The Defenceless (11 page)

‘Police, good afternoon,’ said Anna with a smile. ‘We’ve got a few questions about what’s been going on these last few days. You’ve probably heard.’

‘I certainly heard when the police came bursting into the building. Should I have heard anything else?’ said the woman.

‘There was a substantial seizure of narcotics in an apartment on the ground floor and the tenant was found dead. On top of that, one of the residents in another apartment has gone missing, so we’ll be asking all the neighbours a few questions.’

‘Get on with it then.’

‘May we come inside?’ Sari asked.

‘Is that necessary?’ the woman sniped.

‘Actually, yes. Everything we discuss is confidential; out here someone could overhear us.’

‘Nobody hears a thing round here,’ the woman scoffed.

‘What a nice name you have.
Lehmusvirta
,’ said Anna.

Again the woman scoffed. ‘My old man’s name. He’s been dead and buried for twenty years.’

‘Let’s get down to business. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary round here lately? Any strange people in the stairwell, that sort of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, for instance?’

‘There was a crowd always in and out of the flat downstairs. Sometimes they played music very loud. A terrible racket, it was.’

‘Do you mean Marko Halttu’s apartment?’

‘Yes, I do. That boy wasn’t right in the head. No wonder he’s gone and died.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s no wonder any junkie or alcoholic dies, if you ask me. What use are they to anyone?’

‘How did you know that Halttu was a drug addict?’

‘I didn’t until you started talking about drugs, but I’d guessed as much.’

‘Tell us about the crowd that was always in and out.’

‘They all looked the same to me. Boys in hooded jackets. You couldn’t see their faces.’

‘When was the last time you saw these boys?’

‘Last week, it was. They weren’t here every day. Thankfully.’

‘How often were they here?’

Mrs Lehmusvirta’s expression soured further still. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I don’t spy on them.’

‘What kind of hooded jackets were they wearing?’

‘Normal ones, I suppose.’

‘Did they have any patterns on them or words, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know. They were probably wearing coats on top of the hoods. It is winter, you know.’

‘The image of a snake? A cobra about to attack? Like this,’ asked Sari and showed her the picture.

‘I really do not know. All I remember is the hoods.’

‘Have you seen anything suspicious going on out in the yard?’

‘Nothing in particular. You sometimes see that rabble loitering in the car park.’

‘Did anyone look foreign, do you think?’ asked Anna.

‘You look foreign.’

‘I don’t mean me; I mean the hoodie boys.’

‘I already told you I never saw their faces. Still, I thought they must have been foreign.’

‘Why?’

‘They weren’t speaking Finnish.’

‘So you heard them talking. What language could it have been?’

‘How should I know? I only speak Finnish.’

‘Do you have any children?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I just wondered whether they might have seen or heard something when they visited. Perhaps they could tell us what languages those boys were speaking.’

‘My children don’t visit me. They both live down south and get on with their own lives. They’re not interested in their mother’s affairs.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ said Sari.

The woman glared at Sari with her pale grey eyes. Her stare was bitter, hardened, emotionless.

‘Don’t be. They were never good children. It’s best they keep their distance.’

Neither Anna nor Sari knew quite what to say.

‘Well … Have you seen any jackets like this one?’ asked Sari and showed her a picture of the Hell’s Angels insignia.

‘No.’

‘Any motorbikes?’

‘I doubt anyone drives a motorbike in this weather. I haven’t seen any.’

‘Do you know Riitta Vehviläinen who lives downstairs?’ asked Anna.

Mrs Lehmusvirta snorted. ‘So she’s the one that’s disappeared?’

‘That’s right.’

The woman gave a dry cackle. ‘It’s hardly surprising.’

‘And why is that?’

‘She wandered the stairwell spying on her neighbours. I doubt the druggie crowd liked that very much.’

‘What do you mean, she spied on people? Do you know something about it?’

‘Riitta came round for coffee sometimes. Well, quite rarely, maybe once a month. Judging by her comments she seemed to know quite a bit about what was going on in this house.’

‘What did Riitta tell you?’

Mrs Lehmusvirta turned her nose up and looked at Anna and Sari with a bitter glare her eyes. ‘Last time she was here she was gossiping about the constant rows at the Kumpulas’ place. And she was afraid of that Halttu.’

‘When was the last time she visited?’

‘It’s a while ago now. After Christmas, it was. I haven’t seen much of her since.’

