TH03 - To Steal Her Love (17 page)

Kauppila opened the door and the faintly underground smell of the basement wafted towards them. He switched on the lights and started striding briskly along the brick-lined corridor with Harjunpää and Onerva behind him.

‘I’m sorry. These security systems are my responsibility. We’ve been talking about getting the whole system updated for a while now… I’m sure you know how it is these days; it’s all about investment…’

Kauppila stopped in front of a heavy steel door. The same squirrel logo that had been shining in the front window had been painted on it. Someone had drawn this one a pair of closed eyes and a tongue drooping from its mouth as though it were ill. It was secured with a cylinder lock; Harjunpää glanced at it instinctively and made sure there were no signs of a break-in, though he didn’t have the energy to give this case any more
attention than was necessary. On top of that he sensed that Kauppila had taken control of the matter.

Kauppila opened the door and they were met with the smell of banks during the day. A faint rattling sound came from the ceiling, then one by one the fluorescent lights flickered into life. Everything seemed in order and, although Harjunpää had never seen the place before, it looked just as it would after a normal working day.

‘It’s ironic, I suppose,’ said Kauppila, busying himself and hurrying forwards. ‘A fitter from the security firm gave us an estimate only this afternoon. We’ll start by renewing the cameras and carry on from there. There’ll be motion detectors upstairs and down here. It’s that shiny box over there…’

Kauppila stopped by what was apparently the main vault.

‘It’s old, I’ll grant you, but it still does its job. The fitter checked it this morning so I hardly think we need to ask him back again because of this. If you’d just wait here a minute I’ll go and register the alarm and switch the thing back on.’

Kauppila turned and walked off towards a set of stairs leading upwards and Harjunpää whispered to Onerva: ‘Give the main hall the once over just to be sure, then we’ll have a clear conscience. I’ll have a look down here.’

Harjunpää stood still for a moment. Fatigue was beginning to take its toll on him, that and everything he had thought and understood. He felt himself slipping away somewhere, about to remember something, but managed to shake himself out of the past and stood staring at the door to the vault. It was extremely heavy, but even that wasn’t enough to stop some people. He tried to imagine how much it weighed, then he imagined everything that lay behind the door and the image of Scrooge McDuck diving like a mole into his chests full of glinting golden coins sprung hazily to mind.

He yawned again, stepped unenthusiastically towards the nearest door and opened it. Mops and brushes and bottles of detergent stared at him in silent surprise. The next door was open and he switched on the lights. It was clearly a changing room; the walls were lined with the same kind of plate-metal lockers that they had down at the station. The air carried the faint smell of perfume and make-up.

He walked silently up to the row of lockers and opened the first door. Inside the locker was a white cardigan on a clothes hanger and an
umbrella. On the floor were two briefcases placed next to one another, one of which had been closed so carelessly that a piece of notepaper with numbers in thick pencil had been caught in the lid. He began wondering whether a person might fit into one of these lockers – it was possible, at least for a short while in an emergency. And though it felt pointless he decided to check them all and took hold of the next door along – and that’s when he heard it. He let go of the door and stood perfectly still.

It had been a sound of some sort, but he couldn’t hear it any more. The sound of footsteps came from the hall upstairs, Onerva gave a quiet chuckle and Harjunpää told himself that it must have been the tiredness – but there it was again. A very faint sound, like a sniff or a sob. Goosebumps rose on his skin. He wet his lips and tried to swallow, silently so that his throat didn’t give a gulp, then moved his hand down to his hip, pulled up the bottom of his jumper, located his holster and undid the popper, gripped the handle and pulled out his revolver. He placed his thumb on the safety catch, but didn’t cock the gun just yet.

Again the same sound. A sniff or a sob. And this time he knew where it was coming from: it came from the toilet on the left, its door standing ajar. He wondered whether he should get Onerva’s attention or quietly call her over. He guessed he was probably imagining it all and crept towards the toilet on the balls of his feet.

When he reached the door he stopped, using the wall as cover. Through the open door he could see that the room was dark. He tried to guess which side of the wall the light switch was on. He decided to try the left-hand side, switched on his torch, held his gun ready and slid the tip of his shoe into the open door. He gave a sharp kick and the door flew open; he was already on his haunches in the doorway, the torchlight groping through the darkness. His fingers found the light switch and the lights came on. The room was empty.

