A cold case unearths shocking secrets from the past in this gripping Nordic noir crime thriller, perfect for fans of Wallander and True Detective.
Three detectives, thrown together as expats in their Helsinki precinct, don't seem to have much in common aside from their job. But Charles, who holds a disgraced past, James with a side-gig as a famous author and Aija, young and eager to impress, begin to bond over their otherness, when two cryptic cases suddenly come their way.
The fifteen-year-old remains of a young woman are found buried in the woods. The crime scene hasn’t been preserved, her identity is unknown, and her killer is a couple of decades ahead of them – solving this case seems unlikely.
Months later, after the case has turned colder still, Charlie is unnerved when he is called out to another grisly crime – an apparent suicide. First on the scene, Charlie knows this should be James’ case, but from the evidence he is faced with, he starts to suspect that James may in fact be the perpetrator. How far is Charlie willing to go to uncover the dark secrets surrounding him?
Set against the constant rain of a Nordic spring, The English Speakers is a noir procedural that tackles themes of identity, race, and belonging as it builds towards its devastating conclusion.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Charlie
Everything he owned was gone.
Charles Yeats sat on an unfamiliar bed consumed by the knowledge that he’d been robbed of his life’s belongings. He bounced on the mattress several times using his weight to test its springs, he would eventually have to sleep in it. He rubbed his hands to steel himself and looked around the room. There was nothing wrong with the bed, it was comfortable enough, but it wasn’t his.
He fell back onto the crisp dark orange duvet, his legs remaining over the edge and his feet on the floor. He closed his eyes, but they immediately flickered open. Waves of seasickness washed over him as if he was unmoored in an ocean drifting side to side or perhaps forward to back, not knowing which way he had to go to find dry land.
He was only a short drive away from where he’d lived for the last fifteen years. His tenure there had ended in the early hours of the morning that found him staring at the ceiling unable to stop the ceaseless analysis of his situation.
He rubbed his temples, fighting the tension that had seized his muscles and was now ripening into a heavy pulsating at the base of his neck. He covered his eyes with his forearm and the stench of smoke forced him to throw himself to the floor where he retched but nothing emerged from his dry throat and chapped lips.
He was in a motel that was trying its best to be more than that. Someone, maybe only a few years earlier, had decided to create a moody on–trend ambience which somehow served to make the room feel even more depressing. It was dramatic yet dismal in shades of brown and orange that had been popular in the seventies. He recalled curtains, spurred by the ones that hung in the room. Then a lounge, then a family. Then he was in happier memories of decades previously, he saw himself running down the streets of a small English town with a satchel banging against his leg. He heard the other children call to him to join their football in a park but warning him “oi no talking funny!”. Then all laughing they ran past one of his childhood homes which, when he peered into the memory closer, looked identical to the house that had just burned down.
He turned to his side and looked out of the window. The sun was already up but weak behind dense grey clouds. It was at the cusp of winter becoming spring and last night it had been warm enough that his back door had been briefly propped open as James smoked in the garden. This was what Friday nights were to them; James Grey, Aija Kivinen and a handful of others, American, Canadian and English in various relaxed poses in his terraced house from which, if you stood on the balcony on the second floor, you could see the ocean.
“First floor,” one of his guests had reminded him, when he’d first described his view to her. But all of them here knew when they meant first, ground or second, flat or apartment, terrace or town house or when the word escaped and rivitalo was used instead. They swung between English and Finnish in their daily lives when they needed or wanted to – but here, among them, every word was in English.
Charlie’s semi had been cosy, with large and firm yet comfortable sofas that encouraged anyone seated in them to sink in with a drink in hand. James who came every time Charlie invited him seemed to take up the most space as he leaned back in an armchair with legs crossed and his feet beneath the coffee table. Susanna had been almost asleep in the chair when talking of her need to see family in Dublin. Brad had popped in and out of the room, going outside to smoke. Aija, who also attended every one of his open nights, had tried to lead a game of charades which ended with six people descending into hopeless laughter.
As always at least four different tastes in music had vied to be played on Charlie’s state–of–the–art speakers in a room in which an 85–inch television dominated. One of his guests had brought a box of wine from Tallinn which unsurprisingly was simultaneously sweet and vinegary. They’d complained about it as they’d depleted the box and talked about how prices in Tallinn were rising and wondered aloud how long it would be for it not to be economical to buy alcohol at the city’s quay.
Charlie had brushed his hair before they came, pleased with the way he’d recently had it cut to above the nape of his neck. His high neck shirt hid the slight loosening of skin around his neck and his jeans sagged but not, in his own mind, horrifically, they made him proud of how much weight he’d lost.
