Her Enemy (9 page)

The jungle of overgrown grasses ended at the indoor tennis center and a parking lot. If the hockey fans got their way, soon the meadow wouldn’t exist anymore, and a new ice stadium, surrounded by a sea of asphalt, would rise in its place. I had heard that the city council hadn’t had time to deal with anything other than this tug-of-war over the ice rink lately. Looming cuts to social services seemed incidental in comparison.

Mallu wasn’t home. She was probably at her parents’ place. I couldn’t see a telephone booth anywhere close, and hunger gnawed at my stomach, despite Eki’s
pulla
, so I pedaled back to the other side of the bay and home. Perhaps Antti would be in more of a talking mood now.

On the way, I rehearsed what I would say. Fortunately, I didn’t have to interrupt Antti’s work, because he was sitting in the backyard reading.

“Hi, Antti. I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d stop by home. Could we have a talk?”

“Hmm…” came the answer from behind the book.

“I know that Armi’s death is a real shock for you, but this situation isn’t my fault. I’m sorry to involve your relatives. Still, Kimmo asked me to help him, and he’s in a really tough spot. If I’m going to help him, I have to do my job, and that might mean asking some uncomfortable questions.”

The words I was hearing were smoother than I expected to come out of my own mouth. Kind of like a self-help magazine. Still, I forged ahead.

“I’d like to comfort you, but that would require you letting me get close to you. I’m sad too, even though I didn’t know Armi.”

I stopped when I noticed how Antti was shaking, laughing and crying at the same time. Gradually, the mixture of the two emotions gave way to uncontrollable laughter.

“Stop it!” When my shout had no effect, I poured the glass of water sitting next to Antti on his head. Fortunately, that worked, and I didn’t have to resort to slapping him across the face.

“Oh man,” Antti said, still chuckling as he shook his head and pulled me down next to him. “I was so sure you were pissed at me that I had my own speech ready too, and it would have sounded just as fake. Luckily, you beat me to it. How is Kimmo holding up?”

Relieved, I told him the latest news and mentioned that I was planning to do some private investigating.

“Can we talk a little about the people involved in this mess? You know them all so much better than I do.”

“So I get to be Watson?”

“Watson is supposed to worship the ground Sherlock Holmes walks on, and that role doesn’t fit you, even if you are a big enough dope otherwise. And we aren’t Tommy and Tuppence either, just plain old Maria and Antti. Let’s just go make lunch, and you can tell me about Sanna’s death.”

Antti had forgotten to go to the grocery store, but his parents’ pantry still contained a box of pasta and a can of tomato sauce, so I was able to whip up a marinara. Throwing together pasta sauces out of random ingredients hidden in the back corners of my apartment cupboards could actually be considered my culinary specialty. My all-time triumph was a green-pepper–processed-cheese-spread–peanut-butter sauce. Which, believe it
or not, wasn’t disgusting. Now we settled for a more normal combination of crushed tomatoes, onions, cheese, black pepper, and dried basil.

“Well, for starters, I think you’re right that you can’t understand the Hänninen family without knowing about Sanna’s suicide. What do you want me to tell you?” Antti asked as he grated three carrots for us to eat as a salad.

“Just tell me the story again, like you would tell someone who had never heard it before.”

And Antti did. He started with Sanna, for whom the best descriptive adjective was clearly “self-destructive.” Sanna, who theoretically had everything.

She had a good family. Her father was a successful engineer, her mother worked as a teacher, her older stepbrother was happily married, and her younger brother was following in their father’s footsteps.

She was beautiful. She had large eyes the color of dried oak leaves and long, nearly coal-black hair. Her skin was pale, maybe a little sallow from her destructive lifestyle, but flawless otherwise, except of course in the places she had slashed or burned herself. She had a small nose and a large, sensual mouth that would have made even Nicole Kidman jealous. With her slender frame and large breasts, she was an irresistible combination of girlish insecurity and womanly eroticism.

