The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “Of course it’s important that we catch the person or persons who did this. Did your husband have any enemies?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I didn’t know my husband very well.”

  Wallander paused to think before he continued. Her answer made him uneasy.

  “I don’t know how to interpret your answer.”

  “Is it really so difficult? I didn’t know my husband very well. Once upon a time, a long time ago, I thought I did. But that was back then.”

  “What happened? What changed things?”

  She shook her head. Wallander saw something he interpreted as bitterness in her expression. He waited.

  “Nothing happened,” she said. “We grew apart. We live in the same house, but we have separate bedrooms. He has his own life, and I have mine.”

  Then she corrected herself. “He had his own life. And I have mine.”

  “And he was a researcher at the university?”

  “Yes.”

  “Milk allergies? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you work there too?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  Wallander nodded. “So you wouldn’t know whether your husband had any enemies?”

  “No.”

  “And few friends?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you can’t imagine anyone who would want to kill him? Or why?”

  Her face was strained. Wallander felt as if she were looking right through him.

  “No-one except me,” she replied. “But I didn’t kill him.”

  Wallander looked at her for a long time, without saying anything. Birch had stepped forward to stand next to him.

  “Why would you want to kill him?” Wallander asked.

  She stood up and tore off her blouse with such force that it ripped. It happened so fast that Wallander and Birch didn’t understand what was going on. Then she held out her arms. They were covered with scars.

  “He did this to me,” she said. “And a lot of other things that I won’t even talk about.”

  She left the room with the torn blouse in her hand. Wallander and Birch looked at each other.

  “He abused her,” Birch said. “Do you think she was the one who did it?”

  “No,” Wallander answered. “It wasn’t her.”

  They waited in silence. After a few minutes she came back wearing a new shirt.

  “I’m not going to grieve for him,” she said. “I don’t know who did it. I don’t think I want to know, either. But I realise that you have to catch him.”

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “We do. And we need all the help we can get.”

  She looked at him, and all of a sudden her expression was completely helpless.

  “I didn’t know anything about him,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

  It was quite likely that she was telling the truth. But she had already helped them. When Wallander saw her arms, he lost his last shred of doubt.

  He knew that they were looking for a woman.

  CHAPTER 26

  It was raining when they left the house on Siriusgatan. They stopped at Wallander’s car. He felt restless.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met a widow who took the loss of her husband so lightly,” Birch said, his voice grim with distaste.

  “And yet it’s something we have to bear in mind,” Wallander replied.

  He didn’t take the trouble to explain his answer. Instead he tried to think ahead through the next few hours. His feeling of urgency was intense.

  “We have to go through his belongings both at home and at the university. That’s your job, of course. But I’d like someone from Ystad to be here too. We don’t know what we’re looking for, but this way we might discover something of interest more quickly.”

  Birch nodded. “You’re not staying yourself?”

  “No. I’ll ask Martinsson and Svedberg to come over. I’ll have them leave right away.”

  Wallander dialled the number of the Ystad police, and asked for Martinsson, telling him quickly what had happened. Martinsson said that they would leave immediately. Wallander told him to meet Birch at the police station in Lund. He had to spell the name for Martinsson. Birch smiled.

  “I would have stayed,” Wallander said, “but I have to start working backwards through the investigation. I’ve got a hunch that the solution to Blomberg’s murder is in there somewhere, though we haven’t seen it yet. The solution to all three murders is there in a complex system of caverns.”

  “It would be good if we could prevent any more deaths,” Birch said. “Enough have died as it is.”

  They said goodbye. Wallander drove back towards Ystad. Rain showers came and went. When he passed Sturup Airport there was a plane coming in to land. As he drove he went over the case again. He didn’t know how many times he had done it so far.

  He arrived back at 5.45 p.m. In reception he stopped and asked Ebba if Hoglund was in.

  “She and Hansson came back an hour ago.”

  Wallander hurried on. He found Hoglund in her office. She was on the phone. Wallander signalled to her and then waited out in the hall. As soon as he heard her hang up, he went back in.

  “I think we should go to my office,” he said. “We need to do a thorough overview.”

  “Shall I bring anything?” She pointed at the papers and folders strewn across her desk.

  “No. If we need anything you can come back and get it.”

  She followed him to his office. Wallander told the switchboard to hold his calls.

  “You remember that I asked you to go through everything that’s happened and look for female characteristics,” he said.

  “I’ve done that,” she replied.

  “We have to go over all the material again,” he went on. “I’m convinced that there’s a point where we can make a breakthrough. It’s just that we haven’t seen it yet. We’ve walked right past it. We’ve gone back and forth, and it’s been there the whole time, but we just haven’t been looking in the right direction. And now I’m certain that a woman must be involved.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  He told her about his conversation with Kristina Blomberg and about how she had ripped off her blouse and showed them her scars.

