The Man Who Died

by Antti Tuomainen

  ‘Taina,’ I begin. ‘The same thing happened to me at the beginning of the week. The same symptoms, the same unpleasant series of events. Somebody has done this. Have you noticed anything strange going on recently?’

  I sound like Tikkanen, of all people. I understand the fundamental impossibility of my question: I am speaking to a woman who has been planning a coup, who has deceived me, committed adultery and vomited over our potential business partners. I try to be more specific.

  ‘Were you involved in poisoning me?’

  Taina shakes her head.

  ‘Do you know who poisoned me?’

  Taina shakes her head.

  ‘Do you know anyone who would want to poison you and the toy boy?’

  Taina shakes her head.

  ‘I was sure it was you who had done it. But now it doesn’t look likely. You wouldn’t poison yourself. You’re not the type. After what’s just happened, I wonder whether it’s our new competitor. I don’t think so. No, I’m certain they’re not behind this. I’ve got, shall we say, enough first-hand knowledge of them that I know they are more interested in direct action. If they wanted to get rid of someone they would batter them or stab them with a sword…’

  By now Petri is howling and growling. I decide to change tack. I keep my eyes firmly on Taina. I’m not worried about the traffic. It’s evening and, after all, this is Hamina.

  ‘The more I think about this, the more I realise we’re an unlikely set of victims. I understood my own murder, when I thought you wanted me out of the picture. And from the perspective of our competitors, I can see the rationale in getting rid of us both. But what about the big baby in the back? Why him? He can’t do anything; he doesn’t know anything. This is something else – but what?’

  Petri begins to bark like a dog. After that it sounds as if he starts to sob.

  Taina wipes her face with a towel. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, so quietly that I can only just make out the words.

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘Anything,’ she says. ‘All I wanted was … Am I going to die?’

  ‘We’ll see the doctor soon, and then we’ll know. It’s perfectly possible that you won’t die.’

  Petri lets out a lengthy, anguished whimper.

  ‘I wouldn’t do something like that,’ Taina says quietly. ‘Murder you, I mean.’

  I don’t know what to say. Of course it’s nice to hear that my wife wouldn’t think of murdering me. On the other hand, the very fact that she even has to mention it suggests that things haven’t been going well in our marriage for a while.

  ‘So,’ I continue. ‘Think carefully about the people around us. Who would have a reason to poison first me, then you and Boy Wonder?’

  ‘Petri!’ Petri pipes up.

  Taina’s expression remains impassive and doesn’t betray in the slightest that she has heard the gruff howl from the backseat. Then she says something that I can’t get out of my mind.

  ‘Nobody knows about us,’ she says.

  ‘Who is us?’

  ‘Me and…’

  ‘Petri,’ comes the cry from the back.

  ‘Me and Petri and the Japanese visit,’ she says. ‘It’s a secret. All of it. Nobody knew anything about it.’ Taina turns her head slightly towards me. ‘Then again, it turns out you somehow knew all along.’

  I’m driving quickly and carefully, but not over the speed limit. The minutes and seconds are important. Rain patters against the windscreen, like a thousand small fingers rapping against a table.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you didn’t tell anyone about your plans?’ I ask.

  Taina is silent for a few long, heavy seconds.

  ‘I didn’t even tell Petri everything,’ she says eventually.

  We pull up outside the hospital. I drive straight to the back of the building and park by the delivery bay as we have agreed. The doctor is waiting for us. Beside him is a woman whom, despite her civilian clothes, I recognise as the old-school matron who took my blood samples. I bring the car to a halt right in front of them. The doctor says he will need someone to help him. We extract a promise from Petri before untying him from his seat. There are tears in the corners of his eyes. Taina is full of questions for the doctor. The doctor won’t promise too much, but says they both stand a good chance of pulling through. As he says that he looks at me.

