Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, now known as Onni, were going around everywhere holding hands and there was no sign of the Zimmer frame at all. Onni told impossibly long stories about his diplomatic adventures and Anna-Liisa listened with her cheeks glowing, believing everything he said, though half the Ambassador’s stories were pure hogwash.
‘Heaven protect us! And Anna-Liisa has always been so critical!’ Irma squealed and laughed so hard that her coffee went down the wrong way. Siiri pounded on her back, and Irma coughed and crowed.
But that wasn’t all. The craziest thing about the blossoming love at Sunset Grove was that Anna-Liisa and Onni quizzed each other about interrogative case endings, pronouns that demand the dative, and Finnish bodies of water while they played doubles solitaire. Last weekend they had both memorized the price list for the Sunset Grove cafeteria, in loud voices, and had thought it great fun. When they were in Tallinn, they had danced the foxtrot and the waltz and spent time with a lot of complete strangers, other veterans, in a ‘jacuzzi’, which was a tub filled with hot, bubbly water. They brought back a linen tablecloth with pink hearts and white angels on it as a souvenir for Siiri.
‘The tablecloth of love, so you’ll remember the wonderful veterans’ holiday!’
Irma was sure that Anna-Liisa and Onni would end up getting married, and she made Siiri swear to ask if they could be bridesmaids. They could wear lacy dresses and purple silk bows in their hair, which Irma promised to make for them in the craft sessions for her homecoming test. Irma laughed so hard that she peed in her pants but it didn’t matter because everybody at the hospital wore incontinence pads.
‘They make you. It’s horribly uncomfortable and humiliating. But the nurses don’t have time to help the patients to the bathroom, and no matter how hard I swear I can walk there myself, they won’t believe me.’
The pads were changed three times a day, which was apparently a great luxury because at the Malmi Hospital they only changed them twice, or that’s what someone had told her.
‘One poor woman was positively in agony yesterday at lunch because her pad was so full, but the nurses just said that she could have a clean one at four o’clock. As if it were pre-programmed that you have to wait all day!’
When they’d finished their coffee, Siiri accompanied Irma back to the first floor. The staff had been looking all over the ward for Irma, but the nurses didn’t get too upset, as long as the patient was capable of finding her way back to her own bed. Siiri was frightened, though. She had lured Irma into breaking the rules. She knew that patients were supposed to just lie there and wait to be rehabilitated. After their little escapade Irma was happy and fell asleep as soon as she got into bed.
On the way home, Siiri was vigilant, and justifiably so, because she saw a man who looked like Erkki Hiukkanen standing around on Ruusulankatu with his back to her. He had the same dishevelled hair and sloping shoulders. Siiri quickened her step and saw to her horror, from a reflection in a restaurant window, that the man was following her. She managed to cross Mannerheimintie before he did and the number 4 came just as the pedestrian light turned red. Relieved, she climbed aboard the tram and left her pursuer staring into a bridal-shop window.
Chapter 52
Late in the spring, Siiri received a letter from the Judicial Registry in Hämeenlinna. She looked at the letter in dread, not daring to open it at first. She had no idea what a judicial registry was, but she remembered that there was a women’s prison in Hämeenlinna. She was just getting ready to go with Anna-Liisa on a post-book-club tram ride and then to Kivelä Hospital to look in on Irma when she found the letter in her postbox. They had finally finished reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Siiri thought a trip to the hospital might lighten her mood. No doubt Anna-Liisa was waiting for her in the lobby, because Anna-Liisa was never late, but the stupid letter froze Siiri in her tracks at her own apartment door. She decided to open it and pulled her index finger across the folded top of the envelope. It hurt her finger and made an ugly tear. She tried to read the letter quickly but she couldn’t understand it at all. She glanced at the clock, panicked when she saw how late it was, tossed the letter and envelope in her handbag, and dashed to catch the lift.
