The Winter of the Lions

by Jan Costin Wagner

  ‘I still don’t know how it all hangs together, but it must have something to do with those puppets and the way they were discussed on the show.’

  ‘Puppets, Kimmo, only puppets.’

  ‘Yes, but not for one viewer. Let’s suppose that one viewer saw something else. Perhaps someone close to him, and he had lost that person and was mourning.’

  For a long time Sundström said nothing. After a while he began to eat his cornflakes. Then he put his spoon down and said, ‘Funny idea.’

  ‘I know,’ said Joentaa. ‘But I think it’s right.’

  ‘You think.’

  ‘I watched the DVD again last night. And after that I phoned Vaasara. Mäkelä’s assistant.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He thought it was an outlandish idea.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘Kimmo, I watched the programme myself, I know those puppets were only dummies. Corpses in a film. Props. Made of plastic.’

  ‘You don’t understand what I’m getting at.’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘I’d like to look at the data banks of photos that Mäkelä built up,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Vaasara said he had collected a lot of photos for research.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but why do you want to look at them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sundström looked down at his cornflakes again. ‘That’s a typical Kimmo Joentaa reason – “I don’t know”.’

  ‘You yourself say that the interview plays a key part. And the puppets are at the centre of the interview.’

  ‘Yes, I’m with you so far, but I don’t understand your theory.’

  ‘Do you have a better one?’

  ‘At the moment I don’t have any theory at all.’

  ‘Then in that case …’

  ‘Which of course will send me off to talk to the press in tearing good spirits. I’ll probably have to spend the whole morning preparing for that ridiculous conference.’

  Kimmo got to his feet. ‘See you later. I’m off.’

  ‘Kimmo, wait a minute …’

  Joentaa walked quickly through the breakfast room to the entrance hall. When he turned round once more, he saw Sundström shaking his head as he contemplated his cornflakes.

  He walked on through the hall, thinking about Sundström, who had seemed curiously passive since the attack on Hämäläinen, and for the first time since Joentaa had been working with him appeared to find that a situation was getting him down. Presumably his unique brand of humour had gone AWOL, and he had to rediscover it before he could operate with his usual efficiency.

  On reaching the way out of the hotel Joentaa stopped, and on impulse took his mobile out of his coat pocket. He called his own number, and after a few seconds heard a strange voice, but it didn’t sound like the standard announcement on the answering machine, and indeed it did not consist of the usual wording.

  ‘Er … hello?’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Who … who’s that speaking?

  ‘I think I’m the one who should be asking you.’

  ‘Larissa?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My name is Joentaa, and the telephone you’re holding at this minute belongs to me.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘That’s right. And I’d like to speak to Larissa.’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Ah. And who are you?’

  ‘Jennifer. A colleague of hers.’

  ‘Is … is Larissa …’

  ‘She’s in the bathroom. I came to pick her up because she has such a long walk to the bus stop.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She was late yesterday. That’s rather frowned upon.’

  ‘Ah … well, it’s good that you’re picking her up.’

  ‘Would you like her to call you back?’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Er … just a moment …’

  But Jennifer or whoever it was had cut the connection, and Kimmo Joentaa stood there for a while with his mobile in his hand. Then he put it away in his coat pocket and went out into the winter sunlight.

  39

  PELLERVO HALONEN, THE head of the Home, waves, and Rauna turns in the child seat and waves back. ‘Byeeee!’ she calls, although Pellervo Halonen can’t hear her.

  On the way her neighbour Aapeli sits in the back of the car and tells Rauna stories. Rauna laughs almost the whole time. She is glad that Aapeli is with them. He was coming towards her this morning just as she was about to drive away. Aapeli said good morning and smiled, and she saw the sadness in his eyes and asked if he’d like to come too.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Moomin World. In Naantali.’

  ‘The children’s theme park?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Just the two of us?’ Aapeli asked.

  ‘And Rauna,’ she replied. ‘A friend, a little girl, we’ll be fetching her.’

