The Defenceless (3 page)

‘Pack your lipstick and tampons. We’re off to investigate the scene of an accident,’ he said.

‘Come up with something new, will you?’

‘I’m trying,’ Esko grunted. ‘You know I am,’ he muttered more to himself than to her.

Anna and Esko took the lift down to the depot beneath the police station, checked out a light-blue Ford civilian car and drove into the city. The sun gleamed in the cloudless sky. Exhaust fumes gave off steam in the frosted air, the silhouettes of buildings rising up majestically against the radiant blue of the sky. The tall piles of snow at the side of the road were dirty and grey. That’s what my lungs will look like when I’m older if I don’t quit smoking, Anna thought. Still, we all have to die of something, so why not lung cancer? She tried not to think unpleasant thoughts of hospital beds, painkillers and oxygen masks, but focussed on watching the crowds of people, which became sparser as they made their way out of the city and headed towards Kangassara. The urban landscape turned to forest, and after a bend in the road they saw the car that the police had moved to the verge during the night. The area was cordoned off with police tape. They pulled up by the side of the road, far enough away from the scene of the accident not to disturb any evidence.

Anna stepped out of the car. The icy surface of the road glinted in the bright sunshine. Seen from a distance, the car Gabriella had been driving didn’t seem to have sustained any visible damage, but any closer investigation was a job for one of the vehicular specialists on the traffic-accident investigation team. What a job title, thought Anna; compared to that, senior constable sounded almost human. The car would soon be transferred to the MOT inspection office and all imaginable data regarding the road surface, the friction force, the condition of the tyres, any braking marks and damage to the car would be collated and compared to the injuries and impact marks
on the victim, and to the photographs and sketches of the scene taken by forensics, after which the investigation team would sift through the data, analyse it on their computers and give a statement about the sequence of events. Anna often wondered how the police seemed to have so much specialised expertise at its fingertips. She found it fascinating and was continually taken aback by it, perhaps because it gave her a tantalising sense that her career was in constant development, that it would never stagnate.

The thick spruce forest was silent, the dark-green gloom of its branches extinguishing any light reflected from the snow. Anna looked closely at the forest. Nobody would be able to walk through that thicket, she thought. The man must have been wandering along the road.

‘I’ll drive on a kilometre or so and walk back to meet you,’ said Esko. ‘Let’s try and work out what direction the old boy was coming from.’

‘Okay. Then we’ll examine the ground in the immediate vicinity.’

Esko glanced at the dense spruce wood and sniffed. ‘Nobody could walk around in there,’ he said, repeating Anna’s own summation, before getting back in his car and driving off.

Anna stood on the spot for a moment. She listened to the fading hum of Esko’s car but could no longer hear when it stopped and when Esko slammed the door shut. He must have driven quite a distance, she thought. I wonder if I should go back a bit. She quickly strode about half a kilometre back towards the city, turned and began slowly walking forwards, closely examining the road as she went. Every now and then she saw animal tracks in the soft snow on the verge. The surface of the road was so icy that someone out walking a dog wouldn’t have left any footprints – or had the dog been loose, a runaway, just like the old man might have been? Then two footprints: one in a heap of snow by the verge, the other sunk further into the drift with deep paw impressions all around it.

The snow still hadn’t crusted over, thought Anna. She still couldn’t go skiing across the fields. The human footprints were small. The
dog had been out here with someone, a woman or a child, she concluded. The dog had caught the scent of a hare and raced off into the forest, dragging its owner with it. These weren’t the old man’s footprints, she thought, as she continued on her way, there’s nothing here; the road is too icy. She could see the police tape up ahead. Despite the icy conditions, the car Gabriella had been driving had left skid marks, though they were barely visible. Nothing sticks to a surface like this, thought Anna and looked at the blood spatter on the ground. That had stuck, that much was certain; blood and everything that had sprayed out of the old man upon impact had soaked into the ice, melting large, dark-red pools into its surface. The blood had seeped gruesomely into the surrounding snow.

Esko soon joined her. He was visibly out of breath.

‘You should cut back on the cigarettes,’ she commented.

‘Why the hell should I?’ he snapped, fumbled in his jacket pocket and lit another one. ‘Let’s check out that thicket and cut the bullshit, if that’s alright by Miss Moral High Ground?’

