Before the Frost (18 page)

“Now at least I know you're not sneaking out for secret assignations.”

“Don't you understand that this is serious?” she screamed. “Anna is missing!”

“Of course I take you seriously. I take her disappearance seriously. I take my whole life and yours seriously. The butterfly was the clincher.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“Everything that can and should be done. We're turning every stone, chasing every lead. And now we're not going to discuss this further until we've had your leg checked out at the hospital.”

It was an hour before anyone could deal with her. Wallander dozed in an uncomfortable chair. And the process of cleaning the wound and bandaging it seemed to take forever. Just as they were finally leaving, Stefan Lindman walked in. Linda now saw he had closely cropped hair and blue eyes.

“I said you had terrible night vision,” he said cheerfully. “It doesn't make a lot of sense but it will have to suffice as an explanation for what you were doing wandering around out there.”

“I saw a man in the house with her,” Linda said.

“Henrietta Westin told me she had a visit from a man who wants her to set music to some dramatic verse. It didn't sound suspicious.”

Linda put her jacket on against the morning cold. She regretted having yelled at her father in the car. It was a sign of weakness.
Never scream, always keep your cool
. But she had done something stupid and had needed to turn the spotlight on someone else's shortcomings. She also felt a huge wave of relief. Anna's disappearance was no longer a figment of her imagination. A blue butterfly had made all the difference. The price was a painful ache in her leg.

“Stefan will take you home. I have to get back to the station.”

Linda went into the ladies' room and combed her hair. Lindman was waiting for her in the corridor. He was wearing a black leather jacket and was sloppily shaven on one side of his face, which Linda didn't like. She chose to walk on his good side.

“How does it feel?”

“What do you think?”

“It must hurt. I know something about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pain.”

“Have you ever had your leg caught in a bear trap?”

“It was a fox trap. But no, I haven't.”

“Then you don't know how it feels.”

He held the door open for her. She was still irritated by his unshaven cheek and didn't say anything else. They came out into a parking lot at the back of the hospital. It was broad daylight. He pointed to a rusty Ford. As he was unlocking the door, an ambulance driver came over and demanded to know what he meant by blocking the emergency entrance.

“I came to pick up a wounded police officer,” Lindman said, nodding in Linda's direction.

The ambulance driver accepted this and left. Linda maneuvered herself into the passenger side.

“Your dad said you live on Mariagatan. Where is that?”

Linda explained, and wondered silently about the strong smell in the car.

“It's paint,” Lindman said. “I'm fixing up a house out in Knickarp.”

They turned onto Mariagatan and Linda pointed out her doorway. He got out and opened the car door for her.

“It was nice to meet you,” he said. “And the reason I know what it's like to be in pain is that I've had cancer. Steel trap or a tumor—it's all the same.”

Linda watched his car drive off. She had forgotten his last name.

She let herself into the apartment and felt fatigue set in. She was about to collapse onto the sofa when the phone rang.

It was her dad.

“I heard you made it home.”

“What was the name of the guy who drove me home?”

“Stefan.”

“No—the last name.”

“Lindman. He's from BorÃ¥s, I think. Or else it was Skövde. It's time you got some rest.”

“I want to know what Henrietta said to you.”

“I don't have time to go into that right now.”

“You have to. Just give me the highlights.”

“Wait a minute.”

His voice broke off. Linda sensed he was at the station, but on his way out. She heard doors closing, phones ringing, and then the sound of an engine starting up.

He came back on the line, his voice tense.

“Are you there?”

“I'm here.”

“OK, I'll make this quick. Henrietta said she didn't know where Anna was. She hadn't heard from her recently. Nothing to suggest that Anna is depressed. She had apparently not said anything about seeing her father. On the other hand, Henrietta claims that this happened all the time when Anna was growing up. So it's the mother's word against yours. She couldn't give us any leads, nor did she know anything about Medberg. So as you see it wasn't very productive.”

“Did you notice that she was lying?”

“How would I have noticed that?”

“You always say all you have to do is breathe on someone to know if they're telling the truth or not.”

“I didn't get the impression she was lying.”

“She's lying.”

“I have to go now. But Lindman—the one who gave you the ride—is working on the connection between Medberg and Anna. We've sent out missing persons reports on her, by the way. That's all we can do for the moment.”

He hung up. Linda didn't feel like being alone, so she called Zeba. She was in luck: Zeba's son was at her cousin Titchka's house and Zeba had nothing lined up. She agreed to come over.

“Buy some breakfast on the way,” Linda said. “I'm hungry. The Chinese restaurant by the main square, for example. I know it's out of your way but I'll make it up to you the next time you find yourself stuck in a steel trap.”

 

Linda told Zeba what had happened. Zeba had heard the news on the radio about the severed head that had been found, but she still had trouble believing that anything bad might have happened to Anna.

“If I were a crook I'd think twice before picking on Anna. Don't you know she did martial arts? I can't remember which kind, but I think it's one where everything is allowed—short of actually killing someone, of course. No one messes with Anna and gets away with it.”

Linda regretted having brought it up in the first place. Zeba stayed for another hour before it was time for her to pick up her son.

 

Linda woke up when the doorbell rang. At first she was going to ignore it, but she changed her mind and limped out into the hallway. Stefan Lindman was standing outside the door.

“I'm sorry if I woke you up.”

“I wasn't sleeping.”