  “You’re talking about an abused woman,” she said. “Not about a woman who murders people.”

  “It might be the same thing,” Wallander said. “In any case, I have to find out if I’m right or wrong.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “From the beginning. Like with a story. And the first thing that happened was that someone prepared a pungee pit for Holger Eriksson in a ditch in Lodinge. Imagine that it was a woman. What do you see?”

  “It’s not impossible, of course. Nothing was too heavy or too large.”

  “Why did she choose this particular modus operandi?”

  “So it would look like it was done by a man.”

  “She wanted to throw us off the track?”

  “Not necessarily. She may have wanted to demonstrate how violence comes back, like a boomerang. Or, why not both reasons?”

  Wallander thought about that. Her explanation was certainly possible.

  “The motive,” he continued. “Who wanted to kill Holger Eriksson?”

  “With Gosta Runfeldt there are a number of candidates. But with Eriksson we still don’t know enough about him. It’s as if his life is a no trespassing zone.”

  He knew right away that she was saying something important.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. We should know more about a man who’s 80 years old and has lived his whole life in Skane. A well-known man. We know so little that it’s unnatural.”

  “What’s the explanation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are people scared to talk about him?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “We were searching for a mercenary,” sh
e said. “We found a man who’s dead. We’ve learned that these men often use assumed names. It struck me that the same might apply to Holger Eriksson.”

  “That he could have been a mercenary?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But he could have used an assumed name. He mightn’t always have been Holger Eriksson. That might be one explanation as to why we know so little about his private life. Maybe sometimes he was someone else.”

  Wallander recalled some of Eriksson’s earliest poetry books. He had published them under a pseudonym, later using his real name.

  “I have a hard time accepting what you’re saying,” Wallander said. “Mostly because I don’t see any reasonable motive. Why does someone use an assumed name?”

  “So that he can do something in secret.”

  Wallander looked at her. “You mean that he might have used an alias because he was homosexual? In a time when it was best to keep it secret?”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  Wallander nodded, but he was still dubious. “We’ve got the gift to the church in Jamtland. That must mean something. Why did he do it? And the Polish woman who disappeared. There’s something that makes her special. Have you thought what it might be?”

  Hoglund shook her head.

  “The fact that she’s the only woman who appears in the investigative material on Holger Eriksson,” he said.

  “Copies of the material on her were sent from Ostersund. But I don’t think anyone has started going through it yet. Besides, she’s just on the periphery. We have no proof that she and Eriksson knew each other.”

  Wallander was suddenly determined.

  “That’s right. We have to do that as soon as possible. Find out whether there’s a connection.”

  “Who’s going to do it?”

  “Hansson. He reads faster than any of us. He usually goes right to the heart of the matter.”

  She made a note. Then they left the topic of Holger Eriksson for the moment.

  “Gosta Runfeldt was a brutal man,” Wallander said. “We know that for sure. On that point there’s a similarity with Eriksson. Now it turns out that it applies to Eugen Blomberg too. Runfeldt abused his wife, just like Blomberg. Where does this lead us?”

  “To three men with violent tendencies, at least two of them who abused women.”

  “It might also be true of Eriksson. We don’t know yet.”

  “The Polish woman? Krista Haberman?”

  “For example. And it might also be true that Runfeldt killed his wife. Prepared a hole in the ice for her to fall into and drown.”

  They both knew that they were onto something. Wallander went back through the investigation again.

  “The pungee pit,” he said. “What was it?”

  “Prepared, well planned. A death trap.”

  “More than that. A way to kill someone slowly.”

  Wallander searched for a paper on his desk.

  “According to the pathologist in Lund, Eriksson may have hung there impaled on the bamboo stakes for several hours before he died.”

  He put down the paper in disgust.

  “Runfeldt,” he said. “Emaciated, strangled, hanging tied to a tree. What does that tell us?”

  “That he was held captive. He wasn’t hanging in a pungee pit.”

  Wallander raised his hand. She didn’t say a word. He was thinking, recalling the visit to Stang Lake, how they’d found her under the ice.

  “Drowning under ice,” he said. “I’ve always imagined that would be one of the most horrifying ways to die. To be beneath the ice and not be able to break through. Maybe even see the light through it.”

  “Held captive under the ice,” she said.

  “Precisely. That’s just what I was thinking.”

  “Do you mean that this killer has invented methods of killing that are linked to the event that’s being avenged?”

  “Something like that. It’s a possibility, anyway.”

  “In that case, what happened to Eugen Blomberg looks more like what happened to Runfeldt’s wife.”

  “I know,” Wallander said. “Maybe we can figure that out too if we keep at it a while longer.”

  They went on. They discussed the suitcase. Wallander mentioned the false nail that Nyberg had found out in the woods near Marsvinsholm. Then they started on Blomberg. The pattern was repeated.

