Before the Frost

by Henning Mankell

  He kept looking for houses that cold and windy summer, but they were all either too expensive or just not the house he had been dreaming of all those years in the apartment on Mariagatan. He kept the apartment and asked himself if he was ever really going to move. When Linda graduated from the police academy, he drove up to Stockholm and helped her move her things to Ystad. She had arranged to rent an apartment starting in September. Until then she could have her old room back.

  They started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Linda was impatient to start working and accused her father of not pulling strings hard enough at the station to get her a temporary position. But he said he had taken the matter up with Chief Lisa Holgersson. She would gladly have welcomed the extra manpower, but there was no room in the budget for more staff. Linda would not be able to start until the tenth of September, however much they might have wanted her to start earlier.

  Linda spent the intervening time reacquainting herself with two old school friends. One day she ran into Zeba, or “Zebra,” as they used to call her. She had dyed her black hair red and also cut it short, so Linda had not recognized her at first. Zeba’s family came from Iran, and she and Linda had been in the same class until junior high. When they ran into each other on the street this July, Zeba was pushing a toddler in a stroller. They had stopped at a café and had coffee.

  Zeba told her that she had trained as a bartender but that her pregnancy had put a stop to her work plans. The father was Marcus. Linda remembered him—the Marcus who loved exotic fruit and who had started his own plant nursery in Ystad at the age of nineteen. The relationship had ended quickly, but the child remained a fact. Zeba and Linda chatted for a long time, until the toddler started screaming so loudly and insistently that they had to leave. But they had kept in touch since that chance meeting, and Linda noticed that she felt less impatient with the hiatus in her life whenever she managed to build these bridges between her present and the past that she had known here.

  As she was on her way home to Mariagatan after her meeting with Zeba, it suddenly started to rain. She took cover in a clothing store and—while she was waiting for the weather to clear up—she asked for the telephone directory and looked up Anna Westin’s number. She felt a jolt inside when she found it. She and Anna had not had any contact for ten years now. The close friendship of their childhood years had ended abruptly at seventeen when they both fell in love with the same boy. Afterward, when the feelings of infatuation were long gone, they had tried to resuscitate the friendship, but it was never the same. Linda hadn’t even thought about Anna very much for the last couple of years. But seeing Zeba again reminded her of her old friend, and she was happy to discover that Anna still lived in Ystad.

  Linda called her that evening, and they met a few days later. The rest of the summer they often met several times a week, sometimes all three of them, but mostly just Anna and Linda. Anna lived on her own as well as she could on her student budget. She was studying medicine.

  Linda thought Anna was even shyer now than when they were growing up. Anna’s father had left when she was only five or six years old, and he had never been heard from again. Anna’s mother lived out in the country in Löderup, not far from where Linda’s grandfather had lived and painted his favorite, unchanging motifs. Anna seemed pleased that Linda had reestablished contact with her, but Linda soon realized she had to tread carefully around her. There was something vulnerable, almost secretive about Anna, and she didn’t let Linda come too close.

  Still, being with her old friends helped make Linda’s summer go by, even though she was counting the days until she was allowed to pick up her uniform from Mrs. Lundberg in the stockroom.

  Her father worked constantly all summer, handling a case of bank and post office robberies in the Ystad area. From time to time Linda would hear about this case that seemed like a well-planned series of attacks. When her father fell asleep at night, Linda would often sneak a look at his notebook and the case files he brought home. But whenever she asked him about the case directly, he would avoid answering. She wasn’t a police officer yet. Her questions would have to go unanswered until September.

  The days went by. One afternoon in August, her father came home and said that his real estate agent had called about a property by Mossby Beach. He wondered if she wanted to come and see it with him. She called and postponed a coffee date she had arranged with Zeba, and then her father picked her up in his Peugeot and they drove west. The sea was gray. Fall was on its way.

  3

  The house stood on a hill with a sweeping view of the ocean, but there was something bleak and dismal about it. The windows were boarded up, one of the drainpipes had come detached, and several roof shingles were missing. This is not a place where my father could find peace, Linda thought. Here he’ll be at the mercy of his inner demons. But what are they, anyway? She began to list the chief sources of concern in his life, ranking them in her mind: first his loneliness, then the creeping tendency to put on weight and the stiffness in his joints. What else? She put the question aside for the moment and joined her father as he inspected the outside of the house. The wind blew slowly, almost thoughtfully, in some nearby beech trees. The sea lay far below them. Linda squinted and spotted a ship on the horizon.

  Kurt Wallander looked at his daughter.

  “You look like me when you squint like that,” he said.

  “Only then?”

  They kept walking and came across the rotting remains of a leather couch behind the house. A field vole jumped out of the broken springs. Wallander looked around and shook his head.

  “Remind me why I want to move to the country.”

  “I have no idea—why do you want to move to the country?”

  “I’ve always dreamed of being able to roll out of bed and walk out the front door to take my morning piss, if you’ll pardon my language.”

  She looked at him with amusement.

  “Is that it?”

  “Do I need a better reason than that? Come on, let’s go.”

  “Let’s walk around the house one more time.”

  This time she looked more closely at the place, as if she were the prospective buyer and her father the agent. She sniffed around like a dog.

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred thousand.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “That’s what it says,” he said.

  “You don’t have that much money, do you?”

  “No, but the bank has pre-approved my loan. I’m a trusted customer, a policeman who’s always been as good as his word. I think I’m even disappointed I don’t like this place. An abandoned house is as depressing as a lonely person.”

  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.”<
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  “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.