The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (2 page)

‘But that’s the way it is,’ Irma said. ‘Old people have every little thing decided for them.’

Irma’s children and grandchildren, of which there were many, whom she referred to as her darlings, had sold her apartment in Töölö and put her in a one-bedroom flat at
Sunset Grove without further discussion. They’d said it was for her own good, and it was safer, and this way they would know that she was getting up and taking her medicine every morning and
wasn’t running around the city in her nightgown.

‘And then they installed a surveillance camera in my apartment so that they can get on the computer whenever they like and watch what I’m doing. As if I were a three-toed sloth at
the zoo! I moon the camera every night before I go to bed.’

The Ambassador sat with his shoulders slumped and stared glumly at the worn tabletop.

‘At least you have someone who bothers to look after you,’ he said. ‘Someone to moon.’

‘Don’t worry, we loners have people watching us, too, I can assure you,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘The nurses have their own keys and go snooping around in our homes all the
time.’

‘Yeah! The other day a man came into my apartment at seven a.m., when I was still lying in bed!’ Irma shouted.

‘Really?’ the Ambassador said with delight, picking up the deck of cards to start a new game.

‘He was looking for my will, of course.
Döden, döden, döden
.’

Siiri smiled when Irma said that. It was Swedish for ‘death’, and she said it with a sound of doom in her voice. Irma had a lot of words of her own and tired refrains that she
repeated constantly, but Siiri liked this one, especially when Irma said it at just the right moment.

Then Anna-Liisa started to talk about her missing silver hand mirror again. She was sure it had been stolen, just like the Ambassador’s beautiful
ryijy
wall rug, while they had
been out attending a memory group, a session of chair aerobics and an accordion concert. Siiri didn’t go to those sorts of scheduled events, especially not the accordion concert, although
there was one every week. Why did it always have to be the accordion? Didn’t anyone know how to play a real instrument any more? There were three pianos sitting unused at Sunset Grove.

There were other useless items scattered around the halls, too, left when residents died and no one came to get their belongings. Pianos, books and dining tables and chairs that nobody wanted
were scattered here and there to create a cosy atmosphere, although they didn’t fit the decor since Sunset Grove was a modern building, the rooms low-ceilinged and the walls made of thin
plasterboard. Somebody had probably even left the mahogany table they were sitting at.

‘They do it on purpose,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘They leave an old art nouveau table, a couple of pianos, and six metres of encyclopaedias in the hallways so nobody will think
they’re stealing from the residents. Though that, of course, is by no means certain.’

‘It’s thievery enough the way they charge us for every little thing without us even seeing the money zipping from one account to the other,’ Irma said. ‘But my darlings
take care of my money matters, because the banks have all been moved to computers. Direct deposit! I finessed it!’

‘What do you mean you “finessed” it? Isn’t that a bridge term?’ Anna-Liisa said indignantly.

‘Do you know how to play bridge?’ the Ambassador asked enthusiastically.

‘I mean I remembered the word. Isn’t that what they call that kind of stealing – direct deposit?’

Irma didn’t trust her memory. If she surprised herself by remembering something she thought she’d forgotten, she said she’d finessed it, or said that ‘some odd
instinct’ had told her that her beret was on top of the television. Anna-Liisa found it extremely annoying.

But Irma was right. At Sunset Grove the money went straight from the residents’ bank accounts into the accounts of various providers of treatments and services, and no one noticed a thing.
Just the rent for a small one-bedroom apartment was a thousand euros a month, and on top of that were assorted service fees and other costs. The prices were constantly changing, based on the
assumption that the residents didn’t understand the value of money. Many of them still calculated their purchases in the old marks that hadn’t been used since 1963. The residents’
relatives felt too guilty to quibble about the prices and convinced themselves that the more the place cost, the better it must be.

‘Pants down, fourteen euros. Pants up, sixteen euros,’ Anna-Liisa said, reading from the Sunset Grove price list. ‘That’s a high price for a single service.’

‘Thirty euros. Holy smoke, that’s a hundred and eighty marks!’ Irma calculated.

