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!Darkness
SHE WAS LATE home, another day of meetings and conferences that had left only a few hours to do her actual job. Unwilling, and frankly too tired, to cook, she’d picked up a pizza from the takeaway at the end of the street. It wasn’t exactly ideal – she was conscious that her life was starting to fill up with junk food of late – but all she wanted was to have something to eat, a long hot shower, a drink, and go to bed.
Going up to the sixth floor of her block, the smell of the hot pizza filled the lift. Someone would complain about it at the next residents’ meeting, but screw them.
Juggling the pizza box and her bag and her keys, she managed to unlock the door of her flat and step inside. She flicked the light switch, and for a fraction of a second the light in the hallway blinked on before going out again. She sighed, and there were some moments of low comedy while she transferred everything from hand to hand until she was able to take her phone out and switch it on.
By the light of the screen, she made her way into the kitchen and put the pizza and her bag on the worktop. She tried the kitchen light switch, but nothing happened. The clocks on the microwave and the cooker were blank. Same in the living room; the standby lights on the entertainment centre.
In fact, everything was dark, she realised. There was no light coming in from the street outside. Krista went over to the window, lifted the net curtain aside, and looked out. The streetlights had gone out, and there were no lights in any of the buildings she could see. The only light, in fact, was coming from the cars down in the street which had just pulled to a stop, their drivers getting out and exchanging words with each other, trying to work out what had happened.
Darkness in Tallinn, she thought. One of her favourite films. She lifted her phone and started to dial the office, but she’d only entered a couple of numbers when it buzzed and the screen lit up with Markus’s caller ID. She hit answer and lifted the phone to her ear, but there was nothing, just a strange sense of dead air.
She looked at the phone for a moment, as if that would make it start working again. Then she looked down into the street again. Very distantly, she could hear police sirens.
[[Next|Section 2]]Story by Dave HutchinsonCopyright 2018
[[Front Cover|https://www.silenceintallinn.com]]!Winter
It wasn’t the end of January yet, and already Christmas felt a long, long time ago. Conscious that this would be her first Christmas without her father – her first Christmas without any family – Markus had booked them a room in a little boutique hotel in Helsinki and they’d spent the holiday there. Krista’s heart hadn’t been in it, though. She appreciated the thought – Markus was one of the kindest people she had ever met – but when he’d sprung the trip on her she hadn’t been able to tell him that she would rather have spent this Christmas alone with her thoughts, letting the memories settle before going on to make new ones. But she’d sensed that this trip was more important for him, that he desperately thought he needed to do something for her, so she’d gone along with it, even though it wasn’t necessary.
She’d taken a few days’ leave for the trip, even though she was never properly on leave these days, and had tried to put everything – work, her father, all the external stuff – out of her mind for Markus’s sake. He too, she knew, was mourning the old man.
So here she was, hitting the ground running on a bitterly cold Tuesday morning, the entire country under fifteen centimetres of snow and capped by sallow, boiling, yellow-grey cloud. On the tram into town, everyone took up two times as much space because of all the warm clothing they were wearing. Krista strap-hung and watched the morning news on her phone. Three months on, the Blackout was no longer the top item – that space was occupied by some boyband announcing they’d split up – but it was bubbling under at number two, the investigation into the forty-minute-long interruption of Estonia’s infrastructure still grinding along, angry questions and accusations flung across the Parliament.
Conventional wisdom was that they had been lucky. Though there had been injuries – mostly traffic accidents when the lights suddenly went out – no one had actually died. Airliners on approach to Lennart Meri had been diverted down the coast to Riga, emergency generators had cut in at hospitals and emergency services. There had been some wobbles, but the city and the country had come through it as well as could be expected.
As for the cause, everyone looked east to the old enemy, currently staging a small military exercise a few kilometres the other side of the border. That it had been a cyberattack was not in question, and it was generally agreed that unless some non-state actor had suddenly acquired hackers of genius and a hatred of Estonia, Russia was the prime suspect. It was the sort of mischief they were good at, sticking pins in the boundary of NATO and the European Union, just to remind everyone that they hadn’t gone away.
The Russians, of course, denied it. The Russian Ambassador, a man with a twinkly sense of humour, had stood up in front of the cameras with a straight face and reminded the world that Russia did not have a monopoly on hackers. It could, he said – and he reminded everyone that outside interference had not been proven yet – just as easily have been some teenager sitting in a bedroom in Auckland or Detroit or Berlin with a laptop and a surfeit of testosterone. He looked genuinely hurt that anyone could suggest his government might have been responsible.
Everything seemed to have stalled. Krista was not privy to the investigations of Internal Security, but her work with the Gangs Taskforce sometimes brought her into contact with officers from KaPo, and from them she picked up a sense of frustration. The whole police force was feeling the political pressure to identify the culprits, but KaPo felt it more keenly.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have pressures of her own, although the rest of her team, already in the squadroom when she arrived, didn’t seem to be feeling them. One of their number – she’d never found out who - had dubbed them ‘The Untouchables’, although they were more like Charles Martin Smith’s accountant than Kevin Costner’s Elliott Ness. They were young – the majority of them were under forty, except for Kustav, who was in his fifties and therefore inevitably known as ‘Paps’ – and bright and eager, graduates of university and the Police School, experts at paper trails and unknotting offshore accounts and hedge funds.
Krista hung up her coat and said good morning to everyone and began summarising where they were at in their current investigation. Before Christmas, word had started going round Tallinn that a Chechen warlord who styled himself ‘Tamburlaine’ was looking to invest in businesses and property in the city, presumably looking for a beach-head for future operations. Tamburlaine himself was based in Hamburg, but had obviously felt himself moved to expand his operations up the coast, because individuals identified as his representatives – honest-to-god mob lawyers – had been seen in town scoping out potential business opportunities.
This was clearly not an optimum outcome for anyone. Tallinn was not short of home-grown thugs, and didn’t need to import them from elsewhere. There was also a counter-terror aspect to the business; Chechen separatists had been blamed for a string of recent bombings in Moscow and St Petersburg, and though Tamburlaine had not previously shown an interest in politics or indeed Islamism, his supposed interest in Estonia was less than welcome.
Which meant that, in addition to her own investigations, Krista was liaising not only with the Estonian counter-terrorist unit but her opposite number in the Hamburg police, a working group within EuroPol, and a bluff and amiable detective named Sidorovich from the Moscow police. The rumour in the squadroom was that Sidorovich was really FSB, but Krista had grown up among cops and she knew the real thing when she saw it. Which did not, of course, preclude the near certainty that Sidorovich was reporting everything back to an Intelligence handler. Krista tried not to take it personally; it was just the way things were.
None of this made her job any easier, though; even at the best of times one had to wade through thickets of bureaucracy in order to reach one’s job. At the moment, it was sometimes difficult to even see the job in the distance. She tried to insulate her team from this, keep their eyes on the prize.
She waited for the team to settle, then took a breath and prepared to begin her briefing, when the door at the back of the room opened and her superior, Politseikolonelleinent Tamm, looked in. “A moment of your time, Major,” he said to her.
Everyone turned to look. It wasn’t unusual for Tamm to pop down for informal briefings and pep-talks – he liked to stay hands-on as much as possible – but nobody could remember him running his own errands before.
[[Next|Section 3]]
!Changes
She didn’t go home, at least not immediately. She found herself among the evening crowds on the Town Square without quite noticing that she had left the building. For a dizzying moment, she was unsure where, and who, she was. She was still young, kept herself in shape, but for that brief moment she thought she might be having a stroke.
Then it passed, and she was looking across the square and everything was familiar and her father was under investigation for murder. The two things refused to butt together.
She turned and looked at the police station. From the outside, it looked no different from the other buildings on the square, a Hanseatic frontage indistinguishable from its neighbours save for a discreet sign by the front door. Behind the façade, though, was a state-of-the-art facility, a series of nested cubes that went several floors beneath ground, connected by a maze of corridors and blast doors. It was a product of its time, of the war on terror, which two years ago had brought a massive truck bomb to Tartu. She’d liked it; it had a quiet sense of purpose, of putting one’s shoulder to the wheel and getting the job done. But now it seemed faintly sinister.
Did I brief the team? she thought. She couldn’t remember. Something was going to have to be done about the investigation into Tamburlaine; it would be unforgiveable if this ridiculous accusation against her father resulted in the Chechen mob gaining a foothold in the city. She’d have to call Kustav tomorrow and give him a bowdlerised version of what was going on, arrange for him to deputise for her until she came back to work.
This was how life changed, without warning or time to prepare. One moment you were doing your job, unaware that catastrophe was barrelling towards you from decades before. The next moment, you were in an interview room being grilled about your father. And the moment after that you were standing outside in the snow, looking at the place where you used to work and wondering if you would ever set foot inside again.
Krista took out her phone and dialled a number.
[[Call Markus|Section 6a]]
[[Call a lawyer|Section 6b]]
!Lill
Back home, she left a trail of discarded clothing across the flat and stood for a very long time under the shower with the water dialled up as hot as it would go. Later, she microwaved the leftovers of a Thai takeaway from a couple of days ago, sat curled up on the sofa in her thick fluffy bathrobe and flicked through the channels on the entertainment set. The news, as it had been for some weeks, was more or less evenly divided between the upcoming parliamentary elections and the installation of surface-to-air missiles in the east of the country, part of NATO’s Baltic Shield. There seemed, scanning through videos and presentations, a lot of anger out there, and she wondered how it had passed her by. She’d been more focused on the Tamburlaine investigation than she’d realised.
Her phone rang, and she cursed herself for not switching it off. She sat where she was and waited it out, and presently it stopped ringing. And a few moments later started to ring again.
She sighed and got up from the sofa. It was probably not Markus; he’d got the point that she didn’t want to be disturbed – although with Markus you could never be sure. He might just be making a quick check that she was okay, and if she didn’t answer it wasn’t beyond him to turn up at her door. It could conceivably be Kustav wondering what the hell was going on, or Tamm, or Jakobson. None of these were people she could just ignore. Well, maybe Tamm.
As it turned out, it was none of them.
“Krista?” said a familiar voice. “It’s Erik Lill.”
She scowled. “I don’t think we should be talking to each other, Erik,” she said.
There was a pause. “So you know about it?”
“I spent most of the day with Internal Affairs.”
“Jakobson?”
“And a couple of wingmen. She’s spoken to you?”
“They just left. They gave me notice of a formal interview tomorrow.”
“Then we definitely shouldn’t be talking to each other.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Lill growled. “What did they say to you?”
“That Paps is implicated in a suspicious death back in the Twenties. Maybe more than one.”
“This is…insane,” he said. Lill had been her father’s secretary, sidekick, aide de camp, confidante, driver and general bagman for the final five years or so of his career. Krista was amazed that Jakobson hadn’t hit him first. “He’s barely cold in his grave.”
“Erik,” she said, “we have to stop talking now; you could be arrested just for calling me.”
“You think I care?” Lill himself had been forced into early retirement by illness. “Did he ever talk to you about this?”
“How could he? It never happened. You don’t believe it, do you?”
“No, of course I don’t. Do you really think the force could keep something like this quiet for so long?”
“It looks like someone tried. According to Jakobson the original complaint was just…ignored. Not even buried, just ignored.”
Lill snorted. “A bunch of police officers going round murdering Russians? That would have stayed secret for about five minutes. It’s ridiculous.”
“They have to investigate whether it’s ridiculous or not,” she reminded him. “To find out why nothing was done about the complaint in the first place, if nothing else.”
“Are you going to do anything about it?”
“Like what?”
“He was your father, Krista.”
“Yes, thank you, Erik, that had slipped my mind.”
He was silent for a few moments, getting control of his anger. “I’m sorry; that was awful of me.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” she told him in what she hoped was a kindly tone of voice. “I’ve been put on leave and told not to go anywhere near the investigation. If Jakobson finds out we’ve even been talking to each other about it the most optimistic thing we can expect is demotion.”
“I don’t care,” he said again. “This is a matter of principle.”
“It probably wouldn’t matter too much to me, but it would affect your pension,” she pointed out. “It’s all very well having principles until you can’t afford to heat your flat or feed yourself.”
He thought about that. She almost heard him straightening his shoulders and tucking in his chin. “We must fight this, regardless,” he said.
Yes, she thought. We must. She said, “Let me think about this. Don’t call me again. I’ll call you.”
“What should I tell them tomorrow?”
“Jesus, Erik, have you listened to nothing I’ve said? Tell them the truth. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“There’s always something to be afraid of,” he said, and he hung up before she could ask him what he meant.
[[Next|Section 8]]!A Situation
Krista was momentarily flustered, as if she’d been running up a flight of stairs only to find the top two or three missing. She looked around the room, and her gaze settled on Kustav. “Could you handle the briefing, please?” she asked.
“Of course, boss,” he said, standing up while Krista gathered her bag.
As she passed him on the way to the door, she murmured, “Keep them busy. I won’t be long.”
“Got it,” he said.
Outside, Tamm was standing in the corridor running a hand through his already permanently-tousled hair. He was a tall, rangy man with old scars on his hands and bags under his eyes. As Krista closed the door behind her, he said, “A situation has come up.”
“What kind of situation?”
But Tamm was already striding away from her down the corridor. “Come with me,” he said.
He led her up the stairs – to discourage conversation, she thought later – to one of the upper floors of the building. Executive country, a place she only visited when giving presentations to senior officers and visiting dignitaries. He stopped at a door, opened it, and motioned to her to go ahead of him.
The room was small and cosy, more an informal breakout room than an office. Two sofas faced each other across high-quality carpeting. There were prints on the walls – etchings of the High Town – and the windows looked down into the Town Square. Sitting on one of the sofas were two women and a man. Krista knew one of the women by sight, a Colonel from Internal Affairs named Jakobson. The other two were strangers.
As she entered, Jakobson and the others got to their feet. Hands were shaken and introductions made – the other woman was a Major named Nurmsalu, the man a Lieutenant Vainola – and when that was all over Krista was invited to sit on the unoccupied sofa while Jakobson and Nurmsala and Vainola sat on the other, looking at her. There was an awkward atmosphere in the room.
