Silence (23 page)

It was as simple as that.

They belonged with each other.

Whether she wanted that just now or not.

The car sank into the churned-up water surprisingly fast, then all was calm except for the echo of the scream, and Outi leaned her head on his shoulder.

12

L
aura was lying in the sun.

Aku was diving.

Pia was laughing soundlessly.

Don’t breathe, said Marjatta.

He didn’t want to breathe.

13

A
ku was running. He kept turning round, because he was sure they would follow him, Laura at least would have to run after him to fetch him back, or anyway ask what he thought he was doing, but no one came. There were strange men in the house, some of them had smiled at him while he tried to find out why they were there. After a while the men began avoiding his gaze and looked as if they didn’t even notice his presence.

Laura had been hovering on the edge of the group, smiling uncertainly. Her girlfriend had gone home. The strange men had carried his father’s computer out of the house.

His mother had been sitting on the sofa with one of the men beside her. She hadn’t spoken, not a single word; she had just been nodding as she listened to the man, who spoke in a quiet, gentle voice, and Aku had gone out without saying goodbye.

He was standing at the bus stop. He could see the house, the window of his room on the top floor. The bus came. He got in, and had just enough money for a ticket to the city centre. He sat in the back row and watched the suburbs flying past.

He wondered what the men wanted the computer for. Especially because easily the best computer in the whole house was in his own room.

He got out in the inner city, and just walked around for a while, because he had no money left, not even enough for a single scoop of ice cream. Then he sat down by the harbour and watched the ferries gliding over the water. Next week they were going to Tallinn on the ferry. He was looking forward to that.

When he got home there was only one of the cars left outside the house. Laura opened the door. Her face looked white and stony. The man and his mother were sitting on the sofa. The man was still talking, his mother was nodding. As if only a few minutes had passed. No one asked where he had been.

He ran up to his room, flung the door open and saw his computer standing on the table. For a few moments he was relieved. So they’d left his considerably better computer here.

He sat down on the bed and began looking at a comic. He hummed a tune to himself.

Now and then he looked out of the window to see if the car was still there. The car that belonged to the man who was sitting beside his mother in the living room.

14

E
ven from a distance, Joentaa could see the car sticking up above the water, Sundström and Grönholm and the divers, and members of the salvage team. A boy and a girl were hanging around on the outskirts of the group, talking to Tuomas Heinonen. Niemi and his colleagues were scattered over the entire area, in white overalls. The body was in the driving seat of the car, slumped over the steering wheel. The car was just being pulled out with heavy lifting gear.

Ketola parked carefully beside the police cars and looked at the scene without saying a word. His eyes were reddened; he had been laughing until just before they arrived. Laughing and laughing and laughing, until the moment when he braked sharply and turned into the woodland path leading to the lake.

‘That’s it,’ he said after a while, and fell silent again, as if all had now been said.

Joentaa got out and went over to Sundström and Grönholm. His glance kept going to the crumpled body on the driver’s seat. He thought of the boy kicking his football against the garage door. Again and again. Again and again. He thought of Sanna. He saw nothing, only the wreck of a sports car. He thought of Sanna’s name.

‘That’s it,’ said Sundström too when Joentaa was beside him.

Joentaa nodded.

‘The car is registered in the name of Timo Korvensuo. Astonishing. I’ll admit I’m prepared to congratulate Ketola. When I get a chance. All we need now is the girl’s body,’ said Sundström.

‘What exactly happened?’ asked Joentaa.

‘The man screeched like a lunatic, got into his car and drove straight into the water, just like that.’

Joentaa looked at him, intrigued.

‘I didn’t see it myself. That couple over there did.’

Joentaa followed Sundström’s eyes and saw the two teenagers standing with Heinonen.

‘Of course they’re pretty upset, but they’ll get over it,’ said Sundström.

Behind them, two more vehicles came to a noisy halt. One was a TV outside broadcasts van.

Nurmela, the chief of police, got out of the other. He walked over to them at a rapid but well-controlled pace, waving before he reached them. ‘A television team from YLE. For the news. I’ll give them a short statement and then they’ll be off again. So they told me.’

