Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  They waited around the corner where they could still see the door to the house.

  Vanags came out without the shopping bag. After pulling the door closed, he walked to his car. Rapidly pulling out, in twenty seconds he was gone.

  ‘No rush,’ Paddy said. ‘Next he’ll go to Assets.’

  The Assets strip club was easily distinguishable from the surrounding business premises, which were already shuttered for the night. The glow of the neon signs flashing in the windows was visible from a considerable distance in the twilight.

  Paddy stopped a couple of hundred metres from Vanags’ car, which was parked directly in front of the bar.

  ‘Just a quick check,’ Paddy said, getting out, and Lia understood that he expected her to wait.

  Approaching it on the opposite side of the street, Paddy stopped directly across from the bar. There he dug out from his pocket a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and a moment later blew a wisp of smoke into the air.

  Paddy looked at the bar and then crossed the street. His face illuminated by the advertisements, he looked in for a moment and then quickly returned to the car.

  ‘Good performance,’ Lia said. ‘Bloke who wants to go into a strip club but can’t work up the nerve.’

  ‘Vanags is in there. He’s at the bar talking to the proprietor, with a pint in front of him. He’ll be there for a while,’ Paddy said.

  They waited patiently. Paddy turned the conversation to Lia.

  ‘How did you and Mari meet?’

  Lia described that night at the White Swan the previous spring. She did not tell how the evening had continued on the border of Greenwich Park, but Paddy did not enquire any further. He just laughed hearing how Mari had answered Lia’s colleagues’ questions at the pub.

  ‘Mari’s understanding of human nature is something else,’ Paddy said. ‘An exceptional woman in every respect.’

  ‘How did you meet?’ Lia asked.

  ‘She hired me for a job. I can’t say what, but as the client she can if she chooses to.’

  The next question surprised Lia.

  ‘Can you tell me about Finland?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lia said.

  She told Paddy about the Nordic welfare state, which Finland still was in many ways. Having a social conscience was often a distinguishing characteristic of people who grew up there.

  ‘Although I imagine that’s changing now,’ Lia said.

  The dominant mood for Finns was a melancholy placidity, she said. Melancholy in the sense that people did not dream much there – they weren’t in the habit of fantasising about grand or extraordinary things. Placid because life was good. People’s cares could mostly be solved. In Finland you had every opportunity imaginable, but most people’s goals were commonplace and practical.

  Lia found herself getting caught up in the topic. They compared the differences between their countries, and Lia analysed Finnish women.

  Paddy listened carefully. When Lia finished, he said, ‘I’ve thought a lot about what it is about Mari that’s so exceptional. Is it her or her Finnishness?’

  Lia smiled.

  That’s the same question Martyn Taylor seems to have asked about me.

  ‘I think Mari is pretty exceptional even among Finnish women,’ she said.

  They both liked Mari. This thought vexed Lia somewhat as she felt a fleeting twinge of jealousy. Here she was sitting with an attractive man. They could be talking about anything and getting to know each other better, but instead they were talking about their friend.

  Lia was not looking at Paddy directly, but she was still strongly aware of his virility, the woollen jumper and the man inside.

  When the memory came, Lia found herself utterly disoriented. The woollen jumper feeling. The reason she had chosen London all those years ago.

  Paddy is a man I could feel safe with.

  Lia nodded a few times as Paddy talked, to conceal her discomfiture.

  A man I could have a family with.

  Lia had never thought with any seriousness of starting a family. She had met precious few men who could have made that dream concrete for her.

  With the men she dated she was usually just trying to learn how to be close to another person. She had lost that ability once, during the year when she learned to fear. Brief encounters with men in London had meant sex and overcoming her physical self, taming the fear lurking within.

  But sitting with Paddy she felt stable.

  They had been waiting for Vanags for more than an hour. Lia wondered how long she could sit there with her mind so befuddled with all these thoughts.

  Of course she realised that she was not dreaming of a relationship or family with Paddy specifically. She was thinking of some other man in the future.

  I’ve never thought of myself as a woman who could become a mother. And a wife. But perhaps it is possible. Someday.

  She had had to live for twenty-eight years in order to be able to think of herself starting a family.

  In the end she was forced to push these thoughts aside as Kazis Vanags walked out of the bar.

  Lia and Paddy followed his car, even though Paddy already knew that he was going home to Romford. To Lia’s surprise, Vanags’ residence was a well-kept terraced house in a wealthy-looking area with a lovely view onto a narrow river.

  ‘Whatever he’s doing, he makes good money,’ Paddy said.

  He made an entry about Vanags’ schedule on his mobile.

  ‘That’s it for today,’ he said. ‘Off to Kidderpore Avenue then.’

  With that they drove to Hampstead in a tranquil, weary silence.

  ‘Pretty place,’ Paddy said as he parked his car in front of Lia’s hall of residence.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Lia asked.

  They knew Vanags’ evening routine, Paddy observed. Now they needed to discuss with Mari how to proceed.

  Lia thanked him for the lift and walked to her door without looking back. She heard that Paddy waited until she entered the stairway before starting the car and driving off.

