I was able to confirm that this was the case. Even if the really hard winter storms hadn’t actually occurred yet — an assertion that Margaret agreed with. The worst usually came in January and February.
I thanked her for the tea and the information, and reaffirmed that Castor and I would be turning up again very shortly. Margaret said she suspected she had been too negative about Darne Lodge in some respects, and apologized for going on so long.
We said our goodbyes and left. The walk back up to Winsford Hill turned out to be quite difficult, with various gates, herds of bleating sheep and glaring cattle, and when we eventually came up onto the moor itself we had the wind directly against us all the way to the edge of the Punchbowl, which I could now see, looking at it from this direction, really did look like a crater. Or like the after-effects of a gigantic meteor that had crashed down several thousands of years ago and left behind a hole a hundred metres deep and roughly twice that wide.
Nevertheless, we eventually got home — both Castor and I were equally muddy and exhausted — and even as I opened the garden gate I could see that there was a dead pheasant lying outside the front door.
A magnificent male bird, lying peacefully on its side with its wings and its tail feathers in excellent shape and apparently uninjured.
Apart from the fact that it was dead.
Then Castor did something totally unexpected. He walked slowly up to the bird, sniffed at it from various angles, then carefully grasped it by the head with his teeth. Dragged it gently to one side, just a metre or so, then left it lying there next to the wall.
Then he looked at me, as if to say that it was okay to go in now.
19
In the last-but-one chat show I ever hosted, something happened that I believe was unique in the history of Swedish television.
The theme was quite serious: people who had vanished.
And how family and friends cope with a situation in which somebody has disappeared, and nobody knows what happened. Not even if the missing person is alive or dead.
We had several guests. A psychologist, a woman from the public registration office, a senior police officer who explained how the police deal with missing persons, and three people who had been affected. The latter trio comprised a couple from Västerås whose teenage daughter had been missing without trace for two years, and an elderly woman from Norrland who had reported her husband missing twenty-five years ago.
And there were two of us presenting the programme, to make sure everything went without a hitch. In other words, a normal and carefully planned set-up for twenty-eight minutes of off-peak broadcasting.
The woman from Norrland arrived quite late, just as we had planned. All the others had had their say, and the female half of the pair from Västerås had cried a little. I now turned to Alice, as the new woman was called, and asked her to tell her story. Who was the person who had disappeared from her life?
‘Ragnar, my husband,’ she said curtly.
‘And that was quite a long time ago, I believe?’ I said.
‘Twenty-five years ago,’ said Alice.
‘And what were the circumstances when he went missing?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary. It was in the autumn, shortly before the elk-hunting began.’
‘And he disappeared from your home, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
At this point my male colleague stepped in. He had interviewed Alice on the telephone the previous day, and received a fair amount of information from her.
‘When we spoke yesterday you said that he’d gone off on his bike to fetch your newspaper from the post box: is that right?’
‘No,’ said Alice. ‘We’d already collected the paper. He was going to see if there were any letters. It was round about lunch time.’
‘And this was twenty-five years ago?’ asked my colleague.
‘Twenty-five years and one month,’ said Alice.
‘And you haven’t seen him since then?’
‘Not since that day, no.’
I intervened: ‘So he didn’t come back after going to fetch the mail.’
‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ said Alice.
I recall that she was wearing a very elegant dress. And high-heeled shoes. Her hair was newly trimmed and dyed in a slightly unusual hue verging on gold. I think I realized that something was about to go wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than to keep going. I saw a floor-manager holding up two fingers — so there were two minutes’ broadcasting time left.
‘Are you saying that he did, in fact, come back?’ I asked, wondering if I had misunderstood what my colleague had said briefly before the programme.
Alice sat up straight on the sofa and suddenly stared directly at the nearest camera — instead of looking at the person she was talking to, as we had instructed her beforehand, like we did with all our guests.
‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ she said again. ‘And he’s been lying out there in the woodshed ever since.’
For some reason it never occurred to anybody to stop the broadcast.
‘Why is he lying in the woodshed?’ asked my colleague.
‘I killed him with the sledge hammer,’ said Alice with something reminiscent of triumph in her voice. ‘Then I dragged him into the woodshed and covered him in firewood. I haven’t seen him since then. I always fill up with more firewood before he appears.’
Now I realized the seriousness of the situation. Time to cut. I signalled that we would go over to Camera 3 and begin to round off the programme.
‘He was an evil person,’ our guest from Norrland managed to get in. ‘But it’s statute-barred now, I can’t be prosecuted!’
*
There was quite a hullabaloo after we managed to stop broadcasting — but before that, the very first few seconds, a deathly silence. Everybody was staring at Alice, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what was buzzing round in everybody’s head.
What exactly had she said?
She had killed her husband.
She had put him in the woodshed and left him there for twenty-five years. And reported him missing.
She had confessed to murder on a live television programme.
Or else she was a madwoman who had succeeded in creating a sensation. How come the programme research hadn’t discovered something odd was going on, incidentally?
But then everybody started talking at once. Various studio officials came running up, and the police officer made a call on his mobile. The only person who remained calm in her place on the sofa was Alice. Sitting up straight, with her hands clasped on her knee, she contemplated the chaos on all sides with a slight smile on her lips. Order was restored when the programme’s producer came in and announced that we would all assemble in his office for a brief discussion.
The woodshed in question — located on the edge of the village of Sorsele in southern Lappland — was examined by the police the following day. When they dragged out the skeleton of Ragnar Myrman, they tried to keep all the journalists and photographers and nosy parkers at a distance, but there was no chance of that. There were too many of them — a hundred or so — and in the coming weeks Alice Myrman received as much attention in the media as she had evidently aspired to. After interrogating her, the police released her without charges or conditions because, as she had rightly said during her momentous television appearance, the crime was so far in the past that under Swedish law it was now statute-barred.
I met her once again, purely by chance. She was standing in Sergels Torg, Stockholm, handing out leaflets for a Christian organization — The Pure Life. I couldn’t resist asking her how things were going for her nowadays: it was three or four years since that memorable evening in the Monkeyhouse.
‘I’ve moved on,’ Alice explained. ‘I think you should do so as well. Take this — we have a meeting this evening in the City Church.’