Siiri turned off the torch and stood for a moment in front of the door to the closed unit. She looked through the glass at the slender girl nurse sleeping in a rocking chair with a pale-blue teddy bear in her lap. There were children’s teddy bears like that scattered all over the dementia ward; Siiri didn’t know why. Maybe they were for the nurses. She glanced out of the hall window and for a moment it seemed as if someone was running across the courtyard in the snow. She looked through the door at the clock on the wall. It was past two. At the same moment, she heard more sounds from inside the closed unit. It sounded like several people were shouting. Why didn’t the nurse wake up?
Siiri didn’t know how long she stood looking through the closed door, but she started when she saw smoke inside. She became aware of a strong smell and saw that the smoke was coming from the patients’ feeding area, where the nurse with the teddy bear was sleeping. There was already smoke in the hallway, too, and slowly Siiri’s apprehension changed to confused horror.
‘Fire! Fire! Help!’ she shouted high and loud, without thinking that she shouldn’t have been sniffing around at the door to the closed unit in the middle of the night. The nurse didn’t wake up, although Siiri pounded on the door with both fists. Siiri was in a panic and she felt like a helpless crackpot, not knowing what to do. Smoke was billowing around the nurse, and suddenly Siiri remembered that she had a key in her handbag.
‘It’s a good thing I finessed that,’ she muttered to herself, and started searching her bag for the key. Her hands were trembling and the zip on her handbag pocket was stuck. She tore the zip open, pulled out the key, and pushed it into the lock with both hands. She was afraid that the burglar alarm would start to ring, but the thought of Irma among the flames made her open the door. The acrid stench of smoke whirled through the hallway, stinging her eyes and making her cough. She strode swiftly inside, and although she felt like running straight to Irma’s room, she first tried to shake the nurse awake. She could hear numerous patients calling for help from their rooms. It looked like the smoke was coming from the end of the hallway. The girl snapped awake and took such fright that she started to scream in terror.
‘All right, now. Try to stay focused,’ Siiri told the child soothingly. ‘There’s a fire here and we have to get to work. You call the fire department while I go and check on the patients.’
‘A fire? Where? Who should I call?’
‘Emergency services. One-one-two. Tell them your name and that there’s a fire, and then give them the exact address.’
‘What’s the address here? How am I supposed to know it? Where’s the telephone?’
Siiri led the hysterical girl to the break room, hastily wrote the necessary information on a piece of paper, and went to look for Irma. She felt strangely calm, as if she knew perfectly how to behave in this situation. She turned on the torch and was glad she had it with her, because without it she wouldn’t have been able to see anything. There was quite a lot of smoke in the corridor, and when she got to the end of the hall, she noticed flames coming out of the sauna room. She had to get Irma out fast. She rushed into Irma’s room, where a profound silence reigned. Both old women were fast asleep and there was surprisingly little smoke. They were tied to their beds. Siiri was grateful to Anna-Liisa for her silly knife, with which she easily cut the straps away from Irma and her room-mate.
‘Are you taking me to Karelia? Shall we sing?’ the old war refugee asked, but Irma just slept. Siiri tried to wake her, pinched her earlobes and shook her by the shoulders. She could hear the distant shouts of other patients and wondered in horror how she would get to them all in time to help. She dashed out to see how great the emergency was in the other rooms, the knife still in her hand. Maybe she could free the rest. This was the beginning of the revolution!
In the next room two old people were awake and calling for help. Siiri tried to calm the two women with a lie, telling them that everything was all right as she tore at their straps with the knife. In the first bed they broke easily, but in the second one she had to saw at the straps, and cut a gash in her thumb. Just as she was sucking on it to stop the bleeding, two firemen sprang into the room. It felt like they’d taken hours to get there. They looked at her in astonishment.
‘At last!’ Siiri shouted, continuing to saw at the straps in a near frenzy, heedless of the blood that was staining the sheets.
One of the men was carrying an axe. Without saying a word they grabbed Siiri with practised hands.
