The Last Lullaby

by Carin Gerhardsen

  He walked over to the window with deliberately loud steps, so that she would hear him or at least sense that someone was approaching. But she still sat completely motionless.

  ‘Hi, Solveig,’ said Sjöberg, who could now see her face.

  She stared expressionlessly down at the grounds without responding to his greeting. He placed his hand on her shoulder to make his presence felt.

  ‘My name is Conny Sjöberg and I work with your husband.’

  No reaction.

  ‘Einar,’ said Sjöberg. ‘Einar and I work together in the police.’

  Her expression showed no sign that she heard him or understood what he was saying. The beautiful young woman in the bridal photo was unrecognizable in the bent, skinny creature he now saw before him. Her hair was chalk white and cut short and not a hint of life was visible in her eyes. Sjöberg asked himself what could have happened to her. Had she been sitting like this since the mid-seventies? A shiver passed through his body when he thought about Einar, who had taken the trouble to drive here and sit with her every Saturday for so many years. What did he do? Did he talk to her? Did he sit with her on the sofa and put his arm around her and tell her about his week?

  Suddenly it occurred to Sjöberg what a great human being Einar must be. So loyal. ‘For better or for worse’ was something Einar Eriksson obviously took with the utmost seriousness. He had not bought the townhouse with the intention of living there himself, but in the hope that Solveig would recover her health so that they could live there together. No one could criticize him for getting involved with another woman in the past two years. Personally Sjöberg would have given up much sooner. But Einar had still not abandoned the woman he had once married, not even since he’d met Catherine Larsson. Sjöberg took Solveig Eriksson’s hand.

  ‘Solveig,’ he said, ‘can you show me that you hear what I’m saying? Just move your fingers a little. I know Einar, Solveig. Einar.’

  The limp fingers in his hand did not move and her gaze was still directed towards something indeterminate outside the window.

  ‘Do you think Einar is capable of murder, Solveig? Could Einar murder two small children?’

  Still no reaction. If she had heard him, registered what he said, wouldn’t she at least have become a little curious? He asked himself how she would react if he struck her, gave her a slap. But that was not a method he intended to try. Instead he tried to seem threatening. Threats and bribes were well-proven methods where children were concerned, but in this case he felt doubtful of success. He let go of her hand and noticed how it landed limply on the blanket on her lap.

  ‘Einar is gone, Solveig. He has disappeared. If you don’t help me, perhaps he will never come to visit you again.’

  But Solveig Eriksson simply stared vacantly ahead of her, so Sjöberg gave up at last and left her.

  When he came back down to reception the woman behind the counter window was no longer there. He knocked on the window and a man in his thirties came out from a back room.

  ‘I would like to speak to someone who knows Solveig Eriksson,’ said Sjöberg.

  ‘We all do,’ the man said with a smile.

  ‘Preferably someone who already worked here when she first came. Let’s say the one who has worked at Solberga the longest.’

  ‘Then, let’s see, that must be Ann-Britt. I’ll call her. Who shall I say is looking for her?’

  ‘Conny Sjöberg. I’m a chief inspector at the Violent Crimes Unit in Stockholm,’ he added, and the nurse raised his eyebrows in curiosity before he picked up the phone.

  After a couple of tries he got a bite. He showed Sjöberg to the seating area and suggested that he should wait there until Ann-Britt showed up.

  ‘It may take a while. She’s busy with one of the residents right now, but she will come as soon as she’s finished.’

  Sjöberg sat down on a rather annoyingly hard waiting-room chair and, incongruously enough, browsed through an interior-decorating magazine while he waited. After ten minutes the man in reception showed up again with a glass of orange juice, which he set in front of Sjöberg.

  ‘It’s dragged on, I’m afraid,’ he apologized. ‘Ann-Britt is coming as soon as she can.’

