Before the Frost

  “This is pure, undiluted vodka. Go and put something on. Have you taken a look at yourself recently? Soon you’ll be as big as Dad. But you’re all blubber, he’s just heavy.”

  Mona grabbed the bottle out of her hands. Linda didn’t fight her. She turned her back to Mona.

  “Mom, put your clothes on.”

  “I can be naked in my own house if I want to.”

  “It’s not yours, it’s the banker’s house.”

  “His name is Olof and he happens to be my husband. We own this house together.”

  “You do not. You have a prenuptial agreement. If you get divorced he keeps the house.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Grandpa.”

  “That old bastard. What did he know?”

  Linda turned and slapped her in the face.

  “Don’t say that about him.”

  Mona took a step back, unbalanced more by the alcohol than the slap.

  “You’re just like your dad. He hit me too.”

  “Put some clothes on, for God’s sake.”

  Linda watched as her naked mother took one more long swallow from the bottle. This isn’t happening, she thought. Why did I stop by? Why didn’t I go straight to Copenhagen?

  Mona tripped and fell. Linda wanted to help her up but got pushed aside. Mona finally pulled herself up into a chair.

  Linda went into the bathroom and got a robe, but Mona refused to put it on. Linda started to feel sick to her stomach.

  “Can’t you put anything on?”

  “All my clothes feel too tight.”

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  “Can’t you at least stay for a cup of coffee?”

  “Only if you put something on.”

  “Olof likes to see me naked. We always walk around naked in the house.”

  Now I’m becoming a mother to my mother, Linda thought, firmly guiding her mother into the robe. Mona put up no resistance. When she reached for the bottle, Linda moved it away. Then she started to make coffee. Mona followed her movements with dull eyes.

  “How is Kurt?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “That man has never been fine in his entire life.”

  “Right now he is. He’s never been better.”

  “Then it must be because he’s rid of his old man—who hated him.”

  Linda held her hand up as if to strike and Mona shut up. She lifted her palms in apology.

  “You have no idea how much he misses him. No idea,” Linda said.

  Mona got up from the chair, swaying but staying on her feet. She disappeared into the bathroom. Linda pressed her ear against the door. She heard a faucet running, but no bottles being taken from a secret stash.

  When Mona reappeared she had combed her hair and washed her face. She looked around for the vodka that Linda had poured down the drain, then served the coffee. Linda suddenly felt a wave of pity for her. I never want to be like her, she thought. Never this snooping, nervous, clingy woman who never really wanted to leave Dad but was so insecure that she ended up doing the very things she didn’t want.

  “I’m not usually like this,” Mona said.

  “Just now I thought you said you and Olof always walk around naked.”

  “I don’t drink as much as you think.”

  “Mom, you used to drink next to nothing. Now I catch you stark naked in your kitchen, tossing back vodka in the middle of the day.”

  “I’m not well.”

  “You mean you’re sick?”

  Mona started to cry, to Linda’s dismay. When had she last seen her mother cry? She would sometimes fall into a nervous, almost restless sobbing if a meal didn’t turn out well or if she had forgotten something, and she had cried when she had fought with Linda’s father. But these tears were different. Linda decided to wait them out. The sobbing stopped as suddenly as it had started. Mona blew her nose and drank her coffee.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d rather you told me what was bothering you.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Only you know that, not me. But clearly something’s on your mind.”

  “I think Olof has met another woman. He denies it, but if there’s one thing life has taught me it’s to tell when a man is lying. I learned that from your dad.”

  Linda immediately felt the need to jump to his defense.

  “I don’t think he lies more than anyone else. Not any more than I do.”

  “You don’t know the things I could tell you.”

  “And you don’t know how little I care about that.”

  “Why do you always have to be so mean?”

  “I’m just telling you the truth.”

  “Right now I could do with some plain old-fashioned kindness.”

  Linda’s feelings for Mona had always oscillated between pity and anger, but now they seemed to have reached an unprecedented intensity. I don’t like her, she thought. My mother asks for a love I’m incapable of giving to her. I need to get out of here. She put down her cup.

  “Are you leaving already?”

  “I’m on my way to Copenhagen.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t have time to go into it.”

  “I hate Olof for what he’s doing.”

  “I’ll come back another time when you’re sober.”

  “Why are you so mean to me?”

  “I’m not mean. I’ll call you.”

  “I can’t live like this anymore.”

  “Then leave him. You’ve done it before.”

  “You don’t need to tell me what I’ve done.”

  Her voice was full of hostility again. Linda turned and walked out. She heard Mona’s voice behind her: stay a little longer. And then, just as she was about to close the door: all right then—go. But don’t you dare show your face here again!

  Linda reached the car drenched in sweat. Bitch, she thought. She was furious, but she knew that before she was halfway across the Öresund Bridge her anger would flip over into guilt; she should have been a good daughter and stayed with her mother, listening to her troubles.

