Follow the Butterfly, page 24
At those moments, I was sure my father loved me, though he never said it out loud.
After my time in the Bastard’s cellar, I couldn’t be in any underground space. The stuffy smell in the basement reminded me of the Bastard and the cage. I’ll never forget how disappointed my father looked every time I refused to spend time with him.
I’m actually surprised at how persistently my father kept asking. But I couldn’t set foot in the basement any more. And I couldn’t tell him the reason why. He started spending more and more time in the basement, but now that I wasn’t there, it was the bottle that kept him company. It’s my fault he became an alcoholic.
That’s not a compulsive thought.
It’s the truth.
The Bastard’s car turned onto a smaller, unsurfaced lane. I was thrown uncontrollably around the back seat, painfully banging my elbow against a pot of paint sloshing in the footwell. I didn’t care about the pain. There was only one thought in my mind, and that was guilt.
Tears welled in my eyes.
The cottage stood at the far end of an untended garden, hidden from view under a large maple tree. It was impossible to tell how old the cottage was. The paint had flaked off years ago and the roof tiles looked so precarious that the wind could have blown them off at any moment. The chimney stack was about to collapse. The grass in the garden came up to my knees; it hadn’t seen a lawnmower in years. The building must have stood empty for a long time.
The Bastard stopped the car, opened the back door and snatched me into his arms.
I was there, but I wasn’t there.
The Bastard could do with me as he wished.
My soul was already elsewhere.
Ida
I don’t know how long I was in the cage. The cellar looked the same as it had ten years ago. There was no furniture in storage, no piles of junk or old newspapers. The only things down there were the rusty cage and the old bathtub.
The acrid smell of mould warned me that the heart of the house was rotten.
They say that, when you revisit the places you knew as a child, everything suddenly looks smaller. I couldn’t lie down or stand up in the cage any more, I could barely even turn around. I huddled and tried to stretch my legs, which were numb from crouching in such an uncomfortable position.
The cellar floor was covered in a thick layer of dust; cobwebs dangled here and there across the ceiling. It looked as though nobody had been down here for a very long time. Ten years, maybe. Could my worst fear really have been in vain? What if I really was the last victim to be locked up in here?
The floor inside the cage was lined with the same white rug as before. The rug was covered in a layer of ingrained dirt. I knew that beneath all the filth there was a pattern that hadn’t given me a moment’s respite. I pulled down the sleeve of my father’s old hoodie to cover the palm of my hand and scrubbed the rug as hard as I could until the pattern started to come into view.
A butterfly drawn in blood.
My blood.
I remember as a child imagining a pink butterfly hovering above my head in the cage and keeping me company throughout the hours I spent locked up there.
I didn’t have to be alone. The butterfly fluttered around me until I was finally set free.
I snapped out of my reverie and returned to the here and now.
All of a sudden, the cellar was filled with butterflies.
Apollos, with sets of blood-red eyes on their white hind wings. Female Arctic blues, their wings as grey as freshly dried concrete. Orange tortoiseshells, the blue speckles along the edge of their wings painted as skilfully as my father used to paint my wooden dolls.
The butterflies were heading towards the cage. They landed in my hair, on my shoulders, my face.
And on the rug, right in front of me, there suddenly appeared a whole swarm of pear-tree swallowtails.
The pear-tree swallowtail isn’t native to Finland. It’s only been sighted here a handful of times.
The drugs were starting to take effect.
Once the Bastard had locked me in the cage, he disappeared for a moment. Soon afterwards, he came back down the ladder into the cellar, clattering on his way as if to warn me of his arrival. He was carrying a plate of porridge. He opened the cage door and started force-feeding it to me. I tried to fight back, but he had bound my hands and feet, so struggling was futile. He was stronger than me and managed to force most of the porridge down my throat. It had a bitter aftertaste.
He must have laced it with drugs or poison in an attempt to sedate me.
I tried to convince myself this was all a hallucination. The butterflies didn’t really exist. I screamed as loudly as I could.
‘None of this is real!’
‘Real! Real! Real!’ came the echo from the bare cellar walls.
I was starting to feel drowsy. I tried to force my eyes open, but they kept drooping shut. I knew that if I gave in now, I would die.
I was a butterfly.
And then I flew off.
Arto
I sat down at my desk and started drafting my suicide note for the umpteenth time. Nothing I’d ever written throughout my thirty-year career could have prepared me for this. I wanted to find exactly the right words for Ida: I wanted to talk about love, regret and guilt.
My emotions had been pent up inside me for so long that putting them into words felt impossible.
In the course of my journalistic career, I’d written some very personal articles, including a piece entitled ‘My year as a widower’, where I talked about the loneliness I experienced in the aftermath of Marja’s death. Now it felt as though words were beyond my reach.
The sentences I sketched out felt flat and empty. Words were nothing but words. I couldn’t imbue them with enough emotional charge, though it was with these very words that I needed to convince Ida I’d never loved anyone as much as I loved her.
The greater the emotion, the fewer words there are to express it.
