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!The Dark
Lenna groaned and opened her eyes. For a moment – quite a few moments, actually – she thought she was having another of those hypnagogic dreams where she could see through her closed eyelids but was completely paralysed. She had two or three of these a year, had been having them since university; mostly they were harmless, but every now and again they involved someone standing by her bed.
She’d told her therapist about it, and he had assured her that it was not an uncommon condition – as much as fifty percent of the population had experienced it at least once, and perhaps five percent suffered regular episodes. He said it might be the root of stories of demonic possession and alien visitation. He’d even pulled up Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare – a vaguely Goyaesque painting featuring a sleeping young woman sprawled decoratively on a chaise with a small, bestial figure sitting on her chest, while what appeared to be a cartoon horse looked on. It was not remotely what Lenna had experienced, but something about the painting seemed to capture the sensation.
Anyway, this was not one of those times. She could wiggle her fingers and toes and she could blink her eyelids. She wasn’t dreaming. She was awake; the heavy, paralysed sensation was because she was still drunk, and the profound darkness was because…yes, why was it so dark? Was she at home? Was she in someone else’s bed? Someone whose bedroom had thick curtains and no streetlights directly outside? Details of the preceding evening remained elusive.
If she was in someone else’s flat, that was going to be a problem. Well, it was going to be a number of problems, but the most pressing one at the moment was that she needed to pee and she had no idea where the bathroom might be.
She slowly stretched her arms and legs out to the sides until she encountered the edges of the bed, and established that there was no one there with her, which was puzzling. Was she in some samaritan’s spare room? On previous experience, this seemed unlikely.
Groping around beyond the side of the bed, she encountered a small table, and on it – miracle of miracles – her phone. She picked it up and switched it on, and the light of its screen instantly collapsed the infinite darkness surrounding her.
Oh, so that’s where I am…
She spent a few seconds considering the shadows of her bedroom before rolling off the bed and padding unsteadily out of the room and down the hallway to the bathroom. She tried switching on the bathroom light, but nothing happened, so she peed by the light of her phone, balanced it on the cistern while she washed her hands, then carried it down the hall again to the kitchen.
Where all was darkness. No lights on any of the appliances. She lifted the blind away from the window and looked down into the street. All the streetlamps were out, no lights in any of the blocks across the road. It was a moonless, cloudy night, and the sky was a featureless grey only fractionally lighter than the city it covered. Down below, a tram had come to a stop in the middle of the street. Passengers had disembarked and were standing foolishly in the light of car headlamps. There were quite a few people down in the street, considering it was…she checked the time on her phone. Okay, it wasn’t that late. Everything was vague in her memory, but she thought she might only have been asleep – if it was sleep – for an hour or so. She couldn’t remember when she had left the bar, or how she had got home. Got to stop doing that.
Down below, the traffic had come to a standstill, a line of cars and buses and vans. It was interesting how little actual illumination a car headlight actually put out; everything at about knee height was brightly lit, but above that was darkness. Very faintly, she could hear the sound of car horns, and, distantly, the sirens of emergency vehicles.
She tried to call friends to find out what the actual fuck was going on, but there was no signal. The landline phone, which she kept mostly for nostalgic reasons, was similarly dead. Nothing. Not even static. No television, no wifi, no internet.
In a cupboard in the hall, stuffed in with her camping gear, was a wind-up radio. She located it by opening the cupboard door, pulling everything out onto the floor, and searching through it on her hands and knees. She gave the handle a few turns and switched it on, and the sense of relief when white noise emerged from the speaker almost made her pass out. She settled with her back against the wall and turned the tuning dial, past scraps of music and snatches of conversation in Finnish and Latvian and Russian. So the world wasn’t ending. At least not in Finland and Latvia and Russia. Not a lot of Estonian about, though. She found a sport radio station that was based in Tartu, but the studio discussion wasn’t about football; instead, the newsreader was talking about a massive power blackout in Tallinn. He actually used the word ‘massive’. Then he rode off into the highlands of speculation and started using words like ‘cyberattack’ and ‘invasion’ and ‘tanks on the border’ until someone cut him off. A few moments later, another voice came on, this one fractionally calmer, advising everyone to stay indoors until there was more information. Whether this advice came through official channels or simple common sense was not clear.
Lenna sat where she was on the hallway floor, listening to all this, and thinking that maybe she should be out on the street, gathering material for a story. The problem with that was a) she was still drunk – although it wouldn’t be the first time – and b) every other journalist in the city would be doing the same thing. By sunup this would be the only story in Tallinn; anything she could do would just be more background, lost in the noise.
All of a sudden, and quite without warning, the bathroom light came on, and then the living room lights, and then the television. Lenna watched this for a few moments, then got up and went to the living room window. Outside, the streetlights were struggling to life, and the windows in the buildings opposite were starting to come on. As she watched, a glow of reflected light began to spread across the low clouds.
Her phone rang, startling her, and she dropped it and its screen shattered on the wood-block floor.
[[Next|Section 2 Lenna]]!Dicky Tummy
It was possible, she had discovered, to interview someone while mildly drunk. Or even quite seriously drunk – there had been that evening last year with the American actor who’d been in town to publicise some short-lived miniseries, she was rather sad she couldn’t remember more about it. Alcohol was the great solvent. It relaxed the muscles, loosened the tongue, brought all manner of indiscretions close to the surface.
It was quite another thing, apparently, to interview someone at ten o’clock in the morning while massively hungover.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Ross told her.
“Won’t happen again,” she said.
“It will, unless you get a handle on it.”
“On what?”
He stared at her. “The drink, Lenna,” he said finally.
“What about it?”
Ross tipped his head to one side. He was English, but his Estonian was pretty much perfect, which was a hard trick for the English to pull off. The story around the newsroom was that he hadn’t been able to hack it on Fleet Street so he’d come over here and somehow, over the years, worked his way up to Editor. Lenna had worked for worse editors. At least Ross didn’t shout and throw things or try to grope her.
“You do realise that you drink too much,” he said evenly.
She thought about it, shook her head dismissively. “I’m fine, Ross. I was at that Tourism Ministry reception last night, you know what those parties are like.”
“Did you get any copy out of it?”
“Some,” she said, straightfaced. “I’ll have it typed up and with you in an hour or so.”
He watched her a few moments longer, then returned his attention to his desktop, where presumably the email from Byron Stanley’s PR was being displayed. “According to this you turned up stinking of drink and you had to excuse yourself several times to go away and be sick.” He looked at her and raised an eyebrow.
“Dicky tummy,” she told him. “Must have had a bad canapé at the reception.”
He blinked at her. “One of the conditions of being granted this interview was that you’d actually read Stanley’s book. His PR says she didn’t get the impression that you had.”
“I skimmed it.” She waved it away. “Come on, Ross, it’s science fiction. Not even science fiction. Space opera. Really. Bug-eyed monsters and space empires and characters with names nobody can pronounce. I got the gist.”
“You weren’t supposed to get the gist,” he said, blinking slowly at her. “You were supposed to have read it and you were supposed to have a prepared list of questions. You weren’t supposed to wing it with the press release and the back cover blurb. They’re saying you were grossly unprofessional.”
She snorted. “Writers. Itchy little prima donnas.”
Ross sat back and crossed his arms. He glanced across at Marit from HR, who was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the office and so far had not said a single word. He looked at Lenna again. “We keep having this conversation,” he said. “Everyone in the office went out on the night of the Blackout and managed to file copy when the power came back. From you, nothing.”
“I was ill,” Lenna said.
“Dicky tummy?” Marit said quietly. Lenna didn’t give her the satisfaction of responding.
“Your timekeeping’s appalling,” Ross went on, consulting another document on his desktop. “You haven’t been in the office on time in…eighteen months. For the past three months you haven’t come in once before lunchtime.”
“I work late. Come on, Ross, you know that.”
Ross looked at her. He didn’t go into a spiel about how she was a talented journalist but she had a problem and he wouldn’t be able to protect her for much longer so she’d have to get a grip somehow. He just looked at her. Blinking slowly.
Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. “You’ve had enough last chances, Lenna. You’re fired.”
“Now just a damn minute,” she said. She felt, rather than heard, Marit getting to her feet, behind and to one side of her.
“You’re a drunk, Lenna. You’re barely producing any work and you’re starting to damage the reputation of this organisation. I don’t have any choice.”
Marit’s hand landed on her shoulder, a little harder than was strictly necessary. Lenna felt a wave of panic going through her. “You can’t do that,” she said to Ross. “If I’m a drunk I have an illness, and you can’t fire me because of illness. I’ll take this to a tribunal.”
“Come on,” Marit said. “Let’s go.”
“Go ahead,” Ross told her. “Take it to a tribunal. You’ve had three verbal and two written warnings in the past six months; it’s not like we haven’t given you a chance to clean up your act.”
Marit’s hand moved down and closed on her upper arm like a vice. “On your feet,” she said.
“No,” Lenna said, trying to become heavier by willpower alone. “Ross, I’m sorry, okay? I promise you it won’t happen again. I’ll be in tomorrow at eight in the morning. I won’t drink on the job any more.”
“Not good enough,” he said.
Marit got her hands under Lenna’s armpits from behind and tried to bodily lift her out of the chair. “Up,” she muttered. “Come on.”
“I promise, Ross. I’ll do anything. Let go of me, you bitch.” She squirmed in her seat to dislodge Marit’s grip. “You’re hurting me.”
“If you don’t go quietly I’ll call security to throw you out,” Ross said. “Your choice.”
“This is ridiculous, Ross,” Lenna said reasonably, her heart and mind racing. “Can’t we talk about this like adults?”
“We have talked about it. And you promised it wouldn’t happen again. But it did. We can’t keep carrying you, Lenna. This is a newsroom, not a créche.”
It was a pretty good line, she had to admit, and that was probably why it hurt so much. She said, “I’ve worked my heart out for this paper. You’ll regret this.”
“No, you haven’t,” he said sadly. “And no, I won’t. So, shall I call security?”
For a moment it occurred to her to sit where she was and call his bluff, but a distant and increasingly rarely used rational corner of her mind suggested that would only make things worse. She grabbed her bag from the floor beside her chair and stood, glaring at Ross. For some reason, she couldn’t think of any Famous Last Words, no exit line that would rock him back in his seat and leave him speechless, so she settled for a final glare, turned on her heel, and marched out of the office, Marit right behind her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Marit asked as they pounded down the corridor.
“I’ve got some things in my desk,” Lenna muttered, planning the scene she was going to cause in the newsroom. “Personal things.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Marit said, taking her arm in that death-grip again and hauling her to a stop. “Your belongings will be forwarded to you.”
