The Defenceless (2 page)

THE EARLY MORNING
was still dark. Senior Constable Anna Fekete had woken with a start; she’d been dreaming about something terrible, but now she couldn’t remember what. Her sheets were damp with clammy sweat. Anna took a hot shower and made herself some tea for a change; she drank quite enough coffee at work. Sipping her tea, she sat reading the morning paper, listening to the sounds of the building wakening around her. Her neighbour was in the shower; the sound of rushing came from the pipes next to the kitchen. There was a thud somewhere. It occurred to her that she didn’t know any of her neighbours. People in the stairwell greeted her, polite but distant, but who were they, what did they do for a living, what kind of dreams did they have, what moments of joy, what pains? Anna knew nothing of their lives. She couldn’t even connect the names on the letterboxes to the right faces. But it was fine by her. She had no yearning for communal living, she had no desire to take part in shared gardening activities or local committee meetings held in the building’s clubroom.

For Anna, community spirit was nothing but an illusion, and an over-rated one at that. The only people that actively sought it out were people who had never experienced it first hand. In the West it seemed that mercilessly scrutinising other people’s business, sticking your nose into private matters, and people’s often violent attempts to preserve their personal freedoms were considered charming forms of care and concern without which all social ills flourished. Anna found it irritating. It wasn’t long since the greatest concern for Finnish people was what others, neighbours, relatives, people in the village, thought and said about them. People had allowed their lives to be
shaped to fit society’s expectations; they were afraid of rejection, and in their fear they had accepted a fate imposed on them from outside. How many people had spent their whole lives suffering because of this? Is that what we should go back to? If her brother Ákos returned to Serbia, would he be more depressed than he was now, Anna wondered, more of a drunk? Was that why he wanted to stay in Finland?

Anna glanced at the clock, pulled on a pair of skinny jeans and an old hoodie, and decided to cycle to work despite the biting frost. She put on a thermal jacket, her hat and gloves. It felt crazy, the habit people round here had of cycling to work come rain or shine, of risking the freezing weather and potentially fatal, slippery roads, balanced precariously on two thin wheels. Her family back home would be shocked if they knew, but Anna had come to enjoy cycling in the winter. With a good set of studded tyres and a helmet, the snow didn’t slow her down at all. It did her good to get some fresh air before starting work, to wake her limbs, still stiff from sleep.

‘Anna, I’ve got a special assignment for you,’ said Chief Inspector Pertti Virkkunen at the morning meeting of the Violent Crimes Unit.

‘What’s that?’

Esko Niemi fetched his third cup of coffee of the morning, Sari Jokikokko-Pennanen was eating a sandwich and doodling along the margins of her notepad, Nils Näkkäläjärvi was drinking a cup of tea. Virkkunen’s expression was stern.

‘We’ve picked up a Hungarian girl.’

‘Oh. What’s she done?’

‘We’ll be investigating this as a case of causing death by dangerous driving. She ran someone over last night.’

‘Oh dear. Had she been drinking?’

‘No.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Nothing that showed up in the patrol officer’s initial breathalyser. We’ve sent blood samples to be tested.’

‘Was she speeding?’

‘We don’t know that yet. In any case, she doesn’t speak a word of Finnish, and her English is pretty weak, so it’s best if you take care of the interview.’

‘Of course!’

A tingle of nerves rippled through Anna’s stomach. A Hungarian girl. An interview in Hungarian. Would she be able to do it? How did you say ‘injured party’ in Hungarian? What about ‘involuntary manslaughter’? There were so many words in her native language that she couldn’t remember or that she’d never even heard. Where could she find all the relevant technical terms and phrases? Her mother knew a lawyer back home; perhaps she should contact him.

‘Well, get going then. We can’t keep her locked up forever.’

‘What? Right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s the deceased? Where did the accident happen? When? I can’t go in there not knowing anything about the case.’

‘Last night, just after midnight, near Kangassara on the road leading out of the city, right on the edge of town. The victim was an elderly man. He was only wearing his pyjamas. We still haven’t got an ID on him. Sari can start looking around to see if anyone matching the description has been reported missing. Here are the initial photographs from the scene.’

Anna looked at the photographs spread out on the desk. The body and the blood spatter looked horrific; she doubted whether she would ever get used to images like this. Which was worse: to be so numbed to violence and the sight of bloodied corpses that you didn’t feel anything, or to be distressed by it every time?

