Fatal Headwind (34 page)

“So what would you like to ask me?” she said once we had removed our coats and she had given me a thick pair of wool socks to replace my shoes. “This must be important for you to come all the way from Espoo.”

“Do you mind if I record our conversation?”

When Katrina did not object, I pulled my recorder and a couple of tapes out of my bag. Dictating the date and time of the interview felt unreal sitting in such a peaceful room in a house hundreds of years old.

“I have several questions. First let’s go back to a year ago. Harri Immonen called here a little before his death, trying to reach Mikke. What did Harri say?”

Katrina Sjöberg ran a hand through her gray hair, and I noticed her eyes were gray now too, like the morning sea in the autumn light.

“So much has happened since then. I don’t remember exactly. He asked for Mikke to contact him as soon as possible.”

“How did he sound?”

“Very different from the calm, pleasant young man I had met before. Anxious. He kept repeating how important it was. And then stupid me forgot the whole thing!”

Katrina sighed, and the wrinkles around her eyes tightened. “I blamed myself for forgetting to mention Harri’s call. That was why I waited so long to tell Mikke about his death. I was afraid of how he would react. Sometimes I’m a coward too. Mikke is the only person I really care about. If Harri killed himself, and if that could have been prevented if I’d given Mikke his message . . . it’s hard to bear.”

“If it helps, I don’t believe Harri killed himself,” I said consolingly, without adding that passing on the message probably still could have prevented Harri’s death. “Did he tell you anything about what was going on? Try to remember. This is important.”

The pot started boiling on the stove, giving off a delicious aroma of fish soup. Katrina stood up to move it off the heat. She stirred the soup a couple of times before answering.

“It was about Juha. I can’t remember the exact words, but Harri wanted to talk to Mikke about Juha.”

“You had known Juha Merivaara since he was ten years old. What kind of a person was he?”

Katrina tasted the broth with a wooden spoon and burned her mouth. It took a little while before she could answer.

“Self-indulgent and stubborn like his father. Martti was lazy, and that was why the business went the way it did. Juha was different in that regard. He loved money. When he was twelve years old, he told me how he intended to invest his inheritance from his mother once he became an adult. There’s enough entrepreneur in me too that I could see the sense in his plans. For a child he also understood brutally well why his inheritance was being managed by a caretaker rather than by his father. Juha was so much like Martti, but he lacked Martti’s uninhibited physicality, which was what I had fallen in love with.”

Katrina sat back down at the table, and the light coming through the window wove a net of furrows across her face that moved like something alive. I moved the recorder closer, knowing that I should be focusing on events on Rödskär Island rather than listening to a family history, but for some reason I had the feeling that this was going to give me answers to questions I didn’t even know how to ask.

“Mikke is the son who inherited Martti’s . . . I imagine your generation would say ‘sex appeal.’ They aren’t handsome but there’s something irresistible about them. Don’t ask me to explain what it is. But sex isn’t enough when what’s on the other side of the scale is completely abandoning your own dreams to play the good little wife. I’ve never been able to compromise, and I guess I raised Mikke to be a person who sails his own course too stubbornly too. I pay for that with how infrequently I see him, and with the knowledge that every time could be the last.”

Katrina fell silent for a moment, and then straightened her back. “The fish soup is ready, and I’m hungry. Will it be a breach of protocol if we eat while we talk?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. The soup was made with fish caught nearby early that morning, Katrina said proudly. It was hot and thick, and the
svartbröd
served with it tasted strangely sweet but still delicious to my eastern Finnish palate. The conversation naturally turned to bread baking, because I couldn’t help asking how the sweet black bread was made. I couldn’t imagine spending three days on the baking process, but maybe Antti would have the patience to try it.

“Maybe when I married Martti I thought it was an easy way to a complete life—he already had one child, and I was carrying another. I saw myself in Riikka this summer. She was trying to get herself an older man and an established life so she didn’t have any need to create something for herself. First Juha took Riikka, and then Tapio Holma did. I felt like giving some grandmotherly advice, even though that hasn’t been my way.”

“What advice would you give her?”

“Before Juha’s death I would have told her to stop holding on to her father’s pant legs and go live on her own. You have to learn to live in the same room with yourself before you complicate your life with other people, with men and children. Of course I’m an old hermit now. No one could stand more than a week with me or I with them, not even Mikke anymore. Would you like some coffee?”

