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:
Linda got up. She was never going to get a sensible answer out of him. It also seemed unlikely to her that Anna had had any contact with him.
She left the room without saying good-bye. As she walked to the front door, she heard him start playing on the piano. She glanced into the other rooms on her way out. The apartment was a mess and the air was stale. A lonely man who only has his music, she thought. Just like my grandfather and his painting. What am I going to do when I get old? What about Dad? And what about Mom — the bottle?
She lifted her jacket from the hook in the hall. Music filled the apartment. She stood motionless and studied the clothes hanging by the door. Vigsten might be a lonely old man, but he had a coat and a pair of shoes that did not belong to an old man. She glanced back into the apartment. There was no one there. But she already knew that Frans Vigsten did not live alone. Fear flooded her so quickly that she jumped. The music stopped, and she listened for any sounds. Then she fled, running across the street to the car, and driving away as fast as she could. She only started to calm down when she was back on the Öresund Bridge heading home.
At the same time that Linda was driving over the bridge, a man broke into the Ystad pet store. He doused the rows of caged birds, hamsters, and mice with gasoline, threw a match on the floor, and left just as the animals caught fire.
Part III
The Noose
30
He chose the location for his ceremonies with great care. This was something he had learned as early as during his flight from Jonestown: where could he rest, where would he feel safe? There were no ceremonies as such in his world back then; that came later, when he had reestablished a connection to God that was finally going to help fill the emptiness that threatened to consume him from the inside.
Now it was more important than ever not to make any mistakes in selecting the places where his assistants prepared their assignments. Everything had gone well until now, until the unfortunate incident where a woman accidentally hit upon one of their hideouts and was killed by his disciple, Torgeir.
I never saw Torgeir’s weakness for what it was, he thought. The poor little rich boy that I plucked out of the sewer in Cleveland had a temper I never succeeded in taming. I treated him with infinite patience and listened to him talk. But he carried a powerful rage behind those locked doors.
He had tried to get Torgeir to explain his actions. Why this senseless fury at a woman stumbling down the wrong path? They had even talked about what they should do in the event that someone chose to follow the abandoned path one day. They always had to remain alert to the possibility that the unexpected could happen. Torgeir had not been able to give him an answer. The plan had always been to meet unexpected visitors in a cordial fashion, then remove themselves from the area as soon as was practical. Torgeir had chosen the opposite approach. A fuse had blown in his brain. Instead of giving the woman a friendly welcome, he had reached for an axe. Why he dismembered her body he couldn’t say, nor why he saved the head and posed the hands as if in prayer. Then he had put the remaining body parts in a sack with a heavy rock, removed his clothes, and swum out into the middle of the nearest pond, where he let the whole parcel sink to the bottom.
Torgeir was strong — that had been among his first impressions of the drunk man he encountered in one of Cleveland’s worst slums. He was simply going to walk on when he heard the man sprawled in the gutter moan a few slurred words in a language that sounded like Danish or Norwegian. He had stopped and bent down, understanding that God had sent this man his way. Torgeir Langaas had been near death. The physician who later examined him and prepared the rehabilitation program had been very insistent on this point: there was no room left for any more alcohol or drugs in his body. Only his natural strength had saved him. But now his organs were using their last reserves. His brain was damaged and would perhaps never recover large portions of memory that were missing.
It was a moment he would always remember, the day when a homeless Norwegian by the name of Torgeir Langaas looked up at him with eyes so bloodshot they glowed like a rabid dog’s. But it wasn’t the look that had made such an impression, it was what he said, because in Torgeir’s confused mind the face bending down toward him belonged to God. He had grabbed his coat with his massive hands and directed his putrid breath into his redeemer’s face.
“Are you God?” Torgeir asked.
In that moment everything that had been unresolved in his life — his failures, dreams, and hopes — were reduced to a single point, and he answered:
“Yes, I am your God.”
In the next moment he had been beset with doubts, although there was no reason his first disciple couldn’t be one of the lowest. But who was he? How had he ended up here?
He had walked away and left Torgeir there, but his curiosity got the better of him. He returned to the slum the very next day. It’s like stepping down into hell, he thought, lost souls everywhere. In looking for Torgeir he came close to being mugged several times, but at last an old man with an oozing, stinking sore in the place where his left eye should have been told him that there was a Norwegian with large hands who sometimes took shelter behind a rusty bridge pillar. That was where he found him. Torgeir Langaas was sleeping, snoring loudly. His body reeked of sweat and urine and his face was badly cut.
It didn’t take more than a couple of sessions under the crumbling bridge to get Torgeir’s life story. He had been born in Baerum in 1948, heir to the Langaas shipping enterprise, a company that specialized in oil and cars. His father, Captain Anton Helge Langaas, had studied the shipping industry during his years at sea. Langaas Shipping was an offshoot of the established Refsvold Shipping Company. The parting had not been amicable. Nor was it known where Captain Helge Langaas had initially made the fortune that forced the unwilling board members of the Refsvold Shipping Company to admit him into their midst. Rumors abounded.
Captain Langaas waited to marry until his company was in the black and he was financially secure. In a gesture of contempt for the shipping aristocracy, he chose a wife who was as far from the sea as it was possible to be and still be in Norway, from a village in the forests east of Røros. There he found a woman called Maigrim who delivered mail to the isolated farms of the region. They built a large house in Baerum outside Oslo and had three children one after the other: Torgeir, and then two girls, Anniken and Hege.
Torgeir Langaas sensed what his parents wanted of him from an early age, but realized just as early that he would never be able to live up to their expectations. He never quite understood the role he was supposed to play in life, nor what the play was about, nor why he had been chosen for the starring role. He started rebelling in early adolescence. Captain Langaas fought a battle that was doomed from the outset. Finally he capitulated and realized that Torgeir would never take over his place in the family business. Instead, he turned to his daughters. Hege resembled her father, showed a focused determination even as a child, and retained an executive position within the company at twenty-two years of age. At that point Torgeir had already started his long slide into oblivion with a focused determination of his own. He had already developed several addictions, and despite Maigrim’s best efforts, none of the expensive clinics nor therapists called in to help did any good.