The Healer

cover

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Dedication

Title Page

Three Days Before Christmas

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Two Days Before Christmas

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Christmas Eve

Chapter One

Chapter Two

About the Book

It’s two days before Christmas and Helsinki is battling ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded; abandoned vehicles are burning in the streets; the authorities have issued warnings of malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola and the plague. People are fleeing to the far north where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private security firms have undermined the police force. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still willing and able to live in the city.

When Tapani’s wife Johanna, a journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her. Johanna’s disappearance seems to be connected to a story she was researching about a politically motivated serial killer known as ‘The Healer’. Determined to find Johanna, Tapani’s search leads him to uncover secrets from her past: secrets that connect her to the very murders she was investigating …

The Healer is set in desperate times, forcing Tapani to take desperate measures in order to find his beloved. Atmospheric and moving, The Healer is a story of survival, loyalty and determination. Even when the world is coming to an end, love and hope endure.

About the Author

Finnish ANTTI TUOMAINEN (b. 1971) was an award-winning copywriter in the advertising industry before he made his literary debut in 2007 as a suspense author. In 2011, Tuomainen’s third novel, The Healer, was awarded the Clue Award for ‘Best Finnish Crime Novel 2011’. The Finnish press labelled The Healer ‘unputdownable’. With a piercing and evocative style, Tuomainen is one of the first to challenge the Scandinavian crime-genre formula. Antti Tuomainen lives in Helsinki.

LOLA ROGERS is a freelance literary translator living in Seattle. Her published translations include the novels Purge by Sofi Oksanen and True by Riikka Pulkkinen, selected poems of Eeva Liisa Manner for the Female Voices of the North anthology series, and a variety of other works of fiction, essays, poetry, comics, and children’s literature. She is a regular contributor to Books from Finland, Words Without Borders and other publications.

For Anu

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

WHICH WAS WORSE – complete certainty that the worst had happened, or this fear, building up moment by moment? Sudden collapse, or slow, crumbling disintegration?

I lurched with the force of a swerve that shook me out of my wandering thoughts, and looked up.

Yellow-black flames from a wrecked truck lashed the pillar of the pedestrian bridge at the Sörnäinen shore road. The truck looked broken in two, embracing the pillar like a pleading lover. Not one of the passing cars slowed down, let alone stopped – they moved into the outside lane as they flew by, passing the burning wreck at the greatest possible distance.

So did the bus I was sitting in.

I opened my rain-drenched parka, found a packet of tissues in the inside pocket, pulled one loose with numb fingers, and dried my face and hair with it. The tissue was drenched through in a moment. I squeezed it into a ball and shoved it in my pocket. I shook drops of water from the hem of my jacket, then took my phone out of the pocket of my jeans. I tried to call Johanna again.

The number was still unavailable.

The metro tunnel was closed from Sörnäinen to Keilaniemi because of flooding. The train had taken me as far as Kalasatama, where I’d had to wait for the bus for twenty minutes under a sky filled with rain.

The burning truck was left behind as I went back to watching the news on the screen attached to the back of the driver’s bulletproof glass compartment. The southern regions of Spain and Italy had officially been left to their own devices. Bangladesh, sinking into the sea, had erupted in a plague that threatened to spread to the rest of Asia. The dispute between India and China over Himalayan water supplies was driving the two countries to war. Mexican drug cartels had responded to the closing of the US–Mexico border with missile strikes on Los Angeles and San Diego. The forest fires in the Amazon had not been extinguished even by blasting new river channels to surround the blaze.

Ongoing wars or armed conflicts in the European Union: thirteen, mostly in border areas.

Estimated number of climate refugees planet-wide: 650–800 million people.

Pandemic warnings: H3N3, malaria, tuberculosis, ebola, plague.

Light piece at the end: the recently chosen Miss Finland believed that everything would be much better in the spring.

I turned my gaze back to the rain that had been falling for months, a continuous flow of water that had started in September and paused only momentarily since. At least five waterfront neighbourhoods – Jätkäsaari, Kalasatama, Ruoholahti, Herttoniemenranta and Marjaniemi – had been continuously flooded, and many residents had finally given up and abandoned their homes.

