Before the Frost

1

The wind picked up shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of August 21, 2001. Small waves rippled across the surface of Marebo Lake, which lay in a valley to the south of the Rommele hills. The man waiting in the shadows next to the water stretched out his hand to determine the direction of the wind. Almost due south, he thought with satisfaction. He had chosen the right spot to put out food to attract the animals he would soon be sacrificing.

He sat down on the rock where he had spread out a sweater against the chill. It was a new moon, and no light penetrated the thick layer of clouds. Dark enough for catching eels, he thought. That’s what my Swedish playmate used to say when I was growing up. The eels start their migration in August. That’s when they bump into the fishermen’s traps and wander the length of the trap. And then the trap slams shut.

His ears, always alert, picked up the sound of a car passing by some distance away. Apart from that, there was nothing. He took out a flashlight and directed the beam over the shoreline and water. He could tell that they were approaching. He spotted at least two white patches against the dark water. Soon there would be more.

He turned off the light and tested his mind — exactingly trained — by thinking of the time. Three minutes past nine, he thought. Then he lifted his arm and checked the display. Three minutes past nine — he was right, of course. In another thirty minutes it would all be over. He had learned that humans were not alone in their need for regularity. Even wild animals could be trained to respect time. It had taken him three months to prepare these animals for tonight’s sacrifice. He had proceeded with patience and deliberation. He had made himself their friend.

He turned the flashlight back on. Now there were more white patches, and they were nearing the shore. He briefly illuminated the tempting meal of broken bread crusts that he had laid out on the ground, as well as the two gasoline containers. Then he turned the light off and waited.

When the time came he did exactly as he had planned. The swans had reached the shore and were pecking at the pieces of bread he had set out for them, either oblivious of his presence or simply used to him by now. He set the flashlight aside and put on his night-vision goggles. Altogether there were six swans, three couples. Two were lying down while the rest were cleaning their feathers or still combing the ground for bread.

Now. He got up, grabbed a can in each hand, and sprayed the swans with gasoline. Before they had a chance to fly away, he emptied what remained in each of the cans and set fire to a clump of dried grass among the swans. The burning gasoline caught one swan and immediately spread to the rest. In their agony they tried to fly away over the lake, but one by one plunged into the water like fireballs. He tried to fix the sight and sound of them in his memory: both the burning, screeching birds in the air and the image of hissing, smoking wings as they crashed into the lake. Their dying screams sound like broken trumpets, he thought. That’s how I will remember them.

The whole thing was over in less than a minute. He was very pleased. It had gone according to plan, an auspicious beginning for what lay ahead.

He threw the two gasoline containers into the lake, tucked his sweater into his backpack, and shone the flashlight around the place to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. When he was convinced he had remembered everything he took a cell phone out of his coat pocket and dialed a number. He had bought the phone in Copenhagen a few days before.

When someone answered, he asked to be connected to the police. The conversation was brief. Then he threw the phone into the lake, put on his backpack, and walked away into the night.

The wind was blowing from the east now and was growing stronger.

2

It was the end of August and Linda Caroline Wallander was wondering if she took after her father in ways she hadn’t already thought of, even though she was almost thirty years old and should know who she was by now. She had asked her father, had even tried to press him on it, but he seemed genuinely puzzled by her questions and brushed them aside by saying that she was most like her grandfather. These “who-am-I-like” conversations, as she called them, sometimes ended in fierce argument. They kindled quickly but also died away almost at once. She forgot about most of them and assumed that he did too.

But there had been one argument this summer that she had not been able to forget. It had been nothing, really. They had been talking about their differing memories of a holiday they took to the island of Bornholm when she was a little girl. For Linda there was more than this episode at stake; it was as if by reclaiming this memory she was on the verge of gaining access to a much larger part of her early life. She had been six, maybe seven years old, and both Mona and her father had been there. The idiotic argument had started over whether or not it had been windy that day. Her father claimed she had been seasick and thrown up all over his jacket. But Linda remembered the sea as blue and perfectly calm. They had only ever taken this one trip to Bornholm, so it couldn’t have been a matter of mixing up several trips. Her mother had never liked boat rides and her father was surprised she had agreed to this one.

That evening, after the argument, Linda had had trouble falling asleep. She was due to start working at the Ystad police station in two months. She had graduated from the police academy in Stockholm and had actually wanted to start working right away, but here she had nothing to do all summer, and her father couldn’t keep her company, since he had used up most of his vacation time in May. That was when he thought he had bought a house and would need extra time for moving. He had the house under contract; it was in Svarte, just south of the highway, right next to the sea. But then the buyer changed her mind at the last minute. Perhaps it was because she couldn’t stand entrusting her carefully tended roses and rhododendron bushes to a man who only talked about where he was going to put the kennel — when he finally bought a dog. She broke the contract, and her father’s agent suggested he ask for compensation, but he chose not to. The whole episode was already over in his mind.

He kept looking for houses that cold and windy summer, but they were all either too expensive or just not the house he had been dreaming of all those years in the apartment on Mariagatan. He kept the apartment and asked himself if he was ever really going to move. When Linda graduated from the police academy, he drove up to Stockholm and helped her move her things to Ystad. She had arranged to rent an apartment starting in September. Until then she could have her old room back.

They started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Linda was impatient to start working and accused her father of not pulling strings hard enough at the station to get her a temporary position. But he said he had taken the matter up with Chief Lisa Holgersson. She would gladly have welcomed the extra manpower, but there was no room in the budget for more staff. Linda would not be able to start until the tenth of September, however much they might have wanted her to start earlier.

Linda spent the intervening time reacquainting herself with two old school friends. One day she ran into Zeba, or “Zebra,” as they used to call her. She had dyed her black hair red and also cut it short, so Linda had not recognized her at first. Zeba’s family came from Iran, and she and Linda had been in the same class until junior high. When they ran into each other on the street this July, Zeba was pushing a toddler in a stroller. They had stopped at a café and had coffee.

Zeba told her that she had trained as a bartender but that her pregnancy had put a stop to her work plans. The father was Marcus. Linda remembered him — the Marcus who loved exotic fruit and who had started his own plant nursery in Ystad at the age of nineteen. The relationship had ended quickly, but the child remained a fact. Zeba and Linda chatted for a long time, until the toddler started screaming so loudly and insistently that they had to leave. But they had kept in touch since that chance meeting, and Linda noticed that she felt less impatient with the hiatus in her life whenever she managed to build these bridges between her present and the past that she had known here.

As she was on her way home to Mariagatan after her meeting with Zeba, it suddenly started to rain. She took cover in a clothing store and — while she was waiting for the weather to clear up — she asked for the telephone directory and looked up Anna Westin’s number. She felt a jolt inside when she found it. She and Anna had not had any contact for ten years now. The close friendship of their childhood years had ended abruptly at seventeen when they both fell in love with the same boy. Afterward, when the feelings of infatuation were long gone, they had tried to resuscitate the friendship, but it was never the same. Linda hadn’t even thought about Anna very much for the last couple of years. But seeing Zeba again reminded her of her old friend, and she was happy to discover that Anna still lived in Ystad.

Linda called her that evening, and they met a few days later. The rest of the summer they often met several times a week, sometimes all three of them, but mostly just Anna and Linda. Anna lived on her own as well as she could on her student budget. She was studying medicine.

Linda thought Anna was even shyer now than when they were growing up. Anna’s father had left when she was only five or six years old, and he had never been heard from again. Anna’s mother lived out in the country in Löderup, not far from where Linda’s grandfather had lived and painted his favorite, unchanging motifs. Anna seemed pleased that Linda had reestablished contact with her, but Linda soon realized she had to tread carefully around her. There was something vulnerable, almost secretive about Anna, and she didn’t let Linda come too close.

Still, being with her old friends helped make Linda’s summer go by, even though she was counting the days until she was allowed to pick up her uniform from Mrs. Lundberg in the stockroom.

Her father worked constantly all summer, handling a case of bank and post office robberies in the Ystad area. From time to time Linda would hear about this case that seemed like a well-planned series of attacks. When her father fell asleep at night, Linda would often sneak a look at his notebook and the case files he brought home. But whenever she asked him about the case directly, he would avoid answering. She wasn’t a police officer yet. Her questions would have to go unanswered until September.

The days went by. One afternoon in August, her father came home and said that his real estate agent had called about a property by Mossby Beach. He wondered if she wanted to come and see it with him. She called and postponed a coffee date she had arranged with Zeba, and then her father picked her up in his Peugeot and they drove west. The sea was gray. Fall was on its way.

3

The house stood on a hill with a sweeping view of the ocean, but there was something bleak and dismal about it. The windows were boarded up, one of the drainpipes had come detached, and several roof shingles were missing. This is not a place where my father could find peace, Linda thought. Here he’ll be at the mercy of his inner demons. But what are they, anyway? She began to list the chief sources of concern in his life, ranking them in her mind: first his loneliness, then the creeping tendency to put on weight and the stiffness in his joints. What else? She put the question aside for the moment and joined her father as he inspected the outside of the house. The wind blew slowly, almost thoughtfully, in some nearby beech trees. The sea lay far below them. Linda squinted and spotted a ship on the horizon.

Kurt Wallander looked at his daughter.

“You look like me when you squint like that,” he said.

“Only then?”

They kept walking and came across the rotting remains of a leather couch behind the house. A field vole jumped out of the broken springs. Wallander looked around and shook his head.

“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.

4

Linda flew to Stockholm a few days later. Zeba had helped her make a dress for the cadet ball. It was light blue and cut low across her chest and back. The class organizers had rented a big room on Hornsgatan. All sixty-eight of them were there, even the prodigal son of the group who had not managed to hide his drinking problem. No one knew who had blown the whistle on him, so in a way they all felt responsible. Linda thought he was like their ghost; he would always be out there in the fall darkness with a deep-seated longing to be forgiven and taken back into the fold.

On this occasion, their last chance to say good-bye to each other and their teachers, Linda drank far too much wine. She wasn’t a novice drinker by any means, and she could usually pace herself. This evening she knew she was drinking too much. She felt more impatient than ever to start working as she talked with student colleagues who had already taken the plunge. Her best friend from the academy, Mattias Olsson, had taken a job in Norrköping rather than return to his home in Sundsvall. He had already managed to distinguish himself by felling a bodybuilder who had taken too many steroids and run amuck.

There was dancing, speeches, and a relatively amusing song roasting the teachers. Linda’s dress received many compliments. It would have been an altogether enjoyable evening if there hadn’t been a TV set in the kitchen.

Someone heard on the late-night news that a police officer had been shot down on the outskirts of Enköping. This news quickly spread among the dancing, intoxicated cadets and their teachers. The music was turned off and the TV set brought out from the kitchen. Afterward Linda thought it was as if everyone had been kicked in the stomach. The party was over. They sat there in their long gowns and dark suits and saw footage of the crime scene as well as images of the officer who had been murdered. It had been a cold-blooded killing that occurred while he and his partner tried to question the driver of a stolen car. Two men had jumped out of the car and opened fire on the policemen with automatic weapons. Their intention had clearly been to kill. No warning shot had been fired.

Everyone went home late that evening. Linda was on her way to her aunt Kristina’s apartment when she stopped at Mariatorget and called her father. It was three o’clock in the morning and she could tell from his voice that he was barely awake. For some reason that made her furious. How could he sleep when a colleague had just been killed? That was also what she said to him.

“My not sleeping won’t help anybody. Where are you?”

“On my way to Kristina’s.”

“You mean the party went on until now? What time is it?”

“Three. It ended when we heard the news.”

She heard him breathing heavily, as if his body had still not decided to become fully awake.

“What’s that noise in the background?”

“Traffic. I’m trying to catch a cab.”

“Who’s with you?”

“No one.”

“Are you crazy? You can’t run around alone in Stockholm at this hour!”

“I’m fine, I’m not a child. Sorry I woke you up.”

She hung up on him. This happens way too often, she thought. He has no idea how infuriating he is.

She flagged down a taxi and was driven to Gärdet, where Kristina, her husband, and their eighteen-year-old son lived. Kristina had made up the sofa bed in the living room for her. The room was partly lit up from the streetlights outside. There was a photo of Linda and her father and mother in the bookcase. She remembered when the picture was taken; she was fourteen years old, it was sometime in the spring, and they had driven out to her grandfather’s house in Löderup. Her dad had won the camera in an office raffle and then, when they were about to take a family picture, her grandfather had suddenly balked and locked himself in his studio. Her dad had been extremely upset and her mom had sulked. Linda was the one who tried to convince her grandfather to come out and be in the picture.

“I won’t have my picture taken with those two people and their fake smiles when I know they’re about to leave each other,” he said.

She could remember to this day how that had hurt. Even though she knew how insensitive he could sometimes be, the words still felt like a slap in the face. When she had collected herself she asked him if what he had said was true, if he knew something she didn’t.

“It won’t help matters if you keep turning a blind eye,” he said. “Go on. You’re supposed to be in that picture. Maybe I’m wrong about all this.”

Her grandfather was often wrong, but not this time. And he had refused to be in the picture, which they took with the self-timer on the camera. The following year — the last year her parents lived together — the tensions in their home only escalated.

That was the year she had tried to commit suicide. Twice. The first time, when she had slit her wrists, it was her dad who found her. She remembered how frightened he had looked. But the doctors must have reassured him, since he and her mother said very little about it. Most of what they communicated was through looks and eloquent silences. But it propelled her parents into the last series of violent disputes that finally persuaded Mona to pack her bags and leave.

Linda had often thought how remarkable it was that she hadn’t felt responsibility for her parents’ breakup. On the contrary, she felt that she had done them a favor and helped catapult them out of a marriage that in all but name had ended long before.

