The Winter of the Lions Read online

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Larissa.

  She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in the quilt, and Kimmo Joentaa felt a surge of relief and happiness because she was there, and he wondered why.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said.

  She sat down at the table opposite him.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea too?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Peppermint okay?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  They sat opposite each other, and he began talking about Laukkanen. And Leena. She just nodded, and did not seem greatly impressed.

  ‘Not that expert pathologist on TV, was he?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That forensic pathologist who was on Hämäläinen.’

  ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

  ‘Hämäläinen’s chat show, there were these two characters on it a little while ago. One of them was a forensic pathologist, the other was a make-up artist or a puppet-maker or whatever you call the people who make those puppets for TV, dead bodies for films.’

  ‘Yes …?’ said Joentaa, still at sea.

  ‘It was about those puppets, and how they’re made to look very like the real thing, and the forensic guy said dead bodies can give the investigating officers important clues to their murderers, and he illustrated it with the puppets.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘You’re the policeman around here, you ought to know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Yes … in principle,’ said Joentaa, and now he vaguely remembered that Heinonen and Grönholm had been talking about it. How forensic medicine was going to be discussed on Hämäläinen’s chat show. For some reason or other they’d thought it hilariously amusing. Had they mentioned Patrik Laukkanen? He had followed the conversation only with half an ear, wondering what the hilarity was all about.

  ‘I hated that bit of the show,’ said Larissa.

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘I don’t remember just why, but something about the show really upset me,’ she said.

  Joentaa decided to ask Heinonen and Grönholm about the Hämäläinen chat show when he got the chance, although it presumably had nothing to do with the murder investigation.

  14

  WHEN KIMMO JOENTAA woke in the morning Larissa was up already. He heard the water rushing in the shower. After a while she came in and said she was going back to work today. He lay in bed sleepily thinking of what she had just said.

  ‘You mean …’ he said, as she looked for her clothes.

  ‘Back to work. Doing my job,’ she said. ‘The clients start getting their act together again on the last day of the holiday.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘Would it be okay if I drop by this evening?’ she asked.

  Joentaa looked at her for a while, and nodded again. He was trying to work something out in his mind as she dressed. Something he wanted to ask her.

  ‘See you later,’ she said, and went out.

  He sat up straight and motionless in bed as the front door closed.

  He drove to Turku. He was late getting there. The darkness was slowly retreating before another picture postcard day. Sunlight fell through the branches of the trees, and the newly fallen snow looked like candyfloss. The road was broad and empty.

  He turned left into the narrow street leading to the police station, and passed the low, long building that housed the Forensic Institute, just after the Accident and Emergency hospital. As he slowed down he thought he could see the silhouette of Salomon Hietalahti through one of the windows. Salomon was talking to a woman forensic officer. Today Patrik Laukkanen, who had been head of this institute only a couple of days ago, was one of the cases his colleagues had to deal with. He wondered who would carry out the autopsy, and his mind dwelt vaguely on what Larissa, or whatever her name was, had told him about the Hämäläinen chat show. He drove on.

  When he got into the office Tuomas Heinonen and Petri Grönholm were already sitting at their computers. If they had been surprised to arrive before him this morning for once, they didn’t let it show.

  Sundström came out of the next room. ‘You’re late, Kimmo,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d say there was a new woman in your life.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Joentaa.

  Heinonen and Grönholm murmured morning greetings. Kimmo thought of Tuomas Heinonen sitting in his house like a human question mark on the night when Larissa appeared in the doorway. He looked at him, and caught a glance that was difficult to interpret. He thought he saw a small smile on his face. Even that night Kimmo had felt that Heinonen, curious as the whole thing might seem to him, was glad to see he had a ‘new woman in his life’, but perhaps in view of his own problems Heinonen hadn’t had an eye for detail.

  Joentaa returned the smile and thought of Boxing Day and the English Football League; then he thought of Patrik Laukkanen again, and Salomon Hietalahti who would probably carry out the autopsy. He sat down at his desk and started the computer. He tried to meet Heinonen’s eyes again, but Heinonen’s head was lowered and he was staring at his monitor.

  ‘Meeting in the conference room at 14.30 hours,’ said Sundström. ‘The other officers who’ll be drawn into this investigation will be there as well. By then, anyway, I’d like to have something substantial about Laukkanen’s private circumstances available. Okay?’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘Kimmo, I’d like you to go out and see Leena Jauhiainen again. I called her; she seems to be a little better. She’s drawn up a list of all Patrik’s important contacts, so we already have that.’

  Joentaa nodded. Private contacts. Professional contacts. What had he liked? What had scared him? Where had he succeeded, where had he had problems? Whom did he admire, whom did he hate? Things that hadn’t mattered at all when Laukkanen had still been alive.

  Sundström handed round printouts of the list to everyone. A neatly drawn up document, names, contact dates. Joentaa imagined Leena sitting at the computer writing it. While the baby slept and her life had come off its hinges.