  Aapeli stood there for a while in the swirling snowflakes thinking about it, then he nodded and went straight to the car with her instead of back indoors.

  Now Aapeli is telling stories, and Rauna is laughing, and she glides over the snow as if on rails, and the world is set to rights.

  Rauna asks how he knows all these stories, and Aapeli tells her they are the stories he can’t tell his grandchildren because his children never come to visit.

  ‘Why not?’ asks Rauna.

  ‘I think they don’t have time,’ says Aapeli.

  ‘Why don’t they have time?’ asks Rauna.

  ‘Because they have to work a lot, and they don’t live near here.’

  ‘Why don’t they live near here?’ asks Rauna

  When they reach Naantali, the wooden houses are swathed in white, the restaurants are closed, and the sea is frozen. They go along the broad landing stage, and Aapeli says, ‘Is Moomin World open in winter?’

  She stops and looks at him.

  ‘I was only thinking it’s really much too cold for it now.’

  They walk on to the end of the landing stage, and along the woodland path on the island until the large, fenced terrain of the park begins. The little ticket booths are unoccupied, the windows have blinds down over them.

  ‘You’re right, Aapeli,’ she says.

  ‘What a pity,’ says Rauna.

  ‘I ought to have remembered that it was always closed in winter,’ she says.

  Aapeli has gone a few steps ahead. ‘Funnily enough the gates are wide open,’ he calls back.

  ‘So they are,’ she says.

  The ticket booths are closed, but the broad gates through which you enter the world of the Moomins are open.

  ‘Let’s just go on, then,’ says Aapeli.

  Rauna runs off, and she hesitates. She has always been afraid of doing something that’s not allowed. Even if unintentionally.

  ‘Come on,’ calls Aapeli, and she thinks she has never seen him happier. Rauna takes Aapeli’s hand, and she gives herself a little shake and follows the two of them.

  They run around on a deserted island, and hear a recurrent knocking sound. At regular intervals. Men are calling to each other, saying something that she can’t make out.

  ‘They’re doing renovation work here, that’s why the entrance was open,’ says Aapeli. They stop on the hill and see the blue wooden tower where the Moomins live. A man is standing on a ladder, banging at the red roof with a hammer. Another man is standing down below, giving instructions. The two men don’t notice them at all as they pass.

  ‘The bathing beach is further on,’ she says. ‘And if we keep left we’ll come to Moominpappa’s ship.’

  ‘Super, I want to go there,’ says Rauna.

  ‘So do I,’ says Aapeli.

  The two of them go ahead, although they don’t know the way, and she follows them, thinking of the summer when she worked here. It is not a memory but a sequence of elu
sive images.

  She is Little My.

  Ilmari is a stranger.

  And Veikko isn’t born yet.

  The sensation of cold water on her skin in the sunny evenings.

  ‘Left and up the steps,’ she calls to Rauna and Aapeli.

  She would have liked to bring Veikko here. Next summer. When Moomin World is open again.

  ‘The lions go away on the ship,’ calls Rauna. She is standing up on deck, turning the ship’s wheel wildly in all directions.

  ‘And that man with the beard isn’t the captain, I’m the captain.’

  ‘I’ll be cabin boy,’ says Aapeli.

  She stands down below, craning her neck to see the two of them.

  ‘Coming up?’ calls Rauna.

  Above her the grey sky. It drops away from the loose threads holding it. Ice floes crunch and break up on the water.

  ‘Coming up with us?’ calls Rauna.

  Rauna’s voice, and an image in her mind. Rauna’s eyes. They fill her field of vision entirely. Rauna’s eyes in the dark. ‘Has the sky fallen down?’ That’s Rauna’s voice, she feels her lips shaking and she would like to reach for her, touch her, but she can’t move.

  She opens her eyes and feels Rauna’s cheek on her arm. ‘Coming up with us?’ she whispers.

  ‘This is a great ship,’ says Aapeli, her neighbour of many years whom she has really come to know only today.

