The Fifth Woman

EPILOGUE

On the afternoon of 4 December, Kurt Wallander spoke with Yvonne Ander for the last time. He didn’t know then that it would be the last, although they didn’t make an appointment to meet again.

They had come to an end. There was nothing more to add. Nothing to ask about, no reply to give. And after that the long and complex investigation began to slip out of his consciousness for the first time. Although more than a month had passed since they captured her, the case had continued to dominate his life. In all his years as a detective, he had never had such an intense need to understand. Criminal acts were always just the surface, and sometimes, once the surface of a crime had been cracked, chasms opened that no-one could have imagined. This was the case with Yvonne Ander. Wallander punched through the surface and immediately looked down into a bottomless pit. He had decided to climb down into it. He didn’t know where it would lead, for her or for him.

The first step had been to get her to break her silence. He was successful when he read again the letters that she had exchanged all her adult life with her mother and kept so carefully. Wallander sensed that it was here he could start to break through her aloofness. And he was right. That was 3 November, more than a month earlier. He was still shattered by the fact that Ann-Britt had been shot. He knew by then that she would survive and even regain full health, but the guilt weighed so heavily that it threatened to suffocate him. His best support during that period was Linda. She came to Ystad, even though she didn’t really have time, and took care of him, forcing him to accept that circumstances were to blame, not him. With her help he managed to crawl through the first terrible weeks of November. Aside from the sheer effort of functioning normally, he spent all of his time on Yvonne Ander. She was the one who had shot and nearly killed Ann-Britt. In the beginning he often felt like hitting her. Later it became more important to try and understand her. He managed to break through her silence and get her to start talking. He knotted the rope around himself and started down into the pit.

What was it he found down there? For a long time he was unsure whether she was insane or not, whether all she said about herself were confused dreams and sick, deformed fantasies. He didn’t trust his own judgement during this time, and he could hardly disguise his wariness of her. But somehow he sensed that she was telling him the truth. Yvonne Ander was that rare type of person who couldn’t lie.

In the last bundle of letters from her mother was one from a police officer in Africa named Francoise Bertrand. At first couldn’t decipher its contents. It was with a number of unfinished letters from her mother. They were all from the same North African country, written the year before. Francoise Bertrand had sent her letter to Yvonne Ander in August 1993. Finally he understood. Yvonne Ander’s mother Anna had been murdered by mistake, and the police had covered the whole thing up. Politics were clearly behind the killing, although Wallander felt incapable of fully understanding what was involved. But Francoise Bertrand had in all confidence written the letter, outlining what had really happened. Without any help from Ander at this point, he discussed with Chief Holgersson what had happened to the mother. The chief listened and then contacted the national police. The matter was thus removed from Wallander’s responsibility. But he read through all the letters one more time.

Wallander conducted his meetings with Yvonne Ander in jail. She slowly came to understand that he was a man who wasn’t hunting her. He was different from the others, the men who populated the world. He was introverted, seemed to sleep very little, and was also tormented by worry. For the first time in her life Ander discovered that she could trust a man. She told him this at one of their last meetings.

She never asked him straight out, but she still believed she knew the answer. He had probably never struck a woman. If he had, it happened only once. No more, never again.

On 3 November Ann-Britt underwent the last of the three operations. Everything went well, and her convalescence could finally begin. During this entire month Wallander set up a routine. After his talks with Ander he would drive straight to the hospital. He seldom stayed long, but Ann-Britt became the discussion partner he needed in order to help him understand how to penetrate the depths he had begun to plumb.

His first question to Ander was about the events in Africa. Who was Francoise Bertrand? What had actually happened? A pale light was falling through the window into the room. They sat facing each other at a table. In the distance a radio could be heard. The first sentences she uttered he didn’t catch. It was like a powerful roar when her silence finally broke. He just listened to her voice. Then he started to listen to what she was saying. He seldom took notes during their meetings, and he didn’t use a tape recorder.

“Somewhere there’s a man who killed my mother. Who’s looking for him?”