  Sjöberg smiled gratefully at the nurse, who left an aroma of soap behind him in the waiting room. He happened to think of Margit. Uncalled-for solicitude. Pleasant. Pleasure. Soft sound of feet in sensible shoes. But then: long corridors, stretchers, disinfectant and shiny silver bedpans. From nowhere suddenly he was imagining himself on an operating table. With Margit’s face looming over him, her eyes inspecting him, her mouth covered. He was helpless and dependent; she had stainless-steel instruments and her hands were in gloves. Sterile. Threatening.

  The image was so unexpected, so overwhelming that he was trembling as he reached for the glass. Terrified as he was, he noted that his subconscious was doing its part to take the life out of that … affair. That woman.

  After another twenty minutes and another two home-decor magazines, Ann-Britt Berg finally appeared. She turned out to be the woman he had spoken to on reception when he arrived. She looked to be in her sixties, so she could conceivably have been an employee when Solveig Eriksson first came here.

  ‘Ann-Britt Berg,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘I’m sorry I took so long. I was helping a colleague shower a resident who’s a little troublesome, so you can’t do the job alone.’

  Sjöberg responded to her greeting and introduced himself as well.

  ‘I’ve never seen you here before. Are you a relative of Solveig?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘No, I’m here on duty. I need to speak to someone who has known Solveig a long time and I understand that you’ve been here for a while. Were you by any chance already here when she was admitted?’

  ‘We don’t usually put it that way,’ Ann-Britt Berg said with a smile. ‘We see it as a residence rather than a hospital. Solveig is not even bedridden, for that matter. But yes, I’ve worked here since 1972, for almost thirty-six years.’

  ‘What is wrong with her?’

  ‘That I’m afraid I cannot answer. It’s confidential.’

  ‘How about if I put it like this,’ Sjöberg attempted. ‘I have visited her and I could see more or less what is wrong with her. She seems catatonic, so I would guess at post-traumatic stress or something similar. Was she like that already when she came here or has that happened since?’

  ‘You must understand,’ she said imploringly, ‘we really are not allowed to talk about our residents with anyone other than family. I can be reprimanded if I say too much. Even reported to the police.’

  Sjöberg put on his most authoritative police face and continued in a very friendly but firm manner.

  ‘Now it happens to be the case that her only relative, her husband, Einar, has been missing for the past five days. I am investigating his disappearance and I imagine that it is in Solveig’s interest that we find him. For that reason I need answers to certain questions.’

  ‘But Solveig has no information to give. She doesn’t talk to anyone, not even to Einar, although he sits with her every Saturday.’

  ‘That’s why I’m asking you. You can just nod or shake your head, can’t you, so no one can blame you for having said too much?’

  She did not reply but looked at him with a worried expression.

  ‘Was she like this when she first came here?’ Sjöberg repeated.

  Ann-Britt Berg looked nervously around, but she nodded cautiously. Sjöberg felt relieved that, having had the bad luck to encounter three interviewees who were tongue-tied (including his mother), he might now get something useful out of the fourth. He cast a glance towards the counter window, but saw that it was closed and that no one could hear them right now.

  ‘Was that the reason she was admitted to Solberga?’ he continued.

  The nurse nodded again.

  ‘There is no other medical reason for her being here?’

  She shook her head, starting to look more relaxed now.


  ‘Does she have any other medical problems?’

  No.

  ‘Has her condition changed during the years she has been here?’

  No, it hadn’t.

  ‘Does she function physically? Can she walk?’

  Nod.

  ‘Does she manage her hygiene herself?’

  After some reflection, which Sjöberg put down to general human consideration rather than issues of medical confidentiality, he got a shake of the head in reply.

  ‘Does she eat on her own?’

  No.

  ‘Is this a question of post-traumatic stress?’

  She answered with a light shrug and looked carefully around before she dared to answer verbally.

  ‘Possibly. It’s hard to make any diagnosis in a case like this. Some doctors call it generalized mutism.’

  ‘And how does one get it? Is it contagious?’ Sjöberg asked jokingly to lighten the heavy atmosphere a little.

