The Island Affair

by Helena Halme

  'You don't want me to confiscate that, do you?' Ebba says and smiles.

  'OK,' Patrick replies with a sigh, 'Be like that.' He puts the phone back into his pocket.

  As they stand there, the third policeman re-emerges from behind a rock and waves them over.

  Without a word, Ebba begins to move toward the sea’s edge, followed by an older man carrying the heavy case. Patrick and Alicia look at each other, then start walking behind the two policemen. As they approach the sea, the young policeman points to a shape in the water.

  He is lying face down, his limp body tangled in the reeds. His thin, fully clothed shape moves with the gentle waves of the sea wash. Alicia stares down at the torso and sees in her eyes Stefan, or how his lanky figure would have looked in the morgue. She regrets she didn't insist on seeing him; her mind’s image of how he looked is far worse. There's blue and white police tape strung across two thin, twisted pine trees sprouting from the rocky ground as if by a miracle. The tape is for show only, Alicia thinks. Who would come to a little outpost like this?

  Ebba glances behind her to where Patrick and Alicia are standing, but she doesn't say anything. She moves carefully down the side of the rock that leads down to the water. With one foot on a stone close to the boy's head and another resting on the main rock face, Ebba squats down to take a closer look. Alicia's stomach turns as she sees the swollen state of the corpse. The body is puffed up underneath a dark-colored parka and long shorts. The half-upturned face of the boy looks pasty, bloated and blotchy. Ebba steadies herself on the rock and leans in to take a close look.

  Alicia moves closer, stepping over the police tape.

  'Stay there!' Ebba shouts, but Alicia replies, 'I think I know him.'

  Ebba stares at her and then nods in agreement.

  Alicia puts her other hand to her mouth and nose to stop herself from smelling anything as she takes the few steps down the slippery rock. She squats down beside Ebba, who reaches out to steady her. Alicia looks at his legs and sees the plaster cast on his bare left foot. It too is discolored with a greenish yellow hue, but there are still a few scribbles left visible. His friends must have written stuff on the cast.

  'He is—was—just a kid,' Alicia says.

  Thirty-Nine

  Alicia thinks about her stepfather. How shocked Uffe would be to see the boy in that state. He is a good man, Alicia knows that. He looks after his staff well, too well in her mother's opinion.

  'He keeps asking them to come into the house and then I have to feed them!' she's often said to Alicia. When she was growing up there were two farm laborers who came back each summer to work for Uffe. They were both born and bred in the Åland islands, and Uffe had known them since childhood. But when Eastern Europe opened up to the West and cheaper foreign labor became available, Uffe began employing first Estonian boys, then Polish and now Romanian. It has never occurred to Alicia to ask Uffe where he found the temporary labor; she assumed the boys themselves turned up on the doorstep of her stepfather's farmhouse in Sjoland.

  * * *

  'Oh my God,' she hears Patrick say behind her. He's standing on the rock above Alicia. The sun is shining directly into Alicia's eyes so she can't see his expression fully. Taking her hand away from her mouth, she holds onto the rock and straightens herself up. Patrick reaches his hand out to help her up the bank. This time she takes it and he pulls her up.

  Alicia looks around the little island where the police and Patrick have moored their motorboats; how has the boy ended up here, on this small rocky outcrop? There are clumps of grass in the middle and around the edges, but mostly it’s just a flat, stony surface with patches of moss.

  Alicia is shivering even though it's a very warm day, with little wind and silent except for the seabirds and the occasional sound of a motorboat somewhere in the distance. They are just ten minutes or so away from her swimming place in Sjoland. She hears the sound of an engine, but it soon fades and gives way to the twittering or squawking of the birds. There isn't much habitation in the surrounding islands. One jetty juts out from a shoreline, about 500 meters away, and Alicia can make out an old boathouse, and then a large wood-clad villa further up the hill. The water looks shallow between the larger island and the one they are standing on. Alicia wonders if the little outpost is owned by the people with the jetty. In her mind's eye, she can see children swimming from the larger island to the smaller one, laughing and drying themselves in the sun when they reach the other shore.

