‘Why’s that?’
The fire officer looked at him. ‘There are millions of sheds in Finland. How many have you seen explode? All of a sudden, completely by themselves?’
5
Holma was genuinely confused. He was even slightly agitated. He took a sip of beer, read through the rules on the small sign by the bar and raised his hand. The waitress noticed him and walked down to Holma’s end of the counter. He watched her approaching, and when she was right in front of him he gave her a full, beaming smile.
‘Talent night,’ he said and turned the sign so that the text faced the waitress.
She looked at him, not the sign, and pulled a pen out of her pocket.
‘That’s right. You want to take part?’
‘No.’
‘Another drink then?’ she asked.
Holma looked down at his glass. He had only drunk a third of his beer, so he shook his head. The waitress stared at him. Holma couldn’t tell whether her expression was quizzical or not. Maybe she always looked like that.
‘I’ve read through these rules,’ he said. ‘There’s a mistake.’
‘A mistake?’
Holma pointed to the first section at the top of the sign. ‘It says here, only one talent per performer.’
The waitress glanced at the sign. ‘So it does,’ she said. Her voice sounded uncertain. ‘I haven’t read it. Lasse came up with the rules.’
‘Who’s Lasse?’
‘The owner.’
‘Is Lasse here?’
‘No.’
‘So where is Lasse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When will Lasse be back?’
‘His next shift’s on Tuesday.’
Holma looked at the woman. In other circumstances he would have made the conversation quicker, he thought. But that would require some privacy, and something sharp and sufficiently weighty.
‘So who can I talk to about the mistake in the rules?’
The waitress was still holding the biro, clicking the nib in and out. She glanced behind her, then turned back to Holma.
‘Me, I suppose.’
Holma nodded and gave her another quick smile.
‘You make sure to tell Lasse about this, okay?’
She nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘There are some people…’ Holma began and decided he should aim for utter simplicity. ‘There are some people with more than one talent.’
The waitress said nothing.
‘There are people,’ he continued, ‘with lots of talents.’
The woman was silent. She looked like she was listening.
‘And there are some people,’ he added, ‘who have so many talents that they could perform all evening, moving from one talent to the next.’
She looked at him.
‘So,’ said Holma. ‘On Tuesday, I want you to tell Lasse you need to change the rules.’
The woman said nothing. Then she nodded. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Holma.
The waitress walked away, giving him a quick glance over her shoulder. Holma offered her the broadest smile he could muster.
He didn’t believe her. She wouldn’t tell this Lasse anything at all of what he’d said. Holma had seen the same thing a thousand times. People were untrustworthy. Behind his smile, Holma was furious. He tried to calm himself by thinking about what he’d done a few weeks ago to a woman who turned out to be a police informant. He’d taped her mouth and hands, left her dangling by her tied legs from a pull-up bar, and closed the door behind him – naturally without asking whether anyone was likely to come home any time soon or whether anyone else had keys to the apartment.
His mood lightened.
The power of positive thinking, he reminded himself.
He sipped his beer, turned to face the stage, and then he saw her.
Personal Fitness & Super Dancing by Nea.
Holma read the pink-and-black sign several times, and still couldn’t tell whether he knew what it was all about. But still: Nea – that part was easy to understand – had started some form of public aerobics class. The soundtrack was dance music, new and rhythmical, the lyrics something about a giant snake, an anaconda – there was much sighing, much moaning, a woman singing while speaking, speaking while singing, her voice a whistle, a whisper, a nasal drone. Ohmygosh, lookatherbutt. Holma knew what she meant. What a great butt it was. The singer repeated it a thousand times. An excellent choice of music.
Nea was dressed in what looked like a wrestling outfit with about as much fabric as there was cardboard in the coaster beneath Holma’s pint glass. She was nubile, she had a sense of rhythm: jumping, gyrating, shunting, shimmying, pumping, pushing, grunting and grinding. She smiled throughout her routine, her white teeth gleaming like a row of miniature spotlights.
Holma thought of Pamela Anderson and the leather-clad Finnish celebrity of yesteryear playing the violin in a squatting position, and the two merged in his mind to produce an image of Pamela running in the waves of the Pacific with a Stradivarius in her hand.
Nea resembled one or both of them, but she was more tanned. Quite a lot more tanned. She was very tanned indeed. She was the most tanned white person Holma had ever set eyes on. He drank his beer, and his feet seemed to latch on to the beat of their own accord. He’d dreamed of meeting a local beauty, and it looked as though his dreams had, at least in part, come true.
Nea seemed to have accepted the rule about one talent per performer. When the music stopped, she took a bow so deep that for a moment she entirely disappeared from view. When she reappeared she gave that broad smile again, dazzling at least half of the customers. Holma clapped his hands together and continued clapping as he walked towards talent night’s dead-cert winner: ohmygosh, lookatherbutt.
