My First Murder (17 page)

I slipped unnoticed into a corner of the balcony. I thought about the last time I had been in a church—it had been my friend Annikka’s wedding the previous winter. Churches always felt foreign to me, and I didn’t know how to act in them. I always felt clumsy and loud, and the priests’ sermons never succeeded in getting through to me. Religion was something I thought about only rarely, mostly because I didn’t want to. Now, however, I tried to think about where Tommi had truly gone. Around the station there were rumors that, twenty years ago, one of the most effective cops in the VCU had regularly visited a spiritualist to move homicide cases forward.

Apparently, it had worked pretty well. I had a hard time believing in anything like that, but what did I know? I suppose anything could be possible—maybe Tommi was in the place believers called heaven. Or was his place in hell?

Maybe every person’s heaven was different. I imagined Tommi cavorting with voluptuous female angels, then realized that was an inappropriate thought in a church—no one had noticed me smiling to myself at a funeral, had they? On the other hand, perhaps Tommi had simply ceased to exist. Completely. The dark tone of Antti’s letter came back to me. He certainly didn’t think there was a Tommi anymore, in any sense. The only thing that came after death was a black, irrevocable finality.

I looked down from the balcony. The church was only sparsely filled. The choir sat in their places in front of the mourners, almost facing me directly. A simple oak casket rested before the altar. It would soon burn along with Tommi. Heikki Peltonen sat in the first row, and the woman in the mourning veil hunched against him was obviously Tommi’s mother. How many tranquilizers had been stuffed into Mrs. Peltonen before the funeral?

All of my suspects were in the group preparing to sing. Pia and Tuulia were on the right edge of the soprano row. Pia, whose eyes were already red, was dressed in an elegant black gown though the fabric looked almost inappropriately fancy for a funeral. Tuulia wore a slim, black sweaterdress that made her hair and face look whiter than normal. Sirkku sat with her head bowed, holding Timo’s hand behind her. Mira was scanning the crowd, and her eyes flashed with obvious hostility when they fell on me.

The men sat in the back row; Riku was barely visible behind the altos, and Antti’s head rose above the others in the back
corner. His black suit trousers were too short, revealing a band of slender shin above his black socks. Antti had pulled his shoulder-length hair back in a ponytail with a black scrunchie.

Hopponen sat at the organ. I saw his hands shaking and found myself fearing for the members of the choir, for Tommi’s mother, for myself. I feared the anguish behind those red eyes, that it would flood out of control, and that the orderly singing would turn to weeping and wailing. I feared that someone would cry to the heavens “Who?” and “Why?”—questions I still did not know how to answer. Maybe Tommi had the easiest time of it. After all, it was over for him.

Hopponen played the first chords of the opening hymn. I had always enjoyed singing, so I picked up a hymnal and joined in. Hymn 613, first and second verses. From the beginning of the first verse, I began to wonder at the choice of song, and the words of the second seemed even more apropos of the situation, perhaps too much so: “Neither magnificence nor majesty, neither youth nor skill may save, when thrown open is the grave. The moment of departure shall come, and all shall meet that reward. But when and how knoweth only the Lord.” I found my voice shaking. It must have been because I hadn’t sung in so long.

After the congregational hymn, it was the choir’s turn to sing. I recognized the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s
Requiem
. Its strains were haunting and cruel, as were the dark, menacing words: “Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus. Huic ergo parce, Deus.” Tears when man rises in his guilt for judgment...Had Tommi been evil? He toyed with people, yes, but evil? Would God, if there was a God, forgive him? I couldn’t take my eyes off the choir. I could pick out Riku’s fluting tenor and Mira’s splendid, dark alto. Maybe the most beautiful thing about her was her voice. The basses thundered the low notes, and the
sopranos climbed higher and higher, their voices never faltering. A light flush appeared on Tuulia’s pale face as she sang.

