ANNA WOKE to a distant sound. It was pitch dark. The bed was swaying. It took a moment for her heavy head to realise that the sound was coming from her work phone. It was playing an annoying melody somewhere far away.
Anna dragged herself into the hallway. Her leather jacket was lying in a heap on the floor, and the sound of the ringtone in her pocket was growing louder. She pulled out her phone and stared with bleary eyes at the screaming, flashing, trembling screen. It was Esko.
It was 5.30 in the morning. I’m still completely drunk, she thought, even the hall seems to be swaying. Her head was throbbing. She pressed the reject button and put the phone on silent. It was her day off, the first day off she’d had during the week, the day when she was supposed to clean the house and go shopping.
Shit.
‘Anna, vrati se.’
‘Da, da.’
‘Ko je bio?’
‘It was from work. Don’t talk Serbian to me, I can’t speak it any more.’
Zoran burst into laughter.
‘There’s plenty of work for you here,’ he replied in Serbian and lifted the duvet.
Anna eventually got up after one o’clock. Zoran had kept her awake for a while, after which they had both fallen asleep again. Three cups of coffee, two ibuprofens and Zoran’s bacon omelette weren’t enough to make her nausea go away. Anna’s temples ached and she felt sick. She looked at the screen on her work phone and saw that Esko had tried to call her a further three times. Sari, Rauno and Virkkunen had all called her too. Twelve missed calls in total. Virkkunen had sent her an SMS: Come in ASAP, it commanded her.
‘I have to go to work,’ Anna told Zoran as he stepped out of the shower dripping with water and hugged her as she started to get dressed.
‘Weren’t you supposed to have the day off?’
‘Something serious has happened. Everyone’s been trying to call me.’
‘Šteta.’
‘Šta ćeš.’
Anna had to take the bus into town. She didn’t dare take the car, what with her throbbing headache and woozy condition; cycling was also out of the question for the same reason. Zoran wanted to stay in bed with her; he was almost purring around her, trying to stop her getting dressed. Anna wondered what Zoran’s wife Nataša would think when her husband finally returned from his night out the day after.
When she arrived at the station, Anna could find neither Esko nor any of the other members of the team. She remembered that her phone was still on silent. She had missed another three calls, and the screen was flashing again.
‘Jesus, where the hell have you been?’ Esko bellowed down the phone so loudly that she had to pull her mobile away further from her ear.
‘I’m in my office.’
She was, in fact, in the toilet. Her stomach had started to churn and her headache had taken a turn for the worse.
‘Then get your exotic arse down here. We’ve got another John Doe.’
‘Where are you?’
‘On the running track near Häyrysenniemi, near the village of Asemakylä. You’ll never guess how he was killed.’
Anna looked in the mirror. She hadn’t had time to blow-dry her hair after the shower, and now it was tangled and messy. Large bags hung beneath her reddened eyes. Her stomach was churning and beads of sweat glinted on her upper lip. She felt dizzy.
Why today, of all days, she thought.
‘Shot? With a rifle?’
‘Dead right. So get a move on. We’ve been here all morning and Forensics are just finishing up. Virkkunen’s furious.’
‘There’s just one problem.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’m not fit to drive.’
After managing to say this, Anna vomited. The phone fell from her hand, pieces of omelette spilled into the toilet bowl, flushed down with coffee and other stomach fluids, in a stream of yellow-brown porridge.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ came a voice from the floor beside the toilet.
Anna asked a patrol car at the station to drive her to the scene of the murder.
It was a bright day. The light seemed to ram the pain further into her skull. She should have brought her sunglasses.
She tried to relax as she sat in the back seat of the patrol car. She closed her eyes and focused on the pain pulsing through her temples and tried to wish it away; she’d read about this method in a women’s magazine. It wasn’t working. Her head continued to thump as the car turned on to a remote dirt track.
This is déjà vu, thought Anna as birch trees, thicket and every now and then a resilient juniper bush flashed past the window. It was as though she was revisiting the scene of Riikka’s murder.
‘Are we near the sea?’ she asked the boys in uniform in the front seat.
‘Yes. This track leads right the way down to the shore, but the running track where the body was found is about half a kilometre before the shore.’
‘Quite a coincidence,’ she thought out loud. Asemakylä was twenty or so kilometres north of the city, while Saloinen was located the same distance to the south.
Anna was hopelessly late. The forensics officer Linnea Markkula was bent over the body finishing up her work while the forensics team was scouring the surrounding area like a swarm of ants. Esko was standing to one side puffing on a cigarette.
‘Look at the sight of you…’ he scoffed as Anna appeared on the scene. His voice betrayed a note of satisfaction, of smugness and disgust.
‘If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut about other people’s appearance. So, what have I missed?’
‘A patrol car came out here at about five this morning after the guy’s wife called. She was hysterical, first reported him missing last night.’
Esko pointed to the figure lying on the track. ‘The victim is one Ville Pollari. Seems he’s been lying there since about the time of the wife’s first call.’
‘Why does all this seem so familiar?’ said Anna and felt a wave of nausea in her stomach.
‘Pretty much. Except this time the head’s still intact. Killer aimed for the chest, the heart. And this guy was shot at the start of his run. Riikka had almost finished hers.’
‘Look at these woods. This is just like at Selkämaa.’
‘Yep. The rest of us have been here for hours, so we’ve noted the similarities.’
‘And I’ll bet this shoreline is another hunting spot,’ she replied, paying no attention to Esko’s sarcasm.