He stood there, his heart pounding, and he still had the feeling that someone was close by. Then came the sniff again and he realised what it was. He walked into the toilet cubicle and stopped in front of the
porcelain
bowl. There it was: the surface of the water was shimmering almost imperceptibly at the bottom of the toilet. The flush was somehow stuck leaving water running slowly into the bowl. There it was again:
sniff
…! The mechanism let another drop of water into the bowl. Harjunpää lowered his hand. Suddenly he felt overwhelmed with fatigue.

‘Timo,’ Onerva called out. ‘Let’s get going.’

Harjunpää switched off the lights and took a few heavy, dull steps across the locker room. He decided not to mention the incident to anyone. Onerva was carrying a money-box that looked like a miniature cash machine. Perhaps that was what she was laughing at, that she’d found it in the first place; that or the fact that after her resignation she wouldn’t have anything to put in it.

‘The alarm’s back on and everything seems to be in order,’ said Kauppila as though he’d just saved the world from a global market collapse. Good, thought Harjunpää, good that everything’s in order.

It was half past one; the night was at its darkest. Assistant Chief of Police, Superintendent Olavi Sakarias Tanttu was awake and drinking whisky.

His home lay silent around him; the bedroom was far enough away that he couldn’t hear the sound of his wife’s breathing. All he could hear was the humming of the fridge and the tick-tock of the clock on the wall. Even the cat had stopped purring. He lay slumped in his arms, a warm ball of fur, dreaming cat-dreams, his mouth twitching like it did when he clawed at the sparrows that had fluttered up into the bushes and sat there mocking him.

Tanttu didn’t really know what to think. There was nothing left to think about; he’d already thought about everything, many times over, and the things he’d thought about had formed around him like a dark mass through which it was pointless trying to escape. He knew what it meant.
Night
stretched out in front of him, depression, and he’d learned years ago to accept that it happened once or twice a year. Calling it Night was one of his ways of fighting it: night always eventually ceded to morning.

He shook his glass so that the ice cubes clinked, took a large swig and tried to enjoy the warmth the whisky gave him. But he couldn’t. He wanted to understand what it was that triggered his depression. It always seemed to appear in the most illogical situations, and almost without exception at times when he had reason to be happy – like now. After almost three months of hard work he’d managed to complete the second draft of his proposal for an amendment to criminal law, and he knew it was good. He’d found a number of inconsistencies in the first draft that
had been overlooked, and he’d heard on the grapevine that his comments were already making an impact. He’d had success in another matter too: both the commander and Hongisto had demanded the transfer of another fifty officers to the Public Order Division, but he had managed to talk them down to twenty and it hadn’t been easy. He’d had to go through the statistics for the last three years with a fine-toothed comb and relate the results to the goals set by external officers.

Tanttu took another swig and groaned. Was that it? Facing continual criticism despite all his achievements – and without due cause? He slowly savoured his drink and couldn’t really believe it was true. He’d become hardened to this sort of thing years ago.

He laid his hand lightly on Cat’s back. A few decades before, he’d had a spaniel called Dog. Cat was probably part of the reason that Night was on its way again. It was his neighbours. And even though he was used to handling the knocks that came with his job, attacks on his private life affected him deeply. He knew very well why. His position required him to be constantly on his guard, to live as an example to others, and yet it was precisely because of that position that some people went out of their way to find reasons to criticise him.

From one year to the next Cat seemed as good a reason as any. A letter lay on his desk, signed ‘Local Residents’, claiming that Cat was a beast that terrorised the neighbourhood, stripped trees of their bark and brought children within an inch of their lives. Tanttu cleared his throat. Reasonable complaints were one thing, but this was nothing but malice. Cat was a thirteen-year-old, six-kilo castrated male and was so lazy that he only ventured further than their garden to creep under next-door’s woodshed, and even then he slept most of the time.

This last letter had ended by saying that the matter would be made public if something wasn’t done about it, and his wife had taken the threat so seriously that she’d told him to have Cat put down. He hadn’t agreed to it – and now she was giving him the silent treatment.

Tanttu emptied his glass and realised that it was true: alcohol only serves to heighten the mood of the moment. The night ahead now looked even bleaker than before. He sighed heavily, held Cat tighter, stood up and laid the half-asleep animal in the corner of the sofa. Then he picked up his glass and pattered through to the kitchen in his slippers. What bothered him most about this depression was that it always made him more
irritable 
– meaner, his wife would say; nastier, his daughter would say. He knew it himself, and he knew why it happened. It was because even though depression was invisible and hard to keep in check he still tried to control it, and then all his efforts focused on something else, something real.

