The Hummingbird (2 page)

Gasping for breath, the runner jogged through the now silent, darkening woods. Raindrops glistened on the dark-green foliage, water that hadn’t made it to the ground. Behind her came a loud crackle. It must be a moose, she thought, or a fox, but still didn’t quite believe it herself.

She scanned the area around her. It’s too quiet, she thought, unnaturally muted. She cursed to herself that she’d run so fast, couldn’t run another step, and though she was genuinely afraid and wanted to get out of the woods quickly, she had to slow to walking pace. This is no way to burn fat, she thought. It’ll only turn to lactic acid, and tomorrow I won’t have the energy to do anything. But I have to get my body into shape. I must. Everything had to change, she kept
reprimanding herself, trying to take her thoughts away from the threatening woods around her, whose shadows seemed to be watching her. This is crazy, she muttered under her breath. I’m going crazy – and it serves me right. I just need to forget everything, put an end to all this sin and lick my wounds. What bloody stupid clichés, at least try to come up with something original. Her voice was drowned out by the sound of rustling from the trees.

Breathing heavily she walked the final half kilometre back to the car, feeling as though she didn’t have the energy, that the journey would never end. Just as she made out the shape of the yellow car behind the bushes and was smirking at her overactive imagination, she saw a dark figure in front of her. Someone was crouching down on the running track. The figure stood up and started walking briskly towards her.

2

THE
HEAVY
RAINCLOUDS
that had hidden the sky from view for four days in a row were once again lashing the city with water. The air was grey and chilly. Pedestrians with umbrellas dodged the spray whipped up by cars in the morning rush hour. The smartest people were wearing rubber boots. It seemed that summer had finally come to an end, though the skin yearned to cling to the warmth and the touch of seawater for just a moment longer. The school term had started, the summer holidays had ended, people had returned to work and society was gradually regaining its momentum: work, home, work, home, no more lazing around by the water blowing out dandelion clocks.

At a quarter to eight, Anna opened the main door of the imposing, towering office block in the centre of the city that had once been her home, and stepped into the foyer of the building that never sleeps. She glanced at her watch and noted that her new boss was late. She dug a jar of powder from her handbag, tugged her fringe into a better position, added a little lip gloss. She tried to take deep breaths. She had butterflies in her stomach. She needed the toilet.

Neon lights flickered behind a set of venetian blinds. Anna had slept badly after all. She’d woken in the early hours and started fretting. Despite this she wasn’t especially tired. Adrenalin sharpened the morning stiffness of her senses.

A week earlier the past had once again become the present as Anna had rented a van, and with the help of a few colleagues packed up what little she had in the way of furniture and belongings and moved them many hundreds of kilometres from the city where she had studied and where she had lived, working a string of temporary
positions, ever since graduating. The majority of her belongings were the same ones she’d had when she began studying ten years earlier.

Anna had rented an apartment in Koivuharju, the same suburb where she had spent her youth and where Ákos still lived. The area’s reputation was anything but attractive, but the rent was reasonable. The appearance of Anna’s surname on the letter box in uneven block lettering hadn’t aroused the slightest interest among the other residents. Even her relatively high level of education was nothing out of the ordinary, as Koivuharju was home to a surprising number of teachers, doctors, engineers and physicists from immigrant backgrounds. The only statistical difference was that Anna was actually in work, gainfully employed in a position worthy of her education. The physicists of Koivuharju would have been pleased to get a job as a part-time cleaner.

Koivuharju wouldn’t be considered a place where people
wanted
to live; they simply ended up there. Those who lived in and around the downtown area certainly knew its name and reputation, but they didn’t know what it looked like. The spectrum of surnames, each more difficult to pronounce than the next, might have intimidated them.

Anna hadn’t even looked at the high-end, high-ceilinged downtown apartments. She had always felt more at home on the flipside of these façades – in the shadows and alleyways.

Perhaps this is why she’d become a police officer.

Chief Superintendent Pertti Virkkunen arrived almost ten minutes late. The short, moustachioed man in his fifties seemed in excellent condition. He greeted her with an enthusiastic smile and shook her hand so that her joints cracked.

‘We’re very pleased to have you here,’ said Virkkunen. ‘It’s great to get an officer from an immigrant background on our team. They’ve been banging on about it in national strategy directives for years, but until now we haven’t seen a single one of you, not even a junior constable – immigrants, you know. Though, of course, we’ve met plenty of you in other circumstances. I mean…’

Virkkunen was embarrassed. Anna felt like saying something snappy, making him squirm with shame, but because nothing sprang to mind she let it pass.

‘You can take it easy for a few days, get to know people and find your bearings. There’s nothing particularly pressing going on at the moment, so you can get organised in peace and quiet,’ he said as he accompanied Anna from one department to another.

‘After all, this is your first job and your first position in the Crime Unit, so we’ll give you plenty of time to settle and learn how things work around here. We meet each morning at eight o’clock, assess ongoing cases and delegate work. The analysis team meets once a week. The secretary will be able to give you your rota and more specific timetables.’

Anna nodded and followed Virkkunen, trying to commit the location of various departments and corridors to memory, to construct some kind of mental floor map. The summer after finishing high school she’d done a stint as a seasonal worker in the documentation department on the ground floor of the daunting police station; she had helped in the processing of hundreds of urgent passport applications as people realised, just before going on holiday, that their passport had expired; she had stamped and filed documents, organised shelves and made coffee, and towards the end of her contract she’d even become acquainted with how passports were manufactured. The rest of the building was a mystery to her. It felt labyrinthine, the way large buildings always seem at first.

