The Winter of the Lions (20 page)

‘What programme?’ asked Grönholm. ‘What audience?’

He looked for the list, updated daily, of all names and contact details of importance for the investigation. But there was no mobile number given for Tuula Palonen.

‘Damn it, I don’t believe this.’

‘What is it, Kimmo?’ asked Grönholm.

‘She has five mobiles, one for each ear,’ said Joentaa.

‘No one has more than two ears, Kimmo.’

‘What?’

‘Two. No one has more than two ears,’ said Grönholm.

He called Sundström’s mobile, and got an answer at once.

‘What is it, Kimmo?’ asked Sundström. Judging by the background noise he was in his car.

‘I’ve been trying to reach Tuula Palonen or one of her colleagues in the editorial office of the
Hämäläinen
show, but no one there is answering the phone.’

‘I’m not surprised. They’re all busy with this evening’s programme. All sorts of personalities are coming, They’re all twiddling knobs. There’s news. I’m on my way to see Vaasara, Mäkelä’s assistant and partner.’

‘Yes …?’

‘He tried to kill himself.’

Joentaa said nothing. He thought of the weary, monotonous voice on the phone the night when he had called Vaasara.

‘An amateurish effort. He’s doing fine now,’ said Sundström.

‘Oh,’ said Joentaa.

‘Cut his wrists like a woman, then got scared and called the emergency doctor.’

He thought of Leena and the baby, Kalle. Of Patrik Laukkanen, who had told Hämäläinen about Kalle, a proud father even before the baby was born.

‘With the best will in the world I can’t help you to get hold of Tuula Palonen just now,’ said Sundström.

‘But I need something from her. Please would you tell her that …’

‘I won’t be seeing her until this afternoon.’

‘That’s too late. Do you have her mobile number?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t believe this, dammit. I’ll try calling the TV station again. Maybe I can get them to rustle up someone from that editorial department.’

‘What’s all this about, then?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll be in touch later.’

‘Kimmo …’

Joentaa ended the call and immediately rang the TV station’s switchboard. One of the doormen answered and said he’d connect him. Joentaa waited in a queue, hearing classical music. Violins and piano. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kari Niemi come into the office and talk to Grönholm.

The music while he waited never seemed to end, and Grönholm stared at Niemi as if there was something he couldn’t believe.

Joentaa put the phone to one side.

‘Anything new, Kari?’ he asked.

Niemi nodded. ‘We’ve separated the contaminated tracks from the usable ones as far as possible. The boys who found Patrik left their own footprints. Trainers, around size 37. But we were able to distinguish a third tread from the footprints of those two.’

‘Yes?’

‘Trainers again,’ said Niemi. ‘Size 38.’

‘Ah,’ said Joentaa.

‘It was damn difficult, because the treads are almost identical, but if we’re right then the murderer was wearing size 38 shoes.’

Joentaa nodded.

‘The angle of entry of the stab wounds indicates a murderer of normal size, but that shoe size makes us think of a young person or …’

‘Or a woman?’ said Grönholm.

‘Although according to Salomon’s analysis, the wounds were delivered with considerable force,’ said Niemi.

Joentaa nodded. Unmitigated, uncontrolled rage. Going hand in hand with concentration and patience.

A shadow, Hämäläinen had said.

A voice spoke quietly on the telephone lying on the desk. Joentaa picked it up. ‘Hello?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t reach anyone in the editorial department at the moment,’ said the doorman.

‘Do you have a mobile number for Tuula Palonen?’ asked Joentaa.

‘Wait a minute.’

The violins came in again.

Then the doorman was back on the line. ‘No,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ said Joentaa, and he called Sundström’s mobile again.

‘Kimmo?’

‘Some news. Kari is here,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘The tread of those trainers. Size 38.’

‘What?’

‘38.’

‘That’s a child’s size.

‘Not necessarily.’

A shadow, thought Joentaa. He closed his eyes and thought he could see a picture. Hämäläinen lying in the silence of an empty hall, feeling no fear. No flight impulse in Patrik
Laukkanen. Mäkelä went over to a car in the middle of the night and asked if he could help.

