The Fifth Woman

CHAPTER 29

Just before midnight Wallander realised that they were too tired to do any more. The meeting had been going on since 5 p.m., and they had only taken short breaks to air out the conference room. Hansson had given them the opening they needed. A connection was established. The contours of a person who moved like a shadow among the three men who had been killed were being to appear. Even though they were still cautious about stating that there was a definite motive, they now had a strong feeling that they were skirting the edges of a series of events connected by revenge.

Wallander had called them together to make a unified advance through difficult terrain. Hansson had given them a direction. But they still had no map to follow. At first there was still a lingering feeling of doubt among the team. Could this really be right? That a mysterious disappearance so many years ago, revealed in kilos of investigative materials from police officers in Jamtland who were no longer alive, might help them unmask a killer who had set a trap made of sharpened bamboo stakes in a ditch in Skane?

It was when the door opened and Nyberg came in, several minutes after 6 p.m., that all doubt was dispelled. He didn’t even bother to take his usual place at the far end of the table. For once he was excited, something no-one could remember ever having seen before.

“There was a cigarette butt on the jetty,” he said. “We were able to identify a fingerprint on it.”

Wallander gave him a surprised look.

“Is that really possible? Fingerprints on a cigarette butt?”

“We were lucky,” Nyberg said. “You’re right that it’s not usually possible. But there’s one exception: if the cigarette is rolled by hand. And this one was.”

First Hansson had discovered a plausible and even likely link between a long-vanished Polish woman and Holger Eriksson, and now Nyberg told them that a fingerprint on Runfeldt’s suitcase matched one at the site where Blomberg’s body was found.

Silence fell over the room. It almost felt like too much to handle in such a short time. An investigation that had been dragging along without direction was now starting to pick up speed in earnest.

After presenting his news, Nyberg sat down.

“A killer who smokes,” Martinsson said. “That’ll be easier to find today than it was 20 years ago.”

Wallander nodded thoughtfully. “We need to find other points of intersection between these murders,” he said. “With three people dead, we need at least nine combinations. Fingerprints, times, anything that will prove that there’s a common denominator.”

He looked around the room.

“We need to put together a proper sequence of events,” he said. “We know that the person or persons behind these killings acts with appalling cruelty. We’ve discovered a deliberate element in the way the victims have been killed. But we haven’t succeeded in reading the killer’s language, the code we discussed earlier. We have a feeling that the murderer is talking to us. But what is he or she trying to say? We don’t know. The question is whether there are more patterns to the whole thing that we haven’t yet found.”

“You mean something like whether the killer strikes when there’s a full moon?” Svedberg asked.

“That sort of thing. The symbolic full moon. What does it look like in this case? Does it exist? I’d like someone to put together a timetable. Is there anything there that might give us another lead?”

Martinsson undertook to put together what information they had. Wallander knew that — on his own initiative — Martinsson had obtained several computer programmes developed by the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, D.C. He assumed that Martinsson saw an opportunity to make use of them.

Then they started talking about whether there actually was a geographical centre to the crimes. Hoglund put a map on the slide projector, and Wallander stationed himself at the edge of the image.

“It starts in Lodinge,” he said, pointing. “A person begins surveillance of Holger Eriksson’s farm. We can assume that he travels by car and that he uses the tractor path on the hill behind Eriksson’s tower. A year earlier someone, maybe the same person, broke into his house, without stealing anything. Possibly to warn him, leave him a sign. We don’t know, but it doesn’t have to be the same person.”

Wallander pointed at Ystad.

“Gosta Runfeldt is looking forward to his trip to Nairobi. Everything is ready. His suitcase is packed, money changed, the tickets collected. He has even ordered a taxi for early on the morning of the day of his departure. But he never takes the trip. He disappears without a trace for three weeks.”

Wallander moves his finger again. “Now to the woods west of Marsvinsholm. An orienteer training at night finds him tied to a tree, strangled, emaciated. He must have been held captive in some way during the time he was missing. So, two murders at different places, with Ystad as a kind of midpoint.”

His finger moved northeast.

