The Fifth Woman Read online

  “It’s beautiful here,” Wallander said.

  “Very,” Melander replied. “And the beauty remains. Year after year.”

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Wallander ate heartily. There was plenty of food. Melander was a good talker. He was a man who combined a number of diverse activities to make his living. Among other things, he gave folk-dancing lessons in the winter. Not until they were having coffee did Wallander mention why he was there.

  “Of course it came as a great surprise to us,” Melander said. “100,000 kronor is a lot of money. Especially when it’s a gift from a stranger.”

  “You mean no-one knows who Holger Eriksson was?”

  “He was completely unknown to us. A car dealer from Skåne who was murdered. That was very strange. Those of us who are connected with the church began asking around. We also saw to it that a notice asking for information was placed in the newspapers. But no-one got in touch with us.”

  Wallander had remembered to bring along a photograph of Eriksson. Melander studied the picture while he filled his pipe. He lit it without taking his eyes off the photograph. Wallander’s hopes started to rise. But then Melander shook his head.

  “The man is still a stranger to me,” he said. “I have a good memory for faces, and I’ve never seen him before. Maybe someone else might recognise him, but I don’t.”

  “I’m going to give you two names,” Wallander said, “to see if they mean anything to you. The first is Gösta Runfeldt.”

  Melander thought for a moment. But not for long.

  “Runfeldt is not a name from around here,” he said. “It almost sounds like an assumed or made-up name.”

  “Harald Berggren,” Wallander said, “is the second.”

  Melander’s pipe had gone out. He put it down on the table.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Let me make a call.”

  Wallander felt his excitement rise. What he wanted most of all was to be able to identify the man who had written the diary from the Congo.

  Melander asked for a man named Nils.

  “I have a guest here from Skåne,” he said into the phone. “A man named Kurt who’s a policeman. He’s asking about someone named Harald Berggren. I don’t think there’s anyone alive here in Svenstavik by that name. But isn’t there someone with that name buried in the cemetery?”

  Wallander’s heart sank. But not completely. Even a dead Harald Berggren might be of help to them.

  Melander listened to the answer and came back to the kitchen table.

  “Nils Enman is in charge of the cemetery,” he said. “And there’s a gravestone with the name Harald Berggren on it. But Nils is young. And the man who took care of the cemetery before is now lying there himself. Maybe we should go over there and have a look?”

  Wallander stood up. Melander was surprised by his haste.

  “Someone once told me that people from Skåne are relaxed. But that doesn’t apply to you.”

  “I have my bad habits,” Wallander said.

  They headed out into the clear autumn air. Melander greeted everyone they met. They reached the cemetery.

  “His grave is over by the grove of trees,” Melander said.

  Wallander walked between the graves, following Melander and thinking about the dream he’d had during the night. It seemed unreal to him that his father was dead.

  Melander stopped and pointed. The gravestone stood upright, with a gold inscription. Wallander read what it said and realised at once that there was no help to be found here. The man named Harald Berggren who lay buried there had died in 1949. Melander noticed his reaction.

  “Not the one?”

  “No,” replied Wallander. “It’s definitely not him. The man we’re looking for was still alive at least until 1963.”

  “A man you’re looking for?” Melander said with curiosity. “A man the police are looking for must have committed some type of crime.”

  “I don’t know that. It’s too complicated to explain. Often the police look for people who haven’t done anything illegal.”

  “So your trip here was in vain,” Melander said. “The church has received a gift of a great deal of money, and we don’t know why. We still don’t know this Eriksson.”

  “There must be an explanation,” Wallander said.

  “Would you like to see the church?” Melander asked suddenly, as if he wanted to give Wallander some encouragement.

  Wallander nodded.

  “It’s a lovely place,” Melander said. “I was married there.”

  They walked up to the church and went inside. Wallander noted that the door wasn’t locked. Light shone in through the side windows.

  “It’s beautiful,” Wallander said.

  “Yet I don’t think you’re particularly religious,” said Melander and smiled.

  Wallander didn’t reply. He sat down on one of the wooden pews. Melander stayed standing in the centre aisle. Wallander searched his mind for some way to proceed. Eriksson wouldn’t have left a gift to the church in Svenstavik without a reason.

  “Holger Eriksson wrote poetry,” Wallander said. “He was what they call a regional poet.”

  “We have poets like that too,” Melander said. “To be quite honest, what they write isn’t always very good.”

  “Eriksson was also a bird lover,” continued Wallander. “At night he went out to watch the birds heading south. He couldn’t see them. But he knew they were there overhead. Maybe it’s possible to hear the rushing of thousands of wings.”

  “I know some people who keep pigeons,” Melander said. “But we’ve only had one ornithologist.”

  “Had?” Wallander asked.

  Melander sat down on the pew on the other side of the aisle. “It’s an odd story,” he said. “A story without an ending.” He laughed. “Almost like your story. That doesn’t have an ending either.”

