The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (12 page)

‘What rhythm will I be set for? I hope it’s not a waltz, although there is a song about a waltzing heart. It would be hard to use two feet to walk in threes.’ She was trying to
lighten the mood, but this doctor was very serious.

‘Generator node and electrical impulse pathways, at which point the sinoatrial node and frequency limit, respectively . . . in which case, an elective surgery or micro-process, perhaps
also a telemetry device – all in all a nearly risk-free procedure.’

Siiri listened for a while and then said that she was ninety-four years old and they weren’t going to make her live any longer by installing some gadget inside her.

‘This is a very small operation that’s done under local anaesthetic. The pacemaker is placed under the skin and the electrodes are threaded through a vein to the heart. It will
remove the unpleasant symptoms and increase your quality of life,’ the doctor said.

‘Are you sure about that?’ Siiri asked. ‘What kinds of things do you think would give an old person’s life quality?’

‘Well . . . studies show that, for the aged . . . after all, good health is the first step to a quality life. An untreated heart arrhythmia can be life threatening.’

‘You mean that, in the worst-case scenario, I could die?’ Siiri said, feeling very brisk and strong. ‘You’re still a young person, so maybe you don’t know that
getting old is mostly unpleasant. Days pass slowly and nothing happens. Your friends and relatives are dead and gone, and your food has no flavour. There’s nothing worth watching on
television and your eyes get tired when you read. You feel sleepy, but sleep doesn’t come, so you end up lying awake all night and dozing off all day. You feel all kinds of aches and pains,
constantly – small pains, but still. Even the most ordinary tasks become slow and difficult. Like cutting your toenails. You can hardly imagine. It’s a huge, all-day operation that you
do almost anything to put off.’

The doctor glanced nervously at his watch and promised to write Siiri a referral for a pedicure, for which she could request state health compensation. He turned his back to her and became
absorbed in his computer screen.

‘As far as the pacemaker is concerned, studies show that these small matters affecting health can be crucially important in increasing well-being, not to mention the fact that a pacemaker
would go a long way to increasing the length of your life. According to Current Care Guidelines—’

‘In that case, the answer is clear,’ Siiri interrupted with relief. ‘Install the pacemaker in someone younger, some fat person who makes the mistake of thinking he’s fit
enough to go for a run and gives himself a coronary. Even my sons have died. And Reino’s son. And a lot of other people too. We old people can’t seem to die from anything, even if we
want to. Sometimes at the nursing home we talk about how you doctors don’t seem to understand that death is a natural thing. Life ends in death, and there’s no sense in offering longer
life to someone my age and denying me sugar for my coffee. It isn’t a failure of medicine when people eventually die of old age.’

The doctor turned around and looked at her in surprise. ‘But you’re a lively person in good health. Why in the world should you die? Current Care Guidelines—’

‘Because everybody has to die,’ Siiri said. She squeezed the doctor’s muscular hands, holding them in her own wrinkled ones, so that he would understand that guidelines and
studies and pacemakers can’t change this fact about the world.

‘One day you’ll die, too. And I hope that you’ll be old enough then to know what dying is, and not fight it. Maybe you’ll even be waiting for it, like me and my friends
at Sunset Grove. Even if you put pacemakers in all of us, you won’t change our everyday lives one bit. So I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I need your report and I’m grateful
that you’re writing it. May I have two copies of that paper? That’s all I need from you, and I hope that you’ll take care of young people who are too tired to work any more. The
nurses at Sunset Grove are so overworked that we’re practically left alone there.’

The doctor looked distressed. He tugged his hands forcefully out of Siiri’s well-intentioned grip, rushed to the sink, disinfected them, tightened his tie, straightened his doctor’s
coat, and sat back down in his chair to stare at the computer screen as if the machine actually knew something and would give him the solution to this dilemma. Then he straightened up, picked up
his Dictaphone, and started to murmur into it, glancing now and then at Siiri.

‘. . . otherwise healthy for her age comma memory functional and the patient is alert full stop refuses pacemaker however full stop in respect for patient’s wishes taking into
account her advanced age full stop.’ The doctor turned off the Dictaphone and asked her if she wanted some anti-depression medication in addition to the heart medicine.

‘What for?’ Siiri asked, sincerely surprised.

