Crime Novel

By Petri Tamminen

 

A mysterious criminal upends lives across Helsinki through a string of deviously absurd pranks in this Finnish comic noir novella.

The winter dark of Helsinki is even more chilling thanks to Hermann Ångström, who subjects his unsuspecting victims to a series of unbearable embarrassments. Ångström leaves a young bride at the altar, disguises himself as a doctor and delivers false medical reports, sends a government official into a downward spiral of depression—it’s a veritable plague of shame.

As Ångström’s methods grow ever more cunning, his true identity remains as mysterious as his motive. The case is assigned to Commissioner Vehmas, a widower who believes that the future is an illness and that police work is folk poetry. And though he’s seen it all, even Vehmas can’t seem to track down Ångström. Until serendipity steps in.

At once suspenseful and blackly comic, Crime Novel is a playful twist on Nordic crime fiction from one of Finland’s greats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911420729

Book preview

Crime Novel

Petri Tamminen

Translated by

Kristian London

CaneloFrisch and Co

October

Inspector Vehmas was sitting in the canteen, eating summer soup and gazing at the autumn bluster. Somewhere out there lurked Hermann Ångström, AKA the Malmi Mortifier, the Hämeenlinna Humiliator. Trains slid past in the chasm of the rail-yard, human figures pushed against their fates, and in the din of the canteen the clerks from licensing enjoyed their daily bread. Life was a gift to be lived, and while folks fretted about all kinds of things, usually they fretted about the things you would least expect.

Vehmas walked over and dumped his dishes into the tubs, each into its own, like a bored child clattering shapes through the matching holes of a box. In the stairwell he fished a bar of mint-flavored licorice from his pocket and bounded down to the third floor. The licorice in his mouth made him feel boyish enough to shut the door and browse through the latest reports.

After the unpleasant events of early September, Ångström had paid a call to Puu-Vallila and tormented two small-business owners. There was another sighting in Konala, where an elderly building manager had been the stooge. In Vuosaari, Ångström had set up shop in a closed harbormaster’s office, humiliating a longshoreman and three people who were out of work. And in October, the Hämeenlinna Humiliator had retreated to the town where his career had taken off, or so presumed Vehmas’s sources in the field.

Vehmas crumpled up the black-and-yellow wrapper with his fist and tossed it in the bin. A hint of stickiness remained on the ball of his thumb. For Vehmas, the balls of his thumbs were private areas; he was in the habit of pressing his together at night, when darkness fell and loneliness descended.

On the map on the wall, the pale green lands of metropolitan Helsinki were criss-crossed by a grid of red lines. Vehmas picked three pins from the box, walked over, and stuck them in the squares marking Vallila, Konala, and Vuosaari. Maps lull us into believing that things are a certain way, exist in a certain place.

Vehmas stared at the pins and sighed: Back to the bunny slope.

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The coziest nook of Helsinki police headquarters is located in the far corner of the library. Behind the shelves, surrounded by neighborhood patrol trading-cards and boxes of reflectors marked KEEPING AN EYE ON YOU, awaits a lone armchair from which time has worn all traces of design. It was in this chair that Vehmas now sat, leafing through the Ångström file.

The first case was a year old: a classic Casanova con, but the target was a poor single mother from Hämeenlinna. The autumn darkness, the promise of happiness, a plastic bag’s worth of video rental romance, and before you knew it an engagement and a November wedding. Then that desolate final scene at the medieval stone church in Hattula. The echoing, barrel-organ strains of the wedding march. The forced lightness of the maid of honor’s footsteps. The gloom of the armory. The bride’s mascara-stained cheeks and contorted mouth repeating the two sentences over and over, as if the explanation lay somehow hidden within: All I asked was, ‘Should we go in from the right or the left?’ And he was like, ‘Why don’t you set the goddamn pace too, while you’re at it.’

A nasty case, but not a crime. As far was the law was concerned, you didn’t need a permit to jilt your bride at the altar. It’s unlikely that the incident would have come to the police’s attention at all, if Immonen hadn’t pulled it up. Yet Vehmas considered its discovery to be a breakthrough: Ångström’s thesis project, which would reveal clues that the criminal had since learned to cover up. The parties involved, from the sexton to the clerk at the video rental, were interviewed. They had a collection of cassettes full of the bride-to-be’s testimony alone. But Vehmas hadn’t heard a single sentence that jolted him awake in the middle of the night. All it amounted to was a cardboard box full of conversation, sighs of he seemed like a normal guy and life is so unpredictable, and an endless number of characterizations of Ångström’s appearance that would match every man at police headquarters, and a few of the women, too.