‘Did you take any pictures?’ asked Nea, the delicious, half-naked, tanned angel, once they’d sat down. Holma had offered to buy a bottle of champagne, but Nea replied that she’d just lost so many minerals that she needed a super smoothie to maintain her protein balance and plenty of zinc because it was good for the skin. Holma thought about this for a moment, processed everything he heard, shook his head in answer to the question about the photographs, and smiled. Nea looked at him with her bright-blue eyes set in her glistening, orange face like a pair of tropical fish in shallow water.
‘Shame, I could have Instagrammed them,’ she said.
Holma had no idea what she was talking about.
‘You’re the clear winner,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some champagne?’
‘Problems with my magnesium,’ she said and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t absorb properly. And alcohol has such a terrible effect on your B and D levels, your immune system suffers, your iron balance, everything. Anyway, it’s protein time, thirty grams every two and a half hours – that’s right now: papaya, soya, whey, amino acids…’
Holma smiled; he didn’t understand a word. Nea squeezed thick green liquid into her mouth from a plastic bottle, swallowing in long, cumbersome gulps. Holma sipped his beer. It seemed to slip down his throat much more freely.
‘I’m Sampo,’ said Holma after placing his pint on the table. It wasn’t his real name, of course, but under the circumstances it felt just right.
Nea looked at his outstretched hand, then held out her own. Her nails were long and shiny.
‘Nea,’ she said.
They shook hands. Holma didn’t feel inclined to let go, but eventually released his grip.
‘I’m on holiday,’ he said.
‘Here?’
He thought about this for a moment.
‘Yes. Here.’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘What, now?’
‘No, not now,’ said Nea and rolled her blue eyes. ‘Soon.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘You saw my show.’
‘It was the best performance all evening.’
‘You haven’t seen the others yet.�
��
Holma glanced at the stage. The performer immediately after Nea was a middle-aged man with a beard. He was standing at a tall round bar table, frantically gluing matchsticks to one another, building something abstract. A woman sitting right in front of the stage was the only one of the approximately twelve customers in the bar actually watching the performance. But she was watching it all the more closely. All of a sudden she began barking instructions at the man: ‘Cut, cut,’ she hollered as though she was watching a football match. ‘Cross! Press! Hold!’
Holma smiled at Nea. ‘Where are you going?’
Nea shrugged her shoulders. Holma followed the movement of her bare limbs and liked what he saw more with every passing second.
‘Somewhere,’ said Nea. ‘Somewhere I get a bit more respect.’
Holma tried to think of a place where Nea might get the respect she wanted. He couldn’t think of any.
‘What’s stopping you?’
Nea looked at him. Holma got the distinct impression Nea was taking stock of him.
‘Money,’ she said.
Sometimes good ideas appear out of nowhere. Sometimes they require a muse. This time it was a combination of the two.
‘How much?’
‘How much what?’
‘How much money do you need to get out of town?’
Nea glanced first right then left. She pushed her empty plastic bottle to one side – Holma thought it looked more like a storage box or a small bucket than a drink container – and leaned her elbows on the table. Holma found it hard to look anywhere except the spot where her wrestling singlet gave way under the pressure from her breasts. He forced himself to look at those blue, tropical-fish eyes.
‘Loads,’ said Nea. ‘Like, megabucks.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘What’s that in numbers?’ asked Holma.
Nea nodded.
‘Well…’
She continued nodding. ‘I don’t know…’ More nodding. ‘At least…’ The nodding suddenly stopped, as though Nea had reached her destination. ‘Ten grand.’
The woman in front of the stage was wildly clapping her hands. The man proudly presented his matchstick structure. Holma thought it looked like a banana. Or a gondola. The Eiffel Tower. He leaned forwards.
‘Can I speak in confidence?’ he asked Nea.
‘You want to tell me a secret?’
‘It could be a secret. Our secret.’
Nea sat quietly and waited for him to continue.
‘There was a tragic death here a while ago. A man broke into a house and…’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Some kind of Hannibal Lecter, they said, a real sicko, he was going to rape her.’
Holma thought of Antero. If there was one man in the world who didn’t resemble Hannibal Lecter, it was Antero.
‘And the man died in that house,’ he said.
‘She’s my colleague, you know,’ said Nea. ‘The woman that lives in that house.’
Good, thought Holma and nodded. ‘I’m a lawyer representing the deceased man’s family. We are prepared to offer ten thousand euros for information that leads us to the guilty party so we can wrap up this case.’
‘Ten grand,’ said Nea, and thought about it for a moment, her eyes gazing somewhere into the distance. ‘Wow.’
On the stage a red-haired woman was tying a length of white rope between two timbers, apparently with the intention of walking along the rope or performing some kind of acrobatics. Given her advanced stage of inebriation, the performance was sure to be an interesting one.
‘That’s the amount you said you needed, right?’ said Holma and smiled.
‘I don’t know…’
‘But, if you happen to hear anything, discover anything…’
Nea straightened her back. Holma saw how her muscles shifted, tensed beneath her skin. Like a predatory cat preparing to launch into a gallop.
‘Aah,’ she sighed.