He didn’t know about the second time.

That was the biggest secret she kept from her father. Sometimes she thought he must have heard about it, but in the end she remained convinced he had never found out. The second time she tried to kill herself it was for real.

She had been sixteen years old and had gone to stay with her mother in Malmö. It was a time of crushing defeats, the kind only a teenager can experience. She hated herself and her body, shunning the image she saw in the mirror while she also strangely enough welcomed the changes she was undergoing. The depression hit her out of nowhere, beginning as a set of symptoms too vague to take seriously. Suddenly it was a fact, and her mother had had absolutely no inkling of what was going on. What had shaken Linda the most was that Mona had said no when she pleaded to be allowed to move to Malmö. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with her dad; she just wanted to get out of Ystad. But Mona had been surprisingly cool.

Linda had left the apartment in a rage. It had been a day in early spring when there was still snow lying on the ground here and there. The wind blowing in from the sound had a sharp bite. She wandered along the city streets, not noticing where she was going. When she looked up she was on an overpass to the freeway. Without really knowing why, she climbed up onto the railing and stood there, swaying slightly. She looked down at the cars rushing past below with their sharp lights slicing the dark. She wasn’t aware of how long she stood there. She felt no fear or self-pity; she simply waited for the cold and the fatigue spreading in her limbs to get her finally to step out into the void.

Suddenly there was someone by her side, speaking in careful, soothing tones. It was a woman with a round, childish face, perhaps not much older than Linda. She was wearing a police uniform and behind her there were two patrol cars with flashing lights. Only the officer with the childish face approached her. Linda sensed the presence of others farther back, but they had clearly delegated the responsibility of talking that crazy teenager out of jumping to this woman. She told Linda her name was Annika, that she wanted her to come down, that jumping into a void wouldn’t solve anything. Linda started defending herself — how could Annika possibly understand anything about her problems? But Annika hadn’t backed down, she had simply stayed calm, as if she had infinite patience. When Linda finally did climb down from the railing and start crying, from a sense of disappointment that was actually relief, Annika had started crying too. They hugged each other and stood there for a long time. Linda told her that she didn’t want her father to hear about it. Not her mother either, for that matter, but especially not her dad. Annika had promised to keep it quiet, and she had been true to her word. Linda had thought about calling the Malmö police station to thank her many times, but she never got further than lifting the receiver.

She put the photograph back into the bookcase, thought briefly about the police officer who had been killed, and went to bed. She was woken up in the morning by Kristina getting ready for work. Kristina was her brother’s opposite in almost every regard: tall, thin, with a pointed face and a shrill voice that Linda’s dad made fun of behind her back. But Linda loved her aunt. There was something refreshingly uncomplicated about her, and in this way too she was her brother’s opposite. From his perspective, life was nothing but a heap of dense problems, unsolvable in his private life, attacked with the force and fury of a ravenous bear in his work.

Linda took the bus to the airport shortly before nine in the hopes of catching a plane to Malmö. All of the morning headlines were about the murdered police officer. She got on a plane leaving at noon and called her dad when she got to Sturup.

“Did you have a good time?” he asked when he came to pick her up.

“What do you think?”

“How could I know? I wasn’t there.”

“But we talked on the phone last night — remember?”

“Of course I remember. You were rude and unpleasant.”

“I was tired and upset. A police officer was murdered. No one was in a good mood after that.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything. He let her off when they got to Mariagatan.

“Have you found out anything more about this sadist?” she asked.

At first he didn’t seem to understand what she was referring to.

“The bird hater? The burning swans?”

“Probably just a prank call. Quite a few people live around the lake and someone would have seen something if it wasn’t.”

Wallander drove back to the police station and Linda walked up to the apartment. Her father had left a note by the phone. It was a message from Anna, Important. Call back soon. Then her father had scribbled something she couldn’t read. She called him at work.

“Why didn’t you tell me Anna called?”

“I forgot.”

“What have you written here — I can’t read your handwriting.”

“She sounded worried about something.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just that. She sounded worried. You’d better call her.”

Linda called but Anna’s line was busy. When she tried again there was no answer. At seven o’clock in the evening, after she and her dad had eaten, she put on her coat and walked over to Anna’s place. As soon as Anna opened the door Linda could see what her father had meant. Anna’s expression was different. Her eyes darted around anxiously. She pulled Linda into the apartment and shut the door.

It was as if she were in a hurry to shut out the outside world.

5

Linda was reminded of Anna’s mother, Henrietta. She was a thin woman with an angular, nervous way of moving, and Linda had always been a little afraid of her.

Linda remembered the first time she had played at Anna’s house. She must have been around eight or nine. Anna was in another class at school and they had never been able to figure out exactly what had drawn them to each other. It’s as if there’s an invisible force that brings people together. At least that’s the way it was with us. We were inseparable — until we fell in love with the same guy, that is.

Anna’s father had never been present except in pale photographs. Henrietta had carefully wiped away all traces of him, as if she were telling her daughter that there was no possibility of his return. The few photos Anna owned were stashed away in a drawer, hidden under some socks and underwear. In the pictures he had long hair, glasses, and a reluctant stance, as if he hadn’t really wanted to pose for the camera. Anna had showed her the pictures in the deepest confidence. When they became friends her father had already been gone for two years. Anna quietly rebelled against her mother’s determination to keep the apartment free of all traces of him. One time Henrietta had gathered up what remained of his clothes and stuffed them in a garbage bag in the basement. Anna had snuck down there at night and rescued a shirt and some shoes that she hid under her bed. For Linda this mysterious father had been a figure of adventure. She had often wished that she and Anna could trade places, that she could exchange her quarreling parents for this man who had simply vanished one day like gray wisps of smoke against a blue sky.

They sat on the sofa and Anna leaned back so half of her face was in shadow.

“How was the ball?”

“We heard about the murdered police officer in the middle of it and that pretty much ended it right there. But my dress was a success. How is Henrietta?”

I know what she’s doing, Linda thought. Whenever Anna has anything important to talk about she can never come right out and say it. It always takes time.

“Fine.”

Anna shook her head at her own words.

“Fine — I don’t know why I always say that. She’s actually worse than ever. For the past two years she’s been composing a requiem for herself. She calls it ‘The Unnamed Mass’ and she’s thrown the whole thing in the fire at least twice. Both times she managed to salvage most of the papers, but her self-esteem is about as low as a person with only one tooth left.”

“What does her music sound like?”

“I hardly even know. She’s tried to hum it for me a couple of times — the very few times she’s been convinced that what she was working on had value. But it doesn’t sound like anything close to a melody to me. It’s the kind of music that sounds more like screams, that pokes and hits you. I have no idea why anyone would ever listen to something like that. But at the same time I can’t help admiring that she hasn’t given up. Several times I’ve tried to persuade her to do other things in life. She’s not even fifty yet. But every time she’s reacted like an angry cat. It makes me wonder if she’s crazy.”

Anna interrupted herself at this point as if she were afraid of having said too much. Linda waited for her to continue.

“Have you ever had the feeling you were going crazy?”

“Only every single day.”

Anna frowned.

“No, not like that. I’m not kidding.”

Linda was immediately ashamed of her lighthearted comment.

“It happened to me once. You know all about that.”

“You’re thinking of when you slit your wrists. And then tried to jump off the overpass. But that’s despair, Linda. It’s not the same thing. Everyone has to face their despair at least once in their life. It’s a rite of passage. If you never find yourself raging at the sea or the moon or your parents, you never really have the opportunity to grow up. The King and Queen of Contentment are damned in their own way. They’ve let their souls be numbed. Those of us who want to stay alive have to stay in touch with our sorrow and grief.”

Linda had always envied Anna’s fanciful way of expressing herself. I would have had to sit down and write it all down if I were going to come up with anything like that, she thought. The King and Queen of Contentment.

“In that case I guess I’ve never really been afraid of losing my mind,” she said lightly.

Anna got up and walked over to the window. After a while she returned to the sofa. We’re much more like our parents than we think, Linda thought. I’ve seen Henrietta move in just the same way when she’s anxious: get up, walk around, and then sit down again.

“I thought I saw my father yesterday,” Anna said. “On a street in Malmö.”

Linda raised her eyebrows.

“Your father? You saw him on the street?”

“Yes.”

Linda thought about it.

“But you’ve never even seen him — not really, I mean. You were so young when he left.”

“I have pictures of him.”

Linda did the math in her head.

“It’s been twenty-five years since he left.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four, then. How much do you think a person changes in twenty-four years? You can’t know. All you know is that he must have changed.”

“It was him. My mother told me about his gaze. I’m sure it was him. It must have been him.”

“I didn’t even know you were in Malmö yesterday. I thought you were going in to Lund, to study or whatever it is you do there.”

Anna looked at her appraisingly.

“You don’t believe me.”

“You don’t believe it yourself.”

“It was my dad.”

She took a deep breath.

“You’re right; I had been in Lund. When I got as far as Malmö and had to change trains. There was a problem with the line. The train was cancelled. Suddenly I had two hours to kill until the next one. It put me in a terrible mood since I hate waiting. I walked into town, without any clear idea of what I was going to do, just to get rid of some of the unwanted, irritating time. Somewhere along the line I walked into a store and bought a pair of socks I didn’t even need. As I was walking past the Saint Jörgen Hotel a woman had fallen down in the street. I didn’t walk up close — I can’t stand the sight of blood. Her skirt was bunched up, and I remember wondering why no one pulled it down for her. I was sure she was dead. A bunch of people had gathered to look, as if she were a dead creature washed up on the beach. I walked away, through the Triangle, and walked into the big hotel there in order to take their glass elevator up to the roof. That’s something I always do when I’m in Malmö. It’s like taking a glass balloon up into the sky. But this time I wasn’t allowed to do it — now you have to operate the elevator with your room key. That was a blow. It felt as if someone had taken a toy away. I sat down in one of the plush armchairs in the lobby and looked out the window and was planning to stay there until it was time to walk back to the station.

“That’s when I saw him. He was standing on the street. Now and then a gust of wind made the windowpane rattle. I looked up, and there he was on the sidewalk looking at me. Our eyes met and we stared at each other for about five seconds. Then he looked down and walked away. I was so shocked it didn’t even occur to me to follow him. To be perfectly honest I still didn’t believe I had really seen him. I thought it was a hallucination or a trick of the light. Sometimes you see someone and you think it’s a person from your past, but it’s really just a stranger. When I finally did run out and look around, he was gone. I felt a bit like an animal stalking its prey when I walked back to the train station — I tried to sniff out where he could be. I was so excited — upset, actually — that I hunted through the inner city and missed my train. He was nowhere to be found. But I was sure that it was him. He looked just like he did in the picture I have. And my mother once said he had a habit of first looking up before he said anything. I saw him make that exact gesture when he was standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the window. When he left all those years ago he had long hair and thick black-rimmed glasses; he doesn’t look like that now. His hair is much shorter and his glasses are the kind without frames around the lenses.

“I called you because I needed to talk to someone about it. I thought I would go nuts otherwise. It was him, it was my father. And it wasn’t just that I recognized him; he stopped on the sidewalk outside because he had recognized me.”

Anna spoke with total conviction. Linda tried to remember what she had learned about eyewitness accounts — about the rate of accuracy in their reconstructions of events and the potential for embellishment. She also thought about what they had been taught about giving descriptions at the academy, and the computer exercises they had done. One assignment consisted of aging their own faces by twenty years. Linda had seen how she started looking more and more like her father, even a little like her grandfather. Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognize your face it’s because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.

Linda found it hard to accept the idea that Anna had actually seen her father. He would hardly have recognized the grown woman his little girl had become, unless he had been secretly following her development all these years. Linda quickly thought through what she knew about the mysterious Erik Westin. Anna’s parents had been very young when she was born. They had both grown up in big cities but been beguiled by the seventies’ environmental movement — the so-called green wave — and had ended up in a collective out in the isolated countryside of Småland. Linda had a vague memory that Erik Westin was handy, that he specialized in making orthopedic sandals. But she had also heard Henrietta describe him as impossible, a hashish-smoking loser whose sole objective in life was to do as little as possible and who had no idea what it meant to take responsibility for a child. But what had made him leave? He had left no letter, nor any signs of extensive preparations. The police had looked for him at first, but there had never been any indication of crime and they eventually shelved the case.

Nonetheless, Westin’s disappearance must have been carefully choreographed. He had taken his passport and what little money he had — most of it left over from selling their car, which had actually belonged to Henrietta. She was the only one with an income at the time, working as a night guard at a local hospital.

Erik Westin was there one day and gone the next. He had left on unannounced trips before, so Henrietta waited two weeks before contacting the police.

Linda also recalled that her own father had been involved in the subsequent investigation. There had been little to go on, since Westin had no record — no previous arrests or convictions, nor any history of mental illness, for that matter. A few months before he disappeared he had undergone a complete physical and been given a clean bill of health, aside from a little anemia.

Linda knew from police statistics that most missing persons eventually turn up again. Of those who didn’t, the majority were suicides. Only a few were the victims of crime, buried in unknown places or decomposing at the bottom of a lake with weights attached to them.

“Have you told your mom?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’m still in shock.”

“I’d say you’re still not fully convinced it was him.”

Anna looked at her with pleading eyes.

“I know it was. If it wasn’t, my brain has suffered a major short-circuit. That’s why I asked you if you’ve ever been afraid you were going crazy.”

“But why would he come back now, after twenty-four years? Why would he turn up in Malmö and look at you through a hotel window — how did he know you were there?”

“I don’t know.”

Anna got up again, making the same journey to the window and back.

“Sometimes I wonder if he really disappeared at all. Maybe he just chose to make himself invisible.”

