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surprised me, because I’m sure I’d be interested to read Lauri’s diary if he wrote one, specially if Saara was in it. The other boys, I mean Pekka and Aulis, have dropped out. I think I’m the only boy going to piano lessons now. I get some remarks at school, they call me a model student and all that, but I don’t care. In fact I even laugh at it, and that feels good.
When I arrived this afternoon Anita-Liisa Koponen had just been plunking away on the piano, it almost made me feel ill. She can’t play at all, but Saara still said she was doing well, which kind of made me angry, because that’s what she always says to me too, and I hope she doesn’t say it to everyone, or at least that she means it seriously when she says it to me.
I’d never have thought I’d play the piano of my own accord, but I even like it. Today we played some kind of classical piece as a duet, I mean I only played the bass notes, but it sounded lovely, and Saara asked if I could sense that. That it sounded lovely, I mean. I said yes.
Saara was wearing that dress, that very light, airy dress. As if she had just that dress on and nothing else.
Seeing that no one but me can read this diary, I’ll be completely honest: when she opened the door to me in that dress, and I followed her into the living room, and saw her back where the dress was cut low, I got a hard-on. I had to bend over a bit and make funny distorted movements so that she wouldn’t notice. She laughed. Such a nice, clear laugh, I couldn’t feel bad about it.
Later her boyfriend Risto came along, and he and I played football a bit in the garden. I was in goal, and Risto shot low into the corners, so I had to throw myself full length.
When I got home there was trouble, because my mother thought I’d skipped the piano lesson on account of my dirty trousers, and she even phoned Saara to ask. I think it was Risto who answered, because after a while my mother laughed the way women only laugh when they’re talking to men.
Anyway, then she came and put her hand on my head and apologised and even said she was proud of me. Probably because I play the piano.
Dear diary.
And not because of the e-rec-tion.

15
    IN THE MORNING information began coming in. A number of people were sure they knew the dead woman. A number of people said they thought they knew her. A number of people weren’t sure, but wanted to tell the police that the woman looked familiar to them. She had lived in Helsinki. In Seinäjoki. In Tampere and Joensuu. In Kotka, Savonlinna, Hämeenlinna. She had been unmarried, lived a secluded life, was gregarious, married, the mother of sons and daughters, a professor at the university, head bookkeeper for an insurance company, a cleaner in a department store.
    The officers who took the phone calls and emails reported no definite leads, and other officers went out to check the most plausible stories.
    Sundström had left his office door open, so that Grönholm and Joentaa could see him setting up one of his Excel spreadsheets. He typed names and times in with two fingers, jobs done and to be done, questions asked and to be asked; he cursed to himself when his computer crashed and closed his eyes as it rebooted.
    ‘You want to save now and then,’ muttered Petri Grönholm without looking up from his notes, and Joentaa leaned in the doorway unable to take his eyes off Sundström; it was going to take him quite a while to get the spreadsheet up and running again. But in the end it would be a smooth, white, symmetrical document made up of words without a single grammatical mistake, and it would indeed give some structure to the investigating team’s work for the first time.
    ‘I’ll have it in a minute,’ said Sundström.
    ‘Easy does it, we still have ten minutes before the meeting,’ called Grönholm from the next room.
    Then the printer was running, and Joentaa jumped when Sundström said, ‘We’ll find her.’
    He thought of his empty house in the morning. And in the