Their apartments didn’t stay empty for long. Even damp, mouldy and partially underwater, they were good enough for the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in the country. In the evenings, cooking fires and campfires shone from flooded neighbourhoods where the power was out.

I got off the bus at the railway station. It would have been quicker to walk through Kaisaniemi Park, but I decided to go around it, along Kaivokatu. There weren’t enough police to monitor both the streets and the parks. Walking through the masses of people around the railway station was something always to be avoided. Panicked people were leaving the city and filling jam-packed trains headed north, with all their possessions in their backpacks and suitcases.

Motionless forms lay curled up in sleeping bags under plastic shelters in front of the station. It was impossible to tell whether they were resting in transit or simply lived there. The dazzling glow of tall floodlights mixed with the shimmering layer of exhaust, the streetlights and the strident red, blue and green of glowing advertisements.

The central post office, half destroyed by fire, stood across from the station, a grey-black skeleton. As I passed it, I tried to call Johanna again.

I came to the Sanomatalo building, stood in line for fifteen minutes waiting to go through security, took off my coat, shoes and belt, put them back on, and walked to the reception desk.

I asked the receptionist to ring Johanna’s boss, who for some reason wasn’t answering my calls. I had met him a few times and my guess was that if the call came from within the building he would answer, and when he learned who it was, he’d let me tell him why I had come.

The receptionist was an icy-eyed woman in her thirties who, judging by her short hair and controlled gestures, was a former soldier, now guarding the physical integrity of the country’s last newspaper, her gun still at her side.

She looked me in the eye as she spoke into the air. ‘A man named Tapani Lehtinen … I checked his ID … Yes … One moment.’

She nodded to me, the movement of her head like the blow of an axe. ‘What is your business?’

‘I’m unable to reach my wife, Johanna Lehtinen.’

HALF BY MISTAKE, I had recorded the last phone conversation I’d had with Johanna, and I knew it by heart:

‘I’m going to be working late today,’ she began.

‘How late is late?’

‘Overnight, probably.’

‘Inside or outside work?’

‘I’m already outside. I have a photographer with me. Don’t worry. We’re going to talk to some people. We’ll keep to public places.’

A murmuring sound, the noise of cars, a murmur, a low rumble, and the murmur again.

‘Are you still there?’ she asked.

‘Where would I have gone? I’m at my desk.’

A pause.

‘I’m proud of you,’ Johanna said. ‘The way you keep going.’

‘So do you,’ I said.

‘I guess so,’ she said, suddenly quiet, almost whispering.

‘I love you. Come home in one piece.’

‘Sure,’ she whispered, and her words came quickly now, almost a single chain. ‘See you tomorrow at the latest. I love you.’

A murmur. A crackle. A soft click. Silence.

MANAGING EDITOR LASSI Uutela’s roughly forty-year-old face was covered in blue-grey stubble and his eyes showed an irritation that he lacked the ability, and perhaps even the desire, to hide.

He was standing directly in front of me when the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor. He wore a black shirt and a thin grey jumper, dark jeans and trainers. His arms were crossed over his chest, a position they relinquished with elaborate reluctance as I stepped towards him.

Lassi Uutela’s least appealing characteristics – his envy of more accomplished journalists, his tendency to avoid confrontation, his habit of holding grudges, his need to always be right – were all familiar to me from what Johanna had told me. Johanna and Lassi’s views of the job of a reporter and the direction of the paper had been clashing more and more often. The ripples from these clashes had come ashore even at home.

We shook hands for a long time and introduced ourselves even though we knew who we were. For a fleeting moment it felt like I was performing in a bad play. As soon as he got his hand free, Lassi turned and opened the door into the hallway with a brush of his fingertips. I followed him as he kicked his feet angrily in front of him, as if dissatisfied with their progress. We came to the end of a long hallway where there was a corner office a few metres square.

