Deep as Death

by Katja Ivar

  The traffic was heavy on Unioninkatu. In the three years I’d been away, Helsinki had filled up with cars, Opel Kapitän sedans and Tatras, gleaming Volvos for the affluent, Sovietmade GAZs for the penniless or the optimistic. All were honking, starting and stalling, and the air was thick with fumes. The city was badly in need of traffic police. But then it was also badly in need of new, affordable housing, and food, and order.

  Almost without thinking, Mustonen and I settled back into the routine we knew by heart. Him at the wheel of the brand-new Studebaker he’d got from Headquarters, swerving expertly between cars, a smile on his face. Me with a city map on my lap, giving out directions. It felt like I had never left the squad. It felt like home.

  “What kind of changes?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You said there could be changes on the squad.”

  Mustonen gave a mirthless little laugh. “The squad has changed a lot since you left, Hella. It’s grown corrupt. It has started to defeat its purpose. Or maybe” – he swerved the car into one of the narrow streets off Tehtaankatu – “it’s always been that way but I was too naive to notice. I’m partly to blame too. I should have reacted earlier. Only I could never imagine we’d get to a point where political considerations would take precedence over a murder investigation. So I…” He bit his lip.

  “What did you do, Erik?”

  “I put a stop to it. I should have done so a long time ago, but I was afraid for my career. I guess you’ve got a lot more courage than me.” He smiled ruefully. “This squad needs people like you, Hella. People who are uncompromising and bright.”

  I felt myself blushing. Was he offering me my old job back? What about Jokela? He surely wouldn’t like that. I mumbled something that could mean yes, or no, or thank you, depending on what Mustonen chose to hear.

  He smiled again, nodding to himself. Ten minutes later, we stopped before an imposing nineteenth-century mansion painted light blue. “Don’t tell them who you are,” Mustonen said as we stepped out of the car. “Just follow my lead, OK?”

  A redhead with no neck but plenty of bosom answered the door. Her gaze travelled from me to Mustonen, then back to me again. Behind her, I could see a brightly lit foyer, marble floors and chandeliers and a stuffed polar bear standing guard in one corner.

  Mustonen showed the woman his warrant card. “Is Mr Ahti Virtanen home?”

  “He is,” the woman said. “He just arrived. But you probably need to speak to his father. He’ll be here soon.”

  “We don’t need his father. It’s him we’ve come to see, and he’s of age. May we come in?”

  Mustonen wasn’t really expecting an answer. He had already pushed past the woman and was walking towards the large oak staircase. “Mr Virtanen?” he called out. “Ahti Virtanen?”

  A muffled sound came from somewhere upstairs. “Police,” Mustonen said. “We need to talk to you.” And to me: “Wait here, Mauzer, would you?”

  “All right.” I turned towards the woman. “You said Mr Ahti Virtanen just got back? Do you know where he was?”

  The woman shrugged, licking her lips. I could hear voices coming from upstairs, rising. “Maybe,” the woman said, “maybe I should come up and see what’s going —”

  A gunshot ripped through the house.

  Time froze in mid-breath, the gleaming foyer reverberating around me. The chandeliers, blazing with light, the bear’s open jaws, its pointed teeth.

  Two shots. Three.

  The woman screamed, her hand pressed hard to her mouth, her eyes wild. I ran up the stairs. A long carpeted corridor, with doors opening on either side. “Erik!” I cried out. “Are you all right?”

  The door farthest down the corridor flew open. Mustonen was standing in the doorway, heaving, clutching his gun. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.” He motioned towards the inside of the room. “That bastard tried to shoot me. I had to” – his voice caught – “you know.”

  “Let me in. Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know. Be careful.”

  But the boy was dead all right. He was slumped against the wall, a gun in his hand. He had no face any more, just some bloody pulpous mess and, above it, blonde hair slicked back. “Jesus,” I whispered. “What did you two talk about? Did you know he had a gun when you entered the room?”

