The Winter of the Lions

by Jan Costin Wagner

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘That’s right, nothing.’

  ‘What … what was the matter with that woman?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean, Kai?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ said Hämäläinen. ‘Who’s on next?’

  ‘What?’ asked Tuula.

  Hämäläinen studied his notes. ‘The firefighter. And then Kapanen,’ he said. ‘Send them on.’

  ‘Kai, we have to …’

  ‘I’ve seen the Bond film. Kapanen was excellent,’ said Hämäläinen.

  A girl assistant materialised out of the mist and mopped the sweat off his face with a cloth.

  ‘Kai, we can’t just …’ said Tuula.

  ‘Yes, we can. You’d better get off the stage now, we’ll be on screen again in a moment,’ said Hämäläinen, looking down at the questions he was going to ask Kapanen. One after another. He wouldn’t leave out any of them.

  Tuula watched him for a little while longer. He could feel her watching, but he kept his head bent over the questions, and Tuula, weak at the knees, disappeared into the dazzling light. The voice in his ear was counting down the seconds.

  87

  SALME SALONEN WAS taken to the police station on the outskirts of Helsinki for questioning. At no time did she offer any resistance. No knife was found in her handbag, only a photograph presumably of her husband and her son against a wintry background in Stockholm.

  She sat perfectly still on a chair in a grey room while Sundström questioned her. Westerberg and Joentaa stood on the other side of the glass pane of the interview room, and Salme Salonen willingly gave answers. She spoke slowly, her voice sounded calm, soft, clear and abstracted. She seemed to be thinking very carefully before formulating a sentence. Yes, her name was Salme Salonen. She was twenty-eight years old. Born on 24 March 1980. Yes, she lived in Turku, Asematie 19. She had been married to Ilmari Mattila, she had had a son. Veikko Mattila. She was a widow.

  Name, address, date of birth, thought Joentaa, and Sundström’s own voice sounded clear and gentle and curiously abstracted. A burden seemed to be weighing down on the woman as she sat very upright at the table, and a burden seemed to have fallen from Sundström’s shoulders.

  ‘Profession?’ asked Sundström.

  Until 17 February of this year Salme Salonen had worked as a clerical assistant in the accounts department of a company that manufactured children’s toys. She had survived the collapse of a skating rink in Turku late on the afternoon of that day, but with severe injuries. She had suffered several broken bones and trauma to the skull and brain, and she spent three and a half months in hospital.

  Along with others affected, she was involved in a legal dispute with a firm that had constructed the roof of the skating rink nineteen years ago, and had renovated it a few weeks before it collapsed. The head of the firm had left the country and could not be traced. Presentation of the evidence for the causes of the accident was not yet complete.

  She talked about a woman called Rauna.

  ‘Rauna?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘My friend,’ said Salme Salonen. ‘She was lying beside me when the sky fell down.’

  Sundström said nothing.

  ‘She can skate very well. She is dancing on the ice. Veikko is laughing, and Ilmari slips. Ilmari is not a good skater, but it doesn’t bother him. Then the sky falls down, and Rauna is lying beside me. We look at each other.’

  ‘Have you known this Rauna long?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘No, we meet for the first time that day. She asks me if the sky has fallen down, and visits me in my room in the hospital. While she is getting better. All she has is a broken arm. I would like to adopt her.’

  ‘Adopt her?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Because her parents are dead.’

  ‘Her …?’

  ‘Rauna is nearly six. Her parents were at the skating rink too. Rauna is living in the Children’s Home on the Klosterberg. She would like it if we could live together, but they have to do tests first.’

  ‘What … what do they have to test?’ asks Sundström.

  ‘The authorities are testing to see whether it’s possible. And a psychologist is testing too. To see if I’m legally competent.’

  Sundström said nothing again.

  ‘That’s what they call it. Funny sort of phrase,’ she said. ‘I often think about words.’

  The woman smiled slightly, and Joentaa thought that smile was for Rauna.

  ‘Why did you go to see the Hämäläinen talk show on 8 November this year?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Because I was invited,’ she said.

  ‘Invited … who by?’

  ‘By him. There was a photograph in the letter too, with a signature.’

  ‘An autographed card?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Yes. And the ticket. I had agreed to be on the show on New Year’s Eve … that’s today … and talk about Ilmari and Veikko and that day at the skating rink, so I was invited to be in the audience at an earlier show. As a present because they … they couldn’t pay me a fee.’

  Sundström stared at the woman.

  ‘I was surprised, too. About the fee. I didn’t want a fee, I just wanted to talk about Ilmari and Veikko, and Rauna and her parents, and explain that everything had to be done to put it right again.’

  ‘I see. You told us, when we arrested you, that you didn’t want your lawyer present at this interrogation,’ said Sundström.

  She nodded. ‘He’d have had to come rather a long way. He lives in Turku. And he’s not as young as he used to be.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sundström. ‘You are accused of the murders of the forensic pathologist Patrik Laukkanen and the puppet-maker Harri Mäkelä,’ he added.

  ‘I don’t know their names. But that’s right. You are right.’

  ‘Right about what?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘I did it. What you say.’

