“What kind of problems?”
“Eating disorders. Self-image problems. Depression. I’ve known Heli since kindergarten, she’s always been an emotional mess.”
“Were you her husband or her caretaker?”
This sounds harsh, but I see her point. “I started dating Heli when we were thirteen. We’d been together for fourteen years, married for seven. I was both.”
I lay my head on Kate’s breast and she wraps an arm around me. “Seppo told me she wasn’t my responsibility anymore, to forget about Heli. I told him I’d like to meet him to talk. He said he couldn’t see any point in that. I was so heartbroken and angry that I told him I’d find him, hunt him down and kill him, stab him in the fucking heart. He hung up the phone, and I never spoke to him again until two days ago, when I clapped handcuffs on him.”
She strokes my face. “But you didn’t hurt him. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I got so depressed I was nearly suicidal. I’d wake up and think, ‘Today is the day I kill him.’ But it was like that was all I had to live for. Once I’d killed him, I’d have nothing left. The days passed, I never did, and then one day I just didn’t want to anymore.”
She kisses the top of my head. “It’s a good thing. If you’d killed him, you’d have ended up in prison and we’d never have met.”
“I was lucky. If you kill someone in the line of duty, you have to see a therapist. I talked more about the divorce than the shooting. It helped a lot.”
“Why didn’t you want to kill
her?”
A fair question. I laugh a little at my ridiculous answer. “I couldn’t kill her because I loved her. I needed someone else to blame.”
“Why do you think she left you?” The tone of her voice says she’s afraid she’s prying, but I understand her curiosity.
“I blamed myself for a long time, asked myself what I’d done or hadn’t done. Maybe it was partly my fault. She had her friends at music school, I had my cop buddies, and we didn’t spend much time together or have much in common anymore. We drifted apart during our last couple years together. I didn’t see it and let it happen. Still, though, after a while I realized that her leaving didn’t have much to do with me. She left because I had nothing left to offer her.”
“What do you mean?”
“In high school, I was a good hockey player, and she studied piano. Heli was a dreamer. She thought I’d be a big sports celebrity and she’d be a famous pianist. I broke my knee and couldn’t play anymore. I decided I wanted to be a photojournalist. I got out of high school-you know here we get out at nineteen-and had to do mandatory army duty for eleven months. Just before I left, Heli told me she was pregnant, so we got married. I came home on leave and she said she’d lost the baby.”
“Was she really pregnant?”
There are things I don’t tell Kate. I cheated on Heli a couple times when we were teenagers. I think Heli knew, but we never talked about it. My brothers told me there were rumors that Heli cheated on me. If she was pregnant, I don’t know if the baby was mine. Heli and I never talked about that either.
“Maybe. I doubt it. Heli got accepted into Sibelius Music Academy, in Helsinki, so we agreed that after the army I’d work while she studied, then it would be my turn. In the army, I was in the military police. Afterward, I did what seemed like the natural thing and became a cop. Heli went to school. Six years later, she graduated with her master’s degree. At the time, Seppo was on the board of directors of the Finnish national opera. When I talked to her friends later, I figured out that she had started her affair within a week or two of her graduation, just as I was about to start my education. I guess she thought her relationship with Seppo would do more for her career than supporting me while I studied. Heli only takes. She doesn’t do things for other people.”
“It took you thirteen years to figure that out?”
“I was young and stupid, and love makes you blind.”
“It’s hard to believe she could be so callous.”
“It took me a long time to believe it. Sometimes you don’t know people until after they’re gone.”
She strokes my hair again. “You know I would never do that to you.”
I suppose fear is the reason it was so long before I could be in a serious relationship again, but I’m not afraid anymore. “I know… ”
This is hard to talk about. I pause, try to find the words. “This seems funny when I look back. At first, my plan was to kill Seppo and just turn myself in. We Finnish police are competent. I didn’t think I could get away with it.”
