Before the Frost

by Henning Mankell

  It’s too late, Linda thought. She damned and cursed the phone and pleaded with it not to die on her just yet. The plane came closer and closer, the phone still beeped. Linda called out when the whine of the engines were right between her ears.

  “Then we have a pretty good idea where you are,” Lundwall said. “Just one more question—”

  What he wanted to know, Linda never found out. The phone died. Linda put it in a cupboard with robes and mantles. Did they have enough information to identify the church? She could only hope so. Zeba looked at her.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Linda said. “They know where we are.”

  Zeba didn’t answer. She was glassy-eyed and took hold of Linda’s wrist so hard that her nails dug into the skin and drew blood. We’re equally frightened, Linda thought. But I’m pretending not to be. I have to keep Zeba calm. If she goes into a panic our waiting period may be cut short. What were they waiting for? She didn’t know, but if the truth was that Anna had told her father about Zeba’s abortion, and if an abortion was the grounds for Harriet Bolson’s execution in Frennestad Church, then there was no doubt about what was going to happen.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Linda whispered. “They’re on their way.”

  They waited. It could have been half an hour or more. Then it was as if lightning struck out of nowhere. The door flew open and three men came in and grabbed Zeba. Two more followed and grabbed Linda. They were pulled out of the room. Everything went so fast that it never even occurred to Linda to resist. The arms that held her were too strong. Zeba screamed. It sounded like the howl of an animal. Westin and Langaas were waiting in the church. There were two women and a man in the front pew. Anna was also there, but she sat a little farther back. Linda tried to meet her gaze but Anna’s face was like a stiff mask. Or was she wearing a real mask? Linda couldn’t tell. The people sitting in the front had something that looked like white masks in their hands.

  Linda was filled with a paralyzing fear when she saw the hawser in Westin’s hands. He’s going to kill Zeba, she thought desperately. He’s going to kill her and then he’s going to kill me because I’ve seen too much. Zeba struggled to free herself.

  Then it was as if the walls collapsed. The church doors burst open, while four of the stained glass windows, two on either side of the church, were shattered. Linda heard a voice shouting in a megaphone, and it was her father. He shouted as if he didn’t trust the megaphone’s amplifying capacity. Everyone inside the church froze.

  Westin gave a start, grabbing Anna and using her as a shield. She tried to pull away. He shouted at her to calm down, but she kept writhing. He dragged her with him toward the front doors of the church. Again she tried to get out of his grasp. A shot rang out. Anna jerked and collapsed. Westin had a gun in his hand. He stared in disbelief at his daughter, then ran out of the church. No one dared to stop him.

  Wallander and a large number of armed officers—Linda didn’t recognize most of them—stormed into the church through the side doors. Langaas started to shoot. Linda pulled Zeba along with her into a pew where they lay down on the floor. The officers were firing back. Linda couldn’t see what was happening. Suddenly it grew quiet. She heard Martinsson’s voice. He shouted that a man had gone out the front door. That must be Torgeir Langaas, she thought.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and flinched. Perhaps she even screamed without realizing. It was her dad.

  “You have to get out,” he said.

  “How is Anna?”

  He didn’t answer, and Linda knew she was dead. She and Zeba scurried out a door. In the distance she saw the dark blue car disappear down the road, followed by two police cars. Linda and Zeba sat down on the ground on the other side of the cemetery wall.

  “It’s over,” Linda said.

  “Nothing is over,” Zeba whispered. “I’m going to live with this for the rest of my life. I’m always going to feel something pressing around my throat.”

  Suddenly there was one more shot, then two more. Linda and Zeba crouched down by the low wall. There were voices, orders, cars that took off at high speed with their sirens going. Then silence.

  Linda told Zeba to stay there. She carefully got to her feet and peeked out over the wall. There were a lot of officers surrounding the church, but everyone was still. It was like looking at a painting. She saw her dad and walked over to him. He was pale and grabbed her arm hard.

  “Both of them got away,” he said. “Westin and Langaas.”

  He was interrupted by someone who handed him a cell phone. He listened, then handed it back without a word.

  “A car loaded with dynamite has just driven right into Lund Cathedral. It drove right through the poles with iron chains and then crashed into the left tower. There’s chaos on the scene. No one knows how many are dead. But we seem to have averted attacks against the other cathedrals. Twenty people have been arrested so far.”

  “Why did they do it?” Linda asked.

  Wallander thought for a long time before answering.

  “Because they believe in God and love him,” he said. “But I don’t think their love is reciprocated.”

  They were silent.

  “Was it hard to find us?” Linda asked. “There are a lot of churches in Skåne.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Lundwall was able to locate you almost exactly. We had two churches to choose from.”

  Silence again. Linda knew they were thinking the same thing. What would have happened if she hadn’t been able to help them figure it out?

  “Whose cell phone?” he asked.

  “Anna’s. She felt terrible about what she had done.”

  They walked over to Zeba. A black car had arrived, and Anna’s body was carried out.

