Snow Woman

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “So you went on sick leave?” I asked.

  Milla grimaced. “Well, I guess you could say that. I have a fixed-term contract, and that means no sick leave. At least he promised to take me back. You don’t need to say he’s a shithead. I know he is.”

  She paused and then continued. “I guess I just stayed at Rosberga because . . . because . . . because I was afraid of my neighbor, damn it! I still want to throw up when I think I might run into him. I think Elina knew that, even though she kept bugging me to report him to the police. Before Christmas she helped me install that chain on my door.”

  “What made you come home again then?” I asked.

  “After Elina disappeared, I couldn’t stand being there anymore! All during Christmas that Kivimäki bitch stared at me like I was cheap meat, Johanna was wandering around sighing about her brats, and that other one, Niina, was always banging that classical shit on the piano or blabbering about horoscopes. Apparently I’m a triple Scorpio, which is why I’m such a fuckup. I guess it makes things easier for her to explain away everything with some freaking star chart. No one seemed too concerned when I left.”

  “So the last time you saw Elina was on the night of Boxing Day?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Do we have to go over that again?” Milla raised her eyes from the microphone, and I saw from her expression how difficult it had been for her to talk about the rape. I wondered about her experiences with incest. What kind of life had she had? Milla seemed like a little girl to me despite her tough exterior. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the childish way she talked.

  “We have some slightly contradictory information about who Elina was walking with that night. You said before that you saw her with Joona Kirstilä,” I continued.

  Milla nodded. “I saw and heard them. I noticed them coming toward me on the road, and I didn’t want Elina to start lecturing me about where I was going, so I hid behind some trees. They were so into their conversation they didn’t notice me.”

  “And you’re completely sure it was Kirstilä with Elina?” I said.

  “Absolutely! I saw him! Short guy with dark, curly hair, dressed in black with a red scarf. I’d know him anywhere. Sort of a magazine cover type.”

  “What were Elina and Kirstilä talking about?” I asked.

  “They weren’t talking, they were arguing. I think it was about moving in together. Elina was saying something about how she couldn’t even think about it in the situation she was in. Then Joona asked what situation, but I didn’t hear the answer.”

  I thought it was interesting that Milla referred to Kirstilä as “Joona.” How well did she know him? She’d said he was an occasional customer at Fanny Hill. My runaway imagination instantly dreamed up a scenario in which Milla and Joona murdered Elina together. But what would their motive be?

  “Let’s forget Kirstilä for now,” I said. “Where did you go after you left the estate?”

  “I told you, I hitched a ride from Nuuksio to Espoo and then took the train to Helsinki. I spent some time barhopping, and then at Kaarle’s I met . . . what was his name? I don’t remember. Does it matter?”

  It did. Determining Elina’s precise time of death was impossible, but she had probably succumbed to the cold sometime in the early morning hours of the twenty-seventh. Milla could be lying. Maybe she didn’t go to Helsinki at all. I quizzed her about who gave her a ride—apparently a man who lived near the estate—the bars she had been to, and the man she spent the night with. Milla couldn’t remember anything other than the man’s nickname, Jorkka, and an apartment building near the Kulosaari metro station.

  Just as we finished the interview, Akkila returned from his trip to the hospital.

  “Go with Akkila to see if you can track down this Jorkka character,” I said to Haikala. “Take Marttila along. We’ll see if he’ll corroborate her alibi and—”

  My phone interrupted me. Sounding even more testy than usual, Ström asked where the hell I was. Between my hunger, my anxiety about the pregnancy test, and my general irritation with Ström, I suddenly erupted. Ström was a perfect person to vent at.

  “Don’t you have any goddamn thing better to do than call people and interrupt them when they’re working?” I shouted into the phone. “I’m picking up Kirstilä, and I’ll be at the station in an hour—if Your Majesty can see fit to wait that long. Remember, you volunteered to work with me on this!”