“But why would he have done that?”

“Because he wasn’t up to it, to life. I don’t mean just his responsibilities for me or my mom. He was probably looking for something more. That search drove him away from us. Or perhaps he was only trying to get away from himself. There are people who dream about being like a snake, about changing their skin from time to time. But maybe he’s been here all along, much closer than I realized.”

“You wanted me to listen to you and then tell you what I thought. You say you’re sure it was him, but I can’t accept it. It’s too close to a childhood fantasy, that he would suddenly turn back up in your life. I’m sorry, but twenty-four years is too long.”

“I know it was him. It was my dad. I’m not wrong about this.”

They had reached an impasse. Linda sensed that Anna wanted to be left alone now, just as she had earlier craved some company.

“I think you should tell your mom,” Linda said as she got up to leave. “Tell her that you saw him, or someone you thought was him.”

“You still don’t believe me?”

“What I believe is neither here nor there. You’re the only one who knows what you saw. But you have to admit it sounds far-fetched. I’m not saying that I think you’re making it up; obviously you have no reason to. I’m just saying it’s very unusual for a person who’s been gone as long as your dad has to turn up again, that’s all. Sleep on it and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. I can come by around five — is that good for you?”

“I know it was him.”

Linda frowned. There was something in Anna’s voice that sounded shrill and hollow. Is she making it up after all? Linda thought. There’s something that doesn’t ring true in all of this. But why would she lie to me?

Linda walked home through the deserted town. Some teenagers were standing in a group outside the movie theater on Stora Östergatan. She wondered if they could see her invisible uniform.

6

The following day Anna Westin disappeared without a trace. Linda immediately knew that something was wrong when she rang Anna’s doorbell at five o’clock and no one answered. She rang the bell a few more times and shouted Anna’s name through the mail slot, but still no one answered. After thirty minutes Linda took out a set of passkeys that a fellow student had given her. He had bought a collection of them on a trip to the United States and given them out to all his friends. In secret they had then spent a number of hours learning how to use them. By now Linda was proficient with any standard lock.

She picked Anna’s lock without difficulty and walked in. She toured the empty, well-kept rooms. Nothing seemed amiss; the dishes were done and the dish towels hanging neatly on the rack. Anna was orderly by nature. What had happened? Linda sat down on the sofa in the same spot as the night before. Anna believes she saw her father, she thought. And now she disappears herself. Of course these two events are connected — but how? Linda sat for a long time, ostensibly trying to think it through, but in reality she was simply waiting for Anna to come back.

The day had started early for Linda. She had left for the police station at seven-thirty in order to meet with Martinsson, one of Kurt Wallander’s oldest colleagues who happened to have been assigned to be her supervisor. They were not going to be working together, as Linda — like the other new recruits — would be assigned to a patrol car with experienced colleagues. But Martinsson was the senior officer she would turn to with questions should the need arise. Linda remembered him from when she was little. Martinsson had been a young man then. According to her father, Martinsson had often thought of quitting. Wallander had managed to talk him out of it on at least three occasions over the last ten years.

Linda had asked her father if he had had anything to do with Lisa Holgersson’s decision to assign Martinsson as her mentor, but he vehemently denied any involvment. His intention was to stay as far away from any matters concerning her work as possible, he said. Linda had accepted this declaration with a grain of salt. If there was one thing she feared, it was precisely that he would interfere with her work. That was the reason she had hesitated so long before deciding to apply for work in Ystad. She thought about working in another area of the country, but this was where she had ended up. In retrospect it seemed fated.

Martinsson met her by the front desk and escorted her to his office. He had a picture of his smiling wife and their two children on his desk. Linda wondered whose picture she was going to have on hers. That decision was part of the everyday reality waiting for her. Martinsson started by talking about the two officers she was teamed up with.

“They’re both fine officers,” he said. “Ekman can give the impression of being a bit tired and worn-out, but no one has a better grasp of police work than he does. Sundin is his polar opposite and focuses on the little things. He still tickets people who cross against a red light. But he knows what it means to be a policeman. You’ll be in good hands.”

“What do they say about working with a woman?”

“If they have anything to say about that, ignore them. It’s not how it was even ten years ago.”

“And my father?”

“What about him?”

“What do they say about my being his daughter?”

Martinsson waited a moment before answering.

“There are probably one or two people in the station who would be happy to see you fall on your face. But you must have known that coming in.”

Then they talked at length about the state of affairs in the Ystad police district. The “state of affairs” was something Linda had heard about at home from early childhood, as she played under the table with the sounds of clinking glass and the voice of her father and a colleague discussing the latest difficulties above her. She had never heard of a positive “state of affairs”; there was always something to lament. A substandard shipment of uniforms, detrimental changes in patrol cars or radio systems, a rise in crime statistics, poor recruitment numbers, and the like. In fact, this ongoing discussion about the “state of affairs,” about how this day was different from the day before, seemed to be central to life on the force. But it’s not an art they taught us at the academy, Linda thought. I know a lot about how to break up a fight in the main square and very little about pronouncing judgments on the general state of affairs.

They went to the lunchroom for a cup of coffee. Martinsson’s assessment of the situation was fairly concise: there were too few officers working in the field.

“Crime has never paid as well as it does today, it seems. I’ve been researching this. To find a historical equivalent you have to look back as far as the fifteenth century, before Gustav Vasa pulled the nation together. In that time, the era of small city-states, there was widespread lawlessness and criminality just as there is today. We’re not in the business of upholding law and order. We’re just trying to keep this spread of lawlessness from getting any worse.”

Martinsson followed her out into the reception area.

“I hope all this talk hasn’t depressed you. We certainly don’t need more demoralized police officers — in order to be a good police officer you’ll need all the courage and faith you can muster. A cheerful disposition also helps.”

“Like my dad?”

Martinsson smiled.

“Kurt Wallander is very good at his job,” he said. “You know that. But he’s not renowned for being the life of the party around here, as I’m also sure you’ve already figured out.”

Before she left, he asked her about her reaction to the murdered officer. She told him about the cadet ball, the TV in the kitchen, and its effect on the festivities.

“It’s always a blow,” Martinsson said. “It affects all of us, as if we’re suddenly surrounded by invisible guns out there aimed at our heads. Whenever a colleague is killed a lot of us think about leaving the force, but in the end most people choose to stay. And I’m one of them.”

Linda left the station and walked to the apartment building in the eastern part of Ystad where Zeba lived. She thought about what Martinsson had told her — and what he had left out. That was something her father had drilled into her: always listen for what is left unsaid. That could prove to be the most important thing. But she didn’t find anything like that in her conversation with Martinsson. He strikes me as the simple and straightforward type, she thought. Not someone who tries to read people’s invisible signals.

She only stayed at Zeba’s briefly because Zeba’s boy had a stomach ache and cried the whole time. They decided to meet over the weekend when they would be able to have some peace and quiet to discuss the cadet ball and the success of Zeba’s handiwork.

But the twenty-seventh of August did not go down in Linda’s mind as the day she met with Martinsson, her mentor. It would be filed away in her mind as the day that Anna disappeared. After Linda had let herself into the apartment by picking the lock, she sat on the sofa and tried to recall Anna’s voice telling her about the man who met her gaze through the hotel window and who bore a striking resemblance to her father. What was it she had really been trying to say? She had insisted that it was her father. That was like Anna — she sounded convincing even when she was claiming as facts things that were imagined or invented. But she was never late for an appointment, nor would she forget a date with a friend.

Linda walked through the apartment again, stopping in front of the bookcase by Anna’s desk in the dining room. The books were mostly novels, she determined as she read the titles, as well as one or two travel guides. Not a single medical textbook. Linda frowned. The only thing even close to a textbook was a volume on common ailments, the kind of encyclopedia a lay person would have. There’s something missing, she thought. These don’t look like the bookshelves of a medical student.

She proceeded to the kitchen and took note of the refrigerator contents. There were the usual food items, a sense of future use suggested by an unopened carton of milk with a September 2 expiration date. Linda went back into the living room and returned to the question of why a medical student would have no textbooks in her bookcase. Did she keep them somewhere else? But that made no sense. She lived in Ystad, and she had often told Linda she did most of her studying here.

Linda waited. At seven o’clock she called her father, who answered with his mouth full.

“I thought you were coming home for dinner tonight,” he grumbled.

Linda hesitated before answering. She was torn between wanting to tell him about Anna and saying nothing.

“Something came up.”

“What is it?”

“Something personal.”

Her father growled on the other end.

“I had a meeting with Martinsson today.”

“I know.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me — only that you met. Nothing else. Don’t worry.”

Linda went back to the couch. At eight she called Zeba and asked her if she knew where Anna could be, but Zeba hadn’t heard from Anna in several days. At nine o’clock, after she had helped herself to food from Anna’s small pantry and fridge, she dialed Henrietta’s number. The phone rang a number of times before Anna’s mother answered. Linda tried to approach the subject as carefully as possible so as not to alarm the already fragile woman. Did she know if Anna was in Lund? Had she planned a trip to Malmö or Copenhagen? Linda asked the most harmless questions she could think of.

“I haven’t talked to her since Thursday.”

That’s four days ago, Linda thought. That means Anna never told her about the man she saw through the hotel window, even though they’re close.

“Why do you want to know where she is?”

“I called her and there was no answer.”

She sensed a tinge of anxiety on the other end.

“But you don’t call me every time Anna doesn’t answer her phone.”

Linda was prepared for this question.

“I had a sudden impulse to have her over for dinner tonight. That was all.”

Linda steered the conversation over to her own life.

“Have you heard I’m going to start working here in Ystad?”

“Yes, Anna told me. But neither one of us understands why you would want to be a policewoman.”

“If I’d gone on learning how to refinish furniture as planned, I’d always have tacks in my mouth. A life in law enforcement just seemed more entertaining.”

A clock struck somewhere in Anna’s apartment and Linda quickly ended the conversation. Then she thought it all through again. Anna wasn’t a risk-taker. In contrast to Zeba and herself, Anna hated rollercoasters, was suspicious of strangers, and never climbed into a cab without looking the driver in the eye first. The simplest explanation was that Anna was still disconcerted by what she thought she had seen. She must have gone back to Malmö to look for the man she thought was her father. This is the first time she’s ever stood me up, Linda thought. But this is also the first time she’s been convinced she saw her father walking down the street.

Linda stayed in the apartment for several more hours.

By midnight Anna had still not returned.

Then she knew. There was no good explanation for Anna’s absence. Something must have happened. But what?

7

When Linda got home shortly after midnight, she found her father asleep on the couch. He woke up at the sound of the closing door. Linda eyed the curve of his belly with disapproval.

“You’re getting fatter,” she said. “One day you’re just going to pop. Not like an old troll who wanders out into the sunshine but like a balloon when it gets too full of air.”

He pulled his robe tighter across his chest protectively.

“I do the best I can.”

“No, you don’t.”

He sat up heavily.

“I’m too tired to have this conversation,” he said. “When you walked in I was in the middle of a beautiful dream. Do you remember Baiba?”

“The one from Latvia? Are you still in touch with each other?”

“About once a year, no more. She’s found someone else, a German engineer who works at the municipal waterworks in Riga. She sounds very much in love when she talks about him, the wonderful Herman from Lübeck. I’m surprised it doesn’t drive me insane with jealousy.”

“You were dreaming about her?”

He smiled.

“We had a child in the dream,” he said. “A little boy who was building castles in the sand. An orchestra was playing in the distance and Baiba and I just stood there watching him. In my dream I thought, ‘This is no dream, this is real’ and I was incredibly happy.”

“And you complain about having too many nightmares.”

He wasn’t listening.

“The door opened — that was you, of course — a car door. It was summer and very warm. The whole world was full of light like an overexposed picture. Everyone’s face was white and without any shadows. It was beautiful. We were about to drive away when I woke up.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

“It was just a dream.”

Linda wanted to tell him about Anna, but her dad lumbered out into the kitchen and drank some water from the faucet. Linda followed him, and when he was done he stood up and looked at her, smoothing his hair down in the back.

“You were out late. It’s none of my business, I know, but I have an idea you want me to ask you about it.”

Linda told him. He leaned against the refrigerator with his arms crossed. This is how I remember him from my childhood, she thought. This is how he always listened to me, like a giant. I used to think my dad was as big as a mountain. Daddy Mountain.

He shook his head when she finished.

“That’s not how it happens.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s not how people disappear.”

“But it’s not like her. I’ve known her since I was seven. She’s never been late for anything.”

“However idiotic it sounds, some time has to be the first. Let’s say she was preoccupied by the fact that she thought she had seen her father. It’s not unlikely that she — as you suggested yourself — went back to look for him.”

Linda nodded. He was right. There was no reason to assume anything else had happened.

Wallander sat down on the sofa.

“You’ll learn that all events have their own logic. People kill each other, lie, break into houses, commit robberies, and sometimes they simply disappear. If you winch yourself far enough down the well — that’s how I often think of my investigations — you’ll find the explanation. It turns out that it was highly probable that such and such a person disappeared, that another robbed a bank. I’m not saying the unexpected never happens, but people are almost never right when they say ‘I never would have believed that about her.’ Think it over and scrape away the layers of exterior paint and you’ll find other colors underneath, other answers.”

He yawned and let his hands fall onto the table.

“Time for bed.”

“No, let’s stay here a few more minutes.”

He looked at her intently.

“You still think something happened to your friend?”

“No, I’m sure you’re right.”

They sat quietly at the kitchen table. A gust of wind sent a branch scraping against the window.

“I’ve been dreaming a lot recently,” he said. “Maybe because you’re always waking me up in the middle of the night. That means I remember my dreams. Yesterday I had the strangest dream. I was walking around a cemetery. Suddenly I found myself in front of a row of headstones where I started recognizing the names. Stefan Fredman’s name was among them.”

