Palm Beach, Finland Read online

  ‘Palm Beach Finland,’ said Nyman, looking out to sea, trying to keep up with Leivo’s voice and smell.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Leivo. ‘My idea. It’s my beach too, of course, but who’s counting?’

  ‘This place used to be called something else.’

  ‘Ah, but it wasn’t up to this standard.’

  ‘What standard was it?’

  Leivo stopped and turned again. He reached out his left hand and pointed with his forefinger. At the end of his forefinger, about a hundred and fifty metres away, was a large – no, giant – neon sign, its text gleaming.

  ‘That, my friend, is the future,’ he said.

  Nyman read the text on the sign.

  ‘Right.’

  Leivo gave Nyman a look of satisfaction. They continued on their way. The sun was high in the sky, the day was at its warmest – which didn’t mean it was warm: the wind whipped waves against the shore, and the beach was almost empty. The sea was blue and expansive. At these latitudes, thought Nyman, it gets warm only about seven and a half times a year.

  ‘And what do you do for a living, may I ask?’ said Leivo.

  ‘I’m a maths teacher.’

  ‘Ah, long summer holidays,’ Leivo mused. ‘That’s nice. It being summer and all that.’

  Nyman couldn’t tell whether Leivo was joking or whether, like so many people, he was simply talking without truly listening to himself. Nyman noticed the rivulets of sweat trickling down Leivo’s face. They ran from his forehead and down his cheeks until they reached his neck, where they stopped at his shirt collar. Some of the sweat dripped from his chin onto his white blazer. Perhaps the resort manager had been drinking heavily, thought Nyman, and now his body was detoxifyng itself. That would explain the aftershave, which could have masked the smell of a paper factory, but Leivo didn’t look as though he had been on the booze. Quite the opposite. The man was effusive, perky and energetic. And his perspiration couldn’t have had anything to do with the temperature. Nyman could feel the wind penetrating his shirt, turning the skin along his arms to goose bumps.

  His thoughts were interrupted. They appeared to have arrived.

  There were six chalets in total. They were all painted in bright colours, each glowing in its own garish way: turquoise, pink, mint green, purple, violet, baby blue. They stood in a straight row, tight against one another on a thin strip of pine forest, and their microscopic white-painted verandas all faced the sea. Nyman noted the signs above the doors and read them: Castillo, Zito, Trudy, Gina, Switek and his own chalet, Tubbs.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ said Leivo and opened the door of the mint-green chalet. He handed Nyman the keys. ‘This was the last one. Think of it as a direct flight to Miami, a piece of bona fide Florida. Five-star views. International quality, but for the discerning Finnish taste. These chalets are going like hot cakes. As we agreed, you can book one week at a time, and on the first day of every new week you have the option of booking for the next. You should take advantage of that; people queue for weeks to come here.’

  Nyman glanced at the adjoining chalets. They looked quiet. He couldn’t see any cars parked nearby, no towels drying on the railings, no beach equipment on the veranda or propped against the walls.

  Jorma Leivo reappeared in his field of vision. ‘All reserved,’ he said. ‘Advance bookings.’

  Leivo gestured in a new direction, to the other side of town, towards the end of a peninsula that from this distance looked green (the trees) and brown (the soil). Nyman couldn’t make out any houses, let alone people.

  ‘We’ll be expanding, of course,’ Leivo explained. ‘We’re going to have a marina and luxury accommodation for gold-star customers. The cards will be ready soon, a thousand euros a piece; worth their weight in gold, let me tell you. Why go to Spain when you could come to…’

  ‘Palm Beach Finland,’ said Nyman, sensing Leivo expected him to finish the sentence.

  Leivo nodded with gusto and handed something to Nyman. Nyman took it: a square, bright-pink parcel.

  ‘I didn’t have time to blow it up myself,’ said Leivo, and to Nyman’s ears this was the first time he’d sounded genuine. ‘It’s a pink flamingo. Every guest gets one.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nyman.

  Leivo seemed thrilled. ‘It’s to create the right mood. And you should keep it. You can have plenty of fun with it. Do you want me to blow it up?’

