TH02 - The Priest of Evil

by Matti Joensuu

  ‘No one would top themselves like that, in between the carriages. The risk of being left a cripple is too big. We combed the tracks to see if there was a suicide note or anything, but no.’

  ‘So we can safely close that line of enquiry?’

  ‘With the current information, yes.’

  Mäki changed hands and began pulling at his other ear.

  ‘So what we’re left with is either an accident or a deliberate act.’

  ‘I believe Kallio, our witness. And I asked Tarja about those spasms. Although they’re probably the result of some form of cerebral palsy, she says they don’t affect people in any other way.’

  ‘And why would he make up something like that anyway?’

  ‘Right. And on camera three you can make him out quite clearly because of the way he walks. The tape shows him taking precisely the route he mentioned in the interview room.’

  Piipponen had appeared and was leaning against the door frame holding a blue folder under his arm. He was something of a jack-of-all-trades, always coming or going, and generally making such a fuss that people couldn’t help noticing his presence or the fact that he was going off on a case. At other times he could be quiet enough to pick up on all the latest gossip from behind closed doors. Above all he had the ability to disappear without being noticed, like a thief, and not even his closest colleagues knew where he had gone. True, his nickname Piip was a shortening of his name, but more to the point it came from the days when pagers were still in use and people constantly had to search for him by beeping him.

  ‘But what if he saw wrong?’ said Piipponen, as if he had been part of the conversation since the beginning. ‘What if the hand he saw wasn’t pushing after all but trying to grab hold of the victim?’

  ‘That’s a good point.’

  ‘Maybe you should go and talk to him again. You know, just to go over the details. One of you does the talking, the other can watch him.’

  ‘It’ll be useless,’ muttered Harjunpää. ‘But we could do it.’

  ‘On the other hand, if it was deliberate then where’s the motive?’

  ‘Precisely. And why do it with so many people around when the risk of being caught is so great?’

  ‘The victim had a clean record,’ said Onerva, and Harjunpää noticed himself deliberately trying not to look at her right hand, the one that had been badly damaged in a car crash. Regardless of the fact that the operation had been a success and that the scars were only barely visible, he couldn’t help noticing that the index finger didn’t move at all and he knew that two of the others were partially paralysed. Onerva had given up knitting. Since her recovery she hadn’t even tried it, but she didn’t want to discuss it with Harjunpää and he didn’t want to pry. Nonetheless, with great determination she had learnt to shoot with her left hand and had clearly channelled her creativity in new directions; since coming back to work she had become something of a computer genius.

  ‘I checked through all the national registers and he only appears three times: once as a witness in a car crash and twice as the plaintiff. In the first instance his phone had been stolen and in the second someone had wrecked his motorbike.’

  ‘His motorbike?’ said Piipponen, stretching in a way that left no room for interpretation.

  ‘Yes, but he was a loner, with no obvious connection to any gangs. Central intelligence checked their records.’

  ‘What else do we know about him?’

  ‘He was a perfectly average citizen. In the mobile phone business.’

  ‘Mobiles?’ Piipponen grew suddenly more interested. ‘I suppose you all remember that case when…’

  ‘Yes we do,’ Onerva interrupted him. ‘But our man was the coordinator of a bona fide company in Vuosaari and as far as we know he hasn’t been up to anything on the side.’

  ‘His wife’s statement corroborates that. That’s why he sold his bike, for a bit of extra cash.’

  Harjunpää stood up and closed the window. The rustling of the paper snakes stopped.

  ‘So far only two people have come forward in response to our appeal,’ said Harjunpää. ‘One of them sounds like it’s worth looking into, about someone seen loitering around Hakaniemi. The other one’s something along the lines of, “I saw a man in Ruoholahti sniggering to himself last summer”.’

  ‘Have they checked his clothes for fibres?’

  ‘No such luck, you can imagine the amount of blood they were covered in.’

  ‘So all we’ve got is the rather vague statement of one witness?’ Mäki asked.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Miles of CCTV footage.’

  ‘OK,’ Mäki muttered. He had stopped rubbing his ear and resolutely clasped his hands together. ‘Let’s divide it up by place and time and start going through it systematically. We need to liaise with the underground staff and check out anything they might know. And thirdly, go through our records for any underground-related cases and analyse them thoroughly.’

  ‘There’ll be thousands of them,’ said Onerva somewhat apologetically. ‘There are so many complaints filed about trouble-makers, drunks, pick-pockets…’

  ‘Then get on to IT and ask them to sort out some sort of word search programme for us. What else?’

  No one said anything, for the simple reason that they had nothing to add. Everyone had plenty of work, and it was all from the dullest end of the scale: sitting in front of a video monitor or a computer screen.

  ‘Ahem, sorry,’ said Piipponen hesitantly, clearing his throat. ‘I’ve got some news, but I’m afraid it’s not very good.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m sure you all remember when old Lörtsy had a brain haemorrhage back in November?’

  ‘Has he died?’

  ‘No, he’s still in a coma. But all his open cases are being divided throughout the division. And, well… you know how it is when you get handed a whole pile of new cases and old ones get left hanging around…’

  ‘Get to the point.’