  “I don’t think he meant to shoot her,” Linda said. “I think the gun went off in his hand.”

  “We’ll catch him,” Wallander said. “Then we’ll find out.”

  Zeba stood up as they approached. She was frozen and shivering hard.

  “I’ll go with her,” Linda said. “I did almost everything wrong, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be able to relax more when I’ve got you wearing a uniform and know you’re securely seated in a patrol car circling the streets of Ystad,” her dad said.

  “My cell phone is lost on the dunes somewhere out in Sandhammaren.”

  “We’ll send someone out there to call your number. Maybe the sand will answer.”

  Svartman was standing by his car. He wrapped a blanket around Zeba and opened the back door and Zeba crawled in and made herself small in the corner.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Linda said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m going to start work on Monday.”

  “Push it off for a week,” her dad said. “There’s no hurry.”

  Linda sat down in the car and they drove away. A plane flew low over their heads, coming in for landing. Linda looked out at the landscape. It was as if her gaze was being sucked into the brown-gray mud and there was the sleep that she needed more than anything else right now. After that she would return one last time to the long wait to start working. But this time the wait would be short. Soon she would be able to throw off her invisible uniform. She thought about asking Svartman if he thought they would catch Erik Westin and Torgeir Langaas, but she didn’t say anything. Right now she didn’t want to know.

  Later, not now. Frost, autumn, and winter—time enough later for thinking. She leaned her head on Zeba’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Suddenly she saw Westin’s face in front of her eyes. That last moment when Anna slowly fell toward the floor. Now she realized the despair that had been in his face, the vast loneliness. The face of a man who has lost everything.

  She looked out over the landscape again. Slowly everything fell away, Erik Westin’s face, into the gray clay.

  Zeba was asleep by the time they reached her apartment. Linda gently shook her awak
e.

  “We’re here,” she said. “We’re here and everything is over.”

  51

  Monday, the tenth of September, was a cold and blustery day in Skåne. Linda had tossed and turned and only managed to fall asleep at dawn. She was woken up by her father coming in and sitting down on the side of her bed. Just like when I was little, she thought. He was always the one who would sit on the side of my bed, never my mom.

  He asked how she had slept and she told him the truth: poorly, and she had been plagued by nightmares.

  The previous evening, Lisa Holgersson had called to say that Linda could wait a week before starting work. But Linda had refused. She didn’t want to put it off any longer, even after everything that had happened. They finally agreed that Linda would take one extra day and start work on Tuesday.

  Wallander got to his feet.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “What do you have planned?”

  “I’ll see Zeba. She needs someone to talk to and so do I.”

  Linda spent the day with Zeba, whose son was with Mrs. Rosberg. The phone rang off the hook, mostly eager reporters. Finally she and Zeba escaped to Mariagatan. They went over what had happened again and again, especially the part that Anna had played. Could they understand it? Could anyone understand?

  “She missed her father her whole life,” Linda said. “When he finally turned up, she refused to believe anything except that he was right, whatever he said and did.”

  Zeba often fell silent. Linda knew what she was thinking, about how close to death she had been and that not only Anna’s father but Anna herself had been to blame.

  Mid-morning, Wallander called and told her that Henrietta had collapsed and been taken to the hospital. Linda remembered Anna’s sighs that Henrietta had woven into one of her compositions. That’s all she has left, she thought. Her dead daughter’s sighs.

  “There was a letter on her table,” Wallander continued, “where she tried to explain what she had done. She didn’t tell us about Westin’s return because she was afraid. He had threatened her and said that both she and Anna would die if she said anything. There’s no reason not to believe her, but she surely could have found a way to let someone know what was going on.”

  “Did she say anything about my last visit?” Linda asked.

  “Langaas was in the garden. She opened the window so he would hear that she didn’t reveal anything.”

  “Westin used Langaas to scare people.”

  “He knew a lot about people, we shouldn’t forget that.”

  “Is there any trace of them?”

  “We should find them, since this matter is top priority all over the world. But maybe they’ll find new hiding places, new followers. No one knows how many places Langaas prepared for them, and no one will know for sure until they’re found.”

  “Torgeir Langaas is gone, Erik Westin is gone, but the most gone of all is Anna.”

  When the conversation was over, Linda and Zeba talked about the fact that maybe Westin was already busy building up a new sect. They knew there were many out there who were prepared to follow him. One such person was Ulrik Larsen, the minister who had threatened and attacked Linda in Copenhagen. He was one of Erik Westin’s followers, waiting to be called to action. Linda thought about what her father had said. They couldn’t be sure of anything until Westin was caught. One day maybe a new assault would be launched, like the one in Lund.

  Afterward, when she had followed Zeba home after first making sure she was feeling up to being on her own with her son, Linda took a walk and sat down on the pier down by the harbor café. It was cold and windy, but she found a sheltered spot out of the wind. She didn’t know if she missed Anna or if what she felt was something else. We never became friends for real, she thought. We never got that far. We were really only true friends as children.

