The Fifth Woman

by Unknown

  “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.

  Skåne

  17 October – 3 November 1994

  CHAPTER 25

  Nyberg slowly slit open the sack. Wallander went onto the jetty to look at the dead man’s face. The doctor, who had just arrived, went with him.

  He didn’t recognise the dead man, and of course he hadn’t expected to. Wallander guessed that he must have been between 40 and 50 years old.

  He looked at the body as it was pulled clear of the sack. He looked for less than a minute; he simply couldn’t stand more. He felt dizzy the whole time.

  Nyberg was going through the man’s pockets.

  “He’s wearing an expensive suit,” Nyberg said. “His shoes aren’t cheap either.”

  They didn’t find anything in his pockets. Someone had taken the trouble to remove his identity card, and yet the killer must have assumed that the body would very soon be discovered in Krageholm Lake.

  The body had now been pulled free and was on a plastic sheet. Nyberg signalled to Wallander, who had stepped aside.

  “This was carefully calculated,” he said. “You’d almost think the murderer knew about weight distribution and water resistance.”

  “What do you mean?” Wallander asked.

  Nyberg pointed to several thick seams running along the inside of the sack.

  “The sack has weights sewn into it that ensured two things. One, the weights were light enough so that with the man’s body in it the sack wouldn’t sink to the bottom. Two, the sack would lie with only a narrow air pocket above the water’s surface. Since it was all so carefully calculated, the person who prepared the sack must have known the man’s weight. At least approximately. With a margin of error of maybe four to five kilos.”

  Wallander forced himself to think this over, even though all thoughts of how the man had died made him feel sick.

  “So the narrow air pocket guaranteed that the man would actually drown?”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Nyberg said. “But it’s probable that this man was still alive when the sack was put into the water. So he was murdered.”

  The doctor, who was kneeling down to examine the body, had been listening to their conversation. He stood up and came over to them. The jetty swayed under their weight.

  “It’s too early to be certain,” he said. “But we have to presume that he drowned.”

  “Not just that he drowned,” Wallander said. “But that somebody drowned him.”

  “The police are the ones who will have to determine whether it was an accident or a murder,” the doctor said. “I can only speak about what happened to his body.”

  “No external marks? No contusions? Or wounds?”

  “We’ll need to get his clothes off to be able to answer that question. But I can’t see anything on the parts of his body that are visible. The autopsy may turn up other results.”

  Wallander nodded. “I’d like to know as soon as possible if you find any signs of violence.”

  The doctor went back to his work. Even though Wallander had met him several times before, he still couldn’t remember his name. Wallander went and gathered his colleagues on the shore. Hansson had just finished talking to the man who had discovered the sack.

  “We didn’t find any identification,” Wallander began. “We have to find out who he is. That’s the most important thing right now. Until then we can’t do anything. We’ll start by going through the missing-persons files.”

  “There’s a good chance that he hasn’t been missed yet,” Hansson said. “Nils Göransson, the man who found him, claims he was here as late as yesterday afternoon. He does shift work at a machine shop in Svedala and usually takes a walk out here because he has trouble sleeping. He was here yesterday. He always walks out on the jetty. And there wasn’t any sack. So it must have been thrown into the water during the night.”

  “Or this morning,” Wallander said. “When did Göransson get here?”

  Hansson checked his notes.

  “At 8.15. He finished his shift at around 7 a.m. and drove here, stopping on the way for breakfast.”

  “So not much time has passed,” Wallander said. “That may give us certain advantages. The difficulty is going to be to find out who he is.”

  “The sack could have been put into the lake somewhere else,” Nyberg said.

  Wallander shook his head.

  “He hasn’t been in the water long. And there’s no current here to speak of.”

  Martinsson kicked at the sand restlessly, as if he were cold.

  “Does it really have to be the same man?” he asked. “I think this seems different.”

  Wallander was as sure about this as he could possibly be.

  “No. It’s the same killer. We’d better assume that it is, anyway.”

  He sent them off. There was nothing more for them to do out there on the shore of Krageholm Lake. The cars drove away. Wallander stood and gazed out at the water. The swan was gone. He looked at the men working on the jetty. At the ambulance, the police cars, the crime-scene tape. Everything about it suddenly gave him a sense of depthless unreality. He encountered nature surrounded by plastic tape stretched out to protect crime sites. Everywhere he went there were dead people. He could look at a swan on the water, but in the foreground lay a man who had just been pulled dead out of a sack.

  His work was little more than a poorly paid test of endurance. He was being paid to endure this. The plastic tape wound through his life like a snake.

  He went over to Nyberg, who was stretching his back.