  “You’re in no position to be giving me orders, Kallio,” Ström retorted. He was right. Ström was technically above me in the police hierarchy. But in our unit’s organization we were equal—neither of us was the other’s boss. Sometimes I thought a clear line of authority one way or the other would be easier than our current back-and-forth, always trying to have the last word.

  The guys from Patrol had listened to me scream with their mouths hanging open. At least Milla was in the other room changing her clothes.

  After I hung up, I filled a glass of water from the tap and drank it. Then I gave Haikala and Akkila more instructions. They glanced at each other, grinning like embarrassed teenagers. Obviously they found it titillating to track down Milla’s one-night stand. And I had no doubt Milla would enjoy further embarrassing the young officers. But I didn’t have time to hang around to play chaperone. I wanted to find out why Joona Kirstilä had lied to me.

  “Hey, Kallio, or whatever your name is,” Milla suddenly yelled from the bedroom. “Come in here a sec!”

  Milla’s room was a high, narrow box that barely had space for the wide bed, which was draped with a black satin bedspread. Both the black satin and the dim red lighting made the room look more like a turn-of-the-century Paris bordello than a woman’s bedroom.

  Milla was dressed in black tights and a top resembling a corset. Her mounded breasts looked like two handballs. Her black eye shadow and dark-brown lips gave her the look of a rebellious teenager.

  Milla added another layer of color to her lashes before addressing me. “Um . . . How have Aira and Johanna taken Elina’s death?”

  “How does anybody take the death of a friend? They’re in shock. They cry a lot. How are you taking it?” I said.

  “I wasn’t that close to her.” Milla’s tone was defensive. She wrapped a bright-red chiffon scarf around her neck and then wrinkled her nose at her reflection in the mirror.

  “You don’t have to be family to mourn,” I said.

  “What makes you think I’m mourning?” Milla pulled a pair of black boots with chunky high heels out from under the bed and put them on. “The whole thing is a pain in the ass. I mean, I’ve got cops in my apartment. And please, don’t ever call me before two again. I have to sleep or I won’t have the energy to do my job.”

  Milla clacked past me and in an artificially seductive voice told the officers she was ready to go. The hall outside smelled like beer. Unlocking my car, I decided to stop at a McDonald’s on the way to Kirstilä’s place. My brain was going to shut down if I didn’t eat something soon. I inhaled a double cheeseburger and a large order of fries in less than two minutes. It wasn’t until I was devouring the last bites that it occurred to me that if I were pregnant I should start living more healthily. But was I? I glanced at my watch. The test promised results in minutes. What if I just snuck into the bathroom here?

  I laughed to myself at the thought. A pregnancy test at McDonald’s? Maybe I just needed to forget my own life for a few more hours and focus on Elina’s death and questioning Joona Kirstilä. The case had made the cover of both Helsinki tabloids today. The content of the stories was the same: famous feminist psychologist found dead under suspicious circumstances. Police investigation underway. One tabloid hinted salaciously about a lack of clothing on the body, as if Elina had been caught in the middle of an orgy.

  Kirstilä was waiting for me at the front door of his apartment building. He looked small and fragile in his black coat. The ubiqu
itous red scarf flapped as a gust of wind blew from the bay. Kirstilä’s face was even paler than usual, and he avoided my eyes as he climbed into the Fiat’s passenger seat. We made it all the way to the highway before he opened his mouth.

  “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Elina Rosberg was your girlfriend,” I said. “With unexplained deaths we always interview everyone close to the victim.”

  “Aira said Elina froze to death. I don’t understand how that could be possible.”

  The agony in Kirstilä’s voice sounded genuine, but I stayed impassive. I’ve always had a weakness for beautiful men, and there was no denying Kirstilä was that. Maybe a bit too short and delicate for my taste, but still very handsome. He gave you the impression that even a harsh word could knock him to the ground. His poetry was at odds with his appearance, and maybe that was what made him so interesting. His poems had a modern masculine sexuality to them while retaining romantic echoes of the nineteenth century. He was like a Byron for the new millennium.