Anna laughed. She felt as though, in a very peculiar way, she sometimes even liked Esko.

They clambered in among the spruces. At first their legs sunk up to their knees in snow. Then, though there wasn’t much snow beneath the trees, the thick tangle of branches made it hard to walk. There was no way a feeble old man could have reached the road this way. And there are no prints here either, not even animal tracks, Anna noted just before she saw a bounding hare’s tracks in the soft snow. That’s what the dog must have been chasing; it would have run off after its prey if it hadn’t been on a leash. Anna examined every tree trunk for a strip of fabric, a hair, anything at all. But she could see nothing.

‘It’s odd,’ she said to Esko, as they returned to the road and dusted the snow from their legs.

‘What is?’

‘Well, the fact that there are no tracks round here. Nothing to suggest where the victim was coming from.’

‘I don’t think it’s all that odd. If the old boy was doddering around in the road or on the verge, there wouldn’t be any tracks. Everything’s iced over, and ice is pretty damned hard.’

‘I suppose. But it’s still odd.’

‘You’ll have to apply for more details on the Hungarian driver,’ said Esko. ‘Virkkunen’s orders.’

‘How am I going to do that? I don’t know how to apply for details like that.’

‘For crying out loud, you know how to use the telephone and you can stammer something in your own language. Either that or send an email.’

‘Back at the station I could barely remember how to say “press charges”. And who am I supposed to call? There are probably more police officers in Hungary than there are people in this city.’

‘Ask Virkkunen. You’d better check out her residence permit while you’re at it.’

‘Listen, you’re perfectly capable of doing that yourself. Any news on the identity of the victim?’

‘Sari just sent a message saying she’d come up with nothing. Nobody matching the description has been reported missing. She’s ringing round all the local hospitals and care facilities.’

‘Judging by the photographs, the man’s pyjamas weren’t issued by a hospital. Besides, surely these places would notice if someone has gone missing?’

‘You’d be surprised at the things people do and don’t notice in these places.’

‘I’m not surprised at all, sadly.’

Anna thought of her own grandmother, who lived with her father’s sister, Anna’s aunt. Grandma drank a small glass of home-made
pálinka
every morning. Apparently it helped her circulation and kept her mind in good order, and Anna certainly had no reason to disagree. Grandma was over ninety, she’d survived the wars, she’d seen plenty of sorrow in her life, not least the loss of her son, her grandson and her husband, but somehow she always managed to
remain happy and content with her life. Back home people didn’t hide their old folk out of sight, didn’t send them to care homes to lose their minds. Back home they were treated with respect and greeted with the words
kezét csókolom
, ‘I kiss your hand’.

‘It’s late and I’m starving,’ said Esko. ‘What say we go back to town for a bite to eat?’ he suggested.

‘Good idea,’ Anna replied. She hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day.

A match flared in the darkness. The ember of a cigarette began to glow, then another. Jenni and Katri, both ninth-graders at the Ketoniemi secondary school, peered behind the tree to make sure nobody was coming. Jenni had stolen the cigarettes from her mum’s boyfriend and sent a message to her best friend Katri, who lived next door. The girls had told their parents they were going for a walk. Pinching the cigarettes had been easy, Jenni explained. Mum and her boyfriend had been watching TV; the boyfriend’s jacket was hanging in the hallway and the fags were in his pocket. To top it all off, the packet was suitably half full. If it had been full, two missing cigarettes would have been obvious, but if it had been almost empty, taking two would have cleaned it out. A half-f packet was best; nobody would notice a thing. Jenni knew this all too well, because she’d been caught stealing cigarettes from an almost empty packet before.

The girls dragged hungrily at their cigarettes in the woodland just behind their houses, gossiped about their stupid teachers, the cute guy, Ilari, in their year and all the other important things that fifteen-year-olds talk about. They spat in the heaps of ploughed snow. Once they’d finished their cigarettes, they decided to hang out at the shopping mall, see if there was anyone there, though they doubted it. It was dead on Thursday evenings. In fact, it was always pretty dead at the mall. The youth centre had been closed due to cutbacks and the only people at the shops were families with little kids and the local drunks loitering outside – there was never anyone around. But they needed to get rid of the smell of smoke before going home,
so they had to take a walk somewhere no matter what. They decided to walk through the woods, though the snow made walking quite difficult, their toes froze and their Converse trainers were soaked.

