The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  Siiri didn’t want to spend Easter at Sunset Grove. The new tenants were in the craft room with feathers and toilet-paper rolls covered in yellow trimmings, and the cafeteria was serving mämmi – black rye Easter pudding – for the second week in a row because it was so easy on the old people’s mouths and it never went bad. Siiri didn’t like mämmi, but it was Irma’s favourite. She always heaped sugar on it by the spoonful – and then poked a hollow in it so that she could fit more sugar and cream in.

  On Holy Saturday, Siiri bought a tub of mämmi, a kilo of sugar, and a carton of cream from Low Price Market and headed for Laakso Hospital. There were little plastic chicks on the hospital windowsills.

  ‘But no Easter mämmi! Just the same old fruit trifle, can you believe it? Oh, Siiri, you’re a treasure, bringing me real mämmi. And a kilo of sugar! You’re a wonder.’

  ‘The store didn’t have granulated sugar in anything smaller. You’ll eat it up in no time. Why not put it on your rye crisp? It’ll crunch nicely between your teeth.’

  Irma got a cup and spoon from the refugee-turned nurse and ate the mämmi with relish, although the cup might have been some sort of specimen container. Irma offered some of the viscous black pudding to the nurse, but the woman couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw what Irma was spooning into her mouth, and hurried away.

  ‘It does look a bit like crap,’ Irma said, humming and crunching the sugar between her teeth, in an impossibly good mood. Siiri couldn’t bear to tell her what had been done to her apartment, although she knew she ought to. Irma said her rehabilitation was progressing rapidly. She had walked three steps yesterday without support, and had got to know two sweet therapists.

  ‘Very gentle. One of them has a two-year-old daughter named Irina. Isn’t your daughter named Irina, too? The one who graduated as a nun in France? Why don’t you ever talk about her? Do you think we should become nuns, too? Why haven’t we ever thought of that before!’

  Irma seemed half serious. She immediately started thinking about the upside of a nun’s life. No abbess could be as mean as Virpi Hiukkanen, although Virpi wasn’t a boss like an abbess was, of course, just a sort of vice-abbess, which wasn’t even a real title. There would be no men there, and it would be nice not to have to worry about anyone forcing hugs upon you in the lifts or kissing you in the hallways or feeling you up while you waited at the water fountain. It would be too hard for Anna-Liisa, of course, now that she’d started her new path in life. And the main thing was that in a convent nothing would cost anything.

  ‘We would save thousands of euros a month and we could buy enough goats and cows to fill Africa!’

  ‘True,’ Siiri said, and thought grimly that a convent might, in fact, be their only alternative. ‘But I would probably have to become a believer.’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy. No one will question that you’re a believer, in the last leg of life. Just say that you’ve come to the conclusion that there is something eternal, that this can’t be all there is to life. I’ll be your godmother at the christening, of course. It’ll be fun. Is there an entrance exam for a convent?’

  Siiri got Irma to stop her dreaming by telling her about Mika Korhonen, and since Irma was already in the mood, she practically had an experience of enlightenment when she finessed who Mika Korhonen was.

  ‘Our archangel! The boy who drove the taxi, who wanted to be bald and took us to eat peppery food in the new plastic Restaurant Kämp. Why haven’t you talked about him before?’

  Irma still had good moments and bad moments. Siiri decided to use this lucid moment while she had the chance and told her about Mika’s latest findings. Irma was mostly interested in the fact that he was Siiri’s advocate now. She started to laugh, because she thought that an advocate was the same thing as a guardian and she remembered how it used to be that every village had some mentally retarded person who had been placed under guardianship.

  ‘There was a case like that in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville! Dr Bartolo was Rosina’s guardian, wasn’t he? Is Mika your Dr Bartolo now? The doctor was a complete ninny and just wanted to marry her. Aha! Could that be what’s happening here? Mika must want to marry you!’

  Eventually, Irma got back to where she’d started and came to her senses. She was pleased with Siiri and Anna-Liisa’s initiative and happy that the guardianship didn’t apply to her, since she had a big family and lots of loved ones, unlike Siiri, whose children had died from affluenza and escaped reality to live in convents.

