A thriller
novel freely inspired from our trip to Inkoo
Watching the smoke of his Marlboro lazily swirl
away in the fresh Baltic breeze, Inspector Prasad could not help replay the
night’s bizarre events in his mind. His friend President Tortilla had invited
him to a teambuilding weekend in the remote area of Inkoo to oversee her
turbulent guests. Casual job, and yet that thirteenth beer had somehow switched
his usually acute sixth sense off ; now he had a crime scene in his hands
and felt slightly nauseous. Three questions: what had happened in the lovers’
nest? What was the agonizing scream coming from the bathroom which had woken up
the house earlier this morning? And last but not least, who had chopped off the
tree?
The lovers’ nest was ideally
located apart from the cottage’s main building. A truly charming place to get
hot and heavy after getting warmed up in the sauna, Prasad reflected. Although
there has been nobody to testify, his dirty imagination was picturing the most
unlikely couples in that king-size mezzanine bed, and everywhere else in the
wooden cocoon. The Finnish Three Graces Outi,
Tuikku and Jaana looked just too
reasonable to be innocent in that matter. And where was mysterious Mr. Xiang
Feng? Had he even been there? His blurry memories were of no help, but he
promised himself that he would neatly interview Riku Laitasalo, who had occupied the nest on the second night.
Prasad was not suspecting him – he was certainly not capable of any kind of
performance after “networking” so much with his colleagues – but maybe had he
seen something uncommon. He admitted to himself that the evidence was thin, but
he could also pull at another thread: he had been the outraged witness of how Reverend Father Denisty openly hit on
the delicious Miss Kočárová in the
sauna, and suspected the priest of having broken his sacred vow. The Holy man had
not been seen drinking a single drop of anything else than Pepsi Max… Was he
trying to keep his mind clear to take advantage of her?
Prasad lit another coffin nail
and his mind jumped on to the next enigma. What a bad crime fiction, he thought
to himself. Instead of birds chirping in the surrounding pines, the house had
woken up to horrible, inhuman noises this very morning, coming from an upstairs
bathroom. What terrible tragedy had been at play there? Nobody was reported
hurt, but Inspector Prasad felt that something in the air had changed. Somebody
was hiding something. The ancient sword that was hanging on the living room
wall was broken, too. The list of potential suspects was long. One of them was Dulce “not so sweet” Barrueta, an
undercover Mexican drugs lord who claimed to still be a student at the age of
30. Apparently she was here to handle business with two other infamous underworld
criminals, Nastya “the bride” Gurina
from the Russian Mafia and Chinese Triad henchwoman Dana “I can kill you with that frying pan” Xiaofei Du.
Nevertheless, they had been cooking for everyone that weekend and Inspector
Prasad did not want to appear ungrateful – the lovely cottage party had left
him in excellent spirits. The only significant event that morning was that Colonel Tari remained unseen until late
in the afternoon, under the pretext of a bad headache. Was it substantial to
Prasad’s inquiry? Some claimed that it was the member of the post-soviet Hungarian
military, sick from ingesting excessive amounts of punch, who had woken up the
house. The experienced Prasad had immediately laid that hypothesis aside: he
knew Hungary too well to believe that a women’s cocktail could have shaken the
experienced Colonel.
For lack of clues, he
desperately reached for his pack of cigarettes. Maybe he would be luckier with
his third case, by far the most serious one. The lifeless trunk of a tree lied
in the moss a few yards away from the cottage. Prasad’s heart jumped as he
thought of the awful massacre. The felon Prasad was looking for was truly
devoid of scruples and he would have to walk on thin ice. As a matter of fact,
the inspector would have liked to casually interview Dr Böhm, whose troubled past put him in the position of suspect
number one. While some of his ex-colleagues had chosen Argentina, he had
settled in neutral Switzerland. Judging from the size of the tree, Prasad
exculpated all women, including Milka
Hänninen, although she had left in a hurry short after the probable time of
the crime. He also exculpated the two Frenchmen, Renouf and Reneaume.
They had an alibi: the accomplices would have been completing a so-called
“project sunrise” with Father Denisty, which consisted in a nocturnal romantic
rowing trip on the nearby sea. They were probably gay, Prasad thought to
himself. Frenchmen usually were. He further considered Nikita Semkin: the brutal strength, the Russian roots and the wife
carrying skills pointed him out as the ideal culprit. One detail however made
Prasad hesitate: the murder weapon, which had been found near the pine’s still
warm remains, was an axe – an engineer like him would have used cleaner
methods. The last suspect was Diogo
Conceição. Prasad thought he had caught a barbaric glimpse in his eyes when
the victim had been found. And these lumberjack shirts he kept wearing also
told a lot about his uncivilized inclinations. Happy with himself, Prasad had
narrowed the list of suspects to two. What if both had given their own axe
blow, as in Murder on the Orient-Express,
he asked himself?
Never am I ever joining a CEMS trip again, he
promised himself, and decided to go get some fresh air somewhere in Europe. But
very soon, a call; Outi Broman, that he previously had rolled out of any
suspicions, was leaving the country in an oddly rapid maneuver. Having heard of
her plans to cross the Atlantic, Inspector Prasad engaged himself in a global
womanhunt, questioning his unquestionable inquiring abilities, but eager to get
to the bottom of this case.
(written by: Emmanuel Reneaume)
