The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘damn
it’, and Irma’s mother heard it and was horrified, because she thought a son-in-law of hers should have just said ‘hell’.
    ‘But I don’t think so. Hell is just as strong a word as damn,’ she said, which was how she always ended the story.
    They started a new game, at the Ambassador’s request. Irma shuffled and dealt the cards. The Ambassador was upset because Reino’s outburst had cost him a good hand.

Chapter 5
    After she heard about Tero’s death, Siiri stopped going to the cafeteria to eat. At her age she didn’t need much food as long as she remembered to drink something
other than red wine. The supermarket was selling liver casseroles that were nearing their sell-by date for 30 per cent off. Siiri always paid for her purchases in cash because she didn’t
trust the machines at the supermarket. She preferred getting cash ‘from the wall’. It was easier. She had a trick for remembering her PIN: 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.
    Irma could never remember her number. ‘Should I punch in zero six six eight?’ she asked as she and Siiri brought a liver casserole up to the counter at Low Price Market on the high
street and the cashier put her card into the little machine.
    ‘It’s asking for your PIN,’ the cashier said, but that didn’t help.
    ‘Is my PIN zero six six eight? Or is that my state identity number?’
    ‘You don’t need your state ID number,’ the young woman said, glancing at the queue forming behind them.
    ‘I don’t even know what my state ID number is,’ Irma said nervously. ‘Maybe I should just put in zero six six eight. I think my state identity number ends in one three
two H, but this machine doesn’t have any letters on the keys, or maybe I’m just not seeing it because I—’
    ‘You don’t need any letters,’ the cashier interrupted.
    The machine didn’t accept 0668. The people in the queue shook their heads and craned their necks, trying to see how long this was going to take. Siiri took Irma’s wallet and found a
piece of paper in it with ‘7245’ written in large numbers.
    ‘There it is!’ Irma said, as if it were a friend she hadn’t seen in years. She remembered why it was written so large, too. ‘So I can see it without my glasses, you know.
But what the heck is zero six six eight, then?’
    They would never know, unless some day they did, as Irma always said. They took the liver casserole and went back to Irma’s apartment to eat lunch and get ready for Tero’s
funeral.
    Irma’s plan for a large autumn outing was coming true; even the new couple in A wing had announced that they would be attending the funeral. Irma and Anna-Liisa were so nervous that
they’d ordered a bag of tranquillizers from the health clinic. The newest on their ever-changing roster of ‘personal physicians’ had been a foreigner this time, with an African
name that didn’t tell them whether he was a man or a woman.
    ‘Do you play basketball?’ Anna-Liisa asked the physician in her resonant, crisply articulated voice, but he didn’t know what she meant. Irma silenced her and hastened to
explain why they had come, and Anna-Liisa continued to interrupt whenever she felt a need to correct her.
    ‘. . . and this boy, Pasi, has been our cook for at least ten years, so I’m sure you understand what the loss means to us—’
    ‘The cook’s name was Tero. And he can’t have been at Sunset Grove for ten years, Irma. Even we haven’t been there that long.’
    ‘You see how upset we all are?’ Irma exclaimed. The doctor, clearly keen to get rid of them, wrote out two prescriptions and asked them to come separately on their next visit.
    Siiri didn’t intend to touch Irma’s and Anna-Liisa’s pills, not even at the funeral, although she was mourning Tero’s death even more than she had