The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

  And there it was, behind everything else. A small glass phial, just as Linnea had said. The label bore the name SERENASE.

  Anna returned to the living room. Esko was sitting on the sofa holding Kaarina’s hand. Her hair was unkempt and there were smudges of make-up beneath her eyes. What had initially given the impression of a well-presented, stylish head teacher who took good care of herself had, in a few days, faded to reveal an ageing, suffering woman. I wonder if I look that wretched, thought Anna and glanced at herself in the mirror. Yes, I do, she had to admit.

  ‘We’ve checked your story for the nights of each murder, and I’m afraid you don’t have a verifiable alibi for any of the three evenings. Your mother’s memory isn’t good enough to confirm that you were with her on the evenings in question,’ said Anna and suddenly felt a wave of pity for the woman.

  ‘I was there,’ Kaarina replied, her voice clipped.

  ‘Of course, the fact that we can’t verify your story doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a suspect,’ said Esko.

  Anna gave him a cautionary glower, but he pretended not to notice.

  ‘Good,’ said Kaarina and gave him a tired smile.

  Anna showed Kaarina a photograph of Virve’s tattoo.

  ‘Does this look familiar?’

  ‘It’s the Sarlin girl’s tattoo, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. What do you know about it?’

  ‘Well, it was hard not to pay attention to all that bragging at the school graduation party. There she was, parading around in a sleeveless dress and shoving her arm in everyone’s face. Trying to be so individual, of course, though nowadays almost all the kids have covered themselves in all manner of squiggles.’

  ‘Do you know what this tattoo means?’

  ‘It’s a hummingbird. And a flower.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest.’

  ‘It’s Huitzilopochtli.’

  ‘Good God. You don’t think Virve…?’ Kaarina couldn’t bring herself to complete the sentence.

  ‘Do you think Virve could have done this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Surely not. She was never a very pleasant student, but a murderer…?’

  ‘The only problem with this theory is that Virve has an alibi for the evening of your husband’s murder.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If Virve is embroiled in this, she must have some kind of accomplice. Either that or someone who knew about her tattoo is trying to make it look as though she is guilty. Who could that be?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Kaarina replied coldly.

  ‘Were there any problems in your marriage?’ asked Anna.

  ‘No. Of course, in a long marriage there are always ups and downs. I’ve already told you about the infertility, but other than that there was nothing.’

  ‘Infidelity?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re quite certain?’

  Kaarina was silent. She let go of Esko’s hand, touched her cheek and stroked the surface of the sofa with her fingers.

  ‘Can one ever be a hundred per cent certain?’ she asked.

  ‘So what’s this?’ asked Anna and showed her the phial. Esko stood up.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘It was in your bathroom. In the cupboard above the sink.’

  ‘It’s not mine. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘It’s the substance that was used to drug your husband before he was shot.’

  ‘I’ve never seen that before! I don’t know how it got there!’ Kaarina screamed.

  Esko glanced at the phial with a look of disbelief.

  Anna waited. She would soon have to break the other news too. She mustered all the courage she could. Why was this so difficult?

  ‘Your DNA was found on sweet wrappers we discovered at Selkämaa. And the sperm found in Riikka’s vagina belonged to your husband,’ Anna finally blurted out.

  Kaarina turned to look at the window, behind which the final leaves on the hedgerow were defiantly holding on to the balding branches and the lawn was covered with a yellow-and-brown quilt, the kind that primary-school pupils draw every autumn.

  ‘Did you really not know about the relationship between Veli-Matti and Riikka?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Now would be the time to speak up,’ Esko gently encouraged her.

  Kaarina cleared her throat. Then she stood up and fetched a glass of water.

  ‘Very well,’ she said eventually. ‘I found out about the affair the day Riikka died. I accidentally found a telephone in the pocket of Veli-Matti’s tracksuit as I was putting it in the washing machine. My first reaction was to ask him what on earth this was – I didn’t know he had a phone like this. Then curiosity got the better of me and I looked through the list of calls and messages. He’d only ever called one number. And the messages … He’d never sent me messages like that.’

