Before the Frost
- Автор: Манкелль Хеннинг
- Серия: Linda Wallander #1
- Год: 2004
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Harvill Press
- ISBN: 978-1-84343-113-8
- Переводчик: Ebba Segerberg
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «Before the Frost». Краткое содержание книги:
When the conversation was over, Linda sat staring down at the phone for a few minutes. The man she had seen through the window, the back of the head that had been turned toward her, had not had shoulder-length dark hair with a few gray streaks. His hair had been short and neatly trimmed.
20
Wallander came bounding in, his clothes soaked, his boots covered in mud, but with the happy news that the weather was about to clear up. Nyberg had called the air-control tower at Sturup, he said, and had received the report that the next forty-eight hours would be free of rain. Wallander changed his clothes, declined Linda’s offers of food, and fixed himself an omelet.
Linda waited for the right moment to tell him about the conflicting descriptions of Henrietta’s visitor. She didn’t know exactly why she was waiting. Was it a lingering childhood fear of his temper? She didn’t know, she just waited. And then, when he pushed away his plate and she plopped into the chair across from him and was about to launch into her story, he started talking.
“I’ve been thinking about your grandfather,” he said.
“What about?”
“What he was like, what he wasn’t like. I think you and I knew him in different ways. That’s as it should be. I was always looking for bits of myself in him, worried about what I would find. I’ve grown more and more like him the older I get. If I live as long as he did maybe I’ll find myself a ramshackle, leaky house and start painting pictures of wood grouse and sunsets.”
“It’ll never happen.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
Linda broke in at this point and told him about the man she had seen whose close-cropped head didn’t match Henrietta’s description. He listened attentively, and when she stopped he didn’t ask her if she was sure of what she had seen. He reached for the phone and dialed a number from memory — first incorrectly, then getting it right. Lindman picked up. Wallander told him succinctly that in light of what Linda had observed they had to make another visit to Henrietta Westin.
“We have no time for lies,” he said. “No lies, half-truths, or incomplete answers.”
Then he put the phone down and looked at her.
“This is unorthodox at best,” he said. “Not even necessary, strictly speaking, but I’m still going to ask you to come along. If you feel up to it, that is.”
Linda felt a surge of pleasure.
“I’ll do it.”
“How’s the leg?’
“Fine.”
She saw that he didn’t believe her.
“Does Henrietta know why I was there last night?” she asked. “She can hardly have believed what Stefan told her.”
“All we want to know is who was there with her last night. We have a witness; we don’t have to tell her it’s you.”
They walked down to the street and waited for Lindman. The air-traffic controllers had been right; the weather was changing. Drier winds were blowing in from the south.
“When will it snow?” Linda asked.
He looked at her in amusement.
“Not for a while, I hope. Why do you ask?”
“I can’t remember when it comes, even though I was born and raised here. I don’t remember the snow.”
Stefan Lindman pulled up in his car. Linda climbed into the back seat, her father sat in the front. His seat belt was caught on something and he had trouble getting it on.
They drove toward Malmö and Linda saw the sea shimmering to her left. I don’t want to die here, she thought. The thought came out of nowhere. I don’t only want to exist. Not like Zeba. And not be a single mother like her, or thousands of others whose lives become one long damned struggle to pay the rent and the babysitters and getting someplace on time. I don’t want to be like Dad, who can never find the right house and the right dog and the wife he needs.
“What was that?” Wallander asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s funny. It sounded like you were swearing.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I have a strange daughter,” Wallander said to Lindman. “She curses without even knowing it.”
They turned onto the road that led to Henrietta’s house. The memory of being caught in the steel trap made Linda’s leg throb. She asked what would happen to the man who had set the trap.
“He went a little pale in the face when I told him he had snared a police cadet. I’m assuming he’ll have to pay a hefty fine.”
“I have a good friend in Östersund,” Stefan Lindman said. “A policeman. Giuseppe Larsson is his name.”
“He sounds Italian.”
“No, he’s from Östersund. But he has a connection of sorts with an Italian lounge singer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Linda leaned forward between the seats. She had a sudden urge to touch Lindman’s face.
“His mother had a dream that his father was not her husband but an Italian singer she had heard perform at an outdoor concert. It’s not just us men who have these fantasies.”
“I wonder if Mona has ever had the same thoughts,” Wallander said. “In your case it would be a black dream father, Linda, since she worshipped Hosh White.”
“Josh,” Lindman said. “Not Hosh.”
Linda wondered vaguely what it would have been like to have a black father.
“Anyway,” Lindman said. “My friend has an old bear trap on the wall at his place. It looks like an instrument of torture from the Middle Ages. He always said that if a person ever got caught in one, the steel teeth would cut all the way through the bone. The animals that get trapped in them have been known to gnaw their own legs off in desperation.”
Lindman stopped the car and they climbed out. The wind was gusty. They walked up to the house, in which several of the windows were lit up. When they entered the front yard, all three of them wondered why the dog hadn’t started to bark. Lindman knocked on the door, but no one answered. Wallander peeked in through a window. Lindman felt the door. It was unlocked.
“We can say we thought we heard someone call ‘Come in!’” he said tentatively.
They walked in. Linda’s view was blocked by the broad backs of the two men. She tried standing on tiptoe to see past them but winced with pain.
“Anybody home?” Wallander called out.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Lindman said.
They proceeded through the house. It looked much as it had when Linda was there last. Papers, sheet music, newspapers, and coffee cups were scattered all over. But she recognized that this superficial impression of disarray only disguised a home comfortably arranged to meet Henrietta’s every need.
“The door was unlocked,” Lindman said, “and her dog is gone. She must be out on an evening walk. Let’s give her a quarter of an hour. If we leave the door open she’ll know someone’s inside.”
“She may call the police if she thinks the house is being burgled,” Linda said.
“Burglars don’t leave the front door wide open for everyone to see,” her father said.
He sat down in the most comfortable armchair, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes. Lindman put his boot in the front door to keep it open. Linda picked up a photo album that Henrietta had left lying on the piano. The first pictures were from the early 1970s. The colors were starting to fade. Anna sat on the ground surrounded by chickens and a yawning cat. Anna had told Linda about the commune outside Markaryd where she had spent the first years of her life. Henrietta was holding her in another picture from that time, in baggy clothes, clogs, and a Palestinian shawl around her neck. Who is holding the camera? Linda wondered. Probably Eric Westin, the man who was about to disappear without a trace.