It had been a night on which the women slipped off their shoes and the host drank his beer from a bottle. At some point, a knock on the door announced the arrival of takeaway Nepalese food, which was consumed around the coffee table and cleared away by the guests, who stacked the dishwasher to show their appreciation for his hospitality. Aija was the last out of the kitchen, her deep brown skin perfectly matching her 32 years, looking neither younger nor older than she actually was. Her hair, as it often was, was covered in an assortment of pins that kept her long thin black spirals of hair in place.
Charlie was the oldest of the group and Aija the youngest. James and the others speckled somewhere in the twenty years in between. Despite his age there were very few old items in Charlie’ home. Even his casual clothes had been recently purchased. It was hard to tell he had lived here for so many years since so much of what he owned he’d bought in the previous two years. The sofa and cushions were still firm and unmarked and carpet still so plush that Aija sat on it as they’d discussed both the trivial and consequential.
His home had long ago been sensibly and carefully selected. Rastila, the suburb in which he lived, was a reasonable trip to both work and the city centre. It was a place people came to when they decided square metreage meant more than proximity to night life and cafés. His two children had been nearly teens when they’d moved here and had never played on the nearby playgrounds or on its small rocky windswept beaches.
When the evening was over, he’d watched from the door as James who’d been the last to leave began his walk to the metro station along Rastila’s well–lit streets, in a haze of smoke from a newly lit cigarette.
Then he’d been left alone in a pleasant near silence of suburbia. Somewhere an engine ran briefly, music played and was quickly smothered, and the shout of a merry drunk rang through the night air.
He’d thrown himself on his sofa smiling at his recollections of the evenings – there was little else to occupy him before bed. He was tired and merry and briefly considered picking out one of the uncounted books that lined one of his walls. It was a small luxury of being single, again, he had no one’s permission to ask to allow his living room to be covered in books.
He thought of those books now that they were gone. One of the last things he’d done in his house was tap a pile of them as he passed his dining table to remind himself to get rid of them. He’d finally drifted off on his sofa, knowing Saturday would bring a long bike trip along a forest path and coffee in a café somewhere along the seafront, or that he could be called into work.
The officer on duty had explained to him as he stood beside the smouldering embers that a neighbour who Charlie knew to be a perennial drinker built a fire in her sixties–constructed building whose chimney had long been out of service. Her reasons would never be known – she was her first and only victim. Her action had sent a blaze racing across her living room – engulfing her – fueled by garbage and the detritus of a decade of alcoholism–induced hoarding.
Charlie had been woken by a peculiar angry crackling, followed by an intense chemical odour – not a smell that he would have recognised as smoke. He’d still been heavy with sleep and alcohol and had struggled to get to his feet. In the time it took him to cover the short distance from his sofa, through the corridor and to this front door, his home turned into an inferno.
It seemed the now–deceased drinker hadn’t kept her smoke alarms operating. However, in quick succession, those in his house and his other neighbours sensed the smoke and their sirens began to beep frantically in succession before they too were destroyed in the flames.
The row of brown brick building burned, fed by the terrace’s age, unmet regulations, decades of flammable Styrofoam ceilings and vinyl floors obscured by home DIYers and self–taught house flippers.
Charlie had stood outside on his street with a hangover already creeping in, his body heavy and his mind in a haze. Emergency services in red and yellow arrived with their sirens blaring – too late to save his home. Fire officers drenched the street and its inhabitants with water. As the fire evaded their efforts to quash it, they evacuated a neighbouring street, herding more terrified people from their homes. Children screamed, adults wept, and a halo of red, orange and yellow flames lit up the sky and smoke poured from the inferno.
He’d stood in astonishment as garden sheds and an outdoor sauna were not spared and bicycles were crushed and overturned in the melee. An explosion in a garage made a sound so deafening that it made even him, a seasoned policeman, hurl himself to the ground in fear.
Then somewhere just before dawn, Charlie realised the full extent of the fire’s destruction as the hoses were turned off and the skeletal remains of a row of houses stood, naked and charred.
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About the Author
Agatha Zaza is a writer living in Helsinki, Finland. She works in the international development sector specialising in communications, institutional giving and human rights. Born in Zambia, Agatha has worked and lived in several countries, among them New Zealand and the then Soviet Union. While in Ireland, she earned a Master’s in Equality Studies from University College Dublin and she completed her first novel, The Pretenders , in Singapore. Agatha’s work can be seen in the Johannesburg Review of Books . She has been nominated for a prize for short fiction. She can usually be found working in cafes in Helsinki’s historic centre and enjoys perusing its second hand clothing and furniture shops.