By the time they were on the tram, she had already forgotten the letter and instead was telling Anna-Liisa that she feared Erkki Hiukkanen was spying on her. Anna-Liisa didn’t take it seriously. She was in high spirits, full of excited fantasies about all kinds of silly things.
‘He probably thinks you’re part of Mika’s ring of criminals and has decided to find out what’s what. Either that or he intends to do you in, maybe even rob you. Or maybe he found out that you’re a wealthy heiress and he’s after your money. After all, you might have some rich, childless cousin in America, right?’
It wasn’t until they were sitting with Irma in the shade of the broad staircase at the Kivelä Hospital cafeteria that Siiri remembered the letter from the Judicial Registry and took it out of her handbag.
‘Hämeenlinna? Are they summoning you to prison?’ Irma said excitedly, but Anna-Liisa informed her that the Hämeenlinna Prison was a museum now.
‘It’s two words, you know. Hämeen, the genitive form of Häme, and linna, which can be a castle, a fort, or a prison.’
‘What are you babbling about? What difference does it make? Is this some kind of language reform where compound words are declared separate words? What next, Cata Lonia? Are we just putting spaces into words now?’
‘You really are crazy, Irma. But it is a fact that people’s ability to recognize compound words has diminished dramatically.’
While Irma and Anna-Liisa went off at on this tangent, Siiri read through the letter twice and felt quite dizzy – sabotage, vandalism, criminal liability, compensation for damages, taking into account the felon’s age.
‘That means your age!’ Irma said. ‘Are you a felon now?’
The police and emergency personnel had determined the Sunset Grove fire to be sabotage and vandalism, and the Ambassador’s reporting Erkki Hiukkanen hadn’t led anywhere, except perhaps to Siiri being accused. Apparently, Siiri’s outpouring in Senior Constable Kettunen’s office had made matters worse. Instead of investigating Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen’s activities, the police had straightened the whole thing out by making Siiri out to be a criminal. It had been foolish of her to prove her sanity by reciting the Finnish presidents and explaining her PIN system. Now she had no mitigating factors except her age.
‘Finally, you’ll get some use out of being over the hill,’ Irma said.
Irma had other reasons to rejoice. She had been freed from the hospital’s incontinence-pad requirement because she’d established such good relations with several of the nurses, and that reminded her of several rambling stories about the nurses’ children, until Siiri requested that she please concentrate for a moment on the letter from the Judicial Registry because its contents still weren’t clear to her.
The prosecutor had confirmed the summary judgement of the police, which was forty daily equivalence fines for common vandalism. The courts were behaving just like the health system, writing up punishments and prescriptions without the judge or the doctor ever laying eyes on her. Where did this prosecutor come in? The only person Siiri had talked to was Senior Constable Kettunen, and she didn’t see his name anywhere in the letter. But she did see the name of the advocate for the accused, Mika Korhonen.
‘Why would they call lighting a fire in a dementia ward common vandalism? What’s common about it?’ Irma wondered, and she looked at the letter carefully.
‘It’s a juridical term. Common vandalism,’ Anna-Liisa explained. ‘Vandalism can be categorized as nominal, common, or gross. Siiri should probably be glad the stunt was judged common rather than gross. And vandalism is a lesser charge than sabotage, which is a frequent charge in the case of fires.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Irma asked in astonishment.
But Anna-Liisa pretended not to hav
e heard the question. She was poring over the commentary enclosed with the letter that explained the commutation of the prison term to an equivalent daily fine. Three daily fines were equal to one day in prison. She calculated quickly in her head that Siiri’s forty daily fines would be thirteen and one third days in prison.
‘That doesn’t sound bad. It might even be interesting!’ Irma said, and offered to serve the sentence on Siiri’s behalf, since she was homeless anyway, but Siiri couldn’t join in her merriment. She felt very weak and wished she could stay on at Kivelä Hospital as a patient.
‘How much is it going to cost me?’ she asked Anna-Liisa wearily, as she seemed to be the most informed about her case.
