‘To hell with compulsory Swedish!’
Siiri thought it was important to speak other languages, and she had always felt bad that her grandmother hadn’t spoken Russian with her. Swedish was one of the funniest languages she knew, and Selma Lagerlöf really should be read in the original language. Mika looked bored and didn’t seem to be listening. He wanted to tell her about Pasi. Did she remember Pasi, the social worker at Sunset Grove who’d got the sack shortly after Tero’s death?
‘I remember. You were very angry at him and even blamed him for Tero’s death. You called him a snitch. That’s an insult, isn’t it – snitch?’
‘Yep. He ratted to the cops – all lies. And it was that pathetic user that Tero decided to fall in love with.’
Pasi had also been there when Olavi Raudanheimo was attacked.
‘And he isn’t the only veteran who’s had an unpleasant experience in the shower,’ Mika said.
Siiri could hardly believe her ears, the thought was so repugnant. She always felt faint when Olavi Raudanheimo’s terrible incident was mentioned.
Mika thought it was a stroke of luck that assaulting old people wasn’t Pasi’s only crime. He might never have been caught for his shower games, but his drug and money problems had provided Mika an opportunity to hand him over to the police. Pasi was just one link in a long chain, but the police had to start somewhere. It would probably be a long time before all of the activities of Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen’s various companies were combed through. But it no longer interested Mika.
‘I’m just glad Pasi got caught. As far as I’m concerned, the Russian pill patrol can keep their little incontinence-pad service going as long as they like.’
Siiri would have liked to simply enjoy her time travel, and to relish the fact that Irma had recovered from her dementia symptoms while touring Helsinki’s many hospitals. But she couldn’t. No matter how she tried to float off on her own thoughts, she couldn’t get the problems of Sunset Grove out of her mind. Assaults, drug deals, fires . . . and somehow all of it was connected.
‘We should have talked about that fire.’ Mika’s look turned troubled and his hands raked the air. ‘About the keys, the Group Home keys . . . you shouldn’t have used them to go . . . well, to go anywhere, and it could, like, cause some problems, a lot of problems. For you, I mean. Serious problems, because you used the key to get in at the very moment when Erkki Hiukkanen was starting a fire in the sauna.’
Siiri was ashamed of herself. Here she was, reminiscing about the smell of her beloved old trams, when at any moment she could be charged with breaking and entering. Her head started to buzz and throb, the roll and bowl of coffee in her stomach churned. At a loss for what to do, she fished her handkerchief out of her bag, blew her nose, and dabbed her forehead. ‘Do you believe . . . do you think I could go to jail for the fire?’
‘I doubt it,’ Mika said, and ate his roll in one large bite.
Siiri didn’t consider that gesture sufficient reassurance. He certainly could have arranged matters better for her, since he seemed to be able to direct the activities of the police so skilfully when it came to Pasi. He was her advocate, after all. And he was the one who left the keys on the table, as a signal that she should do something.
‘That’s one way of looking at it. But I do have your medical records from Sunset Grove. They were trying to shove you into the dementia ward, or declare you incompetent, and blame you for the fire, too. There were papers there with all kinds of insinuations about points scored and the need for enhanced care.’
Mika rummaged in his cluttered backpack. A pair of binoculars, a pocket knife, a wallet, a telephone, an asthma inhaler, and a box of liquorice lozenges appeared on the table. The hum in Siiri’s head softened a bit and she had to tell Mika about all the things Irma kept in her handbag.
‘Whisky? That’s one thing I don’t have in here,’ Mika laughed, finally licking the sugar from the sweet roll off his lips and slapping a large stack of papers down on the table.
Siiri looked at the pile sombrely. It was just like the heavy stack of papers from Irma’s file that she’d been carrying in her handbag for more than a week now. The buzz in her head started up again. So she had been right about this, too. She wasn’t paranoid. She looked warily at the documents, flipped back and forth through them and tried to remain calm.
