The Fifth Woman

CHAPTER 20

Peters was waiting for them at the station in Malmo. Bo Runfeldt excused himself, saying he’d stay in Malmo for a few hours and return to Ystad in the afternoon, so that he and his sister could start going through his father’s estate.

On the way back to Ystad, Wallander sat in the back seat and made notes about what had happened in Almhult. He had bought a pen and a little notebook at the station in Malmo and balanced it on his knee as he wrote. Peters left him alone. It was a sunny, windy day, already 14 October. His father hadn’t been in the ground a week. Wallander suspected, or maybe feared, that he hadn’t yet begun to grieve.

They went straight to the police station. Wallander had eaten some outrageously expensive sandwiches on the train and didn’t need lunch. He stopped at the front desk to tell Ebba what had happened to his car. Her well-kept old Volvo stood in the car park as usual.

“I’m going to have to buy a new car,” he said. “But how am I going to afford it?”

“It’s shameful how little they pay us,” she replied. “But it’s best not to think about it.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Wallander said. “It’s not going to get any better if we just forget about it.”

On the way to his office he peeked into his colleagues’ rooms. Everyone was out except Nyberg, who had an office at the very end of the hall. He was seldom there. A crutch was leaning against his desk.

“How’s the foot?” Wallander asked.

“No better than can be expected,” Nyberg answered crossly.

“You didn’t happen to find Runfeldt’s suitcase, by any chance?”

“No, but we know that it’s not in the woods at Marsvinsholm. The dogs would have tracked it down if it were.”

“Did you find anything else?”

“We always do, but whether it has anything to do with the murder is another question. We’re in the process of comparing tyre tracks from the tractor path behind Eriksson’s tower to the ones we found in the woods. I doubt we’ll be able to say anything with certainty. It was very muddy at both places.”

“Anything else you think I should know about?”

“The shrunken head,” said Nyberg. “We got a long, detailed letter from the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. I understand about half of what it says. But they’re positive it comes from the Belgian Congo. They think it’s between 40 and 50 years old.”

“That fits,” Wallander said.

“The museum is interested in acquiring it.”

“That’s something the authorities will have to decide after the investigation is over.”

Nyberg suddenly gave Wallander an inquiring look.

“Are we going to catch the people who did this?”

“We have to.”

Nyberg nodded.

“You said ‘the people’, but earlier you said it was probably a lone killer.”

“Did I say ‘the people’?”

“Yes.”

“I still think it was someone acting alone. But I can’t explain why.”

Wallander turned to go. Nyberg stopped him.

“We managed to get Secure, the mail-order company in Boras, to tell us what Runfeldt bought from them. He ordered things on three other occasions. The company hasn’t been in business long. He bought night-vision binoculars, several torches, and other unimportant things — nothing illegal. We found the torches at Harpegatan. But the night-vision binoculars weren’t there or at the shop.”

Wallander thought for a moment.

“Do you think he packed them in his suitcase to take with him to Nairobi? Do people spy on orchids at night?”

“Well, we haven’t found them, at any rate,” Nyberg said.

Wallander went into his office, sat down at his desk and read through what he had written during the drive from Malmo. He was looking for similarities and differences between the two cases.

Both men had been described as brutal, though in different ways. Eriksson had treated his employees badly; Runfeldt had beaten his wife. There was a similarity. They had both been murdered in a well-planned way. Wallander was convinced that Runfeldt had been held prisoner. There was no other explanation for his long absence. Eriksson, on the other hand, had walked straight to his death. That was a difference.

Why was Runfeldt held prisoner? Why did the murderer wait to kill him? For some reason the killer wanted to wait. Which in turn gave rise to new questions. Could it be that the murderer didn’t have the opportunity to kill him right away? If that was the case, why? Or was it part of the plan to hold Runfeldt captive, starving him until he was powerless?

Once again the only motive that Wallander could see was revenge. But for what? They had found no definite clues. He moved on to the killer. They had guessed that it was probably a lone man with great physical strength. They could be wrong, of course; there could be more than one person involved, but Wallander didn’t think so. There was something about the planning that pointed to a single killer.

Wallander leaned back in his chair. He tried to understand the uneasiness that he couldn’t shake off. There was something about the picture that he wasn’t seeing.

After about an hour he went to get a cup of coffee. He called the optician and was told he could come in whenever he liked. After going through his jacket twice, Wallander found the phone number for the garage in Almhult. The repairs were going to cost a lot, but Wallander had no alternative if he wanted to get anything for the car.

He hung up and called Martinsson.

“I didn’t know you were back. How’d it go in Almhult?”

“I thought we should talk about that. Who’s here right now?”

“I just saw Hansson,” said Martinsson. “We talked about having a short meeting at 5 p.m.”

“So we’ll wait till then.”

