Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  ‘Behind the bushes near the laundry.’

  ‘Correct. What did you find there?’

  ‘Footprints.’

  ‘Exactly. Remember that it had recently rained, but had dried up later. The footprints were saved in the sparsely-covered area behind the bushes. And over a period of four hours you get a lot of prints.’

  ‘Four hours?’

  ‘Well, maybe three. For, after the son-in-law has waited for a couple of minutes and sticks his nose out, what happens?’

  ‘Blom installs himself by the backyard lookout!’

  ‘That’s precisely what he does, and the murderer realises he can’t get inside without being seen. Neither can he use the front entrance, for in that case Blom would hear the doorbell. Nilsson, who understands what has happened, shows himself at the window. He spots the son-in-law behind the hedge, but he can’t do anything except point at the illuminated window in the floor below. After that he keeps himself awake and waits. The son-in-law is forced to remain in his hiding-place whether he wants to or not. He has plenty of time to go over his plan during the three hour wait, and the details he was unsure about at ten o’clock are fully worked out by midnight. Eventually Blom goes to bed, so Nilsson can let the son-in-law in and be murdered.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘They used to call it a “blunt instrument,” perhaps a Chianti bottle wrapped in a towel to avoid breaking the victim’s skin.’

  ‘And then the perpetrator locks the door and jumps through the window?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s impossible!’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘To begin with, it’s too high up.’

  ‘How high?’

  ‘Good grief, do we have to go through that again?’

  The doctor took out his notebook and drew a triangle.

  ‘Here we have the height,’ he said, ‘three and a half metres, as you have stated. Here is the base, the rose bed, two metres. Finally the third side that will be, let me see now: the square of the hypotenuse, according to Pythagoras’ theorem....’

  He scribbled down some numbers.

  ‘The length of the jump would be four metres.’

  ‘That’s not much. The only problem is the take-off. He has to land two metres away from the house so as to avoid the roses. But that’s easy for a fit man in … his thirties, or whatever.’

  ‘Then he would end up on the gravel with a great deal of noise, waking Blom, who’s sleeping within earshot. Furthermore, he might sprain his ankle.’

  ‘Not if he throws out something soft to land on! Some spare blankets from the store, for example.’

  ‘What store?’

  ‘The boarding-house store on the first floor, where Blom keeps beds, mattresses and blankets. The murderer could move about freely and undisturbed at that time.

  ‘But what he takes will be missed whenever Blom or anyone.…’

  ‘No, the son-in-law puts them back in the closet when he goes back inside again.’

  ‘Goes back inside … are you serious?’

  Now it was my turn to object. I tried my best, but had as little success as the doctor.

  ‘Yes, wait a minute and I’ll tell you. Do we agree on the jump?’

  ‘No, far from it.’

  My reply was vocally supported by Efraim.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The jump was impossible for the simple reason there was nowhere to take off from.’

  ‘Don’t forget the window-sill. It was covered by a smooth and clean cloth, which would first have to be pushed aside before the jump— otherwise there would be dirt on it. Remember that he had been standing in damp soil for three hours.’

  ‘He could have moved the cloth a few decimetres, in order to make room for his feet on the support.’

  ‘Did the police find the cloth displaced and….’

  ‘No. It was stretched out. The murderer went back into the house again and put it in order.’

  When Carl uttered those words, my mind went totally blank again, but not so blank that I couldn’t pull myself together and ask two vital questions:

  ‘How could he get inside through the rear door, and how could he enter the room he had locked from the inside before jumping out? That’s what I would very much like to know.’

  ‘Me too,’ echoed the doctor.

  ‘The back door was no problem. He had left it unlocked when he was let in a short while earlier. The other matter is rather tricky. Here we go: the window was still open after his jump and one of the rooms next to his was empty, right?’

  ‘Hell no! The schoolmistresses occupied numbers 4 and 6! Besides, which room are you talking about?’

  ‘Either the one to the right or the one to the left of Nilsson’s.’

  ‘The same thing. None of them was accessible.’

  ‘Yes, but the son-in-law didn’t know that.’

  ‘So what? All the same, the murderer couldn’t use any of them!’

  Carl offered us a smile of combined pride and modesty.

  ‘Johan and Efraim, dear friends, do you remember that Nilsson had asked Blom when the schoolmistresses would leave? He wanted to know it because he was constantly being disturbed when they carried on reading aloud during the night. When he complained, he was told that they would be leaving on Saturday afternoon. That was what he had wanted to know, for next evening he wished to speak undisturbed with the son-in-law. The poor insulation of the walls troubled him. However, the answer was reassuring, for it was not likely that many new guests would arrive during the seasonal lull. He knew the chambermaid worked weekday mornings, so he calculated that the schoolmistresses’ rooms would still be empty when his meeting with the son-in-law was to take place. (That is, assuming they left as they had promised, nota bene.) So Nilsson knew that the rooms on both sides would in all likelihood be empty, and that was what he had told his visitor, for whom the information was a prerequisite for the locked room set-up.’

  ‘But the rooms weren’t empty, so his plan should have come to naught.’

