Deep as Death

by Katja Ivar

  It had started innocently enough, with Steve dropping by to tell me he was awfully sorry but he wouldn’t be able to see me tonight after all. He had forgotten that Eva was performing in a school play. Playing Ophelia, can you imagine? He had to go to the play. Of course he did.

  “Lovely,” I replied. I had been planning on spending my evening at home with Steve, but the theatre was even better. Even when played by fourteen-year-olds, Shakespeare has the power to make one realize how insignificant our problems are in the grand scheme of things.

  Steve paused. He had been wearing his coat when he came in, but when we had started talking he had taken it off and slung it over the back of the visitors’ chair, the only comfortable one in the room.

  “Hella,” he said. “I know it’s not a good time…”

  I should have stopped him there. I should have shrugged it off, told him it didn’t matter. But some angry force inside me, looking for a fight and more reasons to cry, decided that it was time to finally clarify the terms of our relationship.

  “Didn’t you say that Elsbeth and Eva both know we’re living together? Didn’t you” – here I paused because I found it difficult to control my voice – “didn’t you tell me that Eva was looking forward to meeting me?” I looked at the globe; I wanted to smash it against the wall. How happy I had been when I found it in a little store on Kirkkokatu. I had been looking for the perfect gift, and that was the one: not too personal, but thoughtful nonetheless.

  Steve threw his hands up in the air. “True,” he said. “All true. But now’s not a good time. Eva is worried about the performance. She’s afraid she’ll forget her lines, afraid she’ll look ridiculous in front of her classmates. You know how it is with teenage girls.”

  “But she doesn’t have to see me,” I said. “I’ll stay put in my seat, you don’t even have to tell her I’m there. I don’t know much about teenage girls, but from what I hear they’re pretty self-obsessed. She probably won’t even notice the woman sitting next to her father.”

  “Probably not,” said Steve. “But Elsbeth will.”

  “And is she nervous because her daughter’s acting in a school play?”

  “She,” Steve said, frowning at me, “will be nervous because her own parents are coming and she hasn’t told them about our separation yet.”

  “Oh. So you’ll all go like a happy little family, and you’ll see me tomorrow when you can?” My voice took on a sarcastic undertone, but Steve pretended not to notice.

  “Not like a happy little family. Like a family. Why’s that a problem? You’re an adult, Hella. You should understand. A big girl like you.”

  He shouldn’t have started on the big girl thing. I’d heard that one more than enough; no wonder I snapped. “I’ve been very understanding for the last four years. Maybe now it’s time I start thinking about myself a little.”

  “Don’t you always?” Steve was getting as angry as I was, his jaw set and unyielding, his eyes narrow. “No one forced you to embark on an affair with a married man.”

  The realization hit me like a slap in the face. “It’s you,” I said. “All this time I thought it was about Elsbeth, but it’s you. You’re still not ready to introduce your daughter to me. You’re still not sure that you and I are a couple.”

  All those evenings I had spent waiting for him, all his claims that his marriage was over, that he was only staying for the sake of his child, that his sickly wife couldn’t manage on her own – it all came back and crushed me like a tidal wave. When I emerged, there was only one thing that mattered. I needed to know where I stood.

  I took a deep breath. Then, in a voice as loud and clear as I could muster, I asked him to choose. Either it was me, in which case I was going to see the damned play, or it was them. And if it was them, I wanted him out of my life.

  “Is that what you really want?” Steve said. He was standing in front of me, one hand on top of the filing cabinet, the other balled into a fist.

  “Yes,” I said, forcing the tremor out of my voice. “It’s simple really.”

  At this, Steve looked out of the window with a puzzled expression on his face. It was snowing again, another dreadful winter’s day, the sun hovering just above the line of the horizon, almost erased by blurry white streaks of snow. In an hour, the sun would set. So this is it, I thought. The last straw. Could it really be that simple? A child’s school play, for Christ’s sake, we’d been through worse. He loved me. I knew he did. He would do the right thing.

  His glance left the window and stopped on me.

  “Then,” he said, “we’re over.” He picked up his coat from the chair, started to pull it on as he turned for the door. “You can put my things in a suitcase and leave it on the landing. I doubt anyone would want to steal my stuff.”

  With his hand on the doorknob, Steve paused as if he wanted to say something, then thought better of it. He shrugged and walked out, leaving me behind. Like a fish just out of water, my mouth gaping open, my mind blank.

  3

  Hella

  The realization of what had just happened dawned on me after the sound of Steve’s footsteps died away on the stairs. I had put too many expectations on that first meeting with Eva. I couldn’t be light-hearted about it any longer; I couldn’t put things into perspective. And of course, with the weight of my pathetic hope crushing all rational thought, I had blown it.

  Uninvited images flooded my mind: the cold nights to come, the empty apartment above the language school, dinners for one eaten straight out of a pan because what did it matter now?

  My first instinct was to go home, open a bottle of vodka and drink myself into oblivion. Erase all coherent thought, erase the longing.

  Wallow in self-pity.

  Sob my heart out.