  ‘So I don’t at all need to start asking people I meet on the street to be my guardian.’

  ‘But my family isn’t about to start dividing up my possessions while I’m still alive,’ Siiri let slip, and Irma looked very serious.

  Then Siiri had to tell her about the apartment, about the Estonian moving men, the warehouse and the auction. She tried to make it sound vague and confused and repeated many times that no new tenant had moved in yet, and she didn’t know whether anyone would. This was true in a way, because Virpi Hiukkanen had just talked about long waiting lists and hadn’t mentioned anyone by name. But Irma understood all too well, including the things Siiri wasn’t telling her. She’d had time lying in various hospitals to think about all kinds of things and had come to the conclusion that maybe she wasn’t all that important to her precious darlings.

  ‘It’s my own fault, of course. Maybe I’m just a nagging old lady. A bad mother and a tedious grandmother, a burden to everyone.’

  She started to cry and said how she had gradually realized that she was no joy or any earthly use to her children or grandchildren. They were actually waiting for her to die and get out of the way, and it was a relief to them when she was moved to the dementia ward to be a vegetable so that they could forget about her without feeling guilty.

  ‘They can’t wait to get my electric mixer. I’m worth about as much as an old kitchen gadget. Can you believe it? I’ve had it for more than thirty years. It’s just a piece of junk. Although it is a Philips.’

  ‘Well, your granddaughter seemed to want your jewellery, too, and I’m sure that’s valuable,’ Siiri said consolingly, but Irma wouldn’t laugh at anything now.

  ‘Nobody but you and Anna-Liisa has come to see me in the hospital. It didn’t occur to any of my family to come and cheer me up with some mämmi – they’ve never even noticed that mämmi is my favourite. They’re all in Cairo and Japan and in a great hurry, even when they’re on holiday, but that’s probably an excuse. If they have time to go to the other side of the earth, you would think they’d have time to visit the hospital and tell me I’m homeless. Oh, I wish I knew how to die. That would be the best thing I could do for them.’

  Siiri had never heard Irma talk this way. It sounded unflinchingly honest, which was why it was so awful. Siiri started to feel like her own life was actually pretty good, since she didn’t have to wonder why no one remembered her. She hugged Irma, who had grown oddly small and thin. She wiped her tears away with a lace handkerchief and tried to console her. Loneliness was part of growing old, and there was nothing you could do about it. Even old people who had lots of things to do and saw people every day felt lonely. You couldn’t sit by the phone growing bitter because nobody called. Your children and grandchildren had their own lives, and so they should. Everybody was focused on their own life. Old people too. And Siiri and Irma in particular, because they still had lots of things they knew how to enjoy.

  ‘You can move in with me. We still have time to do lots of fun things together,’ Siiri said, and Irma’s smile returned. She said that Siiri snored, that she could hear her through the wall and no earplug was tough enough to keep the noise out. She blew her nose loudly into Siiri’s handkerchief, tucked it into her sleeve as if it were her own, and explained that if you blow your nose all the time, then the stuff that comes out isn’t snot, it’s allergy fluid. Then she let out a deep sigh and wanted to hear more about the romance between Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, and when Siiri told her about the trip to Tallinn for
veterans and their spouses, Irma laughed so much she gave herself a stomach ache.

  Chapter 48

  Siiri Kettunen was summoned for questioning at the East Pasila police station. Her last contact with the police had been in the autumn of 1946 when they’d tried to pump her for information about a weapons cache, but she hadn’t been as nervous then as she was now.

  Luckily, Anna-Liisa was coming with her. She felt partly responsible for Siiri being questioned because the Ambassador was the one who had reported the fire to the police, which was why Siiri was in a sticky spot now. The Ambassador escorted them to the door at Sunset Grove and gave a lengthy speech.

  ‘The police work for us. Have faith in yourself and great things could come of this. You have a tremendous responsibility in the name of justice and morality. Remember that. I demanded justice, and you are my envoys,’ he said, his voice trembling, and then he kissed Anna-Liisa on the cheek and shook Siiri’s hand ceremoniously, as if they were on their way to discover a new continent. He left behind a pleasant smell of aftershave.

