Palm Beach, Finland Read online

Muurla slid the folder across the table to Nyman. They looked at each other. ‘Do you want to hear my theory?’

  Nyman remained silent. Muurla took that as an ardent yes.

  ‘This woman has recently met a man,’ he began, folding his arms across his chest in a way that made him look closer to retirement than Nyman had previously thought. ‘But this man turns out to be something quite different from what he appears. She realises he’s not going to leave in a hurry. She knows people around town, so she hires a couple of bruisers to take care of things. These guys do what they’ve been paid to do, then they stage – or try to stage – the scene to make it look like a break-in or a fight.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Nyman.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If the woman hired some professionals, as you suggest, they’ll be back. These kind of people never go away, they take you for every penny you’ve got. They always come back, and when they can’t use you anymore, they make sure no one else can either.’

  Muurla thought about this for a moment.

  ‘It’s just as well you’re going to be there, then,’ he said. After a further moment of contemplation, he nodded again, not at Nyman but seemingly at something only he could see. ‘Mark my words, the woman’s pulling all the strings.’

  2

  Olivia Koski was walking round the house with a man in a baseball cap. The man was rotund and spoke like a gushing water fountain. Olivia thought it best to stay alert, though, as at some point in the man’s stream of consciousness he might say something relevant. A moment earlier the man had introduced himself as Esa. It was like the moment a stylus touches a record and begins to play. Now the record was in full swing, and so was Esa. The brand-new yellow-and-brown van he’d arrived in bore the words KUURAINEN AND COMPANY – PLUMBING SOLUTIONS, so Esa must have been either Kuurainen or Company.

  At the southern wall of the house Esa stopped and turned to face Olivia. His arms dangled at his sides; he raised his eyes slightly to look at her and had to squint into the bright midday sunshine. He looked like a little boy carrying out an important task.

  ‘This is where I’d run it,’ he said. ‘The main water pipe, that is. Hot and cold. How long have you been having trouble with the water?’

  Olivia thought of her father, her father’s father, and his father before him. Sincere, wise, good men, whose fingers and thumbs had belonged to some of the most impractical hands in the history of humanity.

  ‘Since the tens.’

  Esa chuckled.

  ‘Not the 2010s, the 1910s,’ Olivia explained.

  Esa’s chuckles came to an abrupt end. He looked at the ground and returned to talking endlessly.

  ‘I’d dig here, lay the pipe along here, renew the lot, inside and out. What’s the water like at the moment?’

  Olivia didn’t have to think long about the pressure or quality of the water, all she had to do was think back to her shower that morning: the shampoo that she couldn’t rinse from her hair, the wriggling around, the eventual chattering of her teeth.

  ‘Freezing cold,’ she said. ‘And I can almost count the number of droplets.’

  ‘It’s on its last legs alright,’ Esa nodded, and Olivia could tell the contractor could barely hide his enthusiasm. ‘This needs sorted urgently.’

  ‘How urgently?’

  ‘Hard to say. The plumbing could conk out next week or the next time you flush the toilet. And seeing as there’s little to no pressure – and saying you deposit something bigger than normal – there’s no telling whether it’ll go down or not. Not that I’m suggesting you would, Mrs Koski – you cut a slender figure, so maybe you wouldn’t – but say you have a buffet lunch one day or you’re having a bit of trouble downstairs, then—’

  ‘Miss.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s Miss Koski,’ said Olivia. ‘People called Mrs are generally married, though given my age…’

  Olivia tried not to show quite how exhausted she was. The last two weeks had been even tougher than the weeks and months before that, which, with all the funeral arrangements, were rough enough to start with. Had she bitten off more than she could chew? It wasn’t the first time she’d thought this. Here I am, she thought, standing in my garden, listening as a perfect stranger waxes lyrical about my bowel movements.

  ‘Water,’ said Olivia. ‘I want running water in my house. That’s why I called you.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Esa. ‘We have to decide whether to go for a full pipe refit or whether to concentrate on this area here.’

  ‘A full refit?’

  ‘We’d be talking seventy grand.’

