Before the Frost

  42

  The situation was at once both crystal clear and confusing. Linda knew Zeba would never have abandoned her son of her own free will, or forgotten about him. What had happened? It was something she felt she should know, something that was almost within her grasp and yet eluded her. The big picture. Her father always talked about looking for the way events came together. But she saw nothing.

  Since Anna seemed even more confused than she did, Linda forced her to sit down in the kitchen and talk. Anna spoke in unconnected fragments, but it didn’t take Linda more than a few minutes to piece together what had happened.

  Zeba’s neighbor, a woman who often watched the boy for her, had heard him crying through the thin walls. Since he cried for an unusually long time without Zeba seeming to intervene, she went over and rang the doorbell. When there was no answer, she let herself in with the key Zeba had given her and found the boy alone. He stopped crying when he saw her.

  This neighbor, whose name was Aina Rosberg, had not seen anything strange in the apartment. It was messy as usual, but there were no signs of commotion. That was the phrase she had used: “no signs of commotion.” Aina Rosberg had called one of Zeba’s cousins, Titchka, who wasn’t home, and then Anna. That’s what Zeba had instructed her to do if anything ever happened: first call Titchka, then Anna.

  “How long ago did this happen?” Linda asked.

  “Two hours ago.”

  “Has Aina Rosberg called again?”

  “I called her back. But Zeba still hadn’t returned.”

  Linda thought for a moment. Most of all she wanted to talk to her dad, but she also knew what he would say. Two hours was not a long time. There was probably a natural explanation for Zeba’s absence. But what could it possibly be?

  “Let’s go over to her apartment,” Linda said. “I want to take a look at it.”

  Anna made no objections. Ten minutes later, Mrs. Rosberg let them in.

  “Where can she be?” she said. “This isn’t like her. Nobody would leave such a young child alone, least of all her. What would have happened if I hadn’t heard him cry?”

  “I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” Linda said. “But it would be best if the boy could stay with you until then.”

  “Of course he can,” Mrs. Rosberg said, and left to go back to her apartment.

  When Linda walked into Zeba’s apartment, she picked up a strange smell. Her heart grew cold with fear; she knew something serious had happened. Zeba had not left of her own free will.

  “Can you smell that?” she asked.

  Anna shook her head.

  “That sharp smell. Like vinegar.”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  Linda sat in the kitchen, Anna in the living room. Linda could see her through the open door. Anna was nervously pinching herself on the arm. Linda tried to think clearly. She walked over to the window and looked out. She tried to imagine Zeba walking out onto the street. Which way had she gone? To the left or to the right? Had she been alone? Linda looked at the little smoke shop that was across the street. A tall, heavily built man was standing in the doorway, smoking. When a customer came by he walked in, then resumed his station at the doorway. Linda thought he was worth a try.

  Anna still sat on the couch, lost in thought. Linda patted her on the arm.

  “I’m sure she’ll turn up,” she said. “Probably nothing has happened. I’m going down to the smoke shop for a few minutes. I’ll be back soon.”

  There was a sign welcoming customers to “Yassar’s Shop.” Linda bought some gum.

  “Do you know Zeba?” she asked. “She lives across the street.”

  “Zeba? Sure. I give her little one candy when they come in.”

  “Have you seen her today?”

  His answer came without hesitation.

  “A few hours ago, around ten o’clock. I was putting up one of the flags that had come down outside. I don’t understand how a flag can fall down when there is no wind. ...”

  “Was anyone with her?” Linda interrupted.

  “She was with a man.”

  Linda’s heart beat faster.

  “Have you seen him before?”

  Yassar looked worried. Instead of answering her question, he started asking his own.

  “Why do you want to know? Who are you?”

  “You must have seen me before. I’m a friend of Zeba’s.”

  “Why are you asking all these questions?”

  “I need to know.”

  “Has anything happened?”

  “No. Have you ever seen the man before?”

  “No. He had a small gray car, he was tall, and later I thought about how strange it was that Zeba was leaning on him.”

  “How do you mean ‘leaning on him’?”

  “Just that. She was leaning, clinging. As if she needed support.”

  “Can you describe the man?”

  “He was tall. That’s about it. He had a hat on, a long coat.”

  “A hat?”

  “A gray hat. Or blue. A long gray coat. Or blue. Everything about him was either blue or gray.”

  “Did you see the license plate?”

  “No.”

  “What about the make of the car?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you asking all these questions? You come into my shop and make me as worried as if you were a cop.”

  “I am a cop,” Linda said, and she left.

  When she came back to the apartment, Anna was sitting where she had left her. Linda had the same feeling that there was something she should be seeing, realizing, seeing through, although she didn’t know what it was. She sat down next to Anna.

  “You have to go back to your place, in case Zeba calls. I’m going down to the police station to talk to my dad. You can drop me off there.”

  Anna grabbed Linda’s arm so roughly that Linda jumped. Then, just as abruptly, she let go. It was a strange reaction. Perhaps not the action itself, but the intensity of it.

