For a moment Leivo seemed lost for words.
‘Of course,’ he nodded eventually. ‘Work before pleasure.’
Olivia stood up. Leivo did the same. They looked at each other. Olivia in her swimming costume and trainers, and across the table the large sweaty man who paid her wages, painting doomsday scenarios in his teddy-bear voice. But the situation was different now from when Olivia had entered the room.
‘Bye,’ she said.
‘Bye,’ Leivo nodded.
Olivia had already turned when she heard a voice behind her.
‘You could still change your mind,’ said Leivo. There was a sense of determination in his voice, she thought. It sounded strange. Leivo continued. ‘You never know, you might come to see things differently.’
The remainder of the day in the lifeguards’ tower: too much wind, too few events, too many thoughts.
A stubborn collection of clouds glided at a snail’s pace across the grey sun and refused to break up. Why was it always windy on the ground, but in the sky nothing ever seemed to happen? Olivia fetched her hoodie to keep herself warm, pulling the hood tight over her head.
She looked at the handful of people on the beach and thought about what she’d told Leivo. It was almost as though she knew exactly what she was doing, as though she knew how to do it. Jesus Christ. She didn’t know what she’d do if something unexpected happened. Whatever it might be. She’d used all her savings on a hurried paint job, her monthly salary was enough to cover the property tax, insurance, the water bills, the road maintenance, the rubbish collection, the electricity, phone, internet, food, trainers … but nothing else. Lifeguarding wasn’t exactly the best paid profession. As for the other things Jorma Leivo had hinted at – murder, rape, torture, and God knows what else – Olivia couldn’t deny that the thoughts keeping her awake in the early hours had recently been the stuff of horror movies. Think rationally, Olivia would tell herself at such moments, this was just a one-off, random, inexplicable event. There was no threat to her. And yet a shiver ran the length of her body now, from the soles of her trainers to the top of her head. Stop it, she told herself, serial killers like that don’t roam around sleepy towns like this.
It was three-thirty. Chico appeared at the foot of the watchtower.
Olivia still found it hard to call Kari Korhonen ‘Chico’. She always thought of him as Kari. She still saw a young dreamer with a guitar slung over his shoulder. He was now slightly older than before, of course, but this older Kari still looked like a dreamer and still carried a guitar. Olivia wasn’t sure exactly when Kari had become Chico, or why, for that matter. Perhaps it was for the best. And perhaps she should accept it and call him Chico. It suited him better: the shades, the Bermuda shorts, the tattoo on his lower abdomen with calligraphic text running through it in such small and ornate lettering that in order to read it you’d have to bend down so close that your mouth would be positioned quite literally…
Which Olivia was not planning to do but which Chico may have imagined was the whole idea behind the tattoo. They hadn’t spoken much since Olivia had come back to town. There was no particular drama; they’d never been especially close and their shared job didn’t require much communication. Of course, it had all come as something of a surprise – the fact that Olivia had found herself working in the same place as Kari Korhonen, who at the age of eighteen had said he would never work for The Man. At first they’d wondered whether this was an abbreviation for a mysterious company with which Kari had had a run-in, but he eventually explained what he meant. To him, The Man was the system, the machine. And now they both worked for it – in matching swimming costumes.
As Olivia descended the steps she realised her legs were stiff, as though she’d been sleeping in an awkward position. Chico was swinging his arms around, presumably to keep himself warm. Olivia couldn’t see his eyes, they were obscured behind a pair of almost-opaque sunglasses, and his head was turned towards the sea.
‘What’s up?’ Olivia asked at the bottom of the steps.
Both of Chico’s arms were moving and he seemed to start. The sunglasses briefly turned in Olivia’s direction.
‘What d’you mean?’ he asked.
‘You’re on time. This is the first time in about two weeks that we’ve changed shift and you’re actually waiting at the bottom of the tower.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
Olivia looked at Chico and recalled how the girls in their class used to say he looked like Patrick Swayze. They did share a certain something, once you factored in the passage of time and the parochial je ne sais quoi.
‘It’s almost three-thirty in the afternoon,’ said Olivia.
‘What? Right. I’ve been awake all night. Again. Stress.’
‘Too much work,’ she smiled but wondered whether that was too sarcastic. Given his next question, however, Chico most likely hadn’t been listening to her.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Olivia?’
Olivia was taken aback. For two reasons. Chico had never before asked her anything personal – except the compulsory questions after she’d moved back. Are you seeing anyone? Any ex-husbands? Kids in care? Besides, now he really seemed to be trying hard. His tone sounded genuine.
‘Thanks for asking, Chico. I’m fine. I can’t seem to get used to this uniform. Today I had a little chat with the boss and I completely forgot to mention it. Either that means I secretly like it or I simply don’t remember I’m wearing it when … I’m wearing it.’
Chico turned his head.
‘You talked to the boss? Leivo?’
‘Jorma Leivo, the guy that owns this place.’
Olivia looked into Chico’s sunglasses. His hair was wet and tousled, perhaps from the shower.
‘What did he say?’ asked Chico.
