Silence (14 page)

The room was well situated; the sun fell right on his body, warming him. Relaxing him. The shivers were dying down. He had begun shivering so hard as he drove that he could hardly use the gear shift, but it was better now that he was here in this room, looking down on the city. It was going away.

He felt he was getting back a certain amount of control. The glimmerings of a certain order. Reducing things to essentials. A sheet of paper lay on the desk, along with a folder telling guests about the hotel’s room service and the price list for the minibar. And the DVD lay there as well. In a white, neutral case.

Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all. In the end there was nothing left but memories, vague notions that might just as well have been fantasies. Or dreams that you had dreamed and then forgotten, seeing them resurface later in a blurred image at a certain and entirely random moment.

Perhaps he had just spoken to Marjatta on the phone. In a firm voice. Telling her all she needed to know and hoping she’d have a nice evening. Perhaps Pia had been lying in that field. Perhaps the girl’s voice had begged Pärssinen to stop, a strangely calm voice that came through to him only now and then, because Pärssinen was holding the girl’s mouth closed and drowning out her voice with his groans. He thought he could still hear that voice in his ears. He might be wrong. He let himself drift.

Two young women in smart uniforms were standing down at reception, smiling at him in their professional way as he went past. His car was in the underground garage. The laptop was in the boot and weighed light in his hand as he stood beside an old man in the lift.

The DVD was still on the desk when he came back into the room. He inserted it into the computer drive and heard the gentle whirr of technology at work. A window opened. A button to be clicked.

A small, black-haired girl between two men. The picture slightly blurred and wobbling. Korvensuo let the film run as he fetched toilet paper from the bathroom. When he returned, the girl was staring at the camera, and one of the men announced that he was going to come. Timo Korvensuo clutched his crotch and leaned against the desk, groaning quietly.

Later, he sat on the bed for a long time, waiting for the picture he had seen to lose itself again in the void from which it came.

7

K
immo Joentaa read the old files. Pia Lehtinen was found, the number of investigators stepped up. Joentaa read interviews, word by word, forcing himself not to skip anything.

The circle of the victim’s relations, friends and acquaintances, people who could be shown to have had the slightest connection with Pia Lehtinen, had been drawn ever wider. Interviews with men already in the files as known sex offenders. These led nowhere. One of the men burst into tears and blurted out that he was sorry for the girl, which made him a suspect until it was established without the slightest doubt that he had been on holiday in Greece on the day of Pia’s disappearance.

There had been no useful clues in that old case either: prints on the bicycle that couldn’t be matched with any known to the police and the search for a small red car that led nowhere. The boy who had seen it couldn’t say what make of car it was.

Hundreds of small red cars were investigated. Hundreds of interrogations leading to dead ends. Reading between the lines, Joentaa sensed the frustration of the detectives of the time. An internal memo finally raised the question of whether the boy could be regarded as a reliable witness and suggested that if the small car did exist it need not necessarily have belonged to the murderer.

Joentaa passed his hands over his face, feeling the weariness that he knew would be gone as soon as he lay down to sleep.

He switched on the TV. On the screen, Ketola was sitting on a chair, leaning forward and talking insistently to the presenter of a talk show.

Joentaa stood there for a few seconds, then sat down on the sofa without taking his eyes off the screen. It was some time before he could concentrate on what Ketola was saying. The presenter, Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen, was nodding the whole time as if he understood it all. Beside Ketola sat Pia’s mother, Elina Lehtinen.

It went through Joentaa’s mind that half Finland was probably watching. Hämäläinen was the new star among home-grown entertainers. He had originally been a sports commentator, had then successfully moved into light entertainment and had scored a big hit with his new talk show.

Joentaa watched Hämäläinen, Ketola and Elina Lehtinen, and he simply could not focus on the words they were exchanging. Ketola on the screen, Elina Lehtinen; he had been sitting opposite her only that morning. So that was why Ketola had wanted to speak to her, about an appearance on TV at short notice. But what was the purpose of all this?

