The Fifth Woman (50 page)

“You think that Eriksson killed her?”

Wallander could hear that this idea was occurring to Hamrén for the first time.

“I am not certain of it,” said Wallander. “But it’s a possibility that we can’t ignore.”

Wallander left Katarina Taxell’s flat. He had to have something to eat. He found a pizzeria close by. He ate too fast and immediately got a stomach ache.

Since there was nothing to indicate that the series of killings was over, they were working against time. And they didn’t know how much time they had. He reminded himself that Martinsson had promised to put together a timetable of everything that had happened so far. He was supposed to have done that on the day that Terese was attacked. On his way back to Taxell’s flat, Wallander decided it couldn’t wait. He stopped in a bus shelter and called Ystad. He was in luck. Höglund was there. She had already talked to Hamrén and knew that they had positive confirmation that Krista Haberman and Holger Eriksson had met. Wallander asked her to make the timetable of events.

“I have no idea whether it’s important,” he said. “But we know too little about how this woman moves around. Maybe the geographical centre will become clear if we make a timetable.”

“Now you’re saying ‘she’,” Höglund said.

“Yes, I am. But we don’t know if she’s alone. We also don’t know what role she plays.”

“What do you think has happened to Katarina Taxell?”

“She’s run away, in a hurry, when she discovered that the building was being watched. She’s run away because she has something to hide.”

“Is it possible that she killed Blomberg?”

“Taxell is a link in the chain. She doesn’t represent a beginning or an end. I can’t imagine her killing anyone. She presumably belongs to the group of women who have been victims of abuse.”

“Was she abused too? I didn’t know that.” Höglund sounded genuinely surprised.

“She might not have been beaten up or cut with a knife,” Wallander said. “But I suspect that she’s been victimised in some other way.”

“Psychologically?”

“Something like that.”

“By Blomberg?”

“Yes.”

“But she still had his child? If what you think about the father is true.”

“I described to you the way she held her baby. But of course there are still a lot of holes,” Wallander admitted. “Police work is a question of piecing together tentative solutions. We have to make the gaps speak and the pieces tell us about things that have hidden meanings. We have to try to see through the events, turn them on their heads in order to set them on their feet.”

“Nobody at the police academy ever talked about this. Weren’t you invited to give a lecture there?”

“Never,” Wallander said. “I can’t give lectures.”

“That’s exactly what you can do,” she replied. “You just refuse to admit it. And besides, I think you’d actually enjoy doing it.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Wallander said.

Afterwards he thought about what she had said. Did he really want to speak to trainee police officers? In the past he was convinced that his reluctance was genuine. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He left the bus shelter and hurried on through the rain. It was starting to get windy. Back at Taxell’s flat, he continued to search methodically. In a box in the back of a cupboard he found a large number of diaries. She had started the first one when she was twelve. Wallander noticed with surprise that it had a beautiful orchid on the cover. She had kept on writing the diaries through her teenage years and into adulthood. The last diary he found was from 1993. But there were no entries after September. He kept searching, without finding another. But he was certain that it existed. He enlisted the help of Birch, who had finished interviewing the other residents in the building.

Birch found the keys to Taxell’s basement storage room. It took him an hour to go through it. There weren’t any diaries there either. Wallander was convinced that she had taken it with her. They were in the bag that Hader had seen her put in the boot of the car.

