Light in a Dark House (Detective Kimmo Joentaa)

by Jan Costin Wagner

  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.

  ‘You’ll have some coffee?’ asked Marlene Oksanen.

  ‘Oh, yes, thanks,’ said Seppo.

  Marlene Oksanen poured coffee, and Seppo let his eyes wander over the walls, which were covered with framed photographs. Not of people but of landscapes. Lake landscapes; the theme always seemed to be the same.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, yes, that’s Lake Saimaa, taken from the same place at different times of the year. I like the winter photo best.’

  ‘Ah.’ Seppo went closer to the four pictures and looked at the frozen lake glittering behind snow-covered trees. The autumn picture was in shades of pale red and yellow; spring seemed to have begun at the very moment when Marlene Oksanen pressed the shutter release. And the blue of the summer photo was so vivid that Seppo instinctively took a step back.

  ‘Those are . . . really beautiful photos,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. I was always more of a photographer than a journalist. I just wrote the texts to go with them, and of course I tried to do it all justice. It’s always particularly important to get the names right.’

  To get the names right, thought Seppo.

  ‘When people are in the newspaper, naturally the first thing they look for is their names. And if you’ve spelt them wrong . . . well, that’s bad.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I’m here,’ said Seppo.

  ‘Now, do have something to eat,’ said the little woman, who was sitting bent over her own cake, carrying the cake fork to her mouth with quick but neatly controlled movements, which again made Seppo think of the trolls. A Moomintroll. A Hemulen, perhaps, the meticulous old troll, the collector.

  ‘And I’m sure you also have a collection of photographs of the town . . . of Karjasaari.’

  ‘Of course. Thousands of them. Never throw anything away.’

  A Hemulen to the life, thought Seppo.

  ‘It’s possible that we might want to look at those photographs,’ said Seppo, and he almost swallowed his next mouthful of cake the wrong way because Marlene Oksanen said she had even taken a photo of the exhibitionist.

  ‘Er . . . what?’ said Seppo.

  ‘The exhibitionist. The man who ran around in the forest undressing in front of little girls.’

  ‘Mhm.’

  ‘He really did wear just a coat, and he opened it wide if anyone was coming towards him. Exposed himself not just in front of little girls, in front of me too.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Seppo.

  ‘It must have been in . . . yes, the nineties. I didn’t deliberately go looking for him, but I always kept my eyes open when I was driving through the forest. And there he suddenly was, and I had to brake sharply. He opened his coat, and I took the camera out of my bag and snapped him before he’d closed the coat again.’

  Seppo nodded. The exhibitionist exhibited, he thought vaguely.

  ‘He was so surprised that he didn’t know what to say. Then he did say something, he said that I wasn’t to publish the photograph and he had problems. And do you know what I told him?’

  Seppo carefully raised his fork to his mouth and shook his head.

  ‘I told him: We all have problems.’

  Seppo waited, but the story was over. ‘Yes . . . of course,’ he said, and he really did find it surprisingly enlightening.

  ‘Of course the photograph was never published. And the man was never seen in the forest again. Either with or without his coat.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Seppo.

  ‘Would you like to see the photo? I’d show it to you.’

  ‘Er . . . maybe later,’ said Seppo. ‘I’d really like to do the opposite and show you a photograph that I have here.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He took the photo out of his coat pocket. Removed it carefully from the transparent film into which he had put it, because by now he had come to think of it as the most significant lead they had.

  Summer. Forsman, Happonen, two unknown men.

  ‘It’s about those two men in particular,’ he said. ‘Do you happen to recognise either of them?’

  He pushed the picture across the table to Marlene Oksanen, who got to her feet, left the room, and came back with an oversized magnifying glass. The Hemulen, thought Seppo again, didn’t the Hemulen go around with a magnifying glass just like that? Yes
, he did, the Hemulen studied the mysteries of life on the ground with his magnifying glass.

  Marlene Oksanen sat bending over the picture and murmuring to herself. ‘It’s taken beside Lake Saimaa. Down by the bathing beach. I recognise the place.’

  Seppo nodded.