“I’m not having you going through my stuff.”
“You don’t get a choice.”
Lenna tried to shake free, but Marit kept hold of her, and for a few moments they stood there like that, Marit with her feet solidly planted while Lenna struggled ineffectually. Finally, Lenna stopped trying to free herself.
“That’s better,” Marit said, but she didn’t let go. “Now, let’s go, please.”
Without releasing her, Marit marched Lenna down the stairs to the front desk, where the receptionist was pointedly busying herself with some paperwork or other. “I’ve been fired,” Lenna told her as they passed, but the receptionist didn’t look up. “Bitch.”
Marit actually escorted her out onto the pavement before letting go. Then she turned and, without a word, went back inside. Lenna tried to follow, but her access had already been cancelled and her phone wouldn’t unlock the door. She pressed it against the sensor plate over and over again, feeling numb and unreal, but the door remained shut. She glanced up at the little black golfball of the security system over the door, imagined Ross and Marit and the rest of them gathered around a monitor sniggering at her attempts to get back into the building. Well fuck that. She flipped a finger at the camera, slung her bag over her shoulder, and stomped off.
[[Next|Section 3 Lenna]]!The Penultimate Bar
The Penultimate Bar was a serious place for serious drinkers. There was no pretence, no fashionable food – no food at all. There were no comfortable furnishings, no candles on the tables, no paintings or moodily black and white photos on the walls, no quiet euromuzak. It was not trendy. It did not attract hipsters or students or tourists. It did not serve coffee or provide free internet. Its ambience was regularly described as ‘threatening’, in the city guides that could be bothered to mention it at all. It was Lenna’s favourite bar.
She finished her third vodka and supposed she should try to take stock, but taking stock seemed, at the moment, an insurmountable achievement. She had no idea what state her bank account was in, from day to day, because actually finding out how little money she had was too scary. She’d somehow relied on momentum to carry her from paycheck to paycheck, and that had worked so far, by luck or a miracle, but now there was no paycheck in her immediate future. It all seemed too complicated, so she ordered another drink.
She’d rung everyone on her phone’s contact list – except Ross and the HR department – and no one had responded. People who had, just yesterday, been bombarding her with messages and emails and press releases were now mysteriously unavailable. It seemed a bit soon for news of her sacking to have spread quite so widely, but she presumed that was what it was. All of a sudden, she had nothing these people wanted, and so they didn’t want to know her.
That triggered a slow welling of angry self-pity, in which she allowed herself to wallow. Bastards. All those people who had pretended to be her friends while she was useful to them and now turned their backs when she needed a favour in return. It didn’t have to be much; a bit of freelance work to tide her over until she found something more permanent. But no, they couldn’t even do that, couldn’t even have the decency to answer her calls. All she’d ever done was have a couple of drinks. There was no law against that; hell, it was practically part of the job description if you were a journalist. It wasn’t as if Ross and everyone else was exactly teetotal, although she couldn’t imagine that dried up bitch Marit drinking anything stronger than coffee. Hypocrites, all of them.
She waggled her glass at the barman for a refill. She needed it; she’d had an upsetting day. Best to take the rest of the day off to recover. She could face things with a clear head tomorrow.
[[Next|Section 4 Lenna]]!Descent
Of course, there was no clear head the next day. She struggled awake midmorning, half-convinced that the events of the previous day had been a terrible dream, but as she stumbled around the kitchen she remembered that it was not. She really had been fired.
A thought crossed her mind, like a ship sailing along a distant horizon, that now everyone had had a night’s sleep and time to consider and tempers had cooled, she might approach Ross. Not to beg – she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction – but to discuss the situation rationally. She should give that a try today sometime. Maybe in the afternoon.
The thought sailed away for ever as she found a bagel in the breadbin. She pinched the spots of mould off the surface, cut it in half, put it in the toaster while her coffee brewed. There was remarkably little to eat in the flat; she could have sworn she’d shopped recently. She ought to do something about that. Maybe in the afternoon, after she’d had a bit of a nap.
And that became the shape of her days. Late at night, over a few drinks, she made plans which seemed clever and guaranteed to succeed, but the next morning, bleary and achy, they seemed absurdly complicated. She went out to the Penultimate occasionally, but it was cheaper to buy a bottle and drink at home. She had to watch the pennies now, she kept reminding herself. The growing stack of bills stuffed unopened into one of the kitchen cupboards – she would get round to doing something about them but for the moment she just had too much on her mind – suggested she was running low on funds. She had elected to have paper bills rather than receiving them electronically because she was aware just how easy it was to hack someone’s online accounts. Also it was a lot easier to claim something had gone missing in the post.
So, that was the bills taken care of. She shopped, every now and again, when she realised there was no food. She tried phoning her contacts but she still seemed to be persona non grata, which occasioned quiet evenings of righteous rage while she binge-watched old television series and occasionally dipped into the news, just to keep in touch with the outside world.
One afternoon, at the checkout in the supermarket, she swept her phone over the reader to pay for her groceries and the device made a beeping noise. She tried again. The same beeping noise. It seemed very loud. She looked round and attracted the attention of an assistant, who came over and watched her swipe the phone again.
“Account declined,” he said, pointing to the words on the checkout’s screen.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, a numb sensation gathering in her feet.
“It means your account’s been declined,” he said with the air of someone who has seen this happen too often. “Usually it means you’ve got insufficient funds to pay for your purchase.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she told him, the numbness spreading up her legs. “There must be something wrong with the machine.”
“Ah, that’s not possible,” he told her with a sad little smile. “The machines are checked daily; it’s part of our compliance.”
Lenna could not have cared less about the supermarket’s compliance. “The phone, then,” she said. She slapped it against her palm a couple of times and tried it again, was rewarded with the same beep, which seemed to be increasing in volume. “Ridiculous,” she muttered.
“Perhaps you should call your bank,” the assistant suggested.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do that when I get home; I don’t have the number with me.” The assistant nodded soberly and neither of them mentioned that it would have been the work of a few moments to look up the number of the bank. “Now, I’ll have to pay for this in cash, I suppose…”
[[Next|Section 5 Lenna]]!Justice for Sergii
The shopping more or less cleaned her out of available cash, but she hadn’t been about to admit defeat and just leave her stuff at the checkout. She had flashed on an image of everyone watching her walk out of the supermarket, unable to afford a basket of groceries, and she wasn’t going to let that happen.
So she had a little over a hundred euros in paper money and some coins. On the bright side, she had food and a couple of new bottles of vodka so things weren’t desperate yet. She made a plan to call the bank, but they would probably mention the letters she hadn’t responded to, and she didn’t feel quite up to dealing with that, so she didn’t bother.
The inbox of her phone started to fill up with messages. After a quick glance she didn’t bother to open it any more, just watched as the number of messages climbed into treble figures. People started to knock on the door and ring the bell, but some sixth sense told her they weren’t here to offer her a job, so she sat very still and very quiet, and at night she didn’t put any lights on. Perhaps they’d stop coming to the door if they thought no one was here.
She retreated to bed, sitting up late at night swiping aimlessly through news sites. One night, she happened upon a blog she hadn’t seen before. JUSTICE FOR SERGII! ran along the top in screaming red capitals. The author of the blog bemoaned the death of Sergii, an Estonian of Russian ethnicity, at the hands of the Tallinn police. It was a tale of woe and righteous despair, a little man against the might of Estonian Authority. No one listened, the author said. No one cared. The media did not want to know.
Lenna read, scrolling through older posts. Some of them were very old indeed, in blogosphere terms, where something written a year or so ago might as well have been pressed into clay tablets in cuneiform. The author had not given up; they had kept going in the face of official indifference, because Sergii’s life mattered. It was important to those who knew and loved him, if not to anyone else. Lenna reached out to the bedside table for her glass, but she didn’t pick it up.
One of the early posts was an appeal for help. Donations, administrative aid, more practical things. The author was not, they said, media-savvy, and any advice in that area would be well-rewarded.
[[Get in touch by phone|Section 6a Lenna]]
[[Get in touch using social media|Section 6b Lenna]]!Mr Reinsalu
There was a phone number at the end of the post, for anyone who felt moved to make contact and offer what they could. Lenna looked at the number for a very long time. Then she copied the number into the phone’s address book and pressed ‘call’.
“It is, of course, an absolute scandal,” Mr Reinsalu finished. “A man is dead, a family has been denied justice. Meanwhile, the real criminals walk free.”
“It’s awful,” Lenna agreed, putting as much sincerity into her voice as possible. She had put some effort into this meeting, only having a couple of drinks the previous night, getting to sleep early, showering and washing her hair and putting on her smartest outfit. She was, she thought, the image of the concerned professional journalist, a crusader for Truth and Justice.
“No one has helped me,” Mr Reinsalu admitted sadly. He was a small, compact man with a fuzz of grey hair and an untidy goatee. His suit had seen better days. “I kept asking, making appeals, but no one came. No one wanted to know.”
“Someone wants to know now,” Lenna assured him, cringing inside at how corny she sounded.
Mr Reinsalu didn’t seem to notice. “What I lack is any expertise in the media,” he told her. “I’m a simple country lawyer. It’s all a bit of a mystery to me.”
“You don’t have to worry about that any more,” Lenna said, and cringed again.
They were sitting in the dining room of a small hotel in Pärnu. In order to ensure that no one was lurking outside her door with a writ or some other legal inconvenience, Lenna had slipped out of the flat at five o’clock in the morning, sat nervously in a café near the station while she waited for the first train of the day. She was battling not to yawn, and she really wanted a drink, but all Mr Reinsalu had provided was a hotel breakfast. At the prospect of so much free food, Lenna had piled up her plate.
“Did you have many responses,” she asked, carefully offhand, “to your appeals for donations?”
“Oh yes,” Mr Reinsalu said, mopping his plate delicately with a wad of bread. “Many responses. Funds are not a problem. The problem is practical expertise.”
Lenna tried not to show the relief she felt. She had spotted something in Mr Reinsalu’s blog. On the surface, it was the blog of a man who had singlehandedly taken up a hopeless case, battling the indifference of the entire Estonian establishment. But what Lenna had seen was a desperate man with, quite possibly, a large amount of disposable cash and no one to spend it on.
She said, “If I were to take on the job, it would have to be a salaried position. It will take up quite a lot of my time, time I could otherwise use to write for the papers.”
Mr Reinsalu was nodding as he chewed the piece of bread. “Oh, absolutely. That goes without saying.”
It was perfect. The cause was already hopeless; if she failed, it wouldn’t be her fault. And in the meantime she would be pulling down a salary.
