The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Then I ate by myself, washed up and went to my room to watch TV. You asked how she appeared. She seemed really down – just lay there on the sofa. Then I heard her going into the shower, and when I came out of my room she was pulling on that green tracksuit and … Fucking hell, I should have tried to stop her going out.’

  Virve’s final words were lost amid a volley of whimpers.

  ‘What did you do after she’d left?’

  Virve glanced up at Anna, a look of fright in her teary eyes.

  ‘I stayed home. I was at home all evening.’

  ‘Can anyone corroborate that?’

  ‘Why should they? I don’t suppose they can. I was by myself,’ Virve was beginning to panic.

  ‘There’s no need to be nervous. It’s a routine question. Did Riikka receive any telephone calls that day? Any text messages? Did she make any calls?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything. I spent most of the day in my room. Damn it, I should have pressed her more, forced her to tell me what was going on. Maybe none of this would ever have happened,’ Virve spluttered through her tears.

  ‘Let’s have a short break. I can bring you something if you’d like. Coffee?’

  ‘Tea, thanks. Who could have done it? And why?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’

  ‘It wasn’t Jere, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s not a killer.’

  ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘No.’ Virve seemed startled.

  ‘Jere has disappeared into thin air.’

  Virve said nothing and sat fidgeting with her bracelet.

  Anna fetched a cup of tea for Virve and coffee for herself. They drank in silence. There was something odd about Virve. It wasn’t so much her studied, new-age hippy look, which was actually a fairly everyday sight around the city. She was clearly nervous, but that too was perfectly normal. Almost everyone is nervous when they have to deal with the police, even if they’ve got nothing on their conscience. But Anna had a niggling feeling that the girl was hiding something. Then again, aren’t we all, she thought.

  Esko was right about one thing: in this line of work it was best to put your emotions aside. They could easily lead you astray. The ‘intuition’ of which we heard so much was generally nothing but luck or the skills gleaned from years of experience.

  Anna drank the remains of the coffee, which had stood in the pot for goodness knows how long, and felt a wave of heartburn spread across her chest. That’s all I need, she thought as she replaced her cup on the desk.

  ‘Tell me about Jere,’ Anna asked once they resumed. ‘What kind of man is he?’

  The cup of tea had clearly calmed Virve down and helped her focus. The irritating jangle of jewellery had ceased and her eyes were no longer darting here and there. She stared fixedly at her cup, which she held nestling in both hands and blew on to the steaming tea. She seemed to be thinking carefully about what to say. When she finally answered, it was as though she was speaking to the teacup.

  ‘He was okay, I suppose. He’s from the same village as me and Riikka, but he’s two years older. Everybody fancied him, right through middle school and high school. Everyone except me. He was good-looking and sporty and that, but I always thought he was a bit full of himself. At least, he was when we were younger. He’s not like that any longer. Nowadays he spends loads of time in the woods. And he’s smart too – he got into the uni to do maths. I suppose I always thought the sporty look was a way of trying to hide his family background. I mean, if he’d stuck a safety pin through his cheek, he’d have looked more authentic, you know? But the girls all liked him, that’s for sure. For Riikka he must have been like some pre-teen fantasy come true. She liked athletic guys, even though she’s … she was a bit chubby. She was always a bit superficial – appearance meant a lot to her. Still she was a hundred thousand times more down to earth than her parents. Christ, what yuppies. Have you met them?’

  ‘Are you and Jere close?’

  ‘What do you mean? No, we’re not,’ Virve responded almost angrily. ‘I mean, of course we’ve seen quite a bit of each other through Riikka,’ she continued, striving to catch a friendlier note. ‘But nothing more than that.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know where Jere is now?’

  ‘For God’s sake, how would I know? I don’t know him that well.’

  ‘Are you on Facebook?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Riikka and Jere?’

  ‘Yes, they are. Jere never logs in though.’

  ‘Can we use your account to see whether either of them has written or posted something that could help us?’