  “No. He had it behind his back, I guess. I asked him where he had been and he started shooting.”

  “Jesus,” I said again. “I thought this sort of stuff never happened.”

  “Did you really?” Mustonen asked, drawing a ragged breath. “It happened to you. Go downstairs, call the other cops and your pal Räikkönen. Can you do that?”

  Behind him, the maid paused in the doorway, gasped, then started screaming again.

  52

  Hella

  I refused to stay inside. The air in the house was heavy, viscous like congealing blood. I made the phone call to Headquarters, then went outside and sat on the stone steps. After a while Mustonen came out too. He lowered himself onto the steps and offered me a cigarette. He lit another one for himself, cupping his hands round the lighter and its flame; he screwed his mouth to one side to blow the smoke away from me. “Sorry about that. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking about that other case, when the roles had been reversed and Mustonen had found himself on the outside while I had shot a suspect who was threatening me. I thought about what he knew about that case, and what he might have guessed. I tried to imagine Jokela’s reaction. Most of all, though, I thought about Anita.

  “If it was Virtanen who took her,” I said, “chances are we’ll never find her now.”

  “Oh, we will.” Mustonen dragged on his cigarette. “Believe me, we will. If she was even taken, which I don’t believe.”

  It started snowing again, tiny brittle snowflakes. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the wailing of a police siren. I stood up too quickly for my head, then had to wait for the dark points floating before my eyes to dissipate. “I’d better be going. You don’t need me right now. And if I have to testify about what happened, you know where to find me.”

  “I’d rather you stayed here.” Mustonen turned his head to glance up at me. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “I would love to catch up with the team,” I said ceremoniously. “But I’d rather look for Anita. I have a bad feeling about her.”

  Mustonen flicked the stub of his cigarette into the snow-covered flowerbed. “Stubborn, aren’t you, Mauzer? I’ll keep you posted.”

  One thing my father had taught me was not to panic. Not to jump to conclusions, either. So Mustonen had fired at a suspect who was threatening him. Killed him. It happened. I was living proof of that.

  I observed Mustonen carefully while he sat with me on the stone steps, smoking and waiting. He was shaken, but he wasn’t worried. This meant he had all the evidence he needed. He could prove that Virtanen was indeed our guy. And why not? All the evidence pointed to him. Except for the evidence pointing to Ranta.

  A police car whirred past me, its blue lights flashing. And then another. And another. I believed I saw Dr Palmu’s pinched face in one of the cars, but I couldn’t be sure, so I just kept walking. My priority was finding Anita. Then I’d have the time to think about everything carefully, come up with a decision.

  It took me close to forty minutes to get to Ranta’s place again. All the windows were dark. I paused on the doorstep, but only for a second. I needed to appear as inconspicuous as possible, as if I had every right to be there, to do what I was doing. I pulled a bunch of picklocks from my shoulder bag, shielding it with my body. If anyone was watching, they would see a woman fumbling for her keys. And I was right about the lock, too. Standard pre-war, opened with a hairpin. I let myself in, shut the door behind me.

  The first thing I noticed was Anita’s fake pearl necklace lying on a side table, amid a jumble of keys, fishing hooks and bolts. Maybe Ranta had gone fishing
. Maybe it hadn’t just been an excuse. Or maybe he was one of those accomplished criminals who knew that for a lie to be convincing, you needed to get all your props right. Inside, the house was unexpectedly big. A living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, all a mess. Anita’s clothes, dirty plates, papers. And photographs, but not everywhere, only in Ranta’s bedroom. The photographs were of Anita. Some of the pictures dated back to her childhood. There she was in her first communion dress, a thin veil masking her features. As a toddler in pigtails. As an older child with a huge ribbon in her hair. As a young woman, dressed in a freshly pressed police uniform, smiling self-consciously.

  In one of the photographs, a forty-something man, wiry and strong, was standing next to her, his hand on her shoulder.

