Light in a Dark House (3 page)

The redhead and the drugs investigator were first to leave. Joentaa and Sundström supported the swaying Grönholm, who kept muttering to himself, ‘Oh, man . . . oh, wow, would never have thought . . . thought a thing like that . . . of all people . . .’ Then he giggled again.

Nurmela and Katriina waved, the drugs investigator and the redhead waved, and then the other five were in a car driven by Sabrina Sundström. The Sundströms sat in front, with Joentaa, Larissa and Grönholm in the back.

‘Where first?’ asked Sabrina.

‘Better take Petri home first,’ said Joentaa.

‘Don’t bother about me . . . I . . . I can drive myself if . . . if I have to,’ Petri Grönholm assured them.

It had really begun raining now.

‘Here comes autumn,’ said Sundström.

‘It’s supposed to be going to stay warm,’ said Sabrina Sundström.

Grönholm thanked everyone for the nice evening and insisted on getting out of the car and going into his apartment by himself. It was in a comparatively tall building in the centre of Turku, right on the marketplace.

‘See you tomorrow,’ called Sundström from the passenger seat, and Petri Grönholm grunted something that Joentaa couldn’t make out. Then they drove along narrower streets through the increasingly heavy rain.

‘Are you sure this is right?’ asked Sundström, when Joentaa asked Sabrina to turn off along the forest path.

What’s for sure? thought Joentaa.

The house in the dark.

Larissa beside him.

Her hand in his.

‘Well, goodnight then, you two,’ said Sundström.

‘Sleep well,’ said Sabrina.

‘And you,’ said Joentaa, and he followed the woman whose name he didn’t know and who was already halfway to the front door.

5

SHE CRIED IN
her sleep, and couldn’t remember any reason when Kimmo Joentaa woke her and asked if everything was all right.

‘I have to get some sleep now,’ she said.

‘You must have been dreaming something.’

‘Kimmo, I can’t remember what. Let me sleep, okay?’

‘If you promise me not to cry.’

‘Sometimes you really get on my nerves.’

‘What’s he like, then – August?’

She did not reply, but sat up a little way.

He felt a pang in his stomach, in his chest.

A burning behind his eyes.

‘Kimmo, go to sleep now.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just go to sleep.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Goodnight, Kimmo,’ she said, turning over on her side.

Some time passed. A sentence formed in his mind. He weighed it up on his tongue for a while before bringing it out.

‘I need something from you,’ he said at last.

There was no answer, and he didn’t know whether she had heard him.

‘I need your name,’ he said.

But perhaps his words were only sounds or colours in the dream that she was dreaming, the dream that she would have forgotten as soon as she woke up.

6

14 September now

Dear diary,

That’s what people say, don’t they? Yes. I think so.

Write it down just as you saw it at the time. So that you can remember it. Later.

The hospital is sparsely furnished. The walls are green, white and blue. I walk through wide spaces with a sense of being alone. Glances fall on me but do not linger. They glide away again. There are medics wearing coats the same colours as the walls. They are in a hurry, concentrating. Focused on something that is nothing to do with me. They don’t see me. They walk fast and disappear behind doors, and muted voices come through the walls, sometimes a groan, a scream, or a fit of weeping.

I feel like a shadow. Even when I am sitting with her. In an empty room that I found without actually looking for it. The wall around us is green. There’s a nail in it with a wooden crucifix hanging from the nail. A plastic plant on a side table. The bed and the covers are white. Medical equipment. Tubes, electronic apparatus. The technology looks curiously old. Much used, wearing out. The recurrent, soft humming note dies away in the silence, the way the notes of the piano died away back then after she had struck the keys.

The recurrent, soft humming note saying that she is alive.

Sleeping, waking.

It all happens so fast, that’s why you have to write it down. To keep a record. So that you can remember it some other time.

All so fast, so fast, I must come back to it later.

The device keeping her alive flows into her hand, into her arm, and is easily removed, as if it were only a plaster on a cut.

I leave the room, go along the right-angled corridors.

Other people come towards me. Their shadows fall on the walls. Some of them are sitting on benches, and look up when a voice announces an emergency.

When I step out into the daylight, the autumn feels like summer, the sun is shining as it was back at that time, and for a few moments I feel that only seconds have passed since then.

7

WHEN JOENTAA WOKE
in the morning, Larissa had already got up. He tasted the stale flavour of the sparkling wine on his tongue. The dizziness and headache weren’t too bad, but he knew that they had arrived in the hours while he was asleep, and would stay with him for a while.

He got up and went through the living room into the kitchen. The house was quiet and empty. No splashing, rushing water in the shower. He felt an impulse to call her name, but then the word left his mouth like a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Larissa,’ he said in a neutral voice, one that she couldn’t have heard even if she had been there.

But she wasn’t there. He went down to the cellar and opened the wooden door to the sauna, which lay silent in the cool of morning. The narrow window was open. They’d forgotten to close it. He stood in the small, square room and looked at the aftermath of the previous day. The stones were cold, the water to pour on them was a calm, smooth surface in the old grey bucket, and he thought he saw imprints on the bottom step of the wooden bench, imprints left by their bodies and perhaps their body fluids, souvenirs of the heated hour they had spent here. Before they went off to Nurmela’s house and his unusual birthday party.

What’s he like, then – August?

And what would that heated, passionate hour in the sauna cost him?

He went up again. Sat down at the kitchen table and thought that it was Saturday, and she didn’t really work on Saturdays. Maybe she’d gone for a walk. Or a swim. The telephone rang. He stopped and waited until the answerphone came on. He knew it wasn’t Larissa. Larissa never phoned. It was Sundström asking him to call back.

