The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  “Who do we know that might know about shrunken heads?” Wallander asked.

  “The Ethnographic Museum,” Nyberg said. “These days it’s called the Museum of World Peoples. The national police board have issued a little booklet that’s excellent. It lists where you can find information on the most peculiar phenomena.”

  “Then we’ll get in touch with them,” Wallander said.

  Nyberg laid the head gently on a plastic bag. Wallander and Höglund sat down at the desk and started examining the other items. The medal, which rested on a little silk pillow, was foreign. It had an inscription in French. None of them could read it. They started going through the books. The diaries were from the early 1960s. On the half-title page they could make out a name: Harald Berggren. Wallander shot Höglund a questioning glance. She shook her head. That name hadn’t come up in the investigation so far. There were very few entries in the diaries. A few times of day noted with initials. In one place were the initials H.E. It was dated February 1960 – more than 30 years earlier.

  Wallander began to leaf through the notebook. It was a diary, crammed with entries. The first entry had been made in November of 1960, the last in July of 1961. The handwriting was cramped and hard to read. He realised that he had forgotten to keep his appointment with the optician. He borrowed the magnifying glass from Nyberg and read a line here and there.

  “It’s about the Belgian Congo,” he said. “Somebody who was there during the war. As a soldier.”

  “Holger Eriksson or Harald Berggren?”

  “Harald Berggren. Whoever that is.”

  He put down the notebook. It might be important and he’d have to read it carefully. They looked at each other. Wallander knew they were thinking the same thing.

  “A shrunken human head,” he said. “And a diary about a war in Africa.”

  “A pungee pit,” Höglund said. “A reminder of the war. In my mind shrunken heads and impaled people go together.”

  “Mine too,” Wallander said. “The question is whether we’ve found a lead or not.”

  “Who is Harald Berggren?”

  “That’s one of the first things we have to find out.”

  Wallander remembered that Martinsson was visiting a former employee of Eriksson in Svarte. He asked Höglund to call him. Starting right now, the name Harald Berggren would be mentioned and examined in all conceivable connections. She punched in the number. Waited. Then she shook her head.

  “His phone isn’t switched on,” she said.

  Wallander was irritated. “How are we supposed to conduct an investigation if we aren’t all contactable?”

  He knew he often broke the rule himself – he was probably the hardest to reach of all. At least sometimes. But Höglund didn’t say a word.

  “I’ll find him,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “Harald Berggren,” said Wallander. “That name is important.”

  “I’ll see that word gets out,” she replied.

  When Wallander was alone in the room, he turned on the desk lamp. He was just about to open the diary when he noticed that something was stuck inside the leather cover. Carefully he coaxed out a photograph. It was black-and-white, well-thumbed and stained. One corner was torn off. The photograph showed three men in uniform, laughing towards the camera. Wallander remembered the photograph of Runfeldt surrounded by giant orchids. The landscape in this picture wasn’t Sweden either. He studied the photograph with the magnifying glass. The men were very tanned. Their shirts were unbuttoned and their sleeves rolled up. There were rifles at their feet. They were leaning against an oddly shaped boulder and behind it was open countryside with no distinguishable features. The ground was crushed gravel or sand.

  The men looked like they were in their early 20s. He turned the picture over. It was probably taken at about the same time the diary entries were made. The early 1960s. Their age meant that he could eliminate Holger Eriksson. In 1960 he would have been between 40 and 50 years old.

  Wallander opened one of the desk drawers. He had seen some loose passport photographs in an envelope earlier. He placed one of the photographs of Eriksson on the desk. It was dated 1989. Holger Eriksson, aged 73. Wallander stared at his face. The pointed nose, the thin lips. He tried to imagine away the wrinkles and see a younger face. He went back to the photograph with the three men posing. He studied their faces one by one. The man on the left had some features that resembled Holger Eriksson. Wallander leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Holger Eriksson lies dead in a ditch. In his safe we find a shrunken head, a diary, and a photograph.