  When Linda walked into the reception area, someone called out to her that her dad was at the D.A.’s office, on the other side. She went over. The outer door was locked, but an assistant who recognized her let her in.

  “Are you looking for your father? He’s in the small conference room.”

  She pointed down a corridor. A red light was on outside one of the rooms. Linda sat down outside and waited.

  After ten minutes Ann-Britt Höglund came out, saw her, and looked surprised. Then she turned back to the room.

  “You have an important visitor,” she said and kept going.

  Wallander came out with a very young attorney. He introduced Linda and the attorney left. Linda pulled him down in a chair and told him everything that had happened, not even trying to be systematic about the order in which things came out. Wallander was quiet for a long time after she finished. Then he asked a few questions, primarily about Yassar’s observations. He returned several times to the issue of Zeba “leaning” on the man.

  “Is Zeba the touchy-feely kind?”

  “No, I’d say the opposite, actually. It’s normally the man who is all over her. She’s tough and avoids showing any weakness, although she has several.”

  “If she was being taken away against her will, why didn’t she cry out?”

  Linda shook her head. Wallander answered his own question, as he stood up.

  “Maybe she wasn’t able to.”

  “And that she had to lean on the man? That she was drugged and would have fallen down if he hadn’t held her? That ‘leaning on him’ could be rephrased as ‘propped up by him’?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

  He walked quickly to his office. Linda had trouble keeping up. On the way, Wallander knocked on Lindman’s door and pushed it open. It was empty. Martinsson walked by carrying a large teddy bear.

  “What the hell is that?” Wallander asked irritably.

  “It was made in Taiwan. There’s a large package of amphetamines inside.”


  “Get someone else to take care of it.”

  “I was about to hand it over to Svartman,” Martinsson said, not hiding the fact that he too was irritated.

  “Try to round everyone up. I want a meeting in half an hour.”

  Martinsson left.

  Wallander sat down behind his desk, then leaned over toward Linda.

  “You didn’t ask Yassar if he heard the man say anything.”

  “I forgot.”

  Wallander handed her the phone.

  “Call him.”

  “I don’t know what his number is.”

  Wallander dialed information for her. Linda asked to be transferred. Yassar answered. He didn’t remember the man saying anything.

  “I’m starting to worry,” Yassar said. “What has happened?”

  “Nothing,” Linda said. “Thanks for your help.”

  She put the phone down.

  “He didn’t hear anything.”

  Her dad rocked back and forth on his chair and looked at his hands. She heard voices come and go outside in the corridor.

  “I don’t like it,” he said finally. “Her neighbor is right. No one leaves such a young child alone.”

  “I keep having the feeling that I’m overlooking something,” Linda said. “Something I should see, something that’s staring me in the face. There’s a connection, the kind you’re always talking about. But I can’t think of it.”

  He looked attentively at her.

  “As if part of you already knows what’s happened? And why?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s more as if I’ve kind of been waiting for this to happen. And as if Zeba isn’t the one who’s disappeared, but Anna. A second time.”

  He looked at her for a long time.

  “Can you explain what you mean?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll give Zeba a few more hours,” he said. “If she’s not back by then, we’ll have to do something. I want you to stay here.”

  Linda followed him to the conference room. When everyone was gathered and the door was closed, Wallander started by telling everyone about Zeba’s disappearance. The tension in the room mounted.

  “Too many people are disappearing,” Wallander said. “Disappearing, reappearing, disappearing again. By coincidence or because of factors as yet unknown, all this seems to involve my daughter, a fact that makes me like this even less.”

  He tapped a pencil on the tabletop and continued:

  “I talked to Mrs. Tademan. She is not a particularly pleasant woman. In fact, she’s about as good an example of an arrogant, conceited Scanian aristocrat I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. But she did the right thing in getting in touch with us. A distant cousin who lives on the Rannesholm grounds saw a band of people near the edge of the forest. There were at least twenty of them, and they came and went very quickly. They could have been a group of tourists, but their actions, especially the fact that they were anxious not to attract attention, means they could also have been something else.”

  “Such as?” Höglund asked.

  “We don’t know. But keep in mind that we found a hideout in the forest and a woman was murdered there.”

  “That hut could hardly house twenty people or more.”

  “I know. Nonetheless, this is important information. We have suspected that there were at least several people involved in the Frennestad Church fire and murder. Now there seem to be indications that there are even more.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Martinsson said. “Are we dealing with a kind of gang?”

  “Or a sect,” Lindman said.

  “Or both,” Wallander said. “That’s something we don’t know yet. This piece of information may turn out to lead us in the wrong direction, but we’re not drawing any conclusions. Not yet, not even provisional ones. Let’s put Mrs. Tademan’s information aside for the moment.”

  Lindman reported on his meeting with Håkan Holmberg and his keys. He didn’t mention the fact that Linda had been with him.

