Before the Frost (12 page)

13

Walking into an empty room was like dipping below the mirrorlike surface of a still lake and sinking into the silent and alien underwater landscape. She tried to remember everything she had been taught. Rooms always bore the traces of what had happened in them. But had anything of note happened here? There were no bloodstains, no signs of a struggle, nothing. A framed butterfly was missing, as well as a bag and a few clothes. That was all. But even if it had been Anna who had stopped by to pick them up, she would have left the same number of traces as an intruder. All Linda had to do was find them. She walked through the apartment again but didn't see anything else.

Finally she stopped at the answering machine and played the messages. Anna's dentist had called to ask her to reschedule her annual checkup, “Mirre” had called from Lund to ask if Anna was going to go to BÃ¥stad or not, and then there was Linda's own booming voice asking Anna to pick up.

Linda grabbed the address book on the table and looked up the number of the dentist, Sivertsson.

“Dr. Sivertsson's office.”

“My name is Linda Wallander. I'm returning Anna Westin's calls as she's out of town for the next few days. Would you mind telling me the exact day and time of her appointment?”

The receptionist put her on hold, then came back on the line.

“The tenth of September at nine o'clock.”

“Thank you. She probably has it written down somewhere.”

“I don't remember Anna ever missing an appointment.”

Linda hung up and tried to find a phone number for Mirre. She
thought about her own overstuffed address book that she was continually forced to patch up with tape. Somehow she could never bring herself to buy a new one; it stored too many memories. All the crossed-out telephone numbers reminded her of markers in a private graveyard. That led her thoughts away from Anna and to the moment in the forest with her father. A tenderness for him welled up inside her. She sensed what he had been like as a boy.
A little kid with big thoughts, maybe too big for his own good. There's so much I don't know about him,
she thought.
What I think I know often turns out to be wrong. I used to think of him only as a big friendly man who was not too sharp, but stubborn and with a pretty good intuition about the world. I've always thought he was a good policeman. But now I suspect he's much more sentimental than he appears, that he takes pleasure in the little romantic coincidences of everyday life and hates the incomprehensible and brutal reality he confronts through his work
.

Linda pulled up a chair and turned the pages of a book about Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin that Anna had obviously been reading. It was in English, and it surprised her that Anna was up to the challenge. They had talked about doing a language program in England when they were younger. Had Anna gone and done it on her own? She put the book back and picked up Anna's address book again. Every page was covered in numbers, like a blackboard during a lecture on advanced mathematics. There were scratched-out numbers and changes on every page. Linda smiled nostalgically at a couple of her own old phone numbers, as well as the names and numbers of two of her ex-boyfriends.
What am I looking for? I guess I'm trying to find traces of Anna that would explain what's happened. But why would they be here?

She kept going through the address book, still feeling that she was trespassing on Anna's most private self.
I've climbed over her fence,
she thought.
I'm doing it for her sake but it still feels wrong
.

Then something caught her eye. The word “Dad” appeared on one page, written boldly in red. The phone number was nineteen digits long, all ones and threes.
A number that doesn't exist,
Linda thought.
A secret number to the unknown city where all missing persons go
.

She wanted to put the book away, but forced herself to look all the way to the end. The only other entry of any interest was a
number to “my room in Lund.” Linda hesitated then dialed the number. A man picked up almost at once.

“Peter here.”

“I'd like to speak to Anna. Is she in?”

“I'll check.”

Linda waited. She heard music in the background but couldn't remember the name of the singer.

“No, she's not in. Can I take a message?”

“Do you know when she'll be back?”

“I don't even know if she's around. I haven't seen her for a while. But I can ask the others.”

She waited again while he asked around.

“No one's seen her here for a couple of days.”

She asked him for the address, which he gave and then promptly hung up. She was left holding the receiver to her ear.
No Anna,
she thought. The man called Peter had clearly not been worried and Linda was starting to feel foolish. She thought about herself and her own tendency to take off without leaving messages about where she was going. Her dad had often been on the verge of reporting her when she was younger.
But I always sense when I'm gone too long and I always call in,
she thought.
Why wouldn't Anna do the same?

Linda rang Zeba and asked her if she had heard from Anna. Zeba said no, there had been no news. They decided to meet for coffee the following day.

As she put the phone down, Linda thought,
I'm staging this as a disappearance so as to have something to do. As soon as I can put my uniform on and actually start working she'll turn up. It's like a game
.

She went out into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, then took it with her to Anna's bedroom. She sat down on the side of the bed across from where Anna normally slept. Putting down her cup of tea, she stretched out for a moment, and before she knew it she had fallen asleep.

When she woke up she didn't know where she was at first. She looked at the time—she had been asleep for an hour. The tea was cold. She drank it anyway because her mouth was dry, then stood up and straightened the covers. That was when she saw it.

The covers. On Anna's side. There was an indentation that was still visible: someone had slept there and not smoothed the bed afterward.
That wasn't like Anna. She was the kind of person who never left crumbs on the table.

Linda lifted the covers on impulse and found a T-shirt, size XXL, dark blue with the Virgin Airlines logo. She sniffed carefully and confirmed that it didn't smell like Anna—it had the masculine scent of aftershave or perhaps very strong deodorant soap. She laid the T-shirt out on the bed. Anna preferred nightgowns, and classy ones at that. Linda was willing to bet that she would not have used a Virgin Airlines T-shirt even for one night.

