Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘That he was not just hiding himself in that room!’

  ‘What else could he have been hiding?’

  ‘Perhaps not something, but someone!’

  My little bombshell had the intended effect. My friends looked utterly perplexed, but gradually doubts and objections arose.

  ‘How would that have been possible without the knowledge of the boarding-house owner?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘And of the chamber-maid?’ added Carl.

  ‘At first sight it does seem impossible,’ I admitted, ‘but let me get to that later. We must first analyse the situation. According to Nilsson’s passport, he landed in Sweden on the twelfth, and on the thirteenth he arrived at The Little Boarding-House. Why he returned to his home country we don’t yet know, but he did return right now and he did arrive right here. Of all places, his choice was our town. He had every reason to avoid the unpleasantness that the confrontation with certain people would mean, but despite all that he came here. That can only mean that he had everything to gain here and nothing to lose. But for some reason, the time was not quite ripe. He had to stay here to take care of something, but it was still too early to emerge from the shadows, so for the time being he had to lie…

  down?’

  ‘Lie low.’ Carl, who’s familiar with detective slang, corrected me.

  ‘Yes, for a couple of weeks. It had been about ten years since he’d lived here, the memories of his indiscretions had probably faded and the resolution had probably expired.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ the doctor confirmed.

  ‘What’s more, he’d changed. He was no longer the small-town Don Juan of the past who had surprised his mother with a grandchild, but a broken, worn-out man, unhealthy before his time. The risk of being recognised was small, but could be made even smaller.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I shook a little bit in my shoes before my next move, anxious that my comrades should not find it too exaggerated or fabricated.

  ‘Through disguise!’

  Quite contrary to what I had expected, this was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm, especially by Carl. The doctor stopped frowning and waited attentively.

  ‘How otherwise can you explain the shapeless clothes, the spectacles, the moustache, the limping gait, the grimaces and so on? Note that he doesn’t really put on a mask but is satisfied with a few misleading signs, erasing all connections to the Axel Nilsson who was known in the town, and combining this with his retiring disposition at the boarding-house. All the time he’s vigilant and procuring information from Blom. He’s biding his time.’

  It was now time for a telling pause, letting the idea sink in. After the initial shock, my friends seemed to be thoughtful.

  ‘Let me ask you this: did Blom’s description of Nilsson describe him accurately?’

  ‘Are you suggesting Blom’s description of him was designed to dupe us and the police?’ Carl asked, surprised.

  ‘On the contrary, his description was too good and because of that, misleading!’

  Such paradoxical and apparently contradictory statements are what we take pleasure in and excel at. It comes from reading all those detective novels, where similar mystifying remarks are frequently made.

  ‘Just think,’ I continued, ‘of an individual with very protruding ears! He is easy to describe and recognise. When you meet him you immediately think: “here’s that man with the protruding ears.” You have then made the mistake of letting a detail become the main feature and with that the description has become inapt. Would you recognise him when he takes off his false ears? It’s the same thing with Nilsson. We say: “Aha! He’s the one who limps.” If the limping is fabricated, then we have less chance of identifying him. Take away a couple of the essential characteristics and he will be completely unrecognisable. In my opinion, the picture of himself that Axel Nilsson has supplied is much more cunningly effective than we suspected, and totally incorrect.’

  ‘You’re right. We can’t envisage Nilsson without his badly-fitting clothes, the strange blinking and the limping gait.’

  ‘And what’s more, it’s a disguise which is easy to get rid of and become anonymous again, which made it easier for him when it came to achieving his special purpose.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘To look just like his secret room-mate.’

  There was a dramatic silence. To avoid looking at my friends during their consternation, I bent down and started fiddling with my bootlaces. They were already quite tight with double knots. It took me some time to untie them and then tie them again, during which the only sound to be heard was the crackling of the fire in the grate. Eventually it was the doctor who broke the silence.

  ‘Do you mean that the person staying with him had a real leg injury?’

  ‘It’s quite possible. If two people have to live together for some reason, but only one of them can ever be seen, then why wouldn’t the one with the real leg injury be the one to show himself, so that the healthy one is spared the trouble of imitating him? Well, it might in fact be easier for the healthy one to disguise himself as the other. In this case, if the other person was an older man suffering from heart disease, it might well have been easier for Axel Nilsson, 52 years old, to pretend to be older and frailer than he actually was, rather than have the older man try to make himself look younger and healthier.’

  ‘I agree,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you think that was what decided who the “official” occupant of the room was, so to speak?’

  ‘Not at all, and you’ll soon hear why. But it certainly made things easier for Nilsson and reduced the risk of the double occupancy being discovered.’

  ‘Could two people really have stayed in the room without being exposed? After all, we’re talking about a period of two weeks.’

  ‘Probably. And they both may not have been there the whole time.’

  The doctor looked at me to go on, and I had the feeling that much was at stake before my clever solution would be accepted.

