It didn’t sound very plausible. Not that Jorma Leivo was going to displace Stephen Hawking as the greatest mind to bless the universe anytime soon, but the sheer insanity of a plot like that would be too much for anyone. And yet, it was these unexplained events – the death and Olivia’s renewed fear – that Leivo took such pains to underline every time he got the chance. Olivia wanted to talk to Miss Simola again. Even if she didn’t have any answers, Olivia felt as though Miss Simola guided and supported her thoughts. They had only spoken for a few minutes, but in that time an old channel seemed to have opened up and Olivia found it easy to talk. And because of that she saw everything more clearly.
The bike juddered along the knobbly dirt track. Olivia caught sight of the sea, its blue, shimmering surface, which at first glance seemed infinite but which was cut off along its other edge and disappeared from view. As with everything else, even infinity had its limits: from this point you can go no further.
Olivia glided past the resort’s sign. The brightness, the garishness of its colours, seemed to stick to her clothes, though she passed it quickly, as though she was trying to escape the screaming shades of pink and neon green. Again she tried to fit Jorma Leivo into the picture.
First a mysterious death, then the sauna burns down. There was always something very clear and explicit about burning down a sauna. If you want to get a Finn’s attention, if you want to tell your compatriot something vital and important, you burn down his sauna. Then he’ll get the message. It lets him know, more effectively than anything else, that you have stepped on his turf, that you don’t respect his territorial integrity, and that nothing between you is sacred. It’s a declaration of war. But that was exactly the problem. What war? Whom exactly was Olivia supposed to rise against? More to the point, who was on the battlefield? If we assumed that Jorma Leivo still wanted to get his hands on her land, did he really need to declare all-out war and attract everyone’s attention – not to mention getting the police and the fire department involved? Wouldn’t that just make everything more difficult? It didn’t seem like a particularly clever way of advancing Palm Beach Finland’s business concerns.
Olivia propped her bike against a tree and locked it. The beach had once been a safe place, but this summer lots of people had reported petty thefts: lunch vouchers and other small items taken from a handbag; someone’s sandwiches had disappeared from their picnic basket; and one visitor was convinced that someone had taken her poodle’s collar while she was swimming, explaining that she’d bought a studded black leather collar from abroad, that the dog had been very attached it and had howled with shock after the attack. Olivia expressed regret at the dog’s distress but couldn’t for the life of her imagine who would want to steal a collar the size of a wristband from a poodle – or why.
She arrived at the bright-yellow tower, climbed up a few steps and threw her bag inside. The beach itself was deserted, but further afield there was plenty going on: to the left four people playing beach volleyball, and to the right, in the shallow water just off the shore before the seafloor began its steep drop, an instructor was teaching three students to windsurf. One of the students was Jan Kaunisto.
Olivia recognised him easily. He was wearing a rented wetsuit with the silhouette of a white palm tree printed on the back. He fell over and climbed back onto his board, hoisted the sail upright, fell, climbed, hoisted … Jan Kaunisto looked like a determined man.
Olivia took off her hoodie and hung it on a screw protruding from the wall of the watchtower. She bent over and was about to slip off her tracksuit bottoms when she heard a voice behind her.
‘Nice view.’
Olivia spun round, her trousers at her ankles. The solicitor. So he’d turned up after all.
The man’s eyes slowly rose from her groin to eye level. What was that all about? Was this what evolution had come to? Did one caveman say to another, hey, there’s pussy round here somewhere, I think the rest of the women must be nearby? Olivia looked the man in the eye. He smiled; the smile spread across his face quickly and remained fixed in place. Olivia continued getting undressed, took off her trousers and hung them on the screw. She turned to look squarely at the solicitor.
‘As we agreed,’ he said and held out a small paper bag.
Olivia took the bag. The name of a renowned fashion house ran along one side. This was the kind of place where people bought handbags and scarves, but when Olivia quickly peered inside she saw that the bag contained a bundle of banknotes. It might even have been exactly ten thousand euros; it was certainly a lot. She wasn’t going to count the money there and then.
