Before the Frost (14 page)

Suddenly he looked at her.

“What's the first question we should be asking?”

“If she hid the Vespa deliberately, or was only trying to protect it from being stolen.”

He nodded.

“There's a third alternative, of course.”

Linda understood what he was getting at. She should have thought of it right away.

“That someone else hid it.”

“Exactly.”

A dog came running out from one of the paths. It was white with little black spots; Linda couldn't remember what that kind was called. Then another and finally a third dog appeared out of the forest, followed by a woman dressed in rain gear from head to toe. She was walking briskly and put all three of the dogs on leashes when she caught sight of Linda and Wallander. She was in her forties, tall, blond, and attractive. Linda saw her father react instinctively to the presence of a good-looking woman: he stood up straight, pulled up his head to make his throat appear less wrinkled, and held in his stomach.

“Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Wallander and I'm with the Ystad police.”

The woman looked at him skeptically.

“May I see your identification?”

Wallander dug out his wallet, then presented his ID card, which she studied closely.

“Has anything happened?”

“No. Do you often walk your dogs in this area?”

“Twice a day, actually.”

“That must mean you know these paths very well.”

“Yes, I would say I do. Why?”

He ignored her last question.

“Do you meet many people in the forest?”

“Not during the fall. Spring and summer there are a fair number of people in the park, but soon it will only be dog owners who make the effort. That's always a relief. Then I can let the dogs off the leash.”

“But aren't they supposed to stay on the leash year-round? That's what the sign says.”

He pointed at a sign a few feet away. She raised her eyebrows.

“Is that why you're here? To catch women who let their dogs run loose?”

“No. There's something I'd like to show you.”

The dogs strained impatiently on their leashes while Wallander lifted away some of the undergrowth to reveal the Vespa.

“Have you ever seen this scooter before? It belongs to a woman in her sixties by the name of Birgitta Medberg.”

The dogs immediately wanted to pull forward and sniff it, but they were firmly restrained by their owner. Her voice was steady and without hesitation.

“Yes,” she said. “I've seen both the Vespa and the woman. Quite a few times.”

“When did you see her last?”

She thought about it.

“Yesterday.”

Wallander threw a quick glance at Linda, who was standing to one side, listening.

“Are you sure?”

“No, not completely. But I think it was yesterday.”

“Why can't you be sure?”

“I've seen her so often over the last few weeks.”

“The last few weeks? Can you be more precise?”

She thought about it again before answering.

“I suppose all through July, perhaps the last week of June. That was when I first saw her. She was walking on a path on the other side of the lake and we stopped and chatted for a bit. She told me she was mapping old walking trails around Rannesholm. I saw her again from time to time after that. She had many interesting stories to tell. Neither I nor my husband had any idea that there were pilgrim trails on our property. We live in the manor,” she added, “My husband manages an investment fund. My name is Anita Tademan.”

She looked at the Vespa again and her expression became anxious.

“Is something wrong?”

“We don't know. I have one last question for you. When you last saw her, which path was she on?”

Anita Tademan pointed back over her shoulder.

“That one I was just on. It's a good one when it rains because the canopy is so thick. She found a completely overgrown path in there that starts about five hundred meters into the forest next to a fallen beech tree. That was where I last saw her.”

“Then I have no more questions for you,” Wallander said.

“Can't you tell me what this is all about?”

“She may have disappeared. We're still not sure.”

“How awful. That nice woman.”

“Was she always on her own?” Linda asked.

The question flew out of her mouth before she had a chance to stop herself. Wallander looked over at her with surprise but did not look angry.

“I never saw her with anyone,” Anita Tademan said. “And if that's all your questions I must be on my way.”

She let the dogs off their leashes and started walking up the road that led up to the castle. Linda and her father stood watching her for a while.

“A beauty.”

“Snobby and rich,” Linda said. “Hardly your type.”

“Never say never,” he said. “I know how to behave in polite society. Both your mother and your aunt have taught me well.”

He looked down at his watch and then up at the sky.

“We'll go five hundred meters and see if we find anything.”

He started down the path at a quick pace. She followed him and was forced to half-run in order to keep up with him. A strong scent of wet earth rose up from the forest floor. The path wound around boulders and the exposed roots of old trees. They heard a pigeon fly up from a branch, and then another.

 

Linda was the one who spotted it. Wallander was walking so fast he didn't see where a thin path branched off to one side. She shouted out to him and he backtracked.

“I was counting,” she said. “This is about four hundred fifty meters in.”

“The woman said five hundred.”

“If you don't count every step, five hundred can feel like four or six hundred meters, depending.”

“I know how to judge distances,” he said, irritated.

They started following the new path that was only barely visible. But both of them noted soft imprints.
One pair of boots,
Linda thought.
One person
.

The path led them deep into a part of the forest that looked untouched. They stopped at the edge of a shallow ravine that cut through the forest. Wallander crouched down and picked at the moss with his finger.

They made their way carefully into the ravine. At one point
Linda's foot was caught in some roots and she fell. A branch broke and sounded like a gunshot. They heard birds fly up all around them although they couldn't see them.

“Are you all right?”

Linda brushed the mud from her clothes.