  ‘Sure, but I don’t think you’ll find anything. Jere hasn’t posted anything in ages and Riikka…’ Virve’s voice broke once again and she fell silent.

  Anna brought up the Facebook login page and Virve signed in. In her profile picture she was standing bathed in glaring sunshine, in the shadow of an enormous palm tree.

  ‘Nice picture. Where was it taken?’

  ‘Mexico,’ Virve answered. ‘I was travelling around there last spring, just after our final exams.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Anna and began scrolling through old posts.

  What’s on your mind, Facebook asked. You tell me, thought Anna as she skimmed through the short sections of text that Virve’s 286 friends used to keep each other up to date about what was on their minds. Anna clicked on Riikka’s name from the list of friends, and her profile appeared on the screen. The diagonal angle and grainy quality of the photograph showed that the profile picture had been taken using a webcam or a mobile phone. The same round cheeks as in her graduation photograph, the same greyish blue eyes that should have seen many decades yet stared back at Anna from the screen. This is sick, thought Anna. Life continues here, in a virtual, online world, though Riikka’s comments ended on the twenty-first of the month. After that the page had filled up with her friend’s shocked R.I.P. messages. I’ll have to remind Irmeli and Juhani to have these profiles removed, she thought.

  Riikka had posted intermittently all summer. Perhaps once a week she had decided to share the goings-on in her life with her circle of friends in short status updates dealing with everything from ice cream to a swimming trip. Only once did she mention going for a run. That was in mid-July. Anna quickly scrolled through her list of friends, all 103 of them. Riikka clearly had better things to do than sit staring at the computer, thought Anna. She clicked open Jere’s profile: 754 friends, but no signs of life on his wall. Virve hadn’t been exaggerating; Jere didn’t brag online about the details of his life and didn’t take part in others’ discussions. Anna wondered why he’d bothered to gather such a vast number of friends, and asked Virve.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘Some people are like that. Like, as if it’s really cool the more friends you’ve got on Facebook.’

  Anna logged out and thanked Virve. The search hadn’t revealed anything of interest, but she’d still have to go through Riikka’s private messages and emails.

  ‘Okay, let’s just go through everything once again, so we can get your statement in order. Are you up to it?’

  Virve put down her teacup and sat upright.

  ‘Sure, I’m up to it.’

  They went through events again and there were no changes to Virve’s statement. Virve read through the statement carefully, confirmed that it was correct and signed it, her wrist jangling as she wrote. Finally Anna reminded her that there might be more interviews in the near future. Virve’s suspicions regarding Riikka’s possible new relationship and her observations on the day of the murder were so significant that they would require further investigation. Virve glibly said she would be happy to help with their enquiries. I think that’s your first blatant lie, thought Anna.

  After Virve left, Anna should have gone straight to Esko Niemi’s office to tell him about the important new information: R
iikka and Jere’s break-up and Riikka’s clandestine new relationship. She stood outside the door to his office, raised her hand to knock but suddenly changed her mind. She couldn’t do it, after all, didn’t have the guts.

  Anna could sense Esko’s hostility oozing through the door. It would burn wounds into her knuckles if she so much as touched it. She didn’t know how best to survive working with Esko, how to approach him. And if she couldn’t survive Esko, how was she ever to survive working in this unit, at this station, in this city?

  She lowered her hand, walked away and went to Sari’s office instead. Rauno was there too. They discussed at length the information she had gathered from Virve and considered its significance for the course of the investigation. She’d have to find out the identity of Riikka’s new boyfriend – or girlfriend. The search for Jere had been stepped up. There was still no sign of the boy or his rifle.

  Towards the end of their chat, Anna mentioned her concerns about Esko, about how she’d been offended by the text message sent via Rauno, that she was worried such friction would slow the investigation or make it more difficult – or at worst prevent it from moving forwards altogether. Rauno repeated what Sari had said earlier. Esko will change, just give him time. You have to be patient.

