The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Why did you take those pill bottles from Irma’s apartment?’ Anna-Liisa suddenly asked him, just as he was getting to the part about Russian ice hockey, which apparently also had something to do with the incontinence-pad storage in the closed unit. Mika didn’t bat an eye, didn’t behave in the least as if he’d been caught out; he simply explained which of the drugs could be sold on the black market and how the transactions worked. Apparently, Irma’s prescriptions were really hot stuff.

  ‘Imagine that!’ Siiri said, not knowing what else to say. She was mostly baffled by what she was hearing, and in a way Mika’s visit just added to her fear and uneasiness. What he was saying was like a startling gust of wind from some utterly foreign world. And yet everything he was talking about had supposedly happened right here at Sunset Grove. Mika looked hungry and tired, and Siiri realized with horror that she hadn’t offered anything to her guests.

  ‘Would you two like some liver casserole? I can warm some up. It will only take a minute on the stove.’

  Mika grimaced. It seemed he didn’t like liver casserole, which was understandable, because he was still young – maybe forty? Siiri hadn’t asked him, and it was hard to guess his age since he was purposely bald and it may have made him look older than he really was. Anna-Liisa had already eaten some mashed potatoes and gravy with the Ambassador in the cafeteria and she had no hankering for liver casserole either.

  Suddenly Mika took a wad of money out of his pocket and handed it to Siiri. It was several hundred euros in wrinkled fifty-euro bills.

  ‘From Virpi Hiukkanen to you,’ he said defiantly.

  ‘Good heavens! What’s this about?’ Siiri shouted in horror. An offer of money from the head nurse had to be some kind of bribe to stop her from blabbing to the police. Was Mika in league with Virpi Hiukkanen now?

  ‘Your relative Tuukka figured out your accounts and found a lot of blatantly fraudulent charges. I went and talked to Hiukkanen about it, which scared her so much that she forked out the money.’

  Siiri didn’t know that Mika Korhonen and her great-granddaughter’s boyfriend Tuukka had made each other’s acquaintance without telling her. She felt bad that Tuukka had been dragged into all this, because he was a good boy.

  ‘I should have gone to talk to the accountant, but I couldn’t get hold of him. Hiukkanen was in quite a hurry to pay up immediately. She probably didn’t like the idea of the accounting manager finding out about these little dips into the direct-deposit accounts.’

  ‘Is there an accounting manager? Is that the director’s husband, the one who works at the fish market?’

  Mika laughed for the first time since he’d arrived. She was talking about Kalasatama, the new Fish Harbour office development. But Sundström’s husband was only the quality control manager. The person Mika had been hunting down was the one in charge of the money.

  ‘That money fellow has his work cut out hiding the evidence,’ he informed them.

  ‘They certainly have enough managers,’ Anna-Liisa said, ‘for a place so understaffed.’

  Mika thought that Siiri’s case was a simple one. Since she hadn’t ordered a cleaner, she couldn’t be billed for one, nor for the plumbing work she hadn’t ordered.

  ‘But how could the head nurse give the money to you?’ Anna-Liisa wondered.

  ‘I said I was Siiri’s elder-care advocate. She didn’t question it, she was so damned scared.’

  Siiri almost screamed. First Mika had stolen the keys to Sunset Grove, then Irma’s medical records, and now he’d tricked Tuukka into poking around in criminal matters and had lied about being her advocate. What kind of hot water had they got themselves into?

  ‘Sign your name on this piece of paper,’ Mika said, and handed her a pen from the pocket of his leather jacket.

  Siiri’s hands were shaking, she was now so frightened. Luckily, Anna-Liisa was there as a witness if she ended up in even bigger trouble because of Mika. She needed to go and fetch her glasses from her bedside table so that she could read the paper carefully. She walked nervously around the room and forgot what she was looking for until her eyes fell on her handbag sitting on the kitchen worktop. She found her reading glasses in the bottom of the bag and sat down next to Anna-Liisa on the sofa to look at the document, which said that Siiri Hildegard Kettunen had designated Mika Antero Korhonen as her elder-care advocate two weeks earlier. The margins and line spacing were beautifully done, she noticed that immediately.