  Nyman thought of asking him to do this, but at that moment Leivo’s pocket began warbling an eighties disco hit. Leivo took his phone from his blazer, looked at it, furrowed his brow, and for a moment he seemed to forget all about Nyman. Nyman duly noted this. Then Leivo snapped to, rejected the call and put the phone back in his pocket. He raised his eyes to Nyman again and smiled. The smile was in line with everything else he had presented: it didn’t seem to know whether it was in the right place or not. If there was a right place at all.

  ‘The chalet names,’ said Nyman, though he saw Leivo was making to leave. ‘Where’s Crockett?’

  Jan Nyman watched Jorma Leivo as he walked off; he noticed that his blazer was clinging to his upper back, but in a slightly higher place than he imagined was normal. Nyman shivered with cold. It was chilly despite the bright sunshine.

  Judging by the hour and fifteen minutes he’d spent at this resort so far, he couldn’t quite imagine it replacing St Tropez as the number-one destination for the rich and famous, or that vast flocks of tourists would descend on this beach anytime soon, but who knew what could happen? He’d witnessed stranger things. And he didn’t want to come to any rash conclusions. He had a suspicion – thinking about the case file he’d read on the bus and train journey – that far too many rash decisions had been made without him.

  He stepped inside the chalet Leivo had left open and instinctively closed the door behind him.

  The chalet comprised a single room, about twelve metres square. Opposite the door stood a bunk bed, the kind in which Jan Nyman had last slept approximately thirty years ago. He claimed the lower bunk for himself. The left-hand wall featured a miniature kitchen and a miniature bathroom – to the extent that the tiny plastic booth with a showerhead directly above the toilet could reasonably be called a bathroom. The kitchenette included a sink, a fridge, a coffee machine, and a selection of IKEA cooking and dining implements stood propped in the draining cupboard. Through the window, situated on the right-hand wall above the dining table, he could admire the straight, light-brown trunks of the surrounding pine trees.

  Nyman looked around. Not exactly Nice or the Ritz Carlton, but it was considerably more comfortable than outside in the wind. And it was perfect for his purposes.

  He placed the contents of his large sports bag in the wardrobe attached to the end of the bed: T-shirts, socks, underpants, smart shirts for evenings at the restaurant, swimming trunks, shorts, a woollen jumper for chilly evenings, and his favourite flannel shirts and jeans – two pairs of each. He would have made a pot of coffee but he had no filters, and nothing to put in them for that matter. He flicked through the investigation reports and case material on his iPad and found what he was looking for.

  The photographs were taken without the subjects’ knowledge. Obviously. Even so, some people always looked as though they were posing for the camera. Perhaps it was a sign of the times: we took so many photographs of ourselves that we were always contorting our bodies in every conceivable direction, just in case someone took a snap. Many of the people in the photographs were in swimming costumes. It was understandable in the circumstances.

  He already recognised most of the subjects. There was Jorma Leivo, and his modest criminal record – small-time fraud and a few accounting misdemeanours from ten years back; a few years later one count of threatening behaviour; and almost immediately afterwards an exceptionally feeble attempt at driving under the influence with a blood-alcohol concentration of only 0.06%, driving within the speed limit on an isolated road in the middle of nowhere – the man whose shirts seemed soaked with
sweat from one day to the next, regardless of the time or weather. Nyman paid particular attention to the men photographed in the woman’s company and tried to commit their names and faces to memory. After suspicions arose that she might have had something to do with the body discovered in the house, the local police had naturally started following her too.

  Many of the images were of the woman on the beach with her colleagues. First Nyman looked at the photographs of her colleagues. One of them was a Hollywood-handsome guy who looked like a surfer and who always seemed to have his hands in his pockets. No matter whether he was wearing shorts or long trousers, one of his hands always seemed to be engaged in a casual game of pocket pool. Like most handsome men, his expression was somewhat empty, and yet mysterious and timid: Who am I, I don’t understand anything, am I looking in the right direction? He didn’t look like a professional hit man, but who could say for sure? People are full of surprises.

  One photograph differed from the others. It was the most recent image, taken only four days ago, and it was the last in the pile. The photographer had returned home on the same day as the investigators.