In fact, three murderers have turned themselves over to me. They said they were sorry and asked me to arrest them. It’s common here. “I decided to study law enforcement and learn how to commit a murder. It’s not easy to get away with. Murder investigations here have a ninety-five-percent success rate. Of course, the real reason I didn’t kill him was because deep down, I never wanted to in the first place, but that’s what I told myself. I was insane with grief.”
“How long were you in therapy?”
“About a year, but I gave up on the idea of murdering Seppo long before that. I found out I liked studying. I couldn’t work as a beat cop with a bad limp, but I could be a detective. I decided to get my master’s degree and make a career out of it. I worked while I studied.”
Next to medicine, law enforcement is the most admired profession in Finland. The national police force is one of the best in the world and almost free of corruption. As an inspector, I’m one of the most respected members of the community. It may be egotistical, but I enjoy that status.
She laughs a little. “So if you hadn’t wanted to be a killer, you wouldn’t have become a detective.”
“I already was a killer, and because of it, guilt contributed a lot to my depression, but yeah, the irony is great.”
She hugs me tight. “You were just a human being in a lot of pain. You’re a good man Kari, and I love you for it.”
Funny that I’d been so afraid to tell her the truth. There was no reason for it. “Thank you Kate. I love you too.”
“It sounds like Heli has some kind of narcissism disorder,” she says.
“That’s what my therapist thought.”
“You don’t have to worry about all this old bad business being dredged up in a lawsuit. You were the good guy. She’d come off like the queen bitch of all time.”
“You think?”
“I’m certain of it.”
She pushes herself out of bed and hobbles on her crutches to the kitchen. She brings me a bottle of beer. All that effort to bring me a beer makes me smile.
“I’m ordering us pizza,” she says.
I look at the beer bottle. It’s a Karjala. Thank God, because I’m never going to be able to drink Lapin Kulta again.
15
IN THE MORNING, I call the national chief of police to give him the update he asked for. He must have my name and number in his mobile phone and know it’s me when it rings. He wouldn’t be so rude if I were someone more important. He barks at me, “What?”
I bring him up to date on new developments, tell him about the three sets of DNA found on Sufia’s corpse.
“So she blew the Eklund boy before she got killed,” he says.
“And he has a BMW.”
“A tough situation,” he says. “His father could make our lives difficult.”
“Yeah.”
“Go question him, impound the vehicle and process it, but go easy, don’t arrest him unless you get hard evidence.” He hangs up before I can speak, a fucking annoying habit of his.
***
KATE STILL CAN’T GET used to the idea that during her first year at her new job, she earned four weeks of vacation, not including a bunch of paid holidays. In this country, we work a lot less than most people in the world, an average of around two hundred days a year. Nature is close to the Finnish heart. Most of us like to spend a good portion of that free time in the countryside at a summer cottage. It may be a hut in the forest with no running water, it may be a palace, they all qualify as cottages.
In theory, time spent at a summer cottage is for picking wild mushrooms and berries, for going to sauna and swimming in lakes. In practice, a trip to a summer cottage is often an excuse for us to stay drunk for a week or two at a time.
Some of our more well-to-do also have winter cottages. Peter Eklund’s father has a winter cottage set atop a high mountain. It’s the most valuable piece of real estate in the area and resembles a small Teutonic castle, except that the entire front wall is made of glass. In the months that we have sunshine, the daylight flashing off it can be seen for miles.
I drive up the mountain along the winding road that approaches the Eklund winter cottage and park next to Peter’s BMW. It’s new, a black 3 Series sedan. I brace myself for the shock of arctic cold, get out of the car and check out his tires with a flashlight. They’re Dunlop Winter Sports mounted on seventeen-inch rims, just like Seppo’s. The only difference is that Seppo’s car has star-spoked wheels, and Peter’s are double-spoked.
I call for a tow truck to impound the car, then take in the view from the mountaintop. It’s cloudy, but no matter how dark it is, a little light always reflects off the snow. The world is cast in a charcoal silhouette. Thousands of lights from Levi and Kittilä glitter in the valley below. It’s nine fifteen A.M., a good time to interview Peter. If true to form, he’ll be so hungover that he won’t be able to think straight enough to lie.
