The Winter of the Lions

by Jan Costin Wagner

  A few weeks later she moves to the apartment in Paimio with her mother, and she sees her father three more times after that, on birthdays. On the third occasion he forgets to bring a present and says he will give her one later, but he never does, because on his way home to Helsinki he collides with a motorbike. The newspaper cuttings are kept in a shoebox in a cupboard in their apartment. Her mother does not cry at the funeral. The motorbike rider is only slightly injured, and the lawyer says, ‘We’re not giving up.’

  She nods.

  ‘Believe me, I’m not giving up. It matters to me. I’m in constant contact with your co-plaintiffs.’

  She nods.

  A few months back she went to see him because he was the only lawyer she knew, and because, long ago, he was the only person who tried to make it more difficult for her parents to separate. He didn’t recognise her, and sat quietly behind his desk while she told him what had happened.

  ‘We’re not giving up, we’ll keep in touch with the other plaintiffs, and when the time comes we’ll be well prepared,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ she says.

  ‘Yes …’ he says.

  She reaches for her bag, opens it, and takes out the tin of biscuits she baked herself.

  ‘Oh,’ he says as she hands him the tin.

  ‘Home-made,’ she says. ‘With maple syrup.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much.’

  ‘Because Christmas isn’t so far behind us,’ she says.

  51

  THERE WAS AN updated list from Päivi Holmquist on his desk when he got back. Eleven new names. In all twenty. This should be complete so far as plane crashes and rail accidents are concerned, wrote Päivi, and in addition there’s the ghost-train accident in Salo.

  He looked at the list, read the names. Thought of Joakim Lagerblom, and Josefina, and conversations that couldn’t be conducted.

  He called the editorial office for Hämäläinen’s show and got Tuula Palonen on the line. She said she was short of time and didn’t understand the question he was asking her.

  ‘It’s about the puppets shown on the talk show,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The audience was told exactly what kinds of deaths the attitudes of the figures were based on. Do you understand?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘The discussion set out to show how the puppet-maker, that’s Mäkelä, modelled the puppets on precise kinds of death, and something was said in that context about the deaths the puppets were to illustrate on film. Death in an air crash, in a rail accident, in a fire on a ghost train.’

  ‘Yes … yes, I remember.’

  ‘What I’d like to know now is this: did you get any reactions? Letters or some such communications from viewers criticising the show?’

  ‘Presumably, but nothing out of the ordinary. We get letters and emails after every programme, criticism and praise. Much more praise than anything else, incidentally.’

  ‘What I mean is anything immediately striking, maybe a text message with a threatening undertone, a text attacking one or several of the participants personally.’

  ‘No, definitely not.’

  ‘Or something relating directly to real air crashes, rail accidents, or a fire on a ghost train that actually happened … people who maybe lived through such an experience and … and thought the tone and nature of the conversation was too close to the bone, if you see what I mean?’

  Tuula Palonen thought for a while.

  ‘Yes, I do see what you mean,’ she said. ‘But no, I don’t think we had anything like that. Unusual reactions of that kind are few and far between, and I always look at them myself.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But I’ll ask again,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Joentaa rang off and once again looked at Päivi Holmquist’s list. She had also found out the names of the three children who lost their lives in the ghost-train fire. Seven, nine and twelve years old. In September 1993.

  He stared at the names and came to a decision. He copied the list, spent two hours on the phone, and at the discussion held at 16.00 hours confronted Heinonen and Grönholm with a change of direction within the inquiry.

  Grönholm, frowning, looked at Päivi Holmquist’s note, and Heinonen asked if Joentaa had agreed all this with Sundström.

  ‘More or less,’ said Joentaa.

  Heinonen nodded.

  ‘Eleven of these people lived in South Finland, and we’ll look at those. I’ve delegated the others to our colleagues in the cities concerned. They were very cooperative.’

  ‘A countrywide investigation,’ said Grönholm. ‘Everyone wanting to contribute the crucial piece of evidence.’