  In this image the surfer was standing close to the woman, and his expression had a sense of feeling – tension, thought even, as he looked at the woman with something clearly approaching despair. Perhaps despair was too strong. But then again … Nyman stared at the photograph a moment longer. Regret?

  Perhaps these two were in some kind of relationship and the surfer dude had screwed things up. The hand’s permanent residence in his pocket suggested the man let his little surfer do most of the thinking; it might even have decided where the rest of his body ended up at any given time. In his professional and personal experience, Nyman surmised that concentrating the decision-making like this generally led to full-blown tyranny and rarely resulted in a happy ending.

  Nyman continued to flick through the photographs. If the woman did know something, if she was the key to the case, he would need both direct and indirect access to her. He went over the names again, attached them to faces and tested himself on them. A while later all his answers were correct and he gave himself full marks.

  He was about to put his iPad to one side, but stopped.

  Nyman wanted to see where the woman had been when these photographs were taken and how she appeared in them.

  Perhaps these two matters would tell him more about who she really was.

  4

  Holma was dangling the man from the balcony when the phone rang. He’d been meaning to change his ring tone for a while; this one attracted far too much attention, and besides at the time it was only supposed to be a joke, a facile, ancient hit by a white rapper, and a slogan that, by now, felt like a physical thumping in his head.

  Holma was holding the man by the knees. The man was hanging in the air, his back pressed against the railing of the balcony, his arms flailing and his head twitching as though he were dancing upside down. The top-floor balcony was in a row of grey concrete towers on the eastern side of Helsinki’s Merihaka district. Across the bay rose the coal mountains of Salmisaari, and a cycle path ran along the pavement below. From this vantage point the two looked almost equidistant.

  Ice, ice, baby.

  This was the nature of ring tones; you remembered them when the phone rang and forgot about them as soon as you’d answered. Until you heard it again and … It was an endless cycle. That said, there weren’t many people who knew his number. People who called him did so for a good reason, which meant they called him very rarely. And so, thinking about it more reasonably, it was no wonder that a ring tone, which had seemed funny after a night playing pool and drinking a few pints with the boys, was still on his phone.

  Holma felt the phone vibrating just above his heart. Tightening his grip on the man’s legs, he reached his fingers into his jacket pocket but couldn’t quite get to his phone. His fingertips just about touched the narrow strip of fabric at the top of the pocket, but the phone was deep inside, lying slightly on one side.

  Ice, ice, baby.

  Wasn’t there a setting somewhere to limit the number of times someone could keep the phone ringing?

  Holma tried to put himself in the caller’s position. If he’d heard the ringing tone twelve times, would he allow it to ring a thirteenth time? What was the probability that someone would pick up on the twentieth ring? Not very high, he thought. More than that, Holma started to question his own judgement. Had he given his private number to someone who didn’t really understand how phones worked, who didn’t appreciate telephone etiquette? And all the while his phone continued ringing and vibrating.

  Again he tried to slip his hand into his pocket. But it was no use.

  Holma looked across at the heaps of coal. The sun was beating down, the coal mountains gleamed like black icebergs. Holma had a tendency to imagine things and conjure up elaborate scenarios that in the light of day he could no longer see or understand. He imagined the large power station rising up behind the coal mountains was an ice hall where the rink was black and where people played and sat in the dimness and everything was dark … But where would be the fun in that? And wouldn’t…?

  Ice, ice…

  Holma relaxed his grip, straightened his arms, snatched his phone from his pocket and answered. He might have heard a distant thump, a splodge, something faint, but by that point the phone was already at his ear and it might have been simply the sound of crackling from the satellite. The voice at the other end was old and familiar.

  ‘Bad news,’ said the voice.

  ‘Tell me that first,’ said Holma.

  A pause.

  ‘I just got off the phone with a copper I know. The subject came up when we were talking about … something else.’

  The voice knew people in the police force. Holma was aware of that. He waited.

  ‘Your brother Antero. Dead. Murdered. It’s a bit of a mess.’

  Antero, the black sheep of the family. Everything Antero touched ended in disaster. If Antero had tried to rob a local supermarket, he’d have shown the cashier his loyalty card in the process.

  ‘For some reason it took time to identify the body. It all happened two weeks ago. Some small town. Local police have been all over it, but so far they’ve come up with nothing.’