I ring the doorbell and wait. I ring it again. He doesn’t answer. Waiting in the cold pisses me off, so I push the button in and hold it down. The noise is annoying from outside. Inside the cottage, it must be making his head throb. After a few minutes, he opens the door.
Peter is tall and blond, with classic Nordic good looks. His clothes are rumpled and slept-in. “I-i-in-inspec-”
Peter stutters. When he’s nervous, he’s incomprehensible. When he’s drunk, the stutter disappears.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
“Co-co-come… ” He gives up and nods.
I walk past him. The front room is vast, the ceiling looms three stories overhead. The other floors are constructed as balconies that look down into this space. The room is dominated by a central fireplace open on all four sides. A stone hood connects to a massive chimney that rises twenty yards before reaching the roof. The decor is late-twentieth-century bad taste: everything costs a lot of money, nothing matches. Peter’s father uses it as a fuck pad to get away from his wife in Helsinki. He lets Peter use it when he isn’t.
Three men are passed out on sofas, all in their early twenties. One opens an eye and looks at me. I tell him to go back to sleep. Peter looks queasy. “Bad hangover?” I ask.
“Y-y-es.”
A half-empty crate of Koskenkorva, Finnish vodka, sits in the middle of the floor. I pull out a bottle. “Got a place where we can talk?”
We go to the kitchen. It’s better equipped than some gourmet restaurants, although clearly unused. Empty bottles cover every surface and remind me of the bottles littering Sufia’s cottage. I open the Koskenkorva and hand it to him. “Drink it. I need to talk to you.”
He pours vodka and orange juice, fifty-fifty, in a glass and downs it, pours another. I make coffee while he gets drunk enough to communicate. He lights a cigarette, a Marlboro Light.
He finishes the second drink, makes a third. I pour myself coffee. We sit at an oak kitchen table. It has traces of white powder on it. I doubt Peter is much of a baker. It’s probably not flour.
“Feeling better?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about you and Sufia Elmi.”
“I saw the paper yesterday.”
“Then you should have called me.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“The autopsy turned up your semen in her mouth.”
I expect this to shock and frighten him. He shrugs. “She blew me that morning.”
“You’re pretty casual about it.”
“It’s no big deal. I met Sufia about a week ago, in Hullu Poro. I fucked her that night.”
“Where?”
He laughs. “Everywhere. In the women’s bathroom of the bar, in my car, in her cottage.”
“You don’t seem too sad that she’s dead.”
“Well, it’s not like I really knew her. I like to drink and fuck. Sufia doesn’t drink, but she likes-liked-to fuck. After the second time, she asked me if she could borrow some money. I knew what was up. Every time after that, I gave her one or two hundred. We always called them loans. I guess I met her to fuck like five times, stayed over at her place two or three times. It’s hard to remember.”
“You’re stating that you paid her for sex.”
He looks pleased with himself. “Inspector, she was worth every penny. She had this weird pussy, and Jesus, she loved to give head.”
“I take it you’re referring to her missing labia minora.”
“Her what?”
“Her vaginal lips. They’d been removed.”
“No shit?” He laughs again. “Whatever.”
Peter has to be the most worthless piece of garbage I’ve ever met. “Where were you at two P.M. on the day of her murder?”
He gestures toward the front room. “My buddies came in from Helsinki and their plane arrived about noon. I picked them up at the airport and we’ve been hanging out ever since. We were in Hullu Poro all afternoon.”
“How did you get to the bar?”
“In my car.”
“Do you know Seppo Niemi?”
“A little. I’ve met him in nightclubs in Helsinki and talked to him in Hullu Poro a couple times. Sufia was with Seppo when I met her. He got too drunk and left. Sufia told me she’d been seeing him. It didn’t bother me any, he’s a fucking dumbass.”
“Her room had a lot of empty liquor bottles in it. Were they all yours?”
He puts on a grin like a five-year-old. “Most of them anyway.”
“I have to take your car.”
The alcohol makes him overanimated. He stands up and raises his voice. “Hey, come on, I told you what you want to know!”