Silence Read online

  However that might be, he was sure that Kimmo would take care not to arrive too early today. Indeed, if he knew Kimmo, he’d be in particularly late, just to give Ketola the space on his last day to do whatever he needed to in the empty office, maybe compose his mind, think quietly.

  Ketola chuckled softly as he strode through the snow, which was falling more thickly now. He liked Kimmo, the man’s integrity or whatever you liked to call it was rather overpowering, the way he took everything so damn seriously … but he really did like him and over two whole years now he had toyed with the thought of talking to Kimmo at greater length, some time, about his wife’s death, because he couldn’t shake off the feeling that, calm as he might seem, the death of his wife was sending him crazy. And Ketola knew his way around with crazy people, particularly young ones.

  He greeted the man at the gate, as he did every morning, with a nod, and the man behind the glass pane nodded back. If he wasn’t very much mistaken, he and the man behind the pane had greeted each other daily in the same way for years, without ever exchanging a word. He’d have to think some more about that later, but for now he really couldn’t remember a single conversation.

  Ketola took the lift up to the third floor and went along the dark corridor to his office. He switched on the light, sat down at his desk and started the computer A brand-new machine, state of the art, although its predecessors had worked perfectly well and, above all, after much practice, Ketola had been able to use its operating system.

  However, management had been so proud of their investment that they had placed a long article in the daily paper. Nurmela had posed readily and quite convincingly in front of one of the new machines, although he was the only member of the team who understood even less about modern technology than Ketola himself. And Tuomas Heinonen had shown the impressed woman journalist what you could do with these computers and this perfectly interlinking system, because Heinonen was very knowledgeable about such things and had often come to the rescue when Ketola’s screen blacked out, or error messages came up, and had been remarkably patient about it.

  For Nurmela’s sake, Ketola had joined the training sessions given by self-important IT experts, although everyone knew that he wouldn’t be working with the new computers for more than a few weeks. He chuckled again as he remembered those training seminars, because he had let himself go a little there, sometimes cracking jokes like a child in lessons at school, and once he had even rocked his chair back and forth for so long that he fell rather heavily to the floor.

  Heinonen, who had been sitting beside him, had jumped, Petri Grönholm had roared with laughter, even the ever-serious Kimmo had grinned, and finally the speaker had shut up for a couple of seconds and stared at him as if he were an extraterrestrial.

  At his age you could allow yourself these little flights of fancy, thought Ketola. After all, he didn’t want to know all this stuff and he felt almost a little dizzy at the idea of what was being said about him in the corridors of this building.

  All the little symbols were now lighting up on the screen against a deep blue background, the manufacturer’s default setting. All the others had found different screen savers for their new monitors. Heinonen had a sunny beach, Grönholm had a picture of the Finnish ice hockey star who played successfully in the North American professional league and Kimmo Joentaa had a picture of a red church in front of blue water.

  Whenever Ketola saw this picture he felt a pang, and to be honest it seemed almost an imposition to have to look at it more or less deliberately every day. Kimmo’s wife was buried in the graveyard between the red church and the sea. Ketola had been there on the day of the funeral. The fact that Kimmo had chosen a picture of that church as his screen saver brought up certain questions. For instance, what was really going on inside the man? How was anyone to get over an experience like that if he sat facing it day after day? Ketola couldn’t make it out.

  He sat there leaning back for a while, looking out of the window. It was as dark as ever and snowflakes were settling on the pane, visibly blurring into a soft, white mass.

  When Ketola looked at the situation properly, he didn’t have much business here any more. He had cleared his desk last week, taking away what he wished to keep and throwing out the rest. He had wanted to avoid spending his last day in a burst of frantic activity and winding up in a gloomy or irritated mood. There hadn’t been much anyway, strictly speaking only a shoebox full of stuff, which he couldn’t claim had any deep meaning for him.

  And of course Ketola wasn’t planning to work today. He had spent most of the last few weeks showing his successor the ropes. Paavo Sundström was a colleague from Helsinki whom Ketola by now considered a very difficult but not unlikeable man, with qualities that, he hoped, would yet come to light. If he’d only been one of the ambitious careerist kind – but no, Sundström was only ten years younger than Ketola himself and his most striking characteristic was a sense of humour that could at the very least be called odd, bordering as it did on cynicism and sometimes going too far even for Ketola. Sundström was a tall, angular man with hair receding at the temples, a man of outwardly impressive appearance, and Ketola suspected that certain philistines had already interpreted that as a talent for leadership. And Ketola had to admit that Sundström did seem to have taken a certain amount of trouble with the results he had delivered in the first few weeks. The rest of it was only Ketola’s initial and perhaps slightly prejudiced impression.

  Ketola stood up, or rather suddenly jumped up, he had no idea why. To shake off his thoughts about Sundström, or just because he felt a little restless. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come in even earlier than usual today. He’d have done better to come in around midday, or even not until Nurmela was beginning his speech. He would have listened for fifteen minutes, said goodbye and made off.