Virkkunen led Anna up to the Crime Unit and her new office on the fourth floor. The room was spacious and well lit and was situated halfway down the corridor opposite the staffroom. Folders and paperwork were neatly filed on shelves that covered the walls and the computer on the desk was switched off. Three flower baskets hung in the window and a yucca plant the size of a tree stood in the corner. On the wall was a picture of a blonde woman and three blonde children. They were smiling against the backdrop of an exotic sandy beach, sea and sunshine, the way any happy family would on holiday.

Coffee mugs and a Thermos flask were stacked in the room on a steel trolley. A batch of the mandatory office buns lay beneath a cloth. Anna wondered whether she dared decline. The room was so large that there was room for another table for meetings. Sitting around the table were three people, all plain-clothed police officers.

‘Morning all,’ said Virkkunen. ‘Allow me to introduce our new senior detective constable, Anna Fekete.’

Two of the officers stood up immediately and came over to greet her.

‘Good morning and a very warm welcome to our team. It’s so nice to get another woman on board – the guys here can really get on your nerves sometimes. I’m Sari, Sari Jokikokko-Pennanen – I know, what a mouthful.’

The tall, fair-haired woman, around Anna’s age, reached out a slender hand and took Anna’s in a firm, warm grip. It seemed as though her entire body was smiling.

‘Hello, everyone. I’m very excited to come and work here, though it’s all a bit nerve-wracking.’

‘No need for that. A little bird tells me you’re a damn good officer – we’re really pleased to have you. You speak really good Finnish; I can’t hear any accent,’ said Sari.

‘Thanks. I’ve lived here a long time.’

‘Oh, how long?’

‘Twenty years.’

‘You must have been just a child when you came here?’

‘I was nine, because we arrived in the spring. I turned ten that summer.’

‘You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime. This is Rauno Forsman.’

Also in his thirties, the funny-looking man extended his hand and greeted Anna with a look of curiosity in his blue eyes.

‘Morning. Welcome to the team.’

‘Good morning. Nice to meet you,’ said Anna as the thousands of butterflies in her stomach stopped beating their wings and the
tension in her neck gradually began to relent. She liked these people, Sari in particular.

The third person at the table had remained seated. Virkkunen was just about to turn to him, a note of irritation in his eyes, when the man opened his mouth.

‘Hello,’ the man mumbled in Anna’s direction, then turned to Virkkunen. ‘Emergency Services took a call last night. Some refugee or whatever we’re supposed to call them these days, rang up and said someone was going to kill her. So, should we get to work?’

Virkkunen cleared his throat.

‘Esko Niemi,’ he said to Anna. ‘Your partner.’

A stifled snort came from behind Esko’s sagging cheeks, peppered with rosacea. Either that, or the man had a cold, thought Anna and greeted her new partner. He stood up and held out his hand. It was large and rough, the kind of hand that you could imagine hurling criminals into jail with a steely swipe of the wrist, but his grip felt unpleasantly limp. Anna hated handshakes like this; they gave a strangely suspicious impression of people. And still the man wouldn’t look her in the eye. Virkkunen invited everyone to have some coffee and the officers filed towards the trolley from which an enticing aroma was now wafting. The slightly strained atmosphere in the room seemed to relax, and Anna was enveloped in a buzz of friendly conversation. Still warm, the fresh buns tasted good.

Once everyone had drunk their coffee and eaten their buns, Virkkunen asked Esko to brief the team on the events of the previous night.

‘The girl gave her home address, somewhere in Rajapuro. A couple of officers went round there, but the girl wasn’t at home after all. There was the father, mother and two younger siblings, but not the girl who made the call. Kurdish family, kicked up a right hullabaloo, woke the whole house, I’m sure.’

‘A girl? The person who received the death threat was a girl?’

‘That’s what I just said,’ Esko replied without looking at Anna, then continued. ‘The girl’s father said she was visiting relatives in
Vantaa. The father did all the talking, by the way. The fourteen-year-old son … I’ll be damned if I can remember their names,’ he muttered and fidgeted with a bunch of papers looking for the boy’s name. ‘Mehvan. Fourteen-year-old Mehvan interpreted.’

‘Nobody called an official interpreter?’ asked Anna. ‘You can’t use a child as an interpreter, especially in such a serious matter.’

‘Of course we asked for one, but the interpreter on duty was at the hospital on another call. There wasn’t time to get another interpreter with all the fuss going on – it would have been a waste of public money, paying overtime and what have you for two interpreters. The officers on site were told to sort things out as best they could, there and then. And that’s what they did. You can’t shilly-shally around with important matters. Our boys were simply following orders.’

‘Like in Bosnia, I suppose?’ Anna muttered.

‘What?’ Esko retorted.

Finally he turned and looked at Anna with his swollen, reddened eyes. Anna tried to stare back without blinking. The man already disgusted her, though she’d only known him a matter of minutes.

‘Nothing. I didn’t say a word.’

Anna eventually lowered her glare.

Esko poured himself more coffee, a satisfied smirk on his face.

‘Well, everything in the apartment seemed to be as it should,’ Rauno continued in an attempt to calm things down. ‘Nobody in the house knew anything of what the girl had done or why. A couple of officers in Vantaa checked the girl’s supposed whereabouts. The girl – her name was … just a minute – Bihar was found to be in good health and was precisely where her parents said she was. She told the Vantaa police that perhaps someone had made a prank call and given her name. Either that or she’d had a nightmare and must have made the call herself while half asleep. Apparently she sometimes walks – and talks – in her sleep and can’t remember anything about it the next morning.’

‘Sounds suspicious,’ said Anna.

‘Very,’ said Sari.

‘What’s suspicious about that? The girl admitted she made the call by mistake,’ said Esko.