‘Why could that be?’

‘I told her she stank. I tried to be friendly about it, but I think she took offence. What of it? I haven’t missed her. I don’t give a hoot about the gossip round this place. I hope someone half-decent moves into that tearaway’s flat so we can get on with our lives in peace.’

‘Where could Riitta have gone? Her daughter told us she never goes anywhere.’

‘How should I know?’

‘Are you even the slightest bit concerned?’ Anna couldn’t help asking.

Again Mrs Lehmusvirta gave a dry, deeply unpleasant smile. ‘People should look after their own affairs,’ she said.

Anna and Sari bid her goodbye, left their contact details and continued up to the top floor, but nobody was home in either of the apartments.

Building B was home to pensioners and a group of students sharing a flat. They too had noticed strange-looking young men hanging around the yard, but because they’d been there only rarely and hadn’t seemed to cause any trouble, nobody suspected any criminal activity. Nobody had seen hoodies decorated with snakes or Hell’s Angels jackets here either.

‘That Lehmusvirta was a right old cow,’ said Sari as they drove back to the station.

‘What a truly awful woman. But it’s odd that nobody has seen anything going on.’

‘Maybe the drugs crowd wasn’t there very often,’ Sari suggested.

‘Yes. Perhaps Marko did all his dealing elsewhere. That would make sense.’

‘But people had noticed Marko. Even the ghastly Mrs Lehmusvirta said she’d noticed something wasn’t quite right. And the nice couple in the other building.’

‘Yes. You notice these things if you keep your eyes open. But you’re right, it’s strange that that’s all anybody saw.’

‘And Mrs Vehviläinen has disappeared into thin air.’

‘We found her mobile. It was under the bed,’ said Anna.

‘Under the bed? That’s weird.’

‘I know. And the final call from that phone was to a Villy, who didn’t answer and who’s number is ex-directory.’

‘Sounds spooky.’

‘There’s something really odd about all this. I’m afraid it looks like Mrs Vehviläinen’s disappearance has something to do with Halttu and the drugs.’

‘You know, I feel really sorry for Halttu and all the other kids that get themselves mixed up with drugs and end up ruining
their lives. It’s terrible. I can’t bear the thought of Siiri and Tobias ever…’

‘Siiri and Tobias won’t get mixed up with drugs; they have two loving parents.’

‘You never know. I met that boy’s mother. She said she didn’t know what happened to Marko, why he turned out like that.’

‘You can’t expect her to open up to you, to a complete stranger, in that kind of situation. She’s standing by the body of her own son, she’s not going to talk about how she should have set him stricter boundaries or told him she loved him more often, how his father was a drunk and disappeared from their lives, how he left Marko without a father, how she was unstable as a child too, unsure of herself, not strong enough to bring up a feisty, sad little boy all by herself.’

‘How do you know that? Have you spoken to the mother?’ Sari asked, perplexed.

‘I’ve read the statistics, so I think you can relax. Junkies don’t come from happy, nuclear families living in detached houses in Savela.’

‘There are exceptions. Always.’

‘Very well. Your kids are probably already doomed.’

Sari wiped a tear from her cheek and chuckled.

‘Having your own children turns you into a neurotic wreck,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think I should have got a dog instead.’

Anna laughed out loud. She could never have anticipated hearing that from Sari’s mouth.

‘This job doesn’t exactly bring out the brighter side of human nature. There isn’t much to brag about on Facebook,’ Sari continued.

‘Do we ever get used to this?’ Anna wondered and thought of the old man crushed in the car accident.

‘On some level, we probably do, but never completely. At least, I can’t.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For making me feel relatively normal.’

‘Now that’s saying something,’ Sari quipped, and Anna laughed again.

‘But Marko. Despite everything, and judging by what we’ve heard, he managed to live a fairly quiet life.’

‘Who owns the apartment?’

‘The mother.’

‘How long had he been living there?’

‘According to his mother, about a year.’

‘If you’ve got a junkie dealing drugs in a small apartment block in a peaceful area of town, someone must have noticed more than this. They simply must.’

‘How about we get a bite to eat and come back again after four o’clock? Hopefully the people out at work will be back home by then.’

‘I’ll have to call the babysitter,’ Sari sighed. ‘She’s leaving town in the autumn, going off to university.’

‘Oh, where?’

