The Dogs of Riga - Wallander 02

by Henning Mankell

  They drove across the city. It was already quite late in the day, and it was starting to get dark. When they drove through the arch into the courtyard of the police headquarters, it seemed to Wallander that this must surely be for the last time. On the way up to his office, Murniers paused to unlock a safe and take out the blue file. An armed guard was sitting beside the imposing safe.

  "I suppose it's a good idea to keep it locked up," Wallander said.

  Murniers looked at him in surprise. "A good idea?" he echoed. "It's necessary, Inspector Wallander. Even if Putnis is now out of the way, it doesn't mean that all our problems are solved. We are still living in the same world as before. We are living in a country torn apart by conflicting forces, and we shan't get rid of those simply by putting three bullets into the chest of a police colonel."

  Wallander reflected on Murniers's words as they continued to his office. A man with a coffee tray was standing to attention outside the door. Wallander recalled his first visit to that dingy room. It seemed like a distant memory. Would he ever be able to grasp everything that had happened in between?

  Murniers took a bottle out of a desk drawer and filled two glasses.

  "It's not pleasant to drink a celebratory toast when so many people have died," he said, "but nevertheless, I think we deserve it. Especially you, Inspector Wallander."

  "I've done practically nothing except make mistakes," Wallander said. "I've been on the wrong track, and didn't catch on to how various things fitted together until it was too late."

  "On the contrary," Murniers said. "I am very impressed by what you've done, and not least by your courage."

  Wallander shook his head. "I'm not a brave man," he said. "I'm amazed that I'm still alive."

  They emptied their glasses, and sat down at the table with the major's testimony between them.

  "I suppose I really only have one question," Wallander said. "Upitis?"

  Murniers nodded thoughtfully. "There was no limit to Putnis's cunning and brutality. He needed a scapegoat, a plausible murderer. And he also needed an excuse to send you home. I could see right from the start that he was uneasy about your competence, and scared. He had his men kidnap two small children, Inspector Wallander. Two small children whose mother is Upitis's sister. If Upitis didn't confess to the murder of Major Liepa, those children were to die. Upitis didn't really have any choice. I often wonder what I would have done in the same situation. He's been released now, of course. Baiba Liepa already knows he was not a traitor. We've also found the children who were being held hostage."

  "It all started with a life-raft being washed ashore on the Swedish coast," Wallander said, after a few moments' thought.

  "Colonel Putnis and his fellow-conspirators had just commenced the large-scale operation involving the smuggling of drugs into various countries, including Sweden," Murniers said. "Putnis had placed a number of agents in Sweden. They had tracked down various groups of Latvian emigres and were about to start distributing the drugs that would lead to the discrediting of the Latvian freedom organisation. But something happened on one of the vessels smuggling the drugs from Ventspils. It seems that some of the colonel's men had improvised a sort of palace revolution and intended to commandeer a large amount of amphetamines for their own profit. They were found out, shot, and set adrift in a life-raft. In the confusion nobody remembered the drugs stashed away inside the raft. As I understand it they spent a whole day searching for the raft, but failed to find it. We can now consider ourselves lucky that it was washed ashore in Sweden - if it hadn't been, it is very likely that Colonel Putnis would have succeeded in his intentions. It was also Putnis's agents who were cunning enough to retrieve the drugs from your police station once they had realised nobody had discovered what was hidden in the life-raft."

  "Something else must have happened," Wallander said thoughtfully. "Why did Putnis decide to kill Major Liepa the moment he got back home?"

  "Putnis lost his nerve. He didn't know what Major Liepa was up to in Sweden, and he couldn't risk letting him stay alive without being able to check what he was doing all

  the time. As long as Major Liepa was in Latvia, it was possible to keep an eye on him, or at least to be aware of the people he met. Colonel Putnis simply got nervous. Sergeant Zids was given the order to kill Major Liepa. And he did."

  They sank into a long silence. Wallander could see Murniers was tired and worried.

  "What happens now?" asked Wallander at last.