‘That depends on your net worth. There’s an explanation of it here,’ Anna-Liisa said. Calculating the daily fine was very complicated, because first you had to have a net worth above a certain amount and then they divided that net worth by something. Rather like Siiri’s PIN.
‘Is there someone there for me to call?’ Siiri asked helplessly.
But all the letter had was a web address and Mika Korhonen’s name. Now was certainly a time when she could have used an advocate, but they hadn’t heard a peep out of Mika since he’d brought the social worker Pasi to the attention of the authorities. Irma tried to brighten the mood by talking about her homecoming process. She had been invited by her team of female professionals to a care-counselling session that was held in spite of the fact that none of her relatives showed up. The nurses and physical therapists had diligently put together a test for her, which she thought she would pass easily.
‘My self-image is getting so strong that my head is buzzing. I can recognize my toes, fingers, even my kidneys, without the intern girls having to touch or pet me. And believe it or not, my occupational therapist has her own little playhouse here at the hospital.’
Irma was going to have to prepare a breakfast in the test kitchen before they would let her out of the hospital, because that was what was demanded of a housewife and mother of six. They decided that she should surprise the occupational therapist with poached eggs and a cheese soufflé.
‘And then you can take a shower with your inspectors watching! Is your fitness inspector a man, by any chance?’ Anna-Liisa asked.
Chapter 53
‘Mika, you have to save me. I’m a convicted criminal and an arsonist and I’m going to prison!’
Mika was calm and brief on the other end of the line. He told Siiri to relax and promised to meet her in an hour at the Tram Museum Cafe where they served coffee in soup bowls.
‘Bring the letter with you.’
Siiri left for her date well ahead of time. As she walked towards the number 4 stop enjoying the spring sunshine, she once again had the feeling that someone was watching her. This was really becoming a nuisance. She was behaving like a complete lunatic, couldn’t even take a step without having paranoid thoughts. Erkki Hiukkanen was everywhere, pestering her, a bloodhound – with a pistol in his coat pocket, naturally – and now she’d ruined her light-footedness by imagining dogs wearing coats with pockets. She took a deep breath, stopped for a moment to lean on her cane, and tried to ignore her own thoughts.
She continued on her way, and as she quickened her steps she had the distinct impression that someone really was at her heels, matching their footsteps to hers. She stopped in front of the bank, pretending to look at some window flyers for apartments for sale, which actually did always interest her a bit, although she was never going to buy a new apartment again.
As she stood there she saw who it was that was following her: Erkki Hiukkanen, of course. This time she was sure it was him. She could see his gawking face and messy, thinning hair, which was unmistakable, although Anna-Liisa had been right when she’d said that Finland was full of men who looked like Erkki Hiukkanen. Hiukkanen was wearing blue overalls and a dirty poplin coat and rubber boots, on a warm, spring day so dry that the dust was swirling in the streets.
Siiri stood in front of the bank window for a long time and listened to the uneven, frantic beating of her heart. Why was Erkki Hiukkanen after her? Was he trying to find out where she was going, who she was meeting? How had he known that she had arranged to meet someone in town?
‘They listen to all our telephone calls, you know,’ Anna-Liisa had said. Anna-Liisa and Onni thought that they should disconnect their landlines and get mobile phones because they were harder to tap.
Siiri turned her back on Erkki Hiukkanen, who had stopped to stand in the shadow of a florist’s kiosk. Just then she noticed the number 4 coming down the street. She went to the window of the hardware store to look at the frying pans and ladders, waiting for the tram to leave the stop at Low Price Market. It was taking an excruciatingly long time. Finally, the tram started into motion. When it got near Siiri’s stop, she dashed intrepidly across the street at the very last minute. Erkki Hiukkanen crossed too, at the crossing like a law-abiding citizen, and ran in front of the tram towards the stop, but Siiri waited on the tracks behind the tram, hidden from sight. Not until the very last person was boarding did she approach the back entrance. There were two schoolboys dawdling in front of the tram door, apparently unable to decide whether or not to get on.