‘Of course he must expect to be caught this time. And I wonder whether he even
wants
, somehow, to be caught,’ said Ketola. Hämäläinen nodded. Elina Lehtinen was sitting lost in thought and looked pale, not at all the way she had been that morning in her house.

‘I’d say … I’d almost like to appeal to the man to take that possibility into account. Just reveal himself, in whatever way he can,’ said Ketola. The camera moved close to him until his face was almost filling the screen. He was perspiring, his face looked even craggier and more angular than usual, presumably because of the TV make-up. He was wearing a dark green jacket and appeared both calm and agitated. Joentaa couldn’t pin down his mood precisely.

What Ketola was saying sounded as if he’d worked it all out and was trying to give an impression of calm, to speak with composure. But it was as if his own voice were urging him on; he spoke faster and faster, raising his voice more and more, then he slumped when he had followed an idea to its conclusion.

Now and then Hämäläinen turned to Elina Lehtinen, who described, in clear and quiet tones, how she managed to live with her daughter’s death. Hämäläinen nodded. Ketola was breathing deeply, looking at the floor, and Joentaa felt Elina Lehtinen’s words like snowflakes cooling him for a while, before they began to melt inside his head.

The audience was silent. Hämäläinen became tangled up as he asked his next question. A woman scurried across the picture and mopped the sweat from Ketola’s face with a cloth.

The telephone rang. Joentaa went to pick it up without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘Switch your TV on,’ said Sundström.

‘I already have.’

‘Then I guess you’ll agree with me when I say he’s gone right round the bend,’ said Sundström.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. He’s interfering massively in our enquiries while they’re still in progress, and now he thinks it’s his business to offer the murderer good advice.’

Joentaa was trying to listen with half an ear to what Ketola was saying now. He was talking about how he had felt as an investigator during the search for Pia Lehtinen.

‘Hello?’ asked Sundström.

‘Yes. You’re right,’ said Joentaa.

‘What’s he after? What does he think he’s doing? You know him well, what does he think he’s doing?’

‘Yes …’ said Joentaa.

‘Yes what?’

‘I think he’s … well, convinced that the murderer of thirty-three years ago is back. And he wants to lure him out of hiding.’

‘Ah.’

‘Or that’s what I assume, at least. I don’t really know either, the programme’s still going on.’

‘I can see that,’ said Sundström and fell silent for a while. They both listened as Elina Lehtinen appealed to the murderer to give himself up.

Joentaa thought that once again, Elina Lehtinen looked very like her daughter at this moment, and Sundström said, ‘This programme is a bloody bad joke.’

Hämäläinen was nodding in agreement.

‘All we need now is for them to run a number at the bottom of the screen for the murderer to call,’ said Sundström.

Hämäläinen was just explaining that it was sometimes difficult to make a link between items on the show, so this time he wasn’t even going to try it; then Ketola and Elina Lehtinen went off and an actor replaced them on the set, a man with a drink problem who nonetheless was getting himself established in Hollywood.

Joentaa stood there with the telephone in his hand and watched the actor, who was doing his best to be both amusing and profound. The audience applauded a short film clip, the actor smiled.

‘Right, goodnight, then,’ said Sundström and broke the connection before Joentaa could say anything.

8

T
he children were asleep. Probably. At least, all was quiet. The weekend by the lake had tired them out, and now they were asleep and contented, looking forward to the long summer holidays.

Marjatta Korvensuo sat on the sofa with her arms clasped round her knees, thinking of the pale woman on the TV screen.

She had really switched on the Hämäläinen show to relax, but then that woman had been a guest on the show, the mother of the girl who had been killed thirty-three years ago, Pia Lehtinen. She had said things that Marjatta Korvensuo couldn’t get out of her head. She wouldn’t have been able to repeat a word of it, but the sound of the woman’s voice had made a deep impression on her, and so had the silence of the studio audience, the long silences that had followed what she said.

