Light in a Dark House (20 page)

Helping Olli with his homework. Explaining why five divided by five is not zero, but five minus five is.

‘I see,’ he says when I’ve finished.

The thought of Olli growing larger and older. The boy becoming a man, with a profession, a life that will keep him away from what’s important now. The games, throwing dice, that fill our time together, the joy and annoyance of them will become a memory. Diffuse, pale. Maybe – if I ask him later – he will narrow his eyes and nod his head to signal that yes, he has a picture before his eyes. But in reality there’ll be nothing there, only my claim that there was something once.

You were a bad loser, I shall tell him.

In the end, only a bent crash barrier is left. A mark from braking that no one is looking for. A dead man whom no one misses. A dead woman whom no one knows.

I had an interesting conversation with Leea today about the question of why she always hopefully opens junk mail franked Infopost instead of simply throwing it away. Contrary to all expectations, she claims, there might be something interesting in it.

Shares in Sedigene, biotechnology, are classified neutral by analysts, and outside it is snowing. Ice crystals are hexagonal. They form angles of exactly 60 and 120 degrees. The resulting structure is a kind of perfection that can’t be seen with the naked eye. A perfection that does not demand to be perceived.

Look at it that way, and perhaps Saara was a snow crystal. In a summer that was much too hot for her – and us – to survive it.

55

THE DAILY PAPER
that devoted a page to the little town of Karjasaari was published in the larger neighbouring town of Laappeenranta. The chief editor, who looked very young apart from his grey hair, received Seppo in his office with the ostentatious dynamism of a man who is short of time.

‘Karjasaari, you say,’ he said, wrinkling his brow.

‘That’s right,’ said Seppo.

‘You’re taking an interest in Karjasaari in connection with police inquiries.’

Seppo nodded.

The chief editor also nodded. ‘That’s . . . well, surprising. To the best of my knowledge nothing of any possible interest to the police has happened in Karjasaari for the last hundred years.’

‘We don’t have to go back as far as that,’ said Seppo. ‘The case was twenty-five years ago.’

‘What?’ asked the chief editor.

‘Twenty-five years,’ said Seppo. ‘We’re trying to identify people in a photograph that was taken twenty-five years ago . . .’

‘Oh.’

‘ . . . and we’d very much like to look at your archives, or to talk to people who were writing about Karjasaari at the time.’

‘Oh,’ said the chief editor again.

‘Can you help us?’

‘I don’t know. There certainly won’t be anyone on the paper who was working here twenty-five years ago. Far from it . . . at the moment we’re a young team here.’

‘Do you have archives going back to the year 1985?’

‘1985 . . . I’m afraid not. At the moment we’re digitising the archives, but we go no further back than the year 2000.’

2000, thought Seppo. And before that? Before that the Flood, or what?

‘We do have the paper editions for 1985 still available. But you’d have quite a time of it sorting through them . . . oh, I’ve just had another idea . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I know there was a freelancer writing on Karjasaari for us, she met almost all her deadlines. Myself, I joined the paper only in 2004, but everyone said the lady had been working for us for ages . . . a rather eccentric character . . .’

‘Where can I find her?’ asked Seppo.

‘Hm. Just a moment, I’ll ask.’ He picked up the phone and had a conversation of some length with one of the staff, presumably the editor responsible for the Karjasaari column. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘No, send it over to me, please, before we start spelling it out. Yes. Fine,
ciao
.’

Ciao
, thought Seppo.

‘We’ve got her,’ said the chief editor. ‘And the funniest thing about it is that she still works for us from time to time. She must be almost eighty.’

Seppo nodded.

‘My colleague is sending me the contact details over.’

‘Excellent,’ said Seppo.

‘I’m sure you’ll understand that you’ve made me rather curious. What sort of a case is it you’re working on?’

‘I can’t give you the details at the moment. There’ll certainly be more information for the press very soon.’

