The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “The national police board has sent out flyers about these militia,” said Wallander. “I think it’s very clear what Swedish law says about vigilante activities.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” she replied. “But I have a strong feeling that things are changing. I’m afraid that pretty soon we’re going to see a burglar get shot and killed by someone from one of these groups. And then they’ll start shooting each other.”

  Wallander knew she was right. But at that moment he couldn’t focus on anything other than the two murder investigations they were working on.

  “I agree it’s important. In the long run, it’s crucial to stamp it out if we don’t want people to be playing at being the police all over the country. Let’s talk about it on Monday when we meet.”

  Holgersson let it go at that. The meeting broke up. Hoglund and Svedberg were going to accompany Wallander to Sovestad. It was 6 p.m. by the time they left the station. They took Hoglund’s car. Wallander got into the back seat. He wondered whether he still smelled from his visit to Jacob Hoslowski’s house of cats.

  “Maria Svensson,” Svedberg said. “She’s 36 years old and has a little vegetable shop in Sovestad, selling only organic vegetables.”

  “You didn’t ask her why she got in contact with Runfeldt?”

  “After she confirmed the connection, I didn’t ask her anything else.”

  “This should be interesting,” Wallander said. “In all my years on the force, I’ve never met anyone who has hired a private detective.”

  “The photograph was of a man,” Hoglund said. “Her husband?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know,” Svedberg answered.

  “Or as little,” Wallander corrected him. “We know almost nothing.”

  They reached Sovestad in about 20 minutes. Wallander had been there once many years ago to cut down a man who had hanged himself. It was the first suicide he had encountered. He thought back on the incident with distaste.

  Svedberg stopped the car in front of a building with a shop in the front and a greenhouse next to it. A sign said “Svensson’s Produce”. They climbed out of the car.

  “She lives in the building,” said Svedberg. “I assume that she’s closed up the shop for the day.”

  “A florist and a greengrocer,” Wallander said. “Does that tell us anything, or is it just a coincidence?”

  He didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. The front door opened.

  “That’s Maria Svensson,” said Svedberg. “She’s been waiting for us.”

  The woman standing on the steps was wearing jeans and a white blouse. She had clogs on her feet. There was something odd about her appearance. Wallander noted that she wore no make-up. Svedberg introduced them and Maria Svensson invited them in. They sat down in her living room. It occurred to Wallander that there was also something odd about her house. As if she wasn’t interested in the decor.

  “May I offer you coffee?” she asked.

  All three of them declined.

  “As you know, we’ve come to find out a little more about your relationship to Gosta Runfeldt.”

  She gave him a surprised look. “Am I supposed to have had a relationship with him?”

  “As a client,” Wallander said.

  “That’s true.”

  “Gosta Runfeldt has been murdered. It took a while for us to discover that he wasn’t only a florist, but that he also worked as a private detective. So my first question is: how did you get in contact with him?”

  “I saw an ad in Arbetet this past summer.”

  “How did you first meet?”

  “I went to his florist’s shop. Later the same day we met at a cafe near Stortoget in Ystad.”

  “What was your reason for contacting him?”

  “I’d rather not say,” she said firmly.

  Wallander was surprised because up to that point her answers had been so straightforward.

  “I’m afraid that you’re going to have to tell us,” he said.

  “I can assure you that it has nothing to do with his death. I’m just as horrified and shocked as everybody else by what happened.”

  “Whether it has anything to do with it or not is something for the police to decide,” Wallander said. “You’ll have to answer the question. You can choose to do so here. Then anything that isn’t directly connected with the investigation will just be between us. If we’re obliged to take you in for more formal interrogation, it will be more difficult to stop the details from leaking to the press.”

  She sat in silence for a long time. They waited. Wallander took out the photograph they had developed on Harpegatan. She looked at it without expression.

  “Is this your husband?” Wallander asked.

  She stared at him. Suddenly she laughed.

  “No,” she said. “He’s not my husband. But he stole my lover away from me.”

  Wallander didn’t understand. Hoglund got it at once.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Annika.”

  “And this man came between you?”

  She had regained her composure.

  “I was starting to suspect it. I didn’t know what to do. That’s when I thought of contacting a private detective. I had to find out if she was thinking of leaving me. Or switching. Going with a man. In the end I realised that’s what she had done. Gosta Runfeldt came here and told me about it. The next day I wrote to Annika to tell her I never wanted to see her again.”

  “When did he visit you?”

  “September 20th or 21st.”

  “Did you have any contact with him after that?”

  “No. I paid him through his bank account.”

  “What was your impression of him?”

  “He was friendly. He was very fond of orchids. I think we got along well because he seemed just as reserved as I am.”

  Wallander thought for a moment.

  “Can you think of any reason why he was killed? Anything he said or did?”

  “No,” she replied. “Nothing. And I’ve thought hard about it.”

  Wallander glanced at his colleagues and stood up. “Then we won’t disturb you any further. And none of this will get out. I promise.”

  “I’m grateful for that,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to lose customers.”