  He wondered whether to do just that. He still had plenty of time to drive home, go back to bed – he really was tired now – and considerably later, when the occasion was almost over, he’d thank Nurmela for his kind words and say his final goodbyes in short order.

  But he decided against that, and the reason was an idea that took shape instantly. A good deal later Ketola kept wondering why that distant idea had come into his mind just then. It must have been something to do with the shoebox and the stuff in it, or the snow settling on the dark windowpane that he was staring at when the thought occurred to him. A thought about something he had forgotten long ago, and that was the moment when Kimmo Joentaa came into the office.

  ‘Hello,’ Ketola heard him say.

  He raised his arm, studied Kimmo’s questioning glance and said, ‘There’s something I have to look for.’

  He set off, leaving Kimmo where he was.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Kimmo called after him, and at first Ketola wasn’t going to answer the question, but then he turned and said, ‘Yes, maybe you could. Come along. I want to find something.’

  They went downstairs quickly, in silence, and Ketola muttered, more to himself than to Kimmo, ‘It was before your time, ages ago …’

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kimmo nod and quickened his pace, because this was something that he wanted to get over and done with now that he’d thought of it. It was a case that had been waiting to be cleared up … oh, for almost exactly thirty years.

  ‘Must be thirty years ago,’ he murmured. ‘No, thirty-two … thirty-three years.’

  Kimmo nodded.

  ‘Crazy …’ said Ketola.

  The Central Archive of the department was on the first floor and filled three large, interconnecting rooms furnished with extreme austerity. At the white desk in the first room sat a young man whom Ketola had never seen before, presumably a temporary assistant.

  ‘We’re looking for something,’ said Ketola and appeared to be waiting for the man to hand it to them.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ asked the young archivist.

  ‘A … well, a kind of model.’

  The young man nodded vaguely.


  ‘A model. From a case dating back thirty-three years.’

  The young man nodded again.

  ‘It was 1974. The time of the football World Cup, so it must have been 1974.’

  ‘That’s quite a while ago,’ said the young man.

  ‘Tell me, do you work here?’ asked Ketola.

  ‘I …’

  ‘I mean do you have a regular job here or are you just temping? Because if so you may not know where we can find it in the archives.’

  ‘No, no, I’ve been working here for … oh, three weeks now. It’s my probationary period.’

  ‘Hm, well,’ muttered Ketola. ‘Where’s Päivi? She’s usually in charge here.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I … Päivi’s on holiday, so this is my first week on my own.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ketola. ‘Right, listen carefully. The case was thirty-three years ago, and back then the technicians made a model, a kind of … well, a kind of model railway without the railway.’ Having managed to come up with this explanation, Ketola breathed a sigh of relief, but the young man was no use at all and just sat there looking gormless.

  ‘Understand? We’re looking for a model, a rectangular plastic model. Where might a thing like that be?’

  At least the lad appeared to be thinking about it now.

  ‘Any idea?’ asked Ketola.

  ‘Well, thirty-three years, that’s …’

  ‘A long time ago?’ Ketola helped him out.

  ‘Yes, we don’t really have anything much up here, certainly not a model, anything like that. Downstairs there just might be …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a room down there full of all sorts of stuff, Päivi hates the place, it’s kind of our lumber room …’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Because it’s all jumbled up and none of it means anything any more.’

  ‘Then let’s go down there now.’

  ‘Well … but I can’t leave the archives here.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Ketola.

  ‘Er, Antti. Antti Lappeenranta.’

  Ketola was suddenly in high good humour, he almost felt like joking. He took out his official ID – perhaps for the last time ever, it occurred to him – held it in front of the lad’s nose and said, ‘Antti Lappeenranta, I’m arresting you on suspicion of who cares what? Anyway, you’re in custody. Follow me.’ Then he went ahead, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that Kimmo and the baffled youth were following him.

  They took the lift down to the basement, which couldn’t be reached in any other way, because the stairs ended at a door to which no one ever seemed to have had a key.

  ‘After you,’ said Ketola when they were down in the basement, and the young archivist led them to a room that really was remote, even in this basement storey, and was in fact large, but in relation to the quantity of stuff it contained it was decidedly small.

  Ketola stared in amazement and Kimmo said, ‘Hm.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ the young man agreed.

  The room was stacked high with several strata of cardboard cartons, some of them open and showing that they contained file folders in varying states of grubbiness and assorted fading colours. Similar folders stood or lay on shelves, old office machines were crammed close together along the walls of the room: copiers, printers, overhead projectors. Ketola could smell the dust that had sealed everywhere and, still in a mood for joking, he suggested, ‘Päivi might clear up in here when she gets a moment.’

  ‘Mm, well, it’s only for the time being because we … I mean the archives … well, I wasn’t there at the time, but Päivi told me they had to make space, so they took stuff down here that wasn’t so important any more. Soon a lot of it’s going to be thrown out entirely.’

  ‘Of course. So where’s my model?’

