Before the Frost (10 page)

Widén was one of her dad's oldest friends, and now he was seriously ill. Her dad had a habit of talking about himself in the third person when it came to expressing something emotional and he had taken to saying:
When Sten dies Kurt Wallander will be a lonely man
. Widén had lung cancer. Linda was familiar with the story of how he had raised fine racing horses on the ranch by the ruins of Stjärnsund Castle. A few years ago he had sold the ranch, but just as the buyer was about to close on the deal, Widén had changed his mind and used the clause in the contract that allowed this. He had bought a few more horses and received his diagnosis shortly afterward. It had already been a year since then, a grace period given
the severity of his condition. Now he was again selling his horses and his ranch. He had arranged a bed for himself at a hospice in Malmö. This time there was no backing out of the deal.

Linda went to her room, put on her pajamas, and climbed into bed. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling and reproached herself for being so hard on her dad. Why shouldn't he be allowed to enjoy a night of drinking with his best friend, especially since the friend happened to be dying?
I've always thought of Dad as a good friend to the few he has. It's only right that he stay up late drinking in the stables
. She felt like waking him up so she could apologize for her disapproval. But he wouldn't appreciate being woken up.
It's his day off tomorrow. Maybe we'll do something fun
.

Before she fell asleep she thought briefly about Henrietta and the fact that she hadn't been telling the truth. What was she hiding? Did she know where Anna was, or was there another reason? Linda curled up on her side and thought sleepily that soon she was going to miss having a boyfriend to cuddle up with.
But where am I going to find one in this town?
She pushed her thoughts aside and fell asleep.

 

Wallander shook her awake at nine o'clock. Linda jumped out of bed. Her dad didn't seem hung over. He was dressed and had even combed his hair.

“Breakfast,” he said. “Time is ticking, life is fleeting.”

Linda showered and dressed. Her dad was playing patience at the kitchen table when she came in and sat down.

“I suspect you were hanging out with Sten last night.”

“Right.”

“I also suspect you drank too much.”

“Wrong. We drank way too much.”

“How did you get home?”

“Taxi.”

“How was he doing?”

“I wish I could be sure I'll face the end with the same equanimity. He simply says: you only have so many races in your life. You just have to try to win as many of them as you can.”

“Do you think he's in pain?”

“I'm sure he is, but he doesn't say anything. He's like Rydberg.”

“I don't really remember him.”

“He was an old colleague of mine with a mole on his cheek. Anyway, he was the one who made a policeman out of me when I was young and didn't understand anything. He died much too early, but without a single word of complaint. He had also run his races and accepted the fact that his time was up.”

“Who's going to be that kind of mentor to me?”

“I thought you had been assigned to Martinsson.”

“Is he any good?”

“He's an excellent policeman.”

“You know, I have memories of Martinsson from when I was a kid. I don't know how many times you came home angry about something he had done or said.”

Wallander reached an impasse and gathered up his cards.

“I was the one who trained Martinsson, just as Rydberg trained me. Of course I probably came home and complained about him. He can be damned thick-headed. But once he gets something down, he never forgets it.”

“So that makes you my mentor indirectly.”

Wallander got up.

“I don't even know what that word means. Come on, we're leaving.”

She looked at him with surprise.

“Is this something we talked about? Did I forget something?”

“We said we would go out—not where. It's going to be a beautiful day, and before you know it the fog will be here to stay. I hate the fog in SkÃ¥ne. It creeps right into one's head. I can't think straight when it's gray and misty everywhere. But you're right that we have a goal today.”

He sat down again and filled his cup with the last of the coffee before continuing.

“Hansson. Do you remember him?”

Linda shook her head.

“I didn't think you would. He's another one of my colleagues. Now he's about to sell his parents' house outside Tomelilla. His mother has been dead a long time, but his father turned a hundred and one before he went. According to Hansson he was clear-headed
and mean-spirited to the end. But the house is up for sale and I want to take a look at it. If Hansson hasn't been exaggerating, it may just be what I'm looking for.”

There was a breeze but it was warm. When they drove past a long caravan of well-polished vintage cars, Linda surprised her father by recognizing most of the models.

“Since when do you know about cars?'

“Since my last boyfriend, Magnus.”

“I thought his name was Ludwig.”

“You have to keep up, Dad. Anyway, isn't Tomelilla all wrong for you? I thought you wanted to sit on a bench with your faithful dog, looking out over the sea.”

“I don't have that kind of money. I'll have to settle for the next-best thing.”

“You could get a loan from Mom. Her golf-playing banker is pretty loaded.”

“Never in a million years.”

“I could borrow it for you.”

“Never.”

“No view of the sea for you, then.”

Linda glanced at her father. Was he angry? She couldn't decide. But she realized this was also something they had in common, flare-ups of irritation, a tendency to be hurt by almost nothing.
Sometimes we are so close and other times it's like a crevasse has opened up between us. And then we have to build rickety bridges that usually manage to connect us again
.

He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket.

“Map,” he said. “Give me the directions. We're going to get to the roundabout at the top of the page soon. I know we go in the direction of Kristianstad but you'll have to guide me from there.”

“I'm going to trick you into SmÃ¥land,” she said and unfolded the paper. “Tingsryd? Does that sound good? We'll never find our way back from there.”

The house was attractively situated on a little hill surrounded by a strip of forest, beyond which there were open fields and marshes. A bird—a kite, it looked like—was suspended in the air currents above the house, and in the distance there was the rising and
falling sound of a tractor at work. Linda sat down on an old stone bench between some red-currant bushes. Her father squinted at the roof, tugged on the drainpipes, and tried to peer into the house. Then he disappeared around the other side.

