The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  Inese came in with two cups of tea. She briefly stroked Baiba Liepa’s head, and the major’s widow stopped crying almost immediately. Her face was ashen.

  Wallander told her all that had happened, and that he would be returning to Sweden in the morning. He told her the whole story he had managed to piece together, and was surprised how convincing it sounded. He eventually got around to mentioning the secret which must exist somewhere or other, and she nodded to show that she understood.

  “Yes,” she said. “He must have hidden something away. He must have made notes. A true testimony can never consist of unwritten thoughts.”

  “But you don’t know where it is?”

  “He never said anything about it.”

  “Is there anybody else who might know?”

  “Nobody. I was the only one he confided in.”

  “He has his father in Ventspils, doesn’t he?”

  She looked at him in surprise.

  “I found out about him,” he said. “I thought he might be a possibility.”

  “He was very fond of his father,” she said, “but he would never have trusted him with documents.”

  “Then where can he have hidden them?”

  “Not in our apartment. That would have been too dangerous. The police would have torn the whole building apart if they thought there might be anything hidden there.”

  “Think,” Wallander said. “Put yourself back in time, try to remember. Where could he possibly have hidden them?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “He must have foreseen that something like this could happen. He must have assumed you would understand, would have known there was proof waiting for you to find. It must be somewhere that only you would think of.”

  She suddenly grabbed hold of his hand. “You must help me,” she said. “You can’t leave.”

  “It’s impossible for me to stay,” he said. “The colonels would never understand why I hadn’t gone back to Sweden, and how would I be able to stay here without their knowing?”

  “You can come back,” she said, still clinging on to his hand. “You’ve got a girlfriend here. You can come as a tourist.”

  But you’re the one I’m in love with, he thought. Not Inese.

  “You’ve got a girlfriend here,” she repeated.

  He nodded. He did have a girlfriend in Riga, but it wasn’t Inese.

  He said nothing, and she didn’t try to make him. She seemed convinced he would return. Inese came back into the room, and by now Baiba Liepa had gotten over the shock of hearing that Upitis had made a confession.

  “In our country you can die if you say something,” she said, “and you can die if you don’t say anything. Or say the wrong things. Or talk to the wrong people. But Upitis is strong. He knows we won’t abandon him. He knows we know his confession isn’t true. That’s why we will win in the end.”

  “Win?”

  “All we ask for is the truth,” she said. “All we ask for is decency, something fundamental. The freedom to live in the freedom we choose to live in.”

  “That’s too big a thing for me,” Wallander said. “I want to know who murdered Major Liepa. I want to know why two dead men drifted ashore on the Swedish coast.”

  “Come back here and I’ll teach you about my country,” Baiba Liepa said. “Not just me, but Inese as well.”

  “I don’t know,” Wallander said.

  Baiba Liepa looked at him. “You can’t be a man who lets people down,” she said. “If you were, Karlis would have been wrong. And he was never wrong.”

  “It’s not possible,” Wallander repeated. “If I were to come back here, the colonels would know about it immediately. I’d have to have a false identity, a false passport.”

  “That can be arranged,” Baiba Liepa said eagerly. “Provided I know you’ll come back.”

  “I’m a police officer,” Wallander said. “I can’t risk my very existence by traveling around the world on a forged passport.”

  He regretted saying it the moment the words had crossed his lips. He looked Baiba Liepa in the eye and saw the dead major’s face.

  “All right,” he said slowly. “I’ll come back.”

  The night wore on and it turned midnight. Wallander was trying to help Baiba Liepa locate some clue as to where the major could have hidden his proof. Her concentration was unshakeable, but nowhere could they find any traces. In the end their conversation simply petered out.

  Wallander thought of the dogs that were looking out for him somewhere out there in the darkness—the colonels’ dogs that never ceased to look for him. With a growing feeling of unreality, he saw that he was being drawn into a plot that would bring him back to Riga to conduct a criminal investigation in secret. He would be a non-police officer in a country with which he was completely unfamiliar, and this non-police officer would be trying to establish the truth about a crime that many people already regarded as solved, finished and done with. He knew the whole venture was mad, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Baiba Liepa’s face, and her voice had been so full of conviction he had been unable to withstand it.

  It was nearly 2 a.m. when Inese announced they would have to call a halt. She left him alone with Baiba Liepa, and they bade farewell to each other in silence.

  Baiba leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “We have friends in Sweden,” she said. “They’ll be in touch with you. They’ll help to organize your return.”

  Inese drove him back to the hotel. As they approached the bridge, she nodded at the rearview mirror.

  “Now they’re tailing us. We must look as though we’re very much in love and can’t bear to part when we say goodbye outside the hotel.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Wallander said. “Maybe I should try and persuade you to come up to my room.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m a good girl,” she said, “but when you come back maybe we can let things go that far.”

  She left, and he stood for a while in the bitter cold, trying to look as if he were devastated by her going.

  The next day he flew home via Helsinki.

  The colonels escorted him through the airport and bade him a hearty farewell. One of these men murdered the major, Wallander said to himself. Or was it both of you? But how could a police officer from Ystad be expected to discover what really happened?

