One regrettable behaviour of serial killers is their determination to taunt and cajole their victims and their pursuers. It's not enough that they're bloodthirsty murderers; they also crave attention, writing to newspapers, sending detectives sarcastic audio tapes, teasing future victims and terrifying them. They're monsters who should not be venerated and who certainly shouldn't have large statues erected to them in underground railway stations.
That fluid smeared hand says one thing and one thing only: I will kill again.
I jest of course. This actually a piece called Emma jättää jäljen ("Emma leaves a trace") by Kim Simonsson and works as both a reference and an advert for the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, or EMMA. When you know all that, it's quite cute, but otherwise it's a giant white girl staring down at you, and it's a little intimidating. Also, it's a statue made of bronze and then painted white, and that seems like an awful waste of bronze to be frank.
I'd reached Tapiola metro station on the eastern side of Espoo. When I've been referring to this whole journey as my "Helsinki trip", that's been simultaneously true and false. It's officially the Helsinki Metro, but the Länsimetro - the Western Extension - is mainly within the adjoining city of Espoo. Think of Espoo as Salford to Helsinki's Manchester; the two are intertwined and conjoined but also, one is definitely subservient to the other in both cultural and political power.
While Helsinki is a city with a long and venerable history, Espoo's a far more fractured, make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of place. In 1950, the population was 20,000, up from 9,000 in 1920; today it's 323,000. The area grew rapidly after the war - too rapidly, in fact, with homes being thrown up throughout the district to accommodate returning soldiers and influxes of country dwellers unable to move to Helsinki proper. They strung along the existing railway and the main roads, while estates were built in the south of the district by co-operatives as social housing. It went from a village to a market town in 1963, and then to a city in 1972, and now it's the second largest conurbation in Finland. Espoo, as a result, lacks a city centre, with four towns surrounding a vast central belt of parkland and woods and each competing with one another for primacy. There is an Espoo Centre, where the local government is based, but that's not the same town where the shopping is, or the cultural quarters, or the main residences.
Tapiola was a concerted effort to get a grip on Espoo's development and was planned as a Garden City. It means that it has a slight feel of a Hemel Hempstead or Stevenage about it - the long flat lines of concrete buildings, broken up with the occasional tower, the pedestrian precincts, the breakouts into green areas and bits of art scattered around. Like those new towns built in the UK in the fifties and cities, though, it's also showing its age. There's a slight tiredness, a bit of exhaustion, and the feeling that it's been neglected just that little bit too long.
I walked through neatly laid out car-free streets lined with beauty salons and financial advisers and small convenience stores and ended up on a terrace at the centre of the town. Tapiola was planned from the start to be Espoo's cultural quarter, hence the presence of EMMA, and also, at its heart, a square that would bring the city's residents together to play.
I'll freely admit I was there at the wrong time. There's a wide expanse of open territory which forms the Tapiola Ice Park, a rink for sports and leisure throughout winter. I've seen pictures and in December it's a sparkling white delight. In July, though, it looks like this:
The building in the background is a hotel complex. On the other side of the ice park is a swimming pool, a stark piece of sixties modernity that closed in 2016 due to structural problems and has been empty ever since; there is a debate in the city about whether it should be refurbished (it already was once in 2008) or demolished and a new one built. On the third side, behind me, was the Espoo Cultural Centre, commissioned to celebrate city status in 1972 and finally opened in 1989.
That extremely long germination period might explain why the Cultural Centre is a bit of a mess. It has two concert halls and a library and houses events throughout the year but it also feels cold and unwelcoming. I was on the terrace overlooking the ice park, the very centre of the town, and I couldn't actually see a way in. It was a series of blocks that didn't seem to want me to go near it, which is strange for a public building.
I tried walking round it, looking for some kind of big atrium or overhanging porte-cochère that clearly said "come in here!" but before long I'd realised I'd left the entire complex behind and was in the woods that bordered it, so that was the end of that really.
Instead I pushed through the trees, past a collection of allotments, and into a long stretch of green grass. I wandered across the parkland, happy, alone, until I realised I was really, really alone. I had an entire park to myself.
Anxiety set in. I could see there was a school on the other side of the park; was I accidentally walking across their field? Was I about to interrupt two dozen sturdy girls heading out for hockey, and they'd beat me with their sticks for being a pervert? Was a large burly male PE teacher about to blow his whistle and shout at me and unleash those complicated emotions gay men harbour about sports? I hurried on, taking a shortcut so that I reached the road quicker, and breathing a sigh of relief when I saw an actual sign with the word "park" in it.
A cut underneath the motorway brought me into a far more urban scene. One of the big drivers for Espoo's expansion was the relocation of the prestigious Helsinki University of Technology to a new campus in Otaniemi at the east of the city. It grew rapidly, bringing in students and with them the support networks. In 2010, the University of Technology merged with Helsinki's business and art schools to form the new Aalto University - named after the architect who planned the campus in the first place.
I walked down long streets at the back of teaching buildings and laboratories, humming gently with the promise of terrifying experiments inside. One had a sign saying it was the Centre for nano-technology, which probably means very small optic fibres, but in my head meant tiny robots intent on swarming the human race. Technology in 2025 is at the tipping point between "genuinely useful boon to everyday living" and "keen to plunge us into a dystopian wasteland" and I'm not really sure the scientists doing the experiments are actually on our side any more, and by "us", I mean "people".
This feeling wasn't really helped by a student walking past me wearing a Weyland-Yutani sweatshirt. You do know they're the bad guys, don't you? Don't you?
Aalto-yliopisto station has a couple of entrances. The grander one goes into the student shopping centre, with its mix of convenience stores and bars and eateries. There's an R-Kiosk there, the handy little corner shops that appear at most of the metro stations and from which I'd regularly purchased a bottle of Coke to cool me against the summer heat, and there's also a pizza place called... well...
It seems Smokie's legendary call-and-response hit somehow made it to Finland. The Finns did have their own version of the song, called Viisitoista kesää and performed by Kari Tapio, but the live versions seem to be distinctly lacking in audience participation. On top of that, the Who The **** Is Alice refrain seems to have been invented by a Dutch DJ and then reappropriated by Smokie (with the help of Roy Chubby Brown). It's a delightful melting pot of European nonsense. I don't know why you'd name your pizza parlour after it, mind.
The station itself is big on copper colours, no doubt as an homage to its techie namesake, and it's remarkably calming. Aalto-yliopisto is one of the stations that gets its name in three languages on the platform signs, Finnish, Swedish and English, to reflect its international importance and the fact that an awful lot of dopey Brits and Americans will turn up there and not bother to learn the alternative name.
Another two stations down. I was feeling overstimulated if anything. If I push on, I could do absolutely loads of these things, I thought. This was a stupid idea.
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