‘Incontinence pads are cheaper,’ Siiri said, although she didn’t know how much incontinence pads cost or where to buy them. In Spain you could get them at the regular
supermarket. There were a few returnees at Sunset Grove, people who had retired to Spain and the sunshine and, now that they had incontinence, cataracts and a hip condition, had hurried back to the
safety of a retirement home in Finland. Like the new couple in A wing, who had such noisy sex every afternoon that their neighbours complained. They were thrifty, too. They’d brought cheap
incontinence pads from Spain home with them.

Irma happened to know that they had a balcony stuffed with boxes of them. ‘It looks terrible,’ she said. ‘There’s not even room for a geranium. Can you
imagine?’

Irma’s daughter had ordered government-issue incontinence pads for her through the geriatric workers’ union, but Irma had returned them, because she had no place to store them. She
preferred to keep flowers on her balcony.

‘I think the woman’s name is Margit. Is that possible? And I have a feeling her husband’s name is Eino. Eino and Margit? What does your intuition tell you?’

They couldn’t decide what the new couple’s names were.

‘Why does it cost more to pull pants up than to pull them down?’ asked Anna-Liisa, trying to get the conversation back on track.

‘Would a skirt be cheaper?’ the Ambassador wondered.

‘It’s always easier to take your trousers off than it is to put them on again!’ Reino the Printer shouted, coming over from the drinks machine. He was a greedy-eyed man who
always called Siiri ‘the most beautiful girl at Sunset Grove’. Irma claimed that he’d tried to kiss her once in the lift, but Irma said all sorts of nonsense. Reino, pushing his
Zimmer frame, rushed upon them with surprising speed. He was wearing hospital slippers and a loose tracksuit. He had a bib around his neck, although it wasn’t a mealtime.

‘Isn’t it because of the belt?’ Siiri said, smoothing down her trousers and getting up to leave. ‘It’s harder to do up a belt and buttons than it is to undo them. I
mean if the person’s properly dressed.’

She gathered up her things and put them in her handbag – glasses, handkerchief and mints – and Irma started to do the same. They thought it was a bit revolting that Reino was so
dirty; he was always poorly shaven, with gunk between his teeth, hairs poking out of his ears and eyebrows like briar bushes.

‘I think a woman’s shirt buttons and bra hooks are easier to open than to close,’ Reino said. ‘It’s the gravitational pull.’

‘Rubbish, Reino,’ Anna-Liisa said frostily. ‘You’ve never fastened a woman’s hooks in your life.’

‘It has been quite a while. Want to come up to my place? Take a little ride in the lift?’

That was enough for Anna-Liisa. She snorted glumly and said she was going to the auditorium for a presentation on ‘A Varied Diet for Increasing the Performance of the Aged’. The
Ambassador liked the idea, and offered to escort her. He stood up, came gallantly over to her chair with his Zimmer frame, and offered his arm like a cavalier at a ball. Irma winked at Siiri and
they headed to the lift together, Irma keen to get away, Siiri still sad and mystified at the news of Tero’s death.

Reino was left alone at the card table, wondering where everyone was going, and why he had a bib around his neck.

‘Nurse! Nurse! Miss! Hello? Help me!’

But it was no use shouting for the nurses because they didn’t have time to come running to see what was troubling a perfectly healthy person. He tried to take the bib off himself. It was
difficult. The string was tightly knotted in the back. The harder he pulled on it, the tighter the knot became. He rose to a standing position and tore the bib free, cursing bitterly, and threw it
on the floor. Then he slumped onto the common room sofa, hoping that Siiri Kettunen or one of the other queens of Sunset Grove would appear and entertain him, and fell asleep.

Siiri went down to the ground floor to look for Pasi, the social worker, who was usually in his office. She wanted to talk to him about Tero’s death. Pasi and Tero got
along well; she’d often seen them chatting in the kitchen. But now Pasi’s office door was locked and there was a sign taped to it that read: ‘The social worker’s duties will
be temporarily performed by the head nurse, Virpi Hiukkanen.’

Virpi Hiukkanen was a confidante of the managing director, Sinikka Sundström, her right and left hand, a dedicated member of staff who was responsible not just for the residents’ care
but also for employee welfare and recruitment. Virpi was a lifesaver, because although the director was a sweet, friendly woman, she was very disorganized.