  Siiri knew that she couldn’t possibly tell the police anything but the truth. It had been a different matter in 1946. Then it had been a matter of patriotism, and it had been her duty to protect her friends and relatives, even though her lie had come to nothing, of course: they were all sent to jail. Brave men.

  She had gone over the night of the fire in her mind many times. She couldn’t swear that the person she saw running across the courtyard was Erkki Hiukkanen. Since the fire, the caretaker hadn’t been seen in Sunset Grove’s hallways, the air ducts and drains had been left to clog up while Erkki concentrated on following Siiri around the city. The more she thought about it, the more confused it all became. But she wanted to believe that evil would be punished.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Anna-Liisa said as they crossed Bell Bridge. ‘Many criminals are never caught. If your statement finally made the police understand what kind of game is going on behind the scenes at Sunset Grove, it would be a monumental achievement.’

  The police station was one of those depressing concrete boxes that stand shoulder to shoulder all over Pasila. There was an information desk inside the entrance just like at a bank – or at least the ones that still had customer service. Siiri took a number and sat down with Anna-Liisa among the assorted crooks. Siiri looked around nervously, but Anna-Liisa was already absorbed in a battered old copy of Donald Duck that someone had left on the waiting-room table.

  ‘You stiff-legged old tightwad!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Magica de Spell just called Uncle Scrooge a stiff-legged old tightwad,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘I think it’s a funny thing to call an elderly duck. Look – it’s the one where the police come to take the nephews away. Kind of matches the theme today. He’s eloquent, that Donald. He’s an example of the nuanced language of comics. Listen: “Those flatfoots are nabbing my nephews and hucking them in the hoosegow with everybody in town watching.” Hopefully things don’t go as badly for you today.’

  When Siiri’s turn came they were told they were in the wrong place. A friendly policewoman showed them to a lift that would take them to where they were supposed to be – an echoey little room on the third floor, where a very young man sat. He was dressed in everyday clothes, wearing a tie, and he introduced himself with a somewhat timid mumble.

  ‘Senior Constable Kettunen.’

  ‘Master of Philosophy Petäjä,’ Anna-Liisa replied, and then went to sit down next to the wall.

  ‘I’m a senior Kettunen, too!’ Siiri cried happily, but when the young man held his earnest expression she apologized, since they probably weren’t related. There were lots of Kettunens in Finland, and besides, it was her late husband’s name. Siiri’s maiden name was Närviö, but she preferred the more ordinary Kettunen, because Närviö was a made-up name, forced on her family in the 1880s by her Fennoman grandfather, who wanted to be among the first to Finnicize his name, Neovius, which itself was made up by someone named Nyman, who was going to Turku in the 1700s to study at the university and thought it sounded Latin.

  ‘Do you have any identification?’ the policeman interrupted.

  He was absorbed in flipping through the papers on his desk, of which there were a lot. He read them in the same way a doctor reads a patient’s files, as if he’d never seen the papers before. Siiri found her social security card in her handbag, but apparently it wasn’t identification. After a moment of looking she found her driver’s licence, which she hadn’t needed in ages.

  ‘What’s this?’ the constable asked.

  It was a pink-paper driver’s licence in a plastic pocket with a smudged stamp on it from 1978, the last time Siiri had renewed it. But the Senior Constable seemed to think that it had expired, in spite of the fact that she’d renewed it. He said driver’s licences looked quite different nowadays, and to assure her of this he showed her his own, which was a plastic slab that looked like a bank card. In any case, a driver’s licence was no longer sufficient for identification. She had to show a passport or official proof of identity, which was also a plastic slab that looked like a bank card. Siiri, in other words, had no identification.