Linda shivered.

“I remember that case. Didn’t he break into this apartment?”

“I think so, but we were never able to prove it. He never told us.”

“You went to his funeral. What happened?”

“He was sent to a psychiatric institution. One day he put on his war paint, climbed up on the roof, and threw himself off.”

“How old was he?”

“Eighteen or nineteen.”

The branch scraped against the window again.

“Who were the others? I mean on the headstones.”

“A woman called Yvonne Ander. I even think the date on the stone was right, though it happened a long time ago.”

“What did she do?”

“Do you remember that time when Ann-Britt Höglund was shot?”

“How could I forget? You left for Denmark after that happened and almost drank yourself to death.”

“That’s an extreme way of putting it.”

“On the contrary, I think that’s hitting the nail on the head. Anyway, I don’t remember Yvonne Ander.”

“She specialized in killing rapists, wife-beaters, men who had been abusive to women.”

“That rings a bell.”

“We found her in the end. Everyone thought she was a monster. But I thought she was one of the sanest people I had ever met.”

“Is that one of the dangers of the profession?”

“What?”

“Do policemen fall in love with the female criminals they’re hunting?”

He waved her insinuations away.

“Don’t be stupid. I talked to her after she was brought in. She wrote me a letter before she committed suicide. What she told me was she thought the justice system was like a fishnet where the holes were too big. We don’t catch, or choose not to catch, the perpetrators who really deserve to be caught.”

“Who was she referring to specifically? The police?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know. Everyone. The laws we live by are supposed to reflect the opinions of society at large. But Yvonne Ander had a point. I’ll never forget her.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Five, six years.”

The phone rang.

Wallander jumped and he and Linda exchanged glances. It was four o’clock in the morning. Wallander stretched his hand out for the kitchen phone. Linda worried for a moment that it was one of her friends, someone who didn’t know she was staying with her dad. Linda tried to interpret who it could be from her father’s terse questions. She decided it had to be from the station. Perhaps Martinsson, or even Höglund. Something had happened in the vicinity of Rydsgård. Wallander signaled for her to get him something to write with and she handed him the pencil and pad of paper lying on the windowsill. He made some notes with the phone pressed into the crook of his neck. She peered over his shoulder. Rydsgård, turn off to Charlottenlund, Vik’s farm. That was close to the house on the hill they had looked at, the one her father wasn’t going to buy. He wrote something else: burned calf. Åkerblom. Then a phone number. He hung up. Linda sat back down across from him.

“A burned calf? What’s happened?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

He got up.

“I have to go out there.”

“What about me?”

He hesitated.

“You can come along if you like.”

“You were there for the start of this thing,” he said as they got in the car. “You might as well come along for the rest.”

“The start of what?”

“The report about burning swans.”

“It’s happened again?”

“Yes and no. Some bastard let a calf out of the barn, sprayed it with gasoline, and set it on fire. The farmer was the one who called the station. A patrol car was dispatched but I’d left instructions to be contacted if anything along these lines happened again. It sounds like a sadistic pervert.”

Linda knew there was more.

“You’re not telling me what you really think.”

“No, I’m not.”

He broke off the conversation. Linda started wondering why he had let her come along.

They turned off from the main highway and drove through the deserted village of Rydsgård, then south toward the sea. A patrol car was waiting at the entrance to the farm. Together the two cars made their way toward the main buildings at Vik’s farm.

“Who am I?” Linda asked quickly.

“My daughter. No one will care. As long as you don’t start pretending to be anything else — like a police officer, for instance.”

They got out. The two officers from the other car came over and said hello. One was called Wahlberg, the other Ekman. Wahlberg had a bad cold and Linda wished she didn’t have to shake his hand. Ekman smiled and leaned toward her as if he were shortsighted.

“I thought you were starting in a couple of weeks.”

“She’s just keeping me company,” Wallander said. “What’s happened out here?”

They walked down behind the farmhouse to a new-looking barn. The farmer was kneeling next to the burned animal. He was a young man close to Linda’s age. Farmers should be old, she thought. In my world there’s no place for a farmer my own age.

Wallander stretched out his hand and introduced himself.

“Tomas Åkerblom,” the farmer said.

“This is my daughter. She happened to be with me.”

As Tomas Åkerblom looked over at Linda, a light from the barn illuminated his face. She saw that his eyes were wet with tears.

“Who would do anything like this?” he asked in a shaky voice.

He stepped aside to let them see, as if displaying a macabre art installation. Linda had already picked up the smell of burned flesh. Now she saw the blackened body of the calf lying on its side in front of her. The eye socket closest to her was completely charred. Smoke still rose from the singed skin. The fumes were starting to make her nauseated and she took a step back. Wallander looked at her. She shook her head to indicate that she wasn’t about to faint. He nodded and looked around at the others.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

Åkerblom started talking. He still sounded on the verge of tears.

“I had just gone to bed when I heard a sound. At first I thought I must have cried out in my sleep — that happens sometimes when I have a bad dream. Then I realized it came from the barn. The animals were braying and one of them sounded bad. I pulled the curtains away and saw fire. It was Apple — of course I couldn’t identify him immediately, just that it was one of the calves. He ran straight into the wall of the barn. His whole body and head were consumed by flames. I couldn’t really take it in. I pulled on a pair of old boots and ran down there. He had already collapsed when I reached him. His legs were twitching. I grabbed an old piece of tarp and tried to put out the rest of the fire, but he was already dead. It was horrible. I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.’ Who would do something like this?”

“Did you see anything else?” Wallander asked.

“No, just what I told you.”

“You said, ‘Who would do something like this?’ Why? Is there no way it could have been an accident?”

“You think a calf poured gasoline over his own head and lit a match? How likely is that?”

“Let’s assume it was a deliberate attack. Did you see anyone when you pulled the curtain away from the window?”

Åkerblom thought hard before answering. Linda tried to anticipate her father’s next question.

“I only saw the burning animal.”

“What kind of person do you imagine did this?”

“An insane. . a fucking lunatic.”

Wallander nodded.

“That’s all for now,” he said. “Leave the animal as it is. Someone will be sent out in the morning to take pictures of it and the area.”

They returned to their cars.

“What kind of crazy lunatic bastard...” Åkerblom muttered.

Wallander didn’t answer him. Linda saw how tired he was. His forehead was deeply furrowed and he looked old. He’s worried, she realized. First there’s the report about the swans, and then a young calf named Apple is burned alive.

It was as if he read her mind. Wallander let his hand rest on the car door handle and turned to Åkerblom.

“Apple,” he said. “That’s an unusual name for an animal.”

“I played table tennis when I was younger. I often name my animals after great Swedish champions. I have an ox by the name of Waldner.”

Wallander nodded. Linda could see he was smiling. She knew he appreciated originality.

They drove back to Ystad.

“What do you think this is about?” Linda asked.

“The best-case scenario is a pervert who gets a kick out of hurting animals.”

“And that’s the best-case scenario?”

He hesitated.

“The worst case would be someone who won’t stop at animals,” he said.

8

When Linda woke up the next morning she was alone in the apartment. It was half past seven. The sound of her father slamming the front door must have woken her up. He does that on purpose, she thought and stretched out in bed. He doesn’t like me sleeping in.

She got up and opened the window. It was a clear day, and the nice weather looked like it would continue. She thought about the events of the night, the still-smoking carcass and her father looking suddenly old and worn-out. It’s the anxiety, she thought. He can hide a lot from me, but not his anxiety.

She ate breakfast and put on her clothes from yesterday, then changed her mind and tried on two other outfits before deciding what to wear. She called Anna. The answering machine picked up after five rings and she simply asked Anna to answer the phone if she was there. No reply. Linda walked out into the hall and looked at herself in the mirror. Was she still worried about Anna? No, she said to herself, I’m not worried. Anna has her reasons. She’s most likely chasing down that man she saw on the street, a man she thinks is her long-lost father.

Linda went out for a walk and picked up a newspaper from a bench. She turned to the automobile section and looked at the ads for used cars. There was a Saab for 19,000. Her father had already promised to chip in 10,000, and she knew she wanted a car. But a Saab for 19,000? How long would it last?

She tucked the newspaper into her pocket and walked over to Anna’s apartment. No one answered the door. After picking the lock again and letting herself in, she was suddenly struck by the feeling that someone had been there since she had left the place the night before. She froze and looked all around the hall — the coats hanging in their place, the shoes all in a row. Was anything different? She couldn’t put her finger on it but was convinced there was something.

She continued into the living room and sat down on the sofa. Dad would tell me to look for the impressions people have left behind in this room, of themselves and their dramatic interactions. But I see nothing, only the fact that Anna isn’t here.

After combing through the apartment twice, she convinced herself that Anna had not been home during the night. Nor anyone else, for that matter. The only things she saw were tiny, near-invisible traces she herself had left behind.

She went into Anna’s bedroom and sat down at the little desk. She hesitated at first, but her curiosity got the better of her. She knew that Anna kept a diary — she had done so since she was little. Linda remembered an incident from middle school when Anna had been sitting in a corner writing in her journal. A boy pulled it out of her hands as a joke but she was so furious that she bit him on the shoulder, and everyone knew to leave the journal alone after that.

Linda pulled out the drawers in the desk. They were full of old diaries, thumbed, crammed with writing. The dates were written on the spines. Up until Anna was sixteen they were all red. After that they were all black.

Linda closed the drawers and looked through some papers lying on the desk. She found the journal Anna was currently keeping. I’m only going to look at the last entry, she thought, telling herself it was justified since she was motivated only by her concern for Anna’s well-being. She opened the folder at the last entry, from the day that they were supposed to have met. Linda bent over the page; Anna’s handwriting was cramped, as if she were trying to hide the words. Linda read the short text twice, first without understanding it, then with a growing sense of bafflement. The words Anna had written made no sense: myth fear, myth fear, myth fear. Was it a code?

Linda immediately broke her promise only to look at the last entry. She turned the page back and there she found regular text. Anna had written:

The Saxhausen textbook is a pedagogical disaster. Completely impossible to read and understand. How can textbooks like this be allowed? Future doctors will be scared off and turn to research, where there is also more money.

Further down the page she had noted:

Had lowgrade fever this morning. Weather clear but windy—

That part was true, Linda thought. She flipped the page to the last line and read it through again. She tried to imagine that she was Anna writing the words. There were no changes in the text, no words scratched out, no hesitations that she could tell. The handwriting looked even and firm.

Myth fear, myth fear, myth fear. I see that I have signed up for nineteen laundry days so far this year. My dream — to the extent I even have one right now — would be to work as an anonymous suburban general practitioner. Do northern towns even have suburbs?

That was where the entry ended. Not a word about the man she’d seen through the hotel window. Not a word or a hint. Nothing. But isn’t that exactly the kind of thing diaries are for? Linda wondered.

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.

Then she stood up and caught her breath.

What she had heard wasn’t music. It was the sound of a woman sobbing.

9

Somewhere inside the house a dog started to bark. Linda felt as though she had been caught in the act and quickly rang the doorbell. It took a while for Henrietta to open the door. When she did she was restraining an angry gray dog by the collar.

“She won’t bite,” Henrietta said. “Come in.”

Linda never felt completely at ease in the presence of strange dogs and so she hesitated slightly before crossing the threshold. As soon as she did so the dog relaxed, as if Linda had crossed over into a no-barking zone. Henrietta let go of the dog. Linda hadn’t remembered Henrietta so thin and frail. What was it Anna had said about her? That she wasn’t even fifty years old. It was true that her face looked young, but her body looked much older even than fifty. The dog, Pathos, sniffed Linda’s legs, then retreated to her basket and lay down.

Linda thought about the sobbing that she had heard through the window. There were no traces of tears on Henrietta’s face. Linda looked past her into the rest of the house, but there was no sign of anyone else. Henrietta caught her gaze.

“Are you looking for Anna?”

“No.”

Henrietta burst out laughing.

“Well, I’m stumped. First you call and then you drop by for a visit. What’s happened? Is Anna still missing?”

Linda was taken aback by Henrietta’s directness, but welcomed it.

“Yes.”

Henrietta shrugged, then directed Linda into the big room — the result of many walls being removed — that served as both living room and studio.

“My guess is that Anna must be in Lund. She holes up there from time to time. The theoretical component of her studies is apparently very demanding, and Anna is no theoretician. I don’t know who she takes after. Not me, not her father. Herself.”

“Do you have a phone number for her in Lund?”

“No, I’m not even sure she has a phone there. She rents a room in a house and doesn’t like to give out the address.”

“Isn’t that a bit odd?”

“Why? Anna is secretive by nature. If you don’t leave her alone she can get very angry. Didn’t you know that about her?”

“No. She doesn’t have a cell phone either?”

“She’s one of the few people who’s still holding out,” Henrietta said. “Even I have one. In fact, I don’t see the need for the old-fashioned kind anymore. But that’s neither here nor there. No, Anna doesn’t have a cell phone.”

Henrietta stopped as if she had suddenly thought of something. Linda looked around the room. Someone had been crying. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might have been Anna until Henrietta asked her if that was what she was doing, looking for her here. But it couldn’t have been Anna, she thought. Why would she be crying? She’s not a person who cries very much. Once when we were girls she fell off the jungle gym and hurt herself. She cried that time, but it’s the only time I remember. Even when we both fell in love with Tomas I was the one who cried; she was just angry.

Linda looked at Henrietta, who was standing in a beam of light in the middle of the polished wooden floor. She had an angular profile, just like Anna.

