Silence (2 page)

And he never had seen Pärssinen again.

T
HIRTY-THREE
Y
EARS
L
ATER

January

1

O
n the day of his retirement Ketola rose at six in the morning. He took a cold shower and put on the clothes he’d laid out beside his bed the evening before. A dark green jacket and the black trousers that went with it.

He ate two slices of bread with a scraping of butter, read the leader in the daily paper, drank a cup of coffee, a shot of vodka and a glass of water to take away the taste of the alcohol.

He washed up the glass and cup, put them both back in the china cupboard, folded the newspaper and sat at the table for another five minutes, looking through the darkness beyond the kitchen window at the snow-covered trees in the garden next door.

When those five minutes were over he got to his feet, took his coat off the hook, put it on, and went out to his car. The car had a roof over it by way of shelter, but it had been very cold last night and the windows were iced up.

He scraped the ice off, got in, switched on the blower and waited until he could see clearly enough. Then he drove the car through the thick snow towards Turku.

Warmth slowly filled the vehicle and Ketola began to feel his exhaustion. He hadn’t slept all night. Now and then he’d got up and tried to keep busy. He had read a book for a while, but now he couldn’t remember a single page of it, or what the words on the page had said. He had switched the TV set on and off again, and after that he’d spent the final hours of the night staring at the ceiling and waiting for the shrill note of the alarm clock.

Now he switched on the CD player to keep himself awake, choosing the tune he’d kept playing as he drove to work recently. He had little idea of music, but he liked this piece, a duet for flutes. He didn’t know the composer. The CD was a present from his son Tapani, who had given it to him on his birthday a few years ago.

Tapani had given him the CD without any sleeve notes. Typical of Tapani. Ketola had been pleased with the present, but it was typical for the sleeve notes to be missing and now it was too late to ask Tapani who had composed the music, even if he made up his mind to try asking next time they met.

He liked the piece. The melancholy of the music was really unusual and so pronounced that over the last few weeks Ketola had always felt a little better every time he listened to it.

He had to force himself to keep his eyes open and laughed out loud twice within a few seconds, because two thoughts that amused him, or at least made him laugh, had occurred to him in swift succession.

One was that it would be a pity to die on his last day at work, and in an accident that was his own fault at that. The other was that later, when Nurmela launched into his speech, which they were all agog to hear, perhaps he would finally fall asleep. Nurmela couldn’t hold it against him, not today.

Ketola chuckled to himself for quite a while, then the tune began to make him feel sad. He switched off the CD player.

The rush of warm air from the blower filled the car. It was hot inside by now. Ketola felt the heat, and fancied that this was the first time he’d directly noticed the difference between the warmth of the interior and the cold darkness beyond the windscreen.

His eyes kept closing, nothing to be done about that, but he’d be there in a moment, he was already in the slow traffic of the city centre, which he knew looked worse than it was. His drive would be over in a few more minutes.

The snow mingled with exhaust fumes, yellow headlights and red brake lights to form a curious picture. He had the impression that he was seeing it for the first time, or for the first time in this way. That was nonsense, of course, and he began doing exactly what he had not in any circumstances meant to do: he began trying to work out what was special about this winter day, which in reality was exactly like all the others.

At last he turned left and drove down the less crowded, narrower street to the big building where he worked.

His glance went, as it had done for years, to the third floor CID offices and the window of his own room. There was no fight on yet, he’d be the first in today, which was only right. After all, he’d been the first in for decades.

Only over the last two years, since Kimmo Joentaa lost his wife, had the light in his office very often been on first and Kimmo was to be found sitting at his desk in front of his gently humming computer when Ketola came in. Today Ketola had deliberately set off slightly earlier than usual, so as to win this silly little contest, although he suspected, or rather was sure, that Kimmo didn’t see it as a contest at all, but simply came into the office early when he couldn’t stand being at home any more.

Anyway, Ketola understood Kimmo’s reasons for coming into the office early better than his own. In his first years in the police it must have been ambition, an attempt to make his mark, and ultimately he had done just that. But latterly that reason wouldn’t wash, because Ketola had achieved the senior position he’d wanted, so now he had no idea why he still had to be first in at work, day after day.

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.