The Hummingbird (36 page)

Still at work, he wondered.

The quiet in the corridors was oppressive.

‘Hello?’ Veli-Matti hollered from the front door, but not one of the doors in the dark corridor opened up. The school was empty and silent.

Veli-Matti knew the building like the back of his hand and could have made his way around with his eyes closed. He switched the lights on nonetheless. He felt suddenly afraid. He’d been afraid since the end of August, though he was convinced that those terrible events couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him, they just couldn’t, in all rationality.

He walked past the row of closed doors towards his own classroom. Familiar building, familiar rooms, only familiar colleagues had keys. He would be fine.

After the second murder he had calmed down somewhat. These murders couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him, absolutely not.

That being said, he had started restricting his runs to the built-up areas near his house. Everybody had done the same. It was a normal precaution under the circumstances.

When Veli-Matti opened his classroom door, he noticed that the computer was still switched on too. Strange, he thought. How have I become so careless? I’m sure I switched everything off. Irritated at himself, he marched up to his desk and leaned across the computer, switched it off and stood up to leave again straight away.

But the door was blocked.

A dark figure stood in the doorway, aiming a rifle right at him.

‘Jesus Christ, what are you…?’ Veli-Matti gasped.

‘Shut up and sit down,’ the figure commanded him and switched off the lights in the room. ‘The safety pin is off, this thing’s loaded and I know how to use it, as I’m sure you know.’

Veli-Matti sat down in his chair. The lights in the car park shone dimly through the classroom windows, sketching the shadows of the desks across the floor. How could I not have recognised that car, he thought. Is this how it’s all going to end?

My work. My life. Everything?

Yes, this is where it’s going to end.

I won’t see tomorrow.

‘There’s a present for you on the table. Pick it up and use it. Don’t try anything or other people are going to get hurt besides you. They’re going to get really hurt. Understand?’

Veli-Matti looked at the syringe lying on the table and nodded.

‘What’s in it?’ he asked, his voice trembling.

‘It won’t kill you. It’ll make things more pleasant. I strongly recommend you use it,’ the figure responded.

Veli-Matti stared at syringe. He couldn’t do it. He’d never injected himself with anything. Even the idea of a finger-prick blood test scared him.

‘Come on, get a fucking move on,’ the figure snapped and shook the rifle at him threateningly. ‘Do exactly as I say, and nobody else will get hurt. Think of all those sweet little pupils that live round here. What about Eveliina? She’s at home right now, all by herself. I’ve checked. That single mother of hers is on night shift again. If I have to shoot you here, she’ll get it too. Maybe a few others as well.’

Insane, thought Veli-Matti. You sick lunatic.

Veli-Matti thought of Eveliina, who was at home doing her homework. A quiet, hard-working girl, every teacher’s dream pupil. Her mother felt bad about always being on night shift and leaving her daughter to spend the evenings at home by herself. She’d once burst into tears at the teacher–parent evening; she’d slumped against the desk and opened up to Veli-Matti.

I can’t have anything terrible happen to Eveliina, he thought, and
with quivering fingers he picked up the syringe and started rolling up the sleeve of his tracksuit.

‘That’s it. Good boy.’

Veli-Matti hesitated, his heart was racing; he could hear the blood rushing in his head. Then he pressed the syringe into his arm and closed his eyes. The tension drained from his body almost immediately. His heart began to beat calmly again, lazily, and his mind seemed to relax. His limbs drooped towards the floor. Veli-Matti suddenly felt like going to sleep, resting his heavy head on the desk and succumbing to the liberating power of sleep. The classroom rocked like a lullaby. The figure had shrunk to a distant point beside the door, and Veli-Matti no longer had the energy to care.

He slumped against the table and was just able to make out the point by the door approaching him. Like in a film in slow motion, the point gradually assumed a form, propped the indistinct contours of the rifle against the blackboard, disappeared behind him, pulled his limp arms behind his back and slipped a set of handcuffs on his lifeless wrists. Though Veli-Matti was still fully aware of the seriousness of the situation, he felt like laughing out loud. This was his chance to knock the figure for six, to kick the rifle out of reach and run away. And yet he was unable to move even the tip of a finger.

The figure sat down at one of the desks – that was Henrik’s place – and waited in silence. After a short while the worst of the numbness seemed to disperse. The objects in the classroom regained their form and Veli-Matti’s limbs began to feel like they belonged to him once again. The figure stood up, looked out into the car park for a moment, then nudged Veli-Matti up from his chair with the barrel of the rifle, forced him out of the building and into the car park. He sat him down in the front seat of the red car and drove off somewhere; Veli-Matti didn’t know where.

30

EVERY
DAY
DETECTIVE
INSPECTOR
RONKAINEN
cycled the seven-kilometre journey to the police station where his job was to take calls from members of the public who needed the police’s assistance and to pass them on to the correct officers for further investigation. He was expecting a quiet start to his shift, slowly sipping his coffee without any semblance of hurry, because it was a Tuesday morning, and statistically the night between Monday and Tuesday was the calmest of the week.

On this day, however, his telephone rang abruptly before he had even managed to sit down at his desk.

‘My husband hasn’t come home,’ a woman’s voice spoke into Ronkainen’s ear.

‘Can you give me your name, and tell me exactly what has happened?’ Ronkainen asked. He glanced at his coffee cup, its contents now cooling on the table.