  Her own childhood.

  What a deserted, beautiful place it would be if it wasn't for the dead body of a young man floating between the reeds just a few meters away.

  The older man with the heavy case edges down toward the body, while Ebba, helped up by the young policeman, comes to stand next to Patrick and Alicia.

  'So who is he?' Ebba asks.

  'His name is Daniel. He works—worked—for my stepfather.'

  Patrick makes a sound. Since the exchange with Ebba about his phone, Patrick has been unusually quiet. Alicia now looks at him. His face is very pale.

  'You OK?' Alicia asks. Ebba is regarding them both.

  'Yeah, I keep thinking I should take notes, but I don't seem to be able to think straight.'

  'Shock,' Alicia says.

  Patrick nods.

  'You didn't cover anything like this in Stockholm?' she asks him.

  Patrick shakes his head. 'No, I was more political and financial crimes.'

  * * *

  Ebba coughs, ending Patrick and Alicia's conversation abruptly. Her face is grave.

  'Tell me everything you know about him,' Ebba says, and chin nods back to the other end of the island.

  'I haven't really met him, just seen him from afar. He works as a casual laborer for Uffe, and stays in one of the cottages, that's all I know. The plaster cast is from an accident he had with the tractor last week.' Alicia shivers. She pulls her arms around herself. 'I mean, I think it's him ...' Suddenly Alicia is afraid she's mistaken.

  'OK. I don't want any of this in your paper,' Ebba says.

  Patrick nods, again not uttering a word, but Alicia replies, 'Surely we can say that a body has been found here?'

  Ebba sighs. 'OK, but no details about his ID until we know more about what's happened and can contact his next of kin.'

  'How do you think it happened?' Alicia asks.

  Ebba looks at Alicia, but doesn't answer the question.

  'Wait here, I may need to ask you more questions,' she says instead and moves toward the police tape to talk to the older man.

  Alicia and Patrick are kept on the island for another half an hour, while the police move back and forth between the body and their boat. Eventually, the young policeman fetches a gray plastic body bag. A few minutes later, the three policemen carry the dead body into their boat.

  'You can go now,' Ebba says with her head bent over her notebook, not looking at Alicia or Patrick.

  They travel back to Mariehamn in silence. Patrick doesn't put the sail up, and the noise of the engine provides Alicia with an excuse not to talk to him.

  * * *

  'What an infuriating woman,' Patrick says as they pull up to the jetty in the East Harbor.

  'Yeah, I remember she was a bit of an odd-ball at school,' Alicia replies.

  Patrick is standing in the boat, facing her with his hair mussed up by the wind.

  'Sorry, I forgot she was a friend of yours,' he says, gazing at Alicia from under his eyebrows.

  Alicia climbs onto the jetty, not waiting for Patrick's help. She's holding onto the strap of her canvas handbag, which she’d slung across her body as she got out of the boat.

  'You were very quiet out there,' she says, looking closely at Patrick's face. She's standing above him, watching him getting ready to leave the boat.

  'Not used to seeing dead bodies, I guess,' he says, lowering the fenders, locking the doors to the cabin and putting away their life-jackets. As he steps out onto the jetty, he leans down and makes sure th
e fenders are in place to protect his precious boat.

  'Right,' Alicia says.

  'I'm off then.' Patrick says. But he only stands opposite Alicia, looking down at her.

  'Oh, you're not going to write the article?' Alicia says, surprised. She's still not sure what his role at the newspaper is, nor what is expected of her.

  'This isn't exactly a story for the finance section,' Alicia says, 'so I assumed ...'

  'I told you, I don't work for Ålandsbladet.'

  'So why were you here today?'

  'To give you a lift, of course,' Patrick says, a smile playing on his lips.

  Alicia feels stupid. She looks down at her shoes and nods, 'Well, I should thank you then.'

  They stand on the jetty facing each other. Alicia isn't looking at him, she can't, because she knows what will happen if she does. Instead, she glances down the jetty and into the restaurant at the far end of the harbor. A few tourists are walking on the path that runs along the wooden jetties, and a cyclist passes them.