“Not me,” he had replied. “But if you tell me what happened, and if a Swedish citizen has been killed overseas, we will take steps to see that justice is done.”

He didn’t mention the conversation he had had a few days before with Chief Holgersson, that her mother’s death was already being investigated.

“Nobody knows who killed my mother,” she continued. “Fate selected her as a victim. Her killer didn’t even know her. He thought he was justified. He believed he could kill anybody he wanted to. Even an innocent woman who spent her retirement taking all the trips she never had the time or the money to take before.”

She made no attempt to conceal her bitter rage.

“Why was she staying with the nuns?” he asked.

Suddenly she looked up from the table, straight into his eyes.

“Who gave you the right to read my letters?”

“No-one. But they belong to you, a person who has committed several atrocious murders. Otherwise I never would have read them.”

She turned away again.

“The nuns,” Wallander repeated. “Why was she staying with them?”

“She didn’t have much money. She stayed wherever it was cheap. She never imagined it would lead to her death.”

“This happened more than a year ago. How did you react when the letter arrived?”

“There was no reason for me to wait any longer. How could I justify doing nothing when no-one else seemed to care?”

“Care about what?”

She didn’t reply. He waited. Then he changed the question.

“Wait to do what?”

She answered without looking at him.

“To kill them.”

“Who?”

“The ones who went free in spite of all they had done.”

He realised he had guessed correctly. It was when she received Francoise Bertrand’s letter that a force locked inside her had been released. She had harboured thoughts of revenge, but she could still control herself. Then the dam broke. She decided to take the law into her own hands.

Later Wallander came to see that there really wasn’t much difference from what had happened in Lodinge. She had been her own citizen militia. She had placed herself outside the law and dispensed her own justice.

“Is that how it was?” he asked. “You wanted to dispense justice? You wanted to punish those who should have been brought before a court of law but never were?”

“Who’s looking for the man who killed my mother? Who?”

She fell silent again. Wallander could see how it had all begun. Some months after the letter came from Africa she broke into Holger Eriksson’s house. That was the first step. When he asked her point blank if it was true, she didn’t even act surprised. She took it for granted that he knew.

“I heard about Krista Haberman,” she said. “That it was the car dealer who killed her.”

“Who did you hear it from?”

“A Polish woman in the hospital in Malmo. That was many years ago.”

“You were working at the hospital then?”

“I worked there several different times. I often talked to women who had been abused. She had a friend who used to know Krista Haberman.”

“Why did you break into Eriksson’s house?”

“I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible, and I was looking for signs that Krista Haberman had been there.”

“Why did you dig the pit? Why the stakes? Did the woman who knew Krista Haberman suspect that the body was buried near that ditch?”

She didn’t answer. But Wallander understood anyway. Despite the fact that the investigation had always been hard to grasp, Wallander and his colleagues had been on the right track without knowing it. Ander had echoed the men’s brutality in her methods of killing them.

During the five or six meetings Wallander had with Ander, he went methodically through the three murders, clearing up details and piecing together the connections that had previously been so vague. He continued to talk to her without a tape recorder. After the meetings he would sit in his car and make notes from memory. Then he would have them typed up. A copy went to Per Akeson, who was preparing the indictment, which would inevitably lead to a conviction on three counts. Yet the whole time, Wallander knew he was just scraping the surface. The real descent hadn’t even started yet. The evidence would send her to prison. But he wouldn’t find the actual truth he sought until he reached the deepest depths of the pit.

She had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, of course. Wallander knew it was unavoidable, but he insisted that it be postponed. Right now the most important thing was that he be able to talk to her in peace. No-one objected to this. They understood that she would probably clam up again if she was upset. She was ready to talk to him and him alone.

They went further, slowly, step by step, day by day. Outside the jail the autumn was deepening and drawing them towards winter. Wallander never found out why Eriksson had driven up to get Krista Haberman in Svenstavik and then killed her. Presumably it was because she had denied him something he was used to getting. Maybe an argument turned violent.