Mr Reinsalu took a delicate sip of coffee. “How much were you thinking of?” he asked. “Salary-wise?”
Lenna mentally took a deep breath. Here was the moment of truth. She named a figure half again as large as her old salary at the paper. “Plus expenses,” she added.
Mr Reinsalu nodded. “Yes, we can manage that,” he said.
“Really?” Lenna blurted before she could stop herself. She’d expected him to haggle, to laugh in her face, to get up and walk out.
He smiled. “Really.”
Emboldened, she said, “I would need the first month’s salary in advance. And there may be some…legal matters which need settling before I’m able to give my full attention to the work.”
Mr Reinsalu dabbed his lips with his napkin. “Oh, I’m sure I can help you with those,” he said with a smile. “I am a lawyer, after all.”
[[Next|Section 7 Lenna]]!The Cutout
There was a link to a social media account at the top of the page. She clicked on it and scrolled down through about a dozen utterly inept posts. It was as if whoever was running the account had not only never used social media before but had never even encountered the concept. Even her grandmother, whose total witlessness with modern technology precluded anything but the most basic of phones, could have made a better job of this account.
She scrolled up through the sad little posts, then back down again, thinking. Then she followed the account, and it surprised her by following back almost immediately. Lenna opened a personal message window and started to type.
“Mr Reinsalu is a busy man,” said Dima. “You will meet him soon.”
“Is Mr Reinsalu in charge of your campaign?” Lenna asked.
“In charge of everything,” Dima told her. “He does the thinking, I do the street stuff.”
Lenna sighed inwardly. She had wanted to meet her contact from the campaign at a bar, but he had insisted on a Starbucks. Probably because he wouldn’t have been able to get served in a bar; he looked about twelve, a scruffy young man in jeans and a heavy leather jacket. He was wearing a dazzle scarf round his neck; tied around the face it would camouflage the wearer from the facial recognition algorithms of surveillance cameras. Or something. Lenna was vague on stuff like this. Anyway, most students had them; they were as much a badge of resistance as Guy Fawkes masks had been for an earlier generation.
“So, you want to join our group,” he said, trying to look tough with a chai latte and a sticky bun on the table in front of him.
“I think there are some skills I can bring to the campaign,” she said. She took out her phone and beamed her CV to his. She’d sat up with it last night, polishing and embellishing. “I’m an experienced journalist and I’ve run a number of media campaigns.” This last was only fractionally true; she’d been a team member on one campaign, for a new brand of detergent. She’d quit after two days because it was beyond dull and she felt destined for better things than selling detergent.
Dima picked up his phone, swiped up the CV. He looked impressed. “Are you security conscious?” he asked.
“Excuse me? Am I what?”
He put his phone down again. “I’m under surveillance all the time,” he said, lowering his voice until she had to lean across the table to hear him. “We’re up against the police, right? The police don’t like it when people stand up to them.”
Lenna glanced around the coffee shop, but no one was obviously watching them. “Right,” she said.
“I have to be a ghost or I’d wind up under a tram or something. They’ve killed people already; that’s what this is all about.”
“Okay,” said Lenna.
“Get yourself one of these,” he told her, waggling the end of his scarf. “You’re on the street? You put this on and you’re invisible.”
Well, not really. The scarf might render the wearer’s face unrecognisable, but to the naked eye it was printed with a wrenching jagged pattern of black and white with occasional flashes of brilliant colour. It would be like walking around wearing a migraine.
“Yes,” she said. “So, when do I meet Mr Reinsalu?”
“When I say you can,” he said. “The police would love to find him and make him disappear. I’m the cutout. I meet you; if I get a bad feeling about you, you never hear from us again.”
“Surely you can’t think I’m the police.” It was absurd, but faintly flattering.
“Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re a spook. Maybe you’re just a snitch.”
“I see.” She was starting to get a bad feeling about this whole thing, but the state of the campaign’s website and social media convinced her they needed her, and she had a sense that they were not short of donations. Inept people with lots of money didn’t drift through her life very often; she might not get a second chance. She said, “And what sort of feeling are you getting from me?”
He sat back and made a show of giving her an appraising look. “You don’t look like a cop,” he allowed. “And you don’t talk like a spook.”
“So that leaves…snitch.”
He thought for a moment. “What I can do,” he said, picking up his phone, aiming it at Lenna, and capturing an image, “is ask some of my contacts if they recognise your face.”
“Hey!” she protested. “You’re supposed to ask permission before you take my photo. I could have you arrested.”
“They’d have to find me first,” he said, waggling the scarf again while he typed with his thumb. “There,” he said, laying the phone down. “Now we wait.”
“You’re a dick,” she told him. But she sat where she was. “How long is this going to take?”
He shrugged carelessly. “Shouldn’t be long. My contacts are good.”
“Dick,” she said again, crossing her arms across her chest.
They stared at each other for a couple of minutes, until Dima’s phone buzzed. He picked it up, looked at the screen, and nodded. “Looks like you’re clean,” he said.
Lenna thought of her image on all Dima’s friends’ phones and said, “I’m not sure I want this job any more.”
“Yes you are,” he said, putting the phone down. He looked at her and smiled.
Maybe he wasn’t such a dickhead after all. “I can help you,” she said.
“What makes you think we need help?”
“I want to see Mr Reinsalu,” she said.
He looked at her for a few moments more, then he took out a pen and a crumpled bit of paper. He smoothed out the paper on the tabletop and scrawled on it, then handed it over. Written on it in a childish hand was an address in Pärnu. “Be there tomorrow morning at nine o'clock,” he told her.
She put the bit of paper in her pocket. “How will I recognise him?”
“He’ll know you,” said Dima. “From your photograph.”
[[Next|Section 6c Lenna]]!The Case
The sainted Sergii had not, in fact, been a saint at all. The files Mr Reinsalu gave her painted Sergeii as an honest businessman, but Lenna smelled the small-time hood beneath the retrospective paint-job. In the few photographs they had of him, Sergii looked like Nikita Kruschev, if Kruschev had had hair. He was a small, annoyed-looking man with piggy eyes. Lenna didn’t think she would have liked him, but she didn’t have to. Sergii was dead.
That he had served a brief spell in jail was impossible to gloss over; he had been convicted of handling stolen goods, but that was virtually white-collar crime and anyway he had testified that he hadn’t known the goods were stolen. He’d bought them from a wholesaler – who remained stubbornly unidentified – and then sold them on, all in good faith, just a normal business transaction. The fact that no documentation could be produced to support the transaction was easily explained by Sergii’s somewhat cavalier attitude to paperwork, which was well known in the business community and was not, in and of itself, a crime. It was suggested by his defence that he had somehow rubbed the Tallinn police up the wrong way, and they had set out to destroy him.
He was a good boy in prison, did his time, kept his head down, and he continued keeping his head down when he was freed. Until his body was found near the port one morning with massive multiple injuries, broken bones, a shattered skull, a burst spleen. The official conclusion was that he had been the victim of a traffic accident, the driver in question having fled the scene.
His wife, Sofia, knew who had really been responsible. She filed a complaint with the police, and received no response. She tried to contact them again, and again there was no response. She bombarded them with phone calls and kept being handed off to lackeys rather than the senior officers she wanted to speak to. She went down to police headquarters a couple of times and raised her voice, and for her efforts was escorted out of the building with a gentle warning that if she persisted she would be charged.
Then on a visit to family in St Petersburg, Sofia and her son Alexei were killed, ironically enough in a car crash, although this time there was no ambiguity; the other driver, roughly eighty percent alcohol by body weight, also died in the crash.
After that, The Case Of The Mysterious Death Of Sergii puttered out. He had no family and few friends, and Sofia’s family had despised him. There was no one to speak for him until Mr Reinsalu came along, almost two decades later.
Mr Reinsalu had come to the case quite by chance, a half-overheard conversation between two men in a busy restaurant. Curious to know what they’d been talking about, he’d looked it up and found a tale of injustice that offended his sensibilities. He couldn’t articulate quite why it had struck such a chord with him, except that he thought Sergii had deserved better, petty criminal or not, than to be beaten to death in an alleyway and have his murder simply ignored. If the police were going around killing people, something ought to be done about it.
And he painted a compelling picture of why it was so important. His investigations around Sergii’s case had turned up the deaths of several other Russian men, all of them involved in low-level criminality which had brought them into contact with the police. Mr Reinsalu theorised a death squad, a group of vigilantes within the police force who had grown impatient with the slowly-grinding and sometimes counterintuitive wheels of Justice and decided to take matters into their own hands.
He had already been in touch with the police to revive the complaint about Sergii’s murder, and he had received what he considered a lukewarm response. Initially, they had asked him to hand over all documentation he had about the case, but since then his inquiries had been met with a polite response. The investigation was ongoing and the police could not discuss it with him, but he would be informed of the results in due course.
This was all of vaguely academic interest to Lenna. With a salary coming in and the tricky negotiations with the bank and the utility companies taken care of by Mr Reinsalu, she felt as if a great cloud had lifted from her life. The flat felt like a home again, rather than a prison. She could afford to go out to eat, and she did so regularly, making sure that she would be seen by her former friends and contacts and they would get the message. I’m doing quite all right without you, fuck you very much. None of them tried to get in touch, but that was all right because she had nothing to say to them.
The work itself was quite straightforward, and if she had had any self-awareness at all Lenna would have been faintly embarrassed by how much she was being paid for it. She was basically writing press releases from twenty-year-old material, cutting it up and rejigging it for different sites and news organisations. She made the occasional phone call, but all the principals in the case were dead, so there was nobody to interview. Mr Reinsalu was handling all contact with the police, such as it was. She could work from home, wearing only her nightdress. Nobody cared. The English had a phrase, money for old rope.
Having said all that, there was something very satisfying about watching the story spread, first from obscure websites, then to social media, then to the mainstream media, then to a whole raft of comment blogs. I did this, she thought. I made this happen.
A few days after this realisation, she was watching streaming footage of a demonstration outside police headquarters. It wasn’t a very big demonstration, a couple of dozen people wrapped up against the cold and holding banners which bore slogans like JUSTICE FOR SERGII and POLICE MURDERERS. Someone with a loudhailer was shouting at the building in Russian. Facing the demonstration, a handful of slightly bemused-looking police officers stood outside the doors of the building.
The doorbell rang, followed by a firm knock. Lenna looked at the door. Since the normalisation of her relations with the financial institutions which dogged her life, she had ceased to fear the doorbell, but Mr Reinsalu was the only person who visited her, and she wasn’t expecting him today.
[[Next|Section 8 Lenna]]!Mr Reinsalu
“It is, of course, an absolute scandal,” Mr Reinsalu finished. “A man is dead, a family has been denied justice. Meanwhile, the real criminals walk free.”
