The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (26 page)

‘Your grandma is as healthy as a horse and will soon be back here, needing you – and her stuff! If you take one silver spoon or TV remote out of here, I’m calling the police!
And if you can’t afford to pay for your grandma’s rent at the retirement home because you’d rather travel around the world twice a year, then I’ll pay for it out of my
pension. Don’t think for a minute that Irma is senile, and that she’s turned into a vegetable! She’s coming back here and we’re going to eat as much cake as we like and
drink wine and maybe Irma will smoke a couple of cigarettes while she sips her evening whisky, and then we’ll dance for the rest of the day in our nightgowns and do whatever takes our fancy,
because you know what? I’m ninety-four years old and your grandma is ninety-two, and at our age there’s not very much that’s so terribly important, least of all things that might
be dangerous to your health. They’re just used to frighten you all, so you won’t die of affluenza. For your information.’

It certainly did her good to have a proper yell. She felt strong and supple, she had a heady feeling of well-being, and her blood was flowing furiously, right down to her toes. At some point in
her monologue she’d lifted up her gaze as if she were dancing, and she may even have taken a couple of light steps before performing what looked like a pirouette. The one-year-old clapped its
hands in admiration and tried to dance with her.

‘Old people can do whatever pops into their heads, unlike you poor working folks, who don’t dare even to think, to use your own brains. Stealing old women’s mixers! You can all
just drag your bones right out of here and not come back until Irma sees fit to let you come back. No ifs or buts.’

‘Butts!’ screeched the one in a nappy, twirling around crazily, excited about the new dance and this new grandma. The child’s antics piqued the interest of its older brother,
who had been hiding behind the sofa.

‘You’re a butt!’ the big brother said quietly, giving Siiri a murderous look, which caused her to burst out laughing. The adults tried to laugh a little too, but then Siiri
straightened up and ordered them all to leave.

‘
La commedia è finita
,’ she said in a deep voice, and nobody understood that she was quoting Leoncavallo’s
Pagliacci
, which ends with that line.
Irma’s darlings were baffled and troubled. One of them put a picture back on the bookshelf, but the jewellery box remained in the know-it-all’s handbag.

‘We thought Grandma was out of the game . . .’

‘We were trying to be helpful.’

They looked so sad that Siiri had to explain why Irma’s recent recovery was good news. She assured them that they shouldn’t worry, that one, happy day, Irma would die, and her
grandchildren could then divvy up all her things among them and bake a cake with her old mixer. So Irma’s darlings gathered up their bags and left.

The box of things labelled ‘rubbish’ was left in the middle of the living room: sheaves of photographs, knick-knacks, tablecloths and silk long johns. Siiri slumped into the flowered
armchair to rest for a moment. It smelled like Irma’s perfume, strong and too sweet, but it was Irma’s scent, and Siiri breathed it in until it went to her head and she again felt the
light, floating feeling she’d had in her dream.

Anna-Liisa and Siiri had got into the habit of going into town together to perk themselves up. They had read all of
The Tottering House
and had started Juhani
Aho’s
Panu.
Anna-Liisa was a pleasant travel companion because she knew to sometimes be quiet, unlike Irma. Siiri had learned all kinds of other things about Anna-Liisa over the
months that Irma had been away. She’d come out of her shell and proved to be a warm, fun person, quite brave and sometimes even boisterous. It was amazing and interesting to Siiri to make a
new friend at the age of ninety-four.

‘I think I’ve grown twenty years younger this winter,’ Anna-Liisa said as they rode the 3B and admired the new university library. ‘And it’s all down to you and the
Lavender Ladies Detective Agency.’ The library had scads of little square-shaped windows that were rather amusing, although Siiri suspected that it might not be so fun to sit inside and look
out at the world through such small windows.

Siiri unfortunately could not claim to have grown younger over the winter. Quite the opposite; her age had never weighed so heavily as it had this past year, with events flooding over her
uncontrollably. It felt like people over ninety lived on their own deserted island, completely separate from the rest of the world. The banks wouldn’t take cash, the retirement home was a
nest of criminals, and they were just supposed to drag themselves from aerobics to memory games all day long. Even on the tram they looked out at real life scurrying by from a distance, as if it
were a TV show with no remote. There was just one taxi driver who’d taken an interest in their affairs, and even he seemed to be doing it for partly criminal reasons.

