Rain Dogs

by Adrian McKinty

  ‘All that is true,’ I agreed.

  ‘Even if he were acting for someone else, which seems unlikely, Mr Ek and Mr Laakso had no relationship whatsoever with Mr Underhill. Indeed, they met him only on one occasion, for a few seconds, when he gave them a ticket to visit Carrickfergus Castle.’

  ‘That would also appear to be the case,’ I agreed.

  ‘We go on, then, to Mr McBain.’

  ‘Chief Superintendent McBain.’

  ‘Chief Superintendent McBain was murdered with a bomb under his car that was planted by the IRA.’

  ‘We don’t know who planted the bomb under his car.’

  ‘Mr Ek and Mr Laakso have no connection whatsoever with Mr McBain and I am sure you are not suggesting that they have a connection with a terrorist group,’ Wilmot said.

  ‘No. I’m not going to suggest that.’

  ‘Perhaps you could explain, then, why this meeting was deemed necessary. Why you came a thousand miles to interview my very busy clients about two deaths which they could not possibly have any link to?’ Wilmot said.

  ‘I’ll be happy to explain. Miss Bigelow was investigating a potential paedophile ring connected to a young offenders’ institution in Northern Ireland. We believe that she got herself assigned to cover the Lennätin delegation’s visit to Northern Ireland so that she could further investigate these claims. Before she came to Northern Ireland she was given the name ‘Peter Laakso’ and a suggestion that he might be connected somehow to the Kinkaid Young Offenders’ Institution. We know that on the night of February 6th Mr Laakso, Mr Ek, Nicolas and Stefan Lennätin visited an illegal brothel called the Eagle’s Nest. They may have visited other such places while in Ulster. Miss Bigelow seems to have been sufficiently troubled to have a conversation about the activities of the Finnish delegation with Chief Superintendent McBain. He was sufficiently intrigued, or perhaps concerned, by her speculations that he wanted to interview Mr Ek on the morning he was killed. His surviving notebook says quite clearly that he wanted to interview Mr Ek. It is reasonable, then, that we would wish to follow up on this possible connection between the two violent deaths,’ I said, calmly and clearly.

  Ek’s face was a mask throughout all of this but I noticed Constable Hornborg raise her eyebrows at one point, which was interesting and something, perhaps, to be followed up on.

  ‘What do you wish to know?’ Ek asked, in his perfect, ever-so-slightly American-accented English.

  ‘Tell me about your visit to the brothel,’ I said.

  ‘The young men wished to visit such a house and Mr Laakso and myself felt obliged to go to keep an eye on them. They are the grandsons of David Lennätin and it was our duty, my duty in particular, to see that they did not get up to any mischief.’

  ‘Visiting a brothel didn’t count as mischief?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even though it was illegal?’

  ‘Illegal, but not something the authorities would ever take note of. Am I right in thinking that, Inspector?’ Ek said.

  ‘What did you and Mr Laakso do at the brothel?’

  ‘We played cards.’

  ‘Do you remember the game?’

  ‘Of course. We played Paskahousu.’

  ‘And after the visit to the brothel, where did you go?’

  ‘We returned to the hotel.’

  ‘What time was that at?’

  ‘Perhaps around ten or eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Were you aware of anyone following you on this visit to the brothel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could Miss Bigelow have been following you?’

  ‘Perhaps, but I was not aware of it,’ Mr Ek said. He looked at Mr Laakso, who shrugged.

  ‘Mr Laakso?’ I asked.

  ‘I was not aware of anyone following us,’ he said.

  ‘Did Miss Bigelow ask you any questions about your brothel visit?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Ek said.

  ‘No,’ Laakso agreed.

  ‘She must have spoken to you at some point during the trip?’ I said.

  Ek shook his head. ‘That was what was so puzzling about her. She was travelling with us to do what we had been told was a feature story for the Financial Times, but she didn’t ask many questions. She asked a question about the roof of a factory we visited, I think.’

