Leivo’s admiration for them knew no bounds. He liked the idea of the ambush, their start-up entrepreneurial spirit – he stressed that the country needed innovative pioneers like him, them and Palm Beach Finland – and said he admired their ability to work quickly and, above all, their flexibility so that when it turned out that Plan A wouldn’t work, they seamlessly moved on to Plan B. Real entrepreneurs, he repeated. That said, he reminded them that from now on all plans should be cleared with him first, because the devil was always in the detail. Leivo was talking a lot, thought Chico, considering his voice was more a mutter than anything else.
Leivo’s limbs had stiffened in the sand, so Chico and Robin had to pull him out of the pit. They hauled him onto level ground and helped him to his feet. Leivo was between them, his arms round their shoulders, the three of them stood in a row, the pit in front of them. It was deep and black. Chico was sure he’d done more physical work in a single night than in his entire life. And it felt good, though every conceivable muscle ached, his palms were chafed and his head throbbed in time with his racing heart. But he had done something, he had…
‘You need to fill the pit,’ said Leivo and removed his arms from around them.
Chico was about to let Leivo stand by himself when Robin tightened his grip.
‘One thing,’ he said.
They waited.
‘We might need that pit.’
They waited.
‘It was self-defence,’ said Robin.
They lifted the body out of the boot of the BMW and folded it in two at the bottom of the pit so that the layer of sand on top would be enough. It was a metre thick, which Leivo said was the official minimum. These venture capitalists can sometimes get pretty aggressive, Leivo explained, they might talk nicely but in reality they’re nothing but hostile squatters who don’t spare a thought for long-term success of a business the way a committed shareholder should. Chico didn’t have a clue what Leivo was talking about, but he decided not to ask any further. Chico realised he was enjoying this. He enjoyed working with Robin and liked the clarity with which Leivo took control of events. Leivo was a changed man, he thought, his attitude to them had changed though he was still their foreman, as it were. But he was a foreman who valued his own men.
They flattened the earth with their spades and sprinkled a layer of fresh sand on top. Finally the place looked as though nothing had happened there at all. They picked up their spades and walked off. Leivo again stood between them and raised his hands. He hugged them tight against his shoulders as they walked towards the woodland.
‘Chico, Robin,’ he whispered looking at them both in turn, ‘I’ve got a feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
Jan Nyman was sitting in his chalet, at the table in the light of the moon, waiting for his phone to come to life. The world was so quiet that his breathing sounded like a car approaching then speeding away again. Jorma Leivo might have been lying. It was entirely possible. Likely, even. But Nyman had to be sure.
Finally the phone deigned to switch itself on. Nyman quickly found Olivia’s number and called. Olivia picked up.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
‘You mean apart from the fact that you ran away from our dinner date?’
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I thought I made it clear I—’
‘I’m just teasing.’
‘Right.’
Nyman thought about what to say next. He heard the rush on the phone, steady and distant. Olivia must have been outdoors. In the yard, perhaps, looking at the night-time sea, gilded in the moonlight.
‘So everything’s fine?’ he asked.
‘Very.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night. Jan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thanks for an interesting evening.’
‘Thanks…’
Olivia had already hung up.
Nyman swallowed, feeling slightly awkward, but calmed himself with the thought that Olivia was safe.
So what was still niggling at him?
Those two.
The surfer and his mate.
Nyman knew where Leivo was. He had tried to get hold of his neighbour the mystery man. But what about the other two?
Nyman tapped his phone and thought about everything Olivia Koski had told him. He switched on his iPad and opened the documents, did a few searches. Kari Korhonen had no fixed address. It seemed that Robin, however, lived across the bay. Pedalling hard it would take him barely ten minutes to get there.
Nyman returned to his bike, set off through the town and completed the journey in seven minutes. The final section was a stretch of badly lit dirt track. Nyman slowed a little, he didn’t want to damage the bike. The mudguards rattled. He wasn’t sure if it was his fault, whether he’d treated the old rented bike too strenuously. He slowed his pace even further and jumped from the saddle in good time before the corner of the terraced house.
