TH02 - The Priest of Evil (9 page)

‘Ha!’ he snorted. Taking the risk had paid off, because in return he had been rewarded with a vision. Maammo had granted it to him and had commanded him to make it come true. This time the vermilion swirl had been great, but in the vision he had seen an even greater one, a swirl of giant proportions, one that would occur only when as many as ten or twenty people died at once and their spirits rose up together. And it would be a swirl so great that Maammo would take him into her embrace for all eternity.

Indeed, he already had some idea of how to realise this. Maammo had prepared him for it, though at first he had not understood. The key to everything lay beneath his bedside table. He was not quite sure whether he was to carry out the plan himself, and thinking about it now he felt that he should not. Perhaps not, though this would take him straight into Maammo’s eternal embrace, for as the earth spirit he must not be selfish. Selfishness was an affront to Maammo. He was more important to her the way he was, a quiet pioneer clearing the road to the Truth.

In order to carry out the sacrifice he required someone else, a disciple of sorts. And already he was almost sure who that disciple would be. The girl did however have rather a quick temper, and for this reason he still had doubts. He felt he would have to examine her in a new light and maybe test her in some way.

‘
Pica pica ecclesia
,’ he muttered, concentrating hard as he folded both little fingers into his palms, tucked them beneath his thumbs and crossed the rest of them. He then pressed the tips of his fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes. A moment passed and he could see the girl – her cheeks ruddy, how she walked somewhat awkwardly due to her excess weight. It was enough, and he whispered to himself: ‘Tonight, at the compass in the railway station…’

He moved his head, somewhat bewildered, as if he had suddenly come to, crept towards his bedside table and knelt down beside it. He held it round the corners, gently lifted it and moved it to the side, so carefully that the storm lantern did not so much as flicker and the water in his mug did not splash. There lay his key: four sweet, ripe sticks of dynamite, like four phalluses, caps on each one of them; and a coil of yellow and green wires inside that looked like the spilled guts of an animal.

As he beheld all this, for a brief moment he could see the coming of the Truth, the new Holy Big Bang. It would incinerate everything and make it pure, taking with it all sinners and infidels, all the wrongs and suffering endured by those who know the Truth.

‘Alea iacta est.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Harjunpää sighed quietly – perhaps he merely thought it. His lips didn’t move, but his mind sighed for the umpteenth time. He rested his left hand on his hip, rubbed his forehead with the other and marched over to the office door as if he were about to go outside. Restlessly he returned to his desk, made for the door, then back again to the desk. ‘Jesus Christ…’

‘Good morning to you too,’ said Tupala. He had silently stepped up to the doorway and now stood there on tiptoes, bobbing up and down, his hands crossed behind his back. His expression was serious, as always, but his eyes betrayed an amused little smile. ‘What happened to you?’

‘This underground business. I went over there and blurted out to the victim’s wife that her husband had died, and it turns out she’s about eight months pregnant…’

‘You weren’t to know. And someone would have had to tell her sooner or later.’

‘I know, I know… If only I’d thought to take Carita with me. But the woman lives just up the road in Merihaka. It seemed a bit pointless to drive through rush hour to the station and back.’

‘I doubt having a priest there would have softened the blow.’

‘I don’t know. It’s a good job she didn’t have a miscarriage. What do I know - they rushed her to the maternity clinic.’

‘I know how you feel,’ said Tupala after a moment’s silence, as if he had been wondering whether to go on or not. ‘Once, this woman was only half way through her pregnancy when her husband went and hooked up a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe and stuck it through the car window. Money problems, apparently. And this woman made me tell her over and over that it wasn’t a painful death – you know the way people always want to know their loved ones haven’t suffered… So I assured her that it’s just like falling asleep. The next day I get a phone call from Kirkkonummi Police, because I’d given her my card. She’d driven up to their summer cottage and done the same thing. That’s when I realised what guilt really is.’

They looked at each other in silence. Harjunpää decided not to mention that he had very nearly given the grieving wife the plastic bag containing her husband’s wallet. It was covered in blood of course, but he had remembered just in time, and managed to stuff it back in his pocket without her noticing.

