Light in a Dark House (Detective Kimmo Joentaa)

by Jan Costin Wagner

  So then we were in the garden and we looked through the window. It was all empty inside. The sofa had gone. The big bed in the bedroom had gone. The piano had gone. I was trembling, and I thought I was going mad with fear or sadness or goodness knows what.

  Lauri asked me what was so bad now.

  Nothing, I said, but we’re here.

  Why are we here? Lauri asked, and he said none of this is logical, and he wants to understand it. And I ought to tell him what’s going on.

  Forget it, I said.

  And that’s just it. That’s what I’d like to do.

  At last. At last. At last.

  Forget it.

  53

  ‘SO HERE YOU are again,’ said Joosef Happonen.

  They were sitting opposite each other on the low red sofas that Westerberg had already described during the drive there. Joentaa understood what Westerberg had meant when he said he had felt both at ease and uneasy in the house. Suoma Happonen brought coffee, and Joosef Happonen repeated:

  ‘Here you are again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘And of course we wonder . . . why. Forgive me, but what do you want from us?’

  ‘Mr Happonen . . .’ Westerberg began.

  ‘We would like to have some peace at last.’

  ‘We understand that.’

  ‘Then . . . what is it?’

  Everyone is the same as usual, thought Joentaa.

  ‘Sugar?’ asked Suoma Happonen. ‘Milk?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Westerberg. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘For you?’

  It took Joentaa a moment to realise that she meant him. ‘No, no, thank you. Nothing for me,’ he said.

  Suoma Happonen poured coffee for Westerberg and sat down beside her husband. ‘For you?’ she asked him.

  ‘What?’ asked Happonen.

  ‘Coffee?’

  He waved it away.

  ‘The piano teacher,’ said Joentaa, following an impulse.

  He saw the woman’s enquiring glance. And the look in the man’s eyes, which was extinguished when Joosef Happonen simply closed his eyes. As if he had been forcing himself to keep them open too long, just waiting until he could finally close them.

  ‘The piano teacher?’ asked Suoma Happonen.

  Her husband took his arm from around her shoulders and let himself lean back. His eyes were still closed.

  ‘What piano teacher?’ asked Suoma Happonen.

  ‘A woman who worked at the school that your son attended,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘That means nothing to me,’ she said. ‘Markus never had piano lessons. He did once play the violin, but only when he was small, after that he didn’t want to. And of course we didn’t make him go on. Although it would have been nice. But . . .’

  ‘Perhaps she taught your son at school in the regular lessons on the timetable,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘Yes . . . of course that’s possible. But why is that important?’

  ‘Mr Happonen?’ said Westerberg.

  Happonen opened his eyes.

  ‘Can you remember a woman – she’d have been young at the time – who taught your son? In the summer of 1985?’

  Happonen looked at Westerberg, and did not reply.

  ‘Mr Happonen?’

  ‘Joosef? What’s the matter?’

  Kimmo Joentaa saw Joosef Happonen slowly slide off the sofa. He stood up and took a step towards him. Westerberg had also risen to his feet, but he stopped in mid-step, and Suoma Happonen too sat as if frozen as her husband collapsed on the floor, and after some vain attempts to catch himself up lay there on his back.

  ‘I’ll be all right in a moment,’ he whispered.

  ‘Joosef,’ said Suoma Happonen tonelessly.

  ‘I’ll be all right in a moment. Don’t worry.’

  ‘What is it, Joosef?’ asked his wife. ‘Joosef?’

  ‘Mr Happonen?’ asked Westerberg, and Joentaa went to get a glass of water. He had no idea whether it would help, but he had drunk water in small sips the day after Sanna’s death. When he came back Happonen was just sitting up. He handed him the glass. Happonen nodded and drank a little.

  ‘Yes. Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘All right?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ said Happonen, hauling himself back up on the sofa. ‘Fine. I don’t know what . . . I kind of . . . collapsed.’

  ‘Joosef,’ said Suoma Happonen.

  ‘Not like me at all,’ murmured Happonen. ‘Hasn’t ever . . . happened to me before.’ He laughed. ‘I’m all right. Where were we?’

  ‘The . . . the piano teacher,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘Yes. Right. I’m sorry, I can only confirm what my wife said. Our son Markus never learned the piano, and I really don’t remember his teachers at school now.’ He cleared his throat and sat upright.

  No one talked about what happened, thought Joentaa. Everyone is the same as usual.

  ‘Well . . . anything else?’ asked Happonen, and his briskly casual tone was in almost comic contrast to his collapse of only a few seconds earlier.

  ‘Mr Happonen . . .’ said Westerberg.

  ‘No,’ said Happonen.

  ‘The fact is that—’

  ‘No,’ said Happonen. He got to his feet and walked across the room, taking long strides. ‘I’d like you to go now. I must . . . we must have a little peace.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Westerberg.

  They sat there for a little longer. Suoma Happonen was wringing her hands and shaking her head, presumably to show that she didn’t know what was going on either.

  Happonen was waiting for them by his front door.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll understand,’ he said when Westerberg and Joentaa had joined him.