  ‘Not even a passport?’ the boy asked, and Siiri wondered what she’d done with her passport. The last time she had travelled was in the 1950s, when she took the MS Oihonna to Hamburg. Unlike some people, she wasn’t the lucky bride of a war veteran and couldn’t go gallivanting around at the government’s expense to heal from her traumas. Then Anna-Liisa dug her passport out of her handbag. It was quite new. She’d ordered one in March, in preparation for her trip to Tallinn, without mentioning a thing to Siiri.

  ‘Don’t start bickering about it,’ Anna-Liisa snapped, and then turned to the policeman. ‘I can vouch for her identity. And her pedigree she has already presented.’

  The Senior Constable finally gave in but then shooed Anna-Liisa into the hallway. He continued to look at his papers, and Siiri waited for such a long while that she had time to count the folders on his shelves twice before he began the questioning. He asked her about obvious things, like whether she remembered her identity, did she know what month it was and who the President of Finland was. Siiri recited all the Presidents of Finland from Ståhlberg to Niinistö, just to be on the safe side, because she had lived through each administration, and she said she even remembered her PIN by using a mnemonic: the second number was the first number cubed, the third number was the first and second numbers multiplied and then divided by three, and the fourth number was the sum of the first two minus three.

  ‘Oh, heavens – now you know my PIN and I’m not supposed to tell it to outsiders! But of course you can be trusted because you’re a policeman. Did you get that the common factor in all the rules is the number three?’

  Senior Constable Kettunen put an end to this memory game and finally cut to the chase. He wanted to know what day the fire happened, where the retirement home was, and when Siiri had first noticed the fire. She told him that she had been at the door to the Group Home at 2.30 a.m. and had noticed that there was smoke coming from inside. After a moment’s hesitation, she also told him that she had let herself in with a key, because her shouts weren’t awakening the nurse.

  ‘As I understand it, the nurse then called for help, on your instruction.’

  The policeman didn’t seem to wonder why Siiri was prowling the Sunset Grove hallways at night or where she’d got a key to the Group Home. But how could the poor boy have known what kind of place a retirement-home dementia ward was and what kind of rules it had? Then he asked Siiri if she had seen anyone outside.

  ‘I thought there was someone running outside . . . a man,’ Siiri said, no longer chattering aimlessly.

  The Ambassador would have been greatly disappointed in her because she didn’t use the opportunity to report Erkki Hiukkanen for starting the fire. The constable had nothing more to ask her, and an unpleasant silence fell over the room. All that could be heard was the hum of the ventilation system.
When nothing seemed to rouse the constable, Siiri tried to lighten the mood by telling him about the artist Sigrid Schauman, who, when she was being questioned by the police following a car accident, was asked whether she’d had any dealings with the police before, and she’d answered, ‘Yes, when my brother shot Governor-General Bobrikov.’

  The very young Senior Constable looked at Siiri with empty, pale-blue eyes, almost like Irma’s eyes on her worst days in the Group Home. Maybe he didn’t know who Sigrid Schauman was. Or Bobrikov! Siiri thought about the Ambassador and about Anna-Liisa sitting out in the hallway. Then, Mika Korhonen appeared in her thoughts with his backpack, followed by Irma roaring, in a wheelchair and a sexy T-shirt, and she could no longer contain herself. She burst into a flood of words. It was a long outpouring. At first the policeman looked at her in bewilderment, then with close attention. He was left-handed, and was taking notes with his hand at an awkward angle and listening to her as if he were extremely interested in what she was saying.

  ‘You must have something in those hundred and thirty-eight binders about the rape of Olavi Raudanheimo. And this fellow Pasi must be well-known to you. Mika said so. But I don’t remember Pasi’s last name. From what I understand, Pasi was questioned several times and he’s going to end up in jail.’

  When she’d finished her barrage of talk, Siiri’s heart was pounding and her hands were shaking.

  ‘You said that the head nurse left you lying on the floor in her office. When did this happen? And how big was the package that you found on your postbox without any information about the sender or recipient?’

  Siiri didn’t remember mentioning the package. She couldn’t say when the package appeared, but the occurrence in Virpi Hiukkanen’s office had definitely happened the same day. What day was that? Siiri felt faint. She asked the boy for a glass of water. But before he could get up from his chair, her eyes went dim.