The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  Russians? Men from the Eastern bloc, tortured? Even Rydberg would have thought that this looked like a difficult and lengthy investigation. It was 7:30 p.m. when he went to his car and drove home. The wind had died down, and it had suddenly become colder.

  CHAPTER 3

  Shortly after 2 a.m. Wallander woke with terrible chest pains. He was convinced that he was about to die. The constant stress and strain of police work was having its effect. He was paying the price. He was motionless in the dark, filled with despair and shame. He had left things too late; he was never going to make anything of his life. His anxiety and pain seemed to grow more and more intense. Afterwards he wasn’t sure how long he’d lain there, unable to control his mounting fear, but slowly he had managed to reassert his self-control.

  He got carefully out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and went down to his car. The pain seemed less intense now; it came and went in waves, moving out into his arms, losing something of its initial force. He got into his car, tried to make himself breathe calmly and then drove through the deserted streets to the hospital’s emergency entrance. He encountered a nurse with friendly eyes, who listened to him, and didn’t seem to regard him as a hysterical, rather overweight hypochondriac. Wallander lay on a stretcher, listening to a drunk ranting in one of the treatment rooms, the pain coming and going, until suddenly he found a young doctor standing beside him. He described his chest pains once again. His stretcher was wheeled into a treatment room and he was wired up to an EKG machine. They took his blood pressure, felt his pulse, and answered various questions: no he didn’t smoke, he hadn’t experienced chest pains before, as far as he knew there was no history of heart disease in his family. The doctor scrutinized the EKG reading.

  “Nothing special here,” he said. “Everything seems to be normal. What do you think might have caused this?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The doctor studied Wallander’s records.

  “You’re a police officer, I see,” he said. “I imagine things can get a bit hectic at work now and then.”

  “It’s like that more or less all the time.”

  “What about your alcohol intake?”

  “I like to think it’s normal.”

  The doctor sat down on the edge of a table and put down the record cards. Wallander could see that he was very tired.

  “I don’t think you’ve had a heart attack,” he said. “It might be your body sounding the alarm, announcing that everything isn’t as it should be. You’re the only one who can know about this.”

  “That’s probably it,” Wallander said. “I ask myself every day what my life is doing to me. And I realize I don’t have anybody I can talk to.”

  “You should,” said the doctor. “Everybody should.”

  He stood up when his pager started peeping like a fledgling in his pocket.

  “I’m going to keep you overnight,” he said. “Try to get some rest.”

  Wallander lay there quite peacefully, listening to the hum of an invisible air-conditioning fan. He could hear voices in the corridor.

  All pain has a cause, he thought. If it isn’t my heart, what is it? The guilt I have at failing to devote enough time and energy to my father? Worry because I suspect the letters my daughter sends me from her college in Stockholm don’t tell the full story? That things are not at all as she describes them, when she says she likes it there, and is working, and feels that at last she’s doing something she wants to be doing? Could it be that although I’m not conscious of it, I’m constantly afraid she’s going to try to take her own life again, as she did when she was 15? Or is the pain due to the jealousy I still feel at Mona leaving me, even though that was a year ago now?

  The light in the room seemed very bright. He felt that his whole life was characterized by a sense of desolation that he simply couldn’t shake off. How could the kind of pain he’d just been feeling be caused by loneliness? He couldn’t come up with any solution that didn’t immediately fill him with doubt.

  “I can’t go on living like this,” he said out loud. “I’ve got to get my life sorted out. Soon. Now.”

  He woke up with a start at 6 a.m. The doctor was standing by his bed, watching him.

  “No more pain?” he asked.

  “Everything feels okay,” Wallander said. “What can it have been?”

  “Tension,” the doctor said. “Stress. You know best yourself.”

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “I suppose I do.”

  “I think you should have a thorough examination,” the doctor said. “If nothing else, we need to be sure there’s nothing physically wrong with you. It will make it easier for you to look inside your own head and see what kind of shadows are lurking there.”

  Wallander drove home, took a shower, and had a cup of coffee. The thermometer read -3°C. The sky had cleared, and the wind had dropped. He sat there for a long time, thinking about the previous night. The pains and his stay in the hospital had taken on an air of unreality. But he knew he couldn’t just ignore what had happened. His life was his own responsibility.

  It was 8:15 a.m. before he felt he could face work.

  As soon as he got to the station, he became embroiled in an argument with Björk, who was insisting that the forensic squad in Stockholm should have been brought in at once to make a thorough investigation at the scene of the crime.

  “There was no scene of the crime,” Wallander said. “If there’s one thing we can be sure about, it’s that the men were not murdered in that life raft.”

  “Now that we don’t have Rydberg to rely on, we need outside help,” Björk said. “We don’t have the expertise. Why didn’t you close off the beach where the life raft was found?”

  “The beach wasn’t where the crime was committed. The raft had been drifting at sea. Are you suggesting that we should have fixed a plastic ribbon around the waves?”

  Wallander was getting angry. True, neither he nor any other of the officers in Ystad had Rydberg’s experience, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of deciding when to call in assistance from Stockholm.