  ‘It’s a question of doing the research to discover whether relatives of those victims can be found anywhere near our case – people who reacted particularly strongly to the accidental death or were traumatised for a very long time. And finding the one whose grief broke out in irrational aggression.’

  ‘Sounds pretty speculative,’ said Grönholm.

  ‘I know,’ said Joentaa. ‘I’ve allotted the names. Between us, we should be able to take a look at all of them by tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Grönholm.

  ‘Who Is Killing the Lords of Death?’ said Tuomas Heinonen.

  ‘What?’ asked Grönholm.

  ‘Today’s headline in the Illansanomat.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Grönholm.

  ‘Maybe Kimmo’s idea isn’t so outlandish after all,’ said Heinonen.

  ‘Kimmo’s ideas are always outlandish,’ said Grönholm, smiling.

  52

  SHE LEAVES THE lawyer’s office and glides over the snow as if on rails.

  She is sitting opposite a man, and there is a small table between them. The man is tapping alternately at the keyboard of a small computer and the keypad of his mobile. From time to time he briefly raises his head and seems to look right through her as if through a pane of glass.

  She looks at him, and the steady drumming sound of his fingers makes its way into her and forms a pleasant, harmonious contrast to her present sense of hovering in the air. The conductor comes along to stamp tickets. Now and then children run past, laughing, now in one direction, now in another.

  ‘Slowly, slowly,’ murmurs the man, without taking his eyes off the keyboard.

  At Helsinki station a young man, who has been waiting to meet her, comes towards her smiling. A cheerful, genuine smile. He has a firm handshake. ‘Welcome. I’m Olli Latvala. We’re very glad you agreed to come,’ he says.

  She nods. Agreed. An interesting word. She thinks about words so often now that she finds it difficult to speak them out loud.

  ‘To be honest, I’m relieved that you’re here. Somehow we could never get hold of each other on the phone,’ says Olli Latvala.

  She nods.

  ‘It’s often like that in our outfit,’ says Olli Latvala.

  ‘All arranged at the last minute. But it works in the end.’

  The last minute, she thinks.

  ‘Very good to see you,’ says Olli Latvala. ‘Let me carry that.’ He takes her overnight bag and walks briskly ahead.

  She remembers the first call. A few months ago now. A late summer day. Shimmering heat. The ringing of the phone crystallises in the silence, and as she goes to pick it up she is wondering who it can be. No one has called her for some time now.

  The woman’s voice sounds strange and soft and insistent all at once. She introduces herself as Tuula Palonen and talks for some minutes about the moment when the sky fell in, about Ilmari and Veikko, without mentioning their names and without understanding.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she tells Tuula Palonen in the end, then she says nothing for several seconds.

  ‘Then help me to understand,’ says Tuula Palonen finally. ‘Help me and everyone else to understand. That’s why we’re inviting you. Because who can understand it if not you?’

  When Tuula Palonen calls
again two days later she agrees, and Tuula Palonen is glad and asks her a series of questions about the day when the sky fell in and what it was like for her, and while she answers she feels as if she is taking an examination. In the end Tuula Palonen says she is sorry that it isn’t possible for her to offer a fee.

  Fee, she thinks. Thinking about words. The young man puts her little travelling bag in the boot of the car and holds the car door open for her.

  ‘You’re spending the night at the Sokos. A good hotel.’

  She nods.

  That call was in summer.

  The card of thanks and the invitation came in the autumn. Now it is winter.

  ‘Maybe you’ll run into Bon Jovi in the hotel,’ says Olli Latvala. ‘He’s touring Scandinavia at the moment; we were lucky enough to get him on the show at short notice. You know who Bon Jovi is?’

  She nods, and the young man steers the car into a red, yellow and black sea of lights.

  ‘I’d like to discuss the course of the show with you tomorrow morning. After breakfast, if that’s all right. I could come to the hotel.’