Lassi sat down at his desk in a black, high-backed chair and gestured towards the room’s only other seat, a sort of white plastic cup.

‘I thought Johanna was working at home today,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘To tell you the truth, I was hoping to find her here.’

Now it was his turn to shake his head. The gesture was impatient and brief. ‘The last time I saw Johanna was at yesterday’s all-staff meeting, around six o’clock. We went through the jobs in progress as usual, then everybody went their separate ways.’

‘I spoke with Johanna yesterday evening at about nine o’clock.’

‘Where was she?’ he asked indifferently.

‘Outside somewhere,’ I said, and then after a pause, more quietly, ‘I didn’t think to ask where.’

‘So you haven’t heard from her for a whole day?’

I nodded, watching him. His posture, the expression on his face and the pauses deployed between his words revealed what he was really thinking – that I was wasting his time.

‘What?’ I asked, as if I didn’t notice or didn’t understand his body language.

‘I was just wondering,’ he said, ‘whether this has ever happened before.’

‘No. Why?’

He puckered up his lower lip and lifted his eyebrows – it looked like each one weighed a ton, as if he expected a reward for raising them.

‘No reason. It’s just that these days… all kinds of things can happen.’

‘Not to us,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story, but these things don’t happen to us.’

‘Of course not,’ Lassi said, in a tone somewhat lacking in conviction. He didn’t even bother looking me in the eye. ‘Of course not.’

‘What story was she working on?’

He didn’t answer right away, just weighed his pen in his hand, perhaps weighing something in his mind as well.

‘What was it about?’ I asked again, seeing that he wasn’t going to begin on his own.

‘It’s probably stupid of me to share this information with you, but then it was a stupid article,’ he said, leaning his elbows on the desk and looking at me obliquely, as if to gauge my reaction.

‘I understand,’ I said, and waited.

‘It’s about the Healer.’

I may have flinched. Johanna had told me about the Healer.

She’d received her first email from him right after the family in Tapiola was murdered. Someone who called himself the Healer had taken responsibility for the crime. He said he did it on behalf of ordinary people, to avenge them, said he was the last voice of truth in a world headed towards destruction, a healer for a sick planet. That’s why he murdered the CEO of a manufacturing company and his family. And that’s why he would continue to murder whoever he claimed had contributed to the acceleration of climate change. Johanna had notified the police. They investigated, did what they could. There were now nine executives and politicians who’d been killed, along with their families.

I sighed. Lassi shrugged and looked satisfied with my reaction.

‘I told her it wouldn’t lead anywhere,’ he said, and I couldn’t help noticing a slightly triumphant tone in his voice. ‘I told her she wouldn’t find out any more than the police had. And our rapidly shrinking readership doesn’t want to hear about it. It’s just depressing. They already know that everything’s going to hell in a hand basket.’

I looked out into the darkness over Töölö Bay. I knew there were buildings out there, but I couldn’t see them.

‘Had Johanna already written the article?’ I asked when we’d had sufficient time to listen to ourselves and the building breathing.

Lassi leaned back in his chair, put his head against the headrest and looked at me through half-opened eyes, as if I were not on the other side of his narrow desk but far off on the horizon.

‘Why do you ask?’ he said.

‘Johanna and I always keep in touch with each other,’ I explained. It occurred to me that when we repeat things, it isn’t always for the purpose of convincing other people. ‘I don’t mean constantly. But if nothing else we at least send each other a text message or an email every few hours. Even if we don’t really have anything to tell each other. It’s usually just a couple of words. Something funny, or sometimes something a little affectionate. It’s a habit with us.’

This last sentence was purposely emphatic. Lassi listened to me with his head thrown back, expressionless.

‘Now I haven’t heard from her for twenty-four hours,’ I continued, and realised I was directing my words to my own reflection in the window. ‘This is the longest time in all the ten years we’ve been together that we haven’t been in touch with each other.’

I waited another moment before I said something, not caring a bit how it sounded.

‘I’m sure that something has happened to her.’

