Before the Frost (3 page)

They left. Linda read a sign on the side of the road. MOSSBY BEACH. He glanced at her.

“You want to go down there?”

“Yes. If you have time.”

This was the place where she had first told him about her decision to become a police officer. She was done with her vague plans to refinish furniture, become an actress, as well as her extensive backpacking trips all over the world. It was a long time since she had broken up with her first love, a young man from Kenya who was studying medicine in Lund. He had finally returned to his home-land and she had stayed put. Linda had looked to her mother Mona to provide her with clues about how to live her own life, but all she saw in her mother was a woman who left everything half-done. Mona had wanted two children and only had one. She had thought that Kurt Wallander would be the great and only passion of her life, but she had divorced him and married a golf-playing retired banker in Malmö.

Eventually Linda had started looking more closely at her father, the detective chief inspector, the man who was always forgetting to pick her up at the airport when she came to visit. The one who never had time for her. She came to see that in spite of everything, now that her grandfather was dead, he was the one she was closest to. One morning, just after she had woken up, she had realized that what she wanted was to do what he did, be a police officer. She had
kept her thoughts to herself for a year and only talked about it with her boyfriend at the time, but finally she became sure of it, broke up with her boyfriend, flew down to Skåne, took her father to this beach, and told him her news. He asked for a minute to digest what she had said, which made her suddenly anxious. Before she told him she was convinced he would be happy about her decision. Watching his broad back and his thinning hair blowing up in the wind, she prepared for a fight. But when he turned around and smiled at her, she knew.

They walked down to the beach. Linda poked her foot into some horse prints in the sand. Wallander looked at a seagull that hung almost motionless in the air.

“What are your thoughts now?” she asked.

“You mean, about the house?”

“I mean, about the fact that I'll soon be wearing a police uniform.”

“It's hard for me even to imagine. It will probably be upsetting for me, though I don't feel that way now.”

“Why upsetting?”

“I know what lies in store for you. It's not hard to put the uniform on, but then to walk out in public is another thing. You'll notice that everyone looks at you. You become the Police Officer, the one who is supposed to jump in and take care of any conflicts. I know what it feels like.”

“I'm not afraid.”

“I'm not talking about fear. I'm talking about the fact that from the first day you put on the uniform it will always be in your life.”

She sensed he might be right.

“How do you think I'll do?”

“You did well at the academy. You'll do well here. It's up to you in the end.”

They strolled along the beach. She told him she was about to go to Stockholm for a few days. Her graduating class was having a final party, a cadet ball, before everyone spread across the country to their new posts.

“We never had anything like that,” Wallander said. “I didn't receive much of an education, either. I still wonder how they chose
the applicants when I was young. I think they were interested in raw strength. You had to have some intelligence, of course. I do remember that I had quite a few beers with a friend after I graduated. Not in public, but at his place on South Förstadsgatan in Malmö.”

He shook his head. Linda couldn't tell if the memory amused or pained him.

“I was still living at home,” he said. “I thought Dad was going to keel over when I came home in my uniform.”

“How come he hated it so much—you becoming a police officer?”

“I think I only figured it out after he died. He tricked me.”

Linda stopped.

“Tricked you?”

He looked at her, smiling.

“What I think now is that it was actually fine with him that I chose to be a policeman. But instead of telling me straight out, it amused him to keep me on my toes. And he certainly managed to do that, as you know.”

“You really believe that?”

“No one knew him better than I did. I know I'm right. He was a scoundrel through and through. A wonderful man, but a scoundrel. The only father I ever had.”

They walked back to the car. The clouds were breaking up, and it was getting warmer. Wallander looked down at his watch when they were leaving.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

“I'm in a hurry to start working, that's all. Why do you ask?”

“There's something I should look into. I'll tell you about it while we drive.”

They turned onto the highway to Trelleborg and turned off by Charlottenlund Castle.

“I wanted to drive by since we were in the neighborhood.”

“Drive by what?”

“Marebo Manor. Or more precisely, Marebo Lake.”

The road was narrow and windy. Wallander told her about it in a somewhat disjointed and confusing way. She wondered if his written police reports were as disorganized as the summary she was getting.

Yesterday evening a man had called the Ystad police. He had not
given them a name or location and he spoke with a strange accent. He had said that burning swans were flying over Marebo Lake. When the officer on duty had asked him for more details, the man hung up. The conversation was duly logged, but no one had followed up on it since there had been a serious assault case in Svarte that evening, as well as two robberies in central Ystad. The officer in charge had decided that it was most likely a prank call or a matter of hallucinations, but when Wallander later heard about it from his colleague Martinsson he decided it was so bizarre that there might be some truth to it.

“Setting fire to swans? Who would do anything like that?”

“A sadist. Someone who hates birds.”

“Do you honestly think it happened?”

Wallander turned off onto a road leading to Marebo Lake and took his time before answering.

“They didn't teach you that at the academy? That policemen don't think anything? They only want to know. But they have to remain open to all possibilities, however unlikely. That includes something like a report about burning swans. It could turn out to be true.”

Linda didn't ask any more questions. They parked the car in a small parking lot and walked down to the lake. Linda walked behind her father and felt as if she was already wearing a uniform.

They walked around the entire lake but found no trace of a dead swan. Neither of them noticed that someone was following their progress through the lens of a telescope.