I stared at the screen and deleted yet another draft. I started again but couldn’t get beyond the first few lines. I’d been writing in a professional capacity my whole life, but it seemed I hadn’t learnt anything. I failed at everything I touched; I couldn’t even write a decent suicide note.
The cursor blinked at the top of the empty document. I swallowed back the tears. There was only one thing I wanted in this world.
It wasn’t too late.
I wanted to save Ida.
Pekka
All those years, I’d had the upper hand, so I admit I was surprised the first time the Princess turned up at Clarissa’s office. I would have put money on her not having told anyone about me, neither at the time nor later on. People would have talked about it in the media, and I would have been hunted down, both by the police and the press. But now she had decided to tell Clarissa everything, and I had to make sure that didn’t happen.
I needed a carefully laid plan. How could I destroy her without leaving a trace? I prepared everything one step at a time. And only once I was certain my strategy was watertight did I finally put it into action.
Everybody should have at least one doctor in their circle of friends. Clarissa’s mentor Harri Kuikkasuo was a dull old sod who could bore anyone to death, and usually his gibberish went in one ear and out the other. Time had passed him by decades ago. Freud this, Freud that—the man was like a broken record.
But right now, I needed him.
When I told him I’d suffered from years of debilitating insomnia, Harri took pity on me. He was worried about how I would cope and wrote me generous prescriptions for sedatives, mostly temazepam. It was these sedatives that I used to drug Riku. And the Princess.
It was much harder to get the Princess locked in the cage the second time around. It was too small for a grown adult. But I managed it, then went upstairs to the kitchen to make some porridge. When I opened the pack of temazepam, I realized I’d taken the tub with too few pills left in it. I would be able to drug her with this smaller dose, but it wouldn’t be lethal. There was nothing else for it; I had to go home and fetch the full tub of pills.
Clarissa
That Saturday morning, I was due to head to Kuopio where I was to spend the weekend with my good friend Minna. In the morning, I realized I’d overslept, and now my whole schedule had gone out the window. We had a table booked for twelve o’clock at my favourite restaurant, the Fisherman’s Hook. I would have to drive for four and a half hours straight, ignoring the speed limits, and there was still no guarantee I’d get there in time. I could feel a stress-induced headache beginning to throb in my temples. I quickly packed a few things, said goodbye to Pekka and jumped in the car.
I’d already driven for two hours without a break and had almost reached Mikkeli when I remembered I ought to call Minna and warn her I might be a little late for lunch. I turned off the motorway, pulled into a petrol station and began rummaging in my handbag for my mobile, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I tipped the contents of my handbag onto the passenger seat: hairbrush, chewing gum, a few coins, a card holder and a couple of used tissues, but no mobile phone. I cursed my own absent-mindedness.
I couldn’t spend the whole weekend without my phone. I had several patients whom I’d promised could call me at any time of day. I couldn’t remember all their phone numbers, and some of them did such top-secret jobs that they had unlisted numbers, so there was no way I could have found them, not even through directory enquiries. What’s more, one of them—an artist, whose name I obviously can’t disclose—was currently in the middle of a terrible crisis. Only that past week, the artist in question had called me several times a day and sounded utterly inconsolable. I couldn’t just turn my back.
I was so upset about losing my phone that it didn’t even occur to me that, once I arrived in Kuopio, I could call Pekka on Minna’s phone and ask him to list my patients’ numbers so that I could call them and tell them they could contact me at Minna’s number over the weekend.
Instead, I turned the car around and headed back to Helsinki.
I arrived home a few hours later. I opened the front door and gave a start. The hallway was filled with the piercing shriek of an alarm: the smoke detector had gone off. My head was so sore that the sound was almost unbearable. There was the smell of smoke in the hallway. Without taking off my shoes, I ran straight into the kitchen. The cooker was switched off.
I spun around and ran into my office. Smoke hung in the air by the door. I ran across the room to open the window. Standing in the middle of the rug was my tin bucket, full of burnt papers. Next to the bucket was a half-burnt scrap that must have fallen out of the bucket. It was as though someone had performed a suicide-note ceremony in the room, and everything had gone horribly wrong.
I picked up the scrap. Someone must have tried to extinguish the fire by stamping on it; there was a footprint on the paper. A man with a wicked smirk had lost his torso in the flames. Now all that was left of him was his head.
It was one of Ida’s charcoal sketches. I took the remaining scraps of burnt paper from the bucket and quickly looked through them. Pekka had torn all of Ida’s sketches to shreds and tried to burn them. I stared at the mess in dismay. What on earth had come over him?
My first impulse was to take a photograph of the bucket and the charred remains of the sketches. I needed evidence of what had happened, so there was no way Pekka could deny it. I instinctively slid my hand into my handbag and fumbled for my phone. Only then did I remember I’d come home specifically because I’d forgotten it.
I turned towards my desk but noticed my phone wasn’t in its usual place there either.
I backed out of the room, still in a state of shock, and walked through into the kitchen. My phone was on the kitchen table. I’d received a text message. It was from Ida.
What’s so urgent that we need to meet right away?
I stared at the screen in stunned silence. I hadn’t asked Ida to come today. I clicked through to my outbox to see the messages I’d sent.