  ‘Anywhere you want to go,’ she says.

  ‘To the bathing beach,’ says Rauna. ‘Do you think we’ll be able to walk on the water?’

  40

  WESTERBERG HAD ALREADY gone to the TV station, but a friendly colleague saw to getting all the photos on the hard disk of Harri Mäkelä’s computer copied within minutes and placed at Joentaa’s disposal.

  Joentaa sat alone in a large, overheated room in front of a screen in a long row of obviously new computers, looking at a silently laughing Harri Mäkelä with an arm round a friend’s shoulder. One of many private photos. Mäkelä was laughing in almost all of them, showing a self-confident, attractive smile.

  It took him some time to understand the principle on which Mäkelä had arranged his photo archives. But then a simple pattern emerged. One set of the pictures that he was looking for had been assembled by Mäkelä in a folder called ‘CorpsesForDummies’. Joentaa opened several of the files and brought up the pictures. His shivering fit came back.

  As a rule the pictures had been taken at the scene of accidents. Accidents involving cycles, motorbikes, cars, helicopters, aircraft parts. Firefighting teams bending over the dead, paramedics spreading blankets over bodies.

  Sometimes it took Joentaa several minutes to find the element in the picture that, as the puppet-maker saw it, qualified it for the ‘CorpsesForDummies’ folder. For instance, a severed human leg lying in undergrowth next to the wrecked fuselage of an aircraft. The photos seemed to have been taken by photographers from all over the world: some from Finland, but others from deserts and the tropics. Many appeared to have been taken in America, and there were hundreds of them.

  The lords of death, thought Joentaa.

  He let the pictures run, and wondered how they were going to help him understand the death of Mäkelä, the death of Patrik Laukkanen, and the attack on Hämäläinen.

  A conversation about puppets was the peg that held all three together. And the pictures he was seeing had given Mäkelä ideas and an understanding of dead bodies, enabling him to make realistic models of the dead.

  Realistic fiction. The longer he looked at the pictures, the more dubious the theories he was developing seemed. Of the hundreds of thousands of viewers who had watched the programme, most had surely had to come to terms with the death of someone close to them. Why should one of them take it personally when all the others had simply been entertained? Mäkelä had shown three puppets, and he had explained what kind of cinematic deaths they had suffered, or were going to suffer – the victim of an air crash, the victim of a train disaster, the victim of a fire on a fairground ghost train. Joentaa wondered why he was the only one to find the whole idea tasteless. He and Larissa, or whatever her name was.

  And he wondered whether, for that very reason, his judgement had gone astray and he was developing erroneous theories that led nowhere. Puppets, Kimmo, only puppets. Sundström was quite right.

  He looked at the photos with a queasy sensation in his stomach, and couldn’t understand now what he had expected them to tell him. Photos clearly classified. A macabre slide show. That was all.

  He himself had seen similar pictures in the course of his training. So that he would be prepared, and would acquire the necessary knowledge. Just like Mäkelä, who had put them on file and studied them in order to do his job to the best of his ability.

  Photos clearly classified … every sub-folder of the main ‘CorpsesForDummies’ category was labelled with sequences of letters and numbers that Joentaa did not at first understand: 150402NL/AMS, and 110300US/NY. When he came upon 201199FIN/TAM he got the idea. Dates, countries, cities. On 20 November 1999 there had obviously been a train accident in Tampere. Mäkelä had stored four pictures of it in his sub-folder. An unnaturally flat body lying on its back beside a wrecked dining car.

  He wondered how Mäkelä had been able to build up this extensive archive. The Internet is full of them, Vaasara had said. Three puppets. Air crash, train crash, funfair accident. Spectacular events. Linked to days, years and locations.

  ‘Here, for you,’ said a voice behind him.

  Joentaa jumped.

  ‘Sorry,’ said his police colleague, handing him a stack of CDs. ‘I’ve copied all those photos in case you need them in Turku.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s a great help,’ said Joentaa.