  They said goodbye at the door. She closed it before they reached the street.

  “What did she mean by that last remark?” asked Wallander. “That she was afraid of losing her customers?”

  “People are conservative out in the country,” said Hoglund. “Homosexuality is still considered to be something dirty by many people. I think she has all the reason in the world not to want this to get out.”

  They got into the car.

  “Where does that leave us?” Svedberg asked.

  “It doesn’t lead us backwards or forwards,” Wallander said. “The truth about these two investigations is simple. We have a number of loose ends, but we don’t have a single good clue to go on.”

  They sat in the car in silence. For a moment Wallander felt guilty. He felt as if he’d stabbed the investigation in the back. But he knew that what he’d said was the truth.

  They had nothing to go on. Absolutely nothing.

  CHAPTER 21

  That night Wallander had a dream.

  He was walking along a street in Rome with his father. The summer was suddenly over and it was autumn, a Roman autumn. They were talking about something, he couldn’t remember what, and then all of a sudden his father disappeared. One minute he was right next to him, the next he was gone, swallowed up by the swarm of people on the street.

  He woke with a start. In the silence of the night, the dream had seemed perfectly clear. It was his grief over his father’s death, over never being able to go on with the conversation they had begun. He couldn’t feel sorry for his father, only for himself, left behind.

  He couldn’t go back to sleep. He had to get up early anyway.

  When they had gone back to
the station after visiting Maria Svensson in Sovestad, there was a message for Wallander that he’d been booked on the 7 a.m. flight from Sturup the next morning, arriving at Ostersund at 9.50 a.m, after changing planes at Arlanda Airport. The itinerary gave him the choice of spending Saturday night in Svenstavik or Gavle. A rental car would be waiting for him at the airport in Froson. He could decide then where to spend the night. He looked at the map of Sweden hanging on the wall in his office next to the big map of Skane. That gave him an idea. He went into his office and called Linda. He got an answering machine for the first time and left his question for her: could she take the train to Gavle, a trip that wouldn’t take more than two hours, and spend the night there? Then he went looking for Svedberg, finally finding him in the gym where he usually took a sauna on Friday nights. Wallander asked Svedberg to do him a favour, to book two rooms at a nice hotel in Gavle for Saturday night. The next day he could be reached on his mobile phone.

  After that he went home. And when he fell asleep, he dreamt about his father in Rome in the autumn.

  At 6 a.m. the taxi he had ordered was waiting outside. He picked up his tickets at Sturup Airport. Since it was Saturday morning, the plane to Stockholm was no more than half full. The plane to Ostersund left on time. Wallander had never been there before. His visits to the country north of Stockholm had been few and far between. He was looking forward to the trip. For one thing, it would give him some distance from the dream he’d had during the night.

  It was a cool morning in Ostersund. The pilot had said it was 1 °C. The cold feels different, Wallander thought as he drove across the bridge from Froson through the beautiful landscape. The town lay along the slope of Storsjon. He headed south. It was liberating to be in a rented car, driving through an unfamiliar landscape.

  He reached Svenstavik at 11.30 a.m. He had heard from Svedberg along the way that he was supposed to contact a man named Robert Melander. He was the person in the church administration with whom Eriksson’s lawyer, Bjurman, had been in contact. Melander lived in a red house next to the old district courthouse in Svenstavik. Wallander parked his car in the middle of town. It took him a while to work out that the courthouse was on the other side of the new shopping centre. He left his car where it was and walked. It was overcast but not raining. He entered the front yard of Melander’s house. A Norwegian elkhound was chained to a kennel. The front door stood open. Wallander knocked. No-one answered, but he thought that he heard sounds from behind the house. He walked around the side and found a large garden with a potato patch and currant bushes. Wallander was surprised to see currants growing so far north. At the back of the house stood a man about Wallander’s age, wearing gumboots. He was sawing branches off the trunk of a tree that lay on the ground. When he caught sight of Wallander, he stopped at once and stretched his back, smiled and put down the saw.

  “You must be the policeman from Ystad,” he said, putting out his hand.

  His dialect is quite melodic, thought Wallander, as he greeted the man.

  “When’d you leave?” asked Melander. “Last night?”

  “This morning.”

  “Imagine, it can go that fast,” said Melander. “I was in Malmo several times back in the 1960s. I’d got it into my head that it might be nice to move around a bit. And there was work at that big shipyard.”

  “Kockums,” said Wallander. “But it doesn’t exist any more.”

  “Nothing exists any more,” replied Melander philosophically. “Back then it took four days to drive down there.”

  “But you didn’t stay,” said Wallander.

  “No, I didn’t,” replied Melander cheerfully. “It was beautiful and pleasant enough in the south. But it wasn’t for me. If I’m going to travel anywhere in my life, it’s going to be north. Not south. You don’t even have snow down there, they tell me.”

  “Occasionally we do,” Wallander replied. “When it does snow, it snows a lot.”

  “There’s lunch waiting for us inside,” said Melander. “My wife works at the welfare centre, but she fixed something for us.”

