WHAT MUST IT FEEL LIKE to have to identify your own daughter’s body?
The question struck Anna as she pulled on her tracksuit in her apartment hallway. It was late. Her body felt tired and stiff. Her thoughts spun around restlessly like small children after a long car journey. The situation was ripe. Her imagination attacked at moments of weakness, drove its rusty nails deep inside her and yanked out painful memories that she had hoped were already forgotten, gone for ever, but that festered at the back of her mind and clung around her shoulders, from morning to night, from one move to the next, from year to year. They never let go.
Anna rubbed her eyes to block the path of the welling tears. Amid the red blotches on her retina, she saw the image of a child raped and mauled by a two-headed eagle. It could have been her. It could have been anyone.
Such attacks had become rarer over the years. It’s just a panic attack, the school nurse had told her when she was in high school and suggested she go to the doctor and get herself some medication. Anna couldn’t stand the idea of pills that would affect her state of mind. Instead, she’d started training for the marathon. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had an attack. Perhaps it had been after she’d ended her year-long relationship, the only long-term, serious relationship she’d had. The guy had been another policeman, nice and sensible, all in all a very decent man, but with one fatal flaw: he’d wanted to get married and have children. And though Anna had been the one to end the relationship, the break-up had taken its toll on her. For a while she was quite beside herself. But that, too, was years ago.
Anna lay on the floor in the hallway and stared at the lamp hanging from the ceiling in the hope that it would blind her and dispel the eagle. She remained there for at least ten minutes and forced herself to calm down. It’s no use, she repeated to herself. No use, no use, no use. There was someone out there prepared to kill his own child, someone just like Payedar Chelkin. Wasn’t there something far more terrible about this than mere death, something impossibly bleaker, blacker? For a moment Anna tried to think what could have happened to the Kurdish girl. Then she sat up awkwardly, and though she felt drained she pulled on her trainers, ran outside and jogged to the start of the running track. Just as she had done yesterday, just as Riikka had done too. One–nil to me, she thought.
After the forensics officers had completed their work, Riikka’s body was taken to the coroner’s office. Juhani and Irmeli Rautio were already there, and Anna had waited with them. The couple identified their daughter immediately, without a moment’s hesitation. They buckled with emotion; now they too would be for ever broken. Juhani Rautio’s sobs were so heart-wrenching that Anna could no longer contain her tears. Irmeli sunk into apathetic silence. With expressionless eyes she looked at her daughter as she lay, headless, on a plastic stretcher in the cold room, caressed the skin along her arms, no words, no tears. Anna wrapped her arm around Irmeli’s shoulder; she wanted to say something comforting but found herself incapable of words. There Riikka’s mother stood, stiff and cold as a statue in her arms, and it all seemed so familiar that Anna began to feel sick.
Anna set off on her usual route, which took her through the yards in front of numerous blocks of flats and headed towards the woods on the outskirts of the suburb. That was her running track, the lonely place where she had taken up running all those years ago while, cans of beer in tow, her peers had trundled from one problem to the next, escaping old ones and running headlong into fresh ones. Her mother had been terribly proud that, despite the ravages of puberty and her own social problems, Anna hadn’t become caught up with drugs and was serious and committed when it came to her sport. Still, all those years ago she’d known that she was no different from anyone else.
People can escape the past in so many ways.
Anna dived into the dark embrace of the trees. It was dusky in the forest, but her eyes soon became accustomed. The white of the running track winding its way ahead glowed dimly.
Suddenly she felt frightened. Her mind was darkened by the thought that someone was watching her through the dusk of the trees, following her run in the crosshairs of a sniper’s hunting rifle. Something snapped in one of the bushes. The forest seemed to be tensing around her, ready to explode at any moment. Then, the sound of approaching steps behind her. Anna slowed a little, tensed her body in preparation for the attack and quickly glanced over her shoulder. The dark figure was already right next to her. A short, stocky woman in a black tracksuit. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod of the head before speeding away along the track.
Bolond! Anna reproached herself. Stupid and superstitious. Now’s not the time to let my imagination run away with me. You’ve been out here running in the November darkness too, as a teenager, with no knowledge of self-defence and you’ve never been afraid of anything, she muttered to herself, sped up almost to the limit of her ability, ran for five minutes at full speed, then slowed down for fifteen minutes. She continued like this for an hour, forcing herself to get through the tough set of intervals, using the torturous regime to shed her fear.
She wondered whether Riikka had tried to do the same. Had she been afraid, sensed something in the moments before her death?
After her shower, she listened to AGF’s song ‘Lonely Warriors’. A strange and fascinating soundscape of machines and human voices washed over the sofa where she lay wrapped in a towel, her wet hair a tangled mess on the cushions, like a solitary soldier in her barrack at night after all her comrades had died around her. She was alone on the front line, she thought, alone in the universe.
She thought back to her time in the army. It had been a time of awakening, of finding direction. Of opening a door, and of closing one, because it was then that she’d finally realised she would stay in Finland. It hadn’t been a conscious decision but something that was inevitable.
She vaguely recalled what Áron had looked like in his khaki uniform as he had left home for the last time.
A lonely warrior.
Best to forget about it altogether.
She switched off the CD player and tried to go through the day’s events – without success. There was too much to focus on. She wouldn’t wish a first day at work like this on her worst enemy.
And just then something flashed inside her.
Fuck you. That’s what she should have said to him, perfectly amiably and without any hesitation, collegially, bloke to bloke. And then: Chief Inspector Virkkunen seems to have been reading too many swivel-eyed nationalist blogs before bed. Then she should have given a faint, nonchalant chuckle, just enough to give the impression that she might be joking, having a laugh, saying something apparently frivolous and insignificant. Though, of course, this was not the case.
That’s how she should have dealt with the day’s events.
But what with all her nervousness that morning it hadn’t occurred to her. Of course it hadn’t. And besides, would she have had the guts? To say such a thing to her boss? On her first day at work? Doubtful.
Anna couldn’t decide which was more infuriating: the fact that an appropriately snide comment always popped into your head too late or that she probably wouldn’t have said it anyway. After agonising over this for a while she fell into a restless sleep on the sofa, her hair still wet.