  I remain standing behind the closing hospital doors. The rain murmurs in the otherwise soft evening, and its sound fills the world as it falls around the small roof like three walls. Taina and Petri haven’t spoken openly about their plans. But I have spoken openly about Taina and Petri.

  21

  The yard is empty, the ground softened with rain and dotted with puddles. The lamp on the wall of our mushroom production building illuminates only the front door, and even that only barely. I try as best I can to avoid the potholes filled with water. I can feel the rain on my face, on the top of my head, on my neck, my bare hands. The journey from the car to the front door is no more than fifteen metres, but already I’m soaked through.

  Once inside I take off my suit jacket and wait for a moment. I flick the light switch on and walk to the point in the hallway where I was standing when the idea first occurred to me. This time the lights in the drying room are not turned on and the low, dull murmur of the machinery does not catch my attention or combine a second later with the hum of the surrounding world.

  I turn on the electricity but do not start up the dryers. Instead I look at the log records. Nothing since last spring. Have I heard wrong? Am I barking up the wrong tree? I think for a moment, step into my office and boot up my computer. I wait for a moment and give the mouse a few clicks.

  The dryers can be operated both manually and digitally. All digital use is automatically logged in the drying room program’s own user profile and history. Even manual use, which is nothing more than pressing a sequence of buttons, is logged and registered by the program. In fact the use of all our electric devices, large and small, is logged in the company’s energy-consumption management system, a complicated name for a simple program I installed about a year ago in an attempt to cut down on energy bills.

  The dryer has its own number in the system, and that number appears on a few lines of the log details. It reveals that the dryer has been manually operated a total of eight times since the last official digital operation.

  I return to the hallway and open the dryer door; the lights come on automatically.

  The dryer is essentially a cross between a standard home oven and a shelving system for preserves – on a much larger scale. It is the height and width of a car and features dozens of separate drying racks. Everything looks exactly the way it should. I pull out about ten of the racks at random and check them. They are clean.

  A thought occurs to me and I walk round to the side of the dryer. I turn the bolt holding the extraction fan in place and carefully remove the filter. It is about forty centimetres in diameter, new, bright white, and has clearly been changed only recently. This is careful work, I think as I fit the filter back in place. I walk back to the front of the dryer and take a few steps back. To the left of the machine I see what I have subconsciously been looking for all along.

  Against the wall at the far end of the hall is a long counter, the end of which has turned into a tearoom for the staff – probably because there’s a tap with running water. On the counter there is a coffee machine, next to that an armchair and a few barstools. Above the counter is a shelf with an array of mugs belonging to the staff, each with amusing or endearing texts. Next to a mug bearing the words ‘World’s Best Granddad’ is a small tin, and in that tin a selection of biscuits.

  If I’m not wrong, the appearance of the biscuits coincides with the first time the dryer was operated manually. I remember how happy I was when they suddenly appeared at the corner of my desk. I enjoyed munching on them with a cup of coffee as I took care of the company’s paperwork. Whenever I asked where they got their rich, salty-sweet ta
ste, I was told that the recipe was a secret and the conversation was changed – regularly and systematically – to the subject of women’s wrongs, women’s illogical minds, and how things should be in the eternal struggle between the sexes.

  I hold the tin in my hands and the jigsaw comes together piece by piece.

  According to my doctor, my poisoning was caused by nature’s own toxins. Someone has gathered them and used our dryer to dry them. After this they have been ground to a powder and mixed with biscuit dough. The biscuits were baked and brought into my office. And I have eaten them.

  There is only one more question.

  Why, Olli?

  Isoympyräkatu – the street which, despite being called ‘Big Circle Street’, does not form a full circle – comes to an end at a tight cluster of wooden houses. The oldest of the houses were built more than a hundred years ago, their foundations made of large boulders; some of them are wonky, some renovated, others falling to pieces. The house where Olli lives is something between the extremes.

