Pessi reached the step first, followed swiftly by Moses, and with his free hand Tweety grabbed hold of the door handle; it was a thick copper tube and reminded him of a horse’s penis. He didn’t stop the door altogether, he just slowed it down a little. The fingers of his right hand fumbled for the latch, finally located the cold metallic plate and immediately started pressing the paper egg into its angular nest.
Tweety loosened his grip on the handle. As the door stood ajar he caught a glimpse of Silkybum and the Corpse; they were waiting for the lift,
standing
with their backs to him. The Corpse had his hand beneath Silkybum’s blazer and was fondling her neck. Then the door swung shut. Tweety tried to control his panting as he gasped for breath; he wanted to hear what the lock had to say. And it said ‘click’, but the ‘clack’ that should have followed didn’t sound, and the warm joy of success flooded into his chest.
‘The damn lamp’s broken!’ he snarled almost immediately, as though he were afraid of his sudden happiness. The words themselves startled him; he wasn’t even sure what they meant, but still they bubbled out of his mouth from time to time, often just as his excitement was about to
culminate
. But now wasn’t the time for culmination or relief, it was the time for fingers tickling in his stomach and for being on his guard. Tweety looked around, this time without waving his arms about. He carefully scrutinised the street, the cars and the houses, and the windows in
particular
, but he couldn’t see any lights, not even the old lady who often
couldn’t
get to sleep and who snuck about peering out at the street so that she wouldn’t have to face death so frightfully alone.
He crossed the street and hoped that Silkybum lived on that side of the building, but didn’t turn round to look up at the windows just yet, it would have been too soon, and he imagined the lift arriving and the Corpse holding open the accordion door. C
HILDREN UNDER TWELVE MUST BE ACCOM AN ED
… read the defaced instructions. And now Silkybum was extending the key towards the lock, and perhaps she was annoyed that the smell of next-door’s meat gravy made the entire stairwell smell like sweaty armpits.
Tweety stopped by the wall of the house opposite and turned around. Silkybum’s house was imposing; five stories high with large, recently replaced windows that gleamed with darkness. He tilted his head; he
imagined them walking into the hallway and he sensed that a light would flicker on somewhere very soon, unless her flat really did face on to the
courtyard
. Still, that wouldn’t be a problem; he could get into the courtyard through the stairwell. Another option would have been to make his way up to the floor where the lift had stopped, and after that it wouldn’t be hard to work out where she lived by listening behind the doors.
A light came on! It was on the third floor, the window on the far right; something inside him registered this immediately. Already he began envisaging the landing, and he knew that Silkybum’s door would be the last on the left after coming out of the lift. The light shining through from the hallway was pale at first, but soon afterwards a lamp was switched on in the living room. It was one of those rice paper globes that women seemed to like so much, and he had often wondered how a thing like that would blaze if he were to hold a flame to its lower rim as a leaving gift.
A figure came to the window and pulled down the blinds. Tweety sensed that it was Silkybum; there was something so graceful about the figure and, after all, it was her flat. The Corpse was probably taking off the fabric excrement he was wearing, but Tweety didn’t want to think about him any more. Neither did he want to stand around loitering for too long; someone might ask him what he was doing or at the very least notice him standing there. Besides, he knew from experience that waiting was bad for him; the power might drain away between his toes, and at the moment he set off he didn’t want to be Asko again, the man who forced his way into his skin and took over his body for days at a time, who stole his clothes and used them as if they were his own, leaving him nothing but rags.
Tweety started walking up the hill. He stared fixedly at the pavement, but in fact he was looking inside himself, examining all that he could uncover in his mind. His mind was an unusual one. Like old sailing ships it had a bridge and a deck and innumerable levels in between which were so dimly lit that you had to carry a lantern at all times. The lowest decks were so far down that the faint smell of formic acid hung in the air and all around came the sound of rustling and whispering, and on Sundays you could hear music that sounded like the insects’ harmonica orchestra.
On the first deck, a naked woman sat in a glass chair, but Tweety didn’t pay her the slightest attention; he couldn’t very well crawl around outside. He knew exactly what he wanted. After a day at work, he wanted to come home to Wheatlocks.