  "I shall study Major Liepa's papers thoroughly, of course," Murniers replied. "Then we shall see."

  The reply made Wallander uneasy. "They must be published, of course," he said.

  Murniers didn't respond, and Wallander suddenly realised that was not definite so far as Murniers was concerned. His interests were not necessarily the same as those of Baiba Liepa and her friends. For him it could well be enough to have unmasked Putnis. Murniers might have an entirely different view of the appropriateness of giving the story wider circulation. Wallander was upset at the thought that Major Liepa's testimony might be swept under the carpet.

  "I'd like a copy of the major's report," he said.

  Murniers saw through his request immediately. "I didn't know you could read Latvian," he said.

  "One can't know everything," Wallander replied.

  Murniers stared at him for a long time, without speaking. Wallander looked him in the eye, and knew he must not give way. This was the last time he would be involved with Murniers in a trial of strength, and it was absolutely essential that he was not defeated. He owed that to the short-sighted little major.

  All at once, Murniers made up his mind. He pressed the button fixed to the underside of the table, and a man appeared to fetch the blue folder. A little later Wallander received a copy, the existence of which would never be recorded. Murniers would disclaim any responsibility for it. A copy the Swedish police officer Inspector Wallander had appropriated for himself, without permission and against all the laws and regulations governing practices between friendly nations, and which he had then passed onto people who had no right to these secret documents. By doing this the Swedish police officer Kurt Wallander had displayed exceptionally poor judgement and should be condemned out of hand.

  That is what would happen, that is what would pass for the truth. If anybody should ever ask, which was unlikely. Wallander would never know why Murniers allowed it to happen. Was it for the major's sake? For the country's? Or did he just think Wallander deserved an appropriate farewell present?

  That was the end of the conversation. There was nothing more to say.

  "The passport you are currently holding is of very doubtful validity," Murniers said, "but I'll make sure you get back home to Sweden without any problems. When are you thinking of going?"

  "Maybe not tomorrow," Wallander said, "but the day after, perhaps."

  Colonel Murniers accompanied him down to the car that was waiting in the yard. Wallander suddenly remembered his Peugeot that was parked in a barn somewhere in Germany, not far from the Polish border.

  "I wonder how on earth I'm going to get my car back home," he said.

  Murniers stared at him in bewilderment. Wallander realised he would never discover how close Murniers was to the people who considered themselves to be a guarantee for a better future in Latvia. He had only scraped the surface of what he had been allowed to come into contact with. That was a stone he would never turn. Murniers simply had no idea how Wallander had got into Latvia.

  "It doesn't matter," Wallander said.

  That damned Lippman, he thought angrily. I wonder if the Latvian organisations in exile have funds with which to compensate Swedish police officers for lost cars.

  He felt hard done by, without being fully able to explain why. Perhaps he was still hampered by his overwhelming exhaustion. His judgement would continue to be unreliable until he'd had an opportunity to rest properly.

  They bade each other farewell when they got to the car waiting to take Wallander
to Baiba Liepa.

  "I'll go to the airport with you," Murniers said. "You'll receive two tickets, one for the flight to Helsinki, and one for Helsinki to Stockholm. As there are no passport controls within the Nordic countries, no one will ever know you have been in Riga."

  The car drove out of the courtyard. A glass panel separated the back seat from the driver. Wallander sat in the dark, thinking about what Murniers had said. Nobody would ever know he had been in Riga. It dawned on him that he would never be able to talk to anybody about it, not even to his father. One very good reason for it remaining a secret was that it had all been so improbable, so incredible. Who would ever believe him?

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The important thing now was his meeting with Baiba Liepa. What would happen when he got back to Sweden was something he could think about when it happened.