“I don’t get visitors very often,” she said suddenly, as if that was what had been foremost in her mind. “People avoid me just as I avoid them. I know they think I’m eccentric. That’s what comes of living alone out in the country with only a greyhound for company, composing music no one wants to listen to. It doesn’t help matters that I’m still legally married to the man who left me twenty-four years ago.”

Linda sensed a tone of bitterness and loneliness in Henrietta’s voice.

“What are you working on right now?”

“Please don’t feel you have to make polite conversation. Why did you drop by? Was it really that you’re still worried about Anna?”

“I borrowed her car. My grandfather used to live in these parts and I thought I would take a drive. I’m feeling a little bored these days.”

“Until you get to put on your uniform?”

“Yes.”

Henrietta brought out a coffeepot and cups and set them on the table.

“I don’t understand why an attractive girl like you would choose to become a police officer. Breaking up fights on the street, that’s what I imagine it to be. I know there must be other aspects to the job, but that’s what always comes to mind.”

She poured the coffee.

“But perhaps you’re going to sit behind a desk,” she added.

“No, I’ve been assigned to a patrol car and will probably be doing a lot of the work you would expect. Someone has to be prepared to jump into the fray.”

Henrietta leaned to the side with her hand tucked under her chin.

“And that’s what you’re going to dedicate your life to?”

Her comments put Linda on the defensive, as if she were in danger of being contaminated by Henrietta’s bitterness.

“I don’t know what looks have got to do with it. I’m almost thirty and on good days I’m generally happy with how I look, but I’ve never dreamed of being Miss Sweden. But more to the point, what would happen to our society if there were no police? My dad is a policeman and I’ve never had any reason to be ashamed of him.”

Henrietta shook her head.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Linda still felt angry. She felt a need to strike back, though she couldn’t really say why.

“I thought I heard the sound of someone crying in here when I walked up to your house.”

Henrietta smiled.

“It’s a recording I have. I’m working on a requiem and I mix my music with the sound of someone crying.”

“I don’t even know what a requiem is.”

“A funeral mass. That’s almost all I write these days.”

Henrietta got up and walked over to the grand piano by the window, which overlooked open fields and then the rolling hills leading down to the sea. Next to the piano there was a table with a tape recorder as well as a synthesizer and other electronic equipment. Henrietta turned on the tape player. A woman’s voice came on, wailing and sobbing. It was the one Linda had heard through the window. Her curiosity about this strange woman increased.

“Where did you get it?”

“This is from an American film. I often record the sound of crying from films I see, or from programs on the radio. I have a collection of forty-four crying voices so far, everything from a baby to a very old woman I recorded secretly at a rest home. Would you like to donate a sample to the archive sometime?”

“No, thanks.”

Henrietta sat down at the piano and played a few haunting chords. Linda went and stood next to her, while Henrietta continued to play. The room was filled with a powerful surge of music which then faded into silence. Henrietta gestured for Linda to sit next to her on the piano bench.

“Tell me again why you came here. Seriously. I’ve never even felt you really liked me.”

“When I was little I was afraid of you.”

“Of me? No one is afraid of me!”

That’s where you’re wrong, Linda thought. Anna was afraid of you too — sometimes she had nightmares about you.

“It was an impulse, nothing more. I wonder where Anna is, but I’m not as worried as I was last night. You’re probably right that she’s in Lund.”

Linda broke off.

“What is it you aren’t saying? Should I be worried about her too?”

“Anna thought she saw her father on a street in Malmö a couple of days ago. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should hear it from her.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s not enough?”

Henrietta touched the keys as if sketching out a few more bars of music.

“Anna is always catching glimpses of her father. She’s told me stories like this since she was a little girl.”

Linda raised her eyebrows. Anna had never mentioned one of these sightings before, and Linda was sure she would have. When they were younger they told each other everything. Anna was one of the few people who Linda had told about standing on the edge of the overpass in Malmö. What Henrietta said didn’t fit this picture.

“Anna is never going to relinquish her hope,” Henrietta continued. “The hope that Erik will one day come back. Even that he is still alive.”

“Why did he leave?”

“He left because he was disappointed.”

“By what?”

“By life. He had such marvelous ambitions when he was younger. He seduced me with those dreams, if you must know. I had never met a man who had the kind of wonderful visions that Erik had. He was going to make a difference in the world, in our generation. He knew without a doubt that he had been put on this earth in order to do something on a grand scale. We met when he was sixteen and I was fifteen. Even as young as I was, I knew I had never met anyone like him; he radiated dreams and life force. At that time he was still looking for his niche — was it art, sports, politics, or another arena in which he was going to leave his mark? He had decided to give himself until the age of twenty to figure it out. I can’t remember any self-doubt in him until then. But when he turned twenty he started to worry. There was a restlessness in him. Until then he had had all the time in the world. When I started making demands on him to help support the family after Anna was born, he would get impatient and scream at me. He had never done that before. That was when he started making his sandals; he was good with his hands. He called them ‘sandals of indolence’ as a kind of protest, I think, for the fact that they were taking up his valuable time. It was probably then that he started planning his disappearance or, should I say, escape. He wasn’t running away from me or Anna, he was running away from himself, from his disappointment in life. I wonder if he managed it — I’ve never been able to ask him, of course. One day he was just gone. It took me by surprise. It was only in hindsight that I realized how carefully he must have planned it. I can forgive him the fact that he sold my car. What I’ll never understand or accept is that he left Anna. They were so close. I know he loved her. I was never as important to him, or at least not after the first couple of years while I was still a part of his dreams. How could he leave her — how can a person’s disappointment in life, stemming as it did from an unattainable dream, conceivably weigh more heavily than the most important person in his life? I think that must be a contributing factor to his death, at least to the fact that he never returned.”

“I didn’t think anyone knew what happened to him.”

“He must be dead. He’s been missing for twenty-four years. Where could he possibly be?”

“Anna’s convinced she saw him.”

“She sees him on every street corner. I’ve tried to talk her out of it and make her face the truth. No one knows what happened. But he has to be dead by now.”

Henrietta paused. The greyhound sighed.

“What do you think happened?” Linda asked.

“I think he gave up — when he realized the dream was nothing more than that. And that the Anna he left behind was real. At that point it was too late. He would always have been plagued by his conscience.”

Henrietta closed the lid over the piano keys with a thud and stood up.

“More coffee?”

“No, thanks. I have to get going.”

Henrietta seemed anxious and Linda watched her closely. She grabbed Linda’s arm and started to hum a melody that Linda recognized. Her voice alternated between high, shrill tones and softer, cleaner ones.

“Do you know that song?” she asked when she was finished.

“I recognize it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Buona Sera.”

“Is it Spanish?”

“Italian. It means ‘good night.’ It was popular in the fifties. So many people today borrow or steal or vandalize old music. They make pop songs out of Bach. I do the reverse. I take songs like Buona Sera and turn them into classical music.”

“How do you do that?”

“I break down the structure, change the rhythm, replace the guitar sound with a massive flood of violins. I turn a banal song about three minutes long into a symphony. When it’s ready I’ll play it for you. Then people will finally understand what I’ve been trying to do all these years.”

Henrietta followed her out.

“Come back sometime.”

Linda promised to do so, and then drove away. She saw storm clouds heaped up in the distance, out over the sea in the direction of Bornholm. Linda pulled over after a while and got out of the car. She had a sudden desire to smoke. She had quit smoking three years earlier but the desire still hit her from time to time, even if it was getting more rare.

There are some things mothers don’t know about their daughters, she thought. Henrietta doesn’t know that Anna and I told each other everything during those years. If she had, she would never have told me about Anna always seeing her father on the street. There are a lot of things I’m not sure of, but I know Anna would have told me that.

There was only one possible explanation. Henrietta had not been telling her the truth about Anna and her missing father.

10

She pulled back the curtains a little after five o’clock in the morning and looked at the thermometer. It was nine degrees Celsius, the sky clear with little or no wind. What a wonderful day for an expedition, she thought. She had prepared everything the night before and it didn’t take her long to leave her apartment across from the old railway station in Skurup. Her forty-year-old Vespa was waiting for her in the yard under a custom-made cover. She was the original owner and, since she had taken such good care of it, it was still in mint condition. In fact, word of it had spread to the factory in Italy and she had received several solicitations over the years asking her if she would consider letting the company put it in their museum. In return, the company would supply her with a new Vespa every year.

Year after year she had declined the offer, intending to keep this Vespa that she had bought when she was twenty-two years old as long as she lived. She didn’t care what happened to it after that. One of her four grandchildren might want it, but she wasn’t about to write a will for the sake of an ancient Vespa.

She adjusted her backpack, strapped on her helmet, and kick-started the old machine. It instantly roared into life. Half an hour later she arrived at the small parking lot by Led Lake. She walked the Vespa in behind some bushes beside a large oak tree. A car drove past on the main road, then silence returned.

As she prepared to walk into the forest and become invisible to the outside world, she wondered if this wasn’t the most satisfying way of expressing one’s independence: by daring to abandon the well-trodden path. To step into the underbrush and vanish from the eyes of the world.

Her brother Håkan had taught her that there were two kinds of people in the world: the ones who always chose the shortest distance between two points, and the ones who looked for the scenic route where the curves, slopes, and vistas were to be found. They had played in the forests around Älmhult when they were growing up. After her father was severely injured by a fall from a telephone pole while repairing a phone line, they moved to Skåne. Her mother got a job at the Ystad Hospital. That was where she spent her adolescence and forgot all about exploring, until the day she stood outside the gates to Lund University and realized she had no idea what to do with her life. She turned to her childhood memories for inspiration.

It was a day during that first difficult fall semester when she had enrolled as a law student for lack of a more interesting alternative. She had cycled out toward Staffanstorp and found a small unpaved road by chance. She left her bike there and continued on foot until she reached the ruins of an old mill. That was when the idea had come to her — or rather — tore through her mind like a bolt of lightning. What was a path? Why does a path go to this side of a tree and not the other? Who was the first person to walk here?

She knew in that instant it would become her life’s mission to chart old trails. She would become the protector and historian of old Swedish paths and walkways. She ran back to her bike, quit her law studies the same day, and started studying history and cultural geography. She had the good fortune to meet a sympathetic professor who appreciated the originality of her interests and supported her cause.

She started walking along the path that curved gracefully around Led Lake. The tall trees shaded her from the sun. She had mapped this particular path quite a while ago. It was a standard walking path that could be traced back to the 1930s, when Rannesholm Manor was owned by the Haverman family. One of the counts, Gustav Haverman, had been an enthusiastic runner and had cleared bushes and undergrowth away from the edge of the lake to establish this trail. But a little further on, she thought, up ahead in this old forest where no one else sees anything but moss and stone, I am going to turn off from this trail and follow the path I found just a few days ago. I have no idea where it leads, but nothing is as tempting, as magical, as following an unknown path. I still hope that one day I’ll find a path that is a work of art. A path that has been created without a destination in mind, just for its own sake.

She paused at the top of a hill to catch her breath, looking down at the glassy surface of the lake between the trees. She was sixty-three years old now and, according to her own calculations, she needed five more years to complete her life’s work: The History of Swedish Walkways. In this book she would reveal that paths were among the most important clues to ancient settlements and their way of life. Paths were not laid out only for the simplest way of getting from A to B. On the contrary, she had ample evidence for the numerous religious and cultural factors that determined where and how paths made their way across the landscape. Over the years she had published regional studies and maps, but the conclusions of her many years of research had yet to be set down in final form.

She slowed down when she found the spot. Where the untrained eye saw nothing but grass and moss growing at the edge of the path she spotted the clear outline of a trail that had been out of use for many years. She started climbing up the side of the hill, looking carefully before she stepped. Last year she had broken a leg when she fell exploring a trail to the south of Brösarp. The accident had forced her to take a long rest, which stood out in her mind as a particularly difficult time. Even though it had given her more time to write, she had simply become restless and irritated, especially without her husband to care for her. He had died shortly before the accident occurred and had always been the one to take care of things in the home. She had sold the house in Rydsgård after that and moved to the little apartment in Skurup.

She pushed some branches aside and moved in under the trees. Once she had read about a meadow in the forest that could only be found by someone who had lost their way. To her mind this captured some of the mystical dimension of human existence. If only one dared to get lost, one could find the unexpected. There was a whole other world beyond the highways and byways — if you just dared to take the turnoff. And I’m the caretaker of these old forgotten paths, she thought. Sleeping beauties waiting for someone to wake them from their slumber. If paths remain unused for too long, they die.

She was deep into the forest now, a long way from the main trail. She stopped and listened. A branch broke some distance away, then all was quiet. A bird flapped noisily and flew away. She walked on, hunched over the ground, moving very slowly. The path was nearly invisible. She had to search for its contours under the moss, the grass, and the fallen branches.

Soon she started feeling disappointed; this wasn’t an old path. When she first saw it she had been hoping it was part of the ancient pilgrim’s trail that was rumored to pass close to Led Lake. On the north side of the Rommele hills it was still visible. It disappeared around Led Lake only to pop up again northwest of Sturup. Sometimes she was tempted to think the pilgrims had used a tunnel, but she knew that was not their custom. They walked on trails and one day she hoped to find it. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be today. After a mere hundred meters she was convinced the path was newly established, no more than ten or twenty years old. She hoped to be able to say why it had been abandoned when she figured out where it led. She was about three hundred meters into the forest by now and the trees and the undergrowth stood so thick and close together it was almost impossible to make her way through them.

Suddenly she stopped and squatted. She saw something that confused her. She picked at the moss with her finger. She had seen something white lying there: a feather. A dove? she thought. But are there white forest doves? They were usually brown or blue. She stood up and continued studying the feather. Finally she realized it came from a swan. But how could it have turned up so deep in the forest? Swans came ashore from time to time but never this far inland, not in thick forest.