‘Excuse me,’ Siiri said politely, pushing her way forward and shoving them onto the tram as she did so. ‘No point in you loitering at the tram stop.’
The boys smiled beautifully, bewildered. They were her rescuers. Erkki Hiukkanen couldn’t see what was happening at the back of the car and was left standing at the stop wondering how a ninety-four-year old woman had disappeared into thin air.
‘My heroes! Here’s ten for each of you!’ Siiri said to the boys, digging two notes out of her purse. The boys didn’t quite understand why the scruffy man left standing at the tram stop was following her just because he was a caretaker at a retirement home where she rented a one-bedroom apartment in the A wing and had lived there for ten years.
‘Didja escape?’ one boy asked. He seemed to think that you’re not allowed to leave a retirement home and go outside.
‘He’s spying on me,’ Siiri said, still breathless, trying to look mysterious. She told them that she was a dangerous criminal who started fires and poked her nose into all sorts of things. She told them to take care that they became law-abiding citizens.
‘Use this money wisely. You don’t smoke, do you, you silly boys?’
The two boys looked abashed. One of them still had a burning cigarette in his hand, and it was only then that Siiri understood why they had hesitated at the door of the tram.
‘So you do smoke. But what business is it of mine? It’s good to die in time anyway, so you don’t have to live to be old.’
‘How old are you? Over eighty?’ asked the bolder of the two boys. Siiri laughed gaily, like a divorcée falling in love.
‘I’m ninety-four.’
‘No way. Respect.’
‘You gonna stay standing?’
Siiri asked them to sit down with her so that they could chat. They told her about their grandparents who were really old, maybe seventy, and always travelling, mostly in France, where they’d bought a vineyard. They didn’t have girlfriends, and they were both christened, but they didn’t believe in God and didn’t know what happens after you die. Siiri told them she was going on a date with a thirty-five-year-old cook, and they laughed easily because they didn’t believe a word she said.
‘Fucking tough dudette,’ the bolder one said when he thought she couldn’t hear him.
Chapter 54
Mika Korhonen was waiting for Siiri at the Tram Museum Cafe. He looked different somehow and it took a moment before Siiri realized that he had grown an unusual-looking beard, very small, but long, and tied in a funny little plait.
‘Well, you certainly look cute. I mean, it’s fun – your . . . plait. Your beard, I mean.’
Mika smiled happily and tugged on his chin plait. He had bought her a bowl of hot drink.
‘Lactose-free latte,�
� he said, as if he had to explain or apologize.
It was coffee mixed with hot skimmed milk, but Siiri said it was good so as not to hurt Mika’s feelings. She remembered Margit Partanen talking about her sister who ended up drinking tomato soup out of a coffee mug when she couldn’t tell which buttons were for food and which were for drinks. That was what happened when you had to get everything at a cafe out of a lot of machines, pressing buttons while the staff stood behind the counter and watched to see if you’d survive the ordeal.
‘Yep,’ said Mika, who wanted to talk about the most important things first. He was very curious to hear what the letter from the Judicial Registry said. Siiri took the letter out of her handbag, apologized that the envelope was torn, and let him read it. To her surprise, Mika wasn’t shocked to see his own name in the letter.
‘Speak of the devil. I’m representing you in this thing, since I’m your advocate.’
So Mika had known more than Siiri had about this police matter the whole time, and he hadn’t bothered to call her! This made her angry, but Mika defended himself, saying he had wanted to protect her, because of her heart and everything.
‘Everybody has a heart. Don’t be ridiculous,’ Siiri said hotly, but she relented when he took her hand sweetly, looked at her with those blue eyes, and said that Siiri’s heart was bigger than most, so it was more important that some person who’d been hardened by life such as himself should handle her police matters and criminal cases.
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 25