TH02 - The Priest of Evil (6 page)

His novels formed a series and they had brought him considerable renown both in Finland and abroad.

It was a series about a happy family.

To be absolutely specific, the vehicle was one belonging to the arson unit of the Violent Crimes Squad of Helsinki’s municipal police. Not surprisingly it was known as simply the ‘Fire Engine’, even though this particular one wasn’t red but white, just like all the other police Transporter vans, containing nothing personal that could identify the owners. Only a sharp eye would have noticed it was a police vehicle, from the two flashing blue lights hidden behind the cooling vent.

Officers from other squads were allowed to use the cars as necessary, and this time it was Harjunpää’s turn to borrow it. He approached the car from behind, almost dragging his feet. At this Elisa would certainly
have noted that her husband wasn’t in the best of moods. Harjunpää took a deep breath. Though he could already sense the exhaust fumes drifting in across the Western Highway, he enjoyed the scent of Lauttasaari in the spring. It was a pleasant mix of budding birch trees, lawns slowly awakening and the sea finally released from the grip of ice. The air smelled and tasted of life.

In one hand Harjunpää was carrying a case file and in the other he fumbled with the car keys. As he pressed a button on the key ring the Transporter’s lights flashed and there came a small click as the doors unlocked. He threw the file on to the passenger seat, climbed up into the seat, flicked on the police radio and stuck the key in the ignition. Only then did it hit him: sweat began to drip from his brow and armpits, and his hands trembled so much that his wedding ring began tapping repeatedly against the steering wheel.

‘Good God,’ he sighed heavily. Deep in his stomach he could feel the acceleration through the fall, and the images of all the dozens of balcony suicides he had dealt with flashed before his eyes; all the brain matter and shards of skull he had scraped off the streets throughout the city.

Now that he was no longer outside but shut inside the confined space of the car, he realised that his clothes and hair stank of death, of a decomposing body, and of the nightmare he had just witnessed. The thought of the flies and the larvae filled his mind and soon his back began to itch, then his arms, and soon afterwards his legs too. He hurriedly got out of the car, went round the back, wrenched the sliding door open and jumped into the interview space at the back. The windows were darkened and no one could see inside. He tore off his jacket and shirt and rolled up his trouser legs. There was nothing there – of course.

He remained on the bench, resting on his elbows, and sighed. For a while he sat there motionless. It occurred to him that back at the station there was a sauna, warmed round the clock, and that there was a decent set of spare clothes in his locker. He gave his shirt a thorough shake, put it back on, and ran his fingers through his hair for a final inspection.

‘Anyone from Violent Crimes on the line?’
came the voice of the duty officer over the radio – it sounded like that of Joutsen – and Harjunpää
knew immediately that that meant only one thing: another job. ‘No, there’s no one on the line,’ he muttered to himself.

‘All officers: is there anyone from Violent Crimes on the line?’

Harjunpää slammed the sliding door shut and walked back towards the driver’s seat. Just then his work mobile began to ring. He let it ring three times before picking it up, glanced reluctantly at the screen, then finally relented, pressed the button and raised the phone to his ear.

‘Crime Squad, Harjunpää.’

‘Hi, it’s Pete,’ said Tupala. He was the sergeant major who ran the Violent Crimes office and delegated all the assignments. Tupala never lost his nerve, no matter how awful the matter in hand. He always managed to sound jolly, almost amused.

‘You’re on mornings, right? Free?’

‘I just got back from a pretty nasty job.’

‘All officers, I repeat: is there anyone from Violent Crimes downtown?’

‘Something’s come up.’

‘Where’s Base?’

‘Taking that rape victim from the ferry down to the lab. Both duty sergeants are in Uutela fishing round a lake for a body, and everyone else is at staff training.’

‘The switchboard still needs someone from Violent Crimes. Is there anyone on the line?’

‘What’s the location?’

‘Hakaniemi underground station,’ said Tupala. ‘Someone’s gone and topped themselves. Completely mangled up apparently, jammed in along the undercarriage, so they’re having a hard time getting him out.’

