The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Anna Fekete, who fled the Yugoslavian wars as a child, has just started working as a criminal investigator in a northern Finnish coastal town, when she is thrust into a rolling murder investigation. It doesn't help that her new partner, Esko, doesn't bother hiding his racist prejudices. Anna's work as a criminal investigator barely gets off the ground before she is thrust into a case that has riveted the nation. A young woman has been killed on a running trail, and a pendant depicting an Aztec god has been found in her possession. Another murder soon follows. All signs point to a serial killer. But can Anna catch the Hummingbird before he - or she - strikes again?

Release date: July 15, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

 

 

That night the Sandman arrived like a Gestapo henchman. When he went on his rounds, hush now, hush, he stuffed the blue clothes in the laundry and pulled on a long leather jacket and a pair of shiny boots, threw me in the car and took me away. His belt had a buckle that he could open quickly. Three guesses why. And I didn’t dare fall asleep, though the drive seemed to take forever.


I’ve seen mutilated bodies as a kid, women stoned to death, honest, and I suppose I should be traumatised, but I’m not. But I know what my own body looks like dead and I’ve heard about girls that have fallen from balconies, the Angels of Rinkeby and Clichy-sous-Bois, angels that didn’t know how to fly. And I know another girl that just vanished, wallahi. Everyone knew she’d been sent back home to be married off to some pervert with a pot belly, a golden tooth and fingers like sausages. In that way the family’s honour was restored, phew, the whole fucking family could sigh with relief and smile those everything’s-just-fine smiles for the rest of their lives. All except for the girl, that is. And the pervert bagged himself a nice little plaything, something to stick his dirty fingers into.


The Sandman drove me to my aunt and uncle’s place in another city, in another suburb, dumped me on the living-room sofa, and I lay there, numb, listening to every sound, wondering when they were going to come in and kill me. I heard my aunt turning on the tap in the kitchen, whispering into the phone, chatting with my uncle, rustling something. I don’t know how they were related to me, at least not in Finnish terms. As far as I know Mum’s cousins still live in Sweden and my dad’s only brother died ages ago. These were an aunt and uncle in our terms: age-old friends of my parents, some distant relation to Dad. They never slept and they probably never ate anything either, but they left me bits of bread on the living-room table. It’s like they were constantly at the ready. What were they waiting for? Waiting for someone to say, shove her off the balcony, go on, whoops, it was all a tragic accident. Or was it: your plane’s leaving in two hours; we’ve got you your ticket!


The sofa stank of Kurdistan. I don’t understand how they manage to carry the smell with them and preserve it in everything they own: sofas, rugs, curtains, clothes and textiles, kitchen cupboards, beds, sheets, wall-paper, the television, bars of soap, hair, skin. What do they store it in? A jar? And how does it survive for hundreds of years, across thousands of kilometres? Or is it really like they say in that old song, that Kurdistan is the air that we breathe?


This aunt and uncle watched every move I made; they wouldn’t even let me lock the bathroom door when I went for a pee. As if I could have disappeared down the drain or through the air vent. There was no way I could run away. I counted the steps to see how long it would take me to sneak into the hallway, rattle open the locks and dash into the stairwell screaming for help and make a run for freedom. But this aunt and uncle were keeping watch in the kitchen, which was situated along that route that felt like an eternity, the open kitchen door like a gaping mouth in the hallway, right next to the front door. They would have stopped me before I’d have been able to get out. And I knew they’d double-bolted the door and that my uncle had the key. They’d explained this to me loud and clear as they’d locked all the bolts and security chains and closed the living-room door, as though they were locking me into a cell. And in Finland I was supposed to be safe. But right now I was more frightened than I’d ever been as a little kid; although there were sometimes pools of blood in the street back home, at least it was a time when Mum and Dad still used to laugh.


I couldn’t just lie there and wait for the KGB Sandman to creep in the door and say NOW and let them start doing something really bad to me. I had to act. I pulled my mobile out of my handbag. That was the first miracle: they’d forgotten to confiscate it. That was a really stupid mistake. They must have been nervous too.


