The Defenceless (16 page)

Anna gave Niilo her contact details and asked him to call her if he remembered anything else. On the spur of the moment she asked him about the Oriental rug, just as Niilo was winding up the conversation. He laughed and said that Vilho was a strange man. He never
bragged about things, though he liked to invest in quality. ‘Peace be with him,’ Niilo said with a low sob.

After returning to the police station, Esko called the number on the scrap of paper.

‘Pizzeria Hazileklek, Maalik speaking.’

‘What the bloody hell…?’ Esko cursed.

‘Pardon me? Who is this?’

‘Senior Constable Esko Niemi from the police. Good afternoon.’

‘Afternoon,’ Maalik answered cautiously.

‘This telephone number was found in the pocket of a man suspected of some very serious crimes.’

‘Oh? I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Ever heard the name Reza Jobrani?’

‘No.’

‘So why was your phone number in his pocket?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he order a pizza.’

‘Somehow he’s linked to you and your business. Start talking.’

‘Probably a customer. I don’t know them all.’

‘I’m coming down there today to talk to you and your boyfriend. And I might just check to see that all your licences and tax returns are in order while I’m at it.’

‘For all means. We have nothing to hide.’

‘It’s
by
all means.’

‘Very well. By all means. Is that all?’

‘For now. You’ll hear from me again soon.’

Esko ended the call, flustered. The queer was lying so much his nose would start growing. That pizzeria is probably a front for money laundering, hiding stolen goods or something. It couldn’t be pure coincidence that their phone number was in Reza’s trouser pocket. Reza Jobrani isn’t the sort of guy that orders pizzas, thought Esko angrily. Though it was possible. But given that Sammy was their apprentice, their bum boy or whatever, there were simply too many coincidences in this mess. In a police investigation coincidences like
this provide credible leads. Esko could feel the pieces of the jigsaw moving closer to one another. Soon they would lock together, and as soon as that happened he would make his move.

‘You know the pizzeria pansies.’

Anna raised her eyes from the computer screen and looked at Esko, who had appeared at her office door without knocking.

‘Come in. Nice to see you too,’ she said sourly. She had tried to call Hermanni Harju and was forced to accept what Niilo had suspected: Hermanni was using a Spanish prepaid phone. Now Anna was trying to establish the part of Spain in which he spent the winters and whether there was any way of reaching him. It shouldn’t be too difficult, Anna thought, if only this jerk hadn’t come and disturbed me.

Esko closed the door behind him and sat astride a chair on the other side of the desk.

‘Don’t you think it’s time you decorated this room?’ he asked and looked around with an air of distaste. ‘You’ve been made permanent now. You could bring in some flowers or…’

‘What do you want?’

‘Someone’s in a mood. Time of the month?’

‘Do you want something? I’m a bit busy.’

‘What are you working on?’

Anna explained about Vilho Karppinen’s collection of knives. Esko thought about this for a moment.

‘I think you’re taking this a bit too far,’ he said eventually. ‘How the hell could the knife found in Ketoniemi be from the old guy’s apartment? You reckon Old Granddad stabbed someone, then lay down in the road on the other side of the city – in his slippers and pyjamas? Hardly. Anyway, the knife is Nils’s job. Ask him to look into it.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Anna admitted, though she didn’t entirely agree. ‘So, what did you want?’

‘The gays are somehow mixed up in all this gang business.’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Come off it. You know.’

‘They are people. They have names. You mean Maalik and Farzad.’

‘I talked to the mother of Reza – you know, the gang leader. Anyway, the mother found a scrap of paper in her son’s pocket with a phone number for their pizzeria.’

‘Even a gang leader can order a pizza. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Think about it. Sammy is connected with the pizzeria, and now this. It can’t be coincidence.’

‘Yes, it can.’

‘You’re biased because you’re friends with the immigrant poofters.’

‘Yes, I am. And I know them well enough to know that there’s no way they’re mixed up with any gangs. They’re intelligent, grown men.’

‘Often as not those pizza places are hotbeds of illegal trade.’

‘Hazileklek isn’t one of them.’

‘Listen, are you a criminal investigator or what?’

Anna felt flustered. I must learn to control myself, she thought. I’m unable to take professional distance when I’m emotionally involved, and I let Esko wind me up.

‘I was going to ask for your help, but now I’m not so sure,’ he said.

‘What do you need me to do?’

‘Nothing. I don’t think you’re up to it.’

‘Esko. I’m sorry. I was wrong,’ said Anna and wondered at how easy it felt to admit her mistake.

‘Okay. I called the pizzeria and this Maalik of yours answered the phone.’ Esko said his name in a mocking, simpering voice. ‘Of course, he wouldn’t tell me anything.’

No wonder, thought Anna.