Once we had finished one cup and were pouring our second, I said we needed to resume the questioning for the case.

“In your first interview, you said that a boat visited Rödskär the night of Juha’s death. Can you tell me more about that, like the time and possible the direction it came from?”

“That’s hard to say, since I slept so restlessly,” Katrina replied evasively.

“But you’re sure there was a boat? No one else heard it.”

“Didn’t they?” Katrina’s face was tired. “Maybe I was hearing things, then. Or dreaming. Maybe I just hoped I’d heard a boat, that there could be someone from outside we could blame for killing Juha.”

“You were also heard going outside during the night, and talking with Mikke. You didn’t mention anything about that.”

“Didn’t I? I said I slept restlessly.”

From my bag I brought out a transcript of the previous interview.

“Yes, you did, but you didn’t mention going outside, and Mikke didn’t either.”

“I talked to you the day after Juha’s death. I was tired and in shock. Maybe I didn’t remember everything. Yes, I went outside, and yes, I bumped into Mikke. He was coming from the
Leanda
, probably checking the mooring lines. We talked about leaving early in the morning but we didn’t want to go without seeing Anne again. Mikke also wanted to say good-bye to Jiri and Seija.”

Katrina Sjöberg had had time to think carefully about her answers to any question I could ask. It was unlikely I was going to get her to say anything she didn’t want to say. So I shifted the conversation back to Juha.

“What would you say if I claimed that Juha killed Harri Immonen?”

Katrina’s eyes narrowed.

“I would ask what your basis was for that claim, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Harri had discovered that Juha was using the waters around Rödskär to dump damaged barrels of toxic paint. If it ever came out, Juha would have been charged with environmental crimes and Merivaara Nautical’s business would have been finished. It’s also seeming like Juha had been selling toxic Soviet paints as Finnish eco-paints, at least in Lithuania.”

Katrina looked outside. The sun was starting to descend from its peak, and the light was the slightest bit slanted.

“If you’re done with your coffee, let’s go out to the shore for a walk. Otherwise I start nodding off after I eat.”

For a moment I hesitated. I didn’t feel like dragging the recorder with me, so whatever we said while we were walking wouldn’t have anyone or anything to back it up. Still I decided to go. Pulling on my coat, I wrapped my scarf around my ears. That was unnecessary, though, since the south wind didn’t reach the shore of Mattsboda, where a rock outcropping that projected toward the east protected it quite well.

“The Sjöberg-Merivaara family has made its living from the sea for as long as the parish records go,” Katrina said as we walked along the rocky shoreline. “The sea is the same for us as the forest is for you inlanders. We protect it so it can provide for us, not because it is important in and of itself. The sea gives us nourishment, but it is also an enemy, and if you aren’t careful, it will swallow you. I never really believed in Juha’s environmentalism. Anne and the children are all too serious about it, but for Juha protecting the environment was just a marketing gimmick. When dangerous speedboats were all the rage, he sold products for those too.”

Katrina picked up a fist-size piece of red granite and threw it in the water. The water was so clear that after the ripples faded, I could see the rock on the sandy bottom.

“I still have a hard time believing that even Juha could have murdered Harri intentionally. Do you know how it happened?”

I shook my head. The only people who had been there were dead. Most likely Juha had staged his trip to Tallinn and then gone to Rödskär instead to find out how much Harri really knew. I doubted that good-natured Harri, who literally wouldn’t kill a bug—we had argued heatedly about that on a camping trip—had known he was in mortal danger. Maybe Harri had just slipped trying to get away from Juha, who had seen a golden opportunity. Instead of calling for help, he left Harri on Rödskär to die.

I told Katrina about my suspicions, and she silently stared out to sea. Squatting down, I took off a glove and plunged my hand into the water. It was colder than over the weekend in Inkoo, at most forty degrees. The granite bedrock along the shore was strangely warm in comparison.

“It’s ironic that Jiri is single-minded just like his father but in a different direction.” Katrina’s words came slowly, thoughtfully. “Anne called and told me about that fire. She hoped it would scare the boy enough that he would stop rushing off to make trouble in the name of protecting animals. I do believe in Jiri’s sincerity, though. No one would be able to live such a meager life simply out of rebellion. In a way I understand these Animal Revolution kids. The world is shaped the wrong way and it’s too big, so of course people will try to remake it in the image they want.”