I dialled the number they’d taught us on the first day at school – safety first, yeah, that’s Finland for you. I remember as a kid I’d been petrified at the thought of actually having to call that number, if I had to report a fire or something or if Mum had a heart attack and I was unable to explain what was wrong, if they couldn’t understand what I was saying.  That number did nothing to increase my sense of safety; on the contrary, it loosened it, making it sway and crack and rattle. I had nightmares about all kinds of emergencies. I always thought I’d run to the neighbours’ house, the way we would have done back home, but even that didn’t feel right when after a few weeks I realised I didn’t know any of the people living next door. All I knew was that there was a woman on the ground floor who spat at us.


Now I know the right words. I know a whole new language and I can speak it better than my old one; I could call anyone, the National Forestry Commission, and they wouldn’t hear the faintest hint of Kurdistan in my voice. All they would hear would be the hum of the great northern pine forests.


And I know that here you can trust the police, at least in theory, unless you’re a Dublin Case, that is, or faulty goods that dictators at the Immigration Bureau decide must be sent back to where they came from. I’m not one of them. I’ve got citizenship. OMG, it makes me laugh to say it, but I’ve just got to: I’m a bona fide Finnish citizen, officially. It’s like winning the lottery, though I wasn’t born here. Okay, not quite seven right numbers. More like six plus the bonus. I had no other option but to believe in miracles. I called 112.








AUGUST

THE THICKET FOREST around the running track was silent. The shadows of the branches disappeared into the deepening dusk. A pair of light-coloured trainers struck the sawdust of the running path with dull, regular thumps. Her legs pounded the earth, their strong, pumped muscles working efficiently, her pulse beating at the optimum rate. She didn’t need a heart-rate monitor to feel it; she would never buy one. She knew her body well and knew what it required at any given time. After the first kilometre the initial stiffness began to recede, her legs felt lighter and her breathing steadied, and her running achieved that relaxed rhythm which could carry her to the ends of the earth.


It was easy to breathe in the damp, oxygenated air, fresh from the rain. Her lungs drew it in and pushed it out again like a set of bellows that today, at least, wouldn’t be tired. Sweat had covered the full length of her body. If I stopped now and stripped off, she thought, I’d glisten like the damp forest. Her toes felt warm. She had long since taken off her gloves and stuffed them in her pockets, though her hands had felt the chill when she’d set out. The sweatband round her head absorbed the droplets trickling down into her face, and her thick dark head of hair was soaked at the root. Her feet hit the ground in steady paces; the world shrank around their monotonous rhythm, and her thoughts seemed to empty themselves for a moment. There was just one step after another, step, step, step, nothing more in this malignant world.

She felt a twinge in her knee. Her breathing turned shallower, faster; she was becoming tired after all. She slowed down a notch, just to have the strength to walk up to the front door. Not far now. She could make out the figure of the fallen tree that marked the start of the final straight. As it had fallen, its thick, foreboding trunk had taken a couple of slender birches with it. Now its roots jutted into the air like a troll. She’d often thought how easy it would be for someone to lurk behind them.


On another running track the stillness was broken only by the rhythmic hiss of a solitary jogger’s tracksuit. The forest was silent, not even the rush of the sea could be heard. Surely the birds haven’t left already. Perhaps they’ve already gone to sleep, the jogger thought just as a crow squawked right next to her ear. The noise took her by surprise, her heart jumped with fright, and immediately afterwards came the sound of rustling, as though the branches had been pulled away and flipped back into place. Someone was moving through the woods. No, not someone, something – a bird, a hedgehog, an insect. For crying out loud, what kind of insect would make a sound like that? A fox, perhaps, or a badger, forests are always full of different creatures; there’s no need to be frightened, she nervously repeated to herself, trying to calm herself but not really succeeding. She sped up and started running too fast. All the crises in her life were whirling in her head in a single cacophonous clamour, and she ran to try and empty them from her mind; all summer until this very evening she’d been running like one possessed. If only term would start again soon, she thought, I can get away from here, away from the past. This she had repeated to herself since the day the letter of acceptance to the university had arrived. Still, she felt as though she might never make it.

