Dark As My Heart

by Antti Tuomainen

  If there was one thing I liked about this place it was the sauna. I had permission to warm it up even when the owner wasn’t there. The day before I’d done just that. The steam of the wood-heated sauna was sweet and leisurely, falling over my back like a hot, soothing cloak. I went straight from the sauna into the sea and swam a little circuit in the freezing water. After that I’d sat on the terrace breathing peacefully, languid, and forgotten for a moment who I was, why I’d come here.

  There was still just one boat at the dock, Amanda Saarinen’s boat was nowhere to be seen. The wind grew stronger. The drops were smaller and angrier. There were more of them, falling thick. At first only a few waves had tufts of foam on them, then more and more. The wind was growing colder and fiercer.

  I listened for a motor but all I could hear was the sea, in thousands of surging waves, and a wind that pushed everything before it – the rain, the sauna house, the trees on the shore. What did it matter to me if somebody wanted to defy the sea and rain and wind, the whole world?

  Visibility was abysmal. I turned on the lights that hung from the posts around the sauna terrace. They were just party lights, of course, but even so, you might be able to get your bearings from them, provided you could get them in view. I looked at the waves and thought about the aluminium boat floating on them. The wind was so strong now that I had to shift my stance to get a firmer footing. The cold rain froze my face and hands.

  I thought that if the waves close to shore were this high, heavy whitecaps crashing together, then the situation out on the water must be much worse. How far off were the good fishing spots? It wasn’t my concern, of course. Boats in trouble could call the coast guard. Boats in trouble had to do that themselves. But what if someone was in trouble and didn’t have a phone with her?

  Before I realised what I was doing I had walked to the dock, and all the way to the end. I was wet through. I took a couple of steps to the left, then the right. I kept my eyes on the water. I tried to shove my hands in my pockets to warm them, but my trousers were so cold and pasted to my legs that it did no good. The waves were growing before my eyes. The wind had changed to a steady gale. It felt like standing in a wind tunnel. The rain struck my face with so much force that my skin stung. I was shaking with cold. I wiped my eyes and squinted out at the dark water.

  I heard the sound of an outboard motor. First in bursts, like a chainsaw or lawnmower that won’t start. Then I saw a clear, lone little light. I stood for a moment longer on the dock to assure myself of what I saw and heard. The sound grew louder, although it still disappeared completely at intervals. The light disappeared, too, intermittently, but it always came back again. I thought of the boat on the high waves, rising atop one and sinking between them again.

  As the sound of the motor became clearer and the light shone more and more often and stayed in view for longer stretches of time, I started to feel stupid. As if I’d been caught at something. But what?

  The aluminium boat tossed like a feather on the towering waves. At times it was at the crest of a wave and almost perpendicular to the dock, but it maintained its direction. A few frozen minutes passed. Then I heard Amanda’s voice through the sound of the motor, the waves, and the wind. She was asking for help mooring.

  The boat’s bright light lit up the dark like a tenacious little sun. Amanda stood up, got the rear rope tied to the buoy, took hold of the rudder and, with the rope in one hand, steered and opened the throttle to bring the boat closer to the dock, then took a couple of steps towards the bow, threw me the bow rope, stepped back and, once she’d seen that the boat was close enough, killed the engine, tied her own rope off, and went forward again. Without speaking, she threw me another bow line. I tied it off, too. The cold had numbed my fingers. It felt as if I was watching someone else’s hands tie the knots.

  I reached out to help her ashore. I couldn’t see her face. Her hand was small in mine and she made her way off the boat as nimbly as she had boarded it.

  I turned almost immediately and we walked to the sauna. Amanda walked beside me. She still hadn’t spoken. She had a bucket in one hand and in it were some perch with their bellies sliced open. The essence of the past hour seemed to be concentrated in those open bodies – the denial of what I knew was going to happen, the inevitability of it, the bad feeling I had about where all this was leading to.

  A thought came to me from somewhere back in history class about priestesses in ancient Greece or Rome predicting the future from the entrails of fish, then I drifted back to this moment, the paleness of Amanda’s face and the knowledge of how handy she was with a knife, and the image of an heiress who hunted and fished felt logical now, completely mundane.

  We stopped on the sauna porch. We were sheltered from the rain, but not the wind.

  In the light on the porch I saw her face. Her cheekbones stood out. Her skin looked thin, transparent.

  ‘Thanks for the help,’ she said, and turned to look at me. Her eyes, framed by her damp black hair and her bone-white face in the artificial light, were like wet, blue-grey pearls.

  Water streamed onto the floor of the terrace. She looked into my eyes again.

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This,’ she said, lifting up her bucket to show me the three large perch, their gutted bellies like broad, cold smiles. ‘I’ll make us some supper. We’ll eat in half an hour.’

  JULY 2003

  THE OFFICER’S NAME was Ketomaa. He had been the principal investigator of my mother’s case in the Helsinki Police violent crimes unit. He was the one with the shiny forehead, the man who told me in a patient voice that my mother was missing. Now, eight years later, he listened to my story without speaking, and when I’d finished, asked, ‘On television?’

