At the front entrance to the central police station in Pasila were two large doors which folded in the middle. These were the main doors to the parking lot: the right-hand door leading in and the left-hand door leading out. This, however, was only for police vehicles that could fit through the doors; it hadn’t occurred to anyone designing the building that some vehicles were taller than the average squad car. But as everybody knows, to err is human, to forgive is divine – particularly when men who have spent their entire working lives in the police force are suddenly told they are architects and asked to design a police station.
That Friday evening, just after eleven o’clock, the left-hand door mechanism hissed as someone entered the security code from inside the parking lot. The door slowly began to slide open. Glaring fluorescent light poured out into the night darkness, then a car appeared: a white VW van with an observation platform and a folding ladder on the roof. The vehicle belonged to the Arson unit; a small laboratory and base on wheels, the largest vehicle that would actually fit inside the parking lot, and even then it could only be parked right by the door. But this time the car wasn’t being used by the Violent Crimes officers.
An officer from the Drug Squad sat behind the steering wheel. He had been assigned the case, and he and his colleagues had been allocated this vehicle because, at first glance, it couldn’t be recognised as a police unit and because the windows were lined with mirror glass. This meant that they could park the car almost anywhere and follow what was going on in the world outside without the risk of anyone seeing.
The car belched diesel exhaust fumes into the night air, crossed the pavement and turned on to Radiokatu. Another car appeared, a dark-blue Golf, followed quickly by a light-coloured Samara. From inside the parking lot came the echo of words, the slam of car doors and the revving of engines starting up, and it wasn’t hard to guess that another ten or so police cars were about to speed out into the night, that something out of the ordinary was in the offing, that on that night anyone thinking of getting up to mischief would be better off staying at home quietly sipping their lager.
Cars started appearing, another seven. One after the other they rumbled over the pavement, accelerated down the street and headed off towards the city centre. Last of all came a majestic black Volvo, gleaming and waxed, with numerous antennae attached to its roof. Seagull One glided out into the night.
Operation Spray was underway.
Reino had parked the elephant right in front of the workshop and Tweety could see it clearly through the open door. He was on his knees on the oil-stained floor, leaning against a bench, and he was laughing because Lasse had attached large, yellow stickers on to the elephant’s side that read Helsinki Emergency Plumbing Services Ltd. The signs even gave a telephone number and an address at Vaasankatu 5. That was the funny part; if somebody’s pipes sprung a leak and they tried to call this company for help, the phone would ring and ring and nobody would ever pick up, and if they went to the address on Vaasankatu they’d find themselves in a clothes shop. Water would be pouring everywhere and the crack in the pipes would just get worse.
The fact that the elephant had another car’s registration number made him laugh too. Apart from bluffing for them, in a few hours’ time the elephant would help them carry home sackloads of money and gold and diamonds. He was especially amused at the realisation that Mother Gold was really a witch. She was a wicked witch who had laid a curse on him, magicked him in two, Tweety and Asko, and turned his life into a meat grinder from which she wouldn’t let him escape.
The thought of the corridor in the bank’s basement was suddenly in his mind. Its walls were like flesh, red meat caught on the surface of the grinder, and something moved in his stomach and a thin trace of sweat tickled his upper lip.
Outside Reino said something to Sisko. Night had fallen, enveloping the world in soft folds of cloth. Tweety’s sniggers made Reino nervous,
and every now and then he sent Sisko to keep an eye on him. Reino was nervous anyway; his voice sounded like frayed barbed wire. He shouldn’t have been like that; someone should have said something to him. Because when someone is nervous, he attracts failure like a magnet. Sisko
understood
his giggles; she’d explained that laughter is fear’s backside, and when it turned to face you, fear itself was looking elsewhere and didn’t notice you.
Sisko came indoors; she was wearing the same clothes she always wore and could easily be mistaken for a plumber. She’d been helping Reino and Lasse carry the tools and gas cylinders outside, and on Reino’s orders she’d been keeping a checklist, the kind that pilots keep, making a tick beside each item as they loaded it into the van. She was going with them,
specifically
to help Tweety. She helped him by holding her hand on his neck; she was his guardian angel, and with her hand on his neck he wasn’t afraid of the pouch or the picks or the locks. They’d done it all before. They’d even practised; he’d been able to open every lock Reino had given him, though none of those had been a grooved Abloy lock.
‘Tweety,’ said Sisko and looked at him, her head to one side. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. He looked down at his hands and his voice seemed to thicken. ‘Yes…’
‘And you’re still thinking about the lock on the squirrel door?’
‘Yes. It’s singing very quietly, and I can see lots of shades of brown.’
‘Good… We’re nearly ready to go.’