  Kaarina’s face contorted in a pained grimace. She took a deep breath before continuing.

  ‘I sent the number to directory enquiries. It belonged to Riikka Rautio, Veli-Matti’s former student. My former student. She was all but a child!’

  Anna and Esko waited in silence as Kaarina wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  ‘I sent that little slut a message from Veli-Matti’s phone inviting her for lunch at Hazileklek. You should have seen her face when she realised who was waiting for her.’ Kaarina gave a hollow laugh. ‘I told her to put an end to it. This … relationship was ridiculous. But I wasn’t behaving normally; I was beside myself.’

  ‘How did Riikka react? What did she say?’

  ‘I’m sure she was every bit as flustered as I was. She promised to leave him, apologised over and over. We left it on a note of mutual understanding, if such a thing was possible under the circumstances. I can’t believe the little bitch hopped straight back into bed with him. She’s quite the actress.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘From the restaurant I went straight to my mother’s place. I spent the whole night there, because I wanted to calm down before confronting Veli-Matti. I wanted to think carefully about what to say to him. That’s why I went to my gym class. Exercise helps to clear my head. I’ve never been the type to lie down in the face of problems.’

  Or you were simply trying to provide yourself with an alibi, thought Anna.

  ‘When I heard the next day that Riikka had been murdered out on the running track – word gets round this village like wildfire, you know – I decided not to tell Veli-Matti that I knew about the affair.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Esko.

  ‘I was afraid that he might have done it.’

  ‘What about the phone?’

  ‘I left it in his tracksuit pocket and I haven’t seen it since. And as for those sweet wrappers, I have no idea. I never eat sweets. Except very occasionally. At my mother’s place.’

  As she dashed out of her office, Sari knocked into Nils Näkkäläjärvi, who had stopped right outside her door. Nils chuckled. Sari cursed angrily.

  ‘I’m in a hurry. There’s some sort of emergency back home.’

  ‘Hey, listen. I’ve got something,’ said Nils.

  Sari’s phone beeped as a message arrived. The restlessness inside her was slowly turning to outright panic.

  ‘Out with it then.’

  ‘I’ve been looking into that red car for weeks. You can’t imagine how much I’ve…’

  ‘Spit it out!’

  ‘Kaarina Helmerson’s mother Kerttu owns a red Volkswagen Golf, exactly the kind of car we’re looking for. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s not a coincidence. Call Anna.’

  ‘Surely a demented old woman doesn’t drive around any more?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t. Nils, listen. Stay there. I’ve got to read this message, and I’m frightened to death.’

  Nils looked at Sari somewhat bewildered and nodded. Sari took out her telephone. Her hand was surprisingly steady, though her guts were c
hurning with terror. She took a deep breath and clicked it open.

  Hi there! All fine. Phone was on silent:) Made salmon soup for tea. S.

  37

  ‘I DON’T THINK KAARINA DID IT,’ said Esko as he and Anna stepped out of the holding cells and walked across to the smoking area in the yard.

  Towards the end of their visit, they had received orders from Virkkunen to arrest Kaarina Helmerson. Kaarina hadn’t resisted and hadn’t tried to protest her innocence.

  ‘I knew it would end like this,’ she had said. ‘But I didn’t do it,’ she continued, calm and collected.

  She had asked permission to wash up the few dishes and take out the rubbish before they left, so that it didn’t start to smell. Then she had telephoned the council’s home-help department and told them that she would be unavailable to look after her mother and agreed that the carer would visit three times a day. She had watered the flowers, pulled on an expensive-looking wax coat and a stylish pair of outdoor shoes and followed Anna and Esko out to the car without resisting in the least. Her poise was almost noble. Anna had sat beside her on the back seat. The drive back into the city had been as quiet as a funeral cortege.

