The Fifth Woman

by Henning Mankell

  Now as he lay in the dark and thought back, he realised that here was one thing he couldn’t explain. He was convinced that the woman who called was somewhere close by. There was some reason, which wasn’t clear to him, why she had called him instead of someone else. Who was she? What happened after that?

  He had put on his coat and gone down to the street. He had the keys to the shop in his hand. There was no wind, and a cool scent wafted up towards him as he walked down the wet street. It had rained earlier that evening, a cloudburst that had passed as quickly as it began. He stopped outside the front door of the shop. He could remember that he unlocked the door and went inside. Then the world exploded.

  He had walked down that street countless times in his mind, whenever the panic subsided for a moment. It was a fixed point in the constant, throbbing pain. There must have been someone there. I expected a woman to be standing outside the door. But there was no-one. I could have waited and then gone back home. I could have been angry because someone had played a joke on me, but I unlocked the shop because I knew she would come. She said that she really needed those roses. Nobody lies about roses.

  The street had been deserted, he was sure of that. But one detail of the scene bothered him. There was a car parked, with its lights on. When he turned towards the door, searching for the keyhole to unlock it, the headlights were on him. And then the world ended in a sharp white glare.

  The only possible explanation made him hysterical with fright. He must have been attacked. Behind him in the shadows was someone he hadn’t seen. But a woman who telephones up at night, pleading for roses? He never got further than that. That’s where everything rational ended. With a tremendous effort, he had managed to wrench his bound hands up to his mouth so he could gnaw on the rope. At first he ripped and tore at it like a beast of prey gorging on a kill. Almost at once he broke a tooth on the lower left side of his mouth. The pain was intense at first, but quickly subsided. When he began chewing on the rope again – he thought of himself as an animal in a trap who had to gnaw off its own leg to escape – he did it slowly.

  Gnawing on the hard, dry rope was consoling. Even if he couldn’t free himself, chewing on it kept him sane, and he could think relatively clearly. He had been attacked. He was being held captive, lying on a floor. Twice a day, or maybe it was twice a night, he could hear a scraping sound next to him. A gloved hand would prise open his mouth and pour water into it. Never anything else. The hand that gripped his jaw seemed more determined than brutal. Afterwards a straw was stuck into his mouth. He sucked up a little lukewarm soup and then he was again left alone in the dark and the silence.

  He had been attacked and tied up. Beneath him was a cement floor. Someone was keeping him alive. He worked out that he had been lying here for a week. He had tried to understand why. It must be a mistake. But what kind of mistake? Why would a person be kept tied up in the dark? Somehow he sensed that the madness was based on an insight he didn’t dare allow to surface. It was no mistake. This terrible thing had been planned specifically for him. But how would it end? Perhaps the nightmare would go on for ever, and he would never know why.

  Twice each day or night he was given water and food. Twice he was also dragged along the floor by his feet until he came to a hole in the floor. He had no underpants on either, they had disappeared. There was only his shirt, and he was dragged back to his original position when he was finished. He had nothing to wipe himself with. Besides, his hands were tied. He noticed the smell around him.

  Filth. But also perfume.

  Was there someone near him? The woman who wanted to buy roses? Or just a pair of hands with gloves on? Hands that dragged him to the hole in the floor. And an almost imperceptible smell of perfume that lingered after the visits. The hands and perfume must come from somewhere.

  Of course he had tried to speak to the hands. Somewhere there had to be ears and a mouth. Every time he felt the hands near his face and his shoulders, he tried another approach. He had pleaded, he had raged, he had tried to be his own defence counsel and speak calmly and soberly. Everyone has rights, he had claimed, sometimes sobbing, sometimes enraged. Even a fettered man has rights. The right to know why I’ve lost all my rights. He hadn’t even asked to be set free. To start with, he just wanted to know why he was being held captive. That was all.

  He had received no answer. The hands had no body, no ears, no mouth. Finally he had yelled and screamed in utter despair. But there was no reaction at all in the hands. Only the straw in his mouth. And a trace of perfume.

  He foresaw his own end. The only thing that kept him going was his chewing. After roughly a week, he had barely gnawed through the hard surface of the rope. Yet this was the only way he could imagine his salvation. He survived because of it.

  In another week he was supposed to return from the journey he would have been on if he hadn’t gone to his shop to sell a bouquet of roses. Right now he would have been deep inside an orchid jungle in Kenya, and his mind would have been filled with the most wondrous of fragrances. When he didn’t arrive home, Vanja Andersson would start to worry. Or perhaps she had already. That was one possibility he couldn’t ignore. The travel agency should be keeping track of its clients. He had paid for his ticket but never showed up at the airport. Surely someone must be missing him. Vanja and the travel agency were his only hope of being rescued. Sometimes he gnawed on the rope just to keep from losing his mind – what was left of it. He knew he was in hell. But he didn’t know why. The terror was in his teeth as they worked at the tough rope. The terror was his only possible way out. He kept on gnawing. Once in a while he would cry, overcome by cramps. But then he would go back to gnawing.