After only a few more steps she stopped again, this time because the ground in front of her was curiously flattened. Someone must have walked here only a few days ago. But where exactly did the prints start? She examined the area for ten minutes and decided someone had come out of the forest and only joined the path at this point. She continued on slowly. She was no longer as curious about the path as she had been when she thought it might be the old pilgrim trail. This path was probably simply an extension of the paths Count Haverman had put in to satisfy his outdoor tastes, but that had fallen out of use since his time. The prints she was following probably belonged to a hunter.

After another hundred meters she arrived at a shallow ravine, a crack in the earth covered by bushes and undergrowth. The path ran straight down into it. She removed her backpack, tucked a flashlight into her pocket, and carefully scooted down into the ravine. She started lifting up branches in order to get past them and saw to her surprise that several of them had been cut and placed here in order to conceal the entrance to the hollow. Boys, she thought. Håkan and I often made forts in the forest. She pressed on past the undergrowth and sure enough, there was a small hut. It was unusually large to be the work of children. She was reminded of a news item Håkan had shown her from a magazine, pictures of a shack in a forest that served as the hideout for a wanted criminal by the wonderful name of Beautiful Bengtsson. He had lived in his hideout for a long time and had only been found out by a person who stumbled upon it by accident.

She walked up for a closer look. The hut had been constructed out of planks of wood, with a sturdy aluminum roof. To the back it bordered a steep part of the ravine. She felt the handle of the door — it wasn’t locked. She knocked and felt like an idiot. If someone was there they would have heard her by now. She started feeling more and more confused. Could someone be hiding out in the Rommele forest?

Warning bells started going off inside her head. At first she dismissed these. She was never one to get scared easily. She had run across unpleasant men in remote areas before and although it had sometimes frightened her, she had always managed to control her fears and put up a tough front. Nothing had ever happened, and nothing was going to happen today. But she couldn’t help feeling she was ignoring common sense by investigating this hut on her own. Only someone who needed to hide from prying eyes would have chosen a place like this. On the other hand, she did not want to turn back without finding out what was in here. Her path had indeed had a destination. No one without her trained eyes would have spotted it. But the person who used the hut had not even followed the old path. That was strange. Was the old path she had found simply a backup, the way foxholes had more than one exit? Her curiosity got the better of her.

She opened the door to the hut and looked in. There were two small windows on either side, but they only let in a little light. She turned on the flashlight. There was a bed on one side and on the other side a small table with a chair, two gas lamps, and a camp stove. Who lived here? How long had it been empty? She leaned over and felt the blanket on the bed. It wasn’t damp. Someone has been here recently, she thought. In the last couple of days. Again she thought she had better leave. The person who had stayed here was not the kind to welcome visitors.

She was about to turn and leave when the beam of her flashlight fell on a book lying on the ground next to the bed. She bent down. It was a copy of the Bible. She opened it and saw a name that had been scratched out. The book was well-thumbed and torn in places. Various verses had been underlined and annotated. She carefully put the book down where she had found it. She turned off the flashlight and immediately realized that something had changed. There was more light now than before. Someone must have opened the door. She turned, but it was too late. The blow to her face came with the force of a charging predator. She was plunged into a deep and bottomless darkness.

11

After her visit to Henrietta, Linda sat up in the apartment waiting for her father to come home. But by the time he softly pushed the front door open at two o’clock in the morning, she had already fallen asleep on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her ears. When she woke a few hours later it was from a nightmare. She couldn’t remember what she had dreamed, just that she felt as if she were being suffocated. Low snores rolled through the apartment, like breakers on the shore. Her father’s bedside light was still on. He lay flat on his back, wrapped in his sheet, not unlike a large walrus comfortably stretched out on a rock. She leaned over and checked his breath between snores. Definitely alcohol.

She wondered who he could have been drinking with. The pants that lay on the ground were dirty as if he had walked through patches of mud. He’s been out in the country, she thought. That means a night of drinking with Sten Widén. They’ve sat out in the stables and shared a bottle of vodka.

Widén was one of her dad’s oldest friends, and now he was seriously ill. Her dad had a habit of talking about himself in the third person when it came to expressing something emotional and he had taken to saying: When Sten dies Kurt Wallander will be a lonely man. Widén had lung cancer. Linda was familiar with the story of how he had raised fine racing horses on the ranch by the ruins of Stjärnsund Castle. A few years ago he had sold the ranch, but just as the buyer was about to close on the deal, Widén had changed his mind and used the clause in the contract that allowed this. He had bought a few more horses and received his diagnosis shortly afterward. It had already been a year since then, a grace period given the severity of his condition. Now he was again selling his horses and his ranch. He had arranged a bed for himself at a hospice in Malmö. This time there was no backing out of the deal.

Linda went to her room, put on her pajamas, and climbed into bed. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling and reproached herself for being so hard on her dad. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to enjoy a night of drinking with his best friend, especially since the friend happened to be dying? I’ve always thought of Dad as a good friend to the few he has. It’s only right that he stay up late drinking in the stables. She felt like waking him up so she could apologize for her disapproval. But he wouldn’t appreciate being woken up. It’s his day off tomorrow. Maybe we’ll do something fun.

Before she fell asleep she thought briefly about Henrietta and the fact that she hadn’t been telling the truth. What was she hiding? Did she know where Anna was, or was there another reason? Linda curled up on her side and thought sleepily that soon she was going to miss having a boyfriend to cuddle up with. But where am I going to find one in this town? She pushed her thoughts aside and fell asleep.

Wallander shook her awake at nine o’clock. Linda jumped out of bed. Her dad didn’t seem hung over. He was dressed and had even combed his hair.

“Breakfast,” he said. “Time is ticking, life is fleeting.”

Linda showered and dressed. Her dad was playing patience at the kitchen table when she came in and sat down.

“I suspect you were hanging out with Sten last night.”

“Right.”

“I also suspect you drank too much.”

“Wrong. We drank way too much.”

“How did you get home?”

“Taxi.”

“How was he doing?”

“I wish I could be sure I’ll face the end with the same equanimity. He simply says: you only have so many races in your life. You just have to try to win as many of them as you can.”

“Do you think he’s in pain?”

“I’m sure he is, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s like Rydberg.”

“I don’t really remember him.”

“He was an old colleague of mine with a mole on his cheek. Anyway, he was the one who made a policeman out of me when I was young and didn’t understand anything. He died much too early, but without a single word of complaint. He had also run his races and accepted the fact that his time was up.”

“Who’s going to be that kind of mentor to me?”

“I thought you had been assigned to Martinsson.”

“Is he any good?”

“He’s an excellent policeman.”

“You know, I have memories of Martinsson from when I was a kid. I don’t know how many times you came home angry about something he had done or said.”

Wallander reached an impasse and gathered up his cards.

“I was the one who trained Martinsson, just as Rydberg trained me. Of course I probably came home and complained about him. He can be damned thick-headed. But once he gets something down, he never forgets it.”

“So that makes you my mentor indirectly.”

Wallander got up.

“I don’t even know what that word means. Come on, we’re leaving.”

She looked at him with surprise.

“Is this something we talked about? Did I forget something?”

“We said we would go out — not where. It’s going to be a beautiful day, and before you know it the fog will be here to stay. I hate the fog in Skåne. It creeps right into one’s head. I can’t think straight when it’s gray and misty everywhere. But you’re right that we have a goal today.”

He sat down again and filled his cup with the last of the coffee before continuing.

“Hansson. Do you remember him?”

Linda shook her head.

“I didn’t think you would. He’s another one of my colleagues. Now he’s about to sell his parents’ house outside Tomelilla. His mother has been dead a long time, but his father turned a hundred and one before he went. According to Hansson he was clear-headed and mean-spirited to the end. But the house is up for sale and I want to take a look at it. If Hansson hasn’t been exaggerating, it may just be what I’m looking for.”

There was a breeze but it was warm. When they drove past a long caravan of well-polished vintage cars, Linda surprised her father by recognizing most of the models.

“Since when do you know about cars?’

“Since my last boyfriend, Magnus.”

“I thought his name was Ludwig.”

“You have to keep up, Dad. Anyway, isn’t Tomelilla all wrong for you? I thought you wanted to sit on a bench with your faithful dog, looking out over the sea.”

“I don’t have that kind of money. I’ll have to settle for the next-best thing.”

“You could get a loan from Mom. Her golf-playing banker is pretty loaded.”

“Never in a million years.”

“I could borrow it for you.”

“Never.”

“No view of the sea for you, then.”

Linda glanced at her father. Was he angry? She couldn’t decide. But she realized this was also something they had in common, flare-ups of irritation, a tendency to be hurt by almost nothing. Sometimes we are so close and other times it’s like a crevasse has opened up between us. And then we have to build rickety bridges that usually manage to connect us again.

He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket.

“Map,” he said. “Give me the directions. We’re going to get to the roundabout at the top of the page soon. I know we go in the direction of Kristianstad but you’ll have to guide me from there.”

“I’m going to trick you into Småland,” she said and unfolded the paper. “Tingsryd? Does that sound good? We’ll never find our way back from there.”

The house was attractively situated on a little hill surrounded by a strip of forest, beyond which there were open fields and marshes. A bird — a kite, it looked like — was suspended in the air currents above the house, and in the distance there was the rising and falling sound of a tractor at work. Linda sat down on an old stone bench between some red-currant bushes. Her father squinted at the roof, tugged on the drainpipes, and tried to peer into the house. Then he disappeared around the other side.

As soon as he was gone, Linda started thinking about Henrietta. Now that some time had passed since the visit, her intuition had solidified into certainty: Henrietta had not been telling her the truth. She was hiding something about Anna. Linda dialed Anna’s number on her cell phone and got the answering machine. She didn’t leave a message. She put her phone away and walked around the house to find her father. He was pulling at an old water pump that squeaked and sprayed brown water into a bucket. He shook his head.

“If I could move this house next to the sea I’d take it in a minute,” he said. “But there’s just too much forest for my taste.”

“What about living in a trailer?” Linda suggested. “Then you could camp on the beach. Lots of people would be happy to let you stay on their land.”

“And why is that?”

“Who wouldn’t want free police protection?”

He grimaced and walked back to the car. Linda followed. He’s not going to turn around, she thought. He’s already put this place behind him.

Linda watched the kite swoop over the fields and disappear over the horizon.

“What now?” he asked her.

Linda immediately thought of Anna. She realized she wanted most of all to talk to her father about it, about the worry she felt.

“I’d like to talk,” she said. “But not here.”

“I know just the place.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

They drove south, turning left toward Malmö and leaving the main road at a turnoff for Kade Lake. The forest around the lake was one of the most beautiful Linda had ever seen. She had had a feeling her dad was going to take her here. They had taken many walks here when she was younger, especially when she was about ten or eleven. She also had a vague memory of being here with her mom, but she could not remember the whole family coming together.

They left the car by a stack of timber. The huge logs gave off a fresh scent, as if they had been recently felled. They walked through the forest, on a path that led to the strange metal statue erected to the memory of the warrior king Charles XII, who was rumored to have visited Kade Lake in his day. Linda was about to start talking about Anna when her dad raised his hand. They had stopped in a narrow glen surrounded by tall trees.

“This is my cemetery,” he said.

“Your what?”

“This is one of my secrets, maybe the biggest, and I’ll probably regret telling you this tomorrow. I’ve assigned all the trees that you see here to the friends I’ve had who’ve died. Even your grandfather is here, my mother and my old relatives.”

He pointed to a young oak.

“I’ve given this tree to Stefan Fredman, the desperate Indian. Even he belongs in my collection of the dead.”

“What about the other one you talked about?”

“Yvonne Ander? She’s over there.”

He pointed to another oak with an extensive network of branches.

“I came here a week or so after your grandfather died. I felt as if I had completely lost my footing in life. You were much stronger than I was. I was sitting down at the station trying to figure out a brutal assault case. Ironically it was a young man who had half-killed his father with a sledgehammer. The boy lied about everything and suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. I halted the interrogation and came here, and that’s when I felt that these trees had become gravestones for all the people I knew who had died. That I should come here to visit with them, not where they are actually buried. Whenever I’m here I feel a calm I don’t feel anywhere else. I can hug the dead here without them seeing me.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “Thanks for sharing it with me.”

They lingered a while longer. Linda wanted to ask about the identity of a few more of the trees but she said nothing. The sun was shining through the leaves, but the wind picked up and it immediately became colder. Linda took a deep breath and launched into the topic of Anna’s disappearance.

“It’ll drive me up the wall if you shake your head at me and tell me I’m imagining things. But if you can explain to me exactly why I’m wrong, I promise I’ll pay attention.”

“There’s something you’ll find out when you become a police officer,” he said. “The unexplainable almost never happens. Even a disappearance turns out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation. You’ll learn to differentiate between the unexplained and the merely unexpected. The unexpected can look baffling until you have the necessary background information. This is generally the case with disappearances. You don’t know what’s happened to Anna and it’s only natural that it would worry you, but my intuition tells me you should draw on the highest virtue of our profession.”

“Patience?”

“Exactly.”

“For how long?”

“A few more days. She’ll have turned up by then, or at least been in touch.”

“I’m still convinced her mother was lying to me.”

“I’m not sure your mother and I always stuck to the truth when we were asked about you.”

“I’ll try to be patient, but I do feel like there’s more to this. It’s not right.”

They returned to the car. It was past one o’clock and Linda suggested they stop for lunch somewhere. They chose a roadside restaurant with the funny name My Father’s Hat. Wallander had a fleeting recollection of lunching with his father at this restaurant and ending up in a huge argument. He couldn’t remember what their argument had been about.

