TH03 - To Steal Her Love (10 page)

It was just before four in the afternoon, but Harjunpää decided to give it one more go; he tried to suppress the murky feeling that had nested in his mind that he was up against an insurmountable mystical force. He dialled the number, and after a few rings the tape cut in:
You have reached the answering machine for senior citizens’ officer Kaisa Salin at the Department of Social Services. I will be unavailable today. In urgent matters, please contact my colleague, officer Timo Väänänen, on extension
… Harjunpää had already written down the number and he knew what was going to happen, but he dialled the extension nonetheless and it went straight on to the tape:
You have reached the answering machine for senior citizens’ officer Timo Väänänen at the Department of Social Services. I will be unable to answer the telephone today. In urgent matters, please contact my colleague, officer Kaisa Salin, on
extension
number…

He put the receiver back in place and looked out of the window; far behind the horizon lay Kirkkonummi, Elisa, the girls and Grandpa.

‘Same again?’ asked Onerva, her knitting needles clacking. Harjunpää nodded; he didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. He’d managed to get hold of Ms Salin last week and they’d almost ended up having an argument: as she saw it, Grandpa wasn’t a lonely old man without a home or a carer and therefore his case wasn’t considered urgent, and her opinion remained unchanged despite Harjunpää’s explanation of why things were the way they were. On top of that there had been something in her tone of voice that had made Harjunpää feel like the villain of the piece and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to contact her
again. He didn’t know what to do. He felt caught in one of life’s
mysterious
traps.

‘I’ve had an idea. It’s pretty simple, but it’s good,’ said Onerva. She was sitting in front of a map, knitting; it looked so down-to-earth and made him think of autumn. Harjunpää was used to seeing Onerva at work with a pair of knitting needles in her hands and he’d learned that from the point of view of their ongoing investigations it could only mean good. When Onerva was knitting she was connected to a power concealed within her and, as strange as it sounded, it was at these moments that her mind brought fresh ideas to the problems at hand.

‘Yes?’

‘It seems from the interview transcripts that all these women had spent the evening in a bar somewhere, but only Meriläinen’s report mentioned where she’d been: the Hotel Inter.’

‘OK,’ Harjunpää mumbled and didn’t quite follow; he was still
thinking
about Salin and what old people must feel like every time they reach her answering machine.

‘So tomorrow we’ll call all these women and ask them where they’d spent the evening. And I bet we’re talking about no more than maybe three locations.’

‘Right,’ said Harjunpää, suddenly smiling: it seemed so simple and yet so utterly sensible. ‘And we’ll visit these places and ask them if they’ve got a regular customer that looks like a chaffinch.’

‘Or whether anybody’s seen somebody matching the description on the street. In one of the doorways opposite, perhaps.’

They had gone through all the reports and transcripts several times (there were now twenty-six separate incident reports and as many red pins on Harjunpää’s map, most of them in the Töölö area) and they all followed the same basic pattern: the victim had left a bar fairly drunk and come home, often with a man they had only met that same evening, and woken up in the early hours as the man had started caressing her again, only to discover that there was a third person in the apartment. The intruder had then fled immediately and no one had been able to give a detailed description of him due to the darkness, let alone identify him from photographs. Many had stated that the bathroom light was switched on. None of the victims had claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the intruder, and the medical examiner’s reports had
remained inconclusive because each woman had already engaged in intercourse with the man she had brought home.

‘What do you think?’ Onerva asked. ‘We’ll let Lampinen and Juslin concentrate on Nikander as much as they want to, yes?’

‘I was thinking along the same lines… Now I understand the whole thing with the bathroom light: he switches it on so that enough light seeps through the doorway for him to see properly and to escape if necessary. And both people who live in the flat think the other forgot to turn the light off.’

‘That could well be it. And I was thinking: if we now have twenty-six reported incidents, there’ll probably be just as many who have noticed something but haven’t reported it. And how many women haven’t noticed anything at all?’

The telephone rang.

‘Harjunpää.’

‘Hi, it’s me,’ said Elisa, and Harjunpää knew from her voice that something was wrong. ‘Timo, I’d arranged a doctor’s appointment for four o’clock, and Grandpa knew about it, but now I’ve been looking for him for half an hour and I can’t find him anywhere.’

Harjunpää drew a breath; Grandpa had gone missing several times before.

‘Did you go down to the phone box?’

‘That’s where I went first. They haven’t seen him at the shop either.’

‘What about the girls?’