‘Now, now, everything’s all right here . . . you must have been woken by the smoke . . . let’s go now, calm down . . . how about you give me that knife . . .’
They dragged Siiri out of the room, all the while trying to calm her, although Siiri felt almost icily calm in this catastrophe. She refused to give the knife to the firemen, and they talked over her, imagining that she didn’t understand anything that was happening.
‘Are there a lot of these thumbsuckers here?’
‘Fourteen, somebody said.’
‘We can get by with this gear, then.’
‘Yeah. Let the old lady keep her knife. This is just one floor, and they seem to be light and easy to carry. Some of them can probably walk, like this one.’
Siiri didn’t say anything. It seemed easier to pretend to be demented than to explain what she was doing in the Group Home with a knife in her hand at three o’clock in the morning. She asked the firemen to rescue the people at the end of the hall first – Irma and her room-mate – because the fire was right on the other side of their wall in the adjoining sauna. The men left her in the lobby and went about their business.
The atmosphere in the retirement-home common room was entirely different to what it had been half an hour before. Firemen, ambulance crew and police were running back and forth tugging hoses and shouting orders, radios crackling. The Hiukkanens were there, standing against the wall, Virpi in a see-through nightgown, Erkki next to her in dishevelled clothes and boots. The girl nurse who’d awoken to the fire was still hysterical and Virpi was focused on berating her.
‘I saw someone running outside,’ Siiri tried to say to the people in uniform running past. ‘Should somebody check to make sure there isn’t a patient out there?’
‘Siiri Kettunen! What the hell are you doing here?’
In two vigorous steps, Virpi Hiukkanen was in front of Siiri. She set off to march Siiri to her apartment, though Siiri thought Virpi should have stayed to monitor the fire situation to the end and make sure that the dementia patients were no longer in danger. Virpi wasn’t the least bit interested in finding out who had been running across the lawn.
‘I can get there myself, thank you,’ Siiri said as Virpi shoved her towards the lift in the lobby.
‘How dreadful! Your hand is covered in blood!’ Virpi shouted, turning her head away in horror.
Siiri wasn’t going anywhere until she saw that Irma was all right and had been taken to safety, away from the flames. Virpi dashed back and forth shouting at Siiri and at the poor nurse, who was bawling like a little child with the teddy bear under her arm.
‘You don’t have permission to walk around here alone at night!’ Virpi yelled at Siiri.
‘Do people need a special hall pass in a retirement home?’ Siiri asked defiantly, and then Virpi started to yell until spit flew out of her mouth and her chewing gum fell out onto the floor.
‘I don’t understand you. What is wrong with you? You run around all day long causing a fuss for everyone. This fire is the last straw. I’m giving your information to the police and you’ll be held responsible for all the damage you’ve caused at Sunset Grove. Don’t imagine that just because you’re old you have some kind of immunity and can do whatever pops into your head. Get out of my sight! The patients in the Group Home are not your responsibility, none of them, do you understand?’
Siiri had to sit down for a moment to catch her breath. She found her handkerchief in the bottom of her handbag and pressed it against the cut on her thumb. Uni
t Operations Manager Erkki Hiukkanen slumped onto the sofa beside her when the firemen shepherded him out of the way. Erkki was completely numb, unable to do anything useful. As he sat there staring into space he was quite indistinguishable from the dementia sufferers being carted into the lobby in wheelchairs and carried on stretchers to ambulances. Snow was melting off his boots and forming a large puddle on the floor.
Finally, after an excruciatingly long wait, Siiri saw Irma among the last patients taken to an ambulance. Irma was walking by herself but was very stooped and made her way forward slowly, with fumbling steps. Two firemen led her to the vehicle and kindly helped her in. When she was inside the ambulance she was made to lie down on a stretcher, then the doors were closed and the ambulance drove calmly away without any siren or lights, like a hearse on its way to the chapel.
