Crime Novel by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911420729
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2017-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

At the edge of the report, Immonen had penciled in: “A sad case. Ångström at fault.” Vehmas underlined the words. The shelves of bookstores and libraries were groaning with flower-covered guides to happiness and how one could achieve it, but if you asked Vehmas, happiness was getting Ångström behind bars.

* * *

Vehmas eyed the topmost sheets of the report one more time, then lowered the papers to the floor and closed his eyes. He was seeking that liminal space between sleep and waking, where the mind filters the wisdom out of all the gobbledy-gook that the consciousness has taken in.

But no wisdom appeared. Even that slight lead that he had rejoiced in on the night train seemed to disappear like the puddle shimmering at the end of the highway on a hot day.

Vehmas remembered the great detectives and their superhuman nose for hunches: Sherlock Holmes, who could deduce from a single splotch of mud the terrain that the criminal had crossed, and Columbo, who revealed his suspects by asking “just one more thing.” Compared to these masters, he was slow to the point of hopelessness. There was supposedly plenty of understanding in the world, the latest advances in science were being announced every week, but when he needed this understanding, it remained beyond his grasp. The blame most definitely lay with Ångström as well: all criminal investigators exaggerate their most difficult cases, but Vehmas was prepared to swear, with his hand on a copy of Cool Crimes, that Ångström was the most perplexing mystery in the entire criminal history of the Nordic countries. In stories, detectives might spy an ocean in a droplet and identify a culprit solely by stepping closer and stepping back, but Vehmas was positive that after spending a couple of weeks at Ångström’s mercy, even Holmes would be reduced to smoking his opium pipe in the back room, and Columbo would be grousing to a bartender somewhere at the more squalid end of Sunset Boulevard.

Vehmas yawned. He missed the time when crooks still understood what they were about: breaking into convenience stores, busting open night deposits with crowbars. Concrete action seemed to have vanished from the world. Those few times when you happened to run across old-fashioned reality, it made you stop and stare: a utility pole standing in the middle of a traffic median, a cable box bolted to its side. There it was, perfect in its realness, until the lights changed again and you had to drive back into this bizarre world.

Vehmas decided to clean his apartment. He stood up and got to work and put some elbow grease into it, cleaning as if elbow grease had been the defining principle of his entire life. When he was done, he aired the place out and let the freezing air flow in. As he sat there in the cool cleanness, it occurred to him for the first time to think about what Ångström didn’t do: Ångström didn’t kill. He took people’s lives away

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