“We find a suitcase along the road to Hoor, not far from a point where you can turn off towards Holger Eriksson’s farm. The suitcase is lying at the side of the road as though it was placed there to be found. We can ask ourselves the question: why that particular spot? Because the road is convenient for the killer? We don’t know. This question may be more important than we’ve realised up until now.”

Wallander moved his hand again. To the southwest, to Krageholm Lake.

“Here we find Eugen Blomberg. This means we have a defined area that isn’t particularly large, only 30 or 40 kilometres between the outer points. It’s no more than half an hour by car between each site.”

He sat down.

“Let’s draw up some tentative and preliminary conclusions,” he went on. “What does this indicate?”

“Familiarity with the local area,” Hoglund said. “The site in the woods at Marsvinsholm was well chosen. The suitcase was placed at a spot where there are no houses from which you could see a driver stop and leave something behind.”

“How do you know that?” Martinsson asked.

“Because I checked.”

“You can either be familiar with an area yourself, or else you can find out about it from someone else,” Wallander said. “Which seems likely in this case?”

They couldn’t agree. Hansson thought that a stranger could easily have decided on each of the sites. Svedberg thought the opposite, that the place where they had found Runfeldt indicated beyond a doubt that the killer was extremely familiar with the area. Wallander had his doubts. Earlier he had tended to think of a person who was an outsider. He was no longer so sure. They didn’t come to any agreement on this, and they couldn’t pinpoint an obvious centre, either. It was most likely to be near to where Runfeldt’s suitcase was found, but that didn’t get them any further.

During the evening they kept returning to the suitcase. Why had it been put there, next to the road? And why had it been repacked, probably by a woman? They also couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why the underwear was missing. Hansson had suggested that Runfeldt might be the type of person who didn’t wear any. No-one took that seriously. There had to be some other explanation.

At 9 p.m. they took a break to get some air. Martinsson disappeared into his office to call home, Svedberg put on his jacket to take a walk. Wallander went to the bathroom and washed his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. Suddenly he had a feeling that his appearance had changed since his father’s death. What the difference was, he couldn’t tell. He shook his head at his reflection. Soon he would have to make time to think about what had happened. His father had been dead for several weeks. He also thought about Baiba, the woman he cared so much about but never called.

He doubted that a policeman could combine his job with anything else. But Martinsson had an excellent relationship with his family, and Hoglund had almost total responsibility for her two children. It was Wallander who didn’t seem able to combine the two things.

He yawned at himself in the mirror. From the hall he could hear that they had started to reconvene. He decided that now they would have to talk about the woman who could be glimpsed in the background. They had to try to picture her and the role that she had actually played. This was the first thing he said when they closed the door.

“There’s a woman involved somewhere in all of this,” he said. “For the rest of this meeting, as long as we can keep at it, we have to go over the background. We talk about a motive of revenge. But we’re not being very precise. Does that mean we’re thinking incorrectly? That we’re on the wrong track? That there might be a completely different explanation?”

They waited in silence for him to continue. Even though they all looked exhausted, he could see that they were still concentrating. He started by going back to Katarina Taxell in Lund.

“She gave birth here in Ystad,” he said. “On two nights she had a visitor. I’m convinced that this woman did visit her, even though she denies it. So she’s lying. Why? Who was the woman? Why won’t Taxell reveal her identity? I think that we can assume that Eugen Blomberg is the father of Katarina Taxell’s child — she’s lying about this. I’m sure that she lied about everything during our meeting in Lund. I don’t know why, but I think that we can probably assume that she holds a crucial key to this whole mess.”

“Why don’t we just bring her in?” Hansson asked with some vehemence.

“On what grounds?” Wallander replied. “She’s a new mother. We have to treat her carefully. And I doubt that she would tell us more than she has already if we interrogate her at Lund police station. We’ll have to try to go around her, smoke out the truth another way.”

Hansson nodded reluctantly.

“The third woman linked to Eugen Blomberg is his widow,” Wallander continued. “She gave us a lot of important information. Probably the fact that she doesn’t seem to mourn his death at all is most significant. He abused her, for a long time, and quite severely judging by her scars. She also confirms, indirectly, our theory about Katarina Taxell, since she says he has had extramarital affairs.”

As he said these last words, he thought he sounded like an old-fashioned preacher. He wondered what term Hoglund would have used.

