The Hummingbird (6 page)

Rauno drove past the isolated houses in the vicinity of the crime scene. There were four in total. Two houses stood on Selkämaantie. The first was home to Aune Toivola, who would be left in peace and quiet for the rest of the day, and the second to elderly widower Yki Raappana. The other two houses were newly built detached units in Irjalanperä, a remote area to the south-east of the running track where, in the hope of increased tax revenue, the local council had planned plots of land to house those relocating from the city. These houses were inaccessible from the same path that led to the running
track and to Aune and Yki’s properties. Instead you had to drive back to the main road, drive south for about half a kilometre and turn right at the roundabout by the shopping centre. Still, an old forest track a few kilometres long led from the houses to the illuminated running track. The shooter could well have used that.

Rauno decided to start with Yki. The house was small, old and dilapidated, but beneath the flaking layers of paint and the torn felt roof someone with a penchant for DIY might well have been able to make out the potential for a quaint old cottage. The surrounding gardens featured large currant bushes, their branches heavy with berries. The woods opened out on the other side of the yard, behind the sauna and the fence. Rauno knocked at a slightly skewed door; its white paintwork had long since started to peel in slender strips. An old dwarf of a man in a checked shirt and brown trousers and braces opened the door surprisingly swiftly. The old man’s eyes blinked sharply. The stench of a potato cellar wafted out to the doorstep.

‘Hello there,’ said Yki and shook Rauno’s hand, his palm as rough as sandpaper. ‘It’s a fair surprise to have a real police officer round here. I get so few visitors these days. I’ll put the kettle on.’

Rauno didn’t care to decline, though the kitchen looked like a sure-fire way of picking up food poisoning. The ceramic hob was covered with layers of burnt food and the coffee pot was stained with age-old brown spillages. The draining board was piled with rubbish and dirty dishes. Yki rinsed two cups in cold water. Rauno sat down at a small kitchen table and decided to man up and deal with it.

Though Yki continuously lost his train of thought and delayed Rauno’s departure with endless stories, the visit wasn’t entirely futile. Despite his age, the old man had a sharp mind and an acute sense of hearing. He hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. Like Aune, his house was out of sight of the track. However, he had heard something. At a quarter past ten he had gone outside to close the flues in the sauna and he’d heard a car driving towards the village. That certainly can’t have been the murdered jogger, thought Rauno. The old man had heard shots too, both before and after the sound of the car’s
engine, but hadn’t paid them the slightest attention. At this time of year you heard shots all day long, and had he been a bit younger he too would have been down by the shore taking a pop at the geese late in the evening. But he no longer had a rifle. He had given it to his brother’s granddaughter when she’d turned fifteen and acquired her hunting licence. That was a few years ago now.

The visit to Yki’s house had taken over an hour, and the aftertaste of three bitter cups of coffee still burned Rauno’s throat. He sniffed at the stale air that had soaked into his shirt as he drove to his next visit, which yielded nothing but a sense of burgeoning anxiety. Irjalanperä was home to two families with young children who had moved from the city and who were like clones of one another. Both houses were unfinished, their front gardens nothing but a glorified sandpit, a chaotic mess of toys and two-by-four planks. A flock of pre-school-age children was running around, while their parents looked dead with exhaustion; they were people deep in debt, people who collapsed into bed each night as soon as they’d put the kids to sleep.

Just like me, thought Rauno. Just like us.

Neither of the families had heard or seen anything, for which both couples seemed politely and genuinely apologetic. It was entirely plausible that someone could have walked or driven past, gone to the end of the path leading to the running track and made their way from there to the track or the shore without the couple noticing a thing. Putting the children to bed was such an operation that neither family had paid the slightest attention to the world outside their windows.

However, they might have noticed a car’s headlights or the sound of the motor, simply because there was so rarely anyone else around. Perhaps they might have paid it some attention. But if someone had been moving around out there after they had gone to bed, they most certainly wouldn’t have woken again. Anything was possible, hard to say, maybe, maybe not, Mummy will come and look in just a minute, you wait now, Daddy’s talking to this man. They promised
to mull it over and to get in touch if anything came to mind, though they seemed quite certain that wouldn’t happen. Rauno left his card at both houses and watched as both sets of children immediately seized it for their own games.

He might as well have visited only one of the houses, thought Rauno as he headed back to the city. Now I’ve just exhausted myself. The noise, the small children, the parents running around after them – it was all too close to home, as if he’d been interviewing himself. Rauno wondered whether he looked as fatigued as they did. It occurred to him that he could use the stress of the new case to escape the same hullabaloo when he got home. He’d have a pint somewhere, go home once the kids were sure to be asleep. And his wife.

The thought was tempting.

Sari Jokikokko-Pennanen had remained at the station. After the discovery of the jogger, Virkkunen had assigned her to all operations related to the missing Kurdish girl. Looks like I’ll be on overtime again, she cursed under her breath and reluctantly called the babysitter who had even more reluctantly agreed to stay for another hour but not a minute longer. Sari’s husband was away on business and her mother was on a senior citizens’ spa holiday in Estonia. She’d have to get home in time. Sari’s two small children prevented her from becoming consumed with work, and for that she was truly grateful.