  “We’ll get into the details at the station. For investigative reasons we can’t tell you much at this point.” I didn’t want to talk with Kirstilä before we were in the interrogation room with Ström present and the recorder running.

  “But I loved Elina!” Kirstilä burst out like a five-year-old who thinks repeating his argument will move his intractable parents.

  Instead of answering, I focused on getting into the left lane so I could pass the semi crawling in front of us. I wished I were driving a police car. Getting into the other lane would have been significantly easier in the modern Saab than in my rattletrap Fiat. To top it all off, I seemed to be out of wiper fluid. Fortunately we made it back to the police station in one piece.

  I requested that Dispatch send Ström to interrogation room three and asked Kirstilä whether he wanted coffee or water. Kirstilä barely shook his head; he had disappeared into his own impenetrable world. As we walked to the interrogation room, he seemed to be staring somewhere beyond the walls, as if he didn’t really understand where he was.

  I grabbed a cup of coffee from the vending machine in the hall. When we got to the interrogation room, Ström was waiting for us. Next to Kirstilä with his delicate frame and pale complexion, Ström looked even more red-faced and hulking than usual. The poet didn’t bother taking off his coat, just collapsed into the chair I indicated, looking chilled and confused.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked, already groping for his pack of cigarettes.

  “This is a smoke-free building,” I said a little apologetically and pointed to the sign on the wall. We did on occasion bend the rules if an interviewee was in serious nicotine withdrawal and we thought the shared tobacco ritual might make him trust us enough to relax and let something slip.

  “Of course.” Kirstilä shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. He looked like a teenage kid dragged in for robbing a newspaper stand. As I asked him his personal information, I noticed in his file that he had a criminal record, although it was all petty stuff from a long time ago: a couple of drunk and disorderlies years before and a broken shop window in Hämeenlinna when he was seventeen.

  “We last talked informally a few days ago,” I said. “You told me then that the last time you saw Elina Rosberg was before Christmas. Can you repeat now what you were doing on the evening of Rosberg’s disappearance?”

  Kirstilä’s voice contained no hint of hesitation as he told the recorder that he had been out drinking with old friends that night.

  “Could you tell me these friends’ names?”

  “OK, who was it now? At least Esa Kinnunen and Tinde Hatakka . . . Timo, I mean. And Bulla . . . what the hell is his real name? Let me think.” Kirstilä sounded so sure that I wondered if maybe he had simply mixed up the days. But no—it would be impossible to lose track of what day it was so close to Christmas.

  “Tell me your drinking buddies’ addresses, if you know them, and the bars you visited,” I said. “I ask because we’ve been told that you were actually in Nuuksio out walking with Elina Rosberg on the night after Christmas.”

  Kirstilä quickly glanced at me and then at Ström. I could almost hear the gears turning in his head as he considered how to answer. Finally he decided to counter with his own question. “Who says? Aira?”

  “That doesn’t actually matter. Do you have anything to say?”

  Kirstilä’s small hands shook and his eyes scanned the walls as if he were searching for a hole to escape through.

  Ström’s gaze flashed with interest. He smelled a lie and a possible murderer. I wasn’t terribly surprised when Kirstilä again denied being at Rosberga Manor on Boxing Day.

  “Fine. We’ll check that with the friends you were out with. So tell us about your relationship with Elina Rosberg. How long had you been dating?” I asked.

  Kirstilä suddenly looked irritated. “Dating . . . That sounds so juvenile. I dated girls in high school. I didn’t date Elina Rosberg. We were lovers.”

  His Byron eyes looked at me, half-angry, half-pleading. Apparently Kirstilä had decided to appeal to his interrogator’s feminine empathy. I did feel sorry for him. Losing a lover is tragic. I just wasn’t sure he was innocent.

