Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  ‘You were in the hotel yesterday evening?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes. I should have been at a mess party, but I caught your damned flu and was confined to bed. Had to run to the loo a couple of times every hour. It was hell.’

  ‘Then you must have been in a position to notice things.’

  ‘So it may seem, but I had enough of my own problems.’

  ‘Did you hear any strange sounds?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mister Johanson maintains that you were unhappy yesterday.’

  ‘I’m never unhappy.’

  ‘He said that you were crying.’

  ‘I never cry, but I understand what you mean. There was somebody squealing and whining on and off between midnight and one thirty. I thought that it was that thin hag.’

  ‘Did Johanson visit your room during the night?’

  ‘Yes, he rushed in just when I’d finally been able to fall asleep. He was drunk as a lord and tumbled on to my bed with a bottle of brandy. He said that he felt alone. He had a lot of problems he wanted to tell me about. I told him to go to hell. It was two o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘How can you be so sure that the crying, or whatever it was, ended at exactly half past one?’

  ‘I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, so in order to kill time I counted the number of stitches in the curtain. I began at eleven o’clock with breaks for visits to the loo. Then I heard that whining noise. It went on non-stop after midnight. Was it Nilsson?’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘I was in bed counting but my position was very uncomfortable. I turned over at about half past one and I noticed that the sound had stopped. Since my position was now more comfortable, I fell asleep. But of course I woke up a couple of times after that damned nuisance Johanson had disturbed me, but then it was quiet. That’s all I have to say.’

  On his way out he picked up the ball pen and gave me a meaningful look. I had drawn a row of stars in the form of a spiral. It could have symbolized the brandy, or a military badge of rank. The biggest and centrally placed one could have been a representation of me, Gunnar Bergman. In that case, it seemed to be somewhat exaggerated.

  It was nine o’clock, time for my and Gustavsson’s little game of cards. He dealt them at his usual lightning speed and we both had our stakes ready—we play for coins, not matches. It takes him about fifteen seconds from start to finish.

  Then Melin insisted on spoiling everything by playing the master detective. He ran in claiming there was a drinking-glass missing from room number 9, which was vacant.

  We had just got him into a chair, given him a hand of cards and explained to him that his fiancée would have to sacrifice herself for the sake of law and order and forgo his awkward company that evening, when Ivehed came in to tell me he had found a couple more witnesses. At that point the game was already afoot and we were rather grumpy because of all the unnecessary interruptions. I had to give it a break.

  A man and a woman were standing in the reception area. I recognised the man. He’s a pork butcher at Metro.

  The woman’s name was Ekbom and she runs a laundry. She introduced the man as her fiancé. From what I hear, he’s only part-time, but I don’t like to disillusion people, so I pretended to believe her. His name was Odestam. It sounded as if he had chosen a new surname. I prefer fine old family names. Like Ivehed.

  ‘Carl-Henrik has something to tell you,’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes,’ Carl-Henrik said, ‘my fiancée and I … last night at twelve o’clock.…’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, encouraging him.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I had to pass water, and since the rain had stopped, I went outside to do it.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much for the information. I understand what a load off your mind it must be to have told us this. However, we won’t need you anymore. Good night.’

  ‘But that wasn’t all.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, making it sound as if I was quite surprised.

  ‘There were two rooms brightly lit on the upstairs floor. They were side by side on the same side as the back door, so to speak. The left one was open.’

  It is possible that these were important things, but right then I was in a hurry, so I asked if I could take down the information and contact him later if need be.

  Finally, we sat down for our game. That’s when we got the shock.

  Ivehed’s wife had taken all his small coins. I know that she does it to punish him. It’s happened before and it cannot go on like this. I shall have to talk to the commissioner about it. While Ivehed drove to the railway station to get small change, I called Kerstin to ask if anyone had called. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘not here.’ The children were asleep and mother had returned home in a taxi.

