The Fifth Woman (61 page)

Wallander left the hospital right before midnight. The wind was still blowing hard, and it would freeze overnight. He got into his car and drove to the cemetery where his father lay buried. He found his way to the grave and stood there, completely empty inside, still caked with mud.

Around 1 a.m. he got home and called Baiba. They talked for a long time. Then he finally undressed and took a hot bath. Afterwards he dressed and returned to the hospital. Just after 3 a.m. he went into the room where Yvonne Ander lay, under guard. She was asleep when he entered the room cautiously. He stood for a long time looking at her face. Then he left without saying a word.

After an hour he was back. At dawn Lisa Holgersson came to the hospital and said they had reached Höglund’s husband, in Dubai. He would arrive at Kastrup Airport later that day.

No-one knew if Wallander was listening to anything anyone said to him. He sat motionless on a chair, or stood at a window staring into the gale. When a nurse wanted to give him a cup of coffee he burst into tears and locked himself in the bathroom. But most of the time he sat unmoving on his chair and looked at his hands.

At about the same time Höglund’s husband landed at Kastrup, a doctor gave them the news they had all been waiting for. She was going to make it, and probably wouldn’t have any permanent injury. She was lucky. All the same, her recovery would take time and the convalescence would be long. Wallander stood as he listened to the doctor, as if he were receiving a sentence in court. Afterwards he walked out of the hospital and disappeared somewhere in the wind.

On Monday, 24 October, Yvonne Ander was indicted for murder. She was still in hospital. So far she hadn’t spoken a single word, not even to the lawyer appointed to act for her. Wallander had tried to question her that afternoon. She just stared at him. As he was about to leave, he turned in the door and told her that Ann-Britt Höglund was going to recover. He thought he saw a reaction from her; that she looked relieved, maybe glad.

Martinsson was still off work with his concussion. Hansson went back on duty, even though he had a hard time walking and sitting for several weeks.

Their primary focus during this period was to complete the laborious task of establishing exactly what had happened. One thing they hadn’t managed to find conclusive evidence for was whether it was the remains of Krista Haberman that they had dug up in Eriksson’s field. There was nothing to disprove it, but no hard evidence either. And yet they were certain. A crack in the skull told them how Eriksson had killed her more than 25 years earlier. Everything else began to be cleared up, although slowly. There was another question mark. Had Runfeldt killed his wife? The only one who might give them the answer was Ander, and she still wasn’t talking. They explored Ander’s life in detail and uncovered a story that only partially told them who she was and why she might have acted as she did.

One afternoon, as they were sitting in a long meeting, Wallander abruptly concluded it by saying something he had been thinking for a long time.

“Yvonne Ander is the first person I’ve ever met who is both intelligent and insane.”

He didn’t explain any further. No-one doubted that he believed it.

Every day during this period Wallander went to visit Ann-Britt at the hospital. He couldn’t get over what he was convinced was his responsibility. Nothing anyone said made any difference. He regarded the blame for what had happened as his alone. It was something he would have to live with.

Yvonne Ander kept silent. One evening Wallander sat in his office late, reading through the extensive collection of letters she had exchanged with her mother. The next day he visited her in jail. That day, she finally started to talk.

It was 3 November 1994, and frost lay over the countryside around Ystad.

On the afternoon of 4 December, Kurt Wallander spoke with Yvonne Ander for the last time. He didn’t know then that it would be the last, although they didn’t make an appointment to meet again.

They had come to an end. There was nothing more to add. Nothing to ask about, no reply to give. And after that the long and complex investigation began to slip out of his consciousness for the first time. Although more than a month had passed since they captured her, the case had continued to dominate his life. In all his years as a detective, he had never had such an intense need to understand. Criminal acts were always just the surface, and sometimes, once the surface of a crime had been cracked, chasms opened that no-one could have imagined. This was the case with Yvonne Ander. Wallander punched through the surface and immediately looked down into a bottomless pit. He had decided to climb down into it. He didn’t know where it would lead, for her or for him.

