The Fifth Woman (52 page)

Wallander was standing and looking at the deserted kennel. At first he wasn’t aware of what he was thinking. The image of Krista Haberman slowly slipped away. He frowned. Why wasn’t there a dog? No-one had asked that question before. He hadn’t either. When had the dog disappeared? Did that have any significance at all? These were questions he wanted to have answered.

A car braked outside the house. A moment later a boy who couldn’t be more than 20 came into the courtyard. He walked over to Wallander.

“Are you the policeman that needs the key?”

“Yes, I am.”

The boy regarded him doubtfully.

“How can I be sure? You could be anybody.”

Wallander felt annoyed, but he realised that the boy’s doubts were justified. He had mud all over his trousers. He took out his identification. The boy nodded and gave him the set of keys.

“I’ll see to it that they get back to Lund,” Wallander said.

The boy nodded. Wallander heard the car roar off as he looked through the keys for the one to the front door. He thought fleetingly about what Jonas Hader had said about the red Golf outside Katarina Taxell’s building. Don’t women gun their engines? Mona drives faster than I do. Baiba always stamps on the accelerator. But maybe they don’t gun their engines.

He opened the door and went inside. It smelled musty. He sat down on a bench and pulled off his muddy gumboots. When he went into the main room he noticed to his surprise that the poem about the woodpecker was still on the desk. The night of 21 September. Tomorrow it would be a month since then. Were they really any closer to a solution? They had two more murders to solve. And the mystery of woman who had disappeared, who might be buried out in Eriksson’s fields.

He stood motionless in the silence. The fog outside the windows was still dense. He felt uneasy. The objects in the room were watching him. He walked over to the wall where the two aerial photographs hung in their frames. He searched his pockets for his glasses, put them on and leaned forwards. One of the photographs was black-and-white, the other a faded colour shot. The black-and-white picture was taken in 1949, two years before Holger Eriksson had bought the farm. The colour photograph was from 1965.

Wallander opened a curtain to let in more light, and saw a lone deer grazing among the trees in the garden. He stood quite still. The deer raised its head and looked at him. Then it calmly went on grazing. Wallander stayed where he was. He had a feeling that he would never forget that deer. How long he stood there and watched it, he didn’t know. Finally a sound that he himself didn’t notice caught the deer’s attention. It vanished. Wallander kept on looking out the window for a time and then went back to the two photographs. The plane carrying the camera had come in from due south. All the details were clear. In 1965 Eriksson hadn’t yet built his tower, but the hill was there and so was the ditch. He couldn’t make out a bridge. He followed the contours of the fields. The picture was taken early in the spring. The fields had been ploughed, but nothing was growing yet. The pond was quite clear in the photograph. A grove of trees stood next to a narrow tractor path separating two of the fields. He frowned. He couldn’t remember those trees. This morning he wouldn’t have seen them because of the fog, but he didn’t remember them from his previous visits. The trees looked tall. He studied the house, which was in the centre of the picture. An outbuilding that might have been used as a pigsty had been torn down. The approach road was wider. But otherwise everything was much the same. He took off his glasses and sat down in a leather armchair. Silence surrounded him.

A Chevrolet goes to Svenstavik. A woman comes back to Skåne. Then she vanishes and 27 years later the man who may have gone to Svenstavik to get her is murdered. Now they were looking for no less than three different women. Krista Haberman, Katarina Taxell, and one without a name. One who drives a red Golf, smokes handrolled cigarettes and might wear false nails.

He wondered whether two of the women could be in fact be one and the same, whether Krista Haberman, in spite of everything, was still alive. If so, she would be 65 years old by now, and the woman who knocked down Ylva Brink was a lot younger.

It didn’t add up. Nothing did.

He looked at his watch. It was 8.45 a.m. He stood up and left the house. The fog was still just as thick. He thought about the deserted kennel. Then he locked up and drove away.

