The Fifth Woman

CHAPTER 12

Kurt Wallander’s father was buried in the churchyard in Ystad on 11 October. It was a day of heavy downpours and blustery wind, with the sun showing through the clouds from time to time. Wallander felt unable to come to terms with what had happened. A sense of denial had been with him from the moment he had hung up the phone. It was unthinkable that his father could die. Not now, just after their trip to Rome. Not when they had recaptured the closeness they had lost so many years before.

Wallander had left the police station without speaking to anyone, convinced that Gertrud was mistaken. He arrived in Loderup and ran to the studio. His father lay prone across the painting he had been working on. He had shut his eyes and held on tight to the paintbrush he had used to add tiny dabs of white to the grouse’s plumage. His father had been finishing the painting he was working on the day before, when they’d walked along the beach at Sandhammaren. Death had come suddenly.

Later, after Gertrud had calmed down enough to talk coherently, she told him that his father had eaten his breakfast as usual. Everything was normal. At 6.30 a.m. he went out to his studio. When he didn’t come back to the kitchen at 10 a.m. for coffee, she’d gone out to remind him. By then he was already dead. It occurred to Wallander that no matter when death comes, it disrupts everything. Death always arrives at the wrong time — something is left undone.

They waited for the ambulance. Gertrud stood and held his arm tight. Wallander felt completely empty inside. He didn’t feel anything at all, other than a vague sense that it was unfair. He couldn’t feel sorry for his father.

Wallander knew the ambulance driver. His name was Prytz and he understood at once that it was Wallander’s father they were collecting.

“He wasn’t sick,” Wallander said. “Yesterday we were out walking on the beach. He complained about feeling bad, that’s all.”

“It was probably a stroke,” Prytz said, with compassion in his voice. “That’s what it looks like.”

That was also what the doctor told Wallander later. It had happened very quickly. His father would have had no idea he was dying. A blood vessel had burst in his brain. For Gertrud the sorrow and the shock were mixed with relief that it had happened so quickly; that he was spared a slow decline into a no-man’s-land of confusion.

Wallander was thinking completely different thoughts. His father had been alone when he died. No-one should be alone in their final moments. He felt guilty that he hadn’t responded to his father’s complaint. It was something that might indicate an impending heart attack or stroke. But even worse was that it had happened now. Even though his father had been 80, it was too soon. It should have happened later. Not now. Not like this. Wallander had tried to shake life back into his father. But there was nothing he could do. The grouse would never be finished.

In the midst of the chaos that death always creates, Wallander retained his ability to act calmly and rationally. Gertrud went in the ambulance. Wallander stood there in the studio, engulfed in the silence and the smell of turpentine, and wept to think how his father would have hated to leave the grouse unfinished. As a gesture towards the invisible border between life and death, Wallander took the paintbrush and filled in the two white points that were still missing in the grouse’s plumage. It was the first time in his life that he had touched any of his father’s paintings with a brush. Then he cleaned the brush and put it with the others in an old jam jar.

He went back to the house and called Ebba. She was upset and sad, and Wallander found that he could hardly speak. With difficulty, he asked her to tell the others what had happened. They should go on without him. All they had to do was keep him informed if anything important happened in the investigation. He wouldn’t be coming back to work that day. He didn’t know what he was going to do tomorrow.

Next he called his sister Kristina and told her the news. They talked for a long time. It seemed as though she had prepared already herself for the possibility that their father might die suddenly. She said she would help him get hold of Linda, since he didn’t have the number of the restaurant where she worked.

Finally he called Mona at the beauty shop in Malmo where she worked. She was surprised to hear from him, at first thinking that something had happened to Linda. When Wallander told her that it was his father who had died, he could hear that she was slightly relieved. That made him angry, but he didn’t say anything. He knew that Mona and his father had got along well. It was only natural that she would be worried about Linda. He remembered the morning that the Estonia had sunk.

“I know what you’re going through,” she said. “You’ve been afraid of this moment your whole life.”

“We had so much to talk about,” he replied. “We were finally seeing eye to eye. And now it’s too late.”

“It’s always too late,” she said.

She promised to come to the funeral and help out if he needed her. After they hung up he felt a lingering emptiness. He dialled Baiba’s number in Riga, but she didn’t answer. He called back again and again, but she wasn’t home.