‘Ten thousand euros,’ said the solicitor. ‘And there’s more where that came from.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Olivia.
‘But only once we see results,’ he said. ‘And we want quick results. If we don’t get any, we expect the funds returned to us. With interest. This is a matter we wish to be very clear about, so allow me to remind you. People forget about interest. As if money didn’t cost anything. As if there was such a thing as free money. There isn’t.’
Every time the man stopped talking, he smiled. And he did so now too. But quite what he was smiling at, Olivia wasn’t sure, because he rarely said anything funny or amusing. On the contrary, his voice was so soft, bland and neutral that he couldn’t possibly say anything ending in a punch line, and besides, his intonation always seemed to fall in the wrong places.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Olivia.
‘When?’ the man asked immediately.
Naturally, this was a question to which there was only one correct answer.
‘Soon.’
Olivia had imagined the solicitor would leave after receiving his answer, but instead he pushed his hands into his pockets, took a few steps forwards, stood next to Olivia and stared out to sea. Olivia had to turn around. They stood next to each other. She could sense the man next to her. She saw Jan Kaunisto clambering back on his board, pulling the sail up again, perhaps glancing towards the shore before finally getting the sail into position and bobbing off towards the open sea.
‘So the tramp really is windsurfing,’ said the solicitor.
Olivia had no idea what he was talking about.
‘It makes me angry,’ he continued. ‘You pay your taxes, and this is what you get. Some hippie on holiday, windsurfing all day and growing a beard. And for what? Now he knows how to windsurf. Good for him. Hey man, have a tan on the house. There he is, surfing away, learning a few clumsy moves for a couple of days, then he’ll go home, sit down on his sofa feeling energised and get up next summer. If he gets up at all. Because it’s too cold here, and the collapsing sails will leave him traumatised. At some point a psychiatrist will turn up and explain that we shouldn’t remind the frostbitten windsurfer of his sail collapsing, we should give him a hug and tell him he’s special just the way he is, that he should be allowed to recover emotionally before going back in the water. Adults are like babies. They stretch out their podgy hands whenever they want something but can’t quite reach it. Then they burst into tears.’
Olivia said nothing.
‘Do you know what I’d do?’ he asked.
Olivia shook her head.
‘I’d make people compete with each other – for real.’
The man took the stairs down to the sand, said something over his shoulder like We’ll talk soon, and strode off with long, purposeful steps.
Olivia counted the money. She sat in the watchtower and counted to ten thousand. Well, two hundred. Two hundred times fifty euros. Olivia did the maths in the safety of the bag, put the banknotes back in their place, folded the brown, shiny bag into as tight a parcel as she could and placed it at the bottom of her bag beneath her other things. She had the money. Perhaps the man who’d given it to her wasn’t the most pleasant that Olivia had ever met – but since when were men with money pleasant? They were obsessed with themselves, loved the sound of their own voices, and they were deathly dull. Just like t
his solicitor, who appeared to know everything about subjects from windsurfing to social policy. The more money they had, the more they imagined they were capable of original thoughts – thoughts that deserved to be shared with others, thoughts on every subject under the sun. But they had money. So keep your mouth shut, she told herself, do what you’ve promised and do not – and in this respect the man had hit the nail on the head – do not behave like a baby ever again.
And her next move: Jorma Leivo. That was the most logical explanation. Miss Simola was right, and she always knew what she was doing. Olivia thought for a moment. She looked out to sea. Windsurfers. The maths teacher, the pleasant Jan Kaunisto, who turns up in town just before her sauna burns down. What would Miss Simola have to say about that? Olivia could guess.
But first she had a plumber to call.
17
Copulating old ladies, twenty-five thousand euros in cash stashed inside a microwave, the sauna burning down – not to mention that before all of this a body had turned up in the kitchen. And everything, every detail, related one way or another to that woman.