Reino and Lasse walked in, bringing with them the smell of tobacco and sweat and nervousness. The night had left tiny messages on Lasse’s clothes, so small that he hadn’t noticed them. Tweety inhaled them deep into his lungs and tried to read them, but stopped immediately; they were bad messages. They were shining with a trembling, blue light that licked through his brain, through the city, through the whole world even, and he began to feel as though he’d been out in the rain and his clothes were soaking wet. He started to giggle; he had to. Giggling was a tent peg too, just as words had been earlier that day.
‘Right,’ said Reino and looked at the others, and with that the Chancellor came to life, it was real: Museokatu was somewhere in the distance, sleepy cars parked along the street, and the bank with the blue squirrel glowing in its window. The gate leading through to the yard was real, the flesh-coloured corridor and the squirrel door. Then inside the bank
they were met by the smell of paper, the smell of plate-metal lockers and the toilet that hissed to itself; then there was the alarm that couldn’t raise the alarm and the thick door that Reino would have to cut through. Minutes going past agonisingly slowly, the fear that somebody might come, that they’d be caught. But then there was the money, the gold, the diamonds.
‘Or what?’ he added. He shouldn’t have. Those words and his
expression
meant: shall we postpone it until tomorrow, or shall we call the whole thing off? It made everyone uneasy; they shuffled their feet, and perhaps it occurred to them that this might be the last time they’d all be together like this for years. What would it feel like to be cross-examined, put in a cell, sent to prison? Lasse held his hand to his waist and kept it there, his fingers touching the thick handle of his Smith & Wesson, and in a moment his lips had turned white.
‘What are we standing around here yacking for?’ said Sisko as though someone had tooted a horn. ‘Let’s get in the van and get going.’
‘Right,’ Lasse muttered, his voice hoarse. ‘The sooner we get going…’
‘I still wish we had that bloody police radio. At least then we’d know how many patrols there are in the area, and whether they’re planning a raid, so we don’t walk right into a trap.’
‘But we haven’t got it,’ said Sisko. ‘We’ll be fine without it.’
‘And you’re sure Mum’s asleep?’
‘Yes. She won’t wake up until tomorrow morning now.’
‘And you’ve packed Asko’s…?’
‘Let’s go.’
‘Right, let’s go…’
Sisko came round to Tweety’s left and Lasse to his right. They held him under the arms and helped him stand up. From there he made his own way to the van, stiffly, as though he were learning to walk for the first time, and now all sense of nostalgia was gone; they were filled with action and a sense of assurance. It was in their every movement, encouraging one another: we can do it! And very slowly they began to believe in it themselves, they had no choice, and as that belief set in so the night smelled suddenly much better. It smelled of magic, of a life that was about to take a turn for the better.
‘There you go,’ said Harjunpää, his voice strangely taut, and laid the papers on the desk in front of Tanttu. He looked only at Tanttu and tried to pretend there weren’t other people in the room; Kontio was sitting to one side with his legs crossed and a sour expression on his face, and Järvi was standing by the window with his back to them, looking outside.
Harjunpää’s statement was two pages long. He had tried to stick to short, laconic sentences: ‘
I pointed out that the body was about to sink beneath the surface. For this reason I could see no option but to fetch it myself. Because I was alone, I took off my clothes except for my underpants
…’ He had attached a copy of the original report, which gave a good all-round picture of events, and a copy of Koponen’s post-mortem report, which he’d written up in record time. There was an element of mischief to it all, but Harjunpää hoped that the turgid, official text of an objective second party would make Tanttu understand that the matter was being taken out of all proportion.
But Tanttu didn’t touch the papers; he didn’t even glance at them. He looked right at Harjunpää, and his eyes were decidedly hard and abrupt.
‘That’s not why I summoned you.’
‘OK…’
‘This is a different matter, the repercussions of which are far more serious.’
‘And yet it’s always the same officer, isn’t it?’ said Järvi without turning around. ‘I wonder what that tells us.’
Harjunpää quickly wet his lips. Tanttu hadn’t even asked him to take a seat.
‘Last Tuesday night you were on patrol in unit 5-8-3.’
‘Yes…?’
‘And what happened?’
Harjunpää didn’t understand. He remembered the moped-man and visiting the flat on Messeniuksenkatu, but that had all happened the following night. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Control gave you an assignment.’
‘That’s right,’ he remembered. ‘It was around one a.m. Control called…’
‘It was at 00.49,’ Tanttu corrected him as though this was of great significance. He was holding a piece of paper from which he read the time that the call had gone out. Harjunpää shifted his feet awkwardly.
‘And what was that assignment?’
‘The alarm had gone off at the National Investment Bank on Museokatu. We were relatively close to the scene and…’
‘That would be Museokatu 18.’
‘Yes… but it was a false alarm. There was a…’
‘How do you know it was a false alarm?’
