Evil Things, page 17
All right, the report. Hella inserted a sheet of typing paper into her shiny typewriter. The introduction was easy. Who, where, when. Done. It filled half a page. But what now? The certainty she’d felt the day before was floundering, much like her aspidistra. The nagging feeling that she had first experienced in Kukoyakka’s truck as it struggled along the ice-covered Rajajoosepintie road came back to haunt her. The case was just too neat. It worked on paper, true, but somehow it didn’t feel right. And yes, she was a poor judge of character, her relationship with Steve proved it amply, but still …
She was getting nowhere.
She got to her feet and peered out of the window. The smell was stronger here. The gherkins! That’s what it was. As he rummaged around, Ranta must have dropped one of the jars and broken it. There was a sliver of glass lying on her windowsill. She stared at it, biting her lips. The glass … With shaking hands, she searched in her shoulder bag. There it was! She took out the slivers and held them to the light. The letters were plainly visible. LOROQ. But it was only part of a word; the rest of the glass vial had been shattered. Suddenly, she thought about Kalle’s paper plane. Hadn’t she seen the letter Q there as well? She wrote it down. Loroq-quine. Loroquine. It meant nothing to her. POSITIVE. 19/19. She had a ghost of an idea, but how could she be certain?
Hella picked up one of the two files she’d taken from Eklund’s office. Inside was a typewritten statement by Dr Gummerus. The crime, as he called it, had been committed on Friday, and before his very eyes. The repeat offender Lahti had ventured to his front door, extracted his organ – his organ! Hella chuckled; for a doctor, Gummerus was uncharacteristically prudish – and urinated against his front door, staining the doormat, destroying his property and offending the women of the household. This was the sixth time that Lahti had done this, and this state of affairs could not be tolerated any longer. Measures had to be taken. Public order needed to be restored.
Hella folded the statement in two, imagining how Eklund would cringe if he saw her doing that, and put it in her shoulder bag. Then she picked up her parka. She’d go and check on the doctor, tell him the police were taking his concerns seriously and that measures would be taken. Oh yes.
As she left her office, Ranta was loitering outside her room. Hella flashed him a smile. “Come for more gherkins?”
“I’ve come to warn the pariah that her boss is in a foul mood today.”
“Thanks. I’ve already noticed.”
Ranta edged closer and Hella held her breath.
“There’s trouble between him and the Carmencita. Heard from the grocer she ran off with her dancing partner. She’ll be back, just like the last time, but in the meantime …”
So she’d guessed right. But it was not like she could delay this inquiry until the storm blew over. She needed to act now. Aloud, she asked, “Do you know if Anita keeps records of all the lunatics who come in to report crimes that don’t even exist?”
Ranta chuckled, and the stench of his breath almost made Hella faint. “Of course she does. Has to, doesn’t she? The ledger is in the reception area, second shelf from the top. Anita will show you.”
When Hella had arrived that morning, Anita was not in yet, but now she could hear the clinking of a coffee pot.
“Thanks, but there’s no urgency. I’ll ask her later.”
Or not. Ranta’s cousin had many virtues, but discretion was not one of them. Hella glanced at her watch. Almost ten o’clock. Anita would be out for her lunch break between 11 a.m. and noon. She could go out now and come back when the coast was clear.
Hella sped up when crossing the reception area, waving a hand at Anita.
“Hello there! Got to rush, the boss asked me to deal with Dr Gummerus’ complaint. If he’s looking for me, that’s where I’ll be.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Outside, the bleak October morning was cold and wet. Hella could see almost nothing beyond the circle of yellow cast by the street light at the corner of the police station. She rushed along the empty street, not because she was that eager to see Dr Gummerus again, but because of the damp that was creeping up her sleeves, freezing her to the bone.
42
Dr Gummerus lived on Kaamospolku, in what Ivalo townsfolk called a mansion, even though in reality it was just a big old house that was now in dire need of repair. The doctor answered the door himself. He must have been sitting next to it, in his flower-patterned easy chair, ready to defend his property from the beggar. Contrary to what Hella had expected, the doctor didn’t seem too happy to see her. The reason for this lack of enthusiasm became apparent as soon as he opened his mouth.
