The Troubled Man (2011)

by Henning Mankell

  ‘As spies?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time in Sweden that a man and his wife had been caught spying. Even if only one of them was directly involved.’

  ‘I assume you’re referring to Stig Bergling and his wife?’

  ‘Are there any others?’

  It occurred to Wallander that Ytterberg occasionally assumed an arrogant tone of voice that Wallander would never have tolerated under normal circumstances. If somebody in the police station in Ystad had asked him ironic questions like that he would have been furious. But he let it pass - Ytterberg was probably not always aware of how he sounded.

  ‘Do you know anything about what was on the microfilms? Defence secrets, armaments, foreign policy?’

  ‘I have no idea. But I get the impression that our Sapo colleagues are worried. They’re insisting that we hand over every single document linked to this investigation, not that there are very many. I’ve been summoned to a meeting later today with a Commander Holm, who is evidently a bigwig in the military intelligence service.’

  ‘I’d be interested to hear what questions he asks you.’

  ‘That’s always a good way of finding out what people know already. In other words, you want to know what questions he doesn’t ask?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I promise to let you know.’

  The next morning after breakfast he checked all the burners carefully before going out for a walk with Jussi, who ran off like a shot into the lifting mist.

  He felt clearer in the head than he had in a very long time. Nothing seemed excessively difficult, and his zest for life was strong. He suddenly started running, challenging the lethargy that had filled him for the last few months. He kept running until he was thoroughly out of breath. The sun was warming things up now. He took off his sweaty shirt, made a face when he saw his protruding belly, and decided, as he had so often before, to start dieting.

  On the way back to the house his mobile phone started ringing. Somebody was speaking in a foreign language, a woman, but her voice was very faint, almost completely drowned out by a veritable storm of crackling and noise. After three or four seconds the line went dead. Wallander thought it could have been Baiba. He thought he recognised her voice, despite the background noise. But whoever it was didn’t call back, so he went home and sat out in the garden with a cup of coffee.

  It was going to be a lovely summer’s day. He decided to go for a picnic, all on his own. He had always thought one of the best things in life was settling down among the sand dunes and having a nap in the sunshine after eating the meal he’d brought with him from home. He started packing a basket, which was a souvenir from his childhood home. His mother used to use it for keeping balls of wool, knitting needles and half-finished sweaters. Now he filled it with sandwiches, a Thermos, two apples and a few copies of the Swedish Policeman that he hadn’t got round to reading. It was eleven o’clock when he once again checked the burners before locking the door. He drove out to Sandhammaren and found a place among the dunes and stunted trees. When he had finished eating and reading the magazines, he wrapped himself in a blanket and was soon fast asleep.

  He woke up feeling cold. The sun had gone behind a cloud, the air was chilly and he had cast off the blanket. He rolled himself up inside it again, and folded his jacket to serve as a pillow. The sun soon re-emerged, and he remembered a dream he had had many years ago, a recurring dream that always vanished just as quickly as it had appeared. He was involved in some erotic game with a faceless black woman. He had never had a relationship with a dark-skinned woman, apart from an incident during a visit to the West Indies when he had drunk himself silly one evening and taken a prostitute back to his hotel room. Nor had he particularly lusted after any such relationship. But then that black woman had turned up in his dreams, only to vanish again after a few months.

  A storm was brewing on the horizon. He packed everything into the basket and went back to the car. When he came to Kaseberga he drove down to the harbour and bought some smoked fish. He had just got back home when his mobile phone started ringing again. It was the same woman as before, but this time the reception was much better and he could hear right away that it wasn’t Baiba. The woman was speaking broken English.

  ‘Kurt Wallander?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘My name is Lilja. You know who I am?’

  ‘No.’

  The woman suddenly burst out crying. She screamed into his ear. He was scared stiff.

  ‘Baiba,’ she yelled. ‘Baiba.’

  ‘What about her? I know her.’

  ‘She dead.’

  Wallander was standing with the bag of fish from Kaseberga in his hand. He dropped it.

  ‘She’s dead? She was here only a couple of days ago!’

  ‘I know. She was my friend. But now she dead.’

  Wallander could feel his heart pounding. He sat down on the stool just inside the front door. He eventually managed to piece together the confused and anguished message that Lilja was trying to convey. Baiba had been only a few miles outside Riga when she drove off the road at high speed and crashed into a stone wall, wrecking the car and killing herself. She had died on the spot; that was something Lilja repeated over and over again, as if it might prevent Wallander from sinking into a bottomless pit of sorrow. But it was in vain, of course. The despair welling up inside him was something he had never experienced before.

