by Ulf Durling
If you want to get to the solution straight away, you would be well-advised to follow my example: take a deep breath and walk a few steps to and fro in the room. Such measures fill your lungs with fresh air and relax your joints and muscles in a most pleasant and stimulating manner.
And now the lies! Blom, who is a chronic liar at the best of times, made an unthinking statement at one point which unintentionally threw us off the track.
Do you remember that on Sunday morning he stated that Nilsson’s door was locked? That was true, but he didn’t see the key in the key-hole. Why? Because the only time he caught a glimpse of it inside the lock was during his rounds on Saturday evening at ten o’clock. By the morning, the key was on the doormat, having been thrown there earlier that night by Crona. Blom, who simply took it for granted that the key was still where he last saw it, decided not to look for it once again since at the time Johanson was watching him. If he had acted like a Peeping Tom, it would have seemed peculiar or suspicious to a guest. Under Detective Sergeant Bergman’s questioning he had affirmed something he honestly believed to be true, but the information was twelve hours old. Ivehed believed him and didn’t check the statement, for he was occupied fumbling with the key-hole using one of his private keys in the hole, pretending to use his picklock, which in fact he had lost or forgotten somewhere. Gunnar Bergman believed Ivehed, and we believed Gunnar Bergman and seized on that false notion, convinced that we had found the perfect locked-room situation we’d always dreamed about.
That was wishful thinking in the same way as when a piece of glass becomes a radiant diamond, or a random glance a secret sign of returned feelings of intense passion.
It’s now time to introduce you to the murderer. I couldn’t have presented him earlier, because he’s been away all the time, but he was in fact talked about at length in Johan Lundgren’s report and, in passing, we even suspected him of being the murderer!
6
Not introducing the perpetrator until the end of a detective story is something that few writers have dared to attempt. But in real life, the individual with the heaviest conscience always lies the lowest. The culprit who returns to the scene of the crime is a rarity, and in this particular case I had to call on him.
A small, nondescript man opened the door and peered short-sightedly at me after I pressed the doorbell button. He was wearing a shirt without a tie, striped trousers and slippers. The face was friendly enough, with small, blinking eyes under a furrowed brow. His jowls were rather heavy and he had a fleshy, veined nose. When he asked me to enter, I noticed that the denture in his upper jaw fit loosely, and he kept putting it in place with his tongue, which resulted in a continual sucking noise. It was many years since I had seen him. He was about my age, but less well preserved and more weighed down by worries.
After I had hung up my overcoat, he showed me into the small living-room without even asking me why I had come.
He didn’t break the silence until I’d been shown the only armchair in the room and he had sat down as far as possible away from me on the sofa in front of the TV.
‘Is something wrong, Dr. Nylander?’
‘Yes, Mr. Åhlund, I’m afraid it is. I’ve discovered how you managed to do it.’
His features didn’t become twisted beyond recognition, and he didn’t rush at me with clenched fists or a cocked revolver. Neither did he run down to the furnace room for the purpose of hanging himself with a readymade running noose. He merely smiled in a melancholy way and gave a barely audible sigh.
Then he excused himself, offered me an ashtray and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard running water and the clatter of cupboard doors. There was a clink of chinaware, and then he returned with coffee cups, a Tetra Pak with thin cream and a sugar basin.
‘I have no buns or cakes to go with the coffee. Would the doctor be put off by a few rusks?’
‘A thousand thanks, it would be perfect.’
After that, he looked around with a puzzled expression.
‘On the TV-set,’ I said.
He picked up his spectacles with a smile. He looked embarrassed. Once more he disappeared, returning this time with a coffee kettle and some sweet fancy rusks on a plate. He poured carefully for us both. His hand trembled a little and he spilled a few drops on the teak table, but immediately mopped them up with his handkerchief. All in all, he seemed to be calmer than I was. He possessed a certain tranquility, and I felt a lot of sympathy for him.
For an observer, the scene must have looked like an everyday event. Two older men discussing the news of the day over a cup of coffee. Nobody would have guessed that one of them was a murderer who was treating his unmasker to a sweet fancy rusk or two.
The ornamental wall clock chimed loudly, exactly as at home. During my host’s visits to the kitchen, I’d observed many mystery novels translated into Swedish on his book shelf.
‘I tried to call you on Wednesday,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t home until late. I’d taken my evening meal at my daughter’s place after we returned from Stockholm. I went there on Friday the 24th.’
‘I know. Did you hate him very much?’
‘Well, actually I hadn’t realised how much until he surfaced here a couple of weeks ago. I’d forgotten most of it. My sorrow had somehow been encapsulated, and I’d been forced to accept my new life. We’d been married for thirty years.’
‘Quite a long time.’
‘Yes, and a very happy time.’
He smiled to himself. A photograph on a chest of drawers showed husband and wife sitting on a sofa. It could have been taken on an important day, perhaps a wedding day anniversary. He rose, went over to pick it up, and placed it on the table, as if he wanted her as near to him as possible.
It was now ten years since he’d assisted her to the hospital where she had died. The face on the photo was filled with life and pride, hardly the same face she’d shown during her depression, with vacant eyes and blank features.
‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted my compassion. He was sick, he said, and placed his medicine bottles on the table, just about where the cream is now. Alone, sick and without anywhere to go. Maybe he’d hoped to stay here until his superannuation was arranged. If the circumstances had been otherwise I could have had space for him but, Doctor, I knew that after all these years he’d come for the sole purpose of trying to destroy everything again for Rose-Marie.…’
‘Wasn’t it natural for him to want to see his daughter?’
‘It would have been, if we’d heard from him during the past years. Ten years ago he was sitting here, smiling. Then he took our daughter away from us and returned her when she became inconvenient.’
‘Did he kill your wife?’
‘That was how I felt at the time, and I felt it again when he surfaced now. He couldn’t be allowed to encroach on our family once again. That’s why I murdered him.’
‘I know that.’
‘Was it revenge, or was it to protect those nearest and dearest to me?’
‘Both, perhaps?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t want to think of it as revenge. Maja is just as dead as before. She may have been hit by a depression relapse in any case. Nilsson’s intervention into our lives just helped to trigger the deterioration she never recovered from.’
He wasn’t remorseful or heartbroken, just a bit puzzled, as if he was questioning his own motives. This was not a sick person who could plead temporary insanity in court. He had done what he considered to be the right thing without weighing his own chances. When his planning was over and the necessary arrangements were in place, he’d left town.
‘Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he really die as I had calculated?’
He hadn’t even tried to find out. That’s how little he’d cared. He’d thrown a hand grenade and walked away without asking if it had detonated, or if he’d set it properly.
‘Yes he did, during the Saturday night when you were in Stockholm
.’
‘What’s the punishment for something like that?’
‘Difficult to say. Tell me how you did it.’
‘You already know that.’
‘I want to hear it in your own words.’
‘It was simple, Dr. Nylander. I’m almost surprised that it worked. He appeared here on a Tuesday the week before last, I don’t know exactly why he paid me that visit. It was like an evil dream, but it wasn’t as if I could shake my head or rub my eyes and wake up to find that he wasn’t there. I couldn’t deny his existence and sweep the memories of what he had done under the carpet. And now that he was here, there was no return! While he went to the bathroom, I saw his medicine bottle. It was then or never! I leant forward so eagerly I hit the table and almost caused the cups to spill.’
‘What did the pills look like? What was the name on the bottle?’
‘They were small and pink and they had a notch on one side. I’ve forgotten the name. It was an old bottle. The label was almost impossible to read. Anyway, the text was in English. It said “Welcome.” Välkommen!’
He said it without irony. I nodded. The pharmaceutical manufacturer Burroughs-Wellcome had offered a blood pressure medicine for many years. I think it was called Darenthin and had been withdrawn because of side effects.
‘He told me that the medicine was for blood pressure. It had been prescribed for him in America a couple of years ago, when he’d had his first cerebral haemorrhage attack. On the trip over, he’d felt sick and had had a headache. He may just have been seasick, but he’d thought that the blood pressure might be the cause of his symptoms and he began to take the pills again. When he arrived in Göteborg he felt better, but went straight away to see a doctor to renew his prescription and was then told to take it carefully since his pressure was at a dangerous level. Your colleague gave him another kind of medicine.’
‘Dichlotride-K?’
‘Maybe that was the name. In any case he couldn’t use them because … well, he had to run to the bathroom too often and....’
‘So he continued taking his old pills?’
‘That’s right, the pink ones with a notch. He’d got it into his head that they were more effective, that’s why he didn’t dare to stop using them. They looked like Maja’s old unused antidepressants in the bathroom cabinet. For some strange reason I hadn’t thrown them away.’
‘Niamidal?’
‘Exactly. There were about thirty pills left in Nilsson’s bottle and with a consumption of three pills every day they would last for ten days.’
‘You substituted the pills?’
‘Of course. I flushed the foreign pills in the bathroom and put Maja’s Niamidal in the bottle instead. I made the substitution here, under the table, and Nilsson didn’t suspect anything. He was too busy complaining. He had no money, so before he left I lent him a few hundred-crown bills for his hotel. He also took my old transistor radio to have some form of diversion in the room. He forgot to return it the following week.’
‘So you met again?’
‘Yes, that same Friday evening when I went to Stockholm. I’d asked him to come over and told him I’d a surprise for him.’
‘A bottle of Italian wine?’
‘Yes. But the real surprise was my announcement that his daughter would return home from her trip, and that the two of us would visit him on Sunday. He didn’t know that Yvonne was in town with her cousins all the time. Needless to say, I hadn’t mentioned that Rose-Marie was married to Göran. Had I told him that, Nilsson would have looked him up and caused problems. But I did my very best to prevent him from seeing any of my family.’
‘And when he left you gave him the wine bottle?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the cheese?’
‘A piece of strong Cheddar cheese, yes.’
‘Well ripened?’
He looked at me in agreement. We knew where we stood with each other. There were never any attempts at excuses or lies. It would have been beneath his dignity.
‘The ripest one I could find. “Here you are,” I said to him. “Enjoy something extra tasty on Saturday evening.” He left suspecting nothing. At what time did he die?’