The wail of fire engines pulling up somewhere nearby could be heard, but neither of them bothered getting up to look out of the window: the alarms at the broadcasting company across the road went off accidentally at least once every other week.

‘Oh, there’s someone for you downstairs.’

‘There can’t be,’ said Harjunpää, flicking through his diary. ‘There’s somebody called Eränen coming at two o’clock about that bread knife incident, then the next one’s not until half three.’

‘This one just walked in and asked for the officer in charge of the underground incident. His name’s Kallio.’

‘That’s all I need. I’ve still got to come up with some relatives for our crazy dog man. Apparently they’re keeping him in the mental hospital for at least three weeks, but someone’s got to start taking care of his affairs pretty soon. And that dog’s got to be found a home. Keeping a thing like that at the vet’s doesn’t come cheap.’

‘I’ve told you, Timo, this is it. Things never change in this job.’

‘You’re right there,’ Harjunpää muttered and forced himself up from the desk. The spring in his stride almost replaced the momentary feeling of lethargy, though he had barely managed to take two steps before his phone rang.

‘Harjunpää?’ he all but snapped, but his voice softened once he realised that the caller was his wife Elisa. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing really, just feeling a bit sorry for myself, that’s all. My headache’s started up again.’

‘Poor you. What if I massage your neck and shoulders again this evening? It worked yesterday.’

‘You’re not staying on late?’

‘There’s someone coming in at three-thirty for an interview, but that’s it. I should be on the five o’clock train in any case.’

‘Aah.’

‘I’ve got some 800mg painkillers in my cabinet. Take one of them.’

‘Will do. Love you.’

‘Love you too,’ said Harjunpää. He switched off his phone, walked towards Tupala, who had discreetly moved to one side and added, ‘Elisa’s going back to work next week for the first time in years. She’s worried to death about it.’

‘Make sure you massage her well, eh?’

‘Oh I will.’

The lift jolted into motion and Harjunpää listened instinctively to the sounds it was making this time. A few months ago one of the cleaners, a conscientious but soft-spoken woman had become trapped in this same lift. It had happened late one evening. Naturally she had pressed the emergency button and a group of service men had arrived on scene. But the cleaner had been too shy to respond to their calls, and because there was no reply the service men decided that there must not be anyone in the lift after all. In the end Hush-Hush Heli, as she became known, got out of the lift the following morning - after being trapped inside for fourteen hours. It was a miracle that nothing had ever leaked to the press.

‘Kallio,’ Harjunpää announced from the lift door; there must have been a dozen or so people waiting to be interviewed. A man sitting by the main
entrance stood up. Harjunpää gave a quiet sigh. He was a youngish man who looked generally all right, but he was apparently hampered by some terrible looking spasms. As he walked one knee rose high into the air, while he dragged his other foot across the floor, and his arms rose and fell in an odd, arhythmic fashion. Harjunpää couldn’t recall the name of the man’s condition, but he thought he remembered that it didn’t affect a person’s mind.

‘DS Timo Harjunpää.’

‘Santeri Kallio,’ replied the man, and as he spoke his head jerked violently to one side and his mouth seemed to contort. Harjunpää found it hard to look at him – probably something he had learnt as a child telling him not to stare at disabled people. This time, however, he had no choice.

‘Why don’t we go up to my office and have a chat?’ he suggested. The group of people in the waiting room had just watched the man awkwardly make his way across the floor and now stared in his direction, curious to see how well he could speak.

‘I know… I… thrash about… a lot,’ said Kallio once the lift had started moving. An unfamiliar knocking sound could be heard again, as if someone were hitting the lift shaft with their fist. ‘But… I’ve still… got all my… marbles.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Harjunpää. He then looked at Kallio. Regardless of all he had suffered his eyes were gentle and somehow sympathetic. There was something else too, as if he were imploring Harjunpää to do something.

‘I believe you,’ he said, and perhaps this was precisely what Kallio needed. In any case his whole body seemed to relax and his head stopped twitching so frequently.

‘That man. He was… pushed. Under the… train.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘He was… murdered. I saw.’

‘Are you referring to the man who died this morning in Hakaniemi Station?’