‘What’s that?’ said Katri and stopped in her tracks.

‘What?’

‘That on the ground.’ Katri pointed towards a large pine tree. Something lay on the snow beneath the branches.

Jenni stepped closer.

‘Oh my God,’ she shrieked. ‘Look at this!’

It was a knife. Not just a normal breadknife, but a weapon with a curved blade. It was covered in blood.

‘Look,’ Katri whispered and pointed at the ground about two metres from the knife. A cloud of steam billowed from her mouth into the frozen air.

The snow was soaked in blood. In the darkening evening it looked almost black.

‘Has someone been killed?’

‘D’you think we should call the police?’

‘I’ll be fucking grounded if my mum finds out we’ve been out here smoking.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s go to the mall and think.’

‘Oh God, I’m scared. What if the killer is still here?’

The girls stood listening to the darkening forest around them. At first it was perfectly quiet, all they could hear was the sound of their frightened breathing. There came a crackle from the trees, then another.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Katri whispered, terrified.

The girls broke into a sprint. They ran through the woods, paying no attention to the branches slapping against their faces. Jenni tripped in the snow and began to cry; she shouted for Katri to wait, but got up quickly and continued running. Back to the safety of the houses and the lights, out of this terrifying forest where a crazed killer was on the loose. Soon they were standing in the yard outside
the shopping mall. They ran up to one of the pubs, because it was the only place with people around, leant on the wall and glanced around, gasping for breath. Nobody had followed them out of the woods. The mall was deserted; there was nobody in sight.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Jenni.

A drunken woman staggered out of the pub and lit a cigarette. Soon afterwards a man appeared and began hitting on the woman.

‘Let’s go to my place,’ said Katri. ‘We can think what to say about this. If we talk to my mum first, then maybe your parents won’t start asking about the cigarettes.’

Anna’s studded trainers gripped the icy path. The frosted air tingled pleasantly at the back of her throat. The running track through the woods behind Koivuharju had been turned into a skiing track, so Anna had to run along the cycle paths. She enjoyed skiing too, but for that she needed a stretch of ice covering the open sea and the sight of a distant horizon, the bright, clearly defined contour of the skyline. Anna didn’t like pre-prepared skiing trails through the woods. The aimless freedom of vast expanses of ice, that’s what she wanted to find on her weekend-morning skiing trips that took her kilometres from the shore.

Her run that evening was fast and short: half an hour at full pace, then home to shower and smoke a cigarette. She’d managed to keep her New Year’s resolution – only one a day – though she’d made the promise with a cigarette in her mouth, tipsy with champagne, as the fireworks from the town hall in Kanizsa crackled and fizzed above her, diamonds, balls, glitter and coloured stars all exploding across the sky, people laughing, hugging and wishing each other a happy New Year. Réka’s circle of friends, many of whom Anna had known since they were at nursery school together, had organised a party. They had reserved a pub on the outskirts of town, ordered food from a catering service, played hits from the 90s, danced and drank the night away. Just before midnight they had gone into the town centre to watch the fireworks, like most people in Kanizsa on New Year’s
Eve. Her mother had been there too, with her own friends. Anna had never seen fireworks this spectacular in Finland. In Kanizsa there were sometimes displays of fireworks in the middle of summer. For Anna it was one of the most exhilarating things in the world, an unexpected set of fireworks on a warm, dark summer’s night. She hadn’t seen Ákos among the partygoers.

At the party she’d also met Béci, a boy who used to hide Anna’s satchel and pull her hair when they were in first grade. Béci had been living in Budapest for the last ten years and Anna hadn’t seen him since she’d left; until that moment she’d forgotten he existed. But he had remembered Anna. After the fireworks had ended they bought some beer from a kiosk and walked down to the chilly banks of the Tisza and sat on the old swings suspended on metal chains, garish flakes of red, yellow and green paint flaking from the wooden seats. They reminisced about their childhood as the rusted bolts gave ear-splitting shrieks beneath their combined weight. When Anna began to feel cold, they’d snuck back to Béci’s parents’ house and up to the boy’s bedroom on the top floor, a room that hadn’t been decorated in at least ten years. The next morning Béci’s mother had insisted on cooking breakfast and Anna couldn’t bring herself to decline. It was embarrassing. It felt like being fifteen again.