  *

  He spent two nights and a day in Baiba Liepa's flat. All the time he was waiting for what, not being able to think of anything better, he called "the right moment", but it never occurred. He didn't utter a word about the conflicting feelings he had for her. The closest he came to her was when they sat next to each other on the sofa the second evening, looking at photographs. When he got out of the car that had taken him from Murniers to her house, her greeting had been muted, as if he had become a stranger to her again. He was put out, without even being sure what it was he was put out about. What had he expected, after all? She cooked a meal for him, a casserole with some tough chicken as the main ingredient, and he got the impression that Baiba wasn't exactly an inspired cook. I mustn't forget that she's an intellectual, he thought. She's the kind of person who is probably better qualified to dream about a better society than to cook a meal. Both types are needed, even if presumably they can't always live happily alongside each other.

  Wallander was weighed down by feelings of melancholy that, luckily, he had no trouble in keeping to himself. He no doubt belonged to the good cooks of this world. He wasn't one of the dreamers. A police officer could hardly be preoccupied with dreams, he had to stick his nose into the dirt rather than point it heavenwards. But he knew that he had begun to fall in love with her, and that was the real cause of his melancholy. He would be forced to retain this sadness in his heart as he concluded the strangest and most dangerous mission he had ever undertaken. It hurt him deeply. When she told him his car would be waiting for him in Stockholm when he got back there, he barely reacted. He had started feeling sorry for himself.

  She made a bed up for him on the sofa. He could hear her calm breathing from the bedroom. He couldn't sleep, despite his exhaustion. He kept getting up, walking across the cold floorboards and looking down on to the deserted street where the major had been murdered. The shadows were no longer there, they had been buried alongside Putnis. All that was left was the gaping void, repulsive and painful.

  The day before he left they went to visit the unmarked grave where Colonel Putnis had buried Inese and her friends. They wept openly. Wallander sobbed like an abandoned child, and he felt as if he had seen for the first time what an awful world he lived in. Baiba had taken some flowers, some frail-looking roses, frozen stiff, and she laid them on the heap of soil.

  Wallander had given her the copy of the major's testimony, but she didn't read it while he was still there.

  The morning he flew home it was snowing in Riga.

  Murniers came to fetch him himself. Baiba embraced Wallander in the doorway, they clung to each other as if they had just survived a shipwreck, and then he left.

  Wallander walked up the steps to the aeroplane.

  "Have a good journey," Murniers shouted after him.

  He's also glad to see the back of me, Wallander thought. He's not going to miss me.

  The plane made a wide turn to the left over Riga, then the pilot headed over the Gulf of Finland. Wallander was asleep before they even reached cruising level, his head resting on his chest.

  That same evening he landed in Stockholm. A voice over the public address system asked him to report to the information desk. He was handed an envelope containing his passport and car keys. The car was parked next to the taxi rank, and to his surprise Wallander noted that it had been cleaned. It was warm inside. Somebody had been sitting there, waiting for him. He drove home to Ystad that same night and was back in his flat in Mariagatan just before dawn.

  EPILOGUE

  Early one morning at the beginning of May, Wallander was in his office carefully but unenthusiastically filling in his football pools coupon when Martinsson knocked on the door and came it. It was still chilly - spring hadn't yet reached Skåne - but even so Wallander had his window open, as if he needed to give his brain a thorough airing. He had been absent-mindedly weighing up the chances of the various teams beating each other while listening to a chaffinch singing away in a tree. When Martinsson appeared in the doorway, Wallander put the pools coupon away, got up from his chair and closed the window. He knew Martinsson was always worrying about catching a cold.

  "Am I disturbing you?" Martinsson asked.

  Since his return from Riga Wallander had been off-hand and brusque with his colleagues. Some of them had wondered, strictly between themselves, how he could have grown so out of sorts just because he'd broken his hand skiing in the Alps. Nobody wanted to ask him about it straight out, however, and they all thought his bad mood would gradually die away of its own accord.

  Wallander was aware that he was behaving badly towards his colleagues. He had no business making their work more difficult, but he didn't know how he should go about becoming the Wallander of old again, the firm but good-humoured officer of the Ystad police. It was as if that person no longer existed. Nor did he know whether he really missed him. There was very little he did know about himself. The supposed trip to the Alps had exposed how little genuine truth there was in his life. He knew that he was not the kind of man who consciously surrounded himself with lies, but he had begun to ask himself whether his ignorance of what the world really looked like was in itself a sort of lie, even though it was founded in naivety rather than a conscious effort to cut himself off.