  ‘Antero is a seer’s name. But why is your name Hildegard?’ Anna-Liisa asked, as if to tease her. ‘You’re not from Fennoman stock, are you?’

  To Siiri’s surprise, Anna-Liisa thought the document was an excellent thing, and she didn’t find any grammatical errors in it, either. Because Mika wrote Finnish so beautifully, her doubts about him seemed to be decreasing, and all her pointed questions started to fade. She no longer seemed to feel that Mika was in league with or in the pay of Virpi Hiukkanen. Siiri looked doubtfully at Anna-Liisa, who nodded very formally.

  ‘Sign it. Irma was always telling you that you needed an advocate. And since Mika has figured so many things out, I’m sure he knows that you don’t have any big legacy to leave to him, even if you died tomorrow. Would you be interested in becoming my advocate, too, Mika? I don’t have any children, so you could get a couple of rugs and coffee cups from me for your trouble.’

  Mika and Anna-Liisa were now getting along like old friends – or partners in crime. Mika laughed at Anna-Liisa’s proposal and agreed to be her advocate, but only on the condition that he wouldn’t have to find some corner to put her junk in, and Anna-Liisa wasn’t the least bit offended. God help her if Siiri had referred to Anna-Liisa’s treasures as junk. There would have been a tremendous row.

  ‘Can you write an official document like this by hand?’ Anna-Liisa asked him, and then they wrote up a contract on Siiri’s kitchen table that stated that Mika was also her designated advocate. Siiri signed her document with some relief, and Mika joked that he was now the second man in Siiri’s life.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Siiri laughed, and felt carefree for the first time in months. What did she really have to worry about now she was ninety-four? She could always die of old age or hunger if things went really wrong. And being in prison could hardly be any more tiresome than being at Sunset Grove without Irma. It might even be rather interesting.

  ‘I doubt that,’ Mika said. He nodded towards the wad of notes he’d given her. ‘Put that money in the bank, so no one steals it.’

  ‘Right you are. My lovely silver hand mirror was stolen here, if you can believe it, right out of my apartment,’ Anna-Liisa hastened to say. She grabbed her new advocate’s arm and started confiding in him. ‘I’m sure it’s not terribly valuable, but it had sentimental worth because it was my mother’s morning gift from my father on their wedding day, so it was important to me, of course, but that’s the sort of thing they do here: they take things out of the residents’ apartments. That mirror’s probably been sold already. Russian connections you said they had? There are a lot of antiques collectors in Russia these days. These post-Soviet nouveaux riches, what else are they going to do with their money? So they buy themselves the semblance of a respectable past by purchasing other people’s family heirlooms.’

  ‘Heirlooms?’ Mika smiled, but he didn’t feel like hearing any more about Anna-Liisa’s mirror. He got up to leave as quickly as he’d come. He grabbed his backpack, slipped on his shoes, and left a new puddle behind on the welcome mat. Siiri didn’t ask when he was coming back again because he probably wouldn’t tell her.

  ‘But now we have an official relationship with him!’ Anna-Liisa grinned happily, and asked Siiri to get the red wine out of the cleaning cupboard so that they could make a toast to Mika Korhonen. Sometimes it seemed to Siiri that Anna-Liisa was an awful lot like Irma.

  Chapter 39

  Anna-Liisa suggested that they go to the bank on their way to see Irma at the hospital. Siiri wasn’t thrilled at the
idea – an old woman has no business doing two things on the same day. But it was futile to resist, since Anna-Liisa was brimming with vim and vigour. She really looked almost girlish in the new red hat she was wearing.

  Siiri had tried to go to the bank in Munkkiniemi the day after Mika’s visit and deposit the wrinkled bills he had given her. But the door had been locked in the middle of a weekday and there was a sign that said you could only get in by appointment and that the branch no longer handled cash transactions. It was really shocking. Siiri had kept an account at the same bank since the 1930s, though the bank had changed its name several times. Originally, it had been Finland United.

