The Fifth Woman

CHAPTER 24

They stayed at the police station so long that Sunday turned into Monday. Wallander sent Hansson home and later Nyberg too. But the others stayed on, and they began going through the investigative material once again. The suitcase had forced them into a retreat. They sat in the conference room with it on the table in front of them until the meeting ended. Then Martinsson closed the lid and took it with him to his own office.

They went over everything that had happened, working on the assumption that nothing they had done so far could be regarded as wasted effort. In their retreat they needed to take a fresh look at things, stop on various details, and hope to discover something that they had missed earlier.

But they didn’t come up with anything that gave them the feeling they had made a breakthrough. The events were still murky, the connection unclear, the motive unknown. The retreat led them back to the beginning, to the fact that two men had been killed in gruesome ways, and that the killer had to be the same person.

It was after midnight when Wallander called a halt. Hoglund stayed for the whole meeting. She left the conference room twice for a few minutes. Wallander assumed she was calling home to talk to her neighbour, who was taking care of her children. When the meeting was over, Wallander asked her to stay on. He regretted this at once, knowing that he shouldn’t keep her there any longer. But she sat back down, and they waited until the others had left.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said. “I want you to go through all of these events from a woman’s perspective. Go over the investigative material and imagine that the killer we’re looking for is a woman, not a man. Base your work on two assumptions. First, that she was alone. Second, that she had at least one accomplice.”

“Do you think there was more than one person involved?”

“Yes. And one of them was a woman. Of course, there might have been several people involved.”

She nodded.

“As soon as possible,” Wallander told her. “Preferably tomorrow. If you have other important matters that can’t wait, turn them over to someone else.”

“I think Hamren will be here tomorrow,” she said. “A couple of detectives are coming from Malmo too. I can give my other work to one of them.”

Wallander had nothing more to say. They sat there a little longer.

“Do you really think it’s a woman?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Wallander answered. “It’s dangerous to give too much weight to the importance of this suitcase and the perfume. But on the other hand, there’s been something funny about this whole investigation right from the start. When we were standing out there by the ditch, with Eriksson on the stakes, you said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.”

“That the whole thing seemed so deliberate?”

“The killer’s language. What we saw smelled of war. Eriksson was executed in a trap for predators.”

“Maybe it is war,” she said thoughtfully.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should interpret what we see literally. Pungee pits are used to catch predators. And they’re also used in war.”

“Go on,” he said.

She bit her lip.

“I can’t. The woman who’s taking care of my children has to get home. I can’t ask her to stay any longer. Last time I called home she was pissed off, and it’s not going to make any difference if I pay her extra for her time.”

Wallander didn’t want to cut short the discussion they had started. For a brief moment he felt irritated by her children, or maybe by her husband’s absences. But he regretted these thoughts at once.

“You could come to my house,” she said. “We can continue talking there.”

She was pale and tired, and he knew he shouldn’t put such pressure on her. But he said yes. They drove through the deserted town. The babysitter was standing in the door, waiting. Wallander said hello and apologised for her late return. They sat in her living room. He had been there a few times before. He could see that a frequent traveller lived in the house. There were souvenirs from many countries on the walls. There was also a warmth that was completely missing from his own flat. She asked him if he’d like something to drink. He declined.

“The trap for predators and the war,” he began. “That’s where we left off.”

“Men who hunt, men who are soldiers. We also find a shrunken head and a diary written by a mercenary. We see what we see, and we interpret it.”

“How do we interpret it?”

“We interpret it correctly. If the killer has a language, then we can clearly read what he writes.”

Wallander suddenly thought about something that Linda had said when she was trying to explain to him what acting really was. Reading between the lines, looking for the subtext.

He told Hoglund this, and she nodded.

“Maybe I’m not expressing myself well,” she said. “But what I’m thinking is that we’ve seen everything and interpreted everything, and yet it’s all wrong.”

“We see what the murderer wants us to see?”

“Maybe we’re being fooled into looking in the wrong direction.”

Wallander thought for a moment. He noticed that his mind was now quite clear. His weariness was gone. They were following a trail that might prove crucial. A trail that had existed before in his consciousness, but he hadn’t been able to control it.

“So the deliberateness is an evasive manoeuvre,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe the truth is just the opposite.”

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t know. But if we think we’re right, and it’s all wrong, then whatever is wrong will have to end up being right in the end.”

“I understand,” he said. “I understand, and I agree.”

“A woman would never impale a man on stakes in a pit,” she said. “She would never tie a man to a tree and then strangle him with her bare hands.”

Wallander didn’t say anything for a long time. Hoglund disappeared upstairs and came back a few minutes later. He saw that she had put on a different pair of shoes.

