Fatal Headwind (16 page)

“You’d like to leave, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.” Mikke stared at the sea, his eyes motionless. His eyebrows shone a bright white under his black cap, and angular shadows fell beneath his protruding cheekbones. “I’ll have to wait for Juha’s funeral. He was my only brother after all.”

“The body will be released today. But your leaving depends on more than just his funeral. Right now our forensic team is investigating where you found Juha’s body, even though we can’t see them from here.”

I motioned to the west shore of the island. We looked at the red granite speckled with moss and lichen that concealed the cliffs beyond.

“You lied when you claimed you noticed Juha’s body when you climbed up here to admire the sunset, didn’t you?”

I gave a start when Mikke turned toward me abruptly. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. I stared him down as best I could, as if my gaze could penetrate through his eyes, into his mind, and find out what he was concealing. My stare must have worked, because Mikke turned away and I saw him blush.

“I didn’t mean to lie. I was just embarrassed . . .” Mikke leaned one elbow against the wall, and his face turned to shadow. “I didn’t sleep well, which is normal when I’ve been mixing wine and beer. The wind had changed, so I went to check the
Leanda
’s moorings. Something made me think about what Seija had said about spirits. I don’t believe in any of that, but . . .”

Mikke raised his eyes and tried to look at me, but he couldn’t quite do it. “I brought Harri here last year and then left immediately for my winter trip. I did stop on Föglö to visit my mom on the way, but no one bothered to send news of Harri’s death. I didn’t hear anything about it until January, when I got stuck in Portugal for several weeks with some keel damage. Seija sent me a letter telling me about the accident. I don’t know if I would have turned around for the funeral. Probably. Harri was one of my best friends. It was my fault he ended up dying here. I was the one who suggested he catalog the birds on Rödskär.”

I listened to Mikke’s monologue without interrupting. I couldn’t help the fact that I liked being close to him, even though fate had thrown us together as adversaries in a murder investigation. At the same time I feared that others would notice, so I was trying desperately to treat Mikke as if he were any other person I had to interview.

“All Saturday I wanted to go to the place where Harri fell—it had been a year, and it seemed a good way to honor him, but I couldn’t upset Anne by reminding her of the incident,” Mikke continued. “Sunday morning seemed like a good time for it, since I was alone. I walked to the shore and . . . at first I thought I was seeing things. Then when I realized there really was a flesh-and-blood person down on the rocks; I slipped too out of sheer terror. There wasn’t anything I could do for Juha. And then I had to go tell the family that I . . . that I had found Juha’s body. Oh God, it was horrible!”

Mikke leaned against the glass dome of the spotlight, and his right hand wiped his forehead. I would have wanted to say something completely different, but I continued my questioning.

“What else did you find besides Juha’s body?”

“What do you mean?”

“That wound on the side of his head didn’t make itself. I’d like to have what he was hit with. Did you see it?”

“There wasn’t anything.”

Mikke’s voice was flat, and I was sure he was lying. I also kept thinking about the fact that it was Mikke who had brought Harri to the island on the weekend of his death. Could Mikke have pushed Harri off the rocks before he left? But why? What reason could anyone have had for killing Harri?

“Did you like your brother?”

“Yeah, one summer at a time with him was fine.” Mikke pulled a pipe out of his pocket and started to carefully knock the half-burned tobacco into a fabric bag. “Juha didn’t particularly like my way of life. He said he could understand a younger man wanting to sail around the world, but at thirty-four it was high time that I settle down and start a family. I guess that heart attack last winter scared him, because he was trying to convince me to buy back into the company and come on as some kind of vice president.”

“But you wouldn’t do it?”

A cargo ship had appeared on the horizon, and I tried to shade my face with my hand to see better, but it didn’t help. I closed my eyes, and the sun sent bright spots through my eyelids. Koivu would be wondering why we were taking so long in the lighthouse, but I didn’t want to go down quite yet.

“Whenever fall rolls around I start itching to get away from the Finnish winter. But in the summer I don’t know any finer place than the Finnish archipelago, although this year it was quite a sight with all the cyanobacteria blooms. That makes me so mad sometimes.”

Mikke had his pipe clean now and started to fill it again. Just then my cell phone rang. Forensics reported that the diver had found a pair of glasses in the water.

