“Is that how it was?” he asked. “You wanted to dispense justice? You wanted to punish those who should have been brought before a court of law but never were?”
“Who’s looking for the man who killed my mother? Who?”
She fell silent again. Wallander could see how it had all begun. Some months after the letter came from Africa she broke into Holger Eriksson’s house. That was the first step. When he asked her point blank if it was true, she didn’t even act surprised. She took it for granted that he knew.
“I heard about Krista Haberman,” she said. “That it was the car dealer who killed her.”
“Who did you hear it from?”
“A Polish woman in the hospital in Malmo. That was many years ago.”
“You were working at the hospital then?”
“I worked there several different times. I often talked to women who had been abused. She had a friend who used to know Krista Haberman.”
“Why did you break into Eriksson’s house?”
“I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible, and I was looking for signs that Krista Haberman had been there.”
“Why did you dig the pit? Why the stakes? Did the woman who knew Krista Haberman suspect that the body was buried near that ditch?”
She didn’t answer. But Wallander understood anyway. Despite the fact that the investigation had always been hard to grasp, Wallander and his colleagues had been on the right track without knowing it. Ander had echoed the men’s brutality in her methods of killing them.
During the five or six meetings Wallander had with Ander, he went methodically through the three murders, clearing up details and piecing together the connections that had previously been so vague. He continued to talk to her without a tape recorder. After the meetings he would sit in his car and make notes from memory. Then he would have them typed up. A copy went to Per Akeson, who was preparing the indictment, which would inevitably lead to a conviction on three counts. Yet the whole time, Wallander knew he was just scraping the surface. The real descent hadn’t even started yet. The evidence would send her to prison. But he wouldn’t find the actual truth he sought until he reached the deepest depths of the pit.
She had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, of course. Wallander knew it was unavoidable, but he insisted that it be postponed. Right now the most important thing was that he be able to talk to her in peace. No-one objected to this. They understood that she would probably clam up again if she was upset. She was ready to talk to him and him alone.
They went further, slowly, step by step, day by day. Outside the jail the autumn was deepening and drawing them towards winter. Wallander never found out why Eriksson had driven up to get Krista Haberman in Svenstavik and then killed her. Presumably it was because she had denied him something he was used to getting. Maybe an argument turned violent.
He moved on to Gosta Runfeldt. She was convinced that Runfeldt had murdered his wife, drowned her in Stang Lake. And even if he hadn’t done it, he still deserved his fate. He had abused her so severely that she actually wanted to die. Hoglund was right when she sensed that Runfeldt had been attacked in the florist’s shop. Ander had found out that he would be leaving for Nairobi and lured him to the shop by telling him that she had to buy flowers for a reception early the next morning. Then she knocked him to the ground. The blood on the floor was indeed his. The broken window was a diversion to fool the police into believing it was a break-in.
Then came a description of what for Wallander was the most terrifying element. Until that point he had tried to understand her without letting his emotional reactions take over. But then he couldn’t go any further. She recounted with utter calm how she had undressed Gosta Runfeldt, tied him up, and forced him into the baking oven. When he could no longer control his bodily functions she took away his underwear and laid him on a plastic sheet.
Later she led him out to the woods. By that time he was quite powerless. She tied him to the tree and strangled him. It was at that moment that she turned into a monster in Wallander’s eyes. It didn’t matter if she was a man or a woman. She became a monster, and he could only be thankful that they had stopped her before she killed Tore Grunden or anyone else on the list she had made.
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.