The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

  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?

  After her shower, she listened to AGF’s song ‘Lonely Warriors’. A strange and fascinating soundscape of machines and human voices washed over the sofa where she lay wrapped in a towel, her wet hair a tangled mess on the cushions, like a solitary soldier in her barrack at night after all her comrades had died around her. She was alone on the front line, she thought, alone in the universe.

  She thought back to her time in the army. It had been a time of awakening, of finding direction. Of opening a door, and of closing one, because it was then that she’d finally realised she would stay in Finland. It hadn’t been a conscious decision but something that was inevitable.

  She vaguely recalled what Áron had looked like in his khaki uniform as he had left home for the last time.

  A lonely warrior.

  Best to forget about it altogether.

  She switched off the CD player and tried to go through the day’s events – without success. There was too much to focus on. She wouldn’t wish a first day at work like this on her worst enemy.

  And just then something flashed inside her.

  Fuck you. That’s what she should have said to him, perfectly amiably and without any hesitation, collegially, bloke to bloke. And then: Chief Inspector Virkkunen seems to have been reading too many swivel-eyed nationalist blogs before bed. Then she should have given a faint, nonchalant chuckle, just enough to give the impression that she might be joking, having a laugh, saying something apparently frivolous and insignificant. Though, of course, this was not the case.

  That’s how she should have dealt with the day’s events.

  But what with all her nervousness that morning it hadn’t occurred to her. Of course it hadn’t. And besides, would she have had the guts? To say such a thing to her boss? On her first day at work? Doubtful.

  Anna couldn’t decide which was more infuriating: the fact that an appropriately snide comment always popped into your head too late or that she probably wouldn’t have said it anyway. After agonising over this for a while she fell into a restless sleep on the sofa, her ha
ir still wet.

  8

  SUMMER HAD DECIDED TO LINGER on after all. The chill of the previous few days had disappeared when Anna awoke on the sofa, naked, as the sunshine pushed its way between the slats of the blinds and crept across her eyelids. It was half past five. The towel, which had served as a blanket, had fallen to the floor, but, thanks to the morning sunshine, Anna hadn’t felt cold. She stretched her stiff limbs. A beam of light bisecting the room revealed specks of dust dancing in the air. Anna wanted to feel enthusiasm for the day ahead, the way she always did with new challenges; she wanted to jump up from the sofa and get straight to work. But instead she was worried.

  There was something disturbing about the cases of both Riikka and Bihar. They had torn open wounds over which she had grown a thick, supposedly impenetrable layer of scar tissue. She was afraid that being a detective might yet prove too challenging for her. Practice was different from theory, and investigating cases was different from rounding up drunks on the street. What had she been thinking? That the way to move forward in life was to move back to this city, this damned suburb? In the morning light it seemed all the more clearly a regressive step, and the thought of Esko did nothing to ease her sense of malaise.

  What’s more, she still hadn’t tried to contact Ákos.

  With a sigh, she went to the bathroom and tried to comb the tangles out of her hair. Her thick, full head of hair, so coveted by Finnish women, was a curse when it dried on a cushion, uncombed. But this, too, she would simply have to survive.

  *

  Esko didn’t even bother greeting Anna over coffee, though the others happily wished her good morning; he simply sat po-faced drinking his black coffee and muttered something to Rauno that elicited an awkward chuckle. Again he looked dishevelled, and Anna thought she could smell the stench of old liquor on his breath when he was gripped by another coughing fit.

  You’re nothing but a pathetic drunk, thought Anna, and a small glimmer of hope flickered within her. Bitter old alcoholics were nothing to be afraid of, and they were no match for Anna. The thought cheered her up.

  Together they went through the previous day’s events, considered who the shooter might be. Rauno suggested it could be a hunter with mental-health problems. This sounded far-fetched, though they all agreed it was entirely plausible. Virkkunen told Anna to observe the autopsy by herself. Esko tried to object, claiming that this was technically his job. Virkkunen explained his decision in a tone of voice that left no one in any doubt as to who was the boss. He wanted to give Anna a variety of opportunities to acquaint herself with the day-to-day work of a criminal investigator, otherwise there was no way she could develop professionally. Esko could get on with other things. Anna almost felt the urge to decline, to say she would be happy for Esko to go, that she would have plenty of opportunities to observe an autopsy later on, that there were already so many new and fascinating things for her to learn, but she was unable to open her mouth. Virkkunen had that effect on people. Esko did nothing to hide his annoyance, but at least he managed to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘The victim had engaged in sexual intercourse on the day of her death,’ declared Linnea Markkula, the forty-something coroner who gave off an aura of musk, Anna’s favourite perfume.

  Anna had hurried straight from their morning meeting to the coroner’s office, situated in the basement of the university hospital a few kilometres from the city centre. Linnea had already set to work in the tiled autopsy room, bathed in blue light and filled with the smell of death, where the body of Riikka Rautio lay on a steel examination table.

  Anna had packed her camera. She was wearing white protective scrubs with a paper mask over her mouth. Breathing through the mask felt difficult.

  ‘That would explain her legs,’ said Anna. She felt like pulling the mask away from her lips and taking a deep breath.

  ‘The what?’ asked Linnea.