‘My name is Kaarina Helmerson. I live in Saloinen. My husband went for a run yesterday evening and he hasn’t come back.’

DI Ronkainen suddenly sat up.

‘A run, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Let me put you through to one of our investigators,’ he said after thinking about the matter for only a fraction of a second.

‘Very well,’ the woman replied.

‘Fekete Anna.’

There were a few Finnish customs that Anna would never get used to, and one of them was to give her Christian name first. Hungarians always gave their surname first.

‘Hello, this is Kaarina Helmerson.’

‘Good morning.’

‘My husband hasn’t come home. He went for a run yesterday and hasn’t come back. He hasn’t left me a message and now he isn’t answering his phone. I’m very worried about him. I’ve read about … things in the paper,’ the woman’s voice cracked to an agonised sigh.

‘Where was your husband heading?’ Anna asked immediately.

‘I’m not entirely sure. He used to go to the running track at Selkämaa quite frequently, but after that terrible shooting nobody dares go there any longer. Veli-Matti has taken to running in and around the town, in built-up areas.’

Anna felt her body tense. Riikka was from Saloinen and had died in Selkämaa.

‘Sometimes he would go out to Vainikkala and Riitaharju, but to my knowledge he hasn’t been there since those … murders.’

‘Has anything like this ever happened before? Has he been away from home for a night or two without letting you know?’

The woman began to cry. ‘Never,’ she said.

‘I’m going to end this call and send a patrol car out to check the areas around the running tracks you’ve mentioned. Is that okay? I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve done that.’

‘Fine,’ the woman said.

Anna raced out of her office and into the corridor, where she had arrived only a moment ago. For a fraction of a second she hesitated outside Esko’s office, thought of continuing to Sari’s door instead or going straight to Virkkunen’s office, but changed her mind, geared herself up, pounded on the door with her fist and shouted for Esko, who then appeared at the door.

‘It’s happened again,’ she said. ‘At least, I think so.’

‘Fucking hell,’ said Esko and stared at Anna with that familiar
look of disdain. His breath was a fug of garlic and alcohol, which he had tried to cover up with a throat pastille. Anna felt nauseous.

‘Another jogger, a man. He hasn’t come home. Wife says he didn’t use the running tracks any more, but before that he’d been a frequent visitor at Selkämaa, Riitaharju and Vainikkala. I’ll get patrols out to all three locations. You should brush your teeth. And wash your face.’

‘Not much use at this age,’ he replied.

Anna alerted the patrol units, informed Virkkunen of what was going on and called Kaarina Helmerson. She put her phone on speaker; Esko was listening next to her.

‘Hello, this is Detective Constable Fekete again. The patrol cars are now on their way to the scene and they will let me know as soon as they have any information.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

‘It could well be that nothing out of the ordinary has happened. People go missing and reappear all this time. It’s actually very commonplace, even with people who have never done it before.’

Anna tried to think whether that was actually true or not. It was just something you said to concerned relatives.

‘Veli-Matti would have told me, and besides, he’s supposed to be at work. He never misses work, not unless he’s very ill.’

‘Have you asked at his place of work?’

‘They called me just now. The children started wondering what had happened when their teacher didn’t show up for class.’

‘So your husband is a teacher?’

Again the woman’s voice cracked. ‘Yes. He’s a teacher at Saloinen primary school. 6B should have started their history class at eight this morning.’

‘Why didn’t you call us earlier? Yesterday evening, for instance? I assume your husband isn’t in the habit of jogging through the night. What time did he leave?’

Too many questions at once – again, Anna berated herself. Why
did she always have to rush ahead? And the accusatory tone of the questions wouldn’t help in the least.

‘I wasn’t at home last night. I left the house around 6.30 p.m. and that’s when Veli-Matti told me he was going for a run.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘To my elderly mother’s apartment in town. I often spend the night there. She won’t be able to live in her own home for much longer, but I want to support her as much as I can until the end. I only got home a moment ago.’

‘Do you work too?’

‘I’m the head of Saloinen high school, but I’ve been on leave now for about a year, mostly due to the situation with my mother. She’s 89 and I don’t think she has long left.’

‘So you arrived home this morning and noticed that your husband had gone for a run but hadn’t come home.’

‘That’s right. The first thing I noticed was that the car was still in the driveway, so I imagined he was still at home. He almost always drives to work. But when I came in, I noticed that the house was empty. It wasn’t long before I realised it had been empty since the previous evening.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘The newspaper was still in the letter box; nobody had made any coffee; there were no scraps of supper or breakfast on the table. The bed looked like it hadn’t been touched. And his running clothes weren’t in a crumpled pile on the bathroom floor; Veli-Matti always leaves them there.’

Kaarina started to cry again. Anna wondered whether she ought to go straight to the woman’s house or wait for the patrol units to report back. How long would it take before all three running tracks had been thoroughly checked? If the man had been murdered and everything followed the same pattern as before, they would find him fairly quickly. There had been no attempt to hide the victims; both had been left lying in the middle of the track like a grotesque sign saying
look at me
. Anna guessed they would know within a few
hours whether Kaarina Helmerson’s husband had been killed on the running track or not.

‘Will you be all right or should I send someone over now?’ Anna asked.

‘I don’t really know. I’m sure I’ll be fine. I just want to know where my husband is as soon as possible.’