‘I don’t mistrust Mika any more at all,’ Anna-Liisa said, and looked more radiant than she had in ages. Siiri praised her red hat and her rosy springtime cheeks, and Anna-Liisa
smiled with satisfaction. ‘Not only have I got to know you, I’ve had other experiences to shake my life up a bit. Wasn’t that place designed by Lars Sonck? I think it’s
always been called the Arena Building, although that’s not its original name, of course. Or maybe it is? What do you think – when was that place built? Did you know that Lars
Sonck’s offices were on the corner of Esplanadi and Unioninkatu and he had a habit of taking a bath in the Havis Amanda fountain?’

Anna-Liisa had read about it in a book that the Ambassador had given her as a gift. The book was called
A Skin-disease Doctor Remembers.
She explained that this was a euphemism, because
in the old days everybody understood that a skin-disease doctor was a venereal-disease doctor. She’d learned from the memoir that a diagnosis of syphilis could be made by examining the
eyebrows of the other passengers on public transport.

‘They called it omnibus diagnosis.’

‘Really? So, do I have syphilis?’ Siiri asked, and Anna-Liisa let out a musical laugh like a young girl and said Siiri’s eyebrows were very healthy. For a moment they looked at
the other passengers’ eyebrows, but Anna-Liisa thought they all looked syphilis-free. Although there was one woman who had plucked her eyebrows off and drawn a black line in their place, so
she might be a carrier, but the diagnosis was uncertain.

‘Sparse eyebrows indicate syphilis,’ Anna-Liisa explained.

‘Well, then the Ambassador certainly doesn’t have it,’ Siiri said, and Anna-Liisa’s face flashed a secret smile. Siiri wondered what the Ambassador’s first name
was, but Anna-Liisa was still focused on venereal diseases.

‘Maybe syphilis doesn’t exist any more. There’s probably more AIDS nowadays, although even HIV is not as virulent as it was in the last century. Did you know that the Hat Lady
died the other day? And she was supposed to live for ten more years with her stent.’

The 3B was like a rollercoaster on any day, but with Anna-Liisa with her it seemed even more thrilling than usual. Siiri hadn’t yet recovered from the syphilis conversation and yet
Anna-Liisa had already moved on to the Hat Lady’s death. It was remarkable that Siiri didn’t know any more about it than she did about the Ambassador’s name. The Hat Lady had been
part of their group of friends. Siiri had thought she was mostly troublesome. But now Sunset Grove’s itinerant preacher had gone and died, and wouldn’t come begging for sweet rolls any
more, and in spite of everything it felt sad.

‘She wasn’t begging, she just wanted company and she used the sweet roll defence to get it,’ Anna-Liisa said, ‘if you know what I mean. I probably wouldn’t have
approved of one of my pupils using an expression like “sweet roll defence”, but I can’t think of a better way to put it at the moment.’

‘The sweet roll con?’ Siiri suggested, and Anna-Liisa laughed happily again. Lately, she laughed a lot, brightly, in a way that gave her ordinarily gloomy voice a bit of
sunshine.

‘She died of old age. A poor, unfortunate insomniac who finally fell asleep,’ Anna-Liisa said carelessly.

Just six months ago she would have given a lengthy lecture on how in Finland you’re required to die of pneumonia, a heart malfunction, or some other invented pathology. And on how much
money was spent on cutting a body open just to find out how a ninety-two-year-old woman died in her own home. Finland certainly was a wealthy country, there was no way around it.

But now she just sat quietly, not even enthused about autopsies. Instead she said: ‘His name is Onni.’

Siiri didn’t have a chance to ask whose name was Onni. She was looking out of the window at the stop next to Brahe sports field, and there stood the Sunset Grove caretaker Erkki Hiukkanen
in his overalls and cap, plain as day. He got on the tram through the centre door and Siiri hoped from the bottom of her heart that he wouldn’t notice them. He glanced around and looked
important somehow, as if he were on a top-secret mission. Why in the world was he wandering around Kallio in his work clothes at this time of day? Siiri tried to warn Anna-Liisa, but she was in her
own happy world.

‘Did you know that Onni can recite all the old Finnish market towns? Alavus, Anjalankoski, Espoo, Forssa, Grankulla, Haaga and so on.’