‘They’re all at home. Ari said he’d seen an old man standing up on the hillside about an hour ago…’

Harjunpää rubbed his forehead. There were a number of paths leading down the hill, the majority of which led to other clusters of houses, but those on the left went first to the meadows then on to the swamp, and after that there was nothing but forest for about ten kilometres.

‘Should we call the police?’

‘Not yet. I’ll be there in an hour, let’s see if we can find him first,’ Harjunpää tried to keep her calm, though he felt so worked up himself that he wondered whether or not to go down to the parking bay, take one of the police cars and speed back home.

‘Timo… I think he’s trying to avoid the doctor. And his nitrate tablets are still on the hall table.’

‘Have another look for him. Look through the neighbours’ gardens. And I’ll be there in an hour…’

Onerva looked at him quizzically.

‘Grandpa’s gone missing,’ he said, went over to the wardrobe and picked up his jacket. ‘Sometimes he just can’t seem to find his way home.’

‘Good day, one and all,’ said Lampinen who had appeared at the door with Juslin lurking behind him. ‘What kind of blooding sewing group do you call this? In case you’re interested, Nikander’s been hanging around the city centre all afternoon. In Töölö, to be specific. It’s as if he’s casing the area in advance so he can have his way at night.’

‘And he’s one hell of a letch,’ growled Juslin. ‘You should see his head spin whenever a woman walks past him. I can see him there in the dark: some sweetheart lying there virtually unconscious, legs akimbo, naked as the day she was born. And he puts his hand down on her thigh, gives her a little squeeze… Breasts like foxes’ muzzles, he has a little suckle… and… and his fingers start stroking her bush and he’s… He’s probably got a different woman every night. What a fucking pig!’

‘But we’re going to get him. We’ll set him a trap he can’t…’

‘Is it all right if we talk about this tomorrow? I’ve got to go.’

‘Well! I suppose it’ll have to be all right,’ Lampinen said, then nodded at Onerva’s knitting. ‘I hear people actually pay you for those things, those… let’s call them rags.’

‘That’s right. I get the money brought round in a wheelbarrow twice a week.’

‘Get away,’ Lampinen scoffed, his interest growing, and a glimmer of envy flashed across his face. ‘Well, when I’ve been out round town with the missus I’ve seen people pay over 600 marks for those things… And when you make them on duty, and add that on to your police salary, I bet you make a nice healthy profit.’

‘Goodness, you think just the same way I do.’

‘I take it you’ve got a secondary occupation licence for that?’ he asked, apparently in jest. ‘I used to do a few shifts as a doorman, and you could even say that’s related to police work, the things you hear… But one day they demanded to see a licence and the squad didn’t grant me one. You can imagine what it’s like trying to pay off the mortgage on this wage.’

‘I’m off. Onerva, will you lock the door?’ said Harjunpää and left the room, though even in the corridor he could hear Onerva laughing.

‘Buy some needles and get knitting. We could set up shop together.’ Harjunpää strode along the pavement towards Pasila train station. Holding it by his finger, his jacket dangled over his shoulder and sand crunched beneath his feet, and he kept telling himself that in all probability Grandpa had already returned home. But like some kind of life jacket he thought that, if Grandpa were still in the woods, the most obvious place for him to go was Pilvikallio; Grandpa had been very taken with the place when they’d been out picking mushrooms. His third thought sent a shudder through him, though he knew that Grandpa didn’t want to end up in an institution.

‘Who’s that walking so fast? Whoever it is, you can tell by his steps that he’s superintendent material.’

Harjunpää turned around; he’d heard quickening footsteps behind him a moment earlier. The Bogey Man was standing behind him. He hadn’t noticed where the chief had sprung from; he certainly wasn’t among the commuter regulars.

‘Afternoon.’

‘Quite the Indian summer,’ said Kontio, and Harjunpää slowed his step a little though he didn’t want to – perhaps he did it out of politeness or surprise, as Kontio was never seen talking to people from other units.

‘Can’t complain, I suppose…’

‘I’ve got a spot of business over at the eastern building. I hear you’re pretty busy down at Violent Crimes.’

‘We’re never short of cases.’

‘What was it I heard today – was it in the canteen? Apparently you’ve got a case so big you’re coordinating a Combat unit.’

‘Well, we’re just liaising really.’

‘You see, Harjunpää,’ Kontio lowered his voice and glanced behind him as if to make sure nobody was listening in. ‘To be honest, we’re on similar ground, you and me, and it’s all a bit delicate.’

‘Yes?’

‘My boys are still looking into the Finnair deposit-box job. And between you and me they’re pretty sure who did it. You might know him, one Reino Leinonen.’

‘Can’t say I do, sir.’

