a past well shielded from view.

  They continued with the painstaking work. They recorded everything they knew about Eriksson’s life. Svedberg spent long evenings reading carefully through the books of poetry Eriksson had published. In the end he thought he would go mad if he read any more about the spiritual complexities that existed in the world of birds, but he’d gained no insight into Eriksson.

  Martinsson took his daughter Terese to Falsterbo Point one windy afternoon and walked around talking to birdwatchers standing straining their necks and staring up at the grey clouds. The only thing he gained — apart from time well-spent with his daughter, who wanted to become a field biologist — was that on the night Eriksson was murdered huge flocks of red-winged blackbirds had left Sweden. Martinsson conferred with Svedberg, who claimed that there were no poems about red-winged blackbirds in any of the books.

  “On the other hand, there are three long poems about the single snipe,” said Svedberg hesitantly. “Is there such a thing as a double snipe?”

  Martinsson didn’t know. The investigation continued.

  The day of the funeral arrived. They were all meeting at the cemetery. A few days before, Wallander had learned to his surprise that a certain female vicar would officiate. He had met her on a memorable occasion in the summer. Afterwards he was glad that she was the one; her words were simple, and never sentimental. The day before, she had called to ask whether his father had been religious. Wallander said no. Instead, he told her about his paintings, and their week in Rome. The funeral was not as unbearable as Wallander had feared. The casket was made of dark wood with a simple decoration of roses. Linda was the one who showed her emotions most openly. No-one doubted that her sorrow was genuine. She was probably the one who would miss him the most.