Before the Frost Read online

The house was attractively situated on a little hill surrounded by a strip of forest, beyond which there were open fields and marshes. A bird—a kite, it looked like—was suspended in the air currents above the house, and in the distance there was the rising and falling sound of a tractor at work. Linda sat down on an old stone bench between some red-currant bushes. Her father squinted at the roof, tugged on the drainpipes, and tried to peer into the house. Then he disappeared around the other side.

  As soon as he was gone, Linda started thinking about Henrietta. Now that some time had passed since the visit, her intuition had solidified into certainty: Henrietta had not been telling her the truth. She was hiding something about Anna. Linda dialed Anna’s number on her cell phone and got the answering machine. She didn’t leave a message. She put her phone away and walked around the house to find her father. He was pulling at an old water pump that squeaked and sprayed brown water into a bucket. He shook his head.

  “If I could move this house next to the sea I’d take it in a minute,” he said. “But there’s just too much forest for my taste.”

  “What about living in a trailer?” Linda suggested. “Then you could camp on the beach. Lots of people would be happy to let you stay on their land.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Who wouldn’t want free police protection?”

  He grimaced and walked back to the car. Linda followed. He’s not going to turn around, she thought. He’s already put this place behind him.

  Linda watched the kite swoop over the fields and disappear over the horizon.

  “What now?” he asked her.

  Linda immediately thought of Anna. She realized she wanted most of all to talk to her father about it, about the worry she felt.

  “I’d like to talk,” she said. “But not here.”

  “I know just the place.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They drove south, turning left toward Malmö and leaving the main road at a turnoff for Kade Lake. The forest around the lake was one of the most beautiful Linda had ever seen. She had had a feeling her dad was going to take her here. They had taken many walks here when she was younger, especially when she was about ten or eleven. She also had a vague memory of being here with her mom, but she could not remember the whole family coming together.

  They left the car by a stack of timber. The huge logs gave off a fresh scent, as if they had been recently felled. They walked through the forest, on a path that led to the strange metal statue erected to the memory of the warrior king Charles XII, who was rumored to have visited Kade Lake in his day. Linda was about to start talking about Anna when her dad raised his hand. They had stopped in a narrow glen surrounded by tall trees.

  “This is my cemetery,” he said.

  “Your what?”

  “This is one of my secrets, maybe the biggest, and I’ll probably regret telling you this tomorrow. I’ve assigned all the trees that you see here to the friends I’ve had who’ve died. Even your grandfather is here, my mother and my old relatives.”

  He pointed to a young oak.

  “I’ve given this tree to Stefan Fredman, the desperate Indian. Even he belongs in my collection of the dead.”

  “What about the other one you talked about?”

  “Yvonne Ander? She’s over there.”

  He pointed to another oak with an extensive network of branches.

  “I came here a week or so after your grandfather died. I felt as if I had completely lost my footing in life. You were much stronger than I was. I was sitting down at the station trying to figure out a brutal assault case. Ironically it was a young man who had half-killed his father with a sledgehammer. The boy lied about everything and suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. I halted the interrogation and came here, and that’s when I felt that these trees had become gravestones for all the people I knew who had died. That I should come here to visit with them, not where they are actually buried. Whenever I’m here I feel a calm I don’t feel anywhere else. I can hug the dead here without them seeing me.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “Thanks for sharing it with me.”

  They lingered a while longer. Linda wanted to ask about the identity of a few more of the trees but she said nothing. The sun was shining through the leaves, but the wind picked up and it immediately became colder. Linda took a deep breath and launched into the topic of Anna’s disappearance.

  “It’ll drive me up the wall if you shake your head at me and tell me I’m imagining things. But if you can explain to me exactly why I’m wrong, I promise I’ll pay attention.”

  “There’s something you’ll find out when you become a police officer,” he said. “The unexplainable almost never happens. Even a disappearance turns out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation. You’ll learn to differentiate between the unexplained and the merely unexpected. The unexpected can look baffling until you have the necessary background information. This is generally the case with disappearances. You don’t know what’s happened to Anna and it’s only natural that it would worry you, but my intuition tells me you should draw on the highest virtue of our profession.”

  “Patience?”

  “Exactly.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few more days. She’ll have turned up by then, or at least been in touch.”

  “I’m still convinced her mother was lying to me.”

  “I’m not sure your mother and I always stuck to the truth when we were asked about you.”

  “I’ll try to be patient, but I do feel like there’s more to this. It’s not right.”

  They returned to the car. It was past one o’clock and Linda suggested they stop for lunch somewhere. They chose a roadside restaurant with the funny name My Father’s Hat. Wallander had a fleeting recollection of lunching with his father at this restaurant and ending up in a huge argument. He couldn’t remember what their argument had been about.

  They were drinking their coffee when a phone rang. Linda fumbled for hers but it turned out to be her father’s. He answered, listened, and made a few notes on the back of the check.

  “What was that?”

  “Someone’s been reported missing.”

