Light in a Dark House (Detective Kimmo Joentaa)

by Jan Costin Wagner

Saara’s passport and Saara’s driving licence, both in his wallet. Now and then, before going to sleep, he had looked at the photos, running his fingers over the paper.

  The voucher for the team’s brunch at the fish restaurant on the bathing beach at Karjasaari had never been cashed in.

  Westerberg lowered his mobile, stood up and moved out of his field of vision.

  Afraid of music, thought Risto Nygren, and then, after a while, the humming that had drowned out the silence also died away.

  75

  KIMMO JOENTAA SAT on the ground, leaning back against the tree and reading.

  From time to time Moisander came over and said something, and then the forensic pathologist from Laappeenranta came over and said something, but Joentaa listened only cursorily and never took his eyes off the lines.

  A blue school exercise book. The words were very carefully written, by someone who wasn’t used to producing fine handwriting. Summer 1985. Dear diary.

  Twilight seemed to be falling at midday, and Moisander came back again, bent down to him and gave him some transparent film folders containing various items, documents that the forensic technicians had found. Most of them were wet or softened by rain and snow.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Is that . . . important?’ asked Moisander.

  Joentaa followed his glance to the blue exercise book, and nodded.

  ‘In that box, I mean the shoebox, there was also a receipt from a stationery store.’

  Joentaa looked enquiringly at him.

  ‘A bill for copying forty pages. Eight euros.’

  ‘Copies?’

  ‘Maybe someone wanted this exercise book copied.’

  Joentaa looked down again at the fine letters written so carefully, forming the words.

  Moisander went back to the forensic technicians and medics going about their work, calm and concentrating hard. Joentaa could see the swing and one of the windows of the little house through the branches of the trees. He read the diary again, and felt that now he would remember every word of it, that the text irrevocably made its own mark on the reader’s mind.

  Summer 1985. Winter now. And nothing in between, only the long gap torn open on one of those dates.

  His mobile rang. Sundström. He sounded excited.

  ‘Kimmo, we’ve got him,’ he said. ‘Teuvo Manner. He’s obviously been at sea over the last few years. Mechanical engineer on one of the Baltic ferries.’

  Joentaa did not reply.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Then pay attention. Manner was probably out of Finland for several years, but he came back this summer. On 27 June.’

  27 June, thought Joentaa. Saara Koivula was found in a roadside ditch in the summer. A little later her photo was published by all the major Finnish newspapers.

  ‘We haven’t laid hands on him yet, but we’re working on it, and we have it in black and white that he’s come back to Finland,’ said Sundström.

  ‘Paavo, not only is Teuvo Manner in Finland, to all appearances he’s here. In Karjasaari.’

  Sundström did not reply.

  ‘And he’s dead,’ said Joentaa.

  Sundström still said nothing.

  ‘He’s been dead for months,’ said Joentaa. ‘The forensic pathologist thinks for about six months.’

  Still no reply from Sundström.

  For about six months. Teuvo Manner had come back in June; he had died shortly afterwards. Joentaa’s eyes rested on the words that he didn’t have to read any more, because he knew them all.

  ‘But . . . who . . .’ said Sundström.

  Dear diary. That’s what people say, don’t they? Dear diary. Hi, dear diary. I’ll have to ask Lauri tomorrow if you really do put it that way.

  76

  Yes, Teuvo, that’s what people say. I told you so at the time, and I tell you so today. 25 December. Christmas Day.

  Dear diary.

  Not that it seems appropriate. A book is not a human being, not a person, not a living creature.

  The writer talks to himself, and because that doesn’t work, and he can’t think of a name for the imaginary person he’s talking to, he turns to a diary.

  Or so I assume. That’s one of my theories, nothing more.

  However, I think I’m right.

  77

  RISTO NYGREN DIED before the emergency doctor arrived. Westerberg had sat down again on the sofa where he had been sitting during the interview, and the arrival of the doctors, various members of hotel staff, his bewildered German colleague who had been waiting down in the lobby, and finally Seppo, who told him breathlessly that he had lost their man, passed him by like a scene in a film.

  A satire. A carefully staged farce, so absurd that you felt like yawning because things like that didn’t happen, so you didn’t want to be offered them as a spectator.

  No one went into a hotel room and cut a man’s throat in the presence of two police officers sitting directly opposite the murder victim. No one did it, and no one got away with it.

  ‘I missed him by a second. He blocked the lift with a laundry cart,’ said Seppo, bending double as he tried to get his breath back. ‘Couldn’t get at it, the bloody cart was in the way. He simply rode down in the lift himself and then he’ll have taken the first taxi to come along.’

  Westerberg said nothing.

  ‘Sorry, but it all happened so fast, and there was no emergency button I could press to stop the lift. I ran twenty-four floors downstairs, but of course I was too slow to catch up.’

  ‘That’s no problem, Seppo,’ said Westerberg. ‘Not your fault.’

  He was afraid he hadn’t noticed anything, said their German colleague. Westerberg nodded. Colleagues of their German colleague arrived at the crime scene to look at the body.

  Risto Nygren.