  R. says I’m not to worry about it.

  ‘Do you know a man known as R.?’ asked Joentaa.

  Happonen said nothing and stared at him.

  ‘What?’ he asked at last.

  ‘R. A name. So far we know only the initial.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. Goodbye,’ said Happonen.

  R. says I’m not to worry about it.

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Westerberg wearily as they reached the car.

  L. as in Larissa, thought Joentaa.

  A. as in August.

  54

  Dear diary. 15 December. The hotel room is beige. The wall, the chairs, the bedspread, the cushion, all of them beige.

  Lassi Anttila, fifty-seven, is a store detective and in the evening a cleaner at a shopping centre in Raisio, near Naantali.

  I went there today.

  A pleasing sensation.

  Following a detective.

  I assume it’s something to do with control. Presumably everything I’ve done recently is to do with control. Losing control and getting it back.

  The rituals, the diary, the business cards. At the end I even held a card under Miettinen’s nose, although I knew he wouldn’t be able to make anything of it.

  Sitting at the computer, carefully adjusting the template to size, switching on the printer, printing out the card. A name that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me. Profession: adviser; journalist; pastor; security scout – no, none of that is normal.

  I don’t think there’s any such thing as a security scout, but it will do for Lassi Anttila.

  Keeping a diary at my age – that’s not normal.

  I called Leea.

  Talking to Leea, about her friend Henna and the baby.

  Helping Olli with his homework. Explaining why five divided by five is not zero, but five minus five is.

  ‘I see,’ he says when I’ve finished.

  The thought of Olli growing larger and older. The boy becoming a man, with a profession, a life that will keep him away from what’s important now. The games, throwing dice, that fill our time together, the joy and annoyance of them will become a memory. Diffuse, pale. Maybe – if I ask him later – he will narrow his eyes
and nod his head to signal that yes, he has a picture before his eyes. But in reality there’ll be nothing there, only my claim that there was something once.

  You were a bad loser, I shall tell him.

  In the end, only a bent crash barrier is left. A mark from braking that no one is looking for. A dead man whom no one misses. A dead woman whom no one knows.

  I had an interesting conversation with Leea today about the question of why she always hopefully opens junk mail franked Infopost instead of simply throwing it away. Contrary to all expectations, she claims, there might be something interesting in it.

  Shares in Sedigene, biotechnology, are classified neutral by analysts, and outside it is snowing. Ice crystals are hexagonal. They form angles of exactly 60 and 120 degrees. The resulting structure is a kind of perfection that can’t be seen with the naked eye. A perfection that does not demand to be perceived.

  Look at it that way, and perhaps Saara was a snow crystal. In a summer that was much too hot for her – and us – to survive it.

  55

  THE DAILY PAPER that devoted a page to the little town of Karjasaari was published in the larger neighbouring town of Laappeenranta. The chief editor, who looked very young apart from his grey hair, received Seppo in his office with the ostentatious dynamism of a man who is short of time.

  ‘Karjasaari, you say,’ he said, wrinkling his brow.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Seppo.

  ‘You’re taking an interest in Karjasaari in connection with police inquiries.’

  Seppo nodded.

  The chief editor also nodded. ‘That’s . . . well, surprising. To the best of my knowledge nothing of any possible interest to the police has happened in Karjasaari for the last hundred years.’

  ‘We don’t have to go back as far as that,’ said Seppo. ‘The case was twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘What?’ asked the chief editor.

  ‘Twenty-five years,’ said Seppo. ‘We’re trying to identify people in a photograph that was taken twenty-five years ago . . .’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘ . . . and we’d very much like to look at your archives, or to talk to people who were writing about Karjasaari at the time.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the chief editor again.

  ‘Can you help us?’

  ‘I don’t know. There certainly won’t be anyone on the paper who was working here twenty-five years ago. Far from it . . . at the moment we’re a young team here.’

  ‘Do you have archives going back to the year 1985?’

  ‘1985 . . . I’m afraid not. At the moment we’re digitising the archives, but we go no further back than the year 2000.’

  2000, thought Seppo. And before that? Before that the Flood, or what?

  ‘We do have the paper editions for 1985 still available. But you’d have quite a time of it sorting through them . . . oh, I’ve just had another idea . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know there was a freelancer writing on Karjasaari for us, she met almost all her deadlines. Myself, I joined the paper only in 2004, but everyone said the lady had been working for us for ages . . . a rather eccentric character . . .’

  ‘Where can I find her?’ asked Seppo.

  ‘Hm. Just a moment, I’ll ask.’ He picked up the phone and had a conversation of some length with one of the staff, presumably the editor responsible for the Karjasaari column. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘No, send it over to me, please, before we start spelling it out. Yes. Fine, ciao.’

  Ciao, thought Seppo.

  ‘We’ve got her,’ said the chief editor. ‘And the funniest thing about it is that she still works for us from time to time. She must be almost eighty.’

  Seppo nodded.

  ‘My colleague is sending me the contact details over.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Seppo.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll understand that you’ve made me rather curious. What sort of a case is it you’re working on?’

  ‘I can’t give you the details at the moment. There’ll certainly be more information for the press very soon.’