Jan Nyman’s thighs were trembling from the adrenalin rush as he waded out of the water and onto dry land. Yes, he was cold again, so cold he was shivering, but he felt a languid sense of satisfaction. From the windsurfing, that is, and absolutely nothing else.
As he’d climbed back onto the board for the umpteenth time, he’d glanced back to the shore and seen Olivia and his next-door neighbour standing side by side, almost touching. Why had this man come to meet Olivia Koski? The man with twenty-five thousand in his microwave.
Nyman saw that Olivia Koski was smiling. He admired her tanned arms, her figure. He felt a familiar tingling in the bottom of his stomach, the instinctive eruption of happiness every time a woman came into view, then immediately afterwards a sensation as though he’d been thumped in the diaphragm with a blunt implement, as though something had been poured into his mind to spoil the thought. Nyman got a grip on the emotion. It had been a while since he’d last experienced it.
Jealousy. That’s what it was. Surely not?
Don’t be ridiculous, Nyman told himself and concentrated on trying to walk in a straight line.
Who could have imagined windsurfing was this demanding? His legs were quivering, his arms were numb, hanging like wooden blocks at the side of his body. He realised he was trying to give a good impression of himself as he walked across the sand towards Olivia Koski, which was difficult given the stiffness of his thighs and the softness of the sand. He knew he was wobbling.
He was a policeman, he reminded himself, and this woman was as much as suspect as a person could possibly be without concrete evidence; his attraction was a way of getting close to her – nature’s way of creating tension between them, tension that would build into trust, intimacy. That was it. Nothing more. He would not go any further and certainly wouldn’t…
‘I was wondering if you’d like to join me for dinner this evening?’ Nyman said as soon as they’d exchanged greetings.
Olivia Koski stood upright, leaned her head to one side, as though she was about to say something sarcastic – no, something surprising. And that’s what happened. Both what she said and the speed with which she said it took him aback.
‘Actually,’ she said. ‘I was thinking the same thing. It would be good to talk.’
Nyman was speechless for only about a second and a half, but Olivia noticed it. He could see it in those brown eyes: a flash of realisation, of recognition.
‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’ asked Nyman.
‘Let’s do that.’
Did Olivia smile or was it just the light?
‘As far as restaurants go, I’m not really…’
‘It depends what we want to eat,’ Olivia nodded. ‘And how fancy you want to go. If we want good food, maybe we should look further afield. I know, I’m terrible when it comes to promoting the virtues of Palm Beach Finland, but I just think … If you’re prepared to go a little way out of town, there’s a nice fish place. Not a restaurant as such, more a kind of barbeque, a few tables and lots of landscape, but there’s fish on the menu every day and the menu changes depending on the catch. So I can’t tell you what’s on offer, but the food is always excellent.’
‘Sounds good. But you said it’s further away. I don’t have a car, and…’
‘We’ll cycle,’ said Olivia. ‘You like racing around on that old thing, don’t you?’
Again, those eyes.
‘I’ll rent it again,’ said Nyman. ‘Apparently I like bikes that are too small for me.’
‘Let’s meet at the end of Shore Street. And remember to wrap up warm. The place is right by the sea, and as you know…’
‘It’s the hottest beach in Finland,’ said Nyman like a TV anchor.
‘You’re getting the hang of this,’ said Olivia Koski. But to Nyman’s disappointment, this time she didn’t smile.
Nyman returned to his chalet to change his clothes. The long-sleeved flannel shirt felt soft and warm. He ate breakfast in the beachside restaurant; he ordered six fried eggs, placed them on a long, curved slice of squeaky cheese and tucked in. His intention wasn’t to gobble it all in one, but Christ, he’d broken into the chalet next door, spent an hour windsurfing and asked a suspect out on a date on only a glass of apple juice, and his hands were trembling from lack of food. He wiped egg yolk from his fingers and the corner of his mouth, spread a thick layer of marmalade on a slice of crisp, golden-brown toast, and washed it down with a second cup of black coffee. After that he walked to the bike rental shop.