‘Round about midnight, it seems.’
‘What will you do to me?’
‘I don’t know. Is there any more coffee?’
We talked for a while about this and that. He turned out to have an amazing knowledge of crime literature and, even though he preferred to tell me what he had heard about the need of utmost dietary precautions during treatment with Niamidal from Dr. Herder, who was in charge of Maja at St. Katarina’s. I was more interested in discussing mystery stories with him. I asked him to join Carl, Johan and me that night and, believe it or not, he accepted my invitation. When I had to inform him later over the phone that the meeting was cancelled, he sounded every bit as disappointed as Johan Lundgren.
It might have been high-handed on my part to invite a new member into our little circle, but I felt I would have the tacit consent of my friends. Sven himself—we soon started calling each other by our first names—had nothing against joining our little group, and he assured me that the risk of being questioned and stared at meant nothing to him.
On my way home, I went through the murder in my mind for the last time. Niamidal and other similar medicaments like Nardil and Catran, the so called Monoamine oxidase inhibitors, were used in the early 1960’s as the most promising medicine against depression at the time. Unfortunately, they turned out to have dangerous side effects. A few patients were actually reported to have died of strokes. The explanation for this serious complication was that such preparations reinforced the increased blood pressure that some foods brought about, among other things. After that, they were mostly banned. However, in some places and under certain circumstances, Niamidal was still used.
I acquired my knowledge of this some years ago when I read it in a circular from the Royal Medical Board. It stated that red wines, especially the Chianti variant, and specific foods—among them well-ripened cheese and pickled herring —contained tyramine which, when given to patients treated in this way, could cause an increase of blood pressure and, at the very worst, a lethal arterial burst inside of the brain.
Nilsson had hypertonia and was hit by a stroke some years ago in America. He had been prescribed blood pressure lowering medicine in an attempt to reduce the risk of new, spontaneous bleeding. When he continued taking his pills, not knowing that they had been replaced, his blood pressure was not reduced at all, but remained at a high and life-threatening level. With Maja’s Niamidal he saturated his body for ten days in a way that caused some of the forbidden foods to be perilous to eat. The murderer had, in fact, created a meal that was a virtual murder weapon. Sven Åhlund took into account that Nilsson would have downed all his Niamidal pills on Saturday and thrown away the empty bottle. A newly opened and seemingly innocent bottle of Dichlotride-K pills would be left in the room, together with an empty wine bottle and a piece of cheese.
Why did he save the Swedish medicine, if he wasn’t comfortable with it? Maybe he wanted to show it to another doctor later on and ask for some appropriate and more enduring pill—anything but Dichlotride-K.
Maja Åhlund had had a difficult depression ten years earlier and all kinds of treatments were tried. She often stayed at home and, during one period, she was given Niamidal. When I talked to Dr. Herder I remembered what I had read about Niamidal and he told me that for her own safety he had asked her to cut off the cure. Sven was present at that consultation and received the same information. As her husband, he had been in charge of all her medicaments because of the risk of attempted suicide.
Sometime after that, she became worse and was committed to the hospital, where she took her own life. She managed to hang herself in a toilet in the ward, using the sash of her dressing-gown.
As I’ve already said, Sven was fully aware of the potential complications when it came to wine and cheese in connection with Niamidal treat
ment.
After Maja’s death he had casually put the bottle aside in the bathroom cabinet, not for one second thinking that it would one day be handy for a very different purpose.
While I’m sitting here trying to formulate a proper conclusion, I find that all the alternatives seem to be sentimental and melodramatic.
I don’t feel entirely satisfied now that the truth has been revealed, and I find myself to be irresolute. How to proceed?
My friends the mystery writers have often allowed the culprit to go free. The detective is overtaken by sympathy and withholds what he knows from the police, thus tempering justice with mercy.
It’s debatable whether what I’ve discovered would be enough proof for a court. Maybe Gunnar Bergman is laughing at me by letting the matter rest there. I hope so.
A murder has nevertheless been committed and the murderer has been revealed.
The law should run its course, justice should be seen to triumph and one should atone for one’s crimes; one’s sleep shouldn’t be disturbed by a gnawing conscience.
If I report the murderer he will suffer, yet his suffering deserves to be over by now. His own justice or retribution can’t give him back his wife.
If I don’t report him, I’ve betrayed my social duty by withholding valuable information, which I’m obliged to give as a law-abiding and loyal citizen.
Am I prepared to be an accessory to murder? A few days ago, I didn’t even know him. Am I hesitant about an obvious course of action simply because he and I happen to share a common interest?
I’m not certain what I shall do, but I suspect I’ll go to the police station tomorrow morning.
I would gladly have seen Sven Åhlund as one of our little club. He would have been an asset. Perhaps what he had needed was a sense of fellowship and solidarity. Now that our meeting tonight was cancelled, he probably won’t ever be able to participate. Who knows how much time the law imposes in a case like this? Maybe the courts will show some tolerance? If he goes to jail it may take a long time before he’s out. By then, our club may well have dissolved and we’ll all be dead. We have, as we know, very little time left together.