That evening, Wallander came home and reported that Torgeir Langaas had been found dead. He had driven into a tree. Everything pointed to suicide. But Erik Westin was still at large. Linda wondered if she would ever find out if it was Westin she had seen in the sunlight outside Lestarp Church. And was he the one who had been in her car? These questions remained unanswered.
But there was one question she had found the answer to herself. The puzzling words in Anna’s diary: myth fear, myth fear. It was so simple, Linda thought Myth fear — my father, my father. An anagram, that was all.
Linda and her father sat up and talked for a long time. The police were slowly reconstructing Erik Westin’s life and had found a connection to the minister Jim Jones and his sect, who had found death in the jungles of Guyana. Westin was a complicated person whom it would never be possible to fully understand, but it was important to realize that he was a far cry from a madman. His self-image, not least as expressed in the holy pictures he asked his disciples to carry with them, was of a humble person carrying out God’s work. He wasn’t insane so much as a fanatic, prepared to do whatever it took to realize his beliefs. He was prepared to sacrifice people if need be, kill those who stood in his way, and punish those whom he deemed had committed mortal sins. He sought his justifications in the Bible. He let nothing happen that he did not feel could be justified by the Holy Book.
Westin was also a desperate man who saw only evil and decay around him, not that this in any way justified his actions. But the only hope of preventing something like this in the future, of identifying people prepared to blow themselves up as a chain in something they claimed was a Christian effort, was not to dismiss Westin as a simple madman, Wallander said.
There was not much to add. Those who were to have carried out the well-planned bombings were now awaiting trial. Police all over the world were looking for Westin, and soon fall would come with frosty nights and cold winds from the northeast.
They were about to go to bed when the phone rang. Wallander listened in silence, then asked a few short questions. When he hung up, Linda did not want to ask him what had happened. She saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes, and he told her that Sten Widén had just died. The woman who called was a girlfriend, possibly the last one he had lived with. She had promised Widén to contact Wallander and tell him that everything was over and that it had “gone well.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“We used to talk about it when we were younger, Sten and I. That death was something one could face like an opponent in a duel. Even if the outcome was a given, a skillful player could hold off and tire death out so that it only had the power to deliver a single blow. That was how we wanted our deaths to be, something we could take care of so they would ‘go well.’”
He was very sad, she could see that.
“Do you want to talk some more?”
“No. This is something I have to work through on my own.”
They were quiet for a while, then he stood up and went to bed without a word. Linda didn’t manage to sleep many hours that night either. She thought about all the people out there prepared to blow up the churches they hated — and themselves. According to what her father and Lindman had said, and from what she had read in the papers, these people were far from monsters. They spoke of their good intentions, their hopes to pave the road for the true Kingdom of God on Earth.
She was prepared to wait one day, but no longer. Therefore she walked up to the station the morning of September 11. It was a cold, dreary day after a night that had left traces of the first frost. Linda tried on her uniform and signed receipts for her equipment. Then she had a meeting with Martinsson for an hour and received her first shift assignment. She was free for the rest of the day, but she didn’t feel like sitting alone at home at Mariagatan and so she stayed at the station.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, she was drinking coffee in the lunchroom, talking to Nyberg, who had sat down at her table of his own accord and was showing his most friendly side. Martinsson came in and, shortly thereafter, her father. Martinsson turned on the TV.
“Something’s happened in the U.S.,” he said.
“What is it?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know,” Martinsson said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
There was an image of a clock, counting down the seconds to a special news report. More and more people filtered into the room. By the time the news report came on, the room was almost full.
Epilogue
The Girl on the Roof
The call had come in to the station shortly after seven o’clock on Friday night, November 23, 2001. Linda, who was partnered up with an officer named Ekman that evening, answered the police dispatch department’s broadcast. They had just resolved a family conflict in Svarte and were heading back to Ystad. A young woman had climbed onto the roof of an apartment building to the west of the city and was threatening to jump. To make matters worse, she was armed. The head of operations wanted as many patrol cars as possible to get to the scene. Ekman turned on the siren and sped up.
Curious onlookers had already gathered by the time they arrived. Spotlights illuminated the girl, who sat up on the roof with a shotgun in her arms. Ekman and Linda were briefed by Sundin, who was responsible for getting her down. A fire truck with a ladder was also in place, but the girl had threatened to jump if the ladder was driven any closer.
The girl, Maria Larsson, was sixteen years old and had been treated for several episodes of mental illness. She lived with her mother, who was a drug addict. This particular evening something had gone wrong. Maria had rung a neighbor’s doorbell, and when the door opened she had rushed in and grabbed a shotgun and some ammunition that she knew were kept in the apartment. The owner of the apartment could count on being in serious trouble, since he had clearly stored both the weapon and the ammunition in an unsecured manner.
But this was about Maria. She had threatened alternately to jump, to shoot herself, and to shoot anyone who tried to approach her. The mother was too high to be of any use, and there was also the chance that she would start to shout at her daughter and incite her to carry out her threats.
Several officers had tried to speak to the girl through a trapdoor located twenty meters from the place by the drainpipe where she was sitting. Right now an old minister was trying to talk to her, but she aimed the weapon at his head and he quickly ducked down. They were feverishly working on locating a close friend of Maria’s who would perhaps be able to get through to her. No one doubted that she was desperate enough to do what she had threatened.
Linda borrowed a pair of binoculars and looked at the girl. When the call came through, she had thought of the time she had stood on the bridge railing. When she saw Maria shaking on the roof, her cramped hold on the shotgun, and the tears that had frozen on her face, it was like looking at herself. Behind her she could hear Sundin, Ekman, and the minister talking. No one knew what to do. Linda lowered the binoculars and turned to them.
“Let me talk to her,” she said.
Sundin shook his head doubtfully.
“I was once in the same situation,” she said. “And she might listen to me since I’m not even that much older than she is.”
“I can’t let you take that risk. You’re not experienced enough to judge what you should and shouldn’t say. And her weapon is loaded. She’s showing signs of an increasing desperation. Sooner or later she’ll use her gun.”