The Fifth Woman kw-6

by Henning Mankell

  “That might turn out to be important,” Wallander said hesitantly. “But I find it difficult to believe it.”

  “Otherwise I couldn’t manage to read much from the times,” she said.

  Wallander held up the plastic bag.

  “Now that we’re talking about timetables, I found this in a secret compartment in Katarina Taxell’s desk, as if this were her most important possession, that she hid from the world. A timetable for Swedish Railways’ inter-city trains for the spring of 1991. With a departure time underlined: Nassjo 16.00. It goes every day.”

  He pushed the plastic bag over to Nyberg.

  “Fingerprints,” he said.

  Then he moved on to Krista Haberman and told them about the morning visit in the fog. There was no mistaking the sombre mood in the room.

  “So I think we have to start digging,” he concluded. “When the fog lifts and Hansson has had a chance to find out who worked the land, and whether any changes took place after 1967.”

  For a long time there was complete silence as everyone evaluated what Wallander had just said. It was Akeson who spoke.

  “This sounds both incredible and at the same time highly plausible,” he said. “I assume that we have to take this possibility seriously.”

  “It would be good if this didn’t get out,” Chief Holgersson said. “There’s nothing people like better than having old, unsolved missing-person cases come up again.”

  They had made a decision. Wallander decided to end the meeting as quickly as possible because everyone had a lot of work to do.

  “Katarina Taxell has disappeared,” he said. “Left her home in a red Golf with an unknown driver. Her departure was hasty. Her mother wants us to put out an APB on her, which we can hardly refuse since she’s the next of kin. But I think we should wait, at least a few more days.”

  “Why?” Akeson asked.

  “I have a suspicion that she’ll make contact,” Wallander said. “Not with us, of course. But with her mother, who she knows will be worried. She’ll call to reassure her. Unfortunately she probably won’t say where she is. Or who she’s with.”

  Wallander now turned to face Akeson.

  “I want someone to stay with Taxell’s mother and record the conversation. Sooner or later it’ll come.”

  “If it hasn’t happened already,” Hansson said, getting to his feet. “Give me Birch’s phone number.”

  He got it from Hoglund and quickly left the room.

  “There’s nothing more for now,” Wallander said. “Let’s say we’ll meet again at 5 p.m. if nothing else happens before then.”

  When Wallander got to his own office, the phone was ringing. It was Martinsson, wanting to know if Wallander could meet him at his house at 2 p.m. Wallander promised to be there. He left the station and ate lunch at the Hotel Continental. He knew that he couldn’t afford it, but he was hungry and didn’t have much time. He sat alone at a window table, nodding to people passing by, surprised and hurt that no-one stopped to offer condolences at the death of his father. It was in the papers. News of a death travels fast, and Ystad was a small town. He ate halibut and drank a light beer. The waitress was young and blushed every time he looked at her. He wondered sympathetically how she was going to stand her job.

  At 2 p.m. he rang Martinsson’s bell, and they went and sat in the kitchen. Martinsson was home alone. Wallander asked about Terese. She had gone back to school. Martinsson looked pale and dejected. Wallander had never seen him so depressed.

  “What should I do?” Martinsson asked.

  “What does your wife say? What does Terese say?”

  “That I should keep working, of course. They’re not the ones who want me to quit. I’m the one.”

  Wallander waited. But Martinsson didn’t say anything.

  “Remember a few years back?” Wallander began. “When I shot a man in the fog near Kaseberga and killed him? And then ran over another one on the Oland Bridge? I was gone almost a year. All of you thought that I had quit. Then there was that case with the two lawyers named Torstensson, and suddenly everything changed. I was about to sign my letter of resignation, but instead I went back on duty.”

  Martinsson nodded. He remembered.

  “Now, after the fact, I’m glad that I did what I did. The only advice I can give you is that you shouldn’t do anything rash. Wait to make up your mind. Work one day at a time. Decide later. I’m not asking you to forget, I’m asking you to be patient. Everyone misses you. You’re a good policeman. Everyone notices when you’re not there.”

  Martinsson threw out his arms.

  “I’m not that important. Sure, I know a few things. But you can’t tell me that I’m in any way irreplaceable.”

  “You are irreplaceable,” Wallander said. “That’s just what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Wallander had expected the conversation to take a long time. Martinsson sat in silence for a few minutes. Then he got up and left the kitchen. When he came back he had his jacket on.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Wallander. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  In the car on the way to the station, Wallander gave him a brief summary of the events of the past few days. Martinsson listened in silence. When they entered reception, Ebba stopped them. Since she didn’t take the time to welcome Martinsson back, Wallander knew at once that something had happened.

  “Ann-Britt is trying to get hold of you two,” she said. “It’s important.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Someone named Katarina Taxell called her mother.”

  Wallander looked at Martinsson. So he had been right, but it had happened faster than he had expected.

