WESTERBERG HAD ALREADY gone to the TV station, but a friendly colleague saw to getting all the photos on the hard disk of Harri Mäkelä’s computer copied within minutes and placed at Joentaa’s disposal.
Joentaa sat alone in a large, overheated room in front of a screen in a long row of obviously new computers, looking at a silently laughing Harri Mäkelä with an arm round a friend’s shoulder. One of many private photos. Mäkelä was laughing in almost all of them, showing a self-confident, attractive smile.
It took him some time to understand the principle on which Mäkelä had arranged his photo archives. But then a simple pattern emerged. One set of the pictures that he was looking for had been assembled by Mäkelä in a folder called ‘CorpsesForDummies’. Joentaa opened several of the files and brought up the pictures. His shivering fit came back.
As a rule the pictures had been taken at the scene of accidents. Accidents involving cycles, motorbikes, cars, helicopters, aircraft parts. Firefighting teams bending over the dead, paramedics spreading blankets over bodies.
Sometimes it took Joentaa several minutes to find the element in the picture that, as the puppet-maker saw it, qualified it for the ‘CorpsesForDummies’ folder. For instance, a severed human leg lying in undergrowth next to the wrecked fuselage of an aircraft. The photos seemed to have been taken by photographers from all over the world: some from Finland, but others from deserts and the tropics. Many appeared to have been taken in America, and there were hundreds of them.
The lords of death, thought Joentaa.
He let the pictures run, and wondered how they were going to help him understand the death of Mäkelä, the death of Patrik Laukkanen, and the attack on Hämäläinen.
A conversation about puppets was the peg that held all three together. And the pictures he was seeing had given Mäkelä ideas and an understanding of dead bodies, enabling him to make realistic models of the dead.
Realistic fiction. The longer he looked at the pictures, the more dubious the theories he was developing seemed. Of the hundreds of thousands of viewers who had watched the programme, most had surely had to come to terms with the death of someone close to them. Why should one of them take it personally when all the others had simply been entertained? Mäkelä had shown three puppets, and he had explained what kind of cinematic deaths they had suffered, or were going to suffer – the victim of an air crash, the victim of a train disaster, the victim of a fire on a fairground ghost train. Joentaa wondered why he was the only one to find the whole idea tasteless. He and Larissa, or whatever her name was.
And he wondered whether, for that very reason, his judgement had gone astray and he was developing erroneous theories that led nowhere. Puppets, Kimmo, only puppets. Sundström was quite right.
He looked at the photos with a queasy sensation in his stomach, and couldn’t understand now what he had expected them to tell him. Photos clearly classified. A macabre slide show. That was all.
He himself had seen similar pictures in the course of his training. So that he would be prepared, and would acquire the necessary knowledge. Just like Mäkelä, who had put them on file and studied them in order to do his job to the best of his ability.
Photos clearly classified … every sub-folder of the main ‘CorpsesForDummies’ category was labelled with sequences of letters and numbers that Joentaa did not at first understand: 150402NL/AMS, and 110300US/NY. When he came upon 201199FIN/TAM he got the idea. Dates, countries, cities. On 20 November 1999 there had obviously been a train accident in Tampere. Mäkelä had stored four pictures of it in his sub-folder. An unnaturally flat body lying on its back beside a wrecked dining car.
He wondered how Mäkelä had been able to build up this extensive archive. The Internet is full of them, Vaasara had said. Three puppets. Air crash, train crash, funfair accident. Spectacular events. Linked to days, years and locations.
‘Here, for you,’ said a voice behind him.
Joentaa jumped.
‘Sorry,’ said his police colleague, handing him a stack of CDs. ‘I’ve copied all those photos in case you need them in Turku.’
‘Thanks, that’s a great help,’ said Joentaa.
His colleague nodded. ‘The press conference is about to begin. I’m going down there myself.’
Joentaa switched off the computer, took the CDs and placed them on the table. He probably wouldn’t need to look at the photos again. He’d had another outlandish idea.
The puppets would have to help him.
The puppets and the deadly events to which they owed their existence.