  Ann-Britt Berg smiled gratefully at him.

  ‘Of course it’s not, but presumably it is due to stress. Because you’ve been involved in something traumatic or because you are unhappy and close yourself off from your surroundings.’

  ‘So you can choose to be like this?’ said Sjöberg, deliberately provocative.

  ‘Well, you could say that, in a way, but primarily I guess it’s about not being able to cope with life.’

  ‘A kind of alternative to suicide?’

  ‘I feel that we’re out on pretty thin ice now,’ she said frankly. ‘I haven’t studied psychology. I’m just a nurse; you should probably speak to a doctor or psychologist about it.’

  ‘And in Solveig’s case?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What is the reason that Solveig Eriksson suffers from post-traumatic stress?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ the nurse replied. ‘I seem to recall that I asked Einar about it a long time ago, but I never got an answer. There were probably some staff who knew, but I was only a young whippersnapper back then and they didn’t tell me everything. But I remember that there was something hush-hush.’

  ‘What is Einar like? Do you know him?’

  ‘Of course I know Einar. He’s quiet, you could say. Very friendly. And he is quite fanatical about Solveig, never lets her down. Takes her out on long walks. He usually lets her walk the first stretch, for the exercise, then he pushes her in a wheelchair. I’ve heard him sit and talk to her in her room, and he never gets an answer. He does not get so much as a look and yet he still visits her after all these years.’

  ‘Do you know anything else about Einar?’ Sjöberg asked. ‘There at least you have no confidentiality rules to break,’ he added with a teasing wink.

  ‘Well, confidentiality applies equally to the relatives,’ Ann-Britt Berg replied. ‘But I don’t know much. I know he’s a policeman. He continued to live in Arboga for the first two or three years, but then he moved to Stockholm. Perhaps he came to realize that Solveig’s condition would not change, so I guess he made a fresh start. Job-wise, I mean.’

  ‘He didn’t have a new woman?’

  ‘I don’t know that, of course. As I said he’s not particularly talkative. But I do think he has seemed a little happier in the past few years.’

  ‘Really?’

  This was not something Sjöberg had noticed at work, but on the other hand Einar’s reputation as a sourpuss had long been solidly established, and he was presumably routinely treated as such. Which contributed to his remaining a sourpuss.

  ‘I have to admit that I happened to overhear something he said to Solveig on one occasion,’ Ann-Britt said, a little self-consciously. ‘He spoke with warmth about a woman and some small children. He took care of them when the woman was working, he said. Picked them up from preschool and played with them. He said that it was quite wonderful and I interpreted that as more than a normal friendship. But it would be a little strange of course if he were to describe his new family in lyrical terms to his wife. Even if she doesn’t care what he says. I probably misunderstood the whole thing.’

  Sjöberg reflected on this for a moment. Perhaps it was still his wife Einar turned to when he needed to talk, as he had once been in the habit of doing. The reserved Einar Eriksson aired everyday concerns and the joys of life to the woman who had once, long ago, chosen to share them with him. Was it because he believed she could hear him? Because she was a person who never could abuse his trust? To fill the silent room with the sound of his voice and formulate thoughts and feelings that otherwise would never be expressed? Or could it be because he believed she might react to this particular information? In that case had he expected a positive or negative reaction? Perhaps he wanted to hurt her. Presumably he just wanted to wake her from this eternal mental lethargy.

  ‘Does she have any other visitors?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘No, never. Her parents used to come, but they’re both dead, have been for many years. Now it’s only Einar who visits. What do you think could have happened to him?’

  ‘No idea,’ Sjöberg lied.

  He saw no reason to cast Einar in a bad light with the staff at Solberga. The fact that he was missing was enough.

  ‘So he left Solberga at about nine on Saturday evening?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Ann-Britt Berg replied. ‘He comes at nine and leaves at nine. Same thing every Saturday.’

  ‘Does he usually bring her things?’

  ‘Sometimes. The kind of thing she may have use for: new clothes when they’re needed.’