In front of the shop he looked at his phone, not because he wanted to call someone – there was no one to call. He looked at the time. Olivia Koski would still be in her watchtower for hours.
Nyman jumped on his bike and cycled through the quiet town in a matter of minutes. He pedalled to the top of the hill and felt his thighs fill with lactic acid for the second time that morning. A moment later he was freewheeling downhill. The trees and undergrowth seemed to change. Spruces, sandy soil. He turned on to a dirt track, pedalled for a few more minutes and came to a fork in the road. He took the narrower, more difficult path.
A moment later he began to catch glimpses of Olivia Koski’s house through the trees. Nyman stopped, walked his bike into the woods and left it behind a large boulder. He walked through the woods to the edge of the property and came to a stop. The yard was empty, the house looked quiet. He waited for a moment then began walking towards the building. He went round it from the side facing the woodland before arriving at the front. Before him were the charred remains of the sauna, and behind them, further off, the blue glimmer of the sea, although it was now grey. Clouds hid the sun from view, and the trees along the shore swayed in the wind.
Nyman took the steps up to the veranda, pulled his lock-picking set from his pocket and opened the door. He pulled the door shut behind him and stood there listening for a moment. He was slightly ashamed of what he was doing – he felt a wave of disgust – but this was the nature of his job. He opened the glass door in the porch. It creaked, making Nyman start; the sound was loud, its frequency one that would carry some distance. So everybody who stepped through this door made their presence known. Nyman kept a hold on the handle. He couldn’t quite work out what this might mean, but imagined it must have some significance.
He took a few cautious steps across the floorboards. Their faint creaking was nothing compared to the door. Halfway along the hall was the door into the kitchen. Nyman stepped inside and stood right in the middle of the room. He recalled from photographs where the body had been found, but he wasn’t here to reconstruct a crime scene. He turned and looked outside.
The windowpanes, smashed during the original altercation, had been replaced. Outside the clouds must have parted because the kitchen was flooded with fresh sunlight. The yard was clearly on a lower level – from down there you would only be able to see the head of anyone standing inside, if that. Nyman turned an
d saw his shadow reflected on the wall. He turned back, focussed his eyes in the middle of the yard, turned, and again saw his shadow on the wall. An interrupted trajectory. Whatever that meant.
Time to move on.
Nyman walked through another doorway. This lead into the living room, which was larger than his entire studio flat. On the back wall, the only wall without any windows, was a painting about three metres tall and a metre and a half wide. It was a powerful image: red and black swirls, and right in the middle of the painting was a red pattern on a black background that Nyman couldn’t make out at all. It vaguely resembled … something. He walked from the living room into a smaller room with a long dining table and cupboards with glass doors. The stairs were situated between the smaller room and the hallway.
Now Nyman went upstairs, arriving at a small landing with one door leading out to the balcony and giving access to all the other rooms. There were three bedrooms. Nyman could see straight away which one was Olivia’s. He stepped inside and immediately sensed that he was in the wrong place. The sensation was powerful. He felt it spread through his body like a minor electric shock. He’d never experienced anything like it before. Never with regard to a suspect. All the same, Nyman tried to take an inventory of items in the bedroom, or more to the point, to see whether there was anything in the bedroom that didn’t belong there. The problem with a house this size was that he simply couldn’t rifle through every cupboard and drawer, every nook and cranny. It was more about what he could see and what he couldn’t, and about finding a balance or imbalance between the two. In this respect the bedroom was neutral. In other respects it was not. As he returned to the door Nyman realised what had been bugging him. Olivia’s scent. Bugging him was perhaps the wrong turn of phrase. Quite the contrary. And at the moment Nyman saw himself as exactly the kind of pathetic panty thief that only has the guts to step into a woman’s bedroom when nobody is watching – who leaves his mark on her bed and disappears into the night with sticky hands. It wasn’t the most uplifting of sensations.
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