The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (5 page)

‘What’s wrong with rocking chairs?’ Irma said. ‘I rock in my rocking chair every day, and it’s awfully pleasant. I heard on the radio that it’s good for your
brain. For children’s brains, anyway. I think that’s what they said.’

‘If it’s good for children, it’s good for us,’ Siiri said, going back to the subject of ageing. If only working-age people understood what a small part of life a career
was. If her own children had worked less, they wouldn’t have been worn out by the time they retired. ‘And the way everybody is a former something,’ she said. ‘Former
printer, former telegraph operator, former copy-editor. I’m not a former anything; my profession doesn’t even exist any more!’

Irma had always been able to focus on the essential things in life. She had studied to be a nurse, but since she had so many children, she’d mostly stayed home. She also always remembered
to say that of her six children, only her last was planned. Siiri doubted that Irma’s accidental children enjoyed hearing that story, but Irma disagreed.

‘The accidental children are the ones you love best!’ Irma shouted shrilly from the bedroom. ‘And anyway, no one had birth control back then. You would have had to go to the
wrong side of the bridge to get it. You just had children. It was the same for everyone. Other people don’t talk about it like I do, because I had one that was on purpose. How did your
children come into the world?’

Siiri had always wanted a large family. She had been happy to have three healthy children. But Irma was right. Children just came; you didn’t plan those things. People used to be afraid of
getting pregnant, and now they needed expensive fertility drugs because they couldn’t have children, no matter how hard they tried.

Irma appeared again and twirled in front of the dining table. She had on a stylish black suit which had a beautiful pleated skirt.

‘That’s a good one. When did you get that?’

‘I bought this for my son-in-law’s funeral. Wait, that was almost five years ago. I must have bought this just last year, but I don’t remember whose funeral it was. Maybe my
brother-in-law’s.’ When you were over ninety, funerals were practically a profession.

On Friday evening, Siiri and Irma were right on time and everything was ready. The flowers were ordered from the nice girl at the flower shop on Katajanokka, their clothes were
well pressed and Irma’s medicine laid out in the pill counter that she kept next to her bottle of wine. Siiri had put her green cushion on the chair in her hallway that morning so that she
wouldn’t forget to bring it with her, because the chairs at the chapel were so hard. They decided to go to sleep early, or at least go to bed and read, and wished each other goodnight.

‘Don’t die tonight. I can’t go to Tero’s funeral without you.’

‘
Döden, döden, döden
!’ Irma’s voice boomed down the corridor.

On Saturday the liveliest of Sunset Grove’s old folk set out on the tram for Tero Lehtinen’s funeral. The Ambassador took a taxi, and the Hat Lady rode with him,
which no one opposed. There was nothing wrong with the Ambassador’s legs, but he was accustomed to travelling at others’ expense and drinking free wine and he wasn’t going to
change his habits at the age of ninety – everyone understood that. Irma also happened to know that he was a Freemason.

‘They have their own doctors; not like us, with our “personal physicians” who are never the same person from one week to the next,’ Irma said as they waited for the tram.
‘They get their pills and taxi coupons without even having to ask.’

They ended up having to walk a few roads to change from the number 4 to the number 8. The new couple from Spain didn’t like that at all. They both complained loudly when the traffic lights
wasted their valuable time. The woman, whose name was indeed Margit – Margit Partanen – was particularly peevish and vociferous. She was a straight-backed, sizeable woman who still dyed
her hair black, although it didn’t make her look any younger.

‘Tickets, please, everyone,’ said a young tram inspector the moment they boarded. The Partanens didn’t have any tickets and there was no getting out of a fine, although Margit
tried pretending that she only spoke German. Their funeral outing turned out to be more expensive than they had planned, and Margit thought it was Siiri’s fault because she had insisted on
taking public transport.

‘You’ll get a free ride to your own funeral,’ Irma said to lighten the mood.

‘Oh, but you won’t,’ Anna-Liisa corrected her. ‘The deceased should leave some money for the funeral to their heirs. It isn’t right to let others pay for it. I have
life insurance to pay for mine.’