Sundström nodded.

‘Good work,’ said Nurmela, looking in turn at Sundström, Grönholm and Joentaa, and clapping Joentaa on the back before walking away towards the TV van. Joentaa watched him go and felt, with some reluctance, that the praise pleased him. Even though he had nothing at all to do with it and there was not the slightest reason to be pleased.

‘I’m an arsehole,’ said Joentaa.

Sundström and Grönholm looked at him, taken aback.

‘What?’ asked Sundström.

‘I said I’m an arsehole,’ Joentaa repeated.

‘Oh, really?’ said Sundström.

‘And I wish I knew what those bastards are doing here.’

‘Er …’ said Sundström.

‘How come Nurmela is giving an interview for the news when we know absolutely nothing? Like, for instance, why Korvensuo drove into the lake?’

‘Guilty conscience?’ suggested Grönholm.

‘Guilty conscience. After thirty-three years. And before that he just quickly does away with another girl in the same spot. Then he suddenly starts bothering about his conscience. Or what?’

‘Exactly,’ said Sundström, unmoved.

‘I’m not convinced,’ said Joentaa.

‘Kimmo, calm down, do. You’ve had a strenuous drive. Don’t upset yourself. If Nurmela is going to talk nonsense, that’s his problem. It makes no difference.’

‘It does make a difference. The wife of the man who was driving that car is sitting at home in Helsinki. And Nurmela is shooting off his stupid mouth with the wreck of the car as a backdrop.’

‘They won’t show the body. Not on prime-time television.’

‘That’s not the point, you idiot!’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sundström.

‘For God’s sake!’Joentaa turned and walked away, without knowing where he intended to go. He himself was surprised by his fury. Presumably Ketola’s fits of laughter had got on his nerves. Why was he always the one who let these things get to him? Why was he always the one who was supposed to keep calm?

He stood there undecidedly for a while, then went purposefully towards Kari Niemi, who was issuing instructions to his colleagues and, of course, gave him an easy smile as he approached.

‘Hi, Kimmo,’ he said.

That was all, but it was enough to restore a little of Joentaa’s sense of balance.

Niemi went on talking to his team, and Joentaa looked at the boy and the girl standing sheepishly beside Heinonen.

Further away something attracted Joentaa’s attention, although for a moment he couldn’t see what it was. A car was beginning to move away. His own police car. Ketola was driving it off along the woodland path. Without any frantic haste, perfectly calm again now. Times when Ketola calmed down had always had something final about them. Joentaa watched the car moving away, and told himself that something had come to an end.

Nurmela had finished giving his interview and waved to him.

Again and again, thought Joentaa. Again and again. A ball, a red ball. And a garage door. Again and again, never stopping.

His legs gave way. He sat on the ground, cross-legged, and watched the members of the salvage team hauling the silver sports car up on land, little by little, metre by metre.

15

T
apani came that evening. To wish him a happy birthday. He handed him a cake. A chocolate cake with kiwi fruit and raspberries.

‘Thank you,’ said Ketola and for a while he looked at the raspberries, which appeared to be arranged in numerals or letters that he couldn’t work out.

‘AK,’ explained Tapani after a while. ‘Antsi Ketola. The birthday boy’s name.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Ketola.

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘Absolutely,’ Ketola answered, realized that they were still standing in the doorway and asked Tapani in.

They sat in the living room, both of them eating slices of Tapani’s cake.

‘I made it myself,’ said Tapani.

‘It’s very good,’ Ketola said.

The TV was on. Ketola had switched it on as soon as he got home and had watched every news bulletin since. The reporting was all over the shop. The presumed murderer had presumably committed suicide. His name was Timo K., a Helsinki resident. Timo K. was dead and it was Antsi K.’s birthday. Ketola was too tired to laugh at that, although he had a vague idea that it was funny.

It all seemed very far away. The drive to Helsinki. The car in the lake, the dead body in the driver’s seat. Kimmo. Kimmo, sitting beside him in silence. Nurmela in jacket and tie, at over thirty degrees in the shade. And Nurmela hadn’t even been sweating.