  ‘Yes. Just imagine his disappointment when he was lurking in the dark garden and saw the two ladies entering the house round about eleven o’clock and, shortly thereafter, lights in the rooms on either side of Nilsson’s!’

  ‘So why didn’t he abandon his plan?’

  ‘Maybe he did think of it at first, but he couldn’t give up his visit to room 5 because of Nilsson’s threat. However, once he was inside, he must have learnt something which told him that one of the rooms was indeed empty. When he rebuked his presumed murder victim for the false information about the neighbours, he learned that one of them was down with the flu. Because of that, she as well as her friend had decided to stay an extra night at the hotel. Towards the evening she had felt better and had even dared to go to the cinema, trusting the ladies’ lavatory. Perhaps also Nilsson and his guest heard sounds of wailing or even vomiting from one of the adjacent rooms—proving that the patient had got worse—and the voice of her colleague promising not to leave her alone. Women have a tendency to become distraught in cases like this, don’t they, Efraim?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I remembered my own flu in 1958. Both the chief physician and the nurse Astrid on that occasion had had reason to admire my physique and powers of resistance.

  ‘Well, one of the schoolmistresses’ rooms was empty and the murderer entered it.’

  ‘How?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘With the key that the Good Samaritan had dutifully hung up on the hook outside her door, when she’d left the room to stay with her friend. During my own visit to the hotel.…’

  All of a sudden I realized that the one who had gone in and out through the back door during my stay in the garden must have been Carl, and I now demanded an explanation.

  ‘You obviously wanted to check that there was an easily accessible store at the hotel during your intrusion tonight, but how did you avoid Blom’s watch?’

  ‘You sneaked in through th
e back door, of course, after enticing him to the front by using the night bell. Blom must have thought that some joker had passed by and pulled his leg. Nevertheless, I heard the females cackling upstairs in room 4. The sick woman was obviously still sick. I could hear them quite clearly, so our supposition that Johanson must have been within close enough earshot in order to identify The Saga of Gösta Berling seems to be plausible.’

  ‘Couldn’t the son-in-law have acted in a similar way when he was about to sneak into the house?’

  ‘I think that the idea may have struck him after a while, but if he went to the front door for that purpose, he would have noticed a sign saying guests were referred to the garden door and been discouraged by it.’

  All three of us looked at the clock, which now showed a quarter past two.

  ‘So the murderer went into the hotel twice in the middle of the night,’ Carl resumed. ‘The second time was without Nilsson’s help. He put the blankets back into the store, entered the empty room 6 and opened the window. After that it was easy for him to put out a two metres long object with a hook at one end and, with the help of this device, reach the cloth on the sill of the murdered man’s room and draw it back to its original position.’

  Carl paid no attention to our loud protests. Instead he waved his arms, raised his voice and concluded his speech.

  ‘Then he closed Nilsson’s window with the same object he had used to restore order to his take-off point in the crime scene. The distance from the wall to the window in both rooms is half a metre, and the whole window is one and a half metres wide altogether. The object was exactly two metres long and the outstretched arm added some seventy-five centimetres, which was longer than needed. After that, he only had to close the window through which he had performed his simple manipulation, lock the door, hang the key back up on the hook and go home to sleep. He had locked the back door from the inside, unlike me when I took the same way one hour ago. Finally, he probably left the house by jumping out of a window in the ground floor, where several rooms can be used for that purpose, the kitchen and the breakfast parlour, among others. The police certainly didn’t check any of them for indications of foul play.’

  During Carl’s explanation, the doctor had slowly risen to his feet and was now standing with his legs wide apart and his hands ominously on his hips. The last part of the summary had been performed at a furious pace. It was as if Carl had been afraid of being interrupted before he’d finished it.

  ‘What bloody object is two metres long and hooked on one end?’

  ‘Did I say that? Sorry, that was wrong.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘It was formed like a hook on both ends.’

  ‘And is easily accessible to anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then show us yours.’

  ‘I haven’t got one on me. But, on the other hand, I do have several at home.’

  Carl stared innocently out of the window and up towards the star-studded sky as if seeking appreciation from higher and more powerful authorities.

  ‘Johan has lots of them, I suspect.’

  ‘He has at least one.’

  ‘Two metres long?’

  ‘A folding ruler,’ I tried, forgetting in my haste that such an object is rarely supplied with hooks at any end.

  ‘Efraim,’ said Carl, ‘can you please tell me if the blinds are down, here in Johan’s living room?’

  ‘No, they aren’t. In fact, there aren’t any blinds, only ordinary curtains.’

  ‘Exactly. They are attached to rods of the same kind many people have. Each is two metres long and supplied with hooks at both ends.’

  The doctor asked for a glass of milk. I heated it in the kitchen.

  8

  Our meeting came to an end well after two o'clock this morning. We experienced a powerful sense of kinship when we said goodbye. Carl was pale and could hardly keep his eyes open. While the taxi I had called waited outside, swallowing one crown after another, I helped him to put on his overcoat. He almost stumbled down the stairs after we shook hands for the last time.