  ‘How long have you been working for Lennätin Corporation, Mr Ek?’

  ‘Nearly ten years.’

  ‘And you Mr Laakso?’

  ‘Twenty years.’

  ‘What did you do before working for Lennätin, Mr Ek?’

  ‘How can that question have any bearing on your investigation, Detective Duffy?’ Wilmot objected.

  ‘I will answer him,’ Ek said, unconcerned.

  ‘After the war, I emigrated to America and spent several decades there before moving back to Finland in the early 1970s.’

  ‘What did you do in America?’

  ‘I was in the army.’

  ‘The American army?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What, uhm, regiment?’

  ‘The United States army is not regimentally structured. I was in the 10th Special Forces Group. Commonly known as the Green Berets,’ he said, with a touch of pride.

  ‘The Green Berets? Did you serve in Vietnam?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  ‘That must have been heavy,’ Lawson continued.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said warming to the theme. ‘And that was my fourth war.’

  ‘Your fourth war?’

  ‘If I can interrupt you gentlemen,’ Wilmot said. ‘We are somewhat pressed for time. Inspector Duffy, do you have any more questions relating to the matter in hand?’

  ‘Just to clarify, Mr Ek, Mr Laakso, neither of you were aware that Lily Bigelow may have been following you the night you visited the brothel?’

  ‘No,’ they both said.

  ‘After the brothel visit you returned to the hotel?’

  They agreed that that was the case.

  ‘Do you know why Chief Superintendent McBain may have wanted to talk to you?’

  Neither had any clue.

  I took them through the timeline of their entire visit to Northern Ireland, but nothing jumped out at me. They seemed to have had minimal interaction with Lily Bigelow and, apart from the visit to the brothel, had not done anything untoward. They had been taken to several abandoned factories and brown-field sites and been subjected to several working breakfasts, lunches and one formal dinner with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

  I looked at Lawson. ‘Any additional questions, Detective Lawson?’

  Unhelpfully, Lawson had no additional questions and, jetlagged and somewhat wrong-footed by the day’s events, I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything else.

  Wilmot smiled. ‘Well, I think we’re done then, gentlemen,’ he said.

  He stood up. Lawson stood up. Ek and Laakso and the other lawyers stood up. I sat there. I didn’t want to go. Not yet. I knew we had missed something. Ek and Laakso had pulled a fast one, but I couldn’t think what it was.

  ‘Inspector Duffy?’ Wilmot said.

  Reluctantly I got to my feet.

  We shook hands with everyone again.

  ‘You have all the information you could possibly need,’ Wilmot said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll make sure the Attorney-General tells your Director of Public Prosecutions about your professionalism and courtesy,’ Mr Ek said.

  I looked at Lawson. He wasn’t being sarcastic was he? We had been professional and courteous, hadn’t we?

  I walked with Ek down the stairs.

  ‘You have a lovely house, here,’ I said.

  ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘Does Mrs Ek like it too?’

  ‘My wife, alas, died of cancer two years ago,’ Ek said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

  Ek nodded grimly.

  ‘Your children are n
earby, at least?’

  ‘We had no children.’

  We had reached the front door now. He offered me his hand again and I shook it. ‘I am glad that we have helped you sort this out, Mr Duffy,’ Ek said.

  Yeah, we had sorted it out.

  Everything was fine. Everybody’s story concurred. Everybody’s story worked. The only person who could possibly have killed Lily Bigelow was Clarke Underhill and Chief Superintendent McBain had, like dozens of police officers in the last few years, been murdered by terrorists, by way of a mercury tilt switch bomb.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you again, if that’s possible. And I’d like to talk to Nicolas and Stefan,’ I said.

  ‘We are all very busy men.’

  Car drive back across the frozen sea.

  Constable Hornborg strangely silent.

  Snow falling on the windscreen of the Volvo 240.

