The Troubled Man (41 page)

Wallander said nothing. He understood. Why should she have considered marrying a foreign policeman when her husband, also a police officer, had just been murdered? Wallander remembered how he had tried to persuade her. But if the roles had been reversed, how would he have reacted? What would he have chosen to do?

They sat for a long time in silence. In the end Baiba stood up, stroked Wallander’s hair and went back into the house. Since he could see that her pain had started again, he assumed she was giving herself another injection. When she didn’t come back, he went inside to investigate. She had fallen asleep on his bed. She didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon, and once she had overcome her initial confusion about where she was, her first question was if she could stay the night before catching a ferry to Poland the next morning and driving back to Riga.

‘That’s too far for you to drive,’ said Wallander firmly. ‘I’ll go with you, drive you home. Then I can fly back.’

She shook her head and said she wanted to go home on her own, just as she had come. When Wallander tried to insist, she became annoyed and shouted at him. But she stopped immediately and apologised. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘How long does she have? When is Baiba going to die? If I had the least suspicion that my time was up now I wouldn’t have stayed. I wouldn’t even have come in the first place. When I feel that the end is imminent and unavoidable, I won’t prolong the torture. I have access to both pills and injections. I intend to die with a bottle of champagne by my bed. I’ll drink a toast to the fact that, despite everything, I was able to experience the singular adventure of being born, living and one day disappearing into the darkness once again.’

‘Aren’t you afraid?’

Wallander immediately wished he could bite his tongue. How could he put a question like that to someone who was dying? But she didn’t take offence. He realised with a mixture of despair and embarrassment that she had no doubt long ago grown used to his clumsiness.

‘No,’ said Baiba. ‘I’m not afraid. I have so little time. I can’t waste any of it on thoughts that would only make everything worse.’

She got out of bed and made a tour of the house. She paused at the bookcase, noticing a book on Latvia that she had given him.

‘Have you ever opened it?’ she asked with a smile.

‘Lots of times,’ said Wallander.

It was true.

Afterwards, Wallander would remember the time spent in Loderup with Baiba as a room in which all the clocks seemed to have stopped, all movement ceased. She ate very little, spent most of the time in bed with a blanket over her, occasionally injecting herself, and wanted him to be near her. They lay side by side, talked now and then, were just as often silent when she was too tired to converse or had simply fallen asleep. Wallander also dozed off from time to time but woke up with a start after a few minutes, unused to having somebody so close to him.

She told him about the years that had passed, and the astonishing developments that had taken place in her homeland.

‘We had no idea in the days you and I were together what was going to happen,’ she said. ‘Do you remember the Soviet Black Berets who took potshots all over Riga for no obvious reason? I can admit now that in those days I didn’t believe the Soviet Union would ever loosen its grip on us. I imagined the oppression would only increase. The worst of it was that nobody ever knew who could be trusted. Did your neighbours have anything to gain by you being free, or did that frighten them? Which of them were reporting to the KGB, which was everywhere, like a giant ear that nobody could get away from? Now I know I was wrong, and I’m grateful for that. But at the same time, nobody knows what the future holds for Latvia. Capitalism doesn’t solve the problems of socialism or the planned economy, nor does democracy solve all the economic crises. I think that right now we are living beyond our resources.’

‘Isn’t there talk of Baltic tigers?’ Wallander asked. ‘States that are as successful as countries in Asia?’

She shook her head with a bitter expression on her face.

‘We’re living on borrowed money. Including Swedish money. I don’t claim to be a particularly knowledgeable or perceptive economist, but I’m quite sure that Swedish banks are lending large sums of money in my country with far too little security. And that can only end one way.’

‘Badly?’

‘Very badly. For the Swedish banks too.’

Wallander thought back to the years at the beginning of the 1990s, when they had had their affair. He recalled how scared everybody was. So much had happened in those days that he still didn’t understand. Superficially, a major political development had drastically altered Europe, and hence the balance of power between the USA and the Soviet Union. Until he travelled to Riga to try to solve the case of the dead men in a rubber dinghy that drifted ashore near Ystad, it had never occurred to him that three of Sweden’s nearest neighbours were occupied by a foreign power. How could it be that so many of his generation, born in the late 1940s, had never truly comprehended that the Cold War actually was a war, with occupied and oppressed nations as a result? During the 1960s it often seemed that distant Vietnam lay closer to the Swedish border than did the Baltic countries.

‘It was difficult to understand for us as well,’ said Baiba in the middle of the night, when the first light of dawn was beginning to change the colour of the sky. ‘Behind every Latvian was a Russian, we used to say. But behind every Russian there was somebody else.’

‘Who?’

‘Even in the Baltic countries, the way the Russians thought was dictated by what the USA was doing.’

‘So behind every Russian was an American, is that right?’

‘You could put it like that. But nobody will really know until Russian historians tell us the full truth of everything that happened in those days.’

Somewhere during this rambling conversation, their unexpected meeting came to an end. Wallander fell asleep. The last time he’d checked his watch it said five o’clock. When he woke up over an hour later, Baiba had left. He ran outside, but her car was no longer there. Under a stone on the garden table was a photograph. The picture had been taken in 1991, in May, at the Freedom Monument in Riga. Wallander remembered the occasion. Somebody who happened to be passing had taken it for them. They were both smiling, huddled up close, Baiba with her head resting on his shoulder. Next to the photograph was a scrap of paper that seemed to have been torn out of a diary. There was nothing written on it, just a drawing of a heart.

