Cold Courage (5 page)

Soon Uncle Perttu divorced Auntie Minna, and she said it was because he had been unfaithful. Mari’s sister Marja did become a teacher and now lived in Porvoo.

‘I can understand even a little kid looking at someone and knowing they are using drugs. Or feeling guilty about something,’ Lia said. ‘Maybe you’re just a really good guesser. Like you guessed things about me tonight.’

‘No, Lia. That’s not it.’

The seriousness in Mari’s tone made the unbelievable seem somehow real.

If this woman is a nutcase, she is a very clever nutcase
.

‘Up until then I had thought that everyone could sense this much about everyone else.’

But at the family reunion, Mari had grasped the power of her gift. As an eight year old, she hadn’t known anything about life yet. And yet, she still saw through them all.

Lia shook her head as a surge of mistrust washed over her.

‘The effect on my life has been huge,’ Mari said.

Mari had seen things as a child that other people only realised in adulthood. She had begun to perceive people’s motives and
understand
why adults ended up doing things that harmed even
themselves
. And at the same time, she had become a faster learner.

‘When I said that I graduated from university quickly – actually I sat for exams and completed the book-based sections in two months. I didn’t want to attract attention, so I drew my other requirements out over a longer period.’

‘You were some kind of prodigy? A super genius?’

‘It isn’t intelligence. But this ability – I call it reading people – has brought me luck. And some degree of unhappiness.’

‘What kind of unhappiness?’

Mari sighed: it was hard to explain.

‘But I’m sure you understand why I quit working at an insurance company.’

Mari had been an outstanding personnel manager. Above all she excelled at recruiting new workers and counselling those already on the staff.

‘I could see right off what kind of people they were. Whether they were telling the truth, whether they were a good fit for their jobs. But it wore on me.’

Mari was silent for a moment before continuing.

‘Knowing other people’s troubles is hard. Or seeing that
someone
is making a big mistake or doing something wrong but not being able to intervene. For instance, once a guy requested a transfer to another department, supposedly to get more experience,
but the real reason was that he was selling information to a competitor.’

‘You saw something like that?’ Lia asked in astonishment.

‘And a lot more.’

‘You would be the best police detective in the world.’

Mari smiled.

‘A very tired police detective.’

Lia stood up. Her legs were asleep, and the night was growing old.

‘You may be able to draw conclusions from people’s behaviour better than others, but I still wouldn’t call that knowing what they’re thinking.’

‘OK,’ Mari said. ‘Do you want me to tell you what you really think of me?’

Lia’s mouth remained shut.

This is getting frightening.

‘Let me have it,’ she finally said.

Mari spoke quickly, without a second thought.

‘You like me a lot, more than anyone else you’ve ever just met. But you’re also scared by such a new situation. Most of you believes everything I’m saying, but you won’t accept it. You aren’t used to thinking that anything like this could exist. Within about fifteen minutes you will have pacified the part of you that’s resisting, and then it will be time for us to go home to sleep. You want to see me again. You’re curious about what I haven’t told you yet and about what might happen between us.’

‘Ah,’ Lia said. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to take significantly longer than fifteen minutes for me to believe you.’

‘Good,’ Mari said. ‘A Finnish girl who won’t let herself be talked into things just like that. When you were telling me about yourself, you only told the truth, without embellishment. That’s rare. Although you did leave out a few things.’

Lia blanched.

What does she know? It’s been too long for her to see any of that.

‘You also bent the truth when you said that you never go to bed with colleagues,’ Mari said.

Lia stared at her.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I’m going to wager that you’ve only ever made one exception. Probably the political reporter, Timothy. Being with him was awkward enough that you decided not to do it any more.’

Jesus Christ. She really does see things
.

‘I have to go,’ Lia said. ‘It’s starting to get cold.’

‘OK,’ Mari said and stood up.

Slowly they descended the hill, remaining silent all the way. Lia didn’t know what to say.

After reaching Trafalgar Road, they turned towards the lights of taxis glowing in the darkness.

‘Do you mind if we let this night simmer and then chat again sometime soon?’ Mari asked, offering Lia a calling card. It said simply
Mari Rautee,
with a telephone number below.

No title. Like, for example, Extremely Intelligent Loon.