  ‘So Nilsson took the room and could let his double in at any time,’ I continued. ‘At night there’s very little risk in sneaking down the stairs and opening the back door. By the way, Carl, is it true that there are two flights leading up to the first floor, one from the entrance and another from the rear door?’

  ‘Yes. They lead to opposite ends of the first floor corridor.’

  ‘If one of them wanted to leave, he would keep the key after locking his mate in the room instead of handing it in or hanging it up. As you know, Blom had no spare key. If both men wanted to take a walk separately, one of them would leave through the back door and the other would walk out through the main entrance. This would be safe, since Blom could only watch one door at a time. But Nilsson seldom left the room. Probably both of them stayed inside most of the time.’

  ‘What happened when the chamber-maid wanted to come in?’

  ‘Nilsson probably found out when she was expected and let his alter ego leave through the back door and onto the path to Björkstigen in good time before she arrived. Maybe he shut himself in the bathroom or hid somewhere else.

  ‘But she surely would have suspected mischief if she cleaned the room every day.’

  ‘Possibly, but just think about it. A couple of extra sheets could easily have been hidden in a suitcase, a pair of spare blankets could have been borrowed on the pretext of feeling chilly, and there was already an extra pillow in the closet.’

  ‘It would have been odd to ask for two mattresses because of the cold!’

  ‘Yes, but Nilsson had a double room.’

  ‘The other bedstead had been removed,’ Carl pointed out.

  ‘Is that so? Well, maybe Nilsson took the bed and his room-mate made do with an inflatable mattress, which doesn’t take much space. If the guest was like Nilsson, he wouldn’t have cared much. People of that sort have no great demands when it comes to comfort. Think of the goldsmith in the town park.’r />
  Crona, the goldsmith, is the town eccentric, a habitual drunkard who once had been a skilled craftsman, but who had hit the bottle. On sunny days he stays in the town park, sleeping on a bench with his jacket folded under his head and an old newspaper under his shoes so as not to make things dirty. The park is situated by the church on the other side of the creek. Since he is quite harmless and also serves as a warning to the town youth, he is mostly left alone. Many people consider him to be a colourful contribution to the townscape.

  ‘They took their meals in the room and shared them. After all, they were looking forward to better times ahead.’

  ‘The mystery tenant as well?’

  ‘Maybe. Before I talk about that, let me just go back to what I said earlier. It seems to me quite possible to have carried out this masquerade for a short time. Every time Blom caught a glimpse of his unknown hotel guest, he—.’

  ‘—saw a limping man in baggy clothes!’

  ‘Exactly. What he saw was supposedly Axel Nilsson, and it didn’t occur to anyone that the real Nilsson could actually be lurking behind a locked room on the first floor.’

  The doctor was starting to become impatient. We had now talked for quite a while about the mysterious double, and now it was time to reveal his identity.

  ‘Johan Lundgren, do you know who that second man was?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘He was the murderer.’

  ‘I guessed as much, but do you know his name?’

  ‘Let me ask a counter-question. What do you know about methanol?’

  ‘Methyl alcohol? I don’t see what that’s got to—.’

  ‘Is it harmful?’

  ‘Wait!’ Carl exclaimed, before the doctor could answer.

  A more dramatic writer than I would have been able to depict the reaction in a more graphic way, but my moderation prohibits me from resorting to exaggeration. It would, however, be wrong not to describe his sudden blinding insight as an explosion. Carl stared straight ahead with his hands clapped to his forehead as if he had had a revelation, the sight of which could not be endured.

  In novels the detective, in cases like this, usually blurts out that he has been an idiot, which has always irritated me because of the incomparable intelligence of Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason. How can the reader’s sense of being at a disadvantage not be strengthened when a commonplace mistake or a natural oversight causes the hero to feel as if he’s possessed of a hopelessly feeble intellect?

  My secret sense of triumph and the drama of the occasion inspired me to utter the next somewhat blasphemous remark:

  ‘We have been blind to the truth, have we not, gentlemen?’

  Hastily, Carl took down a publication from the bookshelf, printed by Lindquist’s Printing Office, Ltd. It was entitled It Happened Here and was the annual survey of local events for 1946, compiled by Magnus Ekeblad, the former headmaster of the co-educational school.

  ‘You have a good memory, Johan!’

  ‘It was a particularly disturbing event,’ I replied modestly.

  Then Carl read the following item out loud from Ekeblad’s little pamphlet. In my own dedicated copy I had underlined the wording:

  ‘“It was also this year (1946, my remark) that the horrible wood alcohol catastrophe hit several ill-fated citizens. There were more than ten victims, of which many became permanently visually impaired and some totally blind, but there were very likely others who may have been less injured and because of the circumstances found it best not to step forward in the light of the publicity. The matter was taken up in the local papers and the public at large was upset, judging from several aggravated letters to the press and from protests in his own office to the police commissioner in person, calling for a more thorough investigation.

  It turned out that one of the town’s own sons, who ran a home distilling business, had sold a batch of liquor with an added ingredient of high proof methyl alcohol to his unsuspecting customers. This substance, which is a waste product from our wood-pulp factory, has a potent toxic effect on the optic nerve. However the perpetrator, a former sawmill worker, had succeeded in absconding and was still at liberty.