When the ambulance had disappeared into the darkness, Siiri stood staring at the deserted car park without a single thought in her head. Gradually, the hubbub inside diminished. The police and fire fighters gathered their gear and quickly left to begin another task somewhere else. The girl nurse called a taxi in a trembling voice and went home to sleep, and Virpi Hiukkanen withdrew to her office. That left only Erkki Hiukkanen and Siiri Kettunen, side by side on the sofa. The cut on Siiri’s thumb wasn’t bleeding any more. She put the stained handkerchief and the knife in her handbag and stood up.
‘Well, I guess I should go. Maybe I can still get some sleep,’ she said, and headed for her apartment, relieved.
She wasn’t interested in what kind of damage the fire had caused or how Erkki Hiukkanen would recover from the shock of the experience; the important thing was getting Irma out of the closed unit. That had been the objective of their Plan, but it hadn’t quite gone the way they’d expected.
Chapter 34
There were all kinds of wild rumours going around Sunset Grove about what had happened the night of the fire. Some claimed that Siiri Kettunen lit the fire, but the Hat Lady was sure that Erkki Hiukkanen was the culprit. The Ambassador, on the other hand, thought that it was a white-collar crime. According to him, it was a Finnish custom to arrange a fire when there were irregularities in the bookkeeping.
The fire was even in the newspaper. Anna-Liisa read the article aloud to Siiri. It contained an interview with Virpi Hiukkanen, who told it all wrong and claimed she was the first person to arrive on the scene.
‘I smelled smoke at two a.m.,’ she lied in the paper. Then the article said how quickly and efficiently Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen had taken rescue measures. ‘All of the residents of the retirement home were rescued before any harm could come to them.’
‘Balderdash. Trash media,’ Anna-Liisa snorted. ‘They don’t even say how the fire started. Do you have an opinion about it? After all, you were there, unlike all these other people walking around explaining how it started as if they knew all the details.’
Siiri didn’t know what to think, although she’d thought about it a great deal. She was just going to say something about the sauna storeroom when Virpi Hiukkanen walked into her apartment without knocking, using her own key. Siiri got a terrible fright and even Anna-Liisa looked shocked.
‘How are things going in here? How are you getting along?’
Virpi was cheerful, walking busily back and forth and glancing vigilantly around her. She patted Siiri on the top of her head, didn’t even look at Anna-Liisa, then noticed the newspaper, which was open to the story about the fire, passed it by, and turned to go into the kitchen.
‘How did the fire start?’
Anna-Liisa tossed her question out without any warning into the middle of Virpi’s bustle with a fearlessness that only an interrogator experienced in surprise quizzes on the infinitive forms of Finnish verbs can have.
Virpi stopped and answered without turning to look at them: ‘It started in the sauna. The police figured it out. And that’s actually not part of my job anyway; it’s Sinikka Sundström’s responsibility.’
‘What are you looking for in my apartment?’ Siiri asked, and Virpi said she’d come to see how Siiri was doing. This was probably rubbish.
‘Once you’ve recovered a little, I’d like to have a chat with you. Before the police do – so you don’t blather on about who knows what,’ she called, on her way out. ‘You have been taking your pills, I hope. Your pill counter is on the table, filled.’
Virpi Hiukkanen closed the door behind her with a slam. Siiri tried to shout that if she was going to drop in uninvited, she could at least ring the bell, but there was no point, Virpi was already gone.
‘She’s nervous about you,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘You’re a very dangerous person to her now.’
The idea obviously thrilled Anna-Liisa, but Siiri had an uneasy feeling. How could she explain to Virpi Hiukkanen why she had been in the Group Home in the middle of the night? And what about the police? Would they want to question her too? Would some surveillance video turn up on the Internet showing her entering the dementia ward with her own key?
She asked Anna-Liisa if they could talk about something else. The fire had taken a significant toll on her strength, and she’d spent the days since then mostly in bed. Anna-Liisa had taken care of her diligently every day, brought her food, helped her to the toilet and kept her company.
‘I never thought I’d be the last oak,’ Anna-Liisa said, when they’d sat a little while in silence after Virpi’s inspection visit. ‘I thought of myself as basically weak, thought I would die before the others. And here I am, the last one standing. It’s very strange.’