“Major,” Jakobson began. “My office has received an allegation.”
It had to be Tamburlaine. Somehow his people had got wind of the investigation and he’d decided to throw a spanner into the works. Krista said, “I’m sure it’s groundless.”
Nurmsalu and Vainola were looking everywhere but at her. Jakobson took a slim briefcase from the floor by the sofa and opened it on her lap. Krista said, “My investigation is at an advanced stage; it would be counterproductive to - ”
Jakobson looked at her. “Oh, it’s not against you.”
Krista found herself performing a furious mental algorithm to decide which of her team might have been careless enough to allow Tamburlaine to slip the end of a crowbar into the investigation.
“It’s your father,” Jakobson went on.
Krista’s mind went blank, all of a sudden. “My father’s dead,” she said automatically.
“We know,” Jakobson said. She seemed, if anything, faintly embarrassed. Standing beside the door with his arms crossed, Tamm looked furious.
“He died last February,” Krista said to no one in particular.
“We know,” Jakobson again. She took a cardboard folder from the briefcase, flipped it open, and glanced at whatever it contained.
“What’s he supposed to have done?”
Jakobson looked down into the folder for a moment longer, then looked Krista in the eye. “He’s accused of being involved in one, and perhaps several, murders.”
[[Next|Section 4]]!Sergii
Once upon a time, almost twenty years ago, there had been a man. Sergii N, Jakobson called him, an Estonian national of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Sergii owned a business in Tallinn, and in the course of conducting this business he had come to the attention of the police. Jakobson kept the details vague, for a number of reasons.
At some point during the investigation into his activities, Sergii had been brought in for questioning. There had been a scuffle, and one of the arresting officers was injured, not seriously. Sergii was charged with assault, found guilty, and spent three months in jail. In the meantime, Sergii’s business was found to be blameless of any criminal activity and the investigation was wound down.
Sergii left prison a deeply unhappy man, and he settled down to devote his life to making life difficult for the Tallinn police. He launched a number of lawsuits alleging wrongful arrest and police brutality – he, he said had been the victim of assault, not the police officer in question. He was being targeted because of his ethnicity, the actions of the police had put his business in jeopardy, and so on and etcetera. He actually became quite the minor annoyance.
Until one night he was discovered down by the port, unconscious, severely beaten. He lingered in a coma for several weeks, until medical opinion led to life support being withdrawn. He survived forty-two minutes after the plug was pulled.
In the wake of his death, his family accused the police of being responsible. The police, for their part, were more inclined to blame some of Sergii’s associates. There was an investigation into his death, but it went nowhere. It all petered out, in the end, but every now and again in the following years there would be a suspicious death in the Russian community, and Sergii’s family and supporters would resurrect their complaint. There were years of them on file. The Tallinn police had murdered Sergii. The Tallinn police were operating death squads targeting ethnic Russians.
In due course, these complaints grew fewer and fewer, and then stopped altogether. There had not been one for fifteen years or so, until a few weeks ago, when the death of Sergii had been anonymously brought to the attention of Jakobson’s department and she realised with horror that the allegations of police involvement had not been investigated at all. Had, in fact, been completely ignored. Going back through the original complaint, she discovered the names of several police officers who had been involved in the arrest of Sergii, names which resurfaced again and again in the allegations of brutality and death squads. Among them was Krista’s father.
They kept her in the comfy little room all morning, then stopped for a break for lunch – coffee and sandwiches brought in by Tamm’s secretary – then continued in the afternoon. Night had long since fallen, and the lights of the square filled the windows, when Jakobson finally sat back and took off her reading glasses and rolled her shoulders. Beside her, Nurmsalu and Vainola, who had barely said a dozen words all day, seemed to slump on the sofa in relief.
“Fine,” Jakobson said, putting her spectacles on again and leafing through the sheaf of written notes she’d accumulated.
“It’s not fine,” said Krista, who was fuming about too many things to count. “It’s not fine at all.”
“No,” Jakobson said absently, making a note on one of her sheets of paper. She looked at Krista. “From this moment, you’re on leave,” she said. “You’re not to discuss this conversation with anyone. You’re not to approach any former or serving police officer for any reason, but particularly about this conversation. You are absolutely forbidden from approaching any Russian citizens of Chechen origin, or their representatives.” Quite early on, Krista had floated, rather strongly, the theory that the whole thing had been cooked up by Tamburlaine to derail any investigation into his activities. “Don’t leave the city, please. We’ll want to speak with you again.”
Krista glared at her.
Jakobson sighed and took off her glasses again. “We’re all professionals here, Major,” she said. “It’s not my job to take a view on your father’s guilt or otherwise, it’s to gather evidence in the case. If that evidence were to prove that this is a malicious accusation – say on behalf of your Chechen friend – and any action you took jeopardised subsequent court proceedings, well, that would be unfortunate, wouldn’t it.” Ignoring the look Krista gave her, she stood. Her colleagues stood, too, and Tamm, who had remained by the door all day except when he had escorted Krista down the hall to the lavatory, began to stir. Jakobson glanced at Nurmsalu and Vainola and nodded briefly. The two officers left the room. “Paavo,” she said to Tamm. “A moment, please.”
Tamm looked at her, then at Krista, and he scowled, but he too left the room and closed the door behind him.
“Right,” Jakobson told Krista, who had not budged from her sofa. “This is off the books, but this business has the potential to blow up in everyone’s face. The original complaint was made in 2022, which means that one of my predecessors was either staggeringly negligent or wilfully buried the whole thing. But the point is that there are documents on file which support the fact that the complaint was made. You know how it’s going to look if this is allowed to become common knowledge.”
Krista said nothing.
“I can guess how it must feel, hearing this news, but this fiasco already looks like a cover-up. My investigation has to be seen to be fair and open and above board. If you interfere in any way you can only make things worse, and I need to know you understand that.”
Krista thought about it, then she nodded.
“Okay,” Jakobson said. She went to the door, paused with her hand on the handle. “I knew your father,” she said. “Not well – I was a young officer and he was…” She held her hand up above her head. “Up here somewhere. But I knew him, and I liked him. That doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack, but I promise I will treat him fairly.”
“I’d expect you to do that anyway,” Krista said stiffly. “Whether you knew him or not.”
Jakobson nodded. “Go home, Major. Sit tight. We’ll be in touch.”
[[Next|Section 5]]!Markus
“It’s ridiculous,” Markus said. “Isn’t it?”
For a fraction of a second, she had the strongest urge to slap him, but it passed. “Yes, Markus,” she said tiredly. “Yes, it really is.”
They were sitting in a café not far from the University. Her call had caught Markus working late and they’d decided to meet here rather than at his place or hers because she didn’t think she could face public transport right now.
He said, “So, what happens now?”
“Now? Well, I’m unofficially suspended while the investigation continues. They say I’m on leave, but they’d have me escorted out of the building if I tried to go to work. I’m not allowed to talk about it to anyone.”
“You’re talking about it to me.”
“You’re not anyone.”
He sat back and looked at her. He was a big, untidy man, his University security pass still hanging on its lanyard round his neck. He was smart enough and secure enough in his own ego to understand that she wasn’t here for a hug. Hugs never actually solved anything, just put off the moment when you had to face things. What she was really here for was to vent at someone, and for the moment Markus was the only person she trusted.
“What about this lawyer? The one who contacted the police?”
“I’ll probably be arrested if I go within a hundred metres of him,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t know who he is.”
“He’s not going to go public?”
“Jakobson’s managed to convince him to sit on it, for the moment, but that’s not going to last long. You know what the media are like; it’s a miracle it hasn’t leaked already.”
“Is there anything I can do? Nobody’s told me to stay out of it.”
Bless him. “You’re a geography teacher, Markus, not an investigator.”
“Geography lecturer.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t want any collateral damage. But if I think of something, I’ll let you know.” She looked round the café. “I should go.”
“You sure you want to be on your own right now?”
“Yeah. I want a long hot shower and an early night.” She gathered her things together. “Call you tomorrow.”
“Sure.” If he was hurt, he didn’t show it. They were both adults. He gave her a hug. “Sleep well.”
And she did, almost.
[[Next|Section 7]]!Kross
“We’re not supposed to be having this conversation,” said Oskar Kross. “As I’m sure you were told.”
“They’re saying my father killed a man,” Krista said. “Maybe more than one man.”
They were standing in front of a glass case containing a display of quite hideous candlesticks. Around them tourists moved quietly through Tallin’s City Museum, some of them listening to audio commentary beamed to their phones, others content to read the little liquid paper descriptions mounted at the base of each display. There was the low, respectful buzz of conversation one gets in museums and no one paid Krista and Kross any attention at all, although that did not mean no one was paying them any attention.
“You’re probably not under surveillance,” said Kross. “Not yet, anyway. You will be, if they find out you’ve been talking to me.”
“I need advice,” Krista told him.
Oskar Kross was a small, wizened man in a superb suit. He was quite bald and in one hand he clutched a big fur hat. He said, “I haven’t been here in ages, you know.”
“Oskar,” she said.
“Yes.” He looked grave. “The police were in touch with me this morning. All my records pertaining to your father have been ordered sealed pending their removal. I should really be at the office in case someone turns up to take them away.”
“You’re a busy man, Oskar. You have lots of appointments.”
“Hm.” Kross turned away from the candlesticks and they walked through into another room, this one dominated by a hologram of a magnificent sailing ship, emblematic of the city’s Hanseatic past. Some children were playing with the controls, making the hologram twirl and tilt in thin air as labelled red tags appeared and disappeared here and there around the superstructure.
“Did my father ever say anything about this to you?” she said.
Kross sighed. “You know you can’t ask me that, Krista. Lawyer-client privilege. The only reason the police can requisition my records is because of anti-terrorism legislation.” He saw her raise her eyebrows. “There’s no suggestion of a terrorist connection; it’s just a tool they use.”
“What should I do?”
“Do?” Kross tilted his head and looked up at the ship hanging over them. “I would cooperate fully. Have they given any sign that they think you may be involved?”
“No. Not so far, anyway.”
Kross nodded. “Then I would say your best course is to cooperate. You know nothing, so it can’t hurt, and you may learn something. The alternative is to refuse and be entirely cut out of the situation.”
“I know nothing because there’s nothing to know,” she said. “The whole thing’s insane.”
Kross said, “Are you sure there’s nothing to know?”
“Oh, don’t you start, Oskar. I’ve had a whole day of this from Internal Affairs.”
He turned to her, hat clutched in both hands. “It’s important, Krista. Something he said, some mood he was in one day. Something you may have overlooked. If you don’t tell Colonel Jakobson about it right now you’ll appear complicit.”
She shook her head. “No, Oskar. There’s nothing. My father is innocent.”
“Good.” He went back to watching the ship, but the children had grown bored and wandered off into another room, and the hologram hung motionless.
“Should I instruct you to act for me?” she asked.
He glanced at her. “You could,” he mused. “It wouldn’t hurt, necessarily, although some might see it as an admission that you have something to hide. Have you spoken to the Police Union?”
“They’re on my list. Jakobson told me not to speak to any serving police officer about it, though. I don’t know if they count or not.”
“I don’t see how they can object to you consulting your union rep. I would certainly have words with them if they did.”
Krista looked around the room, her mind reeling. It was as if real life had suddenly been replaced by a series of tableaux that she was passing through, although unlike the museum there was no handy audio commentary to tell her what things were.
“What’s the worst-case scenario?” she asked.
Kross thought about it. “The worst-case is that the allegations are true and your father was involved with some kind of vigilante squad within the police force. The investigation proves this beyond any reasonable doubt and you father’s name, and the names of anyone else involved, is blackened for ever. If any of the officers involved are still alive, they are tried and convicted. The name of the Tallinn police force is tarnished. The government has to be seen to be tough. There is a high-level investigation into the whole force, perhaps into the whole Estonian police service. There are retirements and resignations and sackings. The force is in disarray for a generation.” He nodded to himself. “Basically the worst parts of the Bible.”
This was more or less how Krista saw it, but it seemed worse, coming from someone else. She said, “It’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not,” said Kross. “Your father was a tough guy but he was one of the straightest police officers I ever met. I’m sure he was quite capable of killing to protect himself or his family, but in cold blood? The way this accusation is presented?” He shook his head. “No.”
“Could this Sergii have threatened us?” Krista asked, thinking aloud.
“Not as I understand it. He was a small-time hood, and a barely competent one at that, according to Internal Affairs. And even if he had, your father would have gone to his superiors rather than taking matters into his own hands; you and your mother would have been taken into protective custody until everything was safe again.”
Krista raised a hand up to touch the illusory hull of the sailing ship, but it was just out of reach of her fingers.
“You can’t touch it,” Kross said. “It isn’t really there.”
Krista lowered her hand. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
The next room was given over to a huge diorama of the city as it had been in Hanseatic times. This was definitely real, hand-made in the 1990s, when 3D printers and fabbing weren’t even plotlines in science fiction novels. It sat on a waist-high table and was covered with a transparent dome to keep it clean and stop people stealing the model buildings. Kross and Krista stood looking down on it for a while like glum gods.
“You can see my flat from here,” Kross said, pointing.
You could also see the Town Square and the location of the police station which, until a few hours ago, had been Krista’s place of work. She said, “Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Oskar. It was good of you.”
He inclined his head. “You’ll be getting my bill in due course.” Krista narrowed her eyes at him, and he smiled. “That was a lawyer joke.”
“It might be best if we left separately,” she said. “Just in case someone is watching.”
“I doubt that will fool anyone.”
He was right; it wouldn’t have fooled her.
“If you do need my help, in a professional capacity, don’t hesitate to get in touch,” he told her. “In the meantime, I’m required to cooperate with Colonel Jakobson. It’s nothing personal.”
She nodded. “I understand, Oskar.”