‘Be that as it may, my boys are keeping an eye on him. But what with your case, Lampinen’s watching him too now. My lads are worried it’s going to blow the whole operation.’

‘There must be some misunderstanding… Our suspect doesn’t officially have a name yet. One rather weak suggestion is Klaus Nikander. Lampinen’s been following him.’

‘Listen, Harjunpää,’ said Kontio firmly, like someone who knows better. He stopped by the entrance to the underpass and Harjunpää stopped too; he had no choice. ‘You know I’m not on good terms with Järvi and his team. They’ll make things hard for me out of pure spite. Make sure this Leinonen isn’t watched any more.’

‘But how can I…?’

‘Make sure he isn’t watched, or it could cause the investigation a whole range of problems if there are too many people sniffing around him.’

Kontio gave him a curt wave and turned, and he was soon halfway along the tunnel and his dark, stout back seemed to be repeating:
Make sure he isn’t watched.

Harjunpää walked up to the platform. He felt clammy and dirty, as though his soul needed a shower, then he remembered the autopsy and the smell of the pathology lab: after all these years of routine he’d started to feel nauseous. What was that all about? And as for the water body, he was still none the wiser. There was still nobody he could visit, nobody he could tell, ‘We’ve found your husband. Your father’.

Night was burgeoning; stars shone clearly above the birches. Tweety was on watch in the hayfield outside the workshop. He didn’t like it, and he didn’t like the fact that Reino was so nervous. Everything seemed like proof that an unknown danger was threatening them, that the Chancellor was just as evil as his powers, turning God into an angry old man with eyes of fire, his hands already fingering the enormous boulder he was about to cast down upon them.

He crouched down by the front wheel of a broken bulldozer, as small and invisible as he could, just outside the light shining out from behind the workshop door, and watched Lasse’s cottage. The lights were on. The women were all in there, even Mother Gold. Reino had rented some videos and bought them a bottle of wine and told Bamse to keep everyone there. Tweety was keeping watch on the path and that’s what he was most afraid of, because if anything bad arrived, that’s where it would come from and its name would be Police. Without noticing it, he was staring more at the cottage.

The city lights glowed on the horizon; the traffic on Suurmetsäntie made a constant humming noise and a train juddered along the railway tracks. The path remained deserted and the cottage was quiet.

‘Come on, Lasse, make it work,’ Tweety beseeched for the umpteenth time, and for Lasse’s sake he truly hoped it would work – Lasse was pissed off that everything was always down to him – but also for the sake of the Chancellor and all the good it would bring them, and because he was consumed once again by the Power and it was being wasted as he crouched there. Besides, it hindered his job. He saw and heard far too
much, how worms writhed in the mud, how moths called to one another and how fairies flew down from the hedgerow and made love with the pinecones.

In addition to this he was able to make out the night’s real messages. They were similar to those given off by deserted houses and aspen forests, but these messages emanated from the city centre, and before them he was powerless when he shut his eyes. He could just make out the clip-clop of high heels and bright laughter – and all of a sudden his face was
transformed
into a blonde woman’s breasts and his eyes were her nipples, staring unflinchingly in order to see, though through the lace and the jumper everything looked like it was behind a cloud of curtains. But this woman through whom he looked out at the world was just then in a restaurant toilet; someone came out of the cubicle and adjusted her clothes and a very dark-haired woman was putting on more rouge, her lips almost touching the mirror, and her movements were unbelievably soft and dainty – she could be herself when men weren’t watching her.

Tweety opened his eyes and fidgeted, and the night sucked at him so hard that his lips were sore. He tilted his head and tried to follow what was happening in the workshop. Reino was listing everything Lasse would be able to buy his wife and kids after they’d finished with the Chancellor. This showed just how stupid he was: Reino didn’t understand that Lasse was thin because he had bird-bones and that was why it was no use
shouting
at him. Lasse had to be left in peace by himself to get on with things.

‘Will you shut the fuck up?’ he snapped, to which Reino replied, ‘Well, is it going to work or not?’

‘Not with you jabbering on all the time. Anyway, it’s nearly there. If only I could work out what that symbol means. Should I put the black in there or the red?’

‘Let’s have a look. If it’s red, it’ll link the whole damned circuit back round there.’

‘No it won’t, because I broke the connection over there.’

‘Well, switch the power on and we’ll have a look.’

