The Fifth Woman

CHAPTER 8

At midnight, Ylva Brink finally sat down to have a cup of coffee. She was one of two midwives working the night of 30 September in the maternity ward of Ystad’s hospital. Her colleague, Lena Soderstrom, was with a woman who had just started to have contractions. It had been a busy night — without drama, but with a steady stream of tasks that had to be carried out.

They were understaffed. Two midwives and two nurses had to handle all the work. There was an obstetrician they could call if there was serious haemorrhaging or any other complication, but otherwise they were on their own. It used to be worse, thought Ylva Brink as she sat down on the sofa with her coffee. A few years ago she had been the only midwife on duty all night long, and sometimes this had resulted in difficulties. They had finally managed to talk some sense into the hospital administration and push through their demand to have at least two midwives on every night.

Her office was in the middle of a large ward. The glass walls allowed her to see what was going on outside. In the daytime there was constant activity, but at night, everything was different. She liked working nights. A lot of her colleagues preferred other shifts. They had families, and they couldn’t get enough sleep during the day. But Ylva Brink’s children were grown up, and her husband was chief engineer on an oil tanker that sailed between ports in the Middle East and Asia. For her it was peaceful to work while everyone else was asleep.

She drank her coffee with pleasure and took a piece of sugar cake from a tray on her desk. One of the nurses came in and sat down, and then the other one joined them. A radio was playing softly in the corner. They talked about autumn and the persistent rain. One of the nurses had heard from her mother, who could predict the weather, that it was going to be a long, cold winter.

Ylva Brink thought back on the times when Skane had been snowed in. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was terrible for women who were in labour but couldn’t get to the hospital. She remembered sitting freezing in a tractor as it crept along through the blizzard and snowdrifts to an isolated farm north of town. The woman was haemorrhaging. It was the only time in her years as a midwife that she had been seriously afraid of losing a patient. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen. Women simply did not die giving birth in Sweden.

But still, it was autumn now. Ylva came from the far north of Sweden, and sometimes missed the melancholy Norrland forests. She had never got used to the open landscape of Skane where the wind reigned supreme. But her husband had been born in Trelleborg and couldn’t imagine living anywhere but in Skane. When he had time at home, that is.

Her musings were interrupted when Lena Soderstrom came into the room. She was about 30. She could be my daughter, Ylva thought. I’m twice her age.

“She probably won’t deliver before early morning,” Lena said. “We’ll get to go home.”

“It’ll be quiet tonight,” said Ylva. “Take a nap if you’re tired.”

A nurse hurried by in the hall. Lena Soderstrom was drinking her tea. The other two nurses sat bent over a crossword puzzle.

Already October, Ylva thought. The middle of autumn already. Soon winter will be here. In December Harry has a holiday, a month off, and we’ll remodel the kitchen. Not because it needs it, but so he can have something to do. Harry’s not wild about holidays. He gets restless.

Someone had pressed a call button. A nurse got up and left. A few minutes later she came back.

“Maria in Room 3 has a headache,” she said, sitting back down to her crossword puzzle. Ylva sipped her coffee. Suddenly she realised that she was sitting wondering about something, without knowing exactly what it was. Then it came to her. The nurse who had walked past in the hall. Hadn’t all the women working in the ward been here in the office? And no call bells had rung from intensive care. She must have been imagining things.

But at the same time she knew she hadn’t been.

“Who just walked by?” she asked softly.

The two nurses gave her curious looks.

“What’s that?” Lena Soderstrom asked.

“A nurse walked down the hall a few minutes ago. While we were sitting here.”

They still couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She didn’t understand it herself. Another bell rang. Ylva quickly set down her cup.

“I’ll get it.”

The woman in Room 2 was feeling bad. She was about to have her third child. Ylva suspected that the child hadn’t exactly been planned. After she had given the woman something to drink she went out into the hall. She looked around. All the doors were closed. But a nurse had walked past. She hadn’t imagined it, and suddenly she felt uneasy. Something wasn’t quite right. She stood still in the hall and listened. The muted radio could be heard in the office. She went back and picked up her coffee cup.

“It was nothing,” she said.

At that instant the nurse she had seen earlier went by in the other direction. This time Lena saw her too. They both gave a start as they heard the door to the main hall close.

“Who was that?” asked Lena.