‘Yes. But… there were… people… in between. First… all I could… see was a… hip… shoving him. He… fell against the… wall of the… train. Then a… hand… pushed him by the… shoulder. The man… shouted… ‘
Oy!
’… and fell… in between the… carriages.’

‘Are you quite sure?’ asked Harjunpää. His voice was suddenly hoarse, rough as sandpaper, and his cheeks began to burn as if he had been hit with something. For a moment he questioned the man’s intelligence – in some way he had to question it – but then he conceded, for there it was right in front of him, the worst and most shameful nightmare scenario for anyone in Violent Crimes: visiting the scene of an accident without realising that it was in fact a crime scene.

‘Positive. There’s… no way he… stumbled.’

The lift arrived, jarring to a halt as though it had struck something hard.

Matti was ashamed. It felt as if he were covered from head to toe in mud, or some stinking sludge, as though his shoulders had been worn down by lead weights. Because of this he didn’t look up, but just watched the tips of his shoes as they flashed in front of him, one after the other. He was also a bit scared, though perhaps not as much as normal on his walk home. He still expected them to jump out and attack him, even though they hadn’t even shouted at him on the playground this time. Above all he was disheartened by everything, at the way his life had changed, so that everything good and safe had disappeared.

‘Are you listening?’

‘What?’

‘I asked how you’ve got enough money to live in a place like Kulosaari.’

‘We moved there when my dad was still writing. He had two jobs: delivering the post and writing books.’

‘So why did he stop then?’

‘Dunno. Something must have snapped. Out of the blue they told him they were moving him to the sorting office, and I guess that’s when it all started.’

‘What does your mum do?’

‘She’s at home mostly, but she’s got a job at the newsagents,’ replied Matti. Leena’s curiosity and the fact that she talked non-stop made him
uneasy; he would much rather have been quiet and continued staring at his feet. He wanted to go home, to go out in the garden and down to the shore; perhaps the swans would have arrived by now.

Besides, Leena was a bit odd. Her nose pointed upwards and she had a big chin, almost like a boy’s, and there was something else boyish about her. Her hair had been cut so that she looked as though she was wearing a bowl on her head. Once, back in the days when people called her the Hammer Thrower to her face, she hit this boy Joonas over the head with a stone, and his scalp had opened up and there was blood everywhere. Another time she smacked a girl called Pirjo in the face and gave her a real shiner. But no one called her names after that. Everybody was a bit scared of her now.

‘Can I come over to your house for a while?’ asked Leena. ‘We could watch a video or something.’

‘No…’

‘Why not?’

‘Mum doesn’t let me bring anyone home. And now this guy Roo’s moved in. He’s works nights and he’d tell her.’

‘Why has he got such a funny name? Roo…’

‘My sister Sanna still lived with us when he first moved in. And one day he brought back a bottle opener with a handle made from a kangaroo’s paw. A real one, it was dried. Can you imagine? A kangaroo’s paw…’

‘Doesn’t sound like a very nice guy.’

‘He’s quiet, a bit of a sissy really. Imagine, he’s got his own dressing table. Me and Sanna decided to call him Roo and whenever we got really pissed off with him we’d start singing ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport!’Then we’d fall about laughing because he didn’t get it.’

They had come far enough that Matti could see his house, white behind the trees. It was a two-storey terrace, though there were in fact three floors because the garden sloped so much. Matti no longer felt the same calm and relief upon seeing the house as he had in the past. Now he just felt lousy and stale, like washing-up water left in the sink. He hoped Leena would take the hint and go home, but of course she didn’t, and insisted on walking him to the door like a baby. He sneaked a look at her.
From the side she didn’t look all that bad, and she had bigger tits than anyone in their year. They bobbed up and down in a way that meant she couldn’t have been wearing a bra.

‘Why don’t you come out with me later.’

‘No…’

‘Don’t want to be seen out with the girls?’

‘No, it’s not that. I haven’t got any money, Mum won’t give me any.’

‘Oh come on! We can take the underground, we don’t need a ticket. We can go one stop at a time, get off and wait for the next train. That way you get to feel the excitement over and over.’

‘Are you serious? That’s completely pointless.’

‘Oh really?’ Leena retorted, as if it hadn’t bothered her in the slightest that Matti thought her suggestion was stupid. Instead she started jumping up and down like a toddler, and at this Matti felt even more embarrassed, for Leena too.

