She had just started to slip into that relaxed state before finally falling asleep when someone began ringing the doorbell. Picsába, she shouted and threw her pillow to the ground.
It was Ákos. Her brother was in a bad way. His face was blotchy and gaunt, and his clothes dirty. He stank.
‘Basszd meg, Ákos, aludtam!’
‘Bocs, Anna. This is an emergency. Take a look at these papers from the Social. I can’t understand a thing. My unemployment benefit hasn’t arrived, even though it should have. Now they’re asking for more information, a faszom.’
‘I’m not looking at this now.’
‘Jebiga, Anna! Help me out here, yeah? Just tell me what they need.’
‘Bocs yourself. I won’t. Take care of your own paperwork.’
‘Anna, I need some money. Lend me a hundred, eh? I’ll pay you back with next month’s benefit.’
‘I haven’t got any cash. And I wouldn’t give you any if I did.’
‘Fifty, then. Come on, I’m in the shit here.’
‘I can smell that.’
‘Give me a break. Just give me the money and I’ll go.’
‘You won’t get a penny from me, that’s for sure.’
‘Thanks a fucking lot. Bitch.’
‘Shut up. Have a shower.’
‘Give me a tenner, then.’
‘Not a cent. Now go on, piss off!’
‘Tight-arsed bitch, no wonder nobody’s interested in you. Who would want to look at police scum like that all day? At least give me a smoke, yeah?’ Ákos shouted. Anna picked up the packet she’d bought that day and threw it at him; it was already half empty. Without a word of thanks, Ákos left, slamming the door behind him. The stairwell boomed with the sound of banging and stomping.
Anna slumped on to the hallway rug. Her running shoes stared at her accusingly from beneath the coat rack. Anna threw them limply towards the door, but they continued to laugh at her.
She didn’t sleep a wink all night. Anna looked out of the kitchen window at the darkened suburb, its tower blocks standing unflinchingly, each on its own plot, without a care for what happened within their walls. Does anyone out there wonder what kind of poor human fate my windows hide, she wondered. That’s what I am, a poor human fate, a pathetic soul that will soon go mad. I’ll go mad right here in this apartment. I’ve got to get out.
She decided to pay a visit to Bihar’s apartment. Slowly she drove through the northern suburbs towards Rajapuro. The radio was playing classical music. Loneliness condensed like moisture against a nocturnal window.
A red car glided past her on the empty road. The car’s headlights blinded her for a moment as it passed; Anna didn’t see who was driving. Should she do a U-turn and follow it, stop the car and ask for papers and ID? She hesitated. Even the simplest decisions seemed to get caught in a viscous sludge of fatigue. I’m not turning round, she eventually resolved. The streets are full of red cars, and it would be unprofessional to make a decision like this while my brain is bleary from lack of sleep. In any case, it’s gone now.
Bihar’s windows were dark.
Of course, Anna thought. What was I expecting? Did I think they would beat Bihar with the lights on and the curtains open, right by the living-room windows, at precisely the moment I pulled up in the yard?
Stupid.
I am stupid. You are stupid. Together we’re all stupid, Anna said out loud and laughed.
All decent, sensible people are in bed, asleep.
But I’m still awake. Always fucking awake!
I was bre the only foreigner in our school. By foreigner I don’t mean someone whose parents have come to Finland from Germany or the States or somewhere similar to do some really specialised job for a couple of years and rake in a load of money. There were kids like that at our school. I mean kids like me. And suddenly I was so special and interesting and exotic. In Rajapuro about 35 per cent of pupils have another mother tongue, maybe even 40 per cent. The haggard teachers compare notes and brag about whose class is the most awful.
But the kids at this new school weren’t from out in the sticks. Some of them came in by bus because they were being environmentally friendly. They had hobbies, their parents listened to Mahler and Berlioz and they spent half-term holidays in Barcelona, Christmas holidays in Thailand and skiing holidays in Lapland. Each one of them glowed with the certainty of becoming a lawyer or an economist or an engineer or a doctor or a diplomat. It was a new and strange world to me, and at first I wondered whether I was still in Finland at all, but it wasn’t long before I became caught up in it all too. For the first time ever I felt that people actually saw me. I felt like I belonged somewhere.
Once I managed to convince my family that I would wear the hijab, they sometimes let me go to class parties at the weekend. My cool cousin helped out there too – eternally grateful to you, Piya. I’m not angry with you because of what happened. I know you didn’t have any choice. We came up with incredible lies to cover for each other. It’s amazing that they bought it for so long, but it’s just a matter of using the right words and being able to deploy them at precisely the right moment. For almost a year, my family believed I was an active member of a language, culture and politics group for young Kurdish kids, a group that was basically made up of me and my cousin. And my timetable taped to the fridge door featured at least seven different after-school lessons that didn’t actually exist. Optional classes, we called them. They didn’t know anything about the shorter school days during exam week. If you have to, you can always hatch some new plan. Juse thought my life was really bloody exciting.