‘I’m coming to Helsinki,’ said Joentaa. ‘I’ll be off at once. We need all the photos the TV station has of the talk show on which Patrik and Mäkelä appeared. All the camera angles. I hope they’re still available.’

‘Hm. And why?’ asked Sundström.

‘I think the woman we’re looking for was in the audience.’

COVERING THE PICTURE
with a white cloth. A man is lying under the cloth. The man has one leg. The leg is a stump. The breakfast buffet has an enormous number of dishes.

‘Enjoying your breakfast?’ asks Olli Latvala.

She nods.

‘May I sit down?’ asks Olli Latvala.

‘Yes, of course,’ she says.

‘I’m a little early because we’re running slightly behind time, and I have to go to the station soon to pick up Kapanen. The actor who played Jaws in the latest Bond film.’

‘Oh,’ she says.

Ilmari liked those films. She watched some too, to please him. A perfect world, she always used to think. A simple world, and Ilmari was angry because his enthusiasm amused her. He’d have been interested by the idea of a Finn in the part of the baddie.

‘That looks good. I could do with a little something myself.
I think I’ll slink unobtrusively up to that buffet,’ says Olli Latvala.

She watches him.

Somewhere outside her field of vision people are laughing. They are with her, beside her, above her, below her, but she can’t see them. She only hears their laughter. She tries to laugh with them.

The cloth is lowered and then lifted again. Now she can see the face. The look of the closed eyes.

Olli Latvala comes back and explains the course of the day’s events to her, while he eats scrambled eggs and bacon.

‘You’re fifth in our running order,’ he says. ‘Pencilled in for 21.15 hours, but that could change at short notice.’

She nods.

‘We’ll do it like this: I’ll collect you here at the hotel at 17.00 hours and accompany you until the curtain goes up, so to speak.’

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘It’s only when the show actually begins that I must stay out of sight,’ he says. ‘But you’ll be in the best of hands with Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen.’

She nods.

‘He’s really great, particularly in conversation with people who …’ He stops, and seems to be searching for the right words. ‘Particularly in conversation with people who have had a bad experience.’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘We’re all delighted that he can appear on today’s programme. I’m sure you know about … what happened to him.’

‘Of course,’ she says.

Olli Latvala drains his coffee cup and stands up. ‘I’m always rather jittery on days like this, forgive me. I’ll be off to the station now. You don’t keep actors waiting, especially not when
they have the privilege of going for James Bond’s jugular. We’ll meet at five this afternoon, then?’

She nods.

‘See you later,’ says Olli Latvala, smiling, before he strides across the lobby.

LATE IN THE
afternoon Tuula arrived, bringing Raafael Mertaranta in person.

Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen was standing in the kitchen as Tuula steered the car on to his property. He saw Tuula and Mertaranta climb out, watched them coming towards the house in a flurry of flashlights. Several journalists held microphones over the fence and shouted requests for a short interview.

Hämäläinen went to open the door.

‘Good heavens,’ said Raafael Mertaranta.

‘Fantastic,’ said Tuula, hugging him with a broad smile, before Mertaranta shook his hand fervently and for a long time. The tall man, the very tall man, Irene and the girls were standing in the background.

‘Irene, good to see you,’ said Mertaranta. He went towards her, bent down and sketched a kiss on her hand. ‘Hello, you two,’ he said to the girls.

‘Hello, Raafael,’ said Irene. ‘Hello, Tuula.’

The two women exchanged a brief and distant embrace. The two police officers withdrew quietly into the back part of the house, and Mertaranta asked for coffee as strong as possible.

‘I’ll make coffee for us all,’ said Irene, going into the kitchen.

‘Your … bodyguards?’ asked Mertaranta.

‘What? Oh, yes. So to speak. Come on in,’ said Hämäläinen, leading the way into the living room. ‘Imps, you can go and play anywhere you like.’

The girls ran upstairs. Tuula sat down on the sofa, and Mertaranta dropped into an armchair with a contented sigh. Hämäläinen sat on the second sofa, so that they formed a triangle. In the kitchen, the coffee machine gurgled and hissed.

