Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  ‘Perhaps not in her opinion. Before she died she wanted to clear her conscience. The boys were a part of her and their guilt was her guilt. She could not rest until they had been punished, otherwise she would not have paid off her and her offspring’s share. All her motherly love had been abortive, and her sons had left her in the lurch when she needed them most. Therefore she called them home.’

  ‘That’s impossible. Edvin would never have dared to turn up here!’

  ‘Unless she set a trap and caught them in it.’

  ‘Yes, why not? They rarely heard from their mother and knew almost nothing about her condition. Suppose she wrote a letter and said that she was dying. She understood it was difficult for them to come home, but luckily she could provide for her grandchild through a sum of money.…’

  ‘What sum of money?’

  ‘An imaginary one. For example, first prize in the state lottery, which she had deposited in the bank and let a lawyer hold in trust. Furthermore, she could have said that she had bequeathed the sum to the sons but if they did not personally turn up within a certain period of time that would mean that they accepted her decision that Axel's daughter would take over the inheritance. Then she only had to inform the solicitor that her sons could be expected to return home and that the police could apprehend them if necessary.’

  I was quite happy with my explanation. Of course I had to base it largely on guesswork, but I was convinced that the brothers had arrived in town together and that an acceptable reason had to be invented. I saw that my friends considered the idea to be plausible.

  ‘If the brothers had been instructed to appear personally, such a letter would have been addressed to Edvin, since he had to inform Axel and needed him as a cover because of his fear about appearing in the town.’

  ‘Did both of them have to travel? Couldn’t Axel have got an authorisation from Edvin?’

  ‘How could Edvin guarantee that Axel would actually return with the money? He could have replaced the authorization with a false certificate stating that Edvin was dead and demanded the entire inheritance for himself.’

  ‘But,’ Carl objected, ‘how could the mother be sure that they wouldn’t make sure the inheritance existed while they were still in America and discover the deceit?’

  ‘She gave the name and address of the solicitor and he, for his part, knew of her intention and was willing to join in the game.’

  ‘She gambled that her sons wouldn’t dream that she wanted to lead them to destruction. In her farewell letter they were told she had a malignant disease, perhaps the final stages of cancer. How many months would she have left at that point?’

  The doctor replied immediately. I’d sought to arouse his enthusiasm for my theories, but it appeared the ice was already broken.

  ‘It depends. Stomach cancer would be quick: a few months at the most.’

  ‘The brothers hadn’t much time to act. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The personal property they had in America was only a fraction of the supposed inheritance, so they didn’t hesitate. But for some reason they postponed the journey.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. One of them could have been serving time in prison and had to wait for his release.’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway, is it really plausible that Edvin would risk returning to the town for the sake of the money?’

  ‘He was still not keen and needed to be sure that the coast was clear, so he sent Axel ahead to get the lie of the land.’

  ‘Now I think you’re indulging in fantasies again.’

  It was the doctor who expressed his doubts, but it was now time to grasp the nettle.

  ‘Now listen: The brothers were in need of money. As soon as they could pay the tickets they left. When they arrived in Sweden they were cleaned out, and the room arrangement was necessary in order to keep Edvin hidden. Therefore they had to see to it that nobody could get into the room and discover him.’

  ‘How did they arrange it? I mean, how could Edvin be sure—.’

  Once again, Carl stopped in mid-sentence and the delight that shone in his eyes meant that another penny had dropped.

  ‘By making the extra key disappear! If Edvin had a duplicate key, he could come and go as he liked, without hindrance. Therefore, gentlemen, Axel actually arrived a month before yesterday’s murder and, undisguised, stole the key. We’ve been told he arrived in the country on the twelfth and came to the hotel on the thirteenth, but what if there were one month and not twenty-four hours in between?’

  I turned to Carl, who thought the matter over.

  ‘It’s possible. Gunnar didn’t say anything about the month of arrival, but in that case why didn’t Blom recognize Axel the second time, in the following month?’

  ‘Because the first time he looked different and he probably stayed out of sight as much as possible. His assignment was also over pretty quickly. I suspect all he had to do was to make sure that his mother really was dead and that the name and address of the lawyer were correct.’

  ‘May I ask a few questions?’

  It was the doctor again, and I was prepared for the worst.

  ‘Which solicitor was involved and why did the brothers wait a month?’

  ‘It could only have been Lindner, who pleaded the cause of the visually handicapped people in 1946 and is still active as far as I know. Unfortunately, we don’t know how the insurance problem was resolved twenty years ago, but what a feather in his cap it would be for him if he could produce the guilty party after all these years! The question of the brother’s delay is more difficult. Maybe the lawyer wasn’t available in mid-September. That was what Axel discovered during his first visit here and soon told Edvin, wherever he hid himself.’

  ‘Keeping his passport to have a hold over him?’

  ‘Very likely. By the way, it was no problem for him to check in at The Little Boarding-House without it. Blom doesn’t care about formalities. In any case, Axel’s preliminary visit here confirmed that their mother was satisfactorily dead and found no suspicions of a trap.’

