Dark As My Heart

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘What does it tell you? Being a rich man’s daughter?’

  She leaned forward again. Her low collar opened a little further.

  ‘That people who try to get close to me aren’t necessarily doing it for my sake. My ex-husband’s a good example. Ilari. His name alone should have been a warning to me. Think about it. Ilari. What does that sound like?’

  It sounded to me like a man’s name.

  ‘Ilari was perfect. From good stock, a fine, well-to-do family. My mother and father were so happy. I’m sure Ilari’s parents were, too. No one asked whether I was happy. Not even Ilari. Least of all him. But what of it? I didn’t know anything about what Ilari was thinking anyway. Would you like some wine?’

  ‘No thank you. Still none for me.’

  She looked into her glass. She drank, ran her tongue over her upper lip, licking a drop of wine into her mouth. Then she rubbed her nose.

  ‘It was a horrible life,’ she said.

  A rich man’s daughter who made a wealthy marriage, I thought. It must have been a horrible, hard life.

  ‘I just did what I was expected to do,’ she said, ‘because I wanted to be liked. Isn’t that the real reason people do things? To be loved?’

  Maybe she did have some cracks in her shell, like everyone else. Little fissures that were hidden by her appearance and her lifestyle and her black SUV, and fishing and hunting and silicone breasts and everything else. I couldn’t see the cracks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  ‘You mentioned your mother,’ I said.

  Amanda lifted her elbows off the table.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She must not be still …’

  ‘The old witch lives in Spain. She’s lived there most of my life, for nineteen years. And I haven’t really seen her since they divorced years before that and I ended up living mostly with my father, which is unusual, of course. But I suppose my life is unique in lots of ways.’

  My mother disappeared twenty years ago, I thought, and a year later Henrik Saarinen’s wife moved to Spain. The two things might be connected, or they might not.

  ‘Why did your mother move there?’ I asked.

  Amanda’s expression changed. She looked serious, her head tilted slightly to the right. She looked exceptionally beautiful.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ she said quietly. ‘Maybe she likes sunshine more than sleet. Why ask me that?’

  ‘Just wondering,’ I said, knowing that I needed to back off. ‘I can make conversation, can’t I?’

  ‘Can you?’ Amanda smiled, her face lighting up as instant-aneously as it had turned serious a moment before. ‘That’s a question you ought to ask yourself. I don’t talk to her. There’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, trying to think of another subject, but Amanda already had.

  ‘Where do you come from? I’ve told you everything. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘I think I told you at breakfast,’ I said, ‘I’m a carpenter by trade –’

  ‘I mean the part of your life that’s interesting. Ex-wives? Children? Skeletons in the closet?’

  Skeletons in the closet? Just one. My mother. Who was murdered by your father.

  ‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘No ex-wives, no children, nothing. I’m a rather dull person. An ordinary guy in every way. Very even-keel in the relationship department.’

  That last sentence wasn’t true. My life had been one long storm before Miia. Miia, who I’d left to come here, who I missed terribly, passionately. Physically, too, which was probably the reason that my eyes kept straying to Amanda’s skin and lips and striking eyes. It was a good thing I wasn’t drinking.

  ‘What else,’ she asked, pouring yet another glass of wine.

  ‘I live in Helsinki. I’ve lived there all my life.’

  ‘What part?’

  ‘Most recently in Alppila.’

  ‘It occurs to me that we’re roughly the same age and Helsinki is, in a way, a small town.’

  She looked at me as she took a drink. I remembered something I’d read long ago – by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of my mother’s favourite authors – that the rich are different from you and me. I could see it in Amanda. The way she picked up her glass, drank, talked, sat in a chair. It lacked the weight that ordinary people have on their shoulders. As she looked at me I knew that she didn’t understand anything about ordinary life. She took a drink of her wine and continued.

  ‘Are you sure we’ve never met at all, even in passing?’

  ‘I would remember you,’ I said, and understood even without Amanda’s smile what I’d said.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she said, and again I felt caught out. ‘I just have that feeling. Like we have some connection.’

  I shook my head. I felt something tearing me up inside.

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ve ever run into each other, I mean.’

  I had to get out of there.

  ‘I ought to thank you for the dinner now.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘It’s pretty late, and I have to start work at seven.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  She got up from her chair, and I did the same. Before I’d even pushed my chair in Amanda had come around the table and stood in front of me. She was standing between me and the door. She came closer, put her hands on my arms, and kissed me on the cheek. The kiss was just too long.

  ‘Thanks for the company.’

  I looked into her shining eyes, smelled her soft perfume and the wine on her breath, saw her pale skin and moist lips in the candlelight, and knew that if I had even a drop of alcohol or stayed even a minute longer, something would happen that I couldn’t afford.

  ‘Thanks for dinner. It was all very good. The food, and especially the company.’

  She loosened her grip on my arms and took a step backwards. She smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile; there was something else in it.

  ‘Good night, then.’

  ‘Good night, Amanda.’

  I stepped past her and realised that at any other time I would have turned at that moment, stood in front of her and waited for her to tilt her head ever so slightly back, answered with a careful, polite kiss, and depending on her response, kept going, or backed off, having had a taste of those perfect lips.

