The Hummingbird (35 page)

‘In fact, I’d thought of taking her away, back home for a while, because she’s afraid of sleeping here. Is that all right? I live in Jyväskylä.’

Rauno turned to look at Esko, who thought about this for a moment before nodding his consent.

‘That’s fine. I’m sure it’ll be best for her and the baby. Leave us your contact details, because we will probably have to talk to her again,’ said Esko.

The sound of weeping came from the living room.

‘Maria is in shock. I’m worried about what this will do to the baby. Could you leave us? She needs to get some rest.’

‘We were just leaving,’ said Rauno.

‘When can I have my husband back?’ Maria cried. ‘I want to bury him! Let me have my husband back!’

‘I’m afraid in cases like this it can be some time before we’re able to release the body,’ Esko said apologetically. ‘Given that this wasn’t death by natural causes,’ he continued quietly.

By now Maria was wailing in rasping, brutal sobs, a mixture of weeping and pain that brought the officers out in goose bumps. Rauno felt awkward, didn’t know where to look. He couldn’t bear watching her agony.

‘Please, leave us,’ Sirkka Jääskö implored them in an exhausted voice. ‘Go before she loses her mind, before she goes into labour.’

*

‘I think the killer chooses his victims at random,’ said Rauno as they drove back into town.

‘Hangover easing up yet?’

‘I haven’t got a hangover!’

‘Did you try and come on to the wog? Or did she try it on with you?’

‘Do you have to be such a wanker all the time?’

‘Did you?’

‘For your information, that wog served in the Finnish army. And her father was a policeman.’

Esko fell silent. It had started to rain, drizzle at first, then more steadily. The road was wet. The clouds looked like cotton-wool balls after cleaning out the barrel of a gun.

‘There’s absolutely nothing to connect these two victims. This lunatic probably takes out whoever happens to be running past. He’s pretending to be some kind of Aztec warrior. I don’t think I’ll be going out running any time soon,’ said Rauno as stared at the raindrops trickling down the window.

Rajapuro, 9 p.m. Anna was sitting in a patrol car outside Bihar’s house, the blue lights on the car roof lazily flashing. Drizzle. Cold. When was someone going to question the fact that she was constantly checking out patrol cars, Anna wondered. Someone will start asking questions, wondering what I’m up to. What am I going to say?

But she didn’t care. If she got caught, she would come out here in her own car. They couldn’t stop her.

The lights were on in Bihar’s apartment. The metallic glow of the television in the living room. What were they watching? Not
Friends
or
Sex and the City,
that was for sure. The occasional glimpse of a figure in the kitchen window, fetching water perhaps. Or going to the fridge. A normal family evening. A normal family.

Right.

Rain glistened on the asphalt like oil; the 10- and 12-storey
apartment blocks dwarfed the trees. Kids in baggy jeans were smoking something beneath the roof outside Bihar’s doorway, their presence challenging the shadows cast upon them like a life sentence by the surrounding buildings. Ducks caught in the oil, birds that nobody dressed in overalls is going to come and save.

Nobody cares. We are always outsiders.

Strangers.

Others.

Why can’t I just stop this? Anna was so tired that she could have fallen asleep in the car. She should have driven straight home from work and gone to bed. Now she would have to take the car back into the city centre, check it in at the depot and only then drive back to Koivuharju – almost an hour’s round trip. How would she get any sleep tonight? Fatigue was pressed against her heavy eyelids right now, the heater was blowing a soothing, anaesthetic warmth against her face and she felt languid.

Everything seemed to be in order at Bihar’s house. The girl had probably already done her homework, like all hard-working school-girls, and was now watching a Kurdish soap opera on one of the satellite channels and getting ready for bed. Her mother and father would be thanking Allah for such a wonderful daughter and encouraging her to keep on studying through university. The younger siblings would follow in Bihar’s footsteps and one day, not long from now, Finland would see a wealth of highly educated, multilingual, multicultural, second-generation immigrants.