  She nods.

  ‘A car will come for you at 17.00 hours.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘About your husband and son … I’m very, very sorry about them,’ he says.

  She turns her eyes away from the street and looks at him.

  ‘I think it’s impressive that you … you’re willing to talk about it,’ he says.

  Talk about it, she thinks.

  Who can understand it if she can’t?

  The hotel lobby is full of golden light. A pageboy takes her bag, and the young man tells the lady at reception, ‘Salme Salonen. The reservation is with the block booking for the Hämäläinen talk show.’

  ‘Welcome, Mrs Salonen,’ says the hotel receptionist, smiling, and Olli Latvala presses her hand firmly, for a long time, before hurrying through the broad swing doors and out into the night.

  ‘Shall I lead the way?’ asks the pageboy.

  She nods, and follows him to the lifts.

  53

  GRÖNHOLM WAS LOOKING down at the list when he left the room, and Heinonen was fanning himself with his copy and seemed relaxed. He’s won, thought Joentaa. Presumably at good odds. He must speak to Paulina.

  He called Sundström in Helsinki. Sundström seemed to be in high spirits, told him to do as he liked, and laughed his good-old-Paavo-Sundström laugh, the one that sounded menacing and infectious at the same time.

  At least Sundström’s on the way to improving, thought Joentaa as he rang off.

  He spent the rest of the day working through the names he had given himself to investigate. Besides Raisa Lagerblom they included a married couple from Salo whose daughter had died in the fire on the ghost train. Erkki and Mathilda Koivikko. Looking at the date, he thought it was too long ago. 1993. Plenty of time to grasp the fact, come to terms with it, forget or suppress it. He had had an event closer to the present in mind when the idea first came to him.

  All the same, he went to Salo, because a comment in Päivi’s research notes had seemed important to him.

  In the big market square of Salo, where there had been a funfair with a ghost train in the autumn of 1993, people sat shivering on benches, watching the skaters on the river falling down and getting up again.

  Erkki and Mathilda Koivikko lived in a red house no more than a hundred metres from the market place. Their name was on the letterbox: Koivikko. It was not clear from Päivi Holmquist’s notes whether they had already been living here in 1993. Probably. He stood indecisively outside the house for a little while, imagining Erkki and Mathilda Koivikko seeing the burning ghost train through their own windows.

  He turned away, walked across the market place and over the bridge. The Somero bank was on the ground floor of a large, new-looking shopping centre. Coloured placards of happy people promised high rates of interest and a secure, sheltered life. A young woman behind a reception desk gave him an encouraging smile as he came in.

  ‘My name is Joentaa, I’m from the Turku police,’ he said. ‘I’d like to speak to Erkki Koivikko.’

  He showed her his ID, and she studied it for a while. She seemed about to say something else, but then refrained.

  ‘Is he here?’ asked Joentaa.

  ‘Yes, of course. This way.’

  She went ahead, through a door in the back part of the bank, past men and women on the phone or staring at screens. Erkki Koivikko, unlike most of the employees here, had an office of his own. The woman knocked and waited for a reply, which came a few seconds later, the speaker’s voice muted by the door. She opened it.

  A man of powerful appearance sat behind a pale brown desk. He wore a dark suit and a strikingly colourful tie, and was deep in a phone conversation. He went on talking for a little while before turning to the woman, who was waiting in the doorway beside Joentaa. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘This gentleman is from the police,’ said the woman.

  Koivikko sat there motionless.

  ‘I won’t take much of your time,’ said Kimmo.

  ‘Right,’ said Koivikko. ‘Yes, thank you, Sonja. We’ll do this on our own.’

  The woman nodded and left. Joentaa went in and closed the door.

  ‘Police,’ said Koivikko.

  ‘Nothing that need disturb you,’ said Joentaa. He went closer and handed his police ID to Koivikko. He had deliberately not called in advance to say he was coming. He was pestering a man who had presumably been given news of his daughter’s death fifteen years ago by a police officer. He felt a pang in his stomach and watched for Koivikko’s reaction, waiting to hear what he would say.