  That evening, Wallander came home and reported that Torgeir Langaas had been found dead. He had driven into a tree. Everything pointed to suicide. But Erik Westin was still at large. Linda wondered if she would ever find out if it was Westin she had seen in the sunlight outside Lestarp Church. And was he the one who had been in her car? These questions remained unanswered.

  But there was one question she had found the answer to herself. The puzzling words in Anna’s diary: myth fear, myth fear. It was so simple, Linda thought Myth fear—my father, my father. An anagram, that was all.

  Linda and her father sat up and talked for a long time. The police were slowly reconstructing Erik Westin’s life and had found a connection to the minister Jim Jones and his sect, who had found death in the jungles of Guyana. Westin was a complicated person whom it would never be possible to fully understand, but it was important to realize that he was a far cry from a madman. His self-image, not least as expressed in the holy pictures he asked his disciples to carry with them, was of a humble person carrying out God’s work. He wasn’t insane so much as a fanatic, prepared to do whatever it took to realize his beliefs. He was prepared to sacrifice people if need be, kill those who stood in his way, and punish those whom he deemed had committed mortal sins. He sought his justifications in the Bible. He let nothing happen that he did not feel could be justified by the Holy Book.

  Westin was also a desperate man who saw only evil and decay around him, not that this in any way justified his actions. But the only hope of preventing something like this in the future, of identifying people prepared to blow themselves up as a chain in something they claimed was a Christian effort, was not to dismiss Westin as a simple madman, Wallander said.

  There was not much to add. Those who were to have carried out the well-planned bombings were now awaiting trial. Police all over the world were looking for Westin, and soon fall would come with frosty nights and cold winds from the northeast.

  They were about to go to bed when the phone rang. Wallander listened in silence, then asked a few short questions. When he hung up, Linda did not want to ask him what had happened. She saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes, and he told her that Sten Widén had just died. The woman who called was a girlfriend, possibly the last one he had lived with. She had promised Widén to contact Wallander and tell him that everything was over and that it had “gone well.”

  “What did she mean by that?”

  “We used to talk about it when we were younger, Sten and I. That death was something one could face like an opponent in a duel. Even if the outcome was a given, a skillful player could hold off and tire death out so that it only had the power to deliver a single blow. That was how we wanted our deaths to be, something we could take care of so they would ‘go well.‘”

  He was very sad, she could see that.

  “Do you want to talk some more?”

  “No. This is something I have to work through on my own.”

  They were quiet for a while, then he stood up and went to bed without a word. Linda didn’t manage to sleep many hours that night either. She thought about all the people out there prepared to blow up the churches they hated—and themselves. According to what her father and Lindman had said, and from what she had read in the papers, these people were far from monsters. They spoke of their good intentions, their hopes to pave the road for the true Kingdom of God on Earth.

  She was prepared to wait one day, but no longer. Therefore she walked up to the station the morning of September 11. It was a cold, dreary day after a night that had left traces of the first frost. Linda tried on her uniform and signed receipts for her equipment. Then she had a meeting with Martinsson for an hour and received her first shift assignment. She was free for the rest of the day, but she didn’t feel like sitting alone at home at Mariagatan and so she stayed at the station.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, she was drinking coffee in the lunchroom, talking to Nyberg, who had sat down at her table of his own accord and was showing his most friendly side. Martinsson came in and, shortly thereafter, her father. Martinsson turned on the TV.

  “Something’s happened in the U.S.,” he said.


  “What is it?” Linda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Martinsson said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  There was an image of a clock, counting down the seconds to a special news report. More and more people filtered into the room. By the time the news report came on, the room was almost full.

  EPILOGUE

  the girl on the roof

  The call had come in to the station shortly after seven o’clock on Friday night, November 23, 2001. Linda, who was partnered up with an officer named Ekman that evening, answered the police dispatch department’s broadcast. They had just resolved a family conflict in Svarte and were heading back to Ystad. A young woman had climbed onto the roof of an apartment building to the west of the city and was threatening to jump. To make matters worse, she was armed. The head of operations wanted as many patrol cars as possible to get to the scene. Ekman turned on the siren and sped up.

  Curious onlookers had already gathered by the time they arrived. Spotlights illuminated the girl, who sat up on the roof with a shotgun in her arms. Ekman and Linda were briefed by Sundin, who was responsible for getting her down. A fire truck with a ladder was also in place, but the girl had threatened to jump if the ladder was driven any closer.

  The girl, Maria Larsson, was sixteen years old and had been treated for several episodes of mental illness. She lived with her mother, who was a drug addict. This particular evening something had gone wrong. Maria had rung a neighbor’s doorbell, and when the door opened she had rushed in and grabbed a shotgun and some ammunition that she knew were kept in the apartment. The owner of the apartment could count on being in serious trouble, since he had clearly stored both the weapon and the ammunition in an unsecured manner.

  But this was about Maria. She had threatened alternately to jump, to shoot herself, and to shoot anyone who tried to approach her. The mother was too high to be of any use, and there was also the chance that she would start to shout at her daughter and incite her to carry out her threats.