He put his glass in the kitchen sink and turned off the lights. Back in the living room he opened a drawer in the bureau and pulled out a small black box ready for the morning. In the box was an Alcometer, a
breathalyser
. He breathed into it every morning before setting off.

He hated drink-drivers even when it was Day.

The door closed behind Wheatlocks, cutting off the buzz of traffic and the midday heat, and she delicately walked down the corridor towards the lift, stopped suddenly and looked behind her. Nobody was following her; she knew it, but she hadn’t trusted her intuition. She tried to counter the matter with a smile, but she could only manage a smile that was
one-sided
, more of twitch, and it startled her: only crazy people smiled like that, and she suddenly felt as though she were about to cry.

She hastily opened her handbag and rummaged around in it, as if to give herself a reason for stopping. It wasn’t the first time she’d checked behind herself, and what bothered her most was that it had started happening at work too. She might stop midway through serving a customer, convinced that someone was staring at her, and the feeling was so strong that she couldn’t just be imagining it. At these moments she sensed an imminent danger, as though she was being eaten away or
threatened
with a gun. The situation wasn’t made any better by the fact that lots of men really did look at her, which was perfectly understandable. For a couple of days she’d suspected it was a blonde-haired boy until she found out that he worked in the sports department upstairs and that he had taken a genuine shine to her.

From her handbag she took a small compact and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was neatly done in a French plait. She’d tied her hair like this especially because she knew that Marko liked it that way; as a little girl she’d often had her hair in a French plait. She only wore a small amount of make-up, and that too was a carefully thought-out move: now
she wasn’t an independent woman getting on with her life, she was a lost little girl who needed her big brother’s help. She had another motive, too. She wanted to be rid of what she sensed was the root of her nightmare: she wanted to be ugly. Rather, she wanted to be a man because then she felt she would have been able to take care of the situation differently. It wasn’t even that simple either: she wanted not to be afraid of being a woman. Whatever the reason, she was plagued by a strange feeling that there was something unhealthily inconsistent about it all.

She slipped the mirror back into her handbag and made her way up the stairs. Her clothes too were part of her tactics: a loose red-and-white checked blouse with slightly baggy jeans and a pair of old plimsolls,
shapeless
and silent.

Marko’s company, or rather the advertising company he worked for, was on the second floor. Wheatlocks stopped outside the door and rang the buzzer, and without any warning she felt suddenly nervous. She felt her heart pounding and her hands seemed almost as though they belonged to someone else. She was worried that if Marko had had second thoughts she would be left every bit as helpless as before; she was worried that her actions might accidentally get Marko into trouble and because, for the first time in her life she was about to do something illegal. And somewhere deep inside her was a seed of doubt: were these the actions of a rational human being?

Her steps approached the door and she tried to suppress the thought, beat it back. All she could think about was that she had to seem calm and level-headed, calm and level-headed, and not like someone who was anxious and desperate and contemplating all kinds of things. A young woman opened the door.

‘Hello. I’ve got an appointment with Marko Heinonen.’

‘If you’d like to come this way. You probably know the way. It’s the door on the left.’

Wheatlocks smiled in thanks and strode down the corridor feeling almost as though she were swimming in the silence of the office. For the first time the bustle of the department store had started making her agitated. There was a time she’d loved it, but now the continual hubbub was like a flock of birds circling her and pecking at her. Again she reminded herself to appear calm. She knocked cheerily on the door and stepped inside.

Marko was sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves. His head was propped on his hands and he was staring at the oil canister in front of him trying to make it come to life, to transform it into something fresh, and Wheatlocks felt as though she had interrupted him, disturbed something; Marko might get angry just like when they were children and she’d touched his Lego blocks. The anxiety she’d felt a moment before was awakening again.

‘Hi,’ she said in as happy a voice as she could muster.

‘Hi there, take a seat,’ said Marko and smiled, though the furrow in his brow betrayed that he hadn’t fully relaxed. Wheatlocks thought about how best to proceed: should she begin with some chit-chat, the little
pleasantries
you had to get out of the way first, or should she get straight to the point. She plumped for the latter.