‘You came to meet me on purpose,’ Lia said.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Why? What do you want from me?’

Mari gave Lia a long look, and for the first time after a night that was quickly turning into morning, she looked tired.

‘I want you to be my friend.’

Mari watches as Lia gets into the taxi.

She waits for the car to begin moving, driving slowly along Trafalgar Road and turning at the first corner.

Mari thinks of Kidderpore Avenue, the street where Lia lives. She has been there. She has watched from a distance as Lia walked down the street, as Lia sat in the small park near her flat, as Lia set out for a jog.

Lia is exactly as she had thought.

Mari turns to look at the driver of the next taxi. South-east Asian, a little past sixty, tired from driving the night shift. Does not raise his eyes from the tabloid he is idly perusing.

Even after all that drinking, the certainty comes automatically.

With her knuckles she gently knocks on the side window of the cab, and the driver turns. Mari climbs in, gives the cabbie her
destination
in Hoxton, and the taxi takes off with a jerk.

The driver does not attempt conversation. Mari glances at him once more, deciding he does not warrant further thought. Harmless.

The address Mari gave is three streets away from her home. She never takes taxis directly to her building, always getting out at least three streets away.

At her destination, Mari pays the fare and watches as the taxi glides away into the darkness and disappears. She scans her surroundings, waiting one minute. Two minutes.

Always at least three blocks early, always a check to ensure that no one dodgy is behind, always a quick transition from street to home.

No one will invade her home or her thoughts.

Lia didn’t ring Mari the next day, although she wanted to.

Nursing her hangover, she took it as easy as humanly possible. She didn’t even go jogging, only walked slowly around the neighbourhood.

On Sunday afternoon, she climbed up the flight of stairs and rang Mr Vong’s doorbell.

Once or twice a month they played cards, sitting facing each other, always in the same seats. The table stood in the centre of the small living room. They spoke little, but smiled a lot.

They had the same style of play, bold but not rash. They took the risks they could afford.

Sometimes as they played, Lia imagined how they must look, such a strange pair. Two foreigners living alone in a quiet corner of a city of millions. From such different cultures, but on these afternoons the background of each was swept away. An older gentleman and a young, well, youngish, woman. Between them the steady, calm flow of the cards.

The next week was busy at work. Thinking about the Holborn Circus murder also took up Lia’s time. The incident had nearly
disappeared
from the major media outlets, but one area of social media would not let it die: the crime enthusiast community.

The postings began immediately after the first news reports, and the killing seemed to provide the posters with material for the most astonishing sorts of musings.

‘Woman without a Face the first victim of a ritual killer?’

‘Does crushing with a steamroller hurt as much as being burned to death?’

The user TheHardTruth had a theory: The Woman without a Face was part of the 9/11 plot.

Even referring to the victim by that idiotic name was too much for Lia. She only scanned the posts to see whether anything new had come out about the case.

Every now and then the media covered other killings, none of which aroused the same interest in Lia.

The Holborn Circus murder made the news again on 10th May when a police press release revealed three new details. Although the
police were still unable to identify the dead woman, they had determined that she was most likely of Latvian extraction and in her forties. Forensic investigators had also found indications of a
gunshot
wound inflicted prior to the woman being crushed.

Lia read the brief report repeatedly. The new information made the incident more concrete once again. According to the press release, the additional details were the result of exhaustive analysis of the corpse.

How can they tell her nationality from her body? And why don’t they give more specifics?

The next day the printed papers didn’t run the story, but for Lia it remained important. If the Latvian woman was shot, she could have been dead or unconscious when her killer ran her over. That was scant comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

Latvia – Lia knew so little about Latvia. Actually nothing. Years ago she had visited the capital, Riga, when it became a popular tourist destination following the Soviet collapse.

Riga had been beautiful. Lia had admired the handsome old architecture and taken the lift to the viewing level of the main church tower. She had eaten exceptional
pelmeni
at a fast food place with an amusing name: XL Pelmeni.

Later Riga had become one of the places Brits mobbed in search of inexpensive entertainment. English newspapers published reports describing the raucous stag jaunts of British men and the
indignation
their behaviour aroused in the local populace.