  The guilt had already started to take over as she paid the toll for the bridge, and she wished she were not an only child. I’m the one who will have to take care of them one day. She shivered and decided to tell her father what had happened. Maybe he knew if Mona had ever had problems with alcohol in the past, if there was something Linda didn’t know about.

  She reached Denmark and started to feel better. Her decision to talk to her father made her feel less guilty. Leaving Mona alone was the only thing to she could do until Mona sobered up. If she had stayed, they would only have kept yelling at each other.

  Linda drove to a parking lot and got out. She sat down on a bench overlooking the sound, and stared off across the water at the misty outline of Sweden. Over there somewhere were her parents. They had enveloped her whole childhood in a strange mist. My dad was the worst, she thought. The talented but gloomy policeman who had a sense of humor but never let himself laugh. My father who never found a new woman to share his life since he still loves Mona. Baiba tried to explain it to him but he wouldn’t listen. Baiba told me he claimed, “Mona belongs to the past.” But he hasn’t forgotten her, he never will. She is his one great love. Now I’ve seen her wandering around naked, drinking hard alcohol in the middle of the day. She’s also lost in the gloomy fog. I haven’t managed to free myself from it and I’m almost thirty.

  Linda kicked angrily at the gravel, picked up a pebble and threw it at a seagull. The eleventh commandment is the most important, she thought, the one that reads “Thou shalt never become like thy parents.” She got up and returned to the car. She stopped in Nyhavn and looked at a tourist map, finally locating Nedergade.

  It was already starting to get dark by the time she found Nedergade. It was a street in a shabby neighborhood with rows of tall, identical apartment buildings. Linda immediately felt unsafe and would have preferred to come back in broad daylight, but the
bridge toll was too expensive to waste a trip. She locked the car and stamped her foot on the pavement as a way of rousing her courage. Then she tried to make out the names of the people who lived in the building, although it was difficult to see in the dim light. The front door opened, and a man with a scar across his brow walked out. He was startled when he saw her. She caught the door and walked in before it closed behind him. Inside there was another notice board with names, but no one by the name of Langaas, or Torgeir, for that matter. A woman, about Linda’s age, walked by carrying a bag of trash. She smiled at her.

  “Excuse me,” Linda said. “I’m looking for a man by the name of Torgeir Langaas.”

  The woman stopped and put the bag down.

  “Does he live here?”

  “He gave this as his address.”

  “What was his name? Torgeir Langaas? Is he Danish?”

  “Norwegian.”

  She shook her head. It seemed to Linda that she genuinely wanted to help.

  “I don’t know of any Norwegians around here. We have a couple of Swedes and some people from other countries, but that’s all.”

  The front door opened and a man walked in, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt. The woman with the garbage bag asked him if he knew of a Torgeir Langaas. He shook his head. The hood was pulled up and Linda couldn’t see his face.

  “Try Mrs. Andersen on the second floor. She knows everything about everyone in this building. I’m sorry I can’t help you myself.”

  Linda thanked her for the tip and started walking up the stairs. Somewhere above her a door was pulled open, and loud Latino music reverberated in the stairwell. Outside Mrs. Andersen’s door there was a small stool with an orchid. Linda rang the doorbell. Immediately a dog started to bark on the other side of the door. Mrs. Andersen, shrunken and hunched over, was one of the smallest women Linda had ever seen. The dog, barking by her slippered feet, was also one of the smallest dogs Linda had seen. She asked Mrs. Andersen her question. The old lady pointed to her left ear.

  Linda shouted out her question again.

  “I may hear badly but there’s nothing wrong with my memory,” Mrs. Andersen said. “There’s no one living here by that name.”

  “Could he be staying with someone?”

  “I know everyone who lives here, whether or not they are on the lease. It’s been forty years, believe it or not, since they built this house. Now there are all kinds of people here, of course.”

  She leaned closer to Linda and lowered her voice:

  “They sell drugs here. And no one does anything about it.”

  Mrs. Andersen insisted on inviting her in and serving her coffee that she poured from a pot in the narrow kitchen. Linda managed to leave after half an hour. By then she knew all about what a wonderful husband Mr. Andersen had been, a man had who died far too young.

  Linda walked down the stairs. The music had stopped. Instead there was the sound of a child wailing. Linda walked out the front door and looked each way before crossing the street. She sensed someone’s presence in the shadows and turned her head. It was the man with the hooded sweatshirt. He grabbed her by her hair. She tried to get away but the pain was too great.

  “There is no Torgeir,” he said through clenched teeth. “No Torgeir Langaas. Drop it.”

  “Let me go!” she screamed.

  He let go of her hair, but punched her hard in the temple. Linda fell headlong into darkness.

  28

  She was swimming as fast as she could, but the great waves had almost caught up with her. Suddenly she saw rocks in front of her, big black prongs sticking out of the water ready to spear her. Her strength ebbed away and she screamed. Then she opened her eyes.

  Linda felt a sharp pain in her head and wondered what was wrong with the bedroom light. Then she saw her father’s face looming over her and wondered if she had slept in. But what was she supposed to do today? She had forgotten.