I didn’t respond, just pressed my palm to the stone. The dock was a few dozen feet away, and in the bay a couple of buoys floated as if waiting for fishermen’s boats. No matter what the cost, we would have to get some divers out to Rödskär tomorrow, and Interpol would have to drag out of Peders and Ramanauskas everything they knew about the tributyltin barrels. According to Jiri, the Lithuanians had been to Rödskär the previous summer, so maybe they had been with Juha Merivaara when he dumped the barrels in the water.

“This rock was where the women of my family waited for their men to return from the sea. Most of them returned, but not all. My Uncle Daniel’s boat disappeared in the winter of 1950, and only one of the men was found once summer came. The winter was harsh enough that even these waters froze, and the currents underneath carried away the other bodies.”

Katrina was just a few inches behind me. I sensed the trembling of her muscles, and an intense desire to move came over me. Katrina knew the sea and polished granite even better than Juha had. The shore of Mattsboda was invisible from the other houses, and the only sound was the murmuring of the wind. I whirled around so violently that Katrina jumped and her foot slipped. The only thing that saved her from falling headlong into the water was that I grabbed her forearm. Suddenly I realized that she feared me much more than I did her.

“You didn’t twist your ankle, did you? Should we go inside?” I asked.

“I’m perfectly fine. What came over you?” Katrina tried to smile, but the result was more of a grimace. She walked higher up on the shoreline, and her gaze scanned the ground. Finally she picked up a rock almost the size of her head and tossed it in the sea. There was a splash, and the smooth surface broke into concentric rings.

“The stones don’t yet whirl on the water,” she said and turned to look at me. There were tears in her eyes. And then I knew.

18

I called in the arrest warrant from Mattsboda. I told Katrina it was pointless trying to warn Mikke after I left. We would catch him anyway. Katrina claimed she had no intention of trying, no matter how sad she was. She hadn’t wanted to betray her own son. How could she help that I recognized that verse from “The Brother Slayer,” one of thousands of traditional Finnish folk poems, in which the murderer promises his mother to return only once “ravens glitter white and stones on water whirl”? It was pure coincidence that Antti’s choir had sung Pentti Saarikoski’s lyrical adaptation of the poem a few years before.

But it wasn’t just because of that quote. Who else could it have been but Mikke? Everything had pointed to him the whole time. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

As I drove back toward Mariehamn and the airport, I received word that Mikke Sjöberg had been taken into custody. He had not resisted arrest.

“My plane will be in at 6:45. Can you send someone to pick me up? We’ll start the interrogation tonight,” I said to Puupponen over the phone.

Everything was starting to fall into place. Word had come from the Russian police that tributyltin had been used widely in bottom paint for the Soviet navy. The technician working on Harri’s old computer hard drive had found a piece of a file with a report about the effects of tributyltin on sea creatures, including fish and mollusks. The Veterinary and Food Research Institute reported that Mikke Sjöberg had come in earlier in the fall, asking about the marine samples Harri had brought in.

It wasn’t clear why Juha Merivaara had hidden barrels of toxic paint on Rödskär. Had it been an intermediate point, where the Lithuanians brought the paint for repackaging? Had they unceremoniously dumped the broken barrels in the water around the island? Juha had taken an insane risk exporting toxic paint as environmentally friendly eco-paint for sale abroad. Had he thought no one in Lithuania would ever notice? Maybe Mikke would know the answers to these questions.

At the airport I bought a stuffed airplane for Iida and a bottle of Laphroaig for Antti and me. This late in the day, the flight didn’t upset my stomach. I watched as the rays of the setting sun shone almost horizontally, casting shadow bridges from one islet to the next. Gradually twilight won the battle for mastery of the sea, and by the time we made our stopover at the Turku Airport it was fully dark. Now even airplane coffee tasted good, and I drank three cups because I didn’t know how long a night was ahead. Mikke might deny everything—and so far all we had was circumstantial evidence.

A uniformed officer from Patrol, Mira Saastamoinen, was waiting at the airport, and as I climbed into the front seat of her van, I asked her to use the lights and siren. There wasn’t really any rush other than my own desire to get the case to the prosecutor and off my desk as quickly as possible.

“Did you hear that there was an Animal Revolution protest in front of the Orion building today? They were demanding the release of all the test animals,” Mira said as we pulled off the freeway.

“I hadn’t heard. How did it go?”

“We ended up using tear gas. Thirty or so arrested, and a lot of those had to be dragged away in cuffs. Akkila got into it so badly with this one girl that both of them needed stitches.”

