Before the Frost Read online

  “Do we have any idea how the fires started?” Wallander asked. “I talked to Olsson and he said both churches started burning in several places. The church warden who came on the scene early said that it looked like the fire was burning in a circle, which would imply that it caught in several places at once.”

  “We haven’t found anything yet,” Nyberg said. “But it’s clearly arson.”

  “There’s a difference between the two cases,” Wallander said. “The fire in Hurup seems to have started more in the manner of an explosion. Someone in one of the neighboring houses said it sounded as if a bomb had gone off. The blazes were started in different ways, but synchronized.”

  “It’s a definite pattern,” Lindman said. “Starting a fire to distract attention from the murder.”

  “But why a church?” Wallander asked. “And why would you strangle a person with a hawser?”

  He looked over at Linda.

  “What do you see in all this?”

  She felt herself blushing. The question had come so suddenly that she was unprepared for it.

  “The site has been chosen deliberately,” she started hesitantly. “Strangling someone with a rope seems akin to torture. But this is also something that has to do with religion, like an eye for an eye, death by stoning, or living burial. Why not strangle someone with a hawser?”

  Before anyone had a chance to respond, Lindman’s cell phone rang. He listened, then held it out to Wallander.

  “We’re starting to get information from the States,” he said. “Let’s go back to Ystad.”

  “Do you need me?” Nyberg asked.

  “I’ll call if we do,” Wallander said. Then he turned to Linda.

  “But you should be there,” he said. “Unless you want to go home and sleep first.”

  “You know there’s no need to even ask.”

  He threw a glance at her.

  “I’m trying to be considerate.”

  “Think of me as a police officer and not your daughter.”

  They were silent in the car, both from lack of sleep and a fear of saying something that would irritate the other.

  Once they had parked in front of the station, Wallander walked off toward the district attorney’s office. Lindman caught up with Linda just outside the front door.

  “I remember my first day as a police officer,” he said. “I was still in Borås and had been to a party with friends the night before. The first thing I did when I walked through the front doors of the station was rush into the restroom and throw up. What do you plan to do?”

  “Not that, at any rate,” Linda said.

  Höglund was standing by the reception desk. She still only barely registered Linda’s presence, and Linda decided to treat her the same way from now on.

  There was a message for Linda: Chief Holgersson wanted to speak to her.

  “Have I done anything wrong?” Linda said.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Lindman said, then left.

  I like him, Linda thought. More and more, actually.

  Holgersson was on her way out when Linda walked down the corridor to her office.

  “Kurt has explained the situation to me,” Holgersson said. “We’re going to let you sit in on this one. It’s a strange coincidence that one of your friends is involved.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Linda said. “She might be.”

  The door to the conference room was closed at nine o’clock. Linda sat in the seat her father had pointed out to her. Lindman sat next to her. She looked at her father sitting at the head of the table drinking mineral water. He looked the way she had always imagined him in these situations: thirsty, his hair standing on end, prepared to jump into yet another day of a complicated criminal investigation. But it was an overly romanticized image and therefore a false one, she knew. She shook it off with a grimace.

  She had always been under the impression that he was good at his job, a skillful investigator, but today she realized that he had talents she hadn’t even imagined. Among other things, she was impressed by his ability to keep so many facts in his head, scrupulously arranged according to time and place. While she listened to him, something stirred in her at a much deeper level. It was as if she only now understood why he had had so little time for her or Mona. There had simply been no room for them. I have to talk to him about this, she thought. When all of the events have been explained and everything is over, we have to talk about the fact that he prioritized work over us.

  Linda stayed behind in the room when the meeting was over. She opened a window and thought about everything that had been said. Her father had set his bottle of mineral water down and summarized the very unclear situation they were in: “Two women have been murdered. Everything starts with these two. Maybe I’m being too presumptuous in assuming the same perpetrator is responsible for both deaths, since there is no obvious connection, no motive, not even any similarities. Medberg was killed in a hut hidden away deep inside the Rannesholm Forest, and now we find another woman, most probably a foreigner, strangled with a thick rope inside a burning church. The only connections we have found between these events are tenuous, accidental—not really connections at all. On the outskirts of this is another murky series of events. That is why Linda is here.”

  Wallander slowly picked his way across the terrain that involved everything from swans set on fire to severed hands. It was as if he proceeded with antennae stretched out in every direction at once. It took him one hour and twelve minutes without a break or repetition to reach his conclusion: “We don’t know yet what has happened. Behind the two dead women, the burning animals, and the torched churches lies something else that we can’t quite put our fingers on. We don’t know if what we have here marks the culmination of something, or simply the beginning.”

  At the words “simply the beginning,” Wallander sat down, but continued to speak.