He went back out to the studio, and sat down on the old rickety toboggan where his father had sat, a coffee cup always in his hand. It was raining again. Wallander felt that he was holding his own fear of death in his hands. The studio had become a crypt. He got up quickly and went back to the kitchen. The phone rang. It was Linda, and she was crying. Wallander started crying too. She wanted to come as soon as possible. Wallander asked if he should call her employer and talk to him, but Linda had already arranged to take time off. She would take a bus to Arlanda and try to get on a plane that afternoon. He offered to pick her up from the airport, but she told him to stay with Gertrud. She would get to Ystad and out to Loderup on her own.

That evening they gathered in the house in Loderup. Gertrud was very calm. They began to discuss the funeral arrangements. Wallander doubted that his father would have wanted a religious ceremony, but he let Gertrud decide. She was his widow, after all.

“He never talked about death,” she said. “I can’t tell you if he was afraid of it or not. He didn’t talk about where he wanted to be buried. But I want to have a vicar.”

They agreed that it would be at the churchyard in Ystad. A simple funeral. His father hadn’t had a lot of friends. Linda said she would read a poem, Wallander agreed that he wouldn’t give a eulogy, and they chose “Wondrous Is the Earth” as the hymn they would sing.

Kristina arrived the next day. She stayed with Gertrud, and Linda stayed with Wallander. It was a time in which death brought them together. Kristina said that now that their father had passed on, the two of them were next in line. Wallander noticed the whole time that his fear of death was growing, but he didn’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not to Linda, not even to his sister. Maybe he could with Baiba sometime. She had reacted with deep feeling when he finally managed to get hold of her and tell her what had happened. They talked for almost an hour. She told him about her feelings when her own father had passed away ten years before, and she also talked about how she had felt when her husband Karlis was murdered. Afterwards Wallander felt comforted. She was there and she wasn’t going away.

The day the obituary was printed in Ystad’s Allehanda, Sten Widen called from his farm outside Skurup. It had been a few years since Wallander last talked to him. Once they had been close friends. They had shared an interest in opera and had high hopes for the future together. Widen had a beautiful voice, and Wallander would be his impresario. But everything changed when Widen’s father died suddenly and he was forced to take over the farm, where they trained race-horses. Wallander became a policeman, and gradually they had drifted apart. After their conversation, Wallander wondered whether Widen had ever even met his father. But he was grateful that he had called. Someone outside the immediate family hadn’t forgotten him.

In the midst of all this, Wallander had to force himself to continue to be a policeman. The day after his father died, Tuesday, 4 October, he had returned to the police station, after spending a sleepless night in the flat. Linda slept in her old room. Mona had also come to visit the night before with supper, trying to take their minds off the old man’s death for a while. For the first time since their devastating divorce, Wallander felt that his marriage was finally over. Somehow his father’s death had shown him that the life he had led with Mona was over for good.

Despite sleeping badly the whole week before the funeral, he gave his colleagues the impression that he was in command of the situation. They had expressed their condolences and he had thanked them. When Chief Holgersson took him aside in the hall and suggested that he take some time off, he turned down her offer: his grief eased while he was working.

The investigation moved slowly during that week before the funeral. The other case they were concentrating on, always overshadowed by the murder of Eriksson, was Runfeldt’s disappearance. He had vanished without trace. None of the detectives believed that there was a normal explanation. On the other hand, they hadn’t been able to find any connection between Eriksson and Runfeldt. The only thing that seemed perfectly clear about Runfeldt was that his great passion in life was orchids.

“We ought to take a look at his wife’s death,” Wallander said at one of the investigative team’s meetings. Hoglund said she would take care of it.

“How about the mail-order company in Boras?” Wallander asked later. “What’s happening with that? What do our colleagues there say?”

“They got onto it right away,” Svedberg said. “It obviously wasn’t the first time the company was involved in illegal importing of bugging devices. According to the Boras police, the company would pop up and then vanish, only to reappear with a new name and address. Sometimes even with different owners. They’ve already made some progress there. We’re waiting for a written report.”

“The most important thing is to find out if Runfeldt had ever bought anything else from them,” Wallander said. “The rest is not our immediate concern.”

“Their list of customers is incomplete, to say the least. But the Boras police have found prohibited and highly sophisticated equipment at their offices. It sounds as though Runfeldt could practically be a spy.”

Wallander pondered this for a moment.

“Why not?” he said finally. “We can’t rule anything out. He must have had some reason for buying the stuff.”