  “I’m sure we’ll reach a conclusion,” said Wallander. “We usually do. So what about your story?”

  “Sometime back in the 1960s a Polish woman came here,” he said. “Where exactly she came from, I don’t think anybody knew. But she worked at the local inn. Rented a room. Kept to herself. Even though she quickly learned to speak Swedish, she didn’t seem to have any friends. Later she bought a house. Out towards Sveg. I was young back then, young enough to often think about how beautiful she was. She was interested in birds. At the post office they said she got letters and cards from all over Sweden. They were postcards with information about ringed owls and God knows what else. She wrote lots of cards and letters herself. They had to stock extra postcards for her at the local shop. She didn’t care what the picture was of. They bought up postcards that shops in other villages couldn’t sell.”

  “How do you know all this?” Wallander asked.

  “In a village you know about a lot of things, whether you want to or not,” Melander said. “That’s the way it is.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “What’s that expression? She went up in smoke. Vanished.”

  Wallander wasn’t sure he had understood correctly. “Did she go away somewhere?”

  “She travelled a great deal, but she always came back. When she disappeared, she was here. She had gone for a walk through town one afternoon in October. She often took walks. Strolls. After that day she was never seen again. There was a lot written about it back then. She hadn’t packed her things. People started to wonder when she didn’t show up at the inn. They went over to her house. She was gone. They searched for her. But she was never found. That happened about 25 years ago. They’ve never found anything. But there have been rumours that she was seen in South America or Alingsås. Or as a ghost in the woods outside Rätansbyn.”

  “What was her name?” Wallander asked.

  “Krista. Her surname was Haberman.”

  Wallander remembered the case. There’d been a lot of speculation. He vaguely recalled the newspaper headline: “Th
e Polish Beauty”.

  “So she corresponded with other bird-watchers,” he said. “And sometimes she visited them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do the letters still exist?”

  “She was declared dead years ago. A relative from Poland turned up and her belongings disappeared. And the house was later torn down.”

  Wallander nodded. It would have been too much to expect to find the letters and postcards.

  “I have a hazy recollection of the whole thing,” he said. “But wasn’t there suspicion that she had committed suicide or been the victim of a crime?”

  “Of course there were all manner of rumours. I think the police who investigated the case did a good job. They were people from the area who could tell the difference between gossip and the truth. There were rumours about mysterious cars. That she’d had secret visitors in the night. And no-one knew what she did when she went travelling. She disappeared. And she’s still missing. If she’s alive, she’s 25 years older. Everyone gets older. Even people who disappear.”

  It’s happening again, thought Wallander. Something from the past is coming back. I come up here to find out why Holger Eriksson bequeathed his money to the church in Svenstavik. I don’t get an answer to my question, but I discover that there was also a bird-watcher here, a woman who disappeared over 25 years ago. Perhaps I’ve found an answer to my question after all. Even though I don’t yet understand it.

  “The case material is still in Östersund,” Melander said. “It probably weighs several kilos.”

  They left the church. Wallander looked at a bird sitting on the cemetery wall.

  “Have you ever heard of a bird called a middle spotted woodpecker?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it extinct?” Melander asked. “At least in Sweden?”

  “It’s close to extinction,” said Wallander. “It’s been gone from this country for 15 years.”

  “I may have seen one a few times,” Melander said doubtfully. “But any sort of woodpecker is scarce these days. The old trees have disappeared. That’s where they usually lived. And on telephone poles, of course.”

  They had walked back to the shopping centre and stopped at Wallander’s car. It was 2.30 p.m.

  “Are you going further?” Melander asked. “Or are you heading back to Skåne?”

  “I’m going to Gävle,” replied Wallander. “How long does it take? Three, four hours?”

  “Closer to five. There’s no snow and it’s not slippery. The roads are good. But it’ll take you that long. It’s almost 400 kilometres.”

  “I want to thank you for all your help,” said Wallander. “And for the nice lunch.”

  “But you didn’t get any answers to your questions.”

  “Maybe I did,” Wallander said. “We’ll see.”

  “The officer who handled Krista Haberman’s disappearance was an old man,” said Melander. “He started when he was middle-aged. Stayed with the police until he retired. They say the last thing he talked about on his deathbed was what had happened to her. He could never let it go.”

  “There’s always that danger,” Wallander said.

  They said goodbye.

  “If you ever come south, stop in,” Wallander said.

  Melander smiled. His pipe had gone out again.

  “I think my travels will take me mostly north,” he said. “But you never know.”

  “I’d be grateful if you’d get in touch with me,” Wallander said, “if anything happens that might explain why Holger Eriksson left the money to the church.”

  “It’s strange,” Melander said. “If he’d seen the church, it might be understandable. It’s so beautiful.”

  “You’re right,” Wallander replied. “If he’d ever been here, it might make sense.”

