Silence (3 page)

‘Understand? We’re looking for a model, a rectangular plastic model. Where might a thing like that be?’

At least the lad appeared to be thinking about it now.

‘Any idea?’ asked Ketola.

‘Well, thirty-three years, that’s …’

‘A long time ago?’ Ketola helped him out.

‘Yes, we don’t really have anything much up here, certainly not a model, anything like that. Downstairs there just might be …’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a room down there full of all sorts of stuff, Päivi hates the place, it’s kind of our lumber room …’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Because it’s all jumbled up and none of it means anything any more.’

‘Then let’s go down there now.’

‘Well … but I can’t leave the archives here.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Ketola.

‘Er, Antti. Antti Lappeenranta.’

Ketola was suddenly in high good humour, he almost felt like joking. He took out his official ID – perhaps for the last time ever, it occurred to him – held it in front of the lad’s nose and said, ‘Antti Lappeenranta, I’m arresting you on suspicion of who cares what? Anyway, you’re in custody. Follow me.’ Then he went ahead, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that Kimmo and the baffled youth were following him.

They took the lift down to the basement, which couldn’t be reached in any other way, because the stairs ended at a door to which no one ever seemed to have had a key.

‘After you,’ said Ketola when they were down in the basement, and the young archivist led them to a room that really was remote, even in this basement storey, and was in fact large, but in relation to the quantity of stuff it contained it was decidedly small.

Ketola stared in amazement and Kimmo said, ‘Hm.’

‘Yes, well,’ the young man agreed.

The room was stacked high with several strata of cardboard cartons, some of them open and showing that they contained file folders in varying states of grubbiness and assorted fading colours. Similar folders stood or lay on shelves, old office machines were crammed close together along the walls of the room: copiers, printers, overhead projectors. Ketola could smell the dust that had sealed everywhere and, still in a mood for joking, he suggested, ‘Päivi might clear up in here when she gets a moment.’

‘Mm, well, it’s only for the time being because we … I mean the archives … well, I wasn’t there at the time, but Päivi told me they had to make space, so they took stuff down here that wasn’t so important any more. Soon a lot of it’s going to be thrown out entirely.’

‘Of course. So where’s my model?’

‘Er … well, if it’s anywhere at all, it would be here.’

Kimmo was already forging a path through the cardboard cartons. He stopped in the middle of the room and asked, ‘How big is it, then? I mean, how long and how wide?’

Ketola thought about it. ‘I’d say it was about the size of a small table. And it’s on wheels.’

‘Wheels?’ asked the young archivist.

‘Yes, we kept pushing it from the office to the conference room and back. It’s on wheels. A table on wheels.’

Kimmo went over to the machinery pushed back against the walls, some of the items covered with white cloths. Ketola followed him and stumbled over a carton as Kimmo called, ‘Here!’

‘What?’

‘I think this is it.’ Kimmo stepped aside to give Ketola a view of the model he had been looking for. Ketola was still standing on the carton, half dazed. He straightened up and saw the plastic rectangle. Ketola sighed at the sight before him; he merely heard himself sighing, although he didn’t know where inside him the sound came from and couldn’t interpret its meaning.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ he said and went closer. He stood there for a while and was consciously trying to absorb every detail. He still didn’t understand why he had suddenly been so keen to find this model, because he had forgotten the case long ago.

‘That’s it,’ he repeated. By now the young archivist had joined them. They looked at the model in silence for a while. It depicted a yellow field, an avenue of trees carefully glued in position and a grey bicycle path fenced off from the two-lane road, which was also grey. The whole thing was made of cardboard and plastic, even the fences beside the road had been marked in and, although the sun was missing, the model showed that it was intended to capture a moment in a summer’s day. A plastic bicycle lay in the plastic field and a red car stood at the roadside. The model was as detailed as Ketola had remembered it.

‘What is it?’ asked the archivist.

‘A model,’ said Ketola without looking up. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the young man nod vaguely. Kimmo stood there motionless.

‘It was a murder case. The murder of a girl,’ said Ketola. ‘I’d only just started here when it happened. She was raped and murdered in that field, very close to her parents’ house. We never caught the murderer.’

The young man nodded again. Kimmo still didn’t move.

