The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “Everything lying here on the table was inside,” said Wallander. “I want you to put on some gloves and then pack everything.

  “In any particular order?”

  “In whatever order comes naturally to you. You’ve told me several times that you always pack your husband’s suitcases. You’re experienced, in other words.”

  She did as he asked. Wallander was grateful that she didn’t ask any questions. They watched her. Out of long habit, she selected each item briskly and packed the suitcase. Then she took a step back.

  “Should I close the lid?”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  They all stood around the table and looked at the results. It was as Wallander had suspected.

  “How could you know how Runfeldt had packed his suitcase?” Martinsson wondered.

  “Wait with your comments,” Wallander interrupted him. “I saw a traffic officer sitting in the canteen. Go and get him.”

  The traffic officer, whose name was Laurin, came into the room. They had unpacked the suitcase again. Laurin looked tired. Wallander knew that they were working on a drink-driving campaign. He asked Laurin to put on a pair of latex gloves and pack the suitcase. Laurin didn’t ask any questions either. Wallander saw that he did not do it sloppily but handled the items of clothing with care. When he was done, Wallander thanked him. He left the room.

  “Completely different,” Svedberg said.

  “I’m not trying to prove something,” said Wallander. “I don’t think I can, either. But when Nyberg opened the lid of the suitcase I had a feeling that something wasn’t right. It’s always been my experience that men and women pack suitcases in different ways. It seemed to me that this suitcase had been packed by a woman.”

  “Vanja Andersson?” Hansson suggested.

  “No,” Wallander replied. “Not her. It was Runfeldt himself who first packed the suitcase. We can be quite sure of that.”

  Hoglund was the first one to understand.

  “So you’re saying it was repacked later? By a woman?”

  “I’m just trying to think out loud. The suitcase has been lying outside for only a few days. Runfeldt has been gone for a much longer time than that. Where was the suitcase all that time? It might also explain something missing from the contents.”

  The team remained silent.

  “There’s no underwear in the suitcase,” Wallander continued. “I think it’s very odd that Runfeldt would pack for a trip to Africa without taking a single change of underwear.”

  “It’s hardly likely he would have done that,” Hansson said.

  “Which in turn means that someone repacked his suitcase,” Martinsson said. “A woman, perhaps. And during the repacking all of Runfeldt’s underwear disappeared.”

  Wallander could feel the tension in the room.

  “There’s one more thing,” he said slowly. “Runfeldt’s underwear has disappeared, but at the same time a foreign object wound up inside the suitcase.”

  He pointed at the blue plastic holder. Hoglund was still wearing gloves.

  “Smell it,” Wallander said to her.

  She did as he asked.

  “A woman’s perfume,” she said.

  Nyberg was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “Does this mean that there’s a woman mixed up in all these atrocities?”

  “We have to consider it as a possibility,” Wallander replied. “Even if nothing directly indicates it. Apart from this suitcase.”

  They were all silent again for a long time.

  It was 7.30 p.m. on Sunday, 16 October.

  She had arrived at the underpass just after 7 p.m. It was cold, and she stamped her feet to stay warm. There was still some time before the man would turn up. At least half an hour, maybe more. But she always arrived with time to spare. With a shudder she remembered the few occasions in her life when she had come late, kept people waiting, stepped into rooms where people stared at her. She would never arrive late again. She had arranged her life around a timetable that allowed margins for error.

  She was quite calm. The man didn’t deserve to live. She couldn’t feel hatred towards him. The woman who had suffered so much misfortune could do the hating. She was just standing here in the dark, waiting to do what was necessary.

  She had hesitated over whether she should postpone this. The oven was empty, but her work schedule was complicated over the next few weeks and she didn’t want to risk having him die inside it. It would have to be done quickly. And she had no hesitations about how it would be done. The woman who had finally given her his name had talked about a bathtub filled with water. About how it felt to be forced under the water and almost give up breathing, bursting apart from the inside.

  She had thought about Sunday school. The fires of hell that awaited the sinner. The terror was still with her. No-one knew how sin was measured. And no-one knew when the punishment would be dealt out. She had never been able to talk about this terror with her mother.

  She had wondered about her mother’s last moment alive. The police officer, Francoise Bertrand, had written that everything would have happened very fast. She probably didn’t suffer. She was probably hardly aware of what was happening to her. But how could Bertrand know that? Had she omitted part of the truth that was too unbearable?

  A train passed overhead. She counted the cars. Then everything was quiet again.

  Not with fire, she thought. But with water. With water the sinner shall perish.

  She looked at her watch, and noticed that the laces on one of her running shoes were undone. She bent down and retied it, hard. She had strong fingers. The man she was waiting for, the one she had been tailing for the past few days, was short and overweight. He wouldn’t cause her any problems. It would be over in a flash.