  ‘You attacked and killed the forensic pathologist Patrik Laukkanen and the puppet-maker Harri Mäkelä with a knife,’ said Sundström. ‘And you stabbed Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Louder, please,’ said Sundström.

  There was a long silence.

  Sundström sat down and lowered his gaze to the softly humming tape recorder.

  The change in the woman’s body language took place very slowly, almost imperceptibly. Something seemed to be happening under her skin. She began to stroke her arms, very lightly at first, then pressing harder and harder, scratching them as if she had been bitten by an insect.

  Sundström did not look up until, with abrupt movements, the woman began tearing at her hair.

  ‘Can I …?’ he began, but whatever he had been going to say next was drowned out by the long scream that the woman uttered. It seemed to come for her inmost depths.

  She had closed her eyes.

  She screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Call Larissa, thought Joentaa.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Sundström.

  The screaming died away, and the woman slumped where she sat. She looked at Sundström, who was sitting opposite her, transfixed.

  ‘A desert in my head,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘It didn’t help,’ she said.

  ‘What didn’t help?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘I can’t remember. I know it happened, but I can’t remember.’

  Sundström seemed to be waiting for her to go on.

  ‘Did you see the photo?’ she asked.

  ‘The photo in your handbag?’ asked Sundström.

  ‘Yes.’

  Sundström nodded.

  She seemed about to say something else, but then she didn’t, and Sundström said no more either. After a few minutes he switched off the recorder.

  88

  THE SHOW WENT on. Hämäläinen felt that he weighed very little. Which must be to do with the way he was hovering ab
ove the floor. He was surprised that his guests didn’t seem to notice.

  He spoke earnestly to the firefighter who had brought the dead out of the skating rink. He chatted to the relaxed Kapanen. He announced Bon Jovi and, after his appearance and mention of the dates of his tour, he even got some cheerful remarks about the Finnish winter out of him.

  It was all flowing by. The audience listened and laughed. The woman and the silence might never have been there. He didn’t understand it. The show ended with a firework display based on some clever pyrotechnics, and everyone stood on stage and waved, and Hämäläinen waved too.

  Then, as if gliding on rails, he went to his dressing room and drank what, according to the label on the bottle, was freshly pressed grapefruit juice, and Tuula and Olli Latvala were yakking away at him, and he raised one hand and said, ‘Quiet.’

  They stopped talking.

  ‘Absolute silence, please,’ he said.

  After a while Tuula said that the woman had been taken away by the police, she still didn’t understand why.

  Did he know what had happened? She said the editorial team working on the teletext and Internet versions, who had been processing the incident directly afterwards, had spoken only of a woman overcome by grief and a sympathetic presenter who hadn’t wanted to press her for answers.

  Hämäläinen felt that slight pang again; within a few seconds he felt it in different parts of his body. ‘Oh yes?’ he said.

  ‘I think that’s how the studio audience took it,’ said Olli Latvala.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘But the woman was taken away. And I know they suspect some connection with the accident, the roof of the skating rink that fell in …’ said Tuula. ‘Do you know the woman?’

  ‘No,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘You must have been annoyed when she didn’t say anything. You both just sat there for minutes on end in silence. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of anything to say,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘Could she have been the person who stabbed you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘Of course?’ asked Tuula.

  ‘Of course she was the one who stabbed me.’

  ‘Then you recognised her?’

  ‘No. How could I recognise someone I’d never seen?’

  ‘Kai, I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘Can they quote you on that? That she was the woman who … attacked you. Or at least that’s what you suspect.’

  ‘On the news …’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘Well, yes, I’m asking because Lundberg has spoken to me about it,’ said Olli Latvala. ‘He’s editing the news today, and they haven’t been able to get any statement out of the police. At the moment no one knows exactly what really happened.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hämäläinen.

  ‘They want to know if they could do an interview with you,’ said Olli Latvala.

  ‘An interview,’ said Hämäläinen. Suddenly he couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I’m only passing on what Lundberg said to me,’ said Latvala.

  ‘Don’t worry, Olli,’ said Hämäläinen. ‘It’s not your fault, really.’ He paused for a moment, and chuckled to himself again.

  Go home, he thought. Let off a firework display. A proper one. Light up the dark sky. Irene smiling. The imps gazing at the fireworks wide-eyed.

  He wiped the smile off his face, and for some moments felt full of dwindling, fleeting strength as he said, ‘I’m afraid the answer is no. I’m fed up with interviews for this year.’

  89

  KIMMO JOENTAA AND Paavo Sundström spent the night in Helsinki again. In the same hotel. It was after two in the morning when they checked in.

  The interrogation of Salme Salonen had been resumed and interrupted again several times. She had answered most of the questions that Sundström and occasionally Westerberg asked her with a simple ‘Yes’.

  Kimmo Joentaa had stood on the other side of the window looking at the woman, and the longer she agreed, the more often she nodded, the less he had understood.

  Salme Salonen had talked about a picture she had seen, but when Sundström asked her she couldn’t describe it in any detail.

  ‘It doesn’t do any good,’ she had said.

  ‘Why don’t you leave me to be the judge of what will and will not be any good in this case?’