At 10 a.m. Wallander called the investigative team together for a meeting. Martinsson was still away, but he had promised to come in that afternoon after he had been at Terese’s school. Höglund said that he’d called her late the night before. She thought he sounded drunk, which was out of the ordinary. Wallander felt vaguely jealous. Why had Martinsson called her and not him? It was the two of them who had worked together all these years.

“He still seems determined to quit,” she said. “But I got the feeling that he also wished I would talk him out of it.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Wallander said.

They closed the door to the conference room. Per Åkeson and Chief Holgersson were the last ones to arrive. Wallander had a feeling that they had just completed their own meeting. Lisa Holgersson took the floor as soon as the room was quiet.

“The whole country is talking about the citizen militia,” she said. “From now on Lödinge is firmly on the map. We’ve had a request for Kurt to participate in a discussion programme on TV tonight, to be broadcast from Göteborg.”

“Not on your life,” Wallander replied, horrified. “What would I say?”

“I’ve turned them down on your behalf already,” she replied with a smile. “But I’m thinking of asking for a favour in return later on.”

Wallander realised that she was referring to the lectures at the police academy.

“There is a huge debate taking place,” she went on. “We can only hope that something good comes out of it, now that the issues are actually being discussed.”

“It might also force the senior members of the police administration in this country to be a little more self-critical,” Hansson said. “We’re not entirely without blame for the way things have developed.”

“What are you suggesting?” Wallander asked, curious. Hansson rarely participated in discussions about the police force.

“I’m thinking about the scandals in which the police have been involved,” Hansson said. “Maybe they’ve always existed, but not as often as they do now.”

“That’s something we should neither exaggerate nor ignore,” Per Åkeson said. “The big problem is the gradual shift in what the police and the courts see as a crime. What would have brought a conviction yesterday is suddenly considered a trifle today, and the police often don’t even bother to investigate. I think that’s offensive to the national sense of justice, which has always been strong in this country.”

“They’re probably related,” Wallander said. “But I have strong doubts that a discussion of the citizen militia will have any effect on this, even though I’d like to believe otherwise.”

“I’m thinking of prosecuting these men with as serious charges as I can,” Åkeson said. “The assault was vicious, that’s something I can emphasise. There were four men involved and I think I can convict at least three of them. I should also tell you that the chief prosecutor wants to be kept informed. I consider that quite surprising, but it indicates that at least this is being taken seriously at a high level.”

“Åke Davidsson sounds intelligent and articulate in an interview in
Arbetet
,” said Svedberg. “He’s not going to have any permanent injuries by the way.”

“Then there’s Terese and her father,” Wallander said. “And the boys at the school.”

“Is it true that Martinsson is thinking of resigning?” Åkeson asked.

“That was his first reaction,” Wallander replied. “Which seems both reasonable and natural. But I’m not sure he’s really going to go through with it.”

“He’s a good policeman,” Hansson said. “Doesn’t he know that?”

“Yes,” Wallander said. “The question is whether that’s enough. Other things can come up when something like this happens. Especially with our workload.”

“I know,” Chief Holgersson said. “And that’s not going to get any better.”

Wallander remembered that he still hadn’t done what he had promised Nyberg: talk to Holgersson about his workload. He made a note of it.

“We’ll have to take up this discussion later,” he said.

“I just wanted to inform you,” Holgersson said. “That’s all, except that Björk called to wish you luck. He was sorry to hear about what happened to Martinsson’s daughter.”

“He resigned in time,” Svedberg said. “What did we give him as a leaving present? A fishing rod? If he was still working here, he wouldn’t have time to use it.”

“He probably has a lot on his hands now too,” Holgersson said.

“Björk was a good chief,” Wallander said. “Now let’s move on.”

They started with Höglund’s timetable. Next to his notepad Wallander had placed the plastic bag containing the Swedish Railways timetable that he had found in Katarina Taxell’s desk.

Höglund had done a thorough job. The times of the various events were mapped out and listed in relation to each other. Wallander knew that this was an assignment he wouldn’t have done as well. In all probability he would have been sloppy. All policemen are different, he thought. It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.