  “I know you want to hear how long we’d known each other and so forth,” Kirstilä said. “The police and the tabloids. You’re all interested in the same things. Elina and I never advertised our relationship, but today some society reporter called and basically asked me to write a poem in her memory.” Kirstilä’s delicate mouth contorted in scorn. “Apparently they think they can draw me into their vulgarity.”

  Ström had had enough of Kirstilä’s evasion. “Tell us about your relationship with Rosberg already,” he snapped.

  I was pissed. Ström’s demand sounded exactly the way he intended it to: the lady cop couldn’t rein in this blabbermouth so a man had to step in.

  “OK.” Kirstilä groped for a cigarette again and then stopped in frustration. He dug out a match, which he put in his mouth and started gnawing.

  “We met a couple of years ago in Kouvola at a seminar on masculinity. Of course we disagreed about everything, but after the seminar we continued our conversation in the dining car on the train and then at a restaurant in the train station in Helsinki. Elina didn’t feel like taking a taxi back to Nuuksio and ended up staying the night at my place. That was when it started.” Kirstilä bit the matchstick in half and then dug out another.

  “Neither of us was looking for a relationship, but somehow it just sort of ended up being one. Elina had the institute, which was a lot of work, and she had private patients too. The last thing she needed in her life was a man.” Kirstilä wrinkled his brow in a weird birdlike way, and it took me a minute to realize he was trying to keep from crying.

  I wondered how psychiatrists felt, how Elina Rosberg felt, when a patient sobbed while telling them the sordid details of their lives. Had Elina sat unmoved and neutral or did the patients’ feelings sweep her along? She hadn’t belonged to the most clinical school of psychology. In my understanding of feminist-oriented psychiatry, the therapist got to feel too. But did a police officer?

  I usually tried to make my face a mask whenever a subject started to cry or freak out. Too many suspects tried to avoid difficult questions by bursting into tears or thought that by acting pathetic they could appeal to the sympathy hidden behind my badge. Aira Rosberg had succeeded—and some questions had gone unasked when she broke down. I didn’t intend to fall into the same trap with Kirstilä.

  “But your relationship continued,” I said. “How was it developing recently? Was it cooling off or were you thinking about getting more serious, getting married maybe?”

  “Developing . . .” Kirstilä looked perplexed. “Why would our relationship have been changing? We were happy the way things were.”

  “Where did you see each other?”

  “Us
ually at my place. Sometimes in Nuuksio. Not in the main house, of course. In the old sauna house—the little house. But you can’t tell anyone.”

  The cigarette butts and dark hair on the pillow . . . When had Kirstilä last spent the night in Nuuksio? I didn’t have time to ask before Ström opened his mouth again.

  “Didn’t it bother you that Elina was eight years older than you?”

  Ström’s graceless question made Kirstilä’s eyes open wide.

  “What a stupid question. You wouldn’t ask something like that if I was eight years older than Elina,” Kirstilä said. He nodded toward me: “She wouldn’t have asked something like that.”

  But Ström wasn’t silenced so easily. “So you didn’t have your sights on something a little younger that made you want to get rid of Elina? Do you know anything about her will? She was rich. Maybe she left something to you.”

  Ström’s crude attempt to turn up the heat worked far better to make me sympathetic toward the subject than Kirstilä’s agonized glances and furrowed brow.

  “Young women and money, that’s what every man wants, isn’t it?” Kirstilä had taken up a battle position. “Well, I’m not interested. Elina was smart and sexy and didn’t want a full-time relationship either. And why are you talking about getting rid of Elina? You haven’t even said how she died. Did someone kill her?”

  “Did someone have a reason to kill Elina?” I shot back. Kirstilä sounded convincing, but there were two things I couldn’t get out of my head: Milla’s tip that Kirstilä was a customer at Fanny Hill and Aira’s claim that he was leaving Elina.

  Kirstilä sat back in his seat and seemed to consider my question.

  “She did have some pretty unbalanced patients. Who knows what one of them could have done? And Elina’s opinions irritated plenty of people. She even had what you might call enemies in the psychology world. But murder . . . I don’t know.”