  Suddenly Wallander sat up straight in the chair, his eyes wide. He was thinking about the break-in. The safe was untouched. Let’s assume, thought Wallander, that whoever broke in also had a hard time finding the safe. And assume the contents were the same then as they are now. That’s precisely what the thief was looking for. He failed and apparently didn’t repeat the attempt. And Eriksson died a year later.

  But there was something that presented a serious contradiction to this attempt to find a link between the two events. After Eriksson’s death, his safe would be found – by the executors of the estate if no-one else. The intruder must have been aware of this.

  Still, this was something. A lead.

  He looked at the photograph one more time. The men were smiling. They had been smiling in this picture for 30 years. Could the photographer have been Eriksson? But Eriksson had been selling cars in Ystad, Tomelilla, and Sjöbo. He hadn’t taken part in some far-off African war. Or had he?

  Wallander regarded the diary lying in front of him pensively. He slipped the photograph into his jacket pocket, picked up the book, and went in to Nyberg, who was busy with a technical examination of the bathroom.

  “I’m taking this diary. I’ll leave the pocket calendars.”

  “You think there’s something there?” asked Nyberg.

  “I think so,” said Wallander. “If anyone wants me I’ll be at home.”

  When he came out into the courtyard he could see that some officers were busy taking down the crime-scene tape by the ditch. The rain canopy was already gone.

  An hour later he was sitting at his kitchen table. He opened the diary.

  The first entry was made on 20 November 1960.

  CHAPTER 10

  It took Wallander almost six hours to read Harald Berggren’s diary from cover to cover. With interruptions, of course. The telephone rang again and again. Wallander tried to keep the interruptions brief.

  The diary was one of the most fascinating yet frightening things he had ever encountered. It was a record of several years in the man’s life. For Wallander it was like stepping into an alien world. Although Harald Berggren, whoever he was, couldn’t be described as a master of language – he often expressed himself sentimentally or with an uncertainty that gave way to helplessness – the descriptions of his experiences had a force that shone through the prose. Wallander sensed that they must decipher the diary in order to understand what had happened to Eriksson. And yet he could hear a voice inside warning him that this could lead them in completely the wrong direction. Wallander knew that most truths were both expected and unexpected at the same time. It was simply a matter of knowing how to interpret the connection. Besides, no criminal investigation ever resembled another, not deep down, not once they went past the superficial similarities.

  The diary was a war journal. As Wallander read it, he learned the names of the other two men in the photograph. But when he had read to the end, he still couldn’t tell which man was which. The photograph was of Harald Berggren flanked by an Irishman, Terry O’Banion, and a Frenchman, Simon Marchand. It was taken by a man named Raul. They had been mercenaries in a war in Africa for more than a year. Early on, Berggren described how in Stockholm he had heard about a café in Brussels where contacts could be made with the secret world of mercenaries. He’d first heard of it around New Year, 1958. He didn’t explain what drove him to go there a few years
later. Berggren stepped into his own diary out of nowhere: no parents, no background. The only sure things were that he was 23 years old and desperate at Hitler’s defeat in the war that had ended 15 years earlier.

  Wallander stopped at this point. That was Berggren’s exact word: desperate. Wallander read the passage again: the desperate defeat that Hitler was subjected to by his treacherous generals. The word desperate said something crucial about Berggren. Was he expressing a political conviction? Or were these the writings of a madman? Wallander found no clues to indicate whether either of these things were correct. Nor did Berggren mention Hitler again.

  In June 1960 he had left Sweden by train and stayed a day in Copenhagen so he could go to Tivoli. There he danced in the warm summer night with a girl named Irene. He wrote that she was sweet but much too tall. The next day he was in Hamburg. The day after that – 12 June 1960 – he arrived in Brussels. After about a month he achieved his goal: a contract as a mercenary. He noted proudly that now he was drawing a salary and would be going off to war. He wrote all this down much later, under the date 20 November 1960. By now he was in Africa. In this first entry in the diary, which was also the longest, he summarised the events that had led him to the place where he now found himself. Wallander dug out his old school atlas and looked up the place Berggren described, Omerutu. It wasn’t on the map, but he left it open on the kitchen table as he continued reading the diary.