  She had arranged the room as a place of sacrifice. No-one could guess her secret. She alone carried that knowledge. Once, the space had consisted of many small rooms with low ceilings and dark walls, illuminated only by the dim light that filtered through small basement windows set deep in the thick walls. She could still recall that summer. It was the last time she had seen her grandmother. By early autumn her grandmother was gone, but that summer she had sat in the shade of the apple trees, slowly turning into a shadow herself. She was almost 90 and had cancer. She’d sat motionless all summer long, inaccessible to the world; and her grandchildren had been told not to bother her, not to shout when they were near her, and to approach her only if she called them.

  Once Grandmother had raised her hand and waved her over. She approached with trepidation. Old age was dangerous; it meant diseases and death, dark graves and fear. But her grandmother had looked at her with her kind smile, which the cancer could never corrode. Maybe she’d said something, she couldn’t remember what. But her grandmother had been alive and it was a happy summer. It must have been 1952 or 1953. An infinitely long time ago. The catastrophes were still far off.

  It wasn’t until she took over the house herself in the late 1960s that she began the great remodelling. She hadn’t done the work alone, knocking down all the internal walls that could be spared without risking collapse. She had had help from some of her cousins, young men who wanted to show off their strength. But she had also wielded a sledgehammer herself, and the whole house shook as the mortar crumbled. Then from the dust this gigantic room had grown, and the only thing she had left was the big baking oven that towered like a strange boulder in the middle. Everyone who came to see her back then, after the building work, was amazed at how beautiful it had become. It was the same old house, and yet completely different. Light flooded in from the new windows. If she wanted it dark, she could close the massive oak shutters on the outside of the house. She had exposed the roof beams and ripped up the old floors. Someone told her it looked like a church nave.

  After that she had begun to regard the room as her sanctuary. When she was there alone she was in the centre of the world. She could feel completely calm, far from the dangers that threatened her.

  There had been times when she rarely visited her cathedral. The routine of her life always flu
ctuated. On occasion she had asked herself whether she shouldn’t get rid of the house. There were far too many memories that the sledge-hammers could never demolish. But she couldn’t leave the room with the huge, looming baking oven, the white boulder she had kept. It had become a part of her. Sometimes she saw it as the last bastion she had left to defend in her life.

  Then the letter had arrived from Africa.

  After that, everything changed.

  She never again considered abandoning her house.

  On Wednesday, 28 September, she arrived in Vollsjö just after 3 p.m. She had driven from Hässleholm, and before she drove to her house on the outskirts of town, she stopped and bought supplies. She knew what she needed. To be on the safe side, she had bought an extra package of straws. The shopkeeper nodded to her. She smiled back and they exchanged a few words about the weather, and about the terrible ferry accident. She paid and drove off.

  Her closest neighbours weren’t there. They were German, lived in Hamburg, and only came up to Skåne for the month of July. When they were there they greeted one another, but had no other contact.

  She unlocked the front door, and stood quite still in the hall, listening. Then she went into the big room and stood motionless next to the baking oven. Everything was quiet. As quiet as she wanted the world to be.

  The man lying down there inside the oven couldn’t hear her. She knew he was alive, but she had no wish to be bothered by the sound of his breathing. Or sobbing.

  She thought of the impulse that had led her to this unexpected conclusion. It began when she had decided to keep the house. And it was there when she decided to leave the oven untouched. Only later, when the letter from Africa came and she realised what she had to do, had the oven revealed its true purpose.

  She was interrupted by the alarm on her watch. In an hour her guests would arrive. Before then she would have to give the man in the oven his food. He had been there for five days. Soon he would be so weak that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. She took her schedule from her handbag and saw that she had time off from next Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. That’s when it would be. She would take him out and tell him what had happened.

  She had not yet decided how she was going to kill him. There were several possibilities, but she still had plenty of time. She would think about what he had done and then resolve how he was supposed to die.

  She went into the kitchen and heated the soup. Because she was careful about hygiene, she washed the plastic cup and lid that she used when she fed him. She poured water into another cup. Each day she reduced the amount she gave him. He would get no more than was necessary to keep him alive. When she finished preparing the meal, she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, splashed a few drops of perfume behind her ears, and went to the oven. At its back was a hole, hidden behind some loose stones. It was like a tunnel, almost a metre long, that she could carefully pull out. Before she’d put him in there, she had installed a powerful loudspeaker and then filled in the hole. When she played music at full volume, no sound seeped out.

  She leaned forwards so she could see him. When she put her hand on one of his legs he didn’t move. For a moment she was afraid that he was dead, but then she heard him gasping.

  He’s weak, she thought. Soon the waiting will be over.

  After she had given him his food, and let him use the hole, she pulled him back to his place again, and filled in the hole. When she had washed the dishes and tidied up the kitchen, she sat down at the table and had a cup of coffee. From her handbag she took out her personnel newsletter and leafed through it. According to the new salary table, she would be getting 174 kroner more each month, backdated from the first of July. She looked at the clock again. She seldom went ten minutes without checking it. It was part of her identity. Her life and her work were held together by precise timetables. And nothing bothered her more than not being able to meet schedules. Excuses were unacceptable. She always regarded it as a personal responsibility. She knew that many of her colleagues laughed at her behind her back. That hurt her, but she never said a word. The silence was a part of her too. But it hadn’t always been that way.