‘The alarm attached to the main vault in the basement had gone off. Nobody had broken in: the windows were all intact and there were no signs of forced entry on the doors. Additionally, a man who worked at the bank turned up and he…’
‘Mr Kauppila.’
‘Yes,’ Harjunpää spluttered, and now he really started to worry, though he couldn’t understand why. ‘We entered the building with him and everything was as it should be. He even showed us the door to the vault and the alarm itself. He told us that the alarm had gone off several times in the past because of a problem with the wiring. These alarms are so sensitive that they can be set off by a lorry going past…’
‘I don’t need a lesson on the workings of alarm systems. I’m quite aware of how they work. What action did you take?’
Harjunpää looked past Järvi and out of the window. What actions
had
he taken?
‘We quickly checked the interior of the bank, just to be on the safe side, and reported back to Control that everything had been taken care of.’
‘And after that?’
‘Regarding what?’
‘To my understanding we’re not talking about a bicycle theft here.’
‘I didn’t do anything else.’
‘But you should have,’ Järvi almost yelled, and now he turned around, and in his hand he was holding a piece of paper folded in two.
‘This is an order, signed by me, requiring officers to report all – I repeat,
all
– incidents involving a bank alarm going off at night to my team.’
‘I… What year is that from?’
‘Don’t be smart! That won’t help us now. The fact of the matter is that you have disobeyed a direct order from your superior. In writing.’
‘It wasn’t a false alarm,’ said Tanttu. ‘It was set off on purpose. The alarm in question was swapped for another one that didn’t work. And as a result, this weekend these same people carried out their plan: they cut through the vault door with a blowtorch.’
‘This was a highly skilled, professional job.’
‘The vaults happened to be holding an exceptionally large amount of money. Initial estimates put the sum at just under three million marks. The vault also contained the bank’s reserves of foreign currency; we still don’t know how much that amounted to. On top of that, safety deposit boxes belonging to private clients were all emptied. At this stage we can only imagine what they might have contained: cash, jewellery, gold ingots…’
Harjunpää stared at the floor and forced himself to take deep, calm breaths. When he thought back, he knew they couldn’t have done any more than they did. Neither could anybody else.
‘To my mind, there’s nothing I can do about this,’ he said finally, as it seemed they were waiting for him to comment on his actions. ‘Nothing whatsoever.’
‘But this incident could have been prevented if you had taken care to notify the relevant people,’ said Tanttu. Arguing the point clearly annoyed him; he stood up and leaned his hands against the desk. ‘If you had acted in a manner befitting your training and your experience, this might never have happened. Our officers might at least have valuable information to help them with their investigation.’
‘So there’s nothing to go on?’
‘That’s right,’ Kontio growled. ‘They didn’t leave a calling card.’
Again Harjunpää looked down at the floor. It all began to make sense: Kontio’s officers were in difficulty, or at the very least they were at a loss,
and that was perfectly understandable because the investigation was in its early stages, but it still irritated Kontio profoundly. Harjunpää recalled how Kontio had taken on the Finnair deposit-box job as his own personal mission. What’s more, this might well be the last big case in Kontio’s long career, and naturally he wanted it brought to a swift conclusion.
As for Järvi, his responsibilities included making sure professional criminals were under constant surveillance, keeping the investigation team up to speed with what they might expect to uncover, and after the fact to collect reliable intelligence on what had happened. But this time it hadn’t worked. In addition, while the bank job was underway, Järvi was himself out on patrol with an exceptionally large number of officers, and rumours the next morning had it that absolutely nothing had come of Operation Spray. And the icing on the cake was that over the weekend at least a hundred gravestones had been overturned and smashed at the cemetery in Hietaniemi and the police had no information regarding the
perpetrators
. Indeed, one of the tabloids had led with the mocking headline: P
OLICE WATCH TURNIP PATCH – FENCE STOLEN!
And what was now going on was a procedure typical in the force: looking for a suitable scapegoat. There was always someone to pin the blame on, and they usually came from the lower ranks of the force. Harjunpää also understood perfectly well that there was probably nothing personal in this; he had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘If I might say something…’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘It seems rather senseless to me to…’
‘Are you calling your superior senseless?’ snapped Järvi. ‘Are you calling the chief of police
senseless
? In front of two board members?’
‘No… But as far as I can see I don’t…’
‘There’s no point making a fuss now that you’ve screwed up,’ Kontio snapped. ‘It would be a damn sight more useful for you to go into the woods for a while, sit down in the grass and think about things.’
‘Dismissed,’ Tanttu scoffed, his eyes hard as ever.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘But when we take all this into consideration,’ he added pointing to Harjunpää’s incident statement. ‘It’s no secret that the Public Order Police have requested twenty officers to be transferred to their team. Fourteen of them have still to be named. That was earlier this morning. Now there are only thirteen.’