Light in a Dark House (11 page)

He waited, without knowing why, until the train began moving, gathered speed, and some way off, on a long, gentle slope, disappeared from his field of vision.

29

THAT EVENING KIMMO
Joentaa went the rounds of the ice-cream parlours, from the marketplace to the cathedral and back, without meeting a single person who had seen a small woman of about twenty-five with light blonde hair selling ice cream in summer or autumn, and no one who had worked with her.

At the last place he visited he bought a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of tundra-berry ice cream in a cone. He sat on a bench beside the river, watched the sun setting, and tried to concentrate on the other, nameless woman.

Burn marks, scars, excellent teeth.

The internal examination had yet to be made. Or perhaps it was in progress at this moment, if Salomon Hietalahti in Forensics worked overtime.

Joentaa drove home and stayed sitting in his car for a little while, watching the light behind the windows.

Then he got out and said good evening to Pasi Laaksonen, who was watering the lawn in the garden next door. For whatever reason.

He went in, drank a glass of water, and started his laptop. Two new emails, one from a friend he hadn’t seen for a long time, asking if he wouldn’t like to go to handball again on Friday evening. Another from the lottery, which refused to desist from its attempts to make him rich.

He took his mobile out of his jacket pocket and called Tuomas Heinonen at the hospital. The answering system came on, Tuomas’s good-humoured voice, presumably recorded either when he hadn’t gambled his money away yet, or when he had just had a run of good luck.

‘Hello, Tuomas, just thought I’d give you a call. I’ll be in touch later,’ said Joentaa.

He took out the piece of paper on which he had noted down what little he knew about Larissa, and added something to the scanty information. The registration number of the moped on which she rode around the place. It had taken a while, but after some thought he had managed to recall the letters and figures.

He smiled as he wrote. A little research that afternoon had come up with the fact that a few months ago the number plate had been removed from another, similar moped. The case was not high priority, and the number plate had never turned up.

Joentaa had refrained from telling his colleagues that he knew where it was.
On my girlfriend’s moped, except that she’s disappeared. What’s her name? Well, that’s a bit complicated . . .

Joentaa looked at the letters and figures.

He pictured Larissa unscrewing the number plate.

Likes going for walks. Likes removing number plates from vehicles.

Presumably Pasi Laaksonen was watering his lawn to delay the onset of autumn.

Likes eating pasta bake and ice cream; her favourite flavours are tundra-berry and vanilla. Answers questions with a smile when she doesn’t want to discuss them further. Her smile is aggressive and attractive at the same time.

He sent an email to
veryhotlarissa
. Not a new one; he re-sent the one that he had already written that morning.

The giraffe is lying in the grass under the apple tree. And it will stay there until you come back.

He switched the TV set on and watched tennis.

30

16 September now

Dear diary,

After complaints about Silverman, the major bank, its shares have ended their profitable run on Wall Street and sent the Dow Jones plummeting. OMX Nordic closed at 902 with hardly any change, OMX Helsinki25 dropped 53 points to 2040. Shares in the Sampa Oy department store group have been under pressure since the parent firm made it known that it was ready to begin talks with potential investors about the future of the Galeria chain.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Olli. I take my eyes off the screen and see him in the doorway. In his pyjamas, blue bottoms and pale blue Superman top.

‘I’m writing something,’ I say.

‘Writing what?’ asks Olli.

I look at the text on the screen and wonder what to tell Olli. Market round-up, lighterage. Securities and quarterly figures. Weaker opening expected.

An email comes in. Koski wants to know when the article will be ready.

‘Writing what?’ Olli asks again.

‘Oh, some sort of nonsense,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ says Olli.

Soon, I type, and send the message.

Soon when? Koski replies, seconds later.

Soon soon, I reply.

‘Can we play again tomorrow?’ asks Olli.

‘Sorry, I have to go away,’ I say.

‘Oh. Again?’

‘Only for a couple of days,’ I tell him.

Leea’s voice in the background on the phone. Henna’s baby has arrived. A boy, Valtteri. Henna and the baby have left the hospital, Henna’s husband Kalle has been kept in for observation because he suffered a cardiovascular collapse during the Caesarian.

‘The day after tomorrow, then,’ says Olli.

‘As soon as I’m back,’ I tell him.

Markus Happonen, town councillor, then mayor of a place near Tammisaari.

‘Go to bed, Olli!’ calls Leea.

Olli groans and says, ‘Goodnight.’

‘Sleep well,’ I say.

Round-up 2 – preview – weaker opening expected, send.

Thanks! Koski replies seconds later.

Town councillor, mayor. Markus Happonen’s face was soft and round, just as it used to be. It always made me think of foam rubber, pink foam rubber. It didn’t fit. Simply did not fit into the situation. A foreign body. A mystery in a mysterious situation. Face bright red, not pink. Lips pressed together. Running out of the room with his trousers undone. Nothing about it fits that man. A large, fat man talking big.

In his Internet photograph he looks different. The management team of the town council introduce themselves. Glasses have presumably been replaced by contact lenses. He looks satisfied. If I hadn’t spoken to him, if I hadn’t heard the effort in his voice, I’d have taken him for a happy man. Not a trace of the sweating, groaning boy who first hammered away at Saara with his little prick and then ran out of the room in tears. Forty-three years old, hobbies angling, cross-country skiing, his German shepherd dog. I expect the picture will still be on that homepage for some time to come, although the person it shows is no longer alive.