  “Either you let me make the decisions,” he said, “or you run the case yourself.”

  “There’s no question of that,” Björk said, “but I still think it was an error of judgment not to consult Stockholm.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  That was as far as they could go.

  “I’ll come and see you shortly,” said Wallander. “I’ve got some stuff I’d like your opinion on.”

  Björk looked surprised.

  “Have we got something to go on?” he asked. “I thought we were up against a brick wall.”

  “Not quite. I’ll be with you in ten minutes.”

  He went back to his office, called the hospital, and was astonished to get straight through to Mörth.

  “Anything new?” he asked the pathologist.

  “I’m just writing my report,” Mörth answered. “Can’t you wait another couple of hours?”

  “I have to update Björk. Can you at least say how long they’ve been dead?”

  “No. We have to wait for the results of the lab tests. Stomach content, extent of cell tissue decay. I can only guess.”

  “Do it.”

  “I don’t like guessing, you know that. What good will it do you?”

  “You’re experienced. You know what you’re doing. The test results will only confirm what you suspect already, they won’t contradict them. I only want you to whisper in my ear. I won’t pass it on.”

  Wallander waited.

  “A week,” Mörth said finally. “At least a week. But don’t tell anybody I said that.”

  “I’ve forgotten it already. You’re still certain they’re Russian or East European?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find anything you didn’t expect?”

  “I don’t know anything about ammunition, of course, but I’ve never come across this type of bullet before.”

  “Anything else?”


  “Yes. One of the men has a tattoo on his upper arm. It’s a sort of saber. Some kind of Turkish scimitar, or whatever they’re called.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a sword. You can’t expect a pathologist to be an expert on obsolete weaponry.”

  “Does it say anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tattoos usually have some inscription. A woman’s name, or a place.”

  “There’s no inscription.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Okay, thanks for all this anyway.”

  “It wasn’t very much.”

  Wallander hung up, fetched himself a cup of coffee and went to see Björk. The doors of Martinsson’s and Svedberg’s offices were open, but neither of them was there. He sat down and drank his coffee, listening absentmindedly as Björk finished a phone conversation, which seemed to be getting rather heated. He jumped as Björk slammed down the phone.

  “That was damnedest thing I’ve ever heard,” Björk said. “What’s the point of continuing?”

  “A good question,” Wallander said, “but I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

  Björk was shaking with anger. Wallander couldn’t remember ever having seen him like this.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Björk looked at him. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything about it,” he said, “but I really have to. One of those bastards who murdered the old couple in Lenarp, the one we called Lucia, was let out on leave the other day. Needless to say, he never went back. Presumably he’s fled the country. We’ll never catch him again.”

  Wallander couldn’t believe his ears.

  “Leave? He hasn’t even been inside for a year yet, and that was one of the most brutal killings we’ve seen in this country. How the hell could they let him out on leave?”

  “He was going to his mother’s funeral.”

  Wallander’s jaw dropped.

  “But his mother’s been dead for ten years! I remember that from the report the Czech police sent us.”

  “A woman claiming to be his sister turned up at Hall Prison, pleading for him to be let out to attend the funeral. Nobody seems to have checked anything. She had a printed card saying there was going to be a funeral in a church at Ängelholm—obviously a forgery. There still seems to be some souls in this country naïve enough to believe that no one would forge a funeral invitation. They let him go with a warden. That was the day before yesterday. There was no funeral, nor was there a dead mother, no sister. They overpowered the guard, tied him up and dumped him in some woods near Jönköping. They even drove the prison commissioner’s car to Kastrup Airport via Limhamn. It’s still there, but they aren’t.”

  “This just isn’t true,” Wallander said. “Who in hell’s name could give a criminal like that leave?”

  “Like the ads say: Sweden is fantastic,” Björk said. “It makes me sick.”

  “Whose responsibility is it? Whoever gave him leave should be locked up in the cell he’s left empty. How is a thing like that possible?”

  “I’ll look into it,” Björk said. “But that’s the way it is. The bird has flown.”

  Wallander’s mind went back to the unimaginably savage murder of the old couple in Lenarp. He looked up at Björk in resignation.

  “What’s the point?” he wondered. “Why do we bust ourselves to catch criminals if all the prison service does is let them go again?”

  Björk didn’t answer. Wallander stood up and went over to the window.

  “How much longer can we keep going?” he asked.

  “We have to,” said Björk. “Are you going to tell me now what you know about those two men in the rubber boat?”

  Wallander told him what he knew. He felt depressed, tired and disappointed. Björk made a few notes as he was speaking.

  “Russians,” he said when Wallander had finished.

  “Or from an Eastern bloc country. Mörth was certain of that.”

  “I’d better contact the foreign ministry,” said Björk. “It’s their job to get in touch with the Russian police. Or Polish. The Eastern bloc.”

  “They could be Russians living in Sweden,” Wallander said. “Or Germany. Or why not Denmark?”

  “Even so, most Russians are still in the Soviet Union,” Björk said. “I’ll contact the foreign ministry right away. They know what to do in a situation like this.”

