Derailed

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “I’ve always thought of mathematics as a political science. Two plus two is always four, but numbers aren’t neutral. You can ask who those two and two belong to. Was one of the twos taken from someone with six and the other from someone with only three?” he’d said one day recently as he updated me about the project.

  So we both enjoyed our work, and our kids liked that we were both at home nights and weekends. Antti had spent a few years commuting between Vaasa and Espoo while I’d tried to handle my erratic police schedule and childcare. Without my mother-in-law’s help, we never would have survived. She had been indispensable in more ways than one: she had also forced Antti and his sister, Marita, to use the inheritance from their father sensibly. With it Antti and I had bought a house. We didn’t have a prenup, since when we married it never occurred to us that we’d ever have any assets to fight over. The inheritance had covered half of the purchase, and the rest we financed with savings and a mortgage.

  The past two years had been the best time of my life. Maybe a house in a densely populated neighborhood in Espoo, Finland, wasn’t paradise, but we had good public transportation to both of our jobs and the elementary school. A few weeks ago Taneli had started first grade, which met for half the day, and Antti and I had been taking turns coming home early from work. Iida was in fifth grade, and the early symptoms of puberty were already appearing. Maybe this would be our last peaceful winter.

  September had been warm so far. The forests were full of mushrooms, and violets still bloomed in the yard. And nightmares were just nightmares, memories of a past life.

  Though I had over an hour before the alarm went off, I realized that I was wide awake. Our cat, Venjamin, had also sensed this. Soon he would crawl off my feet and pad into the kitchen to meow for food. I decided to get up and go for a run.

  The thermometer outside the kitchen window read eight degrees Celsius. A few leaves had already turned red on the maple tree in the yard, even though September was only half over. I made and drank a cup of white coffee, fed the cat, stretched a bit, and then went outside to the brisk morning. I started to jog at an easy pace.

  Leena still wasn’t walking, but she hadn’t completely given up hope. I thought of her almost every time I went out for a run. My own steps weren’t as light as they had been when I was twenty, but a three-and-a-half-mile wake-up jog still only took me a little more than half an hour. I didn’t even try to keep pace with the two men in front of me, who were a couple of decades younger and nearly a foot taller than me.

  When I got home, Taneli was already out of bed. He had morning ice skating twice a week, and he tended to wake up early on days he didn’t have practice too. Even though Iida grumbled about having to be seen with her little brother, she walked with Taneli to school. I ate a hearty breakfast with the kids, and then we all left together. Antti jumped on the bus to Otaniemi, and I headed for downtown Helsinki. The ministry had rented us offices on the main railway station square, which felt luxurious for a person whose view at her previous workplace was the Turku Highway.

  I loped up the stairs to the fourth floor. Inside I caught the scent of coffee: my colleagues, Outi and Jarkko, had already arrived. I shouted good morning and went into my own office. A silly picture of Iida and Taneli stared at me from the desk. It had been taken in Vimmerby, Sweden, at a theme park celebrating Astrid Lindgren’s stories. I’d passed along my love of Pippi Longstocking to my kids. They’d posed as Ida and Emil, the prankster brother and well-behaved sister from another of the famous Swedish author’s series. When I took the picture, Taneli had still been a towhead, but now his hair was starting to darken.

  My own hair was longer than it had been at any other time in my adult life, flowing down well past my shoulder blades. I only did it up when I was going for extra credibility, which I didn’t need to do every day in my current job. A researcher could look bohemian, but a detective lieutenant had to hide behind formality. The previous week I’d visited the hairdresser, and the gray strands that had appeared in the red were hidden again for the time being. The laugh lines around my eyes had deepened, and I still had freckles from the summer sun. Every year my nose seemed to turn up a little more. Good: at least one part of my body was defying gravity.

