My First Murder

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “There are a few old summerhouses out here that rich folks have fixed up for themselves,” Rane explained.

  We finally crossed a narrow stretch of land about thirty feet wide onto what felt like an island and drove under a high arched gate. A brass nameplate announced that we had arrived at Villa Maisetta. A narrow, overgrown road led to the yard of an idyllic summerhouse, exactly the sort of place I would have loved to live in. The two-story villa had white window frames and was adorned with intricate woodwork on the eaves. A patrol car was parked on the lawn next to the old, beat-up Volvo used by Forensics.

  “The guys were quick today. What exactly are we supposed to do here?” I asked, forcing myself to take on a cynical, almost aggressive posture. No tears for the corpses of old roommates’ cute ex-boyfriends.

  A patrol officer approached with a morose-looking dark-haired girl. They both eyed me suspiciously as Rane and I introduced ourselves. Though I had braced myself for this kind of reaction, it still rankled me. The girl looked vaguely familiar, and her name, Mira, called to mind Jaana’s less-than-complimentary comments about the choir’s worst tightass. I suddenly remembered that Mira didn’t even drink hard liquor, which, five years ago at least, had been an unforgivable sin in these circles.

  Mira led us down the lawn to the shore, where the boys from Forensics were photographing a body sprawled against the rocks. The medical examiner was also on-site. I guessed they had been waiting for us for a while because everything was done. It struck me as stupid that they had all waited for me to look over the corpse before pulling it out of the water. I had no desire to see the carcass at all, to recognize it as Tommi, or to see what someone had done to him.

  “How does it look?” I asked the medical examiner who stood nearby puffing on a thin cigar. At least a hundred pounds overweight, he despised me almost as much as I despised him. The difference was that I knew he was a real pro at his job, while he did not think as highly of me.

  “Where’s Kinnunen?” Salo asked suspiciously.

  “Wherever he is, we can’t stand around waiting for him,” I replied antagonistically. “Let’s get the ball rolling. What would you say about the cause of death?”

  “Judging from his face, I’d say he died by drowning. But that depression in his skull looks interesting enough that I don’t quite know what to think. I’ll have to get him on the table.” Salo spoke to the tips of Rane’s shoes instead of to me.

  “Is it possible he was whacked on the head and then dropped in the water?” Rane asked.

  “Very possible. Whatever hit him certainly didn’t improve his chances of survival. It looks strange, though. I’m curious to know what he was hit with.”

  “What about a rock?” Rane scanned the boulders on the shoreline. All sorts of smaller stones were strewn among them, some of which would fit nicely in a person’s hand.

  “Yeah, it’ll certainly keep the boys busy if you put them to work checking every rock on this beach,” said the ME with a snort.

  I gave the paramedics permission to lift the body out of the water. They carefully turned it over. The face looked grotesquely familiar, the blond hair clotted with blood and salt. Even the bloating could not remove the expression of horror in the open eyes, which shone like blue warning lights, surrounded by the mottled violet skin of his face. Strands of seaweed adorned his white pullover windbreaker, and his shoeless legs, tanned as far up as I could see, were covered by a pair of jeans.

  An image of the handsome Tommi from a few years before flashed painfully through my mind. Tommi was probably a couple of years older than I was, but still not quite thirty. I had seen younger dead bodies, but those had always been ravaged by booze or chemicals. I swallowed my tears and tried to clear my throat. Then I took a deep breath and started snapping instructions to the forensic investigators: Where could the dent in Tommi’s head have come from? Could he have slipped off the dock? And so on. I knew my terse tone made me look jumpy, but there was nothing I could do to cover it up. Though we had seen a female defense minister muster the courage to cry in public, I still couldn’t.

  “Let’s go find out what those folks in the house know,” I said to Rane, turning toward the ornate villa. It was only then that I noticed the group sitting on the porch on the sea-facing side of the house. Though they must have heard my peevish outburst, none of them was looking in our direction. It was as though they were trying to block out the presence of the police altogether.

  Upon closer inspection, the villa looked like a fake: maybe it was a reproduction of an older villa that had once stood on the lot. The paint had had a good twenty years to fade, but the house could not have been much older than I was.

  The sun shone on the porch, and I cursed my hot jeans. As I expected, some of the seven people sitting on the porch looked familiar.

  “Maria!” a clear, bright voice rang out in confusion. “Are you a policewoman now? Do you remember me? I’m Tuulia.”

  I remembered Tuulia well. She had been in our apartment frequently, and we had hung out together at the university café as well. I liked Tuulia, and I recalled that we’d had a similar sense of humor back then. She was prettier than I remembered, with the stately poise of a grown woman comfortable in her tall frame.

  “I do.” I couldn’t bring myself to smile. “Yes...These days I’m Detective Maria Kallio. I work in the Violent Crime Unit. And this is Officer Lahtinen. Let’s start by having you all introduce yourselves and tell us what you know about last night’s events.” I sounded ridiculous even to myself and didn’t dare look anyone directly in the eye.

  Apparently, Mira was a natural-born leader. She spoke in an even tone as though she were reading from a prepared statement. Maybe she really had planned what she would say in advance.

  “My name is Mira Rasinkangas, and we’re the Eastern Finland Student Association of Singers, or EFSAS. The company Tommi Peltonen works for has a summer event coming up, and they wanted music for it. They promised to pay well, and Tommi put together this double quartet to sing.”

  The group consisted of Tommi’s quartet and four other singers who happened to be spending the summer in the city. Tommi’s parents were off sailing at the moment, so their summerhouse had seemed like the perfect place to practice.

  The eight singers had assembled the previous day, practiced for a couple of hours, and then moved on to the typical Finnish summer activities: sweating in the sauna and drinking. People had started to trickle off to sleep sometime after midnight; however, no one seemed very clear about Tommi’s whereabouts. The last time anyone had seen him alive was around 2:00 a.m.

  “I was surprised in the morning when I didn’t see Tommi,” Mira said. “But then Riku came up from the water, yelling that Tommi had drowned, and there he was...on the shore.” Mira’s voice trembled a bit.

  “When you went to look at Peltonen, did you move the body?”

  “I tried to check his pulse, but we didn’t move him,” replied a deep bass from the far end of the porch. “I’m Antti Sarkela, if you recall. I couldn’t feel any pulse, and it was so obvious that he had drowned that it was pointless trying anything.”

  I remembered Antti too. I had been infatuated with him for nearly two weeks after he sat down next to me once on the tram and started up a conversation about the Henry Parland book I was reading. How many men knew who Henry Parland was? Then I had decided to forget Antti and shifted my attention to worshipping Henry, but ever since that conversation on the tram, I had found Antti both intriguing and irritating. He was very tall, with a narrow face and a large Aquiline nose, and I couldn’t deny that I found him attractive. It was difficult to interpret the expression in his eyes at the moment, which seemed to convey a mix of sorrow and fear. I remembered that Antti and Tommi had been close friends.

  “OK. This is my case now, which means that the interviews will happen in Pasila. For reasons relating to the investigation, I’d suggest that you all leave the house immediately. I’d like to start doing the interviews this
evening, and I can offer a ride to anyone who needs one. I don’t imagine there are any bus stops nearby. Before you leave, we’ll also need your addresses and phone numbers, but that can wait. Rane, will you take notes? I’ll start with you. Who are you?” I asked, turning to a small, young-looking man who was sitting near me. He looked like he might be sick at any moment.

  “I’m Riku Lasinen,” he replied in a high, clear tenor. “I’m twenty-three and I’m studying math and computer science at the university.” The boy sounded like he was at a job interview.

  “I’m Mira Rasinkangas,” repeated the stout woman with the dark hair. “Twenty-six, history student.”

  “Pia Wahlroos,” whispered a barely audible voice. I scanned its owner, who had large, brown eyes, auburn hair, and a slim figure. She wore a stylish linen sundress and a wedding band bearing some impressive rocks. I registered these details without managing to arrange them in any particular order in my mind. “I’m twenty-six, and I study Nordic languages.”

  “Sirkku Halonen, twenty-three. Chemistry. I’m Pia’s sister, but she’s married, which is why we have different last names.” Sirkku was a faded, more run-of-the-mill duplicate of her thin, beautiful sister. Next to Sirkku sat a somewhat thickset man with bristly hair who held her hand reassuringly. Obviously a boyfriend.

  “I’m Timo Huttunen, forestry. Twenty-five.”

  “Tuulia Rajala, twenty-nine. Deadbeat.”

  “Antti Sarkela. Math teaching assistant at the university. Twenty-nine. Although I really can’t see what our ages have to do with anything.” Rane uttered a disgusted snort—he had automatically started to record the word “although” and was grumbling at Sarkela as though it were his fault.

  “Great. Get your things together so you can leave ASAP.” As I set off down the path for the waterline to talk to the forensic technicians, I ran into the stretcher bearers on their way up. Tommi’s next forwarding address would be the pathology lab.

  When I returned to the house a short while later, Mira was emptying the refrigerator.

  “By the way...where did each of you sleep?”

  “Tommi’s room is upstairs, off the landing. Riku and Antti slept on the other side of the hallway, in Tommi’s brother’s room. Timo and Sirkku were sleeping at the end of the hall, in Tommi’s parents’ bed, and Pia, Tuulia, and I were down here on the living room floor.”

  “So Tommi was the only one who was sleeping alone.”

  “I suppose. Although I don’t think anyone slept much. It felt like there was always someone up doing something, people running to the bathroom, that sort of thing—and we saw Riku down here, even though there’s another bathroom upstairs. I don’t know about everyone else, but I only slept in fits and starts the last few hours. Tuulia has this god-awful snore, and no matter how hard I tried to wake her up, she just kept doing it.”

  “I’m sorry I kept you awake,” Tuulia said, appearing suddenly in the kitchen. “I imagine Pia would have been awake anyway with her guilty conscience...” Tuulia glanced at the refrigerator. “So much for the bouillabaisse. Maria, you should join us for dinner once we’re done with the third degree. A dinner in memory of Tommi...Even the tomato sauce is appropriately blood colored. It’s a shame all we have is white wine.”

  “Give it a rest, Tuulia,” Mira hissed, not noticing the trembling in the other woman’s voice. I beat a hasty retreat and headed upstairs to a large landing where Riku was just folding up his sleeping bag. I looked out past the railing. A beautiful vista of the Baltic Sea opened out from the two-story foyer. Off the landing was a narrow hallway, at the end of which was a large bedroom, presumably Tommi’s parents’ room. The door was cracked and I could see a woman’s legs on the bed. A man’s hand was stroking them. Sirkku and Timo, I guessed.

  The empty bedroom was Tommi’s. It didn’t seem to have changed much in the last ten years—it still looked like a teenager’s room. Aqua-blue bedding, sailing posters on the walls, a couple of empty Cutty Sark whiskey bottles on the bookshelf, a few sailing books, a guitar. A sweater was draped on a chair, and a pair of shoes was crammed under the bed. On the night of his death, Tommi had been out barefoot—evidently he hadn’t wanted to wake anyone. The bed was unmade, which suggested that wherever Tommi had gone off to, he had gotten some sleep first and probably expected to return to bed.

  In the last room, I found Antti Sarkela lying on a narrow bed with his hands clasped behind his head. When he saw me, he jumped up like an army recruit confronted by his drill sergeant.

  “Find any clues?” His voice was unmistakably antagonistic.

  “Maybe. You slept in this room?”

  “Yeah...”

  “You know...or knew Tommi pretty well. Could you come with me to his room and see if anything is missing?”

  Antti felt too big for Tommi’s small room.

  “I can’t really tell,” Antti said, peeking into the closet. “It’s just the same clothes that are always here. Tommi kept a bunch of his stuff here, so when we came out here yesterday, he just had a small bag with him. That’s it over there. It probably just has some sheet music, some clean socks...Yeah, I think things in here look just like they did before.”

  Antti’s gaze landed on a beaten-up mixed-choir songbook lying on the desk. It was open to Toivo Kuula’s pathos-laden “Drifting on the Tide.” Even though I wasn’t much of a fan of rhyming poetry, I had always liked the Eino Leino poem from which the song took its lyrics. Tommi had made copious notes on the page. Antti averted his eyes, and I noticed that he was biting his lip.