With a sense of routine Sari filled out the forms used to summon people for interview, printed and signed them, put them in envelopes and left them at reception to be posted. Bihar’s family would receive the forms tomorrow. Sari glanced at her watch; half an hour had passed already. She called the station in Vantaa and left a message requesting they call back. She wanted to talk to the officers that had visited Bihar’s uncle and aunt, who had seen the situation for themselves. Indeed, it would probably also be worth talking to the officers who had been alerted to Bihar’s house. Esko had apparently already done this, but she wanted to form her own perspective
on the matter. Sari had always found it hard to get an overall sense of a case simply by reading other people’s reports, and this had had a somewhat detrimental effect on her work as a police officer. It was a weakness, she thought. My very own little weakness. Nobody’s perfect. Again she looked at her watch. She’d have to go soon. Although she was worth her weight in gold, the babysitter would be annoyed, and this she wanted to avoid at all costs. A good babysitter was hard to find, and she didn’t want to let this one slip through her fingers.

She decided to continue working at home once she’d got the children to sleep. Perhaps she would still have the energy to scour the internet for information on honour violence, something that she knew only as a distant concept, something that occasionally cropped up in headlines from Sweden. She switched off her computer and quickly arranged the papers on her desk into two piles: those to be filed away and those that still required her attention. Both could wait until morning.

Poor Anna, she thought as she closed the door of the station behind her and walked towards her car. What a nasty way to start a career as a detective. Then she called home.

‘I’ll be another ten minutes. I’ll take an extra hour and a half off on Friday, okay?’

7

WHAT
MUST
IT
FEEL
LIKE
to have to identify your own daughter’s body?

The question struck Anna as she pulled on her tracksuit in her apartment hallway. It was late. Her body felt tired and stiff. Her thoughts spun around restlessly like small children after a long car journey. The situation was ripe. Her imagination attacked at moments of weakness, drove its rusty nails deep inside her and yanked out painful memories that she had hoped were already forgotten, gone for ever, but that festered at the back of her mind and clung around her shoulders, from morning to night, from one move to the next, from year to year. They never let go.

Anna rubbed her eyes to block the path of the welling tears. Amid the red blotches on her retina, she saw the image of a child raped and mauled by a two-headed eagle. It could have been her. It could have been anyone.

Such attacks had become rarer over the years. It’s just a panic attack, the school nurse had told her when she was in high school and suggested she go to the doctor and get herself some medication. Anna couldn’t stand the idea of pills that would affect her state of mind. Instead, she’d started training for the marathon. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had an attack. Perhaps it had been after she’d ended her year-long relationship, the only long-term, serious relationship she’d had. The guy had been another policeman, nice and sensible, all in all a very decent man, but with one fatal flaw: he’d wanted to get married and have children. And though Anna had been the one to end the relationship, the break-up had taken its toll on her. For a while she was quite beside herself. But that, too, was years ago.

Anna lay on the floor in the hallway and stared at the lamp hanging from the ceiling in the hope that it would blind her and dispel the eagle. She remained there for at least ten minutes and forced herself to calm down. It’s no use, she repeated to herself. No use, no use, no use. There was someone out there prepared to kill his own child, someone just like Payedar Chelkin. Wasn’t there something far more terrible about this than mere death, something impossibly bleaker, blacker? For a moment Anna tried to think what could have happened to the Kurdish girl. Then she sat up awkwardly, and though she felt drained she pulled on her trainers, ran outside and jogged to the start of the running track. Just as she had done yesterday, just as Riikka had done too. One–nil to me, she thought.

After the forensics officers had completed their work, Riikka’s body was taken to the coroner’s office. Juhani and Irmeli Rautio were already there, and Anna had waited with them. The couple identified their daughter immediately, without a moment’s hesitation. They buckled with emotion; now they too would be for ever broken. Juhani Rautio’s sobs were so heart-wrenching that Anna could no longer contain her tears. Irmeli sunk into apathetic silence. With expressionless eyes she looked at her daughter as she lay, headless, on a plastic stretcher in the cold room, caressed the skin along her arms, no words, no tears. Anna wrapped her arm around Irmeli’s shoulder; she wanted to say something comforting but found herself incapable of words. There Riikka’s mother stood, stiff and cold as a statue in her arms, and it all seemed so familiar that Anna began to feel sick.

Anna set off on her usual route, which took her through the yards in front of numerous blocks of flats and headed towards the woods on the outskirts of the suburb. That was her running track, the lonely place where she had taken up running all those years ago while, cans of beer in tow, her peers had trundled from one problem to the next, escaping old ones and running headlong into fresh ones. Her mother had been terribly proud that, despite the ravages of
puberty and her own social problems, Anna hadn’t become caught up with drugs and was serious and committed when it came to her sport. Still, all those years ago she’d known that she was no different from anyone else.

People can escape the past in so many ways.

Anna dived into the dark embrace of the trees. It was dusky in the forest, but her eyes soon became accustomed. The white of the running track winding its way ahead glowed dimly.

Suddenly she felt frightened. Her mind was darkened by the thought that someone was watching her through the dusk of the trees, following her run in the crosshairs of a sniper’s hunting rifle. Something snapped in one of the bushes. The forest seemed to be tensing around her, ready to explode at any moment. Then, the sound of approaching steps behind her. Anna slowed a little, tensed her body in preparation for the attack and quickly glanced over her shoulder. The dark figure was already right next to her. A short, stocky woman in a black tracksuit. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod of the head before speeding away along the track.

Bolond!
Anna reproached herself. Stupid and superstitious. Now’s not the time to let my imagination run away with me. You’ve been out here running in the November darkness too, as a teenager, with no knowledge of self-defence and you’ve never been afraid of anything, she muttered to herself, sped up almost to the limit of her ability, ran for five minutes at full speed, then slowed down for fifteen minutes. She continued like this for an hour, forcing herself to get through the tough set of intervals, using the torturous regime to shed her fear.

She wondered whether Riikka had tried to do the same. Had she been afraid, sensed something in the moments before her death?