He moved on to Gosta Runfeldt. She was convinced that Runfeldt had murdered his wife, drowned her in Stang Lake. And even if he hadn’t done it, he still deserved his fate. He had abused her so severely that she actually wanted to die. Hoglund was right when she sensed that Runfeldt had been attacked in the florist’s shop. Ander had found out that he would be leaving for Nairobi and lured him to the shop by telling him that she had to buy flowers for a reception early the next morning. Then she knocked him to the ground. The blood on the floor was indeed his. The broken window was a diversion to fool the police into believing it was a break-in.

Then came a description of what for Wallander was the most terrifying element. Until that point he had tried to understand her without letting his emotional reactions take over. But then he couldn’t go any further. She recounted with utter calm how she had undressed Gosta Runfeldt, tied him up, and forced him into the baking oven. When he could no longer control his bodily functions she took away his underwear and laid him on a plastic sheet.

Later she led him out to the woods. By that time he was quite powerless. She tied him to the tree and strangled him. It was at that moment that she turned into a monster in Wallander’s eyes. It didn’t matter if she was a man or a woman. She became a monster, and he could only be thankful that they had stopped her before she killed Tore Grunden or anyone else on the list she had made.

The list was also her only mistake — she hadn’t destroyed the notebook in which she drew up her plans before she copied them into the ledger she kept in Vollsjo. Wallander never asked her why. Even she admitted it was a mistake. That was the only one of her actions she couldn’t explain. Later Wallander pondered whether she had actually wanted to leave a clue, that deep inside she wanted to be discovered and stopped. Sometimes he thought this was true, sometimes he didn’t.

She didn’t have much to say about Eugen Blomberg. She described how she shuffled the slips of paper. She let chance decide who would be next, just as chance had killed her mother. This was one of the times he interrupted her. Normally he let her speak freely, prompting her with questions when she couldn’t decide how to go on. But now he stopped her.

“So you did the same thing as the men who killed your mother,” he said. “You let chance select your victim.”

“It’s not comparable,” she replied. “All those men whose names I had written down deserved their death. I gave them time with my slips of paper. I prolonged their lives.”

He pursued it no further, since he realised that in an obscure way she was right. Reluctantly he admitted to himself that she had her own peculiar sort of truth.

When he read through the transcripts of the notes he made from memory, he could see that what he had was a confession, but it was also an exceedingly incomplete account. Did he succeed with what he intended? Afterwards, Wallander found it difficult to speak about Yvonne Ander. He always referred people who questioned him to the notes.

As it turned out, what became Yvonne Ander’s last will and testament was her story of the terrifying experiences of her childhood. Wallander was almost the same age as Ander, and he thought time after time that the era he was living in was concerned with one single decisive question: what are we actually doing with our children? She had told him how her mother was frequently abused by her stepfather, who had replaced her biological father. The stepfather had forced her mother to have an abortion. She had never had the chance to have the sister her mother was carrying. She couldn’t have known if it really was a sister — maybe it was a brother — but to her it was a sister, brutally ripped from her mother’s womb against her will one night in the early 1950s. She remembered that night as a bloody hell. When she was telling Wallander about it, she raised her eyes from the table and looked straight into his. Her mother had lain on a sheet on the kitchen table, the abortionist was drunk, her stepfather locked in the cellar, probably drunk too. That night she was robbed of her sister and for all time learned to view the future as darkness, with threatening men lurking round every corner, violence lurking behind every friendly smile, every word.

She had barricaded her memories into a secret interior room. She had been educated, become a nurse, and she had always harboured the vague notion that someday she would avenge the sister she never had, and the mother who wasn’t allowed to give birth to her. She collected the stories from abused women, she tracked down the dead women in muddy fields and Smaland lakes, she entered names in a ledger, shuffled her slips of paper.

And then her mother had been murdered.

She described it almost poetically to Wallander. Like a silent tidal wave, she said. No more than that. I knew that it was time. I let a year pass. I planned, completed the timetable that had kept me alive all those years. Then I dug in a ditch at night.

Precisely those words. Then I dug in a ditch at night. Maybe they best summed up Wallander’s experience of his many conversations with Yvonne Ander that autumn. It was like a picture of the time he was living in. What ditch was he digging?

