Хеннинг Манкелль - Before the Frost

“Remind me why I want to move to the country.”

“I have no idea — why do you want to move to the country?”

“I’ve always dreamed of being able to roll out of bed and walk out the front door to take my morning piss, if you’ll pardon my language.”

She looked at him with amusement.

“Is that it?”

“Do I need a better reason than that? Come on, let’s go.”

“Let’s walk around the house one more time.”

This time she looked more closely at the place, as if she were the prospective buyer and her father the agent. She sniffed around like a dog.

“How much?”

“Four hundred thousand.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“That’s what it says,” he said.

“You don’t have that much money, do you?”

“No, but the bank has pre-approved my loan. I’m a trusted customer, a policeman who’s always been as good as his word. I think I’m even disappointed I don’t like this place. An abandoned house is as depressing as a lonely person.”

They left. Linda read a sign on the side of the road. MOSSBY BEACH. He glanced at her.

“You want to go down there?”

“Yes. If you have time.”

This was the place where she had first told him about her decision to become a police officer. She was done with her vague plans to refinish furniture, become an actress, as well as her extensive backpacking trips all over the world. It was a long time since she had broken up with her first love, a young man from Kenya who was studying medicine in Lund. He had finally returned to his home-land and she had stayed put. Linda had looked to her mother Mona to provide her with clues about how to live her own life, but all she saw in her mother was a woman who left everything half-done. Mona had wanted two children and only had one. She had thought that Kurt Wallander would be the great and only passion of her life, but she had divorced him and married a golf-playing retired banker in Malmö.

Eventually Linda had started looking more closely at her father, the detective chief inspector, the man who was always forgetting to pick her up at the airport when she came to visit. The one who never had time for her. She came to see that in spite of everything, now that her grandfather was dead, he was the one she was closest to. One morning, just after she had woken up, she had realized that what she wanted was to do what he did, be a police officer. She had kept her thoughts to herself for a year and only talked about it with her boyfriend at the time, but finally she became sure of it, broke up with her boyfriend, flew down to Skåne, took her father to this beach, and told him her news. He asked for a minute to digest what she had said, which made her suddenly anxious. Before she told him she was convinced he would be happy about her decision. Watching his broad back and his thinning hair blowing up in the wind, she prepared for a fight. But when he turned around and smiled at her, she knew.

They walked down to the beach. Linda poked her foot into some horse prints in the sand. Wallander looked at a seagull that hung almost motionless in the air.

“What are your thoughts now?” she asked.

“You mean, about the house?”

“I mean, about the fact that I’ll soon be wearing a police uniform.”

“It’s hard for me even to imagine. It will probably be upsetting for me, though I don’t feel that way now.”

“Why upsetting?”

“I know what lies in store for you. It’s not hard to put the uniform on, but then to walk out in public is another thing. You’ll notice that everyone looks at you. You become the Police Officer, the one who is supposed to jump in and take care of any conflicts. I know what it feels like.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I’m not talking about fear. I’m talking about the fact that from the first day you put on the uniform it will always be in your life.”

She sensed he might be right.

“How do you think I’ll do?”

“You did well at the academy. You’ll do well here. It’s up to you in the end.”

They strolled along the beach. She told him she was about to go to Stockholm for a few days. Her graduating class was having a final party, a cadet ball, before everyone spread across the country to their new posts.

“We never had anything like that,” Wallander said. “I didn’t receive much of an education, either. I still wonder how they chose the applicants when I was young. I think they were interested in raw strength. You had to have some intelligence, of course. I do remember that I had quite a few beers with a friend after I graduated. Not in public, but at his place on South Förstadsgatan in Malmö.”

He shook his head. Linda couldn’t tell if the memory amused or pained him.

“I was still living at home,” he said. “I thought Dad was going to keel over when I came home in my uniform.”

“How come he hated it so much — you becoming a police officer?”

“I think I only figured it out after he died. He tricked me.”

Linda stopped.

“Tricked you?”

He looked at her, smiling.

“What I think now is that it was actually fine with him that I chose to be a policeman. But instead of telling me straight out, it amused him to keep me on my toes. And he certainly managed to do that, as you know.”

“You really believe that?”

“No one knew him better than I did. I know I’m right. He was a scoundrel through and through. A wonderful man, but a scoundrel. The only father I ever had.”

They walked back to the car. The clouds were breaking up, and it was getting warmer. Wallander looked down at his watch when they were leaving.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

“I’m in a hurry to start working, that’s all. Why do you ask?”

“There’s something I should look into. I’ll tell you about it while we drive.”

They turned onto the highway to Trelleborg and turned off by Charlottenlund Castle.

“I wanted to drive by since we were in the neighborhood.”

“Drive by what?”

“Marebo Manor. Or more precisely, Marebo Lake.”

The road was narrow and windy. Wallander told her about it in a somewhat disjointed and confusing way. She wondered if his written police reports were as disorganized as the summary she was getting.

Yesterday evening a man had called the Ystad police. He had not given them a name or location and he spoke with a strange accent. He had said that burning swans were flying over Marebo Lake. When the officer on duty had asked him for more details, the man hung up. The conversation was duly logged, but no one had followed up on it since there had been a serious assault case in Svarte that evening, as well as two robberies in central Ystad. The officer in charge had decided that it was most likely a prank call or a matter of hallucinations, but when Wallander later heard about it from his colleague Martinsson he decided it was so bizarre that there might be some truth to it.

“Setting fire to swans? Who would do anything like that?”

“A sadist. Someone who hates birds.”

“Do you honestly think it happened?”

Wallander turned off onto a road leading to Marebo Lake and took his time before answering.

“They didn’t teach you that at the academy? That policemen don’t think anything? They only want to know. But they have to remain open to all possibilities, however unlikely. That includes something like a report about burning swans. It could turn out to be true.”

Linda didn’t ask any more questions. They parked the car in a small parking lot and walked down to the lake. Linda walked behind her father and felt as if she was already wearing a uniform.

They walked around the entire lake but found no trace of a dead swan. Neither of them noticed that someone was following their progress through the lens of a telescope.