I woke up screaming, disoriented, and for a while I couldn’t figure out who the other person sharing my bed was. It was only when I switched the night lamp on that I could make out Anita’s flaxen hair and her small hands clutching the pillow. The air in the room was cold and damp. Shivering, I picked up a cardigan, threw it over my shoulders and felt my way into the kitchen. I could never go back to sleep after that dream. Awake, I didn’t believe for a minute that Steve could have had anything to do with the dead girl. Asleep, I wasn’t so sure. And I wasn’t taking any chances.
Instead, I wrapped the cardigan tighter around me, gulped down the remainder of the cold coffee from Anita’s cup and settled on the living-room sofa with the file. Young and radiant, Nellie gazed at me from the photograph supplied by Klara Nylund.
And once again I thought of the Kalevala, that most Finnish of all poems:
And the waves are white with fervour,
To and fro they toss the maiden,
Storm-encircled, hapless maiden,
With her sport the rolling billows,
With her play the storm-wind forces…
6
Chief Inspector Mustonen
Even with a lifetime of training behind me, the coldness of the water took my breath away. I dived quickly, emerged quicker still. Didn’t stay my usual five minutes. Maybe it was because of all I’d had to drink the previous night. I wondered if I could use it as an excuse to put an end to my drinking sessions with Jokela. Probably not. My boss would just tell me to stop exercising.
Sofia was waiting next to the hole in the ice with the towel, like she always did. Smiling. The worst part was over, her morning sickness a distant memory. My wife’s belly was round and she laughed a lot. She was certain this second baby would be a boy as well. She wanted to call him Janus, like the father-in-law she’d never met, but I had rejected it absolutely. Finally, Sofia seemed to have settled on Jonas.
“Thank you, darling.” I blew her a kiss and she stepped back from the edge of the water, throwing me the towel. I wrapped it around my waist. At this early hour, we were alone on the shore; I didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing me.
“Will you train Arne too, when he’s old enough?” Sofia made a show of shuddering. “Ice-water dips so all the Mustonen men stay fit and healthy and handsome?”
“Of course I will! My father always said what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I swept my wife off her feet and ran up the slope with her. “Do you think I could manage this without the ice dips?” I panted.
She was laughing, protesting, but as we drew nearer to the house I stopped paying attention. Inside, the phone was ringing. Not many people had our number. It could be Sofia’s father; it could be Jokela. If my boss was calling me at home, it meant there was a new case. Not a small one, either, or he wouldn’t have bothered. No, it must be something big.
7
Hella
My father always said Helsinki was a city of lost souls. A place forever caught between East and West, the onion-shaped domes and the neoclassical facades. A paler copy of St Petersburg, now revolutionary Leningrad. A city whose golden age had been before the First World War. A city scarred by shrapnel and painted in pastel colours. A city of broken dreams, none of these more broken than those of the girl who had written the pathetic little letter I was reading.
Dear Mother,
I hope you are in good health and that the weather is not too cold. Here in Helsinki, the winter is mild, though it still snows a lot. It’s a good thing I spend my days in the office. In your last letter, you asked me about the other girls, if they were nice. They are, for the most part, but our supervisor says we talk too much.
“So this was Nellie’s white lie?” I said, folding away the letter Klara Nylund had provided with the file. “An office job?” The effects of my bad night were kicking in and I needed coffee badly, but Maria, Nellie’s best friend and our only witness, hadn’t offered me any. I had woken her, I think. Unable to sleep, I’d showed up at the address Klara Nylund had given me – a run-down building in Punavuori – at eight in the morning, and then had spent the next ten minutes with my finger pressed on the doorbell.
Maria shrugged, studying her nails. Her face was too white, as if she’d never seen the light of day. “A stupid girl daydreaming,” she said. “Nellie couldn’t very well tell her mother the truth, could she? So she said she worked at the radio station, as a secretary. Not that it fooled anyone, if you want my opinion, though it wasn’t in their interest to say otherwise. She was her family’s only source of revenue. The fact that she was unhappy – that wasn’t their business. They didn’t want to know.”
The tiny apartment was overheated and cramped, with clothes all over the floor, but it offered a nice view of the sea. I strolled towards the window. “All right,” I said. “So Nellie, who was supporting her widowed mother and four-year-old son, lied to her family and told them she held an office job. Then one day she tells Klara Nylund she’s going solo, and several days later she turns up dead. Is it reasonable to think she might have stopped working for Klara Nylund because she’d met someone?”
“I don’t know,” Maria said. She pulled a strand of hair out of her ponytail and started twisting it around her finger. “Are you really a former policewoman? Klara told me you were a friend of the inspectors in the homicide squad.”
“I used to work with Inspectors Jokela and Mustonen, but now I’m on my own.”
“Why? Did you quarrel with them?”
“Not at all.” I hoped I was convincing enough. “My relationship with the police is great – they recommended me.”
“Yes,” Maria said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
This interview was not going the way I had expected. “Maria,” I said. “I don’t mean to frighten you, but it’s in your best interest to tell me if you know anything at all about the circumstances surrounding Nellie’s disappearance.”
The girl looked away. She knew something, but she wasn’t going to tell me. She was too scared.
“Do you know what I think?” I said.
Maria looked up at me.
“I think your friend met someone she was serious about. At the time of her death, Nellie was three months pregnant, did you know that?”
The girl didn’t answer.
“There are ways to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, and I would expect that someone in your profession would know all about them. So the question is: why didn’t she? Did she think she had a future with the baby’s father?”
“If Nellie believed she could don a frilly apron and pretend the past never happened, she was stupid. For women like us, getting married is about the worst thing that can happen: losing our independence and being prevented from using the only asset we’ve got? No thank you.” Maria attempted a laugh. “Nellie knew what I thought about it. She wouldn’t have confided in me. Besides, we weren’t even that close.”
“She came to you the day she disappeared, because her curling iron broke and she needed to borrow yours.”