“The whole time we’ve had a feeling that it was well planned,” said Wallander. “The question now is whether it was well planned in more than one way.”

“Of course I can’t imagine that a woman could have done this,” she said. “But now I realise that it might be true.”

“Your summary will be important,” Wallander said. “I think we should also talk to Mats Ekholm about this.”

“Who?”

“The forensic psychologist who was here last summer.”

She shook her head.

“I must be very tired,” she said. “I’d forgotten his name.”

Wallander stood up. It was 1 a.m.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Could you call me a taxi?”

“You can take my car,” she said. “I’m going to need a long walk in the morning to clear my head.” She gave him the keys. “My husband is coming home soon. Things will be easier.”

“I think this is the first time I fully realised how hard things are for you,” he said. “When Linda was little, Mona was always there. I don’t think I ever once had to stay home from work while she was growing up.”

She followed him outside. The night was clear. It was below freezing.

“I have no regrets,” she said suddenly.

“Regrets about what?”

“About joining the force.”

“You’re a good police officer,” said Wallander. “A very good one. In case you didn’t know.”

He saw that she was pleased. He nodded, got into her car, and drove off.

The next day, Monday, 17 October, Wallander woke up with a slight headache. He lay in bed and wondered if he was coming down with a cold, but he didn’t have any other symptoms. He got up and made coffee, and looked for some aspirin. Through the kitchen window he saw that the wind had picked up. Clouds had moved in over Skane during the night. The temperature had risen. The thermometer read 4 °C.

By 7.15 a.m. he was at the station. He got some coffee and sat down in his office. On his desk was a message from the officer in Goteborg he’d been working with on the investigation into car smuggling. He sat holding the message in his hand for a moment. Then he put it in his drawer. He pulled over a notebook and started looking for a pen. In one of the drawers he came across Svedberg’s note. He wondered how many times he had forgotten to give it back.

Annoyed, he stood up and went out to the hall. The door to Svedberg’s office was open. He went in and put the paper on the desk, then went back to his own office, closed the door, and spent the next 30 mimutes listing all the questions he wanted answered. He had decided to go over what he and Hoglund had discussed when the investigative team met later that morning.

At 7.45 a.m. there was a knock on the door. It was Hamren from Stockholm, who’d just arrived. They shook hands. Wallander liked him; they’d worked well together during the summer.

“Here already?” he said. “I thought you weren’t coming until later in the day.”

“I drove down yesterday,” Hamren replied. “I couldn’t wait.”

“How are things in Stockholm?”

“The same as here. Only bigger.”

“I don’t know where they plan to put you,” Wallander said.

“In with Hansson. It’s already been arranged.”

“We’re going to meet in about half an hour.”

“I’ve got a lot of reading to do before then.”

Hamren left the room. Wallander absentmindedly put his hand on the phone, meaning to call his father. He gave a start. Grief hit him. He no longer had a father he could call. Not today, not tomorrow. Never.

He sat motionless in his chair. Then he leaned forward again and dialled the number. Gertrud answered almost at once. She sounded tired and burst into tears when he asked her how she was. He had a lump in his throat too.

“I’m taking one day at a time,” she said, after she had calmed down.

“I’ll try to come out for a while this afternoon,” Wallander said. “I won’t be able to stay long, but I’ll try to come.”

“There’s so much I’ve been thinking about,” she said. “About you and your father. I know so little.”

“That goes for me too, but let’s see if we can help each other fill in the gaps.”

He hung up, knowing that it was unlikely he would make it out to Loderup that day. Why had he said that he would try? Now she would be sitting there waiting.

I spend my life disappointing people, he thought hopelessly. Angrily he broke the pen he was holding and tossed the pieces into the waste-paper basket. One piece missed and he kicked it away with his foot. He suddenly had the urge to escape. When had he last talked to Baiba? She hadn’t called him either. Was their relationship dying a natural death? When would he have time to look for a house? Or find a dog? There were moments when he detested his job and this was one of them.

He stood at the window. Wind and autumn clouds, birds on their way south. He thought about Per Akeson, who had finally decided that there was more to life.

Once, towards the end of summer, as he and Baiba walked along the beach at Skagen, she had said that it seemed as though all the people of the West shared a dream of an enormous yacht that could take the whole continent to the Caribbean. The collapse of the Eastern bloc had opened her eyes. In the impoverished Latvia there were islands of wealth, simple joys. She had discovered great poverty even in the rich countries that she could now visit. There was a sea of dissatisfaction and emptiness everywhere. And that was why people dreamed of escape.

