Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman

All of a sudden he was gone. No-one had noticed him leave. Svedberg began to worry, but he thought he knew Wallander well enough: he just wanted to be alone.

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 Hoglund’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 Hoglund’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 Hoglund 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.

Skane

4–5 December 1994

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 Francoise 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. Francoise 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 Francoise 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.