Evil Things, page 10
The parishioners, woken from their torpor by the familiar sound of the church bell, wandered towards the door. Out of the corner of her eye, Irja saw Sergeant Mauzer stop Martta Jokinen and whisper something in her ear. The old woman froze, the red dress gleaming in the dull candlelight. Then she whispered something back at the policewoman, and from where Irja stood, it looked like an insult.
“Aunt Irja, are you OK?” whispered Kalle. “Aunt Irja?”
Through her tears, Irja caught a glimpse of her old paint palette; or maybe it was just the multicoloured splendour of the icons. The candlelight was brighter now, it danced before her eyes. A baby screamed, his first raw scream upon coming into the world. Irja smiled and, as other screams closed in on her, and the heat from the candles became unbearable, she fell first to her knees, and then, face down, onto the floor.
24
“Kalle, I think you know more than you’re telling me,” said Hella. “About your grandpa. About where he went, and what those ‘evil white things’ really are.”
Kalle shook his head. No meaning I don’t know? Or was it a no meaning I don’t want to tell?
Irja was lying on the bed in her room, weeping quietly. She had not been injured in the fall, just scared by it. Her husband was with her; he was whispering something into her ear, but his words brought no comfort.
And here I am, enjoying this opportunity to grill the child on my own, thought Hella, suddenly disgusted with herself. The house was silent and it seemed to her that her voice was unnaturally loud and sinister. She tried again.
“Kalle, I need you to help me. Do you know why? Because I need to find your grandpa. I also need to find the person who killed that lady in the woods. We want him to be punished for what he did, right?”
Wrong, apparently. Because if Kalle wanted him or her punished, he would have said something by now, and he hadn’t.
“Justice,” said Hella, because she couldn’t just leave it at that, even though she knew full well how pathetic what she was about to say sounded – “justice is the most precious thing on earth. Justice makes the world a better place, for everyone.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Father Timo as he strode back into the room, a deep frown creasing his brow. “Is justice more important than forgiveness?”
“There’s no forgiveness without justice.”
Then, just as the priest was about to say something, she turned back to the boy. “All right, Kalle, do you want to tell Father Timo? Or Irja?”
The child wriggled and bit his lip. If only she knew how to talk to him!
“Kalle, listen to me. Please. It’s important. Do you want something from Ivalo? A new toy or a box of chocolates? I can ask my friend who drives the big truck to buy it for you. Or you can ride in the truck with him.”
It was still a no, but there was a glint in the boy’s eye which made Hella think he might be interested after all. The priest must have noticed it too, because he cut in:
“Kalle, why don’t you go and play with Seamus? I think he’s waiting for you.” And, as Hella started to protest, he added, “No, please, Sergeant, the child is tired. He is under my care. You will question him another day.” He practically shoved Kalle out of the living room and closed the door after him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Hella gasped. “This is a murder investigation! I’m the one who decides how it should be conducted.”
The nerve of this man! Telling her what she should do, and when! She was seething with anger. This picture-perfect house, straight out of a fairy tale, the beautiful wife, and now him. Not a priest but a male model, with authority thrown in for extra oomph. Of course he’d be popular. Good-looking, earnest, well meaning, well spoken. Religion as the opiate of the masses. Those naive and trusting people probably eating out of his hand.
The priest said: “Kalle won’t say anything because he promised Erno he wouldn’t, and he’s keeping his word. He should be proud of himself.”
“You think I don’t know that?” screamed Hella, suddenly beside herself with rage at these perfect people and their noble feelings. “I understand that. But a crime needs to be punished. It’s the law, and it’s right, too, whatever your stupid religion thinks about it!”
Father Timo didn’t shout back at her, which only made Hella angrier. Instead, he poured strong black tea into a little cup decorated with forget-me-nots and carried the cup through to his wife’s bedroom. Then he returned and took a seat in front of Hella.