  “The man with an accent,” Wallander mused. “Our Norwegian or Norwegian-Danish link. He turns up again. I think we can safely accept Mr. Holmberg’s assurance that these were the keys to both the Hurup and Frennestad churches.”

  “We know that already,” Nyberg said. “We’ve compared them.”

  The room fell silent.

  “A Norwegian orders copies of some church keys,” Wallander said. “An American woman is later strangled in the church. By whom and why? That’s what we need to find out.”

  He turned to Höglund.

  “What do our Danish colleagues say about Frans Vigsten?”

  “He’s a piano teacher. He was a rehearsal pianist at Det Kongelige Theater and apparently very much admired as such. Now he’s getting increasingly senile and has trouble taking care of himself. But no one has any information indicating that anyone else lives in the apartment, least of all Vigsten himself.”

  “And Ulrik Larsen?”

  “He stands by his confession—and still says he was trying to steal drugs.”

  Wallander threw a hasty glance at Linda before continuing.

  “Let’s stay in Denmark for a moment. What about this woman Sylvi Rasmussen? What do we have on her?”

  Martinsson rifled through his papers.

  “Her original name was something else. She came to Denmark as a refugee after the collapse of Eastern Europe. Drug addict, homeless, the same old story leading to prostitution. She was well-liked by clients and friends. No one has anything bad to say about her. There was nothing else unusual about her life, even the sheer predictable tragedy of it.”

  Martinsson looked through the papers again before putting them down.

  “No one knows who her final client was, but he must be the murderer.”

  “She kept no written record?”

  “No. There are the prints of twelve different people in her apartment. They’re being examined, and the Danes will let us know what they find.”

  Linda noticed that her father was trying to pick up the pace of the meeting. He tried to interpret the information that was brought in, never receiving it passively, always looking for the underlying message.

  Finally he opened the floor for general discussion. Linda was the only one who didn’t say anything. After half an hour they took a short break. Everyone left to stretch their legs or to get some coffee, except Linda, who was assigned to guard the window.

  A gust of wind blew some of Martinsson’s papers onto the floor. Linda gathered them up and saw a picture of Sylvi Rasmussen. Linda studied her face, seeing fear in her eyes. She shivered when she thought of her life and fate.

  She was about to put the papers back when a detail caught her eye. The pathologist’s report stated that Sylvi Rasmussen had had two or three abortions. Linda stared at the paper. She thought of the two Danish sailors who had been sitting in the corner, Zeba’s son playing on the floor, and Zeba, telling them about her abortion. She also thought about Anna’s unexpected reaction. Linda froze, holding her breath and Sylvi Rasmussen’s photograph.

  Wallander came back into the room.

  “I think I get it,” she said.

  “Get what?”

  “I have one question. That woman from Tulsa.”

  “What about her?”

  Linda shook her head and pointed to the door.

  “Close it.”

  “We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

  “I can’t concentrate if everyone comes back in. But I think I’m onto something important.”

  He saw she meant what she was saying and went to close the door.

  43

  Wallander put his head out the door and told someone that the rest of the meeting would be postponed a little while. Someone started to protest but he shut the door.

  They sat down across from each other.

  “What did you want to ask?”

  “Did Harriet Bolson ever have an abortion? Did Birgitta Medberg? If
I’m correct, the answer will be yes for Bolson, but no for Medberg.”

  Wallander frowned, at first perplexed, then simply uncomprehending. He pulled his stack of papers over and started looking through them with growing impatience. He tossed the file to the side.

  “Nothing about an abortion.”

  “Are all the facts there?”

  “Of course not. A full description of a person’s life, however uneventful or uninteresting, still fills a much larger folder than this. Harriet Bolson does not seem to have had a particularly exciting life, and certainly there’s nothing as dramatic as an abortion in the material we received from Clark Richardson.”

  “And Medberg?”

  “I don’t know, but that information should be easier to get. All we have to do is talk to her unpleasant daughter—although perhaps it’s not the kind of thing mothers tell their children? I don’t think Mona ever had an abortion. Do you know?”

  “No.”

  “Does that mean that you don’t know if she did or that she never had one?”

  “Mom never had an abortion. I would know.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Why is this important?”

  Linda tried to clear her head. She could be wrong but every instinct told her she was right.

  “Can you find out about the abortions?”

  “I’ll do it when you’ve told me why it’s important.”

  Something inside of her burst. Tears started to run down her face and she banged her fists into the table. She hated crying in front of her dad. Not just in front of him, in front of everybody. The only person she had ever been able to cry in front of was her grandfather.

  “I’ll ask them to do it,” Wallander said and stood up. “But I expect you to tell me what this is all about when I get back. People have been murdered, Linda. This isn’t an exercise at the police academy.”

  Linda grabbed an ashtray from the table and threw it at him, hitting him right above the eyebrow. Blood ran down his face and dripped on Harriet Bolson’s file.

  “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Wallander pressed a fistful of napkins against the gash.

  “I just can’t stand it when you needle me,” she said.