TH03 - To Steal Her Love (3 page)

‘Imagine if it were your father,’ he said, and this time he wasn’t being sarcastic; he truly wanted her to understand. ‘Or your husband
Risto-Matti
. You wouldn’t want there to be people standing around watching.’

The woman didn’t say anything; she swung around, in a way that suddenly made Harjunpää feel sorry for her, then she was on her way,
climbing
back up the rocks with jogger’s legs, and with that she was gone, the fog thick between them. Somewhere in the distance he heard the dog yelp.

Harjunpää didn’t hang about; he undressed quickly leaving only his boxer shorts, rummaged in his bag for a pair of rubber gloves and pulled them on to his hands. The water was bitterly cold; his skin quickly tightened into goosebumps. He suddenly felt squeamish, as though a warning light had started flashing, then he remembered why. In a similar situation years ago he had stood on a broken bottle and it had cut his foot – badly. After that he’d been on crutches for a long time. That must have been it. He began to slide his feet along the bottom, very carefully, so as not to hit them on anything. Sludge started bubbling up to the surface and the air was filled with a rotten, gaseous smell, and still his feeling of nausea hadn’t passed.

The water already reached well up his thighs, and was becoming deeper more quickly than he had guessed. He was trembling all over, so much that it almost hurt. He stopped and looked at the rest of the journey. He still had about half way to go. He sized up the stones,
assessing
how he could use them for support, and it was then that he realised
they weren’t natural stones after all. They were great concrete blocks covered in algae, a piece of rusted iron jutted out of the one closest to him, and he couldn’t think of any explanation other than that there must have been a jetty here once – a couple of hefty mooring rings had been bored into the rocks on the shore.

Hesitantly he peered over at the body, almost as if he were afraid his eyes would scare it and it would try to run away. It had rolled over on to its side, and now he could see that it didn’t have a head; through the shirt collar splayed nothing but greyish shreds of skin. Something light dangled amongst them, probably a vertebra. The back of the head seemed still intact, or perhaps it was nothing but a loose piece of scalp flapping in the water, limp as the matted grey hairs attached to it.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Harjunpää gasped. That same water was now swirling around his groin, and for a brief moment he almost wanted to turn back, he even made a move towards the shore, then he bit his lip, muttered a stream of curses and carried on. Walking became easier; the slippery stones came to an end and there was something smooth beneath the balls of his feet, a beam of some sort. He waded forwards, careful not to step to the side. The beam was somehow disconnected from the sea floor, angled so that the water seemed to rise more slowly, though it was already up to his waist. Out of the fog flew a giant seagull that began encircling him.

Now I can reach it, he thought, and stretched out his arm; he was less than a metre away from the body. He decided simply to clench his fist, filling it with shirt and water, and pull; there was no way it could tear without the body coming with it. He couldn’t quite comprehend what happened, it all seemed like a hallucination; the surface of the water began to rise as though extra water had suddenly flooded in, and it ran up his chest like a cold hoop, streaming around his shoulders and neck. Instinctively he gasped for breath as the water splashed in his eyes, and a moment later they were engulfed with the sea.

He was under the surface; everything was blurred and green and his ears were filled with a rushing silence. The beam had broken beneath him, this much he understood as he sank further. The surface was merely a disappearing silver film. Something scraped against his shin, first on one side then the other. It felt as though something were falling on top of him, and his leg became wedged between two stones and he couldn’t get it out.
He yanked again, but he was stuck fast, and he was suddenly consumed with a blind panic: he was so utterly alone, so utterly small.

His chest started to burn and a shimmering stream of bubbles escaped from his mouth: God help me, I want to live! Somehow he understood that he needed to crouch down first, to sink even further, but it felt so unnatural. He wanted to go upwards, he wanted to reach the surface. Suddenly his leg came free! And he started rising upwards, but so slowly, so agonisingly slowly, and above him he could see a dark blob, and he knew what it was. It was sinking towards him, right towards his face. He stretched out his arms and his hands were filled with something slimy and soft. Then he reached the surface.