  A man with a dog passed through the underpass on the opposite side. His footsteps reverberated against the footpath, reminding her of an old black-and-white movie. She did what was simplest: pretended to be waiting for someone. She was positive that later he wouldn’t remember her. All her life she had taught herself not to be noticed, to make herself invisible. Only now did she realise that it had been in preparation for her future.

  The man with the dog disappeared. Her car was parked on the other side of the underpass. The traffic was sparse, even though they were in the centre of Lund. Only the man with the dog and a cyclist had passed. She was ready. Nothing would go wrong.

  She saw the man. He came walking along the same side of the street where she was standing. In the distance she could hear a car. She doubled over, as if she was in pain. The man stopped by her side and asked her if she was sick. She fell to her knees, and he did what she had expected. He stepped close and leaned forward. She told him that she was ill. Could he help her to her car? It was right nearby. He put a hand under her arm. She sagged against him. He had to strain to hold her up, just as she had anticipated. He wasn’t strong. He helped her over to her car, and asked if he could do anything else, but she said no.

  He opened the door for her. She reached for the rag. To prevent the ether from evaporating, she had put it in a plastic bag. It took her only a few seconds to get it out. The street was still deserted. She turned around and pressed the rag hard against his face. He fought back, but she was stronger. When he started to collapse to the ground, she held him up with one arm as she opened the back door. It was easy to shove him inside. She got into the driver’s seat. A car passed, followed closely by another cyclist. She leaned over to the back seat and pressed the rag against his face. Soon he was unconscious. He wouldn’t wake up in the time it took her to drive to the lake.

  She took the road through Svaneholm and Brodda to reach the lake. She turned off near the empty camping ground on the shore, turned off the lights and got out of the car. She listened. Everything was quiet. She pulled the unconscious man out onto the ground. From the boot of the car she took out a sack. The weights inside it clattered against some rocks. It took longer than she had expected to
get him into the sack and tie it.

  He was still unconscious. She carried the sack out onto the small jetty that jutted into the lake. A bird fluttered past in the dark. She placed the sack at the very end of the jetty. Now there was only a short wait remaining. She lit a cigarette. In the light from the glow she studied her hand. It was steady.

  After 20 minutes the man in the sack started to come to life. He began to move around.

  She thought about the bathroom. The woman’s story. And she remembered cats being drowned when she was little. They floated away in the sack, still alive, desperately fighting to breathe and survive.

  He started shouting. Now he was struggling inside the sack. She put out her cigarette on the jetty. She tried to think, but her mind was empty. She shoved the sack into the water with her foot and walked away.

  CHAPTER 24

  They stayed at the police station so long that Sunday turned into Monday. Wallander sent Hansson home and later Nyberg too. But the others stayed on, and they began going through the investigative material once again. The suitcase had forced them into a retreat. They sat in the conference room with it on the table in front of them until the meeting ended. Then Martinsson closed the lid and took it with him to his own office.

  They went over everything that had happened, working on the assumption that nothing they had done so far could be regarded as wasted effort. In their retreat they needed to take a fresh look at things, stop on various details, and hope to discover something that they had missed earlier.

  But they didn’t come up with anything that gave them the feeling they had made a breakthrough. The events were still murky, the connection unclear, the motive unknown. The retreat led them back to the beginning, to the fact that two men had been killed in gruesome ways, and that the killer had to be the same person.

  It was after midnight when Wallander called a halt. Hoglund stayed for the whole meeting. She left the conference room twice for a few minutes. Wallander assumed she was calling home to talk to her neighbour, who was taking care of her children. When the meeting was over, Wallander asked her to stay on. He regretted this at once, knowing that he shouldn’t keep her there any longer. But she sat back down, and they waited until the others had left.

  “I want you to do something for me,” he said. “I want you to go through all of these events from a woman’s perspective. Go over the investigative material and imagine that the killer we’re looking for is a woman, not a man. Base your work on two assumptions. First, that she was alone. Second, that she had at least one accomplice.”

  “Do you think there was more than one person involved?”

  “Yes. And one of them was a woman. Of course, there might have been several people involved.”

  She nodded.

  “As soon as possible,” Wallander told her. “Preferably tomorrow. If you have other important matters that can’t wait, turn them over to someone else.”

  “I think Hamren will be here tomorrow,” she said. “A couple of detectives are coming from Malmo too. I can give my other work to one of them.”

  Wallander had nothing more to say. They sat there a little longer.

  “Do you really think it’s a woman?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Wallander answered. “It’s dangerous to give too much weight to the importance of this suitcase and the perfume. But on the other hand, there’s been something funny about this whole investigation right from the start. When we were standing out there by the ditch, with Eriksson on the stakes, you said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.”

  “That the whole thing seemed so deliberate?”

  “The killer’s language. What we saw smelled of war. Eriksson was executed in a trap for predators.”

  “Maybe it is war,” she said thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should interpret what we see literally. Pungee pits are used to catch predators. And they’re also used in war.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  She bit her lip.

