The more banal, the more suspicious, I think to myself on Thursday morning as I unload equipment behind the park. The sky is like a sea of lead, grey and oppressive, and there’s something between rain and fog in the air – a light, cold damp that you only really feel on your skin once it’s too late: by the time you hold out your hand to feel if it’s raining, your clothes are already soaked through. I lift the items I’ve bought from the hardware store out of the van and onto the loading bay and think about my brother.
I have seen Juhani countless times since our nocturnal activities with the jetty. I have received exceptionally accurate reports from him about the park’s current situation and listened to his sensible suggestions about what measures we might take to address it. Neither of us has mentioned our trip to the cottage in any way, shape or form. I have my own reasons for that, and I don’t doubt that he has his.
What’s also noticeable is the employees’ behaviour: it seems as though the sternest resistance might have subsided slightly.
None of them looks entirely content yet, but at least there haven’t been any new protests or anything leading them to down tools. Of course, I’ve been criticised for my new belt-tightening measures: I have cut money from the wrong places at the wrong time, and everybody thinks I have cut more from their department than from all the others. Each time, I have returned to the facts, my calculations and the data we have to hand, and stressed that equality should be the guiding principle in everything we do. I have even offered them the opportunity to go through the numbers with me, but this hasn’t inspired much enthusiasm: thus far, nobody has signed up for my course entitled Fundamental Principles of Adventure-Park Mathematics.
I lift the last box out of the back of the van and place it on the loading bay. The boxes are heavy. They contain parts and tools that I plan to use to repair the park’s machines. These aren’t official parts, and there is a reason for this. The official parts would have to be ordered from Toy of Finland Ltd. I haven’t heard anything from them in a week, and I don’t want to be the one to make contact with them again. I consider it very likely that they are the ones who sent the attacker my way. And I don’t think the kind of gadgetry supplier who sends subcontractors to batter a client’s head against a steel grille should be first in line when it comes to scouting out potential new business partners. The downside of sourcing these parts elsewhere is that we will have to build the spare parts ourselves from components bought here and there, and this will be slow and quite expensive, once we factor in the working hours that could have been put to better use doing other work around the park. It looks worryingly likely that, if internal sabotage and various forms of external attack don’t scupper the park, their cumulative effect threatens to do so in the long term.
I close the van’s back doors, and I’m taking the stairs up to the loading bay when a car swerves around the corner. The car is moving almost silently. It’s an electric car. First it swerves in a wide arch a little further off, then its front wheels turn sharply, and the car starts coming right towards me. There is only one person in the car: the driver. I stand on the loading bay, looking down on the car from such a height that I can’t see the driver’s face. But the grey jacket and blue-and-white checked shirt tell me all I need to know. They are the same as the last time we met.
Detective Inspector Pentti Osmala of the Helsinki organised-crime and fraud unit takes up one half of his electric car, and it seems to me as though the car is slightly tilting towards the driver’s side. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing that I recognise him so easily. I’m pretty sure he knows at least some of what happened in the park after Juhani left it to me and how I survived at the hands of the criminals he too was looking for. However, I don’t have any proof of this, and the way Osmala talks to me certainly doesn’t provide any.
The engine stops humming, and Osmala steps out from behind the steering wheel.
As if his stocky, broad-shouldered frame wasn’t recognisable enough, with the exception of his shoes he is dressed exactly as before. And his shoes, when I finally see them, don’t match the rest of his outfit at all. They are new, brown and polished. They look small and delicate on his feet, like a moose wearing a pair of ballet shoes. For some reason, I assume he must have bought the shoes at the same time as his new electric car, that these purchases must have something to do with each other and that it would be impossible to say which came first – the hybrid or the brogues.
Osmala appears to notice neither the rain-fog nor the November greyness. He stands by his car in his blazer and looks calmly at me and my pile of boxes. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about this scenario, and the fact that he is looking at me from below certainly doesn’t help matters. On the contrary, I feel as though I were standing on a plinth, exposed and under investigation.
‘You’re a busy man,’ he says. It doesn’t sound like a question, but answering him seems a better option than standing here letting him take stock of me.
‘Wear and tear,’ I say. ‘Spare parts come in handy.’
‘Business is booming, I see,’ he says, and this doesn’t sound like a question either. ‘You won’t mind if I come up and take a look.’
Osmala takes the steps up to the loading bay, and I can feel the whole steel structure trembling beneath me. He stops next to me, his eyes light-blue and ponderous, his eyebrows as though they have been worn away.
‘Would I be right in thinking you’ve had plenty of visitors?’
‘Our figures are quite satisfactory,’ I answer truthfully. ‘Naturally, we hope to increase footfall further, but it’s not easy.’
‘Easy,’ he says. ‘No, I’m sure it isn’t. When you say your figures are satisfactory, what kind of figures are we talking about, on a day-to-day basis?’
It’s relatively clear that, if Osmala had come in a purely personal capacity, he would have left his electric car at the front of the park, walked to the main entrance in his new shoes and bought a ticket like everybody else. I present him with the most accurate estimate of our daily figures based on averages taken over a long period. I mention usual daily variation and remind him of the median figures, which often tell us more than the simple average. Osmala nods, and it takes a moment before he speaks again.