  CHAPTER 33

  They weren’t too late. Birch had managed to be there in time. In just over an hour the tape of the conversation was in Ystad. They gathered in Wallander’s office, where Svedberg had set up a tape recorder, and listened tensely to the brief conversation. The first thing that occurred to Wallander was that Katarina Taxell didn’t want to talk any longer than necessary.

  They listened to it once, then a second time. Svedberg handed Wallander a pair of earphones so that he could listen to the two voices more closely.

  “Mama? It’s me.”

  “Dear God. Where on earth are you? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, we’re fine.”

  “Where on earth are you?”

  “With a good friend.”

  “Who?”

  “A good friend. I just wanted to call and tell you everything’s fine.”

  “What happened? Why did you disappear?”

  “I’ll explain some other time.”

  “Who are you staying with?”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Don’t hang up. What’s your phone number?”

  “I’m going now. I just wanted to call so you wouldn’t worry.”

  Her mother tried to say something else, but Katarina hung up.

  They listened to the tape at least 20 times. Svedberg wrote down what was said on a piece of paper.

  “It’s the eleventh line that interests us,” Wallander said. “‘You don’t know her.’ What does she mean by that?”

  “Just what she says,” Hoglund said.

  “That’s not what I’m getting at,” Wallander answered. “‘You don’t know her.’ That could mean two things. Either that her mother has never met her or that her mother doesn’t understand what she means to Katarina.”

  “The first one is the most plausible,” Hoglund said.

  While they talked Nyberg put on the earphones and listened again. The sounds seeping out told them that he had the volume turned up high.

  “There’s something audible in the background,” Nyberg said. “A banging noise.”

  Wallander put on the earphones. Nyberg was right. There was a steady pounding in the background. The others took turns listening. No-one could say for sure what it was.

  “Where is she?
” asked Wallander. “She’s arrived somewhere. She’s staying with the woman who came to pick her up. And somewhere in the background something is banging.”

  “Could it be near a construction site?” Martinsson suggested. It was the first thing he had said since returning to work.

  “That’s a possibility,” Wallander said.

  They listened again. It was definitely a banging sound.

  “Send the tape to Linkoping,” he said. “If we can identify the sound, it might help us.”

  “How many construction sites are there in Skane alone?” Hamren said.

  “It could be something else,” Wallander said. “Something that might give us an idea where she is.”

  Nyberg left. They stayed in Wallander’s office, leaning against the walls and desk.

  “Three things are important from now on,” Wallander said. “For the time being we’ll have to put aside certain aspects of the investigation. We have to keep mapping out Katarina Taxell’s life. Who is she? Who are her friends? That’s the first thing. The second thing is: who is she staying with?”

  He paused before he went on.

  “We’ll wait until Hansson comes back from Lodinge, but I think our third task will be to start digging at Eriksson’s place.”

  The meeting broke up. Wallander had to go to Lund, and he was thinking of taking Hoglund with him. It was already late afternoon.

  “Do you have a babysitter?” he asked when they were alone in his office.

  “Yes,” she said. “My neighbour needs the money, thank God.”

  “How can you afford it on a police salary?” Wallander asked.

  “I can’t,” she said. “But my husband makes a good living. That’s what saves us. We’re one of the lucky families today.”

  Wallander called Birch and told him that they were on their way. He let Hoglund take her car. He no longer trusted his own car, in spite of the expensive repairs. The land-scape slowly vanished into the twilight. A cold wind blew across the fields.

  “We’ll start at Taxell’s mother’s house,” he said. “Later we’ll go back to her flat.”

  “What do you think you might find? You’ve already gone over the flat. And you’re usually thorough.”

  “Maybe nothing new. But maybe a connection between two details that I didn’t see before.”

  She drove fast.

  “Do you usually rev the engine when you start the car?” Wallander asked suddenly.

  She gave him a quick look. “Sometimes. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I wonder if it was a woman driving the red Golf that picked up Taxell and the baby.”

  “Don’t we know that for sure?”

  “No,” Wallander said firmly. “We hardly know anything for sure.”

  He looked out the window. They were passing Marsvinsholm.

  “There’s something else we don’t know with certainty,” he said after a while. “Though I’m becoming more and more convinced of it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s alone. There’s no man anywhere near her. There’s no-one at all. We’re not looking for a woman who might give us a possible lead. There’s nothing behind her. There’s just her. No-one else.”

  “So she’s the one who committed the murders? Dug the pungee pit? Strangled Runfeldt after holding him captive? Tossed Blomberg in the lake, alive in a sack?”

  Wallander replied by asking another question.

  “Do you remember, early on, when we talked about the killer’s language? That he or she wanted to tell us something? About the deliberateness of the modus operandi?”

  She remembered.

  “It strikes me now that from the start we saw things correctly. But we were thinking wrong.”

  “Because a woman was behaving like a man?”

  “Maybe not exactly the behaviour. But she committed deeds that made us think of brutal men.”

  “So we were supposed to think about the victims? It was they who were brutal?”

  “Exactly. Them and not the killer. We read the wrong message into what we saw.”

