Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman

The list was also her only mistake — she hadn’t destroyed the notebook in which she drew up her plans before she copied them into the ledger she kept in Vollsjo. Wallander never asked her why. Even she admitted it was a mistake. That was the only one of her actions she couldn’t explain. Later Wallander pondered whether she had actually wanted to leave a clue, that deep inside she wanted to be discovered and stopped. Sometimes he thought this was true, sometimes he didn’t.

She didn’t have much to say about Eugen Blomberg. She described how she shuffled the slips of paper. She let chance decide who would be next, just as chance had killed her mother. This was one of the times he interrupted her. Normally he let her speak freely, prompting her with questions when she couldn’t decide how to go on. But now he stopped her.

“So you did the same thing as the men who killed your mother,” he said. “You let chance select your victim.”

“It’s not comparable,” she replied. “All those men whose names I had written down deserved their death. I gave them time with my slips of paper. I prolonged their lives.”

He pursued it no further, since he realised that in an obscure way she was right. Reluctantly he admitted to himself that she had her own peculiar sort of truth.

When he read through the transcripts of the notes he made from memory, he could see that what he had was a confession, but it was also an exceedingly incomplete account. Did he succeed with what he intended? Afterwards, Wallander found it difficult to speak about Yvonne Ander. He always referred people who questioned him to the notes.

As it turned out, what became Yvonne Ander’s last will and testament was her story of the terrifying experiences of her childhood. Wallander was almost the same age as Ander, and he thought time after time that the era he was living in was concerned with one single decisive question: what are we actually doing with our children? She had told him how her mother was frequently abused by her stepfather, who had replaced her biological father. The stepfather had forced her mother to have an abortion. She had never had the chance to have the sister her mother was carrying. She couldn’t have known if it really was a sister — maybe it was a brother — but to her it was a sister, brutally ripped from her mother’s womb against her will one night in the early 1950s. She remembered that night as a bloody hell. When she was telling Wallander about it, she raised her eyes from the table and looked straight into his. Her mother had lain on a sheet on the kitchen table, the abortionist was drunk, her stepfather locked in the cellar, probably drunk too. That night she was robbed of her sister and for all time learned to view the future as darkness, with threatening men lurking round every corner, violence lurking behind every friendly smile, every word.

She had barricaded her memories into a secret interior room. She had been educated, become a nurse, and she had always harboured the vague notion that someday she would avenge the sister she never had, and the mother who wasn’t allowed to give birth to her. She collected the stories from abused women, she tracked down the dead women in muddy fields and Smaland lakes, she entered names in a ledger, shuffled her slips of paper.

And then her mother had been murdered.

She described it almost poetically to Wallander. Like a silent tidal wave, she said. No more than that. I knew that it was time. I let a year pass. I planned, completed the timetable that had kept me alive all those years. Then I dug in a ditch at night .

Precisely those words. Then I dug in a ditch at night . Maybe they best summed up Wallander’s experience of his many conversations with Yvonne Ander that autumn. It was like a picture of the time he was living in. What ditch was he digging?

One question was never answered: why she suddenly, in the mid-1980s, changed professions and became a conductor. Wallander had understood that the train timetable was the liturgy she lived by, her handbook. But the trains remained her private world. Maybe the only one; maybe the last one.

Did she feel guilt? Akeson asked him about that many times. Lisa Holgersson asked less often, his colleagues almost never. The only person besides Akeson who really insisted on knowing was Ann-Britt Hoglund. Wallander told her the truth: he didn’t know.

“Ander reminds me of a coiled spring,” he told her. “I can’t express it better than that. I can’t say whether guilt is part of it, or whether it’s gone.”

On 4 December it was over. Wallander had nothing more to ask, and Yvonne Ander had nothing more to say. The confession was complete. Wallander knew he had reached the end of the long descent. Now he could return to the surface. The psychiatric examination could begin, the defence lawyer could sharpen his pencils, and only Wallander had any idea what would happen.

He knew that Yvonne Ander would fall silent again, with the determined will of someone who has nothing more to say. Just before he left, he asked her about two more things he didn’t have answers to. The first was a detail that no longer had any significance, but he needed to satisfy his own curiosity.

“When Katarina Taxell called her mother from the house in Vollsjo, something was making a banging noise,” he said. “We couldn’t work out where that sound was coming from.”

She gave him a baffled look. Then her face broke open in a smile, the only one Wallander saw in all his talks with her.

“A farmer’s tractor had broken down in the field next to us. He was hitting it with a big hammer to get something loose from the undercarriage. Could you really hear that on the phone?”

Wallander nodded. He was already thinking of his last question.

“I think we actually met once,” he said. “On a train.”

She nodded.

“South of Almhult? I asked you when we would get to Malmo.”

“I recognised you from the newspapers. From last summer.”

“Did you already know then that we’d catch you?”

“Why should I?”

“A policeman from Ystad gets on a train in Almhult. What’s he doing there? Unless he’s following the trail of what happened to Gosta Runfeldt’s wife?”

She shook her head. “I never thought about that. I should have.”

Wallander had nothing more to ask. He had found out everything he wanted to know. He stood up, muttered goodbye, and left.

That afternoon Wallander visited the hospital as usual. Ann-Britt was asleep when he arrived, but he spoke to a doctor who told him that in six months she could return to work. He left the hospital just after 5 p.m. It was already dark, just below freezing, no wind. He drove out to the cemetery and went to his father’s grave. Withered flowers had frozen solid to the ground. It was still less than three months since they had come back from Rome. The holiday was vivid in his mind as he stood by the grave, wondering what his father had actually been thinking when he took his night-time walk to the Spanish Steps, to the fountain, with that gleam in his eyes.

It was as if Yvonne Ander and his father could have stood on either side of a river and waved to each other, even though they had nothing in common. Or did they? Wallander wondered what he himself had in common with her. He had no answer.

That night, out by the grave in the dark cemetery, the investigation came to an end for him. There would still be papers he would have to read over and sign, but the case was finished. The psychiatric examination would declare that she was in full possession of her faculties. Then she would be convicted and hidden away at Hinseberg. The investigation of the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death in Africa would also continue. But that had nothing to do with his own work.