“Irja is running a high fever,” he explained. “Every two days, which is really unusual. We’ve consulted Dr Gummerus in Ivalo, but he doesn’t know how to explain it. So we’ve been reduced to home remedies. Tea with raspberry and honey. Would you like some?”
“No, thank you. Did you hear what I just said?”
“I did.”
“And you’re not reacting?”
“I agree with you. Don’t look at me like that. I do agree with you. Justice is important, not as much as forgiveness in my view, but the two frequently go together. And Erno is my friend. I want the murderer of that woman punished. But it’s not right to force the information you need out of a defenceless child. I don’t want Kalle to live forever with the idea that he betrayed his promise. I cannot allow that.”
“Oh, you can’t?” scowled Hella. “I don’t know if you realize it, but Kalle is the one person who can tell us something about what happened here. I have no other witnesses.”
“I know that. But what do you make of Kalle’s freedom? His freedom of choice, his spark of God. It belongs to every human being. The freedom to follow his conscience. He needs to make that decision himself, and not to be tricked out of his free will by promises of trinkets, like those grown men and women who trade their souls for money, or for prestige.”
“Then you find a way to convince him without buying him,” said Hella, who refused to be thrown by the priest’s arguments, even though she recognized their worth.
“I will,” replied the priest serenely. “But first I have something to tell you. Maybe you won’t need to talk to Kalle after you hear this.”
He smiled bravely at her, but Hella could see that he was worried, because his knuckles were white and a vein was pulsing in his temple.
“What is it?” she barked back, which was surely uncalled for but made her feel better.
“Before I start, I need to ask you a question. Did you find a handgun?”
As she looked at him, uncomprehending, he repeated his question slowly, as if he was talking to an obtuse child: “I wanted to know if you found a gun in Erno’s house.”
Hella was sorely tempted to respond that this was not his business, but if she did, she ran the risk of never finding out what gun he meant in the first place.
“No,” she snapped. “I’m still looking. Your gun, right?”
He fell into the trap like a baby. “Correct. I lent it to Erno because he asked me for it a couple of weeks before he disappeared. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it earlier, but I didn’t know what kind of person you were.”
She looked at the priest. “Why would Erno Jokinen want to borrow a gun from you? He had his hunting rifle. Two, even.”
Father Timo was staring down at his hands, as if he had never seen them until this moment. He, too, was conscious of what this meant. Why would you want to borrow a gun, if not to kill somebody? Then, if things go wrong, you can lay the blame on someone else. Or maybe he just wanted a smaller weapon, something easier to conceal than a rifle.
“He didn’t tell me the reason,” said the priest slowly. “He knew I had a gun because I told him once, and he asked to borrow it. Karppinen saw us, actually. He’s always watching Erno’s windows, and when I glanced in the direction of his house after handing the gun to Erno, there he was, armed with his binoculars, staring at us.”
“And why do you have a gun, Mr Waltari?”
Father Timo paused for a second. Maybe he’s wondering whether he can get away with lying to me, thought Hella.
“Because I haven’t always been a priest. Thirteen years ago, I was a revolutionary, part of a group of radical-minded students.”
“Did you kill people while you were at it?”
He looked squarely at her. “I didn’t. We had this idea of assassinating a politician, Juho Niukkanen, because he opposed a treaty with Soviet Russia, and I was supposed to be the one to pull the trigger. But when we got to our hiding place, I realized that I couldn’t take another man’s life. I tried to talk my friends out of it, but it was too late; one of them fired, and fortunately missed.”
“Does anybody know about this?”
“My wife does, but not her parents. The patriarch does. Erno does, too, although how he found out about it, I’ve never known.”
“And if the word got around about your past, that would be a problem for you, right?”
“It would. I might lose my parish here. No one wants a criminal priest. But it’s not me I’m worried about. I don’t want you to think that Erno is dangerous in any way. That’s why I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t know who they’d send to investigate this case.”