‘That’s a lot of customers,’ he says eventually. ‘But I suppose most of them are children.’
‘The adventure park is designed to cater to their needs, primarily,’ I admit.
‘So, you’d say there are fewer adults.’
‘Indeed. Quite.’
‘How many fewer?’
I give a detailed assessment of the distribution of tickets sold in the different categories (children’s tickets for the children, adult tickets for the adults) but stress that these figures fluctuate wildly, especially at weekends and during school holidays. Something about my answer clearly doesn’t satisfy him. I wonder whether I ought to clarify further, when Osmala interrupts my train of thought.
‘That’s still quite a considerable number of people,’ he says. ‘I imagine it might be hard to remember one particular adult among the crowds. Especially as this adult’s ticket was sold last Friday, almost a week ago.’
Last Friday. In a fraction of a second, Osmala’s words vividly bring back the chill of that black pond. The tremors run the length of my body in great surges, like a train stuck between the tracks. I don’t think it shows outwardly – I’m not trembling and my teeth aren’t chattering – but the freezing water is suddenly inside me again.
‘You’ve probably sold thousands of tickets since then,’ says Osmala, ‘going by your figures.’
‘It’s the most accurate assessment I can—’
‘Twenty-eight minutes past four in the afternoon,’ Osmala interrupts. ‘Did anything out of the ordinary happen then?’
‘Last Friday at twenty-eight minutes past four in the afternoon,’ I repeat to be as accurate as possible but also to buy myself some time. I don’t like lying, it is the deliberate dissemination of incorrect information and goes against the best principles of mathematics. And so, even with Detective Inspector Osmala, I try to avoid ending up in a situation that would require me to tell an outright lie. ‘Not to my knowledge.’
Osmala appears to be thinking about something.
‘No accidents or anything like that?’
I realise at some point I’ll have to ask where all of Osmala’s questions are heading. In my estimation, now is my last chance.
‘What exactly happened,’ I ask, ‘at twenty-eight minutes past four last Friday afternoon?’
Osmala still doesn’t seem to notice the November chill. I wonder if he dresses the same way all year round. The idea feels perfectly plausible.
‘At that time, one of the police’s old acquaintances bought a ticket for your park,’ he explains. ‘Yesterday, that same individual floated to the surface of a remote pond – with the ticket in his back pocket. And we can confirm that drowning was not the cause of death. He’d already died several times before hitting the water.’
The icy water inside me starts to freeze. At first, I can’t understand what could have happened to the legs from the Banana Mirror, then I remember who tied the knots that were supposed to attach the mirror’s legs to the man’s legs: Juhani.
‘That sounds terrible,’ I say, sincerely, and realise that we are standing almost exactly at the spot on the loading bay where the strawberry-headed man leapt into the late-autumn night.
‘That’s professionals for you,’ Osmala nods. ‘They don’t leave anything to chance.’
‘Quite.’
‘Perhaps there’s a connection between the ticket and his … demise,’ he adds. ‘Then again, there might not be. And if this individual simply visited the park and nothing untoward happened during that time, then…’
Osmala shrugs his considerable shoulders.
‘Last Friday was a very ordinary day,’ I say, and that too is true. It only became extraordinary at around eleven o’clock that night. I don’t know how to ask my next question so that I don’t sound too interested. Finally, I realise there is only one way to approach the subject, and that is head-on: ‘You said the man was an old acquaintance?’
Osmala’s eyes might be lethargic as they move from one spot to another, but that only makes the movements all the stronger. Now he looks me right in the eye.
‘Torpedo, they call him,’ he says. ‘He’s part of the gig economy of the criminal underworld, you could say. A real jack of all trades. For the time being, he remains a person of interest.’
‘For the time being?’
‘For a while now, I’ve had my eye on a three-man outfit in the hostile-takeover business: one way or another, they take over companies, weigh them down with debt and sell off the company’s assets to their partners at inflated prices, and it goes without saying they don’t pay any tax on this income because all the money has disappeared and the company eventually goes into liquidation. What I’m most interested in is how this happens. I suspect they employ a good deal of intimidation and even violence. They might even hire subcontractors like the man in question.’
Osmala has just described the new owners of Toy of Finland so precisely that they might as well be standing here beside us.
‘The reason I’m telling you all this,’ Osmala continues, ‘is that there’s a chance you might come into contact with them.’
Osmala finishes his sentence, I realise that, but I can’t help thinking that something has been left unsaid. He is clearly waiting for me to ask something.
‘And if I do?’
‘If you do, you’ll know what I’m talking about,’ he says.
We stand there in silence for a moment, then Osmala looks elsewhere.
‘Any new masterpieces in the offing?’ he asks. ‘The wife and I really liked those murals.’
I think of Laura Helanto and her plans, how far she has got with them and how she will soon be at the park putting them together – in the middle of all this mess. And knowing her…
‘Quite soon, I’d say.’
‘Excellent news,’ says Osmala. ‘That means we’ll be seeing each other again soon.’
He turns in his small, brown shoes, making the loading bay shudder again – the moose still getting used to its ballet shoes – then squeezes himself back into his electric car and drives off.