‘Why do you play?’ he asked.
The man looked at him as though he hadn’t understood the question. His fifty-year-old face had lost its battle against gravity; his short-sleeved red-and-white stripy shirt bulged into an optical illusion around the stomach; his blue eyes stared at Holma, looking for something familiar.
‘Who are you?’
Holma smiled.
‘Why do you play?’ he asked again.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘My brother used to play,’ said Holma. ‘I’m just interested.’
The man looked at him, shrugged his shoulders.
‘You play to win, I suppose.’
‘But you didn’t win.’
The man glanced over at the shopkeeper, then back to Holma. ‘Not this time.’
‘What about last time?’
The man shook his head.
‘The time before that?’ asked Holma. ‘When was the last time you won anything?’
The man was becoming irritable, Holma watched as he quickly shifted his weight to the other leg, shook his head and frowned.
‘What’s this about?’
‘I’m trying to understand why people go out of their way to throw their money away. You know you’re not going to win, but you still gamble.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s your answer? You don’t know?’
‘You don’t know either.’
‘I know one thing. With absolutely certainty.’
The man looked at Holma. Something happened in his eyes. ‘And you know who does win, do you?’
‘I know who won’t win,’ said Holma.
‘Who?’
Holma took a gulp from his bottle. In his own estimation, he was a person who naturally liked to help others. But sometimes there was simply nothing you could do. Holma glanced at the television screen, the list of forthcoming matches.
‘Leverkusen,’ he said.
The man turned. Slowly but surely. Holma took a few steps closer to him. They both looked at the rows of results on the screen.
‘Away?’ the man asked.
‘Exactly,’ said Holma. He could smell the man standing next to him: sweat, excitement, disappointment, the hunger for victory. ‘I’d put a lot of money on it.’
It was a windy afternoon, almost chilly. The blue of the sky seemed to deepen as Holma stepped between the tall, dark buildings rising up on all sides. A narrow road ran right through the western edge of the block. Holma walked along the left-hand side of the road, sunglasses over his eyes. The apartment he was aiming for was behind him. He allowed his eyes to scan across the courtyard, the parked cars, the row of windows in the building opposite.
A young student girl brought out her rubbish; the door of the bin shelter gave a crash that echoed round the courtyard. A man in a dressing gown was standing beside one of the doors smoking a cigarette. By the back door of a restaurant, a grocery-van driver was unloading a delivery, carrying boxes in through the narrow doorway.
Nobody moved the way the police moved, even when they were pretending to be civilians. Holma was sure he would be able to identify a police officer in a crowd of people anytime. The only risk appeared to be an apartment on the first floor of the building diagonally opposite his ground-floor apartment. There were two windows, and Holma had seen the figure of a man in both of them. It could have been chance, but if you knew how undercover drugs officers operated, the likelihood of it being merely chance dropped dramatically.
Fair enough, he thought. Given what I’m about to do, perhaps this is for the best. If and when everything goes to plan, people will think this was drugs related. Holma walked through the courtyard and out into the street, then went round the outside of the building, noted the tower blocks of Merihaka, and through the forest of houses could no longer see the building where he had been when he’d received the call that, in its own way, had brought him here now.
A holiday does you good, he thought. He felt free, he felt almost like he used to when he worked freelance – no boss, no time sheets, no weekly routines. His step was light, he didn’t care about the summer breeze that cut through his silk suit. Now he understood why people liked holidays: new ideas and good, fresh thoughts came flooding into his mind. He made sure the switchblade was tucked out of sight beneath his belt by his lower back.
He crossed to the other side of the street. He was about to walk into a Chinese grocery store but realised that he didn’t need any Chinese groceries, so he turned at the steps and remained standing on the pavement outside the store. In the middle of the road, between the lanes of traffic, was the door to an underground parking lot. It swallowed cars from the surface and spat them out onto the road again. Holma focussed his eyes on the front door of a light-yellow building across the square.
He shouldn’t have known, but he did know. This made him suspect that quite a few other people knew too – even the police maybe. The drugs trade was like that: before long everybody knew about it. Thankfully the dealer was generally the last person to know about it. There would be plenty of cash in the apartment.
Holma recalled the conversation. At first he’d been surprised, almost taken aback at Olivia Koski’s demands. He hadn’t imagined anyone would take his offer so literally or that they would ask to see the money upfront. Ten thousand euros. Then he’d changed his mind: this could be fun, and wasn’t that the point of a holiday? And so he had agreed with Ms Koski – he’d duly noted that she wasn’t married – that he would come back tomorrow morning, show her the ten thousand euros in cash, and in return he would get information about who had murdered his dimwit of a brother. He would let Ms Koski keep the money for as long as it took him to find and punish Antero’s killers. Once he’d taken care of them, he would return and reclaim his money, and depending on how Ms Koski dealt with the news, he would either use the ribbed condoms or do the deed without them.
