The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (20 page)

Siiri was still thinking about the green folder, which at first they hadn’t been able to find anywhere, and then there it had been, underfoot with the rest of the mess in the
apartment.

‘It’s plain as day,’ Anna-Liisa snorted. ‘First they took it, and then they returned it to cover their tracks.’

‘Cover their tracks? It seems to me that Irma’s apartment was full of tracks!’

‘But not any more, because Mika Korhonen cleaned it all up. Have you thought about that? Why was your angel Mika in such a hurry to clean away other people’s tracks? Or had he been
there himself? After all, it was his idea to break into Irma’s flat, but if you look at the details, he actually already had the keys in his backpack. Did you happen to notice how many pill
bottles he put in his pocket? I don’t trust that man. For an ordinary taxi driver he is strangely up to date on everything going on here.’

Anna-Liisa was very worked up at this point, her cheeks glowing and her voice trembling, though she was usually so controlled. Siiri was completely speechless. She wasn’t prepared for this
kind of outburst, and everything Anna-Liisa was saying seemed frighteningly logical. Siiri had thought that Anna-Liisa believed Mika Korhonen to be a good person at heart, someone who wanted to
help them.

‘What reason does he have to help us? A bunch of penniless old women?’ Anna-Liisa continued. Siiri looked nervously at her hands, which were squeezed into fists.

‘I . . . I imagined that he’d made friends with us and . . . and that we . . . had a sort of mutual enemy here, because the cook who hanged himself was a friend of his and somehow .
. . somehow it was all connected to Tero. Isn’t that what you thought?’

Anna-Liisa didn’t say anything. Perhaps she was thinking. Siiri wasn’t very persuasive in her defence of Mika. It was all so flimsy and vague. How had she and Irma trusted a
stranger, a cab driver, and gone to lunch with him, just like that? And Siiri had invited him into her own home, a strange man who wore a coat with a skull on it. They certainly needed Irma
now!

‘No; Irma needs us. We have to do it all by ourselves, Siiri Kettunen.’

Siiri padded very nervously in her slippers towards the dementia ward. Anna-Liisa had advised her to wear her slippers so that she wouldn’t make any unnecessary noise as
she made her way down the corridor. When she went down to the ground floor, she felt as if the noise of the lift would wake the whole city. With her heart pounding she wandered down the office
hallway to the common areas and wondered at how different the rooms she knew so well looked at night. There were no old people who had fallen asleep, no one reading the paper, even the television
was dark. Someone had forgotten their Zimmer frame in the middle of the lobby and the Ambassador’s deck of cards was waiting on the table for its players.

She continued like an automaton along the B wing corridor, at the end of which was the locked door of the Group Home. Seventy-three steps, Anna-Liisa had counted. Siiri got confused in her count
after fifty. Anna-Liisa’s steps were clearly longer than hers. The lights in the hallway turned on by themselves, which gave the place a ghostly atmosphere. She had a torch in her hand, which
was unnecessary – she didn’t know why Anna-Liisa had needed one. Or was the idea to rummage through cupboards and peek into corners? In her excitement Siiri couldn’t remember
whether that was a part of their Plan.

She tried to find the surveillance cameras Anna-Liisa had talked about and imagined the poor soul whose job it was to watch her on a screen somewhere. She stopped as she came to one of the
cameras and examined it. It was round and had a glass dome over it; it looked more like a lamp, and she wouldn’t have understood that it was a camera if Anna-Liisa hadn’t given her a
brief presentation on surveillance equipment and told her that they have them everywhere nowadays, even in taxi cabs.

‘
Döden, döden, döden
,’ Siiri whispered, and aimed the torch at the device as she passed, just in case. If it was a camera, it wasn’t going to get a
picture of her. She felt incredibly clever and counted three camera-like protrusions altogether in the corridor and one gadget that might be a fire alarm or an air freshener. A night-time
expedition was actually rather fun.

As she approached the Group Home she heard a muffled shout. Some unfortunate dementia sufferer was yelling in vain for help again, not knowing if it was day or night. It didn’t sound like
Irma’s voice, although Siiri couldn’t be sure because when Irma had that attack of rage at the nurse in the middle of the Augustin song, her voice had become completely unrecognizable.
This was a very feeble moan.

Siiri turned off the torch and stood for a moment in front of the door to the closed unit. She looked through the glass at the slender girl nurse sleeping in a rocking chair with a pale-blue
teddy bear in her lap. There were children’s teddy bears like that scattered all over the dementia ward; Siiri didn’t know why. Maybe they were for the nurses. She glanced out of the
hall window and for a moment it seemed as if someone was running across the courtyard in the snow. She looked through the door at the clock on the wall. It was past two. At the same moment, she
heard more sounds from inside the closed unit. It sounded like several people were shouting. Why didn’t the nurse wake up?

Siiri didn’t know how long she stood looking through the closed door, but she started when she saw smoke inside. She became aware of a strong smell and saw that the smoke was coming from
the patients’ feeding area, where the nurse with the teddy bear was sleeping. There was already smoke in the hallway, too, and slowly Siiri’s apprehension changed to confused
horror.

‘Fire! Fire! Help!’ she shouted high and loud, without thinking that she shouldn’t have been sniffing around at the door to the closed unit in the middle of the night. The
nurse didn’t wake up, although Siiri pounded on the door with both fists. Siiri was in a panic and she felt like a helpless crackpot, not knowing what to do. Smoke was billowing around the
nurse, and suddenly Siiri remembered that she had a key in her handbag.

‘It’s a good thing I finessed that,’ she muttered to herself, and started searching her bag for the key. Her hands were trembling and the zip on her handbag pocket was stuck.
She tore the zip open, pulled out the key, and pushed it into the lock with both hands. She was afraid that the burglar alarm would start to ring, but the thought of Irma among the flames made her
open the door. The acrid stench of smoke whirled through the hallway, stinging her eyes and making her cough. She strode swiftly inside, and although she felt like running straight to Irma’s
room, she first tried to shake the nurse awake. She could hear numerous patients calling for help from their rooms. It looked like the smoke was coming from the end of the hallway. The girl snapped
awake and took such fright that she started to scream in terror.

‘All right, now. Try to stay focused,’ Siiri told the child soothingly. ‘There’s a fire here and we have to get to work. You call the fire department while I go and check
on the patients.’

‘A fire? Where? Who should I call?’

‘Emergency services. One-one-two. Tell them your name and that there’s a fire, and then give them the exact address.’

‘What’s the address here? How am I supposed to know it? Where’s the telephone?’

Siiri led the hysterical girl to the break room, hastily wrote the necessary information on a piece of paper, and went to look for Irma. She felt strangely calm, as if she knew perfectly how to
behave in this situation. She turned on the torch and was glad she had it with her, because without it she wouldn’t have been able to see anything. There was quite a lot of smoke in the
corridor, and when she got to the end of the hall, she noticed flames coming out of the sauna room. She had to get Irma out fast. She rushed into Irma’s room, where a profound silence
reigned. Both old women were fast asleep and there was surprisingly little smoke. They were tied to their beds. Siiri was grateful to Anna-Liisa for her silly knife, with which she easily cut the
straps away from Irma and her room-mate.

‘Are you taking me to Karelia? Shall we sing?’ the old war refugee asked, but Irma just slept. Siiri tried to wake her, pinched her earlobes and shook her by the shoulders. She could
hear the distant shouts of other patients and wondered in horror how she would get to them all in time to help. She dashed out to see how great the emergency was in the other rooms, the knife still
in her hand. Maybe she could free the rest. This was the beginning of the revolution!

In the next room two old people were awake and calling for help. Siiri tried to calm the two women with a lie, telling them that everything was all right as she tore at their straps with the
knife. In the first bed they broke easily, but in the second one she had to saw at the straps, and cut a gash in her thumb. Just as she was sucking on it to stop the bleeding, two firemen sprang
into the room. It felt like they’d taken hours to get there. They looked at her in astonishment.

‘At last!’ Siiri shouted, continuing to saw at the straps in a near frenzy, heedless of the blood that was staining the sheets.

One of the men was carrying an axe. Without saying a word they grabbed Siiri with practised hands.

‘Now, now, everything’s all right here . . . you must have been woken by the smoke . . . let’s go now, calm down . . . how about you give me that knife . . .’

They dragged Siiri out of the room, all the while trying to calm her, although Siiri felt almost icily calm in this catastrophe. She refused to give the knife to the firemen, and they talked
over her, imagining that she didn’t understand anything that was happening.

‘Are there a lot of these thumbsuckers here?’

‘Fourteen, somebody said.’

‘We can get by with this gear, then.’

‘Yeah. Let the old lady keep her knife. This is just one floor, and they seem to be light and easy to carry. Some of them can probably walk, like this one.’

Siiri didn’t say anything. It seemed easier to pretend to be demented than to explain what she was doing in the Group Home with a knife in her hand at three o’clock in the morning.
She asked the firemen to rescue the people at the end of the hall first – Irma and her room-mate – because the fire was right on the other side of their wall in the adjoining sauna. The
men left her in the lobby and went about their business.

The atmosphere in the retirement-home common room was entirely different to what it had been half an hour before. Firemen, ambulance crew and police were running back and forth tugging hoses and
shouting orders, radios crackling. The Hiukkanens were there, standing against the wall, Virpi in a see-through nightgown, Erkki next to her in dishevelled clothes and boots. The girl nurse
who’d awoken to the fire was still hysterical and Virpi was focused on berating her.

‘I saw someone running outside,’ Siiri tried to say to the people in uniform running past. ‘Should somebody check to make sure there isn’t a patient out there?’

‘Siiri Kettunen! What the hell are you doing here?’

In two vigorous steps, Virpi Hiukkanen was in front of Siiri. She set off to march Siiri to her apartment, though Siiri thought Virpi should have stayed to monitor the fire situation to the end
and make sure that the dementia patients were no longer in danger. Virpi wasn’t the least bit interested in finding out who had been running across the lawn.

‘I can get there myself, thank you,’ Siiri said as Virpi shoved her towards the lift in the lobby.

‘How dreadful! Your hand is covered in blood!’ Virpi shouted, turning her head away in horror.

Siiri wasn’t going anywhere until she saw that Irma was all right and had been taken to safety, away from the flames. Virpi dashed back and forth shouting at Siiri and at the poor nurse,
who was bawling like a little child with the teddy bear under her arm.

‘You don’t have permission to walk around here alone at night!’ Virpi yelled at Siiri.

‘Do people need a special hall pass in a retirement home?’ Siiri asked defiantly, and then Virpi started to yell until spit flew out of her mouth and her chewing gum fell out onto
the floor.

‘I don’t understand you. What is wrong with you? You run around all day long causing a fuss for everyone. This fire is the last straw. I’m giving your information to the police
and you’ll be held responsible for all the damage you’ve caused at Sunset Grove. Don’t imagine that just because you’re old you have some kind of immunity and can do
whatever pops into your head. Get out of my sight! The patients in the Group Home are not your responsibility, none of them, do you understand?’

Siiri had to sit down for a moment to catch her breath. She found her handkerchief in the bottom of her handbag and pressed it against the cut on her thumb. Unit Operations Manager Erkki
Hiukkanen slumped onto the sofa beside her when the firemen shepherded him out of the way. Erkki was completely numb, unable to do anything useful. As he sat there staring into space he was quite
indistinguishable from the dementia sufferers being carted into the lobby in wheelchairs and carried on stretchers to ambulances. Snow was melting off his boots and forming a large puddle on the
floor.

Finally, after an excruciatingly long wait, Siiri saw Irma among the last patients taken to an ambulance. Irma was walking by herself but was very stooped and made her way forward slowly, with
fumbling steps. Two firemen led her to the vehicle and kindly helped her in. When she was inside the ambulance she was made to lie down on a stretcher, then the doors were closed and the ambulance
drove calmly away without any siren or lights, like a hearse on its way to the chapel.

When the ambulance had disappeared into the darkness, Siiri stood staring at the deserted car park without a single thought in her head. Gradually, the hubbub inside diminished. The police and
fire fighters gathered their gear and quickly left to begin another task somewhere else. The girl nurse called a taxi in a trembling voice and went home to sleep, and Virpi Hiukkanen withdrew to
her office. That left only Erkki Hiukkanen and Siiri Kettunen, side by side on the sofa. The cut on Siiri’s thumb wasn’t bleeding any more. She put the stained handkerchief and the
knife in her handbag and stood up.