“Let’s say that the details surrounding Blomberg form a pattern,” he said. “Which we’ll come back to later.”

He switched to Runfeldt. He was moving backwards, towards the first killing.

“Gosta Runfeldt was known to be a brutal man. Both his son and daughter confirm this. Behind the orchid lover, a whole different person was concealed. He was a private detective, something that we don’t have a good explanation for. Was he looking for excitement? Weren’t orchids enough for him?”

He switched to Runfeldt’s wife.

“I made a trip to a lake outside Almhult without knowing for sure what I would find. I don’t have any proof, but I can imagine that Runfeldt actually killed his wife. We’ll never know what happened out there on the ice. The main players are dead. There were no witnesses, but I still have a hunch that someone outside the family knew about it. For lack of anything better, we have to consider the possibility that the death of his wife had something to do with Runfeldt’s fate.”

Wallander paused for a moment and then continued.

“So, he’s taking a trip to Africa. He doesn’t go. Something prevents him. How he disappears, we don’t know. On the other hand, we can pinpoint the date. But we have no explanation for the break-in at his shop. We don’t know where he was held prisoner. The suitcase may, of course, provide a clue. For some reason it was repacked by a woman. If so, by the same woman who smoked a handrolled cigarette on the jetty where Blomberg was thrown into the water.”

“There could be two people,” Hoglund objected. “One who smoked the cigarette and left a fingerprint on the suitcase. Someone else could have repacked it.”

“You’re right,” Wallander said. “Let’s say that at least one person was present.” He glanced at Nyberg.

“We’re looking,” Nyberg said. “We’re going through Holger Eriksson’s place. We’ve found lots of fingerprints. But so far none that match.”

“The name tag,” Wallander said. “The one we found in Runfeldt’s suitcase. Did it have any fingerprints on it?”

Nyberg shook his head.

“It should have had,” said Wallander in surprise. “You use your fingers to put it on or take it off, don’t you?”

No-one had an explanation for this.

“So far we’ve talked about a number of women, one of whom keeps appearing,” he continued. “We also have spousal abuse and possibly an undetected murder. The question we have to ask ourselves is: who would have known about these things? Who would have had a reason to seek revenge? If the motive is revenge, that is.”

“There might be another thing,” Svedberg said, scratching the back of his neck. “We have two old police investigations that were both archived, unsolved. One in Ostersund and one in Almhult.”

Wallander nodded.

“That leaves Eriksson,” he went on. “Another brutal man. After a lot of effort, or rather a lot of luck, we find a woman in his background too. A Polish woman who’s been missing for 30 years or so.”

He looked around the table before he concluded.

“In other words, there’s a pattern,” he said. “Brutal men and abused, missing, and maybe murdered women. And one step behind, a shadow that follows in the tracks of these events. A shadow that might be a woman. A woman who smokes.”

Hansson dropped his pencil on the table and shook his head.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Let’s imagine that there’s a woman involved, who seems to have enormous physical strength and a macabre imagination when it comes to methods of murder. Why would she have an interest in what happened to these women? Is she a friend of theirs? How did all these people cross paths?”

“That’s not just an important question,” Wallander said. “It could be crucial. How did these people come into contact with each other? Where should we start looking? Among men or among women? A car dealer, regional poet and bird-watcher; an orchid lover, private detective, and florist; and an allergy researcher. Blomberg, at any rate, doesn’t seem to have had any special interests. Or should we start with the women? A mother who lies about the father of her newborn child? A woman who drowned in Stang Lake outside Almhult ten years ago? A woman from Poland who lived in Jamtland and was interested in birds, missing for 30 years? And finally, this woman who sneaks around in the Ystad maternity ward at night and knocks down midwives? Where are the points of connection?”

The silence lasted a long time. Everyone tried to find an answer. Wallander waited. This was a key moment. He was hoping that someone would come up with an unexpected conclusion. Rydberg had told him many times that the most important task of the leader of an investigation was to stimulate his colleagues to think the unexpected. Had he been successful?

It was Hoglund who at last broke the silence.

“There are some occupations that are dominated by women,” she said. “Nursing is one of them.”

“Patients come from all different places,” Martinsson continued. “If we assume that the woman we’re looking for works in an emergency room, she would have seen lots of abused women pass through. None of them knew each other. But she knew them. Their names, their patient records.”