  It was late evening when he got back home and unlocked the door of his apartment in Mariagatan. Already the whole episode had begun to fade and take on the nature of a dream, and it seemed to him that he would never see Baiba Liepa again. She would have to mourn the death of her husband without ever discovering what happened.

  He took a sip of the whisky he had bought during the flight. Before going to bed he spent a considerable time listening to Maria Callas, feeling tired and uneasy. He wondered how it was all going to end.

  CHAPTER 14

  Six days after he returned he received a letter.

  He found it on the floor in the hall when he returned home after a long and difficult day at the station. Sleet had been falling all afternoon, and he spent some time on the landing shaking his clothes and stamping his feet before opening the door.

  He thought later that it was as if he’d been steeling himself for the moment when they contacted him. Deep down he’d known all along that they would, but he still didn’t feel ready for it.

  The envelope on his doormat was an ordinary brown one—at first he thought it was some kind of advertising material as there was a company name printed on the front. He put it on the hall table and forgot all about it. It wasn’t until he’d finished his dinner, a fish gratin that had been in the freezer too long, that he remembered the letter and went to fetch it. It was from “Lippman’s Flowers,” and it struck him that this was an odd time of year for a garden center to be sending a catalogue. He very nearly put it straight into the trash, but he could never resist taking a look at even the most uninteresting junk mail before throwing it away. It was a bad habi
t picked up from his job: there might be something hidden among the colorful brochures. It sometimes seemed to him that he lived the life of a man compelled to turn over every stone he found. He always needed to know what was underneath it.

  He opened the envelope and saw that it contained a handwritten letter: he realized they had contacted him. He left the letter on the kitchen table while he made a cup of coffee. He needed to give himself a bit of time before reading it. When he’d left the plane at Arlanda a week ago, he had felt vaguely uneasy, but relieved to no longer be in a country where he was being watched all the time, and in a flash of unaccustomed spontaneity he’d tried to start a conversation with the woman at immigration control when he handed his passport in through the window. “It’s good to be home,” he’d said, but she had glanced dismissively at him and shoved the passport back without even opening it.

  This is Sweden, he’d thought. Everything is bright and cheerful on the surface, our airports are built so that no dust or shadows could ever intrude. Everything is visible, nothing is any different from what it seems to be. Our national aspiration, our religion, is that security written into the Swedish constitution, which informs the whole world that starving to death is a crime. But we don’t talk to strangers unless we have to, because anything unfamiliar can cause us harm, dirty our floors and dim our neon lights. We never built an empire and so we’ve never had to watch one collapse, but we persuaded ourselves that we’d created the best of all possible worlds, and that even if small, we were the privileged keepers of paradise. Now that the party’s over we take our revenge by having the least friendly immigration control officers in the world.

  His feeling of relief was replaced almost immediately by depression. In Kurt Wallander’s world, this worn-out or at least partially demolished paradise, there was no place for Baiba Liepa. He couldn’t imagine her here, in all this light, under all these neon strips that never failed. Nevertheless, he was already beginning to pine for her, and when he’d lugged his suitcase down the long, prison-like corridor to the domestic terminal where he would wait for his connection to Malmö, he was already starting to dream of his return to Riga, to the city where the invisible dogs had been spying on him. The Malmö flight was delayed, and he had been issued a coupon that entitled him to a sandwich. He had sat for ages in the café, watching airplanes taking off and landing in the light snow. All around him men in smart suits were chattering away into mobile phones, and to his astonishment he actually heard an overweight washing-machine salesman jabbering into his monstrous plaything, telling the story of Hansel and Gretel to a child. He found a pay phone and dialed his daughter’s number. To his amazement he got through to her, and felt immediate pleasure on hearing her voice. He toyed briefly with the idea of staying on for a few days in Stockholm, but realized that she was very busy and he didn’t raise the subject. Instead, he thought of Baiba, about her fear and her defiance, and he wondered if she really dared to believe that the Swedish police officer wouldn’t let her down. What could he possibly do, though? If he were to go back the dogs would pick up his scent, and he would never be able to shake them off.

  It was late in the evening by the time he landed at Sturup. There was nobody there to meet him, so he took a taxi into Ystad and from the dark backseat chatted about the weather to the driver, who was going far too fast. When there was nothing more to say about the fog and the snowflakes dancing in the headlights, he suddenly imagined he could smell Baiba Liepa’s perfume in the car, and felt anguish at the thought of not seeing her again.

  The next day he drove out to see his father at Löderup. The home help had cut his hair for him, and it seemed to Wallander that he was looking healthier than he had for years. He’d brought him a bottle of cognac, and his father nodded approvingly when he saw the label.

  To his surprise, he’d told his father about Baiba Liepa. They’d been sitting in the old shed his father used as a studio. There was an unfinished canvas on the easel, the unchanging landscape. Wallander could see that it was going to be one with a grouse in the bottom left-hand corner. When he’d arrived with his bottle of cognac, his father had been coloring the grouse’s beak, but he’d put down his brush and wiped his hands on a rag smelling of turpentine. Wallander told him about his trip to Riga and then, without really understanding why, he stopped describing the city and told him about the meeting with Baiba Liepa. He didn’t mention that she was the widow of a police officer who had been murdered, he only told him her name, said he’d met her and that he missed her.