‘Help!’ he shouted, or at least he thought he was shouting. His mouth filled with water and he spluttered: ‘Help!’

But it was useless, there was no one to hear him. The only person who had been there, he had shooed away. Then he realised how close the shore was and he knew he would get through this; he wasn’t in any immediate danger, there would be someone to take care of him. He began paddling, a strange one-armed doggy-paddle. With his other arm he held on to the body, dragging it behind him though for a moment he felt that he no longer had the strength.

Then his feet struck the stones on the bottom. He stood up and waded forwards through the spray of water, and now he took hold of the body with both hands, dragging it like a sack and paying no attention to all the things he should have watched out for. The body must have been in the sea for years; it was only a torso. As well as its head, it was also missing its arms and legs. The joints still showed, however, which was a comfort in itself; the body hadn’t been dismembered, the limbs had simply fallen off by themselves as decomposition had progressed.

‘You bloody nearly killed me…’

He heaved the torso into the shallower water on the shore. Its only item of clothing was the torn, checked flannel shirt, and upon seeing it Harjunpää felt inexplicably sad. He had an inkling that the body was that of an old man who had once pottered about with a cap on his head, stopping every now and then to reach into his pocket for a silver,
turnip-shaped
pocket watch ticking with time gone by.

He slumped on to the gravel, and suddenly he wasn’t sure what he should do next. He peeled the rubber gloves from his hands, then looked
at his leg. It was bright red with blood, but he realised that it couldn’t have been too serious; he couldn’t feel any pain and he could still walk. It must have been scratched; the bleeding looked more profuse because his skin was wet.

But he was still at a loss. Perhaps that was why there was so much space inside him that he was filled with a powerful, unexpected sense of
melancholy
. He remembered a time when he was so small that he could barely see over the table; he used to think the pickled cucumbers were
hedgehogs
. He missed Pipsa, his youngest daughter, and Valpuri, and strangely enough, Valpuri’s rabbit too. And finally he realised that he was grieving for Onerva, grieving as though she had passed away. He had been
grieving
for some time, but had somehow managed to suppress it. Finally he gave in; he slumped on to the sand, rested his head against his knees, and he was so cold that he began whimpering.

‘Hello! You there!’

Harjunpää’s legs were bare, his feet were covered in sand and the sand was mixed with dried algae and a small broken shell. He stared at them and only slowly realised that the voice was addressing him. He stood up stiffly. His mind was already perfectly calm.

On the rocks above stood a man. He wasn’t a very big man, but he exuded power, Harjunpää could sense it. It was in his eyes too, along with a flash of disparagement and a small amount of hatred. From the man’s eyes Harjunpää realised what he must have looked like in his wet
underpants
, hair stuck to his forehead in clumps, his legs bloody, his skin covered in goosebumps and blotches of green slime.

‘My name is Risto-Matti Luukkanen.’

‘Yes,’ Harjunpää mumbled and vaguely remembered having seen the man somewhere before, on the news or in one of those magazines in which the glitterati posed with champagne glasses and explained at length how they had grown apart from their partners or grown back together again, and it dawned on him that Luukkanen was some kind of local politician or the director of a large company. Helen stood further back. She looked much smaller now, almost stunted; the dog wasn’t with them. Perhaps Risto-Matti only ever walked one of them at a time.

‘You have taken it upon yourself to insult my wife in a most uncouth manner,’ Luukkanen began. Harjunpää knew this tone of voice and knew
what was coming, but he wasn’t sure whether he was under any
obligation
to listen to it. He settled for a shrug of the shoulders.

‘Do you know Assistant Chief Constable Kontio?’

‘No… I do know Chief Inspector Kontio.’

‘Sir, you are shameless.’

Harjunpää shrugged again. The fog had thinned and the sun warmed him, and it felt good. A bee buzzed somewhere close by. He felt alive.

To the south of the central train line, nicely tucked away from the
newly-built
apartment blocks in the quiet suburb of Tapanila, ran Tasankotie, and beside that lay a dense birch forest. At least, that’s what it looked like to the average passer-by, as the thick willows by the side of the road hid everything else from view.