  I walked through the half-darkened hall to the foyer and opened the front door.

  The rain had stopped and the wind was almost totally calm. The air was still and moist, the night standing motionless, as if it were waiting for something.

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  ‘HENRIK IS COMING today.’

  Enni’s voice was a mixture of soldierly respect and motherly tenderness. She was standing in front of the window looking out, as if to get a glimpse of the lion soon to arrive. I knew that there was nothing to see. Amanda’s black Range Rover had disappeared. I thought it unlikely that she had been in any condition to drive when she left. But Enni didn’t care about Amanda. She was waiting for Henrik Saarinen’s long, grey, chauffeured Mercedes-Benz.

  Outside was a wistful, calm autumn day filled with golden sunlight. There wasn’t a trace of the night-time storm and winds as the light slanted into the room tinged with a soft yellow. It made Enni’s fiftyish face older, rounder. Her hair, worn twisted into a bun, had streaks of grey here and there that lit up brighter the closer she leaned toward the window.

  I’d listened before coming into the kitchen to be sure it was empty. I’d found what I needed to make a sandwich, brewed a large cup of black coffee, and sat down at the table to eat, when Enni gave me a fright by appearing out of nowhere.

  I couldn’t tell where she’d come from. I was sure that I knew the house now, knew what it sounded like when someone was there, how the sounds carried from room to room. But there she was next to me as I took a bite of oat bread wet with pickle, behaving as if it was completely normal that I should walk right in and sit down in her domain, the inner sanctum, although I’d
never done it before.

  I thought of what I knew about Enni. Not much; our conversations had been short and practical, information about our work and the weather and general manor business.

  ‘How long have you been working here?’ I asked.

  Enni stayed by the window facing the yard, but her eyes glanced quickly at me before returning to the gravel drive where the king would ride to his castle.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just wondering.’

  ‘Why were you wondering that?’

  I looked at her. She seemed stiff, almost frozen in position. Her fingers were stretched straight where they hung by her side.

  ‘It just occurred to me. You must know what the owner likes.’

  She glanced at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Food-wise,’ I added.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Enni said, stepping away from the window towards the countertops, the stove, her territory. She seemed to relax. She looked me in the eye in her familiar, distantly polite way. ‘Of course I do. I’ve been here almost exactly twenty years.’

  ‘More or less than twenty years?’

  I tried my best to sound less interested in this than I was.

  ‘I came here in 1993. I started in November to give me time to get used to the place before taking care of the arrangements for my first Christmas.’

  My mother disappeared in October 1993. A month later Enni started picking out the ham for Henrik Saarinen’s Christmas dinner.

  ‘How did it go, the first Christmas?’

  ‘It went well. I was already …’ Her eyes sought the window again. ‘I mean everything was more difficult in the beginning. Before I’d settled in and got to know … Things become familiar. And you learn who likes what. I’m sure it’s the same in your work.’

  I’m sure it is.

  ‘Henrik Saarinen was still married then?’

  ‘Yes. Or rather … Helena was already mostly in Spain, but officially they were still married.’

  ‘So he was mostly alone here?’

  Enni tilted her head as if she wanted to get a look at me from a different angle. Perhaps to see something that wasn’t visible before. I was still sitting at the table with a half-eaten sandwich on my plate and a mug of coffee in front of me.

  ‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘Were there other people working here then?’

  She swung her hand up to her waist.

  ‘Twenty years ago? Why would you want to know that? After all you weren’t more than …’

  ‘Thirteen,’ I said.

  ‘There were more permanent staff. There are just two of us now.’

  ‘Here in the house?’

  ‘No,’ Enni said. ‘Taking care of the garden and maintenance. It was just me in the house.’

  There was pride in her voice as she said this.

  ‘It’s a big house for one man,’ I said.

  ‘That depends how you look at it. A big man should have a big house. That’s my opinion.’

  ‘What about Amanda? She was just little then. Not even a teenager. Was she here alone?’

  I looked at Enni and ate my sandwich. There was a smile on her face now. A knowing, almost sly smile.

  ‘Forget Amanda,’ she said.

  I swallowed. That wasn’t what I had meant.

  ‘I knew it,’ Enni said, not waiting for my response. ‘I told Elias that this would happen when he said that the new caretaker was about thirty. I thought, that’s too young. Someone that age can still get ideas in his head. Not know his place, not understand how things work.’

  The coffee had gone cold. I drank it anyway. I waited for Enni to continue, but she turned away and didn’t say anything more. She started working, bending over the lower cupboards, putting a mixing bowl on the counter, opening the food cupboards, seemingly absorbed in searching for something.

  ‘When is he coming?’ I asked.

  She didn’t look at me when she answered. Around dusk. She didn’t know exactly when. She cut pats of butter as big as slices of cake into the mixing bowl.

  ‘He’ll want a sauna in the evening, of course,’ she said, still not looking at me. ‘And he’ll want to see you. All of us. It’s customary.’

  ‘Should we all stand in a row like in British movies? Those films about the life of the nobility?’