Ylva shook her head. The nurses looked up from their puzzle.

“Who are you talking about?” one of them asked.

“The nurse who just walked past.”

The one sitting with a pen in her hand, filling in the crossword, started to laugh.

“But we’re right here, both of us.”

Ylva got up quickly. When she pulled open the door to the outer hall, which connected the maternity ward to the rest of the hospital, it was empty. She listened, and far off she heard a door close. She went back to the nurses’ station, shaking her head.

“What’s a nurse from another ward doing here?” Lena asked. “Without even saying hello?”

Ylva didn’t know, but she knew it hadn’t been her imagination.

“Let’s take a look in all the rooms,” she said, “and see if everything’s all right.”

Lena gave her a searching look.

“What could be wrong?”

“Just for safety’s sake, that’s all.”

They went into all the rooms. Everything seemed normal. At 1 a.m. a woman started bleeding. The rest of the night was taken up with work.

At 7 a.m., after briefing the day shift, Ylva Brink went home. She lived in a house right near the hospital. When she got home she started thinking again about the strange nurse she had seen in the hall. Suddenly she was sure it hadn’t been a nurse at all. Even if she did have a uniform on. A nurse wouldn’t have come into the maternity ward at night without saying hello and telling them what she was doing there.

Ylva kept thinking about it. She grew more and more anxious. The woman must have had some purpose. She stayed for ten minutes, then she vanished. Ten minutes. She must have been in a room visiting someone. Who? And why?

Ylva lay there trying to sleep, but it was no use. The strange woman kept appearing in her thoughts. At 11 a.m. she gave up, and got out of bed and made some coffee. She thought she’d better talk to somebody.

I’ve got a cousin who’s a policeman. I’m sure he could tell me if I’m worrying about this for nothing.

She picked up the phone and dialled his home number. The message on his answering machine said that he was on duty. Since it wasn’t far to the police station, she decided to walk over. Maybe the police didn’t take visitors on Saturdays. She had read about the terrible thing that happened outside Lodinge — a car dealer had been murdered and tossed in a ditch. Maybe the police wouldn’t have time for her. Not even her cousin. At the front desk she asked if Inspector Svedberg was in. He was, but he was very busy.

“Tell him it’s Ylva,” she said. “I’m his cousin.”

Svedberg came out to meet her. He was fond of her, and couldn’t resist giving her a few minutes of his time. He got coffee for both of them and they went to his office. She told him what had happened the night before. Svedberg said that it was odd, of course, but hardly anything to worry about. She let herself be reassured. She had three days off and soon forgot about the nurse who had walked through the maternity ward.

Late on Friday evening Wallander called his weary colleagues together for a meeting of the investigative team at the police station. They closed the doors at 10 p.m., and the meeting dragged on until past midnight. He began by telling them about the second missing person inquiry that they now had on their hands. Martinsson and Hoglund had finished their preliminary check of the records, but had found nothing to indicate a connection between Eriksson and Runfeldt. Vanja Andersson didn’t recall Runfeldt ever mentioning Eriksson. Wallander made it clear that all they could do was keep on working without making any assumptions. Runfeldt might show up at any time with a perfectly reasonable explanation for his disappearance. But they couldn’t ignore the ominous signs.

Wallander asked Hoglund to take responsibility for the Runfeldt investigation, but that didn’t mean she was released from the Eriksson case. In the past Wallander had been opposed to asking Stockholm for reinforcements, but this time he had a feeling that maybe they should do so right from the start. He’d mentioned this to Hansson, and they’d agreed to wait until early next week.

They sat around the conference table and went over what they had learned so far. Wallander asked if anyone had anything important to report. His gaze wandered around the table. They all shook their heads. Nyberg sat sniffling quietly at the end of the table in his usual place, by himself. Wallander let him have the first word.

“Nothing at all so far. You’ve all seen exactly what we’ve seen. The planks were sawed through. He fell and was impaled. We didn’t find anything in the ditch. We don’t know yet where the bamboo stakes came from.”

“And the tower?” Wallander asked.

“We didn’t find anything there either,” said Nyberg. “But of course we’re nowhere near finished yet. It would be a big help if you could tell us what we should be looking for.”

“I don’t know, but whoever did this must have come from somewhere. We have the path leading from Eriksson’s house. There are fields all around it. And a patch of woods behind the hill.”