  Together with Terry O’Banion and Simon Marchand, Berggren joined a fighting company that consisted solely of mercenaries. Their leader, about whom Berggren was quite reticent, was a Canadian only referred to as Sam. Berggren didn’t seem to concern himself with what the war was over. Wallander was extremely hazy himself about the conflict in what was then the Belgian Congo. Berggren didn’t try to justify his presence as a hired soldier. He merely noted that they were fighting for freedom. Whose was never made clear. In more than one entry he wrote that he would not hesitate to use his gun if he found himself in a combat situation with Swedish UN soldiers.

  Berggren also made a careful note of each time he received his pay. He did a simple accounting on the last day of each month: how much he was paid, how much he spent, and how much he saved. He also listed every item of booty that he took. In a particularly unpleasant passage, he described how the mercenaries arrived at an abandoned, burnt-out plantation, and found the rotting corpses of the Belgian plantation owner and his wife, swarming with flies. They lay in their beds with their arms and legs hacked off. The stench was unbelievable, but the mercenaries had still searched the house and found diamonds and gold jewellery, which a Lebanese jeweller later valued at more than 20,000 Swedish kronor.

  Berggren wrote that the war was justified because the profits were good. In a more personal reflection not repeated elsewhere in the diary, he’d asked himself whether he could have achieved the same wealth if he had stayed in Sweden working as a car mechanic. His conclusion was that he couldn’t. Living that sort of life, he never would have advanced his prospects. With great zeal he continued to participate in his war.

  Apart from his obsession with keeping accounts, Berggren was also meticulous in his other entries. He killed people. He wrote down the dates and the body count. He noted whether they were men or women or children, and if he’d managed to examine their bodies, he coolly recorded where the shots he’d fired had struck. Wallander read these passages with growing distaste and anger. Berggren had nothing to do with this war. He was paid to kill, by whom was unclear. The people he killed were seldom in uniform. The mercenaries raided villages that were thought to oppose the freedom they were fighting to preserve. They murdered and plundered and then withdrew. They were a death squad, all Europeans, and they didn’t regard the people they killed as equals. Berggren didn’t hide his contempt for the blacks. He wrote that they ran like bewildered goats when we approached. But bullets fly faster than people can jump or run.

  Wallander almost threw the book across the room at those lines. But he forced himself to read on, after taking a break and washing his tired eyes. More than ever he regretted having missed his appointment with the optician.

  Berggren killed roughly ten people a month, assuming he wasn’t exaggerating. After seven months of war he fell ill and was transported by plane to a hospital in Léopoldville. He had contracted amoebic dysentery and was sick for several weeks. The diary entries stopped during this period. By then he had killed more than 50 people in this war he was fighting instead of becoming a mechanic in Sweden.

  When Berggren recovered, he returned to his company. A month later they were back in Omerutu. They posed in front of a big boulder, which was not a rock but a termite mound, and the unknown Raul took a picture of Berggren, O’Banion and Marchand. Wallander went over to the kitchen window with the photograph. He had never seen a termite mound before, but he could tell that the diary described that very picture.

  Three weeks later they got caught in an ambush and O’Banion was killed. They were forced to retreat, and it turned into a panicked rout. Wallander tried to sense the fear in Berggren. He was convinced it was there, but Berggren concealed it. He wrote only that they had buried their dead in the bush and marked their graves with wooden crosses. The war went on. On one occasion they used a group of apes for target practice. Another time they gathered crocodile eggs on the bank of a river. Berggren’s savings were now close to 30,000 kronor.