‘It doesn’t matter where. The bottom line is Sanna will be gone. She’s planning on leaving at the end of May. Backpacking round Asia, apparently.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘Anna! It’s a catastrophe. We’ll never cope without Sanna.’

‘You didn’t expect a girl that age to stay with you forever, did you? To forge a career nannying at your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’

‘Another two months and she’ll be gone. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Two months, and with any luck this damn snow will have melted. Have you advertised for a replacement?’

‘Teemu and I have talked about getting an au pair. We’ve got a big house, there would be plenty of room.’

‘Would you really want a complete stranger working for you day and night?’

‘We’d get used to it, I’m sure, though it’ll be a bit weird at first. If I knew someone who’d already had an au pair, I could ask what it’s like.’

Anna thought of Gabriella and her host family. She could ask them. But she didn’t want to contact Gabriella.

‘
PLEASE DON’T SEND ME HOME
,’ Sammy said in beautiful English with a marked Pakistani accent, looking Anna lethargically in the eyes. The boy had received treatment; the doctor had spent a long while in the holding cell and returned later in the evening to administer more medication and check that everything was all right. He had been ordered to get the boy into a condition fit for interview. When Anna and Esko walked in the room, Sammy looked sleepy, thin and gaunt, but still lucid. Anna noted his tired eyes, eyes that had seen so much and that could have belonged to a man many decades his senior. Pity wrenched her from within. The eyes were meek.

‘We will be submitting an appeal to the immigration office this afternoon,’ said Ritva Siponen, a stern lawyer approaching sixty. ‘His life will be in danger back home.’

Zoran had returned Anna’s call that same evening and asked her out for coffee. Anna hadn’t wanted to meet him, not so soon after speaking to Nataša, and certainly not on a day celebrating equality and the life of the author and social activist Minna Canth. Anna had noticed the raised flags on her way to work and wondered why they were hoisted; she later heard the reason on the radio. Anna had felt a sense of great pride at her new homeland. How many countries in the world raised flags in support of equality or showed such respect for a controversial writer advocating women’s rights? Not very many. Zoran had probably never heard of equality, though he’d lived in Finland longer than Anna. You couldn’t simply pull up roots stuck in the chauvinistic Balkan culture, and Zoran hadn’t even tried. The best thing to do would be to forget about him for good, Anna thought and pursed her lips.

Zoran had given her Ritva Siponen’s number straight away. Anna was surprised that the lawyer was a woman, simply because it was Zoran who recommended her. Zoran was about as macho as a macho Serb could be; he seemed constantly surrounded by other men, especially when it came to business. Ritva had defended countless residence and asylum cases, Zoran assured her, and Anna hadn’t asked any more. She never asked. The ins and outs of Zoran’s business affairs were the last thing she wanted to know. Then he’d suggested he could come and pay her a home visit. My brother is here, she’d said hurriedly and Zoran had burst into laughter. Don’t lie, he said. Ákos is sitting in the pub drinking, his unemployment benefit apparently burning a hole in his pocket. Zoran had helped him out by buying him a pint. Anna was annoyed. She’d hoped her brother might have finally calmed down.

‘So Sammy, tell me how long you’ve known Marko Halttu,’ she asked.

‘Only a few months.’

‘Have you lived at his flat?’

‘A few nights, that’s all.’

‘Where have you been living since you ran away from the reception centre?’

‘Here and there. On the streets, in rubbish bins, stairwells, with friends.’

‘Ask him how long he’s been using drugs,’ Esko told Anna.