She was already on the second floor by the time the downstairs door clicked shut. This was her final spurt: up the stairs to the fifth floor at full speed, and though it felt as though her calf muscles were ablaze, she knew she’d make it. Tonight’s run was one of the gentler ones in her weekly regime, less than an hour’s light jogging at a comfortable pace, unadulterated pleasure and enjoyment. She pulled off her sweaty clothes and threw them in a pile on the hallway floor, stepped into the shower, turned on the tap and let the warm water sprinkle down across her ruddy, pulsing skin, washing the beads of sweat and foaming soap down into the network of drains beneath the city, now the concern of the workers at the water purification plant. The idea amused her. As she stepped out of the shower, she wrapped herself in a thick white dressing gown, twisted her black hair into a towel, cracked open a can of beer and went out on to the balcony for a cigarette. Nothing but bleak concrete and floor upon floor of dark windows. Suburbia. What the hell had made her want to move back here? She laughed out loud at a suburb that, true to form, was trying to trick her. Now it was pretending to be asleep, but she knew it for what it was. She had seen everything that lay hidden behind those concrete walls. Thankfully after a good run it didn’t bother her, and strangely enough neither did the challenges of tomorrow. Endorphins were racing through her body, turning her nerves into an amusement park, and the feeling of exhilaration remained with her until she went to bed. Jó éjszakát, she whispered to herself and drifted to sleep.


Gasping for breath, the runner jogged through the now silent, darkening woods. Raindrops glistened on the dark-green foliage, water that hadn’t made it to the ground. Behind her came a loud crackle. It must be a moose, she thought, or a fox, but still didn’t quite believe it herself.

She scanned the area around her. It’s too quiet, she thought, unnaturally muted. She cursed to herself that she’d run so fast, couldn’t run another step, and though she was genuinely afraid and wanted to get out of the woods quickly, she had to slow to walking pace. This is no way to burn fat, she thought. It’ll only turn to lactic acid, and tomorrow I won’t have the energy to do anything. But I have to get my body into shape. I must. Everything had to change, she kept reprimanding herself, trying to take her thoughts away from the threatening woods around her, whose shadows seemed to be watching her. This is crazy, she muttered under her breath. I’m going crazy – and it serves me right. I just need to forget everything, put an end to all this sin and lick my wounds. What bloody stupid clichés, at least try to come up with something original. Her voice was drowned out by the sound of rustling from the trees.


Breathing heavily she walked the final half kilometre back to the car, feeling as though she didn’t have the energy, that the journey would never end. Just as she made out the shape of the yellow car behind the bushes and was smirking at her overactive imagination, she saw a dark figure in front of her. Someone was crouching down on the running track. The figure stood up and started walking briskly towards her.




THE HEAVY RAINCLOUDS that had hidden the sky from view for four days in a row were once again lashing the city with water. The air was grey and chilly. Pedestrians with umbrellas dodged the spray whipped up by cars in the morning rush hour. The smartest people were wearing rubber boots. It seemed that summer had finally come to an end, though the skin yearned to cling to the warmth and the touch of seawater for just a moment longer. The school term had started, the summer holidays had ended, people had returned to work and society was gradually regaining its momentum: work, home, work, home, no more lazing around by the water blowing out dandelion clocks.


At a quarter to eight, Anna opened the main door of the imposing, towering office block in the centre of the city that had once been her home, and stepped into the foyer of the building that never sleeps. She glanced at her watch and noted that her new boss was late. She dug a jar of powder from her handbag, tugged her fringe into a better position, added a little lip gloss. She tried to take deep breaths. She had butterflies in her stomach. She needed the toilet.

Neon lights flickered behind a set of venetian blinds. Anna had slept badly after all. She’d woken in the early hours and started fretting. Despite this she wasn’t especially tired. Adrenalin sharpened the morning stiffness of her senses.

A week earlier the past had once again become the present as Anna had rented a van, and with the help of a few colleagues packed up what little she had in the way of furniture and belongings and moved them many hundreds of kilometres from the city where she had studied and where she had lived, working a string of temporary positions, ever since graduating. The majority of her belongings were the same ones she’d had when she began studying ten years earlier.


Anna had rented an apartment in Koivuharju, the same suburb where she had spent her youth and where Ákos still lived. The area’s reputation was anything but attractive, but the rent was reasonable. The appearance of Anna’s surname on the letter box in uneven block lettering hadn’t aroused the slightest interest among the other residents. Even her relatively high level of education was nothing out of the ordinary, as Koivuharju was home to a surprising number of teachers, doctors, engineers and physicists from immigrant backgrounds. The only statistical difference was that Anna was actually in work, gainfully employed in a position worthy of her education. The physicists of Koivuharju would have been pleased to get a job as a part-time cleaner.