‘So do I,’ Siiri said, with a sudden look of alarm. Life insurance ought to have been a safe subject, but just then, as they turned onto Mechelininkatu, Siiri had a horrifying
thought. She remembered that her insurance would run out when she turned ninety-five. ‘That means that if I don’t die soon all my payments will be down the drain.’

‘You’ll just have to die, then,’ Irma said, and started to reminisce about watching the brick buildings being built in Töölö when she and the other little girls
in the neighbourhood hadn’t thought twice about women carrying heavy loads of bricks on their backs over dangerous-looking scaffolding. ‘
Döden, döden,
döden
.’

‘I, for one, refuse to save up for my funeral, when I’m not even going to be there,’ Margit said, continuing the already forgotten thread of conversation. ‘You can just
lay me in a cardboard box,’ she said to her husband, who was looking out of the window at the strange new apartment blocks. Half of them looked like their roofs and balconies were falling
off.

‘Of course you’re going to be there,’ Irma said. ‘In the cardboard box.’

‘You want to get laid in a cardboard box?’ Margit’s husband muttered. This unconventional suggestion didn’t particularly surprise anyone, since all of A wing had heard
Margit’s whoops every afternoon. Margit was hard of hearing and no doubt didn’t know she was making so much noise. She didn’t hear her husband’s muttering on the tram,
either, although she was wearing her hearing aid. Those things never worked. The only reason they gave old people a hearing aid in one ear was so that other people would know they couldn’t
hear. If hearing aids were meant to be of some use, they would put them in both ears, like they do for children.

They got to the chapel on time and took off their coats in the narrow foyer, which was always crowded with people elbowing each other and opening up packages of flowers and
trying to find someplace to put the wrappers. A friendly verger with a beard recognized Irma and led the group to good seats in the sanctuary, like an old-fashioned usher. The chapel was pretty on
the inside, bright and open and just the right size. The best seats for a funeral were to the left of the coffin, near the centre, not too close and not too far away. From there you could see the
dear departed and the pastor and hear everything, although the words of remembrance that people said as they left their flowers in front were always vague and mumbled. Siiri and Irma couldn’t
understand why Finland had this custom of baring one’s soul about the deceased in front of everyone, when people otherwise never expressed their feelings, but Anna-Liisa thought it was an
important part of the grieving process. There were all kinds of silly, strange messages written on the flower-arrangement ribbons brought for Tero.

‘For a man who the angels wish to thank,’ a large, handsome young man read from his bouquet.

‘Whom,’ Anna-Liisa said, tapping her hymnal on the back of the seat in front of her.

The large man had come to the funeral in a leather jacket. Actually there were a lot of leather jackets, all the same. Siiri looked on, mesmerized, at the man who dared to stand next to a coffin
and talk about angels. If ever there was an angel, it was Tero Lehtinen, with his long hair and dimples.

‘Do you think he shaves his head?’ Irma asked in a too-loud voice. ‘He doesn’t look naturally bald.’

‘Nowadays even very young men want to be bald,’ Siiri whispered, and Irma shot back, ‘Yes, when they’re not wearing a topknot.’

This made them start to laugh and then feel immediately ashamed of themselves because it was very inappropriate to whisper and giggle at a young man’s funeral.

When it was their turn to go up to the coffin, a considerable operation commenced. Canes clattered against the floor, Siiri dropped her cushion, Zimmer frames got stuck between the pews and
Margit Partanen’s hearing aid started to beep, but she couldn’t hear it, of course. The handsome man who talked about angels helped them, pulling Anna-Liisa’s Zimmer frame loose
from the flower ribbon and picking Siiri’s cushion up off the floor.

‘A thousand thanks,’ Siiri said, taking her green cushion from him with some embarrassment.

‘Don’t mention it,’ the angel man said and looked at her with soft blue eyes. ‘Nice pillow.’

‘The residents of Sunset Grove want to thank our cook, Tero, for the moments of pleasure he gave us,’ the Ambassador read in his quavering men’s-chorus tenor, making the
moments of pleasure sound so indecent that some of the funeral guests had to hold back laughter instead of tears. Irma nudged Margit Partanen with her elbow and told her to do something about her
beeping hearing aid. Margit took the gadget out and stuffed it hurriedly in her handbag. It stayed there beeping throughout the service, competing with the snores of the Hat Lady.

