Silence Read online

  The idea began to feel vague and uncomfortable, and he obviously made some physical move in the effort to shake it off, because Sundström asked, ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Hm?’

  Are you okay? You sort of suddenly twitched,’ explained Sundström.

  ‘No, I’m okay. It was nothing.’

  Sundström nodded and surreptitiously, as if doing something wrong, took another chocolate from the dish. He choked on it when the door opened behind their backs.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Vehkasalo. ‘I’m very sorry; my wife, well, of course she’s very worried. I think … if possible could you speak to her tomorrow? I’m entirely at your disposal myself.’

  ‘Of course. I understand perfectly. I hope your wife will feel a little calmer in the morning. I’d like to clear up just a couple more points and then we’ll be on our way.’

  Vehkasalo nodded and sat down opposite them again.

  ‘What we urgently need is a photograph of your daughter. A recent one if possible. We’ll probably be distributing it to the media as well. A photo that’s … well, as good a likeness as possible, I mean showing her as she looks today. An up-to-date passport photograph would be ideal.’

  Vehkasalo nodded and thought for a moment. He stood up, left the room and soon came back with several photograph albums.

  ‘My wife always puts them straight into albums,’ he murmured, leafing through one of them. ‘They sometimes have group photographs at her school, they take portrait photos as well … yes, here, for instance.’ He handed them a picture showing a girl looking gravely at the camera lens.

  Sundström turned it over. ‘Taken only recently, good,’ he said. ‘Many thanks. We’ll take this away with us, if we may.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Vehkasalo.

  ‘We can talk about everything eke tomorrow,’ said Sundström, rising from the sofa.

  They stood there in silence for a few seconds, then Vehkasalo went ahead of them to the door. ‘I hope you’ll – you’ll find her,’ he said, when they were in the doorway.

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ said Sundström.

  They drove along the urban motorway towards the city centre. Sundström nodded off to sleep several times, waking with a jolt after a few seconds. ‘Terrible,’ he muttered. Joentaa didn’t know whether he meant their conversation with the missing girl’s parents, or his exhaustion, or something else entirely, and he was too tired himself to ask. They parted at the car park outside the police building.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ said Sundström, clapping him on the shoulder.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Kimmo agreed, and got into his car and drove home.

  6

  It was just after one when he parked his car beside the apple tree outside the little house. Sanna’s house. It was and always would be Sanna’s house, and that thought was there every time, waiting for him, evening after evening when he came home. Sometimes it was strongly present, sometimes less so, sometimes it was a good thought, sometimes a painful one, sometimes just a thought, coming and going.

  His house was Sanna’s house. He had lost Sanna for ever. Sanna would be here for ever. It was as simple as that and he couldn’t understand why some people didn’t understand it. What was so odd about the idea?

  He didn’t talk to many people about Sanna and he had never really opened up to anyone, because it was no use. Because he felt he was unable to open up, and didn’t want to either, and it would do him no good. How could he talk to other people about feelings that at heart, and to this day, he himself couldn’t really understand?

  As for the few who were close enough to him to try probing now and then, after a while he left them feeling they were talking to a brick wall. Because he had to indicate that such a conversation would soon come up against barriers that, with the best will in the world, he couldn’t cross. He would suffer a near-allergic reaction when they said things like: you have to look to the future, life must go on some time, it’s all in the past now, that’s what Sanna would have wanted.

  He was indeed looking to the future and life was going on, and he knew what Sanna would have wanted much better than any clever counsellor. It wasn’t his problem if other people wouldn’t believe that, and if they thought looking to the future meant removing everything to do with Sanna from his life they were very much mistaken. He had removed nothing. That had been his first reaction; he had thought he couldn’t live in this house any longer, he had thought he must clear away everything that reminded him of Sanna from cupboards and drawers, but a moment came when he realized that no such plan would ever work.

  He had put everything back in its old place, had spent a weekend restoring everything to the way it used to be when Sanna was alive, and when he sat there in the evening and looked around, he had known that was the right thing to do, and he would come to terms with her death, if he ever did, only in Sanna’s presence.

  His best conversations had been with Kari Niemi, head of forensics. Niemi was in his mid thirties, only a little older than Kimmo himself. They’d never really had much to do with each other in the past, but Kimmo had appreciated Niemi’s very precise and careful work, and liked his unshakeable good humour, even if he also found it irritating.

  Sundström told jokes without ever really laughing, and Kari Niemi was laughing all the time without, so far as Kimmo could remember, ever telling a joke. Behind Niemi’s eternal smile, in Joentaa’s opinion, there was a thoughtful, warm-hearted human being, and Kimmo could talk to him more easily than to anyone else about Sanna. Perhaps because apart from Sanna herself he had never met anyone with whom silence came so easily and who was so good at remaining silent himself. Conversations about Sanna, about her death, about his own life afterwards frequently consisted of silences.

  Joentaa looked at the house. A sunny morning seemed about to dawn behind it, although it was only one thirty and still night. He pulled himself together, got out of the car and walked the short way to the house. He had had to fight off his drowsiness during the drive home, but now he felt wide awake again, and had a sense that he needed to think about several things at the same time. As if he still had something very important to clear up before morning came.