  ‘I told Elias you were too young,’ Enni said. She seemed to be smiling to herself, I thought I could hear it in her voice. ‘Much too young.’

  AUGUST 2003

  TANJA METSÄPURO DISAPPEARED in August of 2003.

  I followed the case in the news and I could see from the start that it wasn’t an ordinary one, not some drunken person who leaves a bar and is found in the nearest river with no indication of a crime. The same feeling of sure recognition, of instinctive knowledge that I’d had sitting in front of the television two years earlier shot through me.

  Tanja Metsäpuro was a 31-year-old hairdresser and single mother of two daughters who had hired a babysitter on a Saturday night and was enjoying a rare evening out in a Vantaa nightclub with a group of friends.

  A little after midnight she got up from the table, and never returned. Her friends noticed this at four a.m., when the lights flashed for last orders. None of them had paid any attention earlier, for obvious reasons. They were all in a party mood and concentrating on their own enjoyment. There was only one member of the group who said she had wondered where Tanja was, but she’d assumed that she had got up to dance and then gone to sit at another table.

  As the nightclub emptied Tanja’s friends realised she was missing. They laughed at first – Tanja must have found someone and dropped her friends like hot potatoes – but it was soon discovered that Tanja’s red leather jacket was still hanging in the cloakroom, alone in an empty row of hooks, like a question mark. One of her girlfriends asked the cloakroom attendant if he had seen Tanja. He didn’t remember, not then or later. Tanja’s friend went back into the club and tried to call her. A phone rang from the sofa they’d been sitting on.

  The next morning the babysitter woke up. Tanja’s daughters were asleep. The babysitter discovered she was the only adult in the apartment. She called Tanja’s mobile phone. Tanja’s hungover friend answered. They decided to report the matter to the police. The police took their statement and said that if Tanja hadn’t returned by the end of the day from wherever she might have spent the night, they would file a missing persons report. Tanja didn’t return. A report was filed.

  Two days later there was a quarter-page photo of Tanja in the evening paper. The sight of it made me catch my breath. It felt as if a dull knife had sliced though my gut and a cold, round stone had rolled in and lodged there.

  Tanja Metsäpuro looked like my mother. They both had thick, dark brown hair, Tanja’s long, my mother’s shoulder-length. They both had eyes that were a mix of green and blue and features that were delicate and symmetrical, a thin nose with a sharp tip, thin lips, but a smile that was broad and warm, and – if you wanted to see it – mysterious. The were both pleasant, even beautiful women in their early thirties, small, slender, and petite.

  When she disappeared Tanja had been wearing a skintight white top, black, shiny leggings, and high-heeled leather sandals. I imagine that many men in the nightclub would have noticed her, but it was a long way from that to a criminal act. Especially since Tanja hadn’t talked to anyone but her friends while they were in the club. At least not before midnight. No one knew what had happened after that.

  Someone thought that Tanja might have said she didn’t feel well. This led to the idea that she had gone outside to get some fresh air. She had done that in the past, so why not this time as well? The cloakroom attendant spiked that idea. He was sure that hadn’t happened – no one in Tanja’s group had gone in or out.

  Then it was discovered that there was another way out of the club. There was a back door that the club staff used. It opened onto the car park behind the building. The poli
ce thought of all this as well, but much too late. The footage from the video surveillance camera had already been auto-deleted. There was no other solid evidence, and nothing that would have suggested that Tanja Metsäpuro had gone out of the back door for some fresh air, or for any other reason.

  Tanja’s case was given almost a page a day in the evening tabloids for several weeks. They dug everything up: her ex-husband’s multiple bankruptcies, his failure to pay child support, the abuse charges and no-contact order that Tanja had brought against him and later dropped. But he had a watertight alibi. On the day she disappeared – in fact from two weeks before the day until a week after – he had been in the Helsinki jail. He had been a suspect in a case of abetting a drug offence. This led to rumours that Tanja herself had been involved in drugs.

  The more I read, the more certain I became. And it wasn’t just because of the similarities between the two disappearances, both cases unexpected and unexplained, both women single mothers with beautiful, suntanned faces. It also had to do with Henrik Saarinen.

  I already knew a thing or two about Saarinen. I’d had two years to find out.

  I knew where he lived, and where he worked, and I knew that he sometimes took another, less imposing car, and went out for night-time drives. When I told Ketomaa these facts he said that driving a car at night was not a crime, and that the most it could tell us about Saarinen was that he might suffer from insomnia. Besides, Ketomaa said, driving can help you think. You could pull yourself together; alone in a car you could be in the world and outside it at the same time.

  Ketomaa also said that he felt bad for me. I knew he wasn’t talking about my mother any more. He was talking about me, about my life, which he thought I was wasting.

  Tanja Metsäpuro dropped out of the headlines a month later.

  A couple on a long hike found a nice spot on the shore in the Uutela recreation area and spread a blanket to enjoy a sunny autumn morning and a well-earned picnic lunch. As they got their food and coffee out of their packs, they noticed something in the water. At first they both thought it was just something that looked like a person.