  This was nothing particularly new. Olivia had never built or renovated a house, but she’d had plenty to do with builders and decorators. It was one of those areas of life in which you could suggest, agree and promise absolutely anything to absolutely anyone, and nothing ever had to be factually correct – it never had to arrive on time, never had to work or reach completion. Not to mention whether the sum of money Esa had pulled out of a hat had anything to do with the scope of the job at hand – or whether it would be enough.

  ‘Let’s concentrate on this area,’ said Olivia.

  At this, Esa clearly tried hard not to look disappointed. But his disappointment lasted only about a second and a half. Like most men in his trade, after the initial setback he started fishing for money from a different angle and didn’t seem to worry himself unduly over how abstract or generally impractical his suggestions were.

  ‘You’ll appreciate, even that is quite a big job. This is an old house, with old structures; it’s a challenging project. Sourcing materials, renting machinery…’

  ‘And?’

  Esa folded his arms and looked as though he was adding it all up. Olivia couldn’t say what went through men’s heads at moments like this, but it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the value of the work or materials. The final results always proved otherwise.

  ‘Fifteen thousand.’

  ‘Euros?’

  Esa stared at her, again looking like he was weighing it up in his head, and nodded. ‘Euros.’

  Olivia paused. ‘Why is it a sum like that sounds as though half of it is made of Scotch mist? The kind of sum a professional tradesman plucks out of thin air and throws at a woman who lives by herself and who knows little about the ins and outs of drainage, plumbing and ventilation, in the stereotypical and all-too-predictable hope that because she’s a woman she won’t understand anything of this most manly of manly subjects?’

  Esa said nothing. Either the sunlight had struck his cheeks and brightened them or the redness was radiating from inside. He looked baffled, perhaps even a little agitated. The wind rustled in the trees.

  ‘Stereo-what…?’ he began quietly.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Olivia. ‘The question is, why?’

  Esa looked askance at Olivia, his face tilted slightly to one side.

  ‘Why? Why indeed,’ he said. ‘It’s not Scotch mist. Ten thousand. That’s my final offer.’

  Olivia waited for a moment, then gave a nod. She wasn’t planning on telling him that this figure was almost precisely ten thousand more than she currently had in her bank account.

  ‘I’ll email you a written quote,’ he said. ‘Once it’s been accepted and the down payment received, we’ll get to work. But you realise this is unprofitable work for us, we almost have to pay the clients to let us dig up their gardens…’

  All the way back to his van, Esa muttered to himself about how everyone was taking him to the cleaners: women, the taxman, subcontractors – and now his customers. Olivia had heard it all before and didn’t pay it any attention. She chose not to ask Esa how happy he would be if all the people he’d mentioned suddenly disappeared, leaving him to potter around in peace, without hindrance or distraction, to dig up gardens and lay drainage pipes without the interference of women, the taxman, subcontractors and customers. It would surely be the kind of bliss that only a man could understan
d.

  Upon arriving at the van, Esa turned in a semicircle – literally spun on an axis – squinted his eyes again and looked at the house. He looked like he was pondering something. Olivia knew what he was imagining: a set of shiny new windows.

  ‘Yep, this place certainly needs touching up here and there,’ he said, with more than a little dose of payback in his voice.

  Olivia said nothing. She was waiting for Esa to get into his van and drive off. Eventually he clambered inside, started the engine and swerved out of the yard. Olivia felt like shouting – something, anything, at anyone.

  It was a small town. Everybody knew what had happened. Or rather, nobody knew what had happened, but everybody knew exactly where it had happened.

  And there it was. Her kitchen, which was beginning to look almost the way it used to.

  For three whole days her kitchen had been like a movie set: broken glass everywhere, things strewn all around, her things, every surface red from the fingerprint powder, and on every surface imaginable, both vertical and horizontal, police marking tape and the dried blood of the unknown victim. Naturally she’d asked the police who this man was, or rather who he once was, but to her surprise the officers, especially the last two to visit, had asked her the very same question. Needless to say she’d been unable to answer, and so they all appeared to be in a situation in which nobody knew anything about anything.