  “I can’t. The woman who’s taking care of my children has to get home. I can’t ask her to stay any longer. Last time I called home she was pissed off, and it’s not going to make any difference if I pay her extra for her time.”

  Wallander didn’t want to cut short the discussion they had started. For a brief moment he felt irritated by her children, or maybe by her husband’s absences. But he regretted these thoughts at once.

  “You could come to my house,” she said. “We can continue talking there.”

  She was pale and tired, and he knew he shouldn’t put such pressure on her. But he said yes. They drove through the deserted town. The babysitter was standing in the door, waiting. Wallander said hello and apologised for her late return. They sat in her living room. He had been there a few times before. He could see that a frequent traveller lived in the house. There were souvenirs from many countries on the walls. There was also a warmth that was completely missing from his own flat. She asked him if he’d like something to drink. He declined.

  “The trap for predators and the war,” he began. “That’s where we left off.”

  “Men who hunt, men who are soldiers. We also find a shrunken head and a diary written by a mercenary. We see what we see, and we interpret it.”

  “How do we interpret it?”

  “We interpret it correctly. If the killer has a language, then we can clearly read what he writes.”

  Wallander suddenly thought about something that Linda had said when she was trying to explain to him what acting really was. Reading between the lines, looking for the subtext.

  He told Hoglund this, and she nodded.

  “Maybe I’m not expressing myself well,” she said. “But what I’m thinking is that we’ve seen everything and interpreted everything, and yet it’s all wrong.”

  “We see what the murderer wants us to see?”

  “Maybe we’re being fooled into looking in the wrong direction.”

  Wallander thought for a moment. He noticed that his mind was now quite clear. His weariness was gone. They were following a trail that might prove crucial. A trail that had existed before in his consciousness, but he hadn’t been able to control it.

  “So the deliberateness is an evasive manoeuvre,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Maybe the truth is just the opposite.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know. But if we think we’re right, and it’s all wrong, then whatever is wrong will have to end up being right in the end.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I understand, and I agree.”

  “A woman would never impale a man on stakes in a pit,” she said. “She would never tie a man to a tree and then strangle him with her bare hands.”

  Wallander didn’t say anything for a long time. Hoglund disappeared upstairs and came back a few minutes later. He saw that she had put on a different pair of shoes.

  “The whole time we’ve had a feeling that it was well planned,” said Wallander. “The question now is whether it was well planned in more than one way.”

  “Of course I can’t imagine that a woman could have done this,” she said. “But now I realise that it might be true.”

  “Your summary will be important,” Wallander said. “I think we should also talk to Mats Ekholm about this.”

  “Who?”

  “The forensic psychologist who was here last summer.”

  She shook her head.

  “I must be very tired,” she said. “I’d forgotten his name.”

  Wallander stood up. It was 1 a.m.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Could you call me a taxi?”

  “You can take my car,” she said. “I’m going to need a long walk in the morning to clear my head.” She gave him the keys. “My husband is coming home soon. Things will be easier.”

  “I think this is
the first time I fully realised how hard things are for you,” he said. “When Linda was little, Mona was always there. I don’t think I ever once had to stay home from work while she was growing up.”

  She followed him outside. The night was clear. It was below freezing.

  “I have no regrets,” she said suddenly.

  “Regrets about what?”

  “About joining the force.”

  “You’re a good police officer,” said Wallander. “A very good one. In case you didn’t know.”

  He saw that she was pleased. He nodded, got into her car, and drove off.

  The next day, Monday, 17 October, Wallander woke up with a slight headache. He lay in bed and wondered if he was coming down with a cold, but he didn’t have any other symptoms. He got up and made coffee, and looked for some aspirin. Through the kitchen window he saw that the wind had picked up. Clouds had moved in over Skane during the night. The temperature had risen. The thermometer read 4 °C.

  By 7.15 a.m. he was at the station. He got some coffee and sat down in his office. On his desk was a message from the officer in Goteborg he’d been working with on the investigation into car smuggling. He sat holding the message in his hand for a moment. Then he put it in his drawer. He pulled over a notebook and started looking for a pen. In one of the drawers he came across Svedberg’s note. He wondered how many times he had forgotten to give it back.

  Annoyed, he stood up and went out to the hall. The door to Svedberg’s office was open. He went in and put the paper on the desk, then went back to his own office, closed the door, and spent the next 30 mimutes listing all the questions he wanted answered. He had decided to go over what he and Hoglund had discussed when the investigative team met later that morning.

  At 7.45 a.m. there was a knock on the door. It was Hamren from Stockholm, who’d just arrived. They shook hands. Wallander liked him; they’d worked well together during the summer.

  “Here already?” he said. “I thought you weren’t coming until later in the day.”

  “I drove down yesterday,” Hamren replied. “I couldn’t wait.”

  “How are things in Stockholm?”