Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Bertil Falk is a retired Swedish newspaper and TV journalist who spent ten years on assignments in Britain, India, and the U.S. His fluency in English has allowed him not only to do many translations of English novels and stories into Swedish, but to some-times try it the other way around, as with his own story here. Mr. Falk is the author of fourteen mystery and science fiction novels published in Sweden and the producer of numerous TV documentaries, some of which have been shown in the U.S.

* * *

It was an incredibly hot summer in Sweden. The meteorological institute reported that for a couple of days the night temperature in Stockholm had been tropical. It had not fallen below sixty-eight degrees, which is very rare.

I spent my summer on a small island in the archipelago. I sat in the shade sipping at my lukewarm coffee, for I had learned during my years in Kenya that in hot weather cold drinks make things worse. My neighbour, whom I thought of as a “young lady,” spent her days painting landscapes. Every weekend her husband, who worked in the capital, came to join her, on board the regular skerry cruiser. They rented a typical small “Falu red” cottage with white-painted trim. So did I, as well as many other summer visitors. In their garden and against the heavenly backdrop of blue skies and the yellow sun, the yellow cross on blue ground fluttered in the wind from a white flagpole with a golden boss at the top.

She was about twenty-five years old and during the week she used to seek the company of the retired missionary who was her neighbour — me, that is. One evening, after she had complained about the difficulty of painting in the heat, she told me that she had just read a strange true story about a case that had taken place about seventy years ago in Gothenburg. A jealous young man had killed his girlfriend in a barn. A simple case of murder? Yes, but the odd thing about it was the aftermath. Some days after the funeral, the police found a dead woman’s body in the home of a mentally deranged man. To his astonishment, the pathologist recognized it as the body of the murdered girl he had performed an autopsy on the week before. It turned out that the deranged man had stolen the corpse on the evening of the day it had been buried. He simply lifted it from the grave, which had been left open till the next day.

“Is that really possible?” she asked me.

She looked so young and so fresh. She reminded me of a girl I had been in love with half a century ago, similar blue eyes, fair hair, an attractive smile.

“I remember that story,” I said. “What would be impossible about it?”

“Do they keep graves open overnight after an interment?”

“Why not?”

“In the night, people could fall into an open grave.”

“Most people don’t run about in graveyards in the night. And it has happened that drunken people have fallen into graves in broad daylight. But yes, sometimes the gravedigger waits till the next day before he covers a grave. Once it happened to me.”

She looked at me, somewhat surprised. “You’ve been a gravedigger?”

“Certainly not.” And I told her the story.

It happened about ten years ago. Evert Svensson was an old friend of mine. For many years he worked as a mining engineer in a South African diamond mine before finally returning to Sweden. His wife Laura was the daughter of a Social-Democratic municipal commissioner, a very good-looking woman. She successfully devoted her time to inducing young women to use cosmetics and to turning her own children into good consumers of the unneeded things that a greedy industry portions out in a never-ceasing stream. She was a very warm and pleasant person, and she had a bizarre sense of humour. The Svenssons had a son and a daughter. The son, Lars, was a computer scientist, married to Ulrika, who was a surgeon. They lived — or as they would say, “resided” — near Evert and Laura. The daughter, Lena, was a housewife and married to a plumber by the name of Sven. They lived a long way off.

Evert and I used to meet quite often for a couple of whisky tumblers at his place. Or rather: Evert took his Bowmore and soda, while I, as the teetotaller I always have been, had my Ramloesa water. He would talk about his time as a mining engineer. Once he even showed me an uncut diamond about the size of a walnut. In my opinion it was not much to look at, but he said that it was worth a fortune.