  ‘I’m still not satisfied as to why they had to wait until mid-October. They were badly short of money and being in Sweden was risky. And where was Edvin waiting while Axel was doing his research?’

  ‘In Göteborg, at a guess.”

  ‘Well, let’s assume that, for the time being. But why didn’t Blom procure a spare key in the meantime?’

  ‘Maybe due to sheer indolence? Blom wasn’t quick on the trigger. The TV in the lounge hadn’t been repaired for ages, for example.

  ‘That won’t wash!’

  ‘In the meantime, there were guests in room 5, so the only key couldn’t be spared.’

  ‘Not good enough. You can get a new key in a few hours.’

  ‘Well, then, maybe he thought he’d be able to get along with one key for a little longer. Or maybe he hoped whoever had taken the key would send it back.’

  ‘I agree the boarding-house was run in a slapdash way, and that Blom wasn’t very careful, but it was in his own interest to have a spare key. And note that the longer it took before Axel Nilsson returned—this time in a new shape and with his brother packed away in his luggage—the greater the risk would be that Blom had been able to replenish his store of keys, and the greater the risk would become of Edvin being discovered in the room.’

  The silly detail of the key threatened to destroy my whole argument. I was being backed into a corner like a criminal, yet I was convinced that I was right.

  It was close to midnight and fatigue began to set in. Carl had opened a window, but the fresh air was not enough to chase away the drowsiness. Efraim appeared almost condescending and didn’t seem ready to call it a day. Despite his age and his weight he is surprisingly tireless, probably due to training during many a night as doctor on duty.

  ‘I admit I find Blom’s failure to get a spare key to be bewildering,’ I said, ‘as does the capacity of the brothers to take that into account. Let me see now....’


  A moment’s pause, a breathing-space, before I continued.

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t care whether Blom had a key or not; the important thing being that the brothers had one key each. When it then turned out that Blom had not obtained a new key, it suited them perfectly and—wait a minute!’

  Up to this point I had been dreading the lack of explanation of the locked room my friends would demand of me. Now I, too, went to the bathroom. After five minutes I was back. Thanks to the discussion about the keys, I had found the solution.

  ‘When Axel realised that the boarding-house owner could not get into the room, he happily announced the news to Edvin and thereby signed his own warrant.’

  ‘What?!!!’

  The doctor and Carl looked at me in astonishment. I permitted myself to insert a pause for effect, during which I sipped at my soda-water, which was lukewarm and flat.

  ‘The brothers installed themselves in the boarding-house around the middle of this month. Nilsson asked for a double room with a view of the passage and he was given, as good luck—or rather bad luck—would have it, room number 5 as planned. Why then did they stay there for almost a fortnight if staying was so fraught with danger? Well, I think that it had to do with the time the lawyer needed to make the financial arrangements. He had his victims in the trap but he waited before acting. Why so? Well, for one thing he didn’t know where they were living. All the negotiations went through Axel, who was the only one who dared show up in public and then only in disguise. But Edvin was the key figure—.’

  I had made an unintentional joke and did not realize it until my two friends burst out laughing.

  ‘Without a confession from Edvin, the visually handicapped people might not get their just compensation. While the lawyer was trying to discover his address in order to have him arrested, he produced a number of reasons for delaying the inheritance payment, and the atmosphere in room 5 became more and more tense.’

  ‘Why didn’t Lindner call the police? Gunnar said nothing about the police keeping Nilsson under observation.’

  ‘No doubt because he wanted to take all the credit for himself. But he never suspected that the individual he was looking for was hiding in plain sight in Axel’s hotel room. In any case, he had them where he wanted them, on tenterhooks. After all their efforts to get hold of the inheritance, all they could do now was wait.’

  ‘Then Edvin began to smell a rat.’

  Now the doctor had caught on at last.

  ‘Yes. One of them found out somehow that the inheritance didn’t exist and that caused a quarrel which left one of the brothers dead. But before that they had been eating and drinking, someone had cut the cheese carelessly and there had been bloodshed. They had stopped fighting and attempted to obtain plaster for Edvin.’

  ‘What about the glasses?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Edvin must have thought that the accident would seem more convincing if the police could be persuaded that Axel had fallen over while he was intoxicated and in a half-blind state, groping around in the room. So he took the glasses away from the body and placed them on the bedside table to add to that impression. And now we come to the keys. Edvin knew that there were two. He had one of them and Axel had the other. He also knew that Blom believed that only one existed. One corpse, two keys: Edvin suddenly realised he had everything he needed to create a perfect crime and a locked-room mystery to boot.’

  ‘Wait a minute! Maybe he could arrange the technical details, but he couldn’t escape. Lindner would know immediately who the murderer was.’

  ‘The fact that the room was locked and sealed during the night gave him enough time to disappear, at least twelve hours. On top of that, nobody would suspect it was murder because the room was locked from the inside. The police would have no reason to look for a murderer. You remember I said that Axel signed his own death warrant when he passed on Blom’s information that there was no spare? At the time, Edvin hadn’t been thinking about murder. But when it happened he took advantage of the circumstances. By arranging the locked room he was able to make the murder look like an accident, at least for long enough.’