Right.

I’m nothing but a paranoid workaholic, thought Anna as she put her foot on the accelerator, put the car into first gear, released the hand brake and sped off from the Chelkins’ front yard.

By the time she arrived home, Anna felt wide awake or, more precisely, the sense of fatigue had momentarily disappeared. She hadn’t felt properly awake for weeks: a thick jelly had settled around her brain, her stiff shoulders wouldn’t relax even after careful stretching, her heart rate was continually too fast, and her entire body felt
constantly as though it was both on overdrive and incapable of functioning properly.

Anna signed in to the police’s intranet and started reading Sari’s reports on Ville Pollari’s phone and bank records. Every call to and from Ville’s telephone on the day of the murder had been checked; they were mostly work-related. On his way home he had received a call from Maria, and once he was home another call from Jussi. That was it. Sari had gone through Ville’s phone records over the summer and compared them with Riikka’s records. What a job Sari has done, Anna thought in awe. Ville hadn’t received any calls from any unlisted prepaid numbers and he hadn’t called any such numbers himself. Moreover, there was nothing to indicate any connection with Riikka or her circle of friends. Ville didn’t even have a Facebook profile. His credit card had been swiped mostly at the large supermarket in Asemakylä. There was nothing to suggest any prior contact with the killer. Nothing whatsoever. Anna racked her brains, trying to think how best to proceed, but her mind was blank. Everything seemed to have reached a dead end, yet again, a dead end with no way out. It was as though the case was stuck in the jelly surrounding her head. And yet she was convinced that there was something she should remember, something she had seen.

Anna eventually managed to doze for a few hours. At least that was something, she tried to console herself, though her head and neck had turned from jelly to burning lava as she clambered out of the tangled sheets at around 5 a.m. She staggered into the kitchen to make some coffee. Her mobile was flashing on the table. She was afraid to look at it; she didn’t think she could deal with another message from an unlisted number.

It was Ákos. He’d tried to call her around 4 a.m. So he was on a real bender. Her brother had also sent her a message, which Anna deleted without reading. She knew he would only be asking for money. Then she fetched the newspaper from the mat in the hallway and began leafing through the news items without feeling the
slightest interest in them. Someone had sent a brusque text message to the readers’ pages:
Why aren’t the police doing anything? Decent people are too scared to go out at night.

Was the writer referring to the jogging murders? Or general law and order? What were they talking about? Come on in and see what we really do, Anna implored the anonymous author, come and watch us lazing around all day long. The police always came in for criticism, no matter what they did.

Whatever. She was already used to it.

What she really needed wasn’t what normal people called rest or refreshment.

She wanted oblivion, real oblivion.

Even for a moment.

OCTOBER

29

VELI
-
MATTI
HELMERSON
raised his eyes from the bright, glowing screen of his computer. What was that clatter in the corridor? As though the door of the neighbouring classroom had rattled. He listened carefully for a moment; sometimes the kids snuck back into school to carry out some kind of prank if the front door was left open. It was strange that schools always attracted pupils in the evenings, especially those that didn’t show their faces much during the daytime. Even at this school, the police were called out several times each summer to shoo groups of kids drinking and making a mess in the playground – the school’s very own bright young things, who clearly missed the place during the summer break.

He couldn’t hear anything. The building again exuded an unbroken silence. The caretaker went round after 4 p.m. locking all the doors in the main building. No pupils were allowed in after that. It was probably Kirsi Koponen leaving her classroom next door. The new fourth-grade teacher was a pretty young woman, who seemed enthusiastic, hard-working and conscientious. They’re all like that to begin with, thought Veli-Matti, then they burn themselves out within a few years.

He looked at the clock ticking on the wall. It was almost six o’clock. After his last lesson, he had stayed on to prepare classes for the rest of the week and gone through essays for one of the children’s development projects. An extra three hours had sped past unnoticed, time for which he wouldn’t be paid. And people still commented on how envious they were of his short working hours.