In fact, three narrow dirt tracks spaced a couple of hundred metres apart wound their way through the birches, and each of them led to a dead end. If anyone were to walk along one of these tracks, they would see that the forest was divided into distinct plots of land, and that about a dozen of them had been built upon. The houses weren’t very big, and many of them looked as though their building plans had existed solely in the minds of the builders themselves. But one thing any passer-by would notice straight away: the inhabitants loved those ramshackle houses. Everything was kept in good order, a gleaming patch on a tin roof, a set of gates newly painted, paths raked and tidy, flowers and berry plants and fruit trees all around.

But there were other kinds of plots too, the kind that had been cut off for years behind overgrown hedgerows, and if anyone were to start clearing the land they would discover ramshackle sheds and collapsed wells, battered old cars and abandoned refrigerators – things that seemed to live forever though the inhabitants had first changed then disappeared altogether.

Then there were a number of plots that looked overgrown at first glance, but where the buildings were still standing, and if you stopped to look for a moment: there was an old lady’s corset and a pair of woollen
socks hanging on the clothes line; over there a thin trail of smoke rose from the chimney; and on the steps of a dilapidated yellow cottage a chubby-cheeked cat lay preening its tail in slow, satisfied motions.

It was obvious that people lived there and fought for their very existence, the bane of the local council, which had long had its eyes on the area for development. To realise its plans, the council had denied
applications
for planning permission and cut back on local amenities and now, as its final trump card, it maintained the vague threat of compulsory purchase. But the little devils just carried on living there, and in the winter cleared the road of snow by themselves.

One of these indeterminate plots was Joutsentie 3. The plot contained four buildings in all; the middle one was the biggest. It was an
odd-looking
cottage, split into two sections, and with a sagging felt roof beneath which there appeared to be some sort of attic room. Twenty or so metres away stood a building painted red; it had once been a sauna, but now curtains hung in the windows and a geranium plant stood on the bench by the front door. An implausibly large television antenna jutted from the roof of the third shack and the surrounding land was scattered with toys. The fourth building was clearly some sort of workshop; in front of it stood old cars and a digger roughly taken to pieces with a blowtorch. Behind the other buildings was a caravan jacked up on a trestle, and up to its door wound a path that betrayed a permanent resident.

The plot was surrounded by an ominous spruce hedge, and other plants grew wherever there was enough space: giant birch trees, raspberry bushes, nettles, willowherb. On the western edge of the plot a vegetable patch and a potato field had been carefully hoed.

At Joutsentie 3 lived the Leinonen family. The Leinonens weren’t very popular because they were ‘newcomers’ – the other local families had lived in the same houses for two or even three generations – and on top of this they were a strange, messy bunch that made the whole area
susceptible
to the ambitions of eager, small-time bureaucrats.

Tweety was the youngest son of Old Mrs Leinonen.

He had been getting ready to wake up for some time, drifting in
no-man’s-land
; he was still downtown collecting small baskets made of folded squared paper from the street. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them, but he knew that they were very important. At the same time he was listening to a conversation in the other room, though he
didn’t really want to. The man’s words were a dark red colour, almost black, and the woman’s were bright turquoise.

‘… go and talk to him anyway. This is a big break for us and
everyone’s
got to pull their weight.’

‘I can’t. He’ll just patronise me again.’

‘You’re imagining things. He is your brother, mind. And what does it matter how he talks to you? Just as long as he keeps them off our back. And he can do it. He knows people – said as much himself last midsummer.’

‘But what if he knows we’re up to something?’

‘He won’t. Listen, I’ll say this, though you know fine well. He’s got business dealings that wouldn’t last the light of day. What was it he said once? He loses over ten million a year and the insurance company pays it all back…’

The red voice belonged to Reino, Tweety’s oldest brother. Reino’s bed creaked as he sat up; there came a rustling as he took out a cigarette and a hiss as he lit a match. There was a note of irritation in his voice, but his girlfriend Bamse hadn’t noticed; she was a bit slow.