They were drinking their coffee when a phone rang. Linda fumbled for hers but it turned out to be her father’s. He answered, listened, and made a few notes on the back of the check.

“What was that?”

“Someone’s been reported missing.”

He put money on the table and tucked the bill into his pocket.

“What do you have to do now?” Linda asked. “Who’s disappeared?”

“We’ll go back to Ystad via Skurup. A widow by the name of Birgitta Medberg has been reported missing. Her daughter is worried.”

“What are the circumstances?”

“The caller wasn’t sure. Apparently the woman is a historian interested in mapping old walkways and she often does extensive fieldwork, sometimes in very dense forest. An unusual occupation.”

“So she may simply be lost?”

“My first thought. We’ll soon find out.”

Wallander called the daughter of Birgitta Medberg to tell her he was on his way, and then they drove to Skurup. The wind was blustery. It was nine minutes past three on August 29.

12

They stopped in front of a two-story brick building — quintessentially Swedish, Linda thought. Wherever you go in this country the houses all look the same. The central square in Västerås could be replaced with the one in Örebro, and this Skurup apartment building could as easily be in Sollentuna.

“Where have you ever seen a building like this before?” she asked her father when they stepped out of the car and he was fumbling with the keys. He glanced at the brick facade.

“Looks like the place you had in Sollentuna, before you moved to the dorms at the police academy.”

“Good memory. So what do I do now?”

“Come with me. You can treat this as a warm-up exercise for real police work.”

“Aren’t you breaking some rules by doing this? No one should be present at an interrogation without relevant cause — something like that?”

“This isn’t an interrogation session, it’s a conversation. Let’s hope it will simply serve to put someone’s fears to rest.”

“But still.”

“No buts. I’ve been breaking rules since I first started working. According to Martinsson’s calculations I should have been locked up for a minimum of four years for all the things I’ve done. But who cares, if you’re doing a good job? That’s one of the few points Nyberg and I can agree on.”

“Nyberg? The head of forensics?”

“The one and only. He’s retiring soon, and in one sense no one will be sorry to see him go. On the other hand, despite his terrible temper, maybe all of us will.”

They crossed the street. A bike missing its back wheel was propped up against the wall. The frame was bent as if it had been the victim of a violent assault. They walked into the entry and read the names of the people who lived there.

“Birgitta Medberg. Her daughter’s name is Vanya. From the phone call I would say she has a tendency to hysteria. She also has a very shrill voice.”

“I am not hysterical!” a woman yelled from above. She was leaning over the railing of the staircase, watching them.

“Remind me to keep my voice down in stairwells,” Wallander muttered.

They walked up to her landing.

“Just as I thought,” Wallander said in a friendly voice to the hostile woman waiting for them. “The boys at the station are too young. They still can’t tell the difference between hysteria and a normal level of concern.”

The woman, Vanya, was in her forties, heavy, with yellow stains around the collar and cuffs of her blouse. Linda thought it was probably a long time since she had washed her hair. They walked into the apartment and Linda immediately recognized the strong scent that hung in the air. Mom’s perfume, she thought. The one she wears when she’s upset or angry. She had another she preferred when she was happy.

They were shown into the living room. Vanya dropped into an armchair and pointed her finger at Linda.

“Who is she?”

“An assistant,” Wallander said in a firm voice. “Please tell us what happened, starting at the beginning.”

Vanya told them in a nervous, jerky style. She seemed to have trouble finding the right words even though it was clear that she was not the kind of person who spoke in long sentences. Linda immediately understood her concern was genuine, and compared it to the way she felt about Anna.

Vanya told them that her mother was a cultural geographer whose principal work was tracing and mapping old roads and walkways in southern Sweden. She had been widowed for a year and had four grandchildren, of which two were Vanya’s. On this particular day, Vanya and her daughters were supposed to have visited her at noon. Birgitta had planned to be out on one of her short excursions before then. But when Vanya arrived, Birgitta had not yet returned. Vanya waited for two hours, then called the police. Her mother would never have disappointed her grandchildren like this, she reasoned. Something must have happened.

When she finished her story, Linda tried to guess what question her father would ask first. Perhaps something along the lines of: “Where was she going?”

“Do you know where she was going this morning?” he asked.

“No,” Vanya said.

“She has a car, I take it.”

“Actually, she has a red Vespa. Forty years old.”

“Really?”

“All Vespas used to be red, my mother tells me. She’s in an association for owners of vintage mopeds and Vespas. The headquarters are in Staffanstorp, I think. I don’t know why — why she wants to be with those people, I mean. But she seems to like them.”

“You said she became a widow about a year ago. Did she show any signs of depression?”

“No. And if you think she’s committed suicide you’re wrong.”

“I’m not saying she did. But sometimes even the people closest to us can be very good at hiding their feelings.”

Linda stared at her father. He glanced briefly in her direction. We have to talk, she thought. It was wrong of me not to tell him about the time I stood on the bridge and was going to jump. He thinks the only time was when I slashed my wrists.

“She would never hurt herself. She would never do that to us.”

“Is there anyone she may have gone to visit?”

Vanya had lit a cigarette. She had already managed to spill ash on her blouse and the floor.

“My mother is the old-fashioned type. She never drops in on someone without calling.”

“Our colleagues have confirmed that she hasn’t been admitted to any hospital in the area, and there are no reports of an accident. Does she have a medical condition we should know about? Does she have a cell phone?”

“My mother is a very healthy woman. She takes care of herself — not like me, though it’s hard to get enough exercise when you’re in the grocery business.”

Vanya made a gesture of disgust at her own body.

“A cell phone?”

“She has one, but she keeps it turned off. My sister and I are always getting on her case about it.”

There was a lull in the conversation. They heard the low sound of a radio or a TV coming from the apartment next door.

“So let’s get this straight. You have no idea where she may have gone. Is there anyone who would have more specific information regarding her research? Is there a diary or working papers of some kind we could look at?”

“Not that I know of. And my mother works alone.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

“That she’s disappeared? Never.”

Wallander took a notepad and a pen out of his coat pocket and asked Vanya for her full name, address, and telephone number. Linda noticed that he reacted to her last name, Jorner. He stopped writing and looked up.

“Your mother’s surname is Medberg. Is Jorner your husband’s name?”

“Yes, Hans Jorner. My mother’s maiden name was Lundgren. Is this important?”

“Hans Jorner — any connection to the gravel company in Limhamn?”

“Yes, he’s the youngest son of the company director. Why?”

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

Wallander stood up and Linda followed.

“Would you mind showing us around? Did she have a study?”

Vanya pointed to a door and then put her hand to her mouth to smother an attack of smoker’s cough. They walked into a study where the walls were covered with maps. Stacks of papers and folders were neatly arranged on the desk.

“What was all that about Jorner?” Linda asked in a low voice.

“I’ll tell you later. It’s an unpleasant story.”

“And what was it she said? She’s a grocer?”

“Yes.”

Linda leafed through a few papers. He stopped her immediately.

“You can come along, listen, and look to your heart’s content. But don’t touch anything.”

“It was just a few papers.”

Linda left the room in a huff. He was right, of course, but his tone was objectionable. She nodded politely to Vanya, who was still coughing, and left the apartment. As soon as she was down on the street she regretted her childish reaction.

Her father emerged ten minutes later.

“What did I do? Is there something wrong?”

“It’s nothing. I’ve already forgotten about it.”

Linda made an apologetic gesture. Wallander unlocked the car while the wind pulled and tugged at their clothing. They got into the car, but he didn’t start the engine right away.

“You noticed my reaction when she said her name was Jorner,” Wallander said and squeezed the steering wheel angrily. “When Kristina and I were little there were periods of time when no art buyers had been by for a while in their fancy cars. We had no money. At those times Mother had to go to work. She had no education, so the only available occupations were on the assembly line or housekeeping. She chose the latter and landed a position with the Jorners, though she came home each night. Old man Jorner — Hugo was his name — and his wife Tyra were terrible people. As far as they were concerned there had been no social change over the past fifty years. The world, in their eyes, was upper-class and lower-class and nothing in between. He was the worst.

“One time my mother came home completely devastated. Even your grandfather, who never talked to her much, wondered what had happened. I hid behind the sofa and will never forget what she told me. There had been a small dinner party at the Jorners’, perhaps eight people. My mother served the food and, when the guests were ready for coffee, Hugo asked her to bring in a stool from the kitchen. They were all a bit tipsy at this point and when she came in with it he asked her to climb up on it. She did as he asked and then he said that from her present vantage point she should be able to see that she had forgotten to lay a coffee spoon for one of the guests. Then he dismissed her, and she heard how everyone laughed as she left the room.

“I still remember it word for word. When she had finished, she started crying and said she would never go back. My dad was so upset he was ready to grab the ax from the woodshed and smash Jorner’s head. But she managed to calm him down. I’ll never forget it. I was ten, maybe twelve years old. And now I meet one of his daughters-in-law.”

He started up the car angrily.

“I’ve often wondered about my grandmother,” Linda said. “I think what I wonder about her most was how anyone could stand to be married to my grandfather.”

Wallander laughed.

“My mom always used to say that he did what she told him if she just rubbed him with a little salt. I never really understood that — I remember wondering how you could rub a person with salt. The secret was her patience. She had an infinite fund of patience.”

Wallander stepped on the brake and swerved suddenly as a sporty convertible overtook them in a dangerous curve. He swore.

“I should pull them over.”

“Why don’t you?”

“My mind is on other things.”

Linda looked over at her dad, who appeared tense.

“There’s something about this missing woman that bothers me,” he said. “I think Vanya Jorner was telling us the truth and I think her anxiety is genuine. My feeling is that Birgitta Medberg either became sick, or perhaps temporarily confused, or else something has happened to her.”

“Like a crime?”

“I don’t know. But I think my day off is over. I’ll take you home.”

“I’ll come with you to the station. I’ll walk from there.”

Wallander parked in the police station garage, and Linda started walking home in the wind that had become surprisingly cold. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. She walked in the direction of Mariagatan but changed her mind and walked to Anna’s apartment instead. She waited after ringing the doorbell, then walked in.

It only took her a few seconds to feel that something was different. This time she had no doubt: someone had been in the apartment since she was here last. She couldn’t articulate how she knew this. Was anything missing? She scrutinized the living room walls and the bookcase. Nothing appeared to have changed.

She sat down in the chair that Anna preferred. Something had changed, she was sure of it. But what? She got up and stood by the window to view the room from a different angle. That was when she saw it. There used to be a large blue butterfly in a framed glass case hanging on the wall between a poster from a Berlin art exhibition and an old barometer. Now the butterfly was gone. Linda shook her head. Was she imagining things? No, she was sure she remembered it being here last time. Could Henrietta have come by and picked it up? On the face of it, it didn’t make sense. She took off her coat and methodically walked through the entire apartment.

When she opened Anna’s closet she knew immediately that someone had been there. Several items of clothing were missing, as well as a bag. Linda could tell because Anna often left the closet doors open. She sat down on the bed and tried to think. Her gaze fell on the journal lying on the desk. Anna must have left it behind, she thought, and then corrected herself: Anna would never have left it behind. Whoever it was who had been here it wasn’t Anna. She could easily have taken the clothes, perhaps even the butterfly. But she would never have left her journal. Not in a million years.

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 Båstad 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.

“I don’t know what gets into me.”

Linda stared at him, waiting to speak until he actually looked at her.

“You just need to get a little action.”

He flinched as if she had struck him, then he blushed.

“You know I’m right,” she continued. “Anyway, you should get going. I’ll walk so you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I was planning to walk myself, actually.”

“Do it tomorrow. I don’t like it when you scream and yell. I need some space.”

Wallander set off meekly as instructed. Linda changed her top since she was drenched in sweat. She reconsidered her decision to report Anna’s disappearance and had still not made up her mind by the time she left the apartment.

The sun was shining and there was a brisk breeze. Linda paused out on the street, unsure of what to do next. She prided herself on being a decisive person as a rule, but sometimes being around her father sapped her of willpower. She thought angrily that she couldn’t wait until she was allowed to move into her apartment behind Mariakyrkan. She couldn’t stand living with him much longer.

Finally she turned toward the police station. If something had really happened to Anna she would never forgive herself for not following through on reporting it. Her career as a police officer would be over before it had begun.

She walked past the People’s Park and thought about a magician she had seen there as a child when she had been out with her dad. The magician had taken gold coins out of children’s ears. This memory gave rise to another, one that had to do with a fight between her parents. She had woken up in her room at the sound of their angry voices. They had been arguing about money, some money that should have been in the account, that was gone, that had been frittered away. When Linda had carefully tiptoed to her door and peeked into the living room, she had seen her mother with blood coming out of her nose. Her dad had been looking out of the window, his face sweaty and flushed. She immediately realized that he had hit her mother, on account of the money that wasn’t there.

Linda stopped walking and squinted up at the sun. The back of her throat was starting to constrict. She remembered looking at her parents, thinking that she was the only one who could solve their problems. She didn’t want Mona to have a bloody nose. She had gone into her bedroom and taken out her piggy bank. Then she walked out into the living room and put it on the table. The room fell silent.

She kept squinting up at the sun but the tears came anyway. She rubbed her eyes and changed direction, as if this would force her mind to change track. She turned onto Industrigatan and decided to postpone reporting Anna’s disappearance. Instead she would swing by the apartment one last time. If anyone’s been there since last night I’ll know, she thought. She rang the doorbell — no answer. When she opened the front door her whole body tensed up, all of her antennae out. But there was nothing.

She walked around in the apartment, looking at the bed where she had lain the night before. She sat down in the living room and went through what had happened. Anna had now been missing for three days, if she really was missing.

