Хеннинг Манкелль - Before the Frost

Zeba stood up as they approached. She was frozen and shivering hard.

“I’ll go with her,” Linda said. “I did almost everything wrong, I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be able to relax more when I’ve got you wearing a uniform and know you’re securely seated in a patrol car circling the streets of Ystad,” her dad said.

“My cell phone is lost on the dunes somewhere out in Sandhammaren.”

“We’ll send someone out there to call your number. Maybe the sand will answer.”

Svartman was standing by his car. He wrapped a blanket around Zeba and opened the back door and Zeba crawled in and made herself small in the corner.

“I’ll stay with her,” Linda said.

“How are you doing?”

“I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m going to start work on Monday.”

“Push it off for a week,” her dad said. “There’s no hurry.”

Linda sat down in the car and they drove away. A plane flew low over their heads, coming in for landing. Linda looked out at the landscape. It was as if her gaze was being sucked into the brown-gray mud and there was the sleep that she needed more than anything else right now. After that she would return one last time to the long wait to start working. But this time the wait would be short. Soon she would be able to throw off her invisible uniform. She thought about asking Svartman if he thought they would catch Erik Westin and Torgeir Langaas, but she didn’t say anything. Right now she didn’t want to know.

Later, not now. Frost, autumn, and winter — time enough later for thinking. She leaned her head on Zeba’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Suddenly she saw Westin’s face in front of her eyes. That last moment when Anna slowly fell toward the floor. Now she realized the despair that had been in his face, the vast loneliness. The face of a man who has lost everything.

She looked out over the landscape again. Slowly everything fell away, Erik Westin’s face, into the gray clay.

Zeba was asleep by the time they reached her apartment. Linda gently shook her awake.

“We’re here,” she said. “We’re here and everything is over.”

Monday, the tenth of September, was a cold and blustery day in Skåne. Linda had tossed and turned and only managed to fall asleep at dawn. She was woken up by her father coming in and sitting down on the side of her bed. Just like when I was little, she thought. He was always the one who would sit on the side of my bed, never my mom.

He asked how she had slept and she told him the truth: poorly, and she had been plagued by nightmares.

The previous evening, Lisa Holgersson had called to say that Linda could wait a week before starting work. But Linda had refused. She didn’t want to put it off any longer, even after everything that had happened. They finally agreed that Linda would take one extra day and start work on Tuesday.

Wallander got to his feet.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “What do you have planned?”

“I’ll see Zeba. She needs someone to talk to and so do I.”

Linda spent the day with Zeba, whose son was with Mrs. Rosberg. The phone rang off the hook, mostly eager reporters. Finally she and Zeba escaped to Mariagatan. They went over what had happened again and again, especially the part that Anna had played. Could they understand it? Could anyone understand?

“She missed her father her whole life,” Linda said. “When he finally turned up, she refused to believe anything except that he was right, whatever he said and did.”

Zeba often fell silent. Linda knew what she was thinking, about how close to death she had been and that not only Anna’s father but Anna herself had been to blame.

Mid-morning, Wallander called and told her that Henrietta had collapsed and been taken to the hospital. Linda remembered Anna’s sighs that Henrietta had woven into one of her compositions. That’s all she has left, she thought. Her dead daughter’s sighs.

“There was a letter on her table,” Wallander continued, “where she tried to explain what she had done. She didn’t tell us about Westin’s return because she was afraid. He had threatened her and said that both she and Anna would die if she said anything. There’s no reason not to believe her, but she surely could have found a way to let someone know what was going on.”

“Did she say anything about my last visit?” Linda asked.

“Langaas was in the garden. She opened the window so he would hear that she didn’t reveal anything.”

“Westin used Langaas to scare people.”

“He knew a lot about people, we shouldn’t forget that.”

“Is there any trace of them?”

“We should find them, since this matter is top priority all over the world. But maybe they’ll find new hiding places, new followers. No one knows how many places Langaas prepared for them, and no one will know for sure until they’re found.”

“Torgeir Langaas is gone, Erik Westin is gone, but the most gone of all is Anna.”

When the conversation was over, Linda and Zeba talked about the fact that maybe Westin was already busy building up a new sect. They knew there were many out there who were prepared to follow him. One such person was Ulrik Larsen, the minister who had threatened and attacked Linda in Copenhagen. He was one of Erik Westin’s followers, waiting to be called to action. Linda thought about what her father had said. They couldn’t be sure of anything until Westin was caught. One day maybe a new assault would be launched, like the one in Lund.

Afterward, when she had followed Zeba home after first making sure she was feeling up to being on her own with her son, Linda took a walk and sat down on the pier down by the harbor café. It was cold and windy, but she found a sheltered spot out of the wind. She didn’t know if she missed Anna or if what she felt was something else. We never became friends for real, she thought. We never got that far. We were really only true friends as children.

That evening, Wallander came home and reported that Torgeir Langaas had been found dead. He had driven into a tree. Everything pointed to suicide. But Erik Westin was still at large. Linda wondered if she would ever find out if it was Westin she had seen in the sunlight outside Lestarp Church. And was he the one who had been in her car? These questions remained unanswered.

But there was one question she had found the answer to herself. The puzzling words in Anna’s diary: myth fear, myth fear. It was so simple, Linda thought Myth fear — my father, my father. An anagram, that was all .

Linda and her father sat up and talked for a long time. The police were slowly reconstructing Erik Westin’s life and had found a connection to the minister Jim Jones and his sect, who had found death in the jungles of Guyana. Westin was a complicated person whom it would never be possible to fully understand, but it was important to realize that he was a far cry from a madman. His self-image, not least as expressed in the holy pictures he asked his disciples to carry with them, was of a humble person carrying out God’s work. He wasn’t insane so much as a fanatic, prepared to do whatever it took to realize his beliefs. He was prepared to sacrifice people if need be, kill those who stood in his way, and punish those whom he deemed had committed mortal sins. He sought his justifications in the Bible. He let nothing happen that he did not feel could be justified by the Holy Book.

Westin was also a desperate man who saw only evil and decay around him, not that this in any way justified his actions. But the only hope of preventing something like this in the future, of identifying people prepared to blow themselves up as a chain in something they claimed was a Christian effort, was not to dismiss Westin as a simple madman, Wallander said.