The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  It was 2:45 a.m. when he reached home. He sat at his kitchen table and noted down the details of the conversation he had had in the fishing boat. The Baltic states, he thought. Can the life raft really have drifted all that way? He went to the living room and found his tattered school atlas in a cupboard among piles of old magazines and opera programs. Southern Sweden and the Baltic Sea. The Baltic states seemed quite close and yet far away at the same time. I know nothing about the sea, he thought, about currents and winds. Perhaps the man was right? And why would he have told me something he knew was untrue? Once again, he thought of the man’s fear, and the other crew member, the unknown man, of whom he was so afraid.

  It was 4 a.m. by the time he went back to bed. He lay awake for a long time before he managed to fall asleep.

  He awoke with a start. The clock on his bedside table said 7:46 a.m. He cursed, jumped out of bed and dressed. He stuffed his toothbrush and toothpaste in his jacket pocket and parked outside the station just before 8 a.m. In reception, Ebba beckoned to him.

  “Björk wants to see you,” she said. “You’re a sight! Did you oversleep?”

  “And how,” Wallander said, darting into the bathroom to brush his teeth. At the same time he tried to gather his thoughts in preparation for the meeting. How on earth was he going to deal with his nocturnal excursion to a fishing boat in Brantevik harbor?

  When he got to Björk’s office, there was nobody there. He made his way to the largest of the station’s conference rooms and knocked on the door, feeling like a schoolboy turning up late for classes.

  There were six people sitting around the oval table, and they all stared at him.

  “I’m a few minutes late, I’m afraid,” he said, sitting down on the nearest empty chair. Björk was looking at him sternly, but Martinsson and Svedberg grinned and looked as if they wondered where he’d been. He thought Svedberg might even be sneering at him. Birgitta Törn was on Björk’s left, inscrutable as ever. Next to her were two other people who Wallander didn’t know. He stood up and went to greet them. Both men were in their 50s, surprisingly alike, well-built and with friendly faces. The first one introduced himself as Sture Rönnlund, the other was Bertil Lovén.

  “I’m from serious crime,” Lovén said. “Sture’s from narcotics.”

  “Kurt is our most experienced officer,” Björk said. “Please help yourselves to coffee.”

  When everybody had fetched a cup, Björk started the meeting.

  “Needless to say, we’re grateful for all the help we can get,” he began. “None of you can have failed to noticed the stir caused in the media by the discovery of these bodies. That is why we need to conduct this investigation with extra vigor and commitment. Birgitta Törn has joined us primarily as an observer and to be of assistance when it comes to making contacts with countries where Interpol has no influence, but that doesn’t prevent us from taking advantage of her expertise.”

  Then it was Wallander’s turn. Everybody had copies of the case documents, so he didn’t bother to go into detail, but simply summarized what had happened. He spent some time on the results of the forensic examination. When he’d finished, Lovén asked for clarification on a few points. That was all. Björk looked around the room.

  “Well,” he said, “what next?”

  Wallander could feel himself getting annoyed at the way Björk was deferring to the woman from the foreign ministry and the two Stockholm detectives. He couldn’t resist firing a shot across their bows, and indicated to Björk that he wanted to speak.

  “Too much of this is unclear,” he said, “and I don’t just mean the case itself. I don’t understand why the foreign ministry has considered it necessary to send Birgitta Törn to Ystad. I can’t believe the ministry simply wants to help us in establishing contacts with the Russian police. It seems to me that the foreign ministry has decided to keep an eye on our investigation, and if so, I’d like to know just what is going to be watched. And most of all, of course, why the ministry has reached such a decision. For obvious reasons, I can’t help feeling that Stockholm knows something we don’t. Or perhaps it isn’t the foreign ministry that has reached this conclusion—maybe it’s somebody else?”

  There was a deathly silence when Wallander had finished. Björk was staring at him in horror.

  Finally Birgitta Törn spoke.

  “There’s no reason to doubt the explanation we’ve given for our coming to Ystad,” she said. “The unstable situation in Eastern Europe requires us to keep a very close eye on developments there.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that the men are from an Eastern bloc country,” Wallander said, interrupting her. “Or do you know something we don’t? In that case, I’d like to know.”

  “I think perhaps we should calm down a bit,” Björk said.

  “I want an answer to my questions,” Wallander said. “I’m not going to be fobbed off with nonsense about the unstable political situation.”

  The inscrutable mask was suddenly gone from Birgitta Törn’s face. She glared at Wallander, her expression indicating an increasing contempt and a wish to keep him at bay. Hmm, I’m awkward, Wallander thought, one of those ever-so-troublesome peasants.

  “The situation is as I’ve described it,” Törn said. “If you had any sense, you would realize there was no need to go on like this.”

  Wallander shook his head and turned to Lovén and Rönnlund.

  “What about your instructions?” he asked. “Stockholm doesn’t usually send out people unless there’s been a formal request for assistance, and we haven’t made such a request, so far as I know. Or have we?”

  Björk shook his head.

  “Okay, so Stockholm has decided this on its own initiative. I’d like to know why, if we’re going to be working together. I’m assuming the ability of our force to conduct its business efficiently hasn’t been impugned before we’ve even started.”

  Lovén was shuffling uneasily, but it was Rönnlund who answered. Wallander detected a note of sympathy in his voice.

  “The commissioner thought you might need a bit of help,” he said. “Our job is to place ourselves at your disposal. That’s all. You’re in charge of the investigation, and if we can be of assistance, so much the better. Neither Bertil nor I have any doubts about your ability to conduct this case on your own, and for myself, I think you’ve acted speedily and decisively over the last few days.”

  Wallander nodded in appreciation. Martinsson was grinning, and Svedberg was picking thoughtfully at his teeth with a splinter he’d broken from the conference table.

  “Well, perhaps we can consider where to go from here,” Björk said.

  “Indeed,” Wallander said. “I have a few theories I’d like to test out on you, but first I’d like to tell you about a little adventure I had during the night.”

  He felt calm again. He’d pitted himself against Birgitta Törn and not been vanquished. He’d find out what she was really doing here soon enough. Rönnlund’s support had made him feel better. He told them about his telephone call and his visit to the fishing boat in Brantevik. He stressed that the man had been certain the life raft could have drifted from as far as one of the Baltic states. Björk was inspired to take unexpected initiatives, and asked reception to arrange for charts of the whole area to be sent up immediately. Wallander imagined Ebba collaring the next officer that sauntered through reception, instructing him to produce the maps without delay. He poured himself another cup of coffee and started to explain his theories.

  “The evidence points to the men having been murdered onboard a ship,” he said. “You would expect the bodies to have been disposed of in the ocean, but I suspect that the killers wanted the bodies to be found. I find it difficult to explain why that should be so, not least because it must have been very uncertain where and when the life raft would wash ashore. Anyway, the men were shot at close range after being tortured. People are tortured as punishment, or to extract information. The next thing to bear in mind is that both men
were under the influence of drugs, amphetamines, to be precise. Somehow or other, drugs are involved in this case. I have the distinct impression these men were not short of money—their clothes make that clear. By Eastern European standards they must have been pretty well off if they could afford to buy the shoes and clothes they were wearing. I’d never be able to afford their clothes.”

  Lovén burst out laughing at his final remark, but Birgitta Törn continued staring doggedly down at the table.

  “We know quite a lot, even if we can’t fit the bits of the jigsaw together to produce a picture that gives us the sequence of events and the reason the men were murdered. There’s one thing we need to establish immediately: who were these men? That’s what we must concentrate on. And we must also get a ballistics report without delay on the bullets that killed them. I want a check on all missing or wanted persons in Sweden and Denmark. Fingerprints, photos and descriptions of the men must be sent immediately to Interpol. Maybe we’ll find something in our criminal records. And we need to contact the police in the Soviet Union and the Baltic states, assuming that hasn’t happened already. Perhaps Birgitta Törn can fill us in on this?”

  “That will happen later today,” she said. “We’ll be contacting the international division of the Moscow police.”

  “The police in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania must be contacted as well.”

  “That will happen via Moscow.”

  Wallander looked questioningly at her, then turned to Björk. “Didn’t we have a visit from the Lithuanian police last autumn?”

  “What Birgitta Törn says is no doubt correct,” Björk said. “The Baltic states have their own national police forces, but it’s still the Soviet police that makes the formal decisions.”

  “I wonder,” Wallander said. “Still, I dare say that the foreign ministry knows more about this than I do.”

  “Yes,” Törn said, “no doubt we do.”

  Björk brought the meeting to a close, and immediately disappeared with Birgitta Törn. A press conference had been arranged for 2 p.m. Wallander stayed behind in the conference room and went over the various tasks with the others. Svedberg fetched the plastic bag containing the bullets, and Lovén undertook to make sure that the ballistic examination happened quickly. The others split the enormous job of going through the lists of missing and wanted persons. Martinsson had contacts in the Copenhagen police, and started to get in touch with them.

  “You don’t need to bother about the press conference,” Wallander said. “That’ll be a headache for Björk and myself.”

  “Are they as unpleasant here as they are in Stockholm?” Rönnlund asked.

  “I don’t know what press conferences are like in Stockholm,” Wallander told him, “but they’re not exactly fun here.”

  The rest of the day was spent sending descriptions of the dead men to all police districts in Sweden and the Scandinavian countries, and working their way through various records and registers. It was soon clear that the men’s fingerprints weren’t in the Swedish or Danish records, but Interpol would take longer to give an answer. Wallander and Lovén weren’t sure whether the East German police records had been incorporated into Interpol. Had their criminal records been transferred to a central database covering the whole of unified Germany? Come to that, had there actually been any normal criminal records in the German Democratic Republic? Had there been a distinction between the vast archives of the security services and criminal records? Lovén agreed to find the answers to these questions, while Wallander prepared himself for the press conference.

  When he and Björk met before the briefing was due to begin, Wallander noticed that his boss was very quiet. Why doesn’t he say anything, he wondered. Did he think I was rude to that elegant lady from the foreign ministry?

  A large number of journalists and television reporters gathered in the room where the press conference was going to take place. Wallander looked for the young reporter from the Express, but couldn’t see him.

  Björk started proceedings, as usual, launching an unexpected attack on the “incomprehensibly irresponsible” reports published by the press. Wallander’s thoughts wandered to his nighttime meeting with the frightened man at Brantevik harbor. When it was his turn to speak, he began by repeating his appeal for the public to contact the police if they had any information that might be relevant. A reporter asked if there had been any response so far, and Wallander said there had not. The press conference was surprisingly low key, and Björk expressed his satisfaction as they left the room.

  “What’s the lady from the foreign ministry doing?” Wallander asked as they walked down the corridor.

  “She’s on the phone nearly all the time,” Björk said. “No doubt you think we ought to bug her calls.”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Wallander muttered.

  The day passed without significant developments. It was a question of being patient, of seeing whether any fish would swim into the nets they’d put out.

  Shortly before 6 p.m. Martinsson popped his head in Wallander’s office and asked if he’d like to come to dinner at his place that evening. He’d already invited Lovén and Rönnlund, who seemed to be feeling homesick.

  “Svedberg’s busy,” he said. “Birgitta Törn told me she was going to Malmö tonight. What about you?”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” Wallander said. “I’ve got an appointment, I’m afraid.”

  It was partly true. He hadn’t absolutely made up his mind whether to drive again to Brantevik and take a closer look at the fishing boat.

  At 6:30 p.m. he phoned his father as usual, and was instructed to buy a new pack of cards and bring it with him the next time he came. As soon as he’d hung up, he left the station. The wind had dropped, and the sky was clear. He stopped on the way home to buy some food. By 8:30 p.m., when he’d finished eating and was waiting for the coffee to brew, he still hadn’t made up his mind. No doubt it could wait until tomorrow. Besides, he was exhausted from the previous night’s exertions.

  He sat for a long time at his kitchen table over his coffee, trying to imagine Rydberg opposite him, discussing the day’s events. He went through what had happened step by step with his invisible visitor. It was three days since the life raft had beached at Mossby Strand. They weren’t going to get any further until they established who the dead men were, but even if they did that, the riddle might remain unsolved.

  He put his cup in the sink. He noticed a drooping plant on his windowsill, and watered it before going to the living room and choosing a Maria Callas recording of La Traviata. He had made up his mind to postpone the visit to the fishing boat.

  Later that evening he tried to call his daughter at her college near Stockholm, but nobody answered. At 10:30 p.m. he went to bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  The following day, the fourth day of the investigation, just before 2 p.m., what everybody had been expecting finally came to pass. Birgitta Törn went to Wallander’s office with a telex. The police in Riga had informed the Swedish foreign ministry, via their superiors in Moscow, that it was likely that the men were Latvian citizens. In order to facilitate further investigations, Major Litvinov of the Moscow police suggested that his Swedish colleagues might like to establish direct contact with the serious crimes unit in Riga.

  “So, they do exist after all,” Wallander said. “The Latvian police, I mean.”

  “Who said they didn’t?” she answered. “If you’d gotten in touch with Riga directly, though, there could have been diplomatic repercussions. I’m not sure we’d have received a response at all. I take it you are aware that the situation in Latvia is rather tense.”

  Wallander knew that. It was barely a month since the Soviet elite troops had attacked the ministry of the interior in central Riga and killed many innocent people. Wallander had seen newspaper pictures of barricades made of stone blocks and iron poles. All the same, he wasn’t quite clear what was going on. As usual, he felt he didn’t know enough about what was happening aroun
d him.

  “What do we do now, then?” he asked tentatively.

  “We establish contact with the police in Riga. The main thing is to make sure we really are dealing with the people indicated in the telex.”

  Wallander read the message again. The man in the fishing boat had been right: the life raft had indeed drifted the whole way from the Baltic coast.

  “We still don’t know who they were,” he said.

  But he did know three hours later. A call from Riga had been announced, and the investigation team gathered in the conference room. Björk was so on edge that he spilled coffee down his jacket.

  “Is there anybody here who speaks Latvian?” Wallander asked. “I don’t.”

  “The call will be in English,” Birgitta Törn said. “We asked for this.”

  “You take it,” Björk said to Wallander.

  “My English isn’t all that good.”

  “No doubt his won’t be either,” Rönnlund said. “What was his name? Major Litvinov? It’ll even itself out, I figure.”

  “Major Litvinov is stationed in Moscow,” Birgitta Törn pointed out. “We’ll be talking to the police in Riga, in Latvia.”

  The call came at 5:19 p.m. The line was surprisingly clear. A man introduced himself as Major Liepa from the Riga police. Wallander made notes as he listened, occasionally answering a question. Major Liepa spoke very bad English, and Wallander was not at all confident that he understood everything he said. Nevertheless, when the call was over he felt he had the most important information jotted down in his notebook.

  Two names, two identities: Janis Leja and Juris Kalns.

  “Riga had their fingerprints,” Wallander said. “According to Major Liepa there was no doubt that the bodies we found are these two.”