“Couldn’t they have sent a man to deal with this … issue? I cannot very well see what you can do about Lahti and his organ.”
“Probably nothing,” said Hella, shivering at the door. “But someone still needs to investigate before we assign the serious part of the job to a man who is able to deal with the suspect.”
The doctor stared at her for a moment, trying to make sense of her words. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s go to my study, and I’ll answer your questions, even though I fail to see why I need to be interrogated. It’s the house he’s targeting, because to him this house is an embodiment of the establishment. Of something he aspired to when he was younger, and that he now rejects out of spite. Don’t you agree?”
Hella didn’t, actually, but she abstained from saying anything that might antagonize the old man. She followed him to his study, an aggressively masculine room decorated with the heads of boars presumably shot by the doctor himself. A fire blazed in the hearth. Hella flipped open her notebook. She went through the doctor’s statement again, asking for specifics on this and opinions on that and dutifully jotting down the answers. Then, when she felt she had done enough, and the doctor started losing patience, she got to her feet. She wanted her question to appear unremarkable, almost an afterthought.
“Oh, by the way, I came across a strange character recently, a deranged man. His obsession was with medications, in particular a drug called loroquine, but I don’t know what it is, nor what it is used for.”
The doctor stared quizzically at her. “Loroquine, you said? Chloroquine, more likely. It must be the same man.”
“Excuse me?”
“The same man. He came here. Twice. The first time, it must have been a year ago, he brought me his daughter to be examined. But the second time … He is medium height, slightly built, probably in his late fifties – are we talking about the same man? He was practically foaming at the mouth.” The doctor’s own mouth twisted with disgust at the recollection. “What was the expression you used? A deranged man? I would say a raving lunatic.”
Hella held her breath. She knew that Erno had come, he must have done, like the good citizen that he was, but she hadn’t dared hope that the doctor would remember him. But on the other hand, why wouldn’t he? Although the doctor was a pompous ass, he had nothing to feel guilty about.
“When was this?”
“The second visit? In March. The twentieth. I remember because it was my late wife’s birthday.” He glanced ostentatiously at his watch. “If you have no more questions, Sergeant —”
“Just one last question. What is chloroquine used for? I haven’t had any medical training” – a lie, but what did it matter? – “so I don’t know.”
The doctor frowned at her.
“Chloroquine is a new drug. I only heard about it two years ago myself. It’s used as a cure for a tropical disease called malaria, which is a fever spread by mosquitoes. Not exactly something you can get in our part of the world. These aren’t the same mosquitoes we have here.” The doctor hesitated. “I’ve read in some medical publications that chloroquine can also be used to treat lupus erythematosus, but I don’t know whether anyone has used it for that purpose yet. Maybe that’s what your man was after?”
“And would you know where one could find” – she glanced at him, her pen raised above her notepad – “chloroquine?”
“In Helsinki, I suppose. At the army pharmacy, most likely. They have all kinds of medicines, just in case. But your man couldn’t just go into the pharmacy and ask for this drug. He’d need a prescription.”
Hella nodded. “Thank you, doctor.”
His tall, stooping figure stood in the doorway as she ran down the steps to the street. Then, with a sigh, the old man pushed closed his front door. She heard the grating of the chair’s legs against the wooden floor. Dr Gummerus had resumed his vigil.
43
As Hella had expected, Anita was out when she returned to the police station. Hella scraped the soles of her boots clean of snow then tiptoed across the room and sneaked a look at Eklund’s door: closed. She didn’t have to worry about Ranta, who always left at 11.15 sharp and never returned before 1 p.m.
