Siiri Kettunen was summoned for questioning at the East Pasila police station. Her last contact with the police had been in the autumn of 1946 when they’d tried to pump her for information about a weapons cache, but she hadn’t been as nervous then as she was now.
Luckily, Anna-Liisa was coming with her. She felt partly responsible for Siiri being questioned because the Ambassador was the one who had reported the fire to the police, which was why Siiri was in a sticky spot now. The Ambassador escorted them to the door at Sunset Grove and gave a lengthy speech.
‘The police work for us. Have faith in yourself and great things could come of this. You have a tremendous responsibility in the name of justice and morality. Remember that. I demanded justice, and you are my envoys,’ he said, his voice trembling, and then he kissed Anna-Liisa on the cheek and shook Siiri’s hand ceremoniously, as if they were on their way to discover a new continent. He left behind a pleasant smell of aftershave.
Siiri knew that she couldn’t possibly tell the police anything but the truth. It had been a different matter in 1946. Then it had been a matter of patriotism, and it had been her duty to protect her friends and relatives, even though her lie had come to nothing, of course: they were all sent to jail. Brave men.
She had gone over the night of the fire in her mind many times. She couldn’t swear that the person she saw running across the courtyard was Erkki Hiukkanen. Since the fire, the caretaker hadn’t been seen in Sunset Grove’s hallways, the air ducts and drains had been left to clog up while Erkki concentrated on following Siiri around the city. The more she thought about it, the more confused it all became. But she wanted to believe that evil would be punished.
‘Not necessarily,’ Anna-Liisa said as they crossed Bell Bridge. ‘Many criminals are never caught. If your statement finally made the police understand what kind of game is going on behind the scenes at Sunset Grove, it would be a monumental achievement.’
The police station was one of those depressing concrete boxes that stand shoulder to shoulder all over Pasila. There was an information desk inside the entrance just like at a bank – or at least the ones that still had customer service. Siiri took a number and sat down with Anna-Liisa among the assorted crooks. Siiri looked around nervously, but Anna-Liisa was already absorbed in a battered old copy of Donald Duck that someone had left on the waiting-room table.
‘You stiff-legged old tightwad!’
‘Sorry?’
‘Magica de Spell just called Uncle Scrooge a stiff-legged old tightwad,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘I think it’s a funny thing to call an elderly duck. Look – it’s the one where the police come to take the nephews away. Kind of matches the theme today. He’s eloquent, that Donald. He’s an example of the nuanced language of comics. Listen: “Those flatfoots are nabbing my nephews and hucking them in the hoosegow with everybody in town watching.” Hopefully things don’t go as badly for you today.’
When Siiri’s turn came they were told they were in the wrong place. A friendly policewoman showed them to a lift that would take them to where they were supposed to be – an echoey little room on the third floor, where a very young man sat. He was dressed in everyday clothes, wearing a tie, and he introduced himself with a somewhat timid mumble.
‘Senior Constable Kettunen.’
‘Master of Philosophy Petäjä,’ Anna-Liisa replied, and then went to sit down next to the wall.
‘I’m a senior Kettunen, too!’ Siiri cried happily, but when the young man held his earnest expression she apologized, since they probably weren’t related. There were lots of Kettunens in Finland, and besides, it was her late husband’s name. Siiri’s maiden name was Närviö, but she preferred the more ordinary Kettunen, because Närviö was a made-up name, forced on her family in the 1880s by her Fennoman grandfather, who wanted to be among the first to Finnicize his name, Neovius, which itself was made up by someone named Nyman, who was going to Turku in the 1700s to study at the university and thought it sounded Latin.
‘Do you have any identification?’ the policeman interrupted.
He was absorbed in flipping through the papers on his desk, of which there were a lot. He read them in the same way a doctor reads a patient’s files, as if he’d never seen the papers before. Siiri found her social security card in her handbag, but apparently it wasn’t identification. After a moment of looking she found her driver’s licence, which she hadn’t needed in ages.
‘What’s this?’ the constable asked.
It was a pink-paper driver’s licence in a plastic pocket with a smudged stamp on it from 1978, the last time Siiri had renewed it. But the Senior Constable seemed to think that it had expired, in spite of the fact that she’d renewed it. He said driver’s licences looked quite different nowadays, and to assure her of this he showed her his own, which was a plastic slab that looked like a bank card. In any case, a driver’s licence was no longer sufficient for identification. She had to show a passport or official proof of identity, which was also a plastic slab that looked like a bank card. Siiri, in other words, had no identification.
‘Not even a passport?’ the boy asked, and Siiri wondered what she’d done with her passport. The last time she had travelled was in the 1950s, when she took the MS Oihonna to Hamburg. Unlike some people, she wasn’t the lucky bride of a war veteran and couldn’t go gallivanting around at the government’s expense to heal from her traumas. Then Anna-Liisa dug her passport out of her handbag. It was quite new. She’d ordered one in March, in preparation for her trip to Tallinn, without mentioning a thing to Siiri.
‘Don’t start bickering about it,’ Anna-Liisa snapped, and then turned to the policeman. ‘I can vouch for her identity. And her pedigree she has already presented.’
The Senior Constable finally gave in but then shooed Anna-Liisa into the hallway. He continued to look at his papers, and Siiri waited for such a long while that she had time to count the folders on his shelves twice before he began the questioning. He asked her about obvious things, like whether she remembered her identity, did she know what month it was and who the President of Finland was. Siiri recited all the Presidents of Finland from Ståhlberg to Niinistö, just to be on the safe side, because she had lived through each administration, and she said she even remembered her PIN by using a mnemonic: the second number was the first number cubed, the third number was the first and second numbers multiplied and then divided by three, and the fourth number was the sum of the first two minus three.