Hoglund and Martinsson had come up with something that might fit.

“We don’t know whether she really is a nurse,” Wallander said. “All we know is that she doesn’t work in the maternity ward in Ystad.”

“She could work somewhere else in the hospital,” Svedberg suggested.

Wallander nodded slowly. Could it really be so simple? A nurse at Ystad General Hospital?

“It should be relatively easy to find out,” Hansson said. “Even though patient records are confidential, it should be possible to find out if Gosta Runfeldt’s wife was treated there. And why not Krista Haberman, for that matter?”

Wallander took a new tack.

“Have Runfeldt and Eriksson ever been charged with assault? That’s easily checked.”

“There are also other possibilities,” Hoglund said, as though she felt the need to question her own previous suggestions. “There are other occcupations in which women dominate. There are crisis groups for women. Even the female officers in Skane have their own network.”

“We have to investigate all these,” Wallander said. “It will take a long time and I think we have to accept that this investigation is heading in many directions at once. Especially in terms of time.”

They spent the last two hours before midnight planning various strategies to be explored simultaneously, until at last they ran out of steam.

Hansson put the final question into words, the one they had all been waiting for the whole evening.

“Is it going to happen again?”

“I don’t know,” Wallander said. “I have a sense of incompleteness about what’s happened so far. Don’t ask me why. That’s all I can say. Something as unprofessional as a feeling. Intuition, maybe.”

“I have the same feeling,” Svedberg said. He said this with such force that everyone was surprised. “Isn’t it possible that we can expect a series of murders that go on indefinitely? If it’s someone pointing a vengeful finger at men who have mistreated women, then it’s never going to stop.”

Wallander knew it was likely that Svedberg was right. He’d been trying to avoid the thought himself all along.

“There is that risk,” he said. “Which in turn means that we have to catch the killer fast.”

“Reinforcements,” said Nyberg, who had barely uttered a word the past two hours. “Otherwise it won’t work.”

“Yes,” Wallander said. “I agree that we’re going to need them. Especially after what we’ve talked about tonight. We can’t manage without extra help to do much more than we already are.”

Hamren raised his hand to signal that he wanted to say something. He was sitting next to the two detectives from Malmo near the far end of the long table.

“I’d like to underline that last comment,” he said. “I’ve rarely if ever taken part in such efficient police work with so few personnel. Since I was here in the summer too, I can say with certainty that it’s the rule, not the exception. If you request reinforcements, no reasonable person is going to refuse you.”

The detectives from Malmo nodded in agreement.

“I’ll take it up with Chief Holgersson tomorrow,” Wallander said. “I’m also thinking of trying to get a few more female officers. If nothing else, it might boost morale.”

The weary mood lifted for a moment. Wallander seized the opportunity and stood up. It was important to know when to end a meeting. Now was the time. They wouldn’t make any more progress. They needed sleep.

Wallander went to his office. He leafed through the steadily growing stack of phone messages. Instead of putting on his jacket, he sat down in his chair. Footsteps disappeared down the hall. Soon it was quiet. He twisted the lamp down to shine on the desk. The rest of the room was dark.

It was 12.30. Without thinking he grabbed the phone and dialled Baiba in Riga. She had irregular sleeping habits, just as he did. Sometimes she went to bed early, but just as often she stayed up half the night. She answered almost at once. She was awake. As always he tried to hear from her tone of voice whether she was glad he had called. He never felt sure ahead of time. This time he sensed that she was wary. He was instantly insecure. He wanted reassurance that everything was the way it should be. He asked her how she was, told her about the exhausting investigation. She asked a few questions. Then he didn’t know how to continue. Silence began wandering back and forth between Ystad and Riga.

“When are you coming over?” he asked at last.

Her response surprised him, even though it shouldn’t have.

“Do you really want me to come?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You never call. And when you do call, you say you really don’t have time to talk to me. So how are you going to have any time to spend with me if I come to Ystad?”

“That’s not how it is.”

“Then how is it?”

Where his reaction came from, he had no idea. Not then or later. He tried to stop his own impulse, but he couldn’t. He slammed the receiver down hard and stared at the phone. Then he got up and left the station. Even before he got to reception, he regretted it. But he knew Baiba well enough to know that she wouldn’t answer if he called her back.