  “Is this what you were practicing yesterday?” I asked, just to fill the silence.

  “Among other things. The client requested Finnish songs.”

  Tommi’s wallet lay next to the music book, and I took possession of it. I had a strange feeling that I hadn’t noticed everything the room was trying to tell me.

  Soon after, we were ready to leave the villa. Forensics stayed to look for any object that might qualify as a murder weapon, and the shoreline was sealed off. A uniformed patrol stayed to meet Tommi’s parents, who were scheduled to arrive sometime that evening.

  I looked over the bewildered group of people I would be interviewing. It was possible that some interloper from outside the group could have witnessed Tommi’s death, or could even have been responsible for it. We couldn’t rule out the possibility. There had been plenty of break-ins around the outskirts of the city in recent months and Tommi may have surprised a thief coming ashore in a boat. There were plenty of summer cabins scattered on the islands, and most of them were unoccupied a good deal of the year.

  However, these seven people would be the focus of the investigation for the time being. At least one member of the choir had to know more than he or she was telling me, and it was possible that one of them had even killed Tommi. In that case, we weren’t dealing with a hardened professional criminal, but a normal person whose guilt might soon become too much to bear, I thought optimistically.

  Antti and Tuulia were down facing the shore yelling, and it seemed like they were trying to explain something to the uniformed officers.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as I approached them to give the order to leave.

  “Einstein. My cat,” Antti answered. “No one has seen him for a couple of hours, and I can’t leave without him.”

  “Do you think he’s lost?” Tuulia asked, concerned.

  “Of course not—he was born here! He’s just out on one of his expeditions.”

  “How about you come back to look for your cat later,” I said, sounding colder than I meant to. I told the officers who were staying on to keep their eyes out for the cat and to catch it if it turned up. They stared at me like I was a half-wit. “So we’re chasing cats now too?” one of them muttered crossly.

  Tommi’s car would remain where it was until the technicians had a chance to take a preliminary look at it. The keys were in the ignition, so someone could easily drive it to the lab later. Pia Wahlroos’s BMW had room for five
choir members. There was no point in assigning an officer to their car to monitor them and make sure they didn’t have a chance to agree on their alibis. They had already had plenty of time to do so before the police had arrived on the scene. I was willing to bet that Mira Rasinkangas and Antti Sarkela would be the only ones to accept a ride from the police—and I would have won. When I felt Antti’s long legs pushing into the back of my seat, I shifted it forward. The contact irritated me.

  “So what are you doing working as a cop, Maria?” Antti asked as we turned off the small forest road onto the pavement. “The last time I saw you, you were studying law.”

  “I went through the police academy before law school. There just happened to be a temporary opening.”

  “Have you solved a lot of these...murders?”

  “Enough.”

  “Hey, man, don’t go underestimating this girl’s brains,” Rane said sourly. This amused me. Rane’s height complex had struck again. He was only just above the minimum police height himself and automatically reacted with hostility toward any man significantly taller than himself. Since he was defending me, I didn’t bother pointing out to Rane that he’d just called me a “girl.” The thin blue line.

  “You were Jaana’s roommate,” Mira said, suddenly making the connection. “Now I remember...” From her tone, it sounded as though her memories of me weren’t especially positive. Maybe it was that night we’d spent drinking together—when I made the mistake of opening my big, fat mouth about the pointlessness of choirs.

  I would have to call Jaana in Germany. Since she had dated Tommi, she might be able to provide some important information. It was clear that Jaana knew most of the choir members mixed up in the murder, and it had only been a couple of years since the fateful Hessian tour.

  No one spoke for the remainder of the trip back into the city. I wanted to get what I knew so far sorted out in my head before I began the interviews. Based on the ME’s initial assessment, Tommi had received a blow to the head diagonally from above and to the front with a blunt instrument. The possible killer was either considerably taller than Tommi—in which case Antti, who was in the car with me, was the only possibility—or Tommi had been sitting or kneeling when he was attacked. But he couldn’t have been bent over, because then the blow would have come from a different angle.