  The voice gave the name of the small town, mentioned the name of the person in whose house Antero had been found with a broken neck. The voice gave the address, said something about a kitchen and an electric whisk, but Holma was still suffering the after-effects of that ring tone. The chorus was lodged somewhere far inside his brain. It was stuck so firmly, its roots so deep, it smothered everything else.

  ‘How are things there?’ the voice asked.

  Holma took a step forwards, looked over the balcony railing and down to the cycle path below. Far beneath him the man looked as though he had lain down on the pavement to sleep.

  ‘All calm.’

  ‘Do you want to take a few days off?’

  Holma hadn’t given the matter any thought. But it made sense.

  ‘Might do me some good.’

  ‘I’ll get someone to take care of anything urgent. Give me a ring when you want to come back. These things can be upsetting.’

  Upsetting maybe, but when it came to Antero, it was only a matter of time.

  ‘I don’t want anyone working while they’re not one hundred percent. Recharge your batteries, focus on things that perk you up, and you’ll come back more motivated than ever.’

  The voice hung up.

  Holma returned indoors, glanced around. Everything was as it should be. He placed the preprepared suicide note on the table and left. On the way down to the ground floor he thought about things.

  Focus on things that perk you up. The words rang in his ears. Holma thought of Antero, their shared beginnings, carjacking on a summer’s night, their first tentative break-ins and clumsy robberies. Learning things together.

  Holma smiled at his reflection in the lift mirror. He had other r
easons for this than faded memories. He wasn’t worried about being seen in or around the building. He knew that his features often caused people problems. It was to do with the symmetry of his face: nothing stood out, nothing stayed with you. When he was younger, people said it was hard to recognise him at all. At the time he’d felt bad about it, and he’d strangled the woman who’d said so just enough that she knew she’d insulted him.

  Youth.

  Golden memories.

  Their first time:

  A clear autumn evening, the leaves of the trees glistening. Holma and his brother have been given their first official gig, and they’re driving through the town. They have been hired by a renowned criminal. Their brief is to remind an actor living in the pricey southern suburbs of Helsinki about a substantial outstanding debt. They gain entry to the actor’s home. It’s easy enough. The actor is drunk, and the smell and stubble reveal that he’s probably been drinking for a while. It’s about two in the morning and the actor automatically assumes they’ve come to deliver his pizza. Do we look like delivery boys? asks Antero. You look too stupid even for that, the actor replies. Naturally Antero takes exception to this comment. He lunges at the actor and the two of them fall wrestling to the parquet floor. Holma looks around. This was the kind of penthouse he would have dreamed of living in – if only he’d known it existed. He’d never seen anything like it before: white-painted walls with high ceilings, bay windows almost as deep as the vaults at the Suomenlinna Fortress, the floor covered in broad, lacquered wooden boards, in the corner of the large room a decorative fireplace that Holma later learns to call a ceramic stove. There and then Holma decides that, one day, he too will live in a place like this. The actor is powerful. He tries to roll on top of Antero, and eventually succeeds. A moment later the actor is straddling Antero’s chest, his knees pinning Antero’s arms to the floor; he slaps Antero round the face, saying nasty things about him, debasing him. Holma has to admit that some of what the inebriated actor says is rather funny and apt. Holma remembers hearing the word improvisation in the past; one of his teachers must have used it. The actor starts improvising. Holma listens for a moment. He turns and steps into the kitchen, and admires that too. Bright white cupboards and countertops, the legs of the table and chairs gleaming and metallic. He tries to imagine what it would be like to eat breakfast here, or any meal for that matter. He rifles through the drawers, finds a knife with an extremely sharp blade – its tip like a needle and its blade only widening slightly on its long, long journey to the handle; a knife whose formal purpose is a mystery. He returns to the living room and thrusts the knife up to the hilt in the actor’s neck just as the doorbell rings. The actor bows slowly across Antero’s body, as if after a performance. Antero’s face is glowing like a tomato set on fire. The doorbell rings again. Holma puts his forefinger to his lips, and Antero understands to keep quiet. Holma goes to the door. The pizza has been prepaid. He carries the steaming box into the kitchen. They eat the pizza before driving back through the autumnal city.