  I put the salmiakki licorice I’d bought at a newsstand to keep my spirits up in a drawer and opened my e-mail. As usual, messages were waiting from two of our research subjects, who called themselves Leonardo and the Snork Maiden to maintain their anonymity. Early on in the project, we’d fished for material and subjects every way possible. Some of our contacts came through the police and social services, and others managed to find us on their own. Because the research was confidential, we didn’t try to discover the real identities of the people sending the messages. Some people told us their real names, some didn’t—we left the choice up to them. At first that had been hard for me, because as a police detective, I’d been used to intervening, but gradually I’d learned to accept that I wasn’t responsible for my research subjects.

  Outi, Jarkko, and I had engaged in lengthy discussions about whether we could trust anonymous sources, ultimately deciding to separate material from them in its own section of the study. We were interested in why people wanted to remain anonymous, since it was precisely the invisibility of domestic violence that we hoped to examine. Jarkko, ever the realist, ensured that we never developed any illusions about our ability to put an end to such an intractable evil, but every little increase in our understanding could make the world a better place.

  I’d deduced that the Snork Maiden was a teenage girl who had been abused repeatedly. She told me that she’d found the project through a brochure distributed at her school. I’d tried to get her to talk to the school welfare officer about her experiences, but she didn’t want to.

  The e-mail began, as the Snork Maiden’s messages usually did, with a description of what she’d last read. The Snork Maiden liked violent books, especially ones based on real life. They were probably a kind of therapy for her, because the people in them were having an even worse time than she was. Then she came to the point, which was what her family member she called the Groke had done this time. Along with the Snork Maiden and the Groke, a person nicknamed Hemulen also lived in the home but was frequently away. Sometimes it seemed that the Groke was the Snork Maiden’s father and Hemulen a stepmother, but sometimes I suspected that Hemulen was an adult sibling or the mother’s boyfriend, and that the mother was the Groke. I wasn’t even entirely sure of the Snork Maiden’s gender. Based on the name, I’d assumed she was female, but there was no way to know for sure.

  I was home alone with the Groke. I tried to stay quiet in my room and write my history paper. Hemulen hasn’t been around for a couple of days. He’s probably out of the country for work. The Groke is always in a better mood then. That’s why she surprised me.

  I’d just done the wash and was ironing the Groke’s and Hemulen’s pillowcases when the Groke came into the laundry room. The Groke hates wrinkled sheets, and you have to iron the pillowcases because she doesn’t think the wringer makes them straight enough or something. She always has a reason. I’m afraid of the wringer. When I was a little kid, the Groke said that it would suck my fingers in if I wasn’t careful with it. I imagined my fingers getting squashed like a pancake and coming out all stretched. In one of our schoolbooks there was a picture of a painting with clocks that were sort of melted, and I thought they’d been through the wringer.

  The Groke seemed to be in a bad mood, and the Groke and a hot iron in the same room is a bad thing. Extremely bad. Of course, she found a reason to complain: I’d washed her hundred-euro green shirt with the whites too hot, and now it was all fuzzy and linty. I didn’t see any lint. She was making shit up again. I realized that I had to unplug the iron fast, but I wasn’t fast enough. Even though I’m bigger than the Groke, she’s stronger. She grabbed my wrist and started pushing the hot iron toward my face. It was so close to my skin I could feel its heat, and then suddenly I l
et go of it and pivoted, pushing the Groke. She was surprised enough that I got away. I locked myself in Hemulen’s office, because the Groke won’t dare break that door. She says that Hemulen won’t believe me if I tell, and that it wasn’t Hemulen’s business anyway.

  I’d received a couple of dozen e-mails from the Snork Maiden, each more chilling than the last. Sometimes I thought I’d have to figure out who she really was. It was irresponsible to leave her alone with the Groke—judging by her e-mails, the Snork Maiden was in mortal danger.

  The first message had come just after Christmas. The Snork Maiden must have been looking for somewhere to talk about what she was experiencing, because our project hadn’t done any advertising since early the previous fall. We already had plenty of material by that point.