  ‘I mean, Ville Pollari doesn’t fit into this pattern at all, unless he was a witness to Riikka’s murder. But why the hell would he have been out running around Selkämaa in August, so far away from home? He never visited the place.’

  Of course you don’t think she did it, because you’re besotted with her, thought Anna but held her tongue.

  ‘You shouldn’t trust your intuition,’ she commented instead. ‘We should let the facts speak for themselves.’

  Esko looked almost offended.

  ‘Kaarina had free access to that gun cabinet,’ Anna reminded him. ‘And the tyre tracks found at Häyrysenniemi are a match for Kerttu Viitala’s red Volkswagen. You’re the one that said her alibi wasn’t up to much. And it certainly isn’t; she hasn’t got one. This is a classic tale of the woman scorned. After years of disappointments and infidelity, something finally snapped.’

  ‘What about the necklaces? Why did she put the Hutsilo pendants in the victims’ pockets?’ Esko tried to defend her.

  ‘Kaarina was Virve’s teacher. Though she claims otherwise, she must have known about the various meanings of the tattoo. So Jere and Virve were innocent after all,’ said Anna.

  ‘Pretty cruel to try and frame your former students for murder. If you ask me, something doesn’t add up here.’

  ‘Come on, everything adds up,’ said Anna. ‘You should be glad we’ve finally wrapped this case up.’

  Esko muttered something and lit another cigarette; Anna stubbed out her own. It tasted good, a bit too good, she thought and wondered how she could start weaning herself off them again.

  When she went back inside, Anna walked up to Sari’s office. Sari was just checking Rauno’s email account.

  ‘Any news on Bihar?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. She hasn’t been seen at the airports or harbours, and there’s been no news from the Swedish border either. The family is being charged with “hiding” the girl,’ said Anna, drawing inverted commas in the air with her fingers. ‘The investigation has been transferred to another team. They’re trying to establish whether she’s still alive or whether she’s been sent abroad somewhere. And how the family is involved in all this.’

  ‘At least Bihar didn’t mysteriously fall off the balcony,’ said Sari.

  ‘Not yet, at least,’ Anna replied.

  ‘I’m so worried about her.’

  Anna sighed, avoiding Sari’s eyes.

  ‘Me too, but there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘Isn’t it shocking that Veli-Matti Helmerson was attacked at school? That Kaarina…’

  ‘I know, it’s terrible. Did they find anything else at the school?’

  ‘The classroom was full of fingerprints, hairs, fibres, everything you can think of, so to save resources Forensics decided not to examine it any further. There’s plenty of evidence as it is.’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Sari and pointed to Rauno’s emails. ‘This came from Moscow this morning,’ she said, her voice victorious.

  ‘A shipment of ten Huitzilopochtli necklaces was sent to the city’s central post office at the beginning of July. The name on the order was Veli-Matti Helmerson.’

  ‘That’s that then,’ said Anna.

  A strange sense of emptiness consumed her.

  Was that it? Was this what they had been investigating, going over detail by detail, throughout the long autumn? Was the case so simple, so quickly resolved after all?

  At the same time she felt a cautious excitement.

  This really was the end of the case, once and for all, and soon it would be over altogether. Soon the rush would be over. Soon she would be able to redeem all those hours of overtime.

  She could sleep. Finally.

  ‘By the way, have you received any weird text messages this autumn?’ Sari asked all of a sudden.

  ‘Yes. How did you…?’ but Anna was cut short as Sari waved an old Nokia mobile phone in front of her face.

  ‘So have I,’ she said. ‘And they’re from this phone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Every now and then I’ve received nasty text messages from an unlisted number. I looked into it, and it turns out the messages were sent from the city centre, right next to the station. Of course, that’s not much to go on – this area must have the busiest mobile-phone traffic in the city – but the other day I happened to bump into that patrol officer Sami. You remember, the guy from the gym? What a prick. I was on my way home, and I was already a bit freaked out – I’ll tell you about that later. Anyway, there he was, standing in the foyer, typing away at this phone. I don’t know what came over me; I just had a really strong hunch. I ran up to him, grabbed the phone and ran off. Take a look!’