‘They can help your . . . condition. You might regain your zest for life.’

Siiri got up. She had a mind to put the silly man straight about the hard facts of life and death, but she remembered her heart and its raggedy impulse pathways and took a deep breath before
replying that she didn’t need any of his peppity-pills. She didn’t need them now and she hadn’t needed them back when her husband died either. The doctor was persistent.

‘Some sleep medication might be helpful. You said that you weren’t sleeping at night, and there’s no reason for that.’ Siiri started to have the desperate feeling that
she would never get out of there without a stack of prescriptions. There had been something in the papers about responsibility for outcomes, how it was becoming a problem for public-sector
employees. Outcomes were measured in numbers, so child-protection services were considered more effective when more children were reported to state custody officials, and doctors apparently were
only earning their salaries if they sent patients for surgery and wrote them a certain number of prescriptions. ‘I’m just trying to help you and do my job as well as I possibly
can,’ the doctor said wearily.

Siiri realized she ‘d behaved badly. The doctor surely had enough work to do without her making more work for him. He had studied hard to be able to prescribe sleeping pills to old people,
and what would happen if all his patients refused his pills and pacemakers? He had no need, at his age, to know what a ninety-year-old’s life was like. It wasn’t his fault that Siiri
had lived to be too old. She thanked him for a job well done, left the hospital, and headed for the tram stop. It was such a beautiful early winter day that she decided to walk one stop further
towards town just so that she could look at the imposing Aura Building, designed by Erkko Virkkunen. It was still handsome even though they had ruined the window frames a long time ago when they
renovated it.

Irma and Siiri decided to tell Anna-Liisa about Mika Korhonen, the taxi driver. They thought it was peculiar that Mika had been so friendly, even promised to visit, and then
they hadn’t heard anything from him. Anna-Liisa’s logical way of thinking was bound to be a help in such a situation. But when they went to the card table in the common room Anna-Liisa
was playing double solitaire with the Ambassador and it was a long time before the Ambassador got the hint that he should leave. The poor man was terribly starved for company now that Reino was
shut up in the closed unit. Only one of the Ambassador’s children was still alive, and he lived in another country. Irma thought it was as clear as day that because he had dragged his family
all over the world his children hadn’t put down any roots in Finland and that was why they had ended up living abroad. The three women promised to play cards with the Ambassador another time
if he went to the auditorium to listen to a presentation on ‘Loneliness in the Everyday Life of the Aged’.

‘He has homophobia,’ Anna-Liisa said when Siiri and Irma had told her about Mika Korhonen.

‘He looked healthy enough,’ Irma said.

‘I think the word he used was mafia, not phobia,’ Siiri said. She was trying to keep the conversation focused. They’d got so excited that they’d been talking and
stumbling over each other’s words and forgetting the essentials, making the whole story even more confused.

Anna-Liisa used this opportunity to exercise her lecturer’s skills with a brief overview of changes in the meanings of foreign words borrowed into Finnish, of which mafia was, in her
opinion, an excellent example, since Mika Korhonen hardly meant to claim that there was actual organized crime at Sunset Grove.

‘I think that’s exactly what he was saying,’ Siiri said emphatically, having got her thoughts back on track. But Irma was muddle-headed.

‘My daughter’s son is gay and he’s a terribly pleasant chap, and so is his boyfriend. They always bring me cake when they come to visit, and they actually come quite often. And
they have a little brown dog they’ve adopted.’

‘You don’t adopt dogs,’ Anna-Liisa said, shooting down Irma’s flight of fancy.

‘It was one of those orphan dogs. They went by plane to Spain, and my grandson and his boyfriend had to fill out a lot of forms and applications to get to be the dog’s
“parents”. They bring the dog with them everywhere they go. It’s been to my place several times and I always give it liver casserole, but they don’t like that because they
feed it fresh pork liver from the market hall. A stray dog!’

Irma laughed happily and Siiri started to feel nervous because Anna-Liisa seemed more interested in Irma’s grandson’s dog than she was in Mika Korhonen. Then Siiri remembered what
Mika had told them about Pasi, the social worker. Mika had said that Pasi was well known to the police.

‘Is that what he said?’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘Did he mean that Pasi is a criminal, like this Mika of yours, or that he cooperates with the police?’

