THE RINGING MINGLES with his dream. It takes a minute for Erne to wake up and haul himself up to sitting on the well-worn leather sofa. The air-conditioning is blowing cold air on his face, and his neck aches. His fever has probably gotten worse. The number flashing on the screen belongs to Sanna Porkka, the police chief who agreed to drive Koponen down from Savonlinna. It’s three fifteen a.m., and the open-plan office is deserted.
“Hello?” Erne has a hard time finding his voice and can’t help coughing.
“Respice in speculo resplendent,” a female voice says. It sounds like the chief inspector, but the voice is sluggish, shaking.
“What?”
Then silence. There’s a rustling in the background. A woman sobbing. Erne tries to process what he’s hearing; his thoughts are still confused from sleep.
“Porkka?”
“Respice in speculo resplendent.”
“I don’t understand,” Erne mumbles, and sits up. He is too out of it to make any sense of what’s going on. “What’s wrong?” His grip on the phone tightens. “Where’s Koponen?”
Then there’s shouting, and the call cuts off. Erne looks at the screen of his phone for a moment, then goes into his recent calls and brings up Sanna Porkka’s number.
The number you are trying to reach is not available.
Fuck. Erne saved Roger Koponen’s number a couple of hours ago but can’t get through to it either. Something is seriously awry. Erne rubs his face hard and stalks into his office. He selects the next number from the phone’s menu and presses the call icon.
“Savonlinna police . . . ,” answers a male voice, alert, considering the time of day.
“Mikson, Helsinki homicide. What time did Porkka and Koponen leave Savonlinna?”
“Just a second . . .”
“What time did they start driving toward Helsinki?” Erne snaps, and now he hears fingers leap into action on a keyboard. An agonizing ten seconds pass.
“According to the log, they left the station at one oh three a.m. But weren’t they supposed to take his car?”
“Yes. Why?”
“My understanding was they had to pick it up from the parking garage at the hotel, so it would have taken a while before they actually got on the road.” The on-duty officer falls silent.
Erne sits down at his computer and feels the pulse at his throat.
“Isn’t Porkka answering her phone?” the on-duty officer asks.
“No.”
“But . . . if anything happened on the road, we would have been informed. . . .”
“If it were an accident.”
“What else . . . ?”
“Call me right away if you hear anything,” Erne says, and hangs up. He can hear the blood rushing in his ears. The bare branches of the birch scratch against the window.
Erne brings up a map on his computer screen. Did Porkka and Koponen ever leave Savonlinna? One oh three a.m. . . . plus twenty minutes . . . They’ve been driving for two hours max. . . . Erne drags his cursor along the route from the Sokos Hotel in Savonlinna and stops it between Mikkeli and Heinola.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” Erne whispers to himself, and looks up the teleoperators’ dedicated number for the authorities. He lifts the phone to his ear again, at the same time trying to remember what Porkka said just a moment ago on the phone. Respis . . . Damn it. The words didn’t mean anything to him in the first place.
The night shift worker on the emergency line answers the phone, but Erne stammers, has a hard time explaining what he needs. A cold wave washes over him.
Porkka was speaking Latin.