So Onni was the Ambassador’s name. Siiri was sure that she’d never heard anyone address him by his first name. She turned warily to look at the back of the tram and saw Hiukkanen
sitting far away from them in the disabled seat with a blank expression on his face. There was no danger of him noticing them, even though Anna-Liisa let her voice echo through the tram in all her
happiness.

‘That kind of brain aerobics is good for you – and fun, too. I’ve already learned quite a few myself. The end goes like this: Vantaa, Varkaus, Virrat, Ulivieska,
Äänekoski,’ she recited, tapping her hand on her thigh. Siiri thought the red gloves she was wearing were new. Stylish, expensive-looking leather.

‘You have to recite it clearly so that you get the meaning and remember it better. Want to try?’

Siiri smiled and started learning the names of the old market towns to please Anna-Liisa. Life certainly was full of surprises.

The Hat Lady’s real name had been Aino Marjatta Elin Nieminen. There was a pleasantly large crowd at her funeral, some relatives and a surprising number of old workmates
from public radio, where she’d had a forty-year career from errand girl to editor.

‘Public radio employees have time to go to funerals. On our tax contributions,’ said the Ambassador, loud enough to be heard.

‘Public radio funds come from licence fees, not taxes,’ Margit Partanen corrected him even more loudly.

‘But didn’t they just change it? Isn’t it taxes now instead of licence fees? Our tax payment doubled. They’ve laid on so many taxes that pretty soon they’ll tax you
to get laid,’ her husband said, and Margit silenced his babbling as efficiently as ever by hissing a threat in his ear.

Munkkiniemi Church had slippery, pale-coloured pews and the floor sloped steeply downwards. This had its good points, because you could see the coffin even from the last row but the downside was
that their Zimmer frames and wheelchairs kept rolling uncontrollably downhill. The pastor spoke into a microphone. This was hard for them to understand – why weren’t people able to talk
without a microphone? Even in churches built in the fourteen hundreds, there were microphones and speakers now, as if no one would be able to hear without them.

‘What? Hear what?’ asked Margit as everyone fell silent for the prayer.

The pastor was a relative of the Hat Lady and was certainly over ninety himself, a tottering old man whose voice broke from emotion and a heart malfunction. He had to take long pauses and lean
on his crutches, and when he trowelled some sand onto the coffin, ‘. . . from dust you came, to dust you shall return . . .’ and so on, they feared he was going to topple over
completely. But by some miracle he made it through alive and dragged himself with the last of his strength to sit down on a chair behind a pillar. The cantor had such a jazzy intro for the hymn
that it took them a little while to realize that it was the familiar, lovely tune ‘Come with Me, Lord Jesus’.

The presentation of flowers wasn’t until the end of the ceremony, but they didn’t dare go up to the coffin. They would have first had to slide down the hill and then find the
strength to climb back up afterwards, which was a recipe for tragicomedy. The other mourners were more interesting to watch than usual anyway.

‘To Aino, an editor who was a cut above,’ said a stocky man with an awfully familiar voice as he put a bouquet of glowing red roses on the coffin.

‘Isn’t he the sports announcer who was drunk at the Sapporo Olympics? It was a terrible scandal. What was his name?’

They tried to beat each other at recognizing the public radio personalities who were taking turns leaving flowers and saying their personal farewells to the Hat Lady.

‘I’ll never forget your hat,’ whispered a bent, bearded man.

The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa almost had a fight about this bearded fellow when they couldn’t make up their minds whether he was an anchor or a correspondent. Or, rather, a former
correspondent, since all of these people were long past retirement and not likely to be wasting the Ambassador’s tax money. After the presentation of the flowers the cantor improvised a
cacophonous piece and eight decrepit men, most of them radio legends, carried the coffin, huffing and puffing, up the hill to the foyer, across the courtyard, and down some stairs to the hearse. It
hadn’t occurred to the architect to just put the stairs in front of the door.

They decided to go to the memorial service, upstairs at Restaurant Ukko-Munkki, because they hadn’t yet had a chance to name all the famous public radio retirees and it was exciting to
think of a memorial with such drinking companions as these.

‘Public radio live,’ the Ambassador said, and Anna-Liisa almost giggled, hanging on her new friend’s arm.