Veli-Matti decided to call it a day. He switched off his computer, sorted the various papers on his desk, flicked off the lights in the classroom and went into the empty staffroom. The table was cluttered with used coffee mugs. Who’s supposed to clear those up, he thought as he recognised a mug belonging to the PE teacher Seppo Vilmusenaho. Spoilt rotten, that guy, always getting other people to do his chores. If I were a woman, would I wash up that mug, he wondered. That’s how women behave – taking care of everything and indirectly perpetuating the cycle of underachievement from father to son.

Veli-Matti rinsed his own mug and placed it in the drying cupboard. Then he went to the coat stand, slipped off his work sandals with soft curved soles and put on his walking shoes, pulled on his coat and double locked the staffroom door, as the last person to leave was expected to do. He stepped out into the dark corridor, regularly punctuated with the doors of classrooms, toilets, closets and cleaning cupboards.

Clouds were drifting across the sky, bringing the promise of rain. The wind had whipped up. Veli-Matti felt the chill and pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket. Two lonely cars stood in the school’s asphalted car park: a red Volkswagen Golf and Veli-Matti’s own black BMW. Was there still someone at school, he wondered. Who could still be at work? Who owned a car like that? It certainly looked familiar, but there were over a hundred members of staff at the school, if you included the canteen staff and all the cleaners. Veli-Matti couldn’t identify everybody’s car; it wasn’t something that particularly interested him. Though he had felt a wave of irritation when Vilmusenaho had come back from Bosnia with a brand-new Mercedes. A year off work and a ludicrously expensive car. It had felt like an unreasonable amount of good fortune for such an arsehole.

Just as Veli-Matti opened the door to his BMW, which had served him well for the last ten years, and was about to step inside, he looked up at his classroom windows.

The lights were on.

Bloody hell, he cursed out loud. Didn’t I just switch them off? He slammed the door shut and turned around, taking a few steps towards the school building before changing his mind. Forget about it, he thought. The council wouldn’t go bankrupt if the lights were left on for one night. It had been hours since his light school lunch and he was hungry. He decided to leave the lights on and drive home.

In the fridge were the remains of yesterday’s lasagne and a drop of white wine. Veli-Matti reheated the food in the microwave and poured the remaining wine into a glass. It tasted flat and was too cold. A bit like her over there, he thought and looked at his wife who was loading the dishwasher with a sour look on her face. What was the matter with her now?

After finishing his meal, Veli-Matti slumped on the sofa and switched on the television.

‘I’m going now,’ came his wife’s voice from the hallway.

‘Okay, I’ll probably go for a run,’ he replied absent-mindedly and didn’t bother getting up to kiss her or give her a hug. She would probably have slapped him if he’d tried.

‘Be careful,’ she said, though there was no warmth in her voice.

‘I will,’ he called nonchalantly, though he felt a wave of terror washing through him.

For an hour or so he watched a re-run of a pointless talk show, then he remembered the lights left on in his classroom. The matter started to bug him. What if Vilmusenaho happened to walk his dog past the school and noticed that he’d forgotten to switch off the lights? He would never hear the end of it. It was a niggling thought. Vilmusenaho was just like that, nagged on about people’s mistakes, as if in jest, and never forgot things. A thoroughly unpleasant man. It would be best to go on that run straight away, stop off at the school and turn those lights off. Not because of Vilmusenaho; it’s the principle, he tried to convince himself. His class had signed up for a project dealing with sustainable development. The students separated their rubbish, tried to use as few paper hand towels as possible
and switched off the classroom lights during break time. It was all pointless, he thought, but he had to lead by example. He pulled on his tracksuit, stepped out into the drizzling rain and started jogging at a leisurely pace towards the main middle school in Saloinen. The car park was deserted except for the red Volkswagen.