“Stupid.”

“The brass are saying that we’re going to have to get tough with the protesters, who they’re calling dangerous anarchists,” Mira said coolly, without revealing what she actually thought.

Technically I was actually part of “the brass” now, but I was sure Mira knew that I wasn’t always in lockstep with the administration. I didn’t want to take sides, since that always meant turning against someone. I was upwind and free, although right now that wind seemed to be howling a little too hard and at the wrong angle.

Mira had been at the Orion building for most of her shift, so she wasn’t on the team that arrested Mikke Sjöberg. Once at the police station, I headed through the quiet halls to my office to drop off my coat and gather the Merivaara case files. Puustjärvi came by and said he would be my witness. I asked him to bring Mikke Sjöberg from his holding cell to Interrogation Room 2. I visited the restroom, powdered my face, and tried to put on a harsh expression. I promised myself half a bottle of the Laphroaig as soon as I got home.

“Is the case solved now?” Puustjärvi asked as we set off for the interrogation room.

“Probably. We’ll see what we get out of Sjöberg.”

Mikke was waiting. He stood up to greet us like a schoolboy. His face looked like a pale, immobile mask; even his eyes were still. Although he shook my hand, he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Instead of sitting on the couch, he took the chair across from me at the table. Puustjärvi plopped down on the couch looking pleased.

“Would you like something to drink? Coffee?” I asked Mikke before I sat down. He declined. He was wearing the same faded gray sweater as on our sailing trip, but he seemed cold.

“You were probably told when you were arrested that you have the right to an attorney during your interrogation. Would you like to contact anyone? We can wait until your lawyer arrives.”

“Thank you, but I don’t want anyone.”

“You’ve been brought in for interrogation on suspicion of killing your half brother Juha Merivaara on the night between the fourth and fifth of October. You have previously denied your guilt, claiming you were asleep until you found your brother’s body. Would you like to change your testimony?”

Mikke’s cheek muscles twitched. He nodded. I didn’t urge him to speak, and it took a couple of minutes before he said anything.

“I knew you would be coming eventually. Actually this is a relief. When we went to Rödskär and you made me show you how I slipped on Juha’s body, I almost ran away the next night. I guess I should have left right away or just confessed that I killed Juha.”

“You wouldn’t have been able to hide forever.”

“I would have, though. I didn’t intend to hide somewhere in South America. I would have piloted
Leanda
into a good storm and gone down with her. I can’t stand living knowing that I killed my brother.”

Mikke leaned forward and rested his head in his hands, his knuckles white. He was so close that I easily could have touched him across the narrow table.

“Of course I would have confessed if you would have arrested someone else. But I stupidly thought that maybe you wouldn’t be able to prove that Juha’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“So how did it happen? Maybe telling will make it easier.”

Mikke raised his head, and his eyes focused behind me. I knew all he was looking at was an empty white wall.

“You know that Juha killed Harri.”

“I had concluded as much. How did you find out?”

Mikke explained that over the summer he had found the tributyltin files on Harri’s computer, which aroused his suspicion. He had begun looking into the events surrounding Harri’s death. Seija had told him about the dead duck, and Katrina told him about Harri’s call. Getting access to the Merivaara Nautical files through Marcus Enckell had been effortless, since as a result of his dementia, the elderly man didn’t remember that Mikke wasn’t a shareholder anymore.

Mare Nostrum’s role was almost ironic. Juha hadn’t been able to get rid of the company as easily as he would have liked because his nosy CFO had started asking questions about why Merivaara Nautical wasn’t paying Mare Nostrum dividends. Mare Nostrum had been importing raw materials for the eco-paints while smuggling hazardous waste from the Soviet navy. Mikke didn’t know why Juha had decided to hide the damaged barrels on his own property.

“We were too drunk the night of Anne’s birthday party. I had been trying to ask Juha about Harri and the tributyltin paint, but he wouldn’t admit anything, and I didn’t have enough evidence to go to the police. I had actually been thinking about staging my departure for the winter. I’d take my mother to Åland, then sail back to Espoo and try to get a couple of my diver friends to check out the seafloor around Rödskär. But it bothered me not to know where the tributyltin had been dumped and how much poison there was.”

After the party broke up, Mikke visited his boat. Then he chatted with his mother. When he saw Juha go out, he went after him.