  “Maybe he went through here sometime? Without anyone knowing about it?”

  “Or maybe only one person knew,” Wallander replied.

  Melander looked at him.

  “You have something in mind?”

  “Yes,” Wallander replied. “But I don’t know yet what it means.”

  They shook hands. Wallander got into his car and drove off. In the rear-view mirror he saw Melander standing there, gazing after him.

  He drove through endless forests. By the time he reached Gävle it was already dark. He made his way to the hotel that Svedberg had told him about. When he asked at the front desk, he was told that Linda had already arrived.

  They found a little restaurant that was cosy and quiet, with only a few guests even though it was Saturday night. He was glad that Linda had agreed to come. Finding themselves in this unfamiliar town encouraged Wallander to talk about his ideas for the future, something he hadn’t planned to do.

  But first they talked about his father, her grandfather.

  “I often wondered about why you were so close,” Wallander said. “Maybe it was envy, plain and simple. I saw something that I remembered from my own childhood, but that had totally disappeared.”

  “Perhaps it’s good to have a generation in between,” Linda said. “It’s not uncommon for grandparents and grandchildren to get along better than parents and children.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can see it’s true for me. And a lot of my friends say the same thing.”

  “But I’ve always had a feeling that the rift was unnecessary,” said Wallander. “I’ve never understood why he couldn’t accept the fact that I became a policeman. If only he’d told me why. Or suggested an alternative. But he never did.”

  “Grandpa was pretty eccentric,” she said. “And temperamental. But what would you say if I suddenly came and told you in all seriousness that I was thinking of becoming a policewoman?”

  Wallander started to laugh.

  “I honestly don’t know what I’d say. We’ve talked about this before.”

  After dinner they went back to the hotel. On a thermometer ouside a shop, Wallander saw that it was –2°C. They sat down in reception. The hotel didn’t have many guests, and they had the place to themselves. Wallander asked Linda cautiously how her acting classes were going. He saw at once that she didn’t want to talk about it. He let the topic drop, but it made him uneasy. Over the course of the past few years Linda had changed plans and interests several times. What made Wallander nervous was how quickly she made these changes. It gave him the impression they were rash decisions.

  Linda poured herself some tea and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.

  “Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve stopped darning our socks,” Wallander said.

  She gave him a perplexed look.

  “I mean it,” he continued. “When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks. I even learned how to do it in school myself. Then suddenly one day it was over. Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No-one bothered to repair them. The whole society changed. ‘Wear it out and toss it’ was the only rule that applied. As long as it was just a matter of our socks, the change didn’t make much difference. But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code. I think it changed our view of right and wrong, of what you were allowed to do to other people and what you weren’t. More and more people, especially young people like you, feel unwelcome in their own country. How do they react? With aggression and contempt. The most frightening thing is that I think we’re only at the beginning of something that’s going to get a lot worse. A generation is growing up right now, the children who are younger than you, who are going to react with even greater violence. And they have absolutely no memory of a time when we darned our socks. When we didn’t throw everything away, whether it was our woollen socks or human beings.”

  He paused. “Maybe I’m not expressing myself clearly,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I still think I know what you’re trying to say.”

  “It’s also possible I’ve got this wrong. Maybe every age seems worse than the ones that cam
e before.”

  “I never heard Grandpa say anything about it.”

  “I think he lived in his own world. He painted his pictures so he could decide where the sun would be in the sky. It hung in the same place, above the fields, with or without the grouse, for almost 50 years. Sometimes I don’t think he knew what was going on outside that studio of his. He had put up an invisible wall around himself.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “He knew a lot.”

  “If he did, he never let me know about it.”

  “He even wrote poems once in a while.”

  Wallander looked at her in disbelief. “He wrote poems?”

  “He showed me some of them once. Maybe he burned them later on. But he wrote poems.”

  “Do you write poetry too?” asked Wallander.

  “Maybe,” she replied. “I don’t know whether they’re really poems. But sometimes I write. Just for myself. Don’t you?”

  “No,” replied Wallander. “Never. I live in a world of police reports and forensic records, full of unpleasant details. Not to mention all the memos from the national police board.”

  She changed the subject so fast that afterwards he thought that she must have planned it all out.

  “How’s it going with Baiba?”

  “It’s going fine with her. How it’s going with us, I’m not so sure. But I’m hoping that she’ll come here to live.”

  “What would she do in Sweden?”

  “She’d live with me,” Wallander replied in surprise.

  Linda slowly shook her head.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Don’t be offended,” she said. “But I hope you realise you’re a difficult person to live with.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Just think about Mama. Why do you think she wanted to live a different life?”

  Wallander didn’t answer. In a vague way he felt he was being judged unfairly.

  “Now you’re angry,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” he replied. “I’m not angry.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m tired.”

  She got up from her chair and sat down next to him on the sofa.

  “This doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” she said. “It just means that I’m growing up. Our conversations are going to be different.”