Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  There was no way to go back to bed after all this, so I gave the children cornflakes and read to them about Mister Hedgehog and his cheerless family. When we called their paternal grandmother and told her that we couldn’t come over for dinner because Kerstin was sick, granny was sad but she promised to come over with bilberry soup for the patient so that the rest of us could go on a picnic or something.

  Kerstin tried to get up to clean the children’s room, but I packed her back to bed and Lillan played nurse. The boy disappeared into the garden on some secret assignment. It was good to get rid of him.

  It was in the middle of all this mess when that idiot Blom called.

  Our town is full of idiots. In fact, it’s amazing that so many have succeeded in congregating in one small Swedish town. But after a week filled with insanity, stupidity and incompetence, the question is whether the biggest idiot of all isn’t your humble servant, Gunnar Bergman.

  So it was that, at five minutes to eleven, I flung myself into the car and headed for Sandstensgatan and The Little Boarding-House. Kerstin was still tucked up in bed and the children had promised to behave until their granny arrived. I’d promised to take care of the washing up later, if nobody else volunteered. Granny, for example.

  All the guests made difficulties of course, but Blom was, as expected, the worst one. He had the nerve to tell me he had to go to a handball match and I had to explain to him that it was suspended, at least as far as he was concerned. We’ve had our eye on him for quite a while and now I intended to show him who was the boss. Once it dawned on him that I was serious he shut up—luckily for him, otherwise I would have set Ivehed on him. By the time the reinforcements from the station arrived and some kind of order was restored, it was already after one o’clock. How time flies.

  I posted Melin to keep strict watch on the first floor and Gustavsson in the reception area. He’d already called for a photographer, but he’d had all kinds of trouble convincing a Danish doctor at the hospital that we had a corpse on our hands. After clearing up some language difficulties, it dawned on him that we were talking about murder and not someone’s mother, whereupon he agreed to store the stiff in his refrigerator and we finally called an ambulance.

  By the time I got home, the children had been waiting for me in their outdoor clothes for an hour. Kerstin had been up vomiting again and my mother refused to leave her. The new district medical officer was on a sick-call and Nylander didn’t answer the phone at home or at the surgery. Even if we’d reached him he would probably have told us to pick stinging nettles for a soup. I was relieved when granny sent us packing. She said we were in the way and Kerstin seemed to agree.

  At the playground by Rådhustorget square the children started to argue over one particular swing although they had three others to choose from. Then I dragged them along Drottninggatan to the book shop. As we stood in front of the window, I had to explain for the hundredth time that their paternal grandfather was old and could no longer work. They immediately assumed he was about to die. Without thinking about Axel Nilsson, I said “nobody dies here,” which started Lillan crying, whereupon the boy demanded we immediately drive to grandfather’s place and check that he hadn’t caught cold. Needless to say, I drove them there and grandfather was somewhat surprised when the children climbed on him and touched him to check his temperature. We sent both of them out into the garden.

  The old man was reading one of his eternal mystery novels. He almost seemed to be vexed by our visit, so I left him alone for a while. I had not eaten and was wolfing down an old piece of pie I’d found in the refrigerator when granny called to say they’d been trying to reach me at home several times. It didn’t seem to be urgent. Then grandfather came over and asked what it was all about and it was then that I proved my foolishness.

  He listened with great interest and asked several questions which per se were not too bad. And I unsuspectingly kept talking. Now, I did know about the Sunday meetings with him and his friends, but I still thought it was safe to have a few words with my own father in private. Private, indeed!

  Anyway, he pumped me dry in less than an hour. He became very excited, too. It was almost as if I needed to ask the children to check his temperature once again.

  I managed to drop in at home before I returned to The Little Boarding-House. Kerstin was feeling better and seemed to have caught some sleep while grandmother was preparing the food. The ironing-board happened to be open and the flat-iron was warm. Kerstin was in bed reading Femina magazine. The children were given their Sunday sweets for good behaviour and grandmother promised to read to them about Mister Hedgehog at bedtime. I frankly didn’t care what happened to that tiresome character, but the boy promised to wake me up early the next morning before I went to work to let me know.

  It wasn’t until around midnight that I discovered who the biggest idiot in town really was. We were in the process of discussing the situation in the boarding-house dining room and, since it was very late, we were not expecting to be disturbed. Well, there was always the press of course, but the reporters had probably gone to cover the handball match earlier that afternoon.

  Blom came running in. He said that there had been an anonymous phone call. Someone had wanted to know who had been the occupant of room number 5. I rushed to the telephone upstairs and tried to get the call tracked. The female operator wanted us to wait until eight o’clock in the morning because she had to call the telegraph director and so on. It took me ten minutes of arguing before I finally got the number. Gustavsson kept his side of the line open all the time.

  From which number had the call been made? Believe me, it was the last one I had expected. The one in my father’s—Carl Bergman’s—house. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the three old boys were seriously at it. I became very upset. They didn’t even know the name of the murdered man. Kerstin and I used to joke about their little mystery club. She calls them the Three Wise Men. For my father to have spilled the beans was bad enough, but if we weren’t going to be able to work without interference, I was going to have to give them all a piece of my mind. Especially Lundgren, Lord Peter Volatile, as Kerstin calls him.

  I dialled Kerstin and asked her to call grandfather and tell the whole pensioners’ meeting to go to blazes. I explained the incident as vaguely as possible to the others waiting patiently in the dining room, but I really felt embarrassed. And my troubles had only just begun.

  We had to be thankful for being left in peace all the way to one o’clock, when we were able to get some pilsner beer and sandwiches. They were ordered from the station. Vivianne at the switch board fixed it in no time at all. We preferred that to anything that Blom could serve us; his rubbish is not for me.

  As we were sitting there, Gustavsson thought he heard someone sneaking past on the gravel outside. He went out and was soon back with a small, pitiful figure, who was trembling all over but trying to appear natural. Johan Lundgren, of course.

  ‘I found him in the garden,’ Gustavsson reported. ‘He was creeping about in the bushes. Take care, he has a flashlight and it’s loaded!’

  ‘You were looking for angling-worms, of course?’ I asked Lundgren.

  He remained silent, so I was mercifully spared the sound of his voice. It has a whining, querulous quality which indicates that—centuries ago—he must have been brought up in the western part of Mälardalen, perhaps in Eskilstuna or Örebro.

  ‘Have you been with a girl and now you can’t find your way home? Well, what’s it all about?’

  He looked offended but preferred to smile in embarrassment. It was really laughable.

  ‘We haven’t got the whole night. Say something, Lundgren!’

  As luck would have it, he was paralysed with surprise and fear and couldn’t speak. It would have looked bad if he had begun to babble about the doctor, and above all about my old man, so I asked the others to leave us alone for a moment, while I grilled him.

  ‘OK, Lundgren, I understand what you’ve been up to. However, w
e don’t want any assistance from you or your geriatric friends. Get that into your head and clear out!’

  He stammered something which sounded like thanks and raised his hat. I should have knocked him about really hard, considering all his stupid visits to the station. He has pestered us about his old rusty bike for years. Some discerning person cut the tyres to pieces several years ago. We regarded it as striking a blow for road safety, but Lundgren saw it as the greatest crime of the century, even worse than the Public Road Association’s attack on his cousin. I’ve forgotten the man’s name. It seems that one winter they failed to grit Åbrogatan and the cousin fell and sprained his ankle. Lundgren reported the matter to the office of the Public Prosecutor and got some senile old people in his building to sign it. He’s not quite right in the head, believe me. And then you have his interest in detective stories! He reads everything he can get hold of, just like my old man. Once I bumped into Lundgren outside the library and, before I was able to escape, he had pressed me into a corner and told me that tedious joke about the fellow who borrowed the phone directory at the library. I couldn’t even raise a weak smile.

  Personally, I don’t mind reading a book or two on vacation or during a long train ride or suchlike, but it doesn’t mean that I wax lyrical when a murder occurs. I have my work and when I’m free I play with the children or read the newspaper Expressen while Kerstin prepares dinner. What else I do in my spare time is my business.

  Be that as it may, I got rid of Lundgren, but I felt bad when the lads asked me what it had all been about. I can’t remember what I came up with.

  Everyone except Melin was permitted to go home and turn in. Kerstin woke up when I sneaked into the bedroom. We talked for a while in the darkness. I told her everything, with the exception of the old men’s contribution. I had to put it out of my mind, otherwise I’d have become excited and then it would’ve been impossible to sleep.

  The next time I heard from The Three Wise Men was on the following Tuesday. I got a big envelope in the mail containing some kind of report. I had no time to read the tripe, for we were in the midst of the investigation, so I took it home with me to the hornet’s nest. That day, Lillan and the boy were arguing about whom granny liked best and Kerstin had unplugged the phone so that they couldn’t call and ask her. Luckily enough they didn’t know her number, but they had nevertheless started dialling at random and had reached three destinations. None of those answering seemed to appreciate the calls, according to the boy.

  I forgot the document on the hat rack, and it was not until Kerstin was bathing the children that I found it again. At first I thought of throwing the whole report in the wastebasket, but then I thought better of it and began to read. My Leica camera, which I had looked for the day before, was also up there.

  Kerstin came in and asked what I was laughing at. She read a few lines over my shoulder and didn’t understand a word. I asked her to put the children to bed as fast as possible, and when that was done an hour later we read aloud to each other. We have never had so much fun. In the midst of it all the telephone rang. Kerstin picked up. ‘It’s your father!’

  She left the room discreetly while I answered. My old man sounded innocent but the eagerness in his voice was not to be mistaken.

  ‘Did you receive anything special in the post today?’

  ‘Yes, I’m reading it at this very moment.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, there’s quite a lot. It’s … interesting.’

  Of course, I didn’t want to disappoint the poor man. The situation was awkward enough as it was. In the end I said something about the children. He promised to call back later and I said that we would probably be going to bed very soon. I don’t know how we got through it. I thought it was the worst nonsense I had ever read. Kerstin, who had kept herself up to speed about the real investigation, agreed that the whole thing was highly speculative, but in a way she appreciated the old men’s efforts.