  R. says I’m not to worry about it.

  A search operation was set up, taxi drivers over a wide area as well as German police officers at railway stations and the airport were informed.

  For some minutes the name Teuvo Manner was bandied around the room, and if Westerberg interpreted it correctly their German colleague was having some difficulty in giving another officer the correct spelling of the first name over his mobile.

  A laboriously staged farce, thought Westerberg again, far too studied, and then Kimmo Joentaa called to tell them that he was in the forest, and Teuvo Manner was very probably dead.

  ‘Aha,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘The man we want is a school friend of Manner’s. Lauri Lemberg.’

  ‘Lauri Lemberg,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘I have the boy’s diary here. Teuvo Manner’s diary, I mean. It seems to me that Lemberg made a great impression on Teuvo, who related strongly to him. Almost as if Teuvo was writing his diary first and foremost for Lauri. Presumably someone read the diary later, and I think it was Lauri. Because it is really addressed to Lauri, do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ said Westerberg.

  ‘We should be looking for Lauri Lemberg.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Westerberg. Seeing Seppo’s enquiring glance, he wondered what Kimmo was really telling him. He had the feeling that he didn’t understand any of it. The German investigators were kneeling on the floor, bending over the body, and Westerberg said, ‘Risto Nygren is dead. Murdered in front of our eyes.’

  At the other end of the line, Joentaa did not respond, and the words that Westerberg had just spoken echoed on in his ears.

  ‘Whoever the man was, he’s gone. It was so crazy and it happened so fast that we couldn’t . . . couldn’t react at all.’

  Kimmo’s silence dragged on, and a small woman in a headscarf appeared and talked excitably to one of the German officers. After a while he came over to them.

  ‘I’ll call you back, Kimmo,’ said Westerberg, breaking the connection, and the German told him that the key-card of one of the cleaning staff had gone missing. He probably got in like that,
with her key, he suggested in broken English, and Seppo nodded. So did Westerberg, and then he tried to tell the German officer that another name should be introduced into the search action, Lauri Lemberg.

  ‘Lauri who?’ asked Seppo, looking so baffled that it almost made Westerberg laugh.

  The German police officer seemed at a loss too, and Westerberg spelled out the name. He thought there could be only one possible spelling. Lauri Lemberg, Lauri whoever. A name dug up by Kimmo Joentaa, who was sitting in some forest or other reading a diary. If he had all that straight.

  Seppo was still standing opposite him, his mouth slightly open and a frown on his forehead, apparently waiting for explanations.

  ‘Seppo,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ asked Seppo.

  ‘I miss that woman. The one in our car.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman. In the patrol car. Who always tells us the right way to go.’

  ‘Ah . . . the satnav system?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what she’s called. I miss her more than anything else in the world.’

  78

  Milestones. It’s a word I heard recently in connection with projects and carrying them out. You get to your destination by reaching milestone after milestone. I suspect that all the milestones of my project have been reached. Project teams are often set up to carry out a project. People who are looking for me while I am looking for Risto. The projects are similar, only the aims are different.

  So I probably ought to be grateful to the two Finnish police officers, because without them I wouldn’t have found Risto. In his nice suite, 2,000 kilometres from Finland.

  In the two press conferences that the news channel transmitted in full, Westerberg appeared very reserved and very tired. I noticed how seriously and thoughtfully he answered questions. Suddenly I was convinced that he if anyone was going to find Risto, and so he did.

  It’s very easy to shadow police officers, I suppose because they don’t expect the person they’re looking for to be following them. They were standing at the check-in counter talking about Risto, quietly but sounding a little harassed. Risto. In Germany. Frankfurt. A hotel. The lady at the airline counter smiled and told me I was in luck, there weren’t many seats still vacant.

  In the plane I sat right behind the two of them, and I sensed their uneasiness, their tension, their hunting instinct now that it was aroused, although they said hardly anything, but I understood them very well.

  However, back to the diary – a diary serves to reflect what its writer has experienced, so it is meant exclusively for the diarist himself. I told you that clearly, Teuvo. But I can understand now why you sent me your diary, and sad as your story is, I am even glad to have it.

  It was strange, because on the day in summer when your diary reached me, my sister’s husband died. In a car accident. He drove into a crash barrier and the car somersaulted several times because he was trying to avoid a drunk driver. The drunk was uninjured.

  Since then I’ve been staying with my sister Leea and her son Olli. You’d have liked Olli. He reminds me of us at that time. Well, perhaps of myself more than you. He’s just as stubborn, and hates to lose, and he also seems to have my preference for subjecting everything to stringent logic.

  I am sorry that I was never honest with you, but unlike you I lacked the strength. Or the courage. I don’t know exactly what I lacked; it must have been something fundamental.

  I was there, Teuvo, I was there every time. I always got there fifteen minutes after you, and stood in the flower bed in the garden, and watched the two of you playing the piano. And listened. I was there on the day when it happened.

  For a long time I tried to find a way of talking to you about it, but I never did, and then you lived your own life and I lived mine, and in the end you were a memory, a memory of someone I had liked and whom I was endlessly sorry for, but also someone who wasn’t part of my life any longer.