Wallander put down the phone and found himself thinking about Jacob Hoslowski and his cats. He wondered when he would have time to look for a house for himself. Their workload was constantly increasing. In the past there had been times when the pressure eased off, but that almost never happened now. And no-one was talking about it getting any better. He didn’t know whether crime was on the rise, but he did know that it was getting more violent. And fewer officers were involved with real police work. More and more of them had administrative jobs. It was impossible for Wallander to think of himself with a desk job. When he did sit there, as he was doing now, it was a break in his routine. They’d never be able to find the killer if they sat around the police station. Forensic science was steadily progressing, but it could never replace field work.

He returned to Almhult. Had Runfeldt made a murder look like an accident? There were strong indications that he had. Too many details didn’t fit with an accident. It should be possible to dig up the investigative work that had been done. It had probably been sloppy, but he couldn’t criticise the officers who had carried it out. What could they have suspected? Why would they have had any suspicions at all?

Wallander called Martinsson again and asked him to contact Almhult and get a copy of the investigative report on the drowning.

“Why didn’t you do that yourself?” asked Martinsson in surprise.

“I didn’t talk to the police there,” Wallander replied, “but I did sit on the floor in a house full of cats, with a man who can make himself weightless whenever he feels like it. It’d be good to get that report as soon as possible.”

He hung up before Martinsson could ask questions. It was 3 p.m. It was still nice outside, and he decided to go and see the optician straight away. There wasn’t much else he could do before the meeting. His head ached. Ebba was busy on the phone, so he wrote a note saying he’d be back for the meeting and left the station.

He stood in the car park looking for his car for a while, before he remembered it was in the garage. It took him ten minutes to walk to the centre of town. The optician’s shop was on Stora Ostergatan near Pilgrand.

He was told he had to wait a few minutes. He leafed through the newspapers lying on a table. There was a picture of him that was at least five years old. He hardly recognised himself. There was a lot of coverage of the murders. “The police are following up solid leads.” That’s what Wallander had told the press, and it wasn’t true. He wondered if the killer read the papers. Was he keeping track of the police work? Wallander turned some more pages. He stopped at a story inside, read it with growing astonishment, and studied the pictures. The journalist from the Anmarkaren, which hadn’t come out yet, had been right. People from all over the country had gathered in Ystad to form a national organisation to create a citizen militia. If necessary, they wouldn’t hesitate to commit illegal acts. They supported the work of the police, but they refused to accept any cutbacks. Wallander read on with a growing feeling of bitterness and distaste. Something had happened, all right. These people were coming out into the open. Their names and faces were in the papers and they were gathering right here in Ystad.

Wallander tossed the paper aside. We’re going to end up fighting on two fronts, he thought. This is much more serious than the neo-Nazi organisations, whose threat is always exaggerated; or the motorcycle gangs.

When it was his turn, Wallander sat with a strange apparatus in front of his eyes and stared at the blurry letters. He began to worry that he might be going blind. But when the optician set a pair of glasses on his nose and held up a newspaper page on which there was also an article about the citizen militia, he could read the text easily. For a moment this took away the unpleasantness of the article’s contents.

“You need reading glasses,” said the optician kindly. “Not unusual at your age. Plus 1.5 should be enough. You’ll probably have to increase the strength every few years or so.”

Wallander went over to look at the display of frames. He was shocked when he saw the prices. When he heard that it was possible to get cheaper plastic frames, he decided on this option.

“How many pairs?” asked the optician. “Two? So you’ll have a spare?”

Wallander thought of the pens he was constantly losing. He couldn’t stand the thought of having glasses on a string around his neck.

“Five pairs,” he said.

When he left the shop it was still only 4 p.m. He strolled over to the estate agent’s office. This time he went inside, sat down at a table, and looked through the house listings. Two of the properties interested him. He got copies of the information sheets and promised to let them know if he wanted to see them. He went back outside. He still had some time left, and decided to try to answer a question that had been on his mind ever since Holger Eriksson died. He went into a bookshop near Stortoget and asked for a bookseller he knew. He was told that he was in the stockroom in the basement. He found his acquaintance there unpacking boxes of books. They greeted each other.

“You still owe me 19 kronor,” said the bookseller with a smile.

“For what?”

“This summer you woke me up at 6 a.m. because the police needed a map of the Dominican Republic. The officer who came over to get it paid 100 kronor. But it cost 119.”

Wallander went to take out his wallet. The bookseller put up his hand to stop him.

“It’s on me,” he said. “I was just kidding.”

“Holger Eriksson’s poems,” Wallander said, “which he published himself. Who bought them?”

“He was an amateur, of course,” the bookseller answered. “But he wasn’t a bad poet. The problem was, he wrote only about birds. Or rather, that was the only thing he was any good at writing about. Whenever he tried some other subject, it didn’t work.”