  ‘That’s little Happonen . . . well, not so little any more . . . and now he’s . . . oh, that’s bad.’ She looked up. ‘Is that why you’re here? Because of little Happonen? Because he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes . . . that’s part of it,’ said Seppo.

  ‘Terrible,’ she said.

  ‘Do you recognise the men?’

  ‘Yes . . . of course.’

  ‘Of course?’

  ‘I must think a moment.’

  Of course, he thought.

  ‘I know who one of them is. This one. I once wrote something about him. Just a moment.’ She went out again, and a few minutes passed by before she came back with a photograph album. 1983, it said on the cover. ‘It was to do with the refurbishment of the Town Hall.’

  Seppo took the album and looked at the close-up of a neat and tidy flower bed. Beside it was a caption – Town Hall Square Ablaze With the Beauty of Roses.

  ‘Aha,’ said Seppo.

  ‘The man in the picture, I mean your photo . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s the gardener, I’m sure he is.’

  58

  ‘THE GARDENER?’ ASKED Westerberg wearily, which meant he was wide awake.

  They were sitting in the muted light of the breakfast area again. The poker machine was blinking. Music had begun to play in the background. Joentaa wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard the same languid tango rhythms as the evening before.

  ‘The gardener,’ Seppo confirmed.

  ‘The gardener, then,’ said Westerberg. ‘The gardener and a music teacher who only . . .’

  ‘ . . . danced together for one summer,’ said Seppo.

  ‘Seppo, I left that unsaid because it gives the wrong picture,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Seppo.

  Joentaa leaned back and let the exchange of words pass him by. Those two seemed to make a good team. The clever, weary Westerberg, and Seppo, who always focused on the essentials.

  He listened to the two of them for a little while, feeling remarkably comfortable. The soft and muted music coming through the walls of the restaurant next door seemed to him light as a feather, and the ideas in his head hovered as if on clouds, going round and round in circles.

  A murderer shedding tears.

  A woman whom he missed without really knowing her.

  A dead woman who had a name at last.

  A giraffe in the snow.

  And a photo, a yellowing snapshot from the past that seemed to be coming closer and closer to the present. To this exact moment, to this second when Westerberg said, ‘Yes, and what do we know so far about this gardener, this man . . .’

  ‘Miettinen,’ said Seppo. ‘This is my turn.’

  ‘This is your turn. Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I’ve been to the address – well, the address that the helpful lady, I mean that local journalist, gave me, but the nursery garden was closed.’

  ‘Closed.’

  ‘Until further notice. And no one reacted when I rang the bell of the house next to it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘I’ll try again.’

  ‘Do that,’ said Westerberg. He seemed to be, for him, unusually restless and edgy. Joentaa guessed why. While they were sitting here in the twilight, their colleagues in Helsinki, Turku and Tammisaari were beginning to go down the new paths that had opened up within a few hours. A full police search for the woman who had been called Saara Koivula was now in progress. By evening, several Saara Koivulas had been traced throughout the country, but there was one little problem.

  They were still alive.

  Early in the evening, Joentaa had phoned Sundström. ‘So now we have her damn name but we still can’t find her,’ Sundström had said. Joentaa had not replied, and Sundström had added, ‘Is she our dead woman anyway? On the basis of the photographs we published she’s been recognised only by the witness in the nut-house.’

  ‘The witness is credible,’ Joentaa had said.

  ‘Isn’t there a photo of the teacher in that school magazine?’

  Joentaa had said no. He had been through the magazine several times without finding a photograph of Saara Koivula. ‘But there’s a connection with the case that Marko Westerberg is working on. Kalevi Forsman. And a connection with the death of the politician Happonen.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but what is it?’

  Joentaa had given him the second name that Seppo had now told him. Miettinen, Jarkko. Landscape gardener.

  ‘Aha,’ Sundström had said. ‘Landscape gardener, yes. But where the hell is the connection between all these . . . ?’

  Dead people, Joentaa had thought. The connection between all those dead people, but Sundström had left his sentence unfinished, and they ended the conversation.

  Now Joentaa saw that Seppo, sitting opposite him, was talking on the phone, and while an expression of surprise spread over Seppo’s face, and the band in the restaurant switched musical style and changed to the blues, Joentaa had a feeling that the connection was that very thing.

