The Mine

by Antti Tuomainen

‘This sample-taking expedition…’ Emil began, and moved deeper between the rows of books. He found himself at the beginning of the crime and thriller section, a large white letter A at eye level. ‘Presumably this is something … how should I put it … unofficial?’

  ‘Very,’ his son replied quickly, then paused. ‘We’ll have to break into the mining complex in order to get the samples.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’ asked Emil. ‘Can’t you do the same work here in Helsinki?’

  Since when was he a parent handing out advice? What right did he have? What authority?

  ‘The shit is up there in the north,’ his son replied, quiet and determined, as though he had read Emil’s thoughts.

  ‘Of course. I understand,’ said Emil, and he meant it.

  ‘We’re setting off in a few hours.’

  ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’

  His son remained silent.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘You be careful too.’

  For a moment Emil stood silently on the spot, motionless, his phone in his hand. He dropped it into his pocket, looked in front of him and saw the row of books arranged by author from A to D: killer this, killer that, death this, death the other, murder here, murder there.

  He walked out of the store and looked up at the sky. It looked higher than it had in days. The snow clouds always hung low in the sky. He tried to concentrate on the facts, but it was hard – every bit as hard as admitting to himself that he knew what had frightened him so much about that phone call.

  His son had sounded just like him.

  21

  The entirety of the conversation after which I lost my family for good:

  ME: I’m sorry, Pauliina, but—

  PAULIINA: Goodbye.

  22

  Manninen the biologist was driving, Maarit was sitting next to him, and I was behind Manninen on the back seat. The fresh, light covering of frozen snow whirled on the road, forming swirls and waves in the currents of air. Manninen had met me in Hakaniemi, and we picked up Maarit in Sörnäinen. Manninen praised Maarit’s work as his research assistant.

  ‘That was years ago,’ said Maarit.

  ‘Three and a half,’ said Manninen. ‘At the environmental information centre in Helsinki. Back when it still existed, before all the cuts. My only permanent job to date.’

  Manninen’s car wasn’t the newest model on the market. It jolted and groaned as though it had been thrown together by a careless six-year-old with a pot of glue. The pocket in the back of the seat in front of me was bulging with papers. The logo of a familiar pizzeria peered from among them.

  ‘You two already know one another, then?’

  This was why I’d moved to the back seat when we arrived in Sörnäinen. I looked from one to the other. They didn’t so much as share a glance.

  ‘These circles are pretty small,’ said Manninen. ‘As far as I’m aware, it’s the same with journalists. Everybody knows everybody else. Everybody gossips about everybody else – except to their face.’

  ‘What circles?’ I asked.

  Manninen looked across at Maarit.

  ‘The environmental crowd all know one another,’ said Maarit.

  ‘Helsinki is a small city,’ said Manninen.

  For some reason I’d pictured Manninen as slightly younger. And based on the voice I’d heard on the phone, I’d imagined him as a short, dry character. In reality he was fifty-six years old, and with his build and blond hair, the figure he cut was akin to that of the wrestler Hulk Hogan.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ I said. ‘You bump into old friends all the time.’

  ‘Maarit knows her way round the mining complex,’ said Manninen. He looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m in charge of the measurements.’

  His eyes returned to the road ahead.

  Good, I thought. I’m writing a story, not playing your games. I know you have your own reasons for helping me. That suits me fine. But I’m writing a story, and in those circumstances all means are acceptable. Every reporter knows that; though in public we rave on about ethics and good journalistic standards. Silly billy, as I’d once said to Ella, tickling her under the chin. Pauliina’s abrupt goodbye gripped my chest, crushed me like an anvil. I didn’t want to think of the consequences. I was writing a story that needed to be written.

  ‘When did you last visit Suomalahti?’ I asked Manninen.

  Maarit looked out of the window at the passing verge, where the forest sprinted past on nimble, snow-covered wooden legs. Manninen’s eyes reappeared in the mirror.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Happy Pizza.’

  Manninen’s right hand touched the gear stick then returned to the steering wheel.

  ‘Right. About a month ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘Did you visit the complex?’

  ‘You mean inside it?’

  ‘So you did pay a visit?’

  Manninen said nothing. He really did look like Hogan, with his large head and thick blond hair. At times his blue eyes looked stern, at others mild, as though the ice melted and reformed every time we looked at each other.

  ‘What about it?’ asked Maarit, breaking the brief silence that had been filled only with the monotonous hum of the tyres. I couldn’t see her face at all.

  ‘I mean, if someone saw this car back then and noticed him wandering around the mine, they might put two and two together.’

  ‘Nobody saw a thing,’ said Maarit. ‘It was dark then; now it’s darker.’

  I sighed. Another seven and a half hours of this road ahead.

  The piles of snow at the edge of the road grew taller; daylight faded, disappeared altogether. The darkness that surrounded the car looked powerful enough to suck into its folds anything that strayed beyond the glare of the headlights.