At least her medical documents weren’t as upsetting to read as Irma’s had been. Although Siiri’s did have some strange memos and groundless claims written in familiar, rounded handwriting. Even before the fire, but especially afterwards, the records claimed that Siiri was senile, fatigued and paranoid, just like the claims about Irma earlier that winter. Siiri was scored according to some scale and she was just 0.2 points below being classified as a patient requiring enhanced care – thank heavens, because otherwise her charges would have been even more expensive than they already were. She had been charged for a tranquillizer, a stimulant and sleeping pills, without a doctor ever seeing her.
‘Par for the course,’ Mika said.
‘You’d make a good Sarastro,’ Siiri said, shoving the papers aside. ‘You have a really fine bass voice, a really rare voice.’
She had to explain to Mika who Sarastro was, and regretted having blurted it out in the middle of a serious discussion about her medical records, which Mika had stolen for her without even being asked.
‘In The Magic Flute you don’t know at first what’s good and what’s bad, because the Queen of the Night’s evil is only revealed when they get to Sarastro’s kingdom and they see everything in a new light,’ she said, trying to speak quickly so that she wouldn’t bore him. ‘It’s a story of the growth of the human spirit, and that’s the way things are in real life. It’s often hard for us to tell good from bad, and vice versa.’
‘Especially at Sunset Grove,’ Mika said gravely.
He packed up his things and offered Siiri a liquorice lozenge for digestion. It seemed like a good idea, and Siiri waxed enthusiastic, recounting long sections of The Magic Flute until Mika started tapping his foot on the floor to indicate that it was time to leave. He said he was satisfied now that Pasi had been caught. He’d done what he’d set out to do. He didn’t intend to investigate the goings on at Sunset Grove any further.
‘Pasi’ll be in for a long stretch. That’s enough for me.’
‘And what about us?’ Siiri asked, not knowing herself what exactly she meant.
‘Well, we’re practically married,’ Mika said with a bewitching smile. ‘An advocate can’t just take off.’
But then he did take off, into the evening sun, without picking up his taxi from Laajalahti, saying that another driver would come to get it. And they hadn’t even begun to solve the matter of the fire and Siiri’s possible prison sentence, not to mention the falsified medical records. Was she supposed to figure this mess out by herself?
Chapter 46
Anna-Liisa wanted to go clothes shopping. Siiri thought it a funny whim, but then she remembered the Ambassador and understood why she wanted something new in her wardrobe. She already had her red hat and gloves.
‘I got them from Onni,’ Anna-Liisa revealed when they were on the tram. ‘What do you think – does the hat flatter me?’
‘Very becoming,’ Siiri replied. It was what Irma would have said.
Siiri couldn’t remember when she’d last bought clothes. She’d gone to Stockmann now and then to buy silk long johns and vests for Irma, but she didn’t care for them herself. Coats, trousers, shirts – she’d worn the same ones for the entirety of this century. Shopping for shopping’s sake was pointless and boring. But it was nice to go into the city, away from Sunset Grove where her thoughts trod over the same tedious paths from the fire to the pill counter to the Hiukkanens.
‘You don’t have to buy anything,’ Anna-Liisa told her. ‘It’s still shopping, even if you just wander from shop to shop and look at everything. It’s extremely popular. Do you remember when there used to be signs that said no beggi
ng or peddling? And yet there were always peddlers coming to the door. Sometimes that was fun. I used to always let one blind war veteran sharpen my kitchen knives and I bought lace napkins from a gypsy woman. There was no harm in it.’
They began their shopping trip at the Forum. It was bustling with people but there wasn’t a single shop suitable for someone over ninety. Anna-Liisa steered them out of the Forum, past the Chapel of Silence and into Kamppi, the huge shopping centre at the old bus station, or rather on top of it, since the bus station had been forced underground. It looked to Siiri like Kamppi had all the same shops as the Forum, but Anna-Liisa was more observant.
‘These are all one-brand shops. Shops have gone branded now, so each shop only sells one company’s clothes. That’s how you know that Kamppi has higher-quality products than the Forum.’
‘So, if I want to buy some trousers, I have to look in each separate shop? That’s rather complicated.’