  Personally I thought that the report proved their brains had become addled, but I had to admit that certain details were accurate, such as some of the street addresses and the weather conditions.

  She thought that I was being unfair since they’d only had the facts that were known as of Sunday afternoon to work on. The next day she planned to take the papers to school and read them once more when she had a gap between lessons. I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that Kerstin teaches twenty hours of English and Swedish at the intermediate level. The children have a child minder, costing fifteen crowns per hour, and they keep her busy. The money is well earned—she is already a shadow of her former self.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Kerstin how far from the truth the old men were. It’s embarrassing. Not only was the jump from the window impossible, with or without a trampoline, but the hooks for the curtain rods were held in place with rusty nails and had not been taken down for years. Åhlund’s son-in-law, whom we interviewed, had been down with the flu the whole weekend with a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius. In other words, a cast-iron alibi.

  I’ll skip the rest of the details, but we did indeed find a note in Nilsson’s wallet with Åhlund’s telephone number, so there was a connection. But the number has not answered for a whole week. As for the son-in-law, Rose-Marie’s husband, his name is Göran Eriksson. Apart from a few parking fines and one speeding offence, we have nothing on him.

  When we went to bed that night, Kerstin was looking thoughtful. She probably pities my old man. I wondered what I would say if he called again. Maybe I’d say we’d had some tip-offs but that we’d had to scrub the idea of a murderer. Indeed, by then we already knew who had been in the room. The fact that the confession had not come until Thursday, yesterday, was beside the point.

  By the time he was caught, I had actually become tired of the whole case. The last interrogation had been hard on all concerned, even though nothing sensational had emerged. Besides, I was furious at everyone involved.

  I was angry at Gustavsson for volunteering a warning conversation with that damned milksop Blom which had ended with a punch on the nose, which was not very polite; at the newspaper journalist Mårtenson, who wanted to use a picture of me on the first page of the Friday edition; and at the post mortem examiner, who couldn’t cough up his report in time; and at Big Boss Bengtsson for having had the gall to choose this very week for sick leave.

  But there’s no point in getting upset over cretins in this town. They’re in the majority here.

  If I hadn’t been one myself, I’d have called it a day after my lower certificate examination and started behind the bookseller counter. Then I could have stood there for fifty years, selling a lot of pretentious trash, weekly magazines and other bumf. And if I’d had enough money, I would have bought a croft far away and moved there with Kerstin and the children. At least with … no, the children too.

  I don’t know where I got the idea of joining the police from. I mean, what kind of profession is it, when all’s said and done? Most of the day is spent typewriting or trying to find something to typewrite. Down at the station, old hags complain about being robbed of half-rotten bananas, alcoholics wander in and out, and there are still a few imbeciles who haven’t grasped the principle of driving on the right. I take the opportunity for the last time to remind everyone that Stationsgatan has been a one way street since January 1, 1963. We even put up a sign about it.

  And in the midst of all the thieves, parking offenders, missing persons, runaway cats and riders without tail lamps on their mopeds, one has to put up with madmen like Lundgren. I was calmer when I was on patrol duty; at least I got fresh air. What’s more, it’s not possible to bring a typewriter along. I never found a pocket for that in my uniform.

  OK, it’s become better since I came over to the criminal investigation department this spring. We have a small and pitiable district and Bengtsson, our first criminal inspector, was in need of reinforcements. He’s on sick leave again because of his bronchitis and my colleague Sand
én has gone away. That’s how I became the chief all of a sudden and have a few boys from the department of law and order at my disposal.

  But this is not the same job as I thought it would be when I was a young lad. I thought there’d be shoulder belts and billy-clubs, ID-tags, brass knuckles and suchlike. I’d probably seen too many gangster movies.

  Instead there were parking fines in the daytime and Mister Hedgehog in the evenings.

  Anyway, all that’s behind me. When I got home yesterday evening –it was late and I was sour and grumpy—Kerstin wanted to know the result straight away. She uncorked a bottle of wine and had bought shrimps. I seemed to become more sociable after a while and we actually had quite a nice time together, until she finally dared to tell me that Inga-Lill had called and invited us to come over the following evening. We had ruined too many Saturday nights at their place, so I wondered if it was not a little bit too early after her bad sickness. She reminded me that she had been working since the day before yesterday, which left me without an argument. So I had to give it the green light and promised to call Pelle. That was fine, Kerstin said, for granny had already promised to take care of the children.

  I don’t know what prompted me to write all this. I suppose I wanted to get a true version of the facts down on paper. There’s a world of difference between the grim reality, as we call it, and the old men’s speculation. Their galloping imaginations played tricks on them.

  I haven’t looked at their document for a couple of days. That’s just as well. It’s good to be able to escape Lundgren’s drivel in this house.

  Vivianne at the switch board has promised to copy this out tomorrow, in spite of it being Saturday. She’s cute, but not to my taste. I prefer brunettes.