Hard Cheese

by Ulf Durling

  PART THREE

  Gjutarvägen, Sunday, November 2

  1

  I had thought of comparing this case with a modern piece of art in a picture gallery. The spectator could interpret it differently depending on the angle from which he viewed it. That was how we proceeded last Sunday, but the reality escaped us. The result we reached was a reflection of ourselves, distilled from our own imagination and our secret desires to be detectives.

  The detective sergeant chose another method. He decided from the very beginning that the painting was non-figurative, but he was as much mistaken as we were.

  We missed the point because nobody thought to turn the picture upside-down. If we’d done so, every detail would have been illuminated differently and seen in another context.

  By using a new technology, I have exposed the murderer. It was ridiculously simple because the manipulation itself was so uncomplicated. He who accepts the original way of hanging the picture will never consider turning his head a half-turn.

  Come to think of it, the picture comparison doesn’t really work and isn’t even original, so forget it. I’ll try to find a better one. A good parable is like a magnifying glass. It frames the subject, clarifies it and mercilessly exposes the details.

  On Monday I was still halfway convinced that Carl’s solution was the correct one, but doubts began to nag at me and, purely by accident, I was soon able to establish the innocence of the son-in-law. I had called Nurse Ruth at the child-health station. She knows all the mothers with small children in the town and she discovered straight away that Rose-Marie Åhlund, under the name of Eriksson, had been coming to the station with her Yvonne since 1963. Her address was given as Tallåsvägen 19. I walked there in the evening in order to have a conversation with Mr. Eriksson, but happened to run into Dr. Rydin just as he was leaving, following a sick-call. He told me his patient had already been in bad shape on the Saturday. That settled it.

  My weakness for detective stories is well known. I’ve half a mind to issue a Challenge to the Reader. In fact, Johan gives the answer early in his report, when mentioning the word “cheese,” and an observant reader should be able to work it all out, provided he’s been supplied with some advance information. Yet, even though I had that knowledge, the truth still escaped me a week ago.

  If I ever decide to publish a book I could reveal the plot in the book’s title, so that a small portion of our population, a few hundred people or so, would be able to anticipate the solution. One of my favorite writers, John Dickson Carr, performed this tour de force many years ago in such a crafty way that every reader, irrespective of knowledge and education, had the same chance of solving the puzzle.

  Just think of the great discoveries: they’re often the result of sheer luck. A sudden insight surprises, light falls in from a new direction, chance takes a hand. From my own professional discipline I only have to think of Röntgen and his X-rays and Fleming and his penicillin. And if I myself hadn’t practiced medicine for almost half a century, following scientific progress and storing its jewels in my memory, maybe no one would have discovered the facts which, properly interpreted, shed new light on the problem.

  It was as early as Wednesday when I had my inspiration. Maybe it was a unique combination of circumstance which opened my eyes at the right moment: a glass of port wine after the food, the scent of my lighted Corona and the temperature in the room combined to bring it about. I like to think of it as providence.

  There, all of a sudden, was the solution of the riddle, the correct diagnosis. It dawned on me gradually without any fuss, more like an assurance than an inspiration. I experienced no triumph nor pride and absolutely no happiness—maybe even a touch of sadness, given the inevitable uncomfortable consequences. Young Mrs. Bergman’s visit to my office earlier that day showed that she, too, had suspected something, vaguely and indistinctly, and her information came as a necessary missing piece of a bewildering jig-saw puzzle. Afterwards, my phone calls, field visits and enquiries were only by way of confirmation, and the last painful excursion was solely due to my own curiosity.

  Many of my patients consider my methods to be old-fashioned. Well, as long as the treatment is the best I can give, they must accept that an old man is by nature conservative. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere.

  The proof that the therapy has been the right one is that the patient recovers. He may get well in spite of the treatment, but then my efforts won’t have been wrong, merely unnecessary. Yesterday, I got the proof that the murder riddle was solved. It happened in the form of the murderer’s oral confession. That’s good enough, as far as I’m concerned.

  We were supposed to have met at my home tonight, but unfortunately Johan couldn’t make it. Over the last few weeks, the town has suffered from a persistent and unpleasant gastric influenza. It had been demanding many house calls of me, and prescriptions by telephone. When I paid him a visit, he was in bed with a woolen scarf around his neck, despite the fact that the flu was affecting his stomach. He really didn’t have much to complain about: the fever was low, not even 38 degrees Celsius, and his strength seemed good. I suggested a most effective bismuth tincture to curb the frequent trips to the toilet, but my friend preferred boiled milk.

  After half an hour I left him, with the understanding he would call Carl himself and tell him the bad news about our cancelled meeting.

  So that way I ended up with a free evening.

  After a while Carl called me. He’d obtained a copy of the police activity report for the previous week from his daughter-in-law. He gave me a short summary. They hadn’t found much and what they had found was totally unimportant. Reality is something else.

