The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (17 page)

But she was happy to see Mika Korhonen standing at her door in his leather jacket. She threw herself around his neck, then pulled herself away just as quickly, because he seemed tense and in a
hurry.

Mika declined her offer of a cup of instant coffee and strode into the middle of the living room. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about. Can you turn off the
symphony?’

‘It’s a concerto, a solo work for orchestra and piano. Beethoven’s third concerto,’ Siiri said, and turned off the record player. She felt as if Mika had something very
important he wanted to discuss, and it would be best to call Anna-Liisa to come and act as a witness. Mika didn’t say anything; he just sat down on the little sofa and rummaged through his
backpack. Siiri asked him to take off his muddy boots and he politely obeyed. He had holes in his socks, and they weren’t even wool, and Siiri knew what she was going to give him as a present
someday, if she remembered. She didn’t enjoy knitting herself, but Margit Partanen knitted every day; she could make a pair of wool socks in no time.

Anna-Liisa arrived with her Zimmer frame amazingly quickly. Now that the two of them were more accustomed to each other’s company, Siiri had noticed that Anna-Liisa didn’t really
need the Zimmer frame to get around. She was very nimble and could, in fact, walk very briskly. But Anna-Liisa said she kept the Zimmer frame because it was good for balance problems; it was a
precautionary measure, to prevent falls. It cost society great sums of money when old people walked around in their stockinged feet without any assistive devices and then broke their bones.

Mika took a large stack of papers out of his backpack and put them on the table.

‘These are Irma Lännenleimu’s medical records and a few other files – everything Sunset Grove had listed under her name.’

Siiri and Anna-Liisa looked at the stack of papers in horror. So much information about Irma! Did Sunset Grove have huge files like that on them, too? Anna-Liisa was the first to pull herself
together, and started questioning Mika as if he were a fifteen-year-old who’d forgotten his adverbials.

‘Where did you get those papers? Who gave you permission to take them? Are they originals or copies?’

‘I stole them,’ Mika said. He dropped the words calmly and pointedly into the silence and gave Siiri and Anna-Liisa a moment to catch their breath before continuing. ‘I got the
Sunset Grove keys from Pasi, the whole key ring. Pasi is in cahoots with your head nurse, the one who runs the nursing agency.’

‘Virpi Hiukkanen? Hardly. She’s the one who fired him,’ Siiri informed him.

‘Yep. The business continues, thanks to Tero. There’s no better scapegoat than a dead scapegoat. And Pasi doesn’t have to be an employee of Sunset Grove to work for Hiukkanen.
Do you know what the name of her nursing agency is?’

‘Well, no, we’ve never had a reason to ask.’

‘Piri Care Suppliers. They’re suppliers all right!’

Sometimes Mika was confusing and a bit peculiar. Now he laughed with a strangely loud guffaw at the name of Virpi Hiukkanen’s company and kept repeating something that they couldn’t
understand. He thought that both Pasi and the police were in cahoots with Virpi Hiukkanen, which couldn’t be true. But Siiri didn’t dare to contradict him, because there was something
frightening about him now that he’d taken to stealing on their behalf.

‘Are we your accomplices?’ Anna-Liisa asked formally, straightening her spine like a former gymnast. Secretly, she was thrilled at the new turn in events. Mika handed Irma’s
papers to her, copies of the originals, he said, so that they could study them at their leisure.

‘It’s ugly reading,’ he warned.

Then he left as quickly as he had come. He had already pulled on his boots when Siiri asked when they would see him again and what was to come of all this. Mika couldn’t promise
anything.

‘Look out for your own affairs, and I’ll take care of Pasi,’ he said, and closed the door behind him.

They were left sitting at the table in bewilderment. Siiri didn’t understand how it had become so important to take care of Pasi, or what Mika was actually up to. The case was taking a new
turn. Anna-Liisa didn’t say anything; finally, she picked up the papers fearfully and started to read them as if they were just another stack of exams to be marked. She was quiet for a long
time, until she paused, leaned back, and said:

‘Mika was right. This is ugly reading.’

Anna-Liisa asked for a glass of whisky, something Siiri had never seen her do before. Siiri got herself a little red wine, in honour of Irma. Irma had been much braver than they’d
realized, writing vehement complaints to everyone from the Ombudsman of Parliament to the Social Services Minister, and every complaint had ended up on the desk in the offices of Sunset Grove.