Anna asked him, but the answer was not short. At first Sammy didn’t want to talk at all, but at Ritva Siponen’s suggestion he relented and told his story in a monotonous and dispassionate voice, now with even the edge of sadness sanded away by all the sedatives. Sammy was originally from Quetta, a city near the border with Afghanistan. The first ten years of his childhood had been good. For members of the Christian minority, they had been in an exceptionally good position, because Sammy’s father had always had a job. They went to church on Sundays; life had been frugal but comfortable. Of course they followed the news about the Taliban and other
extremist groups raising their heads in Pakistan, though at the time it seemed they didn’t have much influence in Sammy’s corner of the city. Later Sammy realised that his mother and father had managed to hide their worry from the children. The sense of danger had been hanging in the air long before a group of fundamentalist Muslims moved into the neighbourhood. That’s when everything started. At first it was just minor disturbances at Sunday services, interruptions and noisy protests outside the church. The priest’s family had been threatened and the church no longer felt safe. Soon afterwards began a systematic campaign of terror against all Christian families in the area; even their old neighbours joined in. Sammy’s family was bullied, harassed and assaulted. The man next door claimed that Sammy’s father had insulted the Quran and for this he was charged with blasphemy, which in Pakistan often carried the death sentence. One day Sammy’s mother was raped. This set in motion a chain of events that wrenched the last remnants of normality from their lives. Sammy’s father and brother wanted revenge. Though her physical wounds eventually healed, his mother never fully recovered from the shock and the shame. When their father was kicked out of his job, it was the final straw. Sammy’s father and brother went to the neighbours’ house. Sammy explained how he and his mother had waited in the darkened house for their return; his mother prepared bandages, mumbled quiet prayers and boiled washing water. They didn’t say a word to one another; fear had taken their ability to speak. They waited and waited, in vain. Sammy’s father and elder brother never returned.

In the early hours of the morning their neighbours and a large crowd of followers arrived, broke into the house and took his mother away kicking and screaming. Sammy escaped through a window at the back of the house and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. The neighbours’ relatives moved into the house the very next day; their house was quite literally occupied. Sammy was fifteen at the time. He lay low for a few days with some Christian people he knew and fled to Karachi after he heard that he too had been accused of
blasphemy. Once there, he lived on the streets and in a church for almost a year. He constantly felt as though someone was watching him, following him, hounding him. The only person he could trust was the priest of the congregation, who worked in fear for his life to protect the small community of Pakistani Christians. The priest had tried to get help, approached the courts, contacted human rights organisations, but it all came to nothing.

I should have stayed there and looked after my mother, he said, expressionless. He never found his cousins, who had already fled to Karachi. Sammy tried to look for them, but asking around was difficult because he had to remain in hiding. Instead he found his way to the opium dens, and heroin was easy to come by – after all, they were right in the middle of the Golden Triangle poppy fields, at the start of the smuggling routes to the west.

The drugs helped him – at first. He wasn’t safe anywhere. The grip of radical Islam seemed to be closing all around him. The local priest eventually helped Sammy to escape. He headed for Europe, a Christian land, in search of help. He found himself in Finland, Lutheran through and through, managed to kick the drugs and started learning Finnish; he was hopeful and finally believed he had a chance at some kind of normal life, though his asylum application dragged on and on.

And now he was being sent back.

‘I have nothing left there. Nothing but a blasphemy charge for defaming Islam. They’ll kill me,’ Sammy said bringing his lengthy story to an end. His posture had slumped; his voice was hushed.

‘We’re going to gather new evidence about these events. I’m going to try and contact the priest who sheltered Sammy in Karachi and helped him escape. In my opinion Sammy’s initial application wasn’t well prepared; lots of aggravating evidence was missing,’ Ritva explained in English and gave Sammy an encouraging smile. There wasn’t a flicker of hope in his eyes.

Anna was shocked. She wanted to help that emaciated, innocent-looking boy. If even half of what he had said was true, it was
incredible that his asylum application had been refused. Why is it that welfare is something we only give out like alms to the chosen few who meet a set of ridiculous criteria dreamed up by a bunch of bureaucrats? We don’t listen to individual stories; we just look at the overall situation, the general conditions and the law in each country, and if everything seems above board officials here simply can’t fathom that the law and the general conditions are not the same for everyone or that things published in writing might not necessarily be true. That wasn’t even the case in Finland, let alone a country like Pakistan. Laws were created by humans and were often rigged to protect the rights of the majority. Anna sincerely hoped that Ritva Siponen knew what she was doing.

‘It’s a terrible story, but it’s not really our concern. We’ve got a dangerous street gang, one drug-related death and a missing pensioner to look into,’ Esko said and looked at Anna. ‘Can he tell us anything about them?’

Anna almost lost her composure at Esko’s indifference. Surely Sammy’s story couldn’t leave anyone cold, not even Esko. On the other hand, he was right: their job was to investigate a crime, not to assess the rights and wrongs of Sammy’s asylum application. That was Ritva Siponen’s job. Anna pulled herself together, reminded herself that she was a police officer, and asked where Marko Halttu had got his hands on the narcotics. Sammy swore he didn’t know.

‘Was there always so much gear there?’

‘Never before. Not when I was there, at least.’

‘When did you go to Halttu’s flat?’