She was gifted. Six perfect scores on her college entrance exams may not have meant all that much, even coming from a rural high school, but admission to the University of Helsinki in French and English did. She had planned to be a teacher; in the Hänninen family, girls followed the path of their mother. Just like in my family—if you didn’t count me.

But Helsinki pulled Sanna away from her studying and dangerously toward darker pursuits. More and more alcohol, drugs, and violent men, some of them actual criminals. There were a couple of abortions, then a drunk-driving conviction that almost landed her in jail.

“After a while, Annamari and Henrik started acting as if Sanna didn’t even exist,” said Antti. “Their daughter was no longer presentable to their circle of friends. They still gave her money but lost interest otherwise. Not that they were great parents to begin with: Henrik has always been away a lot, and Annamari has those obsessive episodes of hers.

“Kimmo was doing his military service when Sanna attempted suicide the first time. It shook the Hänninens a bit, and that was probably what Sanna was looking for. After that, we all tried harder to include her, inviting her to parties and that sort of thing. But she always just got plastered and started making trouble as soon as you let her in the door. Once I had to climb up to pull her down from the Tapiola water tower. When she was sober, she would read and write a lot, and sometimes her grades were even good, but then she would always backslide again.”

According to Antti, Makke’s arrival on the scene that fall before she died cheered Sanna up for a while, as new boyfriends always did. Makke was practically a respectable gentleman compared to the types she usually went out with. I guess he was just starting his drinking career. But because Sanna believed she had found the love of her life, she started to treat every night as if it had to be a party.

On her thirtieth birthday, Sanna had wanted to go out to the Westend breakwater. The winter had been mild, and the seawater was free of ice. Makke and Sanna emptied a bottle of vodka. At some point, Makke passed out on the sand at the swimming
beach, and Sanna went out wading. The shore was quiet even for a Wednesday night in March. Somebody taking his dog out for a pee found Makke on the sand and called the police. Makke later said he didn’t even think about Sanna or what had happened to her until he started sobering up in the drunk tank; he was half-frozen to death himself.

Sanna’s body washed up on shore the next day. On her writing desk at home, between a skull and a black candle, a book lay open to one of her favorite poems: “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, underlined in several places. Antti and Kimmo considered two lines to be evidence of her intention to take her own life: “I am only thirty. And like a cat I have nine times to die.” According to the autopsy, Sanna was intoxicated with alcohol and sedatives, so the police handled the case as an accidental drowning.

“There was nothing suspicious about it?” I asked.

“Annamari wanted Makke charged with criminal negligence, but Eki Henttonen and her husband brought her to her senses. How would that have helped anyone? Nobody, not Makke or anyone else, pushed her into the water. She went in herself. Of her own free will,” Antti said, sopping up the last of his spaghetti sauce with a piece of bread.

“But somehow it feels like too much bad luck for one family,” he went on. “First Sanna. Then Mallu’s miscarriage after years of trying, and her separation from her husband. Now Armi and Kimmo…”

“Miscarriage and separation? What else can you tell me about Mallu?”

“I don’t really know that much. She’s Armi’s sister. An unemployed architectural drafter. Married to a guy named Teemu Laaksonen, who’s some sort of technician. According to Armi,
they had infertility problems, but last November they finally managed to get pregnant. Then they lost the baby in March. Her husband moved out pretty soon afterward.” Antti grimaced. “Sounds pretty bad, even if it is a pretty typical story. Life just goes wrong.”

“No kidding,” I said. “But I think you’re right—it does seem like an awful lot of bad luck for one family.”

Checking the clock, I decided I still had enough time to pay a visit to Armi’s parents, if I picked up the Honda from the office. I called ahead, and after a moment’s resistance, Armi’s father agreed to see me. I would have preferred not to interrupt their grieving, but I had no choice. No one knew more about Armi than they did.