  ‘Yes. The other night. Some current events show where they interviewed people about the recession at the beginning of the nineties.’

  ‘Henrik Saarinen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ketomaa leaned back in the metal café chair. The shore of Kaivopuisto was humming with people in the summer heat – tourists, Helsinki locals, people of all ages, sizes, and shapes. We’d succeeded in finding a quiet table at the edge of the café terrace. Ketomaa had sunglasses perched on his nose, the kind that had been out of fashion for ten or fifteen years.

  ‘They transferred the case to the central police years ago,’ he said.

  ‘This is easy to check. Just find out where Henrik Saarinen was on the ninth of October, 1993. The police must have ways of doing that.’

  Ketomaa didn’t answer. His face was turned toward Suomenlinna Island. The sun burned almost white above us, at its highest point of the year. The heat felt like a suit of clothes you couldn’t take off.

  Ketomaa tasted his lemon soda. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘How are things with you?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your life. Have you finished school? Found work?’

  ‘University student. Carpenter.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad.’

  Ketomaa was a tall, thin man. His forehead shone as brightly as ever. He had his right leg thrown over his left, one foot reaching down like a giraffe bending to drink. He seemed to think for a moment, then adjusted his sunglasses.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I was given the case and I did my best, but we don’t have anything. We were in the dark from beginning to end.’

  ‘That’s why I’m telling you this,’ I said.

  He let the comment pass. He did it deftly, as if my words were evaporating in the heat.

  ‘One minute your mother was at work, working overtime with two other people, and the next minute she wasn’t. Her coat was left on the back of her chair, her bag was on her desk, with her wallet in it, next to a stack of receipts and a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her co-workers thought she’d gone to the toilet. Then an hour passed and they started to wonder where she was. They looked for her. The ground-floor door was
unlocked. Maybe it just happened to be unlocked, or maybe it was left that way on purpose. Your mother doesn’t smoke, so she had no need to go out there. And since she doesn’t smoke, we couldn’t check cigarette butts to see if she was the one who’d opened the door. Another hour went by, then another. In the morning the police arrived. I arrived.’

  Ketomaa loosened his tie. His armpits were wet through.

  ‘There were no clues on her phone. Later – too late – we thought of looking around the building – tyre tracks, things like that. It had rained, of course. It was October. We got nothing from the surveillance cameras. We searched for cars based on witnesses’ statements. Nothing. We went through every possibility – public transport, airports, everything. We checked her bank account, combed through your apartment.’

  He stopped speaking and took a drink.

  ‘I know all that,’ I said.

  ‘I know you know.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Without a body, we have nothing.’

  ‘Can’t we have a suspect first? A murder suspect?’

  ‘For that there has to be a murder. There isn’t one. There’s no basis for suspecting anyone of anything.’

  Seagulls screeched. A crack appeared in Ketomaa’s concrete exterior. His voice grew thin.

  ‘I can only imagine how you must feel. I feel bad. I can’t even fathom what your feelings are. I’m sure all kinds of things come into your mind, hunches based on one thing or another.’

  ‘My mother said she’d met someone.’

  ‘I know. We’ve had this conversation.’

  ‘Why would I have that kind of feeling about Saarinen if he had nothing to do with it? Why was his voice familiar to me?’

  Ketomaa turned away and looked out at the islands. I looked at the back of his head. His earlobe was nearly transparent against the sea and sky. He adjusted his sunglasses and turned back towards me.

  ‘This is just between us. Of course we knew who owned the business. And of course we went through everything connected with the job, the workplace, the business, and its owner. And we did find something, but it didn’t have anything to do with your mother or her disappearance.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Nothing significant. And I can’t tell you about it. But it had nothing at all to do with your mother. It had to do with Henrik Saarinen. We were going to question him, but he was in Stockholm at the time. So that was that.’

  ‘Stockholm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A person can get here from Stockholm in an hour …’

  Ketomaa dropped his right leg off his left and turned in his chair so nimbly that I forgot his height, and his age – nearing sixty.

  ‘A person can get here from Stockholm in an hour and kidnap a woman and hide her body without a trace, particularly if he’s the boss and everyone in the place recognises him. And in another hour he can be back in Stockholm. Because he never actually left. Some things just are what they are and there’s nothing we can do to change them. Saarinen isn’t connected to this case.’

  His sunglasses were pointed directly at me. I assumed that the pale grey eyes behind their dark brown lenses were staring me straight in the eye.

  ‘You sound certain,’ I said.

  Ketomaa opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He turned his profile to me again and leaned back in his chair. We sat for a moment in silence. A champagne cork popped a couple of tables away, a happy hurrah went up, the bottle clinked against the rims of the glasses.

  ‘We did what we could,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘It was ten years ago.’

  ‘What kind of answer is that?’

  He slid his soda bottle a centimetre forward, a centimetre back.

  ‘When a case is left unsolved, everyone feels uncertain. What should we have done differently? What did we miss? Who’s to blame? Where’s the weak link?’

  He loosened his fingers from the bottle, laid his hand on the table.

