Light in a Dark House (23 page)

Disreputable, naive, thought Joentaa.

‘And all that combined with the fact that she looked like . . . like a princess. And yes, there was something sad about her too.’

Sad, thought Joentaa.

‘Incredible to find all this coming back to me now. After so many years,’ said Blom.

‘Markus Happonen,’ said Joentaa. ‘And Kalevi Forsman.’

Once again there was a brief silence, and then Blom said, ‘Two other students in our class. Happonen was an arrogant character. Tall and rather overweight, but so self-confident that no one would ever have thought of teasing him about it. Forsman was rather unobtrusive, but he was friends with Happonen, I think, because they both lived in the same street and had known each other since their early childhood.’

‘Was there anything going on between them and Saara Koivula? You wrote in the school magazine that Forsman had . . . liked her.’

‘Yes, yes, they both did . . . but so did everyone. There was nothing serious about it.’

Nothing serious, thought Joentaa.

‘I don’t understand exactly what you mean,’ Blom persisted. ‘Logically, there wouldn’t have been anything going on between a school student and the music teacher.’

‘You say in the magazine that Forsman changed in his last year at school. From being a hanger-on to . . . a ladies’ man.’

‘Yes, I suppose he did. Now that you mention it. He was chasing girls quite a lot in his last year.’

‘Out of desperation, you write.’

‘Desperation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. Well, if you say so. Kalevi really did change, but of course I exaggerated a bit in the magazine . . .’

‘What about Happonen?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did he change as well? In his last year at school?’

Xaver Blom said nothing for a while, and then said, ‘No. Not at all, as far as I remember. He was top of the class right to the end, and rather full of himself all along. And since we’re talking like this in the middle of the night, I can tell you a little secret of my own . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t really like him, because I was only the second-best.’

‘Hmm,’ said Joentaa.

‘Well, it’s out now, after . . . after twenty-five years . . . ?’

‘Twenty-five years,’ Joentaa agreed.

‘And you’re sure that you . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘. . . that you really are a police detective?’

‘I am,’ said Joentaa.

‘Mhm. Is it . . . is it about Markus, then? I mean, he died.’

‘Yes,’ said Joentaa. ‘It’s about him too.’

‘Crazy . . . I mean that was a strange story,’ said Blom. ‘What happened to Markus.’

Indeed, thought Joentaa.

‘But what does Kalevi have to do with it? And the music teacher?’

‘Does the name Miettinen mean anything to you? Jarkko Miettinen?’

‘No. Who’s he?’

‘A gardener living in Karjasaari.’

‘Gardener?’

‘Yes.’

‘Means nothing to me at all.’

Joentaa nodded.

‘You really do ask some abstruse questions.’

‘I know,’ said Joentaa. ‘Thank you. Sleep well.’

‘Was that it?’ asked Blom.

‘Almost. I’d like you to look at a photograph. I can send it through to you tomorrow if it’s been digitised by then. What’s your email address?’

Blom told him.

‘Fine. And I’ll be in touch if anything else occurs to me.’

‘Right. Well . . . it’s been a pleasure.’

‘Oh, one more thing. What’s your profession these days?’

‘I run an auditors’ office in Laappeenranta.’

‘Thanks. I really am grateful, you’ve given me a great deal of help.’

‘That’s good, then,’ said Blom.

Joentaa put his phone down and sat in the silence. He was trying to pin down ideas that seemed to be hovering in the air, unanchored. Disreputable, naive, desperate. And sad. And disreputable wasn’t the right word. Yet in a way it was. Or how had Blom meant that? So nice that you thought she wouldn’t give you the brush-off.

He logged into the Internet, and then sat motionless for several minutes, looking at the latest message from
veryhotlarissa
.

He read it, and thought:

The budding writer had become an auditor.

The boy who was top of the class had become a politician.

The politician’s friend had become a software adviser.

A long-forgotten moment had become a photograph.

He thought of Westerberg, and the relish with which he always said: software adviser.

He read Larissa’s message again.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Seven years ago I worked with a woman from the Czech Republic. She was eighteen years old, and her boyfriend always brought her to work. If I’d told her that the man was no friend of hers, she wouldn’t have understood me. She worked from ten in the morning to two at night. After several months she had a kind of breakdown and was taken away from the house. I’ve just been looking for her on the Internet, and I saw that she is now working in Helsinki under the same name. The pictures are the same as well, although she’s seven years older now. Presumably her boyfriend is still the same too. Oh well, I’m hardly telling you anything you don’t know already about this trade.

I don’t know why, but I thought of her when I read the message you sent me. ‘We don’t talk about what happened. Everything’s the same as usual.’ You want to find R., but I’m sure you know that already. You’re a clever guy, dear Kimmo.

Kimmo Joentaa read the message. Then he read it again. And then again. After reading it five times he finally worked out what was subliminally occupying his mind, something to be read between the lines. A Czech girl of eighteen who was now seven years older. That meant that Larissa herself – and at least he knew that she had been twenty-six on 15 April – had been only eighteen when she had begun working in that trade . . . or even younger.

15 April. Larissa’s birthday.

He looked at the last line. Should he read affection or irony into it?

Probably both.

He wrote a short answer, turned off the computer and then the light.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Dear Larissa,

I’m thinking of you.

If the giraffe has gone to sleep, wake it up.

61

ON THE MORNING
of 16 December Lassi Anttila, store detective and cleaner in the big shopping centre, had a very odd experience, one which was to occupy his mind for the rest of his life.

Around ten o’clock he was sitting in the fast-food restaurant in the shopping centre, drinking a coffee, when he saw his own face on the TV screen hanging over the counter. The sound was turned down, so that Lassi Anttila couldn’t hear the words accompanying the picture; all he saw was himself the way he must once have looked, an eternity ago.