  “We’ve found a cigarette butt,” he said. “That’s all. At least out here on the jetty. We’ve already done a superficial examination of the sand for drag marks. There aren’t any. Whoever carried the sack was strong. Unless he lured the man out here and then stuffed him in the sack.”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “Let’s assume that the sack was carried,” he said. “Carried with its contents.”

  “Do you think there’s any reason to dredge the lake?”

  “I don’t think so. The man was unconscious when he was brought here. There must have been a car involved. Then the sack was thrown in the water. The car drove off.”

  “So we’ll wait on the dragging,” Nyberg said.

  “Tell me what you see,” Wallander said.

  Nyberg grimaced.

  “It could be the same man,” he said. “The violence, the cruelty, they all look familiar. Even though he varies things.”

  “Do you think a woman could have done this?”

  “I say the same thing you do,” Nyberg replied. “I’d rather not believe that. But I can also tell you that she would have to be capable of carrying 80 kilos without difficulty. How many women can do that?”

  “I don’t know any,” said Wallander. “But I’m sure they exist.”

  Nyberg went
back to his work. Wallander was about to leave the jetty when the swan caught his eye. He wished he had a piece of bread. It was pecking at something near the shore. Wallander took a step closer. The swan hissed and turned back towards the lake.

  Wallander went over to one of the police cars and asked to be driven to Ystad. On the way back to town he tried to think. What he had feared most had now happened. The killer was not finished. They knew nothing about him. Was he at the end or the beginning of what he had decided to do? They didn’t even know whether he had motives for his premeditated acts or was just insane.

  It has to be a man, he thought. Anything else goes against all common sense. Women seldom commit murder. Least of all well-planned murders. Ruthless and calculated acts of violence. It has to be a man, or maybe more than one. And we’re never going to solve this case unless we find the connection between the victims. Now there are three of them. That increases our chances. But nothing is certain, nothing is going to reveal itself to us.

  He leaned his cheek against the car window. The landscape was brown with a tinge of grey, but the grass was still green. There was a lone tractor working out in a field.

  Wallander thought about the pungee pit where he had found Holger Eriksson. The tree that Gösta Runfeldt had been tied to when he was strangled. And now a man was stuffed alive into a sack and tossed into Krageholm Lake to drown.

  The only possible motive was revenge, he was sure of that. But this went beyond all reasonable proportions. What was the killer seeking revenge for? Something so horrific that it wasn’t enough simply to kill. The victims also had to be conscious of what was happening to them.

  There’s nothing random about what’s behind all this, thought Wallander. Everything has been carefully thought out and chosen. He paused at the last thought. The killer chose. Someone was chosen. Selected from what group or for what reason?

  When he reached the station he felt the need for some solitude before he sat down with his colleagues. He took the phone off the hook, pushed aside the phone messages lying on his desk, and put his feet up on a pile of memos from the national police board.

  The hardest thing to comprehend was the possibility that the murderer might be a woman. He tried to remember the times he had dealt with female criminals. It hadn’t happened often. He could recall all the cases he had ever heard about during his years as a policeman. Once, almost 15 years back, he had caught a woman who had committed murder. Later the district court changed the charge to manslaughter. She was a middle-aged woman who had killed her brother. He had persecuted and molested her ever since they were children. Finally she couldn’t take it any more and killed him with his own shotgun. She hadn’t really meant to shoot him. She just wanted to scare him, but she was a bad shot. She hit him right in the chest, and he died instantly. In all the other cases that Wallander could remember, the women who had used violence had done so on impulse and in self-defence. It involved their own husbands, or men they were having relationships with. In many cases, alcohol was part of the picture.

  Never, in all his experience, had there been a woman who planned in advance to commit a violent act. He got up and walked to the window. What was it that made him unable to let go of the idea that a woman was involved this time? He had no answer to this. He didn’t even know whether he believed it was a woman working alone or collaborating with a man. There was nothing to indicate one or the other.

  Martinsson knocked on his door and came in.

  “The list is almost ready,” he said.

  “What list is that?” Wallander asked.

  “The list of missing persons,” Martinsson replied, looking surprised.

  Wallander nodded. “Then let’s meet,” he said, motioning Martinsson ahead of him down the hall.

  When they had closed the door of the conference room behind them, his feeling of powerlessness vanished. He remained standing at the head of the table. Usually he sat down. Now he felt as if he didn’t have time for that.

  “What have we got?” he asked.

  “In Ystad no reports of anyone missing during the past few weeks,” Svedberg said. “The ones we’ve been searching for over a longer period don’t match with the man we found in Krageholm Lake. There’s a couple of teenage girls, and a boy who ran away from a refugee camp. He’s very likely on his way back to the Sudan.”

  “What about the other districts?”

  “We’ve got a couple of people in Malmö,” Höglund said. “But they don’t match either. In one case the age might be right, but the missing person is from southern Italy.”