“I don’t really see a pattern emerging,” Höglund said as she neared the end of her presentation. “The pathologists in Lund have established the time of Eriksson’s death as late on the evening of 21 September. Runfeldt also died at night. The times of death correspond, but one can’t draw any conclusions from this. There’s no correspondence in terms of the days of the week. If we add the two visits to the Ystad maternity ward and the murder of Blomberg, there might be a fragment of a pattern.”

She broke off and looked around the table. Neither Wallander nor anyone else seemed to understand what she meant.

“It’s almost pure mathematics,” she said. “But it seems as if our killer acts according to a pattern that is so irregular that it’s interesting. On 21 September Eriksson dies. On the night of 30 September, Katarina Taxell is visited at the Ystad maternity ward. On 11 October Gösta Runfeldt dies. On the night of 13 October the woman is back at the maternity ward and knocks down Svedberg’s cousin. Finally, on 17 October Eugen Blomberg is found dead. To this we can also add the day that Runfeldt probably disappeared. There is no regularity whatsoever. Which might be surprising, since everything else seems to be minutely planned and prepared. This is a killer who takes the time to sew weights into a sack that are carefully balanced to the victim’s weight. So we could say that perhaps the irregularity is caused by something out of the killer’s control. And then we have to ask: what?”

Wallander wasn’t quite following her.

“One more time,” he said. “Slowly.”

She repeated what she had said. This time Wallander understood what she meant.

“Maybe we can just say that it doesn’t have to be a coincidence,” she concluded. “I won’t try to stretch it further than that.”

Wallander started to see the picture more clearly.

“Let’s assume that there is a pattern,” he said. “Then what’s your interpretation? What factors affect a killer’s timetable?”

“There could be various explanations. The killer doesn’t live in Skåne, but makes regular visits here. Or perhaps he or she has a job that follows a certain rhythm.”

“So you think these dates could be days off? If we could follow them for another month, would it be clearer?”

“That’s possible. The killer has a job that follows a rotating schedule. The days off don’t always occur on Saturdays and Sundays.”

“That might turn out to be important,” Wallander said hesitantly. “But I find it difficult to believe it.”

“Otherwise I couldn’t manage to read much from the times,” she said.

Wallander held up the plastic bag.

“Now that we’re talking about timetables, I found this in a secret compartment in Katarina Taxell’s desk, as if this were her most important possession, that she hid from the world. A timetable for Swedish Railways’ inter-city trains for the spring of 1991. With a departure time underlined: Nässjö 16.00. It goes every day.”

He pushed the plastic bag over to Nyberg.

“Fingerprints,” he said.

Then he moved on to Krista Haberman and told them about the morning visit in the fog. There was no mistaking the sombre mood in the room.

“So I think we have to start digging,” he concluded. “When the fog lifts and Hansson has had a chance to find out who worked the land, and whether any changes took place after 1967.”

For a long time there was complete silence as everyone evaluated what Wallander had just said. It was Åkeson who spoke.

“This sounds both incredible and at the same time highly plausible,” he said. “I assume that we have to take this possibility seriously.”

“It would be good if this didn’t get out,” Chief Holgersson said. “There’s nothing people like better than having old, unsolved missing-person cases come up again.”

They had made a decision. Wallander decided to end the meeting as quickly as possible because everyone had a lot of work to do.

“Katarina Taxell has disappeared,” he said. “Left her home in a red Golf with an unknown driver. Her departure was hasty. Her mother wants us to put out an APB on her, which we can hardly refuse since she’s the next of kin. But I think we should wait, at least a few more days.”

“Why?” Åkeson asked.

“I have a suspicion that she’ll make contact,” Wallander said. “Not with us, of course. But with her mother, who she knows will be worried. She’ll call to reassure her. Unfortunately she probably won’t say where she is. Or who she’s with.”

Wallander now turned to face Åkeson.