  “We could put the bodies back into the life raft and ask the coastguards to have it towed out into international waters,” Wallander answered. “Then we could wash our hands of the case.”

  Björk seemed not to hear.

  “We’ll have to get some help in identifying them,” he said. “Photographs, fingerprints, clothes.”

  “And a tattoo. A scimitar.”

  “A scimitar?”

  “Yes, a scimitar.”

  Björk shook his head and reached for the phone.

  “Just a minute,” Wallander said.

  Björk withdrew his hand.

  “I’m thinking about the man who telephoned,” Wallander said. “According to Martinsson, he had a local accent. We should try to trace him.”

  “Have we any clues?”

  “None. That’s precisely why I suggest we put out an appeal. We can keep it general. We can appeal to anybody who’s seen a red rubber boat drifting around, and ask them to get in touch with the police.”

  Björk nodded. “I’ll have to speak to the press in any case. Reporters started calling ages ago. How they can find out so quickly about what happens on a deserted stretch of beach is beyond me. It took them precisely half an hour yesterday.”

  “You know we have leaks,” Wallander said, reminded once again of the double murder at Lenarp.

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “The police. The Ystad police.”

  “Who does the leaking?”

  “How am I supposed to know that? It ought to be your job to remind all staff to be discreet and observe professional secrecy.”

  Björk slammed his fist down on his desk, as if administering a box on the ears. But he didn’t answer Wallander directly.

  “We’ll make an appeal,” was all he said. “At midday, before the news on the radio. I want you to be at the press conference. Right now I must call Stockholm and get some instructions.”

  Wallander got to his feet. “It would be great if we didn’t have to,” he said.

  “Didn’t have to do what?”

  “Find whoever shot the men in the life raft.”

  “I’ll find out what Stockholm has to say,” Björk said, shaking his head.

  Wallander left the room. Martinsson’s and Svedberg’s offices were still empty. He glanced at his watch: nearly 9:30 a.m. He went down to the basement of the police station where the life raft had been placed on wooden trestles. He used a strong flashlight to examine it thoroughly, looking for the name of a firm or country of manufacture, but he found nothing, which surprised him. He couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation for why that should be. He went around the rubber boat once more, and this time noticed a short piece of rope. It was different from the rope holding the wooden floor in place. It had been cut off with a knife. He tried to imagine what conclusions Rydberg would have drawn, but his mind was a complete blank.

  He was back in his office by 10 a.m. Neither Martinsson nor Svedberg answered when he phoned their offices. He pulled out a notebook and started to write out a summary of the little they knew about the two dead men. People from the Eastern bloc, shot through the heart at close range, then dressed in their jackets and dumped in a life raft that still hadn’t been identified. Plus, the men had been tortured. He pushed the notebook away: a thought had suddenly struck him. Men who’ve been tortured and murdered, he thought: you hide the bodies away, dig graves for them, or send them to the bottom of the sea with iron weights attached to their legs. If you load them into a life raft, the likelihood is that they w
ill be found.

  Can that have been the intention? That they would be found? Doesn’t the life raft suggest the murder took place onboard a ship? He crumpled up the top page of the notebook and threw it into the wastebasket. I don’t know enough, he thought. Rydberg would have told me not to be impatient.

  The phone rang. It was 10:45 a.m. The moment he heard his father’s voice, he remembered that he was supposed to go and see him. He should have been in Löderup by 10 a.m. so they could drive to a shop in Malmö to buy canvases and paints.

  “Why haven’t you come?” his father asked angrily.

  Wallander decided to be perfectly straight with him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”

  There was a long pause.

  “At least that’s an honest answer,” his father said finally.

  “I can come tomorrow,” Wallander said.

  “Make it tomorrow, then,” his father said, and hung up.

  Wallander wrote a note on a piece of paper and fastened it to the telephone. He’d better not forget tomorrow.

  He rang Svedberg: still no reply. Martinsson answered, though—he’d just come back to his office. Wallander went out into the corridor to meet him.

  “Do you know what I’ve discovered today?” Martinsson asked. “That it’s more or less impossible to describe what a life raft looks like. All different models made by different manufacturers look the same. Only experts can tell them apart. So I went to Malmö, and I’ve been visiting the various importers.”

  They had gone to the canteen to fetch some coffee. Martinsson got some biscuits, and they went to Wallander’s office.

  “So, now you know all about life rafts,” Wallander said.

  “Quite a bit, but I don’t know where this one comes from.”

  “It’s odd that there isn’t any logo or a notice of country of manufacture,” Wallander said. “Life-saving equipment is generally covered in all kinds of notes and instructions.”

  “I agree. So did the importers in Malmö. But there is the possibility of a solution: the coastguard. Captain Österdahl, a retired officer who has devoted his whole life to working on the Customs boats—15 years in Arkösund, ten years in the Gryt archipelago. After that he moved to Simrishamn, and was based there until he retired. Over the years he drew up his own register of different types of vessels, including rubber boats and life rafts.”