“Armi was never any trouble to anyone,” her mother suddenly said. “Why did she have to die? She was supposed to be getting married. I always thought Kimmo was such a nice boy…”
Mallu patted her mother comfortingly.
“And you still intend to defend him? You must have come here to ask whether Armi had any other boyfriends, just like the police yesterday. Our Armi was a decent girl—one boyfriend was enough for her. What on earth got into Kimmo?” Armi’s father said in obvious anguish.
The questions I had planned to ask felt unnecessary, even cruel. And presenting them to Armi’s parents made no sense. At least not yet.
“I imagine we could revisit this a little later, at the end of next week, perhaps. I’m sorry,” I said. I meant sorry for everything: Armi’s death, my own intrusion, representing Kimmo. I started my retreat toward the front door, but Mallu stopped me and asked for a ride home.
“Listen, Dad, I need to stop by my place to switch the laundry I started yesterday, so the clothes don’t mildew. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You and Mom will be alright without me for that long.”
Mallu’s departure resembled a getaway. As we turned onto the old Turku Highway, she began making excuses for herself.
“I really did have laundry in the machine when my father called me over to their house. Thanks for the ride; I don’t have a car. Teemu got it.”
“Teemu who?”
“Teemu Laaksonen. My future ex-husband,” Mallu said darkly. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Yes. This isn’t my car.” Whereas my prospective sister-in-law, Marita, was naturally slender, in comparison, Mallu
Laaksonen looked diminished by worry and care. Now two sizes too large, her dark clothing hung off her, the lines on her face were too deep for a thirtysomething, and her hair already contained strands of gray. The expression of her face was more bitter than sad. I wondered how a person could survive a miscarriage, a divorce, and a sister’s death all within six months.
“What do you want to know about Armi?” Mallu asked and then shoved a piece of nicotine gum in her mouth. She was probably in full-on withdrawal, since she seemed to be one of those women who even as adults still don’t dare smoke in front of their parents.
“Anything. Biographical information, friends, other previous love interests. You don’t have any other siblings, right?”
“Right. That’s the great tragedy of our family, if you ask my father. Two girls, no boys. Dad had a little delivery company with a couple of trucks and a van. His greatest dream was that someday the sign on the side of each would read ‘P. Mäenpää and Sons.’ When I was five and Armi was one, Dad came down with meningitis as a complication of the mumps, and that apparently damaged him, making it impossible to have any more children. After that, he sold his company and started driving a taxi.
“Then they started dreaming about grandchildren. Teemu and I tried for five years. Then came the miscarriage, and my uterus ended up so scarred that there’s a ninety percent chance no egg will ever be able to implant in it. They still had Armi, though. But now she’s gone too.”
Mallu spoke in an even, expressionless tone, but every word still sounded like a shout.
My hands trembled on the steering wheel. “We only have us three girls too,” I said. “I’m the oldest. My middle sister is pregnant now, and the whole family is hoping for a boy.”
“I don’t know if I ever even wanted kids,” Mallu continued, as though she hadn’t heard me. “I was so tired of trying, and all the tests. Teemu has a low sperm count, and I had endometriosis, which I got surgery for. We tried and tried, and in the end, we didn’t have anything left but trying to have a baby.”
“So you’re divorcing?”
“It’s for the best. Let him test out his weak sperm on some other woman,” Mallu said bitterly and then continued giving driving directions. As I brought the car to a stop in front of a shabby apartment building, she burst out, “All I’ve done is talk about myself. If you have time to come inside, I can try to tell you about Armi too. I’m in no hurry to get back to my parents’ place. I might go crazy if I don’t get a little breathing room.” Mallu was lighting a cigarette before she even got both feet out of the car.
I still had a while until Kimmo’s interrogation, so I followed her through the building entrance to a rather dark firstfloor apartment. Besides the lack of natural light, the other first impression the place gave was that it had been strangely ripped in half. There was barely any furniture or decoration. Only two chairs stood next to the kitchen table, which should have been able to seat four, and the sofa set in the living room was missing a coffee table and a second armchair. At least the stereo still had two speakers. Mallu watched my eyes as they surveyed the scene.
“Teemu got the car and VCR, and I got the rest of the appliances. Damn it, the laundry!” she said, rushing into the bathroom.