“It’s awful,” Lenna agreed, putting as much sincerity into her voice as possible. She had put some effort into this meeting, only having a couple of drinks the previous night, getting to sleep early, showering and washing her hair and putting on her smartest outfit. She was, she thought, the image of the concerned professional journalist, a crusader for Truth and Justice.
“No one has helped me,” Mr Reinsalu admitted sadly. He was a small, compact man with a fuzz of grey hair and an untidy goatee. His suit had seen better days. “I kept asking, making appeals, but no one came. No one wanted to know.”
“Someone wants to know now,” Lenna assured him, cringing inside at how corny she sounded.
Mr Reinsalu didn’t seem to notice. “What I lack is any expertise in the media,” he told her. “I’m a simple country lawyer. It’s all a bit of a mystery to me.”
“You don’t have to worry about that any more,” Lenna said, and cringed again.
They were sitting in the dining room of a small hotel in Pärnu. In order to ensure that no one was lurking outside her door with a writ or some other legal inconvenience, Lenna had slipped out of the flat at five o’clock in the morning, sat nervously in a café near the station while she waited for the first train of the day. She was battling not to yawn, and she really wanted a drink, but all Mr Reinsalu had provided was a hotel breakfast. At the prospect of so much free food, Lenna had piled up her plate.
“Did you have many responses,” she asked, carefully offhand, “to your appeals for donations?”
“Oh yes,” Mr Reinsalu said, mopping his plate delicately with a wad of bread. “Many responses. Funds are not a problem. The problem is practical expertise.”
Lenna tried not to show the relief she felt. She had spotted something in Mr Reinsalu’s blog. On the surface, it was the blog of a man who had singlehandedly taken up a hopeless case, battling the indifference of the entire Estonian establishment. But what Lenna had seen was a desperate man with, quite possibly, a large amount of disposable cash and no one to spend it on.
She said, “If I were to take on the job, it would have to be a salaried position. It will take up quite a lot of my time, time I could otherwise use to write for the papers.”
Mr Reinsalu was nodding as he chewed the piece of bread. “Oh, absolutely. That goes without saying.”
It was perfect. The cause was already hopeless; if she failed, it wouldn’t be her fault. And in the meantime she would be pulling down a salary.
Mr Reinsalu took a delicate sip of coffee. “How much were you thinking of?” he asked. “Salary-wise?”
Lenna mentally took a deep breath. Here was the moment of truth. She named a figure half again as large as her old salary at the paper. “Plus expenses,” she added.
Mr Reinsalu nodded. “Yes, we can manage that,” he said.
“Really?” Lenna blurted before she could stop herself. She’d expected him to haggle, to laugh in her face, to get up and walk out.
He smiled. “Really.”
Emboldened, she said, “I would need the first month’s salary in advance. And there may be some…legal matters which need settling before I’m able to give my full attention to the work.”
Mr Reinsalu dabbed his lips with his napkin. “Oh, I’m sure I can help you with those,” he said with a smile. “I am a lawyer, after all.”
[[Next|Section 7 Lenna]]!A Knock at the Door
She got up and went down the hall and peered through the door viewer, was rewarded with a fisheye view of a tall middle-aged woman in business clothes. As she watched, the woman rang the bell and knocked again. There was a strong temptation not to answer, to tiptoe back into the living room and wait until the woman grew tired of knocking and went away, but she could hear the sound of the entertainment set from here, the Russian man shouting at the police, and if she could hear it anyone standing outside would probably be able to hear it too.
She opened the door and found that, in addition to the tall woman, two police officers had been flanking the doorway, out of sight of the viewer. Her heart thudded in her chest. “Yes?” she said.
The woman held up a laminated card identifying her as a member of the Tallinn police force. “Lenna Rüütel?”
“What’s this about?”
“Are you Lenna Rüütel?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Jakobson. Could you get dressed and come with us, please?”
“What? No, I’m busy at the moment.”
Jakobson glanced past Lenna and down the hall, at the far end of which she could see into the living room and the screen of the entertainment set. “Yes,” she said. “So I see.” She looked Lenna in the eye and said, “Please get dressed and come with us. I’d prefer not to have to take you into custody; the paperwork is tiresome and I already have more than enough to do.”
“You’re arresting me? For what?”
Jakobson sighed. “No, I’m trying not to arrest you, Ms Rüütel. I’d much rather you came with us voluntarily.”
“Is this about Sergii?” Lenna said.
Jakobson narrowed her eyes at her. “I won’t say ‘please’ again,” she said. “It’s your choice.”
It was, of course, no choice at all. “Wait here; I’ll just put some clothes on.” She went to close the door, but Jakobson stepped smartly inside and closed it behind her.
“I don’t think so,” Jakobson said.
Lenna looked at her for a few moments, then said, “Fine. Fine. Make yourself at home.” She turned and headed for the living room, Jakobson at her heels. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said, taking her phone from the coffee table on the way to the bedroom.
“Oh, I think you’ll find that everyone’s done something wrong,” Jakobson told her, looking around the flat with a lack of enthusiasm. “It’s quite dispiriting, if you let yourself dwell on it. Please put that down.”
Lenna looked at her for a moment, then left the phone on the bookcase.
She took her time getting ready, partly to annoy Jakobson and partly because if she was going to be dragged down to police headquarters she at least wanted to look good while it was happening. When she emerged from the bedroom wearing her best interview suit, Jakobson was standing in the middle of the living room holding her phone.
“You won’t be needing this,” the police officer said. “I’ll look after it for you. Keep it safe.” She dropped the phone into her coat pocket.
Lenna thought of complaining, but it would only make things worse. “Shall we go then?”
Jakobson glanced at the entertainment set as Lenna went to wave it into sleep mode. The screen was still showing the feed from outside police headquarters. The Russian man was still shouting. “I suppose you think this is funny,” she said, half to herself.
They didn’t take her to police headquarters, but to the new police station on Raekoja plats. She was issued with a visitor badge and taken upstairs to a small, comfortable room equipped with a table and two chairs. Jakobson sat her down on one of the chairs and took the other, facing her across the table.
“So,” Jakobson said. “Firstly, I’m required to notify you that you are not under caution and that this conversation is being recorded. Secondly, thank you for agreeing to come down here.”
“I wasn’t given any choice,” Lenna said for the benefit of the recording devices.
Jakobson let this go. She said, “Could you tell me what your connection is with Sergii N?”
[[“There isn’t one.”|Section 9a Lenna]]
[[“I’m running his media campaign.”|Section 9b Lenna]]!Defiance
“There isn’t one,” Lenna said. “I never met him; I’m just running media affairs for the campaign.”
“The campaign,” Jakobson nodded. “The campaign which consists of you and the lawyer Reinsalu.”
“Mr Reinsalu is my employer. Perhaps you should be speaking to him if there’s a problem.”
“A problem,” Jakobson said, nodding again. “Well, yes, there is a little problem. Your campaign is standing outside my police headquarters with signs accusing the police force of being murderers. Yes, that is a bit of a problem.”
“They’re nothing to do with us,” Lenna protested.
Jakobson gave her a Look. “Seriously,” she said.
“We didn’t organise it, they didn’t contact us and let us know it was going to happen or ask our permission. I have no idea who they are.”
“They’re very irritating, is who they are.”
“A group of concerned citizens,” Lenna said, using a phrase she thought Mr Reinsalu would approve of.
“Don’t be so smug and self-righteous,” Jakobson warned.
“You can’t talk to me like that.” Although clearly she could, and not worry that the conversation was being recorded. “I suppose a police force that would kill citizens wouldn’t be too bothered about being disrespectful.”
Jakobson’s eyebrows shot up. “You know,” she said, “I didn’t think you had that in you. But don’t do it again. Tell me how you got involved in this thing.”
Lenna told her story, glossing over her firing from the paper and subsequent descent into penury, and when she’d finished Jakobson sat back in her chair and said, “Yes, well, I have no idea how much of that to believe. Your former editor tells a very different story.”
Lenna sat where she was, unable to think of a single thing to say.
Jakobson rubbed her eyes. “You see,” she said, “I can’t tell whether you’re the drunken little airhead you seem to be, or whether you’re really very smart and just pretending to be a drunken airhead. I have to admit, if it’s the latter it’s a very good act.”
Lenna stood up. “I don’t have to sit here listening to you insulting me.”
“No, you don’t,” Jakobson agreed without moving from her chair. “Perhaps I should have arrested you, after all. You’d have had to sit there then.”
Lenna glared at her.
“Oh, sit down,” Jakobson said tiredly.
Lenna sat.
“Your employer isn’t a lawyer, you know,” Jakobson told her. “Oh, he was, but he was caught embezzling funds from the firm which employed him. They didn’t want the scandal of a court case, but he was quietly disbarred.” When Lenna didn’t respond, she crossed her arms. “So here you are, this strange pair. A disbarred lawyer and a journalist whose personal life is so chaotic that nobody will employ her. And you are, quite genuinely, causing all kinds of trouble for me and the police force. Personally, I think that’s remarkable. Nothing to say now? Hm? Okay. How about some coffee?”
She got up and went to the door, opened it a few inches and spoke to someone in the corridor outside, then returned to her chair, where she regarded Lenna for a long time.
“The police force is not perfect,” Jakobson told her. “I’m with Internal Affairs, so trust me, I know. But it doesn’t go round murdering people. You’re making trouble, whipping people up, for no reason at all. Right now you might issue a press release or have a quiet word with the organisers of that little mob outside headquarters and they might pack up and go away, but eventually – sometime quite soon – you’re not going to be able to control them any more. That’s why I’m talking to you now, while people are still listening to reason, to see if we can defuse this.”
Lenna thought about it. “May I have my phone back, please?” she asked. “I should be recording this too.”
[[Next|Section 10 Lenna]]!Appeasement
“I’m running the media for the campaign to get justice for him,” Lenna said.
Jakobson gave her a sour look. “I know what you’re doing. But why are you doing it?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s in it for you? You’re not a Russian, you have no grudges against the police so far as we’ve been able to discover. Until a short while ago you were writing lifestyle and arts pieces. What suddenly radicalised you?”
Lenna sensed danger. Radicalised could cover a multitude of sins. “I’m not sure it’s radical to want to bring a man’s killers to justice.”
“It is if you use it to foment civil unrest.”
It was the first time Lenna had heard anyone use ‘foment’ in conversation, and for a fraction of a second she blanked on its meaning. She said, “People are worried. The police seem to be ignoring their concerns. You can hardly blame them if they voice those concerns in public.”