He looked at her. “I took care of your father’s legal matters for almost thirty years,” he reminded her. “I know he didn’t do it. There will be no evidence to support this ridiculous claim.”
“I should go,” Krista said, checking her phone. “I’m meeting Markus.”
Kross nodded. “My advice? Stay home, keep your head down, do what Internal Affairs tells you. I’ll be in touch.”
They walked to the entrance, said their goodbyes, and then Kross went out into the evening while Krista retrieved her coat and hat from the cloakroom. By the time she stepped out onto the street Kross was gone and it was snowing again, big fat slow flakes.
[[Next|Section 7]]!Vultures
She was woken by her alarm the next morning. She stumbled cursing into the bathroom and had been standing under the shower for at least five minutes before remembering that there was no reason for her to be up this early. She wasn’t going to work; she’d forgotten to switch off her alarms.
“Idiot girl,” she murmured to herself, resting her forehead against the tiles of the shower.
Well, she could either go back to bed or she could carry on getting on with the day. The shower had brought her back to consciousness and she didn’t think she’d be able to go back to sleep, so she dried herself and dressed in a teeshirt and yoga pants and went into the kitchen to stand in front of the fridge. Lately, breakfast had consisted of a cup of coffee, lunch had been a sandwich and a piece of fruit at her desk, and dinner had depended on which takeaway she passed on the way home, so there wasn’t much to choose from, but there were a couple of eggs and some bacon that was only a day or so past its use-by date, so she used those to make herself some scrambled eggs and sat watching the dawn trying to fight its way through the clouds, forking food into her mouth without tasting it. She made a mental note to go food shopping later.
When eight o’clock rolled around she called Kustav. The first thing he said was, “Are you okay, boss?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Do you know what happened?”
“I know you spent the day with the Vultures,” he said. The older generation of officers – and quite a few of the younger ones – had a very low opinion of Internal Affairs. “What’s it about?”
“I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I’m not under investigation, but I’ve been put on leave until IA have finished, so you’re going to have to stand in for me.”
“Okay. How long do you think you’ll be gone?”
“I don’t know. Not long, I hope. Don’t let the investigation slump, Kustav. Keep on pushing. Whatever’s going on, we can’t let it distract us from Tamburlaine, understood?”
“Understood.”
“When I do come back, I want to find everything in good order, okay?”
He was quiet a few moments. “Is this about the Colonel, boss?”
She felt a cold finger trace its way down the back of her neck. “Why?”
“IA went to see Erik Lill yesterday evening.”
That was the police grapevine for you; faster than the speed of light. You could use it to transmit messages to civilisations orbiting distant stars. One more reason to believe that this whole thing was a mistake. As Lill had said the previous evening, it would simply have been impossible to keep a death squad secret.
She said, “I can’t talk about it, Kustav. Maybe when it’s all over.”
“Okay.” He sounded doubtful. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Just keep on top of everything there and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“What should I tell the others, boss?”
“Tell them I’ve been called away for a while,” she said. It was true enough, as far as it went. “Tell them if I find out they’ve been fucking around while I’m gone heads will roll.”
He chuckled. “Will do. Boss?”
“Yes?”
“Take care.”
She smiled. “Thank you, Kustav. You too. I’ll be in touch.”
She hung up and sat staring at the window. Fat flakes of snow were drifting past beyond the glass.
Is this about the Colonel? She should, she supposed, address the elephant in the room. The near-legendary thirty-six-year veteran elephant in the room, lavishly decorated and universally adored.
He was a hard act to follow, if you wanted to be a police officer in Tallinn. His public profile had receded into a great multimedia pile of yellowing press clippings and forgotten web pages, but he still stood tall in institutional memory.
He’d come late to the force, in his late twenties, after university and a string of short-lived, unsatisfactory jobs. In one address to a class at the Police School he’d said that policing had never previously occurred to him, that it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but Krista thought he was being disingenuous. Nothing was ever left to chance - the man she remembered would have made a list of jobs that interested him and worked through them. Looked at from that perspective, the police force was about a third of the way down the list.
Still, he’d been an exemplary cadet, close to the top of his class. His probationary period had been exemplary, too, a string of glowing assessments. A couple of years on the street and he’d been fast-tracked out of uniform and into a new Criminal Intelligence unit. CI eventually span off a whole organisation chart of smaller units – the Gangs Taskforce was one of them – but for quite a while it had belonged to her father, and he had brought it to bear on the many facets of the city’s organised crime.
It was not admitted to the general public, but it was axiomatic that you could not break organised crime, just as you could not win the war on drugs – one might as well try to defeat the weather. It was, however, possible to win significant victories, and significant victories was what her father achieved. “We put them on notice,” her Uncle Märt – not really her Uncle, just one of the extended family of cops who had decided to take over her upbringing after her mother died – told her once.
No one lives forever, of course, and as the Colonel’s career entered its final laps before retirement he moved, increasingly, towards administrative roles. He did not always do this willingly; he was a street cop by nature, and he chafed at office work – had, in fact, declined multiple promotions in order to remain at the sharp end of things.
My father the murderer. For a brief, transgressive moment, she tried the idea on for size before dismissing it once and for all. The Colonel had been tough, but he had been straight. He’d seen too many cases falter and fall in the courtroom because someone had done something they should not, or had neglected to do something they should have. He had drummed this into her over and over again during her time at the Police School, and during her probation, and her time on the beat, and her slow rise from the ranks. There were few things in this life worse than watching some lowlife you’d spent months building a case against walk free because you, or some subordinate, had not followed, for example, the proper protocol for a chain of evidence. There were no shortcuts in the Law, and those who tried to take them were doomed to fail. It was that simple.
She thought about all this as she wandered around the supermarket. She wasn’t sure how long she had been here; she periodically paused to consider the shelves, grabbed something, and dumped it in her trolley. It looked as if she was preparing for a siege.
Her phone rang. She took it out, saw Markus’s caller ID, put her thumb over the answer icon. “Hi,” she said.
“Where are you?” he said.
“Supermarket. Why?” And then her phone buzzed to tell her she had another incoming call. She checked the ID, and felt her heart sink all the way into the floor. “I’ll call you back,” she said. She hung up, opened the second call, and said, “Hello.”
“Did you go to the media?” asked Jakobson.
“No.”
“Because if you did, your career’s over.”
“No, I didn’t.” All of a sudden, the supermarket seemed simultaneously too large and too small. “What’s happened?” But she already knew.
“The story’s loose,” Jakobson told her. The phone buzzed again; Krista looked at the screen and watched the incoming calls mount up. Four, five, seven, ten, fifteen. When they reached twenty, she put the phone back to her ear. “ – about twenty minutes ago,” Jakobson was saying. “Hello? Are you still there?”
“Yes, Colonel,” she said, feeling tired and heavy. “I’m here.”
“In an hour, your father’s going to be the most famous man in Tallinn,” Jakobson said. “Half an hour after that, he’ll be the most famous man in the country. Don’t go home; the media will be there. Where are you?”
Krista heard herself telling the Colonel. “I was shopping,” she added.
“Shopping,” Jakobson muttered. “All right. Leave your groceries where they are and go outside. There will be a car there in five minutes. Don’t talk to anyone, but in particular do not talk to the media; they’ll have your number soon.”
“They have it already, judging by the number of people trying to get through to me.”
“Take the SIM and the battery out of your phone and dump it, right now,” Jakobson told her. “If they have your number the next thing they’ll try to do is run a geotrace on your phone.” It was against the law to do that, but of course there were any number of pop-up electronics shops where, for a few euros, someone would hack the cell network to locate a particular phone.
Krista suddenly felt unwilling to move. She was perfectly comfortable where she was, leaning on the handle of her trolley in the frozen food aisle. She couldn’t see any reason why she should go anywhere else. She said, “Is all this really necessary, Colonel? I’m tired and I’m upset and I’m actually quite hungry. No one’s going to hurt me and I’m not going to give any interviews. I’d like to go home.”
“Do as you’re told, Major,” Jakobson said. “That’s an order.” She hung up, leaving Krista standing there in the middle of the supermarket, phone still held to her ear.
[[Go to the waiting car|Section 9a]]
[[Escape via the back entrance|Section 9b]]!Front Door
Well, first things first, she wasn’t going to lose all the data on her phone just because Jakobson’s paranoia had gone into overdrive. She turned her back on the trolley and walked down to the checkouts, where there was a rack of terabyte memory cards. She bought one and dawdled by the door while she tore it out of its packaging, fitted it in the phone’s expansion slot, and copied everything onto it. Then she pocketed the card, wiped the phone, and did a factory reset while she went outside and stood on the pavement. She stripped out the battery and SIM, dropped them in her pocket, and was in the act of unwillingly consigning the phone to a rubbish bin – it was a good phone and a replacement wouldn’t be cheap – when an unmarked car pulled up to the kerb beside her. Vainola was in the front passenger seat.
He powered the window down a few centimetres. “Get in, please, Major,” he said.
It was like a bad spy novel, she thought. What came next? A new identity? A false passport? Plastic surgery? She climbed into the back of the car and the driver accelerated smoothly out into the traffic before she had time to fasten her seatbelt.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere safe,” he told her.
“Have you got rid of your phone?”
He grunted. “Nobody’s looking for me,” he said.
The flat Vainola took her to, out on the edge of town, was larger than hers but felt shabby in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It felt as if there were long periods when it was unoccupied, like a flat used by visiting businessmen, and the rest of the time it was looked after by a housekeeper who only visited a couple of times a week. The furniture was clean but vaguely out of date, ditto the fridge and cooker.
Jakobson was already there when she arrived, brought in from the car park behind the block and marched up the stairs.
“So,” said the Colonel from an armchair in the living room.
“So,” said Krista.
“We think the lawyer’s responsible,” said Jakobson, holding out her phone. “The one who made the complaint.”
Krista took the phone, found herself looking at a Russian-language website that called itself Ultimate Truth! With an exclamation mark. The story was pretty much as Jakobson had told her yesterday, only with even more exclamation marks. Russian person beaten to death by police in Tallinn. There was a rather lurid account of Sergii N’s autopsy. About halfway down the page was an image of her father in full uniform, at some official event or other, followed by a long and heartfelt diatribe on the subject of the racism of the Tallinn police force and the years-long cover-up of the death of Sergii N. Near the bottom of the page there were hints of other attacks by the Tallinn police on ethnic Russians.
“That’s where it started,” Jakobson said. “It’s everywhere now. It was always going to break; I was hoping we’d have more lead time.”
“Why didn’t they go public straight away?” asked Krista. “I don’t understand. Why wait?”
“We thought they were being reasonable.” Jakobson stood and walked over to her. “I know you think we’re not being reasonable, but you’re at ground zero in this. You’re not a suspect, as yet, but you were standing next to the suspect, and everyone wants to talk to you.” Krista let that as yet pass. “Anything you could say to the Press can only make things worse. Perhaps you can make a statement in due course, but it will be a statement we write.”
“At least you didn’t tell me this is for my own good.”
Jakobson smiled sadly, and Krista suddenly realised how tired she looked. “Well, that too,” she agreed. “But mostly it’s for our own good. You’re an adult and you’ve been a police officer for a good long while. You know how these things work. Now, may I have my phone back?”
Krista took the phone from her pocket and handed it over. It had been worth a try “Can you get word to my boyfriend?” she asked. “I promised I’d call him.”
Jakobson nodded. “Any message?”
“Just tell him I’m okay and I’ll be in touch when I can.”
“Okay.” Jakobson walked to the door. “I can’t order you not to look at the news,” she said. “And I’m going to treat you like a grown-up and not take the entertainment set away. But it might be advisable if you kept your head down. It will be upsetting.”
“It’s a bit late for that. Like you say, I’m standing beside ground zero.”
Jakobson gave her a long, level look. “Right. Well, make yourself at home. I’ll be back presently and we’ll talk further.”
“Right.”
Jakobson left, and Krista heard the door being locked from the outside. It had not escaped her notice that Jakobson had not asked for Markus’s phone number or address.
[[Next|Section 10]]!Back Door
She put her phone back in her pocket, thinking. Then she turned and abandoned her trolley.
Instead of heading for the exit, she went towards the back of the supermarket, where a set of automatic doors opened and closed in response to RFID chips mounted in the semiautonomous stock pallets used to stack the shelves. Someone, probably in defiance of regulations, had wedged the doors open, but she could see stickers that read WARNING! AUTOMATED MACHINERY. Removing the back of her phone as she went, she stepped through.
The space beyond was larger than she had expected, larger than the supermarket itself. Aisles of shelving almost eight metres tall, packed with products, ran away into an ill-lit dimness. Here and there were the shiny metal sarcophagi of freezers and fridges, and stacks of goods on old-style inert pallets. Orange light blinked across the walls and shelves where freight handling robots rolled across the cement floor, following tramlines of conductive paint. There was not a single person to be seen.
There was still time to change her mind, and for a moment she actually thought of turning on her heel, going back into the store, and going out on the street to wait for Jakobson’s car. But she’d had enough of the Colonel interfering in her life.
One of the robots was coming towards her down the aisle, a machine almost as tall as she was and as long as a car, with a telescoping platform on top fringed with stout hydraulic arms. The platform was loaded with packs of kitchen paper, and as it went by Krista stripped the SIM and battery out of her phone and reached up and shoved it between the packs. The machine came to a sudden stop as she breached its safety perimeter, then started up again as she moved away further into the storeroom.
For such a large space, it was claustrophobic in the store. The shelves were packed solid with products and the machines took up much of the floor space, endlessly rolling and pirouetting as they moved stock, lasers blinking red as they read barcodes on the shelving and matched them to the goods they were carrying. There was a narrow path right down the middle of each aisle – space, she presumed, for engineers to carry out emergency repairs – and she trotted down this, robots passing by on either side.
At the far end of the store were big doors leading to the supermarket’s loading dock. She hit the fat red button beside one of them and the door started to concertina up, admitting a wave of chilly air. When it was high enough for her to pass beneath it, she ducked through and out into daylight. Behind her, she thought she heard an alarm, but it could have been anything.
