Before the Frost (7 page)

“Did you see anything else?” Wallander asked.

“No, just what I told you.”

“You said, ‘Who would do something like this?' Why? Is there no way it could have been an accident?”

“You think a calf poured gasoline over his own head and lit a match? How likely is that?”

“Let's assume it was a deliberate attack. Did you see anyone when you pulled the curtain away from the window?”

Åkerblom thought hard before answering. Linda tried to anticipate her father's next question.

“I only saw the burning animal.”

“What kind of person do you imagine did this?”

“An insane . . . a fucking lunatic.”

Wallander nodded.

“That's all for now,” he said. “Leave the animal as it is. Someone will be sent out in the morning to take pictures of it and the area.”

They returned to their cars.

“What kind of crazy lunatic bastard ...” Åkerblom muttered.

Wallander didn't answer him. Linda saw how tired he was. His forehead was deeply furrowed and he looked old.
He's worried,
she realized.
First there's the report about the swans, and then a young calf named Apple is burned alive.

It was as if he read her mind. Wallander let his hand rest on the car door handle and turned to Åkerblom.

“Apple,” he said. “That's an unusual name for an animal.”

“I played table tennis when I was younger. I often name my animals after great Swedish champions. I have an ox by the name of Waldner.”

Wallander nodded. Linda could see he was smiling. She knew he appreciated originality.

 

They drove back to Ystad.

“What do you think this is about?” Linda asked.

“The best-case scenario is a pervert who gets a kick out of hurting animals.”

“And that's the best-case scenario?”

He hesitated.

“The worst case would be someone who won't stop at animals,” he said.

8

When Linda woke up the next morning she was alone in the apartment. It was half past seven. The sound of her father slamming the front door must have woken her up.
He does that on purpose,
she thought and stretched out in bed.
He doesn't like me sleeping in
.

She got up and opened the window. It was a clear day, and the nice weather looked like it would continue. She thought about the events of the night, the still-smoking carcass and her father looking suddenly old and worn-out.
It's the anxiety,
she thought.
He can hide a lot from me, but not his anxiety.

She ate breakfast and put on her clothes from yesterday, then changed her mind and tried on two other outfits before deciding what to wear. She called Anna. The answering machine picked up after five rings and she simply asked Anna to answer the phone if she was there. No reply. Linda walked out into the hall and looked at herself in the mirror. Was she still worried about Anna?
No,
she said to herself,
I'm not worried
.
Anna has her reasons. She's most likely chasing down that man she saw on the street, a man she thinks is her long-lost father.

Linda went out for a walk and picked up a newspaper from a bench. She turned to the automobile section and looked at the ads for used cars. There was a Saab for 19,000. Her father had already promised to chip in 10,000, and she knew she wanted a car. But a Saab for 19,000? How long would it last?

She tucked the newspaper into her pocket and walked over to Anna's apartment. No one answered the door. After picking the lock again and letting herself in, she was suddenly struck by the
feeling that someone had been there since she had left the place the night before. She froze and looked all around the hall—the coats hanging in their place, the shoes all in a row. Was anything different? She couldn't put her finger on it but was convinced there was something.

She continued into the living room and sat down on the sofa.
Dad would tell me to look for the impressions people have left behind in this room, of themselves and their dramatic interactions. But I see nothing, only the fact that Anna isn't here.

After combing through the apartment twice, she convinced herself that Anna had not been home during the night. Nor anyone else, for that matter. The only things she saw were tiny, near-invisible traces she herself had left behind.

She went into Anna's bedroom and sat down at the little desk. She hesitated at first, but her curiosity got the better of her. She knew that Anna kept a diary—she had done so since she was little. Linda remembered an incident from middle school when Anna had been sitting in a corner writing in her journal. A boy pulled it out of her hands as a joke but she was so furious that she bit him on the shoulder, and everyone knew to leave the journal alone after that.

Linda pulled out the drawers in the desk. They were full of old diaries, thumbed, crammed with writing. The dates were written on the spines. Up until Anna was sixteen they were all red. After that they were all black.

Linda closed the drawers and looked through some papers lying on the desk. She found the journal Anna was currently keeping.
I'm only going to look at the last entry,
she thought, telling herself it was justified since she was motivated only by her concern for Anna's well-being. She opened the folder at the last entry, from the day that they were supposed to have met. Linda bent over the page; Anna's handwriting was cramped, as if she were trying to hide the words. Linda read the short text twice, first without understanding it, then with a growing sense of bafflement. The words Anna had written made no sense:
myth fear, myth fear, myth fear
. Was it a code?

Linda immediately broke her promise only to look at the last
entry. She turned the page back and there she found regular text. Anna had written:

Further down the page she had noted:

That part was true, Linda thought. She flipped the page to the last line and read it through again. She tried to imagine that she was Anna writing the words. There were no changes in the text, no words scratched out, no hesitations that she could tell. The handwriting looked even and firm.

Myth fear, myth fear, myth fear. I see that I have signed up for nineteen laundry days so far this year. My dream—to the extent I even have one right now—would be to work as an anonymous suburban general practitioner. Do northern towns even have suburbs?

That was where the entry ended. Not a word about the man she'd seen through the hotel window. Not a word or a hint. Nothing.
But isn't that exactly the kind of thing diaries are for?
Linda wondered.

