TH02 - The Priest of Evil (10 page)

‘What say we call it a day?’ Rastas finally suggested. His voice was cautiously enquiring, but he didn’t quite manage to hide his yawn.

‘Maybe, but there’s no point going over this same section again and again. We need to widen our search. Let’s start from well before the incident, in case there’s anyone wandering about the platform, or if anyone followed the victim when he first walked into the station.’

‘We ought to check the people coming back up the escalators too.’

‘Yes, but we still don’t know who or what we’re looking for.’

‘We might see a familiar face…’

‘Perhaps,’ Harjunpää muttered flatly. He knew from experience that this would take hours if not days of work, while the rest of the investigation ground to a complete halt.

With a scowl on his face he reached for his work phone and pressed number one on the speed dial. The phone rang five times before someone eventually answered.

‘Mäki.’

‘Hi, it’s Harjunpää again.’

‘Just as we agreed. And what a fine day it’s been. That aquarobics does a world of good, you know.’

‘Good for you. Listen, Rastas and I have gone through all the tapes from the platform. We can place the time of the incident fairly precisely judging by people’s reactions, but that’s about it. There’s nothing here to indicate what actually happened.’

‘So all we’ve got is that nutter’s statement.’

‘There was nothing wrong with his head. My gut reaction says he was telling the truth.’

For a moment Mäki fell silent, perhaps he was rubbing his earlobe, something he was in the habit of doing whenever he was at a loss. He was doing a temporary stint as senior officer at the Pasila division, and over the past four months he and Harjunpää had got on well enough.

‘Has the official notice been typed up yet?’

‘Yes, Leppis just sent it off and it went straight on to the online news. Should be in all the papers by tomorrow. We didn’t mention the possibility of a criminal investigation, but just asked that any potential eye-witnesses come forward.’

‘That’s fine. We’ll have a meeting in the morning and decide whether to go all out on this one.’

‘I’ve got a feeling that’s what we should have done today.’

‘Well, that wasn’t really possible. You shouldn’t worry that the crime scene investigators didn’t do a more thorough job – at least a thousand people must have trampled over the place before you got there.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Who else is coming tomorrow?’

‘Onerva, and that’s about it.’

‘We’ll draft in a few more if necessary. See you tomorrow.’

‘See you.’

Rastas had switched off the equipment and placed the cassettes in a neat, labelled pile. He now stood by the door, which was already ajar, with one hand on the handle and the other on the light switch. Harjunpää understood perfectly well and stood up.

‘Thanks for hanging in there.’

‘It’s all money in the bank. Good night.’

‘Night.’

Harjunpää turned left into the corridor and traipsed towards the lift. He still had to go up to his office on the fourth floor to check whether anyone had tried to contact him. He also had to switch off his computer and remember to charge his phone. As he approached the lift he took his personal mobile out of his jacket pocket: it was an old Nokia, the kind that nowadays people considered heavy and cumbersome. He felt a quiet, sullen satisfaction that it had lasted so long – only once had he had to change the battery. He was particularly happy that he hadn’t got caught up in the ridiculous habit of changing telephones once a year, or even once every other. All of a sudden everyone had to get a new mobile, learn all its new tricks and buy new calling plans with the internet, email and wap – all things he didn’t need.

He pressed the speed dial and this time the phone rang only once.

‘Elisa.’

‘Hello, it’s me,’ he said. In the background he could quite distinctly hear Pauliina, Valpuri and Pipsa singing ‘Hosianna’ – at this time of year? – and the corners of his eyes rose in a smile.

‘We’re having a bit of a sing-along…’

‘Sounds like it. How’s your head?’

‘Those painkillers worked a treat. Still, I wouldn’t object if you want to massage me a bit later.’

‘You might just be in luck… I’m going to try and get the train at 21.07, so I should be home by half past.’

‘Shall I make you a bite to eat?’

‘A sandwich maybe. And a cold beer wouldn’t do any harm either.’

‘Timo,’ she said softly. She didn’t need to continue; Harjunpää knew precisely what that tone of voice meant.

