The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (7 page)

Siiri escorted Antti Raudanheimo down in the lift. He intended to work for three more years before retiring, had two adult sons and a very nice wife. He laughed happily as he said goodbye, and
his handshake was manly and soothing. Nevertheless, Siiri was quite worked up after he left. Some red wine really could have done her good. She stood dumbly in the lobby and regretted that the
Sunset Grove cafeteria wasn’t a real restaurant where you could buy yourself a little sip, in the evening at least. The residents had to sit alone in their own little boxes to drink their
nightcaps.

‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’

Irma and Anna-Liisa were coming down the hallway of C wing, on their way back from the activity session. Irma showed Siiri a cardboard tube peculiarly decorated with glued-on curls of wool.
‘It’s a lamb. I can give it to you as a Christmas present.’

‘I didn’t make anything. I just watched the others having fun,’ Anna-Liisa hurriedly explained, so Siiri wouldn’t think she was silly.

‘I’m so glad you two are here! Do you have a moment? Sit down on the sofa and rest a bit.’

‘You’re agitated,’ Anna-Liisa said as she installed her red Zimmer frame between two chairs.

‘She must have met some charming man!’ Irma laughed and automatically started to search her handbag for a deck of cards. Her glasses, lipstick and coin purse were soon on the
table.

‘Yes, I have, and I invited him to my apartment.’

Irma screeched with delight, stopped emptying her bag, and started picking her things up off the table and putting them back into it. Anna-Liisa turned her good ear towards Siiri, and Siiri
quickly told them what Antti Raudanheimo had said, or as much of it as she remembered, and especially how she felt about it all.

‘It’s really horrible. Nightmarish. The whole thing makes me feel sick. My ears are ringing and my head is aching. But Olavi Raudanheimo is at the Hilton now, and quite clearheaded.
Not a sign of any dementia.’

‘You mean the Meilahti Hospital,’ Anna-Liisa said. Siiri nodded in agreement. The fifteen-storey Meilahti Hospital tower looked so much like a large hotel that people called it the
Hilton. ‘If there’s going to be a criminal report, they’ll need witnesses. Were there any eyewitnesses to this terrible incident?’

‘Just Olavi’s word,’ Siiri said, looking sad. ‘Do you think the police will believe him?’

‘Of course they’ll believe him!’ Anna-Liisa shouted, rapping on the table as if the whole episode invigorated her. ‘It would be a strange state of affairs if they
didn’t listen to the word of a war veteran!’

They knew Anna-Liisa was right again. They were all reassured by the fact that Olavi’s son had taken care of the matter in such an upright manner. Luckily there were still some people with
decent relatives. The fact that Sinikka Sundström didn’t want to believe what she’d been told about what had happened to Olavi didn’t surprise any of them. Sinikka was so
well-intentioned and so stressed. Lately she had been even more nervous and absent-minded than usual. A lot of staff had left. There were always a lot of staff changes among the nurses, but this
autumn the turnover rate had sped up so much that Director Sundström herself didn’t seem able to keep up.

‘Oh my, I don’t know. Ask Virpi. Or somebody else,’ Director Sundström would answer desperately whenever anyone made the mistake of asking her why there was no nurse
available, why the physical therapist had cancelled all her appointments, or why the activity director hadn’t shown up for the joke group. The young girls who made up things for the residents
to do were called activity directors. They believed that old people could be cheered up with songs from the war years, black-and-white movies and crafts.

Sunset Grove also offered rehabilitation and memory exercises. There were pictures and activities glued to the walls for the Memory Game. They looked almost like they might have been donated
from a preschool centre – hand-drawn flowers, boats, houses and animals. Siiri was particularly bothered by the one that someone had glued right next to her door, a picture of a family of
bunnies on a summer outing. But Irma was a curious person and had played the Memory Game more times than she could remember. Anna-Liisa came at regular intervals for a ‘memory check’ at
the afternoon activity session, because she knew that the more you use your brain, the slower your memory breaks down. She started every day with a crossword puzzle and every night in bed she went
through all the case endings for the Finnish interrogative articles, to keep her mind in working order.

‘Self-care. It saves the state money,’ she always said proudly.

Rehabilitation was a very broad concept at Sunset Grove; it might include anything from massage to toe wiggling. It was compulsory and free for the men because they were veterans, but the women
had to pay for their own rehabilitation, even though many of them had been in the Lotta women’s auxiliary, and some of them, like Siiri, were even stationed at the front. Of course all
she’d done was wash bodies and put them in their coffins. It hadn’t really felt like front-line work, but still, it was a tough job for a young girl. During the Winter War the bodies
were frozen so you had to thaw them out. In the Continuation War they were full of maggots and had a sickening smell.

Siiri and Irma occasionally went to exercise class or to the pedicurist out of sheer pity for the nurses. They didn’t really know what they were being rehabilitated for.

‘For death,’ Irma said. ‘
Döden, döden, döden
.’

‘Why in heaven’s name do you keep repeating that?’ Anna-Liisa said, almost angrily.

The Swedish author Astrid Lindgren had said in a TV interview, when she was quite old, that she often talked on the phone with her sister about who would be the last to die, and when they
realized that all they talked about was death and dying, they got into the habit of starting their phone conversations by saying, ‘
Döden, döden, döden
.’
That’s where Irma had got it. She still liked to read Astrid Lindgren’s books, and often had a copy of
Pippi Longstocking
on her bedside table.

‘
Emil of Lönneberga
is my favourite, though. He’s just like my third son – the one who ran away to China. He was a real Emil when he was little, just as sweet,
and quite impossible.’

‘I heard that the boy who was the cook here hung himself,’ Anna-Liisa said.

‘Who?’ Siiri said, but Irma was still talking.

‘I like the Moomin books, too,’ Irma continued. ‘They’re such clever stories!’ She thought that the older a person got, the more like a Moomin they became.
‘Until eventually it’s hard to tell whether someone’s a man or a woman – or maybe it’s not, but anyway. Just think how fun it would be if we could all grow tails. We
could hold them out at right angles and the nurses would urge us to cheer up like Moominpappa did at the Hemulens’ kindergarten.’

‘What are you girls lazing about for?’ Exercise Annie said, interrupting their wandering conversation. She smiled brightly, patted Siiri and Anna-Liisa, and waved her exercise stick
invitingly. They called all the young rehabilitation directors Exercise Annie.

‘You’re not too late for the stick exercises! And today we get to play with balls, too!’

Anna-Liisa and Irma promised they would come to the exercise class and left to get their exercise clothes from their apartments. Siiri didn’t feel like it. There was something degrading
about messing around with sticks and balls, especially when you had to do it in front of a wall of mirrors with everyone looking so old and wrinkled that it was difficult to recognize yourself.
They did, in fact, look like Moomins in their grey exercise outfits, just as Irma had said.

Siiri went out and caught the number 4 tram, accidentally ending up at the stop in front of Stockmann department store although she had intended to get off earlier and transfer to the number 10.
She walked through the store, past the perfume counter and the magazine racks, to the stop on Mannerheimintie. The number 10 came quickly and she took it past the old Surgery Hospital, which
wasn’t a hospital any more. She’d read in the paper that they were building new hospitals in Meilahti for hundreds of millions of euros so that they could move out of the beautiful old
buildings. The more medicine progressed, the more expensive it became because people were healthier and didn’t die when they were supposed to any more.

When the tram came back around to the Mannerheim statue, Siiri got on the number 6 and rode it to Hietalahti market square. That was where the old brick and stucco market hall designed by Selim
A. Lindqvist was, the most beautiful market hall in Helsinki. On her way home she got off on Bulevardi and glanced in the window at Cafe Ekberg. She’d never been in, and she didn’t go
in this time, either, although Irma always talked about how nice it was. Irma liked to go to the Ekberg with her old schoolmates.

Siiri walked through the Plague Park to Yrjönkatu and stopped to look at Wäinö Aaltonen’s relief sculpture on the Suomi building, with its heavy horses and strange, ungainly
angels. She continued to the Swimming Hall and couldn’t think of the architect’s name and wondered when she had last been swimming. But she couldn’t remember. Then she went around
the back of the ugly Forum building and looked into the courtyard of the Amos Anderson Museum, and missed her husband, and turned onto Simonkatu, and finally arrived at the tram stop for her own
number 4, in front of the Glass Palace.

She almost fell asleep on the tram and was so tired when she got off that she stopped to catch her breath at the tram stop. She leaned on her cane and looked at Sunset Grove through the trees.
It was a repulsive, 1970s concrete building with a flat roof and little windows. It was probably impossible to build anything beautiful out of concrete. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an
image of Tero, beautiful, long-haired Tero, hanged, came into her mind: his face swollen and distorted, his feet swinging loose in the air. She’d seen hanged people like that on television.
But why did this horrible vision come to her so powerfully, so realistically? Even his familiar red checked shirt was vivid in her mind. She closed her eyes to get rid of the sight, but the image
didn’t go away, the buzz in her head only grew louder. She started to feel dizzy, her cane fell out of her hand, and she had to hold on to the tram stop railing for support. She hoped her
feeling of nausea wouldn’t make her vomit, and she realized she was crying.

‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ rang brightly across the lobby of Meilahti Hospital. ‘Where have you been?’

Irma had begun to get nervous waiting for Siiri and Anna-Liisa. She had arrived on time, contrary to habit, and ended up having to wait at the reception desk for nearly four minutes. The
neighbourhood around the hospital had changed completely since the last time Siiri had been there, to see her husband, around the turn of the millennium. Without Anna-Liisa she never would have
found the place, now called Meilahti Hospital, its entrance painted a ghastly orange.

‘It’s like walking into a metro station,’ Irma said.

Irma found some art photographs of Helsinki on the wall and looked at them more closely to see if a tenth-generation Helsinkian would recognize anything in them. Anna-Liisa and Siiri
weren’t interested in this game and went to find out what ward Olavi Raudanheimo was in. Siiri asked the attendant to write down the floor and room number on a slip of paper and with this
they wandered down the hallway, following a white line painted on the floor, as they had been instructed.

They walked along the line single file and felt like children holding a rope on a preschool outing to the zoo or the museum. Siiri had the idea that it might be a sobriety test, to see if they
could walk in a straight line, like the tests police give to drivers. Maybe the hospital had painted the line on the floor so they could tell exactly how drunk their visitors were. Irma thought it
was like walking a tightrope in the circus, but she had a hard time staying on the line and started to get so dizzy that she had to step off it.

They continued onwards in this manner and didn’t notice where the line was taking them. When eventually they stopped to clear Irma’s head, they realized they were in the basement,
although Olavi’s room was on the twelfth floor. They had to ask directions several times before they found him. Anna-Liisa found it hard to believe that they really needed to go down two
floors before they could go up, and Irma wanted to ask a real doctor, preferably a medical professor, whether it mattered if they didn’t get there via the white line.

‘The staff are very friendly,’ Irma said, pleased. ‘Much nicer than at Sunset Grove. They stop and talk to you and look you in the eye.’

Anna-Liisa was impressed, too. ‘They even speak Finnish. Did you notice that the last person we talked to used the formal
you
correctly? That’s unusual. I would have been
impressed at the attempt even if he’d got it wrong.’

When finally they reached Olavi, they found he had been given a good room with only four beds and a private toilet. It was quiet, too – no television blaring trivial chatter in a corner.
And you could see a long way from the window, at least as far as Lauttasaari, if not all the way to Espoo. Siiri, Irma and Anna-Liisa admired the view and soon got into a quarrel over where the
proper boundary of Töölö began, but then Olavi’s room-mate, who said he was a townie, intervened.

‘Stenbäckinkatu,’ he said, coughing loudly. ‘That’s the boundary of Töölö.’

Anna-Liisa was obviously of a different opinion, and Irma was curious to know if the man was a drunk, since it seemed that the only people who called themselves townies were chronic alcoholics.
But neither woman said anything because they remembered that they had come to see Olavi Raudanheimo, who was sitting in his bed looking very thin but perfectly alert.

‘You certainly have it good here,’ Irma began cheerfully, but Anna-Liisa got straight to the point, like a good interrogator.

‘What happened to you?’ she said. ‘Do you remember what happened afterwards? Were there any witnesses?’