“I’ll come look.” I motioned for Mikke to follow, and asked him to walk to where he found Juha’s body by the same route he used Sunday morning. He started striding with his long, slender legs across the grass browned by the frost, not giving me time to yell to Koivu to follow us.

“At what point did you see the body?” I asked when we reached the edge of the cliff.

“Somewhere about here, where you start to see the shore . . . I don’t remember exactly. I was so startled.”

Forensics was still combing the shore, even though Hakkarainen had been sure that anything there was to find had been found on Sunday. The diver was taking a break, and in his dry suit and breathing apparatus, he was like some kind of monster plucked out of an alternate reality. The two forensic technicians in their white suits only heightened the unreal feeling of the investigation.

“You said you tripped and almost slipped on top of your brother’s body. Let’s try to figure out what position Juha was in when you found him. Turunen!” I yelled to the diver. “Can you play a body for us? Hakkarainen, take some pictures!”

Turunen awkwardly waded into the water while I carefully inched my way down the rocks. Mikke Sjöberg’s face had turned the same color as the clamshells being washed around by the waves and he clenched his teeth so hard, his cheek muscles tensed like a trumpet player’s.

“OK, tell him what to do,” I told Mikke.

“A little to the left. Put your arms out, your left one between those rocks. The legs were different, more spread out . . .”

Even though I felt cruel doing it, I asked Mikke to show us how he had reached his brother and moved his body. Sliding dangerously down the steep-angled rock, he waded so deep that his boots almost filled with water; then he jerked Turunen into a half-sitting position as lightly as if he were a doll.

“I can’t pull him like I did with Juha,” he shouted. “I’d hurt him!”

“That’s enough!” I replied and Mikke released Turunen’s ankles. Then he covered his face for a moment. I told Turunen to get up and turned to Hakkarainen. He was looking at a pair of stylish blue-rimmed glasses in a plastic bag. They were clearly a men’s model. I couldn’t remember what kind of glasses Juha Merivaara wore. I had to ask Mikke for confirmation.

“Yes, those are Juha’s glasses,” he said, then he started walking back uphill. My phone rang again. Koivu was wondering what would happen next.

“Did we bring any food? I’m starving,” he complained.

“We have some sandwiches, but come down to the shore first. We need to do some brainstorming. The diver isn’t even close to done.”

Climbing up after Mikke, I said that he could go inside with Tapio Holma. Just so long as he didn’t leave, I added sternly. What kind of relationship did Sjöberg and Holma have? I couldn’t imagine either of them judging the other’s life choices as Juha Merivaara had done to both of them. Letting them be together didn’t matter anymore. If they had wanted to plot, they would have had plenty of time to do it already.

“I’m famished with this hangover,” Koivu said, still complaining as he arrived at the cliff. “I could go for a big steak and fries or maybe a pepperoni pizza.”

“We’re going to have to make do with cheese sandwiches. Let’s have another look at where Merivaara fell first. So after being hit in the head, apparently he fell about here and then slipped down the cliff. Good choice of a place for a murder. If the wind hadn’t been coming straight from the west, the body could have just floated out to sea and maybe never have been found.”

“Could that indicate that the killer wasn’t able to read the wind very well, so he thought the water would carry the body out anyway?” Koivu asked.

“Maybe,” I said, although Tapio Holma was the only member of the party who was so inexperienced that he could have made a mistake like that. Or could it really have been someone else who came to the island? But who, and why?

“Pretty nice artillery holes,” Koivu said, indicating the rock wall. “What are those from? The Continuation War?”

“I think they’re earlier. You remember the Battle of Bomarsund, right? The fighting stretched all the way out here. There’s more damage on the south shore. The grand English navy bombarded the fortress in the summer of 1854, but the Finnish troops defended valiantly and the landing was repelled,” I said, repeating Anne Merivaara’s history lecture.

For a moment I was lost in thoughts of how Rödskär must have looked 140 years earlier. I could almost see the three-masters approaching from the south with an officer in a bicorne hat on the deck yelling “Fire!” For some reason the idea made me shudder. What had Seija Saarela said about a curse and negative energy?

I didn’t believe in any of that. Rational inference, scientific analysis, and knowledge of human nature were more my thing. That was how you solved crimes. The truth wasn’t somewhere “out there” and it wasn’t going to appear to me like some sort of magical apparition. Doing the hard work of dredging up scraps of evidence was the only way we were going to bring Juha Merivaara’s murderer to justice.