Wallander thought he should drive to Ystad right away, to the quay where ferries to Poland came and went. He was already in the car and had started the engine when he realised that this was the last thing she would want him to do. He went back into the house and lay down on the bed, where he could still smell her body.

He was tired out, and fell asleep. When he woke up a few hours later, he recalled what she had said. Behind every Russian there was somebody else. She had given him something to think about that might be relevant to Hakan and Louise von Enke.
Behind every Russian there was somebody else
.

Who, he wondered, was standing behind them? And which of them was standing behind the other? He didn’t know the answer, but could see that it was important.

He went out into the garden, got the ladder the chimney sweep always used, and climbed up onto the roof with a pair of binoculars in his hand. He could see the white ferry heading for Poland. A large part of the most important and happiest time in his life was on board and would never return. He felt a combination of sorrow and pain that he had difficulty coping with.

He was still on the roof when the refuse truck arrived. But the man who collected the bags of rubbish didn’t notice Wallander, perched up there like a crow.

Wallander watched the refuse truck drive away. The Poland ferry had vanished in a bank of fog drifting in towards the Scanian coast. His thoughts scared him. Baiba was close to the brink of the abyss at the edge of the unknown. She had said she had a few months, no more.

He suddenly seemed to see himself as he really was. A man filled with self-pity, a thoroughly pathetic figure. He sat there on his roof, and the only truly important thing as far as he was concerned was that Baiba was going to die, not him.

In the end he climbed down and took Jussi for a walk, which was more of an escape. He was who he was, he finally concluded. A man, good at his job, even astute. All his life he had tried to be part of the forces of good in this world, and if he had failed, well, he wasn’t the only one. What else could a person do but try his best?

The sky had clouded over. Expecting it to start raining at any moment, he walked with Jussi through fields where the grass had recently been cut, or was lying fallow, or was waiting for the combine. He tried to think a new thought after every fifty strides but couldn’t manage it. It was a game he used to play with Linda when she was a child. Now he tried to think thoughts about his life, about Baiba’s courage in the face of the inevitable, and about the courage he was sure he lacked himself. He walked slowly along the edge of fields, allowing Jussi to roam freely.

Wallander had worked up a sweat, and he sat down by the side of a small pond surrounded by rusty remains of old agricultural machines. Jussi sniffed at the water, drank, then came to lie down at Wallander’s side. The clouds had begun to disperse; it wasn’t going to rain after all. Wallander could hear emergency sirens in the distance. Fire engines this time, not an ambulance or some of his colleagues. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up Baiba. The sirens were coming closer; they were behind him now, on the road leading to Simrishamn. He turned round. The binoculars he’d had with him on the roof were still hanging around his neck. The sirens were very loud and clear now. He stood up. Could one of his neighbours’ houses be on fire? He hoped it wasn’t the house occupied by the Hanssons, an old couple: Elin was practically immobile, and her husband, Rune, could barely walk with the aid of a walking stick. The sirens were getting closer and closer. He raised the binoculars and saw to his horror two fire engines coming to a halt outside his own house. He started running, with Jussi ahead of him on the path. He occasionally stopped to view his house through the binoculars. Every time, he expected to see flames shooting through the roof, where he had been sitting not long ago, or smoke belching from shattered windows. But there was none of that. Only the fire engines, whose sirens were now silent, and firemen swarming around.

When he arrived at the house, his heart threatening to burst through his chest, fire chief Peter Edler was stroking Jussi, who had arrived first by a large margin. He smiled grimly when Wallander came staggering up. The firemen were preparing to leave. Peter Edler was about the same age as Wallander, a freckled man with a slight Smaland accent. They sometimes met in connection with an investigation. Wallander had great respect for him, and appreciated his dry humour.

‘One of my men knew you lived here,’ said Edler, continuing to stroke Jussi.

‘What happened?’

‘That’s what I should be asking you.’

‘Is the place on fire?’

‘Apparently not. But it could easily have been.’

Wallander stared uncomprehendingly at Edler.

‘I went for a walk about half an hour ago.’

Edler nodded towards the house.

‘Come in and take a look.’

The stench of burned rubber that hit Wallander when he entered the building was strong, almost choking. Edler led him into the kitchen. The firemen had opened a window to let the fumes out. On one of the stove’s burners was a frying pan, and next to it a charred rubber place mat. Edler sniffed at the frying pan, from which smoke was still rising.

‘Fried egg? Sausage?’

‘Egg.’

‘You went out for a walk without turning off the stove. Not only that, but you left a place mat on a burner. How careless can a detective get?’

Edler shook his head. They went outside again. The firemen were already in the trucks, waiting for their leader.

‘It’s never happened to me before,’ said Wallander.

‘It had better not happen again.’

Edler looked around, admiring the view.

‘So you moved out to the country in the end. To be honest, I never thought you’d get round to it. You have a lovely view.’

‘You haven’t moved yourself?’

‘We’re still in the same house in the middle of town. Gunnel wants to move out to the country, but I don’t. Not as long as I’m still working.’

‘How long to go?’

Edler shuddered and looked miserable. He smacked the shiny helmet he was holding in his hand against his thigh, as if it were a gun.

‘As long as I can, or am allowed to. I might be able to keep going for a few more years, but then I’ll be on the scrapheap as well. What I’ll do then, I have no idea. I can’t just sit at home doing crossword puzzles.’

‘You could try writing them,’ said Wallander, thinking of Hermann Eber.

Edler looked at him in surprise, but didn’t ask what he meant. It almost seemed as if he hoped Wallander’s future would turn out to be as grim as his own.

‘Maybe we could form a team? Start a little company and travel around telling people how to protect themselves from burglary and fire?’