  Every time someone came into his office, he felt a twinge of guilt, but he could think of nothing better to do than to pretend that there was nothing wrong.

  "No, you're not disturbing me," he said, trying hard to sound friendly. "Sit down."

  Martinsson sat down in the visitor's chair that sagged and was most uncomfortable. "I thought I'd tell you a strange story," he said. "Or rather, I've two stories to tell you. It looks as if we've been visited by ghosts from the past."

  Wallander didn't like Martinsson's way of expressing things. The grim reality they had to deal with as police officers always seemed to him unsuitable for dressing up in poetic terms. But he said nothing and waited.

  "Do you remember that man who phoned to tell us that a life-raft was going to be washed up near here," Martinsson continued, "the chap we never caught up with, and who never identified himself?"

  "There were two men," Wallander interrupted.

  Martinsson nodded. "Let's start with the first one," he said. "A few weeks ago Anette Brolin was wondering whether to charge a man accused of a particularly nasty GBH, but since he had a clean record, she let him go."

  Wallander's ears had pricked up.

  "His name's Holmgren," said Martinsson. "I just happened to see the papers about that GBH case lying on Svedberg's desk. I noticed he was down as the owner of a fishing boat called Byron, and bells started ringing in my head. It became even more interesting when I saw that this Holmgren had beaten up one of his closest friends, a bloke called Jakobson who used to work as a crewman on the boat."

  Wallander recalled that night in Brantevik harbour. Martinsson was right. They had been visited by ghosts from the past. He realised how keen he was to hear what was coming next.

  "The funny thing was that Jakobson hadn't reported the incident, even though it was very brutal and seemed to have been unprovoked," Mar
tinsson said.

  "Who did report it, then?"

  "Holmgren attacked Jakobson with a crank handle out at Brantevik harbour, and someone saw him and phoned the police. Jakobson was in hospital for three weeks. He was pretty badly beaten, but he didn't want to report Holmgren. Svedberg never did manage to find out what was behind the violence, but I started to wonder if it might have something to do with that life-raft. Remember how neither of them wanted the other one to know that they'd both contacted us? Or at least, that's what we thought."

  "I remember," Wallander said.

  "I thought I'd have a word with Mr Holmgren," Martinsson continued. "He used to live in the same street as you, by the way, Mariagatan."

  "Used to live?"

  "Exactly. When I went to see him, he'd moved. A long way away, as well. He'd gone off to Portugal. He'd sent in various documents that classified him as an emigrant, and given his new address as somewhere in the Azores. He'd sold Byron to some Danish fisherman or other for a real bargain basement price."

  Martinsson paused, and Wallander watched him thoughtfully.

  "You have to agree that it's a pretty strange story," Martinsson said. "Do you reckon we ought to pass this information on to the police in Riga?"

  "No," Wallander said. "I don't think that's necessary. But thanks for telling me."

  "I haven't finished yet," Martinsson said. "Here comes part two of the story. Did you read the papers yesterday?"

  Wallander had stopped buying newspapers ages ago, unless he was involved in a case the press was displaying more than routine interest in. He shook his head, and Martinsson continued.

  "You should have done. There were reports on how the customs in Goteborg fished up a life-raft that later proved to have come from a Russian trawler. They'd found it drifting off Vinga, which seemed odd because there was no wind at all that day. The skipper of the trawler maintained they'd had to put in to dock for some repairs to a damaged propeller. They'd been fishing at Dogger Bank, and he claimed they'd lost the life-raft without noticing. By pure coincidence a sniffer dog happened to pass the life-raft, and it got very interested. They found a few kilos of top grade amphetamine hidden inside the life-raft, and traced it to some laboratories in Poland. That could well give us the explanation we were looking for - the raft that was nicked from our basement probably had something hidden in it that we ought to have found."