  There’s no doubt that this is an example of a murder as a fine art. In my opinion, very little of what happened at the boarding-house in the hours before and after midnight a week ago had anything to do with the actual murder. The drama was performed with the curtain up, but on a revolving stage, where we witnessed an accidental improvisation which caught our interest and diverted our attention while the real action took place behind the scenes, where the murderer himself was hiding.

  When I tried to penetrate the facade, I concentrated on the weak points. The weakest point was Nilsson himself, which was obvious long before the truth suddenly revealed itself on Wednesday evening, after I’d asked a couple of specialists for their advice and read up on some specialist literature.

  Let’s take a look at everything once more. If a certain fatigue has set in following the reports of the other writers, then follow my advice: forget their conclusions and forget what they wrote. We need to start from the very beginning and look at the case from a different angle.

  Let me start by asking you this: isn’t it perfectly obvious what Axel Nilsson was really after?

  2

  Let us recall the picture we have of Axel Nilsson, who, after an absence of many years, returned to his hometown. To put it bluntly, he had aged and changed almost beyond recognition.

  It’s true he stayed mostly in the boarding-house, but do we have any real proof that he deliberately kept in hiding?

  Was he wanted? No.

  Was he in great demand? Well, perhaps as far as the social welfare service was concerned, but he was obviously prepared to run that risk.

  Was he eagerly awaited? Definitely not!

  A week ago, we formulated the theory that he had everything to gain and nothing to lose by coming here.

  Is there a connection between the fact that he had something to gain here, and the fact that he was no longer the same person as before?

  He may have been a different person, but he was not a new individual in a literal sense. It was not Edvin returning home. That supposition was pure nonsense. Neither was he in disguise. What kind of changes do I mean? One may acquire new values and new interests, and one can mature and develop. Was it a regretful man who came back, anxious to atone for his sins? Was his conscience weighing heavily on him?

  A moment’s thought will fo
rce you to conclude that nothing had changed and that Nilsson was just as unreliable, egoistic and ruthless as before.

  So, what do I mean when I say he had changed—and not just due to the deterioration that time imposes on us all? It’s quite simple: he was sick. Now, I’m not the first one to make that observation: Blom remarked that he seemed to be broken, and we have already talked about him taking medicine frequently. The point that I’m making is that we never considered what the fact of his sickness meant to the whole case.

  I’ve spent the whole of my long life working with sick people and I know what they have in common. Some take their suffering with serene calm and confidence. Others are anxious and feel alarmed. What they have in common is their feeling of helplessness in the face of their sickness, and their desire to be free of it and be cured.

  So as far as I’m concerned, the simple truth is that Axel Nilsson was sick. That inevitably leads us to the supposition that he may have come here to get help. He simply wanted to survive as long as possible, and to that end he was prepared to stake everything.

  He probably had nothing to lose in America and may well have preferred to stay there, but he simply couldn’t afford the expensive private health care. He was a Swedish citizen and wanted to make use of the benefits at home. I am not moralising. Anyone would have done the same, myself included.

  So a sick man came home in order to get treatment. Obviously, the first thing he did was visit a local doctor in order to get medicine. But what was he suffering from?

  That is the question, the most important question in the entire case. It’s so important that, if my conclusion is wrong, the murder would never have been committed because the perpetrator would never have been able to pull it off.

  How was Axel Nilsson described? We were told that by Carl, who got it from his son, who got it from the boarding-house proprietor Blom. There’s a party game in which each participant whispers a sentence which must be passed on to the next…and the next…and so on. At each step the meaning of the sentence is slightly altered, until it becomes unrecognizable. With that kind of risk in mind, I will nevertheless attempt to describe Axel Nilsson at fourth hand.

  He was fifty-two years old, of average height, somewhat underweight, with a moustache and glasses. His clothes were worn and baggy. He limped and was in the habit of winking with one eye. His speech was often slurred. He appeared to be sick and was often quite intoxicated. It’s not much to go on, but enough for a diagnosis which many of my colleagues would suggest.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t see it last Sunday. It was not until I received Johan’s report that the truth about this and many other things became clear. There’s also a detail in Detective Sergeant Bergman’s own report which confirms the diagnosis. I learned about it in a conversation I had with Carl today.

  Let’s take a look at Nilsson’s distinctive features. The moustache is a male decoration, which seldom reflects any sickness of its bearer. Spectacles are a sign of impaired vision. By the way, I often mislay my own somewhere. But what about the limp? It’s been suggested that Nilsson had a wounded leg. I doubt it. My belief is that his wound was localized elsewhere and made him limp because it influenced the function of his leg. Which of them? The left one—and, nota bene, his left arm was also impaired by the same injury, resulting in a loss of some of its former strength. That’s why he wore his watch on his right wrist.

  According to Gunnar Bergman’s report, the left arm had been twisted under the body, yet he could see the dead man’s watch before the body had been moved. That means it must have been on the right wrist, contrary to the vast majority of the population. To me this fact suggests that the left arm was at least partly out of order. It was easier for Nilsson to perform the movement that turns and heightens the arm when you want to find out what time it is, by using the right arm.