  Patrick takes her hand, 'Look, can we start again?'

  Alicia lifts her head and sees the sincerity in his face. He's standing so close to her now that their bodies are nearly touching. Her breath is caught in her chest and for a moment she can't speak. But then she remembers the anger in Mia's face a few hours before, and the pain in Patrick's when he spoke about their break-up.

  Those two aren't finished with each other.

  'Look,' Alicia begins. She briefly squeezes Patrick's hand, then lets go and steps backward to put some space between them. 'You need to sort things out with Mia. Perhaps in a few months’ time, when ...'

  Patrick’s face shows no emotion when he says, 'OK, I understand.' There's a pause, then he adds, 'I guess I'll see you around?'

  Alicia stands still for a moment and then walks away. At the end of the jetty, she turns around and sees Patrick still looking at her. She nods and makes her way quickly toward the newspaper office.

  * * *

  Harri is so excited about having a scoop with the body of the Romanian boy that he convinces Alicia to write the story up in spite of the promises she made to Ebba.

  'I'll clear it with her, don't worry about that. We know the Police Chief, and he'll be fine about it.'

  Reluctantly, Alicia writes a brief report about the discovery of the body, leaving out the connection to Uffe, which she hadn’t mentioned to the editor. She just quotes 'unnamed sources' saying that the boy was from Romania and had been working as a farm laborer on the islands.

  Moments later, she sees it's been uploaded to the paper's online version. As she re-reads her own words, the article strikes her as too simple, as if she's forgotten something. Bloody Patrick, he keeps getting into her thoughts, clouding them. She needs to be a good journalist and to learn new skills to keep the job at Ålandsbladet. For now at least. She doesn't know if she's going to stay indefinitely, but at least for now. The money she earns comes in handy.

  But she had no idea when she was offered the job by Birgit that it involved working with all the breaking news. When she’d returned from seeing the body Harri had said, 'Everyone turns their hand to anything here.'

  He swept his hand across the newsroom, where just two people were sitting, Frida and a younger boy, just as they were when she'd met Patrick there earlier. 'Those two are both interns, they are not ready to tackle an article like this.'

  The pieces she wrote for the Financial Times were rarely needed quickly. She often had a few days to write a report on a company, or a feature explaining the impact of a possible interest rate rise, or the effects of the fall in the UK pound after the Brexit vote. Only when she worked on the 2008 financial crisis, did she remember having to turn in stories fast. But she's a trained reporter and she knows she can handle anything. Better than Patrick, it seems. Bloody man! Alicia decides enough is enough. She will control her emotions from now on.

  Forty

  That evening after the discovery of the boy's body, Alicia convinces her mother that she is too tired for a nightcap after dinner. She wants to collect her thoughts about Patrick, about the boy, and think about Stefan in peace. Seeing the dead Romanian has brought back her own fabricated images of Stefan's body after the accident. She curses Liam, who kept her away from her son. Think of the positives. She forces herself to remember how Stefan loved the islands, how he made friends here. Suddenly, she realizes she doesn't know any of the youngsters he used to 'hang out' with as he put it. She resolves to find out from Hilda who they were - surely she would have heard from a friend of a friend who Stefan befriended?

  Alicia tries to empty her mind, and uses the techniques her psychologist, Connie, had taught her.

  'Notice everything around you, look at the trees, take in the color of the sky, the fluffy clouds. Breathe in and out.'

  Alicia sits on the wooden decking outside the sauna cottage and watches the birds dip in and out of the water, picking up insects off the surface, trying to think only about the beautiful nature around her. But her mind wanders and she thinks about the young Romanian man instead. Both Uffe and Hilda were shocked to hear of Daniel's death. Uffe wanted a glass of whisky straight away but then didn't have wine with dinner, whereas Hilda drank several glasses. At the end of the meal her mother was slurring her words and giggling. She acted so inappropriately that Alicia exchanged several glances with Uffe during the meal. Alicia didn't say anything about her drinking, but resolved to talk to Uffe, again, about it, as well as the money worries. The alcohol, the rows and the losses the shop was making must be linked, surely? As soon as the police found out what had happened to the boy, they could move on with their lives.