The prayers and Bible readings washed right past me. The priest, a young man with an appropriately solemn demeanor, directed his words toward Tommi’s parents. I noticed Pia digging a handkerchief out of her purse and remembered that I needed to interview her soon. Sirkku grabbed Timo’s hand again. I still hadn’t been able to come up with a sufficient motive for those two. I could imagine Timo accidentally killing Tommi in a rage if he had been making fun of Sirkku. Timo seemed like the kind of guy who thought it was a man’s duty to retaliate against any insults directed at his woman. No one had ever defended me like that, but I didn’t want that kind of man in my life. On the contrary, I remembered punching a drunken idiot who had shouted that Harri the birdman was a long-haired queer while we were standing in line at a hot dog stand.

But would Timo and Tommi have had any reason to meet secretly at night? What if the letter
T
on the calendar did mean Timo? And what if we found the distilling equipment in one of the love birds’ apartments? The priest stopped talking. Hopponen walked discreetly from the organ to stand in front of the choir, and the men stood to sing. “Grove of Tuoni, grove of night! There thy bed of sand is light, thither my child now I lead...” They had evidently decided to sing the men’s version, because the women simply couldn’t stand to sing it. There were only six men, and Riku and Antti appeared to be alone at the outer edges of the vocal range.

Tommi’s mother began to cry, and a surge of weeping swept like a wave back through the rows of friends and family, drawing the women in the choir along with it. Tuulia didn’t even try to hold back her tears, and I would have liked to go and comfort
her. Pia hid behind her dark, bobbed hair, and a girl I didn’t know blew her nose so loudly that I could hear it all the way up in the gallery. Hopponen led on with a trembling hand, his goatee shaking. Only Mira sat, calm and expressionless, the grief all around her having no effect on her whatsoever. I wondered how much of her placidity was an act. Or had Mira truly hated Tommi so much that she was actually rejoicing over his death? If so, why?

I admired the boys’ self-control. It’s true that society doesn’t give men permission to turn hysterical with grief. But how were they able to sing amid the general weeping, with Tommi’s mother practically howling despite all the sedatives? Riku’s first tenor was light and beautiful. When he sang, his shrill speaking voice turned ethereal, like it was an instrument of the divine. The intermediate voices were a bit rough in places, and the first bass’s cheek twitched dangerously. Antti sang in his astonishingly low voice straight to Tommi’s mother, as though wanting to assure her with his eyes that Aleksis Kivi’s words were indeed true: “Far from hatred, far from strife...” After the song ended, I tasted blood in my mouth. I had bit my sun-chapped lower lip until it cracked.

Fortunately, the funeral homily snapped me back to reality. It made me angry to hear the priest dance around the way Tommi had died. Admittedly, it was a difficult subject since the case had yet to be solved, and it was likely that the murderer was present in the chapel. According to the priest, however, God had, in his infinite wisdom, decided to allow Tommi to “pass from among us.” I hated euphemistic language about death. There was no way the priest would have spoken that way if he had seen Tommi’s body. That was the sort of image that kept a person up at night.

The choir stood again to sing “Drifting on the Tide.” The sopranos’ first words trembled slightly, and Pia looked seriously distressed. This was the song they had been practicing in such a carefree way at the villa. How different it must have felt to them now. “All, all shall fade away,” thundered the basses. “That spring will come again and a new dawn yet will break,” the choir sang optimistically a moment later. “Or have they lied?” came the doubtful basses once again. One thing was certain: spring would never come again for Tommi.

Next came the laying of the wreaths. I fanned my indignation by thinking about all of those beautiful flowers that would bring no joy to the person lying in the casket. Tommi’s mother barely had the strength to stand next to the coffin for a moment, even supported by her husband. The relatives followed, then came Tommi’s coworkers. Tommi’s secretary carried the wreath, and Marja Mäki read a vapid message of sympathy in a confident voice.

Finally Hopponen and the first bass with the twitching cheek lowered the choir’s wreath onto the casket. I noticed that none of Tommi’s friends—Riku, Antti, Tuulia, or even the choir chairman, Timo—had qualified for the job.

As far as I could tell, almost everyone present in the church had taken a turn at the casket, but no flowers had been left by the women or by the man named M mentioned in Tommi’s calendar. Heikki Peltonen had told me that the family wanted a small service, and there hadn’t been an obituary in the paper.

I had probably come to the funeral for nothing.

