The Defenceless Read Online Free PDF

treated with respect and greeted with the words kezét csókolom , ‘I kiss your hand’.
    ‘It’s late and I’m starving,’ said Esko. ‘What say we go back to town for a bite to eat?’ he suggested.
    ‘Good idea,’ Anna replied. She hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day.
     
    A match flared in the darkness. The ember of a cigarette began to glow, then another. Jenni and Katri, both ninth-graders at the Ketoniemi secondary school, peered behind the tree to make sure nobody was coming. Jenni had stolen the cigarettes from her mum’s boyfriend and sent a message to her best friend Katri, who lived next door. The girls had told their parents they were going for a walk. Pinching the cigarettes had been easy, Jenni explained. Mum and her boyfriend had been watching TV; the boyfriend’s jacket was hanging in the hallway and the fags were in his pocket. To top it all off, the packet was suitably half full. If it had been full, two missing cigarettes would have been obvious, but if it had been almost empty, taking two would have cleaned it out. A half-full packet was best; nobody would notice a thing. Jenni knew this all too well, because she’d been caught stealing cigarettes from an almost empty packet before.
    The girls dragged hungrily at their cigarettes in the woodland just behind their houses, gossiped about their stupid teachers, the cute guy, Ilari, in their year and all the other important things that fifteen-year-olds talk about. They spat in the heaps of ploughed snow. Once they’d finished their cigarettes, they decided to hang out at the shopping mall, see if there was anyone there, though they doubted it. It was dead on Thursday evenings. In fact, it was always pretty dead at the mall. The youth centre had been closed due to cutbacks and the only people at the shops were families with little kids and the local drunks loitering outside – there was never anyone around. But they needed to get rid of the smell of smoke before going home,so they had to take a walk somewhere no matter what. They decided to walk through the woods, though the snow made walking quite difficult, their toes froze and their Converse trainers were soaked.
    ‘What’s that?’ said Katri and stopped in her tracks.
    ‘What?’
    ‘That on the ground.’ Katri pointed towards a large pine tree. Something lay on the snow beneath the branches.
    Jenni stepped closer.
    ‘Oh my God,’ she shrieked. ‘Look at this!’
    It was a knife. Not just a normal breadknife, but a weapon with a curved blade. It was covered in blood.
    ‘Look,’ Katri whispered and pointed at the ground about two metres from the knife. A cloud of steam billowed from her mouth into the frozen air.
    The snow was soaked in blood. In the darkening evening it looked almost black.
    ‘Has someone been killed?’
    ‘D’you think we should call the police?’
    ‘I’ll be fucking grounded if my mum finds out we’ve been out here smoking.’
    ‘So what are we going to do?’
    ‘I don’t know. Let’s go to the mall and think.’
    ‘Oh God, I’m scared. What if the killer is still here?’
    The girls stood listening to the darkening forest around them. At first it was perfectly quiet, all they could hear was the sound of their frightened breathing. There came a crackle from the trees, then another.
    ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Katri whispered, terrified.
    The girls broke into a sprint. They ran through the woods, paying no attention to the branches slapping against their faces. Jenni tripped in the snow and began to cry; she shouted for Katri to wait, but got up quickly and continued running. Back to the safety of the houses and the lights, out of this terrifying forest where a crazed killer was on the loose. Soon they were standing in the yard outsidethe shopping mall. They ran up to one of the pubs, because it was the only place with people around, leant on the wall and glanced around, gasping for breath. Nobody had followed them out of the woods. The mall was