As soon as he was gone, Linda started thinking about Henrietta. Now that some time had passed since the visit, her intuition had solidified into certainty: Henrietta had not been telling her the truth. She was hiding something about Anna. Linda dialed Anna's number on her cell phone and got the answering machine. She didn't leave a message. She put her phone away and walked around the house to find her father. He was pulling at an old water pump that squeaked and sprayed brown water into a bucket. He shook his head.

“If I could move this house next to the sea I'd take it in a minute,” he said. “But there's just too much forest for my taste.”

“What about living in a trailer?” Linda suggested. “Then you could camp on the beach. Lots of people would be happy to let you stay on their land.”

“And why is that?”

“Who wouldn't want free police protection?”

He grimaced and walked back to the car. Linda followed.
He's not going to turn around,
she thought.
He's already put this place behind him
.

Linda watched the kite swoop over the fields and disappear over the horizon.

“What now?” he asked her.

Linda immediately thought of Anna. She realized she wanted most of all to talk to her father about it, about the worry she felt.

“I'd like to talk,” she said. “But not here.”

“I know just the place.”

“Where?”

“You'll see.”

They drove south, turning left toward Malmö and leaving the main road at a turnoff for Kade Lake. The forest around the lake was one of the most beautiful Linda had ever seen. She had had a feeling her dad was going to take her here. They had taken many walks here when she was younger, especially when she was about ten or eleven. She also had a vague memory of being here with her mom, but she could not remember the whole family coming together.

They left the car by a stack of timber. The huge logs gave off a fresh scent, as if they had been recently felled. They walked through the forest, on a path that led to the strange metal statue erected to the memory of the warrior king Charles XII, who was rumored to have visited Kade Lake in his day. Linda was about to start talking about Anna when her dad raised his hand. They had stopped in a narrow glen surrounded by tall trees.

“This is my cemetery,” he said.

“Your what?”

“This is one of my secrets, maybe the biggest, and I'll probably regret telling you this tomorrow. I've assigned all the trees that you see here to the friends I've had who've died. Even your grandfather is here, my mother and my old relatives.”

He pointed to a young oak.

“I've given this tree to Stefan Fredman, the desperate Indian. Even he belongs in my collection of the dead.”

“What about the other one you talked about?”

“Yvonne Ander? She's over there.”

He pointed to another oak with an extensive network of branches.

“I came here a week or so after your grandfather died. I felt as if I had completely lost my footing in life. You were much stronger than I was. I was sitting down at the station trying to figure out a brutal assault case. Ironically it was a young man who had half-killed his father with a sledgehammer. The boy lied about everything and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. I halted the interrogation and came here, and that's when I felt that these trees had become gravestones for all the people I knew who had died. That I should come here to visit with them, not where they are actually buried. Whenever I'm here I feel a calm I don't feel anywhere else. I can hug the dead here without them seeing me.”

“I won't tell anyone,” she said. “Thanks for sharing it with me.”

They lingered a while longer. Linda wanted to ask about the identity of a few more of the trees but she said nothing. The sun was shining through the leaves, but the wind picked up and it immediately became colder. Linda took a deep breath and launched into the topic of Anna's disappearance.

“It'll drive me up the wall if you shake your head at me and tell me I'm imagining things. But if you can explain to me exactly why I'm wrong, I promise I'll pay attention.”

“There's something you'll find out when you become a police officer,” he said. “The unexplainable almost never happens. Even a disappearance turns out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation. You'll learn to differentiate between the unexplained and the merely unexpected. The unexpected can look baffling until you have the necessary background information. This is generally the case with disappearances. You don't know what's happened to Anna and it's only natural that it would worry you, but my intuition tells me you should draw on the highest virtue of our profession.”

“Patience?”

“Exactly.”

“For how long?”

“A few more days. She'll have turned up by then, or at least been in touch.”

“I'm still convinced her mother was lying to me.”

“I'm not sure your mother and I always stuck to the truth when we were asked about you.”

“I'll try to be patient, but I do feel like there's more to this. It's not right.”

They returned to the car. It was past one o'clock and Linda suggested they stop for lunch somewhere. They chose a roadside restaurant with the funny name My Father's Hat. Wallander had a fleeting recollection of lunching with his father at this restaurant and ending up in a huge argument. He couldn't remember what their argument had been about.

They were drinking their coffee when a phone rang. Linda fumbled for hers but it turned out to be her father's. He answered, listened, and made a few notes on the back of the check.

“What was that?”

“Someone's been reported missing.”

He put money on the table and tucked the bill into his pocket.

“What do you have to do now?” Linda asked. “Who's disappeared?”

“We'll go back to Ystad via Skurup. A widow by the name of
Birgitta Medberg has been reported missing. Her daughter is worried.”

“What are the circumstances?”

“The caller wasn't sure. Apparently the woman is a historian interested in mapping old walkways and she often does extensive fieldwork, sometimes in very dense forest. An unusual occupation.”

“So she may simply be lost?”

“My first thought. We'll soon find out.”

 

Wallander called the daughter of Birgitta Medberg to tell her he was on his way, and then they drove to Skurup. The wind was blustery. It was nine minutes past three on August 29.

12

They stopped in front of a two-story brick building—
quintessentially Swedish,
Linda thought.
Wherever you go in this country the houses all look the same. The central square in Västerås could be replaced with the one in Örebro, and this Skurup apartment building could as easily be in Sollentuna
.