Before the Frost Read online

  He checked the time: right on schedule. They walked slowly in order to accommodate the few who were older, or less fit, like the British woman, who had been operated on for cancer six months ago. Westin had debated whether or not to include her, but after consulting with God he received the answer that she had survived her illness precisely so that she could complete her mission. They followed a road that led to the back of Frennestad Church. Westin felt in his pocket for the key that Langaas had made for him. Two weeks ago he had tried it, and it had turned without a single squeak. He stopped them when they reached the churchyard. No one said anything, and all he could hear was breathing. Only calm breaths, he noted. No one is panting, no one seems anxious, not even she who is going to die.

  Westin looked down at his watch again. In forty-three minutes Langaas, Buchanan, and Lambert would set fire to the church in Hurup. They started walking again. The gate opened without a sound. Langaas had oiled it yesterday. They walked single-file up to the church. Westin unlocked the doors. It was cool inside; one person shivered. He turned on the flashlight and looked around. Everyone seated themselves in the front pews, as they had been instructed. The last missive Westin had distributed included 123 detailed instructions that were to be memorized down to the letter. He knew they had done so.

  Westin lit the candles that Langaas had placed near the altar. In the dim light he could see Harriet Bolson, the woman from Tulsa, seated on the far right. She was completely calm. God’s ways are inscrutable, he thought. But only to those who do not need to understand them. He looked down at his watch. It was important that the two actions, the burning of Hurup Church and that which was to take place in Frennestad Church, be synchronized. He looked over at Harriet Bolson again. She had a thin, worn face even though she was only thirty years old. Perhaps her face shows the traces of her sin, he thought. She can only be cleansed through fire. He turned off the flashlight and walked into the shadows by the pulpit. He reached into his backpack and pulled out the rope that Langaas had bought in a maritime store in Copenhagen. He placed it in front of the altar, then checked his watch again. It was time. He turned and motioned for everyone to stand. He called them up one by one. He handed one end of the rope to the first person.

  “We are irrevocably bound together,” he said. “From now on, from this day forward, we will never need a rope again. We are bound by our loyalty to God and our task. We cannot tolerate for the Christian world to sink any deeper into degradation. The world will be cleansed through fire, and we must start with ourselves.”

  While he was uttering the last words he had slowly moved so that he stood in front of Harriet Bolson. At the same moment that he tied the rope around her neck she understood what was about to happen. It was as if her mind went blank from the sudden terror. She didn’t scream or struggle. Her eyes closed. All my years of waiting are finally over.

  The church in Hurup started burning at a quarter past nine. When the fire trucks were on their way they received reports that Frennestad Church was on fire as well.

  Langaas and the two Americans had already been picked up. Langaas took Westin’s place and drove the truck to the new hideout.

  Westin remained behind in the darkness. He sat up on a hill close to Frennestad Church. He watched the firemen try to douse the blaze, in vain. He wondered if the police would make it inside before the roof caved in.

  He sat there in the darkness and watched the flames. He thought about how he would one day watch the fires burning with his daughter by his side.

  37

  That night two churches in roughly the same area, a triangle bounded by Staffanstorp, Anderstorp, and Ystad, burned to the ground. The heat was so intense that at dawn only the bare, smoking skeletons of the buildings remained. The bell tower of Hurup Church collapsed, and those who heard it said it sounded like a howl of bottomless despair.

  The warden of Frennestad Church was the first to make it into the burning building, in hopes of saving its unique mass staves dating from the Middle Ages. Instead, he made a gruesome discovery that would haunt him for the rest of his life. A woman in her thirties lay in front of the altar. She had been strangled by a thick rope pulled so tightly it had almost removed her head from her body. He rushed screaming from the scene and fainted on the front steps.

  The first fire truck arrived a few minutes later. It had been on its way to Hurup when it had received fresh instructions. None of the firefighters fully understood what had happened, whether the first alarm had been a mistake or if two churches were actually on fire at the same time.

  There was a similar state of confusion at the police station during the first few minutes when the two calls came in. When Wallander got up from the dinner table, he was under the impression that he was going to Hurup, where a woman had been reported dead. Since he had drunk some wine with dinner, he asked for a patrol car to pick him up.

  It was only as they were leaving Ystad that he learned of the misunderstanding: the church in Hurup was on fire, but the dead woman had been found in Frennestad Church. Martinsson, who was driving, started shouting at the switchboard operator to try to determine once and for all how many damned churches were on fire.

  Wallander sat quietly for the duration of the ride, not only because Martinsson was driving with his usual recklessness, but because he sensed that his worst fears were being confirmed. The animals that had been killed were only the beginning. Lunatics, he thought, satanists, fanatics. As they drove through the darkness he thought he was beginning to discern a logic to the events, if only dimly.

  By the time they pulled up outside the burning church in Frennestad, they at least had a clearer idea of the current situation. The two churches had caught fire at almost exactly the same time. In addition there was a dead woman in Frennestad. They sought out the fire chief, Mats Olsson, to whom, it turned out, Martinsson was distantly related. In the midst of the intense heat and chaos, Wallander heard them give greetings to their respective wives. Then they went into the church. Martinsson let Wallander take the lead, as he usually did at a crime scene, and as he was more than willing to do even in the devastating heat. The aisle provided them with a route, and a fireman preceded them with a hose. The dead woman lay in front of the altar with a rope around her neck. Wallander tried to imprint the scene on his memory. It had to be staged. He turned to Mats Olsson.

  “How long can we stay?”

  “The roof is going to cave. We’re not going to be able to put it out in time.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten minutes. I can’t let you stay any longer.”

  No technicians would be able to make it to the scene in time. Wallander put on a helmet that someone handed him.

  “Go out and see if anyone in the crowd has a camera, or better yet a video camera,” he said. “Confiscate it. We’re going to need to document this.”

  Martinsson left. Wallander started to examine the dead woman. The rope was thick, like a ship’s hawser. It lay around her neck with the ends outstretched. Two people pulling in different directions, he thought. Like the olden days when criminals were ripped apart by tying them to two horses that were sent off in different directions.

  He glanced at the ceiling. The flames were starting to come through. There were people running all around him carrying objects from the church. An older man in his pajamas was straining to rescue a beautiful old altar cabinet. There was something touching about their struggle. These people have realized they’re losing something precious, he thought.

  Martinsson returned with a video camera.

  “Can you figure out how to use it?”

  “I think so,” Martinsson answered.

  “Then you be our photographer. Take full shots, details, from all angles.”

  “Five minutes,” Olsson said. “That’s all you have.”

  Wallander crouched down beside the dead woman’s body. She was blond and bore an uncanny resemblance to his sister Kristina. An
execution, he thought. First animals, now people. What was it Amy Lindberg thought she heard? “The Lord’s will be done?”

  He quickly searched the woman’s pockets. Nothing. He looked around. There was no handbag. He was about to give up when he saw a breast pocket on her blouse. Inside was a piece of paper with a name and address: HARRIET BOLSON, 1250 5TH AVENUE, TULSA.

  “Time’s up,” Mats Olsson said. “Let’s go.”

  He rounded up the people left in the church and hurried them out. The body was carried away and Wallander took the hawser.

  Martinsson called in to the station.

  “We need information on a woman from Tulsa,” he said. “All registers, local, European, international. Highest priority.”

  Linda turned off the TV impatiently. She knew that the spare keys to her dad’s car were on the bookshelf in the living room. She picked them up, then headed out the door and jogged down to the police station.

  Wallander’s car was parked in the corner. Linda recognized the car next to it as Höglund’s. Linda fingered the Swiss army knife in her pocket, but this was not a night for slashing tires. She had heard him mention Hurup and Frennestad. She unlocked the car door and drove as far as the water tower. There she pulled over and got out a map. She knew where Frennestad was, but not Hurup. She found it, turned off the light, and headed out of Ystad. Halfway to Hörby she turned left, and after a few kilometers she could see the smoke from Hurup Church. She drove as close as she could, then parked and walked up to the church. Her dad wasn’t there. The only police officers were young cadets, and it struck her that if the fire had started only a few days later she could have been one of them. She told them who she was and asked where her father was.

  “There’s another church on fire,” she was told. “Frennestad Church. They have a casualty.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It looks like arson—two churches don’t just catch fire at the same time. But we don’t know what happened in Frennestad Church, only that there’s a body.”

  Linda nodded and walked away. A sudden noise made her turn around. Parts of the church roof collapsed and a shower of sparks shot up toward the sky. Who would burn a church? she wondered. But she couldn’t answer that question any more easily than she could imagine what kind of person set fire to swans, cattle, or animals in a pet store.

  She got back into the car and drove to Frennestad. There too she saw the burning church from a distance. Burning churches are something I associate with war, she thought. But here there are churches burning in peacetime. Can a country be engaged in an invisible war against an unseen enemy? She was unable to pursue this thought any further. The road leading up to the church was blocked by cars. When she caught sight of her father in the light of the fire, she stopped. He was talking with a firefighter. She tried to see what he was holding. A hose? She walked closer, pushing past people who were crowded together outside the restricted area. He was holding a rope, she realized finally. A hawser.

  Nyberg walked up to Wallander and Martinsson, who were standing outside the church. He looked irritated, as usual.

  “I thought you should take a look at this,” he said, holding out his hand.

  It was a small necklace. Wallander took out his glasses. One side of the frame broke when he put them on. He swore and had to hold the glasses with one hand.

  “It looks like a shoe,” he said.

  “She was wearing it,” Nyberg said. “Or had been. The chain broke when the rope was pulled tight. The necklace fell inside her blouse. The doctor found it.”

  Martinsson took it and turned toward the fire to get more light.

  “An unusual motif for a pendant,” he said. “Is it really a shoe?”

  “It could be a footprint,” Nyberg said. “Or the sole of a foot. Once I saw a pendant in the shape of a carrot. A diamond was placed where the greens would have been. That carrot cost four hundred thousand kronor.”

