The Dogs of Riga

They went down to the basement. Murniers opened the door to an antechamber with a two-way mirror on one wall. Murniers beckoned to Wallander, inviting him to take a look.

The room behind the mirror had bare walls, a table and two chairs. On one of the chairs was Upitis. He had a dirty bandage on his forehead. He was wearing the same shirt he'd had during their night-time conversation in the unknown hunting lodge.

"Who is he?" Wallander asked, without taking his eyes off Upitis. He was afraid his shock might betray him. On the other hand, maybe Murniers knew already.

"He's a man we've had our eyes on," Murniers said. "A failed academic, poet, butterfly collector, journalist. Drinks too much, talks too much. He's spent quite a few years in prison, for all kinds of offences. We've known for some time that he was involved in serious crime, although we could never prove it. We had an anonymous tip suggesting he might have something to do with Major Liepa's death." "Is there any proof?"

"Needless to say, he doesn't confess to anything at all -but we have evidence as significant as a voluntary confession."

"What?"

"The murder weapon."

Wallander turned to look at Murniers.

"The murder weapon," Murniers repeated. "Perhaps we should go up to my office so that I can give you the background to this arrest. Colonel Putnis ought to be there as well by now."

Wallander followed Murniers up the stairs. He noticed the Colonel was humming to himself. Somebody's been leading me up the garden path, he thought, horrified. Somebody's been leading me up the garden path – but I don't know who. I don't know who, and I don't know why.

CHAPTER 12

Upitis was charged. When the police searched his flat they found an old wooden club with strands of hair stuck to it. Upitis didn't have an alibi for the night of Major Liepa's murder. He claimed he was drunk, had been with some friends, but couldn't remember whom. In the course of the morning Murniers sent out a squad of officers to question people who might have been able to supply Upitis with an alibi, but nobody remembered having seen or been visited by him. Murniers expended an enormous amount of energy on the search, while Colonel Putnis seemed more inclined to wait and see what developed.

Wallander did everything he could to discover the truth. His first reaction when he saw Upitis through the two-way mirror was that Upitis had been betrayed, but then he started to have doubts. Too much was still unclear. Baiba Liepa's description of living in a society where conspiracy was the highest common denominator echoed in his ears. Even if Major Liepa's suspicions had been correct and Murniers was a corrupt police officer, if he was the person behind the major's death, the whole case seemed to be descending into the unreal. Was Murniers prepared to risk sending an i

"If he's found guilty," he asked Putnis, "what punishment will he get?"

"We are sufficiently old-fashioned to have retained the death penalty," Putnis said. "Murdering a high-ranking police officer is just about the worst crime you can commit. I would expect him to be shot. Personally, I think that would be an appropriate punishment – what is your view, Inspector Wallander?"

Wallander made no reply. That he was in a country where they executed criminals was so horrific that he was rendered temporarily speechless.

Putnis was playing a waiting game, and Wallander realised that the two colonels often went in different directions without telling each other. Putnis had not even been informed of Murniers's anonymous tip-off. In the course of one of Murniers's most frenzied moments of hyperactivity during the morning, Wallander had invited Putnis into his office, asked Sergeant Zids to fetch some coffee, and tried to get Putnis to explain to him what was actually going on. From the start he had observed a certain tension between the colonels, and now, when he was more confused than ever, he thought he had nothing to lose by putting his misgivings to Putnis.

"Is this really the right man?" he asked. "What motive could he have? A wooden club with some bloodstains and strands of hair – how can that be proof before anybody has even carried out forensic tests? The hair could be from a cat, couldn't it?"

Putnis shrugged. "We shall see," he said. "Murniers is pretty sure of what he's doing. He very seldom arrests the wrong man – he's much more efficient than I am. But you seem to have misgivings, Mr Wallander. Might I ask on what grounds?"

"I just wonder, that's all," Wallander said. "All too often I've arrested a criminal who seemed to be the most unlikely of suspects."

They sat in silence, drinking their coffee.

"Of course, it would be marvellous if Major Liepa's murderer could be caught," Wallander said, "but this Upitis doesn't look like the leader of a criminal network that made up its mind to dispose of a police officer."

"Possibly he's a drug addict," Putnis said hesitantly. "Drug addicts can be driven to do anything at all. Somebody in the background might have given him an order."

"To kill a senior police officer with a wooden club? A knife or a pistol, OK – but a wooden club? And how did he manage to carry the body to the harbour?"

"I don't know. That's what Murniers is going to find out."

"How's it going with that man you are interrogating?"

"Well. He hasn't admitted anything yet, but he will. I'm convinced he's been part of the drug smuggling that the men who drifted ashore in the life-raft were involved in. Just now I'm keeping him waiting, giving him time to think over the situation he's in."

Putnis went back to his office and Wallander sat perfectly still in his chair, trying to get a fix on the situation. He wondered whether Baiba Liepa knew that her friend Upitis had been arrested for the murder of her husband. He returned in his mind's eye to the hunting lodge in the forest, and realised it was conceivable that Upitis might have been afraid that Wallander knew something which might also have forced him to smash a Swedish police officer's head with a wooden club. Wallander could see that all theories were crumbling, all the trails getting cold, one by one. He tried to reassemble the pieces to see if there was anything he could salvage.

After an hour of quiet contemplation, he concluded there was only one thing for him to do – go back to Sweden.

He had come to Riga because the Latvian police had asked for his assistance. He hadn't been able to give them any help, and now that a culprit seemed to have been arrested, there was no longer any reason for him to stay. He had no choice but to accept his own confusion, accept that he had actually been interrogated at night by a man who might turn out to be the person he'd been looking for. He had played the role of Mr Eckers without knowing anything about the play he assumed he was taking part in. The only sensible thing to do was to go home as soon as possible and forget the whole business. And yet, he was reluctant to do that. Beyond all the uneasiness and confusion there was something else: Baiba Liepa's fear and defiance, Upitis's weary eyes. It occurred to him that much about Latvian society was beyond his comprehension, it might also be that he could see things the others couldn't see.

He decided to give it a few more days. As he felt the need to do something practical, instead of just sitting and brooding in his office, he asked Sergeant Zids, who had been waiting patiently in the corridor, to fetch the documentation for all the cases Major Liepa had been concerned with over the past twelve months. He could see no obvious way forward, so he decided to go backwards for a while, into the major's recent past. Perhaps he might be able to find something in the archives that could provide a lead.