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

There Are No Pockets in Our Graveclothes by Bertil Falk

Translated from the Swedish by the author.

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.

When Evert died and Laura became an ageing widow, she now and then invited me for a dinner in their mansion with its view of the sea. Her relationship with her children was not the best. She used to complain that they wished to see her dead so they could lay their hands on the fortune she had at her disposal, for as long as she lived, she retained undivided possession of the estate.

Her health eventually gave way, and one day she asked me to come over and see her. I had no idea then that she was dying. On the porch, she sat in a deck chair in a semi-recumbent position. It was a sunny afternoon in August. I saw that she had fallen away since the last time I had seen her. But her eyes had their usual acuity.

“I’ve not long left,” she said. “Soon the brats will have their way. Unfortunately, there are no pockets in the cerements, so I can’t bring anything with me to the other side. Or do you think I could? As a staunch Christian, you should know.”

I was puzzled. I did not get what she was driving at, and she was not kidding. She was calm, her voice weak but firm.

“What are you talking about?”

“This,” she said. “Look here.”

She handed me a small case.

“Open it!”

There on a bed of dark blue velvet was that uncut diamond that Evert had shown me many years ago.

“Do you know what this is?” Laura asked.

“A piece of uncut coal that is worth a fortune,” I answered with the words Evert had once used, and I returned the case to her.

“I don’t want the brats to get it,” she said. “They don’t deserve it. I want to give it to you. Evert always enjoyed those afternoons and evenings together with you. And he once told me that he would like to give it to you. So I’ve made up my mind.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want it. I don’t need it. Give it to your children.”

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll get more than they deserve,” Laura tried to persuade me.

“I’m not fond of these kinds of things,” I said.

“You can give it to charity,” she said.

“No. These things have a tendency to bring ill fortune. You give it to charity.”

“It’s too late. I’m dying.”

“Oh, come on, Laura.”

We were interrupted by her home help. She came to serve us coffee. With some water Laura swallowed some pills that her doctor had prescribed. Understanding that this was our last conversation and feeling the atmosphere turn solemn, I bid her goodbye, bent forward, and kissed her forehead. It was feverish and cold at the same time. When I left her, she sat there with the case in her hands. There was a bewildering smile on her lips. I had never before seen her smiling that way.

Three days later, Laura died. She still lay dead in the living room when I came over to express my sympathy. Sorrow and distress were not exactly palpable. Instead a quarrel over property was in full swing.

The brother and sister and his wife and her husband could not agree on who would have the bisected antique mirror or the Gustavian rococo furniture. And above all, they were excited about the uncut diamond:

“On Sunday morning she was there in her bed stuffing herself with those damned pills her doctor prescribed. She did not trust me to attend, of course. It had to be some other doctor. Her daughter-in-law was not good enough. She bluntly told us that she had disposed of the diamond, and then she died. Just like that. We’ve looked everywhere and can’t find it.”

It was Ulrika, her tongue as sharp and her voice as piercing as the tools she used in her profession.

“It was in a case,” I said.

“It’s empty now,” Lars explained.

The small case was indeed empty. A small depression in the velvet indicated where the diamond had been all those years.

“I wonder where she hid it,” Ulrika said.

At the funeral a week later, the diamond was still missing. I understood from the line of reasoning they followed, which was as far removed from mourning as imaginable, that the house had been meticulously searched. The home help had been the target of insinuations. She was red with weeping.

“Perhaps you have some notion of where the diamond could be?” Lars said to me.

I had no idea, and even if I had had one, I did not feel like assisting them in finding a fortune that I knew the deceased had grudged her heirs.

“Laura said that she disposed of it,” I said to Ulrika. “So why do you suspect the home help?”

Ulrika looked intently at me with her big brown surgeon-eyes, as if she reflected on performing a kind of live autopsy on me.

“For the simple reason that the home help could have helped Laura to hide the diamond,” she said. “Haven’t you any idea where it can be?”

