9
I had to run to the metro station and then for the connecting bus to get home by the agreed time. Pauliina was in the hallway doing her make-up.
‘Ella complained of an upset stomach at nursery today,’ she said. ‘She still hasn’t eaten anything.’
A dark-red hue spread across those lips that I had always liked so much. I put the shopping bags on the floor. Ella came into the hall, wanting to carry the bags into the kitchen. I gave her a tin of tomatoes and she set off.
‘Does it smell of beer round here?’ asked Pauliina.
I caught a glimpse of her blue-green eyes in the mirror.
‘I bumped into someone interesting,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ said Pauliina, pressed her lips together and looked at the shopping bags. ‘You’re serious.’
‘Italian,’ I said. ‘I don’t know quite what, but something like that.’
Pauliina arranged her scarf round her neck. I smelled her perfume.
‘I’ll be back when the parliamentarians decide it’s time to go home.’
‘Parliamentarians? Don’t you mean MPs?’
‘We already talked about this. It’s a big night for us.’
‘Right,’ I said, though I couldn’t recall a word of any such conversation.
Ella came back into the hallway. I gave her a packet of lasagne sheets and she tottered towards the kitchen. Pauliina pulled on her coat, fixed her scarf in the mirror. Ella ran back to the shopping bags. Pauliina gave her a kiss, leaving a lipstick mark on her forehead. I didn’t say anything. Pauliina opened the door and wished me a nice evening.
And a nice evening of corruption and money-grabbing to you, I thought.
I thought of other things too.
Finn Mining Ltd. Suomalahti. Antero Kosola. The night-time activity at the mining site. The car park outside the Casino. Two euros. Kari Lehtinen. The missing notepads. Marjo Harjukangas. Editor-in-chief Hutrila. His reluctance regarding the mining story. Pauliina; our cold relationship and our weekend guests. My father. Him more than anything. The more I tried not to think about him, the more he consumed my mind. Father. Emil. Which one was he: Father or Emil? I didn’t know.
I hadn’t mentioned to Pauliina that the interesting person I’d met was my father. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d decided not to tell her. Maybe there was a time I’d yearned for him to come back. Maybe the thought of meeting him had faded, worn away to nothing. It had disappeared like a passion or an obsession that you know you’ve had, but you don’t know where it came from or why it went away.
And my father’s, Emil’s, explanation for his return: I was thirty, the same age as he was when he’d left us. Abandoned us, more like. As an explanation, it was about as good as any. Life rarely provides answers that satisfy everyone to the same degree.
Ella tucked in to the meatballs and mashed potatoes Pauliina had made, and so did I. When I asked if she still felt ill or whether she felt like being sick, she laughed. I sliced up an apple for dessert. I left the plates, the cutlery and the fruit knife on the table; I’d have plenty of time to clear everything up before Pauliina got home. We moved through to the living room. I turned the television to the cartoons channel.
I took my laptop with me to the sofa and tried to write. It had worked before and it would work now. You just had to start with something, anything at all, and before long the text would take over and tell you what needed to be written. Except that the living room was dominated by a two-year-old who needed constant attention.
I tried to strike a balance between the sofa, the computer and Ella. I played with her for a minute, typed out some bullet points for another minute. A moment later, I was crouched on the floor, fishing the remote control from beneath the bookshelf where Ella had hidden it. I made a list of people I wanted to interview. I listed everything I could remember, everything I’d thought of. I ran after Ella into the kitchen and guided her back into the living room, returned to the sofa and remembered what Pohjanheimo had told me. I fetched my phone from the kitchen and scrolled down to Pohjanheimo’s number. I grabbed Ella before she managed to run behind the television and rearrange the cables, and set her down in the middle of the floor where she was surrounded by her own toys and with any luck might find something to occupy herself for a few minutes.
A wave of crackling and noise issued from the phone. Pohjanheimo was on his bike. At home. He’d once explained this to me: his eldest daughter had moved out and he’d turned her bedroom into a cycling sanctuary. He had attached a set of spools to the floor and rode his bike on them while projecting visuals of different routes on the wall in front of him. As far as he was concerned this was the best thing anyone could do during the Finnish winter.
I asked him who knew Lehtinen the best. Pohjanheimo panted that it was probably him, and even he didn’t know Lehtinen particularly well, if at all.
‘In addition to you, then,’ I said. ‘Somebody must have known something about him.’
Pohjanheimo said something. It was blurred by the crackling. I asked again.
I took Ella by the hand just as she was about to grab the laptop screen a little too firmly.
Pohjanheimo repeated what he’d said. ‘The daughter. Maybe.’ His speech came one syllable at a time. Perhaps he was cycling up a virtual hill.
‘Whose daughter?’ I asked.
‘Lehtinen’s,’ Pohjanheimo gasped.
‘What’s her name?’
‘No idea.’