Hella felt her pulse quicken while a pounding headache took hold in her brain. Was the man really telling her that he had withheld crucial evidence because he didn’t know what sort of person she was? Did he realize that he was only making things worse? Was he telling her about the gun, and about his past, only because he knew she had received the file from Eklund? Had he, or Irja, gone through her things while she’d popped to the bathroom before going to church? She kept her door locked at all times, but they might have a spare key.
“And what kind of person am I, in your opinion, Father?” she hissed. She made “Father” sound like an insult.
“An intelligent, sensitive, caring person. A person who would understand, and not jump to conclusions.”
She got up to her feet and grabbed her bag.
“Then you’re a poor judge of character, Father.”
She slammed the door behind her.
25
She had a bar of Fazer Blue chocolate in her bag, for emergencies. The chocolate was hidden under a hand-knitted sweater in bright red wool, which she had made herself during her first year at the police academy. At that time, she’d so missed receiving yet another stupid, ugly, hand-knitted sweater as a Christmas gift from her mother that she’d decided to make one herself. Surprisingly, she had succeeded, in the sense that it was, indeed, ugly, much uglier even than what her mother had ever made. The white snowflakes which, for the sake of simplifying the task, she had sewn onto the sweater instead of weaving them in, were not even level. The first snowflake sat in the middle of her right breast, while the second was way lower, and the third had ended up under her left armpit. Still, she wore the sweater every weekend for three months, until she got tired of the ceaseless comments it provoked. She didn’t wear it any more, but she still kept it with her as a reminder of that blessed time when she still believed that things could be mended.
The chocolate that she wolfed down while sitting on the edge of her bed did the trick, as usual. Ten minutes later, Hella’s anger subsided, leaving an aftertaste of resentment. Jokela had been right about her when he’d told her she was too emotional. Their last conversation was still fresh in her memory. One of the worst moments of her life. Not on a par with her family’s deaths, of course, but a close second.
She stared at the tiny, brittle snowflakes that the cold northern wind was sweeping before her window. Even now, her hands around a steaming mug she’d brought through from the kitchen, Hella felt a knot in her stomach as she remembered their conversation.
“My dear girl, please take a seat.”
Hella cringed but obliged. For all his fatherly manner, Chief Inspector Jon Jokela was not the sort of man one could argue with. She knew already what was coming – maybe not the magnitude of it, but the general idea. And yet the only question that kept reverberating in her brain, like a fly trapped inside a glass jar that keeps banging against the walls until someone lets it out or it dies of exhaustion and stress, was this: Does he call Inspector Mustonen, his protégé, the poster child of Helsinki’s homicide squad, “my dear boy”?
“You know why I called you in, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Hella, while her white-knuckled hands grabbed the edges of her seat.
“Please …” Jokela chuckled, clapping his hands on his knees and leaning forward as if sharing a confidence. “Don’t call me sir. Call me Jon, that’s what all my friends do.”
Friends. Not “colleagues”. It was worse than she thought.
“Jon,” she said in a flat voice. She didn’t know what to add, but maybe she wasn’t expected to say anything. Maybe it was just a way for him to brace himself for what was coming. No one likes to deliver bad news. Or at least not to twenty-five-year-old girls that the University hospital psychiatrist, who assisted the homicide squad every once in a while, had labelled a depressive and an obsessive personality.
“You must understand, Hella, that I’m not disappointed with you, but with myself. What happened is my fault, and I said as much to our chief of staff. I should have known better, but I trusted Colonel Kyander’s recommendation. He is a man of valour, a man of sterling reputation, so when he vouched for you …” Jokela shook his head. “Accepting any woman to the squad was a challenge. But a woman who is almost a child still, who had suffered such a personal tragedy … It was madness. We should have found you a nice, quiet office job, regular hours, no pressure. You would have had time for a private life. I bet being part of a homicide squad is a sure-fire way to drive away any potential suitors, no?”
“No,” mumbled Hella, thinking of Steve, of the increasingly rare moments they spent together. Steve was proud of her and of what she did, she was certain of that.