  But then, in the summer of 1961, everything was over. The diary ended suddenly. Wallander thought it must have been as abrupt for Harald Berggren. He must have imagined that this peculiar jungle war would go on forever. In his last entries he described how they fled the country at night, in a cargo plane with no lights. One of its engines started shuddering as they lifted off from the runway they had made by clearing the jungle. The diary ended there, as though Berggren had grown tired of it, or else no longer had anything to say. Wallander didn’t even discover where the plane was headed. Berggren was flying through the African night, the engine noise died away, and he no longer existed.

  Wallander stretched and went out onto the balcony. It was now 5 p.m. A cloud front was on its way in from the sea. Why was the diary kept in Eriksson’s safe along with a shrunken head? If Berggren was still alive, he would be at least 50. Wallander felt cold standing out on the balcony. He went inside and sat down on the sofa. His eyes hurt. Who was Berggren writing the diary for? Himself or someone else?

  A young man keeps a diary of a war in Africa. Often what he describes is rich in detail, but it is also constrained in some way. Something was missing, something that Wallander couldn’t read even between the lines.

  Not until Höglund rang the bell did it dawn on him what it was. He saw her in the door and suddenly he knew. The diary described a world dominated by men. The women Berggren wrote about were either dead or fleeing in panic. Except for Irene, who’d been sweet but too tall. Otherwise he didn’t mention women. He wrote about furloughs in various cities in the Congo, about how he got drunk and got into fights. But there were no women. Wallander couldn’t help thinking that this was significant. Berggren was a young man when he went off to Africa. The war was an adventure. In a young man’s world, women are an important part of the adventure. He was starting to wonder. But for the time being he kept his thoughts to himself.

  Höglund had come to tell him that she had gone through Runfeldt’s flat with one of Nyberg’s forensic technicians. The result was negative. They had found nothing that would explain why he had bought bugging equipment.

  “Gösta Runfeldt’s world consists of orchids,” she said. “I get the impression of a kindly and intense widower.”

  “His wife seems to have drowned,” Wallander said.

  “She was quite beautiful,” Höglund said. “I saw their wedding picture.”

  “Maybe we ought to find out what happened to her,” Wallander said. “Sooner or later.”

  “Martinsson and Svedberg are getting in touch with his children.”

  Wallander had
already talked to Martinsson on the phone. He had been in touch with Runfeldt’s daughter. She was utterly astonished at the idea that her father might have deliberately disappeared. She was extremely worried. She knew he was supposed to fly to Nairobi and had assumed that’s where he was.

  “There’s too much that doesn’t add up,” he said. “Svedberg was supposed to call when he’d spoken to the son. He was out at a farm somewhere in Hälsingland where there wasn’t a phone.”

  They decided to hold a meeting of the investigative team early on Sunday afternoon. Höglund would make the arrangements. Then Wallander recounted to her the contents of the diary. He took his time and tried to be thorough. Telling her about it was like reviewing it in his own mind.

  “Berggren,” she said when he was through. “Could he be the one?”

  “I don’t know, but at any rate as a young man he committed atrocities on a regular basis and for money,” Wallander said. “The diary makes horrifying reading. Maybe these days he’s living his life in fear that the contents might be divulged.”

  “We’ll have to find him,” Höglund said. “The question is where to start looking.”

  “The diary was in Eriksson’s safe,” Wallander said. “For the moment that’s the clearest lead we have. But we must continue to work with an open mind.”

  “You know that’s impossible,” she said, surprised. “When we find a clue it shapes the search.”

  “I’m just reminding you,” he replied evasively, “that we can be wrong in spite of everything.”

  She was about to leave when the telephone rang. It was Svedberg, who had reached Runfeldt’s son.

  “He was pretty upset,” Svedberg said. “He wanted to jump on a plane and come here right away.”

  “When was the last time he heard from his father?”

  “A few days before he was due to leave for Nairobi. Everything was normal. According to the son, his father always looked forward to his trips.”