  The pair in the front hadn’t said a word. That was fine by me. I tapped away at my laptop and wrote comments in my notebook while going through another pile of Lehtinen’s papers. They proved not to be quite as interesting as I’d thought when deciding which ones to take with me. I turned on the torch on my phone and pulled a history of the Finnish Mining Corporation from my bag. The book had been published in 1994. Naturally, it didn’t cover more recent developments, but you never knew what would open up new doors.

  The journey continued, the hours passed.

  At one point I raised my head and realised I’d fallen asleep. I rubbed my face. At that moment something seemed to startle Manninen and the steering wheel swerved.

  The right-hand side of the car scraped along the verge of snow. My phone and the book flew from my hands. A truck full of logs. The cloud of snow it churned up behind it was like white mud, so thick that the windscreen wipers Manninen had flicked on sagged under its weight. We were travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour. It was as though we entered a dazzling abyss. Then visibility returned to normal and the darkness seemed like light.

  My heart was racing. I fumbled between my feet for my phone. The screen had gone dark. I clicked to activate it again and found myself staring at an image of my father. It was the photograph I’d taken when we’d had lunch together. The longer I looked at it, the more I saw. I was no longer looking at a strange man. This man was my father. I could see the passing of the years in the deep ridges of his brow, the self-discipline in his slender face. The eyes revealed more. What at first I’d thought was cold and calculating, was in fact a shrewdness, a patience. He looked like a man who was used to waiting and who didn’t let small things get to him. His eyes looked directly at the camera, at me.

  My father was now a part of my life. I didn’t know whether I should feel anger or resentment, or whether, when I’d met him, I should have thrown my arms round him and wept. I hadn’t been able to do either, and still my heart was thumping. It wasn’t only to do with the logging truck or Manninen running the car up against the verge. The moment I took
that photograph things had changed – the balance shifted, rousing an old wish that I’d long forgotten. More to the point, it had revealed to me something I would much rather not have known anything about: it showed me the price of loss and the impossibility of return.

  I only needed to look to the side and see my reflection in the window to realise who was looking back at me.

  The same man, only younger.

  It was impossible to reach the Suomalahti mine without first driving through the village. Perhaps I’d been worried about nothing. The darkness of the night and the thickening blizzard wrapped us up so tightly that we could only catch glimpses of life on earth. Manninen said he needed to fill the tank.

  ‘Why didn’t we fill the tank back in Kuusamo?’ I asked.

  ‘Who’s driving this car?’

  We pulled up in front of the familiar petrol station. The windows in the café were dark. Manninen stepped out of the car. A clank as he fitted the nozzle of the pump into the car. Maarit continued to stare fixedly ahead, slightly to the right, as she had done for most of the journey.

  ‘So, here we are,’ I said inanely.

  ‘Wasn’t that the point?’

  ‘I suppose it depends who you ask.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll get what you want.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Will you get what you want?’

  Maarit paused for a few seconds before responding. ‘My father died. Because of this. Of that I’m in no doubt. This won’t bring him back, but … it’s got to be done. We have to do everything we can.’

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

  Maarit didn’t have a chance to answer. During our conversation the lights of a car I’d imagined would simply continue along the road suddenly slowed and began turning into the forecourt of the petrol station. The car had appeared out of the dark, the blizzard. For a long time its lights were directed right at us; so I could only see the make once it had turned and come to a halt on the other side of the pump. The yellow glare from the lights on the roof of the petrol station allowed me a view through the car’s windows.

  One glance was enough.

  In a split second I dropped to the floor of the car and huddled on my side. The driver of the Jeep Cherokee hadn’t turned to look our way. I heard the door of the SUV opening. I couldn’t hear the stocky man’s footsteps. I hadn’t imagined I would hear them. I doubt I had ever heard them.

  Manninen finally pulled the nozzle out of the tank and put it back in the pump with a clatter. We set off again. Once I sensed that the car had turned a few corners and felt Manninen accelerating, I raised my head. I looked out of the back window but couldn’t see the vehicle, only the yellow glow of the station behind the snow. Kosola, the head of security, was back there somewhere.

  ‘Did you recognise that man at the pump?’ I asked Manninen once I’d sat up again. I wondered whether Maarit had even registered my dive on to the floor.

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Apart from us there was only one car at that petrol station, and only one man stepped out to fill up the only other car.’

  ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

  ‘He didn’t look familiar?’

  ‘No,’ said Manninen. ‘Who was he?’

  I looked at Maarit. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said.

  The wind whipped up. Snow danced in the headlights, growing increasingly frantic, heavier, like the train of a dress growing weightier and more cumbersome by the minute. For around half an hour we drove, groping our way through the darkness. The road ran round the mining complex until we reached the main access road. Because we were going to use both torches and headlamps, we needed the forest for protection. There was plenty of that on the eastern side of the mine, so we drove as close to the eastern edge of the complex as the access road would take us.

  Along the access road, there were many smaller maintenance roads leading to different sectors of the complex. It quickly became clear, however, that we’d have to leave the car by the side of the main road, otherwise we might not be able to get back.

  We stopped, and started getting dressed. This time I’d come better prepared than before: I had packed my bag with lots of warm clothes and even some food. Manninen’s bright-red bag, which he attached to his back with numerous clasps and knots, looked particularly heavy. In his hand he was carrying a borer. I was told to carry the folding snow shovel.