The apartment was dark. Either the cook was asleep or he was somewhere else. Nyman plumped for the latter. He looked around, and once he was sure he couldn’t see anybody and that the only lights were in windows that didn’t look directly onto the forecourt, he took the lock picks from his pocket and walked up to the front door.
The lock was an Abloy Classic, the easiest model to pick. Nyman was inside in two minutes. He stopped in the hallway and listened. Silence. He stepped further inside, treading on the rugs so that his trainers wouldn’t creak against the laminate. Nobody. Nyman began to feel as though he was walking through a post-apocalyptic landscape, as though he was in a disaster movie in which a lone survivor tries to find a way out of a deserted town.
He quickly established the basic layout of the apartment, noted the places where you might hide something, anything at all. He took another breath and listened. When everything was quiet and nothing moved, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves, closed the blinds and switched on the lights.
The first things he saw were two mobile phones next to each other on the leather couch. He looked at them for a moment, running through various possible scenarios. He tried the phones; both were in working order. Both required a password. He returned them to the couch. This might be of interest. Or it might not. If the phones had been left here on purpose, that might mean that their owners wanted to make their movements untraceable. Be that as it may, that wasn’t why he was here.
Nyman got to work.
He was quick and thorough. He went through the bedroom, the living room and the small kitchen. He found nothing. The microwave he left till last. There was no money in this microwave. At the back of the microwave was a sausage that had gone through several rounds of heating and now resembled a charred twig. Nyman returned the mummified sausage to where he had found it, gave the place another once-over, and asked himself: have you pulled, pushed, moved and lifted everything you can?
He ran his eyes round the room, the furniture, the corners, the shapes. He was about to answer his question with a yes, but suddenly changed his mind.
Nyman went to the dishwasher, opened the door and almost gagged at the smell – glasses rimmed with rancid milk. This machine certainly wasn’t overused. He held his breath, looked through the contents and froze almost instantly.
Nyman turned, searched through the cupboard for a freezer bag big enough and grabbed the object he had found. He wrapped it in the bag, tied the corners of the bag, walked through to the living room and stood beneath the overhead light. He carefully examined the object, one millimetre at a time, and felt his heart skip a beat when, on the surface of the object, so clear that it could have come straight from the pages of a textbook, he found a set of bloody fingerprints, five in total. And as if that wasn’t enough, there, on the worn wooden surface of the object resembling a fork, was an engraving.
SAMUEL KOSKI, read the text on the handle.
Olivia Koski let her bike glide silently through the night. Sometimes that was enough, she thought: all you have to do is enjoy t
he ride. Keep calm, sit upright, and steer. And eventually you arrived at your destination.
She came to a turn in the road and caught a view of the beach resort. She was far away and couldn’t make out the details. The moon gleamed above everything like a night light. She saw the shores of Palm Beach Finland, the enormous sign, the office, the beach huts and, further off, the chalets. The moonlight softened the worst glare of the colours, but they were bright all the same.
It was the warmest night so far that summer. It felt as though there had been a turn in the weather, as though that turn had occurred only minutes earlier. The wind had calmed, taking a well-needed break, and somewhere a giant thermostat was being turned up. You could feel it. Even the rippling of the sea was different.
Olivia stood still. Here she was. After all this.
In the end everything had happened very quickly.
When Jan Nyman left the restaurant, she had followed him. She couldn’t automatically take him at his word; she wanted to know what was true and what was going on. Nyman had disappeared into the woodland near Jorma Leivo’s chalet. Olivia waited. After a while she noticed a familiar car appearing from the opposite direction. Olivia walked her bike deeper into the cover of the trees. From her vantage point she saw that, behind the wheel of the BMW belonging to the man claiming to be a solicitor, was not the solicitor but Robin, who stopped the car by the side of the road and … wept. Robin sobbed, gasped for air and blew his nose. A used handkerchief flew out of the opened window and fell right at Olivia’s feet.
Olivia guessed something serious must have happened. And if the man behind the wheel wasn’t that strange man but a weepy Robin, then … Olivia remembered what the man had said as he handed her the ten grand: There’s more where that came from.