‘So what? Act as if me and Lasse have finally got ourselves a proper job but that it’ll go tits up if the pigs keep sticking their noses in. Act serious, like you’re in a bit of a panic.’

‘I could do that, I suppose… But what if Lasse’s wrong?’

‘I’ve thought about that too, what if it’s all just talk. But I think I agree with him.’

‘But… is there any point getting ourselves involved in this at all?’

‘Too right there is, we’ve got to. They haven’t got anything on us. Think of it as a family business, we’re the only ones that know about it. That Valkeakoski gave them what for when they couldn’t come up with enough evidence. And this time it’s definitely Lampinen. I’ve already seen him twice in a week, and that’s hardly a coincidence. He’s had it in for me since I said in court I’d seen him hanging around me for weeks on end, but that I’d just thought he was some poof who’d got the hots for me…’

Reino gave a dry cackle. Tweety still didn’t open his eyes. He wanted to explore what was inside him, but he couldn’t quite make it out, and lay listening to what the day had to say for itself. Birch branches caressed the roof, Toby was scuttling around in his cage, and every now and then, Tweety heard a chink from outside as the rake struck a stone – Sisko was out in the vegetable patch – and somewhere at the back of their plot a
pop resounded, followed immediately by a metallic clang: Lasse was out doing target practice with his air rifle.

He was crazy about that rifle. He was even crazier about his Smith & Wesson, and he had good reason to be: it was a .357 Magnum Special, one hundred per cent rustproof steel and with a barrel like an elephant’s trunk, but he couldn’t use that one for practice unless they went down to the pit, because it was an illegal firearm. Still, he always carried it with him. Reino had recently lost his temper with him in the pub when he’d started fingering it under his jacket. He could well shoot someone one day, accidentally at least. He was good-natured at heart – he was probably the best natured of all three brothers – but he was jittery in a bad way.

Downstairs they were still talking about what they referred to as the Chancellor – they didn’t want anyone to use the wrong term by mistake, or for Lasse’s wife or Mother Gold to get wind of what was going on. But Tweety didn’t want to sit around listening to their conversation; it irritated him that Reino couldn’t just decide that it was going to happen
now
. He just wished it was all over.

Tweety pulled the blanket from over his face. His world lay in front of him: an attic room with a sagging roof, barely big enough to fit anything more than a bed, a table, a chair and a chest of drawers with brass lion’s paws for feet. At the other end of the room there was a hatch in the floor with a set of almost vertical steps leading downstairs. The other way out was through the window and down a ladder propped beneath it. Through the square window he could see a section of the path and the red cottage in the yard. The room was in a chronic state of disarray.

Its walls were papered in lumpy cardboard covered with paintings, most of which were very small and painted on whatever sawn-up piece of hardboard had been available. But they all used striking colours,
depicting
wild landscapes that could only exist in the furthest reaches of the mind. If an expert had seen them he might have fallen silent for a good few moments. So far only the people at home had laid eyes on them, and that was enough for Tweety. ‘You’re a sick man,’ Reino had commented, the edge of his nose twitching.

Tweety reached down and opened the door of the wire-mesh cage, and Toby scuttled along his arm and into the bed. Tweety picked up a chocolate drop, placed it between his lips and waited. Toby sniffed him from head to toe, turned, snatched the chocolate drop, then darted inside
his shirt to munch on it. Toby was a black-and-white rat. And he was smart, too: at the table he would hide in Tweety’s sleeve and snatch only the most delicious bits of food from his plate. Apart from that, Toby was the only creature in the world that really understood him. They didn’t need words.

‘He must be around here somewhere, I just can’t think where,’ said Reino. He’d lowered his voice, but Tweety guessed that they were talking about him. It was pointless trying to whisper; the house was so ramshackle that you could almost hear people breathe.

‘What if he’s gone and got himself a woman?’

‘No chance. He’s the last person who’d understand women. Born a sissy, that one.’

‘Maybe I think of him a bit differently… Anyway, none of our business really.’

‘I’m just worried he doesn’t play about so much he loses the plot entirely. Then where will we be?’