One question was never answered: why she suddenly, in the mid-1980s, changed professions and became a conductor. Wallander had understood that the train timetable was the liturgy she lived by, her handbook. But the trains remained her private world. Maybe the only one; maybe the last one.

Did she feel guilt? Akeson asked him about that many times. Lisa Holgersson asked less often, his colleagues almost never. The only person besides Akeson who really insisted on knowing was Ann-Britt Hoglund. Wallander told her the truth: he didn’t know.

“Ander reminds me of a coiled spring,” he told her. “I can’t express it better than that. I can’t say whether guilt is part of it, or whether it’s gone.”

On 4 December it was over. Wallander had nothing more to ask, and Yvonne Ander had nothing more to say. The confession was complete. Wallander knew he had reached the end of the long descent. Now he could return to the surface. The psychiatric examination could begin, the defence lawyer could sharpen his pencils, and only Wallander had any idea what would happen.

He knew that Yvonne Ander would fall silent again, with the determined will of someone who has nothing more to say. Just before he left, he asked her about two more things he didn’t have answers to. The first was a detail that no longer had any significance, but he needed to satisfy his own curiosity.

“When Katarina Taxell called her mother from the house in Vollsjo, something was making a banging noise,” he said. “We couldn’t work out where that sound was coming from.”

She gave him a baffled look. Then her face broke open in a smile, the only one Wallander saw in all his talks with her.

“A farmer’s tractor had broken down in the field next to us. He was hitting it with a big hammer to get something loose from the undercarriage. Could you really hear that on the phone?”

Wallander nodded. He was already thinking of his last question.

“I think we actually met once,” he said. “On a train.”

She nodded.

“South of Almhult? I asked you when we would get to Malmo.”

“I recognised you from the newspapers. From last summer.”

“Did you already know then that we’d catch you?”

“Why should I?”

“A policeman from Ystad gets on a train in Almhult. What’s he doing there? Unless he’s following the trail of what happened to Gosta Runfeldt’s wife?”

She shook her head. “I never thought about that. I should have.”

Wallander had nothing more to ask. He had found out everything he wanted to know. He stood up, muttered goodbye, and left.

That afternoon Wallander visited the hospital as usual. Ann-Britt was asleep when he arrived, but he spoke to a doctor who told him that in six months she could return to work. He left the hospital just after 5 p.m. It was already dark, just below freezing, no wind. He drove out to the cemetery and went to his father’s grave. Withered flowers had frozen solid to the ground. It was still less than three months since they had come back from Rome. The holiday was vivid in his mind as he stood by the grave, wondering what his father had actually been thinking when he took his night-time walk to the Spanish Steps, to the fountain, with that gleam in his eyes.

It was as if Yvonne Ander and his father could have stood on either side of a river and waved to each other, even though they had nothing in common. Or did they? Wallander wondered what he himself had in common with her. He had no answer.

That night, out by the grave in the dark cemetery, the investigation came to an end for him. There would still be papers he would have to read over and sign, but the case was finished. The psychiatric examination would declare that she was in full possession of her faculties. Then she would be convicted and hidden away at Hinseberg. The investigation of the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death in Africa would also continue. But that had nothing to do with his own work.

The night of 4 December he slept badly. The next day he decided to look at a house just north of town. He was also going to visit a kennel in Sjobo where they had a litter of black Labrador puppies for sale. The next day he had to go to Stockholm and speak at the police academy. Why he had given in when Chief Holgersson asked him again, he didn’t know. Now he lay awake wondering what the hell he was going to say.

On that restless night, he thought mostly about Baiba. Several times he got up and stood at the kitchen window, staring at the streetlight swaying on its wire.

Just after he had come back from Rome, at the end of September, they had decided that she would come to Ystad soon — no later than November. They would have a serious discussion about whether she should move to Sweden. But her visit had been postponed, first once, then again. Each time there were excellent reasons for why she couldn’t come, not yet. Wallander believed her, of course, but he couldn’t quell his feeling of uncertainty. Was it still there, invisible, between them? A rift he hadn’t seen? If so, why hadn’t he seen it? Because he didn’t want to?

