The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

Bengtsson said nothing more. Wallander pushed him hard into the back seat. Hansson had finally managed to get away from the hysterical woman.

  “Goddamn it, she’s the one who should be in the kennel.”

  He was shaking. He had a deep scratch on one cheek.

  “We’re leaving now,” Wallander said. “Get in the other car and drive over to the hospital. I want to know if Davidsson heard any names. Or whether he saw anyone who could have been Eskil Bengtsson.”

  Hansson nodded and left. The photographer came over to Wallander.

  “We got an anonymous tip-off,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “A number of individuals attacked and battered an innocent man last night. They seem to be part of some sort of citizen militia. The man was guilty of nothing more than taking a wrong turn. They claimed he was a burglar. They almost beat him to death.”

  “And the man in the car?”

  “He’s suspected of having participated,” Wallander said. “We know that he’s behind this militia. We’re not going to have vigilantes in Sweden. Here in Skane or anywhere else in the country.”

  The photographer wanted to ask another question, but Wallander raised his hand to stop him.

  “There’ll be a press conference later. We’re leaving now.”

  Wallander told the officers that he wanted sirens on the way back too. Several cars full of curiosity-seekers had stopped outside the farmhouse. Wallander squeezed into the back seat next to Eskil Bengtsson.

  “Shall we start with the names?” he asked. “It’ll save a lot of time. Both yours and mine.”

  Bengtsson didn’t answer. Wallander could smell the strong odour of his sweat.

  It took Wallander three hours to get Bengtsson to admit that he had taken part in the assault on Davidsson. Then everything happened quickly. Bengtsson told him the names of the three other men who’d been with him. Wallander had them all brought in at once. Ake Davidsson’s car, which had been left in an abandoned shed, was discovered. Just after 3 p.m. Wallander convinced Akeson to keep the four men in custody. He went straight from his talk with Akeson to the room where several reporters were waiting. Chief Holgersson had already informed them of the events of the previous night. For once Wallander was actually looking forward to meeting the press. Although he knew that the chief had already given them the background, he recounted the sequence of events for them.

  “Four men have just been indicted by the prosecutor,” he said. “We have absolutely no doubt that they are guilty of assault. But what’s even more serious is that there are another five or six men involved in the group, a vigilante guard out in Lodinge. These are individuals who have decided to put themselves above the law. We can see what that leads to in this case: an innocent man, with poor eyesight and high blood pressure, is almost murdered when he gets lost. Is this the way we want it to be? That you might be risking your life when you make a wrong turn? Is that how things stand? That from now on we’re all thieves, rapists, and killers in one another’s eyes? I can’t make it any plainer. Some of the people who are lured into joining these illegal and dangerous militias probably don’t understand what they’re getting involved with. They can be excused if they resign immediately. But those who joined and were fully conscious of what they were doing, are indefensible. These four men that we arrested today unfortunately belong to the latter group. We can only hope they receive sentences that will serve as deterrents to others.”

  Wallander put force into his words. The reporters immediately bombarded him with questions, but there weren’t many in attendance, and they only wanted details clarified. Hoglund and Hansson were standing at the back of the room. Wallander searched through the group for the man from the Anmarkaren, but he wasn’t there.

  After less than half an hour the press conference was over.

  “You handled it extremely well,” Chief Holgersson said.

  “There was only one way to handle it,” Wallander replied.

  Hoglund and Hansson applauded when he came over to them. Wallander was not amused. He was hungry, and he needed some air. He looked at the clock.

  “Give me an hour. Let’s meet at 5 p.m. Is Svedberg back yet?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Who’s relieving him?”

  “Augustsson.”

  “Who’s that?” Wallander asked.

  “One of the policemen from Malmo.”

  Wallander had forgotten his name. He nodded.

  “We’ll meet at 5 p.m.,” he repeated. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  He stopped in reception and thanked Ebba for her help. She smiled.

  Wallander walked to the centre of town. It was windy. He sat down in the cafe by the bus station and had a couple of sandwiches and felt better. His head was empty. On his way back to the police station he stopped and bought a hamburger. He tossed the napkin in the rubbish bin and started thinking about Katarina Taxell again. Eskil Bengtsson no longer existed for him. He knew they’d have another confrontation with the local citizen militia. What had happened to Ake Davidsson was only the beginning.

  They gathered in the conference room at the appointed time. Wallander began by telling the group everything that they had discovered about Katarina Taxell. He noticed that everyone in the room was listening with great attention. For the first time during the investigation he felt as though they were getting close to something that might be a breakthrough. This was reinforced by what Hansson had to say.

  “The amount of investigative material on Krista Haberman is huge,” he said. “I haven’t had much time, and it’s possible I may have missed something important. But I did find one thing that might be of interest.”

  He leafed through his notes until he found the right place.

  “At some point in the 1960s Krista Haberman visited Skane on three occasions. She had made contact with a bird-watcher who lived in Falsterbo. Many years later, long after she’d disappeared, a police officer named Fredrik Nilsson travelled from Ostersund to talk to this man in Falsterbo. He took the train the whole way. The man in Falsterbo is named Tandvall. Erik Gustav Tandvall. He confirmed without hesitation that he’d received visits from Krista Haberman. It seemed as though they’d had a relationship. Detective Nilsson didn’t find anything suspicious in this. The relationship between Haberman and Tandvall ended long before she vanished. Tandvall had nothing to do with her disappearance. So he was removed from the investigation and never reappears.”