The first step had been to get her to break her silence. He was successful when he read again the letters that she had exchanged all her adult life with her mother and kept so carefully. Wallander sensed that it was here he could start to break through her aloofness. And he was right. That was 3 November, more than a month earlier. He was still shattered by the fact that Ann-Britt had been shot. He knew by then that she would survive and even regain full health, but the guilt weighed so heavily that it threatened to suffocate him. His best support during that period was Linda. She came to Ystad, even though she didn’t really have time, and took care of him, forcing him to accept that circumstances were to blame, not him. With her help he managed to crawl through the first terrible weeks of November. Aside from the sheer effort of functioning normally, he spent all of his time on Yvonne Ander. She was the one who had shot and nearly killed Ann-Britt. In the beginning he often felt like hitting her. Later it became more important to try and understand her. He managed to break through her silence and get her to start talking. He knotted the rope around himself and started down into the pit.

What was it he found down there? For a long time he was unsure whether she was insane or not, whether all she said about herself were confused dreams and sick, deformed fantasies. He didn’t trust his own judgement during this time, and he could hardly disguise his wariness of her. But somehow he sensed that she was telling him the truth. Yvonne Ander was that rare type of person who couldn’t lie.

In the last bundle of letters from her mother was one from a police officer in Africa named Françoise Bertrand. At first couldn’t decipher its contents. It was with a number of unfinished letters from her mother. They were all from the same North African country, written the year before. Françoise Bertrand had sent her letter to Yvonne Ander in August 1993. Finally he understood. Yvonne Ander’s mother Anna had been murdered by mistake, and the police had covered the whole thing up. Politics were clearly behind the killing, although Wallander felt incapable of fully understanding what was involved. But Françoise Bertrand had in all confidence written the letter, outlining what had really happened. Without any help from Ander at this point, he discussed with Chief Holgersson what had happened to the mother. The chief listened and then contacted the national police. The matter was thus removed from Wallander’s responsibility. But he read through all the letters one more time.

Wallander conducted his meetings with Yvonne Ander in jail. She slowly came to understand that he was a man who wasn’t hunting her. He was different from the others, the men who populated the world. He was introverted, seemed to sleep very little, and was also tormented by worry. For the first time in her life Ander discovered that she could trust a man. She told him this at one of their last meetings.

She never asked him straight out, but she still believed she knew the answer. He had probably never struck a woman. If he had, it happened only once. No more, never again.

On 3 November Ann-Britt underwent the last of the three operations. Everything went well, and her convalescence could finally begin. During this entire month Wallander set up a routine. After his talks with Ander he would drive straight to the hospital. He seldom stayed long, but Ann-Britt became the discussion partner he needed in order to help him understand how to penetrate the depths he had begun to plumb.

His first question to Ander was about the events in Africa. Who was Françoise Bertrand? What had actually happened? A pale light was falling through the window into the room. They sat facing each other at a table. In the distance a radio could be heard. The first sentences she uttered he didn’t catch. It was like a powerful roar when her silence finally broke. He just listened to her voice. Then he started to listen to what she was saying. He seldom took notes during their meetings, and he didn’t use a tape recorder.

“Somewhere there’s a man who killed my mother. Who’s looking for him?”

“Not me,” he had replied. “But if you tell me what happened, and if a Swedish citizen has been killed overseas, we will take steps to see that justice is done.”

He didn’t mention the conversation he had had a few days before with Chief Holgersson, that her mother’s death was already being investigated.

“Nobody knows who killed my mother,” she continued. “Fate selected her as a victim. Her killer didn’t even know her. He thought he was justified. He believed he could kill anybody he wanted to. Even an innocent woman who spent her retirement taking all the trips she never had the time or the money to take before.”

She made no attempt to conceal her bitter rage.

“Why was she staying with the nuns?” he asked.