The chief editor leaned back. ‘Karjasaari. Now and then someone falls into Lake Saimaa. A drunk fell through the ice in winter a few years ago, the little town lies directly on the water. In fact, in autumn and winter there’s a nice winter fair in the marketplace. But otherwise . . . well, a quiet country idyll, nothing for our local journalists to get their teeth into.’

‘Yes, a pretty little town,’ Seppo agreed.

The chief editor cleared his throat, swivelled his chair Seppo’s way, and sat up ramrod straight. ‘Although something did happen recently – I’ve just remembered. Happonen. Our editorial team really did have news about the place to occupy them for quite a while. But the man only spent his childhood and youth in these parts.’

‘Right,’ said Seppo.

‘That case is still unsolved if I remember rightly . . .’

‘You do, it’s about Happonen. But with the best will in the world I can’t tell you more at the moment.’

The chief editor looked at his screen for a while, and seemed to be formulating a question in his mind before he asked it. ‘Could we agree that I’ll be the first you inform when the case goes public? As soon as you can give more details?’

Who am I, Seppo thought, to decide on a thing like that? But he replied, ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Great,’ said the chief editor. He still hesitated slightly, and Seppo felt an impulse to tell him that, chief editor or not, he had no right to hold up the police in the course of their inquiries.

‘Yes,’ he said at last.

‘Then I’ll print you out the address and phone number of our oldest freelance contributor. Give her my regards.’

56

JOENTAA AND WESTERBERG
had lunch in the hotel, and after that Westerberg went to his room to make some phone calls. Although not until he had entrusted a large amount of his small change to the machine eternally flashing away in the lobby.

Joentaa thought of Tuomas Heinonen. Maybe he’d tell him about Westerberg. And that you could still have fun gambling if all you lost was a handful of pennies.

His mobile hummed its tune. Joentaa looked at the unfamiliar number for a few seconds, and thought of Larissa. Of hearing her voice. Then he did in fact hear the voice of a woman, the helpful school secretary. She said she’d found something.

‘You have?’

‘Yes . . . but I don’t know if it will get you much further.’

‘We’ll soon see. I’ll be with you in ten minutes’ time.’

‘Right . . . you’ll find me in the library,’ she said, and then Joentaa broke the connection and ran to his car.

He drove to the school and parked outside the long, low, flat-roofed building. It was easy to find the library, which was in the basement, and instinctively Joentaa thought of the archives in the basement of the Turku police station, where stuff that had been forgotten for ages was kept.

The secretary was sitting with two men and bending over some papers. She waved him over when she saw him.

‘Samuli Svensson, deputy head of the school, and our librarian Petteri Savo,’ said the secretary.

Both men shook hands with him, Svensson firmly, Savo more softly. The deputy head had a crew cut and was a small man, while Savo was tall, with hair standing out in all directions.

‘We hear that you’re interested in our school,’ said the deputy head. ‘Mrs Rantanen and Mr Savo have looked out everything we have.’ He pointed to the books and folders lying on the table.

Joentaa nodded, and went over to them.

‘May we ask what this is really about?’ asked Savo.

‘A woman who taught here in 1985. Although only for a very short time, as a supply teacher.’

‘Yes, yes, Mrs Rantanen has told us that already. But . . . why . . .’

‘I assume that you were neither of you here in 1985,’ said Joentaa. Or perhaps he was wrong. Savo must be nearly sixty.

‘I’m afraid we weren’t,’ said Svensson. ‘Mr Savo here is certainly our rock of ages, but even he didn’t join the staff until 1989.’

Joentaa nodded, and examined the books and papers on the table.

‘It looks like more than it is,’ said the school secretary. ‘We’ve drawn up yearbooks of all the school’s activities and exhibitions since 1990, but there wasn’t one yet in 1985.’

‘And . . . what did you find?’

The secretary took a set of papers stapled together off the table, and handed it to him. It was a school magazine, its cover showing girls and boys standing in the sun outside the school building. Presumably a whole year’s intake. Almost all of them were letting out silent shouts of glee; the photographer had probably encouraged them to make a noise. The title of the magazine was a plain one:
Upper School Magazine
.