The TV was still on. The late news. The photograph of the missing girl came on screen, and for a few moments pictures of a press conference.

Marjatta felt an impulse to go and look in on the children, but she made herself stay where she was. The children were asleep in their beds. Briefly, she wondered whether to call Timo again and talk to him for a few minutes about the TV interview she had seen. Timo was a very good listener, and often things looked different to her after he had cast a new light on them in his quiet way.

But Timo was very probably asleep by now.

The President of Finland was still on her state visit to Germany. She was standing in front of a speaker’s lectern in a storm of flash photography, smiling.

Marjatta got up and checked once again that the front door was bolted on the inside. She always did that when Timo was away. Then she found herself a blanket and decided to go to sleep on the sofa with the TV still running.

9

T
imo Korvensuo was sitting on the bed. His eyes were burning; he had to keep opening and closing them quickly, at intervals of a second.

The clock on the television showed nearly one in the morning. There was faint twilight outside the window, a touch of blue and a touch of pink.

He wished for deep, dark winter. And sleep, and a dream. A dream of a deluge washing everything away. This whole mess. All the filth that didn’t interest him any more.

He went into the bathroom and checked his eyes in the mirror. They felt reddened, but they didn’t look red. They looked the same as usual and the face in the mirror was the face of a man in his mid fifties who had kept his youthful looks.

He went back to bed. He thought of Marjatta and the children. They were home again and asleep. Everything was fine with the exception of the warning lights in Marjatta’s car Marjatta had told him on the phone that they had begun blinking halfway through her drive home from the weekend house. The blinking had worried her, and Korvensuo, who knew a little about these things, was able to reassure her: the lights on the dashboard would probably need attention, but it wasn’t urgent.

Earlier in the evening it had occurred to him that this was Sunday, and Marjatta was sure to be watching Hämäläinen’s talk show. For Marjatta’s sake he had sat beside her on the sofa every Sunday for months, watching that programme. Marjatta would lie with her head on his lap, and he would stroke her back, very gently.

He had thought briefly of switching on the TV in the hotel bedroom. To watch what Marjatta was watching. But he hadn’t. He had gone straight to bed and his thoughts had stood still, until after a while it occurred to him that tomorrow he was going to call Marjatta again. Tell her that he would have to postpone coming home, for good reasons.

Pekka was holding the fort at the office.

Marjatta was with the children.

The children were on holiday.

He had wondered for a while what to do tomorrow, without coming to any conclusion.

He sat on the bed. The midnight sun shone outside. A shower started running in the room next door.

He closed his eyes. The pillows felt soft and cool as his head lay down.

Nothing, he thought. Nothing.

The water in the next room rushed and splashed.

Just before he fell asleep he thought of Pärssinen. Kindly old caretaker.

Then a man moved away from the dark façade of some buildings. He had curly hair, a face like stone, and he was moving fast, moving smoothly forward as if on rails. He was holding a knife and approaching Korvensuo and Marjatta. He was just explaining to Marjatta that this was all a dream when the curly-haired man struck with his knife, and when Marjatta sank into his arms he realized that it was not a dream, because dreams didn’t exist.

He woke up.

He sat up in bed. The clock showed five. There was a dull pain behind his forehead and a very distinct thought about Pärssinen.

11 J
UNE

1

E
lina Lehtinen woke early in the morning with the image of Pia in her mind. It had filled her dreams, and went away only when she opened her eyes.

She could still feel the TV make-up on her skin, and thought of Ketola. They had talked for a long time, about anything and everything, until late into the night, until they had been the last customers still lingering in the café near the TV studios.

Two old people who had drunk a good deal. They had probably presented an odd picture. At the end of the evening the waiter had even said they suited each other. Elina had giggled, while Ketola stood there with his mouth open.

He was going to get that man, Ketola had said earlier in the evening. The man who did it. That, he said, had been clear to him even on the day of his retirement. It was something he had to do, for reasons he didn’t quite know.