“Was that it just now?” I asked, pleased that I could tell the difference between a cello and a bass violin.
“Yes, that was me with Jaakko Ryhänen. That’s the master tape. Philippe II’s aria.”
At some point during my teenage years, my parents had dragged me to the Savonlinna Opera Festival to listen to Verdi’s Don Carlos. To my horror, I had found that I liked opera. Perhaps that was why the aria sounded so familiar.
“Did you come because of Jari?” Mårten Flöjt asked.
I was relieved that they had already heard about Jaska, even though I had prepared myself on the drive over to be the bearer of bad news.
Then I explained the story of the key, but Mårten said he didn’t really know the house.
“Meritta and I were still good friends, but I never visited much. Aniliina preferred to come to Helsinki to see me.”
“How has she taken Jaska’s death?”
“Right when she heard, she threw up. Since then she’s mostly just been quiet. We’ve been listening to music. One of Ani and Meritta’s friends is coming to visit tonight, someone named Kaisa. Ani doesn’t want to see her grandma or Aunt Jaana though.”
“When does Aniliina’s therapist get back from vacation?”
“She said sometime in early August.”
Almost another month. I had the feeling Aniliina was going to need serious professional help. Anyone who lost two close relatives to violent deaths would, let alone a mentally ill teenager. As Mårten and I talked about his daughter, I was relieved to see that he seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
Then Aniliina reappeared with the teacups, along with what looked like fresh cardamom pulla on a tray. I realized I probably should eat something. Aniliina tasted the pulla too, slowly and birdlike, just a crumb at a time, chewing each little morsel a ridiculously long time. She drank only a small sip of tea. In a hushed tone she asked me about my uncle’s cat.
After tea, we started looking for which lock might fit the key. A few of Meritta’s paint boxes looked promising, but upon closer inspection, the color of the lock made it seem doubtful the key would fit. None of the locks were made of the same gleaming copper as the key. And besides, most of the paint boxes were already open.
“There’s all kinds of junk in the basement storage room. You could go look there,” Aniliina suggested.
The storage room was mostly filled with cardboard boxes stuffed with fabric, which I shoved aside trying to find something more substantial. Finally on the back wall I came across an old cracked-and-peeling chest of drawers with keyholes that were obviously copper, despite a patina of age. I was already squatting, so I tried the bottom drawer first—no luck. The top one was already open, and inside it I found a smaller compartment like many old chests of drawers typically have. The keyhole looked about the right size. My hands were sweating as I tried to shove the key into the lock.
Damn it! Just a tad too small, and one of the grooves was completely wrong. Sneezing from the dust, I finished by rummaging through the bike shed in the yard, which also turned up nothing.
“Is there any other place Meritta would have stored something important?” I asked Aniliina after returning inside.
“I don’t think so. Or, wait, she did go to the art school when she was working on silk or teaching oil-painting classes. And she and Matti met there to plan their art camp. She probably left stuff there. There’s all kinds of boxes and cabinets at the art school.”
“Did Meritta have keys for the school?”
Aniliina grabbed the keys from the entryway and handed them to me. Then she said she was going out for a run.
“Don’t be crazy! Not in that rain you aren’t!” her father yelled.
“Just a couple of kilometers. Running helps you calm down, doesn’t it, Maria?”
Over our morning coffee out at the farm we had talked a lot about sports. I couldn’t help but say yes, even though I knew that an anorexic shouldn’t be allowed to burn off the one piece of pulla she had allowed herself to eat. Mårten had no interest in dealing with a temper tantrum either, so he just shook his head when Aniliina appeared in the studio in her jogging clothes.
“Why did you break up?” I asked after Aniliina had rushed out the door. Mårten looked at me thoughtfully, and I realized how intrusive my question sounded. The chances that the Flöjts’ divorce had anything to do with Meritta’s murder were slim. I just wanted to know as much about Meritta as possible. After considering for a moment, Mårten answered.