“You mentioned something about sandwiches,” Koivu said, interrupting my musings.

“There’s a bag in the boat. Go grab it. If we’re lucky there might be coffee in the hut. Or at least some herbal tea. I’ll look. Bring the water too.”

Tapio Holma was lying in the hut with headphones on, and Mikke Sjöberg was still studying his map. Rummaging through the cupboards, I found some instant coffee and three different herbal teas. I asked the men if they wanted anything to drink.

“I could take some peppermint tea,” Holma said. “There should be some rye crisps somewhere too. Will we be here much longer?”

I said I didn’t know. Waiting made me antsy too. I had a million things to do back at the office. Koivu came in out of breath, carrying the water and sandwiches, and I lit the gas.

“I can do that,” Mikke said. “A police lieutenant shouldn’t have to make coffee.”

I heard the teasing in his voice and couldn’t help smiling. He smiled back, and I asked whether he wanted coffee or tea.

“Anne’s ethical coffee is pretty good.”

“I used to drink quarts of it at the university café,” I replied, then went outside to talk to Forensics again. Focusing on work seemed the only way to curb my flirtatious side.

Turunen complained about how murky the water was and how muddy the bottom was. Without several divers and heavy equipment, there wasn’t any point trying to cover a larger area. And that would be a huge waste of money, since we didn’t even know what we were looking for.

“A flashlight would be a logical weapon,” Turunen suggested. “It’s the right shape and it has glass that can break when you hit someone. And since the murder happened at night . . .”

I had thought the same thing. A flashlight was also small and a common-enough object that anyone could have taken it with them off the island, which would make our searching completely pointless.

We decided to leave Rödskär after lunch. Walking around to the southern tip of the island, I took a moment to admire the red granite lighthouse standing against the deep-blue sky and the light glinting off the calm water. Tonight would be cold. I pressed my hands against the granite, which the sun was too weak to warm anymore. A chill spread through my arms. I picked up a coin-size piece of red granite shot through with white quartz and put it in my pocket as I walked back for coffee and a sandwich.

Turunen and Hakkarainen’s assistant were talking about the upcoming weekend’s Formula 1 races while the others ate in silence. I found myself glancing at Mikke too often and mentally kicked myself in the shin.

On the boat the card-playing resumed, and, with the help of another Dramamine, Koivu joined in. Borrowing his scarf and wrapping it around my ears, I went up on deck with the captain and Mikke. Rödskär was still visible on the horizon behind us as the southern islands off Espoo appeared ahead. I sat down next to Mikke—if you wanted to talk over the noise of the engine, you had to be close.

“Seija Saarela is easiest to get hold of at home, right?”

“She doesn’t have a steady job. Are you going to go harass her next?”

Instead of answering, I turned my face toward the sun, which was already so low in the sky that it reflected as a shimmering pillar in the water. A pair of gulls screeched above us, and my nose started getting cold.

“You said Juha’s body was going to be released.”

I nodded, wrapping my jacket tighter around me. The smartest thing would have been to go into the cabin to get warm, but good sense had never been one of my best qualities.

“He’ll probably be cremated. I’m sure he would have wanted to have his ashes scattered at sea. You can still do that nowadays, right?”

“Yes, you can.”

“I would want to die at sea too, but not without any preparation like Harri and Juha. I’d prefer a storm, fighting against the sea. But based on the family’s male genetics, I’ll probably die of a heart attack.” Mikke grinned dryly and put his hand up on the backrest of the bench we were sitting on, almost touching my shoulder.

“Have you ever been in serious danger at sea?”

“A few times. The worst situation was on the Indian Ocean when I was doing my solo circumnavigation. East of the Chagos Islands I got hit with this terrible stomach bug. I had a fever for days and couldn’t keep anything down. On the fourth day a small cyclone came up from the south. I was so weak that I just couldn’t control the boat, and it took on a lot of water. Something made me hold on, though, and I managed to throw out the drag anchor, which is what saved me. And once off the shore of northern Spain I had a rudder break. Luckily the Coast Guard came to the rescue before I floated out into the Atlantic.” Mikke paused for thirty seconds, then looked straight into my eyes. “And what about you? Have you ever been in danger?”