Jarkko Sipila - Darling

“I think I’ll go for a run tonight,” Takamäki said.

Joutsamo said she was going to bed early.

* * *

Nea Lind lay on her taupe sofa with her feet on the coffee table. She was comfortable in her gray sweatpants. Her forty-inch flat-screen TV was tuned to CNN news, but she wasn’t paying attention. In her hand she held a tall-stemmed glass filled with wine she had brought back from Rome.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Jorma Korpivaara. It wasn’t the past that bothered her, but the fact that he had picked her as his attorney and then acted the way he did. Of course she’d heard the stories of how oppressive prison walls can be

Nea’s gaze wandered around the living room until her eyes focused on a picture on the light-blue wall. The colors in the picture were calm, maybe even dull. It revealed an organized chaos, just like the apartment, she thought, as her gaze shifted to the plates scattered on the walnut coffee table.

Her packed suitcase still waited in the entry hall. She had taken a taxi from the airport to her office and then gone to the police station before coming home. She had piles of laundry to do.

Lind lived alone. She’d dated and lived with an engineer for a while, but she didn’t like the way he wanted her to act as his doting mother and she left him.

Thinking about Korpivaara, she wondered how his memory could come and go like that. It was possible, she thought, but she couldn’t dismiss the fact that he might have faked the initial memory loss. Something seemed amiss. Didn’t Korpivaara understand that she was on his side, trying to help him?

Lind took a sip of the smooth wine and thought about their meeting in the interrogation room. She was waiting there when Korpivaara was brought in. They greeted each other, and Korpivaara recognized her immediately. Then he said life had treated them differently. It was true.

This was perfectly normal, she thought, but suddenly realized that she had no idea of what normal was for a murder suspect.

When Lind asked Korpivaara why he had picked her, he said his finger simply landed on her name. Was it as simple as that? Perhaps. Lind couldn’t say. She knew he’d been drunk, so it was probably just a quick thought. Picking someone he knew was a safe choice. That’s probably all it was.

“What’s your take on it?” she had asked. Somehow the question cut him to the core, and Lind tried to figure out why.

“What’s your take on it?”

To Lind it seemed like a neutral question that addressed the suspect’s angle on the case.

“Shit,” she said when it dawned on her. The question was neutral from the interrogator’s point of view, but not the suspect’s. The police had probably pressured Korpivaara, as was their custom, and now the attorney, who was supposed to be the guardian angel, showed up with the same attitude.

Lind cursed again. It made sense that Korpivaara, who was suffering from memory problems, would’ve believed Joutsamo’s account. He perceived that his attorney was only asking for his version of it, as if she assumed the suspect was lying, just like the police did.

Korpivaara’s confession wasn’t the result of the police pressuring him; she was the one to blame. This was the second time she was about to ruin Jorma Korpivaara’s life. Lind thought it was possible that Korpivaara was the killer, but she wanted to see the evidence, not just hear his confession. As his defense attorney, she needed to do her job perfectly.

* * *

Takamäki was reading a tabloid he had grabbed at the station. He sat at the dining room table with a towel around his waist. His dark hair was wet from the shower, and a few drops ran down his back. As he had promised Joutsamo, he’d gone for a five-mile run before he hopped in the sauna.

The paper had a story about how petty thieves were becoming bolder and more insolent since unpaid fines could no longer be converted into jail time. When a pickpocket was caught red-handed and given a fine, they could tear up the ticket and laugh about it to boot.

In Takamäki’s opinion, the change in the policy wasn’t due to the naïveté of the lawmakers, but rather to the former attorney general’s view that the poor shouldn’t be punished for being poor. Sending someone to jail for unpaid fines wasn’t punishing them for being poor, but for the original crime, like theft, Takamäki thought. But now, the deterrent to petty crime had been removed.

Another article in the paper was about a homicide by an outpatient in a Kuopio mental health hospital. A thirty-four-year-old man had stabbed his fifty-seven-year-old mother. Takamäki lamented that this was yet another example of how sending the mental health patient home with a bottle of pills didn’t work. He thought patients should stay in regular contact with their doctors, and someone-other than the police-should ensure that they stay clean. He wondered if the Salvation Army or perhaps the Red Cross could do something for local communities besides just chasing donations.

These were both examples of how accountants were increasingly at the helm. It was cost effective, at least on paper, to reduce the number of people incarcerated for unpaid fines or number of patients in mental health hospitals. The daily cost of an inmate had become astronomical at two hundred euros.

In reality, the savings was questionable as eighty percent of the expenses were fixed, including building operating costs and staff salaries. Incarcerating a hundred fewer prisoners didn’t actually save all that much in cash-even if on paper it was twenty thousand euros per day.

The continual attempts to save costs meant that more prisoners-and more hardened criminals-were getting transferred to low-security prisons, where it was easy for them to pursue their criminal ventures before they were even released.

In actuality, a first-time offender ended up serving only five years of a ten-year sentence, and of that the last third was usually in a minimum-security facility. The actual time inside a proper prison ended up being three and a half years rather than ten. Prison math was tough-for the victim.

And it became even tougher if the criminal, say, killed again after being clean for three years. The record was wiped clean after three years, and the killer was once again treated as a first-time offender. The rights of crime victims, and the safety of citizens at large, always took second place to offenders’ rights.

FRIDAY, 11:00 A.M.

DAGMAR STREET, HELSINKI

The elderly lady never stopped talking for even a second while Lind helped her with her fur coat. Mrs. Harju had come to her ten o’clock appointment, as agreed, to draw up her will. This was her third appointment, even though Lind could usually write up a simple will while the client waited.

Lind’s neat and conservative office was totally different from her modern, “organized chaos” apartment. The furniture looked majestic. While picking the set, she had wondered if she was trying to compensate for being female. She decided the ambience of the office was more important than her personal taste. Being an attorney required being trusted, and the furniture needed to be dignified.

She was renting the Dagmar Street office space. Having two rooms gave her the option of one day hiring someone else to work there, too. But she wasn’t ready for that yet.

The elderly lady was still hesitating about something, so Lind had set up another appointment for her. Mrs. Harju had assured her it had nothing to do with the fact that Lind was female. Her previous attorney had been a skinny man who, according to Mrs. Harju, was only after her money. Ms. Lind, however, seemed very trustworthy.