“I'm fine.”

Wallander made his way through the brush and Linda followed closely. He parted a few of the branches in front of them and suddenly she saw a small hut. It was like something out of a fairy tale, the house of a witch, the shack leaned up against the rock face. A broken pail lay half-buried in the earth outside the door. Both of them listened attentively for sounds, but there were none. Only the occasional tap of a raindrop.

“Wait here,” Wallander said and walked up to the door.

Wallander opened the door and looked in, flinched, and stepped back. Linda caught up with him and pushed past him to peer inside. At first she didn't know what she was looking at.

Then she realized that they had found Birgitta Medberg.

Or, more precisely, what remained of her.

PART II

the void

16

What Linda saw through the open door, that which had caused her father to flinch and stumble backward, resembled something she had once seen as a child. The image flickered to life in her mind; she had seen it in a book Mona had inherited from her mother, the other grandmother Linda had never met. It was a large book with old-fashioned type, a book of Bible stories. She remembered the full-page illustrations, protected by a translucent sheet of tissue paper. One of the pictures depicted the scene she was now witnessing firsthand, with only one difference. In the book the picture had shown a man's head with closed eyes, placed on a gleaming tray, a woman dancing in the background. Salome with her veils. That picture had made an almost unbearably strong impression on her.

Perhaps it was only now, when the picture had escaped from the page, the memory resurrected in the guise of a woman, that the moment of childhood horror was fully replaced. Linda stared at Birgitta Medberg's severed head on the earth floor. Her clasped hands lay close by, but that was all. The rest of her body was missing. Linda heard her father groan in the background, then she felt his hands on her back as he dragged her away.

“Don't look!” he shouted. “You shouldn't see this. Turn back.”

He slammed the door shut. Linda was so scared she was shaking. She scuttled back up the side of the ravine, ripping her pants in the process. Her father was at her heels. They ran until they reached the main path.

“What is going on?” she heard him mutter under his breath. “What's happened?”

He called the station and gave the alarm, using code words that
she knew were meant to slip under the noses of journalists and curious amateurs listening in on police radio communications. Then they returned to the parking lot and waited. Fourteen minutes went by until they heard the first sirens in the distance. They had said nothing to each other during their wait. Linda was shaken and wanted to be with her father but he turned his back and took a few steps away. Linda had trouble making sense of what she had seen. At the same time another fear was mounting, a fear that this was somehow connected with Anna.
What if there is a connection,
she thought despairingly.
And now one of them is dead, butchered
. She interrupted her train of thought and crouched down on the ground, suddenly faint. Her father looked over at her and started to walk over. She forced herself to stand and shook her head at him as if to say it was nothing, a momentary weakness.

Now she was the one who turned her back to him. She tried to think clearly—slowly, deliberately, but above all clearly.
An officer who can't think clearly can't do her job
. She had written this statement on a piece of paper and pinned it to the wall next to her bed. She knew she always had to keep her cool, but how was she supposed to do that when right now she felt like bursting into tears? There was no trace of calm in her mind, only terrible flashes of the severed head and clasped hands. And even worse, the question of what had happened to Anna. She couldn't keep new images from forming in her mind: Anna's head, Anna's hands. John the Baptist's head on a plate and Anna's hands, Anna's head and Birgitta Medberg's hands.

The rain had started again. Linda ran over to her father and showered his chest with blows.

“Now do you believe me? Don't you realize something must have happened to Anna?”

Wallander grabbed her shoulders, trying to keep her at arm's length.

“Calm down. That was Birgitta Medberg in there, not Anna.”

“But Anna wrote in her diary that she knew her. And now Anna is gone. Don't you get it?”

“You have to calm down. That's all.”

Linda slowly regained control of herself, or rather, felt a paralysis
settle over her. Three, then four police cars came slipping and sliding into the muddy parking lot. The police officers got out and gathered around Wallander after quickly having thrown on the rain gear that they all seemed to keep stashed in the backs of their cars. Linda stood outside the circle, but no one tried to stop her when she eventually joined them. Martinsson was the only one who acknowledged her, with a nod, but even he never asked her what she was doing there. At that moment, in the rainy parking lot by Rannesholm Manor, Linda cut the cord to her life at the police academy. She fell in line behind the others and followed them in their long train into the forest. When a crime scene technician dropped a light stand, she picked it up and carried it for him.

She stayed there while day turned into dusk and finally evening. Rain clouds came and went, the ground was saturated with moisture, the lights erected around the site cast strong shadows. The crime scene technicians painstakingly marked out a working path to the hut. Linda took care not to get in their way, and she never put her foot down without placing it in someone else's footprint. Sometimes her father met her gaze, but it was as if he could not really see her. Ann-Britt Höglund was always at his side. Linda had bumped into her from time to time since she came back to Ystad, but Linda had never liked her. In fact, she felt her father would do best to stay away from her. Höglund had barely greeted her today, and Linda sensed she would not be an easy person to work with, if that ever became the case. Of course, Höglund was a full-fledged detective inspector, while Linda was a rookie who hadn't even started working yet and who would be busy breaking up street fights before she even had the opportunity to apply for a more specialized line of work.