  He went into the kitchen, poured cold milk into a glass, sat down in the living room and stared through the wide window at the lake.

  They hadn’t found anything in that other lake, about an hour’s drive from here at the far end of Turku. Not yet; the divers would go on looking in the morning. Only recently Kimmo had been standing there on the bank of the other lake with Sundström and Grönholm, waiting for the divers to find the body of someone whose name they now knew. Presumably.

  Kimmo put down his glass and realized what was keeping him awake. For the first time that day he found the time to think hard about what had happened. He’d have to talk to Ketola about it in the morning. Ketola might be able to help them. As usual.

  A little while ago, when Grönholm mentioned the possibility of a joke, he had silently agreed. In one way a joke, or whatever you liked to call it, seemed absurd, but in another it was even more absurd to think of a murderer returning to the scene of his crime thirty years later, to commit the same crime again.

  Now that Sinikka Vehkasalo’s disappearance had been confirmed, the joke idea didn’t work. The most likely thing seemed to Joentaa a copycat murderer, whatever the motives of this new murderer thirty-three years on might have been. Maybe he had come upon the idea of the cross, the way it persistently called Pia Lehtinen to mind, and that cross had set something off in him …

  If the murderer really did intend the incidents of the past to run their course again, it would be months before they found the body of Sinikka Vehkasalo, because the search for Pia Lehtinen had also gone on for months. But there the parallel ended, simply on pragmatic grounds: today’s murderer would know that sooner or later they would search the lake that had featured in the old crime, so he had hidden the body somewhere else, in a place that the investigating team wouldn’t
find until considerably later.

  On the other hand, if for whatever reason the murderer wanted to repeat the course of events, reproducing exactly what had happened then, that meant there was a noticeable divergence in one crucial point – always assuming that they didn’t find the corpse in the lake next morning after all.

  Joentaa rose abruptly. His own speculations, leading nowhere, were getting on his nerves, while Ruth and Kalevi Vehkasalo, in their pale green house in Halinen, couldn’t sleep for anxiety about their daughter.

  He turned away from the lake beyond the window, and his eye fell on the two photographs on the bookshelves. They had always stood there, ever since he and Sanna moved in. In the weeks after Sanna’s death Joentaa had removed them, then put them back in their old place a little later.

  Standing in front of them, he looked closely at the photos. One was of Sanna as a small child; the date on the back showed that she had been two years old at the time. Sanna had just knocked a biscuit out of her mother Merja’s hand and the biscuit was flying through the air towards the camera. Merja’s mouth was wide open and Sanna was looking really furious, probably because her mother had told her she couldn’t eat the biscuit without giving her, Merja, a bite. Jussi, Sanna’s father, must have jumped just as he was taking the photo, because the picture was slightly blurred. A wonderful picture. Kimmo felt a smile spreading over his face.

  The other picture had been taken a few months, perhaps only a few weeks, before she was diagnosed with cancer. When everything was still fine. Sanna had just begun working as an architect. The photo showed her standing in front of her desk. Kimmo remembered that she had particularly wanted to have that picture taken and they had sent a print to her parents. Her face showed pride and satisfaction. And the certainty that everything would go on just as well in the future. Kimmo’s glance wandered from one picture to the other, then settled on the little girl knocking a biscuit out of her mother’s hand.

  Sanna.

  Sanna just a metre tall, running, red-cheeked.

  He went into the bathroom, washed, then lay awake on his back for a long time, his eyes open.

  7

  Timo Korvensuo heard Marjatta’s slow, regular breathing as she lay beside him. She had clutched the quilt firmly round her. What a nice evening that had been, she’d said just before dropping off to sleep.

  For a while, Timo Korvensuo had listened to the soft giggling of his children through the open window. Aku and Laura were sleeping in their tent down by the lake. Now their voices, too, had died away and all he could hear was the whining of the gnats.

  He still felt curiously light. Weightless. The guests had stayed a long time. They had enjoyed the evening: the warmth, the clear night, the children had played games. Arvi had told stories, Marjatta, Johanna and even Pekka had talked loudly, having a very good time.

  Maybe the news item about the missing girl in Turku had actually contributed to their good mood; maybe, after a while, discussing it had made them all feel more acutely how well off they were, living in safety – something of that kind.

  Timo Korvensuo felt a vague satisfaction in seeing through the others. But of course that was of no importance. He was digressing, wandering away from something he had not yet really confronted, although all the time he had been trying to concentrate exclusively on that one subject.

  Of course it was important.

  Something important had happened.

  It was difficult for him to formulate it in his mind, to see exactly what it was.

  He had drunk too much, he didn’t have a strong head, usually he never drank. He felt tired and at the same time wide awake; he could hardly keep his eyes open, yet he couldn’t close them either, because as soon as he did a torrent of vertigo streamed into his brain, instantly filling him with almost uncontrollable nausea.

  He thought of going into the bathroom to throw up; he was sure he’d feel better afterwards. Above all he’d have a clear head again, and he needed a clear head.