It had also been pointless to think that the murderer might crack during the funeral. My foul mood worsened as I watched every one of my suspects looking so righteous singing the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy will be done”—did the murderer really think that?
According to Christian ethics, the murderer would get caught. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—God, how I wanted to catch Tommi’s killer! Did I want revenge? Did I want to succeed? Did I want to mete out justice?

But did I have it in me to throw the first stone?

In the early days of my career on the police force, I had involved myself emotionally in every case I investigated. I had felt empathy toward the victim, but I also wanted to understand the criminal. Was I back at that same level of involvement again? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to start projecting my own sense of morality on every case, weighing the blameworthiness of the acts against the proportionality of the punishment. By going from being a person who made arrests to being one who determined the punishments, I hoped to have the opportunity to dispense real justice. A police officer was supposed to arrest the brats who scribbled graffiti on cement office building walls and the stupid college kids who sampled a joint—but a judge could assess the justice of a given punishment. Was I really capable of taking on that responsibility?

Hopponen returned to the organ and began to play Handel’s “Largo.” The funeral party sat in their pews, waiting for the immediate family to leave first. Tommi’s father lifted his wife carefully by the arm. Maisa Peltonen stood on slightly shaky legs and then suddenly began shouting over the organ.

“You monster! You murdered my son, whoever you are! How dare you stand here in a church! How dare you sing at Tommi’s casket! How...” Her voice dissolved into halting sobs, and Tommi’s father turned his wife’s head toward his chest as if to quiet her. Hopponen fumbled through the rest of “Largo” on the organ, while the rest of the party stared uncomfortably at the ceiling or the floor. The choir members looked anywhere
but at each other. Timo was beet red and held Sirkku’s hand tightly. She had shoved her knuckles in her mouth as if to stifle her own cries. Pia had buried her face in a handkerchief. Riku’s face twitched. Only Mira remained calm.

The rest of the mourners only began to leave once Tommi’s parents had exited the church. The memorial was likely to be fraught. The flower-strewn coffin remained in its place at the altar, to be burned in silence.

I tried to slink away without being noticed, but Antti was faster than I was. He ran after me outside and grabbed me painfully by the arm.

“Damn it, you’ve got to do something fast!” Antti hissed at me, his eyes narrowed like a cat preparing to pounce. “Maisa is at the end of her rope. She’s promising to get revenge, to murder us all. She won’t be able to stand this much longer.”

“Well, confess then!” I hissed back, shocked by my own words and at least as angry as he was. Antti let go of my arm and stared at me in horror.

“Listen, you’re on totally the wrong track! If you really suspect me then it’s no wonder nothing’s happening!”

“You could at least be a little more cooperative.”

“So it all comes down to
my
willingness to cooperate?”

The other members of the choir had surrounded us. I recalled the old blindfold game in which one person spins in the middle of the group with her eyes covered and then has to guess who her finger is pointing at. Could I use that technique to reveal the murderer?

“Antti, let’s do a quick run-through before the memorial,” Hopponen said. The clouds had darkened while we were in the church, and a few tentative drops of rain landed on my forehead.

“I’ve told you already that I’m not coming. This was my last time singing with EFSAS. And besides, I’m in the middle of a conversation with Nancy Drew here.”

“Antti. We need you,” Mira said in a commanding voice.

“Come on; let him be.” Tuulia started dragging the rest of them away. A moment later, Antti and I were alone in front of the entrance to the church. Only Mira glanced back at us.

“I’m really not interested in coffee and sweet rolls or reminiscing about Tommi’s childhood,” Antti said to me as though to explain himself. Then he set off down the street, clearly expecting me to follow.

“How did you get it into your head that I killed Tommi?” he asked when I caught up to him.

“That was just a gamble.”

“Have you tried that technique on the others? No results, eh?”

“No, I haven’t. But try to get it through your head that I really
do
want to figure out who the murderer is, and I’ve been doing the best I can. But I’m not some kind of fucking superwoman who just solves murders—snap—like that. I need help, not shouting. I don’t know who’s guilty yet, but I have some ideas. There are all sorts of things we have to check out, but it all takes time. If you don’t trust that I can get the job done, then don’t. But I still have to try to trust myself.”