Jakobson grunted. “Yes, well, they’re voicing them outside my police headquarters and it’s very annoying. Call them off.”
“I’m perfectly happy to do that, but what can you offer in exchange?”
“Exchange?” Jakobson raised an eyebrow. “I think you’ve misunderstood what kind of conversation this is.”
“Look,” Lenna said reasonably, “we didn’t organise that protest directly, but we’re obviously in contact with the people who did. I can make a couple of phone calls. But what happens after that? Do we get shut out again? All our requests bouncing off your publicity department? All we’re asking for is…dialogue.”
Jakobson looked at her phone, reading notes. “Your employer isn’t a lawyer, you know,” she said “Oh, he was, but he was caught embezzling funds from the firm which employed him. They didn’t want the scandal of a court case, but he was quietly disbarred.” When Lenna didn’t respond, she crossed her arms. “So here you are, this strange pair. A disbarred lawyer and a journalist whose personal life is so chaotic that nobody will employ her. And you are, quite genuinely, causing all kinds of trouble for me and the police force. Personally, I think that’s remarkable. Nothing to say now? Hm? Okay. How about some coffee?”
She got up and went to the door, opened it a few inches and spoke to someone in the corridor outside, then returned to her chair, where she regarded Lenna for a long time.
“The police force is not perfect,” Jakobson told her. “I’m with Internal Affairs, so trust me, I know. But it doesn’t go round murdering people. You’re making trouble, whipping people up, for no reason at all. Right now you can make a couple of phone calls and that little mob outside headquarters will fold its tents and go home, but eventually – sometime quite soon – you’re not going to be able to control them any more. That’s why I’m talking to you now, while people are still listening to reason, to see if we can defuse this.”
“Then we both want the same thing,” Lenna said, her mind still chewing on Jakobson’s characterisation of her. “Why can’t we work together?”
“Well, that’s not going to happen. What you want is direct access to our files and records, and I’m afraid that train is never going to pull into the station.” There was a knock at the door and an officer came in with two cardboard cups of coffee. He put them on the table, along with sachets of sugar and creamer and a couple of wooden stirrers, and left again. When the door was closed behind him, Jakobson said, “This situation benefits nobody. I’ll consider appointing a liaison.”
“With respect, that’s not good enough.”
“It’s better than you have now, and it’s all you’re going to get. Now make your phone calls, and then drink your coffee before it gets cold.”
[[Next|Section 10 Lenna]]!Kindling
“She seemed quite genuine,” Lenna said.
“Well, of course she did,” said Mr Reinsalu. “It’s part of her job.”
They were sitting in a McDonalds not far from her flat. She thought this was not the time or place to raise the subject of Mr Reinsalu’s status as a lawyer. In fact, she thought there would never be a time and place to do that. She liked him, thought he was a genuinely kind man, and if he had chosen to take up the cause of Sergii’s death as some route towards redemption that was none of her business.
She said, “She asked us not to inflame things further while her investigation is going on.”
Mr Reinsalu shrugged. “That demonstration was none of our doing.”
“Yes, I told her that.”
Mr Reinsalu grunted and popped a couple of french fries into his mouth. He had not been pleased to learn that she had been taken to the police station, but his displeasure was balanced by the fact that they were now in contact with the person running the investigation. Having confirmation that there was an investigation was quite a step forward.
“You asked her to share the products of her inquiries, of course.”
Lenna nodded. “And she said she’d keep us up to date, as much as she’s able.”
He shook his head. “That’s meaningless, I’m sorry. She’s not obliged to tell us anything. All she’s done is warn us to keep our mouths shut.”
“I believed her. She doesn’t want this thing to escalate.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that at all.”
“Well, none of us do. Do we?”
Mr Reinsalu looked thoughtful. “Did you notice that for months I have had very little response from the police, but the moment someone protested outside police headquarters they actually did something?”
“Yes,” Lenna said. “They arrested me, as good as.”
“I don’t want to make trouble,” he said, continuing the thought, “but perhaps we should, you know. Perhaps we’ve just been too polite up to now.”
The problem was that they were not activists. They were amateurs. How had Jakobson put it? A disbarred lawyer and a journalist whose personal life is so chaotic that nobody will employ her. The only knowledge they had of campaigns was from watching them on the news. Lenna didn’t think just posting ‘A March Is Happening, Come Along’ on social media would end well.
“No,” Mr Reinsalu said, shaking his head. “That’s a flash mob you’re thinking of. No, there needs to be an intelligence behind this. Let me talk to some people.”
[[Next|Section 11 Lenna]]!Busy
She actually found herself more busy than she would have liked. The protest outside police headquarters had made the international news, and she was fielding interview requests from as far afield as the United States. A lot of Russian news agencies wanted to talk to her, and these she strictly rationed. She was aware that Sergii’s death could feed into Russian propaganda, and she didn’t want that to happen. The whole thing was a matter between Estonians, and the fact that the Russian Ambassador and the Russian government were starting to make noises left her feeling uncomfortable. It was the closest she ever got to doubting what she was doing, and the feeling didn’t last long.
If she was to be honest with herself – something she hadn’t done since, well, ever – she couldn’t have put her hand on her heart and sworn that she was all that bothered about the case of Sergii N. In public, and in writing, she could put on an impression of righteous concern, but really it was just a means to an end, something she was being paid for. The cause itself didn’t matter; she could have been campaigning to save the rain forest or clean up the seas. She kept this to herself. It didn’t do to appear mercenary.
At the same time, she didn’t want the campaign to become hijacked. She was at least aware enough that there was a possibility for this thing to blow up into a slanging match between governments, that she would simply be washed away by a tide of diplomat expulsions and stand-up rows in the UN. It was in her interests to keep this a local matter, focused on the campaign which she was, increasingly, running on her own.
She hadn’t seen Mr Reinsalu in a while. He’d gone away after their last meeting and was uncontactable. Lenna found herself beginning to wonder if everything was quite all right with Mr Reinsalu. She’d applied pop psychology to his motives for starting the campaign, and concluded that he was trying to atone somehow for the crime which had resulted in his disbarment. But now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe Mr Reinsalu was not running on all cylinders, maybe the loss of his job and his career had subtly deranged him somehow. Maybe, like her, for him Sergii N was nothing more than a means to an end.
In the meantime, her work had brought into her orbit a lot of crazies, conspiracy nuts who believed they saw secret government evil lurking under every bush, and she tried to keep them at arms’ length, as best she could. There were also ordinary concerned citizens, most of them of Russian ethnicity, who were genuinely worried about the implications of Sergii’s death. Some of them claimed to have known him, although when Lenna questioned them further she couldn’t be certain they were being entirely truthful.
One of the concerned citizens was a tall, languid man named Nikolai. He seemed, to Lenna, too effete to involve himself in political activism, but he had been one of the organisers of the protest outside police headquarters.
“We should do it again,” he told her.
“I can’t ask you to do that, Nikolai,” she told him carefully. “We have to stay within the law. I don’t want to see anyone going to prison because of this.”
They were meeting in a café a short distance from the Old Town. The campaign had no offices; Lenna conducted everything by phone and laptop from her flat, and she wasn’t about to invite people there. She didn’t want people knowing where she lived; if she did that they’d be turning up at her door at all hours of the day and night.
Nikolai said, “It’s no good being polite about this, Lenna. The authorities will just ignore us.”
Mr Reinsalu had ventured just such an opinion, but Lenna decided not to share that. It was all very well sitting at her living room table writing impassioned dispatches calling for the police to deal with Sergii’s death; it was quite another thing to be involved with what she was beginning to think of as the scary militant end of the campaign. “I don’t want people getting hurt,” she said lamely. “That doesn’t do anyone any good.”
Nikolai sat back in his chair and stared at her. “Sometimes I think you’re not really committed to this campaign.”
“Now that’s not true,” she told him. “I’m working day and night to get the message out; I have US senators who are working on our cause at this very moment.” Well, she’d sent a mass email; there had been no replies.
“It’s not the Americans we should be pressuring,” he said. “It’s the Estonian government. Remember them?”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. “There’s a dear.”
He broke a corner off the pastry on its plate in front of him, nibbled at it. “Are you telling me not to organise another protest?”
She sighed. “You’re over twenty-one, Nikolai. I can’t order you to do something or not to do something. I just do media. Have you spoken to Mr Reinsalu?”
Nikolai snorted. He put the bit of pastry back on the plate and took a swallow of coffee. “We have to keep this in the public eye, keep up the pressure. Just putting out press releases isn’t enough. We have to motivate people.”
“Mr Reinsalu told me he was going to talk to some people.”
“That old man,” Nikolai said, shaking his head. He stood up. “Well, if you’re just going to cut and paste articles together I suppose the rest of us are going to have to do the hard work.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Lenna called after him, but she didn’t put a lot of force in the words.
[[Next|Section 12 Lenna]]!Inside
She’d had no idea that police cells could be so…comfortable. In her imagination, she had a picture of a dank, dripping, tile-walled dungeon with a hay-stuffed mattress on the floor, rats running everywhere, and a bucket to piss in. The room she actually found herself in was spartan, it was true, but it wasn’t much worse, objectively, than her own bedroom. The walls and floor were clean and graffiti-free. There was a knee-high concrete block running along one wall, with an acceptably-thick plastic-covered mattress on top of it. On the other side of the room, a stainless-steel lavatory jutted from the wall beside a stainless-steel sink, both of them scoured to a high degree of cleanliness. It wasn’t too hot or too cold, the light wasn’t too bright, and it was nice and quiet. The one real drawback Lenna could see was that the door didn’t have a handle on the inside, and inside was where she was.
They had come for her while she was watching the news. It was hard, from the pictures, to tell what was going on; there was a lot of jerky, surging phonecam footage, faces and bodies blurring past in the dark, people standing in the smashed window display of a shop, a burning car tipped over on its side, clouds of tear gas floating through the bitterly cold air. It was like something from the Third World, or from one of the economically-flatlining countries of the South; it was difficult to believe it was happening a couple of kilometres away.
The doorbell rang and she went to the door and looked through the viewer. Two police officers wearing riot suits were standing outside. She opened the door and looked at them. They looked a bit flustered, and they smelled of smoke. Not woodsmoke or barbecue smoke, something more acrid.
“Lenna Rüütel?” said the one on the left.
Lenna took her coat from the hook by the door. “Let’s go,” she said resignedly.
She didn’t know how long she’d been in the cell. They’d taken her bag and her phone, and in the calm quiet there was no way to judge the passage of time after about half an hour had passed. Certainly it must have been after one in the morning when she heard the lock click and the door opened and Jakobson marched in with a look of biblical fury on her face.