Koivuharju wouldn’t be considered a place where people wanted to live; they simply ended up there. Those who lived in and around the downtown area certainly knew its name and reputation, but they didn’t know what it looked like. The spectrum of surnames, each more difficult to pronounce than the next, might have intimidated them.


Anna hadn’t even looked at the high-end, high-ceilinged downtown apartments. She had always felt more at home on the flipside of these façades – in the shadows and alleyways.

Perhaps this is why she’d become a police officer.

Chief Superintendent Pertti Virkkunen arrived almost ten minutes late. The short, moustachioed man in his fifties seemed in excellent condition. He greeted her with an enthusiastic smile and shook her hand so that her joints cracked.

‘We’re very pleased to have you here,’ said Virkkunen. ‘It’s great to get an officer from an immigrant background on our team. They’ve been banging on about it in national strategy directives for years, but until now we haven’t seen a single one of you, not even a junior constable – immigrants, you know. Though, of course, we’ve met plenty of you in other circumstances. I mean…’

Virkkunen was embarrassed. Anna felt like saying something snappy, making him squirm with shame, but because nothing sprang to mind she let it pass.


‘You can take it easy for a few days, get to know people and find your bearings. There’s nothing particularly pressing going on at the moment, so you can get organised in peace and quiet,’ he said as he accompanied Anna from one department to another.

‘After all, this is your first job and your first position in the Crime Unit, so we’ll give you plenty of time to settle and learn how things work around here. We meet each morning at eight o’clock, assess ongoing cases and delegate work. The analysis team meets once a week. The secretary will be able to give you your rota and more specific timetables.’

Anna nodded and followed Virkkunen, trying to commit the location of various departments and corridors to memory, to construct some kind of mental floor map. The summer after finishing high school she’d done a stint as a seasonal worker in the documentation department on the ground floor of the daunting police station; she had helped in the processing of hundreds of urgent passport applications as people realised, just before going on holiday, that their passport had expired; she had stamped and filed documents, organised shelves and made coffee, and towards the end of her contract she’d even become acquainted with how passports were manufactured. The rest of the building was a mystery to her. It felt labyrinthine, the way large buildings always seem at first.

Virkkunen led Anna up to the Crime Unit and her new office on the fourth floor. The room was spacious and well lit and was situated halfway down the corridor opposite the staffroom. Folders and paperwork were neatly filed on shelves that covered the walls and the computer on the desk was switched off. Three flower baskets hung in the window and a yucca plant the size of a tree stood in the corner. On the wall was a picture of a blonde woman and three blonde children. They were smiling against the backdrop of an exotic sandy beach, sea and sunshine, the way any happy family would on holiday.

Coffee mugs and a Thermos flask were stacked in the room on a steel trolley. A batch of the mandatory office buns lay beneath a cloth. Anna wondered whether she dared decline. The room was so large that there was room for another table for meetings. Sitting around the table were three people, all plain-clothed police officers.


‘Morning all,’ said Virkkunen. ‘Allow me to introduce our new senior detective constable, Anna Fekete.’

Two of the officers stood up immediately and came over to greet her.

‘Good morning and a very warm welcome to our team. It’s so nice to get another woman on board – the guys here can really get on your nerves sometimes. I’m Sari, Sari Jokikokko-Pennanen – I know, what a mouthful.’

The tall, fair-haired woman, around Anna’s age, reached out a slender hand and took Anna’s in a firm, warm grip. It seemed as though her entire body was smiling.

‘Hello, everyone. I’m very excited to come and work here, though it’s all a bit nerve-wracking.’

‘No need for that. A little bird tells me you’re a damn good officer – we’re really pleased to have you. You speak really good Finnish; I can’t hear any accent,’ said Sari.

‘Thanks. I’ve lived here a long time.’

‘Oh, how long?’

‘Twenty years.’

‘You must have been just a child when you came here?’

‘I was nine, because we arrived in the spring. I turned ten that summer.’

‘You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime. This is Rauno Forsman.’

Also in his thirties, the funny-looking man extended his hand and greeted Anna with a look of curiosity in his blue eyes.