  He put money on the table and tucked the bill into his pocket.

  “What do you have to do now?” Linda asked. “Who’s disappeared?”

  “We’ll go back to Ystad via Skurup. A widow by the name of Birgitta Medberg has been reported missing. Her daughter is worried.”

  “What are the circumstances?”

  “The caller wasn’t sure. Apparently the woman is a historian interested in mapping old walkways and she often does extensive fieldwork, sometimes in very dense forest. An unusual occupation.”

  “So she may simply be lost?”

  “My first thought. We’ll soon find out.”

  Wallander called the daughter of Birgitta Medberg to tell her he was on his way, and then they drove to Skurup. The wind was blustery. It was nine minutes past three on August 29.

  12

  They stopped in front of a two-story brick building—quintessentially Swedish, Linda thought. Wherever you go in this country the houses all look the same. The central square in Västerås could be replaced with the one in Örebro, and this Skurup apartment building could as easily be in Sollentuna.

  “Where have you ever seen a building like this before?” she asked her father when they stepped out of the car and he was fumbling with the keys. He glanced at the brick facade.

  “Looks like the place you had in Sollentuna, before you moved to the dorms at the police academy.”

  “Good memory. So what do I do now?”

  “Come with me. You can treat this as a warm-up exercise for real police work.”

  “Aren’t you breaking some rules by doing this? No one should be present at an interrogation without relevant cause—something like that?”

  “This isn’t an interrogation session, it’s a conversation. Let’s hope it wi
ll simply serve to put someone’s fears to rest.”

  “But still.”

  “No buts. I’ve been breaking rules since I first started working. According to Martinsson’s calculations I should have been locked up for a minimum of four years for all the things I’ve done. But who cares, if you’re doing a good job? That’s one of the few points Nyberg and I can agree on.”

  “Nyberg? The head of forensics?”

  “The one and only. He’s retiring soon, and in one sense no one will be sorry to see him go. On the other hand, despite his terrible temper, maybe all of us will.”

  They crossed the street. A bike missing its back wheel was propped up against the wall. The frame was bent as if it had been the victim of a violent assault. They walked into the entry and read the names of the people who lived there.

  “Birgitta Medberg. Her daughter’s name is Vanya. From the phone call I would say she has a tendency to hysteria. She also has a very shrill voice.”

  “I am not hysterical!” a woman yelled from above. She was leaning over the railing of the staircase, watching them.

  “Remind me to keep my voice down in stairwells,” Wallander muttered.

  They walked up to her landing.

  “Just as I thought,” Wallander said in a friendly voice to the hostile woman waiting for them. “The boys at the station are too young. They still can’t tell the difference between hysteria and a normal level of concern.”

  The woman, Vanya, was in her forties, heavy, with yellow stains around the collar and cuffs of her blouse. Linda thought it was probably a long time since she had washed her hair. They walked into the apartment and Linda immediately recognized the strong scent that hung in the air. Mom’s perfume, she thought. The one she wears when she’s upset or angry. She had another she preferred when she was happy.

  They were shown into the living room. Vanya dropped into an armchair and pointed her finger at Linda.

  “Who is she?”

  “An assistant,” Wallander said in a firm voice. “Please tell us what happened, starting at the beginning.”

  Vanya told them in a nervous, jerky style. She seemed to have trouble finding the right words even though it was clear that she was not the kind of person who spoke in long sentences. Linda immediately understood her concern was genuine, and compared it to the way she felt about Anna.

  Vanya told them that her mother was a cultural geographer whose principal work was tracing and mapping old roads and walkways in southern Sweden. She had been widowed for a year and had four grandchildren, of which two were Vanya’s. On this particular day, Vanya and her daughters were supposed to have visited her at noon. Birgitta had planned to be out on one of her short excursions before then. But when Vanya arrived, Birgitta had not yet returned. Vanya waited for two hours, then called the police. Her mother would never have disappointed her grandchildren like this, she reasoned. Something must have happened.

  When she finished her story, Linda tried to guess what question her father would ask first. Perhaps something along the lines of: “Where was she going?”

  “Do you know where she was going this morning?” he asked.

  “No,” Vanya said.

  “She has a car, I take it.”

  “Actually, she has a red Vespa. Forty years old.”

  “Really?”

  “All Vespas used to be red, my mother tells me. She’s in an association for owners of vintage mopeds and Vespas. The headquarters are in Staffanstorp, I think. I don’t know why—why she wants to be with those people, I mean. But she seems to like them.”

  “You said she became a widow about a year ago. Did she show any signs of depression?”

  “No. And if you think she’s committed suicide you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not saying she did. But sometimes even the people closest to us can be very good at hiding their feelings.”

  Linda stared at her father. He glanced briefly in her direction. We have to talk, she thought. It was wrong of me not to tell him about the time I stood on the bridge and was going to jump. He thinks the only time was when I slashed my wrists.

  “She would never hurt herself. She would never do that to us.”

  “Is there anyone she may have gone to visit?”