“Well, if I had been Laura, I would have thrown it into the sea,” I said, suppressing my anger.

“We’ve thought of that,” Lars countered. “But it’s a hundred and fifty yards to the sea and she could not possibly have been near the shore the last weeks of her life, certainly not in her last days. We were here most of the time, and she told us she had only just got rid of it. We were by her side as she swallowed her pills with her glass of water, but she refused to eat anything. And for your information, I don’t think she had any opportunity to give the diamond to the home help as Ulrika thinks.”

He looked reproachfully at his wife.

The funeral service was sparsely attended. The usual psalms were sung. “Earth to earth,” the minister said. The home help wept a little. “Ashes to ashes,” the minister continued. Lars puckered his brows. “Dust to dust.” The coffin was carried out and lowered into the prepared grave. The next day it would be covered by the gravedigger. My eyes moved from one face to another as we stood gathered there around the pit in the ground. At the request of the deceased, there were no flowers and no wreaths. Laura hated cut flowers. Her opinion about this was crystal clear: “It’s enough that I fade away. No flower shall fade on my coffin lid.”

The home help’s face was red and swollen. Lars looked in a pondering way at his mother’s coffin, which now touched the bottom of the grave. Ulrika, who had looked serious, suddenly seemed to have thought better of it. Her face lit up, and for a moment a smile of — was it triumph? — was on her lips. It lasted for a second and then she looked serious again. Lena, the daughter, bit with her upper row of teeth at her bloodless lower lip. Sven, her husband, nervously fingered his left lapel with his right hand.

“Well, let’s go back and continue the search,” Lars said.

“Is there any sense in searching?” Sven wondered.

“Hardly,” Ulrika said. “Lars and I will go home.”

“I don’t know,” Lars said, but stopped speaking as Ulrika caught him with her sharp eyes.

Lena shook her head. “We decided not to have any funeral feast,” she said, her voice tired and flat, “so that Sven and I could go on searching.”

She turned to me. “How about you?” she asked.

“None of my business.”

But I was not sincere when I said that.

The glimpse I had had of the momentary expression on Ulrika’s face bothered me.

“I think that you should come with me and Lars,” Ulrika said to Lena and Sven. I saw them driving away in their cars, Lars and Ulrika in a flashy Volvo, Lena and Sven in an even flashier Chevrolet of a vintage kind. I myself sat in my cheap Skoda Felicia and pondered.

Later that evening, I tried to read but I could not concentrate on the speeches of Cicero. I still pondered as the wall clock in my library struck eleven o’clock. It was then that the pieces fell into their proper places. I shook my head in despair and called my friend Roland Franzen, the police superintendent. I told him about my conversation with Laura a few days before she died. And I told him my theory.

“I think she took the opportunity to swallow the diamond when she took her pills,” I said. “She could have done it under the very noses of her heirs. Maybe she got the idea when she told me that there are no pockets in the graveclothes. I suspect that her daughter-in-law guessed the truth. And she is a surgeon. And the grave is open till tomorrow.”

Roland listened to me and I fairly saw him nodding on the other end of the line. I picked him up in my Skoda. The church clock hit the midnight mark as we arrived. The grave was open. I shone my torch. The lid was on the coffin, but it was unscrewed. Roland leaped down and took it off. The coffin was empty.

“They will either get rid of the corpse or they will return it to the grave,” I said.

“We’ll take no chances,” Roland decided, and sent for reinforcement.

The perpetrators’ cars were parked outside the house of Lars and Ulrika. The door was unlocked. We did not ring the bell but walked straight in. We stopped in silence in the doorway of the dining room. There, on the oblong dining table, was the naked body of Laura. Her daughter-in-law Ulrika leaned over the corpse. We saw how she brought up something from the insides of her mother-in-law, while Lars, Lena, and Sven stood gathered stock-still around the body. In her hand Ulrika held a small capsule. She opened it and unfolded a paper.

“Damn it,” the surgