Her Enemy

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Everybody ready—here he comes!”

  Stop signs and weapons came out, with three megaphones blaring orders to halt as the white BMW careened around a bend in the road, with at least two police cars trailing. Everything happened fast. The BMW failed to stop, despite the crowd of police. Noticing the spike strip, Hellström turned his car straight into the forest. At no less than ninety miles per hour, the car plowed through several dozen yards of brush before a stone retaining wall checked its progress.

  By the time we reached the vehicle, it was too late to do anything. The car was now half its former length. I didn’t even want to know how much of Dr. Erik Hellström remained.

  16

  Sun filtered through birch branches bent under full loads of mature leaves, the patterns of shadow cast on the sand of the old cemetery’s central path shifting and rippling in the wind. As we walked between the rows of graves, light and shadow interchanged constantly, making the fur of a squirrel suddenly change from red to black and black to red as the animal jumped from headstone to headstone.

  We were looking for Sanna’s grave. Having been present at her funeral, Antti said he would recognize it when he saw it. Occasionally, I would see a familiar name as I looked at the faded letters on each stone. I sat down for a moment on a rusted bench and let Antti continue looking.

  The past few days had been pure hell. If not the third degree, Ström had put me through at least a second-degree interrogation as soon as they finished scraping Hellström’s remains out of the car. After throwing me in the back of his cruiser and speeding back to the station, he made me explain everything to him at least five times. Then he threatened to toss me into the same cell he had let Kimmo out of a few hours earlier.

  “Kallio, I can’t even count how many things we could charge you with: interfering with a police investigation, withholding evidence, assault on Dr. Hellström, false imprisonment. It’s a pity we can’t charge you with endangering your own life too. Why didn’t you let us do our job? You’re always so goddamn impatient. If you would have just waited another couple of days, we would have caught up with the doctor too.”

  “If I had waited any longer, Mallu Laaksonen would be dead.”

  “Maybe Laaksonen wouldn’t have tried anything if you hadn’t been bumbling around. Without you, the goddamn gynecologist would still be alive and we could put him on trial.”

  “So charge me with murder! I wasn’t expecting a pat on the back anyway. At least in a cell I could lie down and get some goddamned rest. I’m exhausted from doing your job.”

  “You’re still playing the tough guy, just like at the academy. Listen, Kallio, you’re living in the wrong country. We don’t need private detectives in Finland. If you want to go sticking that cute little button nose of yours into other people’s messy business, why don’t you come back to the force?”

  “I’ve already told you twice that it just isn’t my thing. Especially since I’d have to work with shitheads like you.”

  I heard a snort from the direction of the clerk and then watched as Ström drew in a breath and mentally counted to ten.

  “It doesn’t matter what I say, does it?” Ström yelled, his face glistening with sweat. “Just don’t expect me to cry over you when we have to pick you up in pieces on the side of some road because you’ve been digging around in things that don’t concern you.”

  Something clicked in my head as I remembered the raspy voice warning me on the phone. The same phrase: digging around in things that don’t concern you.

  “Ström, you talk big. What, you think I don’t still have my recording of a certain threatening phone call?” When Ström’s face suddenly went blank, I knew I had hit the bull’s-eye.

  “Today must have been hard on you, little girl, since your memory is acting up now. Puupponen, take her home,” Ström snapped at Dennis the Menace.

  Puupponen said he would be by again the next day with the interview record for me to sign. I assumed Ström would try to lie low, and that was fine by me. I considered whether he might have tampered with my bike too. Somehow, verbal intimidation seemed more his style. Perhaps Hellström was to blame. I would probably never know.

  I came home to a scolding from Antti. Lecturing me about taking unnecessary risks, he marveled aloud why I hadn’t taken him along as protection.

  “I get along just fine without a man as my bodyguard!”

  “So is life with you always going to be a roller coaster like this?”

  “Find out if you dare!”

  Slamming the door, I stormed out into the bathroom, tore off my dirty clothes, and let the shower wash my tears away. When Antti came to make peace, we made love for a long time while the shower continued to run. That was the end of our fighting.

  Armi was buried yesterday. Following Kimmo’s release, the investigation into Armi’s murder wrapped up quickly, since several of her neighbors remembered seeing Dr. Hellström’s BMW in the parking lot of a nearby school the morning of the murder. After searching the house again, the police finally found Sanna’s diary in a plastic bag hidden in the basement behind some jars. It confirmed Sanna’s relationship with Dr. Hellström.

  Eki contacted Hellström’s wife in Nice. She had also known about her husband’s relationship with Sanna and had told Eki about it during discussions about her divorce options. Eki had wrung out of Sanna that Hellström was writing her prescriptions for sedatives whenever she asked. The notes from that conversation were what Eki tore from Sanna’s file. He claimed he was positive that it had nothing to do with Sanna’s suicide or Armi’s murder. I suspected that he had actually guessed the truth and wanted to protect Hellström for some reason. I also suspected that I wasn’t going to want to work for Henttonen & Associates any longer. Even so, I thought I should take my short paid summer vacation before resigning.

  Doris Hellström had happened to be in Finland the previous March. She remembered her husband coming home drunk and sick with a cold the night before he had to go care for Mallu Laaksonen at the hospital early the morning of her accident. She also remembered an odd, cyclamen-red scarf around her husband’s neck.

  “Gathering information and making sure of everything before acting was so typical of Armi,” Kimmo said at her funeral. “I’m sure she smelled something rotten in Sanna’s death from the very beginning. In retrospect, I can see how she was constantly hinting at that. That was probably why she stole the diary. Armi was there when we burned all of Sanna’s papers. If only I would have listened.”

  Kimmo hadn’t really been able to begin mourning Armi until he was released from jail. Time might be able to wash away his sorrow, but it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. After hearing that Hellström had killed both Sanna and Armi, I didn’t know which was worse for Kimmo—finding out about the murders or the fact that Hellström was already dead. Kimmo would have gladly tracked him down and killed him himself. Although Kimmo was clearly in agony, his rage also startled me: here I had thought him incapable of murder. But I guess anyone could kill. I remembered groping for Hellström’s bronze statue to knock him out. As if that would have been the only possible outcome.

  Even so, I wanted to assuage Kimmo’s guilt if I could.

  “Armi was a little like me, I think. Maybe she would have listened to your advice about what to do in the situation, but then done exactly as she pleased anyway.”

  “No, she was more like me,” Mallu said, coming up behind us.

  “She got fixated on things. Armi was convinced that she could make Hellström pay for his actions. Armi was like that even as a child. She might have been a bit of a sissy, but she always wanted to help people who got teased get even. I guess now she wanted to get revenge on Hellström for Sanna and me.”

  “And Maria Marple finished the job,” Antti interjected. “Was your ingenious deduction based at all on the fact that male chauvinists are generally evil?”

  I was already making a face at him before I realized that was inappropriate behavior at a funera
l.

  “No, it was based on the fact that there wasn’t anybody else left it could be.”

  Only once I left Mallu’s apartment after turning her over to the paramedics did I realize that the role I had constructed for Eki actually fit Dr. Hellström even better. Sanna and a doctor—of course! Teemu Laaksonen had confirmed my theory about the scarf. On the day before the accident, he had run into Armi while she was wearing the scarf, which was probably why his subconscious made him see Armi’s face in the car. Mallu and Teemu had each suspected the other, and Hellström egged Mallu on.

  “After Armi’s death, I went completely out of my mind,” Mallu explained. Now, after her brush with death, her eyes were still red and she seemed even thinner than ever, but the deep anguish was gone from her gaze. Maybe she was ready to get back to living.

  “In the end, all I could think of was making all of this go away…”

  You knew I was coming to visit at five o’clock though, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Mallu and Teemu had decided to reunite their half sets of furniture. I didn’t know whether to think they were crazy or brave. At least they seemed to need each other, clinging to one another like frightened children hugging their teddy bears.

  Armi’s parents’ house was crowded with funeralgoers. Outside, the sounds of life had returned: Makke had taken the twins out in the yard to play soccer. The truth of Sanna’s death had given him another rough ride. In the gym together one night, I almost had to drop a hundred-pound plate on his toes before he would believe that Sanna’s death didn’t have anything to do with him being passed out drunk—Hellström would probably have tried to kill Sanna sooner or later anyway. Myself, I didn’t know whether that was true or not.

  Sanna’s entries about Makke in her remaining diary, which ended two months before her death, were touching. He was the personification of youth and purity, the savior who would free her from men like Otso Hakala and Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy.

  “Armi was always going on about how happy I made Sanna,” Makke said, biting his lip, when I told him about what was written in Sanna’s diary. “I asked her how she was supposed to know, and she wouldn’t tell me. I thought she just wanted to comfort me.”

  That shadow would probably never leave Makke’s eyes. He didn’t need to forget Sanna though, and Kimmo didn’t need to forget Armi. They just had to learn to live without. Did believing that mean I had never really loved?

  “There it is,” Antti said, snapping me out of my reverie and then leading me along the smooth-raked path. A blackbird sang in an elm tree next to the grave. A fresh-looking bouquet of lilies of the valley accentuated the dark color of the stone, which was nearly my height. At Armi’s memorial, Annamari had remarked that it was high time to have Sanna’s name carved on the tombstone. That made me happy—perhaps I had succeeded in making Sanna more visible.

  Antti had moved away a little and was feeding nuts from his pocket to greedy squirrels trying to climb his pants legs.

  I set my own bouquet of poppies carefully on the grave. Although I didn’t believe Sanna was under that stone watching me, I didn’t know where else I could send her my greetings. And how did I know she couldn’t see my flowers?

  Sanna appeared for a moment on my internal video screen, the perennial cigarette hanging from her lip, her black hair tousled, extending me that bottle of rowanberry wine. I wanted to imagine she was offering me a drink in thanks. As we were in the shop buying the flowers, I had thought I was finally getting over Sanna. Standing at her grave, however, I realized I would never be free of my guilt. What I did after her death didn’t mean anything to her. I should have shown her when she was alive that I cared about her.

  Love was such a terrible risk. If you cared about someone, you could spend the rest of your life afraid of losing them. Turning away from Sanna’s grave, I realized that I was more afraid of that than I would be meeting up with ten armed murderers. That was why I didn’t dare commit to Antti, to promise to go with him to America or to wait for him in Finland. It wasn’t a healthy desire for independence—it was simple cowardice.

  It was getting late as we set off walking along the shoreline path. The cemetery would be closing soon. The sun was still shining over the neoclassical outline of the Lapinlahti psychiatric hospital, but the shadows of the trees were lengthening. The wind had died down. A hedgehog rustled in the grass. Someone had left a plate of milk for it next to a fir tree.

  The fountain was still working. We sat down on a bench next to it, watching the shafts of sunlight on the bay, the silhouette of the hospital, and a full moon rising to compete with the sun. Antti wrapped his arms around me.

  I thought of Makke and Kimmo, the firm hugs they both gave me at Armi’s funeral. Apparently, they were holding a sort of two-man therapy group at the gym. I thought of the Laaksonens, who wanted to try again. No, they weren’t crazy. They were brave. I tried to gather my own courage.

  “Antti, I’ve been thinking…Your trip to America isn’t the end of the world. I can wait.” I saw in Antti’s eyes that he understood what I wanted to say. “If I get too lonely, I’ll take a vacation and come see you.”

  As we kissed, a nightingale alighted in a nearby maple tree and began trilling wildly.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Tomas Whitehouse, 2011

  Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. A keen reader, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she began her first book, a young adult novel, which was published two years later. Besides writing, Leena is fond of classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. She attends many competitions as a skating journalist and writes for the Finnish figure-skating magazine Taitoluistelu. Her Enemy is the second installment in her bestselling Maria Kallio series, which debuted in English in 2012 with My First Murder. Leena currently lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © Pekka Piri, 2012

  Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian area studies from Indiana University. He has translated over thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, collections of poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the first novel in the Maria Kallio series, My First Murder (AmazonCrossing), the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen (MacLehose Press), the thriller Wolves and Angels by Seppo Jokinen (Ice Cold Crime), and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho (Norvik Press). He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, a dog, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.