‘Looks pretty heavy, that big sports bag of yours,’ said Holma with a smile and saw out of the corner of his eye that the woman who had climbed up on the rope was now thrashing her arms in the air, then she disappeared from view. He heard a crash. ‘I can give you a ride home if you like. My new black BMW is just outside.’
6
Cold, cold, cold.
Jan Nyman stood in the morning chill of the water and listened to the instructions. Standing still was easy, and in fact almost unavoidable, and there were several reasons for this. Despite his wetsuit, he was freezing cold. The water in which he was staggering up to his waist surrounded him like congealing jam. The sensation must have had something to do with his wetsuit, which made the water feel like something other than water, and Nyman wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not.
The sun was given no chance of warming him. Clouds hung in two layers: lower down was a thin gauze the breadth of the horizon, and above that a grey wall, so dense and massive that it looked almost solid. Nyman squinted and looked up above the boughs of the trees; he could have been forgiven for thinking it was October.
The day resembled others like it – days when Nyman started doing something only for the weather to let him know what it thought. He recalled his wedding day, which was supposed to be filled with spring light. Instead, hailstones rattled down from the April sky, sharp and heavy, like tiny Swiss Army knives cutting at their cheeks as they tried to pose for the photographer.
Last night’s events disturbed his concentration too. He had waited for an opportunity to speak to Olivia Koski, but she hadn’t given him the chance. Olivia had come out of the house and into the garden, spoken to the fire chief one more time – Nyman hadn’t caught a word of their conversation – then simply wished him good night. Thanks for the taxi, maybe see you tomorrow.
Nyman could read between the lines. He took the gentle hint, left the yard and walked back towards the centre of the small town, then on to the resort.
That morning he’d woken in his neon-green chalet with a blocked nose, and he suspected Tubbs might be riddled with mildew.
The third factor causing him a degree of chill was what he knew in general and what he knew about Olivia Koski in particular. She was penniless. Olivia had used the last of her savings to take out a substantial insurance policy covering both the house and all the buildings in the yard. Soon after signing the policy, the plumbing in the old house had given up the ghost. Olivia had told him this herself. Then, within only a few hours, the insured outhouse – a shed complete with sauna and various other contents – burned to the ground. And Olivia Koski was conveniently and verifiably somewhere else at the time.
Nyman knew that even if it was later proven that the fire was started deliberately, there would be no way of proving that Olivia had started it. It simply wasn’t possible; the timing was off. The fire had spread very rapidly. According to the fire chief’s initial assessment, it had started and spread from a location where there was neither an electrical point nor any source of an open flame, such as a sauna stove, a hearth, an oven, or a washing machine that might have caught fire; and in Nyman’s experience, such a fire could only have been started on purpose and in situ.
That said, the fact that the fire was lit deliberately meant that Olivia Koski either did know about the fire or she did not.
Under different circumstances Nyman might have thought nothing of it: saunas burn down and barns explode all the time. Finns rarely express their emotions, but when they do, they really mean it. He might have thought it was just bad luck that Olivia Koski had been the target of a prank or petty vandalism, someone calling in an old fishing debt or a jealous, hapless lover taking revenge after being spurned.
But this was the same yard where a man had been murdered only two weeks earlier. And now it had been ravaged by a ferocious blaze. The distance between the two locations was thirty-five metres. What was the likelihood that events of this nature could take place both inside and outside the house without the owner’s knowing anything about them
? Pretty slim.
If Olivia Koski really did know nothing of either incident, she would be understandably confused. But she didn’t seem confused. And if, on the other hand, she did know about it, she must have had connections to people who … had carried out her instructions, which in turn meant that Olivia Koski was leading an operation aiming at … what exactly?
Nyman kept his hands on his board, palms down, and stared at the back of his hands. They looked the way they did in November when he’d forgotten his gloves: ruddy and slightly shrunken. He tried to sense his other extremities, recalled a simile involving a shrimp with an eye infection and quickly thought of something else.
Jan Nyman wasn’t a natural windsurfer. More to the point, he didn’t have the faintest idea who in God’s name would be. The board was a three-metre stretch of hell: both light and wobbly like a cork in a wine bottle, and stiff and unyielding like a strip of pavement the same length. The wind was always coming from the wrong side of the sail, no matter where he tried to position the stretch of white-and-red fabric. What’s more he unfailingly seemed to lean in the wrong direction. He either fell on top of the sail or ended up underneath it. He conceded that it would be best to listen to his teacher’s advice instead of thinking about other matters, about work.
His teacher – a friendly young man who didn’t hesitate to grab Nyman by the buttocks and press his thumbs deeper than Nyman thought was entirely necessary to maintain his balance – guided him through the basics until they both agreed that was enough for one day. They looked at the large black-and-white clock on the wall of the pastel-blue beach house and wearily nodded at one another.
Nyman didn’t quite manage to thank the teacher. It might not have been possible at all. His face was frozen stiff and there was a distinct sensation in his backside – as though someone was diligently trying to advance further than necessary. Who knew windsurfing was a full-on contact sport?
Nyman carried his board into the shed, shivered with cold and looked out to sea.
Palm Beach, Finland Page 10