  For the time being negotiations are taking place on behalf of those individuals who are claiming damages. They are represented by the solicitor Lindner and the Health Insurance Office. The case is still dormant with the National Swedish Social Insurance Board.”’

  The doctor, Carl and I are not only born and bred in this town, but have always lived here. Therefore, I dare say that no single event over the last fifty years has provoked more pronounced indignation and wrath. Yes, I go so far as to assert that during some weeks of 1946, feelings of hostility prevailed among the population, and I can reveal that behind the signature “Teetotaller” to a letter published by a widely-read and respected local newspaper was yours truly! In it I criticised the slow pace of the machinery of justice and called in question the competence of certain unnamed higher officials. In spite of all the efforts of the police and various individuals, the perpetrator could not be found. In the absence of a formal confession his name was not announced, but it was, of course, a matter of common knowledge and on everybody’s lips: Edvin Nilsson, the brother of Axel.

  The business had been run out of a ramshackle outhouse in a yard by the creek, where the distillation had taken place and where their mother had lived up to last year. The police found all of the equipment and confiscated it. It was rusty and out of date and had probably not been in good working order ever since the days of their father, the butcher. He had died of alcohol poisoning in the beginning of the 1930s. Edvin had inherited the equipment and he must have been cunning for, in spite of several police raids over the years, they had not previously succeeded in procuring proof.

  Many people wondered where Edvin had gone, but few knew, among them the mother. People in general had, in spite of their bitterness, found it difficult not to feel sorry for her. She had passed a deplorable life, starting with her husband’s reign of terror and then later as housekeeper and breadwinner for her sons. Her cheerless life, filled with continual disappointments, was nevertheless the only one she had, and we could certainly understand the despair she had revealed to Carl, when Axel in turn had left. She most probably never saw Edvin again. He would not have dared to turn up anywhere near the town. I personally cannot look back at the events that occurred in the mid-1940s without experiencing a wave of loathing for him, and the doctor and Carl, now silent and serious, almost certainly shared the same feeling.

  ‘So you mean that our shadowy figure in room 5 was Edvin Nilsson?’

  ‘Yes, it would seem that he returned.’

  ‘But he would never dare. The period for prosecution may have expired, but....’

  ‘A very apt remark. It would still be imperative for him to keep in hiding!’

  ‘What could possibly have caused him to take the risk of coming back?’

  ‘Exactly, what on earth could have caused two expatriate brothers with that much on their conscience to make that long return journey across the Atlantic? In America they could feel safe, but here it’s different. Here, they’re coming straight into the lion’s den.’

  My friends now expected an explanation. I began a little bit lost for words, but Carl put me on the right track.

  ‘Something must have happened that totally changed the situation.’

  ‘For whom? For Edvin?’

  ‘For both of them. They were independent of each other. Brotherhood and loyalty meant nothing to them. If they were together in America, both of them benefitted by that arrangement and, if something important happened, it had to affect them both as much—or be equally urgent to both of them—for them to have decided on joint action. We know nothing of their situation in America. We can only suspect that they were not particularly successful, and didn’t have much to leave behind.’

  ‘Maybe things were getting too hot for them over there?’

  ‘Possibly, but the event that decided them
must have happened here.’

  ‘And it affected them both?’

  ‘Yes, obviously. Let me just ask you this question: What might constitute something important to these people in life? Something more important than wine, women and fun?’

  ‘Their own security?’

  ‘Which definitely should have discouraged them from coming here!’

  ‘Money? Could there have been money for them to collect here? For both of them?’

  ‘Yes, there was only one event here at home that affected them both, and that was their mother’s death last year.’

  ‘In other words, an inheritance?’

  ‘That must be it. They came to collect their inheritance.’

  At this Efraim could no longer control himself. He had been listening to our discussion, but now came what I had feared. His outburst, however, gave me a short respite, during which I prepared my defence.

  ‘Money to be inherited? From whom? The mother was their only relative and she had to do cleaning in the evenings to keep body and soul together. Her assets could not have been more than a few hundred crowns. It wouldn’t even have covered their travel expenses. We have to do beter than that!’

  ‘How about the house by the creek with the garden?’ replied Carl, splendidly doing the best he could to support me.

  ‘A tumbledown hovel and a few square metres of ground? A shed of corrugated iron in the Arizona desert would entice more prospective buyers.’

  It was now time for my boldest bid.

  ‘Efraim is right, but what if they thought there was something to collect?’

  ‘Aha! They were the illegitimate children of the Wallenberg family, were they? Their bank was up for auction under a writ of execution and they thought that they just had to come with their trucks to the vault. Brilliant! Thank you very much!’

  ‘I’m not kidding. How did their mother feel? All these years she had worked and toiled, but always met ingratitude, and now she wanted to atone for what society had suffered because of her.’

  ‘Not because of her, because of her sons. That’s a totally different matter.’