Light in a Dark House Read Online Free PDF Page B

the familiar sarcasm in his voice. ‘We have a dead woman no one knows, and a murderer no one saw.’
    Joentaa nodded, and Sundström made his way to an empty table at the side of the big room. They sat down, and Sundström took some notes out of his shabby briefcase and put them down on the table like a newsreader about to begin his bulletin.
    ‘Well then . . . to get into the ward you really have to enter a number code, but it seems that the door wasn’t locked. No one knows why not.’
    ‘I know,’ said Joentaa.
    ‘What?’ asked Sundström.
    ‘I mean I know about the number code,’ said Joentaa. He even knew what it was, unless the code had been changed since then, because Rintanen had given it to him at the time so that he could come into the ward and leave it again when he liked. He had learned it by heart, and he still remembered it.
    ‘I was talking to Rintanen the medical director . . .’
    ‘Yes,’ said Joentaa.
    He had wanted to thank Rintanen, for everything. He’d catch up with that later.
    ‘By the way, Kimmo, I heard that this is where your wife died . . .’
    ‘Yes, it’s a long time ago,’ said Joentaa, wondering why he was talking such nonsense.
    ‘Oh,’ said Sundström.
    ‘Quite a while ago,’ said Joentaa.
    Sundström scrutinised him for a few seconds. ‘Rintanen says our woman sometimes had to be given artificial respiration. The murderer obviously cut off her oxygen supply. Simply switched the artificial respiration off.’
    Joentaa nodded.
    ‘She was found in a ditch beside the road in summer with severe traumatic brain injury, which was then diagnosed as . . . wait a moment . . . apallic syndrome.’
    Joentaa nodded.
    ‘In other words unconscious, in a coma. Then in a waking coma, a vegetative state. I didn’t grasp what all that means in detail, but anyway, she wasn’t really conscious at any point, she didn’t know what was going on, and since being brought in here in summer she’d been kept alive only with the help of medical technology.’
    Kept alive, thought Joentaa.
    ‘The cause isn’t entirely clear,’ said Sundström. ‘The woman was very badly injured. Maybe a hit-and-run driver knocked her down, or more likely someone not in a car hit her, struck her down and left her in the ditch. Rintanen also thinks it’s possible that she suffered a stroke or a heart attack.’
    Joentaa nodded.
    ‘Inquiries by our colleagues about hit-and-run accidents haven’t come up with any results. The woman was just found lying there.’
    ‘Just found lying there,’ said Joentaa.
    ‘Yes. Fully clothed, and that’s the point. No papers, no money, no one who knew her has reported her missing, although her photo was in the papers for several days.’
    Several days, thought Joentaa.
    A woman without a name.
    ‘Maybe her name’s Larissa,’ he said without thinking.
    ‘What?’
    Joentaa saw Sundström’s baffled face, and couldn’t help laughing. A brief, slightly hoarse laugh. ‘Forget it,’ he said.
    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
    ‘Ah,’ said Sundström.
    Two women without names. A giraffe. August.
    Sundström was looking at the printed sheets of paper.
    ‘What are you reading?’ asked Joentaa.
    ‘Various stuff,’ murmured Sundström, without raising his head. ‘I don’t understand why no one knows the woman. Obviously the only people who called in when the photo was in the papers were nutcases.’
    Maybe I should write everything down, thought Joentaa.
    ‘Then we’ll publish the photo again, how about that?’
    Everything he didn’t know.

12
14 September now
But when there’s no more to write down, then what?
There are some people you lose for ever.
There are some people who are easy to find.
Kalevi Forsman, for instance. Software solutions adviser. Or something like that. The company’s Internet site is attractive and user-friendly. Forsman is niftily dressed, black suit, white shirt. Black and white. Features curiously soft, as if