I awake to the sound of my phone, and yet my first thought is that I haven’t slept at all. I have no recollection of dreams or anything else after finally getting to bed at six in the morning. I sit up and notice that every muscle in my body aches, and there is still a residual sense of hypothermia in my hands and feet. I fumble for my phone and answer.
Laura Helanto tells me that she has completed her morning work and now she’s free. I tell her I haven’t forgotten the matter – which is true – and that I always uphold my end of a deal. Laura says she knows this and suggests I pack a small bag with me. We agree to meet downtown in one hour.
Before I can get to the shower, I have to face Schopenhauer. He doesn’t hide his disappointment and lets me know he is annoyed. I understand only too well. I have upset his sleeping patterns too.
It’s half past twelve.
In the afternoon.
I don’t even try to explain why all this happened – problems at the adventure park, a nocturnal attacker, my brother, a wintry pond, a pair of steel boots – but I accept his rebukes and answer every meow with, yes, you’re right, I’m very sorry, this won’t happen again. And I mean it. Schopenhauer has saved me from many sticky situations with his unflinching example and his cool, rational mind; he doesn’t deserve such a jumbled, disorganised life. I give him some food and leave the balcony door ajar.
In the bathroom, I encounter something that will be even trickier to hide. My forehead looks like I’ve held it against a hot waffle iron, several times over. It is swollen, raw and distinctly chequered.
I look at it for a moment and weigh up my options – a new and peculiar hairstyle, bandaging my head then hiding it with a hat or baseball cap – but these solutions all share one common feature: they are only temporary. All I can do is accept the mathematical inevitability of this matter too. A given equation will provide a given result, and there is no way my forehead will stop being my forehead any time soon. I’ll have to take it to our meeting just the way it is.
I shave, tidy my hair and get dressed. I give Schopenhauer a little treat, then leave.
It’s only once I’m on the train that I properly wake up.
Why didn’t I just ask Juhani what he was doing behind the adventure park late on a Friday night? Why didn’t I bring up the matter, even in passing, as we were driving back to Helsinki and to the gates of the Rastila campsite as hot air from the heater whirred through the otherwise silent car?
The list of possibilities is short, and it was the same as last night, but I still think it is logical:
1) I realised I was too tired. The frigid, November water and the night spent performing a number of unwanted chores had sapped my strength. My alertness levels weren’t where I needed them to be to have a thorough conversation.
2) I wanted evidence. I still do. I need something concrete before deciding how to proceed.
3) I wasn’t sure how Juhani would react. Early that same evening he had grabbed hold of a giant plastic strawberry with fateful consequences.
And so, I’d just leant forwards, gripped the steering wheel and kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead. Thinking back on it now, I realise I acted just as the situation demanded.
But who was the attacker, and why did he attack me?
It’s quite unlikely that this was simply a customer disappointed with the adventure park’s services. I didn’t recognise the man, neither did he say a word throughout the encounter by which I might have been able to identify him. It could, of course, be a random, lone-wolf attack, an individual acting on motives that would now forever remain a mystery. However, I must also consider the possibility that someone was supporting him, encouraging him, or even paying him to attack me.
And if it is the latter, several theories come to mind right away.
Toy of Finland is top of my list of suspects. They declined my offer, which was above all an attempt at reconciliation. They still refuse to sell the Moose Chute and are still trying to force me to buy the Crocodile Canyon at an inflated price. What’s more, they know something about what happened before. It is perfectly possible that they might seek to speed up the process by sending someone to shape my opinions – not to mention my forehead – to fit their demands.
The park’s employees are suspects now too. This is far from a pleasant thought. But if we consider how radically and rapidly their attitude towards me and their designs for the park have changed, the idea isn’t entirely implausible. Particularly if we imagine that, in order to secure their future interests, they made a shared investment and hired a man who had the potential to help them achieve their goals. Naturally, I don’t know the going rate for actual bodily harm, but I imagine a respectable sum of money wouldn’t be beyond the means of five or six combined salaries. And if the park’s employees have indeed decided to hire someone to carry out their dirty work, there remain only two options: either the man was supposed to scare me – in which case he succeeded quite well – or he was tasked with taking me out of the picture altogether. The latter option feels especially unjust. I think I’ve been a fair boss, I’ve always stood up for my staff’s interests and the park’s long-term outlook. In every conceivable way, yesterday’s feedback is over the top.
The third option, of course, is Juhani. But thinking of him is like trying to grab hold of a bar of soap in a barrel of oil. Juhani has plenty of personality traits that make him susceptible to risky and short-sighted solutions. With this in mind, he could easily have hired someone to advocate for him in the middle of the night. But if we assume that he knew about the attack in advance, why would he turn up himself? Then there’s the even bigger question: why would he have tried to alter the course of events? If, on the other hand, we assume that Juhani didn’t know about the attack, it’s still unclear what he was doing behind the adventure park with a balaclava over his head. Every thought of Juhani raises a reaction, a follow-up question; the bar of soap slips endlessly back and forth inside the barrel.
In addition to all of the above, I have to take into consideration the possibility that there is a completely different explanation for the attack.
In each of these scenarios, the end result is the same: I need more information. I can’t dash here and there without a clear plan. Besides, anything that might arouse the suspicions of Detective Inspector Osmala obviously falls outside my repertoire of available options. At the very least, I don’t know how I could possibly explain the strawberry. We hired a seasonal worker who slipped over in the Maze, and because he was a freshwater diving enthusiast, we gave him the kind of send-off he would have wanted. No. Just, no.
One thing is crystal clear, beyond doubt. As far as the park goes, I’m on my own now.
Sunlight seeps through the clouds, as though filtered through a thin, brittle concrete gauze.
The train judders to a halt at Helsinki central railway station.