  She had nodded, but said nothing.

  She’s at peace, thought Joentaa. She has come to a standstill.

  She said, several times, ‘It didn’t help.’

  Sundström had asked no more questions, presumably because he didn’t think he would get any further explanation of that remark.

  ‘When the third man was lying on the floor I didn’t feel angry any more,’ she had said.

  Sundström had nodded.

  ‘I don’t know what it is now. Anger, I mean.’

  Sundström had nodded again.

  Westerberg had gone home, and Sundström and Joentaa had taken a taxi to the hotel.

  The woman who had opened the computer terminal for Joentaa a few days ago, when he wanted to watch the DVD of the chat show in the middle of the night, was at the reception desk. She gave them their keys and seemed about to say something. They had already turned away when the woman began to speak. ‘Sorry I wasn’t very friendly a few days ago.’

  Joentaa turned round. ‘No problem,’ he said.

  ‘I saw you on TV,’ she said. ‘Both of you. I didn’t know …’

  On TV, thought Joentaa.

  ‘Taking that woman away. Is she … is she guilty?’

  Guilty, thought Joentaa.

  They took the lift up to the fourth floor and went along a red and orange corridor.

  Sundström was listening to his mobile. ‘Nurmela,’ he said. ‘Congratulating us.’ He switched off the mobile and said goodnight to Kimmo.

  Joentaa went into his room. He spent a long time standing in the dark, thinking of the picture that Salme Salonen saw and couldn’t describe.

  Beyond the glass of the window, late rockets shot skywards now and then. As they went off they glittered in all colours of the rainbow.

  1 JANUARY

  90

  AAPELI RAANTAMO WAS woken by the footsteps. And the tables or chairs being pushed back and forth. It was still dark outside. The clock said 4.30.

  He had spent New Year’s Eve alone. Had made himself tomato soup, pasta with a cream sauce and curried prawns. When the time came he had watched the firework display. The couple who had recently moved into the apartment right at the top of the building had been giving a party, and he had stood outside in the cold, knees shaking, among a crowd of young people, and some of them had hugged him and wished him a Happy New Year.

  He had returned their good wishes, and he looked out for Salme, but she wasn’t there, and there had been no lights on in her apartment. He had asked the couple from the top floor about her as they watched the fireworks, closely entwined. They didn’t know where Salme was either.

  But now she seemed to be back. Chairs were being moved about in her apartment, and he heard footsteps and voices. He sat up and concentrated on the noises. Men’s voices, lowered, but easily audible. And now steps in the stairwell too. Several men.

  He got up, put on his coat and his slippers, and opened the door. The stairwell was brightly lit. One man jostled him as he came out.

  ‘Sorry,’ murmured the man, and hurried on downstairs. Aapeli Raantamo went up. The door to Salme’s apartment was open. He approached it cautiously. When he reached the door, a tall, broad-shouldered man came towards him and said, ‘There’s nothing to see here.’

  ‘Excuse me, please,’ said Aapeli. ‘Who … who are you?’

  The man seemed about to reply brusquely, but then he stopped and said, ‘You live here?’

  ‘Yes, down below. One floor under Salme.’

  The man
nodded. ‘My name is Grönholm. Police, Criminal Investigation Department. What’s yours?’

  ‘Aapeli … Aapeli Raantamo. Where … where is Salme, then? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Weren’t you watching TV?’

  ‘Why … why do you ask?’

  ‘Never mind. I have things to do here. I’ll look in on you later.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I was,’ said Aapeli.

  ‘You were what?’

  ‘Yes, I was watching TV. Yesterday evening.’

  ‘Then you must have recognised Mrs Salonen.’

  ‘I was watching an old film. With Cary Grant,’ said Aapeli.

  ‘Oh,’ said Grönholm.

  ‘What’s happened to Salme?’

  The man said nothing for a while. ‘I’ll look in later. Get a little more sleep, all right?’

  Aapeli nodded, and the man turned away and went back into the apartment. Salme’s apartment. But Salme wasn’t there.

  Aapeli slowly went downstairs. Something bad, he thought. Something bad has happened. His hands were shaking as he turned on the TV. The teletext.

  The first headline ran: Murderess on the sofa with Hämäläinen. Underneath, it said: Assumed murderess Salme S. arrested during chat show. A line lower down, in green lettering: Chronology of events. Under that the sports reports. Ski-jumping. A Finn had won the qualifying round in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Aapeli looked at the lines of text. He read and read and didn’t understand anything. He felt the strength drain out of his body.

  He sat on his bed and could not take his eyes off the text on the screen. Up in Salme’s apartment, there were footsteps and men’s muted voices. After a while he looked away and saw the card leaning against the candleholder. Salme’s Christmas card.

  He stood up and went over to the table, picked up the card and opened it. Ilmari and Veikko in Stockholm. Salme must have taken it herself. His hands began trembling again, so badly this time that the card dropped from his fingers.

  He sat down on a chair and looked at the card lying on the floor, while outside the darkness gave way to dawn.

  91

  A FRIENDLY NURSE put new bandages on his wrists. She carefully wound the strips of white muslin from his hands up to his elbows.