He got up and moved closer to the TV screen, looking to the right and left of him at the bored, abstracted faces staring at the TV without identifying the man on the screen with the man standing right beside them.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Mervi, the thin young waitress behind the counter, and followed his gaze to the screen, which was still showing the photograph. Anttila wanted to ask her to turn the volume up, but he bit back the words. A memory was vaguely beginning to surface.

‘Lassi, you look as if you’d seen a ghost,’ said Mervi, turning away.

Hadn’t she recognised him either? Obviously not, as she was now busy with the coffee machine, entirely unmoved.

He propped himself on the counter, and for a little while watched Mervi going about her work, which she accompanied with muttered curses, because it seemed that one of the levers wasn’t functioning.

‘Can I help?’ asked Anttila. He heard his own voice faintly, as if it were coming from a distance. Mervi’s reply, on the other hand, sounded unnaturally close.

‘You, help? That’d be something new,’ she said.

‘What would?’

‘You helping anyone. Of your own free will. Something new, like I said.’

He looked at Mervi, and thought of the photograph. A newsreader was now talking on-screen. The photo. Of course Mervi hadn’t recognised him. He wouldn’t have recognised himself if he hadn’t known that he had once been that man. Sunburned, early thirties. They had trimmed the picture to leave out his bare chest. And the others who had been standing there with him. A hint of Lake Saimaa in the background, but it could be the sky. Maybe he had only seen Lake Saimaa in the background because he knew that it must be there.

He remembered that photo. He also remembered the day it had been taken.

‘Hellooo, Laassii.’

He jumped.

‘You were going to help? With the coffee machine?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you remember? You offered only a few seconds ago.’

‘Oh, yes. S . . . sorry.’

He cast another glance at the screen as he went behind the counter. An American soap opera was being shown now. A big-busted blonde was wriggling out of the embrace of a man who looked like Barbie’s boyfriend Ken. Had they really just shown his own face on TV?

‘The lever’s sticking,’ said Mervi.

He put his hand on the lever and wondered whether he had imagined the whole thing. He had once heard that everyone suffered from hallucinations at least once in his life. A professor had said so in some documentary, and he ought to have known. Everything was in working order again behind the counter, and Mervi clapped her hands.

‘That’s great!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The lever. Working again.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and took his hand off the machine, which was making gurgling sounds.

‘Thanks, Lassi.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he murmured.

He went through the wide concourse, rode down the escalator and went into his office, which was really more of a small cubbyhole near the underground car park. He sat down at the table and for several moments watched the images flickering on both monitors. The labyrinthine gangway system of the big supermarket. The lingerie department of the women’s fashions store. The large hall of the specialist electrical goods store, with light pulsing through it. All seen from a bird’s-eye view.

He thought of the others. Of Happonen. He’d gone in for politics. And had been murdered. But that had nothing to do with him. They surely couldn’t be looking for him in connection with little Happonen. Little Happonen, little Forsman, that’s what they had called the two of them at the time, although they had been sixteen or seventeen years old. All the same. Little kids. Happonen had cried like . . . like a baby on the day when that bad thing happened.

But that wasn’t why his picture was on TV now. It couldn’t be possible that what happened in the dim and distant past . . .

He thought of Jarkko Miettinen. He’d really liked him, but after . . . what happened everything had somehow fallen apart, everything was cancelled out. It had taken some time for them to realise it, but then he had begun avoiding Jarkko, and the two kids were busy with very different things, and one day, in late autumn or early winter, Risto had dropped in to see him, stood in the doorway smiling, and said goodbye.

He remembered that now. The scene was vividly present to his mind’s eye, although only an hour ago he hadn’t known he had any memory of it at all.

‘So long,’ Risto had said, and he hadn’t really known what he could say in reply. Then Risto had gone to his car, and in the light of the street lamp he had seen her on the passenger seat. Saara. She had been sitting upright without moving, and when Risto had started the engine and turned the car, she had seen him and raised her arm. As if to wave to him.

He had thought about that again and again, for several months, that raising of her arm. What she might have been trying to express by it. And then that last memory had faded too, and the next summer had been a very different one, and so had the summer after that.

Years ago, when he heard in passing of Jarkko Miettinen’s illness, it had left him cold. And he had only recently discovered that the kid Happonen had become a politician, that was when the poor man was murdered for reasons that, frankly, interested him very little.

And as for the other kid . . . he could barely remember his name. Or could he? Kalevi. Kalevi So-and-So. That was all. Whatever Kalevi So-and-So was doing these days, it was of no importance to him whatsoever.

He looked at the hands of his watch moving forward for a few minutes. Then he got to his feet and took the escalator up, back into daylight. He made purposefully for the large electrical goods store.

There was ski jumping now on the TV screens, large and small. Quietly, but still audibly, he heard the commentator’s voice, which was highly agitated because a Finn had just been disqualified for too wide an acceleration. A little later a presenter and a former Olympics medal-winner analysed the state of the contest after the first round, and when the break came the presenter said goodbye, smiling, and gave way to the news.

The newsreader was the same. The news was the same. The photo was the same.

Lassi Anttila stood in the centre of a huge room, surrounded by flickering screens showing himself.

He felt his legs beginning to give way, but he forced himself to stay standing, and stared at one of the many screens, a particularly wide, expensive one, while the newsreader read out the text that went with the picture showing him as a young man.

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on what the newsreader was saying, which wasn’t easy, because the sound was turned down and the confused voices of the customers in the store were loud, and because a number of confused thoughts were going through his head.

The police are asking for the cooperation of the public, said the newsreader. Anyone who recognises the man in the photograph is requested to call the phone number at the bottom of the screen. Sought as a witness in connection with the murder of the politician Markus Happonen.