Light in a Dark House Read Online Free PDF

hadn’t asked those important questions. Why he hadn’t insisted on the answers?
    He sent the message, and waited a few minutes for any feeling that someone was beginning to read it at the other end.
    Then he went upstairs, found a piece of paper and a pen, and wondered what he was going to write. His eyes lingered on the photograph of Sanna standing on the shelf beside Larissa’s stack of books. He had once talked to Larissa about Sanna. And about that photo. They had been lying on the sofa, and as a city exploded on the TV screen Larissa had got up to go over to the photograph.
    A photo of Sanna on cross-country skis, leaning back and laughing her clear laugh, taken when she was still healthy, in the winter before her death.
    Larissa had looked intently at the photograph, as if she were seeing it for the first time, and then she had said, ‘Sanna was really wonderful.’
    On the screen, the hero of the film had fallen into the sea from a great height without dying, and Joentaa had talked about Sanna. Probably for quite a long time, because when his voice died away the film was over, and Larissa had been sitting there very upright, clumsily stroking his leg, and their eyes met.
    ‘I didn’t want to make you . . .’ he had begun to say, and she had laughed, but she was still crying, and she had said, ‘Oh, Kimmo, I cry every day.’

11
    HE DROVE BACK to the hospital. As the car went down the street he tried to count the years, months and days that had passed since Sanna’s death.
    He got muddled up, and thought that it would be better to count the hours, or the minutes. The seconds. The moments that had passed by since that one moment that wouldn’t ever pass by.
    He had left the giraffe under the apple tree.
    He sat in the car when he reached the car park, stopped counting minutes and began counting the windows again. That was certainly simpler. The police car had been left in a No Parking area. The forensic team’s minibus was parked in the sun.
    He got out of his car and retraced his earlier footsteps. Faded arrows in assorted colours pointed different ways. Blue arrows for Intensive Care, green for the nearby Surgical Ward. Yellow for Maternity. White for the cafeteria.
    He followed the right angles and the blue arrows.
    The room where Sanna had lain.
    Kari Niemi, smiling as if everything were all right, showed him an item wrapped in transparent film and said something that Joentaa couldn’t make out, because waves swallowed up the words before they reached him.
    Sundström, red in the face, came towards him, and Joentaa thought of the giraffe under the tree.
    ‘For God’s sake, Kimmo!’
    ‘I’m back,’ said Joentaa.
    ‘What got into you?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Kimmo!’
    Joentaa passed him and stopped in the doorway. The woman was still lying on the bed at one side of the room, like an empty shell, surrounded by apparatus that now looked unimportant.
    ‘The great unknown,’ murmured Sundström beside him.
    ‘Yes,’ said Joentaa.
    ‘We’re using the cafeteria for interrogations,’ said Sundström, turning away.
    Joentaa nodded.
    ‘Come on, damn it!’ cried Sundström.
    They followed the white arrows. The cafeteria too looked the same as ever. Large, bright pictures on the walls. Joentaa remembered them only when he saw them again. A view through the big window of the garden, the fountain, the benches grouped around it. Rice pies with egg butter under transparent plastic on the counter. He thought of Sanna carefully spreading egg butter on a roll a few days before her death, and saying that she felt better.
    Members of the hospital staff were sitting at the tables in their medical coats, waiting to make statements. The discreet background noise of whispering.
    Petri Grönholm was sitting at one of the tables bent over a laptop, and nodding to a young man who kept shaking his head apologetically.
    ‘It looks as if no one noticed anything,’ said Sundström, and Joentaa listened in vain for