  But somebody must know. All Olivia knew was that it wasn’t her.

  Scouring the floor had been an operation in its own right, that and making sure she’d picked up every piece of broken glass from between the floorboards, from the table tops, the chairs, the counters. There were even pieces of glass in the bread bin. The peppermill was covered in blood.

  After the initial shock – when she had returned from town to discover the man, run out into the yard and made that garbled call to the emergency services – she had taken the events in her stride with a calm that surprised her: after all, she was living in a house in which a man might have been murdered. Perhaps it was the shock of her father’s recent death from which Olivia was still suffering, a relative had suggested.

  Was she suffering?

  When the news of her father’s death had arrived, she’d cried for a week and regretted not having spoken to him more often, or not having spoken about the things they should have spoken about, without having an idea of what those things might be. Then the feeling passed and she realised she had spoken to him quite enough and that her father wished her all the best, just as he had done when he was alive. That was it.

  And that’s what this was all about. Right here in this kitchen, this house.

  Which reminded her of money, yet again, of the way things had always gone – always! – and always for exactly the same reason.

  She had been engaged twice and married once. Both relationships had lasted almost exactly eight and a half years. On both occasions she had been the one who eventually said, Enough is enough, Kristian / Marko.

  She’d often wondered whether there was something seriously wrong with her, something that flared up every eight and a half years, but as often she wondered whether the greatest success of these relationships was that it was only her money she ended up losing.

  Kristian: a photographer who had once owned a camera – but didn’t any longer. Olivia was young, very young. Kristian had temporary complications when it came to money and inspiration. At that point his complications had already lasted twenty-nine years. Olivia had listened, stroked his head, consoled him, and carried on studying, though she eventually dropped out of college because one of them had to work and pay the rent for their home and the office space they rented in the same building and for which Kristian still hadn’t fetched his own set of keys, until one day Olivia came home from work, sat down on the sofa she had paid for and said to her boyfriend as he sat through a zombie-film marathon (Kristian’s idea of hard work) ‘This isn’t working…’

  Marko: owner of an office hotel situated in a place nobody could ever find and where nobody wanted to work. Marko spent all night sitting in the director’s office looking out at the lights of the nearby industrial area, drinking room-temperature salmiakki liquor and waiting for the phone to ring. Perhaps he was still sitting there, still waiting for the phone call that never came. Olivia had dropped the keys next to the bottle of liquor on Marko’s desk. Marko was tapping the computer’s mouse with his forefinger and running the cursor over the empty reservation diary when Olivia said ‘This isn’t working…’ and walked out of the door. Soon afterwards she started sharing a one-bedroom flat in Kallio with her former classmate Minna, and there she had lived until she moved back here, to this house.

  Conclusion: men are an expensive hobby. They can be charming, funny, rude, stupid, bright as a shining star, dull as the handle of a hammer, handsome, not so handsome but still perfectly okay, trustworthy or untrustworthy, and everything in between, but whatever you do, whoever you meet: keep hold of your wallet.

  And so here she was: thirty-nine years old, witty if necessary, with long dark hair beneath which was a brain that at its best was quick and practical, though it didn’t have such a great track record when it came to men. She’d been told on more than one occasion that she was broad-shouldered, strong-legged, slender, long-nosed, magnificent, with a slightly exotic suntan, a handsome woman, and that her eyes weren’t just brown but nut-brown. In the course of her life she’d made her fair share of mistakes, and for those she took full responsibility. She didn’t hate anyone or anything and she wasn’t embittered; she was penniless and marginally desperate. But there was one possession she planned to hold on to, because in that possession she saw a turning point, a new opportunity: she would not give up this house; she would renovate it, turn it into a home for herself, no matter how many dead men turned up in the kitchen.

  Perhaps this was the secret to her sense of calm.

  Olivia Koski leaned against the sturdy wooden doorframe a moment longer. Between the kitchen and the hall was a short corridor of sorts, so short in fact that it was more like an elongated doorway. From the wall nearest the yard jutted an empty hook. Olivia looked at the hook again, and in particular at the darkened area on the wall beneath it. As she’d cleaned up the apartment she’d found everything else, but not the artefact that had been hanging on that hook and that had belonged to her father and his father before him. She didn’t understand why anyone would steal it. Assuming it had been stolen.

