The Dogs of Riga

When they were safely inside the room behind the sacristy, she put her arms round him and hugged him tightly. He could feel she was crying, and that her fury was so great, her hands were like iron claws digging into his back.

"They killed Inese," she whispered. "They killed all of them. I thought you were dead as well. I thought it was all over, and then Vera contacted me."

"It was terrible," Wallander said. "But we mustn't think about that now."

She stared at him in astonishment. "We must always think about that," she said. "If we forget that, we forget we are human."

"I didn't mean that we should forget it," he explained. "I just meant that we have to move on. Mourning prevents us from acting."

She flopped down onto a chair, and he could see she was haggard from pain and exhaustion. He wondered how much longer she would be able to keep going.

The night they spent in the church became the point in Kurt Wallander's life when he felt he had penetrated to the very centre of his own existence. He had never previously looked at his life from an existential point of view. It was possible that at moments of deep depression – when he had seen the body of someone murdered, a child killed in a traffic accident, or a desperate suicide case – he might have been struck by the thought that life is so very short when death strikes. One lives for such a short time, but will be dead forever. But he had become adept at brushing aside such thoughts. He tried to regard life as mainly a practical business, and he doubted his ability to enrich his existence by adjusting his life in accordance with any particular philosophy. Nor had he ever worried about the particular span of time that fate had ordained he should live. One was born at such and such a time, and one died at such and such a time: that was about as far as he had ever got when it came to contemplating his earthly existence. The night he spent with Baiba Liepa in the freezing cold church made him look deeper into himself than he had ever done before. He realised that the world at large bore very little resemblance to Sweden, and that his own problems seemed insignificant compared with the savagery that was characteristic of Baiba Liepa's life. It was as if it was only now he could accept as fact the massacre in which Inese had died, only now that it became real. The colonels did exist, Sergeant Zids had fired a murderous volley from a real weapon, bullets that could split open hearts and in a fraction of a second create an abandoned universe. He wondered about how intolerable it must be, always to be afraid. The age of fear, he thought: that is my age, and I have never understood that before, even though I am into my middle years.

She said they were safe in the church, as safe as they could ever be. The vicar had been a close friend of Karlis Liepa, and hadn't hesitated to provide Baiba with a hiding place when she had asked for his help. Wallander told her about his instinctive feeling that they had already tracked him down, and were waiting somewhere in the shadows.

"Why should they wait?" Baiba objected. "For people like that there is no such thing as waiting when it comes to arresting and punishing those who threaten their existence."

Wallander thought she could well be right. At the same time, he was certain the most important thing was the major's testimony: what frightened them was the evidence the major had left behind, not a widow and, as far as they were concerned, a harmless Swedish police officer who had set out on his own private vendetta.

Something else occurred to him. It was so astounding that he decided not to say anything about it to Baiba yet. It had suddenly dawned on him that there could be another reason why their shadows had not revealed themselves and simply arrested them and carted them off to the fortified police headquarters. The more he thought about it during the long night in the church, the more plausible it became. But he said nothing, mainly in order not to subject Baiba to any more strain than was absolutely necessary.

He recognised that her despondency was as much due to the fact that she couldn't understand where Karlis had hidden his testimony as to her shock at the death of Inese and her other friends. She had tried everything she could think of, attempted to put herself inside her husband's mind, but still she hadn't found the answer. She had removed tiles in the bathroom and ripped the upholstery off their furniture, but found nothing except dust and the bones of dead mice.

Wallander tried to help her. They sat opposite each other across the table, she poured out tea, and the light from the paraffin lamp transformed the gloomy room into a warm, intimate room. Wallander would have liked most of all to hug her and share her sorrow, and again he considered the possibility of taking her with him to Sweden, but he knew she wouldn't be able to contemplate that, not yet in any case. She would rather die than abandon hope of finding the testimony her husband must have left behind.

At the same time, however, he also considered the third possibility – the reason why the shadows were not moving in to arrest them. If his suspicions were correct, and he was becoming increasingly convinced they might well be, there was not just an enemy lurking in the shadows, but also the enemy's enemy who was actually standing guard over them. The condor and the lapwing. He still didn't know which of the colonels had which plumage, but perhaps the lapwing was aware of the condor, and wanted to protect its intended prey?

The night in the church was like a journey to an unknown continent, where they would try to find something but didn't know what they were looking for. A brown paper parcel? A suitcase? Wallander was convinced the major was a wise man who knew that a hiding place was useless if it was too cleverly concealed. In order to break into the major's way of thinking, however, he would have to find out more about Baiba Liepa. He asked questions he didn't want to ask, but she insisted that he did so, begging him not to spare her feelings.

With her help he explored their lives in intimate detail. Occasionally they would come to a point where he thought they had cracked it, but then it would transpire that Baiba had already been down that trail and found it was cold. By 4.30 a.m. he was on the point of giving up. He looked wearily into her exhausted face.

"What else is there?" he asked. "What else is there we can do? A hiding place must exist somewhere, must be embodied in some kind of space. A motionless space, waterproof, fireproof, theft-proof. Where else is there?"

He forced himself to go on. "Is there a cellar in your block of flats?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"We've already talked about the attic. We've been over every inch of the flat. Your sister's summer cottage. His father's house in Ventspils. Think, Baiba. There must be another possibility."

He could see she was close to breaking point.

"No," she said, "there is nowhere else."

"It doesn't need to be indoors. You said you sometimes used to drive out to the coast. Is there a rock you used to sit on? Where did you pitch your tent?"

"I've told you all that already. I know Karlis would never have hidden anything there."

"Did you really always pitch your tent at exactly the same spot? For eight summers in a row? Maybe you chose a different site on one occasion?"

"We both enjoyed the pleasure of returning to the same place."

She wanted to go on, but he was driving her backwards all the time. It seemed to him the major would never have chosen a place randomly. Wherever it was, it had to be part of their joint past.

He started all over again. The lamp was begi