  “It’s beautiful here,” Wallander said.

  “Very,” Melander replied. “And the beauty remains. Year after year.”

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander ate heartily. There was plenty of food. Melander was a good talker. He was a man who combined a number of diverse activities to make his living. Among other things, he gave folk-dancing lessons in the winter. Not until they were having coffee did Wallander mention why he was there.

  “Of course it came as a great surprise to us,” Melander said. “100,000 kronor is a lot of money. Especially when it’s a gift from a stranger.”

  “You mean no-one knows who Holger Eriksson was?”

  “He was completely unknown to us. A car dealer from Skane who was murdered. That was very strange. Those of us who are connected with the church began asking around. We also saw to it that a notice asking for information was placed in the newspapers. But no-one got in touch with us.”

  Wallander had remembered to bring along a photograph of Eriksson. Melander studied the picture while he filled his pipe. He lit it without taking his eyes off the photograph. Wallander’s hopes started to rise. But then Melander shook his head.

  “The man is still a stranger to me,” he said. “I have a good memory for faces, and I’ve never seen him before. Maybe someone else might recognise him, but I don’t.”

  “I’m going to give you two names,” Wallander said, “to see if they mean anything to you. The first is Gosta Runfeldt.”

  Melander thought for a moment. But not for long.

  “Runfeldt is not a name from around here,” he said. “It almost sounds like an assumed or made-up name.”

  “Harald Berggren,” Wallander said, “is the second.”

  Melander’s pipe had gone out. He put it down on the table.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Let me make a call.”

  Wallander felt his excitement rise. What he wanted most of all was to be able to identify the man who had written the diary from the Congo.

  Melander asked for a man named Nils.

  “I have a guest here from Skane,” he said into the phone. “A man named Kurt who’s a policeman. He’s asking about someone named Harald Berggren. I don’t think there’s anyone alive here in Svenstavik by that name. But isn’t there someone with that name buried in the cemetery?”

  Wallander’s heart sank. But not completely. Even a dead Harald Berggren might be of help to them.

  Melander listened to the answer and came back to the kitchen table.

  “Nils Enman is in charge of the cemetery,” he said. “And there’s a gravestone with the name Harald Berggren on it. But Nils is young. And the man who took care of the cemetery before is now lying there himself. Maybe we should go over there and have a look?”

  Wallander stood up. Melander was surprised by his haste.

  “Someone once told me that people from Skane are relaxed. But that doesn’t apply to you.”

  “I have my bad habits,” Wallander said.

  They headed out into the clear autumn air. Melander greeted everyone they met. They reached the cemetery.

  “His grave is over by the grove of trees,” Melander said.

  Wallander walked between the graves, following Melander and thinking about the dream he’d had during the night. It seemed unreal to him that his father was dead.

  Melander stopped and pointed. The gravestone stood upright, with a gold inscription. Wallander read what it said and realised at once that there was no help to be found here. The man named Harald Berggren who lay buried there had died in 1949. Melander noticed his reaction.

  “Not the one?”

  “No,” replied Wallander. “It’s definitely not him. The man we’re looking for was still alive at least until 1963.”

  “A man you’re looking for?” Melander said with curiosity. “A man the police are looking for must have committed some type of crime.”

  �
��I don’t know that. It’s too complicated to explain. Often the police look for people who haven’t done anything illegal.”

  “So your trip here was in vain,” Melander said. “The church has received a gift of a great deal of money, and we don’t know why. We still don’t know this Eriksson.”

  “There must be an explanation,” Wallander said.

  “Would you like to see the church?” Melander asked suddenly, as if he wanted to give Wallander some encouragement.

  Wallander nodded.

  “It’s a lovely place,” Melander said. “I was married there.”

  They walked up to the church and went inside. Wallander noted that the door wasn’t locked. Light shone in through the side windows.

  “It’s beautiful,” Wallander said.

  “Yet I don’t think you’re particularly religious,” said Melander and smiled.

  Wallander didn’t reply. He sat down on one of the wooden pews. Melander stayed standing in the centre aisle. Wallander searched his mind for some way to proceed. Eriksson wouldn’t have left a gift to the church in Svenstavik without a reason.

  “Holger Eriksson wrote poetry,” Wallander said. “He was what they call a regional poet.”

  “We have poets like that too,” Melander said. “To be quite honest, what they write isn’t always very good.”

  “Eriksson was also a bird lover,” continued Wallander. “At night he went out to watch the birds heading south. He couldn’t see them. But he knew they were there overhead. Maybe it’s possible to hear the rushing of thousands of wings.”

  “I know some people who keep pigeons,” Melander said. “But we’ve only had one ornithologist.”

  “Had?” Wallander asked.

  Melander sat down on the pew on the other side of the aisle. “It’s an odd story,” he said. “A story without an ending.” He laughed. “Almost like your story. That doesn’t have an ending either.”

  “I’m sure we’ll reach a conclusion,” said Wallander. “We usually do. So what about your story?”