‘I love you too,’ he replied. ‘Take care.’

‘You too.’

Harjunpää slid the telephone back into his pocket and for a moment something warm and good flashed through his mind, soft as the finest wool. To have somewhere to go, to be; to be with people who cared about him and about whom he cared, was wonderful. How magnificent, how almost unbelievable it was that in life there existed such a thing as love; without it, he would probably not have been able to cope. And this, to him, was the most profound realisation he’d made that Tuesday.

Despite this, everything that had happened left a bad taste in his mouth, an aftertaste of failure and disappointment, as though he had just eaten a piece of mouldy bread.

‘I know, I know all too well,’ Mikko almost snapped. It shamed him, as did the fact that he always poured all his problems on to Kikka. Helplessly he padded the floor of his workroom in Kontula. He had been unable to stay at home, not wanting Sanna to realise quite how hard he was taking everything.

‘But where am I going to get help?’

‘The local shrink, if you ask me.’

‘Yes, but I tried that a year and a half ago when Cecilia started trying to get Sanna out of the house. I told them Cecilia was abusing her and that Sanna was at a low ebb… The psychologist told me I had to stop getting involved in my wife’s business and start living my own life. She even said there was no way I could help Sanna, that I couldn’t suddenly become her therapist.’

‘That’s outrageous.’

‘I know,’ Mikko sighed. He still remembered how humiliated and useless the situation had made him feel. ‘To cap it all off she turned the whole thing around and asked whether this was all just a projection of my own violent sentiments towards Cecilia.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. And by then I’d already had to take care of Sanna’s bruises maybe three or four times, because whenever she could escape she came to me.’

Mikko stopped and stood in front of the window. He could see only one tree, the top of a pine; the rest was just identical grey concrete buildings, exactly like the one he was in.

‘Still, I can’t really imagine she’d start beating Matti,’ said Kikka. ‘Especially since he’s always been “Mummy’s little boy”.’

‘She used to beat me. I never told anyone before. I was sitting in the red chair downstairs and she just started battering me round the head with both fists. There was nothing I could do but try to take cover. She was trying to get me to hit her back, of course. Imagine the tabloids the next morning:
“Mikko Matias Moisio Batters Wife!”’

‘Of course…’

‘Where can battered husbands go for help? Nowhere. Men don’t even dare talk about it, because then people would think they’re just wimps.’

He turned and looked around the room. It was almost the very incarnation of depression and sorrow. It was bleak and somehow harsh; he hadn’t bothered to decorate it at all. At first he’d sensed that it wouldn’t be an appropriate workroom, but eventually he’d been left with no option but to take it. The only pleasant item in the room was his desk: several decades old, it was sturdy and made of hardwood. Back when things had still been going well he had even painted it two different shades of green with flowers, the sun and a blossoming tree. Down one side there were four birds flying together; a single, whole family just like he’d once had. Was it such a pleasant item after all, bringing back memories of the past he had lost?

Another reason that the room was not truly a workroom was the fact that even the corridors were heavy with smells reminiscent of the earliest stages of his life, a time before he realised he could write: the smell of miserliness and penny-pinching, of tobacco and heavy drinking, the stench of quarrelling families sorting out their differences. Even if he used earplugs while trying to write, he could still make out the sound of the couple next door at each other’s throats. It always ended with the children crying and the eldest son ringing his doorbell asking him to call the police. That put paid to any attempts at writing and he would remain blocked for days at a time.

‘I’m sorry about always unloading the crap in my life on to you,’ he said, and now his voice sounded different, pinched like an oboe; and with that he understood that there was at least some good in his office – it was a place where he and Kikka could meet in secret. He always felt relieved after seeing her. She was sitting in the chair by his desk, a green GN that he had bought with the money from his first novel. Kikka was almost a miniature person, she couldn’t have been taller than 5’2”, yet she was still perfectly proportioned in every way: she was thin but not too thin, and her face had the funny ability to be either angular or soft depending on her expression. Her hair was the colour of wheat, her nails unvarnished and her hands were small and delicate. So too were her breasts, and her nipples were tiny, barely the size of a small coin, yet when he kissed and caressed them they came to life and protruded like olives.