  The doctor preferred to walk home. He said that the fresh air would be good for him and help clear his head. Otherwise he might not be able to sleep with all the thoughts ticking over in his mind. We wished each other goodnight and he closed the door behind him.

  At this time the murderer would be sleeping peacefully somewhere in town, unaware that we had identified him and that capturing him was now a mere formality.

  It’s difficult to say why I used the door-chain on this particular night. While I was emptying the ashtray I heard the doorbell ring.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked through the door and opened the flap of the letterbox, but even though I stooped down and peered through the slot I couldn’t see anything in the darkness outside.

  ‘It’s just me,’ I heard the doctor say.

  He had forgotten his spectacles. I handed them to him and was once again alone.

  My sleep was troubled, even though I’d had two glasses of milk before I went to bed. I dreamt that I was hiding behind a rose bush. The flowers smelt like red wine and I fanned myself with a cloth! All of a sudden I was holding a radio antenna in my hand and playing on a xylophone hanging from some branches. Keys of different sizes were fastened to a curtain rod. It was a very strange dream and it scared me quite a bit.

  Oddly enough, I was awake and alert at eight o’clock and seated at my desk shortly thereafter, having enjoyed a breakfast consisting of sour milk, two cups of coffee and a cheese sandwich.

  My friends, who most possibly were resting during the day, had not said anything about when my report was due. As soon as I started to write, a string of essential questions crossed my mind, but I didn’t feel like calling the doctor or Carl.

  For example, we had not asked ourselves if any of the parties involved happened to be right-handed or not, a rather serious oversight. It’s surprising how many people, especially murderers, are left-handed in mystery novels.

  Neither had we discussed an important aspect of most murder cases—the condition of the victim’s watch. How often has a murderer been unlucky enough to have aimed a staggering blow towards his adversary and smashed his wrist-watch at the same time as his temporal bone, thus establishing the time of death?

  And were there any fingerprints on the glasses in the murder room?

  Were there, perhaps, textile fragments under the corpse’s nails which would, after further analysis, turn out to originate from a cheviot suit bought at Molander’s haberdashery on Drottningatan?

  And did Nilsson, at the moment of death, while summoning all his last physical strength, succeed in writing some secret message on the piece of linoleum with a finger dipped in red wine, thereby exposing the perpetrator—as so many dying individuals have done before him in the literature?

  Soon my fingers began to dance speedily across the keyboard. In the 1930’s, I attended a course in typewriting at the Workers’ Educational Association, in order to be able to use all ten fingers when typing, and I still make a considerable amount of strokes per minute.

  After a short break in the afternoon and dinner at six o’clock—Falu sausage with fried potatoes and a glass of milk—I have at last reached the end of my report.

  I shall shortly post it to Detective Sergeant Gunnar Bergman, Polishuset, Rådhustorget 9, as agreed. We’re convinced that our conclusions will considerably shorten his investigatory work.

  A copy of my elaborate notations is meant to be saved for our little club and attached to the blue file. Maybe we’ll have to buy a new one for the coming year. I’ll bring the question up, together with the question of my expenses for stamps, typing-paper and a fresh ribbon, on our next gathering, which takes place at the doctor’s home.

  I don’t know which mystery novel he will select. I’m very much looking forward to the event.

  PART TWO

  Town Hall Square, Friday, October 31

  1

  My wife Kersti
n insists that I have an even temperament. In fact, I am always in a bad mood. On Saturday evening I could hardly contain myself when I saw Pelle Ramsten calmly staring at her cards, whereupon she abruptly decided to serve the sandwiches, even though we’d all agreed beforehand not to eat before the German mini-series Babeck was on TV. I’d just about calmed down when the children started squealing. First they wanted to go to the toilet, then they said they were thirsty. And every time they got up they made a point of running into the living room, when they were supposed to use the hallway. It was when my daughter Lillan took it into her head to sing a silly song about a chimney-sweep that I decided I’d had enough and carted her and her brother up to their beds. Needless to say, they immediately started caterwauling and I had to send Kerstin up to calm them down.

  After everyone had finished watching television and we were desperately wanting to call it a night, those annoying Ramstens decided they wanted another round of cards. Kerstin, however, was thankfully unable to find the pack. When Pelle announced he was thirsty I put a glass of sparkling lemonade on the table, but when Kerstin didn’t feel very well and almost vomited, he pointed out that whisky was the best thing to have under the circumstances. After a while it finally dawned on the dimwitted Inga-Lill that it was time for them to go. By that time Kerstin was in such a bad condition that I almost had to carry her upstairs.

  In the morning she couldn’t get out of bed. By eight o’clock, the children had already started clamouring. The boy had reopened a wound and it had to be bandaged again. Usually he wants to become some kind of missionary when he grows up, tending to the Negroes in Africa, but just this morning he’d decided he should become a high pole artist instead, using the floor mop for training purposes. He’d probably seen some nonsense on a children’s TV programme the day before. So I had to go upstairs to look for a plaster in the bathroom cabinet and stepped into a pool on the glazed tile floor. It was from Lillan’s potty, which had been overturned. We’d taught her to sit on the toilet like ordinary people, but she hadn’t done so because her brother had forgotten to flush.