Хеннинг Манкелль - Before the Frost

She looked farther back in the book. From time to time her own name appeared. Linda is a true friend, she had written on July 20, in the middle of an entry about her mother. She and her mother had argued over nothing and later that evening she was planning to go to Malmö to see a Russian movie .

Linda sat with the journal for almost an hour, struggling with her conscience. She looked for entries about herself. She found Linda can be so demanding on August 4. What did we do that day, Linda wondered. She couldn’t remember. It was a day like any other. Linda didn’t even have an organizer right now; she scribbled appointments on scraps of paper and wrote phone numbers on her hands.

Finally she closed the diary. There was nothing there, just the strange words at the end. It’s not like her, Linda thought. The other entries are the work of a balanced mind. She doesn’t have more problems than most people. But the last day, the day she thinks she just saw her father turn up on a street in Malmö after twenty-four years, she repeatedly writes the words “myth fear, myth fear.” Why doesn’t she write about her father? Why does she write something that doesn’t make any sense?

Linda felt her anxiety return. Had there perhaps been something to Anna’s talk about losing her mind? Linda walked over to the window where Anna often stood during their conversations. The sun was reflected from a window in the building directly opposite, and she had to squint in order to see anything. Could Anna have suffered a temporary derangement? She thought she had seen her long-lost father — could this event have disconcerted her so violently that she lost her bearings and started behaving erratically?

Linda gave a start. There, in the parking lot behind the building, was Anna’s car, the little red VW Golf. If she had left for a few days, the car should also be gone. Linda hurried down into the lot and felt the car doors. Locked. The car looked clean and shiny, which surprised her. Anna’s car tends to be dirty, she thought. Every time we go out her car is covered in dust. Now it’s squeaky clean — even the hubcaps have been polished.

She went back up to the apartment, sat down in the kitchen, and tried to come up with a plausible explanation. The only thing she knew for sure was that Anna had not stayed home to meet with Linda as they had arranged. It wasn’t a misunderstanding; there was nothing wrong with Anna’s memory. She had chosen not to stay home that day. Something else had come up that was more important to her, something for which she didn’t need her car. Linda turned on the answering machine and listened to the messages but only heard her own bellowing of Anna’s name. She let her gaze wander to the front door. Someone rang the bell, she thought. Not me, not Zeba, not Henrietta. Who else was there? Anna had broken up with her boyfriend in April, a guy Linda had never met called Måns Persson. He was also a student in Lund, studying electromagnetics, and he had turned out to be less faithful than Anna would have liked. She had been deeply hurt by the breach in their relationship, and she had told Linda on several occasions that she was going to take her time before letting herself get that close to a man again.

Linda had also recently had a Måns Persson experience, a man she kicked out of her life in March. His name had been Ludwig and he seemed uniquely suited to that name. His personality was part emperor and part impresario. He and Linda had met at a pub when Linda had been out drinking with some student colleagues. Ludwig had been with another group and they had simply ended up squeezed in next to each other due to the lack of space. Ludwig was in the sanitation business; he operated a garbage truck and made his pride in his work seem like the most natural thing in the world. Linda had been attracted by his huge laugh, his happy eyes, and the fact that he never interrupted her when she talked, actually straining to catch every word although the noise around them had been deafening.

They had started seeing each other, and for a while Linda dared to think she had found a real man at last. But then, purely by accident, she heard from a friend of a friend that when Ludwig wasn’t working or spending time with Linda, he was spending time with a young woman who ran a catering business in Vallentuna. They had had a heated confrontation. Ludwig pleaded with her, but Linda sent him packing and cried for a whole week. She hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but perhaps she too was waiting to recover from the pain of this breakup before she let herself look for someone new. She knew that the rapid succession of boyfriends in her life worried her father, even though he never asked her about it.

Before leaving Anna’s apartment, Linda went to the kitchen, where she had spotted the spare keys to the car in a drawer. In order to avoid having to pick the lock every time, she had pocketed a spare set of keys to the apartment usually stored in a box in the hallway. She had borrowed the car on a few other occasions. It won’t matter if I do it again, Linda thought. I’m just going to borrow the car and visit her mother. She left a note saying what she had done and that she would be back in a couple of hours. She didn’t write anything about being worried.

First Linda stopped by the apartment on Mariagatan and changed into cooler clothing, since it was getting very warm. Then she drove out of town, took the turnoff to Kåseberga, and parked in the harbor. The surface of the water was like a mirror, the only disturbance a dog swimming around next to the boats. An old man sitting on a bench outside the smoked-fish shop nodded kindly at her. Linda smiled in return but had no idea who he was. A retired colleague of her father’s?

She got back into the car and continued on her way. Henrietta Westin lived in a house that seemed to crouch among the tall stands of trees posted like sentries on all sides. Linda had to turn around several times in order to find the right driveway. She finally pulled in next to a rusty harvester and parked the car. The heat outside made her remember the vacation she and Ludwig had taken to Greece before they broke up. She shook away those thoughts and started making her way through the massive trees. She stopped at the sound of an unusual noise, a furious hammering. Then she saw a woodpecker up on the right. Maybe he has a part in her music, she thought. Anna has said her mother doesn’t shy away from using any kind of noise. His input might very well be crucial to the percussion section.

She left the woodpecker and walked past an old run-down vegetable garden that had clearly not been tended for many years. What do I know about her? Linda thought. And what am I doing here? She stopped and listened. At that particular moment, in the shade of the high trees, she was no longer worried about Anna. There was surely a reasonable explanation for why she was staying away. Linda turned and started walking back to the car.

The woodpecker had flown away. Everything changes, she thought. People and woodpeckers, my dreams and all that time I thought I had but that keeps slipping out of my fingers despite my best attempts to keep it dammed up. She pulled her invisible reins and came to a halt. Why was she walking away? Now that she had come this far in Anna’s car, the least she could do was say hello to Henrietta. Without betraying her anxieties, without making pressing inquiries about Anna’s whereabouts. She might just be in Lund, and I don’t have her number there. I’ll ask Henrietta for it.

She followed the path through the trees again and finally came to a half-timbered, whitewashed house covered in wild roses. A cat lay on the stone steps and studied her movements warily as Linda approached. A window was open and just as she bent down to stroke the cat, she heard noises from inside. Henrietta’s music, she thought.