Chapter 38

People have very different ways of ringing a doorbell, even if it is just a mechanical device, and not a musical instrument as such. You can tell a person’s temperament and mood in the way they summon you to open the door. Now there was someone outside Siiri’s door who was full of energy and obviously in a hurry, maybe even in a panic, so it wasn’t a resident of Sunset Grove, and it couldn’t be the cleaner, or, for that matter, anyone else ringing the doorbell as part of their job – not Sinikka Sundström, because she wasn’t energetic and enthusiastic, and not Virpi Hiukkanen, because she never rang the doorbell, she just let herself in. So it had to be Mika Korhonen.

‘Happy Spring,’ Mika said, so enthused that he walked right in without taking off his shoes, though Siiri had mentioned this to him before. It hadn’t occurred to Siiri that it was spring already, but it was, at least according to the calendar, the beginning of March. The streets were covered in grey slush and unmelted ice.

‘Where in Finland do you suppose Josef Wecksell wrote his poem “Demanten på Marssnön”? Siiri said to Mika, who smiled uncomprehendingly. ‘“The Diamond on the March Snow”. He couldn’t have written it in Helsinki, because the only snow we have here in March is in old grey heaps. More like “The Diamond on the March Slush”. It’s a Sibelius song, too, one of his most beautiful, but I like “Första Kyssen” even better. That one is from a Runeberg poem, I think. It always makes me think of my first kiss. Imagine, it happened to me with my husband, right here in Munkkiniemi, on what used to be Linna Road, which is Holland Road now. I never had any other man but that man. My husband, I mean. He died twelve years ago.’

‘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.