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?”