‘Morning. Welcome to the team.’

‘Good morning. Nice to meet you,’ said Anna as the thousands of butterflies in her stomach stopped beating their wings and the tension in her neck gradually began to relent. She liked these people, Sari in particular.


The third person at the table had remained seated. Virkkunen was just about to turn to him, a note of irritation in his eyes, when the man opened his mouth.

‘Hello,’ the man mumbled in Anna’s direction, then turned to Virkkunen. ‘Emergency Services took a call last night. Some refugee or whatever we’re supposed to call them these days, rang up and said someone was going to kill her. So, should we get to work?’

Virkkunen cleared his throat.

‘Esko Niemi,’ he said to Anna. ‘Your partner.’

A stifled snort came from behind Esko’s sagging cheeks, peppered with rosacea. Either that, or the man had a cold, thought Anna and greeted her new partner. He stood up and held out his hand. It was large and rough, the kind of hand that you could imagine hurling criminals into jail with a steely swipe of the wrist, but his grip felt unpleasantly limp. Anna hated handshakes like this; they gave a strangely suspicious impression of people. And still the man wouldn’t look her in the eye. Virkkunen invited everyone to have some coffee and the officers filed towards the trolley from which an enticing aroma was now wafting. The slightly strained atmosphere in the room seemed to relax, and Anna was enveloped in a buzz of friendly conversation. Still warm, the fresh buns tasted good.

Once everyone had drunk their coffee and eaten their buns, Virkkunen asked Esko to brief the team on the events of the previous night.

‘The girl gave her home address, somewhere in Rajapuro. A couple of officers went round there, but the girl wasn’t at home after all. There was the father, mother and two younger siblings, but not the girl who made the call. Kurdish family, kicked up a right hullabaloo, woke the whole house, I’m sure.’

‘A girl? The person who received the death threat was a girl?’

‘That’s what I just said,’ Esko replied without looking at Anna, then continued. ‘The girl’s father said she was visiting relatives in Vantaa. The father did all the talking, by the way. The fourteen-year-old son … I’ll be damned if I can remember their names,’ he muttered and fidgeted with a bunch of papers looking for the boy’s name. ‘Mehvan. Fourteen-year-old Mehvan interpreted.’


‘Nobody called an official interpreter?’ asked Anna. ‘You can’t use a child as an interpreter, especially in such a serious matter.’

‘Of course we asked for one, but the interpreter on duty was at the hospital on another call. There wasn’t time to get another interpreter with all the fuss going on – it would have been a waste of public money, paying overtime and what have you for two interpreters. The officers on site were told to sort things out as best they could, there and then. And that’s what they did. You can’t shilly-shally around with important matters. Our boys were simply following orders.’

‘Like in Bosnia, I suppose?’ Anna muttered.

‘What?’ Esko retorted.

Finally he turned and looked at Anna with his swollen, reddened eyes. Anna tried to stare back without blinking. The man already disgusted her, though she’d only known him a matter of minutes.

‘Nothing. I didn’t say a word.’

Anna eventually lowered her glare.

Esko poured himself more coffee, a satisfied smirk on his face.

‘Well, everything in the apartment seemed to be as it should,’ Rauno continued in an attempt to calm things down. ‘Nobody in the house knew anything of what the girl had done or why. A couple of officers in Vantaa checked the girl’s supposed whereabouts. The girl – her name was … just a minute – Bihar was found to be in good health and was precisely where her parents said she was. She told the Vantaa police that perhaps someone had made a prank call and given her name. Either that or she’d had a nightmare and must have made the call herself while half asleep. Apparently she sometimes walks – and talks – in her sleep and can’t remember anything about it the next morning.’

‘Sounds suspicious,’ said Anna.

‘Very,’ said Sari.

‘What’s suspicious about that? The girl admitted she made the call by mistake,’ said Esko.


‘Who calls the emergency services by mistake?’ asked Sari.

‘Christ, people call 112 when they lock themselves out of the house or when their pet poodle gets something stuck in its eye,’ said Esko.

‘That’s different. This call was placed by mistake,’ said Sari.

‘How old is Bihar?’ asked Anna.

‘Seventeen,’ Rauno replied.