  I stood out there in the sun that day, and looking through the window I saw the men and the two boys go into the bedroom. I heard Anttila, the man from the supermarket – we always laughed at him – when he called you a ‘model student’.

  What a misjudgement! Don’t take this the wrong way, but you were really not a model student, Teuvo. However, you know that yourself.

  Do you know what Anttila said, instinctively and entirely automatically, when I last met him only a few days ago? ‘The friend of the model student.’ Yes, he recognised me. He could remember me and, above all, you, although so many years have passed.

  The friend of the model student, those were his last words, and if you were still alive that might possibly comfort you, although I suspect not. That’s not the way it works.

  For instance, there isn’t anything in the least logical about my writing to you now, because one can’t talk to someone who is dead. But I can find no other way to write this down. If it was not meant for you I couldn’t write it. And I have to write it.

  When your letter arrived this summer, with the letter accompanying it that told me you were planning to take your own life, of course I began looking for you.

  It didn’t take me long. My first thought was the same as yours – to go to Karjasaari. To Saara. The house was empty. A young family seems to have lived there last, but they had just moved out. It’s a very remote place; I had the feeling that most of the houses and farms there are uninhabited now.

  I went into the garden and looked through the window. I didn’t find the piano, but I found you – again, that didn’t take long – I went into the forest and saw you sitting down there, leaning against a tree. I went down myself and sat with you, and stayed for quite a long time. A day and a night.

  You said in your letter that you had seen Saara in the paper, that you had found her. Without looking for her. And that it was too late. You were right. I saw her myself once more, in the hospital, and it was too late for anything. I ended it.

  Can you remember that dictation? You wrote something about it in the diary. You couldn’t write any more, you were sweating and breathing heavily, and in my opinion you were having a breakdown of some kind, I don’t know just what but a breakdown in the clinical sense, so I wrote it out for you, and we laughed about it a bit in break, because old Itkonen didn’t notice, and I even seriously thought I had helped you. But I never did the one thing I really ought to have done, definitely ought to have done long ago: I ought to have talked to you in peace, with all the time in the world, about everything.

  Perhaps it’s as simple as I sometimes think, perhaps I was afraid of your questions.

  I think you would like to ask, even now, why I stood in the flower bed while you and Saara were playing the piano. I don’t know. All that occurs to me is the word longing, and I can’t explain what the longing was for.

  You will laugh, but some years ago I went to see several doctors, and one of them confirmed that I had a defect, one that to the best of his knowledge was not to be found in any medical textbook. He seemed fascinated, and was probably disappointed when I stopped going to him, but that was only because I thought his diagnosis was quite conclusive enough. I like the word defect, and I think he was right.

  At that time my sister Leea, who sometimes says wise things, contributed to our discussion of it over her kitchen table one night – her impression, she said, was that it was difficult for me to take hold of life. To have it in my hands and be aware of that. I know so much, she said, and I would always find categories and concepts, but everything would slide off them. I would find concepts but not the lines holding them together and relating them to each other.

  That’s my sister Leea.

  Her son Olli will amount to something one of these days.

  I don’t mind that you mention in your diary my failed attempt to kiss fat Satu Koivinen. You’re right, it really was a failure, but that was partly Satu’s fault, honestly.

  I’ve always wondered what you were doing, and when I read that you have been at sea all those years i
t seemed to me convincing. Logical in the best sense of the word. Travelling over the water back and forth, there and back, without ever coming to your journey’s end.

  In all these last eighteen years I have practised any number of professions, all of them ultimately stupid stuff. Recently I’ve been working for a news agency, writing things about the Stock Exchange. An absurd but lucrative job, although only if you go about it circumspectly.

  This is where boarding ends. Passengers are standing in line waiting. A funny thing happened just now, while I was writing this. A name was called, telling its bearer that the gates would soon be closing, and I wondered how often they would have to call that name before the right person finally reacted. And then, finally, I realised that it was my name. My new name, mine from now on, so I still have to get used to it, although it’s very memorable, and I’ve already used it on various business cards.

  So I’m going now. I can see the ground staff at the boarding desk getting impatient. I’m looking forward to the flight and my arrival, perhaps because I have never been in that city, and I left the choice of place to chance. A few weeks ago I asked Olli to tell me the name of a city beginning with S, not in Finland. It’s compulsive. The initial S. And the silly name I’ve given myself, and that in fact is already on a passport that I can use for travelling. I can’t travel everywhere on it, there are places I shall avoid, partly on the advice of the odd but friendly man who prepared the document for me. And I wouldn’t have thought that, ultimately, it would be easy to travel with an invented name. It somehow makes me hope that the world is really in order.

  Araas Aluviok.

  Leea thought it sounded Norwegian or Latvian. Olli thought it sounded Greek. They both asked whose name it was, and I almost laughed.

  I know it’s silly, really, but I’ve always liked pseudonyms, names behind which people can hide. Not just any old invented names, but names that make sense, and this one makes sense, even if it’s simple and slightly pathetic.

  An ananym is always simple and pathetic, perhaps even childish, but I like this one, perhaps that’s what it’s about, Teuvo – about our childhood. I just wanted them to have to read Saara’s name once more, although they didn’t understand what they were really looking at.