Free The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell Page A

had happened.
    Wallander wiped the rain off his face and told them. He knew that his voice was unsteady. He turned and pointed down towards the flock of rooks, which had returned as soon as he left the ditch.
    “He’s lying down there,” he said. “He’s dead. It’s a murder. Get a full team out here.”
    They waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t have anything to say.

CHAPTER 6
    By nightfall on Thursday, 29 September, the police had put a canopy over the ditch where the body of Holger Eriksson hung impaled on nine solid bamboo poles. They had shovelled out the mud and blood at the bottom of the ditch. The macabre work and the relentless rain made the murder scene one of the most depressing and disgusting Wallander and his colleagues had ever witnessed. The clay stuck to their gumboots, they tripped over electrical cables winding through the mud, and the harsh light from the floodlights they had rigged up intensified the surreal impression. Sven Tyrén had come back and identified the man impaled on the stakes. It was Eriksson, all right, Tyrén told them. No doubt about it. The search for the missing man had ended even before it had begun. Tyrén remained unusually composed, as though not fully comprehending what he saw before him. He paced restlessly outside the cordon for several hours without saying a word, and then suddenly he was gone.
    Down in the ditch Wallander felt like a rat drowning in a trap. His colleagues were having a hard time. Both Svedberg and Hansson had left the ditch several times because of acute nausea. But Höglund, the person he most wanted to send home early, appeared unperturbed.
    Chief Holgersson had come out as soon as the discovery had been reported. She organised the murder scene so that people wouldn’t slip and fall on top of each other, but a young police trainee stumbled in the clay and fell into the ditch, injuring his hand on one of the stakes. The wound was patched up by a doctor who was trying to work out how to remove the corpse. Wallander happened to see the trainee slip and got a glimpse of what must have happened when Eriksson fell.
    Almost the first thing he had done with Nyberg, their forensic technician, was examine the rough planks. Tyrén had confirmed that they had formed a bridge. Eriksson had placed them there. He told them that he’d once been invited to the tower. Eriksson had been a passionate bird-watcher. It wasn’t a hunting tower, but a viewing tower. The missing binoculars were hanging around Eriksson’s neck. It took Nyberg only a few minutes to determine that the planks had been sawed through. After hearing this, Wallander climbed up out of the ditch and went off to think. He tried to assemble the sequence of events. When Nyberg discovered that the binoculars had night vision, he began to have some idea. At the same time he found it difficult to accept his interpretation. If he was right, then they were dealing with a murder that had been planned and prepared with such ghastly and cruel perfection as to be almost unbelievable.
    Late in the evening they started removing Eriksson’s corpse from the ditch. Along with the doctor and Chief Holgersson, they had to decide whether to dig out the bamboo poles, saw them off, or choose the gruesome option of hoisting the body free from the stakes. On Wallander’s recommendation they chose the last option. They needed to see the murder scene exactly as it was before Eriksson stepped on the planks and fell to his death. Wallander felt compelled to take part in this grisly final act as Eriksson was lifted upwards and then taken away. It was past midnight when they finished; the rain had eased but showed no sign of stopping, and all that could be heard was a generator and the sound of gumboots squelching through the mud.
    There was a momentary lull. Somebody had brought coffee. Weary faces glowed eerily in the white light. Wallander thought he ought to formulate an overview. What had actually happened?