  “We’re still waiting for information regarding the woman we believe to be named Harriet Bolson. While we wait, I’m going to open this up for general discussion, but before I do I’d like to make a final comment. I have a feeling that the animals weren’t burned to satisfy the perverted desires of a sadist. It may have been a form of sacrifice, or an act with its own twisted logic. We have Medberg’s praying hands and also a Bible that someone sat and wrote commentary in. And now something that looks like a ritual killing in a church. We have an eyewitness who claims she heard the man who set fire to the pet store shouting the words ‘The Lord’s will be done’ or something in that vein. All of these things may point to a religious message, perhaps the work of a sect or a few crazed individuals. But I doubt the latter. There is an organized quality to this cruelty that speaks against it being the work of a single person. But are we talking about two or a thousand? We don’t know. That’s why I want us to take the time to discuss the matter without prejudice before we continue our investigation. I think we’ll be more effective if we allow ourselves to push everything else aside and concentrate on this point for a moment.”

  But this discussion was averted by a door opening and a woman announcing that American faxes about Harriet Bolson had started to come in. Martinsson left and returned with a few papers, among them a blurred photograph of a woman. Wallander held his broken glasses in front of his face and nodded. The dead woman was Harriet Bolson.

  “My English is not quite what it should be,” Martinsson said and passed the papers over to Höglund, who started to read aloud.

  Linda had picked up a notebook as she walked into the room. Now she started making notes, without being clear about why she was doing so. She was involved in something without being fully involved, but she sensed that her father had an assignment for her that he would present to her when the time was ripe.

  Höglund said the American police seemed to have covered the case thoroughly—but perhaps it hadn’t been so hard, since Harriet Jane Bolson had been registered as a missing person since January 12, 1997. That was when her sister, Mary Jane Bolson
, had gone to the Tulsa police and filed the report. She had initially tried to reach her sister on the phone for a week without success. Then she had gotten in her car and driven the 300 kilometers to Tulsa, where her sister lived and worked as archivist and secretary to a private art collector. Mary Jane had found her sister’s apartment empty. She was also not at her workplace. She seemed in fact to have disappeared without a trace. Mary Jane and all of Harriet’s friends had described her as a reserved but conscientious and friendly woman who had had neither a drug addiction nor any other vice that might help explain her disappearance. The police in Tulsa had completed a preliminary investigation and maintained a current file on her case, but during the last four years nothing had turned up. No clues, no sign of life, nothing.

  “A police officer by the name of Clark Richardson is eagerly awaiting our reply and confirmation of the fact that the woman we’ve found really is Harriet. He would like the information as soon as possible.”

  “Which we can supply him with immediately,” Wallander said. “It’s her, there’s no doubt about it. Is there really no theory about her disappearance?”

  Höglund scoured the documents.

  “Harriet was unmarried,” she said. “She was twenty-six when she disappeared. She and her sister were daughters of a Methodist pastor in Cleveland, Ohio. Prominent, it says. They had a happy childhood, no evidence of trouble, studies at various universities. Harriet had a position in Tulsa with a very good salary. She lived simply with regular habits. She worked hard all week and went to church on Sundays.”

  “Is that it?” Wallander asked when Höglund finished reading.

  “That’s it.”

  He shook his head.

  “There has to be something more to her story,” he said. “We need to know everything about her. That will be your job. Pour on the charm. Give Officer Richardson the idea that this is the most important murder investigation in Sweden right now. Which it probably is, for that matter.”

  This was followed by a short period of open discussion. Linda listened attentively. After half an hour her father tapped the table with his pencil and ended the meeting. Everyone except Linda and her father left the room.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” he said. “Talk to Anna, hang around, but don’t ask any questions. Try to figure out why Medberg’s name was really in her journal. And Vigsten. I’ve asked my colleagues to look a little closer at him.”

  “Not the old man,” Linda said. “He’s senile. But there was someone else there, someone who kept himself hidden.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” he said impatiently. “Have you understood what I’ve asked you?”

  “Act normal,” Linda answered, “but try to get answers to these questions.”

  He nodded and stood up.

  “I’m worried,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening, and I’m afraid of what’s next.”

  Then he looked at her, stroked her briefly and almost shyly on the cheek, and left the room.

  Linda invited Zeba and Anna to join her for coffee down at the harbor the same day. They had just sat down when it started to rain.

  39

  Zeba’s son played happily with a toy car that squeaked because it was missing two of its wheels. Linda looked at him. Sometimes he could be almost unbearably needy and attention-seeking. Other times, like now, he was peaceful, lost in thought about the invisible roads his little yellow car was traveling.

  The café was almost empty at this time of day. A few Danish sailors in one corner were hunched over a nautical map. The young woman behind the counter yawned.

  “Girl talk,” Zeba said suddenly. “Why don’t we have more time for that?”

  “Talk away,” Linda said. “I’m listening.”

  “What about you?” Zeba asked, turning to Anna. “Are you listening?”