  ‘I understand you better than you think I do. You were thirteen. I remember you. That first night. It felt unfair. I understand that it still troubles you.’

  ‘Not any more. I know who did it.’

  Ketomaa took off his sunglasses and turned to face me. The whites of his grey eyes were threaded with red.

  ‘I don’t have children of my own. There was a time when I thought that by doing this kind of work I could help somebody have a better life. Sort of lead them in the right way. Give something. That’s what I thought that day. Did I succeed? Maybe not. Time will tell.’

  He looked at the sea, squinting.

  ‘I hope you learn how to let go. No matter what happens, no matter how tragic it might be, you have to keep moving forward. I once heard someone say that life doesn’t let you stand still. You can’t just lie there when you’re under fire. If you don’t force yourself to move forward you’ll start sliding backwards.’

  I noticed that I hadn’t touched my coffee. I didn’t know why I’d ordered it in this furnace. There was a splotch of fat on the surface that looked like an accident. Ketomaa continued.

  ‘You only have one life. You’re young and you have all kinds of possibilities. Don’t ruin it by starting to see personal messages everywhere you look, or hear the television talking directly to you. I see people like that every day on the job. They don’t fare well. Ever. Obsessions don’t have happy endings.’

  He leaned his elbows on his knees, looked at me again, and swung his unfashionable sunglasses in his hand. I didn’t say anything. Ketomaa sighed and put the glasses back on. We watched in silence as a boat slipped slowly past with its sails lowered.

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  THE CUTLERY CLINKED against the white plates and the rustle of my napkin was like the roar of a waterfall as I lifted it to wipe my mouth. I had tried to locate Enni in the kitchen or its vicinity but I didn’t hear her bustling activity or the usual groan she emitted when getting up, bending over, or otherwise exerting herself. Maybe she’d surrendered the kitchen as a favour to Amanda and walked the short distance to her apartment, which was in the restored barn.

  Although I felt uncomfortable and was trying my best to be on my guard, I had to admit that the food was good. The perch fillets were lightly breaded, seasoned with garlic, and fried in butter, the mashed potatoes were creamy and the roasted beetroot and carrots were crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. I praised the meal. Amanda glanced at me.

  ‘Enni is a master,’ she said. ‘Still no wine for you?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘None at all? Ever?’

  ‘Not today.’

  She looked at me for a moment and poured some white wine for herself. I didn’t want to explain why I wasn’t drinking. One glass always led to another, and a third, and a tenth, and eventually to decisions and deeds that I later regretted.

  I finished the last bite, set my knife and fork on the edge of my plate, wiped my mouth and tucked the dark green paper napkin under the edge of my plate. I looked up and my eyes once again met Amanda’s.

  ‘If you’re wondering whether I offer dinner to all the maintenance men, the answer is no,’ she said. ‘This is the first time. It’s rare that I’m surprised by a storm. I wanted to chat with you.’

  I didn’t say anything. Amanda tasted her wine before speaking again.

  ‘You see that? If you were anyone else you would have asked me why I want to chat with you, what about. But you’re not asking. You go with the flow, take whatever comes. You’re quiet and just – I don’t know – waiting, I suppose. That’s what you’re doing. Waiting. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact I wish I could do the same. Wish I could have done the same.’

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  Amanda smiled. Or that’s how I interpreted the flash of her white teeth, anyway.

  ‘You’re sharp. You always steer the conversation to something other than yourself.’

  I leaned back in my chair as f
ar as I could. I thought it was still a little too early to say good night. And after the relaxing sauna and dinner, I thought, let things flow where they will, let the conversation carry you along. But be careful.

  ‘There must be some reason for your guardedness,’ Amanda said. ‘You’re not afraid of me, are you? I’m sure there’s no need to be. There’s no one else in the house. I’m twenty centimetres shorter than you, and thirty kilos lighter. I’m the one who ought to be wary. I don’t know you. The closest neighbour besides Enni is almost a kilometre away. I just thought we might have something in common.’

  She leaned her elbows on the table. I noticed how little she’d eaten. She’d hardly touched her dinner. My own plate was nearly licked clean. I tried to interpret the expression on her face, keeping well in mind who she was, and whose daughter.

  ‘I don’t know what that would be,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you think of anything?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m not trying to hit on you, by the way,’ she said. ‘I can make conversation, can’t I? Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  I thought about Miia. I shook my head.

  ‘Not even a girlfriend.’

  She picked up her wineglass and looked over it at me. The thoughts that entered my mind as I took in her dark eyes, framed by make-up, her full, wet lips, her slender hands and arms and ample breasts, weren’t the kind I particularly needed. I reminded myself again why I’d come to Kalmela, why I was sitting there like a good boy, why it was generally a good idea to keep my distance and give her a certain impression: I planned to catch the father of the woman across from me for what he had done twenty years ago, I planned to find out how he had murdered my mother. If this required me to play my part flawlessly, I would.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  Amanda smiled. ‘What about me? I’m a rich man’s daughter. That tells you something, doesn’t it? I was married once, and engaged twice, and now I’m by myself. I studied finance and used to work in a brokerage firm. Now I’m focused on other things.’