‘I thought you might go there and talk to them, because you get on with them.’

‘If they really are mixed up in criminal activities, do you think they’d tell me anything either?’

‘Of course they won’t, but they’ll still talk to you. You’ll notice if there’s something not too kosher going on.’

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea. I want to excuse myself from this one.’

‘Recuse yourself if something comes up.’

Anna thought about it for a moment. She remembered the first time she’d gone into Hazileklek for a pizza while Ákos had been on work experience there. She had got on with Farzad and Maalik from the word go, but she noticed they didn’t think much of Ákos. It was hardly surprising; Ákos turned up late, his breath stinking of yesterday’s liquor. He would do nothing on his own initiative, not even the simplest tasks, like loading and unloading the dishwasher, but always waited to be told. She couldn’t imagine them letting him loose front of house. Maalik and Farzad stoically put up with him until the end of his contract and wrote him a politely neutral reference. Anna had kept in touch with Maalik and Farzad; Ákos hadn’t set foot in the place since leaving. Later on Farzad told Anna that Ákos was a good young man: funny, friendly and with a good sense of humour, but a lousy employee.

Perhaps I’ll have to talk to them, thought Anna. Besides, this Reza could simply have ordered a pizza, no matter what Esko thinks. She nodded at Esko. He gave her a friendly pat on the back.

‘Good one, mate. I knew I could rely on you.’

Anna felt embarrassed again. Esko left the room and Anna stood up, stretched her shoulder blades, stepped to the window and squinted out into the city below. Am I his mate for doing the right thing? Or am I his mate because that’s just the way I am? And since when did I start worrying about something as insignificant as myself?

The sun shone like a smouldering disc in the cold, blue sky. Anna closed the venetian blinds. Every year the speed with which the days got longer took her by surprise; after the months of oppressive darkness it felt astonishing suddenly to notice dust gathering in the corner of the room, greasy fingerprints on the windows. The sun seemed to penetrate everything, make everything visible again. There was something almost distressing about it. Though Anna wholeheartedly enjoyed following the progress of spring and waiting for the onset of summer, she fully appreciated why some people felt almost tormented by the light. Rooms and windows weren’t the only places where dust and grease stains collected.

THE REPORT
on the Opel belonging to Marko Halttu’s mother had been marked as urgent and important. Anna clicked the email attachment with a sense of expectation. More drugs or signs of gangs, she quickly presumed, but the findings revealed something altogether different. Anna carefully read the report twice, once quickly skimming through, then a second time, one word at a time, as if to make sure that the text in front of her eyes truly existed. There was a surprise in the boot of the car. Human traces: a bloodstain, a few hairs, epithelial cells. Call ASAP, Kirsti signed off her email.
Úr Isten
, said Anna out loud. What else has the junkie boy been up to? Who transported people like that? Only dead people got stuffed into the boot of a car. Or prisoners, victims of torture. Nobody travelled in the boot of a car by choice. What on earth has been going on in that ghost house?

Anna got on the phone to Kirsti, who sounded excited and agitated when she picked up.

‘The hairs found in the boot of Halttu’s car match the hairs from Vilho Karppinen, the old man found on the road at Taipaleenmäki,’ she said. ‘Same colour, same length, same structure. You’ll have to cross-reference the
DNA
, but the forensics team knows a thing or two about this. I’ll bet my fifteen years’ experience that old Mr Karppinen was in the boot of that car.’

‘It can’t be!’ Anna exclaimed. What did this mean? Why on earth was Vilho in the boot of the car?

‘Looks like it, I’m afraid.’ Kirsti’s voice had become serious.

‘If he’d been driven there by car, that would certainly explain why there were no footprints on the road.’

‘It also complicates the investigation considerably.’

‘I know. This means that Marko Halttu is somehow involved in Vilho’s death.
Jebiga bassza meg.
’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Besides, we found other hairs in the car too. Black ones, definitely not Finnish. On the headrest in the passenger seat.’

‘Really? This gets more and more interesting.’

‘Don’t you have an illegal Pakistani boy in holding?’

‘Yes. I’m scheduled to interview Sammy today.’

‘Good. Ask him about the car.’

‘Damn right I will.’

Anna felt troubled. She didn’t want to ask Sammy about the car and any hairs they’d found there. She wanted to get him out of police custody, sort him out with an apartment and get him into school, treat his drug addiction and offer him the possibility of the life every young man should have. Esko would strangle me if he knew, she thought. And after Sammy she was due to interview Maalik and Farzad. Am I fit to conduct these interviews at all, she wondered.