All of it could have been an eternity away. The sequence of events was getting muddled up. Now Tapani was here; this was the present. Tapani eating his cake, taking small bites, and in the background, one after the other, pictures of Pia Lehtinen and Sinikka Vehkasalo coming up on the TV screen, and Ketola was thinking of a misty, very cool day in spring, a few months ago, but it seemed a long way off. He thought of the rain, of the sound of raindrops pattering down on the awning, of a very distinct emptiness in his brain. What surprising importance that distant day had now acquired.

He felt a longing. A particularly annoying longing, because he couldn’t put a name to it, he couldn’t assign it any content, he only felt that it was of huge extent and seemed to be sinking deeper into him by the minute.

‘By the way, I brought you a present too,’ said Tapani.

Ketola looked at his son.

‘It’s outside. Well hidden, of course.’

‘Yes. Of course. I’m delighted,’ said Ketola.

‘Come on.’

Ketola followed Tapani, who opened the door and turned into the garden as if he knew where he was going. ‘Look,’ he said, producing his present from behind a bush.

‘A bicycle,’ said Ketola.

‘That’s right.’

It was on the tip of Ketola’s tongue to ask how he had been able to pay for the bicycle, but he bit back the question.

‘And seeing you already have a bicycle, you could lend me your new one now and then,’ said Tapani.

‘Of course,’ Ketola agreed.

The daughter of the family next door was diving into the swimming pool. Her parents were sitting on the terrace. Ketola got the impression that they were looking at him and would have liked to ask him any number of questions. About the case on the news. Did he know any more about it? Of course they were interested, and he’d been in the police for a long time.

‘Sure. I’ll lend you the bike any time,’ said Ketola. ‘And thank you very much. I … well, I always find it hard to show it, but I’m glad to see you here. I really am very glad.’

Tapani looked at him and nodded, but he didn’t seem to grasp what Ketola was trying to tell him.

‘Do you understand?’ asked Ketola.

Tapani nodded again.

They stood there for a while in silence. Then Tapani said, ‘Will you lend it to me?’

‘Hm?’

‘The bike. Will you lend it to me?’

‘Yes, sure. I just said so.’

‘I mean now. I have to leave. I have to go into the woods. I must stop those people doing anything stupid.’

Ketola felt a pang and thought how pointless it was. What a pointless surge of emotion. ‘Yes, sure,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ Tapani swung himself on to the bicycle, pedalled hard to give himself a good start, then cycled smoothly away, holding himself very upright and going goodness knew where.

16

K
immojoentaa was sitting on the landing stage. In the decrepit rocking chair where Sanna used to sit, wrapped in blankets, during the last months of her life.

As soon as he got back Kimmo had gone down to the lake and he had taken the rocking chair out of the shed where it had spent the last two years.

He looked at the calm surface of the water and thought of that other lake, the silver sports car, the crumpled body in the driver’s seat.

He remembered the day when he and Sanna had bought the rocking chair cheap at a furnishing centre. Soon after they met and just before they moved in together.

Sanna had carried the chair to the car like a trophy and put it in the boot, just as Ketola had stowed the model on wheels into the boot of his car. In the driving snow. Not so very long ago.

The rocking chair was damp, and rotting away in places. It had been kept in the dry, Sanna always used to put it away in the shed when there was rain or snow, but all the same the chair got splashed with water every time Sanna had jumped up, gone to the end of the landing stage and dived head first into the water. That was earlier, not in the months before her death, because at that point Sanna had no longer been strong enough to swim.

Some time, thought Kimmo, some time, just when he least expected it, this chair would collapse under his weight, and if Sanna could see that she would be sure to laugh when she saw him lying on the landing stage, with the broken arm of the chair in his hand.

He closed his eyes and spent a little while trying to put his thoughts in order, but it couldn’t be done, it was totally impossible, and he let them drift.

He saw blurred, flickering images and heard words that had been spoken. Today or many years ago. Or maybe only now, at this moment, in his imagination.