Anita’s dainty porcelain coffee pot and matching cup stood, perfectly clean and dry, in the exact centre of her desk. Hella set them aside and climbed onto Anita’s chair to reach the second shelf from the top. Ranta was right. The shelf was crammed with notebooks bound in dark green fabric, the cover inscribed with the year. The notebooks went as far back as 1944, but Hella was only interested in recent history. She pulled YEAR 1952/1HALF out and placed it on the table. If Eklund surprised her, she could always say she’d just had a visitor, a peasant from up north who had come to complain about the wolves that attacked his reindeer herd, and that she was comparing similar occurrences.
She leafed through the notebook, raging against Anita’s clumsy handwriting, her weird annotations – what did “dressed in the prettiest pale pink beret” have to do with any crime? – and her ability to cover a whole page and still not say anything. A 23 June entry caught her eye – a certain Irja Waltari, dressed in a grey dress (“of cheap fabric”) and a shawl, had come in to complain about a wife beater in her village. She had been received by Ranta. No reason to take measures. Poor thing, thought Hella. It was little wonder that Irja felt distrustful of the police after that.
There was only one entry per page. During some weeks, the whole region seemed to storm the police station, complaining of everything and anything: neighbours, dogs, the state of the roads, food rationing (which was always blamed on the hunchback who ran the grocery store, whatever his name was). And then there were periods of quiet, of maybe one visit a week. March had been that sort of month. People had been busy repairing the damage that the heavy snow had inflicted on their houses. One entry on 3 March – a woman accusing her husband of cheating. One entry on 26 March – a dispute between neighbours. Nothing in between. Hella leaned in closer, her heart thumping against her ribcage. There was nothing between 3 and 26 March because a page had been cut out. Not torn out. Excised with a razor blade, neatly, meticulously. Hella knew of only one person who would do this instead of just yanking the pages out.
But she couldn’t be sure, could she? He might have had a perfectly ordinary reason for that – maybe Anita had spilled some coffee on the page and stained it. Or it could have been someone else after all. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who’d sneaked into the station like she had done, maybe during Anita’s lunch break, and extracted the page. But that brought her back to her starting point. Back to the question of why. Slowly, Hella replaced the notebook on the shelf and positioned Anita’s cup and coffee pot at the exact centre of the desk.
Her head was swimming with confusion. She had more questions now than she had answers. Chloroquine was used to treat lupus erythematosus or malaria. It must have been terribly important, otherwise why would the woman have kept it in her mouth? Perhaps she’d done it to keep the medicine from freezing because she intended to use it. There was also Father Timo’s gun, and the bullet wounds. Erno’s cache inside the stove, with Captain Makarova’s identity card inside it. And baby Aleksi, and Anna – they were involved too, indirectly, she could feel it. What happened in that forest? What chain of events led back here, to the Ivalo police station? Was Eklund involved? Did it explain his attitude?
There were two things she could do. First, she could confront Eklund head-on. Ask him if he had seen Erno Jokinen before. Ask him if he knew more about the case than he was willing to tell. Gauge his reaction. But that would probably not be a very smart thing to do, because even if he was innocent, he still wouldn’t like it. He was in a foul mood already. The second option was to wait an hour until Anita was back, and ask her. Anita liked nothing better than a little chat, and she had a good memory.
Hella slid towards the door, opened it and slammed it shut behind her. It felt childish, but if Eklund was paying attention, he would expect her to act in that manner. She marched towards her office, took off her parka and boots, and started typing. It felt easier now that she knew what she was doing, and why. She briefly summarized her actions over the last few days, resisting the temptation to interpret the facts. In the end, she listed the questions she still had. It was not the neat closing her boss had hoped for, but she didn’t have anything else to offer.
When she was done, she glanced at her watch. The report didn’t take as long as she had expected – still fifteen minutes to go until the ever-punctual Anita materialized at her desk. Suddenly ravenous, Hella crept out of her office and in the direction of the larder. There was always some stale bread left over, and cured fish.
