The Defenceless (7 page)

‘Anna and Sari, I want you to examine the scene immediately. It’s been a few days, but at least it hasn’t snowed again. Best to give the place a thorough investigation. Nils, get in touch with these girls. Let’s try and sort this out so that we don’t have to come in tomorrow too.’

Anna and Sari pulled on their police overalls; they came in handy when you had to crawl around in snow-covered woodland. They took the lift down to the car depot beneath the station. The air was heavy with exhaust fumes and another smell associated with cars that Anna couldn’t put her finger on, oil perhaps, dirty old rags or something metallic. Two stocky officers were giving the back of their squad car a good clean. Someone must have thrown up in there, thought Anna. She felt no nostalgia for the time when she had to do the same thing after almost every shift. Still, working with the traffic police had been much easier; the days just came and went without the burden of prolonged investigations and the sense of stagnation. In criminal cases it often felt as though the investigation wasn’t going anywhere, that everything was up in the air. Her shifts consisted of looking for tiny fragments of evidence, trying to stitch them together, discarding false leads, placing good leads in their rightful place in a pattern that was still to be worked out. Her brain was constantly at work, trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel, though sometimes no lamps appeared to light up. At times it was downright frustrating, and yet extraordinarily fascinating. Because a lamp always came on eventually. Always. This Anna needed to believe.

Anna typed the location of the bloody knife into her navigator, or rather she gave the address of the house nearest to the woodlands where the knife and the blood had been found. The neighbourhood was situated to the north of Rajapuro, far away from the city centre. There were a few recently built apartment blocks, but on the whole this was an area of detached houses and families with kids, lots of surrounding nature, good opportunities for outdoor activities, a school and a shop. It occurred to Anna that she’d probably never visited the place before. The temperature had once again dropped overnight, the sky gleamed in a surreal turquoise, not a cloud in sight, the sun burned against it like a giant orange. The car thermometer showed -12°C. Spring had come to Finland.

They parked the car outside an apartment block at the edge of the woods. Nils had already arrived in his own car. The block was home to one of the girls who had found the knife. Behind the building a path led into the woods. Anna and Sari walked off along the path. The place was nothing but thicket. After only a short distance the birches and willows were so tangled that the path came to an end, though the girls’ footsteps continued deeper into the woods. They had pushed their way through the thicket.

Anna and Sari followed the footsteps; the frozen snow crunched beneath their feet. The woods spread out over a large area. Anna thought of the city map. Beyond this there were no more residential areas until you reached Asemakylä, she thought, which until only a few years ago hadn’t belonged to the city. If someone had been murdered out here, then it was done in peace and quiet.

Anna and Sari followed the girls’ steps for a few hundred metres. They were beginning to think they had come to the wrong place when they saw the yellow police tape through the tangle of branches. Just as Virkkunen had told them, forensics were already at work. Kirsti Sarkkinen waved to them with an enthusiastic smile.

‘Come and have a look, but be careful of that corner; there are some really interesting prints over there,’ Kirsti shouted, pointing to the left-hand side of the cordoned area.

Anna and Sari cautiously stepped closer.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Sari gasped.

‘What on earth happened here?’ Anna asked and looked around with a feeling of nausea. The snow was churned up and soaked in blood. There was so much blood that it looked as though someone had slaughtered an animal at least the size of an elk. But this wasn’t elk-hunting territory; this was still within the city limits, and besides, it wasn’t hunting season.

Sarkkinen lifted up the curved weapon, now tagged in a transparent plastic bag, for everyone to see. The blood on the blade had dried and darkened.

‘Any fingerprints?’ asked Sari.

‘We’ll soon find out. But this blood is relatively fresh, a few days old at most. Those girls must have been here fairly soon after the event. Thank God they didn’t turn up while the blood was flying. There are some strange prints over there,’ said Kirsti and pointed to the west.

‘What kind of prints?’ asked Anna.

‘Very likely two sets of footprints: one belongs to a man, the other to a woman or a small man. But the only prints leading away from the site are the larger ones. I guess the owner of the smaller prints was either beaten up or killed here. The knife was found right there in the middle. It’s a very strange model; we should try and trace it.’

‘Christ,’ Sari repeated.

Anna watched for a moment as the forensics officers photographed and sketched the scene and a technician measured the position of the blood spatter. Section by section, scene by scene, they pieced together the events of this tragedy without seeing its protagonists. It was quite a task, but they were good at it.