I thanked him and hung up. Next I called Rantanen, who, before I could say a word, told me he was out of the office. I heard the sounds of a bar in the background. I could see him in a booth at his local pub in Töölö, leaning against the soft, velvet-cushioned chair and swirling a glass of cut brandy across the dark surface of the wooden table.
‘Kari Lehtinen,’ I said. ‘The guy that used to write for us. Do you remember him?’
‘Now he could drink,’ Rantanen chuckled. ‘We went out together one night…’
‘Do you remember his daughter?’
For a moment all I heard was the noises of the bar.
‘You’re married,’ Rantanen said eventually.
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘Sure you don’t. I never met her.’
‘So you don’t know her,’ I said, frustrated.
‘I know her,’ said Rantanen and continued after a short pause. ‘Her name’s Maarit. What’s this about?’
‘Kari Lehtinen,’ I said.
‘Thought so. In what way?’
‘He was a good journalist and an interesting person.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Did you ever work with him?’
‘Quite a lot. If you want to call it that.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I took a lot of photographs for the stories he worked on, but I didn’t work with him. We worked on the same stories at the same time. That’s the way he was.’
‘What was he like?’
More background noises: the Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You’, a fruit machine, a drunken woman’s rattling voice.
‘Incomprehensible.’
I ended the call and Googled Maarit Lehtinen. There were several Facebook profiles with that name. I searched in an online directory: four numbers in Helsinki. I called the first one that came up. Maarit Lehtinen was thrilled when I told her I was from Helsinki Today but was taken aback when I asked for her father’s name. It was Petri. I thanked her. The second Maarit Lehtinen on the list told me straight away she didn’t want to take out a subscription to the newspaper. I told her she was under no obligation to do so. Her father’s name was Vesa.
The third time was lucky, after all. The Maarit Lehtinen who answered the phone remained silent for a moment before asking, ‘Are you a really a reporter?’
I repeated that I was Janne Vuori from Helsinki Today and that I really was a reporter. I told her I was doing a story about Kari Lehtinen, about exemplary journalism, and that
it was an honour to speak to his daughter.
‘What a load of crap,’ said Maarit in as friendly a voice as she could muster. ‘Nobody who knew my father wants to remember him.’
‘I didn’t know him,’ I admitted. ‘Not personally.’
‘But you’re writing a story?’
‘For a sense of background, it would be really good to…’
‘Kari – my father – always said somebody would call.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘What exactly did he say?’
‘That somebody from the editorial would call and ask to see his papers, sooner or later. And if that person knew what they were doing, I was to hand them over.’
I stood up.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So you have the papers.’
‘I know where they are. Are you a reporter and do you know what you’re doing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll know the code word.’
I took a few steps towards the window. I saw my reflection in the pane of glass, partially; just a poor hologram: half of me was dark forest and the façade of the building opposite, its illuminated windows.
‘The code word?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘My father was very serious.’
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Are you a reporter or some kind of pervert?’
‘A reporter.’
A short pause.
‘Not bad looking either,’ Maarit Lehtinen added in a voice somewhere between caution and open flirtation.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I just Googled you. You Googled me; I Googled you back. Now we’re even. I’m looking at your picture, you’re looking at mine.’
‘I’m not looking at anything … and I don’t have a code word. This is an important story.’
The line went dead. I remained standing by the window.
For some reason the meeting with my father felt all the more real with each hour that passed. I thought of our meeting, our moment in the bar. How casually I’d taken the situation. It must have had something to do with his appearance, at least in part. There was something unassuming yet firm about him. He didn’t give me any reason to get upset; in a strange way he even seemed to calm me down. We sat opposite each other; it was perfectly natural. We looked one another in the eye as though we were used to doing so. I unlocked my phone to type his name into the search field, when I happened to glance in the window.
I was still looking at my hologram self, but now I saw something was missing from the picture. The very moment I began running towards the kitchen I heard the noise: first a loud crash, then a softer one – the sound of a plate smashing, the clatter of cutlery, the shattering of a glass against the stone floor.
Ella was lying on her back on the kitchen floor, still silent from the thump and the shock.
I crouched down and saw her right hand.
The fruit knife, sunk to the handle between her index and middle fingers, the curved end of the blade jutting from the back of her hand.
Then the screaming started.
The doctor on duty, who looked like she’d seen everything, stitched up Ella’s hand. Stitched it and shot me suspicious glances. It was a classic Kafkaesque scenario: I tried to look like what I really was: a worried, frightened father who was nonetheless responsible and caring, and who couldn’t possibly have done any more in the circumstances. Yet whose child, this once, had ended up in a state like this.
Despite the ban on mobile phones in the A&E unit, I sent Pauliina a text. I knew what would happen if I only told her once she got home. Pauliina said she’d get there as soon as she could.
Ella was brave and visibly tired. It was no wonder. In its bandage her little hand looked like a doll’s limb. The doctor gave me instructions on how to clean it. I listened carefully, my gaze fixed on her overworked, bleary eyes.