‘Hello, my love,’ said Wheatlocks as she greeted him at the door; she must have heard his Mercedes pull up in the drive.
‘Hello, love.’
‘Looks like you’ve had quite a day,’ she continued. Her voice was comforting, and when she spoke it was as though she gave him permission to be tired, to be himself.
‘You’re not wrong. They faxed the spring collection through from Brussels, but Weckman had forgotten the high heels, of course.’
‘He’s such a dimwit.’
‘Sometimes I’d really love to give him the boot, but he’s got an unbelievable eye when it comes to fashion. It’s as if he can smell next season’s colours.’
‘My love,’ said Wheatlocks once again and moved closer to him, and that meant to hell with Weckman and his shoes. What a magnificent woman, fair-haired, poised and, above all, intelligent. She was his wife. And just then the smell of roast beef and garlic potatoes came wafting in from the flat behind them, while from the living room streamed the soft, relaxing tones of Herbie Mann’s flute.
‘My love,’ she sighed and wrapped her arms around him, and there she remained, tight against him, soft and warm, then she laid her head against his neck and tasted it with tiny kisses. She loved him. And not only because she needed him, benefited from him, spent his money. This was LOVE, like a warm power surging into him through her fingers, and it made him feel good and he knew that life had a meaning after all.
‘My love,’ she ran her fingers down his back, and only then did he realise she was wearing a silk dressing gown that he had brought her from London. It slid open by itself, and he moved his hand to her waist, and her skin felt like velvet. His fingers searched further – and beneath the
dressing
gown she was wearing a black bra, stitched with yearning like a poem, and a pair of panties, so small they could have fitted in a matchbox, and thin, lace-edged suspenders.
‘My love,’ she whispered, gently unzipping his trousers, then they started moving towards the bedroom. Wheatlocks went first, her buttocks tightly pressed against his groin, and with his right hand he caressed her breasts, their raisin tips, while his left hand slid downwards along her smooth belly, down beneath her knicker elastic; between his fingers there was cotton grass, then suddenly honey too.
‘My love,’ Wheatlocks uttered. ‘First from behind, then the missionary position, then sitting in the armchair and over the desk and…’ He didn’t say anything. His hands spoke on his behalf; he lifted up her dressing gown and pulled down her little panties, Wheatlocks sighed and bent over, and there in front of him were her white hips and her buttocks, and his cock was like a copper door-handle.
Tweety turned on to Vänrikki Stoolinkatu; he came from Hesperiankatu just as before, only this time from a different direction. The first thing he did was look up; Silkybum’s window was dark, just as it should be. They’d had well over an hour.
He headed straight towards the main door, his steps now calm as though he were walking home. Just before he reached the door, he unzipped his coat and put his hand into his inside pocket, and the first thing he felt was the handle of his knife. He fingered it for a moment, long enough to locate the silver skull he had pressed into the wood, the eye sockets, the teeth, and only then did he check that the pouch was there too. And there it was, like a second heart. It was a thin purse made of chamois leather, and when he moved it a soft metallic jangling sound came from inside, as though it contained a collection of brass tacks and an animal slowly gnawing away at them.
He stood on the front step, grabbed the handle, pulled, and the door opened. Of course it opened, he’d never doubted it. He scooped the paper egg from the latch, slipped it back into his pocket and stepped inside, and
Carmina Burana
began ringing in his head once again, the part where the women’s voices are at their loudest. He stood on the doormat, perfectly still, listening to it, listening as the door pulled itself shut. The blue wedge of streetlight on the floor became narrower and narrower, then it disappeared altogether and the lock said ‘click-clack’, and everything was just as it should be.
Tweety didn’t switch the lights on; he never switched the lights on. He allowed his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness in peace and tried to imagine what position Silkybum was sleeping in. He had an inkling that she might be lying on her front, her hands beneath her head and her legs slightly apart. Perhaps her camisole was on the floor, now nothing but an empty shell, but it would still carry her scent, and perhaps he’d be able to hold it as he came, low and silent, lying along the skirting board like a giant boa constrictor.