‘A seventeen-year-old girl calls 112 and says someone’s threatening to kill her. Sounds like a real-life nightmare to me,’ said Anna.

‘And why was she was allowed to travel all the way to Vantaa by herself?’ asked Sari.

Esko said nothing.

‘I want to hear that call,’ said Virkkunen. ‘Esko, let’s hear it.’

A few seconds of background noise. The operator’s matter-of-fact voice. Then, very hushed, the girl’s whispers: ‘They’re gonna kill me. Help me. My dad’s gonna kill me.’

The operator asks her to repeat.

The girl says nothing.

The operator asks where the girl is. The girl gives her address and hangs up.

‘She was petrified,’ said Anna.

‘I agree,’ said Sari. ‘Scared to death that someone might hear.’

‘Why didn’t she say where she was?’ asked Rauno.

‘Maybe she didn’t know,’ Sari suggested.

‘Or maybe she wanted to bring the police straight into the hornets’ nest,’ said Rauno.

‘She probably didn’t know the exact address, and her home address was the only one she could remember. And she was in a hurry; this was a matter of life and death,’ said Anna.

‘Maybe she just wanted to give Daddy a few grey hairs,’ scoffed Esko.

‘Did anyone speak to the mother?’ asked Anna.

‘They tried. The report says in bold that the husband did all the talking. Through Mehvan,’ said Rauno.


‘But of course.’

‘So what are we going to do about this?’

‘Let’s get this investigation underway. Finnish law doesn’t recognise honour violence as a crime, but we might be able to bring a charge of unlawful threat or even false imprisonment. It’s Monday morning and the girl is in Vantaa. Shouldn’t a girl that age be in school?’ asked Virkkunen.

Esko yawned noisily in his chair and started playing with his mobile, a look of boredom on his face.

‘I believe compulsory education ends at seventeen,’ he commented.

‘Esko, I want you to call these people in for an interview by the end of the day,’ Virkkunen ordered.

Esko gave a snort and wiped the crumbs from the edge of his mouth with an air of indifference.

‘Yes. Bihar, father, mother, brother and little sister. I want them all here as quickly as possible. And book an interpreter – two if necessary. Rauno and Sari, find out about the relatives in Vantaa, ask the local unit for assistance. Anna, establish what has happened in previous cases.’

‘Okay,’ Anna responded.

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ said Sari. ‘It’s as though a premonition has come knocking.’

At that very moment, there came a knock at the door. A woman poked her head around and nodded by way of a greeting.

‘They’ve found a body. On the running track near Selkämaa in Saloinen,’ she informed the group.

Everyone fell silent and froze on the spot. Sari and Rauno looked at one another in confusion and disbelief. Esko’s coffee cup stopped in mid-air on its journey to his lips. Virkkunen’s voice broke the silence.

‘So much for a quiet start, Anna,’ he sighed.




ANNA FEKETE sniffed at the air. The rain had strengthened the natural scents of the forest. The detritus decomposing beneath the boughs of trees was mixed with the smell of sawdust. Mould had begun its annual autumnal feast, but still the air was fresh. Wind rustled in the branches of dwarf birches and in the tangle of thicket, the remaining green leaves flittering in the rain.


The twenty-kilometre journey to Saloinen had taken them south through heavy traffic heading out of the city. Before reaching the rapidly expanding village, Anna turned on to a dirt track leading towards the shore. For about three kilometres the track wound its way through the woods and ploughed fields and came to an end at a rectangular, overgrown parking area. A slimy cluster of slippery Jack mushrooms had popped up along the edge of the car park. Parked in front of the mushrooms were a blue-and-white police Saab, a yellow Fiat Uno and the civilian vehicle used by Esko Niemi. Beside the cars stood a row of uniformed patrol officers.

I’ve got interval training tonight, Anna found herself thinking as she saw the running track that started behind the yellow police tape. It disappeared into the woods, just like the strands of yellow tape cordoning off the area. The body lay only two hundred metres away, said the policemen, but she couldn’t see that far through the woods.

The body had been discovered just before nine o’clock that morning by local resident Aune Toivola, an 86-year-old widow out on her morning walk. She was in the habit of getting up at seven o’clock every morning, making a pot of coffee and drinking half before and half after her daily walk. And as usual, her walk had taken her to