  He stayed lying there. He worked out how often he had thrown up in his life. Not many times. He couldn’t do it, never had been able to. He had truly vomited only once, as a child, bringing up everything until the carpet was covered with the contents of his stomach. He remembered all about it; a rice dish, rice and curry, which had tasted very good.

  Oh, and a second time, he remembered that now. The memory had been buried until a second ago, but now it was before his eyes. He had been on a bicycle tour with some friends and one of them kept pouring cheap red wine into cardboard cups, and quite early in the evening he had lost consciousness, the only time in his life he had blacked out. So he hadn’t actually known what he was doing, but in the morning he had smelt the vomit on his sleeping bag and felt how wet it was.

  That had never happened to him again, and it wasn’t going to happen now, because he would stay lying here, he wouldn’t move an inch. Wouldn’t move. A few gnats were whining.

  Marjatta was sleeping peacefully, almost inaudibly; she had certainly drunk less than anyone else, just the amount that she could tolerate.

  Korvensuo tried to concentrate, but it was impossible. His thoughts were going round in circles, and his brain was made of cotton wool.

  He had a headache, a bad one, worse than he’d had in a long time. So now he would have to get up after all, he needed tablets, several all at once, to get rid of this pain that had suddenly begun digging into what seemed to him his fluffy, cotton-wool brain. Get up.

  He felt himself staggering as he walked. Marjatta’s voice in the background, he couldn’t hear what she was saying, all he heard was himself grunting something. ‘Go back to sleep!’ probably. ‘Go back to sleep!’

  He was standing in front of the fridge, holding the door open, propping himself on the work surface with his other arm and staring at the bottle full of ice-cold water that he was going to drink in one fast, endless draught. Just as soon as he found the strength to do it, and above all as soon as he found the tablets.

  He turned away and rummaged in a drawer. The vertigo got worse again. His hands were shaking. He found a packet and spent some time trying, unsuccessfully, to get the tablets out.

  When he straightened up his nausea returned. He stared at the tap. He pulled and tore at the packet until at last there were three tablets in his hands. He let them dissolve slightly in his mouth before picking up the bottle and pouring cold water down his throat. He felt as if his head were about to burst.

  ‘Feeling bad?’ he heard Marjatta’s voice asking behind his back.

  He turned and saw her standing in the doorway, hair untidy, eyes tired.

  ‘Bit of a headache,’ he said.

  ‘Pour me a glass of water too, will you?’ asked Marjatta.

  ‘Sure.’

  He took a glass out of the cupboard and tried hard to control his hands as he poured the water, but they were shaking worse than ever.

  ‘You’re drunk, darling,’ said Marjatta.

  He saw her smile and nodded. ‘Yes, probably,’ he said.

  ‘Is it very bad?’

  He shook his head. ‘No … you go back to bed.’

  ‘Very bad, then,’ said Marjatta.

  ‘Please go back to bed.’ He let himself drop on to one of the wooden chairs, and with blurred eyes saw Marjatta coming over to the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside him. He felt her hand on his, and stared at the tabletop.

  ‘But you – you don’t have any worries, do you?’

  There were letters scratched into the tabletop. Words. He’d never noticed before. Laura loves Saku they said, and a little stick man beside them was laughing his head off. Probably Aku’s handiwork.

  ‘Have you …’

  ‘Timo, I asked you a question.’

  ‘Have you seen this written on the table?’ he asked.

  Marjatta lowered her eyes. ‘Yes, Aku did it. He doesn’t like it when Laura looks at other men.’

  ‘I see,’ he said and saw Marjatta smile again.
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br />   ‘Everything went smoothly, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The flats in Helsinki. You said they were off your hands.’

  ‘Yes … yes, they are. That’s great … the week couldn’t have ended better.’

  ‘Then everything’s all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I probably celebrated a bit too much. Really, it’s not so bad … I’m feeling better already.’

  He felt her hand on his. ‘Too much to drink doesn’t agree with me, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Go back to bed. I’ll join you soon.’

  Marjatta stroked his hand for a while, and then, at last, she stood up and left the kitchen.

  ‘I’m feeling better,’ he said again.

  ‘Then come back to bed soon, and if I’m still awake I can massage your head.’

  He nodded and heard her echoing footsteps growing fainter as she walked away over the wooden floorboards.

  He actually was feeling a little better. The sense of vertigo was wearing off. The pain still throbbed behind his forehead, but the mists were beginning to clear slightly. Soon he would have the strength to think about it calmly.

  Think about it calmly.

  He looked at the words that Aku had scratched into the table. The little stick man looked comical. Aku and Laura. Aku and Laura were sleeping outside in the tent. Aku eight and Laura thirteen years old. Marjatta would soon be asleep again as well, perhaps she was asleep now, if not at this moment then she would be in a few minutes’ time. Marjatta usually fell asleep quickly, soon after getting into bed she was asleep, and he would lie beside her hearing her quiet breathing.

  His headache had eased. That was how it had always been; given a large enough dose, the tablets acted like a sponge sucking up everything, leaving a pleasantly woozy sensation where the pain had been.

  The others were asleep and he would soon be able to think. To make connections.

  He must have had some kind of shock, it couldn’t be anything else. A state of shock was normal. Nothing for him to worry about.