The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (24 page)

‘So, about the fire,’ Mika said, launching crisply but volubly into a monologue about everything connected with the fire. He was very angry about everything that had happened, and
the cascade of talk was difficult to follow. He searched for words, raked the air with his big hands, and kept adjusting his stance. His voice was hoarser than usual and his blue eyes were
strangely aggressive. Siiri had to interrupt him when he got to the part about the fraudulent bookkeeping and the incontinence-pad storage used for drug storage.

‘Excuse me. I should ask Anna-Liisa to come over, if that’s all right. Since both of us are soft-headed, we might remember more and understand something if both of us hear
it.’

Luckily, Anna-Liisa was free that day. She had skipped aerobics and was in her apartment reading
Buddenbrooks
in German when Siiri called.

‘I’ll be there in three minutes and forty-five seconds,’ Anna-Liisa announced, and she arrived in almost exactly that amount of time. She shook Mika’s hand and looked
disapprovingly at his muddy shoes.

‘Don’t you know how to undress yourself?’

‘Huh?’

Siiri feared Anna-Liisa was being rude because she had all sorts of suspicions about Mika, but Anna-Liisa was actually being quite friendly, flirting like a schoolgirl as she wrung all she could
out of the word ‘undress’. Mika dutifully took off his shoes and carried them to the hallway. There was a large puddle on the living-room floor, which Siiri rushed to wipe up, to save
him from embarrassment. Anna-Liisa sat and watched the hubbub she’d caused with satisfaction. Siiri took the rag into the bathroom, sat down on the sofa next to Anna-Liisa, and asked Mika to
sit in the armchair, because that was where her husband had always sat.

‘Yep. The place of honour,’ Mika said, and then they listened carefully as he continued his explanation of why the fire wasn’t an accident and didn’t start by itself. He
wasn’t as forceful and angry now, but his flailing hands, darting eyes and continuously tapping foot indicated his restlessness.

‘Siiri did see someone running outside!’ Anna-Liisa cried.

‘Good point,’ Mika said, and continued his rapid-fire talk. He believed that the fire had destroyed important evidence to do with prescriptions, money and the drug market. That
explained why he was angry – he was frustrated about losing some documents he was looking for.

‘Why did you take those pill bottles from Irma’s apartment?’ Anna-Liisa suddenly asked him, just as he was getting to the part about Russian ice hockey, which apparently also
had something to do with the incontinence-pad storage in the closed unit. Mika didn’t bat an eye, didn’t behave in the least as if he’d been caught out; he simply explained which
of the drugs could be sold on the black market and how the transactions worked. Apparently, Irma’s prescriptions were really hot stuff.

‘Imagine that!’ Siiri said, not knowing what else to say. She was mostly baffled by what she was hearing, and in a way Mika’s visit just added to her fear and uneasiness. What
he was saying was like a startling gust of wind from some utterly foreign world. And yet everything he was talking about had supposedly happened right here at Sunset Grove. Mika looked hungry and
tired, and Siiri realized with horror that she hadn’t offered anything to her guests.

‘Would you two like some liver casserole? I can warm some up. It will only take a minute on the stove.’

Mika grimaced. It seemed he didn’t like liver casserole, which was understandable, because he was still young – maybe forty? Siiri hadn’t asked him, and it was hard to guess
his age since he was purposely bald and it may have made him look older than he really was. Anna-Liisa had already eaten some mashed potatoes and gravy with the Ambassador in the cafeteria and she
had no hankering for liver casserole either.

Suddenly Mika took a wad of money out of his pocket and handed it to Siiri. It was several hundred euros in wrinkled fifty-euro bills.

‘From Virpi Hiukkanen to you,’ he said defiantly.

‘Good heavens! What’s this about?’ Siiri shouted in horror. An offer of money from the head nurse had to be some kind of bribe to stop her from blabbing to the police. Was Mika
in league with Virpi Hiukkanen now?

‘Your relative Tuukka figured out your accounts and found a lot of blatantly fraudulent charges. I went and talked to Hiukkanen about it, which scared her so much that she forked out the
money.’

Siiri didn’t know that Mika Korhonen and her great-granddaughter’s boyfriend Tuukka had made each other’s acquaintance without telling her. She felt bad that Tuukka had been
dragged into all this, because he was a good boy.