  ‘It’s about forty-five minutes from here,’ said Maarit as we took our first steps in the snow that came up to our knees. ‘If we’re quick.’

  The wind blew snow into my mouth and eyes. Our shoulders hunched, we plodded forwards, one after the other. I was bringing up the rear. The best protection against the cold and the biting wind was exactly what we were doing: moving. Standing still would soon become painful.

  We’d been walking for about half an hour when I was certain I heard the sound of a motor, the howl of a machine accelerating very fast. The sound disappeared into the wind before I had the chance to say anything to the giant biologist panting in front of me.

  Maarit seemed to know exactly where we were going. I saw her holding her wrist in front of her face. A GPS watch, I assumed. Maarit’s steps were light and effective. Manninen and I had our work cut out just to keep up with her.

  The snow melted against my face and the wind whipped my skin. Breathing turned to gasping, sweat poured down my back. My thigh muscles were exhausted with having to trudge through the snow. They began to ache, and my gait felt heavier with each step. Nobody spoke. The wind gusted around us. Apart from that, all I could hear was our steps. The world suddenly felt very small.

  We arrived at the edge of a logging area and stepped out of the protection of the forest and into a clearing. The wind felt instantly more brutal. From here it was only five minutes to the end of the first stage in our illicit expedition. The cold pressed through our clothes. We were now walking along the frozen river. I knew this, though I couldn’t make out where the land ended and the water, flowing beneath the ice and snow, began. It was dark and the fluttering snow formed a great curtain in the wind, which seemed to be gaining strength all the while.

  Eventually we arrived at the spot we would have found even without our torches. We looked at one another. We were here.

  The snow was doing its best to cover everything in sight, but it couldn’t hide everything. The excavated drainage trenches were deep and particularly long. What’s more, they were also fresh and ran perpendicular to the river, joining it at one end. On my last visit to the mine I’d looked at this part of the terrain from the opposite direction, about a kilometre away from this spot.

  We made our way about five metres down the steep verge and came to a halt. The snow was flat. Beneath it was a layer of ice, and beneath that the water. Manninen slung his borer into the snow, unclasped his bag and shrugged it from his shoulders. From the bag he pulled a torch on a tripod and a plastic bag with a zip, struck the tripod into the snow and switched on the light. A sudden brightness lit the bottom of the ditch. Inside the bag was a selection of jars with red lids.

  Manninen continued his preparations without saying a word. I grabbed Manninen’s borer and, without being asked, thrust it into the ice and began boring a hole. The smell wasn’t what you’d expect from a pure mountain spring. I stepped out of the way so that Manninen could get to the water and held a torch up so he could see what he was doing. He used a small hand-held pump to fill the jars with water. Maarit glanced at the GPS watch on her wrist. Manninen filled the jars and secured them in the plastic zip bag. He then pulled another piece of equipment from his bag – it was the size of an old camera but sturdier – and said he was going to measure the speed of the current.

  Again I made out the sound of a motor. It rose and fell with the wind, then disappeared again. Maarit was standing with her back to me and Manninen. She had heard something too. Manninen was busy with the water and didn’t seem to have heard anything.
The cold burned my feet, my toes ached. In the torchlight Manninen’s fingers looked white. And there it was again, the sound of a motor. This time we all heard it.

  ‘Just a few seconds more,’ said Manninen.

  Maarit and I were silent. Manninen focussed on his work. I felt the urge to hurry him along. The motor seemed to cut the air, coming closer and closer. Now I was sure it was a snowmobile.

  Manninen pulled the contraption from the hole in the ice, took a few steps towards his bag and packed everything, then stood up to his full height, adjusted his headlamp and was just about to sling the bag on his back when a dull crack broke the frozen silence and Manninen’s throat burst open as though it had been cut with a knife.

  23

  He had followed his son and his two travelling companions – the woman and the stocky blond man – first into the freezing, deserted village, then into the spruce forest, across a clearing in the woods, then down to the riverbed and finally to the bottom of the trench. He had watched them clambering down the steep verge, seen his son bore a hole in the ice by torchlight, and the large man who had driven the car fiddling with equipment by the water’s edge.

  His son’s movements and his way of working had made him sigh: yet another quality, another skill that his son had, but of which he knew nothing, skills whose development he had been unable to follow.

  The wind shook the trees and blew gusts of snow across the terrain, but Emil could still make out the sound of a motor – a vehicle somewhere. He had heard it back in the forest, almost as soon as he’d set off after the three bobbing headlamps, the only lights in the otherwise endless, impenetrable darkness.

  At times the sound disappeared, perhaps caught by the wind or smothered by the incessant snow, but it quickly became clear that the vehicle was approaching the part of the terrain where his son was. Emil could see in his son’s movements that he too had heard the sound. Emil was too far away to hear whether his son said anything. The woman turned to face the direction from which the snowmobile was coming. The stocky man continued what he was doing until he suddenly snapped to, bounded towards his bag, packed up his equipment and hoisted the bag on his back. In the light of the lamps the tall, stocky man was like a statue erected in the wrong place.