PASI AND LIISA Laaksonen, his neighbours, waved to Kimmo Joentaa and called ‘Happy Christmas’ as he got out of the car. Each was holding one of their granddaughter Marja’s hands, and she was laughing because Pasi and Liisa were swinging her up in the air.
Kimmo Joentaa returned their greeting and hurried indoors. He stood in the corridor for a while in silence, waiting for the snow to melt and run down the back of his neck. Then he took off his jacket, cap and scarf, and went from room to room switching on all the lights.
Later he stood in the living room, looking at the frozen lake beyond the window and thinking of Kari Niemi, head of the scene-of-crime unit, who had asked if he would like to spend Christmas with him and his family. He had been very glad of the invitation, but declined it. Maybe next year. He had said the same when his mother Anita asked if he would like to spend the festive season with her in Kitee. He had also refused the annual invitation from Sanna’s parents Merja and Jussi Silvonen, saying that unfortunately he had his hands full over Christmas and would hardly get time to stop and take breath.
He would visit Merja and Jussi tomorrow. They would be quiet, and after a while they would all talk about Sanna in their different ways. Exchanging memories that hovered in the air above them for a while. Weightless. Elusive. They would not talk about the weeks after her cancer diagnosis, the last days in hospital. There would be the clink of cups, and Merja offering a plate of home-made biscuits. In an empty house.
Tomorrow. And tomorrow he’d ring his mother too.
He went into the kitchen, feeling pleasantly silly as he took the unopened vodka bottle out of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. He thought of Sanna, who had seldom drunk, but when she did drink, she did it thoroughly. A quality he had liked, and after her death he was the same himself. On the rare occasions when he drank, he too did it thoroughly.
This was one of those times. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. He toyed with the thought of drinking a glass of milk and going straight to bed.
He was still thinking of various tempting alternatives when the doorbell rang.
Pasi, he thought. Pasi Laaksonen come to ask if he wouldn’t like to spend Christmas Day next door, with them and their children and grandchildren.
Or Anita. His mother had got on the train and come to visit him although he had firmly asked her not to.
He opened the door and looked at the face of the woman who had broken Ari Pekka Sorajärvi’s nose and whose name he didn’t know. She looked like a snowman, since she was wearing a snow-white coat and a snow-white cap, and both were covered with snow.
The woman said nothing. There seemed to be a quiet smile on her lips, but he could be wrong about that.
‘Oh … hello,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ she said, walking past him and into the corridor.
‘I … how did you …’
‘Kimmo Joentaa. Says so on the nameplate outside your office door. And on an envelope lying on your desk. There’s only one Kimmo Joentaa in Turku. Unusual name. Sanna and Kimmo Joentaa, it says in the phone book. Is your wife here?’
‘N … no.’
She nodded, as if she had expected that answer, and went towards the living room.
‘What … what did you want?’ asked Joentaa.
She turned and looked at him for a while.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nothing, probably. Do you have anything to drink?’
‘Er, of course. Milk … milk or vodka?’
The woman seemed unimpressed by this selection. ‘Both,’ she said, going purposefully into the living room.
‘Er …’ said Joentaa. He went into the kitchen and filled one glass with milk and another with vodka.
The woman was sitting on the living-room sofa looking at the lake outside the window. ‘Nice view,’ she said.
Joentaa put the glasses down. ‘Can I help you? If it’s about the report you wanted to …’
The woman laughed. Laughed at him again. The last person who had been able to laugh at him so heartily and regularly was Sanna.
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘No, it’s not about the report. I really can’t remember the man’s name anyway.’
‘Ari Pekka Sorajärvi,’ said Joentaa mechanically, and the woman laughed again. Even louder, a laugh ending in a squeal. She couldn’t calm down.
‘Sorry,’ said Joentaa, and the woman laughed and laughed as if he were the funniest comic act she had ever seen. Her slim body was convulsed by fits of laughter.
Kimmo Joentaa went into the kitchen, drank four large shots of vodka in swift succession, and felt rather better as he went back to the laughing woman sitting on his living-room sofa. He sat down in the old armchair beside the sofa.
‘There’s something I’d like to ask you, it’s important,’ he said, and against all the dictates of logic he had an idea he was babbling already. ‘Did that … did that Sorajärvi hurt you?’
The woman laughed again, but only briefly this time. ‘You talk just like senior citizens must have talked in the nineteenth century.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, damn it all, can’t you ever stop saying sorry?’
‘What I mean is … I think you ought to report the man to the police, which is what you were planning to do, after all. And I could understand you better then. I simply don’t understand you yet.’
‘Ari Pekka Sorajärvi was a little rougher with me than agreed,’ she said. ‘In return I broke his nose. Get the idea?’
Joentaa thought about that for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said, and the woman began laughing again.
‘As you say, okay.’
‘Sorry, all I meant was maybe I understand the situation a little better now.’
‘If you say sorry again for no reason I’ll be breaking another nose today.’
‘I can’t help you unless I understand what happened,’ said Joentaa.
The woman looked at him for a long time. ‘Who says I want you to help me?’
‘I thought …’
‘You’re crazy, you just don’t know it,’ she said.
‘There’s something the matter with you,’ she said.
Joentaa waited.
‘Something very much indeed the matter with you,’ said the woman.
Joentaa still waited.
‘There’s something the matter with you, and I’d really like to find out what it is,’ she said.
Then she stood up and put her arms round him. The old armchair creaked. He felt her hair against his cheek, her tongue in his mouth, and a great cry filled his brain.