Lia realised she knew embarrassingly little about a country so close to her homeland and which had experienced such extreme historical upheavals. So at night she began searching for
information
about Latvia. She visited the library and borrowed two
contemporary
histories of the Baltic States and sat surfing the internet for hours.

Hardly anyone but the Latvians themselves knew the history of their tiny country, which was simply too meandering for anyone else to follow – at one time or another the Swedes, Poles and Germans had all conquered the area, along with the Soviets of course.

The economy was weak. This was partially a result of the Soviet period: Latvia manufactured nearly all of the carriages for the
Soviet rail system and half of the telephones, and this specialization continued to inhibit economic growth to this day. Lia imagined the factories that had churned out railway carriages for the machinery of socialism. That job must have felt as though it would never end.

When she found a blog discussing the most popular books in Latvian libraries, she was delighted. The most popular novel was Lolita Puncule’s
Daugavas vizbules sirds
, ‘The Heart of a Daugava Violet’. Apparently it featured ill-fated love, Soviet Latvia and the war in Afghanistan. Number one in non-fiction was a book written by the poet Imants Ziedonis with his son Rimants. It told of trees, the forests of Latvia.

The names didn’t mean anything to Lia, but that didn’t matter. What a fascinating country. People constantly borrowed a
non-fiction
book about trees.

Perhaps none of this had anything to do with the Latvian woman discovered in the boot of a Volvo S40 on Holborn Circus. But now Lia felt that she could place the woman in some context, that she understood something about her.

Both of them had come to England from the north-eastern corner of Europe, from a place little known in the wider world. Her life had probably been hard, since it ended so brutally.

For some reason this Latvian woman had become important to Lia.

One morning, sitting at her window eating a yogurt, Lia looked out at the dull grey features of St Luke visible in the distance and waved her spoon at him.

I’m so well off that I even have time to think about a perfect stranger who was murdered.

My life has room for all sorts of things.

That day she called Mari.

‘Don’t think for a second that I believe what you were saying. I just want to see how long this bluff of yours will hold out,’ Lia said when she and Mari met at the Queen’s Head & Artichoke.

To start with, Lia asked about the thing that had been bothering her the most.

‘How did you know I would be at the White Swan celebrating my birthday with my workmates?’

‘I heard about it,’ Mari replied.

‘From whom?’

‘Martyn Taylor.’

‘Huh?’

Martyn Taylor was Lia’s immediate supervisor, the AD – art director – at
Level
.

‘I know him,’ Mari said. ‘Not very well, though. We’ve met a few times at parties and exhibition openings. When he heard I was from Finland, he mentioned you. Since then we’ve talked about you every time we run into each other.’

‘Did you know the answers to those questions in the pub because you’d been prying into my affairs?’

‘Tempting theory. That Martyn Taylor might have told me
everything
I knew,’ Mari said and smiled. ‘But how would Martyn have known to tell me exactly the things your colleagues asked about?’

That’s true. Not a terribly plausible idea.

Martyn had asked Mari about Finland.

‘He said he wanted to understand your background. He really respects you,’ Mari said.

‘He wanted to hear about Finland in order to understand me?’

‘That’s what he said. Apparently there’s something special about you.’

‘That’s us Finnish women.’

‘Indeed. Us Finnish women.’

Lia told Mari her theory that people from small countries adapted to large countries better than people from large countries to small because people from small countries did not expect the world to work the same everywhere as it did at home.

‘That does sound logical,’ Mari said. ‘And then there are
countries
where anyone would have a hard time adjusting. Like Finland.’

Lia laughed.

Neither of them said so aloud, but they were clearly sounding each other out. Lia had to have time to see whether she could take Mari’s claims about her gift seriously.

She let Mari choose where they met, and each place was chic: Foxcroft & Ginger, Le Mercury, an art museum bar.

‘Ah, my medium,’ Lia might say in greeting. ‘Whose mind have you read today?’

The world held legions of people who claimed clairvoyant powers. Why could they not do the same things Mari said she could? Lia enquired.

‘I don’t know why I can do it and other people can’t,’ Mari said calmly. ‘And this doesn’t have anything to do with the
supernatural
.’

Mari encouraged Lia to compare her gift to those of an artist. Everyone can draw something, and anyone can learn to do it better, but some people are especially gifted and have what it takes to become professionals.