  “Jesus,” I said out loud.

  Then I turned around and hurried towards the exit.

  Another thing my father had taught me was to trust my instincts. I knew then, knew with absolute certainty, that I had been looking in the wrong place.

  53

  Chief Inspector Mustonen

  It was a few minutes past 9 p.m. Dark shadows danced on the walls and I could hear the muted sound of car horns and sirens from downstairs. The squad room was buzzing with excitement. Even though it’s the capital of Finland, Helsinki is still at its heart a sleepy provincial town. The last shoot-out involving a police officer had happened almost exactly four years ago. Hella Mauzer had been involved, and she had ended up being banished to Ivalo. Would the same thing happen to me?

  I hadn’t seen Jokela; I’d barely seen Dr Palmu. The police chief went up to the crime scene, took one hard look and left. He nodded at me as he passed but didn’t meet my eye.

  The pathologist came too, wrinkling his nose as if he’d smelled something rotten. “This unfortunate young man is very probably dead” – Räikkönen’s sense of humour is inimitable – “but I will only have absolute certainty and the list of probable causes after an autopsy.” I had to stay behind and wait until the mortuary team took the body away. Only then did I feel free to leave the house.

  Going down the drive, my car crossed that of Virtanen senior and his wife, dressed to the nines – black tie and tiara – and staring open-mouthed at all the police cars blocking their driveway. I pressed my foot down on the accelerator; I had no desire at all to talk to them. Let Jokela sort this out. If he was still around, that is.

  Tarja stayed late too. At 9.10, she knocked on the door of my office. “Inspector Pinchus would like you to join him in the interview room, sir. He thinks he may be on to something. A witness.”

  “Does he?” I toyed with the idea of saying no. I still had things to do, and no intention of being held up at the office. And it had been a long day. What I needed was a whisky and a cab home, but I knew that was not possible. Not yet. When I got back to the office, I called Sofia briefly, told her in a few words what had happened. She sounded annoyed. Could this interfere with my promotion, she wanted to know. “I don’t think so,” I said, speaking the truth. At that point I didn’t care either, though I had enough sense not to say that.

  “Shall I tell Inspector Pinchus you’re coming, sir?” Tarja again, hovering in the doorway.

  I stifled a sigh. “Yes. Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes.”

  Pinchus was, in my view, the most annoying of the homicide squad detectives. One of those people who always hoped for the worst, only happy when their darkest predictions were realized. At the opening of every new case, he tut-tutted around the evidence gloomily, his whole body sagging with the weight of his dark unerring knowledge. And inevitably, when Pinchus was in charge, the worst did happen, though it was never his fault. He drew those cases to him by some mysterious alchemy. They lent credit to his incipient pessimism, made him come across as a prophet, not just an overanxious doomsayer. If it had been any other officer, I would have said no and gone away. But it was not any other officer, it was Pinchus. I was curious.

  I leafed through the Nellie Ritvanen file, though there was really no need. I knew the file by heart now. My motto is always ready, and I was. Then I went over to the interview room. Pinchus was sitting hunched over a table, his bald head glowing under the artificial light. Across from him sat a small dark man, dressed in some sort of work outfit. His glasses were secured behind his head with a shoelace.

  “Inspector,” Pinchus said, waving a hand. “Take a seat.” He never called me Chief Inspector, presumably because I was younger than him but higher in rank and he considered that unjust. I had never let it bother me until now. I slammed the file onto the desk and ignored Pinchus.

  “My secretary tells me you have information for us,” I said to the little man. “What is it?”

  The man swallowed nervously and glanced across the table at Pinchus, who said in a gloomy voice, “Mr Nurmi thinks he was an eyewitness to a kidnapping. He came here all the way from Tuusula.”

  The little man started nodding away, his eyes never leaving Pinchus. “A young woman,” he said. “Red dress, beige coat, hair just like so.” He put up his hands and twisted his fingers into something complicated. “She said she was from the Helsinki police. And that she had laid a trap for a suspect.”