Anna wandered off in the direction Kirsti had indicated. She was right; there were sets of footprints, numerous indentations pressed into the deep covering of snow, large ones and smaller ones.

‘What’s that?’ Anna shouted back to Kirsti. Along the ground was a deep trail about a metre across. It had erased some of the footprints.

‘Something heavy was dragged along the ground. This looks like it was made by a plastic bin liner. Doesn’t take much imagination to guess what was inside it.’

‘Can I go down there?’ asked Anna.

‘Sure, we’ve already documented those prints, but don’t trample over them. We’ll have to examine them in more detail, see if there’s a proper shoe print anywhere.’

The hairs on Anna’s back stood up as she followed the trail through the thicket. She walked well away from the footprints so as not to compromise them. The trail stopped at a small clearing after which was the start of a forest track cleared by a snowplough. Tyre tracks were clearly visible. One of the forensics officers was in the process of photographing them.

‘Hello,’ Anna greeted the man.

‘Hi there. I don’t think we’ve met. Pekka Holappa, nice to meet you.’

‘Fekete Anna.’ Out of habit, she introduced herself in the Hungarian manner.

‘I know. I’ve heard about you.’

Anna felt like asking what exactly he’d heard about her, but thought better of it. His camera flashed. The man knelt down to take some close-up shots.

‘Any initial thoughts about these tracks?’ she asked instead.

‘Not really. They’re standard treads, quite thick tyres. I’d guess an SUV of some sort.’

‘I doubt a smaller car would get through snow like this.’

‘Well, there is a tarmacked surface underneath, and there have clearly been other cars up this way, but there’s a lot snow. If I were trying to move a body, I wouldn’t risk driving out here in a smaller car,’ said Pekka with a chuckle.

‘Get in touch as soon as you come up with something on these tracks, okay?’

‘Sure thing,’ said Pekka and smiled at Anna. Not bad looking, thought Anna and smiled back.

‘Can I get in touch anyway?’ he shouted after her once she made to leave.

Anna pretended not to hear. You’re a stupid girl, she chided herself and felt the fleeting desire for a cigarette grip the back of her throat.

‘Hey, don’t go yet! Look at what I’ve found here,’ Pekka called after her.

Anna turned around and went back to him. Pekka held up a darkgreen card.

‘What’s that?’

‘A cloakroom ticket.’

‘Where was it?’

‘In that footprint, pressed inside it. It’s a wonder I even noticed it; the footprint is at least thirty centimetres deep.’

‘Does it say what restaurant it came from?’

‘No. All we have is the word KOFF and the number 147.’

‘Someone is going to have to visit every pub in the city,’ said Anna and felt a wave of resignation at the thought that that someone would be her.

His chest felt tight. No, just a twinge. A twinge in his lungs, that was all, too many smokes and too little exercise. Damn it, Anna was right, thought Esko. He reached for the packet of Norths in his jacket pocket but didn’t light up. He couldn’t, not indoors. He watched as a dark-skinned man in his twenties was handcuffed and bundled out of the apartment. As far as he was concerned it was the wrong guy; it wasn’t Reza. No matter, they’d get something out of this one too – at least, they would if Esko was allowed to interrogate him. He knew he wouldn’t have the chance; the NBI boys took care of all the tidy indoor work, while the city police were sent out any time you might have to get your hands dirty.

Esko glanced around. Far too tidy for your average junkie’s pad, he thought. Most likely people didn’t shoot up here; this place was just for dealing or planning. A brand new computer caught Esko’s attention. It was in the bedroom on a light-brown veneer desk with
piles of paper, a pencil stand, headphones and a printer all seemingly in their rightful places. A home office used to organise drug deals and gang warfare – all paid for by his taxation. Fucking hell. Esko’s head ached. The sun beamed in through the windows, hurting his eyes.

‘Look what we’ve got here,’ one of the officers smirked in the corridor. He stepped out of the closet carrying a shoebox. The box contained transparent bags filled with white powder and a few packets of Subutex. Not much of a raid, but enough to prove that there were criminal dealings going on in this apartment.

‘What an ingenious hiding place,’ the officer laughed.

‘Get a load of this,’ another officer shouted from the bedroom. He was holding a clothes hanger with a black hoodie. The back of the hoodie bore the white image of a snake and the words Black Cobra in calligraphic text.