Lia encouraged Mari to read her better: did she need such simple metaphors?

Had Mari ever been examined by a psychologist? she asked.

‘No. Of course I’ve taken hundreds of tests on my own. Just because of my education. But I’ve never felt any need to let anyone else test me.’

‘But if you have such a unique skill, why wouldn’t you want it tested? Just for the sake of science?’

‘I don’t want anyone to start thinking I’m strange; I don’t want to attract attention. There isn’t anything mysterious about any of this.’

Her brain calculated probabilities about people so quickly that she felt as if she knew what was going on inside their heads. The only unusual part was the amount and intensity of the analysis.

‘I’ve never found a name for it,’ she said. ‘I’ve chatted with
cognitive
scientists about it. They suggested terms like social intelligence and apperceptive observation, neither of which is exactly right.’

Some questions Mari refused to answer. She would not tell Lia where she lived, just the area: Hoxton. And she never said anything about her work.

‘I have different things going on,’ was all she would ever say.

‘You left the insurance company three years ago. Have you just been doing “different things” since then? How do you live on that?’ Lia asked.

‘I get by,’ Mari said, communicating the futility of any further questioning.

But Mari always described her gift openly and as a simple matter of fact.

‘I don’t think anything special when I do it. There isn’t any mental state I have to enter. It’s like… eating a sandwich.’

Of course it helped knowing something about the person’s
background
, Mari added. If she wanted to know someone’s thoughts in more detail, she looked into that person’s actions.

Gradually Lia’s resistance crumbled. She heard so many realistic details that believing Mari had just fabricated them became too difficult.

‘Last spring when I went home for a visit, I knew my brother had a secret. I saw it immediately,’ Mari said.

Secretly her brother had married a woman and adopted her children. This twenty-six-year-old man was now a father of three. He had dated a Chilean woman much older than himself for a year and a half and then thrown a rollicking wedding party in Valparaiso attended by the woman’s entire extended family without breathing a word to his own at home in Finland.

‘And I had to keep quiet about it the whole time I was there! I couldn’t let on that I knew, because he had to have the chance to announce the news himself.’

‘Do you mean your family doesn’t know about your gift?’

‘No, they don’t. They think I’m a little peculiar, but just because I live abroad. I’ve only told a few people about this.’

So why me?
Lia thought, but didn’t ask out loud.

Mari didn’t say much about her relatives at home. Lia, on the other hand, confided openly about her own. She had no siblings, only her parents, and they corresponded only infrequently.

For years now, they had been important to her in her thoughts, but not from day to day. She only missed them for fleeting moments. In their high-rise flat in Espoo, her parents were waiting for
retirement
. Lia felt as though she were not good enough for them. They were always expecting something from her: a return to Finland, marriage, family.

No one ever said this out loud, or much else of consequence. The feeling was that they should all live with the noise turned down to a sensible volume to avoid any chance of conflict.

Lia didn’t tell Mari about the thing she had such a difficult time forgiving her parents for. Before leaving Finland, Lia had some difficulties with a young man. In the end it turned ugly, but her parents never understood.

Lia felt as though Mari might understand the situation, with all its sordid details. But she didn’t want to tell anyone about it.

Soon Lia found they were calling each other almost every day and that she looked forward to the times they met. She was having more fun than she had in ages.

To Lia’s irritation, Mari seemed to guess that her mistrust had begun to fade.

‘Everything OK?’ Mari asked, looking at Lia intently.

‘Perfectly,’ Lia said, looking back.

Lia took Mari to rock concerts, which took some small persuading.

‘How old are you, thirty-two?’ Lia asked.

‘Thirty-one.’

‘Too young to live without music,’ Lia said and bought them tickets to a Keane concert.

Keane was one of the first British bands Lia had fallen in love with. Singing along to the words in her downstairs flat, Lia
regularly
subjected Mr Vong to their songs.

Mari was in ecstasy after the concert and, over the summer, they did the rounds of the London clubs. One of the highlights was a show by an American post punk indie band, The Gossip. The front woman was one Beth Ditto, known not only for her big voice and large stature but also for being gay. As she danced in the throng of other
women, Lia realised that people might easily take her and Mari for a couple.

Mari is the best friend I have ever had. This is almost like being infatuated with someone.