Now she was really going to come. They were supposed to meet in Stockholm on 8 December. He would go straight from the police academy to Arlanda to meet her. Linda would join them in the evening and they would all head south to Skane the following day. How long she would stay, he didn’t know, but this time they would have a serious discussion about the future, not just about the next time they could meet.

The night turned into a long vigil. The weather had turned warmer and the meteorologists were predicting snow. Wallander wandered like a lost soul between his bed and the kitchen window. Now and then he sat down at the kitchen table and made a few notes, in a futile attempt to find a starting point for the lecture he was going to give in Stockholm. All the time he couldn’t stop thinking about Yvonne Ander and her story. She was constantly on his mind, and occasionally she even blocked out thoughts of Baiba.

The person he thought very little about was his father. He was already far away. At times Wallander had trouble recalling all the details of his lined face. He’d had to reach for a photograph and look at it so that the memory wouldn’t completely slip away. During November he had visited Gertrud. The house in Loderup seemed empty, the studio cold and forbidding. Gertrud always gave the impression of being composed, but lonely.

Maybe he finally slept for a few hours towards dawn or maybe he was awake the whole time. By 7 a.m. he was already dressed. At 7.30 a.m. he drove his car, which sputtered suspiciously, to the police station. It was a particularly quiet morning. Martinsson had a cold; Svedberg had gone to Malmo on an assignment. The hall was deserted. He sat down in his office and read through the transcript of his notes of his last conversation with Yvonne Ander. On his desk there was also a transcript of an interview Hansson had carried out with Tore Grunden, the man she had tried to push in front of the train at Hassleholm. His background contained the same ingredients as all the other names in her macabre death ledger. Tore Grunden had once served time for abusing a woman. Wallander could see that Hansson had made it very clear to Grunden that he had been close to being torn to shreds by the oncoming train.

Wallander noticed that there was some tacit understanding among his colleagues of what Ander had done. That this understanding existed at all surprised him. She had shot Hoglund, she had attacked and killed men. Normally a team of policemen wouldn’t be supportive of a woman like Yvonne Ander. It was possible to ask whether the police had a friendly attitude towards women at all, unless they were officers with the special stamina that both Ann-Britt Hoglund and Lisa Holgersson possessed.

He scribbled his signature and pushed the papers aside. It was 8.45 a.m.

The day before, he had picked up the keys from the estate agent. It was a two-storey brick house in the middle of a big old garden to the north of Ystad. From the upper floor there was a view of the sea. He unlocked the door and went in. The rooms were empty. He walked around in the silence, opened the terrace door to the garden, and tried to picture himself living there.

To his surprise, it was easier than he had imagined. It was obvious that he wasn’t as attached to Mariagatan as he had feared. He asked himself whether Baiba might be happy there. She had talked about her own longing to get away from Riga — to the countryside, but not too far away, not too isolated.

It didn’t take him long to make up his mind that morning. He would buy the house if Baiba liked it. The price was also low enough that he could manage to get the necessary loans.

Just after 10 a.m. he left the house. He promised to give the estate agent a definite answer within the week. After looking at the house, he went on to look for a dog. The kennel was located along the road to Hoor, right outside of Sjobo. Dogs barked from various cages when he turned into the courtyard. The owner was a young woman who, much to his surprise, spoke with a strong Goteborg accent.

“I’d like to look at a black Labrador,” Wallander said.

She showed them to him. The puppies were still too small to leave their mother.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

“None that still live at home unfortunately,” he replied. “Do you have to have children to buy a puppy?”

“Not at all. But this breed of dog is better with children than almost any other.”

Wallander explained that he might buy a house outside of Ystad. If he decided to do that, he also wanted to have a dog. One depended on the other.

“I’ll hold one of the puppies for you. Take your time, but not too long. I always have buyers for Labradors.”

Wallander promised to let her know within the week, just as he had promised the estate agent. He was shocked at the price she mentioned. Could a puppy really cost that much? But he knew that he would buy the dog if the house purchase went through.

