The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online

his ears, and was pressing on his eardrums. There were sounds, but they came from inside. An internal rushing that wanted to force its way out. But what bothered him most was that he couldn’t move. That was what was driving him insane. Despite the fact that he was lying down, stretched out on his back, he had the constant feeling that he was falling. A dizzy plummeting, without end. Maybe it was just a hallucination, a manifestation of the fact that he was falling apart from within. Madness was about to shatter his mind into pieces.
    He tried to cling to reality. He forced himself to think. Reason and the ability to remain calm might give him some possible explanation for what had happened. Why can’t I move? Where am I? And why?
    For the longest time he had fought against the panic and madness by forcing himself to keep track of time. He counted minutes and hours, trying to keep to an impossible, endless routine. The darkness never changed, and he had woken up where he lay, fettered on his back. He had no memory of being moved, so there was no beginning. He could have been born right where he lay. For the brief moments when he succeeded in keeping the panic at bay and thinking clearly, he tried to cling to anything that seemed related to reality.
    What could he start from? What he was lying on. That wasn’t his imagination. He was on his back and what he was lying on was hard. His shirt had ridden up just over his left hip and his skin lay against the hard, rough surface. He could feel that he had scraped his skin when he tried to move. He was lying on a cement floor.
    He thought back to the last moment of normality before the darkness had fallen over him, but even that was beginning to seem vague. He knew what had happened, and yet he didn’t. It was when he started to doubt what was his imagination, and what had actually happened, that panic would seize him. Then he would begin to sob. A brief outburst that stopped as quickly as it began, since no-one could hear him anyway. There are people who cry only when they’re out of earshot of others, but he wasn’t one of them.
    Actually that was the one thing he was sure of. That no-one could hear him. Wherever he was, wherever this cement floor of terror had been poured, even if it was floating freely in a universe totally unknown to him, there was no-one close by. Nobody could hear him.
    Beyond the growing madness, these were the only things he had left to hold on to. Everything else had been taken from him, not merely his identity but also his trousers.
    It was the evening before he was supposed to leave for Nairobi. It was almost midnight, he had closed his suitcase and sat down at his desk to go over his travel plans one last time. He could see it all quite clearly. Without knowing it, he was waiting in death’s anteroom, which some unknown person had prepared for him. His passport lay on the left side of his desk, and he held his plane tickets in his hand. The plastic pouch with the dollar notes, credit cards, and traveller’s cheques was on his lap, waiting for him to check them too. Then the telephone rang. He put everything to one side, lifted the receiver, and answered.
    Since that was the last living voice he had heard, he clung to it. It was his only link to the reality that held madness at bay. It was a lovely voice, soft and pleasant, and he knew at once that he was speaking to a stranger – a woman he had never met. She asked if she could buy some roses. She apologised for calling him at home and disturbing him so late, but she was in desperate need of those roses. She didn’t say why. But he trusted her at once. Who would lie about needing roses? He couldn’t remember whether he actually asked her or even wondered why she had discovered she didn’t have the roses she needed so late at night, when there were no florists open. But he hadn’t hesitated. He lived close to his shop, and he wasn’t going to bed yet. It would take him no more than ten