Suddenly the phone in the living room rang. Linda flinched, then walked out and looked at the answering machine. Should she answer it? She stretched out her hand but pulled it back. The machine picked up after the fifth ring. It was Henrietta.
Hi, it's Mom. Your friend Linda—the one who wants to become a policewoman—came by here yesterday looking for you. I just wanted to let you know. Call me when you get back. Bye
.

Linda played the message back. Henrietta's voice sounded calm. There was no unvoiced anxiety between the words, nothing out of the ordinary. She heard the implicit criticism of her choice of careers clearly enough. That bothered her. Did Anna share her mother's dismissive attitude?
To hell with them,
Linda thought.
Anna can carry on her disappearing act without me
. Linda walked around one last time watering the plants, then left the apartment.

By the time Wallander came home around seven o'clock she had cooked and eaten dinner. She heated up the food she had left for him while he changed. She sat in the kitchen while he ate.

“What happened?”

“With the missing woman? Svartman and Grönkvist are in charge of it. Nyberg is examining her apartment. We have decided to take her disappearance seriously. Now we can only wait and see.”

“And what do you think?”

Wallander pushed his plate away.

“Something about it still worries me, but I could be wrong.”

“What worries you?”

“Certain people shouldn't go missing, that's all. It's not something they do—if it happens it means something is wrong. I guess that's been my experience.”

He got up and put on a pot of coffee.

“We had a real-estate agent whose wife went missing about ten years ago. Maybe you remember it? She was religious, something evangelical. They had small children. The moment he came in to notify us she was missing I knew something had happened. And I was right. She had been murdered.”

“But Birgitta Medberg is a widow and she doesn't have small children. She's probably not even religious—I certainly can't imagine that fat daughter of hers being religious, can you?”

“I don't think you can tell that just by looking at someone. But I'm talking about something else, something unexpected.”

Linda told him about her latest discovery in Anna's apartment. She watched her father's face take on a strong look of disapproval.

“You shouldn't be getting yourself mixed up in this,” he said. “If anything's happened it's a case for the police.”

“I'm almost the police.”

“You're a rookie, and the proper line of work for you is breaking up drunken brawls in town.”

“I just think it's strange she's gone, that's all.”

Wallander brought his plate and his coffee cup over to the sink.

“If you're genuinely concerned, you should go to the police.”

He left the kitchen. Linda stayed behind. His condescending tone irritated her, not least because he was right.

She sulked in the kitchen until she felt ready to see her dad again. He was in the living room, asleep in a chair. Linda shook his arm when he started to snore. He jerked awake and raised his arms as if to ward off an attack.
Just like me,
she thought.
That's another thing we have in common
. He went to the bathroom, then got ready for bed. Linda watched a film on TV without really concentrating. Shortly before midnight she went to bed. She dreamed about her ex-boyfriend, Herman Mboya, who was back in Kenya and had opened his own practice.

The buzzing of the cell phone woke her up. It vibrated next to the lamp on the bedside table. She answered it at the same time that she checked her alarm clock. Three fifteen. There was no voice on the other end, just breathing. Then the line went dead. Linda knew it had something to do with Anna, whoever had made the call. It was a kind of message, even if it only consisted of a few breaths. It had to mean something.

Linda never managed to fall back asleep. Her father got up at a quarter past six. She let him shower and change in peace, but when he started making noise in the kitchen she joined him. He was surprised to see her up and dressed at that hour.

“I'm coming with you.”

“Why?”

“I thought about what you said, that if I was worried about Anna I should raise the matter with the police. Well, I
am
worried and I'm going to report her disappearance. I think something is seriously wrong.”

14

Linda had never learned to predict when her dad would fall into one of his sudden rages. She remembered with painful clarity how she and her mother would cringe when he got like this. Her grandfather was the only one who simply shrugged it off or gave as good as he got. By now she had learned to look for certain signs: the telltale red patch on the forehead, the nervous pacing.

But this morning she was once more taken by surprise at the vehemence of his reaction to her decision to report Anna's disappearance. Her dad started by throwing a stack of napkins to the floor. There was a comical element in this gesture, since the anticipated violence of the crash never came, and the white papers fluttered softly across the kitchen floor. But it was enough to kindle Linda's childhood fear. She recalled what Mona had said after the divorce:
He can't see it himself. He doesn't know how intimidating it is to be met with a raging temper when you least expect it. Others probably think of him as a friendly, slightly eccentric perhaps, but capable policeman, which is probably a fair assessment of him in the workplace. But at home he let his temper run loose like a wild animal. He became a terrorist in my eyes. I feared him, and I also grew to hate him.

Linda thought of her mother's words as she sat across from her giant of a father, still furious, now kicking at the napkins on the floor.

“Why don't you listen to me?” he was saying. “How are you ever going to be a respected police officer if you think a crime has been committed every time one of your friends doesn't pick up the phone?”

“Dad, it's not like that.”

He swept the rest of the napkins off the table.
A child,
Linda thought.
A big child throwing all his toys on the ground
.

“Don't interrupt me! Didn't they teach you anything at the academy?”

“I learned to take things seriously.”

“You're going to be laughed out of the force.”

“So be it. But Anna has disappeared.”

His rage died down as suddenly as it had started. There were still a few drops of sweat on his cheek.
That was a short one,
Linda thought.
And not as furious as I remember. Maybe he's more afraid of me now, or else he's getting old. I bet he even apologizes this time
.

“I'm sorry.”

Linda didn't answer. She picked up a few napkins from the floor and threw them into the trash. Her heart was still pounding with fear.
I'll always feel this way when he gets angry,
she thought.