“Juha looked at me with such a pompous drunken grin on his face and said, ‘You’re leaving tomorrow, little brother. So you’ve come to your senses and decided to forget Harri and this poison-paint nonsense?’ After a moment he said, ‘We have to celebrate the anniversary of his death somehow, though. I thought I’d go piss where we found the body.’”

That had made Mikke lose control. He took a swing at Juha, but Juha pushed him away and continued toward the shore. As Juha urinated off the cliff into the water, Mikke announced that he wasn’t going to leave and that he was going to start an investigation into the tributyltin.

“This enraged Juha. He shouted, ‘Little brother, I wouldn’t make threats if I were you. Or do you want the same thing to happen to you as Harri?’ Juha’s face was red and his eyes bulged out of his head. Still I asked him what happened to Harri.”

Mikke gave a vivid imitation of Juha’s voice, and I could almost see him standing before me, radiating that entitled self-confidence of his. “‘I might as well tell you, since there isn’t any evidence! I handled that little snoop. First I tried to talk sense into the kid, but when he wouldn’t agree to forget it, even though I offered to quadruple his salary, he didn’t leave me any choice. He didn’t even know how to fight back. And don’t you worry about those paint barrels. What are they, next to all the shit the farmers here in Finland dump in the water every day? Not to mention all the manufacturing pollution in Poland and the Baltic States. Fuck, I probably killed Harri for no reason. The police would have just laughed in his face if he would have gone in there babbling about mysterious paint barrels and showing them his dead clams.’

“Then I attacked him,” Mikke continued. “The craziest thing is that I killed Juha the same way he killed Harri, in anger, on the spur of the moment. Juha was forty pounds heavier than me but more out of shape and drunker. And he definitely would have killed me if I hadn’t beaten him to it. I had an old bronze storm lamp in my hand. When I hit Juha with it, he fell and started rolling down the cliff into the water.”

Mikke had stood and watched for a moment before fleeing the scene. He had taken the broken lamp with him, and he filled it with rocks and threw it into the water on the other side of the island. He didn’t sleep at all because he expected to hear Juha returning to the building.

“But he never came. I didn’t dare go back to the shore to see what I had done until dawn. Juha was lying dead in the water. All I could think of to do was pull him out and claim that I had just found him.”

“Did Katrina guess what had happened?”

“She didn’t say anything, but I suspected she knew.”

Katrina had refused to answer when I asked her how she knew that Mikke had killed Juha. That was wise, because she could be charged with aiding and abetting if she had real knowledge of the crime. Katrina had asked what Mikke’s sentence would be. I hadn’t been able to answer, since I didn’t know whether we were dealing with murder or manslaughter, or whether it had even been voluntary.

Puustjärvi sighed heavily from the couch.

“Can we take a quick break? My heartburn is killing me. I just need to grab a pill from my office.”

“OK. Bring us a couple of cups of tea while you’re at it. This is still going to take a while.”

When the door closed behind Puustjärvi, Mikke looked at me for the first time. I had to work not to avert my eyes.

“You should let me go. I can’t bear the thought of prison and losing the sea. I’d do just like I said. I’d take the
Leanda
into a storm and send us both to the bottom. You can give me that, can’t you?”

“Of course I can’t,” I said firmly. After an act like that, I would never be able to work as a cop again.

If Ström hadn’t killed himself, I might have considered it. Now I knew how senseless suicide was. And Mikke wasn’t going to have to serve very much time.

“You aren’t losing the sea forever. Based on what you’ve said so far, you’ll get off with involuntary manslaughter and a short sentence.”

“I’ve already sentenced myself. The only way I’ll ever escape this guilt is death.”

“You’re wrong.”

“How will I tell Anne and the kids?”

“I think that’s my job, and we can leave it for tomorrow.”

“No, I should do it myself,” Mikke said, burying his face in his hands again. Standing up, I was just about to wrap my arms around Mikke when Puustjärvi returned.

Mikke’s desire to cooperate made the rest of the interrogation easy. We were finished by eight thirty.

“What now? Back to the cell?” he asked as I wrapped up the recording.

“Yes. I’ll speak to the prosecutor tomorrow, and he’ll make the decision about remand on Thursday.”

I would have to tell the prosecutor that Mikke had threatened to flee and commit suicide. I didn’t know if doing that would make me a traitor or a guardian angel. If Mikke was released on bail, he might harm himself before the trial.