‘Told me about his plans,’ said Olivia and waved her hand in an arc through the air. ‘Palm Beach Finland.’
‘His plans?’
‘He wants to expand,’ she said, then decided that Chico didn’t need to know the details of the discussion she and Leivo had had about plots and houses. ‘But we knew that already.’
Chico’s arms were trembling. ‘Quite a wind.’
Olivia looked out to sea. Grey clouds, slow, heavy waves. She remembered that she still needed to go to the supermarket and the hardware store.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘Renovations – you know how it is.’
‘How’s it going…? The renovation?’
Olivia shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s not cheap.’
Chico nodded, but not in keeping with Olivia’s answer. His internal rhythm was altogether different, far more agitated. ‘Right. Money.’
‘And I need lots of it,’ said Olivia.
Chico nodded again, then stopped. ‘D’you remember when we used to spend all summer on this beach, all night, sitting round the bonfire playing the guitar?’
Olivia tried to get an impression of what was going on behind those sunglasses, but she couldn’t see a thing.
‘That was twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘I was always cold, and biding my time until I could get out of this town for good.’
Chico said nothing. He climbed up to the watchtower and sat down.
Jan Nyman took a plastic kitchen chair outside and tried to sit on his veranda for a moment and take in the scenery, the scent of the pines and the fresh, salty sea air. But it proved impossible. Within a few minutes the wind had achieved its goal and penetrated his jeans and flannel shirt. And so, as the sun set in the west, painting the sky in shades of light pink and brown, Nyman was left with two options: either he could take his iPad and walk to the restaurant on the beach or he could sit at his small kitchen table and read the information he’d requested and which had just arrived in his inbox, then walk to the restaurant and enjoy dinner with a clear, or at least semi-clear, conscience.
He plumped for the latter.
What he read was largely what he’d been expecting.
The bank
-account information was a week and a half old. Everybody was broke: Jorma Leivo, the Surfer Dude aka Kari Korhonen, and Olivia Koski. None of them had a penny to their name. Life could be like that, as Nyman knew only too well.
The surfer’s finances were fairly consistent, in that his account resembled a dead man’s pulse. Nyman paid attention to the seasons. During the winter it seemed that his wages were paid in the form of unemployment benefit from the Department of Social Security, and during the summer he was paid by the resort, which operated under a variety of trading names. The surfer never appeared to have very much money at his disposal, and it never seemed to be spent on living expenses. His money went on … What did it go on? The vast majority – almost all of it – was withdrawn from the ATM in cash. This might be interesting, then again it might not. It seemed he had been blacklisted by lenders years before. Perhaps he didn’t want to tell them everything he was doing with his money.
Jorma Leivo and his business ventures were a world of their own. His current account might as well have been covered in cobwebs – he quite simply never used it. His company, on the other hand, had numerous accounts in three different banks, and the movement of funds between banks and accounts was lively to say the least. So lively, in fact, that Nyman decided to send the complete details of Leivo’s financial operations to an acquaintance in the fraud department and quietly ask him for a favour: to follow Leivo’s accounts in real time.
The favour wasn’t entirely legal. Leivo wasn’t officially the focus of the investigation. Nobody was. Officially. Nyman had run into problems like this before in his role as an undercover agent. And it often meant that he had to operate under the radar and in many directions at once.
Nyman wrote an email, explained that he knew and understood that he was asking for something for which he had no authority, that he was instigating the action and it was entirely his own responsibility. If the fraud investigator was ever asked about it, he should say that Nyman told him he did have the relevant authority and that Nyman’s superior had given him free rein. Which was sort of true. Muurla knew that his undercover agents used all means possible to achieve their goals and that oftentimes those means wouldn’t stand the light of day; but he would never accept a fishing expedition quite like this. That said, Muurla purred like a cat when his agents brought him results, Nyman knew this from experience. He uploaded the attachments and pressed Send.
Olivia Koski’s financial situation was the worst of all. It was dire. Even the surfer had more money in his account. Okay, it was only a tenner here, a tenner there, but still. The last of Olivia Koski’s money seemed to have been spent paying off a significant insurance bill. An old, wooden house: the sheer size of the building’s insurance made Nyman shudder. Earlier in the year there had been a few thousand euros in the account, but it had all disappeared in the last two months. The largest individual purchases were at a number of high-street hardware stores.
The account’s total balance at the last statement: eight euros and three cents.
So it’s come to this, Olivia thought to herself. She had just bought a large pot of white paint on credit.
She placed the pot on the floor in the hallway and turned towards the kitchen. She hadn’t switched on the lights, the setting sun cast horizontal beams through the house, changing the colour of the walls, the size of the rooms, their depth. The blackness of the shadows.
The horrors Jorma Leivo had hinted at began to come to life again. An intangible danger – the feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment. An imminent threat.
It’s all in my imagination, she thought. All of it.
Perhaps her fears had begun resurfacing because she was tired, and because of the simple fact that she’d started living on credit again. Though it was a small sum of money, it reminded her of the past, of failed times. It was something she never wanted to relive.
One of the many things she never wanted to relive.