  Then she remembered. What caught up with her was not the great waves but the memory of what had happened right before she plunged into darkness. The stairwell, the street, the man who stepped out of the shadows, delivered his threat, and hit her. She winced. Her dad laid a hand on her arm.

  “It’s OK. Everything’s going to be OK.”

  She looked around the hospital room, the dim lighting, the screens, and the rhythmic hissing of medical equipment.

  “I remember now,” she said. “But how did I get here? Am I hurt?”

  She tried to sit up while at the same time testing all her limbs to make sure nothing was broken. Wallander tried to restrain her.

  “They want you to stay lying down. You were knocked unconscious, though there doesn’t appear to have been any internal damage, not even a concussion.”

  “How did you get here?” she asked and closed her eyes. “Tell me.”

  “If what I’ve heard so far from my Danish colleagues and one of the emergency-room physicians here at the Rikshospital is correct, you were extremely lucky. A patrol car was driving by and saw a man knock you down. It only took a few minutes for the ambulance to arrive. The officers found your driver’s license as well as your ID card from the police academy. They contacted me in half an hour. I drove over as soon as I heard about it. Lindman is also here.”

  Linda opened her eyes and looked at her dad. She thought in a fuzzy way that she was maybe a little in love with Stefan Lindman even though she had hardly spent any time with him. Am I delirious? I return to consciousness after some lunatic has knocked me out and the first thing I think about is that I’ve fallen in love, and much too quickly at that.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Where’s Lindman now?”

  “He went to get a bite to eat. I told him to go home, but he wanted to come with me.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  Wallander gave her some water. Linda’s head was clearer now; images from the moments before the assault were coming back.

  “What happened to the creep who assaulted me?”

  “They arrested him.”

  Linda sat up so quickly that her father couldn’t stop her.

  “Lie down!”

  “He knows where Anna is. Or perhaps he doesn’t know that—but he does know something.”

  “Calm down.”

  She reluctantly stretched out on the bed again.

  “I don’t know his name, it could be Torgeir Langaas, but I can’t know for sure. But he knows something about Anna.”

  Her father sat down on a chair beside the bed. She looked at his watch. It was a quarter past three.

  “Is it day or night?”

  “It’s night. You’ve been sleeping like a baby.”

  “He grabbed my hair and then he threatened me.”

  “What I don’t understand is what you were doing here in the first place. Why Copenhagen?”

  “It’ll take too long to explain. But the bastard who attacked me may know where Anna is. Maybe he assaulted her too. Or he may have something to do with Birgitta Medberg.”

  Wallander shook his head.

  “You’re tired. The doctor said your memory would come back in bits and pieces, and things may be jumbled for a while.”

  “Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I do. As soon as the doctor checks you again we can go home. Stefan can drive your car home.”

  The truth was starting to dawn on her.

  “You don’t believe a word I’ve told you, do you? That he threatened me?”

  “No, I know he threatened you. He’s admitted to that.”

  “Admitted to what, exactly?”

  “That he threatened you because he wanted to get the drugs that he assumed you had bought while you were in the apartment building.”

  Linda stared at her father while her mind was trying to absorb this new information.

  “He threatened me and told me to stop asking about Torgeir Langaas. He never said a word about drugs.”

  “We should be grateful the matter has
been cleared up, and that the police were nearby at the time. He’s going to be charged with assault and attempted robbery.”

  “There was no robbery. It’s all about the man who owns the house behind the church in Lestarp.”

  Wallander frowned.

  “What house is that?”

  “I haven’t had time to tell you about this before. I went to Anna’s house in Lund and found a lead that pointed to Lestarp and a house behind the church. After I was there asking about Anna, everyone disappeared. The only thing I managed to find out was that the house is owned by a Norwegian by the name of Torgeir Langaas, and his address is in Copenhagen.”

  Her father looked at her for a long time, then took out his notebook and started reading from one of the pages.

  “The man they arrested is one Ulrik Larsen. If my Danish colleague is to be believed, Larsen is hardly the kind of man who owns very many country houses in Sweden.”

  “Dad, you’re not listening to me!”

  “I am listening, but what you don’t seem to understand is that there’s a man who has confessed to trying to steal drugs from you.”

  Linda shook her head desperately. Her left temple throbbed. Why didn’t he understand what she was trying to tell him?

  “My mind is completely clear. I know I was knocked out but I’m telling you what actually happened.”

  “You think you are. What I still don’t understand is what you were doing in Copenhagen—after barging in on Mona and upsetting her like that.”

  Linda went cold.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “She called me. She was in a terrible state. She was crying so hard she couldn’t speak clearly, so at first I thought she was drunk.”

  “She was drunk, damn it. What did she say?”

  “That you had accused her of all manner of things and complained about both her and me. She’s crushed. And that banker husband was apparently not there to comfort her.”

  “I caught Mom naked in the kitchen with a bottle of vodka in her hand.”

  “She said you snuck into the house.”

  “I walked in through the veranda doors, which hardly qualifies as sneaking in. She was as high as a kite, whatever she may have told you on the phone.”