  ‘Her legs. I noticed that her legs were very smooth, recently shaved. It stuck in my mind, because I always shave my legs in the shower after my run. And by the following afternoon the new stubble is already showing – on my legs, at least. Of course, Finnish women’s leg hair is different. It’s tamer.’

  Linnea gave a smile and gently stroked Riikka’s shin.

  ‘I still can’t feel anything here. It’s a common misconception that hair continues to grow after death; it only seems that way because the skin retracts, so you would expect there to be some amount of stubble here by now. I imagine they were pulled out by the roots on the day of her death, with wax strips perhaps.’

  ‘She had a date with someone before her run,’ said Anna. Or maybe during her run, she thought.

  ‘Well, that sperm got inside her one way or another – and I doubt she’d just visited a fertility clinic. We should check that though, just to be sure,’ Linnea joked.

  ‘She could have been raped.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of that. You saw for yourself that none of her clothes had been removed by force. Her jogging bottoms and everything else were positioned perfectly normally on the body.’

  ‘Could the killer have pulled her trousers back on afterwards?’

  ‘In theory, yes, but I would have noticed. Re-dressing a body lying on the ground isn’t the same as pulling trousers on yourself. The underpants are always awkwardly crumpled up, for instance. And there are no signs of violence around the vagina either.’

  ‘What about elsewhere?’

  ‘Nothing except the blown-off head.’

  ‘Well, it’s not entirely blown off,’ Anna pointed out.

  ‘Right.’

  For a moment the women looked in silence at the body of the young woman on the autopsy table. Anna photographed the full body. Bluish livor mortis had begun to develop around the chest and stomach.

  ‘What are those?’ asked Anna pointing to some faintly visible blotchy patches on the lower left shank, just above the hip.

  ‘Old bruises. They’re healing now, but they must have been pretty big. A few weeks old, I’d say. The position seems to indicate that she fell. When people fall on their side – if they slip on ice or fall off a bike – the resulting injuries typically affect the area around the hip.’

  ‘Shouldn’t there be something on her palms too, then? Don’t your hands hit the ground first when you fall over?’

  ‘Usually, yes. But she could have been wearing gloves. Or she might not have had time to put her hands out; that happens, too. But in that case there should be some marks on her left shoulder as well, and there’s nothing here.’

  Anna tried to think back a couple of weeks. All she could remember was the relentless sunshine and record temperatures. Two weeks ago nobody was wearing gloves, not even at night. She zoomed in on the marks at close range, snapped three shots, examined the images, then photographed the hands.

  ‘Are you ready?’ asked Linnea. ‘Let’s take a look inside.’

  Linnea opened up the body with a sense of confidence and routine. It looked so clean and easy, as though this wasn’t a real human being at all, someone who had been alive only a moment ago. As Riikka’s stomach and internal organs came into view, Linnea explained that people were always shocked to hear what she does for a living, and that in bars she generally said she was a doctor – or preferably a nurse. Telling someone you’re a pathologist or a coroner was likely to scare off even the most self-assured flirts, while calling yourself a doctor meant that half the bar expected you to be holding open surgery over your pint glass. Being a nurse was a safe option. For lots of people it sounded just stupid and subversive enough to be attractive. The only problem was that Linnea wasn’t the least interested in the kind of men that would be interested in that kind of woman.

  ‘Five years as a single parent is starting to get me down. I need a man,’ Linnea chortled as she weighed the liver. ‘Even a quick bit of fun would do.’

  That shouldn’t be too difficult, thought Anna as she watched the good-looking blonde at work. She was beautiful and well educate
d, and probably fairly affluent too. Not from Koivuharju, that’s for sure.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary here,’ Linnea concluded. ‘A healthy young woman, no pregnancies. She’d eaten a small portion of something a few hours before her death. Judging by the colour she’d washed it down with a glass of orange juice. I’ll take a closer look at the stomach contents later on. Internal organs all fine, intestines fine, no signs of drug or alcohol abuse. We’ll send of blood samples for testing, but I’m pretty sure nothing will show up. Lungs are clean – this girl didn’t even smoke. Well behaved, I’d imagine. Except for the sperm. I’ll extract the DNA, see if we can identify Mr X.’

  Linnea continued somewhat more quietly.

  ‘The shower of bullets destroyed the head entirely. She died instantaneously. The shot came from right in front of her, and the shooter was so close that the barrel of the gun could almost have been touching her. Terrifyingly brazen, don’t you think?’

  ‘It certainly is. What about time of death?’ asked Anna.

  ‘The victim was discovered at nine in the morning. I arrived at the scene around midday. My initial estimate put time of death around ten o’clock the previous evening, and that still stands. Ten p.m., give or take an hour or so, because last night was so cold and wet. Funny time to go out jogging, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Anna sighed. It was late.

  ‘Join me for a drink on Saturday?’ asked Linnea as they pulled off their scrubs and masks in the coroner’s changing room.

  Anna was almost taken aback. She drew a deep breath.

  ‘I can’t. My brother’s coming round,’ she lied and could feel herself blushing.

  ‘My kids are with their dad this weekend, and I’m not planning on lounging around the house. Bring your brother along, too. Is he as good-looking as you? Single? How old is he?’