In retrospect, it was a mistake. The larder was accessible through a narrow door that opened behind Anita’s desk. You never knew if anyone was in there unless you opened the door, or unless Anita told you, but Anita was not back yet. So Hella swung the door open, and there he was. Lennart Eklund. His left arm was circled around a huge jar of strawberry jam, his right tightly clutching a big chunk of stale bread. Hella cursed under her breath. If there was one thing her boss hated even more than improper filing of official documents, it was losing face. And nothing screams more that you are a cuckolded and abandoned husband than a chunk of stale bread and jam for lunch. Now he would pester her just to make her forget what she’d seen.
Eklund’s eyes narrowed. “I presume you’ve finished your report on the Käärmela case?”
Hella attempted a smile. “Yes, I have. I wanted to discuss it with you. After lunch.”
He glared at her. “I’m done with lunch. Esmeralda keeps feeding me those pork meat pierogies of hers, and I can’t take it any longer. I told her to take a break from cooking for a while. So I’ll see you in my office now.”
It was not a suggestion but an order.
“I’m coming,” sighed Hella. This was going to be even more difficult than she had imagined. Abandoning all thoughts of lunch, she hurried back to her office and picked up her typewritten report.
Eklund waited for her behind his desk, his big body slumped in the swivel chair with his elbows up in the air and his fingers interlaced behind his neck. He didn’t bother with a smile or any other niceties, just snatched the report from her hands.
While he read, Hella, who’d taken a seat without having been invited to, stared at his fat, hairy fingers and thought about Esmeralda. Granted, the girl was a birdbrain, but still … How could she have married him? How could she continue to be married to him? Or was he different when he was at home? Was an obsessively neat husband an asset, or a nuisance?
“Is this some sort of a practical joke, Mauzer?” Eklund’s eyes seemed to bore into her. “You write here that you’re not convinced that the priest, this Waltari, is guilty. Not convinced! What kind of proof do you need to be convinced? The man is a communist, a former terrorist, practically an assassin.”
“He is,” recognized Hella. “Even though ‘assassin’ is probably too strong a word. After all, he didn’t actually kill anyone.”
“Just because he got scared at the very last moment.” Eklund waved a dismissive hand at her. “Now listen. He acknowledged that he had quarrelled with Jokinen.”
Hella nodded.
“Good. He had a key to the dead man’s house. He went into that house to search it before you arrived.”
“He went in to get the boy’s clothes.”
“That’s what he says. Didn’t they teach you at the police academy not to trust anything your suspect says?” Eklund sighed deeply to show her, if there was still any need, just how stupid, how un-police-like her attitude was.
Hella dug her nails deep into the soft tissue of her palms and managed to say nothing.
Eklund went on in a condescending, hectoring voice: “Now, he also had a gun, an M1921 Bolo Mauser, which went missing after the murder. Didn’t he? Didn’t he?”
“He told me about it himself.”
“Because he knew you’d find out about it sooner or later. So he had a semi-automatic pistol, and the old man was shot at point-blank range with a pistol, not with a rifle. Which for Lapland is unusual, to say the least. You, Sergeant Mauzer, you found that gun, with two bullets missing, in the stream, not far from the dead man’s body. It’s written here, so I’m assuming you were the one who wrote it. I’m not inventing anything, am I?”
If she opened her mouth now, she would just end up screaming at him. So she kept it shut.
“Did the gun have fingerprints on it?” asked Eklund ominously.
“No. And neither did the tin box that I found inside Erno Jokinen’s stove. I cannot explain it.”
“Can’t you, Mauzer? This is Finland, for Christ’s sake. It’s cold. People wear gloves. Yes, indoors, too, I wouldn’t be surprised. The old man came in from outside and hid the damning evidence inside the stove without taking his gloves off.”
Hella stared at him.
When Eklund spoke again, his voice was two octaves lower. It sent a chill down Hella’s spine. Here was her career, or what was left of it, going down the drain.
“I rather thought that an experienced police officer like yourself would have reached a logical conclusion. Your priest killed that Soviet woman and Jokinen. Everything points to him. Motive, means, opportunity: you have it all. Now you need to write it down.”