  At the same time Gustavsson, who can sound very authoritative, especially when he lowers his voice one octave, called Mrs. Ivehed from the other telephone and said that her husband was on official business and should not be expected home before midnight.

  At half past ten we could at last begin. We extracted all of Melin’s pocket-money in short order, so he was obliged to borrow a five crown note from Gustavsson at 25% interest.

  Just before twelve, the fingerprint guy called. He’d found a lot of gorgeous prints on the wine bottle. It shouldn’t take long to check them in the archive. He promised to get back to me quickly.

  We sent Melin, who was already broke, over to the station to pick up beer and sandwiches and then we could start again. We hung up a sign with the words “Private” outside the door. Gustavsson had found it on the premises. He’s fantastic.

  After that, when we’d finished eating and were about to shuffle and deal again while Melin washed up, Gustavsson heard something outside the window and ran outside. That was how we caught that imbecile Lundgren.

  After he had left us, it was time again. Not for poker, since everything seemed to be going wrong for that, but once more for Carl-Henrik. As he knocked at the window I opened it and whispered that he didn’t have to notify us whenever he took a piss. He said he wanted to report a Peeping Tom, an old man, who was creeping around outside. I explained that it was an extra policeman from the vice squad, charged with observing morals at night, but that Odestam had nothing to worry about because in his case there wasn’t much to see. Then I shut the window.

  Next it was the turn of Stissler, our fingerprint expert. He’s a foreigner, German I think. Nothing wrong with that, most of them are very ambitious and methodical. He said he could give us the name of Nilsson’s mysterious visitor. Nota bene that this was long before The Three Wise Men came up with their nonsensical theory.

  Stissler started toying with us by making us wait whilst he lit a cigarette, but the effect was spoiled because he couldn’t get his lighter to work. He fiddled with it for a while until Gustavsson took over and found that the flint had worn down.

  ‘It’s a very well-known person in this town,’ Stissler began.

  ‘One of our talented colleagues?’ I wondered, remembering that Ivehed had been the first one to enter room number 5 in the morning and was quite capable of contaminating any crime scene in my precinct.

  ‘No.’

  Stissler shook his head triumphantly.

  ‘One of our popular and colourful repeat offenders?’ I asked.

  ‘The most colourful one!’

  At that point we didn’t have to guess who it was. When you work as a policeman you know who the regulars are. They come and go. Or, rather, they stagger in and are kicked out. Our regular habitué, number one for many years, has been Algot Emanuel Cronlund, nicknamed Crona the Goldsmith.

  And he is indeed our oldest customer, take my word for it.

  It was not until I was in bed back home that it dawned on me we had actually forgotten to take the fingerprints of the guests at the hotel. It was our good luck that these particular prints happened to be in our archives. Otherwise we would have been standing there with egg all over our faces.

  Stran
gely enough, we had also forgotten to check potential plasters or wounds on the guests. That, too, was embarrassing, since I had actually sworn that nobody was wounded when my old man had asked me. If pressed, we would have to say that we simply hadn’t had the time. Other things kept cropping up and one can’t do everything. After all, honesty is the best policy, as the saying goes.

  Nevertheless, as I was lying there trying to fall asleep, I did begin to feel like the biggest idiot in town.

  5

  On Monday morning my typewriter broke down. The ribbon got stuck. What a shame! I was actually preparing to do some of the paperwork which had piled up over the last couple of days. Now I would have had to postpone it again. One learns to accept that kind of setback philosophically. The police profession is fraught with such challenges.