Holma thought for a second. The dealer knew him. The only risk factor was the police. If they were watching the apartment, they would see him. If they weren’t watching the apartment, there was no problem that couldn’t be solved with a switchblade. Holma crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and rang the doorbell. He waited for a moment, then rang again.
Eventually a man’s voice came through the intercom. ‘What?’
‘A word,’ said Holma.
‘Who is this?’
Holma said who he was working for.
‘I don’t owe him a penny.’
‘This is something else. More important. It’s to do with you.’
‘What?’
‘Come on. I’m outside. Open the door.’
Silence. With junkies, paranoia and greed would always win the day, Holma counted on that. The door buzzed open. The most primitive instincts had triumphed again.
Holma listened to the sound of the stairwell, inhaled its air. He heard nothing, couldn’t smell any perfume, cigarette smoke, food aromas or anything else. No movement, no people. He arrived at the door of the apartment, adjusted his jacket and rang the doorbell as briefly as he could. The door opened.
The man was about Holma’s age, stocky and unwashed, a wannabe biker in a leather waistcoat. Moving quickly, Holma shoved the man deeper into the apartment, stepped inside and without hesitation sunk the switchblade into the man’s neck. Holma yanked the knife towards himself, snapping the oesophagus and the carotid artery on the other side. He took a step back and watched as the man squirmed in the narrow entrance hall, blood spurting all around as he knocked into the walls on both sides, fell to his knees and died on the floor.
The apartment comprised two rooms and a kitchen. Everything in the apartment was covered in the same layer of grime as its inhabitant. The blinds were closed in all the windows. The living-room couch was so filthy that Holma would only have sat on it for a substantial fee. He took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and got to work. He examined the bedroom first. Judging by the piles of clothes across the fl
oor, a woman lived here too – or was at least a frequent visitor. Holma turned over the mattresses and emptied the wardrobes, looking for a drawer, a loose section of wall panelling or something similar. The bedroom turned up a blank.
The dirty dishes in the sink looked like they’d been there since the war. The smell was like that of an underground cellar. Holma opened the drawers and cupboards, emptied everything onto the floor. He found a packet of macaroni from the Gorbachev era, but not what he was looking for. He rummaged through the kitchen cabinets and structures, feeling with his hands where his eyes couldn’t see.
He returned to the living room. The only new and clean piece of furniture was an enormous flat-screen television. It was typical of crackheads. They watched gangster and action films, and eventually they started believing they too were gangsters and action heroes, behaved like it and either ended up in prison or took a switchblade in the jugular. Holma’s attention turned to the sofa.
Could it really be this simple? He realised he’d left the sofa until last because it was so repulsive. Even he had his weaknesses. He walked up to it, lifted one of the cushions, threw it to one side to reveal a microwavable pizza – or more specifically a biomass that resembled one. He picked up another cushion. This one was heavier and lumpier than the first. As soon as he lifted it up, he knew he’d struck gold.
Holma transferred the money into a canvas bag he pulled from his jacket pocket. There was well over twenty thousand euros. It was a lot, but it meant the wannabe biker was only a mid-level crook. Which, of course, was the main reason he had come to serve as Holma’s cash machine. Holma left the assorted capsules, pills and powders stuffed inside the cushion.
In the hallway Holma checked he had everything: the knife in a ziplock bag in his trouser pocket, the money in the canvas bag, and a latex glove on his right hand, which he used to open and close the front door.
13
Olivia Koski made sure that Jan Kaunisto really did go on his way. He jumped on his rented Helkama, which he’d left outside the supermarket, and pedalled off between the cars to the other side of the car park before cycling the wrong way down a one-way ramp to the road below. Olivia saw him go. Not staring, but as she stood there locking her own bike, taking the shopping bags from the basket attached to the carrier at the back, out of the corner of her eye she watched as his blue-green flannel shirt disappeared between the houses.
A maths teacher. Good-looking, attentive, able to laugh at himself. And somehow, not really there. Perhaps Jan’s ex-wife was right when she’d talked about him not being present. Maybe he simply didn’t know how…
If the story he’d told was the truth, she reminded herself. She’d been following Jan Kaunisto, her interest growing through the course of their conversation, and planted a carefully considered trap when the opportunity arose. As if she could ever have forgotten the coriander chicken at Lemon Grass. It seemed he hadn’t forgotten it either.
Olivia stood by her bicycle a moment longer, dropped her shopping bag back into the basket, jumped on the saddle and pedalled off in the same direction that Jan Kaunisto had taken only a moment earlier.
The fact was, she did know a lot of people in this town. She had dismissed the thought; perhaps she hadn’t wanted to think about how well she knew this town, or how well the town knew her. Not all of her memories were good ones, and the less pleasant memories related to her mother and how she had been treated.
