TH02 - The Priest of Evil (18 page)

‘These guys should be strung up by the balls and have a hot poker shoved up their arse,’ Piipponen growled, his moustache quivering. ‘You know what this means, we’ll be doing nothing but answering reporters’
phone calls all day. And before you know it the TV news will expect some kind of comment.’

‘Who could have done this? Surely not Mäki.’

‘Hang on,’ Piipponen exclaimed. He began leafing through the newspaper, trying to find the lead article, and after scanning through it for a moment he read, ‘“According to police sources…”’

‘You know what that means.’

‘Not a clue.’

‘It means,“According to some half-wit mole…”’

‘Shit…’

Harjunpää was already thinking frantically about who could have been behind it. Apart from himself, the only people who knew about the case in detail were Mäki, Onerva and Piipponen. Of course, then there was everyone at forensics, as well as the whole team at the Crime Squad; after all, they had all gone through the case together in the coffee room. The reality was that any one of thousands of police officers could have been responsible for the leak: all it would have taken was access to the squad’s case files.

‘What are you looking at me for?’ Piipponen snapped and his eyes widened. He was shocked, and stood tapping his fingers against his chest, making his voice shake. ‘You’re not suggesting I had anything to do with…?’

‘Of course I’m not. I was just thinking and stared at you by accident.’

‘Harjunpää, for Christ’s sake don’t go spreading things like that.’

‘Of course not… We’re having a meeting in Mäki’s office at quarter to.’

‘You know what?’ said Piipponen slowly, as if something very important had just occurred to him. ‘There is a silver lining to all this.’

‘And that is…?’

‘All the chief inspectors will have got wind of this, and the ministers. They’re bound to be interested. It’ll give the whole investigation a boost. We’ll all be put on overtime – a suspected serial killer! We’ll get this case rolling once and for all!’

‘Which means we can look forward to spending all our evenings and weekends here too. Thanks very much, but I’d be happy with your basic bread-and-butter policing,’ Harjunpää muttered as he turned on the tap again. His mouth suddenly felt horribly dry. Piipponen slammed the door
shut behind him and a moment later, echoing further along the corridor, Harjunpää could hear him singing yet again.

‘
Ecce sum cumbale
,’ he groaned, heavy and frustrated. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly he was too close to the church, which stood barely fifteen metres away. He was sitting in the park outside Kallion kirkko, as inconspicuous as the shadow of the bushes nearby; a black evil radiated from the church’s grey granite walls – it was almost palpable – while the wail of thousands upon thousands of people killed in the name of Christian heresy rang in his ears.

Secondly, he had deviated from his usual routine. Previously he had always selected his victims at the underground station, at the last minute - just before the arrival of the Orange Apostle; but this time he had planned everything in advance and now lay in wait for the chosen one. From this vantage point he had an unobstructed view of the iron gate leading into the courtyard of the house on Neljäs Linja. The door of number 24 opened out into the street while all the others opened into the courtyard. There was no possible way he could miss Mikko Matias Moisio slipping off to the underground station.

‘
Prate Mamolae non
?’ he uttered, looking for an answer within himself. For this was the worst of his problems: Maammo had not appeared to him. He had remained awake and wandered praying through his underground temples until the early hours, but nothing had happened. Only once had he discerned a faint bluish green glimmer in the wall of the tunnel leading north east, but when he had run up to the spot it had disappeared. He could not understand what was happening. Did Maammo not wish for him to sacrifice this Mikko Matias? Not at all? Or simply not on that particular day? Perhaps Maammo wished merely to test him. Precipitating the New Big Bang was a task requiring the utmost trust and skill, and perhaps Maammo wished to test whether he was capable. He sat, pondering.

From further down the hill came the pulse of the morning rush hour traffic along Hämeentie like water running through a brook. A van
rumbled along Neljäs Linja, shuddering across the cobbles; a lark was singing; on the fourth floor of Mikko Matias’ building someone closed a window; and at the edge of the park an old woman appeared walking a dog the size of a cockroach. From out of nowhere a flock of jackdaws rose into flight, and for a brief moment the air was filled with their noisy squawking. Was this a message from Maammo? Perhaps Maammo had instructed them to nest near the church in order to keep an eye on the evil plotting priests. Suddenly the black iron gate of number 24 was pushed open.