  ‘What’s the latest?’ asked Westerberg as Seppo sat there holding his mobile without telling them what he had heard.

  ‘Seppo?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘Miettinen,’ said Seppo.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That was his son on the phone. Miettinen lives in a care home in Rantaniemi. He has dementia and Parkinson’s disease.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘I mean, lived in a care home,’ said Seppo, and Joentaa thought yes, that was the connection. Death.

  ‘What?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘Lived there,’ said Seppo. ‘Jarkko Miettinen is dead. According to what is known at present, as a result of his poor state of health.’

  ‘What?’ said Westerberg again.

  ‘In circumstances that have not yet been conclusively explained,’ Seppo specified.

  59

  WESTERBERG AND JOENTAA drove to the nursing home for senior citizens in which Jarkko Miettinen the landscape gardener had lived and died. It had begun to snow, and Westerberg was humming a tune that sounded like a lullaby as he concentrated on driving the car along the narrow road.

  The home stood in a large clearing in the woods, a pastel-coloured clapboard house in the darkness, illuminated by pale lanterns. They rang the bell, and a young woman opened the door.

  ‘Police?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Westerberg. ‘Was it you who spoke to my colleague Seppo on the phone?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m Laura Järvi, supervisor of nursing services here. We were expecting you. Come in.’

  Joentaa followed the woman and Westerberg along a dimly lit corridor, seeing the vague figures of people sitting on chairs and sofas in the front hall. Motionless, like statues. He nodded to them with a murmured, ‘Good evening.’

  ‘It will soon be their bedtime,’ said the nursing supervisor, as if she felt she had to explain the presence of the old people. When she switched it on the light in Laura Järvi’s office was bright and all-embracing, and for several moments bathed the room in uncomfortable clarity.

  ‘Yes . . .’ she said. ‘So it’s about Mr Miettinen, who unfortunately has died.’

  Westerberg nodded. ‘We need all the information you can give us. About Miettinen and most of all about the course of . . . about the hours and days before his death.’

  ‘Is there . . . is there anything wrong about his death, then?’ she asked, and Joentaa wondered whether there was such a thing as a death with everything right about it.

  ‘Yes, we have reason to suppose that there was indeed something wrong with it,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘Well . . . it was a kind of sudden co
llapse. Mr Miettinen suffered severe vomiting and diarrhoea, and of course he was taken to hospital at once. As far as I know he died the next day.’

  ‘What of?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘That . . . that hasn’t been fully established yet. But Mr Miettinen was very ill anyway. It had been touch and go with him for months.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Westerberg. ‘We’ll have to speak to the doctor who treated him.’

  ‘Mr Miettinen died in the hospital. That’s at the other end of this town, on the hill and right beside the church.’

  ‘Right. Can you please tell us, with as few gaps in his daily life as possible, just how Mr Miettinen spent the days before his death?’

  She looked at him as if she didn’t understand the question.

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘That’s a hard question to answer,’ she said.

  ‘Oh . . . why?’

  ‘Well, Mr Miettinen’s daily life was . . . was all a gap.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mr Miettinen didn’t have many visitors. Now and then, as I told your colleague, his son came, but not often. Of course we cared for him. Got him to walk a few metres up and down. To eat and drink. To sleep.’

  ‘I see,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘He spent most of his time sitting in his room looking out of the window.’

  ‘Can we see the room?’ asked Westerberg.

  ‘Of course. Come with me.’

  She put out the light, and then they went along the corridor again. The people sitting on sofas and chairs had disappeared. As if they had never been there, thought Joentaa.

  The nursing supervisor opened the door to a room, pressed a switch, and it was flooded with light. An empty, freshly made-up bed. An empty chair, an empty table. You could guess at the snow outside the window, softly falling to the dark ground. A few photographs in film envelopes and a transparent plastic bag lay on the bedside table, along with a red Advent calendar. With a piece of chocolate behind each little door.

  ‘These are the personal things that his son hasn’t taken away yet.’

  Westerberg went over to the window and concentrated on the scene outside, as if he had caught sight of the answer to important questions there, and Joentaa leaned on the edge of the bed to control the sense of vertigo that had suddenly come over him.