The cemetery continued for another hundred yards. She had to walk past it.
When Frida had gone half the distance, she heard foot-steps behind her. Heavy and firm. She listened. She had a strong urge to turn around but didn’t dare. She picked up her pace.
The footsteps were louder now. She had the distinct feeling that she was being followed. Or was she just imagining things? She tried stopping for a moment. The footsteps stopped. All of a sudden her brain was crystal clear. The road was still climbing uphill, so there was no sense in getting on her bike. On one side of the road was the cemetery. The other side was lined with houses with big shady yards. All the windows were dark.
She walked as fast as she could, no longer feeling the cold. Damn her short skirt and these shoes that hurt her feet.
She considered flinging the bicycle to the ground and trying to head across someone’s yard. Instead she started to run. That made the person behind her start running, too. Terrified, she ran as fast as she could. The road leveled out and started sloping downward.
She was just about to jump onto her bike when two strong hands grabbed her by the neck from behind and pressed their fingers into her throat. She couldn’t breathe and let go of the bicycle. It fell over with a crash.
SATURDAY, JUNE 16
Stefan Lindh reported his wife missing on Saturday morning. He was awakened at eight o’clock when their youngest child came into the bedroom. Frida’s side of the bed was empty. His first thought was that she must be in the bathroom, but it didn’t take him long to discover that his wife wasn’t in the house at all. He called her girlfriends, but she wasn’t with any of them. Then he tried the hospital and the police, with no results. The officer on duty told him to wait a few more hours.
When Frida hadn’t come back by lunchtime, he put the kids in the car and drove down to the Monk’s Cellar. He drove the same route that he thought Frida would have taken on her bike. By two o’clock in the afternoon, he couldn’t wait any longer; he called the police, sick with worry. Knutas was informed, and, considering that a woman had been murdered less than two weeks ago, he decided to call a meeting of the investigative team. While he waited for the others, he phoned the worried husband, who was desperate and begged the police for help. His wife had never disappeared like this before.
“Take it easy,” murmured Knutas. “We’re going to have a short meeting here at headquarters in a moment, and right after that either I or one of my colleagues will come over to see you. Shall we say in an hour?”
He hung up the phone. The others came in, one by one, and sat down around his little table: Karin Jacobsson, Thomas Wittberg, and Lars Norrby.
“So what we have is a missing woman,” Knutas began. “Her name is Frida Lindh, thirty-four years old, married and the mother of three. The family lives in Sodervarn, on Apelgatan, to be more precise. She disappeared last night after spending the evening in town with three women friends. They went to the Monk to have dinner and then sat in one of the bars at the inn and drank beer until closing time. According to what her friends told the husband, they said goodbye to each other outside the place. By that time it was a little past 1:00 A.M. Frida is the only one of them who lives south of downtown, so she left the group and headed off alone to bicycle home. No one has seen her since. This is the information we have from her husband. Because Frida Lindh appears to be a conscientious mother to her young children, it doesn’t seem right to me that she’s missing. Her husband says that she has never disappeared like this before.”
“Couldn’t she have just gone home with someone?” asked Norrby with a smirk. “Someone who’s more exciting than her husband?”
“Of course that’s a possibility, but then she should have come back home by now, don’t you think? It’s almost four thirty, and the woman has three small children, for God’s sake.”
“You would think so, although in this job you never stop being surprised,” said Norrby.
“You don’t think that you’re overreacting about this?” asked Wittberg, turning to Knutas. “Isn’t it a little melodramatic to start sounding all the alarms just because a woman who went out drinking doesn’t come straight home?”
Thomas ran one hand through his thick, dark, curly hair and then rubbed it along the stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. In front of him he had placed a bottle of Coca-Cola that was half empty.
“Are you grumpy just because you’re hungover? Is that it?” Karin teased him, poking him in the ribs.
“Not at all,” said Thomas.
Knutas gave him an annoyed look. “Considering that we recently had the homicide of a woman on our hands, I think we need to give this our immediate attention. We’ll start by finding out what her girlfriends have to say. Karin, could you talk to the woman who lives on Bogegatan? The other two live on Tjelvarvagen. You can deal with them,” he said, turning to Wittberg and Norrby. “I’ll go see the husband. Then we’ll meet back here. Shall we say around eight o’clock?”
The chairs scraped the floor as they all got up from the table. Norrby and Wittberg muttered to each other. “Hell, this is stupid. Bringing us in on a weekend for something like this. A woman who’s cheating on her husband.” They both shook their heads and sighed.
Knutas pretended not to notice. He was standing up to his waist in the cold water. It was numbingly cold; he was enjoying it. It reminded him of his childhood when he would go swimming with his father and sister near their summer cottage. The first plunge into the sea water that hadn’t yet warmed up. How they laughed and shrieked. It was one of the few happy childhood memories he had. His mother, of course, didn’t come along. She never went swimming. She was always busy with something else. Washing dishes, doing the laundry, cooking, making the beds, tidying up. He remembered wondering why all that always took such a long time. There were only four of them in the family, and his father did a lot of the chores at home, too. But somehow she always seemed to have her hands full. She never had any time to spend with them. To play. If she had any free time, she would do crossword puzzles. Always those damn crosswords. Occasionally he would try to help her. Sit down next to her and give her suggestions for solving the puzzle. Then she would snap that he was ruining all the fun of it. She didn’t want anyone to help. And he was pushed away. As usual. He looked out across the sea. It was gray and motionless. Exactly like the sky. He had an almost spiritual feeling. Everything was calm. As if time and space had stopped. And here he was. By now he was starting to get used to the coldness of the water. He gathered his courage and dove in. Afterward he sat naked on the lid of the old kitchen bench and spent a long time drying himself off. He felt cleansed. The space in the seat underneath him had been refilled. He exhaled everything that had weighed on him all these years. It seemed as if the more blood he spilled, the more purified he felt.
Sodervarn is located about three-quarters of a mile from the ring wall. That part of town consists mostly of single-family homes from the early twentieth century, but here and there are a few recently built houses. The Lindh family lived in one of them. It was a one-story structure with a white-brick facade, a neat driveway, and an American-style mailbox. On the street several little boys were playing with field hockey sticks. They were taking turns shooting the ball toward a goal that had been set up on the sidewalk. Knutas parked his old Mercedes outside the white-painted wooden fence. He noticed little decals in the windows indicating that the house had an alarm system installed by one of the largest security companies. That was quite unusual on Gotland.
He pushed the doorbell and heard it ring inside the house.
Stefan Lindh opened the door almost at once. His eyes were red rimmed and unhappy.
“Where could she be? Have you heard anything?” He asked the questions even before saying hello.