“There’s a tractor path up to the woods,” said Hoglund, “with tracks from car tyres, but none of the neighbours noticed anything unusual.”

“Apparently Eriksson owned a lot of land,” Svedberg said. “I talked a farmer named Lundberg. He sold off more than 50 hectares to Eriksson ten years ago. Since it was Eriksson’s property, there was no reason for anyone else to be on it. Which means no-one ever paid much attention to it.”

“We still have a lot of people to talk to,” Martinsson said as he shuffled through his papers. “By the way, I got in touch with the forensics laboratory in Lund. They think they’ll probably have something to tell us by Monday morning.”

Wallander made a note. Then he turned to Nyberg again.

“How’s it going with Eriksson’s house?”

“We can’t do everything at once,” Nyberg grumbled. “We’ve been out in the mud because it might start raining again soon. I think we can start on the house in the morning.”

“That sounds good,” said Wallander soothingly. He didn’t want to annoy Nyberg. That could create a bad atmosphere that would affect the whole meeting. At the same time he couldn’t get over his irritation at Nyberg’s continual grouchiness. He also saw that Lisa Holgersson had noted Nyberg’s surly reply.

They continued the review of the case, still very much in its introductory phase. The interviews with Ruth Sturesson and Sven Tyren hadn’t taken them any further. Eriksson had placed his order for oil, four cubic metres. There was nothing unusual in that. The mysterious break-in that he had reported the year before was unexplained. Their exploration of Eriksson’s life and character had barely begun. They were still at the most basic stage of a criminal investigation. The search had not yet begun to take on a life of its own.

When no-one had anything to add, Wallander tried to sum up. During the whole meeting he’d had a feeling that he’d seen something at the murder scene that should have prompted discussion. Something he couldn’t explain.

The modus operandi, he thought. There’s something about those bamboo stakes. A killer uses a language that he deliberately chooses. Why would he impale a person? Why would he go to such trouble? For the time being he kept these thoughts to himself. They were still too vague to present to the team.

He poured himself a glass of mineral water and shoved aside the papers in front of him.

“We’re still searching for a way in,” he began. “What we have is a murder unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This may mean that the motive and the killer too are unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. In a way, it reminds me of the situation we were in last summer. We solved that case by refusing to get hung up on any one thing. And we can’t afford to do that now, either.”

He turned to face the chief.

“We’ll have to work hard. It’s already Saturday morning, but it can’t be helped. Everyone will continue working on the tasks at hand over the weekend. We can’t wait until Monday.”

Holgersson nodded.

The meeting was adjourned. They were all exhausted. The chief and Hoglund stayed. Soon they were alone in the conference room. Wallander thought that here, for once, women were in the majority in his world.

“Per Akeson needs to talk to you,” said Holgersson.

Wallander shook his head in resignation.

“I’ll call him tomorrow.”

Holgersson had put on her coat, but Wallander could tell that she wasn’t finished with him.

“Isn’t it possible that this murder might have been committed by an insane person?” she asked. “Impaling someone on stakes! It sounds like the Middle Ages to me.”

“Not necessarily,” Wallander said. “Stake pits were used during the Second World War. Atrocity and insanity don’t always go hand in hand.”

Holgersson didn’t seem satisfied with his answer. She leant against the doorframe and looked at him.

“I’m still not convinced. Maybe we could call in that criminal psychologist who was here last summer. Wasn’t he a big help to you?”

Wallander couldn’t deny that Mats Ekholm had been important to the success of the investigation. He had helped them draw up a profile of the killer. But Wallander didn’t think it was time to call him in yet — in fact, he was afraid to draw parallels.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I think we should wait a while.”

She studied him.

“You aren’t afraid it’ll happen again, are you? A new pit with sharpened stakes in it?”

“No.”

“What about Runfeldt?”

Wallander was suddenly unsure whether he might be speaking against his better judgement. But he shook his head, he didn’t think it would be repeated. Or was that just what he hoped? He didn’t know.

“Eriksson’s murder must have required a lot of preparation,” he said. “Something you do only once. Something that depends on a special set of circumstances. Like a ditch that’s deep enough. And a bridge. And a victim who goes out at night or at dawn to look at migrating birds. I’m the one who linked Runfeldt’s disappearance with what happened in Lodinge. But that’s for reasons of caution.”

“I understand,” she said. “But think about calling in Ekholm.”

“I will,” Wallander said. “You may be right, I just think it’s too early. Timing often determines the success of certain efforts.”

Holgersson buttoned her coat.

“You need sleep too. Don’t stay here all night,” she said as she left.

Wallander began gathering up his papers.

“I have some things to work out,” he told Hoglund. “Do you remember when you first came here? You said you thought I had a lot I could teach you. Now maybe you can see how wrong you were.”

She was sitting on the table, looking at her nails. Wallander thought she looked pale and tired and definitely not beautiful. But she was talented. And that rarity: a dedicated police officer. In that they were alike.

He dropped the stack of papers on the table and sank back into his chair.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

“Something that scares me.”

“Why?”

“The savagery. The calculation. And no motive.”

“Eriksson was rich. Everyone says he was a tough businessman. He may have made enemies.”

“That doesn’t explain why he would be impaled on bamboo stakes.”

“Hate can blind people in the same way envy can. Or jealousy.”

She shook her head.

“When I saw Eriksson’s body on the stakes I felt instinctively that we were dealing with much more than the murder of an old man,” she said. “I can’t explain it better than that, but the feeling was there. And it was strong.”

Wallander snapped out of his weariness. She had said something important. Something that vaguely touched on thoughts that had crossed his own mind.

“Keep going,” he said. “Think harder!”

“There isn’t that much more. The man was dead. Nobody who saw the scene will ever forget it. It was a murder. But there was more.”

“Every murderer has his own language,” Wallander said. “Is that what you mean?”

“More or less.”

“He was making a statement?”

“Possibly.”

In a code, Wallander thought. A code we haven’t cracked.

“You may be right,” he said.

They sat in silence. Wallander got up and went back to gathering his papers. He discovered something that didn’t belong to him.

“Is this yours?”

She glanced at the paper.

“That looks like Svedberg’s writing.”

Wallander tried to make out what had been scrawled in pencil. It was something about a maternity ward. About a woman he didn’t know.

“What the hell is this?” he said. “Is Svedberg having a baby? He isn’t even married. Is he even dating anyone?”

She took the note out of his hand and read it.

“Evidently somebody reported a woman wandering around the maternity ward dressed like a nurse,” she said, handing back the paper.

“We’ll have to check it out when we have time,” Wallander replied sarcastically. He considered tossing the note in the waste-paper basket, but changed his mind. He’d give it to Svedberg the next day.

They parted in the hall.

“Who’s taking care of your children?” he asked. “Is your husband home?”

“He’s in Mali.”

Wallander didn’t know where Mali was, but he didn’t ask.

Hoglund left the deserted station. Wallander put Svedberg’s piece of paper on his desk and picked up his jacket. On the way out to the front desk he stopped at the dispatch office, where a lone officer sat reading a newspaper.

“Anybody call about Lodinge?” he asked.

“Not a peep.”

Wallander went outside to his car. It was windy. Ann-Britt hadn’t really answered his question about her children. He searched through all his pockets before he found his car keys. Then he drove home. Even though he was tired, he sat on his sofa and thought through everything that had happened during the day. Most of all he worried about what Hoglund had said just before she left. That the murder of Holger Eriksson was something more. But how could a murder be more than a murder?

It was almost 3 a.m. when he went to bed. Before he fell asleep he remembered that he had to call his father and Linda the next day.

He woke up with a start at 6 a.m. He had been dreaming. Eriksson was alive. He was standing on the wooden bridge across the ditch. Just as it collapsed, Wallander woke up. He forced himself to get out of bed. It had started raining again. In the kitchen he discovered he was out of coffee, so he made do with two aspirin, and then sat for a long time at the table with his head propped on one hand.

At 6.45 a.m. he arrived at the station. When he opened the door of his office he noticed something he hadn’t seen the night before. There was a parcel on the chair by the window. Ebba had arranged for Gosta Runfeldt’s mail-order to be picked up. He hung up this jacket, wondering for a second whether he actually had the right to open it. Then he pulled off the paper and opened the box inside. He was frowning at the contents when Martinsson walked past his door.

“Come here,” Wallander called to him. “Come and take a look at this.”