Tweety tasted the sound of Lasse’s voice when he said it was nearly there, and immediately he wanted to see what was going on. He cast a quick glance at the path and the cottage windows, convinced himself that nobody was going to come out, jogged silently to the workshop door and knocked so that they knew it was him and there was no immediate
danger. They looked at him as if he’d disturbed them, and Lasse took his hand back out from under the table. He’d screwed a plastic case beneath the table and kept his Smith & Wesson there whenever he was working, its handle always within reach.

‘That seems to work,’ said Tweety by way of an explanation and twisted the wooden latch shut. The workshed was full of half-stripped motors and small machines – he could barely tell what most of them had once been used for. Cogs and belts and tools hung on the walls, and rickety shelves groaned with the weight of battered canisters and pots. At one end of the workbench was a selection of welding equipment and a blowtorch. The air smelled of oil and rust and rotting wood. A single lamp dangled from the ceiling above a desk that had seen better days.

Wires and switches and meters had been rigged up to the table. Tweety didn’t understand the first thing about them. He’d always been afraid of electricity; it existed, yet at the same time it didn’t exist. But he recognised the oscilloscope and the small, gleaming metal cylinder the size of a plate almost hidden amidst everything else: it was the alarm system for the door to the bank’s vault. Originally it had belonged to the Valkeakoski Savings Bank; Reino had picked it up after a job there, and it had been a smart move. The only problem was that Lasse had been lumbered with having to learn all about electronics and God knows what else, and they’d had quite a job finding another bank that still used the same security system.

The cylinder was still open, the inside looked like an animal’s spilled guts. Lasse started screwing the lid back on, then stood up and bit his lip in thought. After a moment he looked at Reino; Reino nodded in reply and Lasse flicked a number of switches. A light bulb wired up to a small black box lit up and the needles on the ammeter waved back and forth before finally settling next to one another.

‘This one’s like the police’s alarm system,’ said Lasse, his voice strained with excitement. ‘And that’s the one they use in security firms or what have you, bank managers, caretakers. And now, lads, once we’re inside we’ll start…’

He picked up the alarm, banged it on the tabletop so that it rattled, but this time the needles remained in position and the light bulb didn’t start to flicker. The edge of Lasse’s mouth twitched grotesquely before an almost beatified smile spread across his face.

‘It’s working, lads,’ he said quietly. ‘It didn’t go off…’ A moment later they were all huddled in a cluster around Lasse and the table, like ice
hockey players after scoring a goal, and the workshop was filled with a joy and success that tasted like soft, almond chocolate, and although none of them said it aloud, it was on everybody’s mind: soon they would be able to say goodbye to Tapanila, its cold water pipes and nosy neighbours, to final demands and bailiffs and the taxman, and for a fleeting moment Tweety saw himself in a small one-bedroom flat: it was in Alppila or Kallio; everything was painted white and it had its own shower and cupboards that didn’t smell of mould.

‘Fuck me, lads, it works!’

‘We’ve still got to test it though…’

‘Of course we’ve got to test it. We’ve got to measure it too.’

Everyone was talking at once, their words like glass wheels whirring around the already packed shed. Reino was particularly excited. It seemed as though he too secretly wanted to share the limelight, and he motioned everybody over to the workbench. On top he spread out a plan of the ground floor of the bank. Its proportions weren’t exact but it showed all the features that they would need to know. Beside this was a small pile of
photographs
they had taken on their preliminary visits to the site, and Reino had used a felt-tipped pen to show how he planned to cut into a number of the safes. It only required very small cuts, just as long as they were in the right places, and if anyone knew exactly where to cut, it was Reino. He knew about safes: it wasn’t for nothing he’d been on good terms with a bloke called Mäkinen who used to work in a factory that manufactured them.

‘There you go, boys,’ said Reino, jabbing a stubby finger at the map. ‘That’s where you can see along the stairwell up to the first floor and the window that looks out on to Museokatu. But I’ve worked out how we can take care of that. There. See the lower banister? We’ll tape a sheet of one-and-a-half by two tarred cardboard up there, so there’s no way anyone will see the flame.’

‘Bloody hell… but what about the smoke?’

‘There are no smoke alarms in there,’ said Reino and flicked through the photographs until he found what he was looking for. ‘See that
switchboard
? One of those must be the switch for the central ventilation system. The smoke will rise up to the ceiling and disappear into thin air and no one’ll smell a thing…’

They were all filled with a quiet enthusiasm, even Tweety, and it felt comforting to think that the mystery and, at times, desperation
surrounding
the whole Chancellor job had now come to an end. His brothers radiated that same sense of relief too, and a moment later they were eagerly going through the job phase by phase. They started with how they were going to check the area around the bank before the job and finished with how and where to dispose of the equipment and clothes they had used during the operation itself. It was perfection, like a symphony.