Out on the loading dock, there was more handling machinery – autonomous forklifts and loaders – all of it parked for the moment, waiting for deliveries. It went without saying that she had been on camera from the moment she stepped into the supermarket, but there was nothing she could do about that and if she moved quickly enough it wouldn’t matter. She hopped down off the dock and walked across the yard behind the supermarket to a high chainlink fence. There was a rolling gate in the fence large enough to admit a truck, and beside the gate was a kiosk, in which stood the first human being she’d see since she stepped into the storeroom.
He was in his fifties, of North African appearance, one of the wave of immigrants Estonia had taken in the 2020s before the EU had hardened its southern borders against refugees. He was wearing a uniform in the colours of the supermarket’s logo and he looked up from his phone as Krista knocked on the side of the kiosk.
“Could you let me out, please?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, miss?” he asked in almost accentless Estonian. “You should use the employees’ entrance.”
“Yes, but it’s over there,” she waved vaguely behind her, “and I need to catch the tram over there.” She pointed through the fence. “Go on. Please. Just this one time? I’m late for a job interview.” She didn’t quite bat her eyebrows at him, but it was a close thing.
As it was, she didn’t have to. That bit about the job interview swayed him – obviously nobody liked working here. He nodded and pressed a button and the gate started to roll aside. “Good luck!” he called as she slid through and out into the street. She waved without looking back.
She turned left and walked at a brisk pace down the street, not so fast that she would attract attention, but as she reached the main road a car pulled up and stopped across the junction, to a symphony of horns from the drivers behind. The passenger door opened and Vainola stepped out and stood looking at her, hands in his jacket pockets. He wasn’t quite smirking. Krista sighed and walked to the end of the street.
“That was a really good try,” Vainola said in a tone of voice that was almost not patronising.
“You tagged me.”
Vainola stepped forward and ran his fingertips under her shoulder bag. When he took his hand away there was a little black dot on the tip of his index finger. “Put it there while you were being interviewed yesterday.”
She swallowed any number of replies involving civil liberties and similar legal annoyances. “You’re lucky I’m using the same bag.”
“It’s a nice bag,” he told her. “If it was mine I’d use it every day. Get in, please.”
She got in the back of the car. Vainola closed the door and got into the passenger seat and the car pulled away.
“If you do that again, I’ll be forced to arrest you,” Vainola told her as the car slowed and took a right.
“If you’re insubordinate like that again, I’ll have you back on the beat, Lieutenant.” She tried to put as much force as possible into the threat, but it wasn’t much.
Vainola laughed. “For the purposes of this investigation, I outrank you.”
“You do for the moment, Lieutenant,” she told him, settling back with her traitorous bag on her knees. “Don’t let it go to your head. It won’t last.”
Jakobson glowered at her when Vainola delivered her to the flat, but didn’t make a comment. It was as if she had expected Krista to make a break for it and was just wearied by being proved right.
The flat was out on the edge of town. It was larger than hers but felt shabby in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It felt as if there were long periods when it was unoccupied, like a flat used by visiting businessmen, and the rest of the time it was looked after by a housekeeper who only visited a couple of times a week. The furniture was clean but vaguely out of date, ditto the fridge and cooker.
“So,” said Jakobson.
“So,” said Krista.
“We think the lawyer’s responsible,” said Jakobson, holding out her phone. “The one who made the complaint.”
Krista took the phone, found herself looking at a Russian-language website that called itself Ultimate Truth! With an exclamation mark. The story was pretty much as Jakobson had told her yesterday, only with even more exclamation marks. Russian person beaten to death by police in Tallinn. There was a rather lurid account of Sergii N’s autopsy. About halfway down the page was an image of her father in full uniform, at some official event or other, followed by a long and heartfelt diatribe on the subject of the racism of the Tallinn police force and the years-long cover-up of the death of Sergii N. Near the bottom of the page there were hints of other attacks by the Tallinn police on ethnic Russians.
“That’s where it started,” Jakobson said. “It’s everywhere now. It was always going to break; I was hoping we’d have more lead time.”
“Why didn’t they go public straight away?” asked Krista. “I don’t understand. Why wait?”
“We thought they were being reasonable.” Jakobson stood and walked over to her. “I know you think we’re not being reasonable, but you’re at ground zero in this. You’re not a suspect, as yet, but you were standing next to the suspect, and everyone wants to talk to you.” Krista let that as yet pass. “Anything you could say to the Press can only make things worse. Perhaps you can make a statement in due course, but it will be a statement we write.”
“At least you didn’t tell me this is for my own good.”
Jakobson smiled sadly, and Krista suddenly realised how tired she looked. “Well, that too,” she agreed. “But mostly it’s for our own good. You’re an adult and you’ve been a police officer for a good long while. You know how these things work. Now, may I have my phone back?”
Krista took the phone from her pocket and handed it over. It had been worth a try. “Can you get word to my boyfriend?” she asked. “I promised I’d call him.”
Jakobson nodded. “Any message?”
“Just tell him I’m okay and I’ll be in touch when I can.”
“Okay.” Jakobson walked to the door. “I can’t order you not to look at the news,” she said. “And I’m going to treat you like a grown-up and not take the entertainment set away. But it might be advisable if you kept your head down. It will be upsetting.”
“It’s a bit late for that. Like you say, I’m standing beside ground zero.”
Jakobson gave her a long, level look. “Right. Well, make yourself at home. I’ll be back presently and we’ll talk further.”
“Right.”
Jakobson left, and Krista heard the door being locked from the outside. It had not escaped her notice that Jakobson had not asked for Markus’s phone number or address.
[[Next|Section 10]]!Outrage
Krista was sitting watching the Russian Ambassador giving a press briefing. The Ambassador was a rotund man with spectacles and a taste in expensive suits and large, flashy cufflinks. He tended to twinkle when he appeared in front of the press, usually when some outrage or other had occurred along the border or Russian foreign policy became more than normally contentious. But he wasn’t twinkling today. Today he was solemn. Even his cufflinks were small and discreet.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he told the press room in his flawless Estonian, “this is an outrage. We will be meeting with the President and Prime Minister shortly to demand a full investigation into this terrible murder, and if guilt is found we will be demanding full reparations.”
“What kind of reparations?” one of the journalists asked.
“We’ll decide that in due time,” the Ambassador told him. “Next question.”
“They want to send us one of their detectives,” Jakobson said from the doorway. “To make sure the investigation is handled properly.”
Krista looked over her shoulder. “How do we feel about that?”
“We feel unhappy.” Jakobson walked over to the sofa and sat next to Krista. “How are you holding up?”
Krista muted the sound on the press conference. “Climbing the walls.”
Jakobson nodded. “The Press have your flat staked out.”
Krista sighed, even though it wasn’t a surprise. “Bastards.”
Jakobson took a phone from her bag and held it out. “This is to replace yours.”
“It’s a cheaper model,” Krista noted.
“Don’t push it,” Jakobson told her. “The code for the door’s on here. Can I trust you not to do anything silly?”
“That depends what the parameters of ‘silly’ are at the moment.”
“If you want to go out, don’t go alone. My number’s in the contact book. Call me and I’ll assign someone to keep you company. The chances of bumping into the media are fairly slim, but you never know and I don’t want any unpleasantness.”
Krista took the phone. “Where would I go? I can’t go home.” Something occurred to her. “Oh, gods. Markus.”
“He’s smart,” Jakobson said. “He left town yesterday. Left a message for Colonel Tamm saying he’s checking into a hotel somewhere and he’ll let us know where he is when he’s settled. Tamm says he sounded angry.”
“I can’t blame him.” Everything had moved so quickly, and she’d been so mired in her own misery, that she hadn’t thought about how it would affect him. “Did he say where he was going?”
Jakobson shook her head. “But he said he’d be in touch.”
“How long is this going to last?”
“At least until the investigation makes its final report. And probably for a while after that. Then they’ll lose interest. Something else will come along.” She paused. “It could take a while.”
“I’m not used to just sitting on my hands like this.”
“I know. But I can’t let you get involved in the investigation. You’re his daughter, Major. How would it look?”
And for all anyone knew, she was mixed up in it. She saw the Colonel’s point, but she didn’t like it. “I could use some new clothes, and the food here’s awful. Can you arrange a shopping trip?”
“I can do that right now.” Jakobson took out her own phone and dialled a number. “When would you like to go?”
“Soon as possible; these clothes are starting to stand up on their own. You’ll have to lend me some cash as well. I can’t walk into a bank and get them to transfer my details onto this phone.”
“There’s a line of credit on there already,” Jakobson said. “From the Witness Protection budget. Try not to go mad, th – get over here,” she said into her phone. “Dress for shopping.” She hung up. “Yes, don’t go crazy. You’ve run your own ops; you know what the paperwork’s like.”
“Who was that on the phone?”
Jakobson smiled. “Babysitter.”
[[Next|Section 11]]!Shopping
The babysitter turned out to be a large, affable young officer named Ivari in jeans and workboots and a puffa jacket, his ensemble topped off with a peculiar orange knitted cap with long earflaps. If he felt at all awkward about bodyguarding a superior officer, he hid it remarkably well.
He had a car parked two streets away, and he drove them to a big shopping centre on the outskirts of Tallinn, on the grounds that they would be less likely to bump into someone who knew Krista there than in the centre of town.
“I’m not so sure,” she told him, starting to feel uncomfortably warm in the long two-storey mall. “Everyone I know shops here.”
He shrugged. “We could go to Pärnu.”
“We’re not going all the way to Pärnu just for some fresh underwear,” she told him. Anyway, this was so obviously a test. Jakobson wanted to see if she would try to contact someone, or bolt altogether, and she wasn’t going to give the Colonel the satisfaction. “How long have you been with IA?”
“Two years,” he said, stuffing his hat into a coat pocket. “I was with Diplomatic Protection before that.” He smiled at her.
“What’s Jakobson like to work for?”
“What you see is what you get. She’s not afraid of taking a bullet for the team.”
Krista had known senior officers for whom responsibility was something to be avoided at all costs. She said, “Are you allowed to talk about the investigation?”
“I wouldn’t be, but I’m not involved in this case anyway, so it’s academic. I’m just a spare body to go shopping with you. I know the broad details, though.” A sour look crossed his face, betraying what he thought of the whole thing.
“You do know my father’s innocent, though.”
“I don’t know any such thing,” he told her. “One thing you learn in IA is to go into each job with a completely open mind, no preconceptions at all. That’s one of the reasons people don’t like us. They think we should be protecting the reputation of the force. Which we are, just not the way they’d like. You know what they call us.”
“Vultures, yes.”
He nodded. “It’s inevitable, really. Cops investigating other cops are never going to be popular. Not if they do their job properly, anyway.” He paused while Krista stopped to look in the window of one of the shops. “I saw your father lecture once, at the Police School. He was intense.”
She grunted. Intense. That was her father.
“Anyway,” he added. “Let’s not talk about this. Let’s shop.”
Ivari turned out to be an ideal shopping partner. He didn’t get bored or whiny, knew when to offer an opinion and when to keep his mouth shut, and he was a good conversationalist. Krista found herself beginning to relax for the first time in what felt like days. She hadn’t realised just how wound up she’d been.
It seemed as if he had been right about the shopping mall, too; Krista didn’t see anyone she recognised. It was a weekday morning and everyone would be at work, which helped.
Finally, both of them weighed down with shopping bags, they adjourned to a Starbucks for coffee and pastries. Krista guarded a table while Ivari went to the counter. They’d chosen a place near the back of the café but with a clear view of the doors, and where she was sitting Krista could see across the big central atrium of the mall. On the opposite side was an electronics store, its window stacked with the screens of entertainment sets. A crowd had gathered in front of the window, and as she watched more people joined it. All the screens were showing the same footage, but from this distance she couldn’t quite make out what it was. A close-up of a termite colony? A pitch invasion at a football match?
“Something’s going on,” she said to Ivari when he returned with a tray laden with cups and plates.
“Sorry?” He put the tray down on the table, then squinted in the direction she was pointing. “Oh,” he said, and at that moment his phone rang. “Yes? Yes. Really? Right.” He hung up. “We’re going to have to postpone lunch, I’m afraid,” he told her. “The Colonel wants you back at the flat as soon as possible.”
“Why?”
He glanced across at the electronics shop again. The crowd outside was almost a hundred strong by now. “Just to be on the safe side,” he said.
[[Next|Section 12]]!Lunch
The things you miss when you go shopping, Krista thought. The protest march was three or four hundred strong, which wasn’t a bad turnout considering the general grotty subzero state of the weather. It wound through the Old Town, a sea of chanting heads and bobbing banners, towards police headquarters. Tourists and locals alike stood watching it pass by, curious but passive. It was on all the news channels, hurriedly-drafted correspondents giving a moment-by-moment narration from the scene. Occasionally the cameras cut to one studio or another, where talking heads ventured their opinions. Krista heard her father’s name several times, and muted the sound.
She turned it back up when she saw a photo in the studio background of Joonas Salumäe, Estonia’s popular young Prime Minister. One of the newsreaders read a statement from Salumäe’s office, something bland calling for calm and promising that the death of Sergii N was receiving the utmost attention and the investigation would report in due course. Then the camera cut to another press conference with the Russian Ambassador, and Krista muted the sound again.
“Well,” Ivari said, with what Krista thought was admirable understatement in the circumstances, “this is a hell of a thing.”
She watched the cameras cut back to the march. It was starting to get dark, and the crowd outside police headquarters were holding up their phones to record the wall of police officers standing between them and the building. If this really was some sort of ploy by Tamburlaine to get her off his back, it was starting to get way out of control.
Krista got up from the sofa. “Sod this,” she said. “I’m going to have a shower. See if you can cobble together something to eat; I didn’t have my lunch.”
He checked the time on his phone. “I should be going,” he said.
“You can hang around long enough to have dinner with me,” she told him, going into the bedroom.