  They were suddenly cut off, without warning, before Wallander could get Lilja’s phone number. He waited for her to call him again, still sitting on the stool in the hall. Only when it became clear that she was unable to get through did he move into the kitchen. He left the bag with the smoked fish lying on the floor. He had no idea what to do next. He lit a candle and placed it on the table. She must have been driving non-stop, he thought. From the ferry when it docked in Poland, through Poland, through Lithuania, and then almost all the way to Riga. Had she fallen asleep at the wheel? Or had she driven into the wall on purpose, intending to kill herself? Wallander knew that fatal car accidents involving nobody but the driver were often suicides. A former secretary who used to work in the Ystad police station, a divorcee with a drinking problem, had chosen that way out only a few years ago. But he didn’t think Baiba would do anything like that. Somebody who decides to travel around to say goodbye to her friends and lovers would hardly be likely to set up a car crash to bring her life to a close. She must have been tired and lost control; that was the only explanation he could think of.

  He picked up his mobile phone to call Linda - he didn’t feel capable of coping with what had happened on his own. There were times when he needed to have other people on hand. He dialled the number, but then hung up when her phone started ringing. It was too soon; he didn’t have anything to say to her. He threw his phone onto the sofa and went out to Jussi, let him out of his kennel, sat down on the ground and started stroking him. The phone rang. He rushed indoors. It was Lilja. She was calmer now. He asked her questions and got a clearer picture of what had happened. There was also something else he wanted to ask about.

  ‘Why are you calling me? How did you know that I exist?’

  ‘Baiba asked me to.’

  ‘Asked you to do what?’

  ‘To call you when she was dead. But I didn’t think it would be quickly like this. Baiba thought she would live until Christmas.’

  ‘She told me she hoped to live until the autumn.’

  ‘She said different things to different people. I think she wanted us to have the same uncertainty that she had.’

  Lilja explained who she was, an old friend and colleague who had known Baiba since they were teenagers.

  ‘I knew about you,’ she said. ‘One day Baiba rings and she says: “Now he is here in Riga, my Swedish friend. I take him to the cafe in Hotel Latvia this afternoon. Go there and you will see him.” I went there, and I saw you.’

  ‘Perhaps Baiba mentioned your name. I think so. But we never met, is that right?
’

  ‘Never. But I saw you. Baiba always thought much of you. She loved you.’

  She burst out crying again. Wallander waited. Thunder was rumbling in the distance. He could hear her coughing, and blowing her nose.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked when she picked up the phone again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who are her closest relations?’

  ‘Her mother, and brothers and sisters.’

  ‘If her mother is still alive she must be very old. I don’t remember Baiba ever talking about her.’

  ‘She is ninety-five years. But she is clear in the head. She knows her daughter is dead. They had hard relations since Baiba was child.’

  ‘I want to know when the funeral will take place,’ Wallander said.

  ‘I promise to call you.’

  ‘What did she say about me?’ Wallander asked in the end.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘But she must have said something?’

  ‘Yes. But not much. We were friends, but Baiba never allowed anybody very close.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  When the call was over, he lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling where a patch of damp had appeared a couple of months ago. He lay there for quite a while before returning to the kitchen table.

  Shortly after eight he called Linda and told her what had happened. He found it very difficult, and could feel a sense of mounting desperation.

  29

  On 14 July, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Baiba Liepa’s funeral took place at a chapel in central Riga. Wallander had arrived the previous day on a flight from Copenhagen. When he disembarked he recognised the airport immediately, even though the terminal had been rebuilt. The Soviet military planes that had been visible all over the place at the beginning of the 1990s were no longer there, and from the windows of the taxi taking him into Riga he noted that there had been a lot of changes. The hoardings were different; the facades had been newly painted; the pavements had been repaired. But pigs were still rooting around in dunghills next to tumbledown farmhouses, and in the centre of town the old buildings were still standing. The main difference was the large number of people in the streets, their clothes, and the cars lining up at red lights and at turn-offs to centrally located car parks.

  Warm rain was falling over Riga the day Wallander returned. Lilja, whose surname was Blooms, had called and given him the details of Baiba’s funeral. His only question had been whether his presence might somehow be regarded as inappropriate.

  ‘Why should it be?’

  ‘Perhaps there are circumstances within the family that I don’t know about?’

  ‘Everybody knows who you are,’ said Lilja Blooms. ‘Baiba told about you. You were never a secret.’

  ‘The question is what she said.’

  ‘Why are you so worried? I thought you and Baiba were in love? I thought you would be married. We all thought that.’

  ‘She didn’t want to.’

  He could tell that what he’d said surprised her.

  ‘We thought it was you who backed out. She said nothing. It was long before we understood it was over. But she never wanted to talk about it.’

  It was Linda who had persuaded him to go to the funeral. When he called her she had jumped into her car and come over. She was so upset that she had tears in her eyes when she walked through his front door. That helped him to mourn Baiba openly. He sat there for a long time, reminiscing to his daughter about the time he and Baiba had spent together.

  ‘Baiba’s husband, Karlis Liepa, had been murdered,’ he said. ‘It was a political murder. Tensions between the Russians and the Latvians were running high in those days. That was why I went to Riga, to assist in the murder investigation. Needless to say, I had no idea about the political chasms that opened up the country. Looking back, that could well be the moment when I began to understand what the world looked like during the Cold War. It was seventeen years ago.’

  ‘I remember you going,’ said Linda. ‘I was in my last year of school at the time, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself. Although deep down I think I realised that I wanted to become a police officer.’