  Vanya had lit a cigarette. She had already managed to spill ash on her blouse and the floor.

  “My mother is the old-fashioned type. She never drops in on someone without calling.”

  “Our colleagues have confirmed that she hasn’t been admitted to any hospital in the area, and there are no reports of an accident. Does she have a medical condition we should know about? Does she have a cell phone?”

  “My mother is a very healthy woman. She takes care of herself—not like me, though it’s hard to get enough exercise when you’re in the grocery business.”

  Vanya made a gesture of disgust at her own body.

  “A cell phone?”

  “She has one, but she keeps it turned off. My sister and I are always getting on her case about it.”

  There was a lull in the conversation. They heard the low sound of a radio or a TV coming from the apartment next door.

  “So let’s get this straight. You have no idea where she may have gone. Is there anyone who would have more specific information regarding her research? Is there a diary or working papers of some kind we could look at?”

  “Not that I know of. And my mother works alone.”

  “Has this ever happened before?”

  “That she’s disappeared? Never.”

  Wallander took a notepad and a pen out of his coat pocket and asked Vanya for her full name, address, and telephone number. Linda noticed that he reacted to her last name, Jorner. He stopped writing and looked up.

  “Your mother’s surname is Medberg. Is Jorner your husband’s name?”

  “Yes, Hans Jorner. My mother’s maiden name was Lundgren. Is this important?”

  “Hans Jorner—any connection to the gravel company in Limhamn?”

  “Yes, he’s the youngest son of the company director. Why?”

  “I’m curious, that’s all.”

  Wallander stood up and Linda followed.

  “Would you mind showing us around? Did she have a study?”

  Vanya pointed to a door and then put her hand to her mouth to smother an attack of smoker’s cough. They walked into a study where the walls were covered with maps. Stacks of papers and folders were neatly arranged on the desk.

  “What was all that about Jorner?” Linda asked in a low voice.

  “I’ll tell you later. It’s an unpleasant story.”

  “And what was it she said? She’s a grocer?”

  “Yes.”

  Linda leafed through a few papers. He stopped her immediately.

  “You can come along, listen, and look to your heart’s content. But don’t touch anything.”

  “It was just a few papers.”

  Linda left the room in a huff. He was right, of course, but his tone was objectionable. She nodded politely to Vanya, who was still coughing, and left the apartment. As soon as she was down on the street she regretted her childish reaction.

  Her father emerged ten minutes later.

  “What did I do? Is there something wrong?”

  “It’s nothing. I’ve already forgotten about it.”

  Linda made an apologetic gesture. Wallander unlocked the car while the wind pulled and tugged at their clothing. They got into the car, but he didn’t start the engine right away.

  “You noticed my reaction when she said her name was Jorner,” Wallander said and squeezed the steering wheel angrily. “When Kristina and I were little there were periods of time when no art buyers had been by for a while in their fancy cars. We had no money. At those times Mother had to go to work. She had no education, so the only available occupations were on the assembly line or housekeeping. She chose the latter and landed a position with the Jorners, though she came home each night. Old man Jorner—Hugo was his name—and his wife Tyra w
ere terrible people. As far as they were concerned there had been no social change over the past fifty years. The world, in their eyes, was upper-class and lower-class and nothing in between. He was the worst.

  “One time my mother came home completely devastated. Even your grandfather, who never talked to her much, wondered what had happened. I hid behind the sofa and will never forget what she told me. There had been a small dinner party at the Jorners’, perhaps eight people. My mother served the food and, when the guests were ready for coffee, Hugo asked her to bring in a stool from the kitchen. They were all a bit tipsy at this point and when she came in with it he asked her to climb up on it. She did as he asked and then he said that from her present vantage point she should be able to see that she had forgotten to lay a coffee spoon for one of the guests. Then he dismissed her, and she heard how everyone laughed as she left the room.

  “I still remember it word for word. When she had finished, she started crying and said she would never go back. My dad was so upset he was ready to grab the ax from the woodshed and smash Jorner’s head. But she managed to calm him down. I’ll never forget it. I was ten, maybe twelve years old. And now I meet one of his daughters-in-law.”

  He started up the car angrily.

  “I’ve often wondered about my grandmother,” Linda said. “I think what I wonder about her most was how anyone could stand to be married to my grandfather.”

  Wallander laughed.

  “My mom always used to say that he did what she told him if she just rubbed him with a little salt. I never really understood that—I remember wondering how you could rub a person with salt. The secret was her patience. She had an infinite fund of patience.”

  Wallander stepped on the brake and swerved suddenly as a sporty convertible overtook them in a dangerous curve. He swore.

  “I should pull them over.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “My mind is on other things.”

  Linda looked over at her dad, who appeared tense.

  “There’s something about this missing woman that bothers me,” he said. “I think Vanya Jorner was telling us the truth and I think her anxiety is genuine. My feeling is that Birgitta Medberg either became sick, or perhaps temporarily confused, or else something has happened to her.”