4

Linda flew to Stockholm a few days later. Zeba had helped her make a dress for the cadet ball. It was light blue and cut low across her chest and back. The class organizers had rented a big room on Hornsgatan. All sixty-eight of them were there, even the prodigal son of the group who had not managed to hide his drinking problem. No one knew who had blown the whistle on him, so in a way they all felt responsible. Linda thought he was like their ghost; he would always be out there in the fall darkness with a deep-seated longing to be forgiven and taken back into the fold.

On this occasion, their last chance to say good-bye to each other and their teachers, Linda drank far too much wine. She wasn't a novice drinker by any means, and she could usually pace herself. This evening she knew she was drinking too much. She felt more impatient than ever to start working as she talked with student colleagues who had already taken the plunge. Her best friend from the academy, Mattias Olsson, had taken a job in Norrköping rather than return to his home in Sundsvall. He had already managed to distinguish himself by felling a bodybuilder who had taken too many steroids and run amuck.

There was dancing, speeches, and a relatively amusing song roasting the teachers. Linda's dress received many compliments. It would have been an altogether enjoyable evening if there hadn't been a TV set in the kitchen.

Someone heard on the late-night news that a police officer had been shot down on the outskirts of Enköping. This news quickly spread among the dancing, intoxicated cadets and their teachers. The music was turned off and the TV set brought out from the kitchen.
Afterward Linda thought it was as if everyone had been kicked in the stomach. The party was over. They sat there in their long gowns and dark suits and saw footage of the crime scene as well as images of the officer who had been murdered. It had been a cold-blooded killing that occurred while he and his partner tried to question the driver of a stolen car. Two men had jumped out of the car and opened fire on the policemen with automatic weapons. Their intention had clearly been to kill. No warning shot had been fired.

Everyone went home late that evening. Linda was on her way to her aunt Kristina's apartment when she stopped at Mariatorget and called her father. It was three o'clock in the morning and she could tell from his voice that he was barely awake. For some reason that made her furious. How could he sleep when a colleague had just been killed? That was also what she said to him.

“My not sleeping won't help anybody. Where are you?”

“On my way to Kristina's.”

“You mean the party went on until now? What time is it?”

“Three. It ended when we heard the news.”

She heard him breathing heavily, as if his body had still not decided to become fully awake.

“What's that noise in the background?”

“Traffic. I'm trying to catch a cab.”

“Who's with you?”

“No one.”

“Are you crazy? You can't run around alone in Stockholm at this hour!”

“I'm fine, I'm not a child. Sorry I woke you up.”

She hung up on him.
This happens way too often,
she thought.
He has no idea how infuriating he is.

She flagged down a taxi and was driven to Gärdet, where Kristina, her husband, and their eighteen-year-old son lived. Kristina had made up the sofa bed in the living room for her. The room was partly lit up from the streetlights outside. There was a photo of Linda and her father and mother in the bookcase. She remembered when the picture was taken; she was fourteen years old, it was sometime in the spring, and they had driven out to her grandfather's house in Löderup. Her dad had won the camera in an office raffle and then,
when they were about to take a family picture, her grandfather had suddenly balked and locked himself in his studio. Her dad had been extremely upset and her mom had sulked. Linda was the one who tried to convince her grandfather to come out and be in the picture.

“I won't have my picture taken with those two people and their fake smiles when I know they're about to leave each other,” he said.

She could remember to this day how that had hurt. Even though she knew how insensitive he could sometimes be, the words still felt like a slap in the face. When she had collected herself she asked him if what he had said was true, if he knew something she didn't.

“It won't help matters if you keep turning a blind eye,” he said. “Go on. You're supposed to be in that picture. Maybe I'm wrong about all this.”

Her grandfather was often wrong, but not this time. And he had refused to be in the picture, which they took with the self-timer on the camera. The following year—the last year her parents lived together—the tensions in their home only escalated.

That was the year she had tried to commit suicide. Twice. The first time, when she had slit her wrists, it was her dad who found her. She remembered how frightened he had looked. But the doctors must have reassured him, since he and her mother said very little about it. Most of what they communicated was through looks and eloquent silences. But it propelled her parents into the last series of violent disputes that finally persuaded Mona to pack her bags and leave.

Linda had often thought how remarkable it was that she hadn't felt responsibility for her parents' breakup. On the contrary, she felt that she had done them a favor and helped catapult them out of a marriage that in all but name had ended long before.

He didn't know about the second time.

That was the biggest secret she kept from her father. Sometimes she thought he must have heard about it, but in the end she remained convinced he had never found out. The second time she tried to kill herself it was for real.

She had been sixteen years old and had gone to stay with her
mother in Malmö. It was a time of crushing defeats, the kind only a teenager can experience. She hated herself and her body, shunning the image she saw in the mirror while she also strangely enough welcomed the changes she was undergoing. The depression hit her out of nowhere, beginning as a set of symptoms too vague to take seriously. Suddenly it was a fact, and her mother had had absolutely no inkling of what was going on. What had shaken Linda the most was that Mona had said no when she pleaded to be allowed to move to Malmö. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with her dad; she just wanted to get out of Ystad. But Mona had been surprisingly cool.

Linda had left the apartment in a rage. It had been a day in early spring when there was still snow lying on the ground here and there. The wind blowing in from the sound had a sharp bite. She wandered along the city streets, not noticing where she was going. When she looked up she was on an overpass to the freeway. Without really knowing why, she climbed up onto the railing and stood there, swaying slightly. She looked down at the cars rushing past below with their sharp lights slicing the dark. She wasn't aware of how long she stood there. She felt no fear or self-pity; she simply waited for the cold and the fatigue spreading in her limbs to get her finally to step out into the void.