SHE WAS MURDERED in the night. At what time, I cannot say. If Hercule Poirot were called on, I am sure he would deduce that it was somewhere between 3 AM and 4 AM, and all while munching on an apple and leaning against a desk in the study. This was not that kind of story.

It was Klaudia who called me up and showed me the victim. She was dark-haired, with Mediterranean features, although I was told she was purely Estonian. Maybe one of those creamy-colored Saaremaa islanders, the ones with the shipwrecked Portuguese forefathers. I didn’t know how they killed her but she looked quite peaceful lying there, like an old pillow.

It was Klaudia who told me that I had to dispose of her body. This I did, without asking any questions. It’s hard to explain how this happens, but when you are standing over a corpse in the early morning hours, you just don’t start interrogating people. I loaded her up into my car, took her out to the moor. The green muck of those bogs swallowed the girl up and she’s still there, I suppose. The world sucking on her bones. A feast for the microbiota of the moor.

When I got back to the spa hotel, Klaudia was lounging around in her bathrobe like nothing was amiss. She looked beautiful, with her flame of blonde hair. She was inspecting her pedicure. “Don’t you feel guilty at all?” I asked her. “What for?” she shrugged. “She was annoying. Ever since she took over as our manager, Miss Jänes has been on the war path. She’s never satisfied.” “You didn’t have to kill her. You could have just joined another PR agency.”

Klaudia walked over to me and pressed a fingernail against my chest. She said, “Don’t forget that you are in on it too! If we get caught, you’re also going to jail.” I felt overpowered by guilt at that moment, awash in sorrow. I knew that it was true, what she said. But I never intended to become an accessory to murder. It was just another one of those things that happened in life. A coincidence. You miss a train, you stumble on the sidewalk, you dispose of a murdered and despised PR manager in an adjacent swampland. These things do happen, you know.

I looked over at Klaudia as she fixed her pedicure, blowing on her toes to dry them. How could a woman be so beautiful and so cold-hearted and remorselessly evil? I closed my eyes then. I clenched them shut and hoped that when I reopened them, Miss Jänes would still be alive and I would still be innocent. But when I opened them, I wasn’t at the spa hotel at all. I was standing in line at a ticket booth in a Finnish bus station. It was winter and there were restless Finns queueing behind me. But where was I even going now? Something –järvi? Something –koski? Somewhere, anywhere? Anywhere, so long as it was far away from that bitter killing.