We need to meet. Now. We have to talk. This cant wait.
Why would Pekka send Ida a message like that?
I ran around the house in a panic, going through every room, even the cleaning cupboard. I went out to the patio and peered around the garden.
There was no sign of Pekka. Or Ida.
I found myself back in the kitchen. I called Ida. The number I had dialled could not be reached.
It was only then that I noticed a set of keys on the kitchen table. A key ring with three rusty keys, two of them identical. I guessed that the larger key would fit the door of an old house, but I couldn’t imagine what the smaller two were for. I turned the key ring in the palm of my hand for a moment until it all dawned on me. The smaller keys must be for a padlock.
Hanging from the key ring was a dirty square of cardboard. Written on the card, in Pekka’s jittery handwriting, was an address: Kanttarellinkaarre 5. The address meant nothing to me. I keyed it into my phone. The location was half an hour’s drive away in the remote village of Lurikkala. Why did Pekka have keys to a property in a village I’d never even heard of?
I ran out to my car, sat down in the driver’s seat and brushed a few strands of hair from my eyes. I glanced at myself in the mirror. There was a rusty smear on my face, like a butterfly wing.
I typed the address into my satnav and set off for the village of Lurikkala.
Clarissa
I felt faint. I’d eaten nothing but a light breakfast all day, but my light-headedness could have been a result of the fear. I was afraid of what lay in store for me at Kanttarellinkaarre.
With a feeling of determination, I put my foot on the accelerator, but something within me was reluctant. I could still drive to Kuopio and return home on Sunday evening, just as Minna and I had agreed. After getting home, I could breezily greet Pekka and ask how his weekend had gone, adding that I hoped he’d remembered to relax and hadn’t spent the whole weekend huddled over his laptop. I could even pretend to believe his answer, as he appealed to my sympathies by lying, telling me he had worked all weekend and hadn’t left the house once, not even to fetch a pizza. I could massage his shoulders and try to convince myself I had a wonderful, faithful husband whom I could trust wholeheartedly.
But I couldn’t live a lie any longer. Ever since Riku’s death, I’d been keeping up appearances, I’d managed to convince myself I hadn’t separated from Pekka so that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to abuse a child ever again. Only now, sitting behind the steering wheel in my car, did I have the courage to confront the truth head-on. How could I have prevented Pekka’s terrible acts? It was impossible! I couldn’t have followed him, shadowed him all day long. And as the sketches, torn and burnt and left at the bottom of the tin bucket, revealed, I didn’t have the faintest idea what he did when I wasn’t there.
With my patients.
I realized I’d sunk so far into my own thoughts that I’d taken a wrong turn. The satnav told me to make a U-turn. I followed the instructions and turned the car onto a road full of potholes. A crooked signpost read Kanttarellinkaarre. The satnav told me I had arrived at my destination. At the end of the lane was a small cottage.
My phone rang.
Pekka.
I knew I would live to regret it, but I gave my husband one last opportunity to explain himself.
He didn’t even bother to say hello.
‘There was a set of keys on the kitchen table. Where are they?’
I barely recognized his voice. He sounded threatening, as though the mask had slipped to reveal his true face.
I said nothing.
‘Clarissa, listen to me, this is important! I need those keys.’
I remained silent.
‘When did you get here?’ he continued. ‘I only nipped to the shop, and when I got back the keys were gone.’
I hung up, but before I could end the call, I heard him shouting: ‘I’m coming, Clarissa. I’m already on my way.’
Clarissa
I parked my car and ran towards the cottage. The front door was locked. I took the set of keys out of my handbag and pushed the larger one into the lock. I had to yank it and twist it, but eventually it gave way. On the front step there was a basket full of firewood with an axe propped against it. I picked up the axe. It was only as I tried to get a firm grip on its handle that I realized I already knew exactly what awaited me inside the cottage.
I quietly pushed the door open and peered in. The cottage was dark. I couldn’t see anybody. Very cautiously, I stepped inside. Sunlight struck a metallic hook on the floor, glinting briefly. It was a sign. I gripped the hook with my left hand, still holding the axe in my right, and pulled open a hatch. The thought occurred to me: I can still back off, turn around and run away. But I couldn’t.
Not now.
Beneath the hatch there was a rickety ladder leading down into a cellar. I kicked off my high heels and climbed down the ladder. I stood quietly at the foot of the ladder and held onto it to steady myself as I tried to take stock of my surroundings. The first thing I could make out was a rusty old bathtub. Then I saw the cage.
It was right at the back of the cellar. And it wasn’t empty. But though I knew there was someone in the cage, my mind tried to play tricks on me one last time, tried to fool me into believing there wasn’t anyone there at all. Then I heard it. A shrill howl, like that of an animal that knows it is dying. The sound boomed through the cellar, growing in strength as it echoed across the mouldy brick walls. I quivered with fear until I realized that the source of the howl was me.
I hurried towards the cage. Ida was lying on the ground inside it. She muttered something to herself, as though she was talking to someone else. Suddenly, she turned towards me and said:
