CHAPTER 14

Six days after he returned he received a letter.

He found it on the floor in the hall when he returned home after a long and difficult day at the station. Sleet had been falling all afternoon, and he spent some time on the landing shaking his clothes and stamping his feet before opening the door.

He thought later that it was as if he'd been steeling himself for the moment when they contacted him. Deep down he'd known all along that they would, but he still didn't feel ready for it.

The envelope on his doormat was an ordinary brown one – at first he thought it was some kind of advertising material as there was a company name printed on the front. He put it on the hall table and forgot all about it. It wasn't until he'd finished his dinner, a fish gratin that had been in the freezer too long, that he remembered the letter and went to fetch it. It was from "Lippman's Flowers", and it struck him that this was an odd time of year for a garden centre to be sending a catalogue. He very nearly put it straight into the dustbin, but he could never resist taking a look at even the most uninteresting junk mail before binning it. It was a bad habit picked up from his job: there might be something hidden in among the colourful brochures. It sometimes seemed to him that he lived the life of a man compelled to turn over every stone he found. He always needed to know what was underneath it.

He opened the envelope and saw that it contained a handwritten letter, he realised they had contacted him. He left the letter on the kitchen table while he made a cup of coffee. He needed to give himself a bit of time before reading it. When he'd left the plane at Arlanda a week ago, he had felt vaguely uneasy, but relieved to no longer be in a country where he was being watched all the time, and in a flash of unaccustomed spontaneity he'd tried to start a conversation with the woman at immigration control when he handed his passport in through the window. "It's good to be home," he'd said, but she had glanced dismissively at him and shoved the passport back without even opening it.

This is Sweden, he'd thought. Everything is bright and cheerful on the surface, our airports are built so that no dust or shadows could ever intrude. Everything is visible, nothing is any different from what it seems to be. Our national aspiration, our religion, is that security written into the Swedish constitution, which informs the whole world that starving to death is a crime. But we don't talk to strangers unless we have to, because anything unfamiliar can cause us harm, dirty our floors and dim our neon lights. We never built an empire and so we've never had to watch one collapse, but we persuaded ourselves that we'd created the best of all possible worlds, and that even if small, we were the privileged keepers of paradise. Now that the party's over we take our revenge by having the least friendly immigration control officers in the world.

His feeling of relief was replaced almost immediately by depression. In Kurt Wallander's world, this worn-out or at least partially demolished paradise, there was no place for Baiba Liepa. He couldn't imagine her here, in all this light, under all these neon strips that never failed. Nevertheless, he was already beginning to pine for her, and when he'd lugged his suitcase down the long, prison-like corridor to the domestic terminal where he would wait for his connection to Malmö, he was already starting to dream of his return to Riga, to the city where the invisible dogs had been spying on him. The Malmö flight was delayed, and he had been issued with a coupon that entitled him to a sandwich. He had sat for ages in the cafe, watching aircraft taking off and landing in the light snow. All around him men in smart suits were chattering away into mobile phones, and to his astonishment he actually heard an overweight washing-machine salesman jabbering into his monstrous plaything, telling the story of Hansel and Gretel to a child. He found a call box and dialled his daughter's number. To his amazement he got through to her, and felt immediate pleasure on hearing her voice. He toyed briefly with the idea of staying on for a few days in Stockholm, but realised that she was very busy and he didn't raise the subject. Instead, he thought of Baiba, about her fear and her defiance, and he wondered if she really dared to believe that the Swedish police officer wouldn't let her down. What could he possibly do, though? If he were to go back the dogs would pick up his scent, and he would never be able to shake them off.

It was late in the evening by the time he landed at Sturup. There was nobody there to meet him, so he took a taxi into Ystad and from the dark back seat chatted about the weather to the driver, who was going far too fast. When there was nothing more to say about the fog and the snowflakes dancing in the headlights, he suddenly imagined he could smell Baiba Liepa's perfume in the car, and felt anguish at the thought of not seeing her again.

The next day he drove out to see his father at Loderup. The home help had cut his hair for him, and it seemed to Wallander that he was looking healthier than he'd done for years. He'd brought him a bottle of cognac, and his father nodded approvingly when he saw the label.

To his surprise, he'd told his father about Baiba Liepa. They'd been sitting in the old shed his father used as a studio. There was an unfinished canvas on the easel, the unchanging landscape. Wallander could see that it was going to be one with a grouse in the bottom left-hand corner. When he'd arrived with his bottle of cognac, his father had been colouring the grouse's beak, but he'd put down his brush and wiped his hands on a rag smelling of turpentine. Wallander told him about his trip to Riga and then, without really understanding why, he stopped describing the city and told him about the meeting with Baiba Liepa. He didn't mention that she was the widow of a police officer who had been murdered, he only told him her name, said he'd met her and that he missed her.

"Does she have any children?" his father asked.

Wallander shook his head.

"Can she have children?"

"I suppose so. How on earth should I know?"

"You must know how old she is, surely?"

"Younger than I am. About 33, perhaps."

"Then she can have children."

"Why do you want to know if she can have children?" "Because I think that's what you need." "I've got Linda."

"One's not enough. A person has to have at least two children in order to understand what it's all about. Bring her over to Sweden. Marry her!"

"It's not as easy as that."

"Do you have to make everything so damned complicated just because you're a police officer?"

Here we go, Wallander thought. He's off again. The moment you start having a conversation with him he finds some excuse for getting at me because I joined the police force.

"Can you keep a secret?" he asked the old man.

His father eyed him suspiciously. "How could I avoid being able to?" he asked. "Who is there I could tell it to?"

"I'm thinking of packing it in as a police officer," Wallander said. "I might apply for a different job. As a security officer at the rubber factory in Trelleborg. I only said I might."

His father stared at him for some time before replying.

"It's never too late to see sense," he said eventually. "The only thing you'll regret is that it took you so long to make your mind up."

"I only said I might. I didn't say it was definite."

But his father wasn't listening. He'd gone back to the easel and was finishing the grouse's beak. Wallander sat on an old sledge and watched him for a while in silence. Then he went home, thinking how he had nobody to talk to. He was 43 years old, and missed having somebody to confide in. When Rydberg died, he'd become lonelier than he could ever have imagined. The only person he had was Linda. He couldn't talk to Mona, his ex-wife. She'd become a stranger to him, and he knew next to nothing about her life in Malmö.