He stepped out into the night air. A police car rolled past and vanished in the direction of the water tower. There was no wind. The night air was chilly, the sky clear.

He didn’t understand his own reaction. What would have happened if she had been there, right next to him?

He thought about the murdered men. It was as if he suddenly saw something he hadn’t seen before. Part of himself was hidden in all the brutality that surrounded him. He was a part of it. Only the degree was different. Nothing else.

He shook his head. He knew he ought to call Baiba early in the morning. It didn’t have to be so terrible. She understood. Fatigue could make her irritable too.

It was 1 a.m. He should go home to bed, ask an officer to drive him home. But instead he started walking. Somewhere a car skidded, tyres screeching. Then silence. He walked down the hill towards the hospital.

The investigative team had sat in the meeting for seven hours. Nothing had really happened, and yet the evening had been eventful. Clarity arises in the spaces in between, Rydberg had said once when he was quite drunk. Wallander, who was at least as drunk, had understood. He’d never forgotten it, either. They were sitting on Rydberg’s balcony. Five, maybe six years ago. Rydberg was not yet ill. It was an evening in June, right before Midsummer. They were celebrating something, Wallander had forgotten what it was.

Clarity arises in the spaces in between.

He had reached the hospital. He stopped. He hesitated, but only briefly. Then he walked round the side of the hospital and rang the night bell. When a voice answered he said who he was and asked whether the midwife Ylva Brink was on duty. She was.

She met him outside the glass doors of her ward. He could see by her face that she was nervous. He smiled, but her unease didn’t diminish. Maybe his smile didn’t look genuine. Or the light was bad. They went inside. She asked if he’d like some coffee. He shook his head.

“I’ll only stay for a moment,” he said. “You must be busy.”

“Yes,” she replied. “But I can spare a few minutes. If it can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“It probably could,” Wallander replied. “But I was passing on my way home.”

They went into the office. A nurse on her way in stopped when she saw Wallander.

“It can wait,” she said and left.

Wallander leaned against the desk. Ylva Brink sat down.

“You must have wondered,” he began, “about the woman who knocked you down. Who she was. Why she was here. Why she did what she did. You must have thought long and hard about it. You’ve given us a good description of her face. Maybe there’s some detail you thought of afterwards.”

“You’re right, I’ve been thinking about it. But I’ve told you everything I can remember about her face.”

He believed her.

“It doesn’t have to be her face. She might have had a certain way of moving. Or a scar on her hand. A human being is a combination of so many different details. We think we can trust our memory, and that all of the details are there, just like that. Actually it’s just the opposite. Imagine an object that can almost float, that sinks through water extremely slowly. That’s the way memory works.”

She shook her head.

“It happened so fast. I don’t remember anything except what I’ve already told you. And I’ve really tried.”

Wallander nodded. He hadn’t really expected anything else.

“What has she done?” Ylva asked.

“She knocked you down. We’re looking for her. We think she might have some important information for us. That’s all I can tell you.”

A clock on the wall read 1.27 a.m. He put out his hand to say goodbye, and they left the office.

Suddenly she stopped him.

“There might be something else,” she said hesitantly.

“What is it?”

“I didn’t think about it then, when I went towards her and she knocked me down. It wasn’t until afterwards.”

“What?”

“She was wearing a perfume that was special.”

“In what way?”

She gave him almost an imploring look.

“I don’t know. How does one describe a scent?”

“That’s one of the hardest things to do. But give it a try.”

He could see that she was making a real effort.

“No,” she said. “I can’t find the words. I just know that it was special. Maybe you could say that it was harsh.”

“More like after-shave lotion?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

“It was just a thought.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Since I can’t express myself clearly.”

“Oh no,” he replied. “This could turn out to be valuable. We never know ahead of time.”

They parted at the glass doors. Wallander took the lift down and left the hospital. He walked fast. Now he had to get some sleep. He thought about what she had said. If there were any traces of perfume left on the name tag holder, she would be asked to smell it early the next morning. He already knew that it would be the same. They were looking for a woman. Her perfume was special. But would they ever find her?