5

Krista wakes me. She is sitting on top of me, her slender hips pressing down against my own. Cotton pyjamas separate our bodies. I look up at her.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks.

She has opened the curtains. Judging by the amount of light spreading through the room, I guess I must have slept for a few hours. I should be on my way to work. Krista’s thick brown hair falls on both sides of her face. Her grey-green eyes are unique; they always seem to reflect the light even when it’s dim. My wife is a beautiful woman. She is still a beautiful woman, I think.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Minna said someone broke in to the museum last night.’

Minna is married to Jokinen, the local storekeeper. Turunmaa must have called Jokinen, who then told his wife all about it. Minna and Krista are good friends. I know she wishes I could be friends with Mr Hannu Jokinen, but for one reason or another I’m not. I know most of the villagers like him. He chats with all the customers in his store, remembers people’s special orders, even their birthdays, and even has groceries delivered if the customer wishes.

‘It was … just a break-in,’ I say and rub my bleary eyes.

Anything that happens in a small village is common knowledge in a matter of seconds. It’s a striking phenomenon. Sometimes I think that, were I to stub my toe while alone in my house, someone would call within fifteen minutes to ask how my foot was.

‘Just a break-in?’ asks Krista. ‘Darling. Nothing happened to you, did it? Was it terrifying? Are you all right? Why didn’t you wake me up when you got home?’

I don’t know which question to answer first. I tell her I was taken by surprise and that the intruders made off with an ancient grenade. I tell her the police visited the scene and passed the case on to the army.

‘I’m fine,’ I say eventually.

‘That’s the most important thing,’ she says and strokes my head. Her slender hand touches the bump on the back of my head. ‘Oh, sweetheart. It’ll all be fine. Things always work themselves out. You just have to be careful. You’re going to be a father soon. You can’t just—’

‘I’ve signed up for all the remaining night shifts. All four of them.’

Krista’s hand stops. ‘What about us?’

What us, I think, quicker than I even notice. I look at Krista and something almost sinister flashes through my mind.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, though I guess I already know what she means.

‘It would be nice to talk about it, think about things, together. Names, even,’ she says eventually and touches her abdomen. ‘But we’ve got plenty of time to talk about all that, I suppose.’

‘Names?’

‘People generally give their baby a name.’

‘Of course,’ I say, though this is the first time the matter has crossed my mind, and even then it’s not of my own volition. A cold wave of jealousy heaves within me. ‘I’ll try and think of something suitable.’

Krista looks at me long and hard. ‘We can do it together,’ she says. ‘That’s the whole point. After all, it’s not just your baby…’

A phone somewhere gives a text-message beep. Krista glances at hers, on the table on her side of the bed. It’s only a quick glance, but it catches my attention. Krista’s phone is like a broken doorbell, chiming constantly. I, meanwhile, can leave my phone in my jacket pocket, forget all about it, and assume the following morning that nobody needed to contact me. If you’d asked me the day before yesterday to think of something negative about my wife, I would probably have said she’s a bit too attached to her phone. Now I might mention something else.

Krista turns her head. ‘What about Saturday night?’ she asks.

The winter fête in the neighbouring village. I’d been vaguely aware of the fête until last night, the events of which erased it from my mind. Hardly surprising.

‘I don’t want to go by myself,’ she says. ‘And I don’t like the idea of you sitting all by yourself in that museum while the rest of us are dancing and having fun.’

Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing all this time, I think to myself.

‘I want you to be there,’ she continues. ‘And I want to go too. You know how much I like karaoke. Why can’t someone else take care of the night shift? Why do you have to do it?’

Because one humiliation and one near-miss are quite enough, I think. Because you, my dear, you have…

‘You’ll be fine without me. And you can’t put just anyone on watch at the museum. I have special training, remember. It’s only a few more nights.’

Krista flicks her hair behind her shoulders. Her face is lit from the side. I can see the small, pretty crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

‘It just doesn’t feel nice,’ she says. ‘I’m a bit worried about you – in general I mean. You don’t seem very happy or enthusiastic, even though our lives are about to change so much.’

‘I am, of course I am,’ I assure her. ‘It’s just that yesterday … The break-in and everything. The lack of sleep.’

‘Surely the other men understand that people need to have time for their families. Tell them something has come up. Something unexpected.’

That’s one way of putting it. So many times I’ve stood in front of people and said that there’s no way of knowing God’s greater plan. Right this minute, it feels as though not even He knows it. Perhaps the difference between providence and freefall isn’t as great as I’d once thought.

‘You know these guys,’ I say eventually. ‘It’s a done deal. Once you agree a plan, it’s best to stick to it or everything falls apart.’

Krista doesn’t look particularly satisfied with this response. It’s as though she wants to say something else but stops herself. Eventually she sighs and leans over me. She kisses me on the mouth, between my eyes, on my forehead.

‘It might help,’ she says, ‘if you eat some breakfast.’

She stands up, fetches her phone from the table and walks out of the room.

I don’t want breakfast. Instead I decide to find out who owns that Nissan Micra.

Typing the registration number into the app on my phone is easy enough. The results appear just as easily. It seems that the vehicle with this registration number has been deleted from the national register. Before that happened, it had a string of owners, the last of which seems to be a company named Eastern Finland Summer Camping Ltd. The vehicle itself is a red Ford Transit van, a Ford designed for professional use, the model dating from 2006. The description is a far cry from the light-blue Nissan Micra SUV that I saw last night.

If I ever had doubts about whether the break-in was premeditated, this anomaly has swept them away in an instant.