  ‘Well, I got assigned some of his cases too and… one of them is almost identical to this one. It happened at Kaisaniemi underground station and there was an unconfirmed sighting of someone being tripped up. There was even a fairly large-scale search for a grey-haired old woman, and Lörtsy eventually brought someone in for questioning. You remember the one they called Cranky Kaija?’

  ‘The one who hit people with her walking stick?’

  ‘That’s the one, but she had a water-tight alibi. She was in the nick that night and they only let her out five minutes before the incident, so even if she had wings there’s no way she could have been in Kaisaniemi in time.’

  A number of heavy sighs could be heard across the room. None of them dared utter the words that had come into each and every one of their minds. It sounded so absurd: serial killer.

  23. Problem

  What did it mean that the boy had seen a woman at the centre of the vault?

  He pondered this question. He was sitting on a rock rubbed clear of moss, almost exactly at the top of The Brocken, perhaps slightly towards the eastern side, surrounded by high thicket, alders, birches and a few dwarf pines. He sat there thinking, and he was certain that what the boy had seen was some sort of sign, though he was unsure quite what it meant. Was it a command or a warning?

  He held a rope fifteen or so metres long and passed its knots through his fingers like a rosary, though the rope could not have been less like a rosary – it was a hunting rope. He laid it along the ground towards the east, down towards a suitable opening in the thicket, and tied it at the other end to a cotter bolt at the top of a steel pole several metres high. Suspended from the bolt was a contraption fashioned from chicken wire that resembled an old umbrella. At the foot of the pole a generous handful of breadcrumbs lay scattered on the ground.

  ‘Sumo cesi Virgilicius Maria?’

  He was searching for the most opportune moment, and that was why he hoped this was it. The boy had claimed to see a woman radiating ligh
t - one of the two incarnations of Maammo; the boy was simply a heathen and could not have known this. If it were indeed true then the boy’s vision represented an indisputable message to him.

  ‘Quelle villeum a mundo condito.’ He made the holy mark of Maammo three times and looked to the sky, but still he could not see any pigeons. This too was strange, for normally he only needed to wait ten minutes at most. Perhaps this time they too sensed that this was a monumental occasion, and therefore it was of the greatest importance which of them flew down to take their final communion. Around him the city hummed its familiar symphony, somewhere to the west the sound of sirens slashed through the air. At least this time it was not of his doing – he had not crushed a single pebble from his bag.

  ‘Sumo cesi Virgilicius Maria?’ he asked and contemplated the other option, one that was simply not as good. If the boy truly had seen the Virgin Mary, this may have been something sent by the heathen God to defy him - and Maammo. But how could he have seen the Virgin Mary, since neither she nor their God truly exist, and are nothing but a fanciful tale from the pages of books, distorted beyond recognition over the centuries. Only the Holy Big Bang and the coming of the Truth were true and real – countless scientists had been able to prove it. And if the boy had indeed seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, an instrument of the heathens’ false God, then to use the boy to set the New Big Bang in motion would be an act of extreme holiness and of the utmost devotion to Maammo. ‘Ea lesum!’

  Whatever the truth of the vision was, the boy was the right choice. The boy belonged to him, and through him belonged to Maammo, and was therefore suitable to precipitate the coming of the Truth. Indeed, there was something unusual about the boy. For a brief moment he had seen an aura shining around him. At least, he had most certainly sensed something, as the hairs on the back of his hands had stood up the way one’s hair stands when a flash of lightning strikes nearby. In addition to this the boy had swooned far easier than anyone else, and had remained unconscious for almost forty seconds. That - if anything - was proof enough.

  The pigeons had arrived! At first he heard the thrilling whoosh of their beating wings, almost like a squeal, then they appeared overhead in a great curve. There were dozens of them, probably the same flock that lived in an old dead birch near the broadcasting company. They turned once more in the air, then lowered themselves to the ground, to the same place on the rock as always. Their heads jerking forwards, they hopped greedily towards his bait. Already he could see that at least one of them was light brown – a webfoot! He held his breath and waited patiently, then he yanked the rope and the bolt came away with a metallic ping. The chicken wire cage fell crashing to the ground. The pigeons burst into flight, but only one, two, three, he counted, only three had escaped, leaving the rest fluttering wildly inside the cage.

  He did not approach them straight away. He had to let them calm down first, for perhaps an hour or two, so that they would not associate him with their fear, and he could become their saviour. Only at that moment would their blood be in perfect equilibrium, ready for the sacrifice. He quickly made the holy marks of Maammo, and extended a blessed gesture towards the horizon, thankful for the magnificent sacrificial birds it had sent him.

  24. Another Problem

  Mikko always kept his phone on silent whenever he was in his office. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, if the phone rang he had to drag himself out of the world of the book and into an entirely different reality. Far more laborious than this, however, was to get back into this imaginary world after the call had ended; to recreate the characters in his mind and begin to think and act like them. This would waste at least an hour, though generally it took two, and so a few telephone calls were enough to ruin an entire day, leaving him unable to accomplish a single line.