  “Does she have any children?” his father asked.

  Wallander shook his head.

  “Can she have children?”

  “I suppose so. How on earth should I know?”

  “You must know how old she is, surely?”

  “Younger than I am. About 33, perhaps.”

  “Then she can have children.”

  “Why do you want to know if she can have children?”

  “Because I think that’s what you need.”

  “I’ve got Linda.”

  “One’s not enough. A person has to have at least two children in order to understand what it’s all about. Bring her over to Sweden. Marry her!”

  “It’s not as easy as that.”

  “Do you have to make everything so damned complicated just because you’re a police officer?”

  Here we go, Wallander thought. He’s off again. The moment you start having a conversation with him he finds some excuse for getting at me because I joined the police force.

  “Can you keep a secret?” he asked the old man.

  His father eyed him suspiciously. “How could I avoid being able to?” he asked. “Who is there I could tell it to?”

  “I’m thinking of quitting being a police officer,” Wallander said. “I might apply for a different job. As a security officer at the rubber factory in Trelleborg. I only said I might.”

  His father stared at him for some time before replying.

  “It’s never too late to see sense,” he said eventually. “The only thing you’ll regret is that it took you so long to make up your mind.”

  “I only said I might. I didn’t say it was definite.”

  But his father wasn’t listening. He’d gone back to the easel and was finishing the grouse’s beak. Wallander sat on an old sleigh and watched him for a while in silence. Then he went home, thinking how he had nobody to talk to. He was 43 years old and missed having somebody to confide in. When Rydberg died, he’d become lonelier than he could ever have imagined. The only person he had was Linda. He couldn’t talk to Mona, his ex-wife. She’d become a stranger to him, and he knew next to nothing about her life in Malmö.

  As he drove past the turning to Kåseberga, he thought of going to Kristianstad to pay a visit to Göran Boman in the police there. Maybe he could talk to him about everything that had happened. But he didn’t. He returned to duty after writing a report for Björk. Martinsson and his other colleagues asked him a few questions over coffee in the canteen, but it was soon clear they weren’t really interested in anything he had to say. He mailed his application to the factory in Trelleborg and rearranged the furniture in his office in an attempt to revive some enthusiasm for work. Björk seemed to have noticed his heart wasn’t really in it, and made a well-meaning but vain effort to cheer him up by asking him to stand in for him and give a lecture to the Rotary Club. He agreed to do it, and gave an unsuccessful talk on technology in police work over lunch at the Continental Hotel. He forgot every word he’d said the moment he sat down.

  One morning he woke up and was convinced he was ill. He went to the police doctor and was given a thorough examination. The doctor could find nothing wrong with him, but advised him to continue to keep an eye on his weight. He had returned from Riga on Wednesday, and on Saturday evening he drove to a restaurant in Åhus where there was a dance band. After a couple of dances a physiotherapist from Kristianstad called Ellen invited him to join her at her table, but he couldn’t get Baiba Liepa’s
face out of his mind, she was following him around like a shadow, and he made his excuses and left early. He took the coast road from Åhus and stopped at the deserted field where the flea markets are held every summer—the previous year he had set off there like a madman, gun in hand, in pursuit of a murderer. The field was lightly covered in snow, the full moon was shining over the sea, and he could see Baiba Liepa standing before him. He drove back to his apartment in Ystad and drank himself into a stupor. He turned his stereo up so loud that the neighbors started thumping on the walls.

  He woke on the Sunday morning with palpitations, and the day developed into a long drawn-out wait for something unidentifiable, something unreachable.

  The letter arrived on Monday. He sat at his kitchen table, reading the neat handwriting. It was signed by somebody calling himself Joseph Lippman.

  You are a friend of our country, wrote Joseph Lippman. We have been informed from Riga of your marvelous work there. You will shortly be hearing from us with more details of your return journey. Joseph Lippman.

  Wallander wondered what his “marvelous work” consisted of. And who were the “us” who were going to get in touch again?

  He was annoyed by the brevity of the message, and the tone that sounded almost like an order. Did he have no say in the matter? He had certainly not agreed to enter any secret service run by invisible people. His anguish and doubt were stronger than his resolve and willpower. He wanted to see Baiba Liepa again, that was true; but he didn’t trust his motives, and knew he was behaving like a lovelorn teenager.

  Nevertheless, when he woke up on Tuesday morning he suspected that deep down, he had made up his mind. He drove to the station, took part in a dismal union meeting and then went in to see Björk.

  “I was wondering if I might take some of the leave I’m due for,” he said.

  Björk stared at him with a mixture of envy and deep sympathy.

  “I wish I could do the same,” he said gloomily. “I’ve just been reading a long memo from the national police board. I’ve imagined all my colleagues up and down the country doing exactly the same thing, every one of them hunched over his desk. I read it through, then sat there thinking that I haven’t a clue what it’s all about. We are expected to pass comment on various earlier documents about some big reorganization plan, but I’ve no idea which of all those documents this memo is referring to.”