Sometimes sitting in cafés they would have fun with Mari’s gift.

‘That one there,’ Lia might say. ‘What do you see about him?’

Mari looked and then started to tell what she saw.

That young man there studied history and had been doing so for quite some time. He was waiting for his girlfriend; he had something to tell her. It wasn’t good news, but he wasn’t breaking things off. Perhaps he had to move to another city or something.

That woman had a problem, related to her health, specifically something to do with her lower abdomen. She was afraid.

Upon looking at one man, Mari began, ‘He’s very focused – some part of his work demands a lot from him, intense
concentration
like Beth Ditto at her concert…’

‘What?’ Lia interrupted. ‘Did you see what Beth Ditto was thinking?’

Mari looked confused.

‘Why would reading a famous person be any different? Whenever I see someone, the perceptions just pop into my head. I can’t do anything about it.’

‘Well, what was she thinking?’

‘When she came on stage, she was in a perfect, nearly fanatical state of concentration, like lots of artists get into. She was thinking of the first words of the songs, because once she got those out everything else would just flow. Then she just went to it.’

‘Wasn’t she thinking anything else? Like, damn, my panties are riding up, or wow, there sure are a lot of good-looking chicks in the audience?’

‘Maybe she was,’ Mari said, exasperated. ‘I’m not a radar,
monitoring
every second. I was singing along and was… part of the audience.’

‘I was just curious,’ Lia said.

‘I admit that I’m usually curious to see what I’ll find in people too,’ Mari said, and smiled.
Soon they developed their own way of talking, their own vocabulary, including the occasional Finnish word that lacked any exact equivalent in English. They spoke English together since both of them had long since begun thinking in English, but at times an idea was simply easier to convey with the addition of a Finnish word.

For example the word
kuuri:
a time during which something is either enjoyed frequently or abstained from completely.
Kuuri
was much more evocative than
diet, binge
or
fast
, all of which,
paradoxically
, apply equally well. They observed a Philip Seymour Hoffman
kuuri
set off by a film they took in at the East End Film Festival. Lia got Mari on a running
kuuri
, but after a few evening jogs, Mari announced she was giving it up.

‘Running is your thing,’ she said.

‘
Kännit
,’ Lia said. ‘Let’s get
kännit
.’

Mari understood. They didn’t just want to get
drunk
, and certainly not
pissed
, which was the unfortunate and uncontrolled inebriation of teenagers. They were adult women and took their
kännit
seriously.

‘And I mean
kännit
in the plural, not just
känni
. That means drinking together, sociably,’ Lia pointed out.

They ordered vodka. Lia’s favourite was Polish Zubrówka, but Mari liked the classic Russian Stolichnaya.

Drunken Mari was less serious, pleasantly chatty, Lia found.

But Mari still didn’t breathe a word about her gift when others were around. Lia understood that she should not either.

They could talk about social issues for hours, debating and even disagreeing, but the way their intellectual worlds blended gave Lia genuine pleasure.

She especially liked Mari’s thoughts about equality.

‘It’s my personal feminism,’ Mari said. ‘I’ve recognised what things in my life make me aware as a feminist.’

This sounded simple, but a surprising number of people – women – had never considered it. Knowing your own problems gave you power to act. At the same time you also saw what you didn’t understand about others’ problems.

‘That individuality isn’t just self-interest though,’ Mari said. ‘Like demanding equality only according to my own needs. You have to have your principles. And a sense that you’re doing things for other women too.’

What Mari didn’t say was what the problems in her own life were.

But the idea helped Lia. She didn’t have to feel guilty over not sharing someone else’s version of feminism. And it helped to refine her own.

Over the summer, Lia realised that her life had become happier in a way she had thought lost to youth. Now and then with Mari she even felt younger, as if she were twenty again.

Mari is the friend I was looking for when I moved to London. Together we’re doing the things I wanted to do then
.

Although they rarely talked about their homeland any more, Lia found herself remembering things about Finland she had forgotten. The silence of an early Saturday evening falling over the city, even one as large as Helsinki. The comforting feeling that no matter whom you spoke to, you knew you were an equal.

She had not thought about those things in years. For the first time she had begun to think of her homeland with warmth.

Finnish girls in the bars of London. A generation bearing the accumulated power of independent women.