  ‘Forgive my … slight surprise. It’s not every day that a policeman turns up in my office.’

  ‘It’s about your daughter Maini,’ said Joentaa.

  Koivikko did not reply. A powerful man, sitting there looking relaxed, surprised but otherwise in perfect control of himself.

  ‘I know that she died in an accident fifteen years ago,’ said Joentaa.

  Koivikko nodded.

  ‘At the time you did something that occupied the minds of my colleagues here in Salo for a while.’

  ‘You’re talking in riddles, but I think I know what you mean,’ said Koivikko.

  ‘You threatened the man running the funfair that day. He was suspected of contributing to causing the fire through negligence.’

  Koivikko nodded.

  ‘You offered him violence during a confrontation after the trial.’

  Koivikko nodded.

  ‘The man was found not guilty.’

  ‘I still think he was guilty,’ said Koivikko. ‘It wasn’t done on purpose, of course. Negligence, as you put it. An idiot. One idiot too many. And I needed to blame someone anyway, so the court’s decision carried no weight with me. I knew he was guilty, I didn’t need any evidence.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘Not back then,’ said Koivikko. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

  A long time ago, thought Joentaa.

  ‘I gave the man a black eye. It swelled up in seconds, it really did. He got off with a black eye. Unlike my daughter.’

  A long time ago, thought Joentaa. Koivikko sat there unchanged, focused but calm.

  ‘I was questioned about the incident at the time. It didn’t come to charges or a court case. The man who had killed my daughter was kind enough not to take it to court.’

  ‘I know,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘However, here I am today, working at my profession. I expect my colleagues out there are already gossiping. Koivikko … wasn’t there something, back in the past? That terrible case. And now here’s a policeman in his office again. How did you know where to find me, by the way?’

  ‘It’s part of our job,’ said Joentaa, and thought of Patrik Laukkanen, who was dead and whose life was laid out in detail, in impersonally bureaucratic language, on his desk.

  ‘I’d be interested to know why you are here,’ said Koivikko
.

  Joentaa nodded. He forced himself to hold the man’s gaze and asked, ‘Do you know the Hämäläinen talk show?’

  Koivikko still sat there looking just the same, with his eyes narrowed. ‘Who doesn’t?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you see the programme when the puppets were used as models for bodies?’

  ‘You surely don’t think …’

  Joentaa waited.

  ‘You surely don’t think I … you don’t think Hämäläinen’s show of dead bodies interests me personally?’

  ‘Did you see that programme?’

  Koivikko looked at Joentaa. He seemed to be concentrating, and almost imperceptibly shook his head. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘This’ll make you laugh; yes, I did. With my wife. We like that talk show. Well, we did like it.’

  ‘Not any more?’

  ‘We watch only occasionally,’ said Koivikko. ‘We didn’t like the way it put those puppets on display.’

  ‘Exactly what didn’t you like?’ asked Joentaa, and after a couple of seconds Koivikko began smiling to himself.

  ‘When the trailer said there would be bodies specially made for films in it, my wife said at once that she didn’t like the idea,’ he said. ‘But I thought it was an interesting topic. Then, when they talked about a fire on a ghost train and the camera moved to a puppet modelling a dead body, my wife began crying, and I went into the bathroom and threw up.’

  He said no more for a while.

  ‘Then I went back and watched the rest of it. In principle, a fascinating subject. I soon got over my first reaction. My wife had already gone to bed, and next morning she said she thought it was tasteless and she wasn’t going to watch the Hämäläinen show any more.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘Although, incidentally, she does still watch it now and then. Has done for some time. Is that what you wanted to know?’ asked Koivikko.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what you suspect, but I think there’s one thing you should know.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Our daughter’s death is fifteen years in the past. And the charred plastic figure on the stretcher in that TV show was male.’