  “Of course.”

  They were quiet. Anna pushed a teaspoon around in her cup, Zeba folded a pinch of snuff into her upper lip. Linda sipped her coffee.

  “Is this all there is?” Zeba asked. “In life, I mean.”

  “What are you thinking of?” Linda asked.

  “All our dreams. What became of them?”

  “You dreamed of having children,” Anna said. “At least that seemed like your main goal.”

  “You’re right. But all the other stuff. I was such a dreamer! Especially when I was drunk out of my mind, you know the way you drink when you’re a teenager, when you end up on your hands and knees, throwing up in a bush, having to fight off a guy who’s looking to take advantage of the situation. But I never even realized any of my dreams. I drank them away, you could say. When I think of all the things I was going to do: be a fashion designer, rock star—fly a jumbo jet, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s not too late,” Linda said.

  Zeba put her chin on her hands and looked at her.

  “Of course it is. Did you really dream about becoming a policewoman?”

  “Never. In my dreams, if you can call them that, I was always going to devote my life to theater or refinishing old furniture. Not very exciting.”

  Zeba turned her head to Anna.

  “What about you?”

  “I wanted to find a meaning with my life.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “It’s not the kind of thing you can talk about. You either find it or you don’t.”

  Linda thought Anna seemed to be on her guard. From time to time she looked at Linda as if she was thinking: “I know you’re trying to see through me.” But I can’t be sure, Linda thought.

  The Danish sailors got up to leave. One of them patted Zeba’s boy on the head.

  “His existence hung by a thread for a while,” Zeba said.

  Linda raised her eyebrows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was close to having an abortion. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and think I really did it, that he doesn’t exist.”

  “I thought you wanted a baby.”

  “I did. But I was scared. I didn’t think I’d be up to it.”

  “Thank God you didn’t do it,” Anna said.

  Both Zeba and Linda were taken aback by her emphatic declaration. She sounded stern, almost angry. Zeba was immediately put on the defensive.

  “Something as abstract as god makes no sense in that context. Maybe you’ll understand when you get pregnant one day.”

  “I’m against abortion,” Anna said. “That’s just the way it is.”

  “Having an abortion doesn’t mean you’re ‘for’ abortion,” Zeba said calmly. “There can be other reasons for it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like being too young. Or too sick.”

  “I’m against abortion, period,” Anna repeated.

  “I’m happy I had my boy,” Zeba said. “But I don’t regret the abortion I had when I was fifteen.”

  Linda was taken by surprise, and so was Anna. She seemed to stiffen and stared at Zeba.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Zeba said. “I was fifteen years old—what would you have done?”

  “Probably the same thing,” Linda said.

  “Not me,” Anna said. “It’s a sin.”

  “Now you sound like a priest.”

  “I’m just telling you what I think.”

  Zeba shrugged.

  “I thought this was girl talk. If I can’t talk about my abortion with my friends, who am I supposed to talk to?”

  Anna stood up.

  “I have to go now,” she said. “I forgot about something I have to do.”

  She disappeared out the door. Linda thought it was strange that she left without even saying good-bye to Zeba’s son.

  “What got into her?” Zeba said. “It’s enough to make you think she had an abortion herself and can’t talk about it.”

  “Maybe she did,” Linda said. “You think you k
now everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.”

  Zeba and Linda ended up staying longer than they had planned. With Anna gone, the atmosphere became more lighthearted. They giggled like teenagers. Linda followed Zeba home, and they said good-bye outside Zeba’s building.

  “What do you think Anna will do?” Zeba asked. “Say that we can’t be friends anymore?”

  “I think she’ll realize she overreacted.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Zeba said. “But I hope you’re right.”

  Linda went home. She lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and drifted off. Now she was walking to the lake again, where someone had seen burning swans and called the police. Suddenly she opened her eyes. Martinsson had said they would check the phone log of calls to the station that night. That meant the conversation was preserved on a cassette tape. Linda couldn’t recall anyone commenting on what the man had sounded like. It was a Norwegian by the name of Torgeir Langaas. Amy Lindberg had also heard someone who spoke either Norwegian or Danish. She got out of bed. If the man who called in had an accent, we may be able to determine a link between the burning animals and the man who bought the house behind the church in Lestarp.

  She walked out onto the balcony. It was ten o’clock and the air was chilly. It will be fall soon, she thought, the frost is on its way. It will crunch under my feet by the time I become a police officer.

  The phone rang. It was her dad.

  “I just wanted to let you know I won’t be home for dinner.”

  “It’s ten o’clock, Dad. I ate dinner hours ago.”

  “Well, I’ll be here for another couple of hours.”

  “Do you have time to talk?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I was thinking of taking a walk down to the station.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I can’t give you more than five minutes.”

  “I only need two. Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t all emergency calls to the police get recorded and stored?”