“So who bought them?”

“He didn’t sell many copies through the bookshop. Most of these regional writers don’t generate a lot of sales, you know. But they’re important for another reason.”

“So who did buy them?”

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe an occasional tourist? I think some bird lovers discovered his books. Maybe collectors of regional literature.”

“Birds,” Wallander said. “That means he never wrote anything that people might get upset about.”

“Of course not,” the bookseller said in surprise. “Did someone say that he had?”

“I was just wondering.”

Wallander left the bookshop and went back up the hill to the police station.

When he entered the conference room and sat down in his usual place, he put on his new glasses. A certain merriment was evident in the room, but no-one said a word.

“Who’s missing?” he asked.

“Svedberg,” Hoglund said. “I don’t know where he’s got to.”

She had barely finished her sentence when Svedberg tore open the door of the conference room.

“I’ve found Mrs Svensson,” he said. “The woman we think was Runfeldt’s last client.”

“Good,” Wallander said, feeling the suspense rise.

“I thought that she might have been to the florist’s shop,” Svedberg continued. “She might have gone to see Runfeldt there. I took along the photograph we developed. Vanja Andersson remembered seeing a picture of the same man in the back room. She also knew that a woman named Svensson had been to the shop a couple of times. Once she bought flowers to be delivered. The rest was simple. Her address and phone number were on file. She lives on Byabacksvagen in Sovestad. I went out there. She runs a little vegetable shop. I took along the picture and told her the truth, that we believed she had hired Runfeldt as a private detective. She admitted at once that I was right.”

“What else did she say?”

“I left her there. I thought it’d be better if we interviewed her together.”

“I’ll talk to her this evening,” Wallander said. “Let’s keep this meeting as brief as possible.”

They were there for half an hour. During the meeting Chief Holgersson came in and sat down at the table. She kept silent. Wallander reported on his trip to Almhult. He concluded by telling them what he thought, that they couldn’t ignore the possibility that Runfeldt had murdered his wife. They should wait for a copy of the investigative report made at the time. Afterwards they would decide how to proceed.

When Wallander stopped talking, no-one had anything to say. They all could see that he might be right, but what it meant for the investigation was far from clear.

“The trip was important,” said Wallander after a moment. “I also think the trip to Svenstavik could be productive.”

“With a stop in Gavle,” said Hoglund. “I don’t know whether it means anything, but I asked a good friend in Stockholm to go to a special bookshop and get me a few issues of a paper called Terminator. They came today.”

“What kind of paper is that?” Wallander asked.

“It’s published in the US,” she said. “It’s a poorly disguised trade paper, you might say. For people looking for contracts as mercenaries or bodyguards, or any kind of assignments as soldiers. It’s not a pleasant paper. For one thing, it’s extremely racist. But I found a little classified ad that should interest us. There’s a man in Gavle who offers to arrange assignments for what he calls ‘battle-ready and unbiased men’. I called our colleagues in Gavle. They knew who he was, but have never dealt with him directly. They thought he had contact with men in Sweden who have been mercenaries.”

“This could be important,” Wallander said. “He’s someone we definitely need to talk to. It should be possible to combine a trip to Svenstavik and Gavle.”

“I’ve checked the map,” she said. “You can fly to Ostersund, then rent a car. Or ask for help from our colleagues up there.”

Wallander closed his notebook.

“Get someone to make me a reservation,” he said. “If possible, I’d like to go tomorrow.”

“On Saturday?” Martinsson asked.

“It won’t make a difference to the people I have to see,” Wallander said. “There’s no time to waste if we can help it. I suggest that we break up the meeting now. Who wants to come along to Sovestad?”

Before anyone could reply, Chief Holgersson tapped her pencil on the table.

“Just a minute,” she said. “I don’t know whether you realise that there’s going to be a meeting of people who have decided to form a national organisation of citizen militia here in Ystad. I think it’d be good if we discussed as soon as possible how we’re going to handle this.”

“The national police board has sent out flyers about these militia,” said Wallander. “I think it’s very clear what Swedish law says about vigilante activities.”

“No doubt you’re right,” she replied. “But I have a strong feeling that things are changing. I’m afraid that pretty soon we’re going to see a burglar get shot and killed by someone from one of these groups. And then they’ll start shooting each other.”

Wallander knew she was right. But at that moment he couldn’t focus on anything other than the two murder investigations they were working on.

“I agree it’s important. In the long run, it’s crucial to stamp it out if we don’t want people to be playing at being the police all over the country. Let’s talk about it on Monday when we meet.”

Holgersson let it go at that. The meeting broke up. Hoglund and Svedberg were going to accompany Wallander to Sovestad. It was 6 p.m. by the time they left the station. They took Hoglund’s car. Wallander got into the back seat. He wondered whether he still smelled from his visit to Jacob Hoslowski’s house of cats.