Finally only her desk was left. He had quickly gone through the drawers earlier, now he would do it more thoroughly. He sat down on an old chair with the heads of dragons carved into the armrests. The desk was a small secretary in which the top folded down to make a desk surface. On top of the desk there were framed photographs of Katarina Taxell as a child. Katarina sitting on a lawn, with white garden furniture and blurry figures in the background. Katarina sitting next to a big dog, looking straight at the camera with a bow in her hair. Katarina with her mother and her father, the engineer at the sugar refinery. He had a moustache, and seemed to exude self-confidence. Katarina looked more like her father than her mother. Wallander took down the photograph and looked on the back. There was no date. The picture had been taken in a studio in Lund. There was a graduation photograph of Katarina with her white cap, flowers around her neck. She was thin, and had grown pale. Now Katarina was living in a different world. The last picture was an old photograph, the contours faded. It was of a barren landscape by the sea. An old couple gazed stiffly at the camera. In the distance was a three-master, anchored, sails furled. Wallander thought the picture could be from Öland, taken sometime at the end of the last century. Perhaps the couple were Katarina’s great-grandparents. There was nothing written on the back of that one either. He put the photographs back. There was no sign of Blomberg. That might be understandable, but no other man either. Did that mean anything? Everything means something, he thought. The question was what.

One by one he pulled out the small drawers. Letters, documents, bills. Old report cards. Her highest marks were in geography, she had done poorly in physics and maths. In the next drawer he found pictures taken in a photographic booth. Three girls, crowded together, making faces. Another picture, this time of the pedestrian street in Copenhagen. The same three girls were sitting on a bench, laughing. Katarina was on the far right. There was another drawer full of letters, some from as far back as 1972. A stamp with a picture of the man-of-war
Wasa
. If the secretary contains Taxell’s innermost secrets, thought Wallander, then she doesn’t have many. An impersonal life. No passions, no summer adventures on Greek islands, but high marks in geography. He continued going through the drawers, but nothing caught his attention. He moved on to the three larger drawers below. Still no diaries. Wallander didn’t feel like digging through layer after layer of impersonal mementos. He couldn’t see the woman behind them. Had she even been able to see herself?

He pushed back the chair and closed the last drawer. Nothing. He didn’t know much more than he had before. He frowned. Something didn’t add up. If her decision to leave was sudden, and he was convinced that it had been, then she wouldn’t have had time to take along everything that might give away her secrets. She had the diaries within easy reach. But there is almost always a messy side to a person’s life. Here there was nothing. He stood up and cautiously moved the desk away from the wall. Nothing was fastened to the back. He sat down in the chair again, thinking hard. There was something he had noticed. Something that only now came back to him. He tried to coax the image out. Not the photographs. Not the letters either. What was it then? The report cards? The rental contract? The bills from her credit card company? None of those. What was left?

There’s nothing else but the furniture, he thought. Then it came to him. It was something about the small drawers. He pulled one of them out again, then the next, and compared them. Then he took them all the way out and looked inside. There was nothing there either. He put the drawers back in and pulled out the one on the top left, and then the second. That’s when he discovered it. The drawers were not equally deep. He pulled out the smaller one and turned it around. There was another opening. It was a double drawer. It had a secret compartment in the back. There was only one thing inside. He took it out and put it on the desk.

It was a timetable for Swedish Railways, from the spring of 1991. The trains between Malmö and Stockholm. He took out the other drawers, one by one. He found another secret compartment. It was empty. He leaned back in his chair and thought about the timetable. Why was it important? It was even harder to understand why it had been put into a secret compartment. But it couldn’t have ended up there by mistake.

Birch came into the room.

“Take a look at this,” Wallander said, pointing at the timetable. “This was in Katarina Taxell’s secret hiding place.”

“A timetable?”

Wallander nodded. “I don’t get it,” he said.

He leafed through it, page by page. Birch had pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. Wallander turned the pages. Nothing was written on it, no page had been pressed down and fell open by itself. It was only when he came to the next to last page that he stopped. Birch saw it too. A departure time from Nässjö was underlined. Nässjö to Malmö. Departure at 16.00. Arrival in Lund at 18.42, Malmö at 18.57. Nässjö 16.00. Someone had underlined the whole row.

Wallander looked at Birch. “Does that tell you anything?”

“Not a thing.”

Wallander put down the timetable.

“Does Katarina Taxell have something to do with Nässjö?” Birch asked.

