Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a blur and concentrate into a feeling, the feeling that Nurmela was making a very well prepared speech, a speech praising him from the heart and, if he was honest, a positively touching speech, but it was no more than a feeling, because when Nurmela had finally spoken the last sentence Ketola couldn’t have repeated a word of it. The one thing Ketola still had to say in these circumstances was, ‘Thank you.’ And as they stood there and seemed to be waiting for more, he said again, making it rather more specific, ‘Thank you all.’
    A little later Ketola set off. Kimmo, Niemi and Tuomas Heinonen had driven away to investigate the death of an old lady found at the foot of the cellar steps in her building. Ketola left with Grönholm, who was on his way back to his sickbed.
    ‘Good of you to come,’ said Ketola. He felt dizzy. It was snowing as hard as ever.
    ‘Well, of course I did,’ said Petri Grönholm. And when they had reached Ketola’s car, he added, ‘We expect you to come and see us regularly.’
    Ketola nodded. ‘Get well soon,’ he said, climbed in and started the car. He really did feel dizzy, but of course he’d drunk a fair bit of champagne and it had made him a little tipsy, which was surprising, because it was a long time since vodka and whisky had been able to do that.
    Ketola went the long way home. To his surprise, he could still remember the road precisely, a road with very little traffic on it even today, a road he hadn’t driven along for many years. There was a cross at the place where they had found the girl’s bicycle all that time ago. It had been standing there for some thirty-three years.
    As Ketola got out of the car and walked towards the cross, he was trying to remember that day, to bring the whole thing back, the image of the woman in whose eyes he had seen something extinguished and who had then suddenly walked away, carrying the cross, which had been waiting as if ready for her in a corner of the coat stand, like an umbrella. He and his boss had followed the girl’s mother, and after a while the woman had started running until she reached this very place, hardly five minutes from the house where she had lived with her daughter and her husband. The man didn’t often put in an appearance. What Ketola remembered about him chiefly was that he had left his wife a few months after their daughter’s body was found.
    So the cross was still there. Carefully, Ketola brushed aside the snow and read the name. Pia Lehtinen. Exactly, that had been her name. He had been thinking about it briefly in the car and could come up only with the surname. Yet her first name was very simple and easily remembered, and it had been a common one at the time. Pia Lehtinen, murdered 1974, said the wording on the cross.
    And five minutes from here, five minutes’ walk from the place where they had found the bicycle at that time, the girl’s mother lived. Or rather she had lived there, because very likely she didn’t live there any more; how could she still be living there after that …? But now Ketola even remembered talking to her briefly on that subject at the time, in the months when the investigation was still in full swing and they’d assumed that their enquiries would be successful. The woman had told him she had no intention of moving, she would leave this house, at the earliest, after the murderer was caught. And he never had been caught, so maybe the woman was still living there. For a moment Ketola wondered whether to visit her, tell her that this was the day of his retirement from the police, and for reasons he didn’t understand today, of all days, he had been thinking of her and her daughter.
    Of course he rejected the idea and instead went straight back to his car. If the woman did still live here he didn’t want her seeing him.
    He drove home. It was still afternoon, but beginning to get dark. The snowfall was slackening.
    He left the car under the projecting roof, took the newer of