He went into the living room and over to the window in the front wall. His eyes searched the water of the lake. It was another calm, smooth surface, like the water down in the sauna in the dented tin bucket that Sanna had bought, when she was still alive and everything was all right.

He sat on the sofa, never taking his eyes off the lake, and thought that Sanna was dead and Larissa had disappeared. And that there was nothing else to think about.

She’d come back. In the evening. Or tomorrow. In a few days’ or weeks’ time.

He’d go and water Sanna’s grave.

He went into the kitchen, poured water into a glass, and raised it to his mouth. Pasi Laaksonen from the house next door came past. With his fishing rod. He waved, and Joentaa raised an arm to return the wave. As usual. As he had on the day when Sanna died, and so many other days afterwards.

When Pasi Laaksonen went fishing late in the morning at weekends, Joentaa was usually standing at the kitchen window. He watched Pasi disappear down in the hollow leading to the lake, and wondered whether it was really just chance, a recurrent coincidence, or something entirely different.

Pasi with his fishing rod, walking by, waving. A few hours after Sanna’s death. Perhaps he stood at the kitchen window so that he could experience the scene again and again. Because watching Pasi walk down to the water always brought back the moment when Sanna had died – and the moment when she had still been alive.

The longer he thought about it, the more conclusive that idea appeared to him, and he wondered why it occurred to him only now, years later.

He was still thinking about it when the phone rang again. He moved away from the window and went to answer it, walking with swift, springy steps, although he knew it wouldn’t be Larissa.

It was Petri Grönholm. He spoke clearly, if a little slowly. Joentaa thought of the moment, not so long ago, when Petri Grönholm had thrown up on Nurmela’s carpet, and the moment long before that when Sanna had stopped breathing, and then he thought of the fact that Larissa had gone without saying goodbye. Larissa or whatever her name was, and he had difficulty concentrating on what Grönholm was saying at the other end of the line.

‘Kimmo?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you get all that?’

‘Not entirely. At the hospital, you said . . .’

‘Yes, Paavo Sundström is on his way, and Kari Niemi is already there with the forensics team. The woman was very sick anyway.’

Anyway, thought Joentaa.

‘So it’s kind of odd . . . when she’d probably have died of her own accord.’

‘Ah,’ said Joentaa.

‘Never mind that. Anyway, Paavo said we were to park in the car park outside the main building, and then there’s signposting to Intensive Care.’

Joentaa nodded. He knew the Intensive Care ward at Turku hospital.

‘So . . . can you pick me up? In case of any residual alcohol in my bloodstream. I was pretty well pickled last night, so I don’t want to . . .’ said Grönholm.

‘Yes . . . of course I can.’

‘See you soon, then,’ said Grönholm, ringing off.

Joentaa stood there for a while with the phone in his hand.

As he was putting on his coat, he finally remembered Nurmela’s first name. Petri, just like Grönholm. He wasn’t entirely sure, but yes, he did think he saw the name in his mind’s eye. Petri Nurmela, chief of police.

Cover name August.

Wasting electricity, he thought, and he switched on all the lights in the house before leaving.

8

29 June 1985

Lauri says I ought to write it all down. He says I’ll want to remember it some time. Because another thing you have to think about is that everything happens so quickly, and after a while it’s all past and forgotten, and then you’d like to remember it. Lauri says. I think Lauri is a bit of a nutcase, with his books and his clever sayings and the way he acts in general, but he’s smart as well, you have to give him that, and besides, he’s a real friend, I know he is, so I’m going to write it all down.

Starting today.

I want to, as well. Which is funny, because there’s nothing I hate more than writing essays and dictations and all that stupid stuff. But I think Lauri’s idea is a good one, even if just now I was nearly killing myself laughing at him, when he was trying to tell me that Matti Nykänen is bound to fall flat on his face some time, because there has to be more to life than flying through the air on two boards.

That’s only logical, he says.

I asked him why he wanted to start on about Matti Nykänen when it’s 30 degrees and we’re dangling our feet in the water, and the sun is blazing down like it hasn’t for a long time.

‘You’re right,’ said Lauri. He often says that, although really he’s usually the one who is right.

Sometimes I wonder why Lauri hangs out with me at all, because he’s best at all school subjects and I’m worst at most of them, and by way of saying thanks I picked him first of all for my football team yesterday. I saw the jaws of all the others drop, and Lauri thought he’d heard wrong and didn’t like to come over to me. I had to call his name out loud again, and then he came over slowly and gave me kind of an enquiring look. Then he played really well in defence, threw himself at the ball good and hard.

I guess Lauri also sometimes wonders why I hang out with him, and because we both ask ourselves the same question that makes the two of us a pretty good couple. And this is a lovely summer so far. Lauri said it’s a summer that never ought to end, it’s so good.

We let our feet dangle in the water. I’m quite brown from the sun, Lauri’s wearing a T-shirt and has suncream on his arms, because he’s terrified of sunburn.

He says I’ll want to remember it some time, that’s why I ought to write it all down. Not that I’ve told him anything at all yet. I only said I will, about the piano lessons. That’s all. He gives me a funny look and says that I ought to write everything down, all that I remember, because I’ll always want to remember that, about the piano lessons and of course about her too.

And also, he says, I must watch out, because there’s no point falling in love with the wrong women.

Lauri of all people says that, Lauri Lemberg who’s never kissed a girl because his smooching was useless when fat Satu Koivinen wanted to get up close and personal with him at the midsummer party.