The Fifth Woman (6 page)

“I talked to Linda,” she said. “She wasn’t on the ferry.”

It took a moment before Wallander grasped what she meant.

“You mean the ferry that sank?”

“What did you think I meant? When hundreds of people die in an accident, at least I call my daughter to see if she’s all right.”

“You’re right, of course,” Wallander said. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little slow today, but I’m sick. I’m throwing up. I’ve got a stomach bug. Maybe we can talk another time.”

“I just didn’t want you to worry,” she said.

Wallander said goodbye and went back to bed. He was worried about Holger Eriksson, and about the ferry disaster that had occurred during the night, but he was feverish, and soon he was asleep.

He began to gnaw on the rope again.

The feeling that he was about to go insane had been with him the whole time. He couldn’t see; something was tied over his eyes and made the world dark. He couldn’t hear either. Something had been forced into his ears, and was pressing on his eardrums. There were sounds, but they came from inside. An internal rushing that wanted to force its way out. But what bothered him most was that he couldn’t move. That was what was driving him insane. Despite the fact that he was lying down, stretched out on his back, he had the constant feeling that he was falling. A dizzy plummeting, without end. Maybe it was just a hallucination, a manifestation of the fact that he was falling apart from within. Madness was about to shatter his mind into pieces.

He tried to cling to reality. He forced himself to think. Reason and the ability to remain calm might give him some possible explanation for what had happened. Why can’t I move? Where am I? And why?

For the longest time he had fought against the panic and madness by forcing himself to keep track of time. He counted minutes and hours, trying to keep to an impossible, endless routine. The darkness never changed, and he had woken up where he lay, fettered on his back. He had no memory of being moved, so there was no beginning. He could have been born right where he lay. For the brief moments when he succeeded in keeping the panic at bay and thinking clearly, he tried to cling to anything that seemed related to reality.

What could he start from? What he was lying on. That wasn’t his imagination. He was on his back and what he was lying on was hard. His shirt had ridden up just over his left hip and his skin lay against the hard, rough surface. He could feel that he had scraped his skin when he tried to move. He was lying on a cement floor.

He thought back to the last moment of normality before the darkness had fallen over him, but even that was beginning to seem vague. He knew what had happened, and yet he didn’t. It was when he started to doubt what was his imagination, and what had actually happened, that panic would seize him. Then he would begin to sob. A brief outburst that stopped as quickly as it began, since no-one could hear him anyway. There are people who cry only when they’re out of earshot of others, but he wasn’t one of them.

Actually that was the one thing he was sure of. That no-one could hear him. Wherever he was, wherever this cement floor of terror had been poured, even if it was floating freely in a universe totally unknown to him, there was no-one close by. Nobody could hear him.

Beyond the growing madness, these were the only things he had left to hold on to. Everything else had been taken from him, not merely his identity but also his trousers.

It was the evening before he was supposed to leave for Nairobi. It was almost midnight, he had closed his suitcase and sat down at his desk to go over his travel plans one last time. He could see it all quite clearly. Without knowing it, he was waiting in death’s anteroom, which some unknown person had prepared for him. His passport lay on the left side of his desk, and he held his plane tickets in his hand. The plastic pouch with the dollar notes, credit cards, and traveller’s cheques was on his lap, waiting for him to check them too. Then the telephone rang. He put everything to one side, lifted the receiver, and answered.

Since that was the last living voice he had heard, he clung to it. It was his only link to the reality that held madness at bay. It was a lovely voice, soft and pleasant, and he knew at once that he was speaking to a stranger – a woman he had never met. She asked if she could buy some roses. She apologised for calling him at home and disturbing him so late, but she was in desperate need of those roses. She didn’t say why. But he trusted her at once. Who would lie about needing roses? He couldn’t remember whether he actually asked her or even wondered why she had discovered she didn’t have the roses she needed so late at night, when there were no florists open. But he hadn’t hesitated. He lived close to his shop, and he wasn’t going to bed yet. It would take him no more than ten minutes to solve her problem.

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 fluctuated. 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.