None of the escalators started where the previous escalator ended. They had to walk a long way to the next one and got lost several times. They were surrounded by inappropriately short skirts and tops with multi-coloured lace and ruffles. One shop sold nothing but hairbands. For men, there were shops with tasteless green trousers and pink shirts. Siiri’s husband never wore anything but black, brown and grey. Even the Ambassador was hardly addled enough with springtime love to put on a pair of red trousers. The idea of it made Anna-Liisa laugh wonderfully, her voice high and musical. They sat down on some cafe chairs to rest for a moment, but a man working at the ice-cream parlour shooed them away, saying that the chairs were reserved for paying customers.
‘We are paying customers!’ Anna-Liisa said.
They had bought coffee in paper cups from the neighbouring shop, which seemed to be a bookstore of some kind. But that didn’t matter. They had to get up. So they stood next to a rubbish bin with the two empty chairs in front of them and finished their coffee. Shopping centres weren’t meant for old people – there was too much noise and bustle and the businesses were confusing. People shoved and elbowed each other and some of them were just standing around, obviously not there to buy anything, but just to watch what the others were doing.
‘Let’s go to Stockmann,’ Anna-Liisa finally groaned. This sounded sensible.
They got to Stockmann through an incredibly long underground passageway carved into the bedrock, which was handy, since large drops of sleet were falling outside in honour of spring. The passageway made them think of bomb shelters and the bombing of Helsinki. Anna-Liisa had been in Töölö and Siiri in Munkkiniemi on 30 March 1939. They remembered how some of the bombs had struck right near them and they both got an uncomfortable feeling just like they did on New Year’s Eve when people went outside to light rockets.
‘Fireworks always make me think of the war. I can’t understand how anyone really enjoys all those explosions and that dreadful racket,’ Anna-Liisa said as they emerged into the freezing rain just a short walk from the shelter of Stockmann. The department store was full of even more people than the shopping centre, such a mass of people in the middle of the day that they were driven by the crowd onto the descending escalator.
‘Tram routes and the arrangement of the departments at Stockmann are two things that should never change,’ Anna-Liisa said when they noticed they were on a floor labelled with the English word ‘basement’. They argued about this for a moment, because Siiri was quite pleased with all the new tram routes that had appeared in Helsinki lately. She wouldn’t mind if they ran tracks to Munkkivuori, too. A little adventure was always refreshing, including here in Stockmann.
‘Now look at this gadget. I’ll bet you’ve never seen this kind of vacuum cleaner . . . yes, it’s a vacuum cleaner, not a humidifier, like I thought it was. It moves by itself, goes into the corners to suck up the dust. Isn’t that a fun invention? And you would never have found it, if you hadn’t come looking for it.’
‘We’re not really looking, we’re just browsing,’ Anna-Liisa said and strode to the escalator to get back to the ground floor.
Siiri reminded her of the fun of shopping and sang a bit of Schubert, the song that starts with ‘Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern’, but Anna-Liisa silenced her with a sharp elbow in the ribs.
‘Don’t sing,’ she said, and tried on an orange scarf.
In the end she bought a white scarf and a new black handbag to replace her old black one. The orange scarf was unnecessarily bold in her opinion, and the white one could be worn anywhere, even at a funeral, which made it a very practical purchase.
They caught the number 3 on Aleksanterinkatu and took it past the Tennis Palace to the Opera, where they planned to change to the number 4. This had become Siiri’s habitual route from the city centre to Munkkiniemi. As they sat on the number 3, they wondered where old ladies like them were supposed to buy their clothing. There were no such stores, specializing in old people’s clothes, although you heard all the time that there were more things for old people every day.
‘We can’t walk around in flashy, bright-coloured young people’s clothes, like lunatics.’
Anna-Liisa thought anything at all could be an old lady’s clothes as soon as an old enough lady wore it. She looked Siiri up and down appraisingly.
‘It’s not as if that poplin coat you’re wearing is particularly designed for ninety-four-year-olds.’
