He might even have been murdered at the police station itself.
He was suddenly shaken out of his train of thought by the sensation of being watched. He looked to either side of him but could see only faces concentrating on the music.
In the broad central choir all he could see was people's backs. He continued looking round until his gaze reached the aisle opposite.
There was Baiba Liepa, in the middle of a pew, amidst a group of old people. She was wearing her fur hat, and looked away once she was certain Wallander had recognised her. For the next hour he tried to avoid looking at her again, but now and then he couldn't resist glancing in her direction, and he could see she was sitting with her eyes closed, listening to the music. Wallander was overcome by a feeling of unreality. Only a few weeks ago her husband had been sitting on his sofa while they'd listened to Maria Callas singing in Turandot, with a blizzard raging outside the windows. Now he was in a church in Riga, the major was dead, and his widow was sitting with her eyes closed, listening to a Bach fugue.
She must know how we're going to get away from here, he thought. She chose the church as a meeting place, not me.
When the concert was over everyone stood up to leave immediately, and there was a bottleneck at the exit. The rush astonished Wallander. It was as if the music had never existed, and the congregation was trying to flee from a bomb scare. He lost sight of Baiba Liepa in the crush, and allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. Just as he reached the porch, he caught sight of her in the shadows of the north transept. He saw her beckoning to him, and turned away from the throng of people elbowing their way towards the door.
'Follow me,' she said. Behind an ancient burial vault was a narrow door, which she opened with a key bigger than her hand. They emerged into a churchyard, she looked around quickly, then hurried on through the decrepit headstones and rusty iron crosses. They left the churchyard through a gate into a back street, and a car with its lights off started its noisy engine, and they scrambled in. This time Wallander was certain the car was a Lada. The man behind the wheel was very young and smoking one of those extra-strong cigarettes. Baiba Liepa smiled quickly at Wallander, shy and uncertain, and they drove out into a wide main thoroughfare Wallander guessed must be Valdemar. They continued north, past a park Wallander remembered from the tour he'd made with Sergeant Zids, and then turned left. Baiba Liepa asked the driver something, and received a shake of the head by way of reply. Wallander noticed the driver checked his rear-view mirror constantly. They turned left again, and suddenly the driver accelerated and made a U-turn. They passed the park again, and Wallander was now sure it was the Verman's Park; then they drove back towards the city centre. Baiba Liepa was leaning forward in her seat, as if giving the driver silent instructions by breathing down the back of his neck. They went along Aspasias Boulevard, passed another of those deserted squares, and crossed a bridge whose name Wallander didn't know.
They came to a district of ramshackle factories and grim housing estates. They seemed to be going more slowly now; Baiba Liepa was leaning back in her seat, and Wallander assumed they were confident that nobody had managed to get on their trail.
Minutes later they drew up outside a rundown, two-storey building. Baiba nodded to Wallander, and they got out. She led him swiftly through an iron gate, up a gravel path, and unlocked a door. Wallander heard the car driving off behind them. He entered a hall that smelt faintly of disinfectant, noting that it was lit by just one dim bulb behind a red cloth shade, and it occurred to him that they could well be at the entrance to a disreputable nightclub. He hung up his thick overcoat, put his jacket over the back of a chair, then followed her into a living room where the first thing he saw was a crucifix hanging on one wall. She switched on some lights, and all at once she seemed quite calm. She signalled him to sit down.
Afterwards, long afterwards, he would be astonished to find he could remember nothing at all about the room in which he had his meetings with Baiba Liepa. The only thing that stuck in his memory was the black, metre-high crucifix hanging between two windows whose curtains were carefully drawn, and the lingering smell of disinfectant in the hall. But as for the worn armchair in which he sat, listening to Baiba Liepa's horrific story – what colour was it? He couldn't remember. It was as if they had talked in a room with invisible furniture. The black crucifix could just as well have been suspended in mid-air, held up by a divine force.
She had been wearing a russet-coloured dress which he later learned the major had bought for her in a department store in Ystad. She had put it on in order to honour his memory, she said, and she'd also thought it would be a reminder of the crime she herself had suffered through the betrayal and murder of her husband. Wallander did most of the talking, asking questions which she answered in her restrained voice.
The first thing they did was to do away with Mr Eckers.
'Why that particular name?' he had asked. 'It's just a name,' she said. 'Maybe there is such a person, maybe not. I made it up. It was easy to remember.' At first she spoke in a way that reminded Wallander of Upitis. It was as if she needed time to close in on the point she may well have been frightened of reaching. He listened attentively, afraid of missing any implied significance -something he had discovered was a feature of Latvian society, but she confirmed Upitis's account of the struggle that was taking place in Latvia. She spoke of revenge and hatred, of a fear that was slowly starting to lose its grip, of a post-war generation that had been suppressed. It seemed to Wallander that she was anti-communist, of course, anti-Soviet, one of the friends of the West that, paradoxically, the Eastern bloc countries had always managed to produce to give succour to their imagined enemies. Nevertheless, she never resorted to making claims she could not support by detailed argument. He realised afterwards that she was trying to get him to understand. She was his teacher, and she didn't want to leave him in ignorance about the circumstances that lay behind the current situation, that explained the events of which it was too soon to establish an overall view. He realised that he had been far too ignorant of what was really going on in Eastern Europe.
'Call me Kurt,' he had said, but she shook her head and continued to keep him at the distance she'd settled on from the start. He would continue to be Mr Wallander.
He had asked her where they were.
'In a flat belonging to a friend,' she told him. 'To endure, and to survive, we have to share everything – the more so as we are living in a country and at a time when everyone is being urged to think only of themselves.'
'As far as I can see, communism is the opposite of that,' Wallander said. 'I thought it claimed that only things thought and carried out collectively were acceptable.'
'That's the way it used to be,' she said. 'But everything was different in those days. It might be possible to recreate that dream some time in the future, perhaps it's impossible to resurrect dead dreams? Just as once you're dead, you're dead forever.'
'What exactly happened?' he asked.
At first she seemed not to understand what he meant, but then she understood that he was asking about her husband.
'Karlis was betrayed and murdered,' she said. 'He had penetrated too far under the surface of a crime too massive, that involved too many important people, for him to be allowed to go on living. He knew he was living dangerously, but he hadn't yet been exposed as a defector. A traitor inside the nomenklatura.'
'He came back from Sweden,' Wallander said. 'He went straight to police headquarters to deliver his report. Did you meet him at the airport?'
'I didn't even know he was coming home,' she answered. 'Perhaps he'd tried to phone, I'll never know. Maybe he'd sent a telegram to the police headquarters and asked them to inform me. I'll never know that either. He didn't call me until he was in Riga. I didn't even have the right food in to celebrate his return. One of my friends gave me a chicken. I'd only just finished preparing the meal when he turned up with that beautiful book.'
Wallander felt a little guilty. The book he had bought, in great haste and without much thought, was lacking in emotional significance. Now, when he heard her speaking of it like this, he felt as if he had deceived her.
'He must have said something when he came home' Wallander said, painfully aware of the limitations of his English vocabulary.
'He was elated,' she said. 'Naturally, he was also worried and furious; but what I shall remember above all is how elated he was.'
'What had happened?'
'He said something had become clear at last. 'Now I'm sure I'm on the right track,' he said, again and again. Since he suspected our flat was bugged, he took me out into the kitchen, turned on the taps, and whispered in my ear. He said he had exposed a conspiracy that was so gross and so barbaric that you people in the West would finally be forced to recognise what was happening in the Baltic countries.'
