‘There you go,’ said Harjunpää, his voice strangely taut, and laid the papers on the desk in front of Tanttu. He looked only at Tanttu and tried to pretend there weren’t other people in the room; Kontio was sitting to one side with his legs crossed and a sour expression on his face, and Järvi was standing by the window with his back to them, looking outside.
Harjunpää’s statement was two pages long. He had tried to stick to short, laconic sentences: ‘I pointed out that the body was about to sink beneath the surface. For this reason I could see no option but to fetch it myself. Because I was alone, I took off my clothes except for my underpants…’ He had attached a copy of the original report, which gave a good all-round picture of events, and a copy of Koponen’s post-mortem report, which he’d written up in record time. There was an element of mischief to it all, but Harjunpää hoped that the turgid, official text of an objective second party would make Tanttu understand that the matter was being taken out of all proportion.
But Tanttu didn’t touch the papers; he didn’t even glance at them. He looked right at Harjunpää, and his eyes were decidedly hard and abrupt.
‘That’s not why I summoned you.’
‘OK…’
‘This is a different matter, the repercussions of which are far more serious.’
‘And yet it’s always the same officer, isn’t it?’ said Järvi without turning around. ‘I wonder what that tells us.’
Harjunpää quickly wet his lips. Tanttu hadn’t even asked him to take a seat.
‘Last Tuesday night you were on patrol in unit 5-8-3.’
‘Yes…?’
‘And what happened?’
Harjunpää didn’t understand. He remembered the moped-man and visiting the flat on Messeniuksenkatu, but that had all happened the following night. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Control gave you an assignment.’
‘That’s right,’ he remembered. ‘It was around one a.m. Control called…’
‘It was at 00.49,’ Tanttu corrected him as though this was of great significance. He was holding a piece of paper from which he read the time that the call had gone out. Harjunpää shifted his feet awkwardly.
‘And what was that assignment?’
‘The alarm had gone off at the National Investment Bank on Museokatu. We were relatively close to the scene and…’
‘That would be Museokatu 18.’
‘Yes… but it was a false alarm. There was a…’
‘How do you know it was a false alarm?’
‘The alarm attached to the main vault in the basement had gone off. Nobody had broken in: the windows were all intact and there were no signs of forced entry on the doors. Additionally, a man who worked at the bank turned up and he…’
‘Mr Kauppila.’
‘Yes,’ Harjunpää spluttered, and now he really started to worry, though he couldn’t understand why. ‘We entered the building with him and everything was as it should be. He even showed us the door to the vault and the alarm itself. He told us that the alarm had gone off several times in the past because of a problem with the wiring. These alarms are so sensitive that they can be set off by a lorry going past…’
‘I don’t need a lesson on the workings of alarm systems. I’m quite aware of how they work. What action did you take?’
Harjunpää looked past Järvi and out of the window. What actions had he taken?
‘We quickly checked the interior of the bank, just to be on the safe side, and reported back to Control that everything had been taken care of.’
‘And after that?’
‘Regarding what?’
‘To my understanding we’re not talking about a bicycle theft here.’
‘I didn’t do anything else.’
‘But you should have,’ Järvi almost yelled, and now he turned around, and in his hand he was holding a piece of paper folded in two.
‘This is an order, signed by me, requiring officers to report all – I repeat, all – incidents involving a bank alarm going off at night to my team.’
‘I… What year is that from?’
‘Don’t be smart! That won’t help us now. The fact of the matter is that you have disobeyed a direct order from your superior. In writing.’
‘It wasn’t a false alarm,’ said Tanttu. ‘It was set off on purpose. The alarm in question was swapped for another one that didn’t work. And as a result, this weekend these same people carried out their plan: they cut through the vault door with a blowtorch.’
‘This was a highly skilled, professional job.’
‘The vaults happened to be holding an exceptionally large amount of money. Initial estimates put the sum at just under three million marks. The vault also contained the bank’s reserves of foreign currency; we still don’t know how much that amounted to. On top of that, safety deposit boxes belonging to private clients were all emptied. At this stage we can only imagine what they might have contained: cash, jewellery, gold ingots…’
Harjunpää stared at the floor and forced himself to take deep, calm breaths. When he thought back, he knew they couldn’t have done any more than they did. Neither could anybody else.
‘To my mind, there’s nothing I can do about this,’ he said finally, as it seemed they were waiting for him to comment on his actions. ‘Nothing whatsoever.’
‘But this incident could have been prevented if you had taken care to notify the relevant people,’ said Tanttu. Arguing the point clearly annoyed him; he stood up and leaned his hands against the desk. ‘If you had acted in a manner befitting your training and your experience, this might never have happened. Our officers might at least have valuable information to help them with their investigation.’
‘So there’s nothing to go on?’
‘That’s right,’ Kontio growled. ‘They didn’t leave a calling card.’
Again Harjunpää looked down at the floor. It all began to make sense: Kontio’s officers were in difficulty, or at the very least they were at a loss, and that was perfectly understandable because the investigation was in its early stages, but it still irritated Kontio profoundly. Harjunpää recalled how Kontio had taken on the Finnair deposit-box job as his own personal mission. What’s more, this might well be the last big case in Kontio’s long career, and naturally he wanted it brought to a swift conclusion.
As for Järvi, his responsibilities included making sure professional criminals were under constant surveillance, keeping the investigation team up to speed with what they might expect to uncover, and after the fact to collect reliable intelligence on what had happened. But this time it hadn’t worked. In addition, while the bank job was underway, Järvi was himself out on patrol with an exceptionally large number of officers, and rumours the next morning had it that absolutely nothing had come of Operation Spray. And the icing on the cake was that over the weekend at least a hundred gravestones had been overturned and smashed at the cemetery in Hietaniemi and the police had no information regarding the perpetrators. Indeed, one of the tabloids had led with the mocking headline: POLICE WATCH TURNIP PATCH – FENCE STOLEN!
And what was now going on was a procedure typical in the force: looking for a suitable scapegoat. There was always someone to pin the blame on, and they usually came from the lower ranks of the force. Harjunpää also understood perfectly well that there was probably nothing personal in this; he had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘If I might say something…’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘It seems rather senseless to me to…’
‘Are you calling your superior senseless?’ snapped Järvi. ‘Are you calling the chief of police senseless? In front of two board members?’
‘No… But as far as I can see I don’t…’
‘There’s no point making a fuss now that you’ve screwed up,’ Kontio snapped. ‘It would be a damn sight more useful for you to go into the woods for a while, sit down in the grass and think about things.’
‘Dismissed,’ Tanttu scoffed, his eyes hard as ever.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘But when we take all this into consideration,’ he added pointing to Harjunpää’s incident statement. ‘It’s no secret that the Public Order Police have requested twenty officers to be transferred to their team. Fourteen of them have still to be named. That was earlier this morning. Now there are only thirteen.’