“Maria Svensson,” Svedberg said. “She’s 36 years old and has a little vegetable shop in Sovestad, selling only organic vegetables.”

“You didn’t ask her why she got in contact with Runfeldt?”

“After she confirmed the connection, I didn’t ask her anything else.”

“This should be interesting,” Wallander said. “In all my years on the force, I’ve never met anyone who has hired a private detective.”

“The photograph was of a man,” Hoglund said. “Her husband?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Svedberg answered.

“Or as little,” Wallander corrected him. “We know almost nothing.”

They reached Sovestad in about 20 minutes. Wallander had been there once many years ago to cut down a man who had hanged himself. It was the first suicide he had encountered. He thought back on the incident with distaste.

Svedberg stopped the car in front of a building with a shop in the front and a greenhouse next to it. A sign said “Svensson’s Produce”. They climbed out of the car.

“She lives in the building,” said Svedberg. “I assume that she’s closed up the shop for the day.”

“A florist and a greengrocer,” Wallander said. “Does that tell us anything, or is it just a coincidence?”

He didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. The front door opened.

“That’s Maria Svensson,” said Svedberg. “She’s been waiting for us.”

The woman standing on the steps was wearing jeans and a white blouse. She had clogs on her feet. There was something odd about her appearance. Wallander noted that she wore no make-up. Svedberg introduced them and Maria Svensson invited them in. They sat down in her living room. It occurred to Wallander that there was also something odd about her house. As if she wasn’t interested in the decor.

“May I offer you coffee?” she asked.

All three of them declined.

“As you know, we’ve come to find out a little more about your relationship to Gosta Runfeldt.”

She gave him a surprised look. “Am I supposed to have had a relationship with him?”

“As a client,” Wallander said.

“That’s true.”

“Gosta Runfeldt has been murdered. It took a while for us to discover that he wasn’t only a florist, but that he also worked as a private detective. So my first question is: how did you get in contact with him?”

“I saw an ad in Arbetet this past summer.”

“How did you first meet?”

“I went to his florist’s shop. Later the same day we met at a cafe near Stortoget in Ystad.”

“What was your reason for contacting him?”

“I’d rather not say,” she said firmly.

Wallander was surprised because up to that point her answers had been so straightforward.

“I’m afraid that you’re going to have to tell us,” he said.

“I can assure you that it has nothing to do with his death. I’m just as horrified and shocked as everybody else by what happened.”

“Whether it has anything to do with it or not is something for the police to decide,” Wallander said. “You’ll have to answer the question. You can choose to do so here. Then anything that isn’t directly connected with the investigation will just be between us. If we’re obliged to take you in for more formal interrogation, it will be more difficult to stop the details from leaking to the press.”

She sat in silence for a long time. They waited. Wallander took out the photograph they had developed on Harpegatan. She looked at it without expression.

“Is this your husband?” Wallander asked.

She stared at him. Suddenly she laughed.

“No,” she said. “He’s not my husband. But he stole my lover away from me.”

Wallander didn’t understand. Hoglund got it at once.

“What’s her name?”

“Annika.”

“And this man came between you?”

She had regained her composure.

“I was starting to suspect it. I didn’t know what to do. That’s when I thought of contacting a private detective. I had to find out if she was thinking of leaving me. Or switching. Going with a man. In the end I realised that’s what she had done. Gosta Runfeldt came here and told me about it. The next day I wrote to Annika to tell her I never wanted to see her again.”

“When did he visit you?”

“September 20th or 21st.”

“Did you have any contact with him after that?”

“No. I paid him through his bank account.”

“What was your impression of him?”

“He was friendly. He was very fond of orchids. I think we got along well because he seemed just as reserved as I am.”

Wallander thought for a moment.

“Can you think of any reason why he was killed? Anything he said or did?”

“No,” she replied. “Nothing. And I’ve thought hard about it.”

Wallander glanced at his colleagues and stood up. “Then we won’t disturb you any further. And none of this will get out. I promise.”

“I’m grateful for that,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to lose customers.”

They said goodbye at the door. She closed it before they reached the street.

“What did she mean by that last remark?” asked Wallander. “That she was afraid of losing her customers?”

“People are conservative out in the country,” said Hoglund. “Homosexuality is still considered to be something dirty by many people. I think she has all the reason in the world not to want this to get out.”

They got into the car.

“Where does that leave us?” Svedberg asked.

“It doesn’t lead us backwards or forwards,” Wallander said. “The truth about these two investigations is simple. We have a number of loose ends, but we don’t have a single good clue to go on.”

They sat in the car in silence. For a moment Wallander felt guilty. He felt as if he’d stabbed the investigation in the back. But he knew that what he’d said was the truth.

They had nothing to go on. Absolutely nothing.