‘I’ll take it. Send forensics down there, and Mononen too.’

‘They’re already on their way. Mononen’s coming in with your previous man, then heading straight off to Uutela.’

‘Thanks. Over.’

Harjunpää shoved the mobile back in his pocket and grabbed the microphone from the dashboard. ‘Copy. This is 198 and Harjunpää. If this is the Hakaniemi job, then I’m on my way.’

‘Excellent. How far are you?’

‘I’m still in Lauttasaari.’

‘OK, this is fairly urgent so get down there as soon as you can. The entire underground service has been stopped and it’s chaos at the station – thousands of people milling about.’

‘Over and out.’

Harjunpää leant over and began winding down the window. The feelings of emptiness and helplessness were long gone, though he wasn’t quite sure how he had managed to dispel them, they had simply vanished. Everyone in Violent Crimes could dispel feelings like that, and those that couldn’t soon disappeared from the force. He picked up the blue flashing light from beside his feet, stuck the black cable dangling from the dashboard into the back of the dome and held it out of the open window. There came a soft thump, a metallic kiss as the strong magnet clamped the flashing light to the roof.

He shifted himself round behind the steering wheel and a map of the city centre began to form in his mind. The most direct route would have taken him through the downtown area, but this would not necessarily have been the quickest. The area around Kansakoulukatu and Simonkatu was always heavily congested. He was about to settle for an alternative route, taking him around the bay at Töölönlahti, then along Helsinginkatu and through the streets of Kallio, when he remembered the tram lines: that would allow him to drive through the traffic and take him straight from the Central Railway Station to Hakaniemi underground. He had to give it shot.

He turned the ignition and the engine roared into life. From the sound it made you could tell it wasn’t your average motor. He switched the
gearbox
to D. The Transporter was an automatic, which made it a lot easier to drive, particularly in an emergency, as it allowed him to concentrate more on the other traffic. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, turned on the sirens and sped off.

A few metres before the junction of Meripuistotie and Lauttasaarentie he reached down and flicked the furthest of four upright switches on the dashboard, and a red light came on. The light on the car’s roof began flashing and regular, electric blue pulses beamed from the cooling vents. When he pressed the switch again the sides of the car let out an excruciating wail –
wee wah wee wah
.

He passed easily through the first junction – the traffic lights were green – then he put his foot down and headed towards Lauttasaari bridge, the sirens’ blaring now long and high-pitched. One part of his mind was going through all the things any motorist should remember: not too fast, speeding only caused accidents. Calm and controlled driving, through narrow openings that always appeared as long as you were patient enough. One thing he had to bear in mind was that, although inside an emergency vehicle the sound of the sirens seems to fill your entire head, it often sounds muffled and muted to other drivers and it is difficult to judge which direction it is coming from.

At the same time another part of him realised that dealing with death on the underground was just as straightforward as dealing with people run over by trains: interview eye-witnesses and breathalyse the driver as a routine check. After that they would have to start moving the train back one segment of track at a time to ensure that all human remains and pieces of clothing stuck to the undercarriage were retrieved. The firemen would help them with that. Then they would have to check through the security videos and identify the body. And that was just for starters.

To his astonishment he passed along Ruoholahdenkatu and Malminrinne without any trouble – perhaps this was because the lights at the front of the car were so effective: they were at just the right height so that other motorists could see them easily in their rear-view mirrors. Only on Kansakoulukatu did he get stuck in traffic. On the left side of the street, next to a row of parked cars, was a lorry unloading its cargo. Harjunpää turned the steering wheel to the right and so did the silver Micra in front of him. Only as the Micra drew level with the back of the lorry did the driver notice the flashing lights in his mirror. He panicked. He hit the brakes – and so did Harjunpää. There was a screech of wheels, and as they came to a halt there was barely ten centimetres between the two cars.

At this point the driver of the Micra became even more flustered and tried to restart the engine, but for some reason it had stalled completely. Then he got out of the car, a young man with headphones and a portable CD player on his belt, and waved his hands helplessly at Harjunpää.