The girl was not in the picture. They hadn’t found her until a good deal later when she wasn’t a girl any more.

‘I’d really forgotten the case. I’ve no idea why I thought of it today of all days. A few months later, just after we’d finally found the girl, the CID officer leading the enquiries insisted on having this model made. He thought it would help us to see the full picture. We were getting nowhere and it sent him half out of his mind.’

‘So the case was never solved?’ asked the archivist.

Ketola nodded. ‘The man in charge at the time is dead now,’ he said.

‘What make of car is it?’ asked the archivist, pointing to the small red car.

‘Hmm …’ said Ketola. The small red car that they’d never found. The most important part of the picture. It caught your eye at once. By now the small car must be a lump of scrap metal, or even less. In fact that was for sure.

Maybe it had never existed anyway, because the witness who saw the car was a little boy who had been cycling along the parallel bicycle path on the other side of the road at around noon on that day thirty-three years ago.

No, they had never found the small red car. On the other hand they had found the girl; they’d fished her out of a lake. One of the divers threw up immediately after they pulled her out, and Ketola and a colleague had broken the news to the girl’s mother.

It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to the families of murder victims, but he had never seen the life go right out of someone’s eyes before. Like everyone else, Ketola had expected that the girl would be found dead some time, and the mother too must have taken her daughter’s death for granted, but during the seconds when his late colleague spoke the words Ketola had seen the woman’s life end in a way that he could never have described to anyone.

‘I see,’ said the archivist, when Ketola’s silence had lasted a long time.

‘I’d like to take it with me,’ said Ketola. ‘Give me a hand, would you?’

They carried the model through the basement to the lift and, once on the next floor up, they carried it past the intrigued doorman and out into the driving snow. With some difficulty they got it into the boot of Ketola’s car. As they turned back to the building, Ketola realized that he hadn’t answered the archivist’s question about the red car, but as the young man didn’t ask again, Ketola left it unanswered. He didn’t want to discuss the subject. The important thing was that he had just stowed the plastic and cardboard model away in his boot, and as for why he had done it, he’d have plenty of time to think about that later, when today was over.

‘Okay, then,’ said the archivist, when the lift door opened on the first floor.

‘Thanks for your help,’ said Ketola.

‘You’re welcome,’ replied the archivist, sketching a clumsy goodbye wave and returning to his work station, while Ketola and Joentaa went up to the third floor.

Ketola sat down at his desk and resumed looking alternately at the clear blue of his screen, which to his mind was the best kind of background image, and the snow-covered pane of the window. Kimmo sat opposite him and kept his mouth shut, presumably either out of consideration or because his mind was hard at work wondering what on earth was the matter with him, Ketola.

‘Chatty today, aren’t you?’ Ketola remarked, realizing that he had never felt so relaxed and in such a humorous mood on any other working day as he did now, on this last day of all.

‘I noticed that you didn’t answer that question about the red car, so I thought maybe you didn’t want to talk about it.’

Of course. Finger on the sore spot right away. And still considerate about it. He was going to miss Kimmo.

‘We never found the car. A witness saw it, a little boy. Back then, I mean. Today he’d be … oh, in his forties. It was odd, somehow. But the whole thing didn’t really mean much … I don’t know what put me in mind of it. I haven’t thought of that girl for decades. Or the mother either.’

‘The murdered girl’s mother?’

‘Yes, it was … it was a strange experience, you might say, breaking that news to the woman. I’d started work here only a few months before.’

Kimmo nodded, and Ketola ended the conversation with a dismissive gesture. He didn’t want to start getting loquacious at the last minute. ‘Do you know what’s happening today?’ he asked instead.

Kimmo looked enquiringly at him.

‘I mean the goodbyes. It’s my last day, see?’ Perhaps the jokes were getting out of hand, he thought.

‘Oh, we’ve got this and that ready,’ said Kimmo.

‘Come on.’

‘Let it be a surprise,’ said Kimmo and he actually smiled.

Then they went on sitting there in silence. Kimmo was sorting papers that had nothing to do with Ketola any more. Ketola was looking out of the window after brushing the snow off the pane. So now he was watching the snow start to cover the pane again, and trying for the last time to find a good way of mentioning Kimmo’s wife and asking how he was doing these days, but of course he didn’t, because it would just have been ridiculous, and then Tuomas Heinonen came into the room anyway and asked Kimmo to come with him, they had something ready. Winking. Obviously Heinonen had also gone off his rocker.