  His winking was surely nervous, but the slurring may not have been due to intoxication but to facial palsy weakening the muscles on one side of the face. That could very well have escaped the hotel guests’ notice. They only saw Nilsson briefly and Blom himself never looked at Nilsson long enough to discern it. As you remember, Blom’s eyes were always wandering.

  I maintain that Axel Nilsson suffered from high blood-pressure and had had a cerebral haemorrhage—a stroke—in America. The left side of the body was still somewhat paralysed and, since he feared another occurrence, he wanted to be in his homeland, where he could get care at the local hospital.

  I should have understood this last Sunday. Unfortunately, I failed to do so. Nilsson’s medicine, Dichlotride-K, is to be sure a diuretic, but it’s also used to a large extent for the purpose of lowering blood pressure. My regrettable neglect is no doubt due to the fact that, for many years, I’ve used other and more lenient preparations for hypertension and combined them with advice about low-salt diet—something my colleagues have differing opinions about.

  Nilsson had taken blood pressure medicine for fourteen days before his death. The post mortem diagnosis was haemorrhagia cerebri invet. et recens, which means that he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, and that indications of an earlier stroke were visible in the brain tissue. Furthermore, he suffered from hypertrofia cordis, an enlarged heart, which is a common consequence of high blood pressure. His reduced vision could also have been a result of changes of blood pressure in the retina, which can be observed in many patients.

  Can there be any further doubt that Nilsson was worried about his sickness, and that he carefully followed the prescriptions of his doctor in Göteborg?

  Despite that, he succumbed to another stroke, just as he feared.

  Sick, poor and alone, he reappeared after all those years, and his hope was that he would be helped. And even if he was not admitted to a hospital or a nursing home, the community would provide for him. As a citizen of small means, he could get a social allowance; as sick and unfit for work, he would sooner or later get a sickness pension. In this way, he benefitted from his handicap, but then so did the murderer. It seems paradoxical that Nilsson died from a stroke, despite taking all foreseeable measures to prevent it, including medicine.

  Was the medicine ineffective? The answer is no. Dichliotride works, no doubt about that.

  I willingly confess that real medication does not always hinder a sickness in its course. We can never guarantee that the penicillin we prescribe will kill the pneumonia, nor that the bicarbonate will prevent the emergence of a gastric ulcer.

  Nilsson could never entirely avoid the risk of a stroke by treating his high blood-pressure as prescribed, but in his case the heightened tension and ultimate rupture of the vessel in his brain was triggered by another circumstance, the unavoidable consequence of which was death. And of this effect the murderer was guilty. That he has assured me.

  I am sure that my intelligent reader thinks that I’ve spent too much time on the question of Nilsson’s blood pressure. That’s true, but I had a secondary purpose, besides giving you a hint of what really happened. With the best of intentions I also wanted to offer you a chance to discover a recently drawn wrong conclusion, which I will soon correct. I will also surprise you by saying it actually wasn’t a mistake, other than for a certain person. And now that person is dead.

  It’s dark outside. Occasionally, sounds penetrate: the scarcely discernible breath of the wind through the leaky windows; the laughter of children passing by on the street; the less and less frequent sounds of the evening traffic; and the faraway hustle and bustle.

  Now, did you discover my wrong conclusion? I gave you a short while to think about it.

  Of course, it was that Nilsson could not have been taking his medicine properly during those two weeks if only a few tablets were missing from the newly opened medicine bottle!

  Yet, at the same time, nothing was more important to him than taking his medication. Isn’t this contradiction most puzzling?

  3

  Over the years, half the citizens of the town have passed through my clinic. Some have left my surgery
unaided, many have been cured and others have gone out to die.

  Even in my youth I never thought about any alternative profession. In my consultation room and during my home visits to various patients I have experienced most of the happiness, encouragement, disappointment and powerlessness life can ever grant a human being. It’s a pity that Dr. Rydin, whom I hold in high esteem, didn’t want to move in here and probably no other colleague will after me.

  Videll’s paint shop will probably turn it into a storeroom. The paint-dealer often looks up at my place when he stands outside his shop downstairs.

  After my last patient left on Wednesday afternoon I finished up some routine work: sorting patient cards, sending out receipts and sterilising a few instruments. When I went out to water the flowers in the waiting-room, I found to my surprise that Mrs. Bergman was sitting there. She hadn’t made an appointment.

  ‘Excuse me, Dr. Nylander, but I’ve been thinking about the death case the other day, and I need to talk to a doctor to get my thoughts straight.’

  I asked her to come in, whereupon I learned that she had a gap between lessons, that she’d read Johan’s report and that she had things to add following her discussions with her husband. Since she had a lot to tell and I was an attentive listener, it took some time. We shared a cup of coffee I made in an Erlenmeiler flask in the laboratory cubicle.

  When she came to the end, there was a deep and expectant silence.

  ‘Why have you told me all this, Mrs. Bergman?’

  ‘Because there’s a disturbing detail in one part of the evidence.’