‘I should have gone to talk to the accountant, but I couldn’t get hold of him. Hiukkanen was in quite a hurry to pay up immediately. She probably didn’t like the idea of the
accounting manager finding out about these little dips into the direct-deposit accounts.’

‘Is there an accounting manager? Is that the director’s husband, the one who works at the fish market?’

Mika laughed for the first time since he’d arrived. She was talking about Kalasatama, the new Fish Harbour office development. But Sundström’s husband was only the quality
control manager. The person Mika had been hunting down was the one in charge of the money.

‘That money fellow has his work cut out hiding the evidence,’ he informed them.

‘They certainly have enough managers,’ Anna-Liisa said, ‘for a place so understaffed.’

Mika thought that Siiri’s case was a simple one. Since she hadn’t ordered a cleaner, she couldn’t be billed for one, nor for the plumbing work she hadn’t ordered.

‘But how could the head nurse give the money to you?’ Anna-Liisa wondered.

‘I said I was Siiri’s elder-care advocate. She didn’t question it, she was so damned scared.’

Siiri almost screamed. First Mika had stolen the keys to Sunset Grove, then Irma’s medical records, and now he’d tricked Tuukka into poking around in criminal matters and had lied
about being her advocate. What kind of hot water had they got themselves into?

‘Sign your name on this piece of paper,’ Mika said, and handed her a pen from the pocket of his leather jacket.

Siiri’s hands were shaking, she was now so frightened. Luckily, Anna-Liisa was there as a witness if she ended up in even bigger trouble because of Mika. She needed to go and fetch her
glasses from her bedside table so that she could read the paper carefully. She walked nervously around the room and forgot what she was looking for until her eyes fell on her handbag sitting on the
kitchen worktop. She found her reading glasses in the bottom of the bag and sat down next to Anna-Liisa on the sofa to look at the document, which said that Siiri Hildegard Kettunen had designated
Mika Antero Korhonen as her elder-care advocate two weeks earlier. The margins and line spacing were beautifully done, she noticed that immediately.

‘Antero is a seer’s name. But why is your name Hildegard?’ Anna-Liisa asked, as if to tease her. ‘You’re not from Fennoman stock, are you?’

To Siiri’s surprise, Anna-Liisa thought the document was an excellent thing, and she didn’t find any grammatical errors in it, either. Because Mika wrote Finnish so beautifully, her
doubts about him seemed to be decreasing, and all her pointed questions started to fade. She no longer seemed to feel that Mika was in league with or in the pay of Virpi Hiukkanen. Siiri looked
doubtfully at Anna-Liisa, who nodded very formally.

‘Sign it. Irma was always telling you that you needed an advocate. And since Mika has figured so many things out, I’m sure he knows that you don’t have any big legacy to leave
to him, even if you died tomorrow. Would you be interested in becoming my advocate, too, Mika? I don’t have any children, so you could get a couple of rugs and coffee cups from me for your
trouble.’

Mika and Anna-Liisa were now getting along like old friends – or partners in crime. Mika laughed at Anna-Liisa’s proposal and agreed to be her advocate, but only on the condition
that he wouldn’t have to find some corner to put her junk in, and Anna-Liisa wasn’t the least bit offended. God help her if Siiri had referred to Anna-Liisa’s treasures as junk.
There would have been a tremendous row.

‘Can you write an official document like this by hand?’ Anna-Liisa asked him, and then they wrote up a contract on Siiri’s kitchen table that stated that Mika was also her
designated advocate. Siiri signed her document with some relief, and Mika joked that he was now the second man in Siiri’s life.

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Siiri laughed, and felt carefree for the first time in months. What did she really have to worry about now she was ninety-four? She could always die
of old age or hunger if things went really wrong. And being in prison could hardly be any more tiresome than being at Sunset Grove without Irma. It might even be rather interesting.

‘I doubt that,’ Mika said. He nodded towards the wad of notes he’d given her. ‘Put that money in the bank, so no one steals it.’

‘Right you are. My lovely silver hand mirror was stolen here, if you can believe it, right out of my apartment,’ Anna-Liisa hastened to say. She grabbed her new advocate’s arm
and started confiding in him. ‘I’m sure it’s not terribly valuable, but it had sentimental worth because it was my mother’s morning gift from my father on their wedding day,
so it was important to me, of course, but that’s the sort of thing they do here: they take things out of the residents’ apartments. That mirror’s probably been sold already.
Russian connections you said they had? There are a lot of antiques collectors in Russia these days. These post-Soviet nouveaux riches, what else are they going to do with their money? So they buy
themselves the semblance of a respectable past by purchasing other people’s family heirlooms.’

‘Heirlooms?’ Mika smiled, but he didn’t feel like hearing any more about Anna-Liisa’s mirror. He got up to leave as quickly as he’d come. He grabbed his backpack,
slipped on his shoes, and left a new puddle behind on the welcome mat. Siiri didn’t ask when he was coming back again because he probably wouldn’t tell her.

‘But now we have an official relationship with him!’ Anna-Liisa grinned happily, and asked Siiri to get the red wine out of the cleaning cupboard so that they could make a toast to
Mika Korhonen. Sometimes it seemed to Siiri that Anna-Liisa was an awful lot like Irma.

Anna-Liisa suggested that they go to the bank on their way to see Irma at the hospital. Siiri wasn’t thrilled at the idea – an old woman has no business doing two
things on the same day. But it was futile to resist, since Anna-Liisa was brimming with vim and vigour. She really looked almost girlish in the new red hat she was wearing.

Siiri had tried to go to the bank in Munkkiniemi the day after Mika’s visit and deposit the wrinkled bills he had given her. But the door had been locked in the middle of a weekday and
there was a sign that said you could only get in by appointment and that the branch no longer handled cash transactions. It was really shocking. Siiri had kept an account at the same bank since the
1930s, though the bank had changed its name several times. Originally, it had been Finland United.

‘Oh, so you’re an anti-Fennoman. My bank is Citizen’s Cooperative, of course,’ Anna-Liisa said self-righteously.

It said on the bank window that the nearest branch with staff was the one in Lassila, and Siiri couldn’t understand why she should have to take a bus all the way to Espoo and get carsick
just to put money in her own bank account. Anna-Liisa said that Lassila was in Helsinki, not Espoo, but since you couldn’t get there by tram they decided to go to the branch in Punavuori
instead. It sounded pleasant, and safer in every way.

As they rode the tram they pondered what the bank’s business could be if it wasn’t cash transactions. Siiri suggested stocks and bonds, but Anna-Liisa thought those had to be cash
transactions, too.

‘They probably do something with accounts. They don’t want to serve ordinary account holders, just deal with investments and funds and other more lucrative financial
matters.’

The door to the Punavuori branch was broken. It was supposed to open automatically, so there wasn’t any handle to pull on. For a moment they thought that this branch was closed, too, but
then a miracle happened and the doors suddenly slid apart.

‘Open sesame!’ Siiri shouted.

Three middle-aged men rushed in at once, talking on mobile phones, not even noticing the two old ladies pressing up against the wall to get out of their way. Siiri and Anna-Liisa let them go
first since they were in such a hurry, then went inside and looked around to see where they were. The bank looked like a government office, with birch-veneer counters, a TV screen and casual
furniture. There were several rows of chairs like at a health clinic, where you waited for your number to be called. There was no sign of the luxury of yesteryear, no arches, no marble, just a look
of dull utility.

They went bravely up to the number dispenser, pressed all the buttons, just to be on the safe side, and got numbers 721, 13 and 221. The number on the board read 438.

‘This is like the lottery!’ Siiri said happily, but Anna-Liisa started squawking, although it had been her idea to stop at the bank on their way to the hospital.

‘At this rate we’ll never get to the hospital. There must be some mistake.’

Off to the side, in front of an advertising placard, stood an idle-looking security guard in uniform. Siiri asked him why the number board read 438 and the numbers on their tickets were 721, 13
and 221.

‘Do you think these will ever be winning numbers?’

The guard said he worked for a security company and wasn’t officially employed by the bank, except to stand guard and keep order. Siiri thought she might be disrupting order, so all they
could do was sit down and wait their turn. Luckily, Siiri had her green cushion with her, because the seats were hard and uncomfortable. After a moment it became clear that there were four queues,
each one with different numbers, and the best one had 38 customers ahead of them.