While they waited for the number 4 at the new opera house they played with the idea of fashion just for old people.
‘The trendy granny this spring is wearing shades of pear and olive. A gracefully draped skirt covers varicose veins handsomely, and brings out the legs from behind a Zimmer frame. The heels on her colourful sandals are subtle but youthful, and a polka-dot chiffon scarf completes the ensemble.’
Siiri extended her ankle and pivoted like a model, just as Irma had done when they were planning what to wear to a funeral – it must have been Tero’s. There certainly had been a lot of funerals since then.
Just as the number 4 pulled up to the stop, Anna-Liisa said she was going to Tallinn for Easter with the Ambassador, on a veterans’ rehabilitation tour, where spouses could come along for free.
‘Just think of it – a sea crossing! And I plan to leave the Zimmer frame at home completely.’
It was only then that it occurred to Siiri that Anna-Liisa hadn’t brought her Zimmer frame with her on their shopping trip. She walked perfectly without it, her red spring hat balanced on her head. It seemed she didn’t need her old support now that she had a real gentleman friend to lean on – a cavalier to escort her to the crematorium, Siiri thought, and missed Irma terribly.
‘You know, Siiri, I feel so young and alive. It’s just like you always say – life is certainly amazing.’
‘Do I say that? And did you just say that veterans’ spouses get to go to Tallinn for free?’ Siiri was shocked and a little envious of these travel plans.
‘Yes! Since there are so few veterans of the war left, they’re paying all expenses for spouses, too, although back in the eighties they didn’t pay for anything. And since the spas are so much cheaper in Tallinn than in Finland, they’re sending us there to save money!’
‘But you’re not the Ambassador’s spouse, Anna-Liisa. At least, not to my knowledge.’
Siiri noticed that she was getting worked up and her voice was unnecessarily sharp. She had certainly never sponged off the government like that. Anna-Liisa didn’t seem to notice Siiri’s annoyance; she just told her proudly how clever Onni was at arranging the visas and everything – all taken care of in a snap.
‘And he said we can always buy the rings in Tallinn if they’re required.’
Chapter 47
Finnish Easter week was a dreary holiday, and it was a particularly hard one now, because on Maundy Thursday Irma’s apartment was emptied. Some Estonian men came early in the morning and started carrying her things out to a truck parked in the car park. None of the darlings were present, just these foreign men
who knew so little Finnish that Siiri couldn’t figure out what was going on. Apparently, Irma’s things were being taken to some storage warehouse, because the men were talking about a container. On Good Friday, the same men carried some cherry-veneer tables and a horrible, black TV stand into the apartment.
‘Why are someone else’s things being put in Irma Lännenleimu’s apartment?’ Siiri asked Virpi Hiukkanen when she saw her in the A-wing hallway. Without blinking an eye Virpi let flow a pack of lies, all about serious dementia, long-term care, a special exception being made to provide Irma a bed in the Group Home, long waiting lists for the apartments, and these difficult times.
‘You can’t live your life thinking that a ninety-two-year-old chronic patient is going to experience a miraculous recovery,’ Virpi said. She couldn’t remember the new tenant’s name.
Siiri called Irma’s doctor daughter Tuula ten times before she answered from some resort in Japan where it was night-time in the middle of the day. The call didn’t go well.
‘Living in a retirement home isn’t cheap. It’s not fun and games, as I’m sure you are aware,’ Tuula said, yawning audibly, and Siiri could already guess what had happened. ‘Virpi Hiukkanen advised this course of action. She has kindly arranged everything – I simply don’t have the time.’
‘May I ask where Irma’s things were taken?’
‘Things? It was just a lot of junk. The young people in the family went and looked at it and none of them wanted anything. Electric mixers and other antiques, and, to top it all, some addled retirement-home resident came in yelling incoherently at them. The only valuable item was the TV, but they didn’t bother with it. Did you want it? For practical reasons everything was put up for auction through a company Virpi Hiukkanen recommended, but I doubt we’ll get much money for it.’
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 22