They had searched for Harald Berggren but hadn’t found the slightest trace of him. The museum in Stockholm confirmed that the shrunken head was definitely human, and probably came from the Congo. So far so good. But who was this Berggren? They had already spoken with people who had known Eriksson during different periods of his life, but none had ever heard him speak of Berggren. No-one had heard that he’d had contact with the underworld in which mercenaries moved like wary rats and wrote their contracts with messengers of the Devil, either. It was Wallander who came up with the idea that got the investigation moving again.

“There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Eriksson,” he said. “Particularly the fact that there isn’t a woman in his life. Not anywhere, not ever. That made me start to wonder whether there was a homosexual relationship between Eriksson and this Harald Berggren. There are almost no women in Berggren’s diary either.”

There was silence in the conference room. No-one seemed to have considered this possibility.

“It sounds a little strange that homosexual men would choose such a macho occupation as being soldiers,” Hoglund said.

“Not at all,” Wallander replied. “It’s not unusual for gay men to become soldiers. They do it to hide their preference. Or just to be around other men.”

Martinsson studied the photograph of the three men.

“I get a feeling you might be right,” he said. “These men have something feminine about them.”

“Like what?” Hoglund asked.

“I don’t know,” Martinsson said. “Maybe the way they’re leaning against the termite mound. Or is their hair?”

“It doesn’t do us any good to sit here guessing,” Wallander interrupted. “I’m only pointing out one more possibility. We should keep it in mind, just like everything else.”

“In other words, we’re looking for a gay mercenary,” Martinsson said dourly. “Where would we find one of those?”

“That’s not exactly what we’re doing,” Wallander said. “But we have to weigh this possibility alongside the rest of the material.”

“Nobody I spoke to so much as intimated that Eriksson might have been gay,” said Hansson, who had been sitting in silence.

“It’s not something people talk about openly,” Wallander said. “At least not the older generation. If Eriksson was gay, then he can remember the time when blackmail was used against people of that persuasion in this country.”

“So you mean we have to start asking people if Eriksson may have been homosexual?” Svedberg asked.

“You have to decide how you want to proceed,” Wallander said. “I don’t even know if this is the right track, but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility.”

It was as if they all suddenly understood that there wasn’t anything simple or easily understandable about the murder of Holger Eriksson. They were dealing with one — or maybe more — cunning killers, and it was possible that the motive for the murder lay hidden in a past well shielded from view.

They continued with the painstaking work. They recorded everything they knew about Eriksson’s life. Svedberg spent long evenings reading carefully through the books of poetry Eriksson had published. In the end he thought he would go mad if he read any more about the spiritual complexities that existed in the world of birds, but he’d gained no insight into Eriksson.

Martinsson took his daughter Terese to Falsterbo Point one windy afternoon and walked around talking to birdwatchers standing straining their necks and staring up at the grey clouds. The only thing he gained — apart from time well-spent with his daughter, who wanted to become a field biologist — was that on the night Eriksson was murdered huge flocks of red-winged blackbirds had left Sweden. Martinsson conferred with Svedberg, who claimed that there were no poems about red-winged blackbirds in any of the books.

“On the other hand, there are three long poems about the single snipe,” said Svedberg hesitantly. “Is there such a thing as a double snipe?”

Martinsson didn’t know. The investigation continued.

The day of the funeral arrived. They were all meeting at the cemetery. A few days before, Wallander had learned to his surprise that a certain female vicar would officiate. He had met her on a memorable occasion in the summer. Afterwards he was glad that she was the one; her words were simple, and never sentimental. The day before, she had called to ask whether his father had been religious. Wallander said no. Instead, he told her about his paintings, and their week in Rome. The funeral was not as unbearable as Wallander had feared. The casket was made of dark wood with a simple decoration of roses. Linda was the one who showed her emotions most openly. No-one doubted that her sorrow was genuine. She was probably the one who would miss him the most.

After the ceremony they drove to Loderup. Wallander felt relieved that it was over. How he would react later he had no idea. He belonged to a generation that was particularly ill-prepared to accept that death was always nearby, he thought. This was intensified for him by the fact that he had to deal with dead people so often in his work.

On the night of the funeral he and Linda stayed up talking for hours. She was going back to Stockholm early the next morning. Wallander asked tentatively whether she would visit him less frequently now that her grandfather was gone, but she promised that she would come more often. In turn, Wallander promised that he wouldn’t neglect Gertrud.