  Anna was incensed. She left the room, went outside, smoked a cigarette and decided to call it a day. On the way home she bought a frozen pizza at the local supermarket. The girl at the checkout greeted her brightly and bid her goodbye with a friendly See you as Anna left the store. This put Anna in a slightly better mood.

  The beep of the microwave echoed round the kitchen. An empty kitchen is somehow depressing, thought Anna, so terribly lonely. Better buy something to put in those cupboards or some kind of wall hanging to dampen the echo. A pair of curtains might help too. She gobbled the steaming pizza and felt so drained that she didn’t have the energy to go for her run. That evening she was supposed to do a longer run. She had planned to run for at least an hour and a half, all the way from Koivuharju via Savela to Koskela, and from there to head back north on the cycle path along the shoreline. She would go tomorrow. Instead of a run, she switched on the TV and cracked open one of the beers she’d picked up at the supermarket. Lazily she surfed from one channel to the next looking for something to watch, but there was nothing interesting on. She wondered how this was possible, given that there were dozens of channels in total. She switched off the box and went out to the balcony for a cigarette. Should I get rid of the TV altogether, she pondered as she blew smoke rings towards the windows of the building opposite. A faint breeze blew then apart. I could give it to Ákos. Anna couldn’t understand why she’d bought the television in the first place. There never seemed to be anything interesting on. Mindless entertainment made her feel as ill as the pizza she’d just eaten. And she’d been planning on sticking to a healthier diet. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ceramic ashtray that was beginning to fill up. Enough is enough! No more fast food, no cigarettes, no beer and no mind-numbing television!

  Anna switched on her computer and googled the term honour violence. Thousands of articles, cases all across Europe. Research. Information. Projects. Despite all this, the subject still remained vague; Anna couldn’t make sense of it. There seemed to be no recorded cases in Finland. The entire concept was clothed in darkness. The law was chugging forwards like a steam engine, while reality sped ahead like a high-speed train.

  Anna sat reading for so long that her eyelids started drooping shut of their own accord. She switched off the computer and crawled into bed, letting the fatigue get the better of her. Yet once she had switched off the lights, she found it impossible to get to sleep.

  Sari gently rinsed between her legs. A small scratch had appeared on her labia and it stung each time the water touched it. Water and sperm trickled into the lavatory. There they go; thank God for the hormonal coil, she thought glowing with warmth and happiness. Her husband had returned from a week-long business trip just as the kids were going to bed. After he’d read them their bedtime story, he’d grabbed Sari and carried her into the bedroom and locked the door, and any remaining signs of jetlag were long gone. The fringe benefits of all those work trips. After all these years, their sex life was still exciting. This was the reward for weeks of loneliness, of running the family’s everyday life single-handedly. Not a bad reward at all, Sari thought as she towelled herself off and climbed back into her husband’s warm embrace. She could have carried on straight away, but knew it would be best to wait a while.

  ‘How was your week?’ he asked as he gently caressed Sari’s back.

  ‘A nightmare. Two big new cases came in at once: a murder and a case of honour violence. The honour case might be a false alarm, but the murder is going to be a big one. And Esko’s being a complete wanker, for a change. I think he drinks every night. He’s been pretty rude to our new detective who only started on Monday. Anna Fekete, she’s called.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Really nice. Good at her job. A bit quiet.’

  ‘They hardly need another chatterbox down at the station.’

  ‘You shut up!’ Sari quipped and threw a pillow at her husband. ‘We went to the gym together yesterday. Her Finnish is perfect, and I mean really flawless; you’d never know she’s not originally from Finland. There was no need to worry about her, after all. I’ve invited her round some evening.’

  ‘That’s nice. Where’s she from?’

  ‘Was it Serbia? I didn’t want to pry. Somebody said she’s Serbian. I’ll ask her next week. We agreed to go to the gym once a week.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  His hand was now stroking her stomach, his rough fingertips gently scratching her skin.

  ‘How was the trip?’ she asked. ‘Mmm, that feels good.’

  ‘China is a polluted, strange, chaotic place. Beijing is, at least. But we struck a good deal. Your skin’s so soft.’

