Saara just lay on the bed and didn’t move at all.
I was standing in the corridor and I couldn’t move either.
Then it was Forsman’s turn, and then the other boy from the top class, Happonen, who talks so big, but he burst into tears and suddenly ran out of the room into the open air, with his trousers undone.
Risto called after him to stay, and he asked me if I wanted a go too. Well, little one, want a go too? That’s what he said, and I think I shook my head, but maybe I didn’t do anything because I couldn’t move.
Then Forsman lay on top of her again, and then they all went into the living room, and Risto dropped on the sofa like a sack of potatoes and told one of the men to go and get something to drink. He was still fiddling around with his trousers, and Risto shouted at him again to go and get something to drink and five glasses.
Then it was the turn of one of the men I didn’t know, at least not really; I know that one of them works at the supermarket, he goes all over the floors in the evening with a cleaning machine, and once he shouted at me for spitting out a piece of chewing gum.
But I don’t know the other one at all, the one who was to fetch something to drink. He brought the glasses, and Risto stood up and filled them, and tried to give me one.
I think I shook my head, and Risto said something or other, that I could raise a glass with them or something like that. The others did drink something, I think, and Forsman’s mouth was still wry in the middle of his face, and he kept pulling at his balls as if they hurt. Risto kept saying something to me, and suddenly he threw the spirits in his glass in my face and broke the glass on my head. Then he grabbed me by the throat and said that hadn’t gone so well, and it was not for public consumption.
That’s how he put it – not for public consumption.
Then he told the others to go away. They were holding their glasses and didn’t know what to do, and then they all did go away when Risto shouted at them again to get out. There’s nothing else to see here, he shouted. When the others had gone he fetched Saara, led her by the hand to the piano, and then he grabbed hold of me and told me to sit down beside her.
Then we were sitting side by side again, like before. Before all that happened. Saara in the blue-and-white summer dress. It was all untidy and rucked up. There was that humming in my head, like bees or flies. Risto said Saara was to play something, and Saara looked at the floor. Then she raised her head and stared at the piano keys, concentrating on them. And then she pressed one key and it made a high sound. Then another key. High and somehow soft, but louder than the humming in my head. Yes, I wrote that down already. Like a kind of whispered scream.
Then Risto came back. Hauled me up and shoved me across the room, I don’t know just how, but anyway his hand was on my throat all the time, and he kept on talking, and I felt kind of like I was going to die any moment.
He pushed me down on the lawn outside and said I was never to show my face here again. Never again. He kept saying that, never again, never again, never again.
He pushed me down until I was lying on the ground, and I saw the two wooden sticks we’d used last week to be the goalposts. I caught almost every ball that time, and in the end Risto was getting almost angry, but I think he didn’t want to show it. Then he suddenly had the bottle in his hand, and he tipped the schnapps out all over me. It stung, and he said he’d kill me if I ever turned up there again. Then he went indoors and closed the door.
I rode home on my bike. I kept thinking of Saara all the time.
When I got home my mother asked how the piano lesson had gone, and I said it was okay, and then I went straight up to my room, because I didn’t want her to smell the alcohol. I smelled of it, and it stung my eyes badly. I showered for a long time.
Today I saw Forsman at school. He was standing on the edge of a group, not saying much. Stood there looking quite normal, in a brightly coloured T-shirt, and he wasn’t scratching his balls the whole time any more.
Saara wasn’t at school again today.
Lauri kept on asking me if everything was all right, because I was acting in such a funny way. But I don’t feel funny at all.
I just have to concentrate, because everything feels all mixed up.
I dreamed of Saara in the night, but I don’t remember just what it was about, except that Risto was there too, like a huge shadow.
28
MARKO WESTERBERG MET the dead man’s sister at Helsinki station. Kirsti Forsman had brought only a small case, and she was wheeling it along behind her as he led her through the concourse into the open air and over to the car. When he picked up the case to put it in the boot, he got the impression that there was either nothing in it or, at the most, a couple of bird’s feathers.
She looked out of the passenger-seat window and only nodded as he threaded his way into the evening rush-hour traffic and explained the course of events. She was to make a statement. Give information about her brother. Go to the forensics department. Yes, that was no problem. No, she hadn’t booked into a hotel, she was going to travel back that same evening.
Westerberg bit back his objection that it was already evening.
‘Your . . . case?’ he asked instead.
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean, you’ve brought a case with you.’
‘Oh, I bought that in a shop at Hämeenlinna station.’
So much for the bird’s feathers, thought Westerberg. And then he wondered why a woman would buy a case on the way to a city she intended to leave again at once.
In the mortuary she stood by the stretcher with her dead brother on it for a long time.