  Now that I had a moment to spare, I could work out a brilliant theory about the events at The Little Boarding-House. Here goes:

  Nilsson and Crona are old buddies and they’re going to have a good time in a big way on Saturday evening. Since Blom is busy with the accounts that particular evening, Crona can steal up around eight o’clock without being seen. For a while they kick up their heels, but then there is a quarrel and Crona leaves just before the newscast, just when Blom’s surveillance begins. When Nilsson is alone, he locks the door and opens the window in order to air the room. Then he lies down on the bed with the intention of listening to the radio. After a while he falls asleep, but wakes up a few hours later, around two o’clock, because the window is squeaking in the wind. Then he drinks some wine, turns off the radio and shuts the window. The three old men made a mistake when they thought that Nilsson had been unable to get to his feet without his glasses. The light was actually on when he woke up! We know that thanks to Odestam. On his way from the switch at the door he stumbles in the darkness, hits his head and falls to the floor. He hits the chair as well as the table with the wine bottle on it, and the result is what we found.

  I take back what I said about the mystical whining reported by Ivar Johanson. It could not have been the result of Nilsson’s death struggle ending at half past one or two o’clock, for if he lay there moaning from midnight on, how on earth could he then get to his feet and shut the radio after an hour, in the middle of everything?

  What do you think? I ran this past the lads at coffee and they thought that it was super. Except Gustavsson, who asked what they had been drinking in the room if they had been satisfied with one Chianti Ruffino between them and there was still wine left over. I said we could search the rose bushes below the window and find out. At Gustavsson’s question about who had washed the glass that Nilsson drank from before he died, I replied that the glass had been washed earlier that evening at the same time that the wine was mopped up with the towel. After that, in the middle of the night, Nilsson did what other normal citizens do. He swigged it, if he was drinking at all. The farewell drink was my own little addition that would give my theory an added credibility. When Gustavsson still looked questioningly at me, I informed him that swigging means drinking straight from the bottle. Then he kept silent. For five seconds.

  Why did they have three glasses in the room when there were only two people celebrating, one of whom one was used to drinking straight from the bottle? That was his next shrewd question.

  I replied that both of them could have been swigging, because then they didn’t have to wash anything at all, if that would be better, and the borrowed extra glass could have been for flowers. That was my theory. If I had interpreted his tattooing rightly, Nilsson was a lover of flowers.

  At last we bet on it. I guessed that we would find the two bottles among the roses. Ivehed bet on one and Gustavsson refused to take part unless we put five crown notes in a pool.

  We clinched the deal and he took out a paper and wrote down our guesses, plus his own solution. Melin still had no money and he passed. We sent him over to The Little Boarding-House, after which we cleared up some routine measures and felt that we had worked very hard.

  We gathered again in my stylish office, supplied with every imaginable modern convenience: a letter-opener, a pencil-sharpener, a hole-puncher and who knows what else. There is an enormous sense of comfort and well-being: King Gustav VI Adolf is hanging on the wall and Kerstin Bergman is sitting on the table.

  Constable Birger Melin brought in the results of his painstaking investigation: five paper bags containing four bottles and seven empty half-bottles of spirits, a bottle of wine and at least twice as many beer cans, all empty. It was Gustavsson who had guessed there would be twelve and he pocketed his booty of five-crown bills. Things got even more interesting when Melin said that he’d been into the room and opened the window, and the hinges squeaked like nobody’s business. Well done, detective Melin!

  Since we were in discussion mode, the question of the time of death arose. We had two versions of when the noise from the room ended. According to Renqvist it was at half past one, but according to Johanson it was closer to two o’clock. It was curious that the two hags hadn’t heard anything. Maybe the home of Lilliecrona had been too distracting, or maybe they didn’t care about being disturbed, because they weren’t able to sleep anyway. Otherwise they should have heard the sound better than anyone else, since the squeaking window was so close to theirs.

  Ivehed was of the opinion that Johanson was right about the time and that Renqvist simply fell asleep when he changed position. For my part, I thought that the warrant officer seemed to be reliable. While you’re asleep, sounds can be unconsciously registered; sounds which are recalled when you awaken and are assumed to have happened then. That was the explanation of Johanson’s wrong estimate of the time.