Siiri was a little surprised at this. If anyone was a strong person, it was Anna-Liisa. She was so unyielding; if you were to compare her to a tree, it would be an oak.
‘My last name is Petäjä. The Eastern Finnish word for a pine tree. It’s a pretty name, but it doesn’t suit me at all.’
Petäjä was Anna-Liisa’s second husband’s name. They had divorced after the war because he had proved to be a violent, unpredictable man. The war had jumbled his brain, and when Anna-Liisa didn’t have any children, he started to blame her for everything bad in his life. A lawyer she knew arranged the divorce without any scandal, but in the 1950s it was difficult to be a divorced woman. People said all kinds of awful things wherever you went, and especially in a small town.
‘As you must know, a divorced woman is almost the same as a whore.’
When Anna-Liisa said that horrible word she lowered her voice almost to a whisper and articulated it dramatically, as if it had three Rs on the end. She talked about going to work as a young teacher in trousers, how after that there was no end to the gossip, because a woman should only wear trousers when skiing. Finally, she’d had enough and she moved to Helsinki to escape the slander.
Siiri looked at her friend and realized for the first time how tall and thin Anna-Liisa was, simultaneously delicate and imposing. She had never thought of Anna-Liisa as fragile before; she was so vigorous and knowledgeable. Even her voice was expressive and strong, not at all like a frail old woman’s. And now she’d learned that Anna-Liisa wasn’t even an old maid – she’d been married at least twice!
‘Did you say that Petäjä was your second husband’s name?’
‘Yes. My first husband was studying to be a doctor when the Winter War started. We rushed to get married before he was sent to the front – it seemed safer somehow,’ she said, then smiled wryly and sighed. ‘He fell right at the beginning of the war. A bullet in the knee. How’s that for a cause of death? There wasn’t any chance to help anyone there, because there were so many wounded and in such terrible conditions. But of course you know about that. Weren’t you in the Lottas during the Continuation War?’
Anna-Liisa seemed to be quite a pacifist. When Siiri made the mistake of saying something about a heroic death, she was almost angry, her eyes smouldering as she demanded to know what was heroic about dying over some trivial offence, drowning in blood out in the woods somewhere. She thought the worst thing about heroism was that it didn’
t let you grieve for the fallen. Even she had walked around bravely with her head held high, as if it were some great honour to be a twenty-one-year-old widow. She hadn’t cried once, not even when she was alone, although she’d felt like she had nothing left to hope for in her life.
‘And then, when I was ninety, I started to have a dream about my first husband, and I realized that I was still grieving for him, and I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Does that happen to you? Far-off memories come back to you all of a sudden now you’re old? So strongly that even though you don’t want to think about them, you have to?’
Siiri thought about her little brother Voitto, who’d died in the last summer of the Continuation War. She couldn’t grieve for him, either. Nobody talked about Voitto, but a portrait of him in his army uniform was framed and placed on the piano to remind them of their silenced grief. Siiri didn’t have very many memories of her brother. She remembered how Voitto would tease her and how he had broken her beautiful doll on purpose, the only one she had; he’d kicked it in the head and broken it and looked her in the eye and laughed. He’d done it on purpose, impudently. She didn’t dream about Voitto, but she had started thinking about her mother, who had been a very difficult person. Siiri had thought she was over it until, when she was ninety-four, her mother started haunting her dreams and thoughts.
‘Isn’t it sort of peculiar?’
‘People must not be meant to live this long,’ Anna-Liisa said after a thoughtful pause. ‘But here we are, victims of retirement home aerobics. I’ve never once in my life exercised until now. It’s a pastime, so we’ll have something to do during these pointless years, waiting for everything finally to end. What I mean is, life hands you surprises, right up to the end, even us old ladies over ninety. Who could have guessed that you and I would end up being each other’s only friends? We didn’t know a thing about each other ten years ago. Or that Irma would end up in the dementia ward? Or that your heart would give out before its time?’
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 16