The three of us took a cab home.
Pauliina kept an arm round Ella. She wouldn’t look at me but held Ella as if to protect her, as though they’d both turned their backs on me. Back home I hung Ella’s outdoor clothes in the wardrobe and took off my shoes in front of the mirror. I didn’t look up at my reflection.
Ella was soon asleep and Pauliina came into the living room. I sat on the sofa, the laptop next to me. Pauliina nodded at it.
‘I suppose that’s the reason for everything that’s happened tonight.’
I said nothing. Pauliina sat down at the other end of the sofa. We had made love on this sofa.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
I looked at her. ‘These things happen to everybody. Kids that age can get anywhere. You can’t keep your eye on them every minute of the day.’
‘What were you doing when it happened?’
‘I was on the phone, but that doesn’t change—’
‘On the phone?’
‘Yes.’
I looked at Pauliina. She was still wearing her evening attire: a black, long-sleeved blouse with three strands of shiny fabric running across her neckline from one shoulder to the other.
‘I’m sure it was very important,’ she said.
I sighed. ‘Is there any point having this conversation?’
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. Is there any point?’
‘I took my eyes off her for a few seconds. It happens.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
Pauliina’s eyes focussed on the black-and-white rug in the middle of the floor.
‘I want to make this as clear to you as I possibly can,’ she said in a voice that was at once quiet yet charged. ‘Ella is the most important thing in my life.’
‘I know that.’
‘If something were to happen,’ she continued, without indicating that she’d registered my words at all. ‘If anything were to threaten Ella or put her in danger, I don’t know … no, I think I do know. Ella is more important to me than anything else. That’s all I wanted to say.’
Pauliina turned her head. Her eyes were red and hard.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said and stood up.
I remained sitting on the sofa and took a series of deep breaths. I thanked God, the gods, fortune, luck, divine providence, fate, the state of things, the forces of the universe and the laws of physics: the knife hadn’t fallen in Ella’s eye, hadn’t cut an artery.
Still I felt a sense of guilt. And as, one by one, the moments and events of the evening came into focus in my mind, I knew all the better why. What was it I’d thought only a few hours ago? Thank God I’m not like my father, who, decades after leaving, asks me for a drink and tries to connect with something that disappeared long ago and that can never return.
And what had I been thinking about in the clammy, vinyl-covered chair at the A&E unit once my immediate concern for Ella had subsided?
As I watched the doctor’s hand take a needle and pierce my daughter’s skin, I was thinking of Maarit Lehtinen, of the code word.
10
The sound of the kettle sounded like a ship leaving the dock. Emil waited. The red light finally went out and the switch flicked loudly back into the upright position. Emil poured the boiling water over his fruit teabag and felt the warm steam on his face. He swirled the teabag in the water, lifted it on to his plate, took a chocolate cookie and his cup of tea and sat down at his desk.
He opened up the instant messenger app in his anonymous Tor network programme. The profile
I can’t take on work at such short notice, he typed.
The situation is critical, replied
Emil opened up another w
indow and signed into his Swiss bank account.
The money was in his account.
Emil paused for a moment and thought. With the added bonus, it would be a significant sum of money. How much did he still need? If he wanted to retire and live in this city, he would need every pound and yen, every dollar and euro. But, more to the point, his work brought a sense of structure to his life, a purpose. Work had kept him sane, guided him in the right direction through all those lonely years. It kept his mind focussed, helped when nothing else could help him. Work had saved him; it had always saved him.
I’ll get back to you in a moment, he wrote.
11
Two euros. I was brushing my teeth when it occurred to me. I almost swallowed a mouthful of Sensodyne. I rinsed my mouth, wiped my chin and thought for a moment. Text message. People can respond straight away or wait until the morning; they can answer in their own time, at their own risk. I typed the short message.
The response came instantly. Do you want to come round now or later?
12
A lot of misconceptions persist about the ease or difficulty of killing our fellow humans, especially among those who have never killed other people. One person says they’d never be able to do it; another might say it would be as easy as breathing. In, out. Many people believe that, if the person in question was a particularly unpleasant specimen of humanity – a paedophile or a brutal dictator – they wouldn’t give it a second thought. On the other hand, a surprising number of people are convinced they would even respect the life and humanity of someone who had murdered their own daughter. The truth is you can’t predict what will happen. Only when the critical moment arrives can we establish our own feelings about the matter.
Emil knew perfectly well what it was that had made him think back to that first time. This city, his son, leaving everything behind him almost thirty years ago. And the fact that he was about to do it all over again.
13
The taxi was waiting at the front door. I gave the address: Harjutori 4 in the Kallio district. The snowfall seemed to thicken the closer we came to the city centre. We crossed Kulosaari Bridge, and when I looked towards downtown, instead of the city skyline all I could see was a feverish glow.
The Mine Page 7