  I remember my voice when I was a child. It was strong, but not shrill. The muteness had come later. After I saw all the blood, and my mother when she almost died. I didn’t scream that time. I hid in my own silence. There I could make myself invisible.

  That’s when it happened. When my mother lay on a table and, sobbing and bleeding, robbed me of the sister I had always waited for.

  She looked at the clock. They would be here soon. It was Wednesday, time for their meeting. If she had her preference, it would always be on Wednesdays, that would create regularity. But her work schedule didn’t permit it, and she had no control over that schedule.

  She set out five chairs. She didn’t want any more people than that to visit her at once. The intimacy might be lost. It was hard enough as it was to create sufficient trust that these silent women would dare to speak. She went into the bedroom and took off her uniform. For each article of clothing she removed, she muttered a prayer. And she remembered.

  It was my mother who told me about Antonio. The man she had met in her youth, long before the Second World War, on a train between Cologne and Munich. They couldn’t find seats, so they ended up squeezed close together in the smoky corridor. The lights from the boats on the Rhine had glimmered outside the dirty windows, and Antonio told her that he was going to be a Catholic priest. He said that the mass started as soon as the priest changed his clothes. As a prelude to the holy ritual, the priests had to undergo a cleansing procedure. For each garment they took off or put on they had a prayer. Each garment brought them a step closer to their sacred task.

  She had never forgotten her mother’s recollection of the meeting with Antonio in the train. And since she had realised that she was a priestess, dedicated to the sacred task of proclaiming that justice was holy, she too had begun to view her change of clothes as something more than simply exchanging one set of garments for another. But the prayers she offered up were not part of a conversation with God. In a chaotic and absurd world, God was the ultimate absurdity. The mark of the world was an absent God. She directed her prayers to the child she had been, before everything fell apart. Before her mother robbed her of what she wanted most of all. Before the sinister men had towered up before her with eyes like writhing, menacing snakes.

  She changed her clothes and prayed herself back to her childhood. She laid her uniform on the bed. Then she dressed in soft fabrics with gentle colours. Something happened inside her. It was as if her skin altered, as if it too was shifting back to its infant state. Last, she put on a wig and glasses. The final prayer faded inside her. Ride, ride a cock-horse . . .

  She looked at her face in the big mirror. It wasn’t Sleeping Beauty that awoke from her nightmare. It was Cinderella.

  She heard the first car pull into the courtyard. She was ready, she was somebody else. She folded her uniform, smoothed out the bedspread, and left the room. Athough no-one would go in there, she locked the door and then tested the handle.

  They gathered just before 6 p.m., but one of the women was missing. She had been taken to the hospital the night before with contractions. It was two weeks early, but the baby might already have been born.

  She decided at once to visit her at the hospital the next day. She wanted to see her. She wanted to see her face after all she had gone through. Then she listened to their stories. Now and then she pretended to write something in her notebook, but she wrote only numbers. She was making timetables. Figures, times, distances. It was an obsessive game, a game that had increasingly become an incantation. She didn’t need to write anything down to remember it. All the words spoken in those frightened voices, all the pain that they dared express, remained etched in her consciousness. She could see the way something loosened in each of them, if only for a moment. But what was life except a series of moments?

  The timetable again. Times t
hat coincide, one taking over from the other. Life is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between pain and relief, endless, ceaseless.

  She was sitting so that she could see the big oven behind the women. The light was turned down and muted. The room was bathed in a gentle light, which she imagined as being feminine. The oven was a boulder, immovable, mute, in the middle of an empty sea.

  They talked for a couple of hours, and then drank tea in her kitchen. They all knew when they would meet next. No-one questioned the times she gave them.

  It was 8.30 p.m. when she showed them out. She shook their hands, accepted their gratitude. When the last car was gone she went back inside the house, changed her clothes and took off the wig and glasses. She took her uniform and left the room. She washed the teacups, then turned out all the lights and picked up her handbag.

  For a moment she stood still in the dark beside the oven. Everything was very quiet.

  Then she left the house. It was drizzling. She got into her car and drove towards Ystad. She was in her bed asleep before midnight.

  CHAPTER 5

  When Wallander woke on Thursday morning he felt better. He got up just after 6 a.m. and checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window. It was 5°C. Heavy clouds covered the sky, and the streets were wet, but the rain had stopped.

  He arrived at the police station just after 7 a.m. As he walked down the hall to his office he wondered whether they had found Holger Eriksson. He hung up his jacket and sat down. There were a few telephone messages on his desk. Ebba reminded him that he had an appointment at the optician later in the day. He needed reading glasses. If he sat for too long leaning over his paperwork, he got a headache. He was going to be 47 soon. His age was catching up with him.