  Up to this point Hansson had been reading from his notes. Now he looked up at everyone listening around the table.

  “There was something familiar about the name,” he said. “Tandvall. An unusual name. I got the feeling I’d seen it before. It took me a while before I remembered where. It was in a list of men who had worked as car salesmen for Holger Eriksson.”

  There was total silence in the room. The tension was high. Hansson had made an important connection.

  “The car salesman’s name wasn’t Erik Tandvall,” he continued. “His first name was Gote, Gote Tandvall. And right before this meeting I got a confirmation that he’s Erik Tandvall’s son. I should probably also mention that Erik Tandvall died several years ago. I haven’t been able to locate the son yet.”

  Hansson was done. No-one said anything for a long time.

  “So there’s a possibility that Holger Eriksson met Krista Haberman,” Wallander said slowly. “A woman who has disappeared without a trace. A woman from Svenstavik, where there is a church that has received a bequest in accordance with Eriksson’s will.”

  Everyone knew what this meant. A connection was finally beginning to emerge.

  CHAPTER 29

  Just before midnight Wallander realised that they were too tired to do any more. The meeting had been going on since 5 p.m., and they had only taken short breaks to air out the conference room. Hansson had given them the opening they needed. A connection was established. The contours of a person who moved like a shadow among the three men who had been killed were being
to appear. Even though they were still cautious about stating that there was a definite motive, they now had a strong feeling that they were skirting the edges of a series of events connected by revenge.

  Wallander had called them together to make a unified advance through difficult terrain. Hansson had given them a direction. But they still had no map to follow. At first there was still a lingering feeling of doubt among the team. Could this really be right? That a mysterious disappearance so many years ago, revealed in kilos of investigative materials from police officers in Jamtland who were no longer alive, might help them unmask a killer who had set a trap made of sharpened bamboo stakes in a ditch in Skane?

  It was when the door opened and Nyberg came in, several minutes after 6 p.m., that all doubt was dispelled. He didn’t even bother to take his usual place at the far end of the table. For once he was excited, something no-one could remember ever having seen before.

  “There was a cigarette butt on the jetty,” he said. “We were able to identify a fingerprint on it.”

  Wallander gave him a surprised look.

  “Is that really possible? Fingerprints on a cigarette butt?”

  “We were lucky,” Nyberg said. “You’re right that it’s not usually possible. But there’s one exception: if the cigarette is rolled by hand. And this one was.”

  First Hansson had discovered a plausible and even likely link between a long-vanished Polish woman and Holger Eriksson, and now Nyberg told them that a fingerprint on Runfeldt’s suitcase matched one at the site where Blomberg’s body was found.

  Silence fell over the room. It almost felt like too much to handle in such a short time. An investigation that had been dragging along without direction was now starting to pick up speed in earnest.

  After presenting his news, Nyberg sat down.

  “A killer who smokes,” Martinsson said. “That’ll be easier to find today than it was 20 years ago.”

  Wallander nodded thoughtfully. “We need to find other points of intersection between these murders,” he said. “With three people dead, we need at least nine combinations. Fingerprints, times, anything that will prove that there’s a common denominator.”

  He looked around the room.

  “We need to put together a proper sequence of events,” he said. “We know that the person or persons behind these killings acts with appalling cruelty. We’ve discovered a deliberate element in the way the victims have been killed. But we haven’t succeeded in reading the killer’s language, the code we discussed earlier. We have a feeling that the murderer is talking to us. But what is he or she trying to say? We don’t know. The question is whether there are more patterns to the whole thing that we haven’t yet found.”

  “You mean something like whether the killer strikes when there’s a full moon?” Svedberg asked.

  “That sort of thing. The symbolic full moon. What does it look like in this case? Does it exist? I’d like someone to put together a timetable. Is there anything there that might give us another lead?”

  Martinsson undertook to put together what information they had. Wallander knew that — on his own initiative — Martinsson had obtained several computer programmes developed by the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, D.C. He assumed that Martinsson saw an opportunity to make use of them.

  Then they started talking about whether there actually was a geographical centre to the crimes. Hoglund put a map on the slide projector, and Wallander stationed himself at the edge of the image.

  “It starts in Lodinge,” he said, pointing. “A person begins surveillance of Holger Eriksson’s farm. We can assume that he travels by car and that he uses the tractor path on the hill behind Eriksson’s tower. A year earlier someone, maybe the same person, broke into his house, without stealing anything. Possibly to warn him, leave him a sign. We don’t know, but it doesn’t have to be the same person.”

  Wallander pointed at Ystad.

  “Gosta Runfeldt is looking forward to his trip to Nairobi. Everything is ready. His suitcase is packed, money changed, the tickets collected. He has even ordered a taxi for early on the morning of the day of his departure. But he never takes the trip. He disappears without a trace for three weeks.”