‘Something has happened to her?’ he said, then paused in a way that was becoming familiar. There could be only one purpose for these pauses: to undercut me, to make what I said sound stupid and pointless.

‘Yes,’ I said dryly.

Lassi didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he leaned forward, paused, and said, ‘Let’s assume you’re right. What do you intend to do?’

I didn’t have to pretend to think about it. I immediately said, ‘There’s no point in reporting her disappearance to the police. All they can do is enter it in their records. Disappearance number five thousand and twenty-one.’

‘True,’ Lassi agreed. ‘And twenty-four hours isn’t a terribly long time, either.’

I raised my arm as if to fend off this statement physically, as well as mentally. ‘As I said, we always stay in touch. For us, twenty-four hours is a long time.’

Lassi didn’t need to dig very deep to find his irritation. His voice rose, and at the same time a colder rigidity crept into it. ‘We have reporters that are in the field for a week at a time. Then they come back with the story. That’s the way it works.’

‘Has Johanna ever been in the field for a week without contacting you?’

Lassi kept his eyes on me, drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, puckered his lips. ‘I admit, she hasn’t.’

‘It’s just not like her,’ I said.

Lassi twisted in his chair and spoke rapidly, as if he wanted to hurry up and make sure he was right: ‘Tapani, we’re trying to put together a newspaper here. There’s basically no advertising money, and our rule of thumb is that nobody’s interested in anything. Except of course sex and porn, and scandals and revelations connected with sex and porn. We sold more papers yesterday than we have in a long time. And I assure you we didn’t do it with any in-depth reports about the thousands of missing warheads or investigative articles on how much drinking water we have left. Which by the way is about half an hour’s worth, from what I can tell. No, our lead story was about a certain singer’s bestiality video. That’s what the people want. That’s what they pay for.’

He took a breath and continued in a voice that was even more tense and impatient than before, if that was possible. ‘Then I’ve got reporters like, for instance, Johanna, who want to tell the people the truth. And I’m always asking them, what fucking truth? And they never have a good answer. All they say is that people should know. And I ask, but do they want to know? And more importantly, do they want to pay to know?’

When I was sure he had finished, I said, ‘So you tell them about a no-talent singer and her horse.’

He looked at me again, from someplace far away where clueless idiots like me aren’t allowed to go. ‘We’re trying to stay alive,’ he said laconically.

We sat silently for a moment. Then he opened his mouth again: ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Do you still write your poetry?’

I had expected this. He couldn’t resist needling me. The question had the seed of the next question in it. It was meant to indicate that I was on the wrong track when it came to Johanna, just like I was when it came to everything else. So what. I decided to give him a chance to continue in the vein he’d chosen. I answered honestly.

‘Yes.’

‘When was the last time you were published?’

Once again, I didn’t need to think about my answer. ‘Four years ago,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything more, just looked at me with red-rimmed, satisfied eyes as if he’d just proven some theory of his to be correct. I didn’t want to talk about it any more. It would have been a waste of time.

‘Where does Johanna sit?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘I want to see her work station.’

‘Normally I wouldn’t allow it,’ Lassi said, looking like his last bit of interest in the whole matter had just evaporated. He glanced nonchalantly past me through the glass wall at the office full of cubicles. ‘But I guess there’s not much we do normally any more, and the office is empty, so go ahead.’

I got up and thanked him, but he’d already turned towards his monitor and become absorbed in his typing, like he’d been wishing he was somewhere else the whole time.

Johanna’s work station was on the right side of the large, open office. A picture of me led me to it. Something lurched inside me when I saw the old snapshot and imagined Johanna looking at it. Could she see the same difference in my eyes that I saw?

In spite of the large stacks of paper, her desk was well-organised. Her laptop lay closed in the middle of the table. I sat down and looked around. There were a dozen or more work stations, which they called ‘clovers’, in the open office space, with four desks at each station. Johanna’s desk was on the window side and had a direct view into Lassi’s office. Or rather, the upper section of his office – cardboard was stacked against the lower half of the glass walls. The view from the window wasn’t much to look at. The Kiasma art museum with its frequently patched copper roof was like a gigantic shipwreck in the rain – black, tattered, run aground.