Harjunpää had got a stone in his shoe back on the footpath, and he wondered whether to stop and take it out, but by now it had stopped chafing his foot and he decided to let it be and quickened his step in the hope of maybe getting home sooner, but above all so that he could keep up with the woman in front of him, and to his slight amazement he found that he almost envied her. She was ploughing ahead energetically, amusingly even, in a way that made him think of a bird, a sandpiper or some other quick-footed wader, and he got the nagging feeling that, in comparison, he was like a tractor, an old green Zetor that had trouble getting started.
The woman talked incessantly, explaining what she had discovered again and again. Maybe it was something about her voice. In one way it was beautiful, like the sound of a woodwind instrument, but too refined, and perhaps it was this that made her seem somehow dishonest – not like the people he normally dealt with. The only person this woman was deceiving was herself, and she had a right to do so if she so wished. Harjunpää hadn’t been listening to her for a while, but mumbled politely every now and then. ‘Yes.’
On top of that, he hoped that the woman was wrong, that it wasn’t a body after all but a sunken log or a stone – surely he might at least be afforded this much good luck after all the pain, the crying and the
crawling
about under trains of the previous night. But the main reason for his sullenness was that it was very early on a Sunday (it was ten to six in the morning; he had checked as he got out of the Lada), and his twelve-hour
night shift was almost behind him, or rather it was inside him along with the fatigue, and together they weighed him down like a chest filled with lead and the multicoloured glass found at crash sites.
‘Or what do you think?’
‘Yes, sorry?’
‘I said, what do you think?’ the woman repeated and stopped in her tracks, and for a brief moment Harjunpää thought of answering her honestly: he was thinking of the man run over by a freight train in the early hours, and in particular he was thinking of the man’s left hand, which they hadn’t been able to find anywhere, and the furore that would erupt in the media should it be dislodged from the undercarriage somewhere further north:
GRUESOME DISCOVERY AT PROVINCIAL TRAIN STATION
!
‘Pardon? I didn’t hear.’
‘I can see that. And to be perfectly frank, I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously – or me, for that matter.’
‘I’m sorry… It’s been quite a night. Three deaths, one manslaughter and a man run over by a train. And now this. And on top of that, a woman was raped and my partner had to go out there by himself. He’s only been in the force a few months.’
‘Well!’ the woman exclaimed, more to her Great Dane than to Harjunpää. She yanked on the lead and the dog cowered in surprise, and Harjunpää admitted to himself that he didn’t like the woman; he hadn’t liked her from the start, though he couldn’t say why. She was in her fifties and, just like her speech, there was something very prim about her, her old jogging suit notwithstanding. On her wrist she wore an intricately braided golden chain and her perfume was one of those familiar,
expensive
fragrances. As her address she had given the rather exclusive Granfeltintie. Perhaps Harjunpää was truly envious of her, or maybe it was because you simply can’t like everybody.
‘I did say who I am, yes? My name is Helen Ekstam-Luukkanen.’
‘Yes, madam, I’ve written it down.’
‘And my husband is Risto-Matti Luukkanen.’
‘Yes,’ Harjunpää muttered, keeping his expression impassive, though he realised that the woman was expecting a reaction of some sort, at the very least a raising of the eyebrows. She gave him a flimsy smile and set off again. The path soon became narrower, nothing but a furrow running
between the twigs and tussocks. Spiders’ webs sparkled in the air, heavy with the scent of dew and moss and the mushroom season. The name Risto-Matti Luukkanen didn’t mean anything to Harjunpää. It only served to remind him that the name of the assistant in the hardware store in Kirkkonummi was one Taisto Luukkanen, and this reminded him that the roof of his daughter Valpuri’s rabbit hutch had broken after Pipsa had used it as a trampoline and he had promised to buy some new wire mesh a week ago.
‘I asked you whether you believe he drowned here.’
‘Let’s take a look at him first… Still, they can drift for miles, you know. If it isn’t a stone, that is.’