  In some of her e-mails, the Snork Maiden said the Groke and sometimes Hemulen had threatened to send her away because they thought she was crazy. I wasn’t a psychiatric professional, so I couldn’t make a diagnosis, but it seemed likely that the Snork Maiden’s neuroses were a reaction to her environment. She talked about her compulsion to always sit with her back toward the wall and how she detested anything with holes in it. She couldn’t eat Swiss cheese or watch porridge bubbling. Each time I replied, I asked her to contact me using her real name if she wanted help. She hadn’t yet done so, and I had to remind myself that my job in this project wasn’t to do police work.

  The message from Leonardo wasn’t any more comforting. Like Snork Maiden, he sent his message from a server that didn’t allow me to trace his identity. I wasn’t completely sure of his gender either, or his age, though he was clearly a young person. Leonardo’s latest stepfather—he seemed to be the third so far—abused him sexually. Leonardo wrote that when he had told his mother, she accused him of lying. Yesterday the stepfather had come into Leonardo’s room and forced him to perform oral sex.

  I felt like retching as I read Leonardo’s e-mail. I wondered for a moment whether it would be unprofessional to tell a research subject that I knew exactly how horrible it feels to be raped. I decided it would be. I tried to craft my words to encourage Leonardo to contact either me or the police.

  No one has the right to treat you that way or to call you a liar. You are a valuable human being. I know a lot of police officers, so if you tell me where you live, I can find the right person for you to contact. And you can contact me between nine and five at this e-mail or the phone number below. We can help you, Leonardo, and your stepfather will get the punishment he deserves.

  I considered that last line for a long time, because sex offenders often received outrageously light sentences.

  I also knew how difficult it was to recount being victimized like that. Every interview and court proceeding requires reliving the attack again and again. With that thought a bitter, salty taste rose to the roof of my mouth. Sometimes my memory for tastes and smells was too good. I tossed a salmiakki skull in my mouth and savored the licorice flavor, trying to think about something else. I read a couple of other e-mails and called a phone number provided by another contact. That ended up taking the rest of the morning.

  I’d arranged to meet Leena for lunch. For the first two years after the accident, she’d only traveled from home to the rehabilitation center and back. I visited her whenever I had time. During the last year, she’d started venturing out into the city again, even though getting around Helsinki in a wheelchair was difficult to say the least. Fortunately, the Ateneum Art Museum had an elevator, and her wheelchair fit at the tables in the restaurant with a minimum of rearranging.

  After we got settled, I went to assemble a salad for her at the buffet. Leena was in a better mood than she had been in ages, and I quickly learned why.

  “I got a job,” she announced. “I’ve had enough of disability leave.”

  “Wow! Where?”

  “At the Adaptive Sports Association!” Leena said, grinning widely. “I’m going to be their part-time lawyer. Mostly I’ll get to work from home. Jutta tipped me off about the open position. Have I mentioned Jutta? I met her at the physical therapy center.”

  I realized immediately whom Leena meant. That name had been in all the papers after Jutta Särkikoski had been disabled in a car accident the year before. Apparently, Jutta believed that the collision wasn’t really an accident and that someone had wanted to intimidate her, maybe even silence her altogether. I remembered that one of Finland’s best hopes for the Beijing Olympics, the middle-distance runner Toni Väärä, had also been injured in the accident. According to reports, he didn’t remember anything about it or the preceding car ride. Some maliciously speculated that Särkikoski was taking the opportunity granted by Väärä’s amnesia to claim that she was forced off the road when in reality she simply lost control. The fact that the other vehicle was never found confirmed these rumors in the minds of many. However, Särkikoski’s car bore dents and traces of dark-gray paint on its left side. A man who’d been out jogging on the Inkoo-Salo road had also reported a dark-colored van nearly running him down as it sped toward Inkoo.

  Surgeons had operated on both of Särkikoski’s legs several times. Väärä’s worst injuries were to the lumbar spine, and at first it was uncertain whether he would ever run again. A few weeks ago, I’d noticed a blurb on the sports pages saying that he was training again, shooting for the 2009 World Championships. No one was writing stories about Jutta Särkikoski’s condition, however. I’d gotten the impression that she wasn’t very popular among her colleagues.

  “When do you start?” I asked Leena before taking a bite of my shrimp salad.

