The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  “You don’t forget something like that,” Nilsson said. “It was before I was married. There was an old house here that I tore down when I built the new one. Was it really ten years ago that it happened?”

  “Exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months.”

  “He came and pounded on my door. It was the middle of the day.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “He was upset, but in control. He called the police while I put on my coat. Then we took off. We took a shortcut through the woods. I did a lot of fishing back then.”

  “He gave you the impression of being in control the whole time? What did he say? How did he explain the accident?”

  “She had fallen in. The ice broke.”

  “But the ice was quite thick, wasn’t it?”

  “You never know about ice. There can be invisible cracks or weaknesses. But it did seem strange.”

  “Jacob Hoslowski said the hole in the ice was rectangular. He thought it might have been cut with a saw.”

  “I don’t remember whether it was rectangular or not. Only that it was big.”

  “But the ice around it was strong. You’re a big man but you weren’t afraid to go out on the ice?”

  Nilsson nodded.

  “I thought a lot about that afterwards,” he said. “It was a strange thing, a woman disappearing into a hole in the ice like that. Why couldn’t he have pulled her out?”

  “What was his own explanation?”

  “He said he tried, but she vanished too fast. Pulled down under the ice.”

  “Was that true?”

  “They found her several metres away from the hole, right under the ice. She hadn’t sunk down. I was there when they pulled her out. I’ll never forget it. I wouldn’t have believed that she could weigh so much.”

  “What do you mean by that? That she could have ‘weighed so much’?”

  “I knew Nygren, who was the police officer back then. He’s dead now. He told me several times that the man claimed that she weighed almost 80 kilos. That was supposed to explain why the ice broke. I never understood that. But I guess you always brood over accidents.”

  “That’s probably true,” Wallander said, standing up. “Thanks for your time. Tomorrow I’d like you to show me where it happened.”

  “Are we going to walk on water?”

  Wallander smiled. “That’s not necessary. But maybe Jacob Hoslowski has that power.”

  Nilsson shook his head.

  “He’s harmless,” he said. “That man and all his cats. Harmless but nuts.”

  Wallander walked back along the forest road. The kerosene lamp was still burning in Hoslowski’s window. Nilsson had promised to be home around 8 a.m. the next morning. He started up his car and headed back to Älmhult. The knocking in the engine was gone now. He was hungry. It might be sensible to suggest to Runfeldt that they have dinner together. For Wallander the trip no longer seemed pointless.

  When Wallander reached the hotel there was a message for him at the front desk. Bo Runfeldt had rented a car and gone to Växjö. He had good friends there, and intended to spend the night. He promised to return to Älmhult early the next day. For a moment Wallander felt annoyed. He might have needed Runfeldt for something during the evening. He had left a phone number in Växjö, but Wallander had no reason to call him. He realised that he was relieved that he would have the evening to himself. He went to his room, took a shower, and found that he didn’t have a toothbrush with him. He got dressed and went in search of a shop where he could buy what he needed. He ate dinner at a pizzeria, thinking the whole time about the drowning accident. He was slowly piecing together a picture. Back in his hotel room, he called Höglund at home. He hoped her children were in bed asleep. When she answered, he outlined what had happened. What he wanted to know was whether they had succeeded in tracking down Mrs Svensson, Gösta Runfeldt’s last client.

  “Not yet,” she told him.

  He kept the conversation short. Then he turned on the TV and watched distractedly for a while. Eventually he fell asleep.

  When Wallander woke up just after 6 a.m., he felt well rested. By 7.30 a.m. he had eaten breakfast and paid for his room. He sat down in reception to wait. Runfeldt arrived a few minutes later. Neither of them mentioned his having spent the night in Växjö.

  “We’re going on an expedition,” said Wallander. “To the lake where your mother drowned.”

  “Has the trip been worth the trouble?” asked Runfeldt. Wallander noticed that he was irritable.

  “Yes,” he replied. “And your presence has actually been of crucial importance, whether you want to believe it or not.”

  Wallander wasn’t sure of this, of course, but he spoke so firmly that Runfeldt, if not totally convinced, at least looked pensive.

  Nilsson was waiting for them. They walked along a path through the woods. There was no wind and the temperature was close to freezing. The water spread out before them. The lake was oblong. Nilsson pointed to a spot in about the middle of the lake. Wallander noticed that Runfeldt looked uncomfortable, and assumed he had never been there before.

  “It’s hard to imagine the lake covered with ice,” said Nilsson. “Everything changes when winter arrives. Especially your sense of distance. What seems far away in the summer can suddenly seem much closer. Or the other way around.”

  Wallander walked down to the shore. The water was dark. He thought he caught a glimpse of a little fish moving next to a rock. Behind him he could hear Runfeldt asking if the lake was deep. He didn’t catch Nilsson’s reply.

  He asked himself what had happened. Did Gösta Runfeldt plan to drown his wife on that particular Sunday? That’s what he must have done. Somehow he must have prepared the hole in the ice. The same way someone had sawed through the planks over the pit at Eriksson’s place. And had held Runfeldt prisoner.

  Wallander stood there a long time, looking at the lake spread out before them. But what he saw was in his mind.

  They walked back through the woods. At the car they said goodbye to Nilsson. Wallander thought they should be back in Ystad well before midday.

  He was mistaken. Just south of Älmhult the car stopped, and wouldn’t start again. Wallander called the road service he belonged to. The man came in less than 20 minutes, but quickly concluded that the car had a problem that couldn’t be repaired on the spot. They would have to leave the car in Älmhult and take the train to Malmö.

  Runfeldt offered to buy the tickets and bought firstclass seats. Wallander said nothing. At 9.44 a.m., the train left for Hässleholm and Malmö. By then Wallander had called the police station and asked for someone to come to Malmö and pick them up. There was no good connection by train to Ystad. Ebba promised to see to it that someone was there.

  “Don’t the police have better cars than that?” Runfeldt asked suddenly after the train had left Älmhult behind. “What if there’d been an emergency?”

  “That was my own car,” Wallander replied. “Our emergency vehicles are in much better shape.”

  The landscape slid past the window. Wallander thought about Gösta Runfeldt. He was sure that he’d murdered his wife. Now Runfeldt himself was dead. A brutal man, probably a murderer, had now been killed in an equally gruesome way.

  The most obvious motive was revenge. But who was taking it? And how did Holger Eriksson fit into the picture? Wallander had no answers.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the conductor. It was a woman. She smiled and asked for their tickets with a distinct Skåne accent. Wallander felt as though she recognised him. Maybe she’d seen his picture in a newspaper.

  “When do we get to Malmö?” he asked.

  “12.15,” she replied. “Hässleholm 11.13 a.m.”

  Then she left. She knew the timetable by heart.

  CHAPTER 20

  Peters was waiting for them at the station in Malmö. Bo Runfeldt excused himself, saying he’d stay in Malmö for a few hours and return to Ystad in the afternoon, so tha
t 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 Älmhult. He had bought a pen and a little notebook at the station in Malmö 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 Borås, 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 Malmö. 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 Älmhult. 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 Älmhult?”

  “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 Älmhult. 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 Älmhult 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 Östergatan near Pilgränd.

  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 followin
g 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 Anmärkaren, 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.