  ‘Er … well, if it’s anywhere at all, it would be here.’

  Kimmo was already forging a path through the cardboard cartons. He stopped in the middle of the room and asked, ‘How big is it, then? I mean, how long and how wide?’

  Ketola thought about it. ‘I’d say it was about the size of a small table. And it’s on wheels.’

  ‘Wheels?’ asked the young archivist.

  ‘Yes, we kept pushing it from the office to the conference room and back. It’s on wheels. A table on wheels.’

  Kimmo went over to the machinery pushed back against the walls, some of the items covered with white cloths. Ketola followed him and stumbled over a carton as Kimmo called, ‘Here!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think this is it.’ Kimmo stepped aside to give Ketola a view of the model he had been looking for. Ketola was still standing on the carton, half dazed. He straightened up and saw the plastic rectangle. Ketola sighed at the sight before him; he merely heard himself sighing, although he didn’t know where inside him the sound came from and couldn’t interpret its meaning.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ he said and went closer. He stood there for a while and was consciously trying to absorb every detail. He still didn’t understand why he had suddenly been so keen to find this model, because he had forgotten the case long ago.

  ‘That’s it,’ he repeated. By now the young archivist had joined them. They looked at the model in silence for a while. It depicted a yellow field, an avenue of trees carefully glued in position and a grey bicycle path fenced off from the two-lane road, which was also grey. The whole thing was made of cardboard and plastic, even the fences beside the road had been marked in and, although the sun was missing, the model showed that it was intended to capture a moment in a summer’s day. A plastic bicycle lay in the plastic field and a red car stood at the roadside. The model was as detailed as Ketola had remembered it.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the archivist.

  ‘A model,’ said Ketola without looking up. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the young man nod vaguely. Kimmo stood there motionless.

  ‘It was a murder case. The murder of a girl,’ said Ketola. ‘I’d only just started here when it happened. She was raped and murdered in that field, very close to her parents’ house. We never caught the murderer.’

  The young man nodded again. Kimmo still didn’t move.

  The girl was not in the picture. They hadn’t found her until a good deal later when she wasn’t a girl any more.

  ‘I’d really forgotten the case. I’ve no idea why I thought of it today of all days. A few months later, just after we’d finally found the girl, the CID officer leading the enquiries insisted on having this model made. He thought it would help us to see the full picture. We were getting nowhere and it sent him half out of his mind.’

  ‘So the case was never solved?’ asked the archivist.

  Ketola nodded. ‘The man in charge at the time is dead now,’ he said.

  ‘What make of car is it?’ asked the archivist, pointing to the small red car.

  ‘Hmm …’ said Ketola. The small red car that they’d never found. The most important part of the picture. It caught your eye at once. By now the small car must be a lump of scrap metal, or even less. In fact that was for sure.

  Maybe it had never existed anyway, because the witness who saw the car was a little boy who had been cycling along the parallel bicycle path on the other side of the road at around noon on that day thirty-three years ago.

  No, they had never found the small red car. On the other hand they had found the girl; they’d fished her out of a lake. One of the divers threw up immediately after they pulled her out, and Ketola and a colleague had broken the news to the girl’s mother.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to the families of murder victims, but he had never seen the life go right out of someone’s eyes before. Like everyone else, Ketola had expected that the girl would be found dead some time, and the mother too must have taken her daughter’s death for granted, but during the seconds when his late colleague spoke the words Ketola had seen the woman’s life end in a way that he could never have described to anyone.<
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  ‘I see,’ said the archivist, when Ketola’s silence had lasted a long time.

  ‘I’d like to take it with me,’ said Ketola. ‘Give me a hand, would you?’

  They carried the model through the basement to the lift and, once on the next floor up, they carried it past the intrigued doorman and out into the driving snow. With some difficulty they got it into the boot of Ketola’s car. As they turned back to the building, Ketola realized that he hadn’t answered the archivist’s question about the red car, but as the young man didn’t ask again, Ketola left it unanswered. He didn’t want to discuss the subject. The important thing was that he had just stowed the plastic and cardboard model away in his boot, and as for why he had done it, he’d have plenty of time to think about that later, when today was over.

  ‘Okay, then,’ said the archivist, when the lift door opened on the first floor.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ said Ketola.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ replied the archivist, sketching a clumsy goodbye wave and returning to his work station, while Ketola and Joentaa went up to the third floor.

  Ketola sat down at his desk and resumed looking alternately at the clear blue of his screen, which to his mind was the best kind of background image, and the snow-covered pane of the window. Kimmo sat opposite him and kept his mouth shut, presumably either out of consideration or because his mind was hard at work wondering what on earth was the matter with him, Ketola.

  ‘Chatty today, aren’t you?’ Ketola remarked, realizing that he had never felt so relaxed and in such a humorous mood on any other working day as he did now, on this last day of all.

  ‘I noticed that you didn’t answer that question about the red car, so I thought maybe you didn’t want to talk about it.’