Esko flinched. So that damn Islamist gang from Denmark and Sweden really was trying to expand out here, in our city. The Cobras were an extremely violent, dangerous, nasty crowd. While the police had expected them sooner or later, the black hoodie seemed to take everyone by surprise, like a sudden storm. The officers stared at it in disbelief. An electric tension fizzed in the air; Esko could feel its ripples on his skin. These hooded youths’ future plans didn’t include a classroom and a shitty, underpaid job. As far as these guys were concerned, society had been unable to provide them with anything of interest. On the contrary, it had only succeeded in marginalising them. Esko hocked up a persistent clump of phlegm and spat into the kitchen sink, its rim covered in yellow scum. For a group like that, it was easy to wind up in the world of organised crime, a world of poverty, frustration, disappointment and substance abuse. It was as easy as planting a potato in soil hoed by someone else. All you needed were good contacts, of which these guys had plenty, relatives all over the place, and soon new members would be popping up like rabbits. Decent contacts, good planning, a head for organisation, and the bomb was set. Suburban wogs craved money and power
just as much as business-school yuppies, and now it was on offer to them with a bit of action on the side. Jesus Christ, the police had to stop the Cobras setting up in Finland, no matter what the cost. Esko felt a quiver of excitement inside him. Drunken louts, wife beaters, burglars, shoplifters – it was all so familiar, so harmless, almost mundane crime, the unchanging routine of decades of work, serving only to fill his empty days with more emptiness. But this case, these gangs. They were international and probably better organised than Nokia. There was a sense of real criminality about them, real danger. It was a proper assignment. Stopping the loathsome expansion tactics of the Black Cobras would be the good deed of the century. Admittedly, his part would be small, very small, but great rivers run from small springs, or what was it they said? He would do his job to the best of his ability, better than any assignment he’d ever worked on – and that was saying something, because he always did his job well. Then he could think about retiring. He could do anything he wanted.

Macke didn’t open right away. Sammy didn’t want to ring the doorbell for too long. He felt afraid standing in this stairwell. He felt as though someone was watching him through the peephole in the door opposite; it seemed to gleam in the dim of the corridor, staring at him, accusing him. He listened, his ear up against the door to Macke’s apartment; there was noise, someone was home. Why wouldn’t Macke open the door? Then the sound of shuffling steps in the hallway, the glow of light behind Macke’s peephole went out for a moment, the door opened and Macke almost fell into the stairwell, a can of beer in his hand. Sammy grabbed him and pushed him back inside, quickly pulled the door shut behind him. Macke said something, but Sammy couldn’t make it out. He noticed a trickle of blood running from Macke’s forehead.

‘You hurt?’ Sammy tried to ask, but it was futile. Macke didn’t hear him; he was already far away.

They went into the living room. The low coffee table was covered
in packets of pills; there must have been dozens if not hundreds of them. Strewn on the table there were syringes, spoons, pieces of tin foil and the cotton wool used to filter solutions of dissolved pills. Cans of lager covered most of the floor. Sammy wondered where Macke had got his hands on so much gear, but he didn’t want to ask. He wondered too how Macke dared let him in, with so much stuff to pinch. Sammy hadn’t said anything about his past, but perhaps Macke realised that Sammy was an exception, even for a junkie, an outcast among outcasts and therefore harmless. Sammy didn’t understand, and he wasn’t all that interested in Macke. As long as he got his hands on some bupe. Macke slumped on the sofa, took a gulp of lager and again tried to say something. His eyes couldn’t focus. Blood still oozed from his head; Sammy saw a gaping wound on his crown. The hair around the area was dark-red and sticky. Macke chuckled incoherently and started to choke. A moment later bilious green and white vomit gushed over the sofa. Sammy felt a wave of disgust, but the packets of Subutex strewn across the table commanded his attention. They formed a wonderful little hill, almost a mountain. Macke’s not just a street dealer, he must be involved in some kind of smuggling ring, thought Sammy. That’s the only explanation. The apartment started to feel more and more dangerous. Gangs of organised criminals were the last people Sammy wanted to get messed up with. He knew that gang members weren’t afraid of violence and carried weapons in their clothing. Best to get away, quick. Get out of here, you’re not safe here, he tried to command himself as he sat down in an armchair and reached a hand towards the offerings of the table.