‘Hmm. That I don’t know. Pasi is somehow connected to the fact that Tero was held for questioning. And that’s where Tero died – in his jail cell. Does that make
sense?’ Siiri felt unpleasantly shaky, and Anna-Liisa’s sharp interrogational style wasn’t helping. ‘As I recall, he said that Sinikka Sundström tried to appease the
police by giving Pasi the sack. At least, I think that’s what he said.’

‘I’m sorry, who’s Sinikka Sundström?’ Irma asked.

Siiri’s head spun like someone had struck her. She looked frantically at Anna-Liisa, who didn’t flinch in the slightest, just calmly explained who they were talking about, without
teasing or taunting Irma, which was unusual for Anna-Liisa. She had obviously noticed the same thing as Siiri: Irma was having more and more frequent moments of confusion. Once she’d calmed
Irma down, Anna-Liisa turned firmly back to Siiri and urged her to get in touch with Mika Korhonen soon, because surely he was a man who could help them.

‘But we don’t have his telephone number!’ Siiri shouted, horrified. How could they have been so stupid? And how could Mika have been so absent-minded? Or was it that he really
was a criminal and was only trying to get useful information out of them? What if he ‘d made the whole thing up?

‘Calm down,’ Anna-Liisa said, in the stern tone she had perfected through years of addressing rambunctious preadolescents. ‘He couldn’t have made the whole thing up,
because he knew a lot of things that are true. And if he is a criminal, we’ll have to intervene in his activities.’

She was right, of course. Siiri admired her courage. Anna-Liisa seemed positively thrilled at the possibility of investigating organized crime at Sunset Grove. But there had to be at least ten
Mika Korhonens in Helsinki alone, and they didn’t even know where he lived. Should they just go through the phone book and call every Mika Korhonen?

All this guesswork was making Siiri feel like she should have had a career as a detective. But it was exhausting just investigating the mysteries at Sunset Grove. Thank goodness she hadn’t
had to do it for her whole life. She might not have lived so long otherwise.

‘People don’t put their phone numbers in the phone book any more. You have to look up addresses and phone numbers on the Internet. Or you could look for him on Facebook,’
Anna-Liisa said, pronouncing the exotic word with a lilt, as if it were Italian.

‘What if we just started taking taxis?’ Siiri suggested. ‘Maybe one day we would get Mika for a driver.’

She hoped this suggestion would bring Irma back to earth, but Irma was fast asleep in the uncomfortable institutional chair, her head hanging awkwardly, her purple handbag fallen to the floor.
She was so quiet that for a moment they thought she had died. Then she breathed, thank heavens, but she wouldn’t wake up, even when Anna-Liisa gave her a sharp flick on the back of the
hand.

A couple of weeks after her doctor’s visit, Siiri received a report about her heart arrhythmia, two prescriptions, and a complete explanation of why this
ninety-four-year-old, alert patient was not having a pacemaker installed. She particularly liked the phrase: ‘seems rational for her age’. The doctor had sent two copies of the report,
which was very kind of him. Siiri went to find Irma to show her – not exactly a bill of health, but at least she was rational. The weight of an expert’s opinion would surely speed up
the handling of their complaint to the Loving Care Foundation.

But Irma didn’t answer her door. Siiri knew that Irma was in her apartment because she could hear Mozart’s piano concerto blaring much too loudly. Luckily, they had given each other
spare keys. You never knew what might happen if you left your handbag somewhere or accidentally closed the door when you went out to get the post in your nightgown. Erkki Hiukkanen charged
twenty-five euros to open a locked door, and they refused to pay that lazy caretaker such exorbitant fees. Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen lived on the top floor of Sunset Grove in a large apartment, so
it couldn’t have been any great inconvenience to come and open an old woman’s door. Many of the residents walked around with their keys around their necks like 1970s schoolchildren,
including Anna-Liisa, but Siiri thought that a grown woman should keep her keys in her handbag, which she now remembered she had left at home on her kitchen table. So she didn’t have her own
keys with her, let alone Irma’s. There was nothing for it but to pound on Irma’s door with her fist and crow loudly. She had to pound for a long time, and kick, too, before there was a
pause in the music and Irma came to the door.