“Not as far as I know,” Wallander said. “But it’s possible that she does. Our biggest problem right now is that everything seems to be possible. We can’t tell what is important and what isn’t.”

Wallander had acquired several plastic bags from the forensic technicians who had gone through the flat earlier in the day, searching for fingerprints that didn’t belong to Katarina Taxell or her mother. He put the timetable in one of them.

“I’m taking this along,” he said, “if you have no objections.”

Birch shrugged.

“You can’t even use it to tell when the trains go,” he said. “It expired three years ago.”

“I rarely take the train,” Wallander said.

“It can be relaxing,” Birch said. “I prefer taking the train to flying. You get time to yourself.”

Wallander thought about his most recent train trip, from Älmhult. Birch was right. During the journey he had managed to fall asleep for a while.

“I think it’s time for me to go back to Ystad.”

“We’re not going to put out an APB for Katarina Taxell and her baby?”

“Not yet.”

They left the flat. Birch locked up. The wind was coming in gusts, and it was cold. They said goodbye at Wallander’s car.

“What should we do about her surveillance?” Birch asked.

Wallander thought for a moment.

“Keep it up for the time being,” he said. “Only don’t forget the back this time.”

“What do you think might happen?”

“I don’t know. But someone who has run away might decide to return.”

He drove out of the city. Autumn pressed in all around the car. He switched on the heater, but he was still cold.

What are we going to do now? he asked himself. Katarina Taxell is missing. After a long day in Lund I’m going back to Ystad with an old Swedish Railways timetable in a plastic bag.

But he knew that they had taken an important step forward that day. Eriksson did know Krista Haberman. They knew that there was a connection between the three men who had been murdered. Involuntarily he accelerated. He wanted to find out what Hamrén had discovered. When he reached the exit for Sturup Airport he called Ystad. He got hold of Svedberg. The first thing he asked about was Terese.

“She’s getting a lot of support from the school,” Svedberg said. “Especially from the other students. But it’s going to take time.”

“And Martinsson?”

“He’s depressed. He’s talking about quitting.”

“I know.”

“You’re the only one who can talk him out of it.”

“I will.”

He asked if anything important had happened. Svedberg had just arrived at the station himself after sitting in on a meeting with Åkeson about obtaining the investigative material on the drowning of Runfeldt’s wife in Älmhult.

Wallander asked him to call a meeting of the investigative team for 10 p.m.

“Have you seen Hamrén?” was his last question.

“He’s sitting with Hansson going over the material on Krista Haberman. That was apparently something you said was urgent.”

“If they could finish by 10 p.m., I’d be grateful.”

“Are they supposed to find Krista Haberman by then?” Svedberg asked.

“Not exactly. But not far from it, either.”

Wallander put the phone down on the seat next to him. He thought about Katarina Taxell’s secret drawer, which contained an old timetable. He didn’t understand it. Not at all.

At 10 p.m. they were all assembled. Only Martinsson was missing. They began by talking about what had happened that morning. Everyone knew by then that Martinsson had decided to resign from the force.

“I’ll talk to him,” Wallander said. “I’ll find out if he’s really made up his mind. If he has, then of course no-one is going to stop him.”

Wallander gave a brief summary of what had happened in Lund. They considered various explanations as to why Taxell had run away. They also asked themselves if it might be possible to track down the red car. How many red Golfs were there in Skåne?

“A woman with a newborn baby can’t disappear without a trace,” Wallander said at last. “It’d be best for us to be patient.”

He looked at Hansson and Hamrén.

“The disappearance of Krista Haberman,” he said.

Hansson nodded to Hamrén.

“You wanted to know the details surrounding the disappearance itself,” he said. “The last time she was seen was in Svenstavik on Tuesday, 22 October 1967. She went for a walk through town. It wasn’t unusual for her to be out walking. A lumberjack coming from the station on his bike saw her. It was about 5 p.m. and it was already dark. There are several witnesses who said they’d seen a strange car in town that evening. That’s all.”