“Sometimes a marriage between two people who put their work ahead of everything else works. Sometimes it doesn’t. We belonged to the latter group. In a way, neither of us should ever have gotten married and had a child, although we were both overjoyed about Aniliina. Things just started falling apart. We never had time to spend together, and we were always fighting about housework and childcare. Eventually, Meritta decided to move here, both to paint the mine and because her mother volunteered to nanny. Of course, I couldn’t leave my work in Helsinki.”
Mårten stared out, watching the water cascade off the eaves. Birch leaves torn from the trees floated in rivulets in the yard.
“And Meritta did want to see other men, but she didn’t want to cheat on me. I imagine you know Meritta’s reputation as a man-eater. She did change partners frequently, but as I understand it, she only ever had one relationship at a time.” Mårten Flöjt’s narrow fingers ran through nonexistent hair; only a few dark locks remained above his ears. “She was a unique woman. So absolute about so many things. She always aroused strong emotions in people. Somehow it’s easy believing that someone could have murdered her.”
Suddenly the door opened with a clatter and Aniliina staggered in, complaining of dizziness. Although her breathing indicated she had been running, her face lacked any hint of color. Her pulse was strangely slow and uneven. As Mårten carried her to bed and stripped off her wet clothing, I cursed the stupidity of two adults allowing a girl like her to go out at all. Running to the kitchen, I found homemade apple juice in the refrigerator, into which I dissolved a couple of tablespoons of honey. Aniliina needed calories.
I forced her to drink the liquid even though she resisted. In the meantime, Mårten tried to reach the physician who had treated her at Joensuu Hospital. She was in serious danger of dehydration, which I had heard could be deadly for anorexics who exercise too much.
“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” she croaked after recovering a bit. “It’s a prison there. They won’t even let you go outside and they threaten to feed you with a tube if you won’t eat. The nurses even come into the bathroom with you to watch you so you don’t throw up!”
“You’re in really bad shape, Ani. You either go back to the hospital or you start eating!”
“I don’t want to turn into a fat-ass cow like Mom!” Aniliina’s cries were furious again, as if we were trying to cut her in half. I had no way to calm her down, and I couldn’t even decipher the meaning behind all the things she was crying about. Then her father came into the room with a glass of water and two pills. Aniliina looked at him skeptically but swallowed the pills anyway.
“Those sleeping pills aren’t going to solve anything,” Mårten said to me after Aniliina had finally nodded off. “I don’t want to take her to the hospital, but at this rate she’s going to kill herself.”
“One of my friends was a patient at a Helsinki University clinic that specializes in eating disorders. She talked a lot afterward about how good their therapists were. I’ll call her today to find out more. We’ll figure something out.”
With that I started making my way to the art school. My appetite had come back now, so on the way into town I stopped at a grocery store and bought some cold smoked salmon and pasta salad. Then I went to the police station break room to wolf them down. Detective Antikainen peeked his head in and then came to sit with me over coffee.
“County forensics just called,” he said. “They’re pretty pissed that whoever kil
led Flöjt and Korhonen was smart enough not to leave any prints.”
“People watch too much TV nowadays.”
“There should be a law that cop shows have to do things wrong so we can bust murderers easier. They do have the prints from the piece of jewelry we found in the Tower though. They say they found a match on a pocket mirror that Koivu brought in, but he never said who it belonged to. You don’t happen to know, do you?”
I fought hard not to blush and reveal that I knew, but to no avail.
“I was betting they were Johnny Miettinen’s. You and Koivu did almost arrest him on Sunday. Shouldn’t we ask Forensics to get official prints? He was dating our first vic, after all.” There was a malicious note in Antikainen’s tone. Of course he remembered Johnny saying in his first interview that he left the Old Mine gala with me. This was unfolding in exactly the way I feared it might.
“Go and get his prints yourself. But maybe you should ask Sergeant Järvisalo first.”
“But Miettinen is missing. His wife hasn’t seen him, or his parents, which is where he was supposed to stay last night.”
To my surprise I managed to stay calm despite my vivid memory of the warning we had given Johnny Sunday night to stay put. So the little shit had skipped town. Was Johnny the one Jaska had intended to talk to?
Detective Järvi blew into the break room with new information about Jaska’s whereabouts the day before. After work had ended at six, he stopped by home to eat and then had gone out at around eight o’clock. From eight thirty to eleven thirty he had been sitting in the Matador, where, according to the waitresses and the other customers, he had drunk astonishingly little, only two pints in three hours. I imagined that would barely touch Jaska’s liver, and indeed according to our blood test, his BAC had been only 0.06. So Jaska had wanted to stay relatively sober.
At around eleven thirty he had left, cursing the rain and the umbrella he had forgotten at home. One of the guys at the Matador was sure that Jaska had a meeting with someone. When he left he seemed in good spirits, even excited.
I could imagine. Of course he was probably thinking of the money he was going to get from whomever he was hustling. And then the demo tape he would make, the record deal, the fame…In a teenage boy these periodic paroxysms of enthusiasm for future glory aroused feelings of sympathy, but in a thirtysomething who had failed too many times to count, they were just pathetic.
No one had seen Jaska after the Matador. Arpikylä had been sleeping soundly on a rainy Wednesday night. Even in the houses that overlooked the Sump, no one had noticed anything. The curtain of rain had obscured everything from view.
11
The art school was just down the street from the police station. Taking a pair of rubber boots three sizes too large and a raincoat that reached to my knees, I decided to walk. The pelting downpour had made the summer day nearly dark. Even the Tower was concealed behind sheets of rain, its existence attested only by the red light atop the radio tower sending its warning message to low-flying planes with three quick flashes.
Previously the art academy had been a regular duplex house. Now the door was painted in a rainbow that continued along the exterior wall, and the gutters were painted bright red. The door squeaked as I stepped inside. The cabinet-filled entryway was dark, but somewhere farther inside a light shone. After shaking off most of the rain, I walked in.
“Don’t come any closer or I’ll stick this in your throat!”
Someone jabbed a dangerous-looking palette knife toward me from where they stood backlit by the doorway down the corridor. My heart did a backflip. Had the burglar somehow happened to come in just before me?
“I have a phone in my other hand, and I’m calling the police,” the voice continued. It sounded familiar. Grabbing the wrist of the knife-wielding hand and bringing my assailant closer, I burst into laughter when I saw Matti trembling with fright at the end of the arm.
“You shouldn’t play with knives, Matti.”
“Maria!” Matti looked embarrassed. “I thought that…Never mind.”
“Who did you think I was?”
Matti thrust the palette knife back into a box but didn’t turn back to look at me.
“I heard about the prowler at Meritta’s house. I thought maybe he had her keys and was coming here now. Or—Or maybe I thought it was Meritta herself.”
“You believe in ghosts?”
“You never know. If anyone was going to come back to haunt the living, it would be Meritta.”
“I guess some traditions do believe that the souls of the murdered can’t rest until their killers have been punished. But why would Meritta bother you…because your fingerprints are on the brooch we found in the Tower after her death? And Ella’s folk costume happened to have the same brooch.”
Matti still wasn’t looking at me as he turned on a faucet and started rinsing brushes. His pink-and-violet-striped Marimekko shirt was stained with paint, and he was wearing dark-blue corduroy work trousers. Did he have to dress like the stereotype of an artist all the time? Where was his beret? Brownish water ran from the brushes along the edge of the counter onto Matti’s moccasins, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“I don’t know anything about a brooch,” he said finally. “And what do you mean about my fingerprints? I’ve never had my fingerprints taken.”
“Did you go home with Ella after we split up? Or did you go back to the Old Mine, perhaps in search of Ella’s missing brooch?”
“What do you mean? Of course I went home with Ella!” Matti spun to face me, the paintbrushes splashing water across the floor. “Did you just come here to harass me? Do me a favor and get lost. I have work to do. All the arrangements for the art camp fall on me now that Meritta isn’t around anymore.”