Olivia’s mother was ahead of her time, as they say. A manic-depressive artist trying to bring 1920s Paris to a small Finnish seaside town. Unlike her mother’s mood swings, which were clear for all to see, her artistry was a matter of interpretation. She painted only rarely, and even then it was without a brush. To put it discreetly, she used her body parts. Olivia’s father was her mother’s primary patron – an anonymous admirer that her mother talked about as she dreamily stared out to sea, a glass of red wine in her hand – and after buying the paintings he would send them with only the recipient’s name and no return address all over the world, generally to people who had at some point thrust their business cards into her father’s hand. Olivia found out about the scam just before she turned ten. Her father, who had seemingly loved her mother more than anything before or after, asked Olivia to keep it their little secret. And she did – for a year and a half. Then her mother died. Olivia never really found out what her mother had died of. An illness, her father said. An accident, her relatives said. A strange case, said a family acquaintance who visited from time to time.
The latter was the closest her mother had had to a friend in the entire time they had lived here. Olivia hadn’t remained in contact with Miss Simola after leaving town. She either didn’t know or couldn’t remember Miss Simola’s first name. But she knew where she lived: one of the furthest buildings high up on the hill in the district of Hiekkala.
The district was awkwardly built on a steep hillside, and looking from below it seemed as though the main entrances to the houses were in fact on the upper floor. Miss Simola’s house was situated almost at the top of the hill, and beyond it began a stretch of unkempt woodland, which everyone called a protected area of natural beauty but was anything but. There was so much vagueness in this town, she thought, that it was hardly surprising somebody could just turn up and rename the place Palm Beach Finland. It was an indication of just how strange recent events had been that Olivia hadn’t batted an eyelid at the new name.
The roads in and around Hiekkala were either up or downhill. Cycling this way, they were all uphill, and very steep. Olivia pedalled halfway up the hill, jumped off her bike and pushed it the rest of the way up. How did Miss Simola get up here? She must have been more than seventy, she must have been…
Miss Simola looked like Miss Marple in the TV drama. So much so that Olivia expected her to burst into prim, cricket-lawn English at any moment. But she did not. Miss Simola’s leather brogues, her tweed skirt and white lace blouse were all immaculate, her hair was grey, just as curly as it always had been, perhaps even curlier on top, where her fringe rose in a grey, Elvis-like tsunami sweeping all before it. Olivia would have remembered her eyes anywhere; they were dark brown, like a pair of soaked almonds.
Miss Simola gave Olivia a vigorous hug, asked how she was doing (in Finnish), didn’t listen when Olivia answered, and informed her that if Olivia had come to talk about her mother, she was ready. She had understood Liisa, and Liisa had understood her, and that, back then, and in a place like this, friends were few and far between, and for that reason they were all the more valuable. Miss Simola stressed that she was prepared to talk about anything. Quite literally. She could talk about everything now, and she did so, directly, face-to-face. She clearly relished the opportunity to talk. Especially about love between ladies.
‘But Liisa wasn’t very keen on gardening … not the type of gardening I like to indulge in, anyway,’ Miss Simola added, as nonchalantly as if she really were talking about watering the hydrangeas. ‘Not even a very well-tended lady garden.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘But I didn’t hold it against her.’
Olivia explained that this wasn’t quite the reason for her visit.
Miss Simola kept her arm gently round Olivia as she guided her through to the veranda. Olivia felt awkward, but only for one reason: the woman’s arm was only slightly longer than Olivia’s forearm. Miss Simola was barely five feet tall, and felt so slight next to Olivia that it seemed she was being walked through the garden by a doll.
The garden was small and overgrown, as though all the flowers, bushes and various sprawling trees of a larger garden had been crammed into a small cube, which had then been shaken and opened only at the top. Olivia had to look directly up in order to ensure that she was still part of the same world.
They sat down on the veranda’s white iron chairs, and Olivia could feel on her skin that here within the garden, sheltered from the wind, it was much warmer than elsewhere in the town; here there was a hint, a promise perhaps, of tropical weather. At the same time
she found herself hoping that Jorma Leivo never found his way out here. He would doubtless rename the place Everglade and set alligators loose in the bushes.
‘I imagined you’d come one day,’ said Miss Simola.
‘I should have come and said hello when I first got back.’
‘It’s understandable. You probably don’t have many good memories of this place.’
‘But of you, I do,’ said Olivia. ‘And you look … wonderful.’
Miss Simola leaned forwards slightly, and said, her voice hushed: ‘I’m expecting company.’
‘I’ll only take a minute of your time.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I’ll always have time for you. I’ve been thinking of you.’
‘Really?’
‘Especially when they found that thief dead in your house.’
‘Thief? According to the police he might have been a sexual predator who got into an argument with his accomplice.’
‘Nonsense, dear. He was a thief, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. The whole matter seems nothing but a confounded mess. Men behaving badly, if you ask me.’
‘I am asking you, actually,’ said Olivia.
Miss Simola waited a moment, her eyes fixed on Olivia. Olivia could see a smile descending from her eyes and reaching her lips, her cheeks.
‘You don’t trust the police to get to the bottom of things?’
‘I do, I think. But yesterday I got the impression they suspected me of something. If not of killing that man, then of something else. It felt quite unpleasant. And then…’
Palm Beach, Finland Page 14