It was a reasonable question.
“Most of all it’ll tell us that we’re on the right track,” Wallander said. “That the motive connecting these murders is revenge.”
“And you still think it’s a woman behind this?”
“Yes,” replied Wallander. “Now more than ever.”
When the conversation was over, Wallander remained standing outside in the autumn night. The sky was cloudless. A faint breeze blew on his face. They were slowly approaching something — the centre he had spent exactly one month searching for. He still didn’t know what they would find there.
The woman he tried to visualise kept slipping away, yet at the same time he sensed that in some way he might be able to understand her.
Cautiously she opened the door to where they were sleeping. The child lay in the bassinet she had bought that day. Katarina Taxell was curled up in a foetal position on the edge of the bed. She stood still and looked at them. It was as if she were looking at herself. Or maybe it was her sister lying in the crib.
Suddenly she couldn’t see. She was completely surrounded by blood. It’s not just a child who is born in blood. Life itself had its source in the blood that ran out when the skin was cut. Blood that remembered the arteries it had once flowed through. She could see it clearly. Her mother screaming and the man standing over her as she lay on a table with her legs spread. Even though it was 40 years ago, time came rushing towards her from the past. All her life she had tried to escape, but she couldn’t. The memories always caught up with her. But she knew that she no longer needed to fear these memories. Now that her mother was dead, and she was free to do what she wanted, what she had to do to keep the memories at bay.
The feeling of dizziness passed as quickly as it had come. Cautiously she approached the bed and looked at the sleeping child. It wasn’t her sister. This child already had a face. Her sister hadn’t lived long enough to have anything. This was Katarina’s newborn baby. Not her mother’s. Katarina’s child, who would never have to be tormented, haunted by memories.
She felt quite calm again. The images were gone. What she was doing was right. She was preventing people from being tormented as she had been. She had forced those men who had committed violent acts that had gone unpunished, to take the harshest of all roads. Or so she imagined. A man whose life was taken by a woman would never be able to understand what had happened to him.
It was quiet. That was the most important thing. It was the right thing for her to go and get the woman and child. Speak calmly, listen, and tell her that everything that had happened was for the best. Eugen Blomberg had drowned. What it said in the papers about a sack was rumour and exaggeration. Eugen Blomberg was gone. Whether he had stumbled or tripped and then drowned, nobody was to blame. Fate had decided. And fate was just. That’s what she had repeated over and over again, and it seemed as if Katarina was now starting to accept it.
Yesterday she’d had to tell the women that they would have to miss their meeting this week. She didn’t like interrupting her timetable. It created disorder and made it hard for her to sleep. But it was necessary. It wasn’t possible to plan everything.
As long as Katarina and her child stayed with her, she would live at the house in Vollsjo. She had brought along only the essentials from her flat in Ystad: her uniforms and the small box in which she kept her slips of paper and the book of names. Now that Katarina and her child were asleep, she didn’t have to wait any longer. She dumped the slips of paper onto the top of the baking oven, shuffled them, and then began picking them up.
The ninth slip she unfolded had the black cross on it. She opened the ledger and slowly scanned the list, stopped at number 9 and read the name. Tore Grunden. She stood motionless and stared straight ahead. His picture slowly materialised. First as a vague shadow, a few barely visible contours. Then a face, an identity. Now she remembered him. Who he was, and what he had done.
It was more than ten years ago. She was working at the hospital in Malmo. One evening right before Christmas she was working in the casualty ward. The woman in the ambulance was dead on arrival. She had died in a car accident. Her husband had come with her. He was upset, and yet composed, and she was immediately suspicious. She had seen it so many times. Since the woman was dead, there was nothing they could do. But she had taken one of the policemen aside and asked him what happened. It was a tragic accident. Her husband had backed out of the garage without noticing that she was standing behind the car. He had run over her, and her head was crushed under one of the back wheels of the car. It was an accident that shouldn’t have happened. In a moment when she wasn’t being observed, she had pulled the sheet away and looked at the dead woman. She wasn’t a doctor, but she was convinced that the woman had been run over more than once. Later she started investigating. The woman who now lay dead on the stretcher had been admitted to the hospital several times before. Once she had fallen from a ladder. Another time she hit her head hard on a cement floor when she tripped in the basement.
She wrote an anonymous letter to the police. She talked to the doctors who examined the body. But nothing happened. The man was given a fine, or maybe a suspended sentence, for gross negligence. Nothing else happened. Now everything would be made right again. Everything except the life of the dead woman. She couldn’t bring her back.
She started planning how it would take place, but something bothered her. The men who were watching Katarina’s house. They had come to stop her. They were trying to get to her through Katarina. Maybe they had started to suspect that a woman was behind all that had happened. She was counting on that. First they would think it was a man. Then they would begin to have doubts. Finally they would see that they had been looking in the wrong direction.
They would never find her. Never. She looked at the baking oven and thought about Tore Grunden. He lived in Hassleholm and worked in Malmo. Then it came to her how it would happen. It was almost embarrassingly easy. She could do it on the job. During working hours. With pay.
CHAPTER 34
They started digging early on the morning of Friday, 21 October. The light was still quite dim. Wallander and Hansson had marked off the first quadrant with crime-scene tape. The officers, dressed in overalls and gumboots, knew what they were looking for. Their apprehension seemed in tune with the cool morning air. Wallander felt as though he were in a cemetery. Somewhere in the earth they might come upon the remains of a body.
He had put Hansson in charge of the digging. Wallander was going to work with Birch to track down the waitress who had once made Katarina Taxell laugh on a street in Lund. For half an hour, he stayed out in the mud where the men had started digging. Then he walked up the path to the farm where his car was waiting. He called Birch and caught him at home. Birch had managed to discover that they might be able to find the name of the waitress they were looking for in Malmo. Birch was having coffee when Wallander called. They agreed to meet outside the station in Malmo.
This is the fourth woman involved in the investigation. There was Krista Haberman, then Eva Runfeldt and then Katarina Taxell. The waitress was the fourth woman. Was there another woman, a fifth one? Was she the one they were looking for? Or had they reached their goal if they succeeded in finding the waitress? Was she the one who made the night-time visits to Ystad’s maternity ward? Without being able to explain why, he doubted that the waitress was the woman they were really searching for. Maybe she could give them a lead, but he couldn’t hope for much more than that.