A cigarette still dangling from her lip, Mallu bent down to empty the washing machine, which smelled like my uncle’s root cellar. Mallu sniffed the clothing for a moment and then decided washing them again would be best. She added detergent, started
the machine, and then said she was calling her parents to tell them she would be a little longer than expected.
We ended up sitting on the two lonely chairs in the kitchen, sipping cups of coffee.
“OK, so about Armi. You heard what my mom said, that Armi was never any trouble to anyone. In a way that was true. She was a nice little sister. You know, the smiling girl with a bow in her hair. When she was little, she walked the neighbors’ dogs, and when she was a teenager, she babysat their children. She always wanted to take care of people, and I guess that’s what led her to nursing school. But even as a little kid, she also had an amazing knack for finding things out about other people’s lives. ‘Mom, why do the Kervinens have so many empty liquor bottles?’ she asked once after she had been babysitting at the neighbors’ house.”
“Caring for others can create a kind of power,” I observed, not really knowing exactly what I meant.
“You said it. I’ve always thought Armi specialized in gynecology because of my issues, and I don’t think purely out of a desire to help. Maybe it was a way to get control somehow.”
“What does your mother do for work?”
“She used to work for the Elanto food co-op, but now she’s on disability. Naturally, my family was never good enough for that Hänninen witch. If the police hadn’t arrested Kimmo, my first guess would have been that she strangled Armi to keep her from contaminating their bloodline. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of them was mixed up in Sanna’s death too. They couldn’t stand what a disgrace she was.”
Mallu sensed my shocked stare and raised her eyes from her coffee cup.
“You don’t believe me either.” She took a sarcastic tone. “Yeah, I just say whatever pops into my empty head. Everybody
knows I’m unstable. Because of the miscarriage—I even go to therapy! And I’m out of work, so I have plenty of time to sit around and dream up crazy stories, right?” Mallu clearly meant her icy tone to echo someone else’s idea of her. I wondered who. And why was Sanna’s ghost constantly looming in the background whenever the subject of Armi’s murder came up?
“Were you and Armi close?”
“Close…If you have sisters, then you know how it is. Hate, jealousy, and love all rolled up into one—but probably that last one least of all. We did a lot together, especially lately. Armi seemed to think it was her duty to cheer me up, so she dragged me all over the place with her. Like to the Hänninens’ party the other night. Armi even took me to my appointments with my psychiatrist.”
Caring is power, I thought again and then wondered what kind of power Armi would have liked to try to use on me. I was surer than ever that she wanted to talk to me about something more than sewing needles and wedding gossip.
“How long were Armi and Kimmo dating?”
“About four years. There was a party thrown by the nursing school and Helsinki Tech—they were assuming that nurses are all women and engineers are all men. Of course, they met there! Before Kimmo, Armi only ever had one boyfriend, and he lives in Lapland now, in Rovaniemi.”
“Was there anything between Armi and Makke Ruosteenoja?”
“I doubt there was anything on Makke’s side—I always thought he liked his women in a more intense flavor, like Sanna. Armi pitied Makke, so of course she wanted to take care of him. Makke is kind of like a lost puppy dog. Teemu and Makke were in the same class, which is why I know him.”
Switching gears, I bluntly asked Mallu, “Did they figure out what caused your miscarriage?” Unfazed by my question, she simply lit another cigarette. “There wasn’t anything to figure out. One Saturday, Teemu and I were coming back from Kimmo and Armi’s. It was March, and the roads were slick. Teemu was a little drunk too, since he and Kimmo had been doing shots after their squash match. We were crossing the street in the middle of a block. Suddenly this car came speeding out of nowhere. I jumped out of the way and tripped and fell.”
“Did the car stop?”
“I’ll give you one guess. We didn’t think anything happened to me, that I’d only torn my tights and bruised my knees, so we just hobbled the rest of the way home. The bleeding started during the night. Early the next morning, Teemu called Dr. Hellström, and he made us call an ambulance. But there was nothing anyone could do. When I came to from the anesthetic, Dr. Hellström’s red eyes were the first thing I saw. At first I thought he had been crying for me, but he was just getting over the flu.”