He made a note to call Baiba that evening. He saw that it was 8.15 a.m., and went to the conference room. In addition to Hamren, there were also two detectives from Malmo, Augustsson and Hartman whom Wallander hadn’t met before. They shook hands. Lisa Holgersson arrived and sat down. She welcomed the new arrivals. There wasn’t time for anything else. She looked at Wallander and nodded.

He began as he’d decided to do earlier, with the conversation he’d had with Hoglund. He noticed at once that the reaction of the others in the room was marked by doubt. That’s what he had expected. He shared their doubts.

“I’m not presenting this as anything but one of several possibilities. Since we know nothing, we can ignore nothing.”

He nodded to Hoglund.

“I’ve asked for a summary of the investigation from a female perspective,” he said. “We’ve never done anything like this before. But in this case we have to try everything.”

The discussion that followed was intense. Wallander had expected that too. Hansson, who seemed to be feeling better this morning, started things off. About halfway through the meeting Nyberg came in. He was walking without the crutch. Wallander met his glance. He had a feeling that Nyberg had something he wanted to say. He gave him an inquiring look, but Nyberg shook his head.

Wallander listened to the discussion without taking an active part in it. Hansson expressed himself clearly and presented good arguments.

Around 9 a.m. they took a short break. Svedberg showed Wallander a picture in the paper of members of the newly created Protective Militia in Lodinge. Several other towns in Skane were apparently following suit. Chief Holgersson had seen a report about it on the evening news.

“We’re going to end up with vigilante groups all over the country,” she said. “Imagine a situation where pseudopolicemen outnumber us.”

“It might be unavoidable,” Hamren said. “Maybe it’s always been true that crime pays. The difference is that today we can prove it. If we brought in ten per cent of all the money that disappears today in financial crimes, we could comfortably afford 3,000 new officers.”

This number seemed absurd to Wallander, but Hamren stood his ground.

“The question is whether we want that kind of society,” he continued. “House doctors are one thing. But house police? Police everywhere? A society that’s divided up into various alarm zones? Keys and codes even to visit your elderly parents?”

“We probably don’t need that many new officers,” Wallander said. “We just need a different kind of policeman.”

“Maybe what we need is a different kind of society,” said Martinsson. “With a greater sense of community.”

Martinsson’s words had taken on the sound of a political campaign speech, but Wallander understood him. He knew that Martinsson worried constantly about his children. That they’d be exposed to drugs. That something would happen to them.

Wallander sat down next to Nyberg, who hadn’t left the table.

“It looked like you wanted to say something.”

“It’s just a small detail,” he said. “Do you remember that I found a false nail out in the woods at Marsvinsholm?”

Wallander remembered.

“The one you thought had been there a long time?”

“I didn’t think anything of it then, but now I think we can say for certain that it hadn’t been there very long.”

Wallander nodded. He motioned Hoglund over.

“Do you use false nails?” he asked.

“Not often,” she replied. “But I have tried them.”

“Do they stick on pretty well?”

“They break off easily.”

Wallander nodded.

“I thought you should know,” Nyberg said.

Svedberg came into the room.

“Thanks for returning the note,” he said. “But you could have thrown it out.”

“Rydberg used to say that it was an inexcusable sin to throw out a colleague’s notes.”

“Rydberg said a lot of things.”

“They often proved to be right.”

Wallander knew that Svedberg hadn’t got on with his older colleague. What surprised him was that he still felt that way, even now that Rydberg had been dead for several years.

They reassigned various tasks so that Hamren and the two detectives from Malmo could get involved in the investigation straight away. At 10.45 a.m., Wallander decided that it was time to adjourn. A phone rang. Martinsson, sitting closest, picked it up. Wallander was thinking that maybe he’d have time to go out to Loderup and see Gertrud later that afternoon after all. Martinsson raised his hand. Everyone stopped talking. Martinsson glanced at Wallander. Not again, he thought. We can’t handle this.

Martinsson hung up.

“A body has been found in Krageholm Lake,” Martinsson said.

Wallander’s first thought was that this didn’t have to mean a third murder. Drowning accidents were common enough.

“Where?” he asked.

“There’s a small camping ground on the eastern shore. The body was just off the end of a jetty.”

Wallander could tell that his feeling of relief was premature.

“The body of a man. Inside a sack,” he said.

It has happened again, Wallander thought. The knot in his stomach tightened.

“Who was that on the phone?” Svedberg asked.

“A camper. He was calling on his mobile phone. He was upset. It sounded like he was throwing up in my ear.”

“Nobody would be camping now, would they?” Svedberg asked.

“There are trailers for rent there all year round,” Hansson said. “I know where it is.”