Linda shook her head angrily and walked back into the bedroom. She apologized to the air and started looking through the diary again. She flipped back about thirty days. Nothing. The most notable occurrence was a toothache on August 7 and 8 and a resulting appointment with Dr. Sivertsson. Linda remembered those days and furrowed her brow. On August 8, she, Zeba, and Anna had taken a long walk out at Kåseberga. They had taken Anna’s car. Zeba’s boy was cooperative for once, and they had all taken turns carrying him when he was too tired to walk.

But a toothache?

Linda again had the feeling that there was a strange kind of double-language in Anna’s diary, perhaps a code. But why? And what could an entry about a toothache possibly signify?

She kept reading and looked closely at the handwriting itself. Anna frequently changed her pen, even in the middle of a sentence. Perhaps she was interrupted by the phone and couldn’t find the same pen when she was done. Linda put the journal down and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

When she turned the next page she drew a breath. At first she was sure she was getting it confused. But no, there it was: on August 13, Anna had written Letter from Birgitta Medberg.

Linda read it again, this time by the window with the sun on the page. Birgitta Medberg was not a common name. She put the diary down on the windowsill and picked up the phone book. It only took her a few minutes to confirm that there was only one Birgitta Medberg in this area of southern Sweden. She called information and asked about Birgitta Medbergs in the rest of the country; there were only a few other individuals with that name. And there was only one who was listed as a cultural geographer in Skåne.

Linda returned to the journal and read the rest of the text with impatience. She finally reached the strange message at the end: myth fear, myth fear. But there was no other reference to Birgitta Medberg.

Anna disappears, she thought. A few weeks earlier she receives a letter from Birgitta Medberg, who has also gone missing. In the middle of all this is Anna’s father, whom she thinks has just reappeared on a street in Malmö after a twenty-four-year absence.

Linda looked through the apartment for Birgitta Medberg’s letter. She no longer felt guilty for violating Anna’s privacy. She found a number of letters over the next three hours. Unfortunately, the letter from Medberg wasn’t one of them.

Linda left the apartment with Anna’s car keys. She drove herself down to the Harbor Café and had a sandwich and a cup of tea. A man her own age in oil-spattered overalls smiled at her as she was getting ready to leave. It took her a while to recognize him as a classmate from high school. She stopped and they said hello. Linda struggled in vain to remember his name. He stretched out his hand after first wiping it clean.

“I’m sailing,” he said. “I have an old boat with a dud motor. That’s why I’m covered in grease.”

“I’ve only just moved back to town,” Linda said.

“What do you do?”

Linda hesitated without even knowing why.

“I’ve just graduated from the police academy.”

His name suddenly came back to her: Torbjörn. He smiled at her again.

“I thought you were into old furniture.”

“I was, but I changed my mind.”

He stretched out his hand again.

“Ystad is pretty small. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Linda hurried up to the car, parked behind the old theater. I wonder what they’ll think, she thought. I wonder if they’ll be surprised that Linda became a cop.

She drove out to Skurup, parked on the main square, and then walked over to the house where Birgitta Medberg lived. There was a strong smell of cooking in the stairwell. She rang the doorbell; there was no answer. She listened, then called through the mail slot. When she was sure no one was there, she took out her pass keys and opened the door. I’m starting my career in law enforcement by breaking and entering, she thought. She was sweating and her heart was thumping. Alert for any noise, she carefully made her way through the whole apartment, constantly afraid that someone would come in. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for here, just something that would confirm the connection between Anna and Birgitta Medberg.

She was about to give up when she found a paper under the green writing pad on the desk. It was a photocopy of an old surveyor’s map on which the lines and words were hard to make out.

Linda turned on the desk lamp and was finally able to make out the writing on the bottom of the page: Rannesholm Estate. She recognized the name, but where was it exactly? She had seen a map of southern Sweden in the bookcase. She took it out and managed to find Rannesholm, which only lay a few miles north of Skurup. Linda looked at the older map again. Even though it was a poor copy, she thought she could see the outlines of some notes and arrows. She tucked both maps into her coat, turned off the light, and checked for noise through the mail slot before leaving.

It was four o’clock by the time she reached a public parking lot by the nature reserve at Rannesholm. What am I doing here? she asked herself. Am I just playing a game to pass the time? She locked the car and walked down to the lake. A pair of swans were out in the middle of the lake where the wind sent ripples across the surface of the water. It looked like rain clouds were moving in from the west. She zipped up her jacket. It was still summer, but there was the unmistakable feeling of fall in the air. She looked back at the parking lot. It was empty except for Anna’s car. She tossed a few pebbles into the lake. There is a connection between Medberg and Anna, she thought. But what could they have in common? She threw another stone into the water. The only thing I can think of that links them is the fact that both of them have disappeared. The police are investigating one case, but not the other.

The rain came sooner than she had expected. Linda ducked under a tall oak tree next to the parking lot. Raindrops started to fall all around her and suddenly the whole situation seemed completely idiotic. She was about to brace herself for a run through the rain to the car when she saw something glittering between the wet branches of a nearby bush. At first she thought it was a discarded beer can. She poked at one of the branches and saw a black tire. She started pulling the branches away with both hands and her heart beat faster. Then she ran to the car and grabbed her phone. For once her dad had his cell phone with him and turned on.

“Where are you?” he asked.

His voice was unusually gentle. She could tell he was still trying to make up for the morning.

“I’m at Rannesholm Manor,” she said. “In the parking lot.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“Dad, there’s something you need to see.”

“I can’t. We’re about to have a meeting about crazy new directives from Stockholm.”

“Skip it. Just get over here — I’ve found something.”

“What?”

“Birgitta Medberg’s Vespa.”

She heard her father’s sharp intake of breath on the other end.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And how did this happen?”

“I’ll tell you everything when you get here.”

There was a noise on the line and the connection was broken, but Linda didn’t bother calling him again. She knew he was on his way.

15

It was raining even harder now. Linda saw something flashing through the windshield and turned on the wipers. It was her father’s car. He parked, ducked out, and jumped into the passenger seat next to her. He was impatient, clearly in a hurry.

“Let’s hear it.”

His impatience made her nervous.

“Do you have the journal with you?” he interrupted.

“No. Why? I’ve given you the text word for word.”

He had no more questions and she continued her account. When she had finished, he sat and stared out into the rain.

“A strange story,” he said.

“You always say to watch for the unexpected.”

He nodded, then looked her over.

“Did you bring a raincoat?”

“No.”

“I have one you can borrow.”

He popped the door open and ran back to his car. Linda was amazed to see her large, heavyset dad move so quickly, with such agility. She followed him out into the rain. He stood at the back of the car putting on his gear. When he saw her he handed her a raincoat that fell all the way down to her feet. Then he fished out a baseball cap with the logo of a local car-repair shop and pushed it down over her head. He stared up at the sky. The rain poured down over his face.

“It’s Noah and the flood all over again,” he said. “I don’t remember rain like this since I was a child.”

“It rained a lot when I was young,” Linda said.

He nudged her on and she led the way over to the oak tree and pushed the bushes away so he could see. Wallander took out his cell phone and she heard him call the police station. He grumbled when they didn’t pick up right away. Wallander read out the license-plate number and waited for confirmation. It was her Vespa. Wallander put the phone back in his pocket.

The rain stopped at that exact moment. It happened so fast it took them a while to register what had happened. It was like rain on a movie set being turned off after the take.

“God has decided to take pity on us,” Wallander said. “You’ve found Birgitta Medberg’s Vespa.”

He looked around.

“But no Birgitta Medberg.”

Linda hesitated, then pulled out the photocopy of the old map that she had found in Birgitta Medberg’s apartment. She regretted it as soon as she had taken it out, but it was too late.

“What’s that?”

“A map of the area.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Here on the ground.”

He took the dry piece of paper from her and gave her a searching look. Here comes the question I won’t be able to answer, she thought.

But he didn’t ask. Instead he studied the map, looked down to the lake and the road, at the parking lot and the various paths that branched out from it.

“She came here,” he said. “But this is a big park.”

He studied the area right around the Vespa. Linda watched him, trying to read his mind.

Suddenly he looked at her.

“What’s the first question we should be asking?”

“If she hid the Vespa deliberately, or was only trying to protect it from being stolen.”

He nodded.

“There’s a third alternative, of course.”

Linda understood what he was getting at. She should have thought of it right away.

“That someone else hid it.”

“Exactly.”

A dog came running out from one of the paths. It was white with little black spots; Linda couldn’t remember what that kind was called. Then another and finally a third dog appeared out of the forest, followed by a woman dressed in rain gear from head to toe. She was walking briskly and put all three of the dogs on leashes when she caught sight of Linda and Wallander. She was in her forties, tall, blond, and attractive. Linda saw her father react instinctively to the presence of a good-looking woman: he stood up straight, pulled up his head to make his throat appear less wrinkled, and held in his stomach.

“Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Wallander and I’m with the Ystad police.”

The woman looked at him skeptically.

“May I see your identification?”

Wallander dug out his wallet, then presented his ID card, which she studied closely.

“Has anything happened?”

“No. Do you often walk your dogs in this area?”

“Twice a day, actually.”

“That must mean you know these paths very well.”

“Yes, I would say I do. Why?”

He ignored her last question.

“Do you meet many people in the forest?”

“Not during the fall. Spring and summer there are a fair number of people in the park, but soon it will only be dog owners who make the effort. That’s always a relief. Then I can let the dogs off the leash.”

“But aren’t they supposed to stay on the leash year-round? That’s what the sign says.”

He pointed at a sign a few feet away. She raised her eyebrows.

“Is that why you’re here? To catch women who let their dogs run loose?”

“No. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

The dogs strained impatiently on their leashes while Wallander lifted away some of the undergrowth to reveal the Vespa.

“Have you ever seen this scooter before? It belongs to a woman in her sixties by the name of Birgitta Medberg.”

The dogs immediately wanted to pull forward and sniff it, but they were firmly restrained by their owner. Her voice was steady and without hesitation.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen both the Vespa and the woman. Quite a few times.”

“When did you see her last?”

She thought about it.

“Yesterday.”

Wallander threw a quick glance at Linda, who was standing to one side, listening.

“Are you sure?”

“No, not completely. But I think it was yesterday.”

“Why can’t you be sure?”

“I’ve seen her so often over the last few weeks.”

“The last few weeks? Can you be more precise?”

She thought about it again before answering.

“I suppose all through July, perhaps the last week of June. That was when I first saw her. She was walking on a path on the other side of the lake and we stopped and chatted for a bit. She told me she was mapping old walking trails around Rannesholm. I saw her again from time to time after that. She had many interesting stories to tell. Neither I nor my husband had any idea that there were pilgrim trails on our property. We live in the manor,” she added, “My husband manages an investment fund. My name is Anita Tademan.”

She looked at the Vespa again and her expression became anxious.

“Is something wrong?”

“We don’t know. I have one last question for you. When you last saw her, which path was she on?”

Anita Tademan pointed back over her shoulder.

“That one I was just on. It’s a good one when it rains because the canopy is so thick. She found a completely overgrown path in there that starts about five hundred meters into the forest next to a fallen beech tree. That was where I last saw her.”

“Then I have no more questions for you,” Wallander said.

“Can’t you tell me what this is all about?”

“She may have disappeared. We’re still not sure.”

“How awful. That nice woman.”

“Was she always on her own?” Linda asked.

The question flew out of her mouth before she had a chance to stop herself. Wallander looked over at her with surprise but did not look angry.

“I never saw her with anyone,” Anita Tademan said. “And if that’s all your questions I must be on my way.”

She let the dogs off their leashes and started walking up the road that led up to the castle. Linda and her father stood watching her for a while.

“A beauty.”

“Snobby and rich,” Linda said. “Hardly your type.”

“Never say never,” he said. “I know how to behave in polite society. Both your mother and your aunt have taught me well.”

He looked down at his watch and then up at the sky.

“We’ll go five hundred meters and see if we find anything.”

He started down the path at a quick pace. She followed him and was forced to half-run in order to keep up with him. A strong scent of wet earth rose up from the forest floor. The path wound around boulders and the exposed roots of old trees. They heard a pigeon fly up from a branch, and then another.

Linda was the one who spotted it. Wallander was walking so fast he didn’t see where a thin path branched off to one side. She shouted out to him and he backtracked.

“I was counting,” she said. “This is about four hundred fifty meters in.”

“The woman said five hundred.”

“If you don’t count every step, five hundred can feel like four or six hundred meters, depending.”

“I know how to judge distances,” he said, irritated.

They started following the new path that was only barely visible. But both of them noted soft imprints. One pair of boots, Linda thought. One person.

The path led them deep into a part of the forest that looked untouched. They stopped at the edge of a shallow ravine that cut through the forest. Wallander crouched down and picked at the moss with his finger.

They made their way carefully into the ravine. At one point Linda’s foot was caught in some roots and she fell. A branch broke and sounded like a gunshot. They heard birds fly up all around them although they couldn’t see them.

“Are you all right?”

Linda brushed the mud from her clothes.

“I’m fine.”

Wallander made his way through the brush and Linda followed closely. He parted a few of the branches in front of them and suddenly she saw a small hut. It was like something out of a fairy tale, the house of a witch, the shack leaned up against the rock face. A broken pail lay half-buried in the earth outside the door. Both of them listened attentively for sounds, but there were none. Only the occasional tap of a raindrop.

“Wait here,” Wallander said and walked up to the door.

Wallander opened the door and looked in, flinched, and stepped back. Linda caught up with him and pushed past him to peer inside. At first she didn’t know what she was looking at.

Then she realized that they had found Birgitta Medberg.

Or, more precisely, what remained of her.