  Anna picked up the phone and opened the messages in the phone’s outbox.

  I fuck u till u die.

  That’s the one she had received while she was at the Helmersons’ house with Esko.

  That and all the other disgusting messages were there in a neat folder, their recipients listed only as A and S.

  ‘So he realised he had to change the SIM card, but he wasn’t smart enough to delete the messages from the phone’s memory. Maybe he read them at night and fantasised.’

  ‘What are we going to do about this?’ Anna asked Sari.

  ‘We’ll come up with something. He’ll get what’s coming to him.’

  They both smiled.

  NOVEMBER

  38

  DARKNESS HADN’T COME RUSHING into the city, brash as a troubadour, but still it had taken everyone by surprise. Suddenly people noticed that it was dark all the time. It was dark when you went to work, to school, and it was dark when you trudged through the driving rain and sleet to the local shop and back home. In the November darkness, the desperate plight of the homeless didn’t bear thinking about; not having a place to leave, a place to return to. In the darkness. Despite of the darkness.

  Of course, the darkness had announced its arrival through the gradually encroaching evenings, rudely edging the summer out of its way, as it does every year. People knew to expect it, yet it had succeeded in creeping up behind them and startling them with a whisper. It’s me again. Are you ready?

  On a good day, an orange glow might hang behind the apartment blocks for a moment, but for the most part the days passed unchanging through the colourless landscape.

  Somewhere else it might have been possible to relax, to let yourself be carried along by the quiet, the stillness, to descend into the darkness as it appeared, to find the beauty in the myriad shades of grey that defined the restrained winter landscape, to let your mind rest with the rhythm of nature. In the city, nobody would even think of such a thing.

  Puddles of sleet seeped up through the soles of your shoes, into your socks, chilling your feet. If only it would snow, people said, begging for mercy
; it would be so much lighter. Then when the snow did come, everything went crazy: trains and aeroplanes were late; there were fatal car pile-ups on the motorway; the price of electricity went through the roof. Shops ran out of spades and snow shovels. Flu spread through the city. Alcohol sales reached record levels.

  And in the mornings you had to go to work, though it was the last thing anyone wanted to do. Beneath the glare of LEDs and fluorescent lamps, people were expected to unflaggingly present a play directed by market forces, a performance called Western civilisation.

  It was the eve of Kaarina’s trial. Anna was on her way to meet Ákos. She had taken her brother to the rehab clinic in Kivelä when, repentant and in very bad shape, he had turned up at her door to apologise.

  Anna had forgiven him – almost. And though she knew that by helping him she was actually helping to prolong his illness, she couldn’t turn her own brother away.

  Now Ákos was doing much better. The tremors and the voices were kept at bay with sedatives, liberally dished out at the clinic. On principle, Anna thought it was wrong to treat addiction with other substances that caused addiction, but now she didn’t have to strength to care. The priority was to get Ákos back on his feet. At least for a while.

  As she wandered along the street, she noticed the Pink Ink tattoo studio and remembered that Virve had said this was the place where she’d had the hummingbird etched into her left arm. On the spur of the moment, Anna stepped inside. A young girl with multiple face piercings was sitting at the counter leafing through a magazine.

  ‘Hi there.’ The girl raised her eyes from the magazine and greeted her.

  ‘Hello,’ said Anna and showed her police ID. The girl looked frightened.

  ‘I’d like to ask about a tattoo. Do you remember a girl who came in here back in May and got a tattoo of a hummingbird sucking nectar from an orchid?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember her,’ the girl said. ‘It turned out great! But I don’t do the tattoos here. I only do piercings. Timo!’ she shouted. ‘The police are asking about the hummingbird sleeve you did back in the spring.’