  “It may help us identify her,” Wallander said. “That’s what counts right now.”

  Nyberg walked back over to the low wall next to the graveyard and started yelling at a photographer who was taking pictures of the burning church. Wallander and Martinsson walked down to the barricades.

  They saw Linda and waved her over.

  “Just couldn’t stay away?” her dad said. “You can come with us.”

  “How is it going?”

  “We don’t know what we’re looking for,” Wallander said slowly. “But these churches didn’t set fire to themselves, that much is certain.”

  “They’re working on tracing Harriet Bolson,” Martinsson said. “They’ll let me know the minute they find something.”

  “I’m trying to understand the significance of the rope,” Wallander said. “Why a church, and why an American woman? What does it mean?”

  “A few people, at least three but maybe more, come to a church in the middle of the night,” Martinsson said.

  Wallander stopped him.

  “Why more than three? Two who commit the murder and one victim. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Theoretically, yes. But something tells me there were more, maybe many more. They unlocked the door. There are only two existing keys. The minister has one, and the church warden who fainted has the other. They’ve both confirmed possession of their keys. Therefore we have to assume these people used a sophisticated pass key or a copy,” Martinsson said.

  “A group, a society. A band of people who chose this church to execute Harriet Bolson. Is she guilty of something? Did she become victim to a kind of religious extremism? Are we dealing with satanists or some other kind of lunatic fringe? We don’t have the answers.”

  “Another thing,” Wallander said. “What about the note I found on her body? Why was it left behind?”

  “So that we would be able to identify her. Perhaps it was a message to us.”

  “We have to confirm her identity,” Wallander said. “If she so much as visited a dentist in this country, we’ll know.”

  “They’re working on it.”

  Martinsson sounded affronted.

  “I don’t mean to get on your case. What’s the word?”

  “Nothing, as of yet,” Martinsson said. “Then there’s another thing. Whoever saw a pendant necklace shaped like a shoe or a sandal?”

  He shook his head and walked away.

  Linda held her breath. Had she heard him correctly?

  “What was it he said? What have you found?”

  “A note with a name and address.”

  “Apart from that. Something else?”

  “A pendant necklace.”

  “That looked like something?”

  “A footprint. A shoe. Why do you ask?”

  She ignored his question.

  “What kind of shoe?”

  “Maybe a sandal.”

  The light from the fire grew brighter in spurts as gusts of wind caught the flames.

  “May I remind you that Anna’s dad was a sandal-maker before he disappeared? That’s all.”

  It took a moment to click in his mind. Then he nodded slowly.

  “Good,” he said. “Very good. That may just be the opening we need. The question is, where does it leave us?”

  38

  Wallander had tried to send Linda home to get some sleep, but she had insisted on staying. She had curled up in the back seat of a patrol car and only woke up when he rapped sharply on the window. He’s never learned the art of waking a person gently, she thought. My father doesn’t simply wake people up, he tears them from their dreams.

  She stepped out of the car and shivered. Shreds of fog drifted over the fields. The church had burned to the ground, and only the gaping, sooty walls remained. Thick smoke still rose from the caved-in roof. Most of the fire trucks were gone; only two crews were needed for the mop-up. Martinsson had left, but she could see Lindman in the distance. He came over to her and handed her a cup of coffee. Her dad was speaking with a journalist on the other side of the police
line.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this landscape before,” Lindman said. “Not in the west, not up in Härjedalen. Here Sweden simply slopes down into the sea and ends. All this mud and fog. It’s very strange. I’m trying to find my feet in a landscape that’s completely alien to me.”

  Linda mumbled that fog was fog, mud was mud. What could possibly be strange about something so ordinary?

  “Anything new on the woman?” she asked.

  “Not yet. But she’s definitely not a Swedish citizen.”

  “Any reason to think she’s not the person named in the note?”

  “No. It’s far-fetched to think the murderer would leave a false name.”

  Wallander came walking over. The journalist disappeared down the hill.

  “I’ve talked to Chief Holgersson,” he said. “Since you’re already involved in the fringes of this investigation, we may as well let you in on the whole thing. I’d better get used to having you around. It’ll be a little like having a ball constantly bouncing up and down by my side.”

  Linda thought he was making fun of her.

  “At least I can still bounce. That’s more than some people I know.”

  Lindman laughed. Wallander looked angry, but controlled himself.

  “Don’t ever have children, Lindman,” he said. “You see what I have to deal with.”

  A car swung onto the road leading up to the church. Nyberg got out.

  “He’s freshly showered,” Wallander noted. “Ready for another day of unpleasantness, no doubt. He’ll keel over and die the day he retires and no longer has to be digging in the mud with rainwater up to his knees.”

  “He acts like a dog,” Lindman said in a low voice. “Have you noticed? It’s almost as if he’s sniffing around, and wishing he could just get down on all fours.”

  Linda had to agree: Nyberg really did look like an animal intent on picking up a scent.

  Nyberg joined their group, seeming not to notice Linda. He smelled strongly of aftershave.