In his eyes everything about Kikka was beautiful. Her wrists, her thin white neck; the way she walked, the way her hips and buttocks came to life. Her laugh was beautiful, as was the way she coyly tilted her head when she was amused. Particularly beautiful was her profile, both her face and her body. Her smooth stomach curved gently down towards her groin, while on the other side her bottom was softly rounded.

The very fact that she was a woman was beautiful too. Mikko found that same beauty in all women, even supposedly ‘ugly’ women. It was this that had first captivated him about Cecilia and that had blinded him to so many things he should have seen as warning signals.

And when he looked at all of this together – the tilt of her head and her fleeting smile, almost revealing her teeth – the sense of how much he loved her began to burst within him; how he craved her, how at once fervently and wistfully he wished that Kikka were something permanent and stable in his life, a part of him. Yet then the thought began to puzzle him, frighten him even, and with difficulty, like holding in a sneeze, he would try to suppress those feelings. On one level he fully understood that he was not afraid of Kikka herself, nor was he afraid that over time she too might prove to be some kind of monster. What he was afraid of was commitment and, ultimately, love itself.

‘Mikko, come and sit next to me.’

‘On the bed?’

‘We’re hardly going to do it on the table,’ she scoffed as laughter spread across her face. She had to say this, it was their little joke. The first time they had made love had been on that same table, as there hadn’t been a bed in the room. The typewriter had fallen, crashing to the floor, cracking its cover. Every time he saw that crack he smiled quietly to himself.

He lay down on the bed next to Kikka and pulled himself up tightly against her side so that his head was resting on her shoulder and his face lay against her neck. He began to inhale the smell of her skin, drinking it in with his soul, moving his arm around her head and caressing her earlobe with his fingertips. They would often sit like this for hours at a time, two hours, occasionally changing positions, Kikka curling up in Mikko’s arms. Sometimes they would exchange a few odd words, but for the most part they’d simply lie there, breathing together.

‘Did you try talking to anyone other than that psychologist?’

‘You name it… There was a man at the community office in the church, Jokinen I think his name was. I stupidly thought he’d understand what was going on, but once it became clear that Sanna was going to move in with me, the only thing he worried about was how Cecilia would deal with losing her role as a mother and how Sanna and I could support her – even though Cecilia was deliberately trying to force Sanna to move in with me because she knows I can’t work properly with someone else living under the same roof.’

‘So how did you work back in Kulosaari?’

‘The ground floor had a room facing the sea that I used as an office. You could only get in through a door in the back garden. Down there I always felt like I was alone.’

For a moment they lay together, inhaling the same air, each breathing strength into the other. Mikko could feel an artery in Kikka’s throat pulsing restlessly, expectantly, and moved his hand to her smooth stomach.

‘But even that stopped working?’

‘Yes. Cecilia started appearing at the door dozens of times every day, even though she’d agreed not to. She’d make a drama out of nothing, then once she’d gone it would always take me an hour or two to get back into the world of the novel.’

‘Yet you were supporting the family with your writing?’

‘Well… I don’t know. She must have been profoundly envious, jealous even. Once we’d already decided that I would move out she suddenly announced that she would stop the divorce proceedings if I signed a written agreement never to write again. When we went to the social services things couldn’t get underway because Cecilia just didn’t turn up. At least there they understood what a terrible situation this was for Sanna. They started talking about placing her with foster parents – my own daughter! I walked out of the office and Sanna moved to Kallio the following week.’

Kikka tightened her arms around him and moved her leg across his thigh. Mikko closed his eyes and tried to close his mind too, to concentrate on that single moment, on Kikka lying there warm beside him, her hair gently tickling his forehead. But his thoughts still turned to his son, and all at once everything was perfectly clear to him: as soon as Sanna had moved out, Matti would have to move in.