A man stepped out on to the street; he was on the thin side and had bad posture. He was carrying a brown leather case; he checked his watch. There was not a shred of doubt: this was Mikko Matias Moisio, the chosen victim – he could tell from his overgrown hair and profile; his nose was larger than average. The straggling tufts of hair across his cheeks sealed the matter once and for all.

‘
Ea
lesum cum sabateum
,’ he proclaimed and held his breath. He waited to see which route the man would take: would he turn first into Suonionkatu then along Kolmas Linja or would he take the road straight down the hill along Siltasaarenkatu? He glanced in passing at the window of a shop on the corner. It was filled with corsets and brassieres and lace underwear, all items that lured men into sin and lewdness. On his way to the park he had noticed them and had made the first sign of the curse in front of each window.

The man continued straight ahead past the colossal church building. This too had horrified him: an entire block of flats filled with priests! The man then turned at the next corner – this was the most obvious route, as there was an entrance to the underground station at the bottom of the hill. Just before the man disappeared from view he quickly made the sign of the holy diamond. In this way there would always be an unbreakable connection between them. Even if he disappeared from view, the mark of the diamond meant he would be able to find the man again and again.

He crossed the road and made his way towards Suonionkatu. A shudder ran through him as he passed the house of priests, but once at the corner he could see Moisio again: he was already halfway down the
hill. He was a writer, and he began to wonder whether a writer – an artist – would produce a swirl different from those of other people as the spirit left the body.

And despite his initial hesitation he now felt more strongly than ever before that, in good time, all this would become clear to him.

They had all crammed into Mäki’s office. Mäki himself was sitting at the edge of his desk and for once even he seemed uncertain as he flicked distractedly through the Statute Book. Onerva, Piipponen and Harjunpää were all present, as was Rantanen, the new chief of the Violent Crimes Division. He was a youngish man, apparently the youngest chief the Crime Squad had ever had, but in a short space of time he had achieved a great deal - solving a few old stagnating cases, and without stepping on anyone else’s toes in the process. To everyone’s astonishment he had even got the old screws to put in a bit more effort.

‘These are the facts,’ said Rantanen, absent-mindedly scratching his chin.

‘And there are still two conflicting witness-statements regarding the first case?’

‘Yes. One says the woman barged into the victim, the other says the exact opposite.’

‘Whichever way you look at it, it seems to me that everything points towards it being an accident.’

‘Then why didn’t the woman come forward?’ exclaimed Piipponen, exasperated. Harjunpää rubbed his eyes. From the outset he had sensed that, of all of them, Piipponen was the one who most wanted to turn these cases into murder investigations.

‘And what if she quite simply didn’t see the headline? She may not have noticed what happened in the slightest.’

‘Or she noticed but felt too guilt-ridden to come forward.’

Harjunpää half closed his eyes. He was certain that what little information they had was not enough to start investigating these deaths as homicides. Their only hope was to try and obtain more evidence, but he didn’t have the
faintest idea how. The investigation had come to a standstill, all they could do was go over the same information time and again, just as they had done the day before, and Harjunpää suddenly had the feeling that even Rantanen was at a loss. Given the circumstances this was no great surprise.

‘It can’t just be a coincidence that we have two very similar fatalities and a woman fitting the same description present on both occasions,’ said Piipponen emphatically, and Harjunpää remembered what Onerva had told him earlier: year after year Piipponen was always at the top of the overtime list.

‘That is a point worth noting,’ said Rantanen. ‘But even that doesn’t bring us close to what might be considered “reasonable doubt”. Timo, what’s your honest opinion of our witness?’

‘You mean Kallio? I do believe we should take him seriously. He’s got all his marbles about him, but as we mentioned yesterday, and as he himself said, he does have compulsive spasms that affect his head, and that’s why he can’t maintain eye contact for long.’