‘This is not a stone. My morning jog has taken me past this spot for seven years. Those three to the left are stones, but this is a body, I could tell straight away.’
‘Yes.’
‘My first husband said “yes” all the time, and after a while it became quite unbearable.’
‘Yes… absolutely,’ Harjunpää corrected himself and took a firmer grip on his bag. The handle had been repaired with iron wire and now it had started rubbing against his thumb as if it too had something against him. Be a stone, he thought, just please be a stone! Then he caught the murky, clay smell of the sea, and behind the gnarled pine trees gleamed its motionless, placid surface.
They reached the rocky shore. Red and glistening, it stretched out in both directions, and in front of them it sloped beautifully, round and steep, into the sea. Directly across the sound lay the island of Sompasaari with its colourful skyline of tanks and containers, on the right loomed the bridge to Kulosaari and to the left was Korkeasaari, and behind everything else, its contours softened by the fog, lay the entire city and its familiar spires. The sea felt far away, at an exceptionally low tide, and in the
half-light
it looked improbably green, almost toxic, as if it wanted to suck everything into its folds and keep it there until its bones had rotted away. On the Mustikkamaa side of the bay a woolly mist drifted aimlessly above the water’s surface.
‘Over there,’ said the woman and pointed her finger. ‘More to the right.’
All Harjunpää could see were two ducks paddling calmly towards Korkeasaari, blissfully unaware of anything else. But then he saw what the
woman meant: about ten metres from the shore a couple of large boulders jutted out from beneath the surface, four of them altogether, and he stared at them for a moment, in particular the one towards which the woman was gesticulating.
He looked more closely, and there was no doubt that it was different; the others made ripples as the water gently ebbed and flowed, but this one bobbed along with the water, heavily and awkwardly, and Harjunpää began to accept that the woman had been right all along, and with that the taste of the previous night rose up in his mouth. A moment later and he was certain; he’d seen the same thing so many times before. It was a human body, floating in a position typical for drowning victims: face in the water, limbs dangling towards the bottom, only the shoulders barely visible.
‘Damn it.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘It is a body. You win… you were right.’
‘I told you so! I’ve walked past this spot every morning for a good many years, and this is the place I do my stretches and look out at the sea, and this morning there were suddenly four stones. Hang on a minute, I thought to myself, stones don’t just multiply by themselves, and that’s when I climbed up this hillside to…’
‘You did the right thing,’ Harjunpää thanked her, and now he really wanted to get rid of her, partly because in a childish way he felt as though she had beaten him, but mostly because he knew that he would soon have so much to do that he wouldn’t have the time or the inclination to be especially polite to anyone. Aside from that he didn’t like her enthusiasm for the matter; she was too keen, so much so that in other circumstances he might have suspected all kinds of things, and he had met hundreds of people who had made similar discoveries. ‘Thank you very much. And if we need any more information I’ll call you. Have a very good day.’
He turned, perhaps a little too casually, and began tottering down the embankment, and the exertion that lay ahead finally hit him. Fatigue almost overwhelmed him, it heaved inside him and he thought of how wonderful it would be to curl up in the nearest rocky hollow lain with hay and forget about everything. The matter was far more complicated than that; his policeman’s soul was somehow broken, but he didn’t dare think about that now, because otherwise he might not have been able to keep on going. And if he had said it out loud, someone would have
commented, ‘You don’t have to be here, you know.’ But he did. And that made it all the more diabolical.
Almost without noticing, his thoughts had turned to work, and he already knew that he would have to photograph the body as soon as
possible
, drowned bodies can blacken in as little as twenty minutes; that he would have to take a sample of the water in a film container; that he’d have to get Mononen on the job, and of all the other things he had to do. He still wasn’t sure how he was going to get the body on to dry land, and a moment later he was certain that the nearest emergency station and rescue pole were at least a kilometre away. Typical. The fact that he was alone didn’t help matters either, but he couldn’t help that. He couldn’t help the fact that the superintendents had been watching American police dramas and come to the conclusion that the ‘initial patrol principle’ was always a good thing, and because of this the number of detective
inspectors
had been cut, as they were deemed as useless as paper machines, and night shifts now ran on a skeleton staff of four men.
‘Or what do you make of it?’
‘What?’
‘Do you think he’s been murdered? I can sense it. No, I’m certain of it, just as I was certain it was a body.’
‘If you’d be so kind as to wait back up there…’ said Harjunpää. He could feel himself getting irritated; he hadn’t noticed that the woman and her dog had followed him. Of course, homicide was one option among many, but he hadn’t wanted to think the worst straight off. Already he was envisaging himself undressing the body amid the smell of death at the coroner’s office and discovering a knife wound between the shoulder blades, and he imagined the extra hours this would incur and realised that he wouldn’t get home until around six in the evening.
‘Quite frankly, your attitude is… Don’t forget, I’m the one that found him.’
‘I haven’t forgotten. And I’m the one that’s going to examine him. Now, please, go back up the hill.’
Something hard flashed across the woman’s eyes, or perhaps he had only imagined that too, but at any rate she raised her chin almost
threateningly
and didn’t make any indication that she was leaving.
‘Are you ordering me about?’
‘I’m not ordering anybody… But this is now a police investigation, and that means that bystanders have no business being here.’
The woman pursed her lips tightly. The dog sat down on the rocks. It looked like a good-natured fool; its tongue dangled from the side of its mouth like a lump of meat. Harjunpää turned round without taking another look at either of them, but as he walked down to the shore, he said: ‘In any case, it could be a terrible sight. Boat propellers sometimes tear bodies to shreds leaving the guts hanging out…’
Between the rocks was a narrow strip of water, the ground a mixture of sand and gravel. Harjunpää jumped down on to the sand with his bag and suddenly felt a chill. The fog had slowly drifted closer to the shore and now he was almost inside it, like being in a grey pocket, the rest of the world somewhere else. The sun could barely be seen. He quickly glanced around: the ground was littered with horsetails, algae and shells, all manner of small objects and a single slipper eaten away by the water, but as far as he could see there was nothing obviously linked to the body.
Then he looked out towards the body – and there was no doubt that it was a body. Its back was covered in dark material, so wet it was almost black. Though it was impossible to make any reliable observations, it looked like a brown flannel shirt. For one reason or another Harjunpää had an inkling that the body was no longer fresh, then he realised why: it was clearly not floating on its own, its back was buoyed up by the accumulation of gases inside, but was partly resting on a jagged rock just visible beneath the surface. Maybe it had been brought in by the waves of the previous day or a current of some sort had drawn it into the bay. It turned slowly and tilted in the water, almost ghostlike, as though a giant slimy fist had risen up from the bottom, grabbed hold of it and pulled, and it was surely only a matter of minutes before it disappeared again.
He opened his bag and pulled the hand radio up to his mouth. ‘Control, this is Harjunpää from Violent Crimes,’ he stated. If good fortune were on his side, for once, a police boat would be on patrol nearby, and with any luck it would be on site in a matter of minutes.
‘Control. Violent Crimes to A 5.’
He would at least ask for the nearest patrol car to be sent out and for them to bring the first rescue pole they could find. Calling out divers from the fire service would take too long. ‘Control, do you copy?’The Criminal Investigation department’s own call centre had been discontinued and they didn’t have anyone from their division stationed with the emergency services either. Someone had to be there, though it was still so early in the
morning that there may only have been two men on duty, and if that were the case, both of them would of course be on the telephone.
‘Control. Violent Crimes to A 2-3.’
‘How are you going to get him out of there?’
Harjunpää spun around; the woman was standing exactly where she had been before. She was actually rather beautiful. The dog had pulled its tongue back inside its mouth. Harjunpää knelt down, put the radio back in his bag and glanced at the body. It was moving more quickly now; he could only see half of its shoulders, and when he stood up again it all seemed perfectly clear.
‘I’ll have to go and get it,’ he growled, unzipped his coat and let it fall to the ground. Then he removed his revolver from the holster on his waist, put that in the bag too, then began untying his shoes – and only then did it occur to him that he would have to take his trousers off too. He looked up at the woman, almost pained.