Linnea had sent Anna an email too. She had completed Marko Halttu’s autopsy and submitted the preliminary report. Linnea estimated the time of death at around two days before they had found the body. That means Sammy had been in the apartment with a corpse, helping himself to drugs. Halttu’s body displayed contusions that had been caused around twenty-four hours before his death. The bruises were on his chest and arms, and there was one large bruise on his left thigh. In addition to the contusions, there was severe blunt-force trauma to his left temple, and this he sustained around the same time as the other injuries. Halttu had lost a lot of blood from the wound. Linnea said the injuries were consistent with a fight. However, none of them was serious enough to kill him. There was no internal bleeding. Linnea had sent blood samples off to the forensics laboratory to be tested. Despite the signs of violence, the death looked like a routine junkie overdose. They would have to wait weeks for the results of the blood samples and forensic confirmation of the hairs from the Opel,
Anna estimated impatiently. She told Virkkunen the news and asked him how they should now proceed with Sammy’s interview.

‘How are you feeling?’ Anna asked Sammy in the interview room.

The boy looked wretched. The tremors had gone, but the sedatives and all the placebo drugs pumped into him made Sammy look like one of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. His face was unresponsive; he was awake yet asleep.

Sammy shrugged his emaciated shoulders.

Anna had asked Esko to join her, but he politely declined. Naturally Ritva Siponen was present too. She was sitting at the back of the room, behind Sammy’s back.

‘Let’s go through once again what happened in Marko Halttu’s apartment. Tell us everything you can remember.’

‘Too tired,’ Sammy replied.

‘When did you first meet Marko?’

‘End of January.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Can’t remember. On a street somewhere.’

‘Did Marko try to sell you some Subutex?’

‘No. I asked him for some.’

‘Had someone told you to ask him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Can’t remember. It might have been the same guy that gave me my first tabs.’

I must go and talk to that guy, thought Anna.

‘Then what happened?’

‘At first Macke said he didn’t have any subs. Then we chatted for a while; he asked where I’m from and why I’m in Finland – the same shit that you probably know all about.’

‘I do. Then what?’

‘Then Macke said he might have something back at his flat. We went there. That was the first time I slept there.’

‘Was there a lot of gear in Marko’s flat at that time?’

‘No. Only subs, and not very many.’

‘Do you think Marko was mixed up in something bigger back then?’

‘He only ever had the same amount of gear as a regular user, nothing more.’

‘Where in Pakistan do you come from?’

Sammy swayed almost imperceptibly in this chair, glanced up at Anna for the first time. The boy’s eyes were so terribly mournful that she felt a sting inside.

‘From the suburbs around Quetta.’

‘What kind of place is it?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘A river runs through my home town,’ said Anna.

Sammy stared at her.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked suddenly. A glimmer of interest flashed in his eyes.

Got you
, Anna thought contentedly.

‘The former Yugoslavia. I came here as a little girl, to escape the war.’

Sammy continued staring at her. Anna could almost see the cogs turning in his head. A police officer who was almost like him. Could such a thing really exist?

‘Quetta is surrounded by beautiful mountains and fruit groves. There’s lots of dust and sand. It can be dangerous.’

‘Why is it dangerous?’

Sammy gave a cheerless smile. ‘It’s near the Afghan borderlands. The place is full of crazy people, the Taliban, communists, the tribes, smugglers, you name it.’

‘I lived near a border too.’

Anna thought of the restless atmosphere in the border areas. Her mother had taken liquor and cigarettes across the border into Hungary, sold them in lay-bys straight out of the car window, then treated herself to something special in one of the Jugend-style cafés in
Szeged. Western liquor, so widely available in Yugoslavia, was once a desirable commodity in Hungary under communism. Nowadays she felt a strange sense of release as she crossed the EU border and entered Serbia, as though a belt pulled tight around her waist had suddenly slackened, as though she’d taken off her seat belt. In her childhood, Hungary had been a drearier, poorer place than Yugoslavia; now their roles had dramatically switched, at least superficially. But the sense of a somewhat freer atmosphere in her former home country hadn’t gone away. In Serbia she still breathed and laughed differently from in Hungary, regardless of the shameful stains of the wars, the break-up of the country and the rise of nationalism. Anna often thought about this. How much does it take to crush a person once and for all? Why was it that, for all its welfare, Finland often felt so unbearably bleak?

‘Tell me about your family,’ she urged him.

The boy swayed again. It was a good sign. I’m touching a nerve, Anna thought.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What about your father?’

Sammy thought about this for a long time, chewed the fingernails of his left hand.

‘My father was an electrician,’ he answered sullenly. ‘He had a good job with one of the big construction firms in Quetta. He worked hard, and people liked him.’

‘And your mother?’

Sammy said nothing; he stared ahead, a distressed gaze in his bleary eyes.

‘Did your mother have a job?’

‘She was a seamstress. She made her own clothes and mended torn ones. It brought in a little extra income. We weren’t rich, but we were never hungry.’