‘There’s an old folks’ home out near Kangassara, isn’t there? The victim could have wandered off in the night.’

‘Maybe. Things like that happen all the time, but they don’t usually end up under a car.’

‘Normally they freeze to death,’ said Sari.

Esko hadn’t said anything. Everyone in the room had noticed his
reddened eyes and the faint tremor of his coffee cup, but nobody said anything, not even Virkkunen. Perhaps he’d worked out how long it was until Esko’s retirement and decided it was too late to change him. Besides, Esko always did his job and wasn’t in the habit of taking days off sick, though nobody understood how this was possible given how obvious it was he’d been hitting the bottle. Anna had started to think that maybe some people simply needed alcohol to survive, to postpone death, to make waiting for death that bit more bearable, to numb their pain, to brighten their mundane day-to-day lives, to pep them up, to splash some colour against the greyness of routine, to provide release, self-deceit, self-destruction. Not everybody could be sporty health-freaks in top physical condition. Society needed the drunk, the obese, the depressed, as examples to the rest of us and to provide statistics with which to frighten people. And to this end, alcohol was the perfect weapon.

I wonder how Ákos is doing, Anna wondered. She knew her brother had been drinking for at least a week now.

‘Good job we can deal with this without an interpreter,’ said Virkkunen. ‘I’ll call the boys upstairs and tell them to take the girl into the interview room.’

‘Jó reggelt, Fekete Anna vagyok,’
Anna introduced herself.

‘Farkas Gabriella, kezét csókolom,’
the young woman responded formally, making Anna feel awkward. Nobody had ever addressed her like that before. ‘I kiss your hand’. That’s what you said to old folk or people who were clearly in a higher position than you. And for the first time Anna realised that that’s exactly what she was in this job. A superior, the holder of power. She had power over this person. Of course, not all power; thankfully there were laws and regulations in place to protect the rights of individuals and to define the extent of the police’s jurisdiction, but in this instance, as in most other work situations, the balance of power lay with her. A simple greeting, one that she happily used when she was visiting elderly relatives back home without giving it a second thought, had suddenly revealed
something about the nature of her work that she’d never appreciated before. This was the power of words, she thought – the link between our native tongue and how we understand the world. How many other things remained hidden from her, concealed behind words without a mother tongue?

Anna noticed that Gabriella was waiting. She began by recapping what she already knew about the case and asked whether this was correct. Gabriella nodded.

‘Where were you going?’

‘Kangassara. That’s where I live. I’m an au pair with a family out there.’

‘How long have you been an au pair?’

‘Just over ten months.’

‘And you’re staying for a year?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you from originally?’

‘Budapesti vagyok. És te?’

‘Én vajdasági magyar vagyok, Magyarkanizsáról.’

‘Cool! I have friends nearby in Erdély but I’ve never been to Vajdaság. Have you lived in Finland long?’

‘Since I was a child. I’ll ask the questions, okay?’ Anna said, trying to sound friendly.

‘Oh, yes, of course. I haven’t spoken Hungarian for ten months, except on Skype,’ replied Gabriella, a little embarrassed.

‘I know the feeling. But let’s get back to business. Where were you driving from?’

‘The university. Well, the student village really. I was at a party.’

‘And your breathalyser test was negative.’

‘That’s right, I don’t drink if I have to drive. I don’t drink much anyway.’

‘And had you taken anything else?’

‘No. But I was listening to music.’

‘Well, that’s certainly not illegal.’

‘I was completely lost in it. Hungarian folk music,’ Gabriella said quietly.

‘Tell me in your own words, as carefully as you can, exactly what happened.’

Gabriella seemed to stiffen. She was clearly holding back tears, didn’t look Anna in the eyes but stared off into the distance, breathing in fits. Then in an anxious voice and swallowing back her tears, she explained how she had seen the man lying in the road but that the car hadn’t obeyed her, how it had continued sliding forwards. It felt like it took an eternity, though in reality the whole sequence of events must have lasted no longer than a few seconds. How the man seemed to get closer and closer, and she was unable to do anything about it. The sound of the thump as he struck the car. How she momentarily lost control of the car and feared more for her own life than for that of the man.

‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked, by now weeping.

‘First we’ll have to establish how fast you were driving. If you weren’t over the speed limit, there’s probably nothing to worry about. Of course, you should bear in mind that the speed of a vehicle should always be regulated according to the prevailing driving conditions. The roads were very slippery last night.’

‘I’m not used to driving in weather like this, but they told me the car had a good set of winter tyres.’

‘Whose car is it?’

‘My host family’s second car. I’m allowed to use it to get about. Will I ever get home? Look at me, always thinking of myself instead of others.’

‘You’ll have to stay in Finland for the duration of the investigation and possible trial. Let’s think about that once we know which … charges are going to be pressed or whether you’ll be charged at all.’

Anna had to think for a moment how to talk about pressing charges. I must get myself a legal dictionary next time I’m at home, she thought.
A büdös fene
, I don’t even know how to tell her she’s suspected of reckless driving! At worst, I could be found guilty of misconduct. I should have insisted on an interpreter – and at the
same time I might as well admit to my colleagues that I can’t speak my own mother tongue any more.

‘At least he was an old man,’ Gabriella woke Anna from her thoughts. ‘If it had been a child, I don’t think I could bear it. I’d kill myself.’

‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘thankfully it wasn’t a child. But you say the man was already lying in the road when you noticed him?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So he wasn’t walking along the road?’

‘No, he was lying there. At first I didn’t even realise it was a person, it just looked like a dark heap in the road, a pile of gravel or something, a rubbish bag.’

‘Was he moving?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not. At least I don’t remember him moving.’

‘Do you remember how the man was lying before you hit him?’

‘No. It was so terrible, so unreal. All I knew was that the heap was getting closer and that it was a man after all. Wait, he might have been lying on his side. I think I remember seeing his face; it was like he was staring me right in the eyes. But I’m probably wrong or I’m just imagining it. Who was he?’

‘We don’t know that yet. It’s likely he was a dementia patient who had run away and got lost. You see people like that wandering about in strange places.’

‘Did he have a heart attack?’

‘Perhaps, or he might have fallen over. The autopsy will tell us what happened.’

‘The relatives are going to hate me.’

Anna didn’t have the heart to tell her that this was very likely.

‘But I can’t believe you’re Hungarian too. How great is that!’ said Gabriella. ‘I’d never get through this if I had to try and speak English.’

‘You would be assigned an interpreter.’

‘You’re far better than an interpreter. I want you.’

Though she might have wanted to, Anna was unable to say anything in reply.

Esko Niemi was standing outside the police station smoking a cigarette. He was thinking of the case the National Bureau of Investigation had assigned him. Jesus Christ. Working as a dogsbody for those idiots in suits annoyed him. He didn’t want to take orders from anyone but Virkkunen, and even those orders generally pissed him off. Things had started to irritate him more and more recently, and Esko didn’t really know why. Something was bugging him, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He felt as though he’d been driven into a corner, trapped in a cage. He’d felt troubled like this before, though he didn’t want to think about that, let alone admit it to himself. What if he just sold his apartment, bought a house in the woods, withdrew into the peace and quiet? He didn’t need all that much in the way of modern conveniences. Running water would be good, he’d need a small kitchen and a place to put his bed, a sauna and a fireplace.

Living without electricity might be a bit too basic – he wasn’t moving to a Siberian gulag. Maybe he could install a few solar panels; they were fairly cheap, though the people that normally bought them were generally your typical green-fingered eco-warriors. He could give it a try. There were a couple of small panels at Virkkunen’s summer cottage too. Esko visited Virkkunen there at least once every summer, and together they went fishing and relaxed. Those panels were enough to run a couple of lamps and charge up the laptop. A boat on the shore, a decent barbecue, a simple life far away from everything. Damn, it would be great. Esko felt a burning in his chest. He rubbed the spot with a clenched fist. The pain seemed to singe his dreams. He was no longer a young man, but surely he still had time to do something other than wading through the endless mire of the criminal world. But before that he would show the rookies at the NBI how an experienced policeman does his job, Esko thought. This case would be his grand finale. Then he could disappear, ride off
into the sunset, leaving the dust to settle behind him. Esko smoked his cigarette right up to the filter, stamped the stub into the ground and lit another one. After finishing it, he went up to Anna’s office.