  “The plan was to drown him, but not too fast. He had to be aware of what was happening to him.”

  Wallander leaned back in his chair and looked at her across his desk.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “A revenge motive is taking shape. At any rate, it runs through each crime as a possible link. Men who use force against women are attacked in return by a calculated violence of a masculine kind. As if they were being forced to feel their hands on their own bodies.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it,” Wallander said. “Go on.”

  “It could also be a way of hiding the fact that a woman committed the crimes. It took a long time for us to even imagine that a woman was involved. And when we did think of it, we rejected it immediately.”

  “What is there to contradict the idea that the killer might be a woman?”

  “We still know very little. Women almost never use violence unless they’re defending themselves or their children. And then it’s not premeditated violence, but instinctive, acts done in self-defence. A woman would not normally dig a pungee pit. Or hold a man captive. Or throw a man in the lake inside a sack.”

  Wallander looked at her intently.

  “Normally,” he said. “Your word.”

  “If a woman is involved in this, then she must be very sick indeed.”

  Wallander stood up and went to the window. “There’s one more thing,” he said, “which could knock down this whole house of cards we’re building. She isn’t avenging herself. She’s avenging others. Runfeldt’s wife is dead. Blomberg’s wife didn’t do it, I’m sure of that. Eriksson has no woman. If this is revenge and if it’s a woman, then she’s taking revenge for others. And that doesn’t sound likely. If it’s true, I’ve never come across anything like it.”

  “It could be more than one woman,” Hoglund said hesitantly.

  “A number of angels of death? A group of women? A cult?”

  “That doesn’t sound plausible.”

  “No,” Wallander said, “it doesn’t.”

  He sat down again in his chair. “I’d like you to do just the opposite,” he said. “Go over all the material again. And then give me the reasons why it isn’t a woman who did this.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait until we know more about what happened to Blomberg?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think we have time.”

  “You are thinking that it could happen again?”

  Wallander wanted to give her an honest answer. He sat silently for a moment before he replied.

  “There is no beginning,” he said. “At least none we can see. That makes it less likely that there will be an end. It could happen again. And we don’t have any idea what direction to look in.”

  They didn’t get any further. Wallander felt impatient that neither Martinsson nor Svedberg had called. Then he remembered that he had blocked all his calls. He checked with the switchboard. Neither Martinsson nor Svedberg had rung in. He asked for their calls to be allowed through.

  “The break-ins,” Hoglund said suddenly. “At the florist’s shop and at Eriksson’s house. How do they fit into the picture?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Or the blood on the floor. I thought I had an explanation, and now I don’t.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said.

  Wallander could see that she was excited. He nodded to her to continue.

  “We’re talking about having to distinguish what we can see from what has happened,” she began. “Holger Eriksson reported a break-in where nothing was stolen. Why did he report it at all?”

  “I’ve thought about tha
t too,” Wallander said. “He may have just been upset that someone broke into his house.”

  “In that case it fits in with the pattern.”

  Wallander didn’t understand immediately what she was getting at.

  “There’s always the possibility that someone broke in to make him nervous. Not to steal anything.”

  “A first warning?” he asked. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the florist’s shop?”

  “Runfeldt leaves his flat. Or he’s lured out. Or else it’s early in the morning. He goes down to the street to wait for a taxi. There he vanishes without a trace. What if he went to the shop? It only takes a few minutes. He could have left his suitcase inside the front door. Or carried it with him. It wasn’t heavy.”

  “Why would he have gone to the shop?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot something.”

  “You mean he might have been attacked there?”

  “I know it’s not a great idea. But it’s what I’ve been thinking.”

  “It’s no worse than lots of others,” said Wallander. He looked at her.

  “Has anyone checked if the blood on the floor was Runfeldt’s?”

  “I don’t think it was ever done. If not, I’m to blame.”

  “If we had to keep track of who was responsible for all the mistakes made during criminal investigations, there wouldn’t be time for anything else,” Wallander said. “I assume there aren’t any samples left?”

  “I’ll find out. We’ll check it out just to be sure.”

  She got up and left the room. Wallander was tired. They had had a good talk, but his anxiety had increased. They were as far from the heart of the matter as they could be. The investigation still lacked a gravitational force drawing them in a specific direction.

  Someone was complaining loudly out in the hall. He started thinking of Baiba, but forced himself to concentrate on the investigation again. He got up and went for some coffee. Another officer asked him if he’d had time to decide whether it was proper for a local association to call itself “Friends of the Axe”. He said no. Went back to his office. The rain had stopped. The clouds hung motionless in the sky over the water tower.

  The phone rang. It was Martinsson. Wallander listened for signs in his voice that something important had happened, but he heard nothing.