‘Let me say something,’ said Mertaranta after a few seconds of silence. ‘Let me just say first how enormously glad I am that you’re here, that we can all be together here today. And that I’m proud, really proud, and I mean it when I say that you are the flagship of our TV station.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hämäläinen. He waited for his usual warm reaction, but it didn’t seem to be setting in. It was not unusual for Mertaranta to make such remarks; one of the most pressing duties of the head of a station was to take good care of its star, support him at bad times, and be the first to congratulate him at the moment of triumph. Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen knew that, he had learnt to take it for granted, and he had enjoyed it. But today the good feeling somehow wouldn’t materialise.

‘Thank you,’ he said again, and Irene brought in a white tray on which stood white cups and a white coffee pot with steam rising from it.

They drank coffee. Put their cups down. Then Tuula began explaining the strategy that she and Mertaranta had worked out.

‘Well, here’s how we’ll do it. After this you drive to the TV station with the two policemen. And please don’t look down your nose at me if I say you ought to be smiling.’

‘Smiling,’ said Hämäläinen, without looking down his nose.

‘Yes, smiling. Giving the impression that everything’s all right. And of course you won’t say anything, just get in the car. You’ll keep your mouth shut until the show begins.’

‘Giving the impression that everything’s all right …’

‘And I have just the right opening line for you,’ said Tuula.

‘What would I do without you?’ said Hämäläinen.

Irene cleared her throat and asked if anyone would like more coffee.

‘Yes, please,’ said Mertaranta.

‘It may be rather a strain, I know, to get through it, but we all agree that we … that we want to make as much of an effect as possible,’ said Tuula.

‘Of course,’ said Hämäläinen.

‘What you’re doing today is great, and extraordinary, and we want it to come over like that,’ said Tuula. ‘Right?’

No one raised any objections.

‘Well then, you will get in the car and be driven to the station, where you get out, still acting the same way – smiling, saying nothing – and then you withdraw and the two of us will go over the final schedule for the programme again, and the list of questions. We’ll do without your few words with the guests before the show. Olli Latvala and Margot Lind are briefing them.’

Hämäläinen nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ he said.

Tuula leaned back in relief.

‘Wonderful coffee, Irene,’ said Raafael Mertaranta.

THE SHARP OUTLINE
of the glass tower thrust up against the pale blue sky. Kimmo Joentaa entered the building through the broad swing doors. One of the doormen greeted him and tried to call Tuula Palonen, but she was not in her
office. He tried again and reached one of her colleagues. After a short conversation the doorman ended the call and said, ‘He’s just coming. You can wait in the cafeteria.’

‘Thank you,’ said Joentaa. He went through another door into the large hall. The place where Hämäläinen had been stabbed was still secured by a barrier of yellow tape, and looked a little like something in an exhibition, or an artist’s installation with some indefinable meaning. He went past it, on to the cafeteria, and sat down at an empty table.

Soon a young man came towards him with quick, purposeful footsteps. ‘Olli Latvala,’ he said. ‘You must be the gentleman from the police?’

‘Yes. Kimmo Joentaa.’

‘I don’t think we’ve met before.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been busy for the last few days with plans for the annual retrospective. That’s why I’m also pretty busy at the moment. You want to speak to Tuula Palonen?’

‘Yes. Although maybe you could help me just as well,’ said Joentaa.

‘Sure, if I can.’

‘It’s about the show with Harri Mäkelä and Patrik Laukkanen, the forensic pathologist.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’d like to see any recorded material available. I’m particularly interested in the audience.’

‘The audience?’

‘Yes, there’s always a camera turned on the audience, isn’t there? To catch their reactions.’

‘Ah … yes, of course.’

‘Is that material available? Will it be in the archives somewhere?’

‘Er … you may laugh, but I have no idea. I’m responsible for preparations for the show and assessment of it afterwards.
In between, the programme itself is in other hands. I’d have to ask the director, or the cutter responsible.’

‘That would be kind of you. It’s rather urgent. And one more question: are the names of the audience for a given show on record?’

‘Er …’

‘I mean, are there lists of their names?’

‘Well, no. Unless we’ve specially asked someone to come. In that case we have the records because we send the tickets for the show by post. But anyone can turn up spontaneously and ask if there’s still space in the studio.’

‘Good. I’d very much like to see any such lists.’

‘I understand. I tell you what, you have a cup or two of coffee here while I try to dig up any material.’