Sometimes Mum encouraged me to do something more useful than reading. In her own little mind she must have wondered what I’d do with six As when my rising-star career had already been planned out as the wife of the Kurdish man whose photo she showed me one evening, telling me what an excellent family he was from and that he was a good man. But what they didn’t tell me was that everything had already been arranged. I started to suspect the worst when suddenly I was expected to learn to cook all kinds of special Kurdish foods and to clean like I’d never done before. Of course, they’d been preparing me for this since I was a kid, with Mum constantly explaining what a good woman should be able to do and blah blah blah. She tried to force me to cook and bake bread and crochet some ridiculous lace doilies. I was like, for God’s sake, I’ve got a physics exam the day after tomorrow, then maths, and I’m not baking anything. And I didn’t bake anything. They put me on house arrest for two weeks, but I told them they might as well put me on arrest for the rest of my life: I’m not cooking all night long and that’s that. It was the first time I’d ever openly stood up to them, and immediately I became proof of everything they’d suspected all along: that the Finnish school system was like a rotten, secular dog park and if only we had a nice Kurdish school all of our own, if only we’d had our own wonderful homeland then none of this would have happened. The worst of it was that they started to suspect all my after-school activities.
So I was stuck at home for a few weeks. They lied to our headmaster, saying we were going home for a few weeks and asked to be sent all the homework and exams I’d need to study for. I sat at home and studied like crazy, so I wouldn’t fall behind. They took my phone and wouldn’t let me use the computer, so I couldn’t keep in touch with my friends who all thought I really was in Turkey. Dad said if I did one more thing, said one more word out of place, then he’d take me out of school altogether. That’s why I didn’t throw a fit or raise my voice when they finally revealed that the creepy guy in the photo was actually my future husband and that we’d been engaged for years.
But it was still a shock.
31
ANNA WENT TO WORK at 6.30. After returning home from Rajapuro she had slept for about an hour, woken up, had some coffee and smoked a cigarette in the kitchen, listened to the buzzing in her head and wondered when she would finally crack. When she didn’t crack after all, she decided to have a shower and face the
day ahead. But she resolved to sleep the following night. She would have to.
The suburb was every bit as dark and wet as it had been the night before. Anna didn’t notice the glimmer of light, the faint augurs of morning rising behind the tower blocks. She didn’t even look. And just as she was about to open her car door there in the quiet, almost empty car park, someone grabbed her by the shoulders from behind and squeezed hard. Anna gave a shout; she turned around in a flash, her fist raised and ready to punch the attacker right in the face.
‘Bocs, Anna, bocs, az én vagyok!’ It was Ákos. Anna only just managed to stop her fist striking its target. Her brother seemed spaced out and he was very pale.
‘I’ve lost my fucking keys – can’t afford to get the caretaker to come and open the door. It costs 80 euros. I’m skint.’
‘I see. So when did you lose your keys?’
‘Last night. I need to shower, change my clothes.’
‘Where did you spend the night?’
‘At a mate’s place. Anna, I wanna go clean. Help me.’
Ákos looked terrible. Anna felt sorry for him. She couldn’t abandon her brother when he was in trouble. There was nobody here to care for him, nobody at all that he could really talk to. Anna had returned to her former hometown and moved back to the same suburb where her brother still lived. The decision hadn’t been motivated solely by her new job and a regular income. It must have had a greater meaning, something to do with her brother, a man whom life had left so crushed. Right there, Anna realised that she had nobody either – nobody but Ákos. And at that moment she knew that if she ever did return home, it would be because of Ákos.
‘All right. I’ll give you 80 to get the door opened. Not a penny more. I’ll come round this afternoon and check that you’ve cleaned yourself up, then we’ll get you into rehab. And I can go through your paperwork from Social Services too. Okay?’
‘Great, Anna. I knew I could rely on you.’
A single tear trickled from Ákos’s glazed, yellowed eye, as Anna pulled the notes from her wallet and pressed them into his trembling hand. He snatched them greedily and stuffed them into his jacket pocket.
‘Köszönöm, Anna. Nagyon szépen köszönöm.’
‘I’ll come round soon. I can’t say exactly when – things at work are pretty manic – but probably some time after midday. Okay?’
‘Okay. See you later. Hey – you couldn’t shout me a couple of beers, could you? I can’t go cold turkey straight away; I don’t think I’d cope.’
Anna sighed. Reluctantly she went inside and fetched two small cans of beer from the fridge. It was all she had. Ákos stuffed them into his pocket and disappeared.
When she arrived at work, Anna flicked through the papers on her desk without focusing on anything, fighting the urge to have a cigarette. What the hell’s wrong with me, she wondered. Why can’t I get to sleep? Am I ill? What if I’ve got cancer or HIV, she thought, horrified.
She tried not to think about all those hazy one-night stands.
Should I go to the doctor?
The thought felt terrifying, as if she were signing her own death warrant. Her eyes were shutting of their own accord; she felt like sleeping but battled against the fatigue. Rauno popped in to bring her more files, before slipping out just as quickly, muttering something indistinct. Now he hates me too, after that awful night out, she thought. They all hate me. I’m a failure as a police officer and a failure as a human being. They blame everything on me being a foreigner. After this, I doubt a single applicant with an immigrant background will ever be employed here again – and I was supposed to be a pioneer, an example to others, fully integrated, fluent in Finnish, equal to any Finn. Anna felt her pulse quickening and the hum in her head intensifying.