  It seemed like a good idea; the only thing that stopped me was the woman waiting across the street. I saw her as I was leaving the building. She had been looking up at my windows, but when she spotted me on the doorstep she turned away quickly and pretended to busy herself with her watch. This made me pause. Even though the woman’s face was partly hidden by a sable hat, it was not Elsbeth, of that I was certain. Elsbeth was tall, blonde and pretty as a picture. Most people I knew looked surprised when they saw her, and I knew why: they wondered why Steve, Helsinki’s most popular – and only – American DJ and radio presenter, had left her for me. This woman was short, buxom and blonde. A peroxide blonde, not a natural one. There was something jarring about her, but I only realized what it was when I retraced my steps and dived back into the building. The woman’s face looked cheap, there was too much makeup – the lips were too red, the eyebrows non-existent. But her clothes were expensive: a sable coat, soft leather gloves and the sort of shoes you only saw on the feet of people who never had to walk anywhere.

  The woman was here to see me, but she was hesitating. I considered my options. The vodka binge was still tempting, but could I afford it? What I had told the judge that very morning had been wishful thinking: I did advertise my murder-solving capabilities, but no murder investigations had come my way yet, and they probably never would. The only people who came to see me were, ironically enough, wives who suspected their husbands of cheating. And money was always tight. In all the cases I’d had, the husband had been the only breadwinner in the family. The wives paid me with whatever they could put aside from their grocery shopping budget, and that wasn’t much. So that woman on the street, with her fancy clothes… Even if it was the usual philandering spouse story, I had to take it. Unless I wanted to be penalized further for not paying the court.

  I climbed the stairs back to my third-floor office and waited, forcing myself to recite the Kalevala to avoid thinking about Steve. I was on Beauteous Daughter of the Ether, her existence sad and hopeless / Thus alone to live for ages when I heard a tentative knock on the door.

  “Miss Mauzer?”

  Up close, the woman looked older than I’d first thought, closer to fifty than forty. Her name, Klara Nylund, told me
nothing.

  I pointed at the visitors’ chair. “How can I help you, Mrs Nylund?”

  “It’s Miss,” the woman corrected, pulling off her gloves. Her nails were painted the exact same shade as her lipstick: ruby red. “It’s about one of my girls.”

  It was only then that I understood. My potential client was nobody’s wife. She ran a brothel. There were a number of them around – Helsinki was a port city, after all, and with all the refugees flooding the streets, lots of girls were on the market. Although, given the woman’s clothing, this brothel was probably at the upper end of the market. I flipped my notepad open. “What happened to the girl?”

  “She drowned,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Last month. Nellie went down on the ice in West Harbour. The ice gave way.”

  “And?”

  “And the police seem to think it was an accident.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” I said. Immediately, my inner voice screamed: Bravo, Sherlock! If you go on like this, your visitor will get up and leave.

  The woman must have been thinking along the same lines because she squinted at me. “How long have you been doing this job, Miss Mauzer?”

  “I was a police officer,” I told her, with more confidence than I really felt. “In Helsinki, I was the first woman ever to be part of the homicide squad. After that, I worked in Ivalo.”

  “And now you’re here,” the woman added, scanning the room. She didn’t need to add anything. The threadbare rug on the floor, the chipped desk, the icy chill of my office, they all screamed failure. “He assured me you were OK,” the woman said doubtfully to her folded hands. “How much do you charge?”

  “It’s five hundred markka a day, or we can agree on a flat fee. Did someone recommend me?” I tried to keep the hopeful note out of my voice. No one ever did. Aside from the cuckolded wives, of course, but I doubted very much that any of them would be speaking to a madam.

  The woman nodded, fumbling in her bag. “Him.”

  She pulled out a business card. Cream vellum, elegantly formed letters. Chief Inspector Jokela, Head, Helsinki Homicide Squad.

  “You know him, right?” the woman asked. She was having second thoughts.

  “Jokela and I go back a long way,” I said. What I didn’t say was that there was no love lost between us, and never had been. And that I couldn’t imagine any reason for him to recommend me, except if he was convinced that the girl’s death had indeed been an accident and police time would be wasted on it.

  There was a silence. I kept my eyes on the card, wondering whether the woman would get up and leave, and if that was the case, whether I was still going for the vodka bottle. Just as I was about to suggest to Miss Nylund that she come back once she had made up her mind, she pulled an envelope out of her bag and slapped it on my desk.

  “Good,” she said. “I hope you’re good. Because Nellie – she was one of the better ones. I want you to find who did this to her, and I want that person to pay for what he did.”

  4

  Chief Inspector Mustonen

  “My dear boy,” boomed Jokela’s voice, “come over here.” Those who were still at the office at that hour watched as I shot a desperate glance at the wall clock – it was a quarter past five already and I had promised Sofia I’d be home early. I picked up a folder at random and trudged towards Jokela’s office. I knew why my boss was asking to see me: it was time for one of our increasingly frequent drinking sessions. Just the two of us and a bottle of expensive whisky, the provenance of which I preferred to ignore.

  Work sessions, Jokela called them. Some days, he gave the impression of actually believing in that excuse. He would make me open a file and ask me irrelevant questions while he poured the whisky. The work part of the sessions usually lasted for the first glass or two. After that, we would invariably slip into a discussion that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the way the world at large was treating Jon Jokela.