‘I’ve come to pick it up,’ she said, trying not to fidget with the strap of her handbag. Marko swept the hair back from his forehead. There was a note of impatience, almost regret, in the gesture.
Please, God, just make him give it to me
, Wheatlocks repeated to herself.

‘Are you absolutely serious about this?’

‘You know very well that I am…’

‘Right, then why don’t you apply for a licence of your own?’

‘Oh, surely you understand. They’d never give me a licence. I don’t even belong to a club. And anyway, this is only temporary.’

Marko reclined in his chair, rubbed his chin in thought and watched her as though his grey-blue eyes were assessing quite how crazy she was. Wheatlocks leaned her head to one side, her smile fixed, and looked back at her brother imploringly and seriously. Time passed; somewhere a telephone was ringing incessantly. An ambulance sped past outside.

‘Tell me honestly,’ Marko began and couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eyes, choosing instead to concentrate on adjusting the position of the canister on his desk. ‘You’re not… you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you? I’d never forgive myself.’

‘Marko, listen,’ she said, almost chiding him, and waited a moment before continuing. ‘I could never do something like that to you. Or to myself. That’s never the answer… Do I seem out of my mind to you?’

‘No.’

‘And in case you were worried, I’m not about to kill anyone or start robbing banks, OK?’ she joked.

‘I’d love to see that,’ he quipped. He managed a brief smile before turning serious again. ‘But surely you realise that all this talk about Simo’s visits really worries me.’

‘That’s exactly why I need it, so I don’t need to be afraid of them any more, so I can feel safer. I remember how calm I felt that time you left it at the cottage when I was there by myself.’

‘All right,’ he said abruptly – he’d always been quick to make decisions once he’d fully understood the matter in hand. ‘Shut the door.’

Wheatlocks stood up, and as she touched the door handle she felt the same sensation she’d experienced whenever she’d fired Marko’s gun or was alone at the cottage and knew the gun was hidden under the mattress in the spare bed. It was a strange and oddly relaxing sensation, as though she’d been able to channel fierce, forbidden powers hidden within her, as though that power had come to protect her, all the while remaining outside her in the form of a black, iron object that went
bang
when you pulled a small trigger. The very thought was breathtaking.

Marko had lifted his briefcase on to the desk and opened it. Inside it lay the gun, bare on a white sheet of paper. There was something both frightening and fascinating about it. It was like an animal, a tamed beast that people wanted to stroke, even at the risk it might harm them. Marko picked it up, pointed it towards the floor with exaggerated care, pressed a small button and opened the barrel.

‘As you can see, it’s not loaded. I’m sure you remember: bullets in those holes, then lock this bit shut. And when you fire, either pull the trigger directly or set the safety catch with your thumb like this.’

Marko pulled back the safety catch and the gun made a comforting, sonorous click. Then he aimed the gun at the empty armchair and squinted.

‘Imagine it’s the Sea Dragon,’ he said with a smile. Wheatlocks
chuckled
– the Sea Dragon was the woman next door who had always told tales on them as children – then Marko squeezed the trigger and the barrel spun round with a sharp click.

‘Dead. See her lying there? This is a small calibre firearm, a .22, but it can kill someone just as easily as the next gun.’

Wheatlocks managed not to think about that. She stepped closer, placed her hand on her brother’s wrist and looked him in the eyes, and though it only lasted a brief moment they both felt something neither had
felt for years: thoughts of how life had been before, how they’d grown up together and taken care of each other, even fought quietly so their mother wouldn’t hear. Marko held the gun by the barrel and handed it to her without a word.

Its handle felt firm and calming. She remembered how it shook when it went off, the smell of gunpowder, the cases once they were taken out, still warm, but let it pass. She didn’t stand around feeling the gun but quietly slipped it into her bag. After that she didn’t once leave her bag on the floor but hung it over her shoulder, keeping it tightly pressed between her side and her elbow.

‘Here are the rounds,’ said Marko and handed her a small blue-
and-red
box. ‘But maybe it would be for the best if you didn’t load it
unnecessarily
. Besides, don’t carry it around with you. Keep it at home and don’t talk about it to anyone.’

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, held her brother’s neck, smelled his scent and kissed him on the cheek as lightly as a butterfly. Then she backed off towards the door and decided to load the gun as soon as she got home.