Joentaa sat down at the table and opened the magazine at the first page. ‘You’ll find the rankings at the end,’ said the secretary.

He looked up enquiringly.

‘Drawn up by the final-year students before the leaving exam,’ said the secretary.

Joentaa leafed through the pages.

‘Page eighty-seven,’ said the secretary.

Joentaa opened the magazine at that page and ran his eyes over the names and numbers.

‘I came upon something,’ said the secretary in the background. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll show you.’

She leaned over him and pointed to a table, headed by the words
The Nicest.
It took him a little while to realise that the students were assessing their teachers on this page. They had had twelve years’ experience of being marked by them, and now it was the other way around.
The Strictest. The Worst-Dressed. The Latest to Arrive.
But also
The Most Committed. The Most Easy-Going. The Nicest.
In first place for the nicest was a teacher called Harkonen. Second came one Mr Väsänen. Third was Ms Koivula. Joentaa read the report on her.

Unfortunately Ms Koivula was only here for the summer of 1985, but she didn’t need any longer than that to turn the collective heads of the male half of our year. How she did it no one is quite sure, because she didn’t seem to be trying to make them like her. But she certainly had the nicest smile you can imagine, and angelic patience. For instance, when Jani A. threw a tennis ball at her head during the lesson – by accident – she surprised the whole class by handing him back the ball and asking him not to throw it quite so hard another time. That’s what she was like. When Ms Koivula left again after a few months and Mrs Niskala came back, some of the boys may even have failed their exams out of unrequited love, and with Mrs Niskala’s return the usual old boring music lessons came back as well.

Joentaa’s gaze lingered on the letters. He heard the secretary’s voice in the distance. ‘That could be her, don’t you think? And earlier on there’s another mention of her. Wait a minute.’

She picked up the magazine and leafed through it purposefully to find the page she was looking for.

‘Here.’

Joentaa looked at the photograph she was pointing to.

Angelic patience, he thought.

Not to throw the ball quite so hard another time.

‘The pictures of the students,’ she said.

Joentaa looked at the picture of one boy. Appearing reserved and yet almost forthcoming, smiling uncertainly. He read:

In his last year here Kalevi F. underwent a strange transformation, from a shy hanger-on to a ladies’ man who had several short but intense, we’d be inclined to say desperate, relationships with several of the girls in our year. There’s a rumour that his sudden courage in approaching the opposite sex was the result of Kalevi’s frustration, because he didn’t get anywhere with the real lady of his heart, our supply teacher for music, Saara K., in the short time that she was with us this summer. Nor did any of the other boys in our year either.

Joentaa closed his eyes. He was trembling.

Kalevi F.

Saara K.

‘Does that . . . get you any further?’ asked the deputy head.

Supply teacher for music, Saara Koivula.

By accident. A nice smile.

‘Yes . . . I think it does, yes.’

‘We keep full records here,’ said Savo the librarian.

‘Is it . . . is it about Ms Koivula, then?’ asked the deputy head.

‘I think it is,’ Joentaa repeated.

A strange transformation, he thought. Like Happonen’s father, who slid off the sofa from one moment to the next, just like that.

Joentaa took the magazine and said goodbye to the school secretary, the deputy head and the librarian. As he went up to the ground floor and out into the open air, he tried to remember his own teachers at school. People he had seen all the time then, in his childhood and adolescence, and he had no idea what they were doing today or even if they were still alive.

Unfortunately she was only here for the summer of 1985, he thought as he got into the car. And he also thought that of course angels had names like anyone else.

57

THE JOURNALIST MARLENE
Oksanen lived in a small clapboard house that vaguely reminded Seppo of the Moomin family’s home. Sky-blue like the trolls’ house, he thought, and then a woman who looked remarkably like a troll herself opened the door to him.

‘Mrs Oksanen?’ asked Seppo.

‘And you’re the policeman?’

‘Er, yes. Seppo is my name,’ he said.

‘Come along in, please,’ she said, and went ahead of him into the little living room. Two coffee cups were standing ready on the table, with a coffee pot and a cream cake decorated with grapes.