Bad men, decisions delayed, dreams dashed, hasty solutions born of her own pennilessness. Maybe that was why Leivo’s fearmongering gave her goose bumps.
Someone had broken into her house. God knows what he’d been meaning to do…
Olivia had instinctively assumed the man must have been a burglar. A burglar who got into an argument with his accomplice or accomplices, and met a messy end. It had never occurred to her that she might have been the target. What if she wasn’t safe in this house after all – a house in which she had always thought she was secure?
She had lost her appetite – didn’t feel like stepping into the kitchen to put some supper together. She turned and saw the pot of paint in the middle of the floor. She was far too tired to start painting anything. She wanted…
She wanted…
Olivia moved the pot of paint and placed it by the wall, took off her clothes, walked past the large hallway mirror without looking at her reflection and went into the bathroom. She stepped into the bath and turned on the tap.
And nothing happened.
PART TWO
IMPLEMENTATION
1
‘I’d rather not kill anyone else.’
Chico glanced around nervously and tightened his grip on his beer bottle. ‘Shut up,’ he hissed.
They were sitting in their regular spot, the table at the far end of the local pub. A few metres away the jukebox glowed in neon shades of pink and light blue, thirsting for more of Chico’s valuable coins. Rather, normally it thirsted. But not now.
‘How can I answer the question if I shut up?’ asked Robin.
‘Give me a sensible answer,’ said Chico. ‘Don’t start talking until you’ve thought it through.’
‘I have thought it through. I don’t want to kill people, that’s all.’
‘Okay, just don’t say it out loud.’
Robin appeared to do as he was told. Chico took a deep breath.
The incident that Robin was referring to made Chico feel strange – a vague sense of queasiness, an odd emotion that seemed tied up with his own mental processes. He’d never experienced anything like this before, but it was simply too hard to think about what had happened. Not like back in school, when he had to remember something complicated, but because the mere thought of what they had done didn’t seem to fit into his brain. Either that or it kept turning and churning, changing form and shifting from side to side. And so, whenever the events in Olivia’s house started to resurface in Chico’s mind, he focussed on thinking about something else entirely. He made lists, all the while trying to forget the doubts he’d had in recent weeks. The top-ten guitar solos ever. Eric Clapton’s top-ten guitar solos. Eric Clapton’s top-ten guitar solos from the 1970s. Eric Clapton’s top-ten guitar solos between 1970 and 1972…
‘“Layla”,’ thought Chico and sipped his beer.
It tasted good, though the best-before date had passed years ago. Chico knew the barman, knew how to enjoy quality imported beverages on the cheap, and knew that everybody ended up a winner despite all the pedantic regulations, or perhaps because of them. He couldn’t decide which.
‘We have to do something,’ he said, once he could no longer stand the cacophony of wailing guitars in his ears.
‘As long as we don’t…’
‘Of course not. Forget that for a minute. It was an accident. I’ve said so a thousand times. Shit happens. Last night I watched some American documentary about a guy with two heads.’
Robin stared at him. ‘Did he kill someone?’
‘What?’ Chico asked, incredulous. ‘No. But he had two heads.’
Chico could see that Robin didn’t follow.
‘It’s just chance, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A freak of nature.’
‘A two-headed man,’ Robin nodded. ‘A man with two heads.’
Chico could see the metaphor was still eluding Robin. Then again, perhaps Robin didn’t need to understand everything. Chico stared ahead and contemplated things, picking at the label on his bottle. It seemed the beer had expired in 2014.
Did it have a funny aftertaste after all? He looked at Robin.
‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘You heard it yourself. If we don’t come up with the goods, Leivo says he’ll tell the police what we did.’
‘What if we just do what he wants?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to explain,’ Chico sighed.
‘What was it he said the first time we met him, back in his office?’
Chico looked at Robin with fresh eyes. He couldn’t tell whether Robin was secretly wise or simply a first-rate, dyed-in-the-wool, out-and-out idiot, but what did it matter when every now and then, completely out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, he remembered something as though it were recorded on tape, repeated it out loud and helped sharpen Chico’s thoughts, Chico, of course, being the dynamo of the two.
‘Robin, you’re a genius.’
‘Thanks, man,’ said Robin, clearly confused.
Chico imagined Robin probably didn’t hear compliments like that very often.
Robin’s cheeks reddened slightly. ‘Sometimes things just, you know, pop into my head,’ he said modestly.
Chico clinked his bottle against Robin’s and took a long gulp. The beer definitely had an aftertaste, something cheesy. But it was a fair cop: if you want a bottle of premium Dutch Pils for one euro in a small Finnish town, you have to compromise somewhere. Chico was a businessman too, he understood how capitalism worked. Or was this socialism? No matter, there was something old, sticky and cheesy about the beer, but it only cost one euro a bottle, and at that price it meant he could sit in his favourite bar, even when he was virtually penniless, and think about ways to get his hands on larger sums of money. Capitalism or socialism?
And now an opportunity appeared to present itself.
‘Tonight,’ said Chico. ‘We’ll sort it out tonight.’
Palm Beach, Finland Page 7