A situation like this required cunning. If Siiri asked Sinikka Sundström directly about the cook’s death and the social worker’s absence, Sinikka might think she was accusing
her of something. Straightforward communication with the director was sometimes difficult because she carried all the troubles of the world on her shoulders and blamed herself first in every
situation. Siiri would have to think up some other excuse for speaking to her.

She went back to her apartment, watched an episode of
Poirot
on television, and lay down on her bed for a rest. She imagined that she lived in a 1930s house as beautiful as
Poirot’s house in London, surrounded by sleek modern furniture, and was about to fall asleep with Poirot stroking his whiskers, smiling at her with his friendly brown eyes, and lifting a hand
to the brim of his hat, when the telephone rang.

Siiri had to get up because the phone was on a small table near the front door. Many people keep the telephone next to the bed, but Siiri was accustomed to having a telephone table and a chair
next to the front door. It was a better place to talk than sitting on the edge of the bed swinging her feet. Plus it was good exercise getting out of bed. But she couldn’t get up very quickly
because once she was upright she had to wait a few moments to let the dizziness and the buzzing in her head pass. The phone rang for a long time.

‘Hi, it’s Tuukka. You got a cleaning bill that’s a bit peculiar.’

Siiri had long ago asked if one of her grandchildren could handle her banking on the computer, since she didn’t know how, and her great granddaughter’s boyfriend had kindly agreed to
do it. Tuukka was a very pleasant boy who was studying something weird at university.

‘Microbial and environmental technology,’ he always said, which didn’t mean a thing to anyone.

Now he was saying that he’d seen on his computer that seventy-six euros had been taken out of Siiri’s bank account for cleaning. Just for a girl in a black dress to come by and give
the middle of the floor a once-over the week before last. Even her lips were painted black, and her hair was dyed blacker than the night sky.

‘She didn’t say a word to me, standing there leaning on her mop.’

‘The bill says it’s for two hours,’ Tuukka said. Being a businesslike man, he didn’t comment on the cleaner’s appearance or behaviour.

‘That creature was only here for half an hour, if that. I was here the whole time, looking at the clock.’

Siiri felt pleased after the call. The unreasonable cleaning bill was a stroke of luck, just the excuse she needed to go and talk to the director. She decided to file a written complaint, too,
so that she had some sort of official documentation. She had to write it by hand, though, in ballpoint pen on notebook paper, and it didn’t look very persuasive. This from a former typist
who’d worked for decades at the National Public Health Institute, touch-typing other people’s scribbles. She knew how to make clean documents with the proper margins, line spacing, and
layout, never making an error. She could still remember how upset she used to be when she’d got a letter on paper perfectly only to have the office manager decide to change his greeting, so
she’d have to do the whole thing all over again. But typing was a skill that was no longer needed or appreciated.

When she finished writing her complaint she thought about the title for a moment, then wrote: ‘Doesn’t anybody know how to clean any more?’ and left to take the paper to
Sinikka Sundström’s office. On the way there she started regretting the title, since the point was to complain about the bill, not about poor cleaning, although she certainly had reason
to discuss that as well. She and the other residents had wondered many times why somebody didn’t take the housekeepers by the hand and teach them how to sweep the dust from behind a radiator
and wipe a door frame with a damp cloth.

The director’s office was on the ground floor at the front of the hallway, right next to the waiting room. Many people thought she had her office there so that she could monitor and spy on
the residents. Anna-Liisa insisted that the staff at Sunset Grove had an obsessive need to control everything. From what Siiri had heard, Virpi Hiukkanen’s husband was the worst snoop of them
all.

Erkki Hiukkanen was noticeably older than his wife, a somewhat stupid, lazy man who was referred to as the caretaker, although his official title was probably something like Unit Operations
Manager. Erkki had grey hair and would sometimes come in uninvited to change a lightbulb, even though there was nothing wrong with the old one. Or he might come to check the pipes or the ventilator
ducts, which seemed to be continually acting up. Everyone had learned that if someone surprised you with a knock on the door it was probably Erkki Hiukkanen in his blue overalls – the only
service at Sunset Grove that didn’t cost anything.