Wallander felt suddenly incapable of dealing with the situation. Maybe Hoglund felt the same way. She helped him out by getting to her feet.

“I guess we’d better go,” she said.

“Yes,” Wallander said. “We’d probably better leave right now.”

Since Hansson knew where they were going, Wallander got into his car. The others followed. Hansson drove recklessly and fast. Wallander braked with his feet. The car phone rang. It was Per Akeson wanting to talk to Wallander.

“What’s this I hear?” he asked. “Is this another one?”

“It’s too early to tell. But it may be so. If it was just a body in the water, it might have been a drowning accident or a suicide, but a body in a sack is a murder.”

“God damn it to hell,” Akeson said.

“You might say that.”

“Keep me posted. Where are you?”

“On our way to Krageholm Lake. We should be there in about 20 minutes.”

Wallander hung up. It occurred to him that they were headed towards the place where they had found the suitcase. Hansson seemed to be thinking the same thing.

“The lake is halfway between Lodinge and Marsvinsholm,” he said. “It’s no great distance.”

Wallander grabbed the phone and dialled Martinsson’s number. His car was right behind them.

“What else did the man who called say? What’s his name?”

“I don’t think I got his name, but he had a Skane accent.”

“A body in a sack. How did he know there was a body in the sack? Did he open it?”

“There was a foot with a man’s shoe sticking out.”

Even though it was a bad connection, Wallander could hear Martinsson’s distress. He hung up.

They reached Sovestad and turned left. Wallander thought about Gosta Runfeldt’s client. Everywhere there were connections to the events. If there was a geographical centre, then Sovestad was it.

The lake was visible through the trees. Wallander tried to prepare himself for what awaited them. As they drove down towards the camping ground, a man came running towards them. Wallander climbed out of the car before Hansson had even stopped.

“Down there,” the man stammered.

Wallander walked slowly down the slope that led to the water. Even at this distance he could make out something in the water, to one side of the jetty. Martinsson came up beside him but stopped at the shore. The others waited in the background. Wallander walked cautiously out onto the jetty. It wobbled under his weight. The water was brown and looked cold. He shivered.

The sack was only partially visible above the water’s surface. A foot was indeed sticking out. The shoe was brown and had laces. White skin could be seen through a hole in the trouser leg.

Wallander looked back and motioned to Nyberg to join him. Hansson was talking to the man. Martinsson was waiting further up, and Hoglund stood off to one side. It looked like a photograph, Wallander thought. Reality frozen, suspended. Nothing more would ever happen.

The mood was broken by Nyberg stepping onto the jetty. Reality returned. Wallander squatted down and Nyberg did the same.

“A sack made of jute,” Nyberg said. “They’re usually strong. But this one has a hole in it. It must be old.”

Wallander wished Nyberg were right, but he knew he wasn’t. The hole in the sack was new. It looked as though the man had kicked his way through it. The fibres had been pushed out and then ripped apart. Wallander knew what this meant. The man had been alive when he was put in the sack and thrown into the lake. Wallander took a deep breath. He felt sick and dizzy.

Nyberg gave him an inquiring look, but didn’t say anything. He waited. Wallander kept on taking deep breaths, one after another.

“He kicked a hole in the sack,” Wallander said when he felt able to speak. “He was alive when he was thrown into the lake.”

“An execution?” Nyberg asked. “A war between two crime gangs?”

“We could hope for that,” Wallander said. “But I don’t think so.”

“The same killer?”

“It looks like it.”

Wallander got to his feet with difficulty. His knees were stiff. He walked back to the shore. Nyberg remained out on the jetty. The forensic technicians had just arrived. Wallander went over to Hoglund. She was standing with Chief Holgersson. The others followed. Finally they were all assembled. The man who had discovered the sack was sitting nearby.

“It could be the same killer,” Wallander said. “If that’s the case, then this time he’s drowned a man in a sack.”

Disgust passed like a ripple through the team.

“We have to stop this madman,” Lisa Holgersson said. “What’s become of this country?”

“A pungee pit,” Wallander said. “A man tied to a tree and strangled. And now a man tied up in a sack and drowned.”

“Do you still think a woman could have done something like this?” Hansson asked aggressively.

Wallander asked himself the same question. What did he really think? In a matter of a few seconds all the events passed through his mind.

“I don’t want to believe it, but yes a woman could have done this, or at least be involved.”

He looked at Hansson.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “It’s not about what I think.”

Wallander went back to the shore of the lake. A solitary swan was on its way towards the jetty. It glided soundlessly across the surface of the dark water. Wallander watched it for a long time. Then he zipped up his jacket and went to Nyberg, who was already starting his work out on the jetty.

Skane

17 October — 3 November 1994