Then she looked at herself in the hall mirror. Her hair was standing on end.

“Actually I
was
sleeping,” she said. “I don't know why I said that. My leg hurts.”

“I need the keys to Anna Westin's apartment,” he said. “I heard you tell your father you had a spare set of keys.”

“I'll come along.”

He seemed surprised by this.

“I thought you were in pain.”

“I thought that too. What are you going to do over there?”

“Try to create a picture for myself.”

“If it's a picture of Anna, then I'm the person you should be talking to.”

“I'd like to have a look by myself first. Then we can talk.”

Linda pointed to a set of keys on a table. The keyring had a profile of an Egyptian pharaoh.

Linda hesitated.

“What was that about you having cancer?”

“I had cancer of the tongue if you can believe it. Things looked bad for a while, but I survived and there's been no recurrence.”

He looked her in the eye for the first time.

“I still have my tongue, of course; I wouldn't be able to speak without it. But my hair has never recovered.”

He tapped his neck with a finger.

“Soon it'll all be gone.”

He walked down the stairs and Linda returned to bed.

Cancer of the tongue
. She shuddered at the thought. Her fear of death came and went, though right now her life force was strong. But she had never forgotten what had gone through her mind while she was balancing on the edge of the bridge. Life wasn't just something that took care of itself. There were big black holes you could fall into with long sharp spikes at the bottom, monstrous traps.

She turned over on her side and tried to sleep. Right now she didn't have the energy to think about black holes. Then she was startled out of her half-awake state. It was something to do with Lindman. She sat up. She had finally caught hold of the thought that had been bugging her. She dialed a number on her cell phone. Busy. On the third try her father finally picked up.

“It's me.”

“How do you feel?”

“Better. There was something I wanted to ask about the man who was at Henrietta's house last night. The one who was said to be commissioning a composition. Did she say what he looked like?”

“Why would I have asked her that? She only gave me his name. I made a note of the address. Why?”

“Do me a favor. Call her and ask about his hair.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because that's what I saw.”

“I will, but I really don't have the time for this. We're drowning in rain over here.”

“Will you call back?”

“If I get ahold of her.”

He called her back nineteen minutes later.

“Peter Stigström—the man who wants Henrietta to set his verse to music—has shoulder-length dark hair with a few gray streaks. Will that do?”

“That will do just fine.”

“Are you going to explain yourself now or when I get home?”

“That depends on when you were planning to come home.”

“Pretty soon. I have to get out of these clothes.”

“Do you want something to eat?”

“No, we've been taken care of, in fact. There are some enterprising Kosovo immigrants out here who make a living out of putting up food stands around crime scenes and fires. I have no idea how they hear about our work, but there's probably a leak at the station who gets a commission. I'll be home in an hour.”

 

When the conversation was over, Linda sat staring down at the phone for a few minutes. The man she had seen through the window, the back of the head that had been turned toward her, had not had shoulder-length dark hair with a few gray streaks. His hair had been short and neatly trimmed.

20

Wallander came bounding in, his clothes soaked, his boots covered in mud, but with the happy news that the weather was about to clear up. Nyberg had called the air-control tower at Sturup, he said, and had received the report that the next forty-eight hours would be free of rain. Wallander changed his clothes, declined Linda's offers of food, and fixed himself an omelet.

Linda waited for the right moment to tell him about the conflicting descriptions of Henrietta's visitor. She didn't know exactly why she was waiting. Was it a lingering childhood fear of his temper? She didn't know, she just waited. And then, when he pushed away his plate and she plopped into the chair across from him and was about to launch into her story, he started talking.

“I've been thinking about your grandfather,” he said.

“What about?”

“What he was like, what he wasn't like. I think you and I knew him in different ways. That's as it should be. I was always looking for bits of myself in him, worried about what I would find. I've grown more and more like him the older I get. If I live as long as he did maybe I'll find myself a ramshackle, leaky house and start painting pictures of wood grouse and sunsets.”

“It'll never happen.”

“Don't be too sure.”

Linda broke in at this point and told him about the man she had seen whose close-cropped head didn't match Henrietta's description. He listened attentively, and when she stopped he didn't ask her if she was sure of what she had seen. He reached for the phone and dialed a number from memory—first incorrectly, then getting
it right. Lindman picked up. Wallander told him succinctly that in light of what Linda had observed they had to make another visit to Henrietta Westin.

“We have no time for lies,” he said. “No lies, half-truths, or incomplete answers.”

Then he put the phone down and looked at her.

“This is unorthodox at best,” he said. “Not even necessary, strictly speaking, but I'm still going to ask you to come along. If you feel up to it, that is.”

Linda felt a surge of pleasure.

“I'll do it.”

“How's the leg?'

“Fine.”

She saw that he didn't believe her.

“Does Henrietta know why I was there last night?” she asked. “She can hardly have believed what Stefan told her.”

“All we want to know is who was there with her last night. We have a witness; we don't have to tell her it's you.”

They walked down to the street and waited for Lindman. The air-traffic controllers had been right; the weather was changing. Drier winds were blowing in from the south.

“When will it snow?” Linda asked.

He looked at her in amusement.

“Not for a while, I hope. Why do you ask?”

“I can't remember when it comes, even though I was born and raised here. I don't remember the snow.”

Stefan Lindman pulled up in his car. Linda climbed into the back seat, her father sat in the front. His seat belt was caught on something and he had trouble getting it on.