  Wallander moves his finger again. “Now to the woods west of Marsvinsholm. An orienteer training at night finds him tied to a tree, strangled, emaciated. He must have been held captive in some way during the time he was missing. So, two murders at different places, with Ystad as a kind of midpoint.”

  His finger moved northeast.

  “We find a suitcase along the road to Hoor, not far from a point where you can turn off towards Holger Eriksson’s farm. The suitcase is lying at the side of the road as though it was placed there to be found. We can ask ourselves the question: why that particular spot? Because the road is convenient for the killer? We don’t know. This question may be more important than we’ve realised up until now.”

  Wallander moved his hand again. To the southwest, to Krageholm Lake.

  “Here we find Eugen Blomberg. This means we have a defined area that isn’t particularly large, only 30 or 40 kilometres between the outer points. It’s no more than half an hour by car between each site.”

  He sat down.

  “Let’s draw up some tentative and preliminary conclusions,” he went on. “What does this indicate?”

  “Familiarity with the local area,” Hoglund said. “The site in the woods at Marsvinsholm was well chosen. The suitcase was placed at a spot where there are no houses from which you could see a driver stop and leave something behind.”

  “How do you know that?” Martinsson asked.

  “Because I checked.”

  “You can either be familiar with an area yourself, or else you can find out about it from someone else,” Wallander said. “Which seems likely in this case?”

  They couldn’t agree. Hansson thought that a stranger could easily have decided on each of the sites. Svedberg thought the opposite, that the place where they had found Runfeldt indicated beyond a doubt that the killer was extremely familiar with the area. Wallander had his doubts. Earlier he had tended to think of a person who was an outsider. He was no longer so sure. They didn’t come to any agreement on this, and they couldn’t pinpoint an obvious centre, either. It was most likely to be near to where Runfeldt’s suitcase was found, but that didn’t get them any further.

  During the evening they kept returning to the suitcase. Why had it been put there, next to the road? And why had it been repacked, probably by a woman? They also couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why the underwear was missing. Hansson had suggested that Runfeldt might be the type of person who didn’t wear any. No-one took that seriously. There had to be some other explanation.

  At 9 p.m. they took a break to get some air. Martinsson disappeared into his office to call home, Svedberg put on his jacket to take a walk. Wallander went to the bathroom and washed his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. Suddenly he had a feeling that his appearance had changed since his father’s death. What the difference was, he couldn’t tell. He shook his head at his reflection. Soon he would have to make time to think about what had happened. His father had been dead for several weeks. He also thought about Baiba, the woman he cared so much about but never called.

  He doubted that a policeman could combine his job with anything else. But Martinsson had an excellent relationship with his family, and Hoglund had almost total responsibility for her two children. It was Wallander who didn’t seem able to combine the two things.

  He yawned at himself in the mirror. From the hall he could hear that they had started to reconvene. He decided that now they would have to talk about the woman who could be glimpsed in the background. They had to try to picture her and the role that she had actually played. This was the first thing he said when they closed the door.

  “There’s a woman involved somewhere in all of this,” he said. “For the rest of this meeting, as long as we can keep at it, we have to go over th
e background. We talk about a motive of revenge. But we’re not being very precise. Does that mean we’re thinking incorrectly? That we’re on the wrong track? That there might be a completely different explanation?”

  They waited in silence for him to continue. Even though they all looked exhausted, he could see that they were still concentrating. He started by going back to Katarina Taxell in Lund.

  “She gave birth here in Ystad,” he said. “On two nights she had a visitor. I’m convinced that this woman did visit her, even though she denies it. So she’s lying. Why? Who was the woman? Why won’t Taxell reveal her identity? I think that we can assume that Eugen Blomberg is the father of Katarina Taxell’s child — she’s lying about this. I’m sure that she lied about everything during our meeting in Lund. I don’t know why, but I think that we can probably assume that she holds a crucial key to this whole mess.”

  “Why don’t we just bring her in?” Hansson asked with some vehemence.

  “On what grounds?” Wallander replied. “She’s a new mother. We have to treat her carefully. And I doubt that she would tell us more than she has already if we interrogate her at Lund police station. We’ll have to try to go around her, smoke out the truth another way.”

  Hansson nodded reluctantly.

  “The third woman linked to Eugen Blomberg is his widow,” Wallander continued. “She gave us a lot of important information. Probably the fact that she doesn’t seem to mourn his death at all is most significant. He abused her, for a long time, and quite severely judging by her scars. She also confirms, indirectly, our theory about Katarina Taxell, since she says he has had extramarital affairs.”

  As he said these last words, he thought he sounded like an old-fashioned preacher. He wondered what term Hoglund would have used.

  “Let’s say that the details surrounding Blomberg form a pattern,” he said. “Which we’ll come back to later.”

  He switched to Runfeldt. He was moving backwards, towards the first killing.

  “Gosta Runfeldt was known to be a brutal man. Both his son and daughter confirm this. Behind the orchid lover, a whole different person was concealed. He was a private detective, something that we don’t have a good explanation for. Was he looking for excitement? Weren’t orchids enough for him?”