The top of the desk was cool to the touch but quickly grew damp under my hand. I glanced towards Lassi Uutela’s office and then looked around. The place was deserted. I slid Johanna’s computer into my bag.

There were dozens of sticky-notes on the desk. Some of them simply had a phone number or a name and address; a few were complete notes written in Johanna’s precise, delicate hand.

I looked through them one by one. There was one in the most recent batch that caught my attention: ‘H – West–East/ North–South’, then two lists of neighbourhoods – ‘Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari’ and ‘Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Kluuvi, Punavuori’ – with dates next to them.

‘H’ must mean the Healer. I shoved the note in my pocket.

Next I went through the piles of papers. Most of them were pieces Johanna had already written: articles about the alleged closing of Russia’s nuclear power plants, the dwindling Finnish tax base, the collapse in food quality.

One pile was entirely about the Healer. It included printed copies of all his emails. Johanna had written her own notes on the printouts, so many on some that they nearly obscured the original text. I crammed the whole stack into my bag without reading them, got up and stood looking at the abandoned desk. It was like any other desk, impersonal and indistinguishable from a million others. Still, I hoped it would tell me something, reveal what had happened. I waited a moment, but the desk was still just a desk.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Johanna had sat here.

And she would still be sitting here, if something hadn’t happened to her.

I couldn’t explain why I was so sure of it. It was as hard to explain as the connection between us. I knew that Johanna would call me, if only she could.

I took a step away from the desk, unable at first to take my eyes off her papers, her handwriting, the little objects on the table. Then I remembered something.

I went back to the door of Lassi Uutela’s office. He took no notice of me, so I knocked on the door frame. The plastic cracked against the back of my hand. I was surprised at the loud, hollow sound it made. Lassi stopped his hurried typing, left his hands waiting in the air as he turned his head. The irritation in his red-rimmed eyes didn’t seem to have diminished.

I asked which photographer had been on the job with Johanna, although I had already guessed who it was.

‘Gromov,’ Lassi growled.

I knew him, of course. I’d even met him. Tall, dark and handsome. Something of a ladies’ man, according to Johanna, obsessive when it came to his work, and apparently in everything else as well. Johanna respected Gromov’s skill at his job and liked working with him. They had spent a lot of time together on jobs in Finland and abroad. If anyone had any information about Johanna, it would be him.

I asked Lassi if he’d seen Gromov. He understood immediately what I meant. He picked up his telephone, leaned back and aimed his gaze at the ceiling, either towards the air-conditioner duct or towards heaven.

‘This world’s a fucking mess,’ he said quietly.

ON THE WAY home Lassi’s questions about my writing rose up in my mind again. I hadn’t told him what I was thinking. I didn’t want to. Lassi wasn’t a person you confided in or trusted any more than you had to. But what would I have said, what reason would I have given for keeping on at something that had no future? I could have told him the truth.

To keep writing was to keep living. And I didn’t keep living or writing to find readers. People were trying to survive from one day to the next, and poetry didn’t have much to do with it. My reasons for writing were completely selfish.

Writing gave my days a shape, a routine. The words, the sentences, the short lines, gave my life order, which was disappearing all around me. Writing meant that the fragile thread between yesterday, today and tomorrow remained unbroken.

I tried to read Johanna’s papers on the way home, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything because of the clatter of beer cans and other trash rolling across the floor of the bus, thrown there by drunken teenagers. They were no real danger to the other passengers, but they were nevertheless annoying. The night routes were another matter, especially the ones without security guards.

