Light in a Dark House (14 page)

A young woman officer was standing in the doorway with a stack of paper which looked heavy for her to carry. ‘The records from Tammisaari,’ she said.

‘Fine, put it all down here,’ said Seppo, making a sweeping movement in the direction of his desk.

‘This is only the start,’ she said. ‘They’re sending it all through as PDF files, and our system is getting kind of overloaded.’

The server, thought Westerberg. Our server, our PDF files.

‘I’ll be back with more soon. Järvi and Koskela are looking through it as well,’ said the young officer, leaving. Seppo stood in front of the carefully stacked and stapled sheets of paper, smiling, and Westerberg wondered what there was about it to please him.

Seppo divided the stack carefully in two, and put half of the documents on Westerberg’s desk.

‘Or should we sort them according to content first?’ he asked.

‘Hm? No, better just start.’

Seppo nodded, and began leafing through the papers.

Westerberg sat there in silence for a while, deep in thoughts that he couldn’t quite pin down. Then he looked at the first printout. He read for a few minutes, then looked up.

‘What does PDF stand for?’ he asked.

‘Portable Document Format,’ said Seppo.

Westerberg leaned back. ‘You just thought that up, didn’t you?’

Seppo didn’t seem to be listening. ‘What did you say?’ he muttered.

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Westerberg, concentrating on the file in front of him again. The interview with the dead politician’s wife had brought nothing to light, except that the interviewee had suffered what was presumably a nervous collapse.

39

IN THE AFTERNOON
Kimmo Joentaa went to the conference room with empty hands and a brain full of information. Sundström and Grönholm were already there; the other members of the core group of investigators were being brought in for an exchange of opinions only once a week now.

Joentaa sat down and interrupted Sundström, who was about to embark on a stocktaking statement.

‘I’m doing something new,’ he said.

‘Oh . . . you are?’ said Sundström.

Joentaa nodded.

‘Doing what?’ asked Grönholm.

‘Going through all the leads again,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Sundström.

‘I’ll have done it by this evening.’

‘The old leads,’ said Grönholm.

‘Yes, all 2,711 of them. I’ve already read through nearly a thousand, and I’ll be going on soon.’

‘Okay,’ said Sundström. ‘2,711 statements. And . . . what do you expect to come of that?’

‘I expect to—’

‘You know we’ve followed up every single one of them, and checked most of them ages ago, don’t you?’ said Sundström.

Joentaa nodded. ‘I’d just like to . . . look through it all in a different way, from another point of view.’

‘What point of view, for instance?’ asked Sundström.

Joentaa thought about that and couldn’t come up with an answer.

‘Kimmo?’

‘Male violence,’ he said finally.

Sundström and Grönholm looked at him.

‘Violence,’ said Joentaa. ‘On the quiet. So that at first it’s not seen for what it is.’

He returned their gaze, and thought that he couldn’t really express what he meant.

‘See you later,’ he said, leaving them.

40

13 December now

In Rantaniemi near Laapeenranta this afternoon. I sit in the hotel, leaning against the bedstead, and I can see the sky through the window, the snow and the shopping centre that stands in the middle of this small town of clapboard houses like a gigantic ferry. A large green ferry run aground.

The costume fitted as if made for me, and the young nurse who took me through the bright nursing home, past tubs of flowers and paintings, gave me a smile and seemed to think it was a good thing that I came today, not the young woman who usually comes.Jarkko Miettinen seldom has visitors. Only relations and close friends are let in to see him, and the woman pastor who comes to encourage him and prepare him for death.
As I am not a friend or relation, I went in the character of a pastor, a week earlier than the real pastor who, if the nurse is to be believed, is too young for this job anyway and always seems to be bored and unfriendly.

The nurse smiles at me before closing the door. Jarkko Miettinen is sitting in a wheelchair by the window, and doesn’t take his eyes off the winter whiteness. He doesn’t seem to have noticed me coming into the room. I take a chair and sit down beside him. Black coffee shines in a white cup on a white table.

I don’t know how long it goes on. Miettinen is looking out of the window, and memories condense into concrete images, but they are still hard to grasp. Time stands still, but at the same time it is racing along a rail, forward and back, no stopping it, from image to image, until at last the old man slowly turns his face to me. My thoughts come to rest in those dead eyes.

I feel a little uncomfortable in my costume. Uncomfortable but at the same time protected. The boy in the shop made much of the fact that it’s genuine, whatever he meant by that. Jarkko Miettinen can’t see me, but he nods to me. I think I see his eyes light up as I open the box and give him the piece of quiche. Cream, salt, rye dough, cheese, salami sausage.

As he holds the piece of quiche and looks at it as if it were something strange but familiar, the images come back. A younger Miettinen, tanned and kneeling in a sea of coloured flowers in the sunlight. My mother beside him, praising his work. Miettinen turns to my mother and thanks her, smiling, and I see his face as I try keeping a football in the air so that it won’t fall on the lawn. The lawn that Miettinen has just been mowing.

I don’t know how long this memory lasts. Maybe only seconds, seeming to last longer because I need them to reconcile Miettinen, the landscape gardener giving our garden a makeover, with the other and yet identical Miettinen lying gasping and groaning on top of Saara.

That day is a long time ago, and the image is both loosely and firmly rooted in my mind. Miettinen – landscape gardener and rapist. I myself – a child.

My mother, who is dead now, stands in the picture, a strange and unsuspecting figure. To her, Miettinen is only a landscape gardener, no more.

She praises him again as I run indoors, shivering, and go up to my room. I remember how cold I felt.

Later Miettinen and my mother sit out on the terrace, and I hear them talking through the open door of my room. Miettinen is enjoying the quiche she has baked. Cream, salt, rye dough, cheese, salami sausage, mushrooms.

My mother praises Miettinen; Miettinen praises my mother’s quiche.

Now, many years later, Miettinen raises his cup and then the piece of quiche to his mouth.

He eats patiently, and turns back to the window when he has finished.

I ask him whether he can remember Saara, but there is no reply. He sits there motionless; only his hand trembles, as mine did a few weeks after that dreadful day when I saw him standing in a flower bed in our garden wearing a straw hat and green overalls.

I ask him again. No reply.

For the sake of doing the thing thoroughly I show him the business card, but he won’t look at it.

I ask him whether he knows where Risto is. No reply.

Perhaps his trembling gets worse, but I may be imagining that.

I stand up and walk out of the room. I carefully close the door after me. The young nurse, who is coming along the corridor towards me, says goodbye with a smile.

Miettinen’s death is a matter of simple arithmetic. A sum of the probabilities that, to my mind, work out conclusively. Because of his age and weak constitution, it’s possible that the amatoxin syndrome is already setting in. Vomiting, watery diarrhoea, stomach pains. But it will take some time. I shall not be here when he dies.

Outside, evening is falling fast. I look at the shopping centre, the ferry run aground, which begins to sway before my eyes, and after a few minutes merges with the black sky.

41

WESTERBERG AND SEPPO
drove to Karjasaari. To the little town where the dead men had grown up and attended school together, about three hundred kilometres from Helsinki.

The most talkative person in the car was the lady telling them which way to go. Her directions were gentle and perfectly clear, and Westerberg slowly dozed off and fleetingly dreamed that the gentle voice became a loving, seductive one, and its owner was no longer leading him along roads to a strange place but by familiar paths to the bright room where she was hiding.

He felt humiliated by his dream, and tried to make his way back to reality, but didn’t manage it until Seppo’s voice broke through the images. Seppo was saying something that he couldn’t make out.

‘What?’ he asked, opening his eyes and sitting abruptly upright.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Seppo.

‘What?’

‘Sorry I woke you, I didn’t notice that you . . .’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Westerberg.