Director Sundström and Nurse Hiukkanen weren’t at the funeral and so they weren’t able to witness the Sunset Grove residents’ condolences for Tero’s loved ones. It
was also a great disappointment that Pasi, the social worker, wasn’t there either. As soon as the coffin was in the hearse, Irma walked briskly up to Tero’s mother, introduced herself,
and talked about all sorts of things. Unfortunately, it was difficult to get any useful information out of the woman because she was so deranged by grief and strong medication.

‘Why did he do it? Why?’ she sputtered.

On Wednesday Irma had a book-club meeting at her daughter-in-law’s house in some godforsaken place, probably East Helsinki or Espoo. She was supposed to have read George
Perec’s
Life: A User’s Manual
for the meeting but she’d found it so tiresomely long-winded and convoluted that she had stopped reading. It was definitely intended for
someone younger than ninety.

‘You didn’t finish it? How are you going to participate in the discussion, then?’ Siiri asked nervously, but Irma just waved her hand with her jangling golden bracelets and
laughed.

‘I’m sort of their mascot. They invite me because they’re afraid I’ll be lonely. They think I’m senile and they don’t expect me to understand what
they’re talking about anyway. The fun thing about being my age is that I can act however I like and no one’s surprised. My daughter-in-law always serves the most wonderful goodies.
That’s why I go. Of course, I have to remember to bring my pillies.’

Irma hopped into a taxi in front of the Japanese restaurant at Laajalahti Square and Siiri went to catch the tram, taking a few running steps to make the nearest one. First the number 4, then
one and a half times around the loop on the number 3. When the number 3 got to the last stop, at the Zoological Gardens, she had to sit in the tram and wait for several minutes. It felt awkward to
just sit and watch the driver smoke his cigarette. A proper last stop has a little turnaround, like the number 4 has at Munkkiniemi. She particularly liked the little loop on Arabianranta, where
the number 6 and the number 8 had their last stops. When the tram was going at a good clip it made her stomach do a lovely flip.

The driver had left the radio on, tuned to a programme about the unusually large number of people in Finland who mixed alcohol and drugs, much more than in other European countries. In other
places people knew to use just one or the other. Mixing the two was most common among the young and the old. This surprised her. There was no denying that everyone at Sunset Grove drank large
quantities of alcohol and popped large quantities of pills, but they were doctor’s prescriptions for various maladies. However, Siiri never took anything but a little red wine with Irma now
and then, and a blood sugar pill every morning, like everybody else. She needed it because she was too fat, or too thin. Was she a mixed user? What about Irma, who drank nothing but red wine and
took all kinds of pills? The Serbian doctor who prescribed Siiri’s diabetes medicine didn’t say anything about the dangers of mixing them with alcohol, he just tried to convince her to
change her eating habits and drink her coffee without sugar, but Siiri told him that a ninety-four-year-old can eat what she likes and she still won’t die.

Finally the driver finished his smoke and the trip continued to Alppila. There, behind the amusement park, was one of Siiri’s favourite buildings, the Alppila parish hall. Its white beauty
always had a strangely calming effect on her. Or was it the actual church? Churches were all just boxes nowadays. The one in Munkkiniemi was such a grey-brick monstrosity that people would stand in
front of it and ask passers-by how to get to the church. Eventually, they built a tower on one corner of the building and put a cross on top so people would understand what it was. Siiri had
wondered why there were no church bells in the tower, not one, and the vicar had explained that the bells were played on a CD player.

‘Isn’t it just as much trouble to climb the tower to turn on a stereo as it would be to play real bells?’ Siiri had asked, trying to be amusing, but the vicar was a serious
woman.

‘The stereo is not in the tower; just the speakers.’

The number 3 tram was getting lively. A confused but smartly dressed woman started to give a speech in such a smooth, resonant voice that even Anna-Liisa would have approved.

‘There are tremendous numbers of laboratory rats in Helsinki. They bring bacteria and diseases with them and this organ-transplant business is important, particularly in Spain, with which
Finland has significant ties. They use old people’s organs, too, kidneys and livers, anything at all. In our laboratory there were hallways full of large boxes of kidneys and livers,
styrofoam boxes that were taken away and hidden in the basement, but I saw everything.’