  A pale-yellow light, the old buildings wet from the rain, the narrow street and a few tall trees, their boughs as dark as the night, make the strip of road seem like a time machine. There is no evidence of the modern age. If I die right now and this is the last landscape I ever see, it will be impossible to say whether I died in 1946 or 2016, or whether this matters in the grand scheme of our passing. Plenty of people die all the time, and most of them believe they went too soon.

  Judging by Olli’s address and apartment number I estimate that he must have two windows looking out onto the street. Both of them are covered with closed Venetian blinds.

  The garden is surrounded by a slatted wooden fence, and the gate is open. Olli’s four-wheel quad bike is parked beneath a small shelter.

  The garden is a mixture of mud and overgrown grass. Olli might be able to gather webcaps, hemlock, yew berries and fly amanitas, he might know how to harness them and cleverly poison people, but keeping his garden in order seems beyond his capabilities. In one of the windows looking out onto the garden the blind is not quite closed. At first I wonder whether there is a fire inside, then I realise it must be the television. The colour and lighting in the room is in constant flux. From the outside it looks like there is a disco going on.

  I am about to ring the bell when I see the door handle gleaming in the rain. I try the door, and it opens gently. I hear the sound of the television, and it takes a moment before I recognise the show: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? It seems Olli has other passions besides assassinating people.

  The sound of the television is so loud that, though I can feel the hundred-year-old floorboards moving beneath my feet, I can’t hear the sound of their creaking. The hallway is a short corridor that comes to an end at the toilet door. To the right there are two doorways. The darkened room at the front is presumably the bedroom, and the closer door, lit with warm light and filled with the sound of the blaring television, must lead to the living room.

  On the television someone gives a wrong answer, the audience sighs with disappointment, Olli mouths something I can’t make out. He is half sitting, half lying in his armchair.

  The living room is tidy but slightly depressing. The furniture seems to be a selection of the kind of stuff people acquire when other people move house; the wallpaper and the waist-high panelling are a strange combination of English bungalow and Finnish sauna, the dome light hanging from the ceiling is fitted with a bulb far too strong, which reveals not only a spot of damp on the ceiling but every last ball of dust in the corners of the panelling and on the floor.

  ‘Olli, would you turn the television down a little?’ I ask.

  Olli’s hands fly up from the arms of the chair, his back straightens, his face seems to elongate, his mouth opens and his eyes are filled with questions. But he remains in his chair and continues to look like George Clooney, whose last film was a while ago now.

  ‘Jaakko,’ he says.

  ‘Still alive,’ I say and throw a biscuit into his lap.

  He doesn’t even try to catch it. He seems utterly frozen. The brown biscuit falls onto the front of his grey jogging trousers, where it breaks in two. Olli’s head moves solely to look at the two halves. I’m not sure how long he has to stare at them before he understands what this is all about. I give him a few seconds to take it all in. Then I pick up the remote control from the table and switch off the television.

  The silence seems to wake him up. He raises his eyes to meet my gaze. He looks exactly like the Olli I know: sincere, either slow or cunning – I still haven’t worked out which – and somehow backward, despite all his apparent prowess with the opposite sex.

  ‘I poisoned them for you,’ he says.

  Not quite the opening I’d expected.

  ‘Them?’ I ask.

  ‘Taina and Petri,’ Olli replies. ‘They were at it like rabbits, screwing like…’

  ‘Olli,’ I say. ‘You poisoned me first.’

  For a moment he is silent. He looks me in the eyes, but still seems an open, honest man.

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  I am standing in a wooden house, looking at my murderer.

  ‘You’re sorry about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nods, again with deep sincerity.

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ I say. ‘Then everything’s okay. You’ve apologised, so that’s the end of it and I can go home to die now.’

  I notice I am becoming agitated. I take a deep breath.

  ‘Olli, for Christ’s sake,’ I say calmly. ‘I really don’t know what I was expecting. But I’d be lying if I said a simple apology makes this okay.’

  Olli raises his shoulders. The gesture is presumably supposed to be a shrug, but it lasts so long that it seems more a sign that a moment of contemplation has ended in uncertainty.