When he went to bed that night he felt that it was time to get back to work at full speed. For a week he had been distracted. Only when he had put some distance between himself and his father’s sudden death could he begin to come to terms with it. To get that distance he had to work. There was no other way.

I never did find out why he didn’t want me to be a policeman, he thought before he went to sleep. Now I’ll never know. If there is a spirit world, which I doubt, then my father and Rydberg can keep each other company. Even though they met very seldom when they were alive, they would find a lot to talk about.

She had made an exact and detailed timetable for Runfeldt’s last hours. He was so weak now that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. She had broken him down. The worm hidden in the flower portends the flower’s death, she thought as she unlocked the door to the house in Vollsjo. According to her timetable, she was to arrive at 4 p.m. She was three minutes ahead of schedule. She had to wait until dark. Then she would pull him out of the oven. For safety’s sake she’d put handcuffs on him. And a gag. But nothing over his eyes. Even though he’d have trouble with the light after so many days spent in utter darkness, after a few hours he would see again. She wanted him to really see her. And then she would show him the photographs. The pictures that would make him understand.

There were some elements she couldn’t completely ignore which might affect her planning. One was the risk that he might be so weak that he couldn’t stand up, so she had borrowed a small baggage cart from the Central Station in Malmo. No-one had seen her taking it. She could use it to roll him out to the car if necessary.

The rest of the timetable was quite simple. Just before 9 p.m. she would drive him to the woods. She would tie him to the tree she had already picked out. And show him the photographs.

Then she would strangle him. Leave him where he was. She would be home in bed no later than midnight. Her alarm clock would go off at 5.15 a.m., and by 7.15 she’d be at work.

Her timetable was perfect. Nothing could go wrong. She sat down in a chair and looked at the oven towering like a sacrificial altar in the middle of the room. My mother would have understood, she thought. If no-one does it, it won’t happen. Evil must be driven out with evil. Where there is no justice, it must be created.

She took her timetable out of her pocket and looked at the clock. In three hours and 15 minutes, Gosta Runfeldt would die.

Lars Olsson didn’t really feel much like training on the evening of 11 October. He had been wondering whether he should go out on his run or forget about it. It wasn’t just that he felt tired, there was a film on TV that he wanted to see. In the end he decided to go for his run after the movie, even though it would be late.

Olsson lived on a farm near Svarte. He had been born there, and still lived with his parents although he was over 30. He was the part owner of a digger and was the one who knew best how to operate it. This week he was busy digging a ditch for a new drainage system on a farm in Skarby. He was also a devoted orienteer. He lived for the joy of running in the Swedish woods. He ran for a team in Malmo that was preparing for a national night-orienteering run. He had often asked himself why he devoted so much time to it. What was the point of running around in the woods, often cold and wet, his body aching, with a map and compass? Was this really something to spend his life doing? But he knew he was a good orienteer. He had a feeling for the terrain, as well as both speed and endurance.

He watched the film on TV, but it wasn’t as good as he expected. Just after 11 p.m. he started out on his run, headed for the woods just north of the farm, on the boundary of Marsvinsholm’s huge fields. He could choose to run either five or eight kilometres, depending on which path he took. Tonight he chose the shorter route. He strapped his running light to his head and started off. It had rained that day, heavy showers followed by sunshine. He could smell the wet earth. He ran along the path into the woods. The tree trunks glistened in the light from his headlamp. In the densest part of the forest there was a little creek. If he kept close to it, it made a good shortcut. He decided to do that. He turned off the path and ran up a small hill.

Suddenly he stopped short. He had seen someone in the light of his lamp. At first he couldn’t work out what he was looking at. Then he realised that a half-naked man was tied to a tree in front of him. Olsson stood quite still. He was breathing hard and felt very frightened. He took a quick look around. The lamp cast its glow over trees and bushes, but he was alone. Cautiously he took a few steps forward. The man was hanging over the ropes tied around his body.

He didn’t have to go any closer. He could see that the man was dead. Without really knowing why, he glanced at his watch. It was 11.19 p.m.

He turned around and ran home. He had never run so fast in his life. Without even taking the time to remove his headlamp he called the police in Ystad. The officer who took the call listened attentively, then without hesitating, he called up Kurt Wallander’s name on his computer screen and punched in his home number.

Skane

12–17 October 1994