‘Idiot,’ Harjunpää’s lips moved as the sirens continued to blare –
wee wah wee wah!
The lorry driver seemed to understand what was going on and with its back doors still open moved the lorry a few metres forward, leaving enough of a gap for Harjunpää to squeeze through and pass the stalled Micra.

He drove along Simonkatu without any trouble and the lights at the junction of Mannerheimintie were green. At this point Harjunpää managed to manoeuvre the Transporter on to the tram tracks. He put his foot down a little, but realised that he still had to drive very carefully, especially around the tram stops. Pedestrians weren’t always expecting a car to come racing along the tracks, they might think the sirens were coming from somewhere else and absent-mindedly step out in front of him and end up under the car. This had happened once in the past, but that time the vehicle in question had been an ambulance.

The Transporter sped across Long Bridge and, once the tram coming towards him had passed, Harjunpää could see in front of him a number of Emergency Service vehicles and a tide of flashing blue lights. They had gathered at the entrance to the underground station on the pavement along Siltasaarenkatu. There were at least four cars: the fire chief’s, a patrol car, an ambulance and another that looked like it was for the paramedics. There were two police Mondeos and another Transporter parked on the square outside the underground entrance. Harjunpää blinked, more out of satisfaction than anything else, content that the area had been successfully cordoned off.

Harjunpää did a U-turn outside the circular building on the corner. A van from forensics stood parked in front of the building, as there was another underground entrance on that side of the street. He gently drove his Transporter up on to the pavement and switched off the sirens. If not the silence, then at least the fact that he could hear again seemed almost miraculous: the roar of traffic, the urgent clatter of footsteps on the pavement, the screech of the trams as they turned the corner.

Harjunpää picked up his case file, stepped out of the car and opened up the sliding door on the right-hand side. He opened the lowest drawer of the interview cabinet, took out a handful of rubber gloves and stuffed
them into the file – his own supply of gloves had run out back in Lauttasaari. He removed his jacket from the hook and drew it over his head. On the chest was a lion, the police coat of arms; on the back stood the word POLICE in large reflective letters and beneath that, in much smaller print, Crime Squad. He slammed the sliding door shut.

Seagulls squawked in the air and the square was swarming with people – some were even wearing T-shirts – and life went on as if nothing had ever happened. That was exactly how it should be, he thought, the end of a particular world had taken place deep in a tunnel underground. He’d had this same thought before: the death of a person was always the end of a world, of the one world in which that person had been
me
, in the world where they had experienced everything else in the only way they could, the only way they knew how. And yet other worlds were bound to theirs: a lover, children, parents, colleagues. The end of one person’s own world also shook the worlds of all these other people.

The path downwards was not blocked because the first underground level in Hakaniemi station consisted of a small shopping mall full of little boutiques and customer service offices. On the stairs leading down an elderly and, for some reason, very agitated woman came up to Harjunpää. She had long, flapping, silver hair and a beret pulled down almost to her eyes, and she was clenching a pile of papers to her chest. She held out one of these flyers to Harjunpää, but his eyes were cast downwards. There must have been about a hundred or so people milling about and the air was filled with a dull, uncertain and disquieted murmur.

‘Take it!’ said an urgent, demanding voice beside Harjunpää: the woman with the flyers was doddering alongside him. ‘Take it!’

‘No, thank you. They’re waiting for me down there.’

‘Take it! You of all people will soon find yourself praying for mercy! And the Lord shall grant it to you, but even more mightily shall the Lady!’

‘Give it a rest!’

‘To deny the existence of the divine Lady is an affront!’ croaked the old woman. Harjunpää was becoming annoyed. The last thing he needed amidst everything that had happened that morning was the save-the-planet brigade. For want of anything better to do, he stretched out his hand, took
the flyer, pretended to look at it, folded it and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

Blue and white police tape had been drawn between the ticket machines and the escalators, preventing anyone from going down to the platforms. ‘POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS’ it read again and again. Behind the tape stood two uniformed policemen, and Harjunpää recognised one of them as his old friend Rannila from his student days.