Bamse yawned and Tweety could tell she was stretching too; he’d once peeped through the hatch. She stretched so that her breasts stood out, and this she did because she was up for it. She was always up for it; that’s probably why Reino had picked her. Then the bed downstairs gave a creak and Tweety yanked the duvet up over his ears.

Born a sissy
. He thought about this, and he could feel a fever rising inside him. Reino had told Bamse to say that he and Lasse had got themselves jobs, but he hadn’t mentioned Tweety at all. And now he was banging her downstairs so that the bed creaked. Tweety couldn’t
understand
what she saw in him. Reino was a short, stocky slob who smelled of sweat, smacked his chops when he was eating and farted whenever he pleased. He was just like Dad.

Tweety groaned and turned on to his side, and Toby nimbly darted out from underneath him. Reino had taken Dad’s place in the house; he treated Tweety in the same way too, as though he were nothing but a dogsbody. But with the Chancellor, for once they were at his mercy: without him, their blowtorches would be useless – they wouldn’t even get into the bank. He’d been stringing them along all the while. He could have easily told them the sequences to the various locks, but instead he’d said he didn’t know anything about those sort of locks, because if he’d done that they would have made themselves a set of keys, and after that Reino and Lasse would have done the gig on their own
and the idea of splitting the money into three would never have been mentioned again.

He raised his head, but they were still at it and he couldn’t bear
listening
to it. He pressed his hands over his ears. He wanted to live downtown! He wanted to be by himself, he wanted a life of his own! He fucking hated Reino sometimes! He hated him the way he had hated Dad. And he hated Dad because he couldn’t even do them the favour of dying so that he really was dead, and Tweety was constantly worried that one day he’d come back, stroll in through the door and say hello. That’s what he’d done when he was released from prison. He’d killed a man called Ryynänen, but they weren’t allowed to talk about that. Tweety had been very young back then, but he still remembered: Dad turned up, said hello, and yanked Tweety away from where he lay next to their mother, and from then on his bed had always been on the floor.

Still, he wasn’t coming back. He and Heikki Ahola had gone off to try out their salmon lines – it would be four years ago come November – and the following day Heikki’s boat had been found off the tip of Katajanokka, then a week later his body washed up in the same place. But nobody had ever found so much as Dad’s fur cap.

All of a sudden the Corpse and Silkybum entered his mind, though he’d been trying to forget them. Them, and the entire evening’s events.

He’d been right about the door and that they were both sleeping heavily; in the stairwell he’d been able to hear their breathing, thick with drink. Inside the flat, a small one-bedroom place, he’d had no difficulty getting his bearings because light from the street had shone in through the blinds, so much so that he hadn’t even had to resort to the bathroom-light trick.

Taking care of the Corpse had been simple. He was sleeping on his stomach. First Tweety had pulled the sheet over his head, then tucked the edges under the mattress, and when the Corpse had started tossing and turning Tweety gently laid his hand on his neck and he had calmed down; in his drunken slumber he must have thought it was Silkybum’s hand. Finally Tweety had covered him with a blanket as well, paying particular attention to his head, and there he’d lain, wrapped in a cotton coffin, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, breathing his own breath. His sleep became heavier with every moment and soon he lay perfectly still as though he were unconscious.

Silkybum was covered with nothing but a sheet. But her sleep had become restless while Tweety was burying the Corpse, almost as though she had sensed something or felt ill from the wine. She didn’t seem to like the Corpse, or perhaps she couldn’t accept that she had brought the man back home, as she had shoved Tweety’s hand away as soon as he’d laid it on her body.

Then suddenly she was awake. Tweety was lying on the floor barely twenty centimetres away, and if she’d got up for the toilet she would have stepped on him. He followed her as she sighed and looked for a more comfortable position, and it took her half an hour to get back to sleep. But then the Corpse had turned and Tweety had had to bury him again. Time went on and just as he was about to get down to it with Silkybum she sat bolt upright, saw what was going on and screamed, and he watched as the blanket billowed in the darkness like a black sail as the Corpse jumped up. Then he was gone. It had been such a botch-job that he didn’t want to think about it any more.