‘Saturday, I think. In the afternoon.’

‘Why did you go there?’

‘To buy some subs.’

‘What did you think when you saw everything?’

‘I thought, wow.’

‘Didn’t it occur to you that Halttu could have been mixed up in more than just dealing?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t care.’

‘No. The cramps were terrible.’

‘What was Marko’s condition when you entered the apartment?’

‘He was completely out of it. He fell asleep on the couch soon afterwards.’

‘Marko had a head wound. Did you two get into a fight?’

‘No.’

‘So where did his injury come from?’

‘I tried to ask him; he already had it when I arrived. But he didn’t tell me. He couldn’t speak.’

‘You were there almost two days. Did Marko wake up at all?’

‘To be honest I don’t know. I was too excited by all the drugs and took quite a lot of subs.’

‘So it’s possible that Marko died on Saturday, right in front of your eyes, and you did nothing.’

Sammy looked at Anna. Could she see a glimmer of fear and anxiety behind those meek eyes, so clouded with medication?

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever seen Riitta Vehviläinen, the lady that lives opposite Marko?’

‘No. Why?’

‘She’s gone missing.’

Anna tried to read Sammy’s expression to see if there was even a flicker of fear, of not quite telling the truth, anything to suggest he knew more than he was telling her, but the drugs had rendered him almost expressionless.

‘I don’t know anything about Macke’s neighbours.’

‘Did Marko ever mention anyone else by name? Other dealers or customers?’

‘No.’

‘Ever heard of the Black Cobras?’ Esko interrupted them in English. So he does understand, thought Anna.

Sammy shuddered almost imperceptibly.

‘No. I mean, I’ve heard of them, but that’s it.’

‘Where did you hear about them? Who told you?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Try and remember,’ Esko snapped.

‘Somewhere in Rajapuro, I think. I’ve been there a lot.’

‘More specific,’ Esko commanded him.

‘A man once asked me if I wanted to become a dealer. He was wearing a hoodie with gang emblems on the back.’

‘What kind of emblems?’

‘The Black Cobra emblem.’

‘How do you know what the Black Cobra emblem looks like?’

‘I’ve seen them before.’

Anna gave Esko a look of concern.

‘When was this?’

‘The end of January, maybe. My sense of time is a bit hazy.’

‘So this happened in Rajapuro?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘In an apartment. Please believe me, I don’t remember where it was or who lived there. I was totally out of it.’

‘Was the man Finnish?’

‘No. He spoke English and he looked … Iranian or Palestinian.’

‘Did you start dealing?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s a greater risk of being caught. I wanted to be as invisible as possible.’

‘But you got hooked on Subutex.’

‘Yes, unfortunately.’

‘It’s easy to get your hands on drugs round here,’ said Anna, and recent statistics for drug-related deaths flashed through her mind. Most of them had been caused by Subutex. The substance had become a real nightmare. It had taken over the streets because it was so cheap and easy to get hold of. A drug originally intended to help alleviate heroin addicts’ withdrawal symptoms had now hooked
people who had never laid eyes on heroin. The demon had been replaced by the Devil himself.

Sammy laughed glumly. ‘Yes. I’d only been on the streets for a week when someone came up and offered me some pills. Hungry and desperate in the freezing cold, it was easy to relapse. I was weak.’

‘Describe this guy.’

‘He was Finnish, in his twenties. Blond hair, acne. I haven’t seen him for a while.’

Anna thought she might just know who the young man was.

‘Where did you get money?’

‘It’s not very expensive.’

‘You were asked where you got the money,’ Esko barked.

‘I did odd jobs,’ Sammy replied.

‘Ah, working illegally. Where?’

‘Here and there.’

‘At the queers’ pizza parlour?’ Esko ratcheted up the pressure.

‘No, not there. They’re just friends.’

‘Did you sell your arse to them?’

For the first time, Sammy’s expression suddenly changed. He was shocked.

‘To Maalik and Farzad? Absolutely not. They would never…’

‘Who then? Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who to?’

‘I didn’t know them.’

‘You make me fucking sick.’

‘Esko, it’s against the law to buy sex, not to sell it,’ Anna interrupted.

‘Yeah, right. I’d have you on the next plane to Karachi, mate, the whole fucking lot of you.’

Sammy wiped a tear that had trickled down his cheek. Ritva Siponen began gathering her papers. She glared at Esko across the table.