  ‘It was an accident,’ he says. ‘In a way.’

  ‘How can you accidentally gather poisonous mushrooms, dry them and mix them into a sweet dough and roll them into delicious, little fucking biscuits?’

  My voice rises towards the end of the question. Olli looks as though he is suddenly afraid of me.

  ‘I was just experimenting to see if I could do something like that,’ he says. ‘To see how it … and whether anyone would eat them.’

  ‘I fucking ate them.’

  ‘You ate all of them.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘First you murder me, then you criticise my eating habits.’

  Olli raises his hands in self-defence. ‘No, mate, not at all. Everyone can eat whatever they want, everyone has the right to their own body, everyone…’

  ‘Olli,’ I say, as if to a dog.

  We are both silent for a moment. Olli stares ahead, then glances at me from beneath his eyebrows.

  ‘I was practising making them. The biscuits. I think I’d run out of options.’

  ‘Options? What options? Either you don’t bake anything at all or you bake deadly mushroom biscuits, is that it?’

  Olli slowly shakes his head.

  ‘I told you I’ve been divorced three times. I didn’t want to get divorced, not once. The missus has always left me. I’ve been dumped. That’s the truth. On top of that, I’ve been engaged six times, and every time I get given the boot. I’ve never dumped anyone. Nobody can deal with that. I certainly can’t. The next one won’t leave me. I’ll feed her biscuits instead. I’ll poison her. It’s the only sensible option. The bitch will die while she’s still happy – while we’re both happy – before she has a chance to run off. It’s a win-win situation.’

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘At least Taina and Petri got what they deserved.’ Olli’s voice is solicitous, angling for something.

  Again I shake my head. ‘They’re in hospital,’ I say. ‘If the poison is detected early enough, the doctors might be able to stop it spreading.’

  ‘But you wanted it to…’

  ‘I might have said that, might have expressed my feelings in st
rong terms, but that doesn’t mean I want this to happen.’

  The surprise on Olli’s face looks genuine.

  ‘I thought you and me were on the same side.’

  ‘How the hell can we be on the same side when you’ve murdered me and you’re planning to murder other people too?’

  Olli gazes in front of him. He seems to be thinking, either about my question or something else entirely. Then he looks at me again.

  ‘Are you going to tell the police?’ he asks.

  ‘What would you suggest? Should we poison them too? And after them the rest of the people of Hamina? And when we get found out, everyone else in Finland? We’ll feed people little biscuits until there’s nobody left to find us out.’

  Olli doesn’t answer. He repeats the previous sequence of movements: first he stares right ahead, then glances at me surreptitiously. When he moves, I think he might try to attack me. But that’s not the direction of his movement. Olli is trying to escape, to run away. By the time he’s darted past me, and I realise I should run after him, he is already struggling with the front door.

  Olli doesn’t stop to put on his shoes. He yanks the front door open, leaps downs the porch steps and continues sprinting. At that same moment I gather my energy at the top of the steps, dive into the air and throw myself onto his back.

  The rain is pouring around us, the earth is soft and wet. Our knees and elbows sink into the mud. Beneath us it feels like a soaked, lumpy mattress. We struggle with one another.

  It seems neither of us knows how to fist-fight properly like they do in films, so we both try instead to get a firm hold on the other and wrestle him to the ground. But neither are we top-level athletes – far from it. What’s more I have the added problems associated with my impending demise: I’m out of breath in an instant, gasping for air, the excess lactate in my bloodstream almost stops my movements altogether. The tie round my neck isn’t the best wrestling kit either; I’m beginning to understand the benefits of Lycra.

  We twist and turn, huffing and grunting, our movements slow. At times our faces are so close that we’re breathing down each other’s noses, at others we are almost standing up, wrestling on our feet, then we collapse again and roll in the mud. I can’t see anything anymore. My eyes and mouth are full of earth, sweat and rain.