Suddenly she looked up from the table, straight into his eyes.

“Who gave you the right to read my letters?”

“No-one. But they belong to you, a person who has committed several atrocious murders. Otherwise I never would have read them.”

She turned away again.

“The nuns,” Wallander repeated. “Why was she staying with them?”

“She didn’t have much money. She stayed wherever it was cheap. She never imagined it would lead to her death.”

“This happened more than a year ago. How did you react when the letter arrived?”

“There was no reason for me to wait any longer. How could I justify doing nothing when no-one else seemed to care?”

“Care about what?”

She didn’t reply. He waited. Then he changed the question.

“Wait to do what?”

She answered without looking at him.

“To kill them.”

“Who?”

“The ones who went free in spite of all they had done.”

He realised he had guessed correctly. It was when she received Françoise Bertrand’s letter that a force locked inside her had been released. She had harboured thoughts of revenge, but she could still control herself. Then the dam broke. She decided to take the law into her own hands.

Later Wallander came to see that there really wasn’t much difference from what had happened in Lödinge. She had been her own citizen militia. She had placed herself outside the law and dispensed her own justice.

“Is that how it was?” he asked. “You wanted to dispense justice? You wanted to punish those who should have been brought before a court of law but never were?”

“Who’s looking for the man who killed my mother? Who?”

She fell silent again. Wallander could see how it had all begun. Some months after the letter came from Africa she broke into Holger Eriksson’s house. That was the first step. When he asked her point blank if it was true, she didn’t even act surprised. She took it for granted that he knew.

“I heard about Krista Haberman,” she said. “That it was the car dealer who killed her.”

“Who did you hear it from?”

“A Polish woman in the hospital in Malmö. That was many years ago.”

“You were working at the hospital then?”

“I worked there several different times. I often talked to women who had been abused. She had a friend who used to know Krista Haberman.”

“Why did you break into Eriksson’s house?”

“I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible, and I was looking for signs that Krista Haberman had been there.”

“Why did you dig the pit? Why the stakes? Did the woman who knew Krista Haberman suspect that the body was buried near that ditch?”

She didn’t answer. But Wallander understood anyway. Despite the fact that the investigation had always been hard to grasp, Wallander and his colleagues had been on the right track without knowing it. Ander had echoed the men’s brutality in her methods of killing them.

During the five or six meetings Wallander had with Ander, he went methodically through the three murders, clearing up details and piecing together the connections that had previously been so vague. He continued to talk to her without a tape recorder. After the meetings he would sit in his car and make notes from memory. Then he would have them typed up. A copy went to Per Åkeson, who was preparing the indictment, which would inevitably lead to a conviction on three counts. Yet the whole time, Wallander knew he was just scraping the surface. The real descent hadn’t even started yet. The evidence would send her to prison. But he wouldn’t find the actual truth he sought until he reached the deepest depths of the pit.

She had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, of course. Wallander knew it was unavoidable, but he insisted that it be postponed. Right now the most important thing was that he be able to talk to her in peace. No-one objected to this. They understood that she would probably clam up again if she was upset. She was ready to talk to him and him alone.

They went further, slowly, step by step, day by day. Outside the jail the autumn was deepening and drawing them towards winter. Wallander never found out why Eriksson had driven up to get Krista Haberman in Svenstavik and then killed her. Presumably it was because she had denied him something he was used to getting. Maybe an argument turned violent.

He moved on to Gösta Runfeldt. She was convinced that Runfeldt had murdered his wife, drowned her in Stång Lake. And even if he hadn’t done it, he still deserved his fate. He had abused her so severely that she actually wanted to die. Höglund was right when she sensed that Runfeldt had been attacked in the florist’s shop. Ander had found out that he would be leaving for Nairobi and lured him to the shop by telling him that she had to buy flowers for a reception early the next morning. Then she knocked him to the ground. The blood on the floor was indeed his. The broken window was a diversion to fool the police into believing it was a break-in.