  ‘Oh, so you’re an anti-Fennoman. My bank is Citizen’s Cooperative, of course,’ Anna-Liisa said self-righteously.

  It said on the bank window that the nearest branch with staff was the one in Lassila, and Siiri couldn’t understand why she should have to take a bus all the way to Espoo and get carsick just to put money in her own bank account. Anna-Liisa said that Lassila was in Helsinki, not Espoo, but since you couldn’t get there by tram they decided to go to the branch in Punavuori instead. It sounded pleasant, and safer in every way.

  As they rode the tram they pondered what the bank’s business could be if it wasn’t cash transactions. Siiri suggested stocks and bonds, but Anna-Liisa thought those had to be cash transactions, too.

  ‘They probably do something with accounts. They don’t want to serve ordinary account holders, just deal with investments and funds and other more lucrative financial matters.’

  The door to the Punavuori branch was broken. It was supposed to open automatically, so there wasn’t any handle to pull on. For a moment they thought that this branch was closed, too, but then a miracle happened and the doors suddenly slid apart.

  ‘Open sesame!’ Siiri shouted.

  Three middle-aged men rushed in at once, talking on mobile phones, not even noticing the two old ladies pressing up against the wall to get out of their way. Siiri and Anna-Liisa let them go first since they were in such a hurry, then went inside and looked around to see where they were. The bank looked like a government office, with birch-veneer counters, a TV screen and casual furniture. There were several rows of chairs like at a health clinic, where you waited for your number to be called. There was no sign of the luxury of yesteryear, no arches, no marble, just a look of dull utility.

  They went bravely up to the number dispenser, pressed all the buttons, just to be on the safe side, and got numbers 721, 13 and 221. The number on the board read 438.

  ‘This is like the lottery!’ Siiri said happily, but Anna-Liisa started squawking, although it had been her idea to stop at the bank on their way to the hospital.

  ‘At this rate we’ll never get to the hospital. There must be some mistake.’

  Off to the side, in front of an advertising placard, stood an idle-looking security guard in uniform. Siiri asked him why the number board read 438 and the numbers on their tickets were 721, 13 and 221.

  ‘Do you think these will ever be winning numbers?’

  The guard said he worked for a security company and wasn’t officially employed by the bank, except to stand guard and keep order. Siiri thought she might be disrupting order, so all they could do was sit down and wait their turn. Luckily, Siiri had her green cushion with her, because the seats were hard and uncomfortable. After a moment it became clear that there were four queues, each one with different numbers, and the best one had 38 customers ahead of them.

  ‘Well, then! This should all go swimmingly! Only two more hours to wait,’ Anna-Liisa said sourly and adjusted her red hat, its shiny trim gleaming in the glow of the halogen lighting.

  Siiri suggested they play a word game to pass the time, because she knew that Anna-Liisa liked those. They thought of adjectives that began with a K, verbs that began with a vowel, and nouns that ended with an S. They couldn’t think of a single nice neighbourhood in Helsinki that began with an L, and to finish up, Siiri even declined some nouns into whatever grammatical case Anna-Liisa gave her. Anna-Liisa was quite impressed with Siiri. She’d had no idea that Siiri knew her case endings so well. When Siiri remembered the comitative case she gave an appreciative whistle.

  ‘Seven two one! Bingo!’ Siiri squealed when she saw one of their numbers come up, and ran to the counter in two steps with the number in her hand. She often leapt into motion like this out of habit, although she shouldn’t any more. Irma had always scolded her about it, told her that one day she was going to fall down and break a bone and spend the rest of her life rotting in bed, and Irma didn’t intend to come delivering gruel and liver casserole.

  ‘I can’t be your designated caregiver, even if I wanted to, because they won’t pay for it if you’re over ninety,’ Irma had said, and told her about her cousin Tauno who took care of his senile wife to the day she died and didn’t get a penny for it because he was overage. And now Irma was lying in the hospital in line for a new hip because she’d been drugged into senility and tied to a bed that she fell out of without anyone even noticing. Siiri would rather break a bone running a few steps than falling out of bed.