  The chief editor leaned back. ‘Karjasaari. Now and then someone falls into Lake Saimaa. A drunk fell through the ice in winter a few years ago, the little town lies directly on the water. In fact, in autumn and winter there’s a nice winter fair in the marketplace. But otherwise . . . well, a quiet country idyll, nothing for our local journalists to get their teeth into.’

  ‘Yes, a pretty little town,’ Seppo agreed.

  The chief editor cleared his throat, swivelled his chair Seppo’s way, and sat up ramrod straight. ‘Although something did happen recently – I’ve just remembered. Happonen. Our editorial team really did have news about the place to occupy them for quite a while. But the man only spent his childhood and youth in these parts.’

  ‘Right,’ said Seppo.

  ‘That case is still unsolved if I remember rightly . . .’

  ‘You do, it’s about Happonen. But with the best will in the world I can’t tell you more at the moment.’

  The chief editor looked at his screen for a while, and seemed to be formulating a question in his mind before he asked it. ‘Could we agree that I’ll be the first you inform when the case goes public? As soon as you can give more details?’

  Who am I, Seppo thought, to decide on a thing like that? But he replied, ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Great,’ said the chief editor. He still hesitated slightly, and Seppo felt an impulse to tell him that, chief editor or not, he had no right to hold up the police in the course of their inquiries.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

  ‘Then I’ll print you out the address and phone number of our oldest freelance contributor. Give her my regards.’

  56

  JOENTAA AND WESTERBERG had lunch in the hotel, and after that Westerberg went to his room to make some phone calls. Although not until he had entrusted a large amount of his small change to the machine eternally flashing away in the lobby.

  Joentaa thought of Tuomas Heinonen. Maybe he’d tell him about Westerberg. And that you could still have fun gambling if all you lost was a handful of pennies.

  His mobile hummed its tune. Joentaa looked at the unfamiliar number for a few seconds, and thought of Larissa. Of hearing her voice. Then he did in fact hear the voice of a woman, the helpful school secretary. She said she’d found something.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes . . . but I don’t know if it will get you much further.’

  ‘We’ll soon see. I’ll be with you in ten minutes’ time.’

  ‘Right . . . you’ll find me in the library,’ she said, and then Joentaa broke the connection and ran to his car.

  He drove to the school and parked outside the long, low, flat-roofed building. It was easy to find the library, which was in the basement, and instinctively Joentaa thought of the archives in the basement of the Turku police station, where stuff that had been forgotten for ages was kept.

  The secretary was sitting with two men and bending over some papers. She waved him over when she saw him.

  ‘Samuli Svensson, deputy head of the school, and our librarian Petteri Savo,’ said the secretary.

  Both men shook hands with him, Svensson firmly, Savo more softly. The deputy head had a crew cut and was a small man, while Savo was tall, with hair standing out in all directions.

  ‘We hear that you’re interested in our school,’ said the deputy head. ‘Mrs Rantanen and Mr Savo have looked out everything we have.’ He pointed to the books and folders lying on the table.

  Joentaa nodded, and went over to them.

  ‘May we ask what this is really about?’ asked Savo.

  ‘A woman who taught here in 1985. Although only for a very short time, as a supply teacher.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Mrs Rantanen has told us that already. But . . . why . . .’

  ‘I assume that you were neither of you here in 1985,’ said Joentaa. Or perhaps he was wrong. Savo must be nearly sixty.

  ‘
I’m afraid we weren’t,’ said Svensson. ‘Mr Savo here is certainly our rock of ages, but even he didn’t join the staff until 1989.’

  Joentaa nodded, and examined the books and papers on the table.

  ‘It looks like more than it is,’ said the school secretary. ‘We’ve drawn up yearbooks of all the school’s activities and exhibitions since 1990, but there wasn’t one yet in 1985.’

  ‘And . . . what did you find?’

  The secretary took a set of papers stapled together off the table, and handed it to him. It was a school magazine, its cover showing girls and boys standing in the sun outside the school building. Presumably a whole year’s intake. Almost all of them were letting out silent shouts of glee; the photographer had probably encouraged them to make a noise. The title of the magazine was a plain one: Upper School Magazine.

  Joentaa sat down at the table and opened the magazine at the first page. ‘You’ll find the rankings at the end,’ said the secretary.

  He looked up enquiringly.

  ‘Drawn up by the final-year students before the leaving exam,’ said the secretary.

  Joentaa leafed through the pages.

  ‘Page eighty-seven,’ said the secretary.

  Joentaa opened the magazine at that page and ran his eyes over the names and numbers.

  ‘I came upon something,’ said the secretary in the background. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll show you.’

  She leaned over him and pointed to a table, headed by the words The Nicest. It took him a little while to realise that the students were assessing their teachers on this page. They had had twelve years’ experience of being marked by them, and now it was the other way around. The Strictest. The Worst-Dressed. The Latest to Arrive. But also The Most Committed. The Most Easy-Going. The Nicest. In first place for the nicest was a teacher called Harkonen. Second came one Mr Väsänen. Third was Ms Koivula. Joentaa read the report on her.