  “Here,” my boss said, pushing a chair towards me. “Have a seat.” Jokela was wearing the new open-collared uniform that had been created in preparation for the Olympic Games the previous year. The uniform was supposed to give the police a modern, less military appearance. I rarely wore it: for what I had to do, plain clothes were better.

  “So, my boy, what have you been working on?”

  “Roof signs for police cars. This way, the public will be aware of our presence. I’m certain it will reduce traffic offences.”

  Jokela pulled a face. “Haven’t heard of such a thing. More likely than not folks will get scared and drive into ditches. Do they put roof signs on police cars in America?”

  “No. We’d be the first. And here’s another idea. Why don’t we establish a dedicated traffic police? All those farmers we hired in the run-up to the Olympics would be perfect for the job.”

  My boss pulled an immaculate handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his forehead. His office was stiflingly hot. The windows, sealed for the winter, were steamed up with fog; a gas fire hissed in a corner. There was talk of the homicide squad moving into another, more modern building, but dinosaurs like Jokela were resisting. He loved being there, loved the moose antlers fixed to the walls, the bulbous office furniture, the view across the square to the neoclassical facade of Helsinki Cathedral. To him, that office represented some sort of gentlemen’s club. But Jokela didn’t have a family, he didn’t have a life outside of the office. I did.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Jokela said. “Maybe there’s something in your idea. I’ll think about it. And what about the rest of the boys? What are they doing?”

  “The Goldberg assault file is ready to go.”

  “Good job.”

  “Not mine,” I smiled. “Pinchus was the one working on it, and he’s been very diligent as usual. A valuable member of the team.” I paused. There was a pink business card on Jokela’s desk.

  Jokela glanced up at me. “What is it?”

  “I saw you talking to a woman, earlier this afternoon. I was wondering if it was the drowned girl’s madam?”

  “That was her.”

  “Oh.” Now I was hesitating. If the madam had come to ask how the investigation was progressing, why hadn’t Jokela told her to go and see me directly? Because he had doubts over the way I was running the case all by myself? Or was I just being paranoid? Aloud, I said: “I was surprised she managed to get an appointment with you.”

  “That’s because I know her.” Jokela winked. “You’re too serious, my boy. You should get out more, have a fun night with me. That wife of yours is lovely and all, but a man needs variety.”

  “I love Sofia,” I answered, smiling to soften my rebuttal. “What did the madam want?”

  “To know where we were with the investigation.” Jokela pulled the bottle of whisky towards him, poured me a glass, refreshed his own. “I owe her a small favour.”

  Of course he did. Everyone who was anyone in Helsinki had been to Klara Nylund’s club at least once.

  “I’m still working on it,” I said. “Though I didn’t really get very far. I don’t even know whether we’re dealing with a murder or an accident or suicide. The forensic pathologist thinks he may have spotted something, but he’s not sure. I sent a query to Interpol, asked them if they’d had similar cases in other port cities.” I took a sip of my whisky. It tasted like cough syrup.

  Jokela’s small eyes were on me. “Relax,” he said. “This sort of investigation is a drag. You’ll never find the killer – if there even is one. The girl fell into the water. Big deal! This city is built on water. There are – I don’t know – dozens of islands!”

  “Three hundred and fifteen, to be exact.”

  “You see! That’s why they call this city the Daughter of the Baltic. The girl must have been hurrying somewhere, the ice gave way… You do that too, right, you take shortcuts through the bay?”

  “Everyone does.”

  “Exactly! And I prefer my people to focus on more important jobs tha
n a drowned prostitute. Klara Nylund kept insisting, so I told her to contact a PI.”

  I frowned. “Which one?”

  “Mauzer.” Jokela hooted with laughter, sending drops of whisky flying in all directions.

  “Great idea. She’s perfectly competent.”

  Something in the way I said it made my boss squint at me. “You’re hiding something.”

  I laughed it off. “Everyone does. And anyway, it’s good of you to give Hella a chance. As I said, she’s perfectly competent.”

  Jokela patted me on the arm. “Of course she is. Of course. That’s what I thought too, let’s help out poor Hella. After all, I knew her father. I heard she’s not doing so well.”

  “No,” I confirmed, “she’s not. From what I’ve heard.”

  “Then we’ll drink to her success.” Jokela filled his glass again. “To Hella!”

  I raised my glass reluctantly. I didn’t expect to lose control of the investigation but I knew Mauzer, the way she operated. Maybe it was for the best. “To Hella!” I said. “To her success!”

  5

  Hella

  Helsinki is a city for walking fast. The bitter wind constantly blowing off the sea is there to make a point: no leisurely strolls here. No loitering. As soon as Klara Nylund was gone, I wrapped my coat tight and hurried home, past the neoclassical splendour of Senate Square and down Unioninkatu, the cobblestones slippery under the soles of my shoes.

  As I walked, I wondered whether my day could possibly get any worse. It was a rhetorical question, not a challenge to the gods. What I needed was a warm bath and a little something to eat before I sat down with the notes Klara Nylund had left me. One thing I didn’t need was an unexpected guest.