So he sat there without thinking of anything in particular; now and then he took phone calls, which proved to be not very important, and around midday Nurmela knocked on the door and came in wearing a chef’s hat and an apron, and balancing an enormous tray.

Nurmela was followed by the entire team, they really were all there, even Petri Grönholm had come to Ketola’s goodbye party, although Petri Grönholm had been off sick with flu for several days.

There were little sausages in tomato sauce, Ketola’s favourite. Nurmela served the lunch in cheerful mood. Kari Niemi, head of forensics, poured champagne, also in cheerful mood, but that was nothing unusual in Niemi. Ketola’s successor Sundström shone with a number of particularly pointless puns and the entire team sang the Finnish hit that Ketola must have hummed quite often over the last few years – ‘Oh, all the time, my dear fellow, all the time,’ Nurmela insisted – when he was thinking, or when he gave the impression of thinking.

The performance was very good, his colleagues had obviously worked hard on it, and just as Ketola was wondering when they could have rehearsed, Nurmela wound things up by launching into his eagerly awaited speech, and instead of dropping off to sleep as he had originally intended, Ketola stood there feeling the words take shape before his eyes, come together in a blur and concentrate into a feeling, the feeling that Nurmela was making a very well prepared speech, a speech praising him from the heart and, if he was honest, a positively touching speech, but it was no more than a feeling, because when Nurmela had finally spoken the last sentence Ketola couldn’t have repeated a word of it. The one thing Ketola still had to say in these circumstances was, ‘Thank you.’ And as they stood there and seemed to be waiting for more, he said again, making it rather more specific, ‘Thank you all.’

A little later Ketola set off. Kimmo, Niemi and Tuomas Heinonen had driven away to investigate the death of an old lady found at the foot of the cellar steps in her building. Ketola left with Grönholm, who was on his way back to his sickbed.

‘Good of you to come,’ said Ketola. He felt dizzy. It was snowing as hard as ever.

‘Well, of course I did,’ said Petri Grönholm. And when they had reached Ketola’s car, he added, ‘We expect you to come and see us regularly.’

Ketola nodded. ‘Get well soon,’ he said, climbed in and started the car. He really did feel dizzy, but of course he’d drunk a fair bit of champagne and it had made him a little tipsy, which was surprising, because it was a long time since vodka and whisky had been able to do that.

Ketola went the long way home. To his surprise, he could still remember the road precisely, a road with very little traffic on it even today, a road he hadn’t driven along for many years. There was a cross at the place where they had found the girl’s bicycle all that time ago. It had been standing there for some thirty-three years.

As Ketola got out of the car and walked towards the cross, he was trying to remember that day, to bring the whole thing back, the image of the woman in whose eyes he had seen something extinguished and who had then suddenly walked away, carrying the cross, which had been waiting as if ready for her in a corner of the coat stand, like an umbrella. He and his boss had followed the girl’s mother, and after a while the woman had started running until she reached this very place, hardly five minutes from the house where she had lived with her daughter and her husband. The man didn’t often put in an appearance. What Ketola remembered about him chiefly was that he had left his wife a few months after their daughter’s body was found.

So the cross was still there. Carefully, Ketola brushed aside the snow and read the name. Pia Lehtinen. Exactly, that had been her name. He had been thinking about it briefly in the car and could come up only with the surname. Yet her first name was very simple and easily remembered, and it had been a common one at the time. Pia Lehtinen, murdered 1974, said the wording on the cross.

And five minutes from here, five minutes’ walk from the place where they had found the bicycle at that time, the girl’s mother lived. Or rather she had lived there, because very likely she didn’t live there any more; how could she still be living there after that …? But now Ketola even remembered talking to her briefly on that subject at the time, in the months when the investigation was still in full swing and they’d assumed that their enquiries would be successful. The woman had told him she had no intention of moving, she would leave this house, at the earliest, after the murderer was caught. And he never had been caught, so maybe the woman was still living there. For a moment Ketola wondered whether to visit her, tell her that this was the day of his retirement from the police, and for reasons he didn’t understand today, of all days, he had been thinking of her and her daughter.