Pretending not to hear her, Jokela turned to the window, behind which two slow-marching junior officers passed, leading guard dogs.
“All I want to say is, I think you’ll be better off elsewhere. You’ll be much happier. Chief Inspector Lennart Eklund, head of the newly established Ivalo police station, is looking for an experienced officer. I think you’ll be perfect for the job. Eklund is a nice, quiet man, very diligent, very methodical. Lapland is beautiful. That’s true Finland for you. Clean air, lots of lakes, mushrooms, wild strawberries and blueberries, if you like that sort of thing.”
“I don’t,” said Hella. “Please let me stay. I’ll be less” – she struggled to find the right word, the words that would convince him – “less emotional.”
Jokela breathed a long sigh and let his arms drop to his sides. “My dear Hella, you know as well as I do that this isn’t possible. Not after what’s happened. You just can’t go about shooting suspects. And don’t tell me it was self-defence. Yes, the man had grabbed a knife, but you were the one who led him into the kitchen in the first place, and at the precise moment Inspector Mustonen went to answer the door. He told me he had expressly instructed you not to go there.”
“Mustonen didn’t instruct me on anything,” Hella said. “And when the suspect grabbed that knife, I thought he would kill us, his mother and me. So I fired first.”
“Because you panicked,” Jokela cried out. “You see, that’s exactly the problem. And this wasn’t just any suspect, was it? It was the man who killed his wife and four of their children, and who was about to walk free because of a procedural error. You were the first officer present at the scene, and you cried. I remember it. I felt bad for you at the time. I still do. You, of all people! Trust me, Hella, that’s not the life you want to lead. I’m not doing this for myself. I like challenges. I’m doing it for you.”
“No. You’re not.” She was angry now, rising from her seat like a Fury, her good resolutions forgotten completely. “You’re doing it for yourself, because you just don’t want to be bothered. You want me off your hands, and you always have. You only hired me because someone in the Ministry decided that the Finnish police were going to be the most progressive in the world and employ women not just as … as administrative assistants, but as regular officers. You had no choice. Do you think I don’t know that? And now at last you’ve found a pretext to send me away.”
Jon Jokela wrinkled his nose, not bothering to conceal his disgust any more. “Calm down, my dear, you’re being hysterical. The facts speak for themselves.”
“There are no facts,” screamed Hella at the top of her lungs, and if the whole floor heard her, so much the better. “It’s my word against his. You’re choosing to believe Mustonen, that’s all. Because you go drinking after work with him, because you go hunting with him at weekends.” Her eyes were filling with tears, and she blinked them away. She was not going to let him see her cry.
A silence fell upon the room, troubled only by the scraping of his black and gold fountain pen. At last, he tore a page out of his notebook and pushed it towards her.
“Chief Inspector Lennart Eklund’s phone number. He’s expecting you in Ivalo in two weeks’ time; earlier, if you’re ready. The chief of staff will send you the forms to fill in, but you might still want to call Chief Inspector Eklund beforehand. Nothing like human contact to make a good start.”
Hella rose to her feet, smoothing her wrinkled uniform skirt. She didn’t shake Jokela’s hand, nor did she take the paper with her new boss’s contact details. Instead, she marched to the door and swung it open.
Dear boy Mustonen was eavesdropping in the lobby. He straightened himself up, but not quickly enough. Hella heard muffled laughter coming from the secretary’s office.
“Speak of the Devil,” smiled Hella. And then, in the sweetest voice she could muster: “Your brown-noser is here, Jon.”
FRIDAY 17 OCTOBER
26
“What a lovely sweater!” cried out Irja with a little more enthusiasm than was necessary. It was a lie, too – the red top that Sergeant Mauzer was wearing, full of holes, with three white shapes that resembled crushed spiders on its front, was not lovely at all. But it was touching, in a way. Like an old toy that had been worn to pieces by a child’s unrelenting affection.