  Again, Alicia forces herself to think about her surroundings. It is a still evening, with the sun hovering over the horizon, and she sits on the decking, trying not to think about anything, and just concentrating on her breathing. She thinks how amazing it is that the sun will only dip down a couple of hours before midnight and emerge again around 4am, leaving a dusk that never gets truly dark. It's now 9pm, and there is no sign of darkness. This is what she has missed in London. The quiet peace where you can really gather your thoughts.

  This is her favorite time of the year on the islands. The end of the day, when the wildlife around her is busy calling each other, or feeding their young, is magical. Watching the calm sea in front of her, she spots a pair of birds emerge from the reed bed and dive elegantly, hardly breaking the glinting surface. Alicia holds her breath as she waits for the bird to emerge. She thinks they are Artic loons, which have an amazing ability to stay under water for several minutes, and her suspicion is confirmed when she sees the first bird emerge a couple of meters away from where it entered the water. Alicia wants to clap but is afraid of alarming the wildlife around her.

  A noise of a motorboat cuts through the landscape. A wooden rowing boat with an outboard motor attached to the back is heading across the shipping lane toward the island opposite, a young man holding onto the tiller. When the boat disappears around a point, peace is once again restored. Alicia closes her eyes and concentrates on the natural sounds around her: the soft rustling in the trees and the lower sound of the reeds swaying in the breeze. The birds are twittering warnings to each other.

  Suddenly a noise she doesn't recognize makes Alicia open her eyes.

  'Your mum said I'd find you here.'

  Ebba stands with her feet wide apart, her hands in the pockets of her trousers. She isn't in uniform anymore, but she still looks as if she is on duty, with the same waterproof coat she was wearing earlier, now over a plain white shirt bearing the logo of Finnish police force—a gray sword and the head of the Lion of Finland against a blue background. On her feet she wears sensible black, flat shoes, which Alicia suspects are police issue too.

  'So what happened to your promise not to write about the body?' Ebba has her eyes on Alicia.

  'Sorry, Harri said that you'd be OK with it. Apparently, he knows the Chief of Police.'

  'Yeah, the sa
me man who chewed my head off when he saw what you'd written.'

  'Sorry,' Alicia says. 'I'm still new at the paper. I couldn't refuse it.' Alicia tries to smile at Ebba. 'Please sit down?'

  Ebba plonks herself on a chair next to Alicia.

  'Apology accepted. Besides, I knew that would happen, but I thought it'd be Mr Eriksson's son-in-law who would write about it, not you.'

  'Me too,' Alicia says, trying to avoid looking at Ebba, and instead studying her hands.

  Ebba regards Alicia silently for a moment before speaking. 'We've definitely identified the boy.'

  'Oh,' Alicia says, 'that was quick.'

  'I've also just spoken with your mum and dad.'

  'You mean my mum and Uffe?' Alicia remarks.

  Ebba raises an eyebrow and scratches her hair. 'Sorry, yes, your step-dad.'

  'That's OK. It's just that I don't, never have, called Uffe “Dad”.'

  Ebba exhales. 'Let’s cut the crap. We didn't know each other that well at school, nor at uni, so I can be excused for not knowing the ins and outs of your family relationships.'

  'Sure,' Alicia says. She's surprised at Ebba's tone, but recognizes her direct manner. She was just the same at school and university.

  'But what's the issue, what more can I tell you? I came to see the body because of my job and happened to know who it was. That's all,' Alicia says.

  'Why didn't you tell me about you and Patrick?' Ebba says, looking straight at Alicia.

  'I didn't think it was relevant.' Alicia is hoping Ebba is referring to the fact that she knows Patrick.

  'See, that's where I disagree.' Again Ebba lifts her eyebrows. 'It seems a bit of a coincidence that a boy you and your boyfriend both know turns up dead ...'

  'Colleague,' Alicia says. 'Look, I've just started at Alandsbladet and Patrick, who didn't know Daniel, offered to take me to the island on his boat. That's all.'