‘Your complaint has been received and will be processed according to standard procedures,’ said the paper from Parliament, which was dated three years ago. Nothing more was heard
from the Ombudsman of Parliament – no doubt the wheels of the standard procedures were still turning.

‘These aren’t medical records,’ Anna-Liisa said solemnly.

And yet someone had added this documentation of Irma’s complaints to her medical records. There were also two letters from the Uudenmaa County Administrative Board, the oldest one from
five years ago, plus a few more recent letters, including the one they’d written together to the members of the board of the Loving Care Foundation, which was on the top of the stack.

The worst documents, however, were the ones concerning Irma’s health. The staff had sent Irma’s ever-changing personal physicians incorrect information about her over a year ago.
They’d said that she had shown signs of suspiciousness, serious paranoia, intermittent aggressiveness, and increasingly serious memory loss. The doctors’ consultations had been
conducted entirely by email and telephone, and various prescriptions had been written without them ever seeing the patient. The last correspondence read: ‘The only solution to these worsening
problems is immediate removal to the Group Home dementia unit. The patient’s daughter will provide a statement.’

‘They could at least have arranged a doctor’s visit for her. Then someone could have seen that she wasn’t sick,’ Anna-Liisa said, her voice even more sombre than
usual.

‘Sharp as a tack, that’s what she always said. Although she was very confused and tired in December, and even before that, actually, like it says here. And her suspicions only got
worse. Is it possible . . . do you think that they might have been . . . ?’

‘It’s as clear as day. Multiple drugs acting on the central nervous system will make an old person sick. It was somebody’s long-term plan to give Irma dementia.’

Irma had been prescribed pills for irritability, restlessness, insomnia, muscle stiffness, extreme pain, depression and who knows what else, in ever larger doses and increasing numbers over the
course of a year. It was as if, when one pill caused one symptom, they prescribed another pill for that, in an endless chain.

Siiri started to feel weak. There was nothing in her head but emptiness. This really would be a good time to go to sleep for good. She couldn’t comprehend why anyone would go to the
trouble of doing such a thing. Surely one old woman in a dementia ward couldn’t generate so much money from the city that the Loving Care Foundation would institute such a complicated course
of action. There must be easier ways to silence an old lady’s complaints.

‘I guess there’s no one looking out for us, to make sure everything is legitimate,’ Siiri said numbly. ‘And they write about it so much in the papers.’

‘The only good old person is a dead old person,’ Anna-Liisa said grimly, then drank down the rest of her whisky and hastened to add, ‘And don’t say “
döden,
döden, döden
”. Have you heard anything from Olavi Raudanheimo?’

‘I forgot about Olavi. There’s been so much going on. Are you leaving?’

Anna-Liisa hadn’t lost her ability to function just because of Irma’s files. She had a chair aerobics session starting at eleven and after lunch she planned to go with the Ambassador
to play bingo in the auditorium. She tried to coax Siiri to come along, but in vain.

‘I’m not so senile that I’m going to start playing bingo. Are these your keys? Don’t tell me they’re mine, because I’m sure I’ve never seen them
before.’

There was a ring of keys lying on the table. It wasn’t Anna-Liisa’s or Siiri’s.

‘Do you think Mika left them here . . . on purpose?’ Anna-Liisa asked.

Siiri looked at the key ring more closely. There were three keys, and one of them was labelled ‘Group Home’.

‘Hello Siiri, dear. It’s the director calling. Good news! Your cane was found at Laakso Hospital.’

All through the winter Siiri had wondered where her cane had disappeared to, but she hadn’t yet bought a new one. It certainly would have been useful to have one in the slippery weather;
the freezing temperatures had made the streets treacherous. Director Sundström’s voice on the phone was even more energetic than usual as she shared the exciting news. She commended
Siiri for being so clever as to put a label on the cane with its owner’s name and address, as if she were a small child. Siiri asked politely how the director’s winter holiday had been,
but that was a mistake.