‘Hang on!’ she said, as though she had just thought of something astonishing, and tried to grab Matti by the hand, but he quickly moved his arm to safety, behind his back.

‘Well?’

‘I’ll take you to meet this funny bloke I know. You remember how people used to tease me back in the autumn?’

‘Yes.’

‘This man sort of cured me. I don’t know how he did it, he just cured me somehow.’

‘Give me a break. What guy?’

‘Some preacher or priest. But he’s not from the church or anything, I think he’s with some cult.’

‘I’m not interested in any of that religious mumbo-jumbo.’

‘But this is completely different. He does these amazing magic tricks and he speaks some weirdo language all the time. Come on, let’s go!’

‘Where does he live?’

‘We’re not going to his house. He’s always hanging around the underground or down at the railway station in town. Take this,’ said Leena, and this time she managed to grab him by the wrist and push something
into his hand. It was a piece of paper folded over many times, smudged from her sweaty hands.

‘That’s my mobile number. Call me anytime you want. Please?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Matti. He didn’t know why he was so reluctant. What he really wanted to do was fly, and even when his mum and Roo were at home it was still almost possible: he could always shut the door to his room and put headphones on, then he could conduct the orchestra again, though he couldn’t properly take flight – there wasn’t enough space in his room.

‘Bye then! Give me a ring and we’ll go out!’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, again and again, and it was the truth: he really didn’t know. He turned and began plodding towards the front door, and no matter how hard he stared at his shoes they remained just a pair of beaten-up trainers, and he couldn’t make them chat to one another.

‘Hi. How come you’re back so early?’

‘To be perfectly honest I’ve had a really shit day. First off this morning someone ended up under a train and all the lines were down. I didn’t get to Kontula until well after ten.’

‘Another suicide?’

‘How should I know? But it made me feel pretty bad. Even though I’m well aware that my fear of death is in fact a fear of rejection, it still doesn’t help.’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Yes please,’ said Mikko, placing his briefcase on the floor. All of a sudden he could no longer understand why he had bothered carrying those few sheets of paper with him all day. He could just as well have left them at the office or at home that morning; he knew it all off by heart, like a poem:
“Someone called out his name…”
Maybe it was just a habit that had stuck from the days when he was able to write properly. He had had an almost irrational fear of losing his papers or that they would be destroyed in a fire or in some other terrible way, so he had always made numerous copies of everything and kept them in different places.

‘We’re going to take the flat, Dad. There’s just enough room for two and since we’ll be sharing the rent it’ll be fine.’

‘That’s great news,’ he sighed. He walked up to his daughter and put his arms around her, but a moment later that same uncertain guilt
reawoke
within him, and he began to explain, or rather, to defend himself. ‘You know it’s not that I’m kicking you out…’

‘I know, I know. Let’s not start that again.’

‘But I need you to understand. It’s just I can’t think or write with someone else under the same roof. It makes me nervous, like I’m always worried something’s going to happen and I’ll have to go and help. And I need to be able to walk around at night without worrying that I’m going to wake you up. And I talk to myself a lot… the characters’ lines.’

‘You think I haven’t noticed?’

‘Well, no and… To be honest, financially this is a bit overwhelming. I can only barely afford to pay rent on two flats, and then there’s the travelling. It doesn’t come cheap, you know.’

‘Dad, I know.’

‘I’m being silly; of course you know. But soon they’ll be out of the way, and then I can turn this place into a proper home – with a workroom – and when I jump out of bed I can be right in front of the computer, just like back in Kulosaari.’

Sanna turned and picked up the chopping board. Her movements had suddenly become stiff and angular, her neck tensed, and Mikko had the distinct impression that everything was not quite right. Perhaps he had been too excited about Sanna’s move and had offended her.

‘Listen,’ she began. He had been right: her voice was completely different from before; it was lower, almost as if she were holding back tears.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s something I need to tell you…’

‘Then you need to get it off your chest.’

‘I can’t…’

‘And why not?’ he asked, only to realise immediately how clumsy it sounded. He gently stepped behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. At this Sanna spun round and hugged him tightly around the
neck, the way she had done as a little girl. But something was terribly wrong. Tears flowed down her cheeks, her whole body heaving as she sobbed, as painfully as if she had just heard about the death of a loved one.