‘What kind of woman was she?’

‘I’m tired. I want to go back to my cell and sleep.’

‘I still have a few questions. We don’t have to talk about your mother if you don’t want to.’

Sammy gave a barely audible snort.

‘When he died, Marko had bruises on his body and a head wound. Did you two fight?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Try to remember.’

‘I don’t think we fought. His head was bleeding when I arrived.’

‘Did Marko tell you where he got the wound?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘Can’t remember.’

Anna sighed. The trivial answers were beginning to annoy her.

‘You were in Marko’s car,’ she said, changing the subject.

‘Was that a question?’ Sammy asked.

‘We found black hairs in the car. Why were you there?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘We also found hairs belonging to an old man who lives in the same building as Marko. Do you know anything about that?’

There was a flash of panic in Sammy’s eyes. He turned and looked helplessly at his lawyer.

‘I’m tired,’ he said once again.

Ritva Siponen jumped to her feet and informed them that the interview was over for now.

‘We’ll continue tomorrow,’ said Anna and smiled at Sammy. He didn’t smile back.

Sari and Esko were in a patrol car driving towards Rajapuro. They had a warrant to search an apartment where at the weekend there had been a sighting of a man tattooed with gang insignias. The police were throwing all their resources at this operation; this time they were joined by a group from Special Branch and reinforcements from Patrol. Esko had high hopes for the operation. The more the police were able to disrupt the Cobras, the more swiftly their activities in the city and throughout the country could be snuffed out. Also, he wanted to get in before the Angels had a chance. For once,
the police and the bikers had the same objective, but the Angels’ methods were somewhat different from those of the police; they resulted only in more violence, more law-breaking, chaos and fear. Esko remembered only too well what it was like when the Angels and the Bandidos fought a turf war in the late 1990s. A repeat of those events was the last thing anyone needed.

The building in question was one of the ten-storey blocks in Rajapuro. Its red-painted concrete walls stood tall, stretching up towards the sky, which was gleaming with bright blue spring light. It was a few degrees below freezing. The forecourt had been badly gritted and was glazed with patches of black ice. The search would be carried out without delay. A group of officers in blue overalls crept into the stairwell. A few of them remained outside to guard the forecourt; a couple stood at the door. The field officer was standing next to his car, overseeing the operation and giving orders and instructions over his police radio.

The apartment door had to be broken down, because nobody answered. The occupants clearly had better things to do, as from inside the apartment the officers heard shouts, stamping footsteps, the flush of a toilet. The police burst inside. Three men were waiting for them, their hands already above their heads. They were all arrested; two officers conducted an initial search and found a pistol and ten packets of Subutex. Enough to press charges, thought Esko, satisfied with himself. That’s three snakes out of action, at least for a while. The pack of Cobras was shrinking. Once they had Reza in custody, the group would disappear altogether and he could move on to other things.

Esko went into the stairwell, called the lift and ordered a nosy neighbour peering out of his door to get back inside. The man looked Asian, black hair and squinty eyes, his mouth set in a permanent smile, like a mask hiding his true face. Where the hell do they all come from, Esko thought as he stepped into the lift. Once outside he lit a cigarette, filling his lungs with long, satisfying drags that induced a coughing fit. Esko noticed he’d been coughing more
and more all winter. Sometimes he coughed so much that his ribs ached.

‘Esko, look!’ one of the officers shouted and pointed at the neighbouring building.

Esko saw the figure of a young man peering round the corner at the squad cars parked outside. Then he disappeared. It was Reza.

‘Tell the field officer. We’ve got to bring him in,’ said Esko and began running after Reza and the two officers who were in pursuit. He saw the boy turn back on himself and slip behind the apartment blocks with the uniformed officers on his tail. A moment later one of the officers walked back and said the boy seemed to have vanished into thin air.

‘He’s gone inside,’ Esko shouted and told the field officer to call for back-up.

The police surrounded the building and quickly filed inside.

But Reza was smarter. Once most of the officers were inside the building and Esko was just about to go inside too, out of the corner of his eye he saw something move by the side of the opposite building.

‘Over there,’ Esko bellowed and dashed after the boy.

Esko ran as fast as he could. The scarf he had carelessly thrown round his neck flew into the air and Esko almost fell on the slippery pavement, but sped up regardless. Reza’s shiny puffer jacket and his head, covered in a hoodie, bobbed about fifty metres ahead of him. Damn it, I’m going to get you, thought Esko and right then felt the strength drain from his legs, and his lungs clenched so tightly that he was forced to stop. Reza disappeared from view. Esko’s chest stung and ached; the pain was excruciating. He pressed his palm against his chest, coughed and gasped for breath, heard the sound of the patrol cars speeding off after Reza, their sirens wailing. He didn’t have the strength to alert them.