Some Of My Favourite Things

It’s yet another case that has taken them across the Baltic, to a favored hangout spot of a group of young people their victim had been a part of. Sakari thinks that drugs are probably involved–it’s an abandoned hotel essentially in the middle of nowhere but easily accessible from the highway. It seems like the perfect spot. Sofia, however, isn’t so sure, and honestly, Sakari would love to be proved wrong. 

They’ve parked the car behind a thicket of trees, so it’s not visible from the road, and now they make their way on foot to the building. 

It’s not in terrible condition for what it is. The roof is mostly intact and there are few holes in the walls. Most of the windows are shattered and the building is dotted with spray-painted messages. Sakari sniffs and stomps his feet to knock the snow off his shoes, and then they head inside the ruin. 

It’s damp and musty and the sound of the snow and wind from outside is downright eerie as it comes through the broken windows. Glass shards crunch under their feet. The smell is a combination of things–smoke, piss, weed, rot. There are empty beer cans and chip bags everywhere. 

In short, it’s exactly like Sakari had expected it to be. He shines his flashlight around in the poorly lit lobby.

“I don’t think they would have left messages here,” Sofia says. “Let’s go further in.”

They’d learned from a friend of their victim that the group had often left messages for each other in their favorite spots. He’d been unable or unwilling to tell them what the messages said or what they looked like, so about all that Sakari and Sofia know is that the messages, in theory, exist. 

Not the strongest clue to go on, but their investigation has been less than successful so far, and it’s the best lead they’ve got. 

They poke their way through the first floor and find nothing of real interest. Plenty of graffiti, none of which seems to be attempting to tell the reader anything very meaningful. Lots of trash. Cigarette butts and the ends of joints. Sakari had expected evidence of harder drugs, and is pleased to not have come across any. 

“Let’s go upstairs,” Sofia suggests, as they make their way through the destroyed kitchen. 

“Are you sure? What if it’s unstable?”

“This building isn’t that old. The kids probably go up there all the time. It’ll be fine.”

She has a point, and so he follows her up. 

The graffiti gets more sparse on the second floor, and even more so on the third and final floor. The rooms are largely left open, scattered with trash and dotted with writings. Sakari reads everything, understands about half of it, photographs the rest. 

“I think I found something!” Sofia calls from down the hall. They’ve split up to investigate the individual rooms, and she’s on the left side while he’s on the right. 

“Coming!”

Sakari joins Sofia in her room. She points to a small piece of graffiti below the window. Meet me at sunset at the place where it all began. –AH

Anneli Heikkinen. Their victim. 

Sofia photographs the message, and Sakari photographs the rest of the room. The place where it all began. 

Back to Helsinki, then. 

They’re back on the first floor, crossing through the lobby, when all of a sudden, the floor just…crumbles. 

All Sakari is aware of is taking a step, and then the ground disappears from under his feet. 

And then he’s on the ground again, and everything hurts and he’s breathing in dust and he’s looking up at the lobby that he’d just been standing in. 

With Sofia. He’d been standing in the lobby with his partner. 

“Sofia!” he shouts, coughing on the dust. “Karppi!”

Like he’s called her into existence, her face appears above him. 

Several feet above him, in fact.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he replies automatically. “You?”

“I’m fine, the damn floor collapsed. I guess it missed me. Can you see a way out?”

Sakari shoves himself up onto his elbows, which hurts, and looks around. It’s dark and his phone’s flashlight, along with the phone itself, has disappeared. He feels around for it and finds it. It won’t turn on, and he can feel how shattered it is. Great. 

“I can’t see much,” he calls back. “But it’s big down here. Maybe a basement.”

“I’ll try and find a staircase up here,” Sofia says. “You look down there.”

“Okay.”

He gets to his feet slowly. Pieces of plaster and insulation and god knows what else fall to the floor. His head spins as he stands, and his legs shake. He starts walking and almost immediately has to stop. 

His left ankle hurts, threatening to fold beneath him when he puts weight on it. Maybe it’s broken, or at least sprained. But he has to find a way out of here even so. 

