‘Living with a corpse isn’t enough to warrant sectioning him. It would be a bit extreme,’ said the doctor. He was a youngish man with a round face, but despite his age he gave off the natural authority of someone capable of rational thought and who had implicit trust in his own judgement. He walked up to the living room door, looked around for a moment, then came back.
‘Neither is being a transvestite.’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ said Harjunpää, running his fingers through his hair – there too he found a dead fly. There was something about the doctor’s attitude that bothered him. ‘Ever since he was a little boy his mother has been telling him she had hoped for a girl and that life with a girl would have been much easier. When she died, if I’ve understood right, he thought he could bring her back to life by being a girl.’
‘Aha.’
‘He’s your typical mummy’s boy. When his mother died, everything fell apart.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes, I know I’m only a policeman, but as far as I can see he’s completely incapable of looking after himself. You heard them say how he’s given away everything he owned. And just before you got here he tried to jump off the balcony. It was a close call – for me too.’
‘I’ll examine him,’ said the doctor. His voice was different now, there was something almost disparaging about it. He turned and marched into the living room with the firemen close behind him.
‘He’s been feeding the body all this time. With porridge,’ Harjunpää added, but immediately wished he hadn’t. Still, it was a fact nonetheless.
Harjunpää decided not to follow the interview but instead crept into the corridor between the kitchen and the living room. At that moment he couldn’t hear any tapping, just heavy panting. Perhaps Daddy had sensed the new arrivals in the flat and was assessing the situation. At least Jari had been taking some care of the animal: on the floor there were a dozen or so empty tins of dog food. Harjunpää didn’t stay there for long, but quietly continued towards the bedroom door and pushed it open with the tips of his fingers.
The body looked exactly the way he remembered it. The only thing he had forgotten was her mouth: her lips had dried away to reveal her teeth in their entirety, almost as if this grin were her final grotesque gesture to the world.
As many times as Harjunpää had witnessed scenes like this before, this time, for some reason, he couldn’t help thinking that this used to be a living person, Hilja Maria. Once Hilja Maria had been a little baby, suckled in her mother’s arms, with everything to look forward to: life and all its beauty and horror. Maybe Hilja Maria had once been a little girl with pigtails, skipping with the other girls in the playground, the best of them all at hopscotch.
Hilja Maria had probably been a very slim young lady who marvelled at herself, at the woman she had become, at the breathtaking power of creation that womanhood brought with it. At some point a man called Simo had appeared – the same man who had been dead for over thirty years – and they had told each other how much they loved one another. Because of their existence and their love a son appeared, Jari, whose hoarse crying could now be heard from behind the wall and for whom the doctor was currently writing out a referral to a mental hospital.
Harjunpää couldn’t quite understand where it had all gone wrong. Perhaps after becoming a widow Hilja Maria couldn’t understand that Jari had not been born simply to be there for her, but also for himself - and even then only for a short time. Or perhaps she truly believed she owned something: a child, a son, and through that another person’s life and freedom. Still, Harjunpää couldn’t bring himself to believe that Hilja Maria really wished she had had a girl. It was all just talk, a way of teasing Jari.
‘Timo.’
‘Yes?’ said Harjunpää turning around.
Rummukainen had appeared behind him and was sizing up the body, though even now he refrained from commenting on the scene in front of him.
‘No use talking to him. He got an injection up the arse and now they’re taking him off. Eränen’s squad is waiting downstairs and they’ll take him. Listen…’
Only then, from the echoes, did Harjunpää realise that the crying was coming from the stairwell, and perhaps it wasn’t crying after all but an agonised wailing: like frayed steel wire, lacerating everything in its path.
‘OK, let’s get that dog out of here,’ Harjunpää said finally. He remembered only too well how high and how heavily the dog’s paws had thumped behind the door when he had arrived, and he had not forgotten Jari’s blind fear and his claim that the dog would go straight for the throat.
They stopped outside the cupboard door: the smell of urine and excrement hung in the air and the tapping behind the door resounded back and forth like a distant drumming. Daddy was probably more restless now than earlier, it must have smelt and heard all the strange people in the apartment. Harjunpää instinctively brought his hand up to his throat and looked at Rummukainen. His eyes seemed uncharacteristically fixed on the floor. Even his shoulders seemed to be drooping slightly.
‘I don’t know,’ Harjunpää hesitated. ‘Can something like this really make a dog go mad too?’
‘Well, if it’s enough to make a human go mad…’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I once had to deal with a boxer dog that had eaten its dead master’s backside, but that was only out of starvation.’
‘Timo.’
‘Yes?’
‘If I tell you something, can we keep it between ourselves?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘You see,’ he began and raised his eyes from the floor. His expression was no longer that of a policeman carefully registering the details of a room; this was a side of Rummukainen he’d never met before. ‘We once went to my aunt’s place in Pälkäne – I must have been about six at the time. Their garden backed on to a graveyard, you could see all the crosses and gravestones over the wall. They had an outdoor toilet back then and I used to be terrified of going out there because of this graveyard…’
‘And?’