  ‘Are we absolutely sure that Axel Nilsson is the one who’s dead?’

  The idea was interesting and I welcomed it with open arms. Mistaken identities are a staple fare of mystery literature and it would have been fascinating to be faced with something similar in real life.

  ‘Not completely. The brothers did look alike and it would be difficult to determine precisely the identity of the dead man without clues such as limping, blinking without spectacles and speaking thickly. And Axel could have left his passport behind and become Edvin’s double. But, whoever died in that room, the other brother is the murderer.’

  Now Carl came to life and proved his alertness with a detail I’d missed.

  ‘The spilled red wine would reinforce the impression that a self-inflicted accident had taken place!’

  At that, Efraim must have sensed that his bloodstained towel theory was in danger, for he immediately asked:

  ‘What about the red-coloured towel? How does it fit in the context?’

  ‘The murderer had a lot of things to take care of in the room and he didn’t want to leave any clues behind, neither fingerprints nor—.’

  ‘—footprints,’ Carl added.

  ‘That’s right. He wound the towels around his shoes so as not to leave any footprints in the wine pools, and in order to avoid getting wine from the floor on his clothes. Gunnar Bergman never specified the exact shade of colour of the spots, but he must have meant spots of red wine, although they were not really red in the proper sense.’

  ‘Where did the second towel go?’ asked the doctor, with perfect timing.

  ‘It was probably used to wrap up some of the murderer’s belongings. He had to collect his goods and chattels and disappear.’

  With a sigh, the doctor abandoned defending his theory of a bloody towel and we downgraded the previous theory about the plaster to be about a harmless scratch somewhere on the murderer’s miserable body. I continued:

  ‘So how did the murderer get out of the house? He obviously bided his time until the moment when the back door was unguarded while Blom was locking the front door during his round of inspection. If the police haven’t already been in touch with lawyer Lindner today, it’s quite possible that the culprit has been able to leave the country in peace and quiet. The identity of the victim is less important. The murderer is the stronger and the smarter brother, while the victim had the bad luck to lose.’

  ‘Edvin was suffering from heart disease and was the elder.’

  ‘And, at the same time, he was the more desperate of the two brothers. The identification is a mere formality, and the police will take responsibility for that as they will for capturing the murderer. I myself think that Edvin is the one who’s still alive, but I am in agreement that both of them had the same opportunity to arrange the locked-room murder.’

  With that, I had returned to the central part of the riddle.

  ‘Yes,’ said Efraim, ‘we must have an explanation of that before we break up, Johan. How was it done? After all, the room was locked from the inside.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But, my dear Johan, Blom saw the key in the keyhole, and his testimony is strengthened by the fact that Ivehed’s picklock didn't work because the key on the inside was in the way.’

  ‘Gentlemen, I went to the bathroom a few minutes ago.’

  The situation was such that I could afford another mystifying clue.

  ‘Stick to the point!’

  ‘I am. Carl, how do you open the door of the garden shed?’

  ‘I use a key, of course. It’s hanging on a nail outside.’

  ‘Exactly. When I went to the W.C. just now, I took the liberty of borrowing the bathroom key, which is about the same shape and size as that of the garden shed. I went out and inserted it loosely from inside in the lock of the tool shed door and succeeded in locking the door with the real key
from the garden side. After having taken it out with the utmost care, the bathroom key was still in place and visible through the keyhole in the same way as the key of room 5 was visible.’

  ‘You mean it only seemed as though the inner key belonged to the lock?’

  ‘Yes, it had just been inserted far enough to create the impression that it had been used to lock the door. That was the reason the key fell out easily when the police knocked on the door.’

  ‘But in that case Ivehed’s picklock would also have fit and unlocked the door, since the key on the other side didn’t go in far enough to block it.’

  ‘Not if you put in a small stone or wedge in the keyhole. It can’t be seen, but it prevents the key-bit from engaging the locking mechanism. From that, one gets the impression that the key doesn’t work because of the presence of another one, but in reality it’s not the key that doesn’t fit, but the lock that has been disabled in an ingenious way.’

  My friends looked suspiciously at me and the doctor even borrowed a flashlight and went out into the garden. Five minutes later he returned, smiling broadly.

  ‘Congratulations, Johan!’

  I tried my best to look modest, but inwardly I was swelling with pride.

  ‘But then who turned off the transistor radio in the middle of the night?’

  Good heavens, I had totally forgotten the wretched radio. My beautiful construction would collapse like a house of cards if that problem could not be explained. Then I had a brainwave!

  ‘Edvin left the radio switched on in order to make any listeners at the door believe that everything was okay in the room: that Axel was perfectly well after his troublesome visitor had left.’

  ‘But by the morning the radio had been switched off.’

  ‘No, the batteries ran down during the night. It is a complete illusion that Axel or someone else turned the radio off.’

  There was an awestruck pause, then the doctor spoke:

  ‘Before we ask Carl to conclude tonight’s meeting, which has been the longest in our club’s history—I actually heard the church clock striking twelve during my visit to the garden shed—I’d like Johan to call the boarding-house.’