The Hummingbird (9 page)

Three sets of twelve repetitions. Her chest muscles were in agony. Anna was out of breath; her arms were trembling under the strain. A pair of hands helped her with the final push; a familiar-looking man in a tight sleeveless T-shirt, his arms solid as a rock.

‘Hi, I’m Sami,’ the man greeted her. ‘We saw each other yesterday at the car park.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Anna as she got up from the bench. She walked towards the rack of free weights. The man followed her.

‘Do you fancy meeting up some evening? Friday maybe? We
could grab a bite to eat somewhere,’ he said without beating around the bush. He came up so close to her that they were almost touching. Anna felt awkward. She didn’t need a date at the moment. Particularly not with another police officer.

‘I don’t know,’ she stumbled. ‘I’ve just moved and everything’s a bit up in the air. I’m not sure I’ll have the time.’

‘I got the impression you might have been interested,’ said Sami.

Menj a picsába,
thought Anna. One wink, and men imagine all kinds of things.

‘Well, that was, you know … I didn’t mean anything by it,’ she awkwardly tried to explain.

‘What about your friend, then? Good-looking lass. Better looking than you.’ Sami seemed hurt and fixed his gaze on Sari.

‘We’re both spoken for,’ Sari shouted from the exercise bike.

‘I doubt it,’ quipped Sami, his expression impassive.

‘Why don’t you go and have a wank in the changing room,’ said Sari. At the other side of the gym, two officers chuckled.

Anna too gave a smirk. Sari was great. How did she have the balls? Sami slung his heavy free weights back on the rack with an indignant clatter and left the room.

‘What a jerk,’ Sari puffed. ‘This is the downside of working in a male-dominated profession: hormonal dickheads everywhere you look. Hey, now it’s your turn to spill the beans. Have you got family here? Where are you from? I want to hear everything. I think it’s just great that we’ve got a foreigner on the team, though you don’t seem much like an immigrant.’

Anna had no desire to talk about herself, though she knew there were some questions she’d have to answer sooner or later, over and over again.
Why did you come to Finland
was the most common, and it irritated her no end. Though people generally asked out of sheer, benevolent curiosity, Anna always felt there was another dimension to the question: did you have a good reason for coming, one that we real Finns can find acceptable, or did you simply come here in search of a better life?

The question always aroused a sense of guilt, making her feel like an unwanted guest whose secret had been revealed. Anna saw nothing wrong with looking for a better quality of living. Surely it was natural for everyone to search for such a thing? Why should it be restricted to people who already had everything they needed?

‘Here you are,’ Esko interrupted just as Anna drew a deep breath and was about to begin her story. He had appeared at the gym door. Though Sari had been assigned the Bihar case, Esko seemed to direct his words at her rather than Anna. Anna tried not to show her irritation. It was pointless letting arseholes make your blood boil.

‘Jere’s disappeared,’ he informed them.

‘What?’ Anna and Sari cried in unison.

‘Disappeared into thin air. Phone switched off. Parents, friends, landlord – nobody knows where he is.’

‘Great,’ sighed Sari.

‘Quite. Seems like an open-and-shut case to me.’

‘It does, doesn’t it,’ admitted Anna.

‘The boy shot Riikka, probably in a fit of jealousy – wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened in this country. Then took fright once he realised what he’d done and went into hiding.’

‘We’ll have to put out a warrant for him,’ said Sari.

‘Already done. And I’ve got a search warrant for his apartment too. I’ll have to get out there now – with her,’ Esko continued speaking to Sari and nodded towards Anna.

‘Right now?’ asked Anna. Annoying. The shift would go into overtime.

‘Be in the car park in fifteen minutes.’

‘Okay,’ said Anna and hurried towards the showers.

‘Anna, wait. Bihar and her family are coming in for an interview on Friday. Can we go through the details of the case tomorrow? I want to talk about it before they come in,’ said Sari.

‘How about lunch and a meeting at twelve?’

‘It’s a deal. See you.’

9

JERE
’
S
APARTMENT
WAS
SITUATED
near the city centre in a stale-smelling, 1970s block of flats on Torikatu. On this spot there had once been a beautiful old wooden house with good ventilation and free of mould. Anna had seen photographs of the city taken at the turn of the century; it had changed a great deal since then. In the name of progress, quaint wooden areas of the city had been torn down to make way for concrete boxes, and cobbled streets were covered with tarmac. The remaining art nouveau buildings in the downtown area still exuded a bygone, bourgeois elegance, but only a very few wooden houses had been spared the cull. There were still a few former working-class areas complete with small wooden cottages in and around the city centre. These properties were highly desirable for the rich and famous, who spent hundreds of thousands repairing and extending them.

The door to Jere’s apartment block stood anonymously between a local pub and a second-hand store. The caretaker was waiting for them with a set of keys. The lift creaked and rattled as they went up to the second floor. He opened the door and would have followed them into the apartment had Esko not raised a hand in front of him.

‘Hey, this is our territory now,’ he said and the caretaker retreated into the corridor, disappointed.

On the doormat were a pile of flyers, a bill and a couple of free newspapers; the lowest in the pile was dated 21 August. Anna’s letter box bore the words N
O
F
LYERS
. She couldn’t stand it that in a matter of days the hallway was filled with rubbish. In an investigation, however, rubbish often provided crucial evidence.

The spacious one-bedroom apartment was dim. All the curtains
had been pulled shut. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and the scarcity of any furniture made the place seem almost deserted. A bachelor pad, par excellence, thought Anna.