‘And lads,’ Reino winked, his expression at once cunning and vaguely childish. Then he began whistling and moving clutter lying on the floor in front of the workbench. He cleared a space on the floor and knelt down, scratched at something for a moment then lifted one of the
floorboards
out of the way. The smell of earth wafted up from beneath the floor. In a hole about twenty centimetres deep lay ten metre-long lengths of copper piping, welded shut at one end and with a tightly fitting brass plug at the other.

Reino had made them. These were his ‘treasure chests’. After each job he’d divided the loot into these pipes and buried each one in a different place, leaving only one of them easily accessible at any given time while they lived on its contents. Working like this there was no need to worry that the whole lot would disappear at once, no matter how thoroughly the police searched the premises.

Reino knelt down, groaned, reached his hand far beneath the
floorboards
and pulled out a copper pipe. It was clearly older than the others; the metal had darkened and it was covered in something that looked like green mould. Reino’s firm hands twisted the plug out of the end and moved over to the workbench, placed the pipe on the floor plan and tipped it up. Something yellow started flowing slowly out of the pipe, and only when the light of the single lamp settled on it could they see that it was gold. It seemed as though the flow from the pipe would never end; it was filled with heavy signet rings and intricate brooches, tie clips and necklaces and small, clean-cast ingots, and amongst it all dozens of
different
coloured stones sparkled, red and white and pure green. There were hundreds of items of jewellery; there must have been several kilos of gold on the floor plan.

They stood in silence. It seemed as though they were all breathing together, slowly and heavily, and perhaps each of them was searching the depths of their minds for a fragment of a book they’d read as children in which the hero manages to prise open the pirates’ treasure chest, while
deeper down still a strong sense of power stirred within them, the
knowledge
of something better, of surviving, of winning.

Before them lay their emergency supplies: the jewellery taken from safety deposit boxes on their two most recent jobs. Reino hadn’t wanted to sell them, and he’d been right: they had survived until then on cash alone, and they needed so many middlemen to sell off their stuff that the risk of being grassed up was too big.

‘Just to remind you what’s at stake here, lads,’ Reino said eventually, his voice hoarse. ‘Soon we’ll be shovelling more of this by the sackload. Cash too. People keep loads of money in deposit boxes nowadays. That way the bank could go bust twice over and they’d still get their money back, but if they’d had it in a normal account…’ Reino’s hands moved stiffly; he was holding a wad of banknotes. He swallowed. Lasse picked up a fistful of jewellery and let it trickle back on to the table, giving off a soft jangle the colour of sunshine as it fell.

There was a knock at the door. They jumped as though they were already in the bank and the police had started flooding into the room; it was as though they had suddenly awoken or something had snapped. Reino grabbed the sack and threw it over the gold and the floor plan; Lasse ripped the alarm from its sockets, slipped it into a plastic bag and stuffed the bag on the floor between two dismantled chainsaws. Tweety didn’t move a muscle.

‘Tweety? Are you in there?’

‘It’s Sisko,’ said Tweety and realised how stupid it sounded – the others had heard her too – and opened the latch hoping that nobody would notice how much his hands were trembling. Their sister stood in the doorway. Sisko was almost forty, a lonely, strangely introverted woman, maybe even slightly masculine: her hair was short and almost entirely grey, and like an American farmer she only ever wore checked shirts and dungarees, but she was a good person and Tweety wasn’t as close to anyone as he was to her.

‘Bamse says you’ve got piles of laundry to be done,’ she said, her voice metallic. ‘I’m going to put mine in to soak overnight and wash them tomorrow. I could do yours too…’ She didn’t even try to peer inside, but Reino and Lasse continued talking to one another, pretending to work on an electric mangle missing its lid.

Sisko leaned closer to Tweety and whispered: ‘The women will be over in a minute. Ritu and Mum have been whispering about something all
night. She’s worried sick that our Lasse’ll get himself banged up again.’ Then she was gone, striding like a shadow towards the trailer where she lived all year round and read – she was always reading – and Tweety realised that she’d come to warn them, and she wouldn’t have done so unless she’d known they were up to something.

‘Mother Gold is coming,’ Tweety hissed and turned around, and he was suddenly overcome with nausea, like the time when Lasse had kicked him in the groin. The others snapped to it: Reino put the floorboard back in place and moved all manner of junk on top of the sack on the workbench, and Lasse dismantled the rest of the alarm in only a few swift movements. Already they could hear voices outside, then the door was flung open and Mother Gold and Ritu were standing there with Bamse, who skulked behind them looking oddly guilty.