  ‘And last Saturday?’

  ‘Nothing last Saturday. I was the one who received him then.’

  ‘No farewell gift then. Nothing that suggested that he intended to go away,’ Sjöberg thought out loud.

  Nurse Ann-Britt shook her head with a worried expression. Sjöberg changed tack.

  ‘She doesn’t read? I didn’t see any books, newspapers or a TV in her room.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. Solveig is not interested in the outside world whatsoever. We have a TV in the residents’ lounge, and sometimes we sit her there, but she never looks at the TV. Instead she always has her gaze directed at something else in the room. She takes no notice of the other residents either, or the staff for that matter. She screens herself off from everything and everyone.’

  ‘That sounds like pure torture. She has never injured herself physically? Tried to kill herself?’

  ‘Nothing like that, but she does not show many human reactions in general, if I may say so. The ones who injure themselves usually do it to feel that they are alive. I have a feeling that Solveig … perhaps does not want to feel that she is alive.’

  ‘Yet she holds herself prisoner in her own body,’ Sjöberg continued his line of reasoning. ‘Refuses any type of enjoyment. Perhaps she thinks she deserves to die.’

  Ann-Britt Berg threw up her hands as if to show that she could not contribute anything else. Sjöberg could not think of anything further to ask and got up stiffly from the uncomfortable little chair.

  ‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,’ he said, extending his hand to the nurse.

  She responded to his farewell with a slightly embarrassed expression, but whether it was because she felt she had violated patient confidentiality or because she did not think she had anything substantial to offer he could not decide.

  He let her return to her duties, and with the dull thud of the heavy mansion door sounding in his ears he left Solveig Eriksson and her Solberga behind him.

  * * *

  His nose had become so accustomed that only now and then was he overwhelmed with disgust at himself and the miserable little figure he must cut, lying on the floor in the tool shed. Bound hand and foot, his trousers soaked and sticky after five days of imprisonment in an area considerably smaller than the shed itself, limited by the length of the rope that fettered his feet to the wall.

  There was not a part of his body that did not ache from the countless hours in unnatural po
sitions, the cold, the filth, his thirst and hunger. The water he managed to lap up from the awkwardly accessible bowl was not nearly enough to quench his thirst, and the crumbs he could get from the pieces of bread on the floor were far from sufficient to satisfy his stomach. For the first few days he had managed to hold back the more troublesome bodily functions. But on the third day he had had diarrhoea, and now he could not or no longer cared to try to control his bowels, he was not sure which.

  Two of his teeth had already been kicked out when he was first dumped in the little shed, though he had been unconscious when it happened. One eye was stuck shut with blood from a wound on his forehead, two fingers on one hand were broken and probably also a couple of ribs. Yet it was the biting cold that tormented him most, that made his body shake as he lay there, even though he tried to relax to save energy.

  He had given up hope long ago that any passer-by would hear him or get suspicious about the shed. The only hope he had – and it was not much; the ropes sat solid, as if moulded around his wrists – was that he would manage to loosen the knots enough to slip out of his bonds. That was the little straw he clutched at as he again started to work the rope, despite the intense pain these small movements caused him. He pulled and stretched, ten times, twenty … Twenty minutes later he still had not come back to the car. She must have wondered where he had got to, would not understand how it could take him so long at the cobbler’s, but perhaps she assumed there was a long queue or that he had met some acquaintance that out of politeness he could not rush away from without talking for a while first.

  Actually he had been one of only two customers in the shop, but the other – a very pregnant woman in her mid-thirties – had suddenly fainted, and he had sat on the floor with her head in his lap, giving out orders. First he got the shaken cobbler to call for an ambulance, then he managed to get him to bring towels and a jug of water. He dabbed water on the woman’s pale face and tried as far as possible to clean the wound she had got on the back of her head. All the while he tried to talk reassuringly to her and the semi-hysterical cobbler, whom he had stationed at the door to keep curious passers-by out of the shop.