  ‘We go back home tomorrow, sir?’ Lawson asked from the front passenger’s seat.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Should we do our souvenir shopping here? Or do you think we’ll have a day in Helsinki?’ Lawson wondered.

  ‘We’ll head straight back. Flight out in the morning and straight back to Belfast. I don’t want Dalziel to have any excuse to think this trip was a boondoggle.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Lawson said glumly. ‘Only, you know, we’re never likely to be back in Helsinki …’

  I didn’t reply. I was thinking about Harald Ek. He’d been perfectly credible, perfectly civil, but I just didn’t like his bloody answers.

  ‘It was a pretty successful trip, if you ask me, sir. We finally nailed down that lead,’ Lawson said.

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir. I think it’s obvious now that Lily’s death had nothing to do with the Finns.’

  ‘They certainly did give us all the right answers.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. A rushed visit, but, you know, a successful one, sir, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It could be considered a successful trip from a political or diplomatic standpoint, but not, I think, as police work.’

  19: CONSTABLE HORNBORG’S STORY

  Constable Hornborg left us off at the Finnair Hotel on the easy-to-remember Pakkahuoneenkatu Street, which was just down the road from the Lennätin Corporate Headquarters.

  Although this was 1987, the Finnair Hotel was still stuck somewhere in the early seventies – its décor was very much of the orangey-brown sort and the furniture was a squeaky plastic that smelled. Strange, unfashionable hotels in strange, unfashionable towns were often places of beauty and mystery, but not this strange, unfashionable hotel in this strange, unfashionable town.

  The desultory hotel restaurant had an incomprehensible menu and when we asked for steak it was reindeer steak with cloud berries and cold mashed potatoes. Actually, it wasn’t bad, and properly cooked, or even heated up, it could have been OK.

  The drink was rather good vodka. The background music was Finnish easy listening, which was surprisingly inoffensive.

  ‘It’s snowing,’ was Lawson’s conversational gambit as he looked through the windows at the lifeless Pakkahuoneenkatu Street. But it wasn’t his job to sustain the convo anyway – that was what I was supposed to do.

  ‘Your name’s Alexander, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They ever call you Sasha?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They ever call you Sandy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you they call you?’

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Bit of a boring nickname, no?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You did maths, you say?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ll bet at some point someone offers you Detective Sergeant in the fraud squad.’

  ‘I don’t fancy that. I like general cases.’

  ‘If you’re good with numbers you should go the white-collar crime route. You can get up the promotion ladder pretty quickly there, too.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I brushed up on my Finnish humour before I left. Didn’t get a chance to use it today. You wanna hear my joke?’

  ‘Do I have a choice, sir?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘OK, then, I would love to hear the joke.’

  ‘How can you tell the difference between a Finnish introvert and a Finnish extrovert? … When he’s talking to you a Finnish introvert looks at his feet. A Finnish extrovert looks at yours.’

  Lawson nodded.

  ‘If you were Finnish you’d be on the floor now,’ I claimed.

  It wasn’t a great conversation, but at least we hadn’t resorted to football. The easy-listening music went off abruptly and an elderly man with a mysterious stringed instrument got on to a stage and began singing in Finnish. The singing was OK, but the mysterious stringed instrument could not possibly have been tuned for the human ear. By the time the old man was done, Lawson and I were the only customers left in the place. We gave him a round of applause, he bowed and came over for a tip. He seemed satisfied with a couple of the gold Finnish coins.

  It was 8 pm, but so quiet and dark now it felt like two in the morning.

  A final round of the excellent local vodka and I got the bill.

  Nothing else for it but to go to bed, I supposed.

  I paid in the strange, colourful Finnish banknotes, left a tip and looked up to see Constable Hornborg walking in from the street.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You just missed the concert.’

  She was pale, nervous, twitchy.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘They did not tell me all the details of the case that you are investigating,’ she began breathlessly.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  We sat back down at a corner table, ordered three beers and I told her the whole story. She listened intently, made notes, asked a few questions and then decided that it wasn’t safe to make notes after all and threw the paper in a rubbish bin.