The only glimmer that seemed promising was the bride’s description of Ångström’s final glance:

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Then at the door he turned, and I thought, you know, he’s just kidding. But when I realized that no, he’s actually going, boy, did he have a strange look on his face.

What do you mean?

Like, excited. It wasn’t like he was angry or felt bad about it, like I’m sorry or anything. More like he was getting a kick out of it. And I’m just sitting there like… in this big frilly dress… with my daughter, who was my maid of honor, going, what’s going on Mom, what’s going on, Mom, what’s going on, Mom, asking me over and over… (crying)

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Vehmas pictured Ångström’s gloating expression and tried to mimic it. After he felt like he had found it, he frowned it away. This humiliation on the church steps must have been Ångström’s goal, and similar humiliations were what he would continue to aim for, although later he learned to profit from them and get his kicks more quickly.

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The first crime reports came from the lab swindles at the Tikkurila and Munkkivuori health centers a couple of weeks after the wedding. The scenario was always the same: a falsified diagnosis late in the afternoon, when the health centers were backed up and patients were streaming in and out.

The victims had shaky recollections of their respective moments of doom. One had noted the male nurse’s general surliness. Another was perplexed by his indifference; and the one for whom Ångström had forged a positive AIDS result remembered the vengeful jubilation on the nurse’s face. In terms of the investigation, the most interesting fact was that Ångström appeared to have taken the same pleasure in a fifteen-year-old’s trumped-up angina as he did in the acute arrhythmia concocted for a patient in his fifties.

The false diagnoses were followed by construction-industry cons, visits to single-family homes and building co-ops across the suburban backwoods of Espoo and Vantaa. Introducing himself as a building inspector, Ångström put his victims at ease with an air of engaged professionalism, which was evidently something seriously lacking in the field. The homeowners quivered with joy as Ångström thoroughly investigated a leaking roof or seepage in the foundation, mechanical problems that would later grant him the power to hound average people to the brink of suicide.

Notebook and moisture gauge in hand, Ångström would examine the target, eyeballing it expertly. As the finale to his inspection, he would invite the owner to the kitchen table, hold an agonizing artistic pause, look around once more, and then state that the house’s problems were no cause for concern, that the building was in excellent shape for its age; at most it would need certain minor repairs, for which he would draw up a separate plan. One of the victims remembered having hugged Ångström.

By now the frauds involved money, and substantial amounts of it, too. But Ångström wouldn’t achieve his real goal until he returned to present the schedule of repairs, slapped fresh analyses down on the table, and apologized for his mistake: the house was a tear-down after all. Following his announcement, Ångström would gaze at the victim, as one of them later recalled, with a peculiar enthusiasm.

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Vehmas set down the folder and scanned the book-spines on the library shelves. The nearest surface was filled by a long streak of red: Cool Cases—Intriguing Crimes from Nordic Climes. The sight had surprised him as a rookie officer. Vehmas remembered wondering whether his colleagues also liked crime stories with thrilling twists and turns, and practiced their police work in hopes of coming across such adventures. Later, on long, lonely evenings, when he read the books, he found them to be a kind of folk poetry. Police work was folk poetry.

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Ångström continued to strike. Not long after the hospital attack, he gave employment classes, promising nonexistent jobs to people who had been laid off, teaching them how to jazz up their CVs.

One of those lured into the trap described a job interview and the subsequent encounter with Ångström:

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Well, I spiced it up a little, and wouldn’t you know it, these guys actually conducted the interview in German. Zum byeschpiel and auf weederzayn, you know. So afterwards, this Pelkonen or whatever you guys call him, he pulls up and yells, ‘Do you want a ride? Don’t worry, there are other fish in the sea.’ Bite me! And then a really low blow: ‘We work with a lot of partners in Germany.’ Fucking German partners, I’m a goddamn forklift driver. You work your butt off for thirty years and end up with a boot-print on your ass, and then you have this guy hollering out the window of his Opel, ‘Hey, you dropped your glove, be careful now, you don’t want to lose your glove.’ Like he’s talking to some kid. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find you something.’ Bite me!

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The employment con reports were followed by a yellow section divider. Like everyone who