  For hours Lia lay awake, waiting for exhaustion to overcome her, but sleep didn’t come. She tried to read her books about Latvia, but nothing came of it. She searched for her London, Good for You! travel guide, but reading that was just as impossible.

  Chaos swirled in her head. Sitting next to Paddy, that surprising feeling of security had triggered it.

  Not just daydreams about a family. No, there was also that fear that she had never fully shaken.

  Lia went to her computer. After hesitating for a moment, she typed a few words into the search engine. She had never allowed herself to do this, not once in all the years she had lived in London.

  She looked for the person who was the reason she had left her home.

  Finding the familiar name took time, but not much. The search results were few, but the person did still exist. He was doing things, living life in his own way.

  An old, familiar feeling rose in Lia’s mind. Not fear as such, but instead the memory of its power, the memory of how living with it had felt.

  She had got over it. Or had she?

  She shut down the computer and went to her bed. The tears that came were only a physical reaction. She knew the crying was a result of the surge of emotions. She was just processing.

  This was the second time in a year that she had cried. The previous time had been because of the Latvian woman.

  The crying only lasted a moment, and in its wake came weariness and sleep.

  28

  The following evening, Mari called Lia to the Studio. They went through the information they had on Kazimirs Vanags. Paddy had briefed Mari about everything he had found out about him.

  Lia was relieved that Paddy was not present now though.

  I’m not infatuated with him. But too many things came at once yesterday, too much to think about.

  One of Kazis Vanags’ companies, Dynos, owned the flat upstairs in the building on Vassall Road. In recent years a neighbour had l
odged three complaints with the property management company, complaining of the number of people coming and going and the screams that frequently emanated from the flat. The complaints had not led to any action. The property company had called Vanags, who claimed that he had rented it as a shared flat to some students.

  Vanags owned the terraced house on Sangley Road in his own name, and another company he controlled, Riga Trade, owned Assets. He did not have any unpaid taxes, but the registered information about the companies’ employees and social security contributions was woefully incomplete.

  With the help of his acquaintances in the police, Paddy had checked Vanags’ criminal record. Over the years the authorities had interviewed him three times, twice on suspicion of assault and once as a witness in an assault and battery incident. None of these cases had gone to court.

  ‘The Eastern European criminal network protects its own,’ Mari said.

  In two of the cases the victim had been a woman, one involving a large knife and the other strangulation. In the third case, a young Russian man had been found beaten in an alley near the strip club. As the police investigation proceeded, the man stopped talking, and the case dried up.

  Vanags had money, as his expensive flat, expensive car and payroll of several employees demonstrated.

  ‘What do we do now? Do we give this information to the police?’ Lia asked.

  ‘I’m torn,’ Mari said.

  If they arrested Vanags, he probably already had some plan in place. His associates would probably destroy any remaining evidence. If they got him for pimping, something bigger might go unsolved – like the Latvian woman’s murder.

  ‘Let’s not give this to the police yet then,’ Lia said.

  ‘I agree,’ Mari said.

  They decided to revisit the issue later.

  Teasing, Lia told Mari how Paddy had asked about her the previous night.

  ‘What did he ask?’ Mari enquired with obvious interest, and Lia gave an account of the conversation she had had with Paddy about Finland.

  ‘What’s really going on between you two?’ Lia asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Neither of us has made any moves. It’s hard to say what might come of it.’

  Paddy knew an immense amount of the Studio’s business, Mari reminded Lia. That complicated things.

  ‘And how are you doing?’ Mari asked.

  ‘Well, I’m feeling pretty drained.’

  That was putting it mildly, but Lia did not want to tell Mari everything: not her dreams of a family, getting over her fear or her sorrow. Maybe Mari saw it all in her anyway.

  Not long had passed since her holiday, but her days working at Level, the running around chasing Vanags, her work at the Fair Rule office, her evenings at the Studio – it had all sapped her energy. At the same time, she wanted to get things off her mind and rush forward with them.

  ‘Then I have a difficult choice for you,’ Mari said.

  ‘What do I have to do?’ Lia asked, feeling a wave of exhaustion roll over her.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything. But you can if you want.’

  Mari had reviewed everything they knew about Arthur Fried’s private life.

  ‘I realised that there is something similar in him to Vanags.’

  This had dawned on her when she had seen the Latvian. He was clearly a criminal, but Mari had recognised the same sort of emotional coldness as in Fried.

  As she considered this, Mari had noticed that Fried had not married Anna Belle until he was thirty-seven years old.

  ‘It clicked that I had overlooked something really critical.’

  Arthur Fried had been married before. They had divorced years earlier, a little before his current marriage. No mention of his first wife appeared in Fried’s biography.

  Mari had only found the information in the marriage records at Fried’s former church in Shoreditch. She doubted that this was a coincidence. Why the information remained in the congregational records was difficult to say. Perhaps Fried lacked the temerity to have the information removed.

  Fried had however managed to purge record of the union from the General Register Office. This was quite a stunt, since they tracked all officially sanctioned weddings and divorces in Britain.