  “Did you see the kidnapper?” I asked. My heart was going fast.

  “Not too well, sir.” The man put his hands back on the table, like an obedient child. “I was too far away, on the opposite platform. And then a train passed.” The witness sniffed. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize him or anything. But he dropped something. The kidnapper, I mean.”

  Pinchus coughed. I hadn’t noticed it until then, but my colleague had a brown paper envelope lying in front of him. He slid it towards me.

  “It’s a scarf, Inspector.” He paused while I shook the scarf out of the envelope and bent low to inspect it. “The description of the victim matches Anita,” Pinchus said, when I straightened myself up again.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “The scarf has its owner’s initials embroidered on it – do these people embroider every piece of clothing they own, even socks? And there are bloodstains, too.”

  “We can’t be sure it’s blood. Get it to the techs, ask them to analyse it as a priority.”

  Pinchus glanced at his watch. “The tech on duty is at the Virtanen incident. The other one has gone home.”

  I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Take it to Räikkönen, then. He’s capable of doing this, and he’s already at the morgue. Tell him it’s urgent.”

  Pinchus shook his head. “He’ll refuse. He’ll say it’s not his job.”

  “Flatter him. Tell him he’s a great artist. Tell him I offered to put his works on display in the squad room.”

  Pinchus stared at me as if I was mad.

  “Just do it, OK?”

  54

  Chief Inspector Mustonen

  “She’s dead, mark my words,” Pinchus said gloomily, on his way out. “Anita left the office at 3 p.m. She was last seen alive on a train platform in Tuusula shortly before five.” He sighed noisily. “That’s four hours.”

  “How can you be certain about the time?” I asked the witness. “You don’t have a wristwatch.”

  The man stared down at his wrist, as if unsure whether he had a watch or not. “I saw the 4.47 train go past just as that guy grabbed her from behind,” he said at last. “I looked again after the train had passed, and she was gone.”

  “She couldn’t have climbed aboard the train?”

  “The 4.47 doesn’t stop at that station.” The witness fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, brought out something grey and stained. “It used to, but then they changed the schedule.”

  “All right, do you think anyone aboard that train could have seen the kidnapper?”

  “Maybe,” the man said, but I could see he thought it very unlikely. “I suppose you could always ask.”

  I pulled Ahti Virtanen’s photograph out of the file, slid it towards the witness. “Could it have been this man? He’s of mediu
m height, about the same build as me.” I stood up and walked towards the window so the man could observe me from some distance. A black Volvo stopped directly under the window, and I saw a uniformed chauffeur rush out and open the passenger door for Jokela.

  “Could be,” said the little man behind me. “I told you, I didn’t see him well.”

  “Thank you,” I said without looking at him. “You have been a very responsible citizen. Please write down your name and contact details. If we ever need you to testify, we want to be able to reach you easily.”

  “What about the compensation?” the man said.

  I whipped round. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a reward,” the man said stubbornly, his jaw jutting out. He didn’t look like an obedient little citizen any longer. “For helping the police with inquiries. I know there’s one – I wouldn’t have come otherwise. How do I claim it?”

  “What I don’t understand,” Pinchus said when he was back in the squad room, “is what Anita was doing on that railway platform in the first place.”

  I shrugged. “That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? How did it go with Räikkönen?”

  “How do you expect?” Pinchus countered. “He was already in a foul mood because of that dead boy you sent him. When I told him there was biological evidence to examine as well, I thought he was going to bite my head off.”

  “Well, he didn’t. Consider yourself lucky. Did you mention his drawings?”

  “Is that like some sort of secret password? I did. That got him angrier still. But in the end, he said he’d do it.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Good. It wasn’t such a big deal, was it? All Räikkönen has to do is dab on some oxidant, then swipe with luminol. I could practically do it myself. Do you have confirmation, yes or no?”