They looked round the apartment, sizing it up. At first glance, everything seemed perfectly normal. Shoes were arranged in a tidy row on the hallway mat and coats hung on a rack. A T-shirt and a pair of socks lay on the floor next to the bed, but the bed itself had been made up neatly. There were no dust bunnies cowering beneath the sofa. On the coffee table was a pile of magazines and a coffee cup with a dried, brown oval at the bottom. Even the bathroom was clean. There was a tangle of hair in the plughole in the shower cabinet, but there were no layers of limescale around the toilet bowl or dried toothpaste stains in the sink. The kitchen looked as though it had recently been cleaned. The rubbish had been taken out and the dishes washed, and there were no crumbs on the worktop. The metallic draining board gleamed when Anna switched on the lights. There was nothing fresh in the fridge. It seemed that Jere hadn’t wanted to leave anything behind that might start smelling or grow mouldy.

It’s a pain coming home when the first thing you have to do is start tidying up, Anna heard the voice of her mother. Was that why she always left a mess behind whenever she went on a trip? Was Jere planning on coming back? Hadn’t he run away after all? Anna had almost been hoping to encounter something sick and perverted, something that would have struck them the minute they walked in the door and revealed Jere’s guilt in an instant, but if there was such a thing, it was well hidden.

‘He certainly didn’t leave in a hurry,’ said Anna.

‘Hmph,’ Esko snorted.

‘He’s taken out the rubbish and everything,’ she continued.

‘And maybe there was something in the rubbish that needed to be disposed of,’ said Esko, his enunciation deliberately exaggerated. ‘You sure you understand everything I’m saying?’

Anna tried not to rise to it.

‘Yes, I do. What about Riikka? Wasn’t she supposed to be living here? There are no signs of another occupant here – and certainly not a woman.’

‘Maybe that’s all been disposed of, too – Riikka included.’

Esko spoke each word slowly and carefully and looked at Anna with mischief in his eyes.

‘Well, no point standing around, is there?’ said Anna, trying to control her irritation as she pulled a pair of gloves from her pocket. ‘If there’s something here to find, we’ll find it.’

Esko scoffed again.

They started in the living room. It was an oblong-shaped room with a window looking down on to the street. The few pieces of furniture were second hand but in good condition. Beneath the window was a white melamine desk that looked like it had been taken from his childhood home; one of its drawers featured a Turtles sticker. The old brown leather sofa was worn but looked comfortable. A shallow bookshelf featured a television and DVD player and a few books, but no ornaments. Mathematics, physics, Chandler, Nesser and Åsa Larsson. The boy certainly had good taste in crime fiction.
The Hunter’s Cookbook, The Deer Hunter’s ABC, A Guide to Hiking
and
Fly Fishing: Baits and Lures.
The outdoor type, no doubt about it. There was a shelf of CDs and DVDs, cheap American entertainment for the masses. The belongings of a pretty average young man. On the desk there was a relatively new laptop and a fancy calculator. There were box files full of marked essays and sheets of squared paper covered in complicated formulae. No diaries, no letters, nothing particularly personal except a passport.

‘He hasn’t gone abroad, at any rate,’ said Anna. ‘Here’s his passport.’

‘Just think for a minute, eh? You don’t need a passport to get to Sweden.’

True. Or Norway, thought Anna but didn’t say anything.

‘We’ll have to ask Virkkunen for a warrant to confiscate the laptop, see what the IT boys can find on it,’ said Esko. ‘Kids’ private lives are
on computers these days, private information posted on Facebook for all and sundry to read. You must have hundreds of dago friends online,’ Esko chuckled as though he’d told a particularly witty joke.

Anna counted to five before responding.

‘I’m not on Facebook.’

‘Well! So we do have something in common. Who’d have thought?’

Esko stared at Anna for a moment, a seedy smirk on his ruddy face. Anna looked away.

‘If Jere had posted online where he was going, one of his friends must surely know where he is,’ she continued.

‘Fancy that. So you can think, after all.’

‘I don’t get the impression that Jere fled on the spur of the moment. By the looks of it, he planned his departure very carefully,’ Anna carried on regardless of Esko’s tone.

‘This Jere is one cold-blooded character. See, that’s why men make better police officers. You women are too vulnerable to fluctuations in your emotions, you southern types probably more so than Finnish women.’

Menj a picsába,
Anna cursed to herself and decided not to exchange another word with him.

If this had been a treasure hunt, the door into the bedroom would have been signposted
Getting Warmer.
The room itself was large. Anna opened the dark-blue curtains. A sudden light glinted against the white walls. From the window she saw the wall of the house opposite and looked down into the concrete courtyard, featuring a handful of parking spaces and a wooden seesaw with a small shrub sprouting beside it.

In the middle of the room was a double bed. Even the bedspread was blue. Anna turned up the hem. It was hand made. Riikka? His mother? And why do I automatically assume it was made by a woman, she thought angrily. The boy could just as easily have made it himself.

Esko gave a whistle. He had opened the double doors of a walk-in closet. There was nothing inside that might have suggested that Riikka lived there. Instead, there was a gun cabinet, locked according to official regulations. Anna felt her pulse quickening.

‘Well, well, let’s see what skeletons this model student has in his cupboard. Try and keep schtum for a minute, eh, so I can concentrate,’ said Esko rudely and knelt down in front of the cabinet. He slowly turned the dials of the combination lock, his ear close to the cabinet. In under a minute the door gave a quiet click and swung open. Wow, thought Anna. This is just like in the cinema. Naturally, she didn’t say this out loud.

The cabinet contained a Marlin .45-calibre rifle, an old single-barrelled shotgun, a 16/70 Baikal and several drawers full of rounds and bullets.

‘There’s one rifle missing,’ said Esko.

Anna was forced to open her mouth.

‘How do you know that?’