The man might have been lying about everything else, but he wasn’t lying about that.
Olivia had located the money in a matter of minutes. It had taken her the same amount of time to break into the chalet. The door was locked, of course. But Olivia had noted in the past that in all his renovation work Jorma Leivo was more interested in aesthetics than structural integrity. The chalet was glowing with a fresh coat of bright paint, but everything else was old, including the windows. She remembered a trick she’d seen as a child. She positioned herself in front of the window, placed her hand on the side of the window that opened and gave a sharp push. The single-pane window frame was made of soft, cheap materials. Olivia pushed again. And again. And again. The frame started to move, with each shove it loosened further. In the moonlight she saw the handle move. She put all her body weight into one last shove, and the window opened with a crack. The sound wasn’t particularly loud, but Olivia waited a moment longer. When she didn’t hear anything, she climbed inside, closed the window behind her and looked around. For a moment she felt a sense of despair, then told herself to think like a man. Where would a man hide the money? she asked herself. A few misses, then bingo. Only her departure left a small blemish. She imagined it would be okay to leave by the front door, and that’s exactly what she did, but from the outside the lock seemed somehow faulty. You could only lock it with the key. She had to leave the door ajar.
Olivia took the bag from her back and peered inside. She hadn’t yet counted the money; she didn’t want to do so right away. She ran her fingertip along the thick bundles of cash and estimated that there was more here than in her initial down payment of ten thousand euros. After a spot of haggling, she guessed this would be just enough for a full-scale plumbing renovation.
She closed the zip and slung the bag over her shoulder. She gripped the handlebars and placed a foot on the pedal. A moment later the bike was moving again, gently gliding forwards, and all Olivia had to do was keep her feet on the pedals and steer in the right direction.
She thought of the promise she’d made to herself. Never again would she allow a man to mess with her finances. This was a promise she was determined to keep. And she would keep another promise too: she was going to renovate her house.
She wondered how Jan Nyman might fit into that scenario.
The bike rolled gently onwards. Olivia smiled.
Robin wanted to drive. Chico knew this. Robin took responsibility. It was a new quality. Chico could see the changes in Robin with his own eyes. He was growing both inside and out: he stood more upright, his gaze had gone from drifting and submissive to determined and self-assured without appearing brash or arrogant, his speech was more concise and generally more sensible, the words new and precise. And it had all happened since Robin sat down in the driver’s seat.
The BMW sped through the ghoulish night with the two quiet, dirty men inside. Robin kept to the speed limit, just to be on the safe side. Leivo had given them a job, said he needed a shower and a change of clothes before a meeting in the morning. With them.
They turned off the highway. Gravel pattered against the chassis. They drove along a darkened road lined with spruce trees. When they arrived at a junction, they took an even narrower dirt track. Eventually they turned off that too. The slip road was steep and familiar. The BMW’s front lights illuminated the bottom of the quarry as Robin gradually slowed the vehicle. The surface of the pond was like black ice. Robin drove the car right to the water’s edge.
The pond wasn’t very big, but it was deep. Chico had once heard that it was created the way you sometimes saw on TV: the ground suddenly sunk away and fell into the depths below. He didn’t know whether that was strictly true or not, but right now it hardly mattered. Most important was what the pond could swallow up.
Robin turned to look at Chico. In the light of the dashboard and the moon, his face looked like the face of a grown man. It wasn’t the face of a giant baby or a forest creature; it was a man’s face. Chico said nothing as Robin shifted the automatic gearstick to P and left the engine running as they stepped out of the car.
Chico left the door open and walked to the back of the car. He was standing a few metres away when Robin reached inside and shifted the gearstick to D. Robin jumped back, away from the car, just as it jolted forwards.
The BMW crept into the water like a large black beetle. It seemed to swim upright for a few metres then to turn on a sharp axis, and soon it looked as though the car dived underwater head first. The rear of the car bobbed on the surface, and for a moment it seemed as though it might remain in that position. Water frothed around it, something hissed, and the sound of frantic bubbling came up from the deep. Eventually the lights went off and the dive sped up, and soon the BMW disappeared altogether. The bubbling was steady and continued for some time. That stopped too and the surface of the pond gradually calmed again. There was only Chico, Robin and the moonlit quarry.