‘Absolutely fantastic! You can’t imagine what a country India is – it’s amazing, absolutely amazing. A lot of tourists just go there to enjoy the hotels and beaches and
never see the poverty of the country, which is so heart-rending. Pertti and I were there for three weeks and we really threw our hearts into India’s problems, especially the children. Just
think, Siiri, there are tens of thousands of orphans there, illiterate and unhealthy, sweet little children, and seeing them touched me so deeply that I’ve decided to help the orphans of
India. We’ve started up a collection for Indian orphans here at Sunset Grove. You will, of course, contribute, won’t you, Siiri?’

‘Well, I put quite a lot of money into the collection for the Brotherhood of War Invalids over Christmas.’

‘Yes, I understand if the Indian issue seems distant to you. But these orphans don’t even have shoes on their feet; they absolutely need help from people like us, who have piles of
everything. After all, there are hardly more than a couple of Finnish war invalids still alive.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘Well, we can chat about it some other time. I have lots of photos of Indian orphans, and when you see their pictures I’m sure your heart will melt for this important cause. But
listen, unfortunately, you’re going to have to go and get the cane from Laakso Hospital yourself. There’s no one here who has the time to help. We haven’t a single spare hand at
the moment, and there’s so much work to do that I fear for the health of my employees. Elderly work is difficult, and rather uninteresting, to be honest. And not terribly rewarding. And who
ever even thanks us? And the pay is so low, because society doesn’t understand the significance of our work. In short, it’s very hard nowadays to find workers for retirement homes, and
thus we are shorthanded this week.’

As soon as she managed to get off the phone, Siiri started getting ready to leave. She searched for her comb and mirror. When she found them, she noticed Mika’s key ring on the table and
was going to put it in her handbag, until she realized that her handbag wasn’t on the chair by the door. She forgot about combing her hair because she couldn’t find her glasses, and
then she noticed that they were on top of her head. Next, she wondered where her cane was, before remembering that she was on her way to get it. Finally, she put the keys in her bag. Just as she
was ready to leave, and was standing in the hallway with her coat on, she heard someone opening her front door with a key. She froze where she stood and watched as the door slowly opened. The
corridor was dark, and the first thing that came through the door was a toolbox.

Siiri wasn’t exactly surprised when the man carrying the toolbox, Erkki Hiukkanen, followed, wearing blue overalls and his ever-present billed cap. He tiptoed through the door, looking
over his shoulder into the hallway, and fumbled for the light switch. He had a considerable fright when he saw Siiri standing in her winter coat in her own apartment. Closing the door in a panic,
he dropped the toolbox loudly on the floor, and pushed his cap to the back of his head. He stood there for a moment, then said with a stutter that he ‘d come to check the bathroom drain.
Siiri said the bathroom drain had worked flawlessly for all the years she’d lived in the apartment.

‘Yeah. Well, We’re checking all the drains because we’ve had some complaints,’ Hiukkanen lied, so Siiri let him into the bathroom, although she had to leave. She really
didn’t want to sit there in her coat watching him grub around in the drain.

As she sat on the tram, Siiri tried to remember when she had gone to Laakso Hospital. How in the world had her cane ended up there? She didn’t dare trust her memory. Just
yesterday Virpi Hiukkanen had come to fetch her from the common room in the middle of a game of cards for her blood-pressure check. She could have sworn that she’d never agreed to such a
thing. It cost an additional fee, after all.

‘Don’t you remember, Siiri? We all agreed to it just a short while ago,’ Virpi had said, as if she herself were one of the old people, and then she’d dragged Siiri to her
office and started asking about arrhythmias and zest for life. Siiri didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘Well, you did go to Meilahti Hospital in December to chat with a cardiologist. Don’t you remember?’

Virpi’s questioning had been unpleasant, and Siiri felt a bit nervous, too, because her blood pressure was normal, not low, like it usually was.

‘Now, don’t be aggressive,’ Virpi had scolded her, and that had made Siiri so angry that she had firmly said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ and gone to her
apartment. The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa could play cards by themselves, although Siiri was ever so slightly upset about the interruption of the game, because she’d been dealt two jokers. Or
was that yesterday? Or the day before? It was best not to think about it, she decided now, and got off at the stop at Tullinpuomi. It was a puzzle that would never be solved, unless it was, as Irma
would say. Siiri looked for a moment at the sun shining against the wall of the Aura building and set off on foot to climb the hill to Laakso Hospital.