Henning Mankell: The Dogs of Riga

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.

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," Martinsson 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."