  ‘Will you have to go back again?’

  ‘Not until after Christmas. Thankfully.’

  ‘What if the kids and I joined you next time? I could take some time off. I’d be fascinated to see the culture over there.’

  ‘Not a bad idea. But I won’t be able to spend much time with you while we’re there.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Do you think it’ll work?’

  ‘We’ll make it work.’

  Sari’s mobile beeped as a text message arrived, but she didn’t care to read it.

  ‘I love you. I’ve really missed you.’

  ‘Me too,’ Sari mumbled into her husband’s mouth, and the kids didn’t wake up once that night even though the couple made no attempt to hold themselves back.

  12

  A NERVOUS BIHAR CHELKIN was waiting outside Anna’s office. Anna watched her through the venetian blinds in the staffroom. The girl was chewing gum and repeatedly glancing up at the large wall clock whose second hand glided evenly across the white surface of the clock face. Her head was covered in a tightly wrapped hijab and her body was cloaked in a long trench coat. What’s she wearing beneath that, Anna wondered. Just a swimming costume? She’ll be sweltering.

  The warm sunshine had continued since Monday afternoon. Today it was almost 25°c.

  The rest of the family had arrived at the station too, and the entire team had been briefed for their interviews. Rauno and Esko were to take care of Payedar and Mehvan Chelkin, while Sari would talk to Zera and Adan. In Vantaa, Bihar’s aunt and uncle were currently being interviewed by the local authorities. To her surprise, Anna found a certain satisfaction in the idea of Esko and Mr Chelkin sitting across the table in Interview Room Two. She knew Esko wouldn’t assume the role of the sympathetic policeman and conduct the interview like an informal chat. She was convinced that Payedar Chelkin would go home shitting bricks, mentally crushed. Or rather, he wouldn’t be going home at all; he’d be taken straight into police custody in handcuffs to await sentencing. Anna recognised her emotion as that of revenge – and it felt damn good.<
br />
  The Chelkin family had been granted asylum after waiting in a reception centre for over two years. The application process was long but not at all exceptional. That was what to expect if you had the audacity to try and come here: years of waiting.

  The shoreline. The screeching seagulls in Munkkisaari.

  Table tennis with Ákos.

  The worry carved into their mother’s face.

  Memories began to flicker in the back of her mind, oozing out of their hiding places like a toxin.

  Anna had to go outside for a cigarette. Just to keep the level of toxins in my body stable, she chuckled to herself.

  Anna smoked her cigarette so quickly that she felt faint. That’s that rule broken too, smoking at work, she thought, disgusted at herself. Let this be the first and last time, and yesterday doesn’t count because I’d already clocked off. She crushed the butt against the rim of the stinking communal ashtray and dropped it down the brown flue. This is one habit I mustn’t start, she decided.

  We were given leave to remain relatively quickly, she thought as she walked back up the stairs back to the Violent Crimes Unit. After her cigarette, the climb felt tougher than normal.

  At least they hadn’t been forced into a cycle of agonised worry, wondering where they could escape to next. But back then there had been a state of emergency law; they were privileged. In any case, they were already – how could she put it? – European, Ákos with his Mohican and a cassette full of Finnish punk music. A boy on civil service at the reception centre had formed a band with him almost immediately. Back then Ákos’s assimilation had seemed so certain. Their mother had hated his new friends.

  A young Kurdish woman had been invited to the station to serve as an interpreter.

  Bihar had informed them that she didn’t need an interpreter. Anyone who came to Finland as a first-grader would know Finnish better than their own mother tongue, which was destined gradually to dwindle and lose its fluency. Anna knew all about that, but didn’t want to think of it now. Bihar’s parents, on the other hand, didn’t know a word of Finnish. The interpreter was there primarily for them. Anna had checked a total of three references to ensure that the woman wasn’t a relative of the Chelkin family. Getting to the truth would be hard enough, and an interpreter unable to remain objective could put a stop to the investigation altogether.