‘What on earth’s the matter? Are you…?’

‘N-no… it’s not me…’

‘Well what is it?’

‘It’s Matti. And you…’

‘You shouldn’t worry yourself about our problems. He’s going through a phase; it’ll soon pass. I’m sure he doesn’t really hate me.’

‘He doesn’t… But you weren’t supposed to know. Matti told me that for as long as he could remember Mum’s been telling him that you don’t really love him, that you’re just pretending, and that she’s the only one that really loves him.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. He misses you so much that all he ever does is listen to your writing music. Always something classical, never anything that other kids his age listen to.’

‘Well now I understand a thing or two…’

Sanna lowered her arms limply, walked over to the sink and wiped her face with a towel before bursting into tears again.

‘Sanna, listen.’

‘You don’t know! He didn’t want to… he didn’t dare tell you. He told me and… and…’

‘And?’

‘And now Mum’s trying to do the same to him!’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘You know the way she tried to smoke me out of the house because I couldn’t stand Roo. Imagine: there’s a strange man in the house eyeing me up and I’m supposed to act as if there’s nothing wrong! And she expected me to send that oaf a Fathers’ Day card!’

‘Sanna. What’s she doing to Matti?’

‘Exactly the same. She doesn’t speak to him for days, doesn’t wake him up in the morning, so that he oversleeps. She takes the rubbish into his room if he’s forgotten to take it out and goes off with Roo for days at a time without
telling him anything, so he suddenly finds himself home alone for the weekend. Last autumn they went to Crete and left him at home for a week!’

‘What in the world can we do to help him?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No…’

‘You need to save him like you saved me!’ she shouted, her voice strange and almost angry, but in a way that the anger wasn’t directed at him. ‘He’s got to come and live here with you, but then you won’t be able to write again and…’

‘Good God,’ Mikko whispered almost silently. He could sense the swamp, frighteningly close, dragging him into its murky, brown waters. He saw eyeless, white fish swimming deep beneath him. He barely had enough time to bring his hands up to his face before bursting into tears; the heavy, pounding sobs of a grown man. And he cried not only because of what he had just heard, but for the sake of so many other things that had passed without tears.

‘He’ll be over there. Take it back a couple of frames.’

‘OK.’

‘And make sure to print it off, in case the image is clearer on paper,’ he continued, though he wasn’t sure whether this would be of any use.

He and Rastas from the forensics lab had been sitting in the video room for well over four hours and it had clearly been too long. Harjunpää’s eyes could barely focus, they felt as though they were covered in powder; his neck was stiff and his temples were pounding with the beginnings of a headache. From Rastas’ laboured sighing Harjunpää could tell that he wasn’t feeling much better.

‘However you look at it, it’s impossible to say what actually took place.’

‘I know, it’s the same on the camera by the door. There’s some sort of movement, but it could just as easily be the guy himself.’

‘At least now we know the exact time of the accident, down to the second.’

Rastas rolled his finger over the viewfinder. The screen clearly showed how, like a vortex, some of the people on the platform surged backwards, while others found themselves pressed dangerously close to the side of the train, which was still moving at considerable speed. Then a man in a
light-coloured
jumper threw up his hands and began waving them frantically: this must have been the man the driver had mentioned.

But no one ran off, nor did anyone attempt to hide. The tape revealed absolutely nothing about what had taken place: had the victim fallen by himself, or had someone shoved him?

‘Huh,’ Harjunpää muttered as he stretched, rolled his neck back and closed his eyes, but it didn’t help: beneath his eyelids flashed dozens upon dozens of television screens, hundreds of men and women, young and old, all in a single, unified grey mass. In total there were five video recorders and eight screens in the room, though on that particular day each of them was in some way broken. The one and only video recorder that did work was inadequate because it played everything in black and white. This could prove crucially important, especially if they had to provide an official notice of the incident, let alone begin searching for someone on the basis of distinguishing features. The situation was made all the more miserable by the fact that throughout the city there were enough security cameras to provide CCTV footage of almost every crime – and yet the police’s own technology let them down.