‘It is.’
Rauno approached them, clearly anxious.
‘Guess what they found in this guy’s pocket?’ he said and nodded at the figure of a man lying on the running track, his chest ripped open.
‘Well?’
‘A pendant on a leather strap.’
A shiver ran down Anna’s spine and she felt the hairs on the backs of her hands stand up.
‘What kind of pendant?’
‘One with the image of a man in a feathered cap. Exactly the same as the one we found in Riikka’s pocket.’
Anna crouched beneath the yellow tapes and stepped on to the running track. She took a deep breath as she approached the man lying dead on the ground. He was relatively young, not yet thirty, and was wearing a blue tracksuit. He was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched; he looked like a stickman against the golden yellow covering of sawdust. In the man’s chest, right around the heart, was a large, bloody hole. His strong, masculine chin was covered in blood spatter.
Linnea was packing up her equipment and stood up with a groan.
‘Judging by the body temp and degree of rigor, I’d say between seven and nine yesterday evening,’ she said, stretching her limbs. ‘Christ, your muscles get so stiff at this age.’
Anna looked at the dead man and felt the nausea in her stomach increasing. She had to turn away. She couldn’t deal with this. Not now. Not today.
‘I’ll let you know before I do the autopsy. You can come and document it. This case is clearly linked to Riikka’s death. Similar surroundings, similar victim profile, similar MO, and the boys from ballistics said the rounds from the rifle will probably be a match too. Almost certainly the same killer. Pretty shocking,’ Linnea nattered on, but Anna couldn’t concentrate. She felt faint.
Anna set off anti-clockwise along the track without saying a word to Linnea. She had to get away; she’d seen too much. The woods seemed to be swaying around her. How had she managed to drink herself into this state? She tried to remember what had happened the previous night and tried to count how many drinks she’d had. At home she’d had only one beer, because she hadn’t wanted to tempt Ákos unnecessarily. Then she had gone to the bar where Akim, Zoran and a Bosnian guy Anna had never met were waiting for her. There she’d downed at least another four pints. Full pints. At midnight they’d moved on to a nightclub on Hämeentie, which was pretty full for a Thursday evening. Anna stopped counting at the point when Akim had brought ten whiskies to the table. Pičku mater, she thought, and she would have laughed if she hadn’t felt so horrendous. The situation had got fairly out of hand, but at least Anna’s Serbian had started to come back to her. Her old friends were genuinely excited about her return. And so was Anna – last night, at least. Now she wasn’t so sure. She was probably still over the limit. Even the fresh air didn’t seem to be making her feel any better. Quite the opposite; it was making matters worse.
Then there was Nataša.
Why the hell hadn’t Zoran brought his wife along with him? Why was it that Serb men never went anywhere with their wives?
Zoran.
Just when Anna thought she’d finally got over him.
The running track shimmered in front of her like a river. The clear light of autumn made it shine in a myriad shades of yellow. The air betrayed a hint of the winter chill. Anna listened to the fluttering of the birds in the boughs above, chirps here and there, warning calls. The summer chattering had come to an end. The swallows were leaving. She had seen them perching in flocks on the electricity cables.
On any other day she would have enjoyed the beauty of watching nature prepare for the winter. Now a young man lay dead in front of her, her head was thumping and woozy, the inside of her mouth tasted of cat’s piss and her legs could barely carry her. She forced herself to do something. First she walked slowly round the length of the track; it was only a few kilometres long, winding but not too hilly. Her heart was racing as if she’d just run a marathon. After this she began investigating the scrubland around the track. She zigzagged in and out of the trees along the edge of the track without knowing what she was looking for.
At the start of the track, the woods were a tangle of thicket bushes that soon gave way to birch trees covered in lichen. The lingonberries were a deep shade of red. Anna knelt down to pluck one. It was bitter, still needed a few frosty nights to bring out the full flavour. I’ll have to come out and pick some, she thought, and picked up a sweet wrapper lying among the berries. It’s terrible that people litter the woods. When she raised her eyes, she saw a dark figure about a hundred metres away behind the thicket.
It was Esko. He had hidden himself in the bushes like a hare. Anna pressed herself tightly against the nearest birch tree and watched him pull a hipflask out of his jacket pocket, its silver edges glinting in the sunlight. Esko took a long swig, and again Anna felt a wave of nausea rising from her stomach as she tasted the imaginary kick of alcohol in her mouth. Thankfully she didn’t vomit this time. She felt better as soon as Esko put the hipflask back in his jacket. Then he fumbled in his trouser pocket and popped something in his mouth. Chewing gum or a mint, she thought, something to mask the smell. What a drunk – boozing at work!
‘Esko!’ she shouted.
He gave a start and turned round, instinctively touching his jacket pocket as if to make sure the flask was back where it should be and not still in his hand.
‘Find anything?’ he shouted back, lit a cigarette and began walking towards her.
‘A sweet wrapper. Should I give it to Forensics?’
‘Why not? You never know.’
‘What about you? What are you looking for?’ she asked.
‘Nothing in particular. Thought I’d come out here for a piss. Wanna watch?’
‘I’m going home and back to sleep.’
‘Of course. Some dago lover boy there waiting for you, is there?’
Anna pretended not to hear.
‘I wasn’t really needed here at all. And I don’t feel very well either.’
‘I heard – and I can see for myself.’
‘At least I sort myself out with ibuprofen,’ she said and looked at him fixedly. Esko blew smoke in her face.