  ‘Now, why don’t you tell us what the Finnish police don’t want us to know about Harald Ek and Peter Laakso?’ I said.

  She swallowed. ‘You are right. This is a company town. Lennätin is Oulu. Oulu is Lennätin. Peter Laakso is the CFO. Harald Ek is head of corporate security.’

  ‘And the boys?’

  ‘This is not about Nicolas and Stefan.’

  ‘Who is it about?’

  She took a sip of her beer, wiped the foam off her nose and continued.

  ‘First, let me tell you about Ek.’

  I got out my notebook.

  ‘Please, no notes, just remember,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t know if you are aware of this, but there is a small Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, from the time when Finland was part of the Swedish Empire. These Swedes, sometimes, are more Finnish than the Finns, as the expression goes. Harald Ek is one of these Swedish-Finns. In 1939, Finland and Russia went to war. Harald Ek joined the Finnish army and quickly proved himself an able fighter. When the war with the Soviets was concluded in 1940, Ek had become an army captain. In 1941, following Operation Barbarossa, Finland joined with Nazi Germany to invade Russia. The Finnish army quickly captured the territory we had lost in the Winter War and our soldiers advanced on Leningrad from the North. Cooperation between the Finns and Germans was very good. So good, in fact, that thousands of the best young Finnish soldiers were trained by the Wehrmacht in Germany and others joined the Nordic legions of the Waffen SS. Harald Ek was one of these men.’

  ‘He was in the SS?’ Lawson said, shocked.

  ‘The 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland, to be exact. They fought in many desperate campaigns on the eastern front, including the final battle for Berlin, where most of them were killed.’

  ‘But not Ek.’

  ‘No, not Ek. Fortunately for him, he was captured by the Americans, who wanted to send him back to Finland to be tried for treason.�
��

  ‘Treason? I thought you said Finland was on Germany’s side.’

  ‘Finland switched sides before the end of the war,’ Hornborg explained.

  ‘Smart of them. OK, so he comes back to Finland, to be tried for treason …’

  ‘He never makes it to Finland. He goes to America, marries a Finnish-American girl and joins the US army. He fights in Korea –’

  ‘His third war, I’ve been counting,’ Lawson said.

  ‘And is part of the original formation of the American Green Berets in Vietnam. In 1966, he is wounded at the battle of Lang Vei and invalided back to the United States. His first marriage has broken up by this stage and he expresses the wish to move back to Finland. He is a hero to the American Special Forces (one of their camps is named after him) and the Americans fix things with the Finnish government, so that he can return. He marries a local government official here in Oulu and since the mid-1970s he has worked for the Lennätin Corporation. He is known to be tough, even ruthless, and he has powerful friends in the civil service and, depending on the administration, in the government.’

  ‘Would you say that he was a man who was capable of anything?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Even murder?’

  ‘He has no criminal record, unlike …’

  ‘Unlike Mr Laakso?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I looked Peter Laakso up on Interpol. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘I am not surprised,’ she said.

  ‘Tell us about him,’ I said.

  ‘Peter Laakso comes from a very prominent Finnish family. His father was a member of parliament, both before and after the war. His uncle was on the supreme court. He himself was an MP in the 1950s. He was a very successful businessman before being recruited by David Lennätin in the late 1960s to improve the Lennätin Corporation’s finances. The new team that David Lennätin brought in, including Laakso, helped turn the company from a small national concern to a multi-national electronics giant. Phones, calculators, computers, radios, CD players.’

  ‘He must be getting up there. How old is Laakso?’

  ‘Sixty-four,’ Lawson said, remembering his remark about his aged knees.

  ‘He is no longer in charge of the day-to-day running of the company’s finances, but he is still a very important figure in Lennätin, in Oulu and in Finland.’