“Up,” she said. “Stand up.”
Lenna, who was sitting on the bed, stood. “Where are we going?”
“We’re not going anywhere. I’m not talking to you while you’re lounging in front of me.” The Colonel had obviously not been on riot duty tonight, but equally obviously she had not had a good evening. “Have you any idea what you’ve done?”
[[Say nothing|Section 13a Lenna]]
[[Proclaim innocence|Section 13d Lenna]]!Acts
“It’s nothing to do with us,” Lenna said.
“I’m getting sick of this whining,” Jakobson told her angrily. “‘It wasn’t me, miss, please miss, someone else did it.’ You publicised this march. You invited people to turn up and protest.”
“We didn’t tell them to riot,” Lenna pointed out, and she was able to say it truthfully, although she wasn’t about to let on that she knew who the organisers were. “And they wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t over-reacted.”
Jakobson glared at her. “Your friends were carrying broken-up paving stones, which they started throwing at our officers.”
“I think you’ll find the protesters responded to police firing tear gas into the crowd.”
Jakobson seemed about to levitate with pure fury. “This is the worst civil unrest in this country since Bronze Night and it’s your fault.”
“Since what?”
All the anger suddenly seemed to drain out of Jakobson. She stared at Lenna. “You know,” she said, “I can’t decide whether you really are stupid or if it’s just an act. If it’s an act, you’re in real trouble. If you’re not…” She shook her head.
“Are you going to charge me?” Lenna asked.
“Haven’t decided yet,” Jakobson said. “Thinking about it. Under the Terrorism Act, I can hold you for forty-eight hours without charge, and right now that seems like an attractive prospect.”
“This is misuse of police powers,” said Lenna. “This is so obviously not a case of terrorism.”
“Isn’t it? Is it really not?” Lenna got the impression that, had she not been constrained by rules and regulations, Jakobson would happily have beaten her senseless. And then, for the first time, it occurred to her that she was in the hands of a police force which had already killed people who had proven awkward.
“These are people expressing real and pressing concerns, and the police have attacked them,” she said. “It’s regrettable that some may have responded too strongly, but surely it’s understandable.”
Jakobson stared at her. Then she rubbed her eyes. Then she stared at her again, as if angered anew to find that she was still there. “So far we have thirty people injured, two of them police officers,” she said in a low, dangerous voice. “And it’s still going on. The Prime Minister’s in an emergency meeting right now, discussing whether to deploy the Army, and if he does, people are really going to get hurt. All because you and that defrocked lawyer wouldn’t leave things alone.”
“Are you suggesting we should have just ignored a case of murder?”
Jakobson seemed to swallow her temper by sheer effort of will. “I’m not having this conversation now,” she said coldly. “I have things to do. You have a nice sleep and maybe we’ll chat in the morning. Maybe not, I don’t know. Forty-eight hours, Ms Rüütel. Keep that in mind, while you’re sitting here twiddling your thumbs.” She turned for the door.
“Could I get something to eat?” Lenna said to the Colonel’s receding back. “I didn’t have dinner.”
Jakobson didn’t even pause. She slammed the door behind her.
[[Next|Section 13b Lenna]]!Get Out
“I thought we had an understanding,” said Jakobson.
“We didn’t tell them to riot,” Lenna said, and she was able to say it truthfully. The word ‘riot’ had never been mentioned.
“Can you stop them?” Jakobson watched her face and nodded stonily. “Thought not.”
“I might be able to do something, but not while I’m in a cell.”
“You know,” Jakobson said, “I can’t decide whether you really are stupid or if it’s just an act. If it’s an act, you’re in real trouble. If it’s not…” She shook her head.
“Are you going to charge me?” Lenna asked.
“Haven’t decided yet,” Jakobson said. “Thinking about it. Under the Terrorism Act, I can hold you for forty-eight hours without charge, and right now that seems like an attractive prospect.”
“That’s not going to help anyone. We didn’t want this, but emotions are running high.”
“You see?” Jakobson said, nodding. “I told you it would happen. I told you it would get out of control, and you just carried right on doing what you were doing.” She actually wagged a finger at Lenna. “This is your fault.”
Lenna tried to load her body language with reasonableness. It was a trick which had worked in the past with difficult employers and boyfriends who had started to grow tired of her drinking. “It’s really not,” she said, conscious she was starting to whine and not caring. “They came to us and said they wanted to hold another march. We thought it would be like last time, just a few people standing outside police headquarters with banners.”
“You know,” Jakobson said wearily, “I thought after our last conversation we had agreed to be professional.”
“We’re still waiting to hear from your liaison.”
“And you couldn’t have called me and talked to me about that? You had to put people on the streets instead?”
Lenna pouted.
“I mean, are you actually running things at the campaign, or does it just say that on your paycheck?”
“That’s not fair,” Lenna snapped. “I’m not involved in policy decisions.”
Jakobson snorted. “Policy decisions. Your precious campaign’s two men and a dog.” She shook her head. “I’ve got more important things to do tonight. Hold out your hand.”
“What?” Without thinking, she put her hand out. Jakobson seized her wrist, turned it over, and pressed something cold to the inside of her forearm. There was a snapping sensation against her skin, then the spreading feeling of a bruise. “Ow!” There was a fat inflamed circle on the skin, with a tiny red dot in the middle. She pressed her arm to her mouth.
“Get out,” Jakobson told her. “Don’t leave the city; I’m going to want to talk to you again. If you think you can do anything to stop this fiasco, by all means feel free to do so, but I won’t be holding my breath.” And with that she turned and left.
An officer came along to escort her along the corridors and back upstairs to the front desk of the police station. At the desk, a Sergeant made her sign half a dozen forms, in triplicate, then handed over her bag. She took her phone out and looked at the time. Almost two in the morning.
[[Next|Section 13e Lenna]]!Time
Jakobson didn’t turn up in the morning. Lenna managed a few hours sleep – there was nothing else to do – and was woken by the door opening and a uniformed Sergeant entering the cell with a cardboard tray on which sat a cardboard cup of black coffee and a bacon roll. He put the tray on the floor and left again. Lenna got up and went to examine her breakfast.
“What if I was Jewish?” she shouted. “Or Muslim?”
Of course, they knew she was neither. She wolfed the roll down in four or five mouthfuls and drained the coffee in a couple of swallows. It was terrible coffee, and she wondered if they reserved it for prisoners; she couldn’t imagine the police standing for it.
After that bit of excitement, there was nothing to do. She washed her hands and face, rinsed her mouth out, went back and sat on the bed and stared at the door in the opposite wall.
Oddly enough, she didn’t want a drink. A drink would have been nice, but she didn’t need one. There had been moments of clarity, over the past couple of years, when she had wondered whether she was not, in fact, an alcoholic. She was aware that she probably drank more than was strictly good for her, but all her family were big drinkers. Her father was in his sixties and still a picture of health. Anyway, the fact that she was sitting in a police cell, facing the possibility of prosecution on trumped-up charges, and wasn’t craving alcohol was probably a good sign. Maybe she should take the opportunity to knock the drinking on the head for a few days, once they released her. Of course, if they did prosecute her and she was sent to prison, it might be quite a while before she had her next drink. That thought did bother her, vaguely. It was one thing to give up drinking voluntarily, it was another to have it deliberately taken away from her.
At some point, the door opened again. Again, it was the Sergeant with a cardboard tray. He took put it on the floor, took the old one, and left without a word.
This time it was a cheeseburger, with another cup of the awful coffee. The cheeseburger was overcooked and lukewarm. She was in police custody, so it was foolish to expect haute cuisine, but Lenna suspected they were using the food to mess with her head. They probably hadn’t factored in the fact that she was so hungry she would have eaten the tray, if it came with mayonnaise.
And once again, that was the excitement over and she was left with her thoughts. She wasn’t blessed with a deep level of introspection; she mostly kept moving forward by moving forward, and if she stopped to think for too long things started to go wrong. Although lately things seemed to be going wrong whatever she did.
Still, she had a well-paid job that occupied roughly one percent of her capacities, and she was being paid whether she was in a cell or not. It was, if she thought about it, ridiculous to worry about being charged. The police had nothing on her; there was nothing illegal about suggesting people turn out for a peaceful protest about the state-sponsored death of a man. The police were the ones who should be on notice. If Jakobson’s investigation returned a whitewash there would be more trouble, and this time no one would have to organise it, it would organise itself spontaneously.
She slept, was woken by a different Sergeant with a tray. Coffee and a bacon roll again. She sat with the tray on her knees and stared at it. Surely this wasn’t their idea of dinner? Could she really have slept all the way round to breakfast again? Why hadn’t they bothered to wake her to feed her in the evening? She ate the roll before it got cold, washed it down with the coffee, considered banging on the door to find out what was going on with the food.
Sometime later, coffee and another cheeseburger arrived. As the Sergeant turned to go, Lenna said, “What time is it?” but he left without replying.
Weren’t there rules about this sort of thing? The Geneva Convention or something? Wasn’t she entitled to legal representation? A lawyer? Not Mr Reinsalu – she didn’t want him anywhere near the police – but a public defender or something. Anything. So long as they could tell her what day it was.
She determined to stay awake to see if dinner materialised, but she fell asleep, and when she woke up again there was a fresh tray on the floor with a bacon roll and a cup of coffee. The bastards hadn’t even bothered to wake her up this time. The roll was cold and greasy, the coffee tepid, but she ate and drank them anyway.
She tried to work it out. Three bacon rolls and two burgers. Three breakfasts; surely she’d been here longer than forty-eight hours?
She was sitting on the bed mentally composing letters to Amnesty International and the European Court of Human Rights when the door opened again and Jakobson stood in the corridor looking into the cell. The Colonel looked as if she hadn’t slept at all.
“Out,” she said.
Lenna got up and walked to the doorway. “So?”
Jakobson gave her a hard stare. “According to the Ministry of Justice there’s a chance we could convict you on charges of incitement to riot,” she said. “But the Ministy of Justice is busy at the moment, so you’re being released. Hold out your hand.”
Lenna obeyed without thinking. Jakobson grasped her wrist, turned it over, and pressed something cold to the inside of her forearm. There was a snapping sensation against her skin, then a spreading feeling like a bruise.
“Ow!” Lenna looked at her arm. There was a fat inflamed circle on the skin, with a little red dot in the middle.
“Don’t leave the city,” Jakobson said. “I’m going to want to talk to you again.” And she walked away.
[[Next|Section 13c Lenna]]!Release
An officer came along to escort her along the corridors and back upstairs to the front desk of the police station. As she approached, she could see daylight through the armoured glass inserts in the doors. At the desk, a Sergeant made her sign half a dozen forms, in triplicate, then handed over her bag. She took her phone out and looked at the time. She had been in the cell for just under fourteen hours. When she looked at the Sergeant, he was suppressing a snigger.
The police station she’d been taken to was some distance from the centre of town, and even further from her flat, which was a problem because public transport seemed to be spotty. Some trams and buses were running, some were not. She found a taxi rank and stood there for about fifteen minutes, but no taxis turned up.
She walked until she found a kiosk and bought a prepaid disposable phone. She wasn’t going to use hers ever again, not after it had been in Jakobson’s hands overnight. It was probably transmitting everything from her location to her blood pressure back to the police. She tried the numbers of a couple of taxi firms, but nobody was answering.
Finally, she came to a Starbucks and sat down in a corner with a latte and a sandwich and tried Mr Reinsalu’s number, and for a miracle he answered. He’d probably been waiting for her to call since the riot began.
“Well,” he said when she’d finished her story. “You seem to have had quite a night.”
“They tagged me, too,” she said, scratching the itchy bruised spot on her arm. “They’ll know where to find me anytime they want to.”
“Have you seen the news?”
“I saw it last night. I haven’t had time since they let me go.”
“Hm. Perhaps it might be for the best if you and I kept our heads down for a while. Things may have got a little out of control.”
“Jakobson said lots of people were hurt.”
“Yes. There were. Look, go home. Have a decent meal and a rest. I’ll call you on this number in the evening. Oh, and stay out of the centre of town.”
They hung up. Lenna finished her sandwich and drank her coffee. She took her phone out, intending to check the news, and saw that her inbox was full of messages. She’d block-deleted the whole thing during that unpleasantness with the bank and the utilities, but now there were dozens again. She opened the folder and found message after message from papers and media outfits asking her to get in touch and discuss the prospect of interviews or commissions for articles. All of a sudden, she had something everyone wanted, and now they wanted to be her friend. There was even one from Ross, a breezy hi-how-are-you suggesting they get together for a drink and have a chat about her returning to the paper.
Well. They could all fuck off. For the moment, anyway. Let them wait until she was ready. Ross could fuck off completely; there was no way she was ever going back there, no matter how much satisfaction it would give her.
She finished her coffee and went home. It took her ages because she had to walk for kilometres before she could find a bus that took her near her flat.
Though she had only been gone overnight, the flat looked unfamiliar to her. She put the news on while she made herself an omelette, sat eating with the plate on her knees while she watched scenes of people clearing up after last night’s disturbances. Various government ministers gave press conferences condemning the violence and restating the Prime Minister’s determination to get to the bottom of the murder of Sergii N. Salumäe himself had given a short press briefing earlier in the day, with a promise of a more substantial statement later.
The people in the footage from Tallinn looked shellshocked, baffled by what had happened. The snow had turned, briefly, to rain, and everything looked dreary and horrible. The news networks were running their own investigations into Sergii’s death now, rolling reports that repeated every half hour or so. They didn’t seem to have managed to dig out much more than the basic facts.
Her phone buzzed. Another message from a news agency promising her a small fortune for an exclusive. She put the phone down again. She was aware that the window for these commissions was very short; was in fact already closing. As the networks started to dig up details of their own, she was going to become increasingly irrelevant, reduced to putting out the occasional press release. At the moment, this was the biggest story in the country, and she was right at the heart of it. Tomorrow she might not be, and all the offers of money would dry up and blow away. How could it hurt to give just one interview?
[[Respond to Estonian media outlet|Section 14a Lenna]]
[[Respond to Russian media outlet|Section 14b Lenna]]!On the Record
They sent a young woman. They probably meant to establish some kind of rapport, but Lenna found her irritating. She sat perched on the edge of the sofa as if trying to reduce the area of contact between her clothes and the furniture to an absolute minimum. She looked about fourteen, face freshly scrubbed, neat and discreetly-expensive clothes, a faint smell of a scent that Lenna would have had to work for…well, she’d never been able to afford it.
Lenna took her step by step through the case of Sergii N, explaining as if to a simpleton. If the girl was annoyed at being patronised, she didn’t let it show. She butted in now and again with questions, but mostly she just nodded along and let her phone record the story.
When Lenna had finished, the girl picked up her phone and consulted her notes. “And you’ve been a journalist for…?”
“Almost ten years.” Lenna tried to radiate the wisdom of seniority. The girl had obviously only been in the business for a couple of years. Lenna felt vaguely insulted.
“You’ve got a lot of experience,” the girl said, looking at her phone.
“There’s no substitute for experience,” Lenna said.
“Well, you’ve worked for a lot of people, I mean,” the girl said. She bobbed her head a little as if she was totting up a list. “Twelve different organisations in almost ten years.” She blinked innocently at Lenna. “That’s a lot of jobs.”
“It’s a lot of experience,” Lenna said.
“You did a lot of lifestyle stuff,” the girl said.
“And?” Lenna suddenly wanted this interview wound up.
“Oh, nothing wrong with that.” The girl smiled at her. “I’ve done my share of lifestyle. It’s just, well, it seems a bit of a leap from boybands to this. I was wondering if you’d had some sort of political awakening or if you’d always wanted to do campaigning work like this.”
Oh. Well, that was all right. “I’ve always had a social conscience,” she told the girl. “I suppose I was looking for the right Cause, and when I heard about the case of Sergii N I knew I’d found it.” It sounded ridiculous said out loud, but she knew it would look good in print.
“So it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’d recently been fired from your previous job for gross unprofessionalism.”
Lenna opened her mouth.
“Or that you were on the verge of being made bankrupt.” The girl looked at her, a kindly expression on her face. “It’s just that, well, some of our readers might think you were just being opportunist and I wondered how you’d respond to that.”
Lenna felt colour rise in her cheeks. “That is absolutely not what happened,” she said.
“But you were fired.”
“It was a mutual decision. We parted amicably.”
The girl checked her notes. “That’s not what I heard.”
“Well, you heard wrong,” Lenna snapped. She stood up. “I think I’d like you to go now, please.”
The girl didn’t move from her perch on the sofa. “But I still have a few questions…”
“You can email them to me. I just remembered I have an appointment.”
The girl stood unwillingly. “Well…all right…”
Lenna showed her to the door, and when the girl had gone she stood in the hallway, heart pounding. The girl had obviously arrived with an agenda, to discredit Lenna and the campaign. It was an obvious angle, and Lenna cursed herself for not expecting it. She’d have to be more careful next time, vetting questions, demanding copy approval. In fact, it might be better if she turned down all the interview requests and just concentrated on writing articles. That way at least there would be no nasty surprises.
[[Next|Section 15 Lenna]]!A Lone Woman
“It must have been terrible,” said the Russian girl.
“It was,” Lenna said.
“Have you any idea how it started?”
“Excuse me? Started?”
The girl was a Russian Russian, not an Estonian of Russian ethnicity. She’d flown in from Moscow the moment the airport opened again, and sitting on Lenna’s sofa she was as exotic as a borzoi. Her clothes were stylishly expensive, her makeup flawless, her long brown hair streaked blonde and pomegranate. She looked as if she’d stepped down from a catwalk, not from a cab directly from the airport.
“The attack on your people by the police.”
“The police are saying some of the protesters threw stones at them.”
The girl nodded. There was a strange air of watchful listlessness about her, as if she had written her story already and was only here to get some colour to fill it in. “Of course they would say that,” she mused. “I understand your Prime Minister was once a police officer.”
“Salumäe? Yes, I think he was, for a while, after he left university. It obviously didn’t agree with him.”
The Russian smiled politely. “So you might reasonably expect him to be sympathetic to the needs of the police?”
“Oh, absolutely.” Lenna remembered a speech Salumäe had made during the last election, vowing to support the police and the work they did, but every politician did that during elections.
“To the extent of helping to cover up this crime committed against Sergii N?”
“You think Salumäe’s involved in this?” Lenna asked.
The Russian girl shrugged. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it? The former policeman protecting his own.”
Lenna thought about it. “I suppose it would,” she said.
The girl smiled. “Good. Now, you gave up a good career in journalism to take up this campaign. That must have been quite a decision.”
“Not at all,” Lenna said. “A great injustice has been committed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s against an Estonian or a Russian.”
The girl’s smile dimmed a little. “Well, you wouldn’t imagine such a thing happening to an Estonian, would you?”
Lenna had no idea. “I guess not.”
“Good. So, let’s recap. Sergii N was murdered by the police and the police refused to investigate. That would be your campaign’s point of view, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“And you yourself have suffered at the hands of the police while trying to publicise this injustice.”
“That’s right. I’ve been arrested. Twice.”
“Were the police aggressive towards you?”
“Oh yes. There’s one called Jakobson. She’s a total bitch.”
The Russian glanced at her phone to make sure it was still recording the conversation. “You’ve been very brave.”
“I don’t think I’ve been brave at all,” Lenna said, unable to suppress a smile. “Anyone would have done what I’ve done.”
“Against state violence?”
“Well, no one’s been violent towards me, exactly…”
“But you were arrested!” the girl said. “And the police were aggressive.”
“Well, yes, they were. They tagged me. Look.” She pulled up her sleeve and held her arm up to let the Russian girl see the mildly inflamed lump where the locator tag had been injected under her skin. “I think I’m having an allergic reaction.”
The girl shook her head sadly. “It’s a scandal. It’s as if you are still in jail.”
“Yes,” Lenna said. “Yes, it’s exactly like that.”
“This is authoritarianism of the worst kind,” the girl told her. “It would not be allowed in my country.”
“Really?” Lenna had heard different.
“But of course not! Such a thing is not civilised, don’t you agree?”
Lenna scratched her arm absent-mindedly. “I don’t think I can argue about that.”
“Good. So here you are, a crusader for the truth, standing up for the rights of a man whose life was cruelly taken by those he should have expected to protect him.” She shook her head. “Just between us, and off the record, I admire you.”
“I don’t think I’ve done anything admirable,” Lenna said, blushing. “I’m just trying to do what’s right.”
“That’s a wonderful line,” the girl said. “And so typically humble of you. You’re a lone woman standing up against the forces of authoritarianism. Why, they could have killed you.”
“I’m not really alone,” Lenna said. “There’s Mr Reinsalu…”
The girl waved Mr Reinsalu away. “A lone woman,” she said again. She looked as if she was working herself up to some serous fangirling, which was slightly alarming but also quite gratifying. “You’re going to be a star in my country.”