‘Well, they had this big dog, some sort of Alsatian. It used to be a stray. And well… Once it wouldn’t let me out of the toilet. It stood there growling and baring its teeth and had me cornered up against the stone wall. I must have been there for about an hour before any of the adults noticed. And believe me I was scared.’
For a moment both men fell silent and tried to avoid looking each other in the eye. With the tip of his shoe Rummukainen scraped dead flies into a pile. The doors of at least three cars could be heard slamming shut outside.
‘I can take anything else in this job, but not dogs,’ Rummukainen finally broke the silence. ‘But nobody knows that.’
‘And they still don’t know. Where’s your squad partner?’
‘Out in the car. He’s still young, almost parted company with his breakfast when we got to the door.’
Harjunpää was silent. Part of him was still following what was happening inside the cupboard. He could hear panting, whining, the dog crying, but not growling, which he thought must be a good sign, as he vaguely remembered hearing that dogs only growl when they are about to attack.
‘I’ll open the door and grab it,’ he said finally. His mouth was dry and he didn’t like it, because he knew that dogs smell fear. He licked his lips and reached into his jacket for his revolver, but decided to leave it there for the time being. Instead he walked over to the coat rack in the hallway and picked up the leash hanging there. It was a robust piece of material, clearly made for a large, powerful dog.
Harjunpää stepped right up to the cupboard door. He slid one of his feet along the edge to stop the dog from bounding out and placed his hand on the handle – his palms, by now, were sticky with sweat. There came a sharp click as Rummukainen cocked his gun. Harjunpää glanced behind him – the last thing he wanted was to be struck by a stray bullet – but Rummukainen nodded reassuringly and pointed his gun at the floor. He was obviously preparing himse
lf for the worst. But now his expression was resolute once again, and the six-year-old boy who had just a moment ago peeped out through his eyes was nowhere to be seen.
‘And how are you, Daddy?’ said Harjunpää trying to make his voice as friendly as possible. Something told him it would be wise to keep talking. ‘Come on out of there, boy. No, it’s not nice in there, is it?’ He pulled the door handle down and the padding stopped. The dog was clearly standing right by the door. Harjunpää still couldn’t hear any growling.
He pulled the door wide open and the smell intensified. The dog was incredibly big. It had to be a cross between a Great Dane and another large dog, because it certainly wasn’t a pedigree – even with its head slightly drooping it was still level with Harjunpää’s chest. It was completely black, and perhaps this made it seem even larger than it actually was.
‘Come on out Daddy, you old mutt,’ said Harjunpää, trying to coax it out of the cupboard. The dog sniffed the air loudly and suspiciously, then took a few steps forwards.
‘Come on, boy, and we’ll take you for a walk.’
With slow, heavy steps Daddy finally plodded out of the cupboard and cried, whining constantly. Harjunpää thought how terribly sad it looked, almost as if it knew precisely what had taken place: its mother had died and, in a way, so had its master. It began sniffing Harjunpää’s hand, patting it with its dry nose, and finally licked his fingers.
There came another click as Rummukainen replaced the safety catch on his revolver.
6. M. M. M.
Someone called out his name; rapidly, over and over, as if they were thrashing him over the head with a twig. ‘Mikko! Mikko!’
But he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to.
‘Mikko!’
He didn’t want to be Mikko again, clutching terrified at someone’s legs or round their neck; he didn’t want to keep watch at the door any longer, because it was nasty and said bad things.
He read through the opening again very slowly, thinking about every word, but it was pointless. His eyes saw the words in front of him, saw the rest of the text, but he couldn’t hear it in his soul. His soul was broken. He had lost count of how many years it had gone on. His sense of rhythm had vanished, and when it came to writing prose, rhythm was everything: it dictated the words, their length and order, the form and structure of sentences, paragraphs and chapters, their size and relation to one another – an ear for rhythm was vital.
His soul had a good ear for rhythm. But now it felt castrated, a pile of rust and rubble, and in a hushed but persistent voice it argued against everything he did, making things seem shameful and bad and ugly, and simply not allowing him to be good.
Yet again he felt a strange sorrow slowly awakening within him. Though normally he would have quickly run from it, this time he decided to listen for a moment. It was still the same anxious feeling that made his shoulders tremble, that made him feel like weeping. He sighed heavily and let it pass, grabbed hold of his papers and began once again to read from the beginning.
But he was too exhausted. All at once he felt the fatigue of a sleepless night and years of futile attempts at writing. He gave in, cast his papers on to the table and sat there staring at them, his head bowed.
That night not only had his stomach been tense – he had spent the early hours running to the toilet every fifteen minutes – but his hands had been restless too. His fingers had left sticky dents on the sheets of paper. If paper were snow, someone might have thought a stubby-legged creature had plodded across it. He wondered what it might have looked like and decided that it must have been like floor dust rolled up into a ball. Suddenly he could almost see it: it had a wicker tail covered in thin hairs and a pair of deep red eyes as round as pearls. In the middle of all this he remembered the slipper - and the red-eyed creature died in a flash.
It was made of brown checked material and had fallen off Father’s foot. There was a hole in his sock, right at the heel, though it didn’t look like a hole at all, but rather like an object. It looked like he’d stood on a ping-pong ball, which had become stuck there forever, never to bounce again. Its only function was to remain there and be crushed little by little into nothingness, under Father’s immense weight.