  Melin shared my opinion, but Gustavsson felt that it wasn’t important and it was enough to establish that the window was shut just before two o’clock, that Nilsson was still alive at that time, and that he died soon after.

  At this point, it occurred to me I should call the medical examiner. When I called the switchboard, I first got no answer and then I was disconnected. When I called again, Nyegaard’s associate, who was the one who should know where he was, had gone for lunch. In a tone that did not sound promising, I was requested to call back in the afternoon.

  I drove home to the ranch. Kerstin had fully recovered and the children were healthier than ever. We got hot dogs with creamed spinach, which Lillan refused to eat because she was afraid of getting the same kind of knobs that Popeye has on his elbows. At last she promised to eat if Kerstin fed her, but only one bite for every Donald Duck figure I could remember. Just to be bloody-minded, she replaced the tablespoon I had produced with a slender egg-spoon of plastic. It went well until I ran out of names for those damned annoying animal specimens. I had to go through a pile of comic books before she finally finished, thanks to Gyro Gearloose and a cur called Tramp.

  I fled before the dessert.

  When I finally reached the associate who should have known where Nyegaard could be reached in the afternoon, she told me he had gone out. I left a message asking him to call me.

  Then there was a down-period until two o’clock, when the afternoon tabloids arrived. Gustavsson appeared just as I was leaving for the day. He left a short and concise account of what he had dug out about Axel Nilsson.

  Nilsson was born on March 12, 1917, the youngest son of Valentin Nilsson, a butcher, born in 1895, and his wife Agda, born Lindgren, in 1899. The father died in 1937 and the mother in 1968. The brother Edvin left the country in 1946 and was heard from for the last time four years ago, when he was in San Francisco, USA. Axel Leonard Nilsson enjoyed six years of elementary school with modest results, after which he held a couple of jobs of short duration and in different trades. He was probably jobless much of the time. He left town in 1959, his last recorded home address being Torggatan 10.

  He did compulsory military service with the Swedish Naval Forces in a low position on fatigue-duty, on account of alleged nervous difficulties. Contact with the temperance authorities si
nce 1948 and with the police a number of times in connection with drunkenness, disorderly conduct, unlawful assault and insulting a civil servant. He had been fined and had had three jail sentences for a total of 14 months. Several sojourns at the detoxification centres at Ryboholm and Ramsättra. Strangely enough his driving license had never been revoked. No weapons. Was charged for non-payment of maintenance in 1960-63 for Yvonne Linnéa, daughter of Rose-Marie Viktoria Åhlund, born 1941, since 1963 married to foreman Göran Eriksson, Tallåsvägen 19.

  ‘It seems as though Yvonne Linnéa is his only surviving family,’ observed Gustavsson. ‘May I suggest that the chief mercifully inform her of the man’s death.’

  It had to be done sooner or later.

  There’s no big drama when one is travelling on official police business of this sort. If anyone thinks we have police sirens on and two screaming wheels when we take the curves, while people stand two-deep waving Swedish flags, they are mistaken, at least in our precinct. My old Volkswagen has a leak in the gear box which leaves a trail. There’s some damned gasket loose, but I can’t afford to send it for repair. They say that the brake-light doesn’t work either, because of a loose contact, but I’ve not been caught as yet. Ivehed once stopped me at the corner of Västra Långgatan and Kungsbroallén and asked to see my driving license, which I had forgotten at home. He was so droll, leaning into the car to smell me. I just love policemen with a sense of humour.

  Tallåsvägen is situated on the fringe of the town, almost down by the marina. There are mostly one-storied houses there, with fences and hedges. Number 19 was quite a new building, low and stained brown, with a separate garage on the site. There was a set of white stained furniture on the lawn and a flagpole in front of a children’s playhouse. Behind the building, through a screen of birch-trees, one could glimpse the waterfront.

  Nobody opened when I rang the door-bell. I knocked at the back door but got no answer there, either. Not until I was back inside the car did he come out on the porch in pyjamas and dressing gown.