  “But here’s where it gets difficult,” she said. “To believe that a woman can be capable of this. I’m not talking about physical strength. I’m just as strong as my husband, for example. He has trouble beating me at arm wrestling.”

  Wallander looked at her in surprise. She noticed and laughed.

  “People amuse themselves in different ways.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “I remember having a finger-pulling match with my mother when I was little,” he said. “I think I was the winner.”

  “Maybe she let you win.”

  They turned off towards Sturup.

  “I don’t know what motivation this woman has for her actions,” Wallander said. “But if we find her, I think we’ll be dealing with someone the likes of whom we’ve never encountered before.”

  “A female monster?”

  “Maybe. But that’s not certain either.”

  The phone interrupted their conversation. Wallander answered. It was Birch. He gave them directions to Katarina Taxell’s mother’s house.

  “What’s her first name?” Wallander asked.

  “Hedwig. Hedwig Taxell.”

  They would be there in about half an hour. The twilight wrapped around them.

  Birch was on the steps to receive them. Hedwig Taxell lived at the end of a row of terrace houses on the outskirts of Lund. Wallander guessed that the houses had been built in the early 1960s. Flat roofs, square boxes facing onto small courtyards. He recalled having read that the roofs sometimes caved in during heavy snowfalls.

  “They almost started talking before I got the machine set up,” he said.

  “We haven’t exactly been overwhelmed with good luck,” Wallander replied. “What’s your impression of Hedwig Taxell?”

  “She’s worried about her daughter and grandson. But she seems more composed than before.”

  “Do you think she’ll help us? Or is she protecting her daughter?”

  “I think she wants to know where she is.”

  He let them into the living room. Without being able to define it, Wallander had a feeling that the room was somehow similar to Katarina Taxell’s flat. Hedwig Taxell came in and greeted them. As usual, Birch stayed in the background. Wallander studied her. She was pale. Her eyes shifted restlessly. Wallander was expecting this. Her voice on the tape had been nervous and tense, close to breaking point. He had brought Hoglund along because she had a great ability to reassure nervous people. Mrs Taxell didn’t seem to be on her guard. He had a feeling that she was glad not to be alone. They sat down. Wallander had prepared his first questions.

  “Mrs Taxell, we need your help. Can you answer some questions about Katarina for us?”

  “How could she know anything about those horrible murders? She just had a baby, you know.”

  “We don’t think she’s in any way involved,” Wallander said in a friendly voice. “But we have to look for information from many different sources.”

  “What’s she supposed to know?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find out.”

  “Can’t you try to find her instead? I don’t understand what’s happened.”

  “I’m sure she’s in no danger,” Wallander said, but he wasn’t entirely successful in hiding his doubt.

  “She’s never done a thing like this before.”

  “So you have no idea where she is, Mrs Taxell?”

  “My name is Hedwig.”

  “You have no idea where she is?”

  “No. I can’t quite believe what is happening.”

  “Does Katarina have a lot of friends?”

  “No, she doesn’t, but the ones she has are close friends. I don’t know where she’d be other than with one of them.”

  “Maybe there’s someone she didn’t see very often? Or someone she has met recently?”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Or maybe someone she met earlier? So
meone she had started seeing again recently?”

  “I would have known about it. We have a good relationship. Much better than most mothers and daughters.”

  “I’m not implying that you had any secrets from each other,” Wallander said patiently. “But it’s rare that someone knows everything about another person. Do you know, for instance, who the father of her child is?”

  Wallander hadn’t meant to throw the question in her face like that. She flinched.

  “I’ve tried to get her to talk about it,” she said. “But she refuses.”

  “So you don’t know who he is? You can’t even guess?”

  “I didn’t even know she was seeing anyone.”

  “You knew that she had a relationship with Eugen Blomberg?”

  “I knew about it. I didn’t like him.”

  “Why not? Was it because he was already married?”

  “I didn’t know that until I saw the obituary in the paper. It was a shock.”

  “Why didn’t you like him?”

  “I don’t know. He was unpleasant.”

  “Did you know that he had abused Katarina?”

  Her horror was genuine. For a moment Wallander felt sorry for her. Her world was threatening to collapse. She was being forced to admit that there was a lot she didn’t know about her daughter, that the intimacy she thought they shared was hardly more than a shell.

  “Did he hit her?”

  “Worse than that. He abused her in many different ways.”

  She stared at him in disbelief, but saw that he was telling the truth. She couldn’t defend herself.

  “It’s possible that Eugen Blomberg is the father of her child, even though they weren’t seeing each other.”

  She shook her head slowly and said nothing. Wallander looked at Hoglund. She nodded. He took this to mean that he should go on. Birch stood motionless in the background.

  “Her friends,” Wallander said. “We need to talk to them.”

  “I’ve already told you who they are. And you’ve already talked to them.”

  She rattled off three names. Birch nodded in the background.

  “There are no others?”

  “No.”

  “Does she belong to any clubs?”