The Dogs of Riga

Besides the fear, her face also indicated something else -determination perhaps, or maybe obstinacy. He walked across the cold floor and fetched a pencil from the desk. On the inside of the dust jacket, which had a photograph on it of the cathedral in Lund, he wrote: I have understood. He gave her back the dust jacket, and it struck him that Baiba Liepa looked nothing like what he had imagined. He couldn't remember what the major had said when he was sitting on Wallander's settee in Mariagatan in Ystad, listening to Maria Callas and talking about his wife, but the impression he'd formed was different, not of a face like hers.

He cleared his throat as he carefully opened the door, and she melted away.

She had come to him because she wanted to speak to him about her dead husband, the major. And she was terrified. When somebody called his room and asked for a Mr Eckers, he was to take the lift to the foyer, then go down the steps leading to the hotel sauna and look for a grey-painted, steel door next to the dining room's loading bay. It should be unlocked, and when he came out into the street behind the hotel, she'd be waiting for him and would tell him about her dead husband.

Please, she'd written. Please, please. Now he was quite certain that there had been more than mere fear in her face: there was defiance as well, perhaps even hatred. There's something going on here that's bigger than I'd suspected, he thought. It needed a messenger in a chambermaid's uniform to make me realise. I'd forgotten that I'm in an alien world.

Just before 8 a.m. he emerged from the lift on the ground floor. There was no sign of a man reading a newspaper, but there was a man looking at postcards on a stand.

Wallander went out into the street. It was warmer than the previous day. Sergeant Zids was sitting in the car, waiting for him, and bade him good morning. Wallander climbed into the back seat and the sergeant started the engine. Day was slowly breaking over Riga. The traffic was heavy, and the sergeant was unable to drive as fast as he would have liked. All the time Wallander could see Baiba Liepa's face in his mind's eye. Suddenly, without warning, he felt scared.

CHAPTER 8

Shortly before 8.30 a.m., Wallander discovered that Colonel Murniers smoked the same extra-strong cigarettes as Major Liepa. He recognised the packet, with the brand name "PRIMA" that the colonel took out of his uniform pocket and placed on the table in front of him.

Wallander felt as though he was in the middle of a labyrinth. Sergeant Zids had led him up and down stairs around the apparently endless police headquarters before stopping at a door that turned out to be to Murniers's office. It seemed to Wallander that there must surely be a shorter and more straightforward way to Murniers's office, but he was not allowed to know it.

The office was sparsely furnished, not especially big, and what immediately caught Wallander's interest was the fact that it had three telephones. On one wall was a dented filing cabinet, with locks. Besides the telephones there was a large cast-iron ashtray on his desk, decorated with an elaborate motif that Wallander thought at first was a pair of swans, then realised was a man with bulging muscles carrying a flag into a headwind.

Ashtray, telephones, but no papers. The Venetian blinds for the two high windows behind Murniers's back were either half-lowered, or broken, Wallander couldn't make up his mind which. He stared at the blinds as he digested the important news Murniers had just imparted.

"We've arrested a suspect," the colonel had said. "Our investigations during the night have produced the result we'd been hoping for."

At first Wallander thought he was referring to the major's murderer, but then it came to him that Murniers meant the dead men in the life-raft.

"It was a gang," Murniers said. "A gang with branches in both Talli

The last few sentences were delivered as a calm, factual and measured statement. Wallander could see Putnis in his mind's eye, slowly extracting the truth from a man who'd been tortured. What did he know about the Latvian police? Was there any limit to what was permitted in a dictatorship? Come to that, was Latvia a dictatorship? He thought of Baiba Liepa's face. Fear, but also the opposite of fear. When somebody telephones and asks for Mr Eckers, you must come.

Murniers smiled at him, as if it was obvious he could read the Swedish police officer's thoughts. Wallander tried to hide his secret by saying something quite untrue.

"Major Liepa led me to understand that he was worried about his personal safety," he said, "but he gave no reason for his anxiety. That's one of the questions Colonel Putnis ought to try and find an answer to – whether there's a direct co

Wallander thought he could detect an almost invisible shift in Murniers's expression. So, he'd said something unexpected. But was it his insight that was unexpected, or that Major Liepa really had been worried and Murniers already knew?

"You must have asked the key questions," Wallander said. "Who could have enticed Major Liepa out in the middle of the night? Who would have had a reason to murder him? Even when a controversial politician is murdered one has to ask whether there might have been a private motive. That's what happened when Ke

"That is correct," Murniers said. "You are an experienced police officer and your analysis is accurate. Major Liepa was happily married. He was not in financial difficulties. He didn't gamble, he didn't have a mistress. He was a conscientious police officer who was convinced that the work he did was helping our country to develop. We think his death must be co

"Major Liepa talked about drugs," Wallander said. "He referred to the spread of amphetamine factories in Eastern Europe. He was convinced that the two men died as a result of an internal dispute within a syndicate involved in drug smuggling. He devoted much energy to trying to discover whether the men had been killed for revenge, or because they had refused to reveal something. Furthermore, there were good reasons to believe the life-raft itself had been carrying a cargo of drugs, as it was stolen from our police station. What we never managed to work out was how these various things might be linked."

"Let's hope Colonel Putnis gets an answer to that," Murniers said. "He's a very skilled interrogator. In the meantime I thought I might suggest that I should show you the place where Major Liepa was murdered. Colonel Putnis takes his time over an interrogation, if he thinks it's worth it."

"Is the place where he was found the actual place where he was killed?"

"There's no reason to suppose otherwise. It's a remote spot. There are not many people around the docks at night."

That's not true, Wallander thought. The major would have put up a struggle. It can't have been easy to drag him out on to a quay in the middle of the night. Saying the place is remote isn't a good enough explanation.