I got off the bus at the Herttoniemi metro station. I gave a wide berth to a gang of drunken skinheads – a dozen bald scalps that shone with rain and tattoos – avoided the persistent beggars patrolling in front of the shops, and headed towards home. There was a break in the rain and the strong, gusting wind couldn’t decide which direction to blow. It lunged here and there, grabbing onto everything with its strong hands, including the powerful security lights on the walls of the buildings, which made it look as if the houses themselves were swaying in the evening darkness. I walked briskly past the nursery school that had first been abandoned by children, then scrawled on by random passers-by, and finally set on fire. The church at the other side of the junction had an emergency shelter for the homeless and it looked like it was full – the previously bright vestibule was half dim with people. A few minutes later I was turning onto the path to our apartment building.

The roof of the building opposite had been torn off in an autumn storm and still hadn’t been repaired, and the flats on the top floor were dark. Soon we would be facing the same thing, like people in a thousand other buildings. They weren’t designed for continuous high winds and rain for half the year, and by the time people realised that the wind and rain were here to stay it was too late. Besides, no one had the money or the interest to keep up a building where power and water outages had already made the flats unpleasant and would no doubt eventually make them uninhabitable.

The lock on the street door recognised my card and the door opened. When the power was out we used the old cut key. Keys like that should have been unnecessary, should have been history, but like many other objects and ideas once considered relics, they managed to do what the newer ones couldn’t: they worked.

I tried the lights in the stairwell, but the touch pad was out of order again. I climbed to the second storey in the dark, using the railings as a guide, came to our door, opened both safety locks and the ordinary lock, turned off the alarm, and, instinctively, breathed in.

The smell of the place had everything in it: morning coffee, a hurried spritz of perfume, the pine soap from washing the rugs the summer before, the long Christmas holidays, the armchair we bought together, every night spent with the person you love. It was all there in that smell, and it was all connected in my mind, although the place had been aired out a thousand times. The smell was so familiar that I was just about to announce that I was home, automatically. But there was no one there to hear me.

I carried my bag into the kitchen, took out the papers and the laptop and put them on the table. I warmed up the vegetable casserole Johanna had made over the weekend and sat down to eat. Somewhere, a couple of floors up, lived some devoted music-lovers. The beat from their flat was so low, steady and repetitive that it was easy to believe it would carry on for ever – nothing short of massive intervention would ever stop its progress.

Everything I saw on the table and tasted in my mouth and thought in my head confirmed my fear that something bad had happened. An outsized lump rose in my throat and made it difficult to swallow, and I felt a squeezing around my chest and abdomen that suddenly forced me to concentrate entirely on breathing.

I pushed my plate aside and turned on Johanna’s computer. The hum of the machine and the glow of the screen filled the kitchen. The very first thing I saw was the desktop image: Johanna and I on our honeymoon ten years ago.

More swallowing.

The two of us in the foreground, younger – in many ways. Above us an almost palpably blue southern European sky, behind us Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, beside us a patch of the uneven, ancient wall of a house and the gilded sign of a riverside café, half illegible from the dazzle of sunlight.

I looked at Johanna’s laughing eyes gazing straight ahead – reflecting green as well as blue in the bright light of April – her slightly wide mouth, her even, white teeth, the very beginnings of tiny wrinkles, and the short, curly hair that bordered her face like spring petals.

I opened the folders on the computer desktop.

In the folder marked ‘New’ I found a subfolder, ‘H’. I realised I had guessed correctly: H was for Healer. I went through the documents. Most of them were Johanna’s text files; some were news videos, links and articles from other papers. The most recent text file was from yesterday. I clicked it open.

The piece was nearly finished. Johanna would certainly be using most of it in her final article. As soon as she writes it, I reminded myself.

The piece began with a description of the multiple murder in Tapiola. A family of five had been killed in the early morning hours and someone using the pseudonym the Healer had announced himself as the perpetrator. According to the police investigation, the father of the family was the last to die: the CEO of a large food company and an advocate for the meat-processing industry, he’d had to look on, with his hands and feet tied and his mouth taped, as his wife and three small children were each cold-bloodedly executed with a gunshot to the head. He was murdered last, with a single bullet to the centre of his forehead.

Johanna had interviewed the police investigator, the interior minister and a representative of a private security company. The piece ended with an extended plea from Johanna, directed as much at the police and the public as it was at the Healer himself.

This