  The previous wife had not appeared in even one newspaper article Mari had read about Fried. Of course the reason could be that during his first marriage he had only been in the first stages of his political activity and neither he nor Fair Rule were widely known. And since he was attempting to court Christian voters, he didn’t want to appear as a divorcee.

  ‘Do you know anything about the first wife?’ Lia asked.

  Mari rattled off what little she had found out: Sarah Hawkins was born in Suffolk, and her marriage to Fried had lasted seven years. Nothing else appeared in the congregational records or online.

  ‘So what were you thinking?’ Lia asked.

  ‘We have to talk to the ex-Mrs Fried. I was thinking you could go.’

  ‘You don’t want to do it yourself? If she was involved in covering up the marriage, she may not want to talk about it. Wouldn’t that be a case where you could use your ability?’

  Mari did not want anyone to be able to connect her directly to anything involving Arthur Fried. When they started releasing their information about him, he would realise quickly that someone was out for blood. Better if Fried didn’t know his adversary.

  ‘Right then. Do you know where to find Sarah Hawkins?’

  At her home in Lambeth, Mari said. Based on her phone records, Rico thought that she was likely to be home at that moment.

  ‘How did he find that out?’

  ‘A very old fashioned way. In addition to a mobile phone, she also has a landline, and it’s been busy for hours at a time over the past few days. She’s probably been online all the time.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have anything planned for tomorrow,’ Lia said. ‘Wow, dial-up. Does that still exist?’

  29

  Number 204 Ferndale Road, Brixton, was a two-storey terraced house. The area was full of council flats and the children they contained. Parts of the district may have been on the rise, but this street was still the London of open drug trafficking and gang attacks that the travel bureaus did not show visitors.

  It was Saturday morning, and Lia was looking from the street at Arthur Fried’s ex-wife’s house. The paint was peeling from the walls, and the front garden fence was leaning. Two scratched and battered plastic chairs fulfilled the role of garden furniture. Sarah Hawkins’ life looked meagre.

  One window was open, and Lia could hear the sounds of a TV programme or perhaps a video game coming from within.

  Children?

  If Fried had a child with his ex-wife, he or she would be a teenager at most. Lia waited, thinking about how to make her approach.

  Someone came to close the open window. A woman, past forty, with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Face devoid of make-up and slightly puffy.

  She noticed Lia standing on the street. For a moment their eyes locked. Collecting her courage, Lia waved and entered the garden.

  The woman met her at the door. There was no curiosity in her eyes, as though she were too tired to be interested in anyone standing in front of her house.

  ‘What do you want?’ Sarah Hawkins asked.

  Lia had an explanation ready, but the bluntness of Hawkins’ question made her abandon the window dressing.

  ‘Ms Hawkins, my name is Lia Pajala. I came to talk to you about your ex-husband.’

  Sarah Hawkins’ eyebrows went up.

  ‘You know Arthur?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve just met him. I have some questions for you about him.’

  The woman looked at Lia appraisingly.

  ‘Are you a reporter? You don’t look like a political reporter. Or a gossip columnist.’

  Lia smiled. Sarah Hawkins might look like a tired housing estate mother, but, as Arthur Fried’s sometime wife, she clearly knew how the media operated.


  ‘Actually, I’m a graphic designer for a magazine,’ Lia said. ‘But I’m interested in Arthur, and I’d like to talk to you about him, Ms Hawkins.’

  Hawkins hesitated. She was still looking at Lia narrowly. In the end she nodded.

  ‘If I let you in, you have to leave off that Ms Hawkins rubbish. I’m Sarah. And I’ll decide what we talk about and what we don’t. I say when we’re done and whether I want to talk about a subject or not.’

  Lia nodded.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Sarah said and opened the door the rest of the way.

  Lia followed her into the small kitchen, sitting down on a chair and looking around. The house was relatively tidy, and piles of washing showed that Sarah had been in the middle of doing the laundry. She could hear the sound that had been audible from outside better now as well: it was a video game, with booms and rapid-fire bangs filling the back room.

  Lia looked at Sarah questioningly.

  ‘My nephew. He’s eleven,’ Sarah explained. ‘He spends a lot of time with me. My sister does shift work at the hospital and I’m… I’m not currently working.’

  She prepared a plate of biscuits, laid out cups and a pot of tea and encouraged Lia to help herself.

  Lia thanked her. Into her mind popped the little bottle of vodka she had bought from the Eastern Buffet, which she had been carrying in her bag for days.

  She pulled the bottle out and set it on the table next to the tea service. Sarah smiled sourly.

  ‘You aren’t going to get much out of me with that little thing. And getting people drunk isn’t very posh.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not about that,’ Lia said. ‘I’m from Finland, and we have a tradition of having a nip with our coffee or tea when we’re talking business.’

  Sarah laughed. It was a small, satisfied giggle, but Lia guessed that the ice-breaker had been timed just right.

  ‘From Finland?’

  Sarah didn’t really know anything about the country. Only that the capital was Helsinki.

  ‘But you didn’t come here to talk about that. What do you want to know?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘All sorts of things. For starters, why did you divorce Arthur?’