‘We’ve arranged another interview with him later on today,’ said Onerva. ‘We’ll show him some photographs. And just for the record, I checked our databases with a number of different word combinations but there doesn’t seem to be any woman matching this description on file.’

‘OK,’ Rantanen sighed. He looked each of them in the eye in turn. ‘As far as I can see we don’t have enough evidence to turn this into a murder investigation at the present time.’

Piipponen drew a sharp, hissing breath through his teeth, showing his disbelief at the stupidity of this decision.

‘But let’s keep our options open,’ Rantanen added. ‘We need to approach this on two fronts. First we need to try and get more evidence of any potential crime, let’s not rule anything out just yet. That might mean talking to people travelling on the underground during rush hour, but I’ll leave that up to Mäki.’

‘So it’s full steam ahead?’

‘Yes. The other line of enquiry is to ascertain who this woman is. And if it turns out she was at the scene then we get her in for questioning, at the very least as a witness. That way this case should start opening up.’

‘So that means we can put in for overtime?’

‘As Mäki sees necessary at this point.’

‘Yes!’

‘But if I find out who leaked unsubstantiated information to the press, I’ll skin him alive. You can imagine the flood of calls I’ve had to deal with this morning…’

No one said a thing. Not even Piipponen.

Every time he stepped into the underground station the same smell wafted towards him - damp stone, like something ripped apart - and he didn’t like it. For Mikko it signified the journey to his strange workroom, the smell of hopeless attempts at writing and constant failure. But this time he barely noticed it. A dilemma spun through his mind: should he call them or not? And as he was already halfway down the clunking escalator at Hakaniemi station, on some level he had already decided not to make the call.

It simply wasn’t the done thing to pop round to his parents’ apartment. He had to be invited, or rather summoned: “Come round for coffee tomorrow at two.” Mikko had never been able to say no; at most he may have mumbled something indistinct about having something else to do, but it was useless – by the appointed time he would always be there. Whenever he turned up of his own accord, uninvited, he was always chided for having upset their ‘schedule’ or their ‘timetable’. This despite the fact that his parents were both retired.

His journey to Kontula was hampered by an inexplicable anxiety – all he could do was try, try, try, churning out first one page, then another; a third, a hundredth, a thousandth. Yet not a single one of them could he accept, for they all had the same fatal flaw: they lacked rhythm. They were nothing but lists of words, one after the other. They didn’t ring properly, they lacked that sense of smoothness, like when you run your hand along a steel bar: it slides seamlessly. Never before had he churned out as many empty pages as now; so many thousands of pages that he had stopped counting them over two years ago.

The handrail was moving marginally faster than the escalator itself and his body stretched forward awkwardly. He adjusted his position and switched his satchel to his other hand. It was the same satchel that years ago he had taken to school, it even had an old-fashioned buckle. Another reason to make the call and go to Eira was because he simply couldn’t carry on like this, living between two expensive apartments, neither of which was conducive to doing any work. It was a cold fact, but he had no other option. The bank had refused him a loan, the manager’s argument being that his artistic funding was not considered sufficient income, let alone the fact that it was only temporary and would run out in less than a year’s time. Even his wages from the post office had been considered too meagre.

According to the screen the next train would be arriving in four minutes: this gave him another moment to think things through. On the down side, going to Eira always unnerved him well in advance, and this time he had been nervous from the moment he had promised Kikka he would do it. After every visit he felt depressed, humiliated even, to the extent that he was unable to write anything. All he could do was sit slumped at his desk, his forehead resting against the cover of the typewriter.

Three minutes until the train arrived. Almost without realising it he slipped his hand down to the mobile phone case on his belt, but he didn’t open it yet; and just then he sensed it more strongly than ever: it was as if someone were staring at him. Watching him, observing him, standing too close. He took a few steps to one side and slowly turned around. No, there was no one looking at him, everybody looked just as closed and indifferent as always. But still the feeling wouldn’t go away. It brought with it a fear, almost like when as a child he needed the toilet in the middle of the night but was afraid the Cupboard Monster was lurking behind him. What was going on? It startled him: on top of everything else - the writing, the loneliness - was he now becoming paranoid?