Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman

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 Francoise 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 Francoise 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 Lodinge. 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 Malmo. 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 Akeson, 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 Gosta Runfeldt. She was convinced that Runfeldt had murdered his wife, drowned her in Stang 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. Hoglund 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.

Then came a description of what for Wallander was the most terrifying element. Until that point he had tried to understand her without letting his emotional reactions take over. But then he couldn’t go any further. She recounted with utter calm how she had undressed Gosta Runfeldt, tied him up, and forced him into the baking oven. When he could no longer control his bodily functions she took away his underwear and laid him on a plastic sheet.

Later she led him out to the woods. By that time he was quite powerless. She tied him to the tree and strangled him. It was at that moment that she turned into a monster in Wallander’s eyes. It didn’t matter if she was a man or a woman. She became a monster, and he could only be thankful that they had stopped her before she killed Tore Grunden or anyone else on the list she had made.