He left the kennel at midday. When he came out onto the main road, he suddenly didn’t know where he was going. Was he on his way anywhere at all? He wasn’t going to see Yvonne Ander. For the time being they had no more to say to each other. They would meet again, but not now. Per Akeson might ask him to expand on some of the details but he doubted it. They had more than enough evidence to convict her.

The truth was that he had nowhere to go. No-one really needed him. Without being fully aware of what he was doing, he headed towards Vollsjo and stopped outside Hansgarden. Yvonne Ander owned the house, and would presumably continue to do so during all the years she would spend in prison. She had no close relatives, only her deceased mother. Whether she even had any friends was questionable. Katarina Taxell had been dependent on her, had received her support, just like the other women. But friends? Wallander shuddered at the thought. Yvonne Ander didn’t have a single person who was close to her. She stepped out of a vacuum and she killed people.

Wallander got out of his car. The house emanated desolation. When he walked around it, he noticed a window stood slightly open. That wasn’t good. Someone could easily break in. Wallander found a wooden bench and put it under the window, climbed inside and looked around. The window had been left open out of carelessness. He walked through the rooms, and looked at the baking oven with distaste. There was the invisible boundary. Beyond it he would never be able to understand her.

Now the investigation really was over. They had drawn a final line through the macabre list, interpreted the murderer’s language, and found the solution. That was why he felt superfluous. He was no longer needed. When he returned from Stockholm he would go back to the investigation of car smuggling to the former Eastern bloc countries. Not until then would he truly feel real to himself again.

A phone rang in the silence. Only on the second ring did he realise that it was ringing in his jacket pocket. He took it out. It was Per Akeson.

“Am I interrupting anything?” he asked. “Where are you?”

Wallander didn’t want to tell him where he was.

“I’m sitting in my car,” he said. “But I’m parked.”

“I assume you haven’t heard the news,” Akeson said. “There’s not going to be a trial.”

Wallander didn’t understand. The thought had never occurred to him, although it should have. He should have been prepared.

“Yvonne Ander committed suicide,” Akeson said. “Sometime last night. She was found dead early this morning.”

Wallander held his breath. There was still something resisting, threatening to burst.

“She seems to have had access to pills. She shouldn’t have had them. At least not so many that she could take her own life. Spiteful people are going to ask whether you were the one who gave them to her.”

Wallander could hear that this was not a veiled question, but he answered it anyway.

“I didn’t help her.”

“The whole thing had a feeling of serenity about it. Everything was in perfect order. She seems to have made up her mind and carried it out. She died in her sleep. It’s easy to understand, of course.”

“Is it?” Wallander asked.

“She left a letter. With your name on it. I have it here on the desk in front of me.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said.

He stood where he was, with the silent phone in his hand, and tried to gauge what he was really feeling. Emptiness, maybe a vague hint of injustice.

He checked that the window was closed properly and then left the house through the front door.

It was a clear December day. Winter was lurking somewhere nearby.

Wallander went into Per Akeson’s office. The letter was lying in the middle of the desk.

He took it with him and went down to the harbour. He walked out to the sea rescue service’s red shed and sat down on the bench. The letter was short.

Somewhere in Africa there is a man who killed my mother. Who is looking for him?

That was all.

Who is looking for him?

She had signed the letter with her full name. In the upper right-hand corner she had written the date and time.

5 December, 1994, 2.44 a.m.

The next-to-last entry in her timetable, he thought. She wouldn’t write the last one herself, the doctor would do that, when he put down the time of her death. Then there would be nothing more. The timetable would be closed, her life concluded.

Her departure was formulated as a question or accusation. Or maybe both.

Who is looking for him?

He tore the letter into strips and tossed them into the water. He remembered that once, several years ago, he had torn up a letter that he had decided against sending to Baiba. He had tossed that one into the water too. There was a great difference. He would see Baiba again, and very soon.

He watched the pieces of paper float away over the water. Then he left the harbour and went to the hospital to visit Ann-Britt.

Something was over at last. The autumn in Skane was moving towards winter.