KIMMO JOENTAA TOOK the DVD out of the drive, switched off the computer, left the receptionist there and went to his room. He dropped on to the smooth white bed and thought for a while.
He hesitated briefly, then called Enquiries, but he got nowhere with his question. He took the list containing the phone numbers of the central investigators out of his rucksack. There were three numbers by Westerberg’s name: office, mobile and home. He tried the home number.
After a few seconds Westerberg picked up the phone, sounding considerably more alert than during the day. Joentaa explained what it was about.
‘Vaasara. The puppet-maker’s assistant?’ asked Westerberg.
‘Exactly. Do you have his number? He lived with Mäkelä, but there’s no entry in the phone book under either name.’
‘Hm,’ said Westerberg. ‘Just a moment.’
Joentaa heard a woman’s voice in the distance, and a rustling, and Westerberg murmured something not meant for him. Then he was back on the line. ‘Got it,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘Hm. Ready to write it down?’
Joentaa got out a pen and noted down the number that Westerberg dictated to him. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome. Listen, Kimmo, why …’
‘See you tomorrow,’ said Joentaa, and broke the connection. There was no time to formulate his idea for Westerberg when it still eluded Joentaa himself.
He rang the number on the piece of paper and waited. He let the phone ring for several minutes, until Vaasara picked it up.
‘Yes … hello?’
‘Kimmo Joentaa from the Turku CID. I came to see you with two of my colleagues.’
‘Yes …’
‘I have to ask you something, something that strikes me as important, that’s why I’m ringing so late at night.’
‘Yes …’
‘It’s about the puppets.’
‘Yes …’
‘About the process of making them. What does a puppet-maker use as a model?’
‘As a model?’
‘Yes.’
‘I … excuse me, but I …’
‘What serves you as the model? You make exact copies. So what are they modelled on?’
‘Well …’ said Vaasara.
‘Well?’
‘Various things. It also depends on the way you go about making a particular puppet.’
‘Meaning?’
‘A puppet-maker commissioned to provide copies of dead bodies is well trained in human anatomy, of course. He needs that training for making other … well, normal puppets. And for copying corpses we use various sources. For instance, we’ve often used police literature. There are textbooks for trainees at police colleges, showing different kinds of deaths in great detail …’
Joentaa nodded.
‘We work with the Forensic Institute in Helsinki, and the Faculty of Medicine at the university … we attend autopsies, and besides his craft training Harri also had diplomas in chemistry and biology, he … he was brilliant.’
Joentaa nodded. ‘I meant something else,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Vaasara.
‘Is it possible that someone related to a dead person could recognise that person, the one he’s mourning for, in one of your puppets?’
Vaasara said nothing.
‘Do you understand?’ asked Joentaa.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Well?’
‘That’s not possible,’ said Vaasara.
‘Why not?’
‘We don’t copy real dead people,’ said Vaasara.
‘But you use photos as models. Photos from police textbooks, for instance.’
‘Of course,’ said Vaasara.
‘Well then?’
‘We use photos, yes. Harri more than me. Harri had whole data banks of such photographs, the Internet is full of them. Drowned bodies. People killed in various different ways, shot, run over, mutilated. Corpses in progressive stages of decomposition.’
‘Then we agree,’ said Joentaa.
‘No,’ said Vaasara. ‘We use photos and copies just as we use our knowledge of chemical and biological processes and above all, of course, our craft skills to make puppets. Not real people.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that the real model, if there is one, doesn’t look like the puppet that is our end product.’
Joentaa closed his eyes and felt the vague, outlandish idea take ever more concrete shape the longer Vaasara tried to convince him of its impossibility. Vaasara did not sound upset or offended, he was answering the questions calmly, in a drowsily abstracted way, and did not seem to understand what Joentaa was telling him.
‘The faces,’ said Joentaa.
‘Faces?’ asked Vaasara.
‘The puppets’ faces. Who is used as a model?’
‘Which faces did you say?’
‘The faces of the puppets,’ said Joentaa.
‘Oh, the puppets don’t have any faces. Usually they’re just blank surfaces, because when we make puppets for films, their heads aren’t shown.’
‘Sometimes you see the heads.’
‘Yes, true, you do. But as a rule then they’re unrecognisable … just raw flesh, or scraps of skin, or bloated …’
‘That’s not quite accurate,’ said Joentaa.
‘Hm … well, sometimes there are real faces, but they’re the faces of the actors. We even made one of a dead Hollywood star once. It was used as a running gag in some silly comedy.’
‘No, what I mean is the puppets in that talk show with Hämäläinen … they have faces.’
‘Hm … no, I don’t think so,’ said Vaasara.
‘Yes, for instance the victim of that air crash. The puppet’s face was even shown in close-up for a few seconds.’
‘Air crash?’
‘Didn’t you see the programme?’
‘No, I was in the States working on a project at the time.’
‘Well, you see the face …’
‘You say an air crash; I don’t think there’d be much of anyone’s face left after that.’
‘You see the face. Of course it’s … well, badly injured, and …’
‘Like I said, a mass of flesh with bloody streaks all over it, bloated … certainly unrecognisable. Maybe that one was modelled on Harri himself.’
‘Sometimes Harri gave the puppets his own face when he was making them. For – well, for fun.’
Vaasara sounded sad as he said that, and Joentaa felt exhausted. ‘The face I’m talking about wasn’t Harri Mäkelä’s face,’ he said.
‘I’m only saying that sometimes Harri …’ Vaasara began.
‘No. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,’ said Joentaa.
‘Well …’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Well …’ said Vaasara.
Joentaa ended the call.
He put his mobile down on his bedside table and sat on the bed for some time.
He thought of the face he had seen.
The face of a dead man who had no face.
The face of a dead man who wasn’t dead.
He thought of the blonde woman, the stranger in his house, and didn’t understand why he missed her.
After a while he closed his eyes, and seconds later fell into a sleep as vague as the pain and dizziness in his head.