TH03 - To Steal Her Love Read Free Page B

pulled itself shut. The blue wedge of streetlight on the floor became narrower and narrower, then it disappeared altogether and the lock said ‘click-clack’, and everything was just as it should be.
    Tweety didn’t switch the lights on; he never switched the lights on. He allowed his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness in peace and tried to imagine what position Silkybum was sleeping in. He had an inkling that she might be lying on her front, her hands beneath her head and her legs slightly apart. Perhaps her camisole was on the floor, now nothing but an empty shell, but it would still carry her scent, and perhaps he’d be able to hold it as he came, low and silent, lying along the skirting board like a giant boa constrictor.

Mustikkamaa
    Harjunpää had got a stone in his shoe back on the footpath, and he wondered whether to stop and take it out, but by now it had stopped chafing his foot and he decided to let it be and quickened his step in the hope of maybe getting home sooner, but above all so that he could keep up with the woman in front of him, and to his slight amazement he found that he almost envied her. She was ploughing ahead energetically, amusingly even, in a way that made him think of a bird, a sandpiper or some other quick-footed wader, and he got the nagging feeling that, in comparison, he was like a tractor, an old green Zetor that had trouble getting started.
    The woman talked incessantly, explaining what she had discovered again and again. Maybe it was something about her voice. In one way it was beautiful, like the sound of a woodwind instrument, but too refined, and perhaps it was this that made her seem somehow dishonest – not like the people he normally dealt with. The only person this woman was deceiving was herself, and she had a right to do so if she so wished. Harjunpää hadn’t been listening to her for a while, but mumbled politely every now and then. ‘Yes.’
    On top of that, he hoped that the woman was wrong, that it wasn’t a body after all but a sunken log or a stone – surely he might at least be afforded this much good luck after all the pain, the crying and the crawling about under trains of the previous night. But the main reason for his sullenness was that it was very early on a Sunday (it was ten to six in the morning; he had checked as he got out of the Lada), and his twelve-hournight shift was almost behind him, or rather it was inside him along with the fatigue, and together they weighed him down like a chest filled with lead and the multicoloured glass found at crash sites.
    ‘Or what do you think?’
    ‘Yes, sorry?’
    ‘I said, what do you think?’ the woman repeated and stopped in her tracks, and for a brief moment Harjunpää thought of answering her honestly: he was thinking of the man run over by a freight train in the early hours, and in particular he was thinking of the man’s left hand, which they hadn’t been able to find anywhere, and the furore that would erupt in the media should it be dislodged from the undercarriage somewhere further north: GRUESOME DISCOVERY AT PROVINCIAL TRAIN STATION !
    ‘Pardon? I didn’t hear.’
    ‘I can see that. And to be perfectly frank, I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously – or me, for that matter.’
    ‘I’m sorry… It’s been quite a night. Three deaths, one manslaughter and a man run over by a train. And now this. And on top of that, a woman was raped and my partner had to go out there by himself. He’s only been in the force a few months.’
    ‘Well!’ the woman exclaimed, more to her Great Dane than to Harjunpää. She yanked on the lead and the dog cowered in surprise, and Harjunpää admitted to himself that he didn’t like the woman; he hadn’t liked her from the start, though he couldn’t say why. She was in her fifties and, just like her speech, there was something very prim about her, her old jogging suit notwithstanding. On her wrist she wore an intricately braided golden