  The other advantage to this was that, once he had finished trying to write for the day and was beginning to make his way home, he could see whether anyone had called him. If Sanna or Matti had called him that usually meant that something serious was happening, because they at least had learned not to call him while he was working.

  It was only by chance that he happened to be standing by the window, leaning his forehead against the cold glass and staring at the telephone which lay on the window ledge, when the screen began to flash the name SANNA in a dim green light. He didn’t hesitate for a second.

  ‘Sanna?’

  ‘Hi dad… How come you answered? Sorry I…’

  ‘It’s all right. I wanted to answer. Work’s not going particularly well right now.’

  ‘Well… this might sound really odd.’

  ‘Then it should suit me fine.’

  ‘It’s just that… What does it mean if someone dreams… or has a vision of a long tunnel with bright light shining and a golden figure standing waiting for them at the end of the tunnel?’

  ‘A vision with light shining at the end of a tunnel?’ he repeated, if only to gain time to think, as he could hear from her voice that his daughter was clearly upset, worried even.

  ‘And you dreamt about this last night, did you?’

  ‘Not me, someone just asked me about it.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Not really… just a guy at work.’

  ‘You see, there’s no one right way to interpret dreams and visions, they’re so personal. Don’t tell your friend this, but I’ve read a number of books about people who have been near death or who have actually died and been resuscitated. A tunnel leading into the light and someone standing there waiting for them seems to be common in those cases. In one of the descriptions I read, the man standing at the end of the tunnel was the person’s father, who had died years before. The father wouldn’t allow him to go any further and said that it wasn’t his time yet. And then he was resuscitated!’

  ‘Oh God,’ Sanna whispered, and fell silent. Mikko sensed a cloud appear over his mind and he suddenly felt the need to lighten the tone of the conversation.

  ‘Cynics say it’s just the lights in the operating theatre… Remember that television series Iron Age?’

  ‘Not really, isn’t it really old?’

  ‘Oldish, you can borrow it from the library. Have a look at that, especially the scene where Väinö tries to solve all his problems. He goes and lies down under a boat…’

  ‘What, a rowing boat?’

  ‘Some kind of boat. Anyway, he sees the boat turn into a tunnel just like the one you described and the person he meets at the other end is himself – dead. It’s all very well put together. Then at the end he realises that he’s found what he was searching for upon the River of Death after all… Sanna? Hello?’

  He glanced at the screen – they were still connected – and quickly moved the telephone to his other ear. ‘Sanna, are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Have you spoken to Matti at all?’

  ‘I called him yesterday, I think it was. Your mother said he wasn’t home. I guess I should get the extra cash together to buy him a mobile of his own.’

  ‘She always does that – says he isn’t home. She used to do it to my friends too. Matti called me really late last night, he couldn’t get to sleep…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s in danger,’ she said, and although Mikko couldn’t see her, he knew that her lips were quivering, the way they always did when she was about to cry.

  ‘Would you care to explain?’

  ‘Matti had the vision. He’s the one that asked me about it. Some priest or magician hypnotized him or something… He’s being dragged into some weirdo cult!’

  ‘Sanna, calm down. I’ll come home straight away and you can tell me exactly what he said, OK?’

  ‘I’m… at work.’

  ‘When do you finish?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Right, I’ll be home by then. Trust me, we’ll sort this out and I’ll take care of him. OK?’

  ‘Ye-yes.’

  Mikko ended the call and his han
d dropped.

  ‘God help me,’ he whispered. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep…’Then it was as if he woke up, and his thoughts began flying back and forth, yet always returning to the realisation that he had neglected his son. In his defence he told himself that he couldn’t have done any more, that his own struggle had been too overwhelming. Nonetheless, leaving the children with Cecilia had been the wrong decision, despite the fact that she had convinced them to stay by calling him a monster. And what a ridiculous settlement he had agreed to - simply because the children had stayed with their mother he had given up his share of the house! Where was Matti right now? What did he know about Jehovah’s Witnesses? The Pentecostalists? He knew nothing about them. What about Satan worshippers?

  Everything came to an abrupt halt, as though he were somehow paralysed. A moment later he was filled with the urge to set off right away. His intuition was telling him something, he was sure of it. He felt a strange force within him. He had to find Matti, wherever he was; he’d even take him out of school if necessary. He slammed the door behind him.

  He too had been down that tunnel once, back when everything had fallen apart – and he had held the barrel of a pistol in his mouth.

  25. Flash

  Harjunpää pressed a button by the door of the video room, switching off a row of monitors and dozens of different LED lights. He returned to the control desk and began gathering up cassettes, discs and reels of tape. The day’s achievements were as much of a mess as the pile of equipment in his hands, he thought to himself. There came a knock at the door; not even the normal security keys could open it. Harjunpää dropped the material back on to the table and cursed – something he rarely did – as he was sure it was Piipponen, who was supposed to have arrived several hours ago to look through the rest of the tapes. Typical that he should turn up just when the job was finished.

  ‘Hi,’ said Onerva quietly. She had probably knocked the same way as she had a thousand times before, but he had been too worked up to recognise the familiar rhythm. ‘What’s eating you?’ she asked.