“I have work to do too. How did Ella’s brooch end up on top of the Tower?”
“We all went up to the view deck at the beginning of the party. She must have dropped it then.”
“She was wearing it after that. I remember.”
“Why don’t you ask Ella! I wasn’t watching her all night. Ella has keys to the Tower. She could have climbed up any time she wanted.”
Now there was no longer any way to avoid talking to Ella. Better me than Järvisalo or Koivu though. But for now I needed to inspect the locks on all the storage boxes and cabinets at the art academy. I didn’t want to do it with Matti present though. What if I found something he didn’t want me to see and he started waving the palette knife around again?
“I have to ask you to leave now, Matti. I need to search the premises, and you’re in my way.”
“Do you have some sort of warrant?”
“No, but it will only take one phone call to get one,” I lied.
“Wait ten minutes and I’ll be done cleaning up.”
So I sat down at a drawing desk and looked around. The room we were in had once been a spacious kitchen, and the sink was surrounded by cabinets with no locks on the drawers. At least in this room I couldn’t see anywhere that would have fit Meritta’s key.
I’d have to check the local banks in case Meritta had a safety-deposit box. The key didn’t look like a safety-deposit box key, but it could belong to a smaller container that Meritta might have hidden inside of one. And, of course, I would have to visit Jaska’s house. Maybe Meritta gave him more than just the key for safekeeping. I wondered a little about the likelihood of Meritta trusting Jaska with anything important to her. But maybe she hadn’t trusted him. Maybe the key was stolen from Meritta’s purse, and for some reason or another Jaska had known it was important. Why hadn’t he left any clues in the envelope? He must have known something about the key because he appeared to have tried to use it for blackmail.
Matti was finished washing and drying and was now wiping his round eyeglasses with a checkered handkerchief. He opened his mouth a couple of times as if to say something before deciding against it. Finally he made up his mind to speak up.
“I’ll admit that I know Ella and Meritta were havi
ng some sort of disagreement. I imagine it had something to do with the grant money for the art camp. Ella thought Meritta was using it for things other than what it was intended for, which was paying for materials and hiring instructors. Eventually the city auditors were going to end up getting involved, and then Ella would be in trouble.”
“Who was organizing the art camp, officially?”
“The Aprikylä Artists’ Association. The same group that runs this school. I’m the board president, and Meritta was the treasurer. The city has been quite generous in funding us, and Ella administers the grant. But she wouldn’t have murdered anyone over that!”
“So you haven’t talked to Ella about this?”
“No. This is the first I’m hearing about the brooch.” I could tell from Matti’s voice that he was lying, and I remembered Ella’s bitter words about Matti hanging around in bars with Meritta. Had Ella been jealous?
“What was your relationship with Meritta?”
“Coworker. Colleague. Yes, we spent a lot of time together. Finding kindred spirits isn’t easy in this town, and we’d known each other for twenty years after all. There was never anything romantic between us though. If you believe all the gossip and newspaper stories, you probably have completely the wrong idea about Meritta. She might have liked sex, but she didn’t try to seduce every man she met walking down the street. Just being friends with her felt completely natural.”
This time I believed Matti was telling the truth. But had Ella thought the same way?
“So will you inherit Meritta’s city council seat?”
Staring at me in puzzlement, Matti shook his head. “More like it’s being forced on me. The third member of our party list has already moved away, so I have to take it. But you can’t think I’d kill my friend for that. I don’t even want to be on the city council!”
“Of course I don’t think that.”
But Matti continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “City politics around here is absurd. They spend hours fighting over dog-license fees, but big land deals go through without comment. Or they would have if it hadn’t been for Meritta. But one person can’t accomplish anything there since everything is arranged behind closed doors. And I don’t have the energy to bang my head against the wall like Meritta.” Matti’s tone left no doubt what a waste of time he thought being on the city council was going to be.
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