Seppo took the exit recommended by the friendly lady, whose voice now sounded tinny and strange again.

‘Did you just say something?’ asked Westerberg.

‘Hmm?’

‘Did you say something? Some kind of word I didn’t . . . or else I was dreaming it.’

‘Oh, yes. Xing?’

Westerberg turned to Seppo and wondered for a moment whether he was still dreaming. But Seppo looked perfectly real, sitting at the wheel of the police car.

‘What?’

‘Xing. I said I’ve put my profile on Xing.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Westerberg.

‘It’s a career portal.’

Westerberg nodded.

‘A networking site,’ said Seppo. The voice recommended them to turn off after 200 metres, and Seppo met his eye.

‘Not that I’m thinking of changing my job,’ he said, ‘but I’d kind of like to remain open to . . . to something new.’

Something new, thought Westerberg. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Seppo was talking about. But Seppo seemed to have said all he had to say, and the woman’s directions were now confined to the road to their destination.

‘Is there a Pling too?’ asked Westerberg.

‘Hmm?’ asked Seppo.

‘I wouldn’t mind signing up to Pling.’

‘To what?’

‘Or Zong.’

Seppo looked at him. ‘Are you taking the mickey?’

‘Just joking,’ said Westerberg.

Then Seppo concentrated on the road again, and Westerberg pursued a hard-to-define chain of thought until Seppo said he suspected there might be a fault in the satnav system.

‘Hmm?’ said Westerberg.

‘We’re going to drive into the water any moment now. Take a look.’

They were surrounded by an enormous lake, and Seppo was steering the car over the only firm terrain visible for far around, a bridge.

‘Oh,’ said Westerberg.

‘Yes,’ said Seppo.

‘Remarkable,’ said Westerberg.

After a few minutes, however, land came in sight and they turned off along a fork in the road. A few minutes more, and the tinny female voice announced that they had reached their destination.

Karjasaari. Clapboard houses in the wintry evening sunlight. Pale pastel colours. Snow clung to the trees like candyfloss. The street lamps were already on; it would soon be dark.

The school building passed by, and Westerberg recalled his fruitless conversations at an earlier stage of the investigation with the young headmaster, and with teachers long retired who had only the vaguest recollections of Kalevi Forsman as a school student.

He thought again of Forsman’s sister Kirsti, who had come to Helsinki in the evening and left again that same evening, and in the brief interim had said goodbye to her brother, with whom she must have lost any real contact some time earlier. Considerably earlier.

She had gone back to Hämeenlinna, and the investigation had gone off in a direction which, he hoped, brought them closer to the dead man than his long-forgotten childhood.

Seppo drove the car towards a building with gigantic letters fixed to its roof. Karjanhovi, the hotel into which Seppo had booked them, probably the only one in the little town.

It was only a feeling that he had, but it was an intense one, and it could be summed up in a simple sentence.

‘I think we’ve come to the right place,’ said Westerberg.

42

THE LEAD THAT
Kimmo Joentaa was looking for was hidden in just a few lines, and he overlooked it at first, before going back minutes later to the transcript entered in the extensive records under the number 1,324.

He read the text again. One of their colleagues who had been looking after the hotline at the time had written it down after the conversation.

Anita-Liisa Koponen, born in Mikkeli on 14 May 1973, thinks she recognises the unidentified dead woman as her piano teacher from her home town of Karjasaari. On being asked whether she could be certain of that, Koponen replies that the unknown woman played Sibelius like an angel; on being asked whether she could give us the dead woman’s name, she replies that she can’t remember it. On being asked why not, she replies that angels have no names; on being asked when she last saw the dead woman, she replies: in another life. On being asked whether she can provide any facts that would be useful to the police investigation, she replies that the unknown woman fell victim to the Devil. On being asked what she means by that, she replies that angels are always victims of the Devil, that’s the way of the world; finally the lady ends the phone call. It came in on 30 September, was passed on to P. Grönholm for examination and evaluation.