Anna got up and went out for a cigarette. She took the lift downstairs, opened the back door and walked to the smoking area across the yard. The empty gherkin jar was full of stinking cigarette ends. Anna looked at the blackened edges of the jar with a sense of disgust and imagined that her lungs must look the same. Her cigarette tasted just as bad as the old butts smelled. She smoked it right down to the filter all the same.
As she walked back inside, she saw someone watching her from a window on the fourth floor. It was Sari’s window.
Anna went to the toilet and tried to rinse the taste of ashtray from her mouth with a handful of water, but the taste was ingrained on the enamel of her teeth. She locked herself in one of the cubicles and sat staring at the door for a long while. Then she slipped into her office and began reading the documents Rauno had brought. One sentence at a time, one line at a time, she forced herself to focus on them. This is my job and I have to do it to the best of my ability, she told herself. I can do this. If I don’t understand something, I’ll read it again. If I realise I’m not concentrating, I’ll read it again. In this way, she painstakingly went through the details of the killings once again. But to what end? The files didn’t reveal any new information. Would they have to track down all the active joggers in the city and the neighbouring towns? There must be far more runners around here than hunting folk. What could they possibly do? Hopelessness stared back at her from behind the papers. Compared with the tempo of American police dramas, real criminal investigations often moved painfully slowly. But somewhere, somehow, they would break the deadlock and the case would start to unravel. She had to believe it would. As they reached the final strait, things would pick up. How long would that take? And more to the point: would she be able to go the distance?
There came a knock at the door. Sari stepped inside.
‘How are you doing?’
‘All right. I guess.’
‘Is something the matter? I’m really worried about you.’
Anna thought for a moment about what to say, though she would rather have left the room altogether.
‘I’ve been sleeping badly the last few nights, that’s all. Actually, I haven’t been sleeping much at all. Last night I only got an hour’s sleep. But I’ll be fine.’
Anna tried to put on a brave smile, though she felt like crying.
‘But that sounds really serious,’ said Sari. ‘You won’t cope with this or any other job if you’re not getting enough sleep. I’ve always got a box of Somnor tablets in the cupboard. I never need them, because I know they’re there if I can’t get to sleep. Just the thought of them calms me down. Have you got any sleeping pills?’
‘No … Pills always freak me out a bit.’
‘Listen, call the doctor.’
‘What?’
‘Call the station’s health officer right now; they’ll give you an appointment for this afternoon. I’ve got the number in my phone.’ Sari dug her mobile out of her blazer pocket, pulled up the number on the screen and handed it to Anna.
‘I’ll save this and call them later.’
‘Make sure you do,’ Sari said sternly. ‘We all want things to go well for you. Even Esko mentioned you looked really burned out, and he didn’t say it as a put-down.’
Anna felt a wave of irritation washing over her, but to her surprise the feeling shrank and turned into a warmth that stung her eyes. She took Sari’s telephone, went to the window to take down the number and turned her back to Sari, hoping that she hadn’t noticed anything. She tapped the number into her own phone and handed the other one back to Sari.
‘Make sure to call them. We really care about you,’ said Sari as she took the phone, her warm touch lingering on Anna’s hand before leaving the room.
Anna remained standing by the window, and didn’t bother wiping the tears from her cheeks. She tried to focus on the landscape framed in the window, which at that moment wasn’t especially beautiful. A single yellowed bush in the police-station forecourt braved the autumn weather, a solitary dash of colour in the city’s otherwise grey canvas. Cars flowed past beneath a cloud of exhaust fumes, four lanes in each direction, and along the edge of the street rose a wall of ugly apartment blocks, built so tightly together they co
uld have grown fast to one another. My own personal protective wall, a wall with no checkpoint, she thought. My wailing wall.
Soon it’ll be November. November sucks people dry, drains their energy and gives them only darkness in return.
Huitzilopochtli battled against the darkness too, she’d read in one of Rauno’s files. It was specifically this battle that required human sacrifices, so that the sun would once more vanquish the darkness.
And still the days were growing shorter.
Wicked people are full of darkness.
When was the last time someone took care of me?
At the point where her emotions should finally have burst forth, Anna felt only a cold and hollow gap. Finally she packed her camera and notepads into her bag and left for the forensics department to observe the autopsy on Veli-Matti Helmerson.
From the autopsy Anna drove straight to Ákos’s apartment in Koivuharju, though she knew this would make her late for the investigation team’s meeting that afternoon. Her brother’s unwashed stench greeted her at the door. As agreed, he was at home, but he had no intention of going to the rehab clinic. Again he was blind drunk. Anna was furious and started shouting and raging at her brother, who treated Anna’s disappointment the only way a drunken alcoholic knows how – by laughing at her and mocking her. A fat woman stood up from the living-room sofa, lit a cigarette and fetched another can from the fridge. It didn’t take much imagination to realise that the events of that morning had been nothing but a bluff.
She felt like killing both of them.
She would never forgive her brother for this.
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