Chico couldn’t take his eyes from the dark surface of the pond. They had sunk the BMW. They’d done what had to be done. Chico realised that only recently they wouldn’t have been able to do it, not after sitting on its leather upholstery and feeling the power of its huge engine. They would have kept the car, though it would have caused them no end of problems. They would have been unable to resist their own instincts. But now they had done just that.
And Chico realised that something else had sunk too. Something heavy pressing down on his shoulders. He remembered something he had noticed while sitting in the passenger seat: the numbers flashing on the dashboard.
‘Robin,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Robin. ‘The spades went down with it.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about the spades. But, good. I was thinking about the time. It’s three o’clock.’
‘So?’
‘It’s the twelfth of July. It’s my birthday. I’m forty years old.’
Robin turned.
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How are you going to celebrate?’
Chico thought about this. He looked at Robin, then the surface of the water.
‘I think I’m celebrating now.’
‘Will you be long?’
> Chico knew what Robin meant. They had to get going, they had a long walk ahead of them.
The length of the return journey didn’t matter, thought Chico, and neither did the exertion.
Not when the journey was right.
9
Jan Nyman imagined that one day Muurla might actually turn into the item of furniture that he so resembled. In a matter of days, Muurla had acquired a tan, which further enhanced the impression of an antique English divan.
Muurla was sitting behind his desk, Nyman in the plastic chair on the other side. Outside it was the first real summer’s day of the year and Nyman was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt.
Nyman had travelled to Helsinki by bus, taken a commuter train to Tikkurila and walked from the station to the headquarters of the National Bureau of Investigation. He’d made the most of the summer’s morning. The sun rose in time with his steps, its beams were soft and warm, the sky cloudless and light blue in such a way that no painting could ever do justice. The grass on the empty plot next to the station was fragrant. The leaves of the trees danced in the gentle breeze.
Nyman placed the plastic bag on the desk along with the initial report, which he’d hurriedly written up on the bus. Nyman assumed that because he could see the bloody fingerprints on the shaft of the backscratcher, Muurla must see them too. In any case, Muurla was looking at the bag and the wooden object inside it, so Nyman began to speak.
‘Some things we can prove fairly easily,’ he began. ‘And others we can’t, unless someone starts talking. Nobody has spoken up so far, and I don’t think that’s going to change. But, this is basically what happened. These two genii – the surfer and the cook – their names are in the report – are hired or somehow recruited to disrupt the life of Olivia Koski, either to make Koski agree to sell her house or for some other reason. They go to her house; they either do or do not know that there’s already somebody else inside, but nonetheless decide to act. At the moment, I assume they threw a stone through the window, and the stone struck this guy, Antero Väänänen. That explains the broken windows and what happened next. We didn’t find any stones inside the house, but it would have been easy to remove them. Be that as it may, Väänänen was hit, and these guys decided they would have to finish off the job. I’m not entirely sure about this. There could be other reasons. But the two guys enter the house, and there’s an almighty fracas, as we can see from the photographs. Things go badly for Väänänen. One of these guys, or both of them, steals this wooden item here. I don’t know why. It belongs to Olivia Koski, it’s a … tool used by her father and grandfather. Most importantly, it’s covered in fingerprints and lots of blood, presumably Väänänen’s. I’m convinced the fingerprints belong to the cook. The cook and the surfer do everything together. I’m also fairly sure they were responsible for burning down Olivia Koski’s sauna. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out they had bought or procured fire-starting equipment earlier that day. At present I don’t know whether the sauna building has any more than insurance value, because in the wider picture we’re investigating a homicide. In the report you’ll see where to find these guys, and I’ve emailed you pictures of where I found the wooden implement. At this point I’m going to hand the investigation over to someone else, but here’s everything you need.’
Palm Beach, Finland Page 27