  They went through the bulletins from the closest districts. Wallander was aware that if necessary they might have to cover the whole country and even the rest of Scandinavia. They could only hope that the man had lived somewhere near Ystad.

  “Lund took a report late last night,” Hansson said. “A woman called to report that her husband hadn’t come home from his evening walk. The age is about right. He’s a researcher at the university.”

  “Check it out, of course.”

  “They’re sending us a photograph,” Hansson went on. “They’ll fax it over as soon as they get it.”

  Now Wallander sat down. At that moment Per Åkeson came into the room. Wallander wished he hadn’t come. It was never easy to report that they were at a standstill. The investigation was stuck with its wheels deep in the mud. And now they had another victim.

  Wallander felt uncomfortable, as if he were personally responsible for the fact that they had nothing to go on. Yet he knew they had been working as hard and as steadily as they could. The detectives gathered in the room were intelligent and dedicated.

  Wallander pushed aside his annoyance at Åkeson’s presence.

  “You’re here just in time,” he said. “I was just thinking about summarising the state of the investigation.”

  “Does an investigative state even exist?” asked Åkeson.

  Wallander knew he didn’t mean this as a sarcastic or critical remark. Those who didn’t know Åkeson might be put off by his brusque manner. But Wallander had worked with him for so many years that he knew that what he had just said was intended to demonstrate a willingness to help if he could.

  Hamrén stared at Åkeson with obvious disapproval. Wallander wondered how the prosecutors in Stockholm behaved.

  “There’s always an investigative state,” Wallander replied. “We have one this time too. But it’s extremely hazy. A number of clues we were following are no longer relevant. I think we’ve reached a point where we have to go back to the beginning. What this new murder means, we can’t yet say. It’s too early for that.”

  “Is it the same killer?” Åkeson asked

  “I think so,” said Wallander.

  “Why?”

  “The modus operandi. The brutality. The cruelty. Of course a sack isn’t the same thing as sharpened bamboo stakes. But you have to admit it’s a variation on a theme.”

  “What about the suspicion that a mercenary soldier might be behind all this?”

  “That led us to discover that Harald Berggren has been dead for seven years.”

  Åkeson had no more questions. The door was cautiously pushed open, and a clerk handed in a picture that had arrived by fax.

  “It’s from Lund,” the girl said, and then she closed the door behind her.

  Everyone stood up and gathered around Martinsson, who stood holding the picture. Wallander gave a low whistle. There could be no doubt. It was the man they had found in Krageholm Lake.

  “Good,” he said in a low voice. “We just got a good jump on the murderer’s lead.”

  They sat down again.

  “Who is he?” Wallander asked.

  Hansson had his papers in order.

  “Eugen Blomberg, 51 years old. A research assistant at Lund University. His research has something to do with milk.”

  “Milk?” Wallander said in surprise.

  “That’s what it says. ‘The relationship between milk allergies and various
intestinal diseases.’”

  “Who reported him missing?”

  “His wife. Kristina Blomberg. She lives on Siriusgatan in Lund.”

  Wallander knew they had to make the best use of their time. He wanted to make an even bigger dent in the killer’s lead.

  “Then we’ll go there,” he said, getting to his feet. “Tell our colleagues that we’ve identified him. See to it that they track down the wife so I can talk to her. There’s a detective in Lund named Birch. Kalle Birch. We know each other. Talk to him, tell him that I’m on my way.”

  “Can you really talk to her before we have a positive identification?”

  “Someone else can identify him. Someone from the university. Another milk researcher. Now we’ll have to go through all the material on Eriksson and Runfeldt again. Eugen Blomberg. Is he there somewhere? We need to get through a lot of it today.”

  Wallander turned to Åkeson. “I think we could safely say that the investigative state has changed.”

  Åkeson nodded, but said nothing.

  Wallander went to get his jacket and the keys to one of the squad cars. It was 2.15 p.m. when he left Ystad. He briefly considered putting on the emergency light, but decided against it. It wouldn’t get him there any faster.

  He reached Lund at about 3.30 p.m. A police car met him at the entrance to town and escorted him to Siriusgatan, in a residential neighbourhood east of the centre of town. At the entrance to the street the police car pulled over. Another car was parked there. Wallander saw Kalle Birch get out. They had met several years back at a conference of the Southern Sweden Police District held in Tylösand, outside of Halmstad. The purpose of the conference was to improve operational cooperation in the region. Wallander had participated grudgingly. Björk, Ystad’s chief of police at the time, had ordered him to go. At the lunch he had sat next to Birch. They discovered that they shared an interest in opera. They had occasionally been in contact since then. From various sources Wallander had heard that Birch was a talented detective who sometimes suffered from deep depression, but he seemed cheerful enough today. They shook hands.