  ‘I’ve divided them up between you. By midday I want everyone to be able to contribute something about the contacts he’s covering,’ said Sundström.

  ‘Right,’ said Petri Grönholm.

  ‘It wouldn’t be a bad notion to get some idea of any motive for murder very quickly,’ finished Sundström.

  Joentaa thought again of the conversation he had had with Larissa in the middle of the night. ‘Was it really Patrik on Hämäläinen’s chat show a little while ago?’

  Sundström didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.

  ‘Yes,’ said Grönholm. ‘It was rather good.’

  Heinonen nodded. ‘Is that important?’

  ‘Probably not. It’s just that I was … someone asked me about it, and didn’t know for sure if it had been Patrik or someone else from Forensics.’

  ‘Is anyone going to tell me what this is all about?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Patrik Laukkanen was on the Hämäläinen chat show. He did very well, got laugh after laugh,’ said Heinonen.

  ‘I must have missed it,’ said Sundström.

  ‘He really was good. Surprisingly witty, quick off the mark with the repartee,’ said Grönholm.

  ‘Aha,’ said Sundström.

  ‘It probably isn’t important,’ said Joentaa.

  He drove to the outskirts of Turku and the attractive residential area on the Klosterberg where Patrik Laukkanen had lived in the pastel orange house. He sat opposite Leena Jauhiainen, who was holding the baby in her arms and told him that the tablets had helped. ‘First I felt tired, then it was like being weightless. Amazing what those little white pills can do,’ she said.

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘I hope the effects will last for a while. I must go very easy on the tablets while I’m still breastfeeding.’

  They sat in silence for some time. Then he began asking questions. Leena seemed t
o be concentrating and at the same time somewhere far away as she answered them, and Joentaa got to know a new side of Patrik Laukkanen. The Laukkanen who had loved classical music and was an enthusiastic dancer – 1989 classical dance champion of Finland.

  ‘We met out dancing. At one of the competitions. I thought at first he … well, swung the other way. It’s not unusual in that line. Luckily I was wrong.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘Oh, how wrong I was!’ she said, with a little smile. The baby started crying, and Leena began feeding him. Kimmo Joentaa thought of the Laukkanen he had known, the efficient Laukkanen who talked fast and to the point, and seemed to have no time to do anything but look death in the face. But then, during autopsies, there was an aura of calm composure about him that had almost frightened Joentaa.

  When he left the baby had gone to sleep, and Leena stood in the doorway to see him off. The world beyond the windscreen was sunny and white, and from the first the meeting in the conference room was dominated by Sundström’s principle of the utmost possible efficiency and clarity, which was in stark contrast to the fact that there weren’t even the beginnings of a lead to any explanation of Patrik Laukkanen’s death. Twelve CID officers were present along with eight uniformed police officers, conscripted for the early phase of the case.

  When Joentaa, in the course of his report, mentioned that Patrik Laukkanen had been a good dancer, most of the others present laughed. And when, in the hope of putting a stop to the laughter, he pointed out that Laukkanen had been good enough to win the Finnish championship, it became hilarious mirth, but then it died away abruptly when everyone realised that they were laughing at a colleague who wasn’t alive any more.

  Around 15.30 Sundström suggested a break, and Heinonen, who was sitting next to Joentaa, rushed out of the room as if he had been just waiting for that moment.

  ‘Everything okay?’ asked Joentaa when Heinonen came back.

  ‘Yes, yes. They’re two hours behind us, but it’ll soon be kick-off.’

  Joentaa looked enquiringly at him.

  ‘The matches. Boxing Day. Kick-off any time now,’ said Heinonen, looking at his watch again. Joentaa followed the direction of his gaze: 13.37 hours. Heinonen had put his watch back to British local time.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ he whispered as they went back into the conference room. His gaze was abstracted, as if focused on some distant point, like Leena Jauhiainen’s that morning in the orange house.

  ‘Who did you bet on?’ asked Joentaa.

  Heinonen was leafing aimlessly through his papers, and didn’t seem to have heard him.

  ‘Tuomas …’

  ‘What? Sorry.’

  ‘Who did you bet on? Can’t wish you luck without knowing who I’m crossing my fingers for.’

  ‘Manchester United. To win away,’ said Heinonen.

  Joentaa nodded, and Heinonen stared at him. ‘Wish me luck,’ he said again, and Joentaa felt an urge to ask Heinonen the question that was really on his mind – how much had he bet on the match?

  Sundström cleared his throat and asked Kari Niemi to sum up the results from the scene of the crime so far. For the first time that day a mood of confidence and a certain readiness for action could be felt, as Niemi told them that the number of clues found at the scene was surprisingly large.

  ‘We found just about everything you might expect to find. Fibres from the murderer’s clothes on the clothing of the … on what Patrik was wearing. The kids who found him contaminated the scene of the crime, but all the same what we’ve been able to assess so far allows us to say that Patrik was attacked not, as we first assumed, from behind but from in front. Anterior wounds. And it looks as if he didn’t try to avoid the killer until the last moment.’