He shuffles along very slowly and cautiously, relying as heavily on his right leg as he can. And then he trips over something and hits the ground hard. His palms start stinging and he can feel that there is something sharp–probably shards of glass–buried in them. 

He decides to stay in place, pull the glass out of his palms, and hope that Sofia will be able to find him. 

Sure enough, after perhaps five minutes, he hears the noise of a door scraping open, and sees a beam of light in the distance. 

“Sofia!” he calls out again, willing himself back to his feet. 

“Are you okay?”

He hesitates on answering for too long, and suddenly Sofia is next to him. 

“Nurmi. Sakari. Are you okay?”

“Mostly.”

She crosses her arms. 

“I hurt my ankle. I don’t know if it’s broken. I can walk, if I can see what’s in front of me.”

“Okay.”

Sofia lights the way back to the door. Sakari tries his best to keep up with her, but even with his partner going at a very slow pace, he falls behind. His ankle hurts, throbbing with every step he takes, threatening to stop working entirely and send him sprawling back to the floor. 

Mercifully, they make it to the door without him falling. And then it’s the stairs. 

Sofia helps him wordlessly, sliding in beside him and taking on some of his weight. It’s slow going and it hurts so very badly, but he grits his teeth and gets on with it. 

They reach the main floor again. They’re in a storage area off of the kitchen, the door to which looks like it hasn’t been opened since the place shut down. They’d walked past it earlier, in fact, assuming that no one would’ve gotten past the rusted hinges. 

“It took me a while to open,” Sofia says, catching his eye. “You’re lucky I found a fire extinguisher to break it.”

Sure enough, half of the doorknob is sitting on the ground beside a once-red cylinder. 

“Thank you,” Sakari says. 

“Don’t mention it.”

They make it out of the building without incident, giving the hole in the floor a wide berth. Outside, the sun has begun to set and the snow has stopped. Perhaps an inch of it now blankets the ground, and everything feels peaceful. 

Or it would, if Sakari could focus on anything besides the insistent pain in his ankle. 

Broken, most likely.

They reach the car, and then both stop. Sofia looks at him and touches a soft hand to his cheek. “You’re a mess,” she says, smiling slightly. Then she looks down, takes his hands, grows more serious. 

Sakari looks at their joined hands. His palms are smeared with blood and still embedded here and there with shards of glass. 

“Does it hurt?”

He shrugs. Not as much as my ankle, he thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud. 

“Should we see a doctor here? Or wait until we’re back in Helsinki?” She helps him into the car as she talks and he tries not to lean too heavily into her. 

Honestly, he wants the pain to go away. But he doesn’t want to delay their return for something that can easily be accomplished back home. He stays silent, thinking.

“Actually,” Sofia says, pulling the car back onto the main road, “you should probably get that looked at here. You’re covered in shit, so it wouldn’t hurt to get cleaned up before we get on the ferry.”

She has a point there. He nods silently, and they drive. 

An hour and a half later, he’s sitting on an exam table in a very nice hospital, having his ankle put into a lightweight cast. The x-ray had confirmed that it is indeed broken, but the doctor had been confident that there were no other major injuries. 

Besides this, his hands have been cleaned, disinfected, and the largest of the cuts have been bandaged up. They’d let him use a shower to clean off the debris and had presented him with hospital-issue clothes. They’re grey and thin and don’t quite fit, but they’re also free of pieces of the ruined hotel, so he doesn’t mind too much. 

Sofia is still here. He’d told her that she could go ahead and return to Helsinki. No sense in waiting around when they’ve just gotten a new lead. But she’d given him a look and a light smack on the arm, and he’d never refuse her desire to stay. 

They give him painkillers, standard paracetamol, and part of him wants to take them and part of him does not. Sofia looks at him and something wordless passes between them. 

“Take one. Just one. Then give them to me.”

He complies easily and hopes that she can tell how grateful he is when he thanks her. She smiles and takes his hand, gentle and mindful of his cuts, and he knows she understands.

After all of this, the ride back to Helsinki is pleasant. The sea is calm and the ferry isn’t terribly full. The pain has receded and he feels fine, controlled, and very tired. 

He falls asleep on Sofia’s shoulder and doesn’t wake up until they arrive back home.