She looked farther back in the book. From time to time her own name appeared.
Linda is a true friend,
she had written on July 20, in the middle of an entry about her mother. She and her mother had
argued over nothing
and later that evening she was planning
to go to Malmö to see a Russian movie
.

Linda sat with the journal for almost an hour, struggling with her conscience. She looked for entries about herself. She found
Linda can be so demanding
on August 4.
What did we do that day,
Linda wondered. She couldn't remember. It was a day like any other. Linda didn't even have an organizer right now; she scribbled appointments on scraps of paper and wrote phone numbers on her hands.

Finally she closed the diary. There was nothing there, just the strange words at the end.
It's not like her,
Linda thought.
The other entries are the work of a balanced mind. She doesn't have more problems than most people. But the last day, the day she thinks she just saw her father turn up on a street in Malmö after twenty-four years, she repeatedly writes the words “myth fear, myth fear.” Why doesn't she write about her father? Why does she write something that doesn't make any sense?

Linda felt her anxiety return. Had there perhaps been something to Anna's talk about losing her mind? Linda walked over to the window where Anna often stood during their conversations. The sun was reflected from a window in the building directly opposite, and she had to squint in order to see anything. Could Anna have suffered a temporary derangement? She thought she had seen her long-lost father—could this event have disconcerted her so violently that she lost her bearings and started behaving erratically?

Linda gave a start. There, in the parking lot behind the building, was Anna's car, the little red VW Golf. If she had left for a few days, the car should also be gone. Linda hurried down into the lot and felt the car doors. Locked. The car looked clean and shiny, which surprised her.
Anna's car tends to be dirty,
she thought.
Every time we go out her car is covered in dust. Now it's squeaky clean—even the hubcaps have been polished.

She went back up to the apartment, sat down in the kitchen, and tried to come up with a plausible explanation. The only thing she knew for sure was that Anna had not stayed home to meet with Linda as they had arranged. It wasn't a misunderstanding; there was nothing wrong with Anna's memory. She had chosen not to stay home that day. Something else had come up that was more important to her, something for which she didn't need her car. Linda turned on the answering machine and listened to the messages but only heard her own bellowing of Anna's name. She let her gaze wander to the front door.
Someone rang the bell,
she thought.
Not me, not Zeba, not Henrietta.
Who else was there? Anna had broken up with her boyfriend in April, a guy Linda had never met called MÃ¥ns Persson. He was also a student in Lund, studying electromagnetics, and he had turned out to be less faithful than
Anna would have liked. She had been deeply hurt by the breach in their relationship, and she had told Linda on several occasions that she was going to take her time before letting herself get that close to a man again.

Linda had also recently had a MÃ¥ns Persson experience, a man she kicked out of her life in March. His name had been Ludwig and he seemed uniquely suited to that name. His personality was part emperor and part impresario. He and Linda had met at a pub when Linda had been out drinking with some student colleagues. Ludwig had been with another group and they had simply ended up squeezed in next to each other due to the lack of space. Ludwig was in the sanitation business; he operated a garbage truck and made his pride in his work seem like the most natural thing in the world. Linda had been attracted by his huge laugh, his happy eyes, and the fact that he never interrupted her when she talked, actually straining to catch every word although the noise around them had been deafening.

They had started seeing each other, and for a while Linda dared to think she had found a real man at last. But then, purely by accident, she heard from a friend of a friend that when Ludwig wasn't working or spending time with Linda, he was spending time with a young woman who ran a catering business in Vallentuna. They had had a heated confrontation. Ludwig pleaded with her, but Linda sent him packing and cried for a whole week. She hadn't thought about it in those terms, but perhaps she too was waiting to recover from the pain of this breakup before she let herself look for someone new. She knew that the rapid succession of boyfriends in her life worried her father, even though he never asked her about it.

Before leaving Anna's apartment, Linda went to the kitchen, where she had spotted the spare keys to the car in a drawer. In order to avoid having to pick the lock every time, she had pocketed a spare set of keys to the apartment usually stored in a box in the hallway. She had borrowed the car on a few other occasions.
It won't matter if I do it again,
Linda thought.
I'm just going to borrow the car and visit her mother.
She left a note saying what she had done and that she would be back in a couple of hours. She didn't write anything about being worried.

First Linda stopped by the apartment on Mariagatan and changed into cooler clothing, since it was getting very warm. Then she drove out of town, took the turnoff to KÃ¥seberga, and parked in the harbor. The surface of the water was like a mirror, the only disturbance a dog swimming around next to the boats. An old man sitting on a bench outside the smoked-fish shop nodded kindly at her. Linda smiled in return but had no idea who he was. A retired colleague of her father's?

She got back into the car and continued on her way. Henrietta Westin lived in a house that seemed to crouch among the tall stands of trees posted like sentries on all sides. Linda had to turn around several times in order to find the right driveway. She finally pulled in next to a rusty harvester and parked the car. The heat outside made her remember the vacation she and Ludwig had taken to Greece before they broke up. She shook away those thoughts and started making her way through the massive trees. She stopped at the sound of an unusual noise, a furious hammering. Then she saw a woodpecker up on the right.
Maybe he has a part in her music,
she thought.
Anna has said her mother doesn't shy away from using any kind of noise. His input might very well be crucial to the percussion section.