The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (25 page)

‘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 always 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.

‘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.

‘Well, my, my,’ Irma said several times. She shook her head and muttered to herself, ‘Good gracious me.’ At times she didn’t believe them. ‘You must be
kidding!’ she would say. There were some very important things she had no memory of. ‘Who’s Mika?’ And to Siiri’s great pleasure, she laughed heartily again and again,
or let out musical little screeches of delight. She most enjoyed hearing about her own fit of rage in the Group Home.

‘Did I honestly bite the nurse’s hand?’ she asked, wiping tears from her eyes with her lace handkerchief. ‘Oh my, oh my. I’m about to pee in my pants!’ That
was always the climax of a good story for Irma.

Then she started to sing ‘Oh, My Darling Augustine,’ and wanted to know what her growl of rage had sounded like. Siiri tried her best to perform it, and Irma started laughing again.
Anna-Liisa was surprised by this tangent. She would have preferred the story to continue in a logical order. She stood up, leaned on the bed railing, and rapped her knuckles smartly on the
footboard.

‘May I have a turn to speak?’

Irma and Siiri looked at her in surprise, and then Irma clapped her hands together in rapture.

‘You have a lovely new hat!’

Anna-Liisa just knocked on the end of the bed again.

‘Listen, Irma! In January, we were at Reino’s funeral and in February Olavi Raudanheimo died. He killed himself in the hospital by refusing to eat.’

‘No we weren’t!’ For once Siiri got to correct Anna-Liisa. ‘We weren’t at Reino’s funeral. We went to the wrong funeral. You’re going to like this
story, Irma.’

‘Stop! There’s one very important thing that has gone completely undiscussed!’ Anna-Liisa almost shouted, but then quickly regained her self-control. ‘I’m talking
about the fire in the closed unit, which started in the incontinence-pad storage room.’

‘Right. But think about it – we went to a memorial reception for some Uncle Jaakko. And we were the only guests!’

‘Siiri, you’re impossible. Focus!’

Anna-Liisa’s brown eyes smouldered frighteningly, and Siiri had to give up the battle. Anna-Liisa sighed audibly and began an explanation in a laboured tone.

‘As you may recall, the pads were stored in a former—’

‘Tuula, would you say hello to Siiri Kettunen, and ask her to come and visit?’

Siiri froze. Irma’s eyes looked strangely empty again, like they had in the closed unit. She thought Siiri was her daughter. Perhaps Irma really was permanently senile and this had been
only a temporary window of happiness, or a last swan song before the final catastrophe. But on the way home Anna-Liisa assured her that it was all completely normal. People with dementia had all
kinds of different days and moments. Senility and alertness might alternate very quickly, and things like physical health and fatigue could influence mental states.

‘Irma was tired out from babbling about all sorts of trivial matters for an hour, which is why we didn’t get to tell her all the important facts.’

‘But . . . does that mean that Irma really is senile? That she isn’t going to be her old self again?’

‘Dementia is a symptom, not a diagnosis, as I have explained many times. But I’m no doctor, either. We’ll just have to take it one day at a time.’

‘It’ll never clear up, unless it does.
Döden, döden, döden –
oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that you don’t like it when I use Irma’s
sayings.’

When they got home, Siiri was really tired. She had an empty ringing in her head and felt like she was becoming more useless as the days went by. She went to bed exhausted and
fell asleep in the middle of an Eeva Joenpelto novel, which fell with a thud to the floor without her even noticing. She had an incredibly fun dream about Irma, young and pretty, dancing
uproariously in the middle of a huge dance floor and trying to coax Siiri to join her, but Siiri wouldn’t dance. She just enjoyed watching Irma’s happiness.

A loud clatter from Irma’s apartment interrupted Siiri’s meal of liver casserole. Fearless, she marched straight over to see what was going on. And Irma would have
laughed so hard to see it!

A flock of Irma’s darlings were dividing up Irma’s possessions, just as if she were safely dead and buried. Things were packed in moving boxes, and everyone had their own bags that
they were filling with any object that struck their fancy. The boxes were marked ‘flea market’, ‘summer cabin’, and ‘rubbish’. The box of rubbish was by far the
fullest.

‘We all got together and decided to do it this way,’ a funny-looking boy said, holding one of Irma’s favourite pictures in his hand.

‘Since it looks like Grandma’s never coming back,’ another one said. Siiri assumed that these two were the beloved gay grandsons Irma always talked about. And they were
handsome boys, who looked her in the eye politely when they spoke to her. It was no wonder Irma was charmed by them.

The others started to defend themselves, too. A woman with a small child wrapped around her leg explained that the apartment was much too expensive for Irma’s heirs and none of them could
afford to pay for it to sit empty, and there were long waiting lists for retirement-home spaces and some old person in better health might need a home. The small child reminded Siiri of the inmates
at the Group Home: a sparse-haired thing in nappies, of indeterminate sex, with just two teeth in its mouth. It was holding Irma’s television remote in its hand, sucking on it until it was
slick with saliva.

‘Grandma,’ the child said, pointing at Siiri with its thick, drooly finger.

‘I’m not your grandma. Your grandma is in the hospital. But she’s doing very well and is sure to come back home soon, and when she does, she’s going to want to watch the
Moomins
and
Poirot
on television, and she won’t be able to, if you suck on the remote until it won’t work any more. Nowadays televisions won’t work without a
remote. It’s so crazy, don’t you think?’

Siiri was letting out a flood of words because she was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to do. She babbled to the drooly child in nappies, who had started to cry, and cried harder
the longer she spoke. The positive side to this ridiculous situation was that Siiri was able to tell the one-year-old what she wanted to tell the grown adults standing around it.

‘Yes, you can turn on a television without a remote,’ said one of Irma’s grandchildren, a boy with a long beard, as he shoved an electric mixer into his bag.

‘Oh, can you? So have you all decided who gets the television? It’s brand new. Digital.’

Irma’s darlings had strange looks on their faces. The one-year-old stopped its crying.

‘We don’t want it. Nobody watches TV any more,’ one of the grandsons said.

‘Because it’s all on the net,’ continued the other, as if they were Donald Duck’s nephews.

‘Grandma?’ the one-year-old said, tugging on Siiri’s trouser leg. The child was clearly the bravest and most intelligent of the bunch. Siiri told her new friend that they were
going to give Grandma a new hip with a couple of screws in it and then Grandma was coming home and they could eat cake together again, and drink wine.

‘Grandma shouldn’t drink so much alcohol,’ the woman said knowingly, prying the child off her leg while trying to fit Irma’s jewellery box into her handbag. In her
opinion eating sweets or drinking alcohol of any kind was dangerous for Irma’s health.

That’s when Siiri got angry. She got so tremendously angry that Irma would have been proud of her. She felt like the pretty, young Irma who had danced in her dream, not caring what other
people thought, just sashaying around without any inhibitions, and she let this gang of young people who called themselves family know just what she thought of them and their health warnings.