[[Next|Section 15 Lenna]]!Bus Stop
The police station they had taken her to was some distance from the centre of town, and even further from her flat, which was a problem at this time of the morning; public transport wouldn’t start running for another couple of hours. It was biting cold outside, and she wondered if she shouldn’t go back in and ask if she could wait for a taxi, but she wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. She felt tired and panicky, and in the distance she could hear the sirens of emergency vehicles.
She tried the numbers of a couple of cab companies, but nobody was answering their phone tonight. She was just trying to work out what to do when she saw a bus coming up the street towards her. Without thinking, she stepped out in front of it with her arms raised. The driver mashed his hand on the horn, but he still pulled to a stop, although he didn’t open the doors.
“Where are you going?” Lenna shouted. The liquid matrix display on the front of the bus said KADRIORG, but that was ridiculous. Kadriorg was kilometres away and the bus was going in the wrong direction. The driver shrugged helplessly.
“Let me on!” Lenna yelled.
The driver shook his head.
“I have money! I can pay!” It never for a moment occurred to Lenna that she was trying to hijack a bus metres from the front door of a police station.
The driver thought about this for a lot longer than Lenna felt comfortable with. She could smell smoke in the air, and the sirens were getting closer. Finally the driver heaved a huge sigh and opened the doors.
Lenna ran round the front of the bus and climbed aboard. “Where are you going?” she said again.
“You’re welcome,” the driver said.
Lenna took a breath, willed herself to slow down. “Thank you,” she said.
The driver nodded. “Okay.”
“Where are you going?” she asked again. “Not to Kadriorg, surely?”
He shook his head. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, and he looked terrified. “I was heading for the bus station in Juhkentali but someone’s overturned a bus there and set it alight; the whole area’s full of crazy people.”
“So where?”
The driver looked out at a little group of officers who had gathered on the front steps of the police station to watch the bus. “I might stay here for a while,” he said.
“Oh no you don’t,” she said. “I have to get home.”
“Where’s that?” She told him, and he groaned. “I just came from there. It’s madness; the streets are full of people throwing things.”
Lenna felt her heart sink. “So what are we going to do?”
“We could get out of the city, park up somewhere, wait for daylight.”
“You’re not serious.”
“The trouble’s only in the city centre and in a couple of other places.” Lenna could see him coming up with the plan as he went along. “I’ve got friends in Jüri; they’ll let me park on their farm.”
“That’s crazy.” It was as if she’d fallen into a zombie apocalypse movie. “I’m not going to Jüri.”
He shrugged. “That’s where I’m going.”
Lenna thought about it. “You don’t have to go south from here; you can go through Juhkentali and drop me there, then head down past the airport.”
“Juhkentali.” he sucked his teeth. “Okay, we’ll try that. Better find a seat.”
She looked down the length of the empty bus. “Yes,” she said.
“And you said something about money.”
[[Next|Section 13f Lenna]]!Unrest
The bus dropped her in Juhkentali half an hour later and several hundred euros lighter. The driver didn’t bother saying goodbye, just closed the doors and drove off into the night, leaving Lenna standing on the pavement wondering if she had lost her mind. All of a sudden a night on a farm out in Jüri didn’t seem so bad, but the bus was already heading off down Peterburi tee towards the southbound junction by the big shopping centre.
The streets were deserted. No cars, no people, but in the distance she could hear shouting and more sirens, and what sounded like quite a crowd somewhere beyond the buildings behind her. She moved quickly away from the sound, making for her flat in Raua. It was only a couple of kilometres or so away, on the other side of Gonsiori; she’d be home in a few minutes.
Everything went well for the first couple of minutes, but then she became aware of the sounds of shouting and things breaking ahead of her, and when she emerged from a side street onto Tartu mantee she saw, a few hundred metres further on towards the city centre, a group of maybe fifty or so people gathered outside a department store. The huge windows of the store lay in a glittering carpet on the pavement and the road, and people were going in and out through them. The ones going in were empty-handed; the ones coming out were laden down with boxes and bags. As Lenna watched from the corner of the side-street, half a dozen police vehicles came screaming up, lights and sirens turned off so as not to alert the looters. Officers in riot suits spilled out of the vehicles and started to lay into the looters with batons and tasers and shotguns firing beanbag rounds. At least, Lenna hoped they were beanbag rounds. The police weren’t messing about; Lenna couldn’t tell whether they were putting down the crowd as efficiently as they could, or if they had entirely lost control. Another police car came roaring up and struck one of the looters, scooping him up and carrying him a few metres before braking and tumbling him across the glass-strewn road. An officer jumped out and struck the prostrate looter twice with his baton, then waded into the fight.
Lenna took a couple of deep breaths, then hurried across the main road and down the side streets on the other side. No one noticed she was even there.
The sounds of the fight carried a long way on the cold night air, but she didn’t see any more trouble. At one point she passed a young man sitting on the pavement outside a Japanese restaurant. He was smoking a cigarette and he seemed perfectly calm, but as she went by Lenna saw that the side of his head was slick with blood. She kept going.
A few minutes later, she came to her street. It seemed deserted and she stumbled as far as her building, held her phone against the sensor, and all but fell into the lobby when the door clicked open. She let it close behind her and leaned back against it, breathing hard.
She finally managed to contact Mr Reinsalu around eleven o’clock that morning. She told him about being arrested, about her journey home from the police station. Unusually, for her, she didn’t embellish much. Last night was beyond embellishment. She kept seeing that one looter, scooped up onto the bonnet of the police car and then shot off into the road like a bag of bedding. And then the policeman hitting him.
Mr Reinsalu made sympathetic noises and said he’d call her later. Lenna wondered where he had spent the night of the riot; she’d forgotten to ask.
At lunchtime, she made herself an omelette, sat eating in front of the news with the plate on her knees while she watched scenes of people clearing up after last night’s disturbances. Various government ministers gave press conferences condemning the violence and restating the Prime Minister’s determination to get to the bottom of the murder of Sergii N. Salumäe himself had given a short press briefing earlier in the day, with a promise of a more substantial statement later.
The people in the footage from Tallinn looked shellshocked, baffled by what had happened. The snow had turned, briefly, to rain, and everything looked dreary and horrible. The news networks were running their own investigations into Sergii’s death now, rolling reports that repeated every half hour or so. They didn’t seem to have managed to dig out much more than the basic facts.
The inbox on her phone was full of messages. She’d block-deleted the whole thing during that unpleasantness with the bank and the utilities, but now there were dozens again. She opened the folder and found message after message from papers and media outfits asking her to get in touch and discuss the prospect of interviews or commissions for articles. All of a sudden, she had something everyone wanted, and now they wanted to be her friend. There was even one from Ross, a breezy hi-how-are-you suggesting they get together for a drink and have a chat about her returning to the paper.
Well. They could all fuck off. For the moment, anyway. Let them wait until she was ready. Ross could fuck off completely; there was no way she was ever going back there, no matter how much satisfaction it would give her.
Her phone buzzed. Another message from a news agency promising her a small fortune for an exclusive. She put the phone down again. She was aware that the window for these commissions was very short; was in fact already closing. As the networks started to dig up details of their own, she was going to become increasingly irrelevant, reduced to putting out the occasional press release. At the moment, this was the biggest story in the country, and she was right at the heart of it. Tomorrow she might not be, and all the offers of money would dry up and blow away. How could it hurt to give just one interview?
[[Respond to Estonian media outlet|Section 14a Lenna]]
[[Respond to Russian media outlet|Section 14b Lenna]]!Oh My!
The window of opportunity was in fact closing more swiftly than Lenna realised. A month later the government announced that it had proof that the accusation against the Tallinn police was a hoax, fake news cooked up, presumably, by the Russians. The Russians, of course, denied it and demanded to see the proof, and then the public diplomatic tit-for-tat suddenly went silent. Clearly discussions had been taken behind the scenes.
For Lenna, there was a brief flurry of interview requests and calls for comment, and then everything dried up. She continued to write press releases, denouncing the government’s ‘proof’ as fake, but nobody ran them and as the days went by she wrote less and less, until one day she just stopped. It wasn’t her fault that nobody wanted to use her material, and she was getting paid anyway. She checked, just to make sure she was getting paid, and discovered that her salary hadn’t gone into her account for two months. She was, in fact, getting dangerously low on funds.
There was no one to ask about this. Mr Reinsalu had gone into seclusion shortly after the riot, fearing that he too would wind up sitting across a table from Colonel Jakobson, and had been uncontactable for some time.
Lenna was furious, an anger composed to quite a large degree from panic. It had to be a mistake, she reasoned, a clerical error which, had she spotted it straight away, would have been fixed long ago, but after all the work she’d done for the campaign – she’d been arrested, for Christ’s sake – she thought she deserved better.
Fortunately, she was in a better position now than she when she had been fired by Ross. There were those – and not so long ago she would have been dismissing them as conspiracist wingnuts – for whom the government’s demolition of the allegations against the police only proved the sheer depth of the conspiracy being enacted against the people, and she reached out to them and found herself mainlined into a deep vein of vodcasts and discussion programmes. True, she was sharing a platform with people who believed that Elvis lay cryogenically frozen at a secret facility in the Rockies and the US government was running a covert programme to interbreed humans with aliens recovered following the Roswell crash, but she only had to do two or three of them a month and that was her bills paid. A couple of channels offered her a programme of her own, but it would have been too much work for not enough money.
And anyway, she had all the audience she could handle. Her inbox and postbag were full of messages of support and abuse, packages of old newspaper clippings or folders of attached documents, snippets of news and suggestions for investigations. Periodically, when boredom overcame her, she sorted through this mass of anger and conspiracy theories and cries for help, and it was one bored evening in early Spring when she came across an email from a correspondent who did not give their name.
//Miss Rüütel, my uncle, now sadly deceased, was for many years an
officer with the Tallinn Police, and he shared many of your concerns about
their attitudes to Estonia’s Russian minority. When he died, it fell to me to take
care of his estate, and in the process of discharging this obligation I came across
the attached file. I am a private citizen, unfamiliar with the complexities of the
media, and I am frankly anxious about what would become of me if the authorities
knew I possessed the file. It seems to me, though, that you are ideally-placed to bring
it to the attention of the public, and so I entrust it into your hands.
//
Attached to the email was a video file – not a terribly large one, as these things went. She scanned it and found it free of viruses and malware – she’d been caught out once like that – and clicked to open it.
For a few moments she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. A bunch of drunk men in what looked like uniforms, lurching about and laughing. And then she realised what it was, and she watched it to the end.
“Oh my,” she said. Then she clicked to watch it again.
----
[[Return to the cover page to read Krista's story|https://www.silenceintallinn.com]]Copyright 2018
[[Front Cover|https://www.silenceintallinn.com]]Story by Dave Hutchinson