  She greeted the young lady in the window politely, put the notes on the counter, trying to smooth them out as much as possible, and said that she wanted to deposit them into her account. She wrote her account number on a piece of paper to avoid any error, but it wouldn’t do.

  ‘You need an IBAN number.’

  ‘But I’m sure this is my account number. Or do you want my PIN?’

  ‘We have to have an IBAN number. An international transfer number. It’s an EU rule.’

  Siiri had no idea what she meant, so she dug her bank card out of her handbag. They ought to be able to figure out the right number from that.

  ‘You mean you want to put the money in your own account? That’s not possible, unfortunately.’

  One of them had to be confused. It wasn’t possible that a bank wouldn’t let a person put money into her own account. What harm could possibly come of it?

  ‘You see, you can put money in someone else’s account – make an account transfer, in other words – but depositing cash into your own account is no longer, like . . . it’s not done. You ought to keep that money, because you’re gonna hafta get cash sometime anyway, right?’

  Siiri explained patiently that she didn’t need such a large sum of cash, and that she was living in a retirement home where all kinds of funny things happened, and that it was much too dangerous to keep large sums of money in a biscuit tin under her mattress.

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, maybe we can sorta make an exception this time. Wait a minute.’

  The young lady left and came back with an older cashier. They whispered between themselves and looked at the wrinkled notes as if Siiri were a thief. Even the security guard was standing unnecessarily close behind her, ready to settle the dispute. Siiri clutched her cane and handbag in one hand and her green cushion in the other, trying to remain calm.

  ‘All right, so a deposit is charged for at the bank’s costs, so it’ll be twenty-seven euros. But you can deposit your cash; it’s possible with, like, special dispensation.’

  ‘Kekkonen was made president with a special dispensation,’ Siiri said, and told her to put the money in her account, regardless of the cost.

  ‘D’you need a receipt?’

  Siiri took a receipt, thanked the cashier, then remembered to her chagrin that it was special legislation that had got Kekkonen re-elected, not special dispensation, but she couldn’t bring herself to explain her mistake to the bank cashier. She found Anna-Liisa in the waiting area with the other old people, reading a Donald Duck comic. Siiri would have thought that Anna-Liisa would consider comic books rubbish, but she was completely engrossed in the happenings in Duckberg and gave a start when Siiri interrupted her artistic appreciation.

  ‘Donald Duck comics are different,’ Anna-Liisa explained. ‘They help Finnish children learn to read. The Finnish language in them is exceptionally good and al
ways current. I’m interested in it mainly in a professional sense.’

  Anna-Liisa still considered herself a teacher at the age of ninety-three. It wouldn’t have occurred to Siiri to look at the world from a typist’s point of view, but, of course, that was because typewriters didn’t exist any more, and her job had never been that important to her. It seemed that once you were a teacher, you were always a teacher.

  Chapter 40

  ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ Irma crowed from a long way off, and Siiri and Anna-Liisa knew that she had finally recovered from her medication. She still looked a little small and strange in the Töölö Hospital bed, but that always happened to people when they were in hospital.

  ‘You two probably thought I was going to die.’

  Siiri could have purred like a cat, she was so happy that Irma was Irma again. She sat down on the bed next to her dear friend and felt a warm glow spreading through her, all the way to her toes – although she usually had a chill in her feet. Irma was obviously at a loss as to how she’d ended up in the hospital and all that had happened. And who would have told her? Her daughter had popped off to Patagonia or Iceland and her sons and her grandchildren had no idea what was going on at Sunset Grove.

  ‘They were pretty amazed when I was as sharp as a tack again. They all thought I would lie here like a vegetable for the next ten years. That sure would have been a dreary hundredth birthday party. Can you imagine!’

  ‘We can, actually,’ Anna-Liisa said in her grim way, and then even Irma turned serious.

  They had to tell Irma what had been happening over the winter, but it was hard to know how much she would understand and how much she could take in. Anna-Liisa made things frighteningly clear, in chronological order, and Siiri watched Irma’s reactions, enjoying her voice, her gestures and her joyful eyes. Everything was like it used to be.