I parked our small black company car in the driveway of the weathered one-and-a-half-story house. The squealing of small children playing came from somewhere farther off. However, at this door, I was met with only silence. Fair-haired and sturdily built, the man who opened the door was obviously Armi’s father. Instead of saying hello, he simply motioned for me to enter.

After all of the homes in Tapiola I had visited where the decorating was obviously the work of a fancy interior designer, the Mäenpääs’ living room felt homey. Exactly the same busy wallpaper and faded plush sofa set as in innumerable other post–World War II–era one-and-a-half-story houses in Finland. On the bookcases, glass knickknacks, trophies, and souvenirs from long-ago trips were more prevalent than books, most of which were
Reader’s Digest Favorites
. These were precisely the sort of people who could give their daughter a beautiful old Finnish name without realizing what a problem it would become once the schoolyard bullies started learning English.

Her face so swollen from crying that her eyes were barely visible, the woman perched on the corner of the sofa shattered the impression of normality. Her shabby black skirt and blouse, which was shiny at the seams, looked as though she had slept
in them. She didn’t seem to notice me at all; she simply stared past me.

“More police?” A young woman dressed in black and wearing an apron appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. It was Mallu, Armi’s sister. We had chatted briefly at the Hänninens’ party on Friday night, but she didn’t seem to recognize me.

“A woman this time, is it?” Mallu continued testily. “Hopefully you’re more respectful than the clods who came before. You’re the third officer to show up here within the past twenty-four hours. I’ll tell you exactly what I told the others: my parents were on an outing with their seniors’ group all yesterday morning. If you want witnesses, at least twenty other people were on the same bus.”

“I’m not with the police. We met the night before last at Risto and Marita Hänninens’ house.”

Mallu looked confused for a moment and then the lightbulb switched on.

“Oh, yeah, you’re Antti’s girlfriend! You just look so different now than you did that night. Why are you—what was your name—here?”

“Maria Kallio. I’m here from Henttonen & Associates. I’m Kimmo Hänninen’s legal counsel,” I said, sounding about as sympathetic as a gravestone peddler.

The mention of Kimmo’s name seemed to smack into the woman hunched on the sofa. Tears began streaming down her frostbitten-apple-colored cheeks again, at which Mallu crossed the room to wrap her arms protectively around her mother.

“I’m very sorry about Armi’s death,” I said in the general direction of the couch. I couldn’t handle looking at her frostbitten-apple cheeks and watering eyes.

“Is this the same Ms. Kallio who found our girl?” Paavo Mäenpää, Armi’s father, asked in his loud, nasty-sounding smoker’s croak.

“How can you be Kimmo’s legal counsel, when you found Armi? Aren’t you almost like a suspect yourself?” Mallu asked with surprising perspicacity.

The question was a good one. No one had questioned my position so far, and no law prohibited me from acting as Kimmo’s legal advisor. However, morally speaking, my situation was definitely awkward. I had wondered a bit why Ström let me off so easily, but perhaps he was just so sure of Kimmo’s guilt that he didn’t feel like wasting his energy on me.

“The police told us so little. Armi was strangled…Was she…Had anything else been done to her?” Armi’s father asked. No doubt he meant to ask if she’d been sexually assaulted, which is what fathers always ask about when their daughters turn up dead.

“Armi was strangled, but nothing else was done to her.”

Nothing else. As though strangulation weren’t enough.

“Um…Did she…Did she suffer much?” he asked, his voice faltering. I thought of Armi’s blue-black face, her tongue lolling out. I thought of the patch of lawn gouged by her pink toenails as she fought for her life.

“It was over quickly. She probably went unconscious within less than a minute.” That sounded like a short amount of time, one minute, although for Armi and her murderer it likely felt like an eternity.

Following these words, a thick fog of silence enveloped us. The sounds of the outside world were muffled, unreal. A clock on the bookcase ticked, as if in a reminder that time at least meant to soldier on.