‘Kalle’s back at home,’ says Leea, adding when I look enquiringly at her, ‘after his cardiovascular collapse. He’s back at home, and the baby is doing well too.’

Studied jurisprudence and political science. Once the youngest member of Tammisaari council. Married. Two children. Olli will soon be asleep. Leea’s voice in the background. A recurrent, gentle, humming note in the silence.

It all happens so fast, that’s why one has to write it down. To fix it on paper. And be able to remember it later.

‘See you in the morning,’ says Leea.

An empty space that I found without looking for it.

31

KIRSTI FORSMAN ARRIVED
in Hämeenlinna at 22.46 hours. She walked through the pedestrian precinct at the end of which she lived, going over several messages that she had emailed or left by voicemail from her mobile as she went along.

Since the company had launched its new fruit yoghurt – with splinters of coconut and chocolate, sold in a Tetra Pak – legal questions about its manufacture and marketing had been accumulating.

She had a conversation of some length with the managing director, stopping from time to time in the warm lights of the shop windows to look at the displays. Clothes, shoes, delicatessen. The managing director seemed to take it for granted that he could bother her with clauses and their necessary rewording late in the evening.

At the end of the conversation he thanked her and asked her to turn up punctually for tomorrow’s meeting although, unlike him, she was always punctual. It had turned cool.

Two excavators stood outside the last clapboard house at the end of the shopping arcade. Renovations to the gas mains, according to the letter put through all doors by the municipality. The works would be finished in two weeks’ time, it said. Two weeks. Two weeks ago Kalevi had been alive, not that she had noticed it. Only now did it occur to her that his death left something missing, although she didn’t know exactly what.

As she climbed the stairs and looked for the key to her apartment, the idea formed in her mind: she was the last. The last of them still alive.

She had not been consciously aware of her father’s death, and she knew him only from family stories. The death of her mother . . .

Her hand was trembling. The key didn’t seem to fit the lock and fell on the floor. She picked it up and tried to calm herself as the trembling took over her whole body.

She concentrated on getting the key into the lock.

Her mother hadn’t really died until yesterday.

Because now Kalevi too was dead.

At last.

She pushed the door open, went straight to the kitchen and opened the bottle of red wine that an over-attentive colleague in the law practice had given her on her birthday a few weeks ago. She drank, and thought that Kalevi hadn’t called those few weeks ago to wish her a happy birthday.

She thought of the photograph. Kalevi had not looked the way she remembered him. Probably because she had no concrete memory left of Kalevi’s appearance as a schoolboy. It was only the smile she had recognised, and it had looked as if Kalevi was pleased with himself. Although the date had been on the back of the photo: 19 August 1985. Pleased with himself and in a good temper.

She sensed memories coming back. Very specific memories. Things that had been said; she recalled them verbatim. Even the rising and falling of voices, the moments when her mother had begun shedding tears.

Kalevi’s voice, which had lost its resonance. The murmuring and lamentations, all about something incomprehensible to her.

And then that photo. The normality of it. Kalevi smiling at the camera and noting, on the back of the photo, that he didn’t have to worry about it. Because R. said so. That was the only indication of what might have been going on in his mind. The fact that he could no longer write the name out in full.

Risto. A name.

She picked up her glass and went into the living room. On the way she stopped several times because waves of feeling were running through her body. She went on.

When she was standing in the middle of the room the scream came out at last. It built up slowly and rose, until it finally broke out, too loud and too painful for her to hear it herself.

WINTER

32

WHEN WINTER CAME
the body of the unknown woman, reference number 1108–11, was buried.

Kimmo Joentaa, representing the investigating team, and Salomon Hietalahti, the forensic pathologist, were the only people who came to the funeral. Four employees of the cemetery carried the coffin; the pastor officiating said a few words that seemed to be lost before they could reach anyone listening.

It was cold, but not snowing yet. When the funeral was over, Kimmo Joentaa spent a few more minutes standing at the side of the grave, thinking that there must be people alive somewhere who missed this woman. People who laughed and suffered with her. And thinking that there would have been hundreds at the funeral, hundreds of strangers, if the date had been publicly announced. Fortunately it had not.

Most of the methods and opportunities known to forensic medicine had been tried with the unknown woman, but they had not provided any decisive clues as to her identity. An isotope analysis had shown that she was of northern European and probably Finnish origin.

‘A Finnish woman. A perfectly normal Finnish woman,’ Sundström had said, putting into words what they were all thinking – if, in that case, the dead woman had spent most of her life in Finland, then the absence of any useful clues was particularly annoying.

The number of people calling the police about the unknown woman had fallen, and her photograph appeared in the media only when the press office deliberately placed it there, to keep the stream of further information from drying up entirely.

There would presumably be a revival of interest at the end of the month, when the unsolved murder was one of the incidents mentioned in the Turku university hospital’s retrospective survey of the year. A private broadcasting station had already asked Police Chief Nurmela for an interview, and he had said he was inclined to accept.

Nurmela had drawn Kimmo Joentaa aside several times in the corridor or the cafeteria to ask about Larissa in a whisper, with an almost comic conspiratorial expression on his face. Was she back? Had he heard anything of her?