  ‘I seem to recall that you talked about all kinds of possibilities, but never that one.’

  ‘That should have made you suspicious. I can’t believe you had no idea what I was thinking!’

  ‘Nor did I have any idea about Baiba when Karlis Liepa came to the police station in Ystad.’

  Wallander remembered the details very clearly. Apart from his chain-smoking, which aroused vehement protests from all the non-smokers, Karlis Liepa had been a calm, reserved man, and Wallander had got along well with him. One evening, during a heavy snowstorm, he had taken Liepa back to his apartment in Mariagatan. He had produced a bottle of whisky, and to his delight had discovered that Liepa was almost as interested in opera as he was himself. They had listened to a recording of Turandot with Maria Callas as the snow whirled about in the strong winds blowing through the deserted streets of Ystad.

  But where was that record now? It hadn’t been among those he had found in the attic the previous day. The question was solved when Linda told him she had it at home.

  ‘You gave it to me in the days when I was dreaming of becoming an actress,’ she said. ‘I thought of putting on a one-woman show depicting the tragic fate of Maria Callas. Can you imagine? If there’s anything I’m totally different from, it’s a Greek opera singer.’

  ‘With bad nerves,’ Wallander added.

  ‘What was Baiba? A teacher?’

  ‘When I met her she was translating technical literature from English. I think she did a bit of practically everything.’

  ‘You must go to her funeral. For your own sake.’

  It wasn’t all that straightforward, but she convinced him in the end. She also made sure that he bought a new dark suit, accompanied him to a tailor’s in Malmo, and when he expressed his astonishment at the price she explained that it was a high-quality suit that would last him for the rest of his life.

  ‘You’ll be attending fewer weddings,’ Linda said. ‘But at your age, the number of funerals increases.’

  He muttered something inaudible and paid. Linda didn’t press him to repeat whatever it was he had said.

  He clambered out of the taxi and carried his little suitcase into the reception area at the Hotel Latvia. He noted right away that the cafe where Lilja Blooms had seen him and Baiba together was no longer there. He checked in and was given room 1516. When he got out of the lift and stood in front of the door, he had the feeling that this was the very room he’d stayed in the first time he went to Riga. He was quite sure that the figures 5 and 6 had been part of the room number then as well. He unlocked the door and went in. It didn’t look at all like what he remembered. But the view from the window was the same, a beautiful church whose name he had forgotten. He unpacked his bag and hung up his new suit. The thought that it was in this hotel, and possibly even in this very room, that he first met Baiba filled him with almost unbearable pain.

  He went to the bathroom and rinsed his face. It was only twelve thirty. He had no plans, but thought he might take a walk. He wanted to mourn Baiba by remembering her as she was when he met her for the first time.

  A thought suddenly struck him, a thought he had never dared to confront before. Had his love for Baiba been stronger than the love he had once felt for Mona? Despite the fact that Mona was Linda’s mother? He didn’t know, and would never be sure.

  He went out and strolled through the town, had a meal in a restaurant even though he wasn’t especially hungry. That evening he sat in one of the hotel bars. A girl in her twenties came up and asked him if he wanted company. He didn’t even answer, merely shook his head. Shortly before the hotel restaurant closed, he had another meal, a spaghetti dish that he hardly touched. He drank red wine, and felt tipsy when he stood up to leave the table.

  It had been raining while he ate, but it was clear
now. He retrieved his jacket and went out into the damp summer evening. He found his way to the Freedom Monument, where he and Baiba had once had their photograph taken. A few youths on skateboards were practising their skills on the flagstones in front. He continued his walk, and didn’t arrive back at the hotel until very late. He fell asleep on top of the bed without taking off anything but his shoes.

  The next morning he put on his funeral suit and went down to the dining room for breakfast, despite the fact that he wasn’t hungry.

  He had bought two half-bottles of vodka at Kastrup Airport. He had one of them in his inside pocket. As the lift conveyed him down to the dining room, he unscrewed the top and took a swig.

  When Lilja Blooms came in through the glass doors, Wallander was already in the reception area, waiting for her. She went over to him right away. Baiba must have shown her pictures of him, he thought.

  Lilja was short and plump, and her hair was cropped. She didn’t look anything like what he had imagined. He thought she would look more like Baiba. When they shook hands, Wallander felt embarrassed, without knowing why.

  ‘The chapel isn’t far from here,’ she said. ‘It’s only a ten-minute walk. I have time for a cigarette. You can wait here.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Wallander.

  They stood in the sun outside the hotel, Lilja wearing sunglasses and holding a cigarette in her hand.

  ‘She was drunk,’ she said.

  It was a moment before Wallander realised what she was referring to.

  ‘Baiba?’

  ‘She was drunk when she died. The autopsy made that clear. She had a lot of alcohol in her blood when she crashed her car.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘So do I. All her friends are astonished. But then, what do we know about the thoughts of a person who is going to die?’

  ‘Are you saying that she committed suicide? That she crashed the car on purpose? Drove into that stone wall?’