‘Thank you,’ she said at last.
Then she went along the corridor, walking with long, steady strides. Westerberg had difficulty keeping up with her. The evening sun was shining, both cool and warm. Kirsti Forsman lit a cigarette as they sat in the car, and Westerberg scraped the carriagework on another car’s bumper as he backed out of his parking place.
He got out of the car to inspect the damage, and wrote a note giving Seppo’s direct phone number and saying there was no need to report it to the police, they had already been there.
‘Okay?’ asked Kirsti Forsman as he restarted the car.
‘Not too bad,’ he said.
At police headquarters, Seppo was waiting with one of his catalogues of questions, which as a rule were logically constructed. Seppo’s warm voice and Kirsti Forsman’s clear, regular tones filled the room.
‘You work as a lawyer in Hämeenlinna.’
‘That’s right. Mainly for Arsa, a dairy company.’
‘Dairy.’
‘Yes, milk. Yoghurt. Chocolate too in the north of the country. I draw up contracts and advise the company management on legal questions.’
‘Yes,’ said Seppo. ‘Your brother. We need your help because he . . .’
‘I don’t know that I can help you there.’
‘. . . seems to have been in touch with very few people.’
‘I’m afraid we were hardly in touch at all ourselves.’
‘Oh,’ said Seppo, and Westerberg thought: so much for the catalogue of questions.
‘We last saw each other at Christmas three years ago. I was thinking about that on the train,’ said Kirsti Forsman.
‘Where was that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where exactly did you see each other then?’
‘Oh, I see. At our house. We’d invited him. My husband and I. Well . . . my then husband. Kalevi came and spent the night. It was . . . really nice.’
‘So the three of you celebrated Christmas together,’ said Seppo.
She nodded.
‘Three years ago?’
‘Christmas three years ago.’
‘Right, then . . .’
‘That is, two years and nine months ago. Roughly.’
‘Right. And since then . . .’
‘We spoke on the phone now and then. I tried to reach him on his birthday last year, but I
only got his answering machine.’
‘Do you know anything about his lifestyle? I mean, we know he was in close contact with his business partner, but outside that did he have friends or . . . or a woman in his life?’
‘A woman in his life . . . not as far as I know, no,’ she said. ‘The last was a few years ago, she was an employee of his company, but it didn’t work out because he felt the two things couldn’t be combined.’
‘Couldn’t be combined?’
‘The private and professional spheres of life.’
‘I see.’
‘In fact we did talk about it this way and that at the time, and he called me more often for a while after he’d ended the relationship.’
‘The relationship with this employee of the company?’
She nodded. ‘And there were some legal aspects involved, because the woman wanted to hand in her notice.’
‘I see,’ said Seppo.
‘But then she left of her own accord anyway.’
‘I see. And there’s been no woman in his life since then, so far as you know?’
‘Not so far as I know. But as I said, we’ve not been in touch. We simply never had much in common. I’m a few years younger, I had a different circle of friends, different interests. A different life.’
‘His firm was under pressure. Do you, by any chance, know of conflicts on a professional level that could give us somewhere to start investigating?’
She seemed to be thinking it over without coming to any conclusion. ‘I don’t think his firm was under more or less pressure than many others,’ she said. ‘He had to struggle, like everyone who sets up a company of his own. But I really do think his programs were good. When we last saw each other he’d just got a major new customer.’
‘So that would have been about three years ago?’
‘Yes, exactly . . . he talked about it that evening.’
‘But it’s quite a while ago.’
‘Of course, but as I said, I can’t confirm that his company was in difficulties. I just don’t know what went on in his life.’
A different life, thought Westerberg, and said, ‘We’re asking only because he fell from the fourteenth floor of a hotel.’
The woman looked away from Seppo and turned her eyes on him.
‘I understand that you didn’t have much to do with your brother. It’s certainly nothing unusual for brothers and sisters to lose sight of each other, but now he’s dead, you know.’
She nodded, and he wondered whether she really did know. Whether it had sunk in.
‘Do you know the people in this photograph?’ asked Seppo. He showed her the picture he had found under the mattress in Forsman’s bleak apartment.
She looked at the photo for a long time. Turned it over and examined the back of it as well.
‘No,’ she said at last.
‘But your brother . . . you recognise him?’
‘Yes, of course, this is Kalevi. But the others mean nothing to me. We had very different . . . relationships.’
Seppo nodded, and Westerberg thought about the word. Relationships.
‘It’s quite an old picture anyway,’ she said.
Westerberg drove her to the station. Her case was still light, her handshake firm.
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 arr
ived. 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.
Light in a Dark House (Detective Kimmo Joentaa) Page 8