  Kari Niemi looked down at his notes, and in the tense silence Paavo Sundström asked, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘A reconstruction like that is always speculative, but our assumption agrees with Salomon Hietalahti’s first analysis after examination of the angle of the stab wounds. And in spite of the contamination it’s certain that the struggle between murderer and victim was confined to a very small area. There’s no indication that Patrik made any attempt to change direction. Which would suggest that the murderer didn’t set off any early flight impulse in him.’

  Sundström nodded for a while. ‘Thanks, that’s interesting,’ he said at last.

  ‘So that’s as far as we’ve gone at present,’ said Niemi. ‘The problem is that we can’t evaluate the clues we have until it’s possible to compare them with the clothes and items carried by a suspect. That means they’re not much use to us at present. And as I said, the two kids trampled all over the scene of the crime and came … came quite close to Patrik’s body before the woman who called us joined them a few minutes later. So we have to separate the tracks left by the children from those that can be said to relate to the crime in order to get a fuller picture.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sundström. ‘But thanks all the same. It’s a start.’

  A little later the meeting broke up, and Sundström issued instructions for the rest of the day. From his office, Joentaa called Salomon Hietalahti, whose voice sounded very far away as he talked about parameters, the direction of the wound channels, and the resistance offered to the stabbing instrument by the victim’s clothing, skin and bone structure.

  ‘You see we can never judge these things precisely. But one impression has been confirmed: it seems to have been done in a … a frenzied rage,’ he said.

  Joentaa waited for Hietalahti to expand further on this, but he did not. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘It looks as if he was struck down by an assailant in a state of frenzy. The stab wounds are random, distributed over almost the whole of his torso. Some are superficial, some go deep. It’s like the attack hadn’t been thought out in advance, it was more like sudden fury … do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks, that could be helpful,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I do,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘It doesn’t get me any further, because I can’t imagine anyone who … well, I just can’t imagine it. And I really did know Patrik well,’ said Hietalahti.

  Joentaa had no idea what to say to that. He ended the call, and thought about Patrik Laukkanen and how on earth he could have been the object of such furious frenzy as Salomon had described. Patrik hadn’t tried to get away. The person facing him had not set off any flight instinct.

  He looked across his desk at Tuomas Heinonen, who was concentrating on the screen of his computer and muttering curses from time to time.

  ‘Tuomas?’

  ‘Yes, sorry … I was only taking a quick look.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘They’ve just kicked off. No goals yet,’ said Heinonen.

  15

  ‘I GLIDE OVER the snow, it’s like being on rails,’ she says.

  She smiles apologetically, because she knows that doesn’t answer his question. He seems to be waiting for her to add something more precise.

  ‘I went to see Rauna this afternoon,’ she says.

  He nods.

  ‘It was nice,’ she says.

  ‘It’s a good thing if you can give each other strength,’ he says. ‘But a time may come when Rauna begins to connect you personally with the incident. And then you might not be able to help her any more. It might become more of a burden on her. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Rauna was glad to see me,’ she says.

  ‘I know. I’m just trying to point out that it will take her a long time to work her way through the incident and go through the various stages.’

  The incident, she thinks. How matter-of-fact he sounds when he says it. She likes him. He is clever, but clumsy at the same time. She likes that odd mixture, he sometimes reminds her of Ilmari. They don’t look like each other, but they’re about the same age, and Ilmari too was clever and clumsy. Would Ilmari have described the moment when the sk
y fell in as an incident?

  ‘What good does that do us?’ she asks.

  He waits.

  ‘What good does it do to talk about an incident?’

  He waits a moment, then says, ‘I think it’s important to find a term that creates distance. You need distance before you can begin again.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  He nods.

  ‘Because that’s what you were taught?’

  For a while he says nothing.

  ‘What did you mean when you said you were gliding over the snow as if you were on rails?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s what I’d most like to do. Glide over the snow on rails and put the world to rights,’ she says.

  He waits, but she doesn’t know what else she could say to him.

  ‘Do you understand?’ she asks.

  He nods.

  When she goes out into the cold it is snowing, and Ilmari and Veikko still lie buried under the ruins of the sky.

  16

  WHEN JOENTAA GOT home the house was dark. He opened the door and stood on the threshold for a while.

  ‘Larissa?’ he said softly.

  No reply. He went into the living room, dropped on to the sofa and looked at the little spruce tree beside the picture window for some time. He tried to concentrate on Patrik Laukkanen. On any possible motive for his murder. That was how Sundström had put it. An efficient investigation had been set in motion, there was a conclusive scenario, there were clues that could be assessed, but no sign of what, in most cases, emerges quite early as at least a possibility – there was no indication of the murderer’s motives.

  Joentaa stared at the television screen, at the silhouette of his own body reflected in it, and heard a faint crunching outside and felt a cold draught of air as the front door was opened. He sat there motionless, holding his breath. In the kitchen, the fridge was opened. He heard the clink of a glass, the rushing of water. After a while, someone drawing long breaths. Someone breathing there in his house. He waited.