The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “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. Gosta 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.

  “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?”

  “Stang Lake. It’s not far from Almhult. In southern Smaland.”

  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 Hoglund 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,” Hoglund 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 Gosta 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 Hoglund’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 everything 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.

  Taking off her glove, she approached the woman lying in the bed; she was awake. She stuffed the glove in her pocket, the same pocket where she had put the letter from her mother. She sat down on the edge of the bed. The woman was very pale, and her belly pushed up the sheet. She took the woman’s hand.

  “Have you decided?” she asked her.

  The woman nodded. It didn’t surprise her, and yet she felt a sort of triumph. Even the women who were most cowed could be turned towards life again.

  “Eugen Blomberg,” the woman said. “He lives in Lund. He’s a researcher at the university. I don’t know any better way to describe what he does.”

  She patted the woman’s hand.

  “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “I hate that man,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the woman sitting on the edge of the bed. “You hate him and you have every right to.”

  “I would have killed him if I could.”

  “I know. But you can’t. Think of your baby instead.”

  She leaned forward and stroked the woman’s cheek. Then she got up and put on her glove. She had been in the room no more than two minutes. Carefully she pushed open the door. No-one was around. She walked back towards the exit.

  Just as she was passing the station a woman came out. It was bad luck. The woman stared at her. It was an older woman, presumably one of the midwives.

  She kept walking towards the exit doors. The woman yelled and started running after her. She walked faster. But the woman grabbed her left arm and asked who she was and what she was doing there. It was a shame that this woman had to interfere, she thought. She spun around and hit her with the glove. She didn’t want to hurt her badly, and so she took care not to hit her on the temple, which could be fatal. She struck her hard on one cheek — hard enough to knock her out. The woman groaned and fell to the floor.

  She turned around to leave, but felt two hands gripping her leg. When she looked back she realised she hadn’t struck hard enough. At the same time she heard a door open somewhere in the distance. She was about to lose control of the situation. She yanked her leg away and bent down to deliver another blow. The woman scratched her in the face. Now she struck without worrying if it was too hard or not, right in the temple. The woman sank to the floor.

  She fled through the glass doors, her cheek stinging where the midwife’s nails had torn her skin. No-one called after her. She wiped her face, and her white sleeve showed streaks of blood. She stuffed the glove in her pocket and took off her clogs so she could run faster. She wondered whether the hospital had an internal alarm system. But she got out without being caught. When she reached her car and looked at her face in the rear-view mirror, she saw that she had only a few scratches.

  Things hadn’t gone the way she had planned. But you couldn’t always expect them to. What was important was that she had succeeded in persuading the woman to reveal the name of the man who had caused her so much grief.

  Eugen Blomberg.

  She still had 48 hours to begin her investigation and draw up a plan and a timetable. She was in no hurry. It would take as long as necessary. She didn’t think she’d need more than a week.

  The oven was empty. It was waiting.

  Just after 8 a.m. on Thursday morning the investigative team was assembled in the conference room. Wallander had asked Akeson to attend. As he was about to begin, he noticed someone was missing.

  “Where’s Svedberg? Didn’t he come in today?”

  “He’s been in, but he left again,” Martinsson said. “Evidently there was an assa
ult up at the hospital last night. He said he’d probably be back soon.”

  A vague memory flitted through Wallander’s head, but he couldn’t pin it down. Something to do with Svedberg and the hospital.

  “This brings the need for additional personnel to a head,” Akeson said. “We can’t avoid the issue any longer, I’m afraid.”

  Wallander knew what he meant. On several earlier occasions he and Akeson had clashed over whether they should request extra manpower or not.

  “We’ll take up that question at the end of the meeting,” Wallander said. “Let’s start with where we actually stand in this mess.”

  “Stockholm has called a few times,” Chief Holgersson said, “and I don’t think I need to tell you who it was. These violent events are clouding the image of the friendly local police force.”

  A mixture of resignation and mirth swept through the room. But no-one commented on what Lisa Holgersson had said. Martinsson yawned audibly. Wallander seized on that as a starting point.

  “We’re all tired. A policeman’s curse is lack of sleep. At least in crises like this.”

  He was interrupted by the door opening. Nyberg came in. Wallander knew that he had been talking on the phone to the forensic laboratory in Linkoping. He hobbled up to the table using his crutch.

  “How’s your foot?” Wallander asked him.

  “It’s better than being impaled on bamboo from Thailand,” he replied.

  Wallander gave him an inquiring look.

  “Do we know that for sure? That it’s from Thailand?”

  “We do. It’s imported for making fishing rods and furniture by a company in Bremen. We talked to their Swedish agent. They import more than 100,000 bamboo poles each year. It’s impossible to say where they were purchased, but I just talked to Linkoping. They can determine how long the bamboo has been in Sweden.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “Anything else?” he asked, still facing Nyberg.

  “With regard to Eriksson or Runfeldt?”

  “Either one.”

  Nyberg opened his notebook.

  “The planks for Eriksson’s bridge came from the Building Warehouse in Ystad. The murder scene is clean of any objects that might have helped us. On the side of the hill where he had his birdwatching tower there’s a tractor path that we can assume the killer used, if he came by car, which I’m assuming he did. We’ve taken impressions of all the tyre tracks we found. But the whole scene is extraordinarily devoid of clues.”