  “In a couple of weeks. Who knows, maybe I’ll take up wheelchair racing or chair dancing,” Leena said with a grin. Even though Leena detested competitive sports, she had always been active, and forced idleness obviously got her down. I doubted I would handle a permanent disability as well as she had. Getting the services that people with disabilities deserved required determination, and Leena’s legal training had been a help not just for her but also for others who hadn’t known to demand the service contracts or the free rides they were legally entitled to from the city of Espoo. Out of necessity, my friend had become an advocate for disability rights. Even though we hadn’t been able to start our law firm, we were each still working to save the world, what we’d dreamed of doing when we were in school.

  That afternoon I had a meeting with a social worker from Joensuu, which was located to the east, near my own hometown. He was an expert in domestic violence; he could have written a book on the subject. However, he preferred client work over research. In the world of social services, every man was valuable, since they were rare and offset the possible bias that some people claimed female social workers had that favored their female clients. As I walked to the bus station, I noticed a woman with a blond ponytail rushing ahead of me, which was an accomplishment since she was using forearm crutches. She turned her head a little, and I got a glimpse of the side of her face. I realized again what a small place Helsinki was—it was Jutta Särkikoski. I caught up to her, and she cast me a quick glance as if startled, but her expression relaxed when she saw that I was no one she knew, just a harmless stranger.

  I almost tried to talk to her, but what would I have said? Instead, I continued to the bus stop. Once on board, I answered a text message from my mother, then pulled out a book about a detective in Tampere, whom I would have loved to have as a colleague. At home the usual chaos awaited me, and I fed my family before heading off to band practice.

  Over the years, the Flatfeet had almost learned to play. We were just buddies from the force who liked to perform but didn’t have any great musical ambitions. Even though I wasn’t a cop anymore, they’d let me stay in the band.

  As I dropped the drummer off at home after our intensive two-hour rehearsal, I felt like I really didn’t have anything to complain about. All I had on the horizon was the same old, same old, and that was just fine with me.

  2

  Leena called me two days later. I
guessed from her tone that she was about to ask me for a favor, like giving her a ride somewhere or going with her to a movie or concert. Dependence on others and using accessible transport was still hard for her, but she could travel in a normal car as long as her wheelchair fit and someone was there to help her in and out. At first, I’d let her buy my tickets to whatever we were seeing, but then I realized that was unfair. I enjoyed our outings just as much as she did. And I didn’t want her to feel like she always had to pay extra, at least not with me.

  This time the call wasn’t about getting a ride or attending a cultural event. Rather, Leena wanted me to meet her friend Jutta Särkikoski. “Would Friday night after Iida’s synchronized-skating practice work?” she asked.

  After quickly conferring with Antti, I agreed. For the rest of the week, whenever I found a quiet moment at work, I googled Jutta Särkikoski and the details of the doping scandal. After ending up on a discussion board, my stomach turned: the majority of people writing comments considered Jutta a traitor to her country, even though she had just been doing her job in accordance with journalistic standards. Many of the posts questioned her professionalism, because a mere “girl” couldn’t understand the rules of the sporting world. Even if that girl was an established journalist with a degree in sports science from the University of Jyväskylä.

  The doping article was relatively easy to find after a little searching through the archives of the tabloid newspaper that had published it. The headline said it all:

  DISCUS THROWERS SALO AND TERÄVÄ DOPING

  Jutta Särkikoski, Vantaa/Nokia

  Two of Finland’s greatest hopes for the future of discus throwing, Eero Salo, 21, and Sami Terävä, 23, are suspected of using illegal doping substances, including anabolic steroids. According to information received by our newspaper, near the end of July Salo and Terävä visited Estonia by helicopter and brought back hundreds of anabolic steroid tablets. The men then sold the drug at gyms in their hometown of Vantaa and in Nokia. Through interviews with several people who purchased doping drugs and received instructions for their use from Salo and Terävä, it has been established that buyers included both professional and amateur athletes. To date, no criminal reports have been filed.