  The brightness of the day lit up the house, cleaned the kitchen, lightened her mind. There’s no reason to panic, she tried to convince herself.

  Surely?

  Every now and then the house creaked, gave a dull thud, and she took fright. It was all to do with the dead man in her kitchen, of course. For a few chilling seconds she imagined there was somebody in the house, then she relaxed again. This was a safe place, that much she’d learned. Safe, but certainly not without its problems.

  The drainage pipe, which her father – a dreamer and unofficial record holder for the world’s most impractical human being – had never afforded a single thought, would last. It wouldn’t give up on her. Not before she could get her hands on ten thousand euros. A moment ago she’d imagined she was only missing just over nine thousand, but that was premature, wishful thinking. After paying her bills she would need to find ten grand exactly.

  She looked at the clock on the wall and gave a start.

  Her shift started in fourteen minutes. She’d accepted the first job she’d found, the only job on offer. It was badly paid, the working conditions were always changing, and her colleagues behaved strangely, especially these last few weeks. But the worst of it was the uniform. At first it had seemed just awkward, and the feeling hadn’t gone away, though Olivia had hoped it might.

  Maybe, she thought once more, maybe today will feel different.

  Maybe today I won’t feel like a cut of meat on display, like a nudist at the South Pole.

  She walked into the hall, t
ook her uniform from the clothes rail and held it in her hand. No, the feeling was still there. Olivia undressed and stood in the middle of the hallway, as naked as the day she was born, for that’s what her uniform felt like. She took a deep breath, picked up the outfit, pulled it on and flicked the rubber straps over her buttocks hoping it wouldn’t feel the same as yesterday.

  It did.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Even if she were to close her eyes, she thought, she would still see that bright-yellow text. It was worth a try. A quick blink, a moment of darkness – and true enough, for a brief moment she didn’t see the text.

  But at the same time, for a few chilling seconds, she saw the figure of a man walking towards her, as clearly as if it was happening in broad daylight, somewhere out in the open, on the shore perhaps. The man raised his hand as if in distress.

  Olivia opened her eyes, out of bewilderment more than anything. The man disappeared, as did the cold.

  The text on the front of her bathing costume seemed to suggest more than just the resort’s new name. Olivia stood in front of the mirror a moment longer.

  It felt better to keep her eyes open.

  3

  A man with impossibly aerodynamic hair, and surrounded by a stifling cloud of aftershave, introduced himself as resort manager Jorma Leivo, then turned his back. Following him, Nyman realised he was walking directly through a series of fruit bushes. Resort manager Leivo gestured towards the shore with his right hand, which was half hidden by the sleeve of his white blazer.

  ‘The beach is up there with the best,’ said Leivo. ‘Whatever they’ve got in St Tropez, we’ve got too, only better: canoes, pedalos, rowing boats, surfboards, Optimist dinghies, deckchairs – brand-new deckchairs; a hundred and twenty of them. You’d better reserve one before they’re all gone. Okay, it looks like there’s only one in use right now, but it really depends on the day. Volleyball, tennis, mini golf. Three holes, so Tiger Woods would approve. Dancing classes – our instructor’s been to Mexico, so we’re talking world-class salsa. There’s the restaurant offering à la carte and all kinds of delicacies, plus seafood, pizzas and craft beers you can’t even get in Germany. Happy people. It’s a top-notch beach experience for a five-star clientele. The sky’s the limit round here. If everything goes to plan, next summer we’ll be opening a casino, a Moulin Rouge-type place, tits and windmills – tasteful, classy – and after that a helipad for VIP guests, movie stars and Formula One drivers. The shopping mall isn’t ready yet, it’s still in the design phase – something for the ladies, you know. You don’t have to be rich and beautiful to spend money. The waterfront shop is open. It’s the hottest beach in Finland.’ Leivo turned around just enough to give Nyman the decisive nod that concluded his monologue.