A FRIENDLY NURSE put new bandages on his wrists. She carefully wound the strips of white muslin from his hands up to his elbows.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ she replied.
In the waiting room the news had been running on a TV screen. He’d had to look almost vertically up to see it.
The photograph had shown Salme S. with red hair, wearing a strange costume. A newsreader mentioned that the picture had been taken several years ago. As yet little was known about the background, said the objective voice. The investigating authorities were holding a press conference at 14.00 hours, which would be transmitted live.
‘Just a moment …’ said Nuutti Vaasara.
‘Yes?’ asked the nurse.
‘Could you make them a little looser? Because I … I probably ought to work today.’
‘Work? But this is New Year’s Day. I thought only people like us worked today. What do you do?’
‘I’m a puppet-maker.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Marionettes?’
‘Something like that.’
‘My little daughter loves puppet plays. We had a puppet theatre recently in our parish hall. Classical stuff. Punch and Judy, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf.’
Vaasara nodded.
‘Do you really have to work today? You ought to take it easy for a while.’
‘I know. It’s just that I’m under pressure of time.’ Because Harri is dead, he was going to add, but then he bit back the words.
‘Let me have a look,’ she said, and began loosening the bandages round the palms of his hands and freeing his fingers. ‘Better?’ she asked after a few minutes.
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said. He stretched his fingers and clenched them into a fist. ‘Yes, that should be all right.’
She smiled. ‘Take care. And all the best,’ she said, and he thanked her again before he left. Photographs of the forensic pathologist and Harri were flickering on the TV screen as he crossed the entrance area. He stopped to watch for a little while. The photos disappeared, the announcer came on. Then there was a landscape of palm trees with dead bodies. They were carefully lined up in front of the wreck of a crashed plane. The bodies were covered with something shiny, but some of their arms were sticking out.
Nuutti Vaasara turned away from the pictures on the screen and went home. The low-built blue house looked strange with the snow piled high. Newspapers, letters and advertising brochures lay scattered around outside the door. He opened it and went in, making his way straight through the dividing door and down the passage to the studio.
The clown puppet which had startled that policeman Joentaa so much was leaning up against the wall. The policeman had probably been upset because the clown was holding the model of a dead man. Vaasara stood there for a while undecided, then he took the puppet out of the arms of the clown and laid it against the opposite wall, in a corner where it was hardly visible.
A middle-aged woman lay on the workbench. A drowned body. The puppet on which Harri had been working in the days before his death. The job was urgent, because the deadline for shooting that scene in the film was only two weeks away. The production company had called, and Vaasara had promised to deliver the puppet in time.
He went up to the workbench and stood motionless there too for a while. He felt reluctance, awe, a joy that he couldn’t explain, and a fear that had been with him for days.
He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. Then he bent over the lump of material in front of him and, carefully and with concentration, began completing Harri Mäkelä’s last puppet.