‘Damn it,’ he hissed and stood bolt upright. He was covered in sweat, droplets fell out of nowhere on to the lenses of his glasses, and he glanced furtively through the morning darkness surrounding him, scanning the corners and turning to look at the floor behind him. Eventually he noticed the soothing colours of the familiar painting on the wall. He was home. Safe.
Or rather, he was in the place he called home: a tiny bedsit in the middle of town, amongst unfamiliar people, almost directly opposite Kallio church; so close in fact that its bells plagued him. The walls in this room had seen other peoples’ lives, but not his; the ceiling didn’t know how to protect him while he was thinking, creating new worlds back when everything was still fine; the floor didn’t know his feet, couldn’t steer him on to the right path, a path that would bring him life: people, people’s deeds, the mindless chaos that one day becomes a novel.
Besides living in a false home, he was somewhere else too, a place he despised. He despised that state of mind. Six years on the trot, and on the door to this state of mind hung a sign bearing the word HELL.
In his profession he ought to have been able to describe it well, but he could not. If he could have painted it, he would have depicted how a person can fall by the wayside, being sucked further and further down, engulfed in an abyss of murky water; how moss covers even the tiniest glimmer of light and water floods into the chest. How you hope against hope that a hand will reach out from somewhere. But no hand ever appears – nothing but eyeless fish swimming around you, their round white mouths shouting: ‘Shame on you! You are guilty and should be ashamed!’
‘Dad?’
‘What?’ he gave a start, as if he had been caught in the act, up to no good, and immediately he could feel the anxiety draining into his hands, and they began to quiver as though he were ill.
‘Is… is everything all right, Dad?’
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘You were puffing and blowing again,’ said Sanna, her voice thick with sleep. ‘And swearing.’
‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘I have to get up now anyway. Have you been up all night?’
‘No, only since three o’clock.’
‘And you’re sure everything’s OK?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I was just thinking through a really exciting chapter. With a very nasty man.’
He stood up and walked the few metres to the end of the screen. Its frame and slats were made of unvarnished wood but otherwise it was nothing but white, transparent paper. They had bought it in a shop near the ring road, to split up the room.
‘Try and sleep a while longer,’ he said and only then realised how empty it sounded. The important thing was that he had walked across the room and now looked his daughter in the eye. ‘I’ll wake you before I leave. And I’ll make you a cup of tea and a sandwich.’
‘OK,’ she sighed and rested her head on the pillow. ‘Don’t forget to leave me some money for the bus. Mari and I are going to look at that flat today.’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you liked the place… I’ll leave the money in the hall cupboard. Have a good day then.’
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you seen Matti at all?’
‘Well… you know how he hates me.’
‘No he doesn’t, not really, it’s just that he’s been hurt so badly, that’s all. You have a good day too.’
‘Thanks.’
He went back to his desk and hopelessly picked up his papers, knowing that nothing would come of reading them again. It suddenly struck him how much he missed his son and his real home in Kulosaari; he missed the life he had lost, the years when Sanna and Matti were still little and everything was just right. With uncomfortable certainty he suddenly fel
t that nothing like that would ever happen to him again, that from now on grey days would follow, one after the other, and that soon the weekend would be no different from a Thursday. Another grey morning was dawning. Soon he would trudge down the hill to Hakaniemi, take a rattling underground train to Kontula and shut himself inside the even smaller rented room he called his office. The years went by as quickly as ever – four years of a state grant behind him and he hadn’t been able to write a thing. In less than a year’s time he would have no choice but to return to the post office and the drudgery of his job in the sorting office.
He glanced drowsily over the first page and somewhere deep inside him, almost beyond his reach, he could sense that perhaps this was good prose after all, but the cold fact remained that it was of absolutely no use to him whatsoever.
He turned and stared at the bookshelf: there in a row stood his eight novels. The words Mikko Matias Moisio appeared on the spine of each book, leading his colleagues at the post office to tease him incessantly. Some of them had given him the nickname the Three M’s.
His novels formed a series and they had brought him considerable renown both in Finland and abroad.
It was a series about a happy family.
7. Jam
To be absolutely specific, the vehicle was one belonging to the arson unit of the Violent Crimes Squad of Helsinki’s municipal police. Not surprisingly it was known as simply the ‘Fire Engine’, even though this particular one wasn’t red but white, just like all the other police Transporter vans, containing nothing personal that could identify the owners. Only a sharp eye would have noticed it was a police vehicle, from the two flashing blue lights hidden behind the cooling vent.
Officers from other squads were allowed to use the cars as necessary, and this time it was Harjunpää’s turn to borrow it. He approached the car from behind, almost dragging his feet. At this Elisa would certainly have noted that her husband wasn’t in the best of moods. Harjunpää took a deep breath. Though he could already sense the exhaust fumes drifting in across the Western Highway, he enjoyed the scent of Lauttasaari in the spring. It was a pleasant mix of budding birch trees, lawns slowly awakening and the sea finally released from the grip of ice. The air smelled and tasted of life.
The Priest of Evil Page 4