It was half past one; the night was at its darkest. Assistant Chief of Police, Superintendent Olavi Sakarias Tanttu was awake and drinking whisky.
His home lay silent around him; the bedroom was far enough away that he couldn’t hear the sound of his wife’s breathing. All he could hear was the humming of the fridge and the tick-tock of the clock on the wall. Even the cat had stopped purring. He lay slumped in his arms, a warm ball of fur, dreaming cat-dreams, his mouth twitching like it did when he clawed at the sparrows that had fluttered up into the bushes and sat there mocking him.
Tanttu didn’t really know what to think. There was nothing left to think about; he’d already thought about everything, many times over, and the things he’d thought about had formed around him like a dark mass through which it was pointless trying to escape. He knew what it meant. Night stretched out in front of him, depression, and he’d learned years ago to accept that it happened once or twice a year. Calling it Night was one of his ways of fighting it: night always eventually ceded to morning.
He shook his glass so that the ice cubes clinked, took a large swig and tried to enjoy the warmth the whisky gave him. But he couldn’t. He wanted to understand what it was that triggered his depression. It always seemed to appear in the most illogical situations, and almost without exception at times when he had reason to be happy – like now. After almost three months of hard work he’d managed to complete the second draft of his proposal for an amendment to criminal law, and he knew it was good. He’d found a number of inconsistencies in the first draft that had been overlooked, and he’d heard on the grapevine that his comments were already making an impact. He’d had success in another matter too: both the commander and Hongisto had demanded the transfer of another fifty officers to the Public Order Division, but he had managed to talk them down to twenty and it hadn’t been easy. He’d had to go through the statistics for the last three years with a fine-toothed comb and relate the results to the goals set by external officers.
Tanttu took another swig and groaned. Was that it? Facing continual criticism despite all his achievements – and without due cause? He slowly savoured his drink and couldn’t really believe it was true. He’d become hardened to this sort of thing years ago.
He laid his hand lightly on Cat’s back. A few decades before, he’d had a spaniel called Dog. Cat was probably part of the reason that Night was on its way again. It was his neighbours. And even though he was used to handling the knocks that came with his job, attacks on his private life affected him deeply. He knew very well why. His position required him to be constantly on his guard, to live as an example to others, and yet it was precisely because of that position that some people went out of their way to find reasons to criticise him.
From one year to the next Cat seemed as good a reason as any. A letter lay on his desk, signed ‘Local Residents’, claiming that Cat was a beast that terrorised the neighbourhood, stripped trees of their bark and brought children within an inch of their lives. Tanttu cleared his throat. Reasonable complaints were one thing, but this was nothing but malice. Cat was a thirteen-year-old, six-kilo castrated male and was so lazy that he only ventured further than their garden to creep under next-door’s woodshed, and even then he slept most of the time.
This last letter had ended by saying that the matter would be made public if something wasn’t done about it, and his wife had taken the threat so seriously that she’d told him to have Cat put down. He hadn’t agreed to it – and now she was giving him the silent treatment.
Tanttu emptied his glass and realised that it was true: alcohol only serves to heighten the mood of the moment. The night ahead now looked even bleaker than before. He sighed heavily, held Cat tighter, stood up and laid the half-asleep animal in the corner of the sofa. Then he picked up his glass and pattered through to the kitchen in his slippers. What bothered him most about this depression was that it always made him more irritable – meaner, his wife would say; nastier, his daughter would say. He knew it himself, and he knew why it happened. It was because even though depression was invisible and hard to keep in check he still tried to control it, and then all his efforts focused on something else, something real.
He put his glass in the kitchen sink and turned off the lights. Back in the living room he opened a drawer in the bureau and pulled out a small black box ready for the morning. In the box was an Alcometer, a breathalyser. He breathed into it every morning before setting off.
He hated drink-drivers even when it was Day.