“My God.” I wished I had something else to say, but I couldn’t find the words.
“You know what the strangest thing was? It happened so fast and it was dark—we couldn’t even tell the color of the car, let alone the make or license plate number, but Teemu swore up and down that Armi was the one driving it.”
My breath caught. Did Mallu realize she was offering me a motive for Armi’s murder? A motive both for herself and for Teemu?
“But it couldn’t have been Armi. She didn’t even have a driver’s license, let alone a car. And she and Kimmo were going to bed right after we left. I still can’t understand why Teemu
would say something so stupid. Armi was floored when I told her.”
A clicking sound came from the bathroom as the washing machine began the first rinse cycle. I was baffled. What if Armi had been behind the wheel of that car?
“Where does your husband live now?”
“With his parents, in Kirkkonummi. You’ll find the number in the phone book under Taisto Laaksonen. Hold on, let me check to make sure I remembered to put the washing machine hose in the tub so it doesn’t just drain onto the floor.”
As I poured myself more coffee, I wondered how much I could trust Mallu. Perhaps I should look up Teemu Laaksonen and hear his version of the accident. High speed, Saturday night, and fleeing the scene. Sounded suspiciously like drunk driving.
Mallu returned with a photo album.
“I have some pictures of Armi when we were younger, if you want to see.” Mallu laid the album in front of me and began turning pages. “This is Armi when she was six, with our dog.”
A slightly plump, owlish-looking little girl with braids hugged a decidedly nasty-looking German shepherd. On the facing page, the same little girl with braids and Mallu, much huskier than now, posed next to their bicycles. Unceremoniously skipping past whole pages, Mallu showed me Armi’s confirmation, high school graduation, and college commencement portraits. In a more recent-looking picture on the final page, Mallu weighed at least twenty pounds more than she did now and smiled happily under the arm of some man. A Christmas tree stood in the background. I heard Mallu’s breathing speed up. Without saying a word, she tore the picture from the album, crumpled it into a ball, and hurled it into the trash.
“That was at Armi and Kimmo’s engagement party. Last Christmas,” Mallu said, pointing to another photograph.
This picture had the same Christmas tree as the previous photo, with Kimmo and Armi hand-in-hand, showing off their engagement rings. I remembered Antti’s words: “Last November they finally managed to get a bun in the oven.” Last Christmas Mallu was also probably celebrating her pregnancy.
“Do you know how soon we’ll be able to bury Armi?” Mallu asked, her breathing now steady again.
“Two weeks from now, at the earliest. The final autopsy can take up to a week, and that’s once they actually start.”
“I just want to get it over with as soon as possible. That’s the best kind of burial. I would have liked to see my baby too, but they didn’t bring it to me. They said it came apart because they had to scrape me out. They just threw her in the trash or something. Maybe they have some place they bury discarded children. I didn’t ask.”
Mallu slapped the photo album shut, knocking over her empty coffee cup. It banged to the floor but didn’t break.
“God, I just keep talking about myself. You wanted to know about Armi, not me,” Mallu said as she straightened up from retrieving the cup. “Did you still have something to ask? If that machine would just finish, I could get back to my parents’ house,” Mallu said tensely. Since this sounded like an invitation to leave, I did.
When I reached the car, I realized that I hadn’t asked Mallu what she had been up to the previous morning. I would need to pose the same question to Risto, Marita, and Annamari. Makke had been partly at his store and partly at home. It was only a short trip from his apartment to Armi’s neighborhood, and he would pass there on his way to work.
I decided to drive back to Armi’s house myself. As I could have guessed, blue-and-white police tape and yellow velcro closures blocked off Armi’s backyard, and the front door was sealed. However, no one was on guard.
Standing outside the vine-covered fence, I looked toward the neighboring residences. To the east were a couple of apartment buildings, the windows of which almost certainly had views into Armi’s backyard. Hopefully Ström’s boys had realized this as well and were making the rounds questioning the residents. Although you would hope that if someone saw a strangling in progress, a call to the police would have been forthcoming. But you never know—as a police officer, I had picked up plenty of people passed out in the middle of the street, and even dealt with a few dead bodies, where someone had keeled over from a medical emergency and passersby just walked around them for hours without stopping to help.