  His colleague nodded. ‘The press conference is about to begin. I’m going down there myself.’

  Joentaa switched off the computer, took the CDs and placed them on the table. He probably wouldn’t need to look at the photos again. He’d had another outlandish idea.

  The puppets would have to help him.

  The puppets and the deadly events to which they owed their existence.

  41

  I RENE. AND the imps. And the young doctor whose name he now knew: Valtteri Muksanen.

  Funny sort of name. Funny sort of day.

  The imps stood there facing him, and didn’t seem to recognise him any more. They couldn’t utter a word, they were inspecting him as if he were an attraction for sightseers and giggling nervously.

  A new room. Wintry light came through the windowpanes. From time to time a uniformed police officer put his head round the door, possibly suspecting that the two little girls had explosives hidden about their persons.

  The doctor with the funny name, the one he’d been talking to when Irene and the children knocked at the door, withdrew, not without nodding encouragingly at Irene again and shaking hands with the girls.

  Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen looked at Irene and his daughters, thinking of Niskanen. He couldn’t get the man out of his head. Irene watched the doctor as he closed the door behind him.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at that young man, but he’s the medical director in charge of this outfit,’ said Hämäläinen, and Irene nodded.

  ‘Valtteri Muksanen. Funny sort of name.’

  ‘You think so?’ asked Irene.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he asked back.

  She sat down beside him. The children, arms hanging by their sides, inched slightly closer to him.

  ‘He recommends me to stay here a little longer, but he says I’ve been extremely fortunate, and I may be able to leave hospital within the next few days.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Irene.

  ‘Good to see you here,’ he said.

  Silence.

  ‘Come over here, imps. It’s only medicine in that tube.’

  The girls went over to the bed and looked at Irene for help. Irene took his hand and stroked it. He made several faces, and the girls laughed and ventur
ed closer still, finally sitting down cautiously on the bed.

  ‘Have you heard anything from the TV station? Has Tuula called? Or Mertaranta?’

  ‘I disconnected the phone, it was ringing the whole time.’

  ‘Ah.’ His mobile. He felt the impulse to reach for it, but he was still supposed to move extremely carefully, and anyway he didn’t know where it was. He’d have to ask the doctor about that.

  ‘It’s all over the news,’ said Irene.

  He nodded. And felt a curious satisfaction. All over the news.

  ‘The headline announcement,’ said Irene quietly.

  He made another face for the children.

  ‘How fragile everything is,’ said Irene.

  42

  KIMMO JOENTAA TOOK the train back to Turku. He asked his friendly Helsinki colleague to tell Westerberg and Sundström that he had left.

  Sundström would be annoyed, but he had no time to bother with matters of minor importance just now. White buildings, lakes and forests flew past outside the carriage windows. A boy sat beside him bent over a laptop, playing a computer game the point of which Joentaa could not work out. A man in a yellow bird mask reduced the cars he drove to scrap metal and flung himself off high-rise buildings. The man on the screen was smashed to pieces, and the boy looked as if he were about to fall asleep.

  ‘Thrilling stuff,’ murmured Joentaa.

  The boy cast him a suspicious glance, then concentrated on killing off the yellow man yet again.

  Joentaa walked from the station to the police building, thinking about the idea that had occurred to him while he was looking at Harri Mäkelä’s neatly stored photographs. An idea that would, presumably, be difficult to put into practice. Difficult or impossible.

  Petri Grönholm was out when he arrived, and Tuomas Heinonen was sitting at his desk.

  ‘Kimmo,’ he said. ‘Back already?’

  ‘Only me. Paavo’s still in Helsinki.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I have an idea I’d like to try out …’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Heinonen.

  Joentaa looked at Tuomas Heinonen, and wondered why he shouldn’t put what he had been thinking into words, and while he was thinking of that he noticed the changed expression on Heinonen’s face. His eyes still looked veiled, he still looked hunted. But something had changed.