When she came out, with an armful of new clothes still in their bags and her shoulder bag clutched to her chest, he was clattering around in the kitchen trying to find pots and pans and utensils.
She showered quickly, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and hoodie, and stepped out into the hall. The sound of clattering from the kitchen had been replaced by the smell of cooking. Krista dithered for a few moments, then she grabbed her coat from its hook in the hallway, opened the front door, and stepped out into the corridor. She held her phone over the sensor and heard the lock click, and a moment later the handle waggled as someone tried it from the other side.
Krista stood, almost hypnotised. There was an override to allow the door to be unlocked from the inside, to prevent accidents and allow the occupant to escape in case of fire, but it seemed that it had been disabled because Ivari was unable to open it. That was very poor, not health & safety conscious at all.
The handle stopped waggling, and she heard a muffled “For fuck’s sake” from the other side, then she turned and was gone.
She was in a cab when the phone rang.
“Turn around and go back and we’ll pretend this never happened,” Jakobson told her.
“If I’m not under arrest you have no right to hold me,” Krista told her. She saw the driver glance at her in the rear-view mirror, but that was all right. She wanted him to remember her.
“This really doesn’t make things look good for you,” Jakobson said. “It makes you look guilty.”
“You already think I’m mixed up in this, Colonel,” Krista said. “That’s why you put me under house arrest, not because you were worried about the papers catching up with me.”
She heard Jakobson sigh. “You went out shopping today. Do you really think I’d have let you do that if I thought you were involved?”
“I was under guard the whole time.”
“Yes, well, I’ll be having a quiet face-to-face with Lieutenant Käsper about that in an hour or so.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Krista said. “I tricked him.”
“He’s supposed to be better trained than that.”
“You disabled the override on the door so I couldn’t get out,” Krista told her. “Does the key code in the phone only open the door during the daytime, when there’s someone available to babysit?” Silence, at the other end of the connection. “Fine. Well, this is me officially withdrawing my cooperation.”
“Major,” said Jakobson. “Listen to reason.”
Krista hung up. “Pull over here,” she told the driver, rummaging in her bag as if to put her phone back in it but in reality shoving it down the back of the rear passenger seat.
She paid with cash she’d withdrawn at the mall earlier in the day, walked off slowly until the cab had vanished into the evening traffic, watched it carry her phone off into the distance, presumably to an appointment with Jakobson’s people when they finally tracked down the phone. It probably wouldn’t buy her a lot of time, but it was a breathing space.
So, here she was. Night in Tallinn, snow on the ground and snow swirling in the light of the streetlamps, a fugitive from the police. What she’d done was enough to put a serious reprimand on her career, at the very least. It might very well have ended it. And she had no idea what to do next.
One step at a time. She stopped at a kiosk and bought a cheap phone, slotted the expansion card onto which she’d copied her old phone, and walked to the nearest bank cashpoint while it took over the new one. She withdrew four thousand euros in cash – almost everything she had in her current account at this point in the month – and took another cab to the other side of town. All these things were trackable, but it would take time and she planned to keep moving.
In a run-down café, she wolfed down a sandwich and a cup of coffee and dithered over whether to call Markus. She decided against it. Things were already bad enough for him; making contact right now could only make them worse.
There was, she thought, really only one place she could go, and she realised she had been trying not to think about it.
[[Hire a car|Section 13a]]
[[Take public transport|Section 13b]]!Rental
The village was an hour or so’s drive from Tallinn, straggling along a little bay nibbled out of the coast by the Gulf of Finland. To get there you had to turn off the main road and onto a minor road, and then you had to turn off that and drive along a narrow, bumpy road – a cart track, basically – through dense forest that suddenly opened up into a vista of rocky beach and abandoned dinghies and wooden houses. It was quite some time since she’d last been here – since not long after her father’s retirement, she realised – but the scene was as familiar to her as if she’d only seen it yesterday.
There was a rather seedy car-hire firm on the outskirts of Tallinn which had come to her attention during the investigation into Tamburlaine. The team hadn’t so far been able to prove any connection, aside from rumour, but it was definitely a low-level criminal enterprise, and they had chosen to keep an eye on its affairs, just in case. When she walked into its offices at eight o’clock on the evening of the protest march, she found a middle-aged man wearing a shabby three-piece suit sitting at a desk and pecking tentatively with two fingertips at the keyboard of a battered old laptop.
Krista didn’t have time for small talk. She told the owner of the firm that she wanted to hire a car on the quiet, something without tracking devices, and she wanted to pay cash.
The owner had no idea who she was, of course, so he had no idea that she knew a lot more about him than he would probably have felt comfortable with, from the details of his bank accounts to his browsing history. He named a price about a third higher than she would have got at Hertz. She haggled a bit, for form’s sake, and wound up paying fifty euros or so less than his price.
The car was a wreck, probably as old as she was, which was good because it was unlikely to have a tracker fitted as standard, and bad because most of the way to the coast she expected the engine to just give up and drop onto the road.
But it got her here, to this modest bungalow in the crook of an arm of the forest which stopped just short of the shore. She could see no signs of surveillance, but that was the point of surveillance; you weren’t supposed to see it. She supposed she’d find out in the next few minutes.
She parked on a flat grassy area a few metres further on, walked back to the bungalow. Its boards were weatherbeaten but it was neat and well looked-after and the garden seemed regularly-tended. The lights were on, inside, behind thin curtains. She walked up to the front door and knocked.
It took a minute or so for him to answer; she heard the sound of his chair before he opened the door. Then she was standing there looking down at him and he was sighing.
[[Next|Section 14]]!Journey
The majority of people, if asked what the most important part of a surveillance state was, would probably say ‘cameras’, but that wasn’t quite true. The most important thing was forgetting that the cameras were there at all.
If mass surveillance had arrived all of a sudden, fully-formed, a camera on every building and in every public vehicle, there would have been an outcry. But it hadn’t happened like that. It had happened gradually, a camera at a time, and people had got used to them to the point where they didn’t notice them any more. Down the years cameras had become smaller and the software behind them more sophisticated, but they were invisible, just another part of everyday street furniture. It was only when you thought about them that you noticed just how many there were.
The trick, with surveillance, was to move quickly and to keep moving. There was no central control room monitoring all the cameras in Tallinn; the street cameras belonged to the Traffic Authority, every store had its own system, each of the four bus companies, and so on. The authorities could tap into these any time they wanted, but civil rights legislation meant they had to produce a warrant first unless there was a massive emergency, and that took time. At this time of night it would mean trying to find a judge who was home to sign the warrant, or failing that rousting one from a restaurant or a theatre. Krista figured she had maybe half an hour.
She spent a few minutes of that half-hour buying two overcoats in a rundown little secondhand shop not far from where the taxi had dropped her. They were tatty and smelled peculiar, but they were warm and had hoods, and they altered her profile, which was important. Wearing one and with the other in a carrier bag, she left the shop and walked down the street.
Next, she caught a tram. It was cold on the tram; half the passengers were wearing hats or had their hoods pulled up. She found a seat in the final carriage, and kept her head down while she typed inconspicuously on her phone. A review of any footage might fail to spot her among all the other people in cold-weather gear.
The tram took her across the city. Surveillance was thinner on the ground the further you got from the centre of town, until the only cameras were on main roads and on streets patrolled by private security firms, which handily advertised their presence by means of warning signs bolted to lamp-posts.
She made her way from the tram stop, down lanes and side streets. At one point, feeling reasonably comfortable that she wasn’t in range of a camera, she changed coats and stuffed the old one into some bushes. She found a pebble by the side of the road and dropped it inside her right boot, where it was just annoying enough to alter her gait. The trick was to walk differently enough to spoof the recognition algorithms, but not so much that you looked like someone deliberately walking with a stone in your shoe, which the algorithms were also written to look for. It was surprisingly tough to pull off.
In a new coat and with a new walk, she made her way to a shabby-looking car-hire firm, where she found an employee sitting behind a desk gloomily watching the snow falling beyond his window. He was so relieved to make at least one hire tonight that he gladly agreed to do the transaction in cash and he didn’t look too closely at the ID she’d mocked up on her phone during the tram journey, which was good because it was paper-thin, not much more than a false name and address and an electricity bill she’d created using the phone’s text editor and a cut-and-pasted letterhead. He didn’t even bother to ask for her driving licence. She’d been reasonably sure she would get away with it – the hire office was far from the centre of town and probably didn’t do a huge amount of business, particularly on a night like this. All you had to do was appear confident, seem as if you knew what you were doing, and have the bare minimum of ID, and the desperation of the other party did the rest of the work for you.
But she was still willing her heart rate to return to normal as the employee led her out to a compound at the back of the office and showed her a car that was so old it had an actual physical key. She took a few minutes to familiarise herself with the controls – it wouldn’t do to have an accident; any half-competent traffic cop would blow through her false ID as if it wasn’t there – and then she drove out of the compound and onto the street, and turned northeast.
The car was a wreck, probably as old as she was, which was good because it was unlikely to have a tracker fitted as standard, and bad because most of the way to the coast she expected the engine to just give up and drop onto the road.
But it got her here, to this modest bungalow in the crook of an arm of the forest which stopped just short of the shore. She could see no signs of surveillance, but that was the point of surveillance; you weren’t supposed to see it. She supposed she’d find out in the next few minutes.
She parked on a flat grassy area a few metres further on, walked back to the bungalow. Its boards were weatherbeaten but it was neat and well looked-after and the garden seemed regularly-tended. The lights were on, inside, behind thin curtains. She walked up to the front door and knocked.
It took a minute or so for him to answer; she heard the sound of his chair before he opened the door. Then she was standing there looking down at him and he was sighing.
[[Next|Section 14]]!Hit-and-run
For five years or so, Erik Lill had been her father’s closest confidante in the Tallinn police force. Aide de camp, partner, all-purpose gofer, if not keeper of her father’s secrets then at least party to many of them.
“They were here again yesterday,” he told her, driving his chair back into the living room. “They seemed angry.”
“They don’t want to upset the Russians,” she said. “Tempers are starting to get frayed; all it would take is one unwise word.”
“Russians,” he snorted. He stopped in the middle of the living room, spun his chair round to face her. “Have you done something to your hair?”
“Apart from not having time to wash it for a couple of days?”
He nodded. “That’s it.” He gestured at a sofa which stood against one wall. “Please, sit.”
She sat. “I probably shouldn’t stay here long,” she told him. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did wonder about that. Did they take you into custody?”
“Protective. They said.”
Lill rubbed his eyes. Krista noticed his hand was shaking. “Well,” he said.
“What did they want to know?” she asked.
“They wanted to know if your father murdered Sergii Volkov.”
Volkov. So that was his name. “What did you tell them?”
Lill looked at her. “I told them I didn’t know. I seriously doubt it – he wasn’t that kind of man – but I don’t know. I have no knowledge one way or the other.”
She’d always found Lill a little creepy, weaselly, like a minor Bond villain or a Nazi doctor, and the multiple sclerosis that had brought his police career to a premature close didn’t help. None of these things were, of course, his fault, but it was a hard feeling for her to shake.
She said, “Was that the truth, Erik?”
He looked surprised by the question. “Oh yes. I’m in no position to lie to them; they can withdraw support for my treatments any time they want.” He was undergoing a strenuous programme of treatment intended to encourage the myelin sheaths of his central nervous system to regrow; there were those who said the treatment was almost as bad as the MS.
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not in a position to call their bluff either.”
“Did my father know Sergii Volkov?”
“In a manner of speaking. He arrested him a couple of times.”
Krista felt her heart sink. Any kind of connection between her father and Sergii N only strengthened Jakobson’s case. “Who was he?”
“Sergii?” Lill looked thoughtful. “Sergii was a shit. Small-time criminal and wife-beater. Ran an import-export business. He was an absolutely terrible criminal, no aptitude for it at all. It made us wonder why he bothered; he’d been in and out of prison since he was eighteen or so, and every time, he went straight back to it. Never learned his lesson. Some of us sort of admired that, in a twisted kind of way. The rest of us found it a bit pathetic.”
“Did my father arrest him, that last time?”
Lill shook his head. “No, that was someone else, I can’t remember who. It’ll be in Records. He had a bunch of high-end watches, Patek Philippes, Breitlings, Jaeger-LeCoultres, that he was trying to sell, but they came from a smash-and-grab robbery in London. He said he didn’t know they were stolen, there was enough uncertainty to get him a lighter sentence than he might have received, he did his time and came out, and he died.”
“You seem to know a lot about him.”
“Everyone knew Sergii. He was sort of a bad-luck mascot. You’d pick up bits of gossip about some harebrained scheme or other he’d got himself arrested for. Also, I was the officer who investigated his death.”
“Oh.” Krista sat bolt upright on the sofa.
Lill nodded. “That was how I met your father, the first time, actually. We thought maybe Sergii had tried to cheat someone with the watches, maybe his supplier didn’t appreciate him losing tens of thousands of euros’ worth of merchandise. We were looking for a motive.”
Krista tried to fit all this together in her head. “Did you find one?”
Lill shook his head. “There was three or four times the legal driving limit of alcohol in his blood. He was blind drunk, stepped off the kerb without looking, a car clipped him, cracked his head on the pavement, and goodbye Sergii.”
“Everyone’s saying he was beaten to death.”
“I thought maybe he’d been in a fight, when I first saw the body, but the autopsy report said it was a hit-and-run. Now, whether it was an accident or not…” He shrugged. “We could never prove it, so we left the file open. It’s probably still open.”
“The wife thought he’d been murdered,” Krista said. “She said he’d been hassling my father and my father killed him to shut him up.”
“I don’t know about any of that.” He moved the chair back a few centimetres and squirmed to try to get more comfortable. “Jakobson had all this documentation I’d never seen before. Complaints by Sergii about your father, complaints by Sergii’s wife alleging we’d killed him. All of it new to me.”
“Surely you’d have seen it when you were investigating his death?”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you.”
“You think someone buried it?”
“I don’t know. Jakobson said her office never logged a complaint from the wife, but when they went looking for it, there it was.”
For the first time, Krista began to appreciate the true scale of the disaster which was overtaking the Tallinn police. At the very best, they looked criminally negligent. At worst? She closed her eyes and tried not to think about that.
“Jakobson says they found details of three other complaints, while they were looking for Sergii’s documents,” Lill told her. “Three more cases where the police were accused of killing Russians. All of them apparently ignored or deliberately covered up. She’s got her people going through Records to see if there are any more.”
Krista put her hands to her face. It wasn’t a simple disaster; it was a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. It was Revelation and Ragnarok combined.
“You look tired,” he said. “You shouldn’t drive tonight.”
“I can’t stay here, Erik,” she told him, opening her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”
“I really don’t think you need to add a car crash to your list of woes,” he said with a sad smile. “They won’t come out here at this time of night.”
“They’ll know I’ll come to see you. It’ll just be a matter of time. Best if I leave now.”
He nodded. “Where will you go?”
“I was thinking maybe I’d go down the coast, into Lithuania, maybe, or Poland. Give myself time to think.”
Lill pulled a face. “Oh, please,” he said. “Jakobson’s never going to believe that so there’s no point in lying to me about it.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble, Erik. If they pull the plug on your treatment…”
“Then they pull it.”
She got up from the sofa, knelt beside the wheelchair, and hugged him awkwardly. She had never exactly liked Lill, but she could still feel sympathy for him. “I’m sorry this has happened,” she said.
“That’s kind of you,” he told her, “but it’s not your fault.”
“Well,” she sat back on her heels, balancing herself by holding on to one of the chair’s armrests, “someone needs to apologise, and it might as well be me.”
He thought about that. “All right, then.” He patted her shoulder. “Thank you.” As she stood, he added, “But even if you don’t stay tonight, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go back to Tallinn. It would be unfortunate if you got caught in the riot.”
She found herself actually doing a comedy double-take. “Excuse me? The what?”
[[Head for Tallinn|Section 15a]]
[[Head for the border|Section 15b]]!Tapa
The centre of Tallinn was a landscape of overturned and burned out cars, the pavements crunchy underfoot with glass from shattered shop windows. Bits of merchandise lay everywhere, abandoned by looters, and there was still, ever so faintly, a tang of tear gas in the cold air.
Krista had watched it all from a hotel room in Tapa, not quite believing what she was seeing. The Prime Minister and President broadcast appeals for calm, the Russian Ambassador held a solemn press conference. There was a terse communique from the Kremlin itself, which had thus far held back from any comment. Almost a hundred injured, some of them seriously. No one had managed to add up how much damage had been done, but it must run into many hundreds of thousands of euros. Millions, maybe. The damage to tourism was incalculable. A couple of big cruise ships, due to dock in Tallinn that evening, had instead anchored offshore for several hours before electing to sail down the coast to Riga instead.
Somehow, the Prime Minister did not put the army on the streets. Salumäe had begun his career in the Tallinn police, and he’d always been sympathetic to the plight of the cop on the beat. He still had a cop’s eye for trouble; a rumour was going round that he’d gone into the centre of town during the night, incognito, to scope the situation out first-hand, and he’d decided that the police could cope without bringing the military into things. Martial law was the very last thing anyone needed.
Trouble was scattered all across Estonia. It was worst in the capital and in some of the towns along the eastern border, but there had been some disturbances elsewhere. In Tapa, someone had thrown a firebomb at a police station and thrown a brick through the windscreen of a parked patrol vehicle. Any other time, that would have been near the top of the news, but that night it barely rated a mention.
The next morning, at breakfast, there was an air of tension. None of the guests or staff spoke much and nobody wanted to sit near the windows. Krista ate quickly, checked out, and drove back toward Tallinn.
She still had no idea what to do, and even if she did, she had no resources with which to do it. Had it not been for the riot, Jakobson would have moved heaven and earth to find and arrest her. As it was, she thought she had a limited amount of leeway to move around, so long as she was careful.
[[Next|Section 16]]!The Border
She sat in the car watching the riot on her phone, not quite believing what she was seeing. The footage was jerky, flashes of people fighting, a line of police officers in riot suits, cars burning, furtive groups with scarves wrapped round their faces emerging from the smashed windows of shops with racks of clothes and boxed entertainment sets in their arms.
The footage kept cutting back to the studio, where solemn newscasters went over the story again and again and interviewed a steady procession of experts and talking heads. At one point, a shaken-looking Joonas Salumäe made a brief statement asking – begging, really – for people to stop the disruption and go home. He didn’t sound too confident that they would listen.
Outside, all was still and silent. It felt as if she was at the edge of the world. She thought of calling Markus, of calling Jakobson and turning herself in, but she did neither of these things. She could accept Lill’s invitation and stay here – the police had more pressing matters to worry about than looking for her now – but she felt safer on the move.
What she really needed to do was get out of the country. Find herself a bolthole somewhere and try to work out what to do next. Airports were out of the question – to start with, she didn’t have her passport. Returning to Tallinn and trying to sneak on board one of the supercats that boomed across to Helsinki briefly appealed, but according to the news all services had been suspended and the port closed. A couple of cruise ships which had been due to dock that evening had diverted down the coast to Riga.
She checked the time on her phone. A little after midnight. She thought a little more, then she put the key in the ignition and started the car.
The moment she started, she realised she was making a mistake. It was a three-hour drive to the border at Ikla and she hardly saw any traffic. What she did see was police vehicles everywhere. Most of them were on the way somewhere else, but some were parked watchfully at the side of the road. She kept dutifully to the speed limit, made sure her lights were on, tried not to panic.
About halfway, she felt weariness starting to overtake her. She turned off the main road after Märjamaa and drove for a while until she found a country road that wound deep into the surrounding forests. After a kilometre or so feeling the car’s ancient suspension being shaken to bits by the rutted track, she stopped, did a sloppy three-point turn, then pulled to the side and turned off the engine. It seemed as good a place as any. She set the alarm on her phone, reclined the seat as far as it would go, and closed her eyes.
She managed maybe an hour’s sleep, jerked suddenly awake half an hour before her alarm was due to go off, sat up stiffly and looked out through the windscreen. It was snowing again, and a layer of new fall had covered the tracks of her tyres.
She blinked and rubbed her eyes, took a few moments to clear her head. She felt as if a trapdoor had opened under her life and she was still falling. Rummaging in the glove compartment, she found a tin of boiled sweets left behind by some previous user of the car. She popped one in her mouth to try and get rid of the nasty taste already there. She got out, walked over to the trees, and scooped some snow into her mouth from a branch. It had not occurred to her to bring a bottle of water, let alone a flask of coffee and some sandwiches. It occurred to her that this was one of the more inept attempts in the history of escapes. She peed at the side of the track, scooped up some more snow and rubbed it on her face, dried herself with the hem of her hoodie, and went back to the car. For a moment, when she turned the key in the ignition, nothing happened but a sort of grinding cough, and she had a moment of blind panic until the engine caught and turned over.
Back on the main road, she skirted Pärnu to the east. Beyond the town, the road followed the coast all the way down to Riga. In the borderless Europe of Schengen, one could drive from the Russian border to the Atlantic coast of Portugal without having to stop for passport checks; getting into Latvia by road would be a mere formality.
Except it wouldn’t. As she drew closer to the border she saw more and more police vehicles, and increasingly they had Piirivalveamet – Border Guard – markings. She also saw a couple of Army trucks going in the other direction.
Just outside Ikla, she saw in the distance a line of brake lights. She pulled off onto the wide verge, got out of the car, and walked a few metres further on down the road. Peeking around a tree, she could see the buildings of the old border crossing. A number of police and Border Guard vehicles were parked on the road, and a line of cars was waiting to cross while officers checked papers. She blinked. With riots in the capital and the Russians still dicking about with their war games, Salumäe must have gone as close to declaring a state of emergency as he dared. She spotted soldiers among those guarding the border. It would be the work of a couple of minutes, if things became very bad, to seal off the country entirely.
It was hopeless. She was never going to cross here. They’d spot her fake ID the moment they looked at it and they’d arrest her for trying to cross the border on false papers and that would be that. Eventually – probably after quite a while – she would wind up back in a room with Jakobson and all this would have been for nothing. She could go through the forest, abandon the car, and walk across the border that way, but what then? She was out in the middle of nowhere early in the freezing morning and she would have no transport. She didn’t have a good grasp of the geography on the other side, but she had a vague idea that it was some kilometres to the nearest town. If she overshot that or didn’t manage to find a road to follow, she would just wander in the woods until she dropped.
She got back in the car and started the engine. A truck went past her to join the end of the line of traffic waiting to cross the border. The road here curved slightly, hiding her from view where she sat on the verge. She glanced over at the wing mirror to make sure nothing else was coming towards the crossing, then she turned the car, drove across the carriageway, and set off back the way she had come, in search of a hotel where she could get a few hours' sleep. She stayed within the speed limit the whole way.
[[Next|Section 16]]!Calling In
Halfway between Tapa and Tallinn, she turned off the main road in a small town, drove around for a while, then pulled into a car park behind a little block of flats and phoned Kustav.
“Are you okay, boss?” he asked.
“I’ve been better. How are things there?”
“It was quite a night.”
“I saw it on the news. Have IA been in touch with you?”
“Colonel Jakobson called last night, before everything went crazy, and this morning too. She wanted to know if you’d been in contact.”
“Did she have any message for me?”
“She didn’t look happy. Mind you, nobody looks happy at the moment.”
“Okay. When we’ve finished this conversation, call her and tell her you’ve spoken to me. Tell her I have no intention of interfering with her investigation, but I’m not going to let my father be dragged through the dirt like this.”
“I don’t see how that qualifies as not interfering with the investigation, boss, with all due respect.”
She smiled. Beyond the windscreen, she saw an old man emerge from one of the doors along the back of the block of flats. He was carrying a black rubbish bag, which he carried along to a dumpster at the end of the block and slung over the side onto a snow-dusted pile of similar bags.
She said, “I’m going out of town for a couple of days. There are some people I want to talk to. I’ll be in touch when I get back.”
“What are you actually doing, boss?”
“I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I work it out.”
She presumed last night’s events had driven her some distance down Jakobson’s list of priorities – it would be hard, at the moment, to justify expending manpower on a search for one errant police officer - but it couldn’t hurt if the Colonel thought she’d left Tallinn rather than returning to it. Anyway, technically Laagri wasn’t actually in Tallinn; it lay just beyond the outskirts of the city.
[[Next|Section 17]]!Stepan
It was almost five o’clock in the evening when she reached her destination, a little estate of four-storey apartment blocks arranged around a bleak snowbound square that in the summer was a pleasant garden. She parked the car a few streets away, just in case, and walked back to the flats.
On the top floor of one of the blocks, she walked to a door at the end of the corridor and pressed the button on the entryphone beside the door.
After a few moments a distorted voice emerged from the little speaker. Krista bent down close to the grille and said, “It’s me, Uncle Stepan.”
In the way – in her experience, anyway – of many elderly people, Stepan kept the flat heated to equatorial levels. It smelled of spices and coffee and cigarette smoke and old books, and the walls that were not covered with hanging rugs were covered with bookshelves.
The general tone of the place was dark. The furniture was dark, the woodblock flooring was stained to a dark oak colour, the heavy curtains – now drawn against the evening – were dark. Stepan tended not to use the ceiling lights, preferring to depend on a couple of table lamps, one in a corner, the other by his favourite chair. It gave the flat a sheltered feeling, as if it was walled off against the insults of outside life. It was, of all the places in her life, the most familiar. She could not remember a time when the flat was not a part of her life.
Stepan made them tea with lemon, in glasses with filigreed silver holders that had belonged to his grandmother’s family in Moscow, before the Revolution. He was a short, fat man with delicate hands and a dancer’s sense of balance, and he wore his long white hair in a braid.
Like the detectives who had unilaterally elected themselves part of her family when her mother died, Stepan was not really her uncle. Unlike them, he really was part of her family. Like the flat, Krista couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know him.
She stood in the living room reading the spines of the books on the shelves – and many of those had been a part of her life as long as she remembered – while he clattered around in the kitchen. The majority of the books were in Russian or Estonian, but there was a fair scattering of titles in English and French and German. Looking around the room, she felt, for the first time in what seemed a very long while, safe.
Stepan came into the room carrying a battered silver tray – another heirloom – in which sat the tea glasses. He put in on top of a pile of yellowed newspaper cuttings on the coffee table, took one of the glasses, and sat down in his armchair.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m living interesting times,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “I tried to call, but your phone was unavailable.”
It had probably been in a bin at the time. “Things have been a bit…nonlinear.”
“Sit down,” he said. “You look exhausted.”
She took her glass and perched herself on the edge of the other armchair. “I need some context,” she said.
“And you decided you’d come to your tame Russian?” he chuckled.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “And you know it. It’s just…” she sipped some tea. “I need someone who won’t lie to me.”
He thought about that. “Well, all right. So, here we are. Your father has been accused of murder, and Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority is up in arms about it. Literally. Those in authority have handled the business badly, resulting in last night’s…exuberance. Does that all sound about right?”
She nodded wearily. “Do you think he did it?”
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “What kind of question is that? Do you?”
“I don’t know any more,” she said. She told him about her conversation with Erik Lill, the complaints which had been filed and then apparently buried.
“It sounds like a fairly incompetent cover-up, as these things go,” Stepan said when she’d finished. “Just ignoring something doesn’t qualify as a cover-up.”
“I know. But everything sounds just convincing enough. I know there were things my father never told me; he was dealing with a lot of classified stuff, towards the end of his career. We both know he had a temper.”
“He was a tough guy, it’s true,” Stepan mused. “Which is not the same thing as being a murderer.” He took a sip of tea and put his glass down on the low table beside his chair. “Shall I tell you a story?”
“Does it have a happy ending?”
“It doesn’t have an ending at all, happy or not.”
“Okay.”
[[Next|Section 18]]!Bronze Night
He settled back and clasped his hands in his lap. “This goes back to Pronksiöö,” he said. “Bronze Night. Do you remember?”
“I was a baby, Uncle Stepan. I was, what, a year old?”
Stepan nodded and looked around the living room. “It was poorly handled,” he said. “On all sides. There’s still a lot of resentment.”
“It was forty years ago.”
“You think we should all let go of our grudges?” he asked, smiling sadly at her.
“I think they’re the only thing keeping some of you going.”
He laughed. “That would be true.”
“Were you there?” she asked, approaching the real question – was my father there? – at a tangent.
“Oh yes, I was there. Would you like to see the scars?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “What happened?”
“You know what happened. Everyone knows what happened.”
“Pretend I don’t. Pretend I’m a foreigner.”
“You are. All young people are foreigners.” He watched her face for a moment, but she didn’t respond to the joke. “Okay,” he said. “Well. The Bronze Soldier. Bronzovyj Soldat. It’s a Soviet war memorial out at the Military Cemetery, but once upon a time it used to be right in the middle of town, in a little park on Tõnismägi, what we used to call Liberators’ Square. There were the graves of a dozen or so Russian soldiers and a statue of another soldier in Red Army uniform. Officially it was The Monument To The Liberators Of Tallinn. You can imagine how that went down with the Estonians.” He took a sip of his drink. “This stuff runs very, very deep. After the Soviets took over in 1944, they started destroying monuments to the Estonian War Of Independence, which was not the best way to win over hearts and minds. And then they put up this…thing.” He sat back and lit a cigarette without bothering to offer one to Krista. “Actually, I’d forgotten, but there was originally another monument on Tõnismägi, a wooden thing with a red star on top of it. A couple of teenage girls blew it up one night.”
Krista got up and opened the window a fraction. Stepan watched her come back to her chair with a sad expression on his face.
“So,” she said. “Alyosha.”
He chuckled. “Yes, people call it that sometimes. Alyosha stood there, through rain and sun and snow, all the way through the years of the Soviet Empire, until 1991, when Estonia’s independence was restored. After that, really, Alyosha’s days were numbered.”
“Why did it take so long?”
“I imagine the authorities had some idea what would happen if they tried to take the monument down,” he told her. “People tend to want to put things like that off. Until they’ve left public office, anyway. After Independence, Red Army veterans carried on as they always had, coming to the memorial with Soviet flags on Victory Day and Liberation Day and generally pissing off the Estonians. There was a bit of a fuss around Victory Day in 2006 – Estonians protesting and threatening to blow the thing up and so on – and that, as the British say, is when it all kicked off. Although it had been kicking off ever since the end of the War, really.” Stepan stubbed out his cigarette and topped up his glass. He waggled the bottle at Krista, but she shook her head and he put it back on the table.
“April 26, 2007,” she said.
Stepan took a drink. “Bronze Night. Yes. There was a lot of low-level unpleasantness and manoeuvring,” he said. “But to cut to the chase, as it were, the authorities exhumed the graves and set about relocating the monument. There was a mass protest and then there were riots. Water cannon, teargas, cars overturned and set alight, shops looted, vandalism. All that joyous stuff. The official figure was about a thousand arrested, more than a hundred injured. It was a lively couple of nights.”
“What did you do, those two nights?”
He regarded her levelly. “The first night, I was at the monument, protesting its removal.” He paused, watching her face. “We’re a minority,” he went on. “A sizeable minority, but a minority nevertheless. Fighting for our identity.” It was the first time Krista had ever heard him say ‘we’, meaning Estonia’s ethnic Russian community. “That’s really what it was about. Us and Them. There are those who will tell you that it was whipped up by the Russians – the Russian Russians, over the border – and maybe some of it was, but in all honesty it didn’t need much whipping. Have you ever been in the middle of a riot?”
“You know I haven’t.”
“It’s…” he struggled to find a word. “It’s…exhilarating. Can I tell you my theory?”
“Please.”
“People are angry all the time. Not about any one thing, just this hot, explosive core of anger waiting to be aimed at something. Doesn’t even matter what it is. All you have to do is point them at it and off they go.”
“Were you angry?”
He looked at her for so long, considering an answer, that she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. “Did I riot?” he said quietly. “Yes, I did. Did I help overturn cars? Yes, I did. Did I smash windows and throw stones at the police? Yes, I did. Then your father arrested me.”
Krista blinked.
“He arrested me, then he dragged me down a side street and told me to fuck off,” Stepan went on. “He actually said that, and you know what he was like about bad language. ‘Fuck off, Stepan. Go home to Nadia and stay there until this insanity is over one way or another.’”
“And what did you do?”
“I didn’t leave the flat for a week.” He lit another cigarette, regarded her steadily through the smoke. “I won’t kid you that your father caused the scales to fall from my eyes, but I did realise I’d had a lucky escape and he wouldn’t be there the next time.”
“He never talked about it.”
“I don’t blame him; neither have I, really. He and I never spoke of it. It wasn’t our finest hour. Best forgotten.”
“Not everyone feels that way.”
“No,” he said. “Well, that’s politics. I try to stay out of politics, these days.”
Krista sighed and sat back in her chair.
[[Next|Section 19]]!Memories
“Your father and I grew up together,” Stepan said. “Our families were neighbours. We played together, grazed our knees together, broke the odd window together. He was the best man at my wedding, and I at his. If I’d been anyone else I doubt he’d have let me go, but he did. It could have got him into a lot of trouble, if anyone had seen him, but he did it anyway.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “It’s not evidence that you would want to take into court, but I don’t think that’s the action of a murderer.”
Stepan had a touching faith in human nature. She said, “I don’t think that’s going to carry a lot of weight, but thank you,”
“The question is, how do you prove it?”
“Me personally, or the police?”
“Either. Both.”
She sighed. “The accusation is twenty years old; finding witnesses or corroboration is going to be a slog. People’s memories become unreliable. The victim was cremated so we can’t exhume him and do another autopsy. All that’s left is the documentary evidence. Someone made a direct complaint against my father, and followed it up, and we seem to have just ignored it. There are a couple of archived newspaper reports, a couple of other suspicious deaths, but it all seems to have died down very quickly.”
Stepan grunted. “Russian Man Dies. Nobody Cares.”
“I know that’s how it looks, but it’s not what happened. We’d never do that.”
“Unless it was officially sanctioned. Unless there really was some sort of death squad and your father’s superiors sought to cover it up.” He sipped more tea. “What it looks like, Krista, is the tip of an iceberg.”
She nodded glumly.
“Have you seen the complaint?”
“Jakobson showed it to Erik Lill. He says it’s authentic. But there are no internal documents to go with it. No action forms, no memos, nothing. Jakobson’s spoken to some officers who were serving back then, but nobody remembers anything.”
“As would be expected.”
“Either they don’t remember anything because they’re lying, or they don’t remember anything because there isn’t anything to remember. Jakobson’s only just started her investigation; it’s going to last for years. She’ll have to upend the entire police force, past and present.”
“What about you? Is there anything you can do?”
“I don’t have the resources. I’m supposed to be in protective custody, although I’m not sure who’s supposed to be protected from who. I put my father’s stuff in storage when I cleared out his flat. I had to give Jakobson the key to the storage unit, but she won’t find anything there. I’ve read all his documents. And if it was true, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to write it down.”
“Do you remember anything? Around the date this Russian man died?”
She shook her head. “Twenty years ago, Uncle Stepan. I was still at the Police School; I didn’t see much of my parents. My father could have become an international criminal and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“And afterward?”
She’d thought about that a lot, going back over her memories of the time, looking for little signs and inconsistencies, tense silences between her parents, angry outbursts from her father. Anything at all to indicate a period of upheaval. And she’d come up empty. “Nothing. Everything was normal, as far as I can remember. Normal for a police family, anyway.”
He nodded. “I’ve been thinking back to that time, too. I was in England then, lecturing at Nottingham, but I saw your father from time to time, when I came back during holidays. I don’t remember any impression that he was under stress.”
“It’s not evidence, Uncle Stepan. It was twenty years ago. No one’s memory is that good.”
He thought about it. “What will you do now?”
She closed her eyes. “I really wish people would stop asking me that, because I don’t know.”
“You can’t stay on the run, you know. Eventually this Colonel Jakobson will just get annoyed and order your arrest.”
She groaned. “I know.” She opened her eyes. “What do you think I should do?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do. You have no access to your father’s papers, no access to the investigation, you’re a fugitive in all but name. It’s not a particularly strong position. Are you asking for my advice?”
She opened her eyes. “Yes.”
“Go back to Colonel Jakobson. Offer to work with her. That way you might at least get some distant access to things. Otherwise you’re just out in the cold, watching it all on television.”
Krista thought about it, thought about the embarrassment of just meekly giving herself up, thought about what Jakobson would say. “She’ll lock me in a room somewhere and throw away the key,” she said. She added. “And I wouldn’t blame her, really.”
Stepan shrugged. “It would save on hotel bills.”
That made her laugh, for the first time, it seemed, in a long while. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it would.”
[[Next|Section 20]]!Miracles
She spent the night in another hotel. There was no news but the news of the riot. For a miracle, the unrest had subsided to a slow simmer and there had been no repeats of actual mass violence, but the atmosphere in Tallinn was officially described as ‘tense’. All police leave had been cancelled, and the army remained on standby. Prime Minister Salumäe had spent all night in an emergency committee, and when he made a brief statement at breakfast time it showed. He praised the role the police and other emergency services had played during the disturbance and denied that it had been sparked off by police heavy-handedness. He ended with a plea for Estonians – all Estonians – to band together in fraternity. All he would say about the investigation into the death of Sergii N was that it was still ongoing.
Krista breakfasted late, after a sleepless night of her own. She was drinking a second cup of coffee when a tall man dressed in jeans and a fleece sat down opposite her. Krista looked at him, looked around the dining room. It was almost empty; the waiting staff were tidying up to get ready for the lunch service.
“Hello, Major,” said the man. He was middle-aged, brown-haired, pale-eyed. “My name is Kristjan Alver. Do you mind if I join you?”
“You seem to have joined me already,” Krista said.
“Quite.” Alver raised a hand to attract the attention of one of the waitresses. “Could I have a cup of coffee, please?” he asked her.
“It’s serve yourself, sir,” the girl said, indicating a coffee machine sitting on a table piled up with cups and saucers.
“Yes,” Alver said with what turned out to be a devastatingly charming smile. “But could I have a cup, please?”
The waitress deadpanned him for a moment before turning and heading off to the coffee machine with a barely-suppressed sigh.
“That was cheeky of me,” Alver confided to Krista. “I’m not even a guest.”
Krista sipped her own coffee. She’d checked in using her own ID, but she’d paid cash in advance for the night’s stay. Unless Jakobson had put a bulletin out to every hotel in the country, she should have been invisible. “You’re with KaPo,” she said.
Alver favoured her with a dialled-down version of the smile he’d used on the waitress. “I’m afraid not. Although we do work a lot with Internal Security. Ah, thank you.” This last to the waitress. “Is there any sugar?”
The waitress half-turned, swiped a pot full of sugar sachets from the neighbouring table, and set it down in front of Alver with a delicacy which suggested she really wanted to slam it entirely through the tabletop. “Will that be all, sir?” she asked.
Alver beamed. “It will, thank you.”
When the waitress had stomped off, Alver said, “So, no. Not KaPo.”
“Do you have any way of identifying yourself as working for Not KaPo?”
“Gods no.” He gave a theatrical shudder. “That would defeat the whole object.”
“How do you identify each other then? Secret handshakes? Funny walks?”
He leaned forward slightly and said in a stage whisper, “We have a company song.”
Despite everything, that made Krista smile. “Very good, Mr Alver. I presume this is about my father? Unless my life has really broken free of its moorings?”
He nodded. “I’m here to reassure you that your father is almost certainly innocent.”
“There’s no ‘almost’ about it.”
“Just so. We’ll be notifying the rather splendid Colonel Jakobson of this…” he checked his watch. “Well, it’s been done already. So.” He beamed at her. “You can go home. There will be no black marks on your career; in fact I think your superiors will be rather apologetic, although I can’t promise that. People are unpredictable.”
They sat looking at each other for quite a while. Then Krista said, “No, Mr Alver. That won’t do. You’re not going to walk into my life, tell me everything is suddenly magically all right, and then just walk away again without telling me what’s going on.” And even as she said it, she knew something more was going on. Alver and Not KaPo could simply have passed their message on to the police; she would never have had to know they existed.
He thought about it, while he tore the ends off three of the sugar sachets and dumped their contents in his cup. “What do you think of,” he asked, picking up his spoon and stirring his coffee, “when you hear the word ‘disinformation’?”
“Deception. Black propaganda. Fake news.”
Alver took a sip of his coffee, frowned at the cup, put it back on its saucer. “The nature of disinformation has changed slightly, down the years. At one time, it was just about spreading lies, and you’ll have to believe me when I tell you those were simpler, better times. These days, it’s all about making people unsure what to believe. If all news is fake, what is real? How is one to decide? In an environment like that, even the most implausible lies can seem true. To a large enough number of people to make a difference, anyway. Even when they’re proved to be lies, people will still insist they’re the truth. In a sense, ‘truth’ no longer matters. Truth is what the largest percentage of the population believe.” He picked his cup up to take another sip, decided against it, put the cup down again. “Did you ever hear the story of the straight bananas?”
She shook her head.
[[Next|Section 21]]!Bananas
He settled back in his chair, the body language of someone revisiting a favourite old story. “Even before Britain left the European Union, there was a lot of anti-EU sentiment, particularly in the right-wing media. They would go through EU regulations and then publish scare-stories about how the Brussels bureaucrats were destroying the British way of life in some way or other.
“So, there was a story about how the EU were seeking to ban curved bananas, which was an affront to the British for…reasons I never quite understood. What had actually happened was that the European Commission had been asked by the banana industry to standardise what up to that point had been a confusing mess of individual national classifications. It was a way of importers everywhere in the EU knowing what they were buying. The regulation stipulated that bananas should be free of malformation or abnormal curvature – those that were perfect were classified Class 1, those with a slight malformation were Class 2, and so on. There was no ban, just a new industry classification system.
“The story about the banana ban was debunked over and over again, but it wouldn’t go away. I was in England around the time of the Brexit referendum and I heard it repeated time and time again. There were people who said they’d voted to leave the EU because of it. It was useless telling people there was no banana ban, because they just wouldn’t believe you, even though the truth was perfectly checkable. It had become ingrained in popular culture to such an extent that I heard politicians repeating it.”
He was talking about bananas, but he really meant her father. Even if he were proved innocent, there would be those who would still believe he was guilty. The accusation would never go away; it would drift around the internet, attracting conspiracy nuts and malcontents, and every time a Russian was hurt during an interaction with the Tallinn police it would be taken out and dusted off and it would gain a few more followers. It would never end.
“The Russians did this,” she said.
“They would be our chief suspects, yes. Although proving it will be tricky; it always is. We believe they engineered the blackout before Christmas as a cover to insert certain items into certain servers and databases, and to make it appear they had been there for some considerable time. And really, you can’t fault their ambition. For most people, blacking out an entire city would be enough of an achievement.”
“The complaint about Sergii N’s death.”
“Indeed. They put it, and some supporting material, in various places, and then they sat back and waited for someone to notice it. Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t. I think this time they worked rather well.”
“But Sergii died twenty years ago. They can’t have planned that far ahead.”
“I think you’d be surprised just how far ahead some things are planned. But no, you’re right. They looked for a Russian who had died in uncertain circumstances, long enough ago to make it plausible that witnesses had died or dropped out of touch and memories had become unclear, and they wrote the whole scenario around him. It’s rather elegant, really.”
“How do you know all this?”
Alver shook his head. “Can’t tell you. Sorry.”
“Then why should I believe any of it?”
“Because you want to? It rather proves my point, doesn’t it. A complete stranger comes up to you in a hotel dining room and spins you a most unlikely story. Is it true, or is it not? It confirms what you want to believe, therefore it’s true.” He sat back and crossed his arms.
Krista looked around the dining room. They had the place to themselves; even the waiting staff had gone. “They’ve destroyed my father’s reputation, just to discredit the police and embarrass the government.”
“It’s not a game, I’m afraid, Major. And it’s actually quite an achievement; frankly, we’d be over the moon if we managed to pull something like this off. And we’re not at all certain it’s over yet. No offence, but it’s rather a lot of trouble to go to just to blacken the name of one policeman and cause a riot. We’re waiting to see if another shoe drops.”
“So what am I supposed to do now? Go home, pretend it never happened?”
Alver looked levelly at her. “I told you, Major. It’s not a game. It’s not a book you can close and put back on the shelf. Your life will never be the same as it was last week, and I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you it will be. In all likelihood you’ll never have closure; the people who did this will never be brought to justice, even if we ever manage to identify them. You’ll have to cope as best you can, I’m afraid.”
“None of this is remotely reassuring.”
“We’re going to wait a few days before we make this public – operational reasons, I can’t tell you why. We’ll say the Russians deliberately set out to blacken your father’s name. The Russians will issue a shocked denial. People will believe us, or they’ll believe them. I imagine at some point there will be some trumped-up outrage for them to accuse us of and us to deny. And so on and so forth.” He looked down at his cup and shook his head ever so slightly. “Go home, Major,” he told her. “You look tired.”
[[Go to police station|Section 22a]]
[[Visit father’s grave|Section 22b]]!The Station
She drove back into Tallinn, dropped off the hire car, and got a tram down to Raekoja plats police station.
The riot had mostly missed the Old Town – a couple of smashed shop windows and a smell of smoke on the cold air seemed to be the extent of the damage – but there seemed fewer people about. Certainly fewer tourists, although some hardy souls, probably hoping for some exciting footage to show the folks back home, were out and about.
At the front desk, the security gate no longer recognised her ID. The duty Sergeant refused to let her through, phoning up to Jakobson instead. Krista and the Sergeant were still trying to outstare each other when Jakobson emerged from the lift on the other side of the security barrier and let her through.
They went up to an interview room on the first floor, sat down, and looked at each other across the table.
“Well,” Jakobson said finally.
“You’ve spoken to Alver’s people?”
“I have, but let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about how you disobeyed an order and went walkabout.”
“You never ordered me to stay there.”
Jakobson was obviously struggling not to shout. “Where did you go?”
“I talked to a couple of people.”
“Alver?”
“He found me. Appeared like a bad special effect and proceeded to mansplain everything to me.”
Jakobson scowled. “I’ve had KaPo bending my ear this morning as well. They’re not too impressed with your behaviour either.”
“Look…”
Jakobson held up a hand. “No, Major, you look. If it were up to me you’d never work as a police officer again. And that might still happen. All Mr Alver and his band of little spooks have done is spin me a fancy story. They haven’t shown me any evidence yet, and until they do you’re on suspension. There will be a board of inquiry about your behaviour, to be convened not more than thirty days from this date, and you’d better be at the top of your game because they’re going to be just as angry with you as I am. Seriously, Major, what did you think you were going to achieve?”
“He was my father.”
“I know who he was.” Jakobson shook her head. “Personally, I hope they throw the book at you, I really do. You behaved unprofessionally and you could have jeopardised my investigation, and finding out it was all a Russian plot doesn’t change that. I suspect everyone’s going to be so relieved that they’ll let you off with a reprimand, but I’m not going to forgive and forget.”
Krista thought it wasn’t going to be as simple as that. Even if Alvers and his people came up with footage of the Russians blacking out the city and planting stuff in the country’s databases, there would still be people who believed the lie. It didn’t matter that the scheme had been uncovered – the Russians had probably allowed for that – it had lasted long enough to plant doubt.
The same could be said for her career. Jakobson had been right that she escaped with a stern reprimand from the board of inquiry, but there was still doubt. She could feel it in the way her colleagues and superiors looked at her when she went back to work. She could feel it in the change in atmosphere when she entered a room. No one ever said anything – everyone was, in fact, wholly supportive – but it was as if she had experienced a subtle change in weight or density, and she didn’t know quite what to do about it.
The Tamburlaine investigation came to an abrupt end when its subject suffered a fatal heart attack while shopping with his wife in Bremen. Deprived of their leader, his lieutenants took to squabbling among themselves for the right to inherit his empire , and the streets of Hamburg were briefly a bloodbath. Expanding into Estonia was presumed to be somewhere far down their list of priorities right now, but they would bear watching.
[[Next|Section 23]]!Respect
A funeral was going on at Rahumäe when she got there – quite a large one, judging by the number of cars. There was nowhere to park and she wound up leaving the car over on the other side of the cemetery and walking the rest of the way.
The sun had come out, finally, and the light reflecting off the snowy ground was almost blinding. If she closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sky, she thought she could feel the warmth of the sunlight on her cheeks, although her breath still plumed in the chill air. A few kilometres away, across Ülemiste järv, she could hear the engines of jets taking off and landing at the city’s airport.
The grave was marked with an unassuming plain stone of black marble, unadorned save for her parents’ names and dates. Not even her father’s rank. No way to know who they were, what they had done in life. Krista brushed a cap of crusty snow from the top of the stone and stood there with her hands in her pockets.
It was a while since she’d been out here, even though it was only a couple of kilometres from her home. After her father’s funeral she’d come every weekend, but work started to intrude and then the Tamburlaine thing had come along and she was spending seven days a week on that, and…well, her father would have understood. Her mother, maybe not so much.
She’d been twelve when her mother died, eaten alive by an aggressive brain tumour which had been inoperable even before the headaches announced its presence. Her father had never remarried, although there had been a few woman friends down the years, some of whom Krista got on better with than others. They had all turned up at the funeral, six intense-looking women standing in a tight little group. Krista had found herself watching them, trying to see if her father had had a ‘type’, but the women, short and tall, slim and stout, dark and fair, had nothing in common except the man they were there to mourn. None of them resembled her mother.
Her father had been an outstanding police officer, but nobody could have accused him of being a natural parent. A great chunk of her upbringing had been outsourced to a loose network of aunts from both sides of her family, and there had been rows. She thought her father had been deeply relieved when she went to university, and then to the Police School, because it meant he could finally speak to her as an equal. She found she didn’t resent any of this; it was just the way their life had been. She didn’t even regret the arguments, although she wished she had managed to win more of them.
He had never told her what he thought about her decision to become a police officer. In another family that would have seemed strange, but for her it was perfectly normal. They hadn’t even discussed it beforehand; she had just gone ahead and applied. He’d always been there for advice, if she asked for it, and they occasionally talked over cases, but that was it. How he felt about having a daughter in the police force remained a mystery.
None of this meant that they didn’t care very much about each other. Every now and again her aunts – her mother’s sisters – would profess themselves scandalised by her father’s lack of parenting skills, but they didn’t understand him the way she did. He would, she had always been sure, have taken a bullet for her, and she for him.
And now it was all moot anyway. He was gone and she was who she was, for good or ill.
She turned from the grave and walked back down the wide path through the wooded cemetery towards the car. A large number of Tallinn’s notable citizens were buried here; she passed the graves of politicians and writers and painters and rock stars. Scattered among them were names of Russian origin. She’d never really noticed them before; they were all, in her mind at least, Estonians. That, in the light of recent events, was probably naïve of her. It was going to take some years for the wounds of the past week to heal, if they ever did.
On the way out of the cemetery she passed the grave of ‘Iron Man’, the legendary rocker Gunnar Graps. Graps had once been arrested trying to cross the Swedish border carrying anabolic steroids. He said his two months in a Swedish jail wasn’t so bad; the jail was better than most Estonian restaurants. Krista had never liked Graps’s music, but that line about the jail made her smile. She’d visited a prison in Norrköping once, to pick up a suspect who was being extradited to Estonia, and all she could say was that Estonian restaurants must have been pretty terrible back in Graps’s day.
Back in the car, she started the engine and let it run while the heater thawed out the interior. She had, she considered, achieved precisely nothing. She hadn’t broken the case and proved her father innocent; Alvers and Not KaPo had appeared out of thin air and done that while she had been driving around the country wondering what to do next. It was hardly a shining performance. On the other hand, Alvers had access to all the resources of the state security apparatus, while all she’d had was a cheap phone. Maybe it all balanced out in the end.
The car was finally warm enough for her to drive without shivering violently. She put it in gear and drove towards the centre of town.
[[Next|Section 23]]!Spring
Winter turned to Spring, and Spring turned to Summer. The news of the Russian cyberattack seemed to have drawn the poison which had overtaken the country earlier in the year, but as Alver had said, there was still a vocal minority which believed her father was guilty. Relations between Estonia and Russia remained frosty.
She had some leave – quite a lot of leave, actually – saved up, and she and Markus took a holiday in Amsterdam. He’d been hurt by the way she had dumped him and taken off on her own, and she still had a lot of bridges to mend. Being out of Tallinn helped.
One evening they dined at a little restaurant off Dam Square, walked back to their hotel hand in hand. They were almost there when her phone rang.
“Have you seen the news, boss?” Kustav asked when she answered.
“News about what?” she said with a sinking sensation.
“You’re going to want to see this,” he told her.
Back in their room, she called up a news service on the entertainment set, sat on the end of the bed scrolling through the headlines. While Markus took a shower.
The item was about halfway down the headline page. She watched it three times, was watching it a fourth when Markus came out of the bathroom wearing in one of the hotel’s thick white dressing gowns and towelling his hair.
“What is it?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“Trouble,” she said, starting the news item again.
The footage was jerky and grainy, a nighttime scene of a group of figures in Estonian police uniform standing swigging from bottles in some open space. They were joking and laughing and shoving each other, unsteady on their feet. The studio narration informed the audience that the video had recently come to light as a result of an investigation into the Tallinn police and was currently being studied to establish its authenticity.
Whoever had filmed the footage was clearly drunk; the viewpoint swooped and yawed, spending as much time focused on the ground as on the little group of men. Suddenly, one of them lurched to the side and the camera followed him as he stood in front of a statue of a soldier in Red Army uniform, unzipped himself, and began to urinate on it. There was laughter, tinny and flat, on the soundtrack.
The police officer finished, zipped himself up, and for a moment he turned grinning at the camera, and the footage froze on the face of Joonas Salumäe. He was a lot younger, his hair shorter, but there was no mistaking that face.
The scene cut to a woman in her thirties. She was pretty, but she had the look of a drinker. A caption identified her as Lenna Rüütel, spokesperson for some pro-Russian pressure group Krista had never heard of before. She was telling the interviewer that the video was an outrage, an insult to all the dead of the Second World War, not just the Soviet dead. She said it surprised her not at all that the Tallinn police had behaved in this way, but she was saddened and disappointed that the Prime Minister, in his younger days, had shown such disrespect, and she called for him to step down.
The news item ended with a statement from the Prime Minister’s office, in the strongest possible terms, that the video was fake and the whole thing was clearly a Russian attempt to undermine Salumäe and his government in the run-up to next month’s elections.
“It’s got to be a fake,” Markus said.
Krista shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She thought this was what Alvers had meant when he said he and his colleagues were waiting for another shoe to drop. “Enough people will believe it.” Estonia’s largest opposition party had lobbied vigorously against joining the Baltic Shield, and its leader had promised to have the American missiles removed from Estonian soil if he was ever elected Prime Minister. And that wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility; Salumäe was popular, but he wasn’t bulletproof. The last election had been closer than many people had expected. Was that what this whole thing was about? Driving a wedge between Estonia and NATO?
“So, what are you going to do?” Markus said.
“Me?” she asked, surprised.
“I was wondering if I should start packing, that’s all.”
“Gods no,” she said, turning off the entertainment centre. “I’m on holiday. Someone else can worry about it.”
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[[Return to the cover page to read Lenna's story|https://www.silenceintallinn.com]]