‘Oh, heavens – now you know my PIN and I’m not supposed to tell it to outsiders! But of course you can be trusted because you’re a policeman. Did you get that the common factor in all the rules is the number three?’
Senior Constable Kettunen put an end to this memory game and finally cut to the chase. He wanted to know what day the fire happened, where the retirement home was, and when Siiri had first noticed the fire. She told him that she had been at the door to the Group Home at 2.30 a.m. and had noticed that there was smoke coming from inside. After a moment’s hesitation, she also told him that she had let herself in with a key, because her shouts weren’t awakening the nurse.
‘As I understand it, the nurse then called for help, on your instruction.’
The policeman didn’t seem to wonder why Siiri was prowling the Sunset Grove hallways at night or where she’d got a key to the Group Home. But how could the poor boy have known what kind of place a retirement-home dementia ward was and what kind of rules it had? Then he asked Siiri if she had seen anyone outside.
‘I thought there was someone running outside . . . a man,’ Siiri said, no longer chattering aimlessly.
The Ambassador would have been greatly disappointed in her because she didn’t use the opportunity to report Erkki Hiukkanen for starting the fire. The constable had nothing more to ask her, and an unpleasant silence fell over the room. All that could be heard was the hum of the ventilation system. When nothing seemed to rouse the constable, Siiri tried to lighten the mood by telling him about the artist Sigrid Schauman, who, when she was being questioned by the police following a car accident, was asked whether she’d had any dealings with the police before, and she’d answered, ‘Yes, when my brother shot Governor-General Bobrikov.’
The very young Senior Constable looked at Siiri with empty, pale-blue eyes, almost like Irma’s eyes on her worst days in the Group Home. Maybe he didn’t know who Sigrid Schauman was. Or Bobrikov! Siiri thought about the Ambassador and about Anna-Liisa sitting out in the hallway. Then, Mika Korhonen appeared in her thoughts with his backpack, followed by Irma roaring, in a wheelchair and a sexy T-shirt, and she could no longer contain herself. She burst into a flood of words. It was a long outpouring. At first the policeman looked at her in bewilderment, then with close attention. He was left-handed, and was taking notes with his hand at an awkward angle and listening to her as if he were extremely interested in what she was saying.
‘You must have something in those hundred and thirty-eight binders about the rape of Olavi Raudanheimo. And this fellow Pasi must be well-known to you. Mika said so. But I don’t remember Pasi’s last name. From what I understand, Pasi was questioned several times and he’s going to end up in jail.’
When she’d finished her barrage of talk, Siiri’s heart was pounding and her hands were shaking.
‘You said that the head nurse left you lying on the floor in her office. When did this happen? And how big was the package that you found on your postbox without any information about the sender or recipient?’
Siiri didn’t remember mentioning the package. She couldn’t say when the package appeared, but the occurrence in Virpi Hiukkanen’s office had definitely happened the same day. What day was that? Siiri felt faint. She asked the boy for a glass of water. But before he could get up from his chair, her eyes went dim.
The police station devolved into chaos because a ninety-four-year-old woman had fainted. Senior Constable Kettunen thought at first that his client had died on his office floor. He bent uncertainly over her to look for signs of life, and when he could see that she was breathing, however weakly, he called the department assistant, who berated him for not immediately calling the emergency services. An eternity was spent waiting for the emergency services to answer, and after that Constable Kettunen was asked a slew of questions that he couldn’t answer. He got testy, at which point emergency services got testy because Constable Kettunen was the seventy-seventh caller in a row who’d had the nerve to get annoyed, even though the emergency-services worker was just doing her job as well as she could, based on what she’d learned at training camp.
Constable Kettunen finally lost his temper and started bellowing into the phone in such a loud voice that Anna-Liisa appeared at the door to witness the scene, looking angry. She grabbed the phone from him and started shouting orders at the emergency service centre in no uncertain terms, and the call ended quickly.
‘An ambulance is on the way,’ she said grimly and ordered Constable Kettunen to fetch some water.
The old lady lying on the floor revived, drank a little water, and was then able to sit up with her friend’s help. Constable Kettunen stood helplessly beside them, glancing nervously at the clock, not knowing what to do in a situation such as this, other than complain afterwards that it took too long for an ambulance to get to the police station. The department assistant came to the door to scold him, and soon half the department was there watching as the ambulance crew carried a half-dead woman out of his office on a stretcher.
‘Well done, Siiri,’ Anna-Liisa said in the ambulance, squeezing her hand tightly. Her red hat was askew, her hair dishevelled, her aspect agitated. Siiri’s other hand had an IV connected to it and the ambulance man was bustling about efficiently in the tiny space.
‘She’s conscious,’ he said, but Siiri didn’t bother to introduce herself because she’d learned by now that ambulance crews didn’t waste their time with polite niceties. ‘Take her to the retirement home!’
The ambulance drove down Mannerheimintie at high speed with the siren blaring, as if Siiri was in mortal danger and they were rushing to save her life before it was too late.
‘Why do you have the siren on?’ Siiri asked.
‘For amusement. It’s more fun this way.’
Siiri thought it was scandalous, disrupting traffic like that. She was ashamed, embarrassed and upset. No doubt she would be getting a bill for this joyride. What a waste of money.