The Fifth Woman (7 page)

Her closest neighbours weren’t there. They were German, lived in Hamburg, and only came up to Skåne for the month of July. When they were there they greeted one another, but had no other contact.

She unlocked the front door, and stood quite still in the hall, listening. Then she went into the big room and stood motionless next to the baking oven. Everything was quiet. As quiet as she wanted the world to be.

The man lying down there inside the oven couldn’t hear her. She knew he was alive, but she had no wish to be bothered by the sound of his breathing. Or sobbing.

She thought of the impulse that had led her to this unexpected conclusion. It began when she had decided to keep the house. And it was there when she decided to leave the oven untouched. Only later, when the letter from Africa came and she realised what she had to do, had the oven revealed its true purpose.

She was interrupted by the alarm on her watch. In an hour her guests would arrive. Before then she would have to give the man in the oven his food. He had been there for five days. Soon he would be so weak that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. She took her schedule from her handbag and saw that she had time off from next Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. That’s when it would be. She would take him out and tell him what had happened.

She had not yet decided how she was going to kill him. There were several possibilities, but she still had plenty of time. She would think about what he had done and then resolve how he was supposed to die.

She went into the kitchen and heated the soup. Because she was careful about hygiene, she washed the plastic cup and lid that she used when she fed him. She poured water into another cup. Each day she reduced the amount she gave him. He would get no more than was necessary to keep him alive. When she finished preparing the meal, she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, splashed a few drops of perfume behind her ears, and went to the oven. At its back was a hole, hidden behind some loose stones. It was like a tunnel, almost a metre long, that she could carefully pull out. Before she’d put him in there, she had installed a powerful loudspeaker and then filled in the hole. When she played music at full volume, no sound seeped out.

She leaned forwards so she could see him. When she put her hand on one of his legs he didn’t move. For a moment she was afraid that he was dead, but then she heard him gasping.

He’s weak, she thought. Soon the waiting will be over.

After she had given him his food, and let him use the hole, she pulled him back to his place again, and filled in the hole. When she had washed the dishes and tidied up the kitchen, she sat down at the table and had a cup of coffee. From her handbag she took out her personnel newsletter and leafed through it. According to the new salary table, she would be getting 174 kroner more each month, backdated from the first of July. She looked at the clock again. She seldom went ten minutes without checking it. It was part of her identity. Her life and her work were held together by precise timetables. And nothing bothered her more than not being able to meet schedules. Excuses were unacceptable. She always regarded it as a personal responsibility. She knew that many of her colleagues laughed at her behind her back. That hurt her, but she never said a word. The silence was a part of her too. But it hadn’t always been that way.

I remember my voice when I was a child. It was strong, but not shrill. The muteness had come later. After I saw all the blood, and my mother when she almost died. I didn’t scream that time. I hid in my own silence. There I could make myself invisible.

That’s when it happened. When my mother lay on a table and, sobbing and bleeding, robbed me of the sister I had always waited for.

She looked at the clock. They would be here soon. It was Wednesday, time for their meeting. If she had her preference, it would always be on Wednesdays, that would create regularity. But her work schedule didn’t permit it, and she had no control over that schedule.

She set out five chairs. She didn’t want any more people than that to visit her at once. The intimacy might be lost. It was hard enough as it was to create sufficient trust that these silent women would dare to speak. She went into the bedroom and took off her uniform. For each article of clothing she removed, she muttered a prayer. And she remembered.

It was my mother who told me about Antonio. The man she had met in her youth, long before the Second World War, on a train between Cologne and Munich. They couldn’t find seats, so they ended up squeezed close together in the smoky corridor. The lights from the boats on the Rhine had glimmered outside the dirty windows, and Antonio told her that he was going to be a Catholic priest. He said that the mass started as soon as the priest changed his clothes. As a prelude to the holy ritual, the priests had to undergo a cleansing procedure. For each garment they took off or put on they had a prayer. Each garment brought them a step closer to their sacred task.

She had never forgotten her mother’s recollection of the meeting with Antonio in the train. And since she had realised that she was a priestess, dedicated to the sacred task of proclaiming that justice was holy, she too had begun to view her change of clothes as something more than simply exchanging one set of garments for another. But the prayers she offered up were not part of a conversation with God. In a chaotic and absurd world, God was the ultimate absurdity. The mark of the world was an absent God. She directed her prayers to the child she had been, before everything fell apart. Before her mother robbed her of what she wanted most of all. Before the sinister men had towered up before her with eyes like writhing, menacing snakes.

She changed her clothes and prayed herself back to her childhood. She laid her uniform on the bed. Then she dressed in soft fabrics with gentle colours. Something happened inside her. It was as if her skin altered, as if it too was shifting back to its infant state. Last, she put on a wig and glasses. The final prayer faded inside her.
Ride, ride a cock-horse
 . . .

She looked at her face in the big mirror. It wasn’t Sleeping Beauty that awoke from her nightmare. It was Cinderella.

She heard the first car pull into the courtyard. She was ready, she was somebody else. She folded her uniform, smoothed out the bedspread, and left the room. Athough no-one would go in there, she locked the door and then tested the handle.

They gathered just before 6 p.m., but one of the women was missing. She had been taken to the hospital the night before with contractions. It was two weeks early, but the baby might already have been born.

She decided at once to visit her at the hospital the next day. She wanted to see her. She wanted to see her face after all she had gone through. Then she listened to their stories. Now and then she pretended to write something in her notebook, but she wrote only numbers. She was making timetables. Figures, times, distances. It was an obsessive game, a game that had increasingly become an incantation. She didn’t need to write anything down to remember it. All the words spoken in those frightened voices, all the pain that they dared express, remained etched in her consciousness. She could see the way something loosened in each of them, if only for a moment. But what was life except a series of moments?

The timetable again. Times that coincide, one taking over from the other. Life is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between pain and relief, endless, ceaseless.

She was sitting so that she could see the big oven behind the women. The light was turned down and muted. The room was bathed in a gentle light, which she imagined as being feminine. The oven was a boulder, immovable, mute, in the middle of an empty sea.

They talked for a couple of hours, and then drank tea in her kitchen. They all knew when they would meet next. No-one questioned the times she gave them.

It was 8.30 p.m. when she showed them out. She shook their hands, accepted their gratitude. When the last car was gone she went back inside the house, changed her clothes and took off the wig and glasses. She took her uniform and left the room. She washed the teacups, then turned out all the lights and picked up her handbag.

For a moment she stood still in the dark beside the oven. Everything was very quiet.

Then she left the house. It was drizzling. She got into her car and drove towards Ystad. She was in her bed asleep before midnight.

When Wallander woke on Thursday morning he felt better. He got up just after 6 a.m. and checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window. It was 5°C. Heavy clouds covered the sky, and the streets were wet, but the rain had stopped.

He arrived at the police station just after 7 a.m. As he walked down the hall to his office he wondered whether they had found Holger Eriksson. He hung up his jacket and sat down. There were a few telephone messages on his desk. Ebba reminded him that he had an appointment at the optician later in the day. He needed reading glasses. If he sat for too long leaning over his paperwork, he got a headache. He was going to be 47 soon. His age was catching up with him.

One message was from Per Åkeson. Wallander phoned him at the prosecutor’s office, but was told that Åkeson would be in Malmö all day. He went to get a cup of coffee, then he leaned back in his chair and tried to devise a new strategy for the car-smuggling investigation. In almost all organised crime there was some weak point, a link that could be broken if leaned on hard enough.

His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone. It was Lisa Holgersson, their new chief, welcoming him home.

“How was the holiday?” she asked.

“Very successful.”

“You rediscover your parents by doing these things,” she said.

“And they might acquire a different view of their children,” Wallander said.

She excused herself abruptly. Wallander heard someone come into her office and say something. Björk would never have asked him about his holiday. She came back on the line.

“I’ve been in Stockholm for a few days,” she said. “It wasn’t much fun.”

“What are they up to now?”

“I’m thinking about the
Estonia
. All of our colleagues who died.”

Wallander sat in silence. He should have thought about that himself.

“I think you can imagine the mood,” she went on. “How could we just sit there, discussing organisational problems between the national police and the districts all over the country?”

“We’re probably just as helpless in the face of death as everyone else,” Wallander said. “Even though we shouldn’t be, since we’ve seen so much of it. We think we’re used to it, but we aren’t.”

“A ferry sinks one stormy night and suddenly death is visible in Sweden again,” she said. “After it’s been hidden away and ignored for so long.”

“You’re right, I suppose. Although I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

He heard her clearing her throat. After a pause she returned.

“We discussed organisational problems,” she said, “and the eternal question of what should take priority.”

“We ought to spend our time catching criminals,” said Wallander. “Bringing them to justice and making sure we have enough evidence to get them convicted.”

“If only it was that simple,” she sighed.

“I’m glad I’m not the chief,” Wallander said.

“I sometimes wonder myself,” she said, and left the rest of her sentence unfinished. Wallander thought she was going to say goodbye, but she had more to say.

“I promised that you would come up to the police academy in early December,” she said. “They want you to give a talk on the investigation of last summer. The trainee officers requested it.”

Wallander was shocked.

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I just can’t stand up in front of a group of people and pretend I’m teaching. Somebody else can do it. Martinsson’s a good speaker. He ought to be a politician.”

“I promised you’d come,” she said, laughing. “It’ll be fine, really.”

“I’ll call in sick,” Wallander said.

“December is a long way off,” she said. “We can talk more about this later. I really called to hear how your holiday was. Now I can tell it turned out fine.”

“And everything’s quiet here,” Wallander said. “All we have is a missing person. But my colleagues are handling it.”

“A missing person?”

Wallander recounted his conversation with Sven Tyrén.

“How often is it something serious when people go missing?” she asked. “What do the statistics say?”

“I don’t know about the statistics,” said Wallander. “But I do know that there’s very seldom a crime or even an accident involved. When it comes to old or senile people, they may have simply wandered off. With young people there’s usually a rebellion against their parents or a longing for adventure behind it. It’s rare that anything serious is involved.”

They said goodbye and hung up. Wallander was dead set against giving lectures at the police academy. It was flattering that they had asked for him, but his aversion was stronger. He would try to talk Martinsson into taking his place.

He went back to the smuggling operation. Just after 8 a.m. he went to get some more coffee. Since he felt hungry, he also helped himself to a few biscuits. His stomach no longer seemed upset. Martinsson knocked on the door and came in.

“Are you feeling better?”

“I feel fine,” Wallander said. “How’s it going with Holger Eriksson?”

Martinsson gave him a baffled look.

“Who?”

“Holger Eriksson. The man I wrote a report on, who might be missing? The one I talked to you about?”

Martinsson shook his head.

“When did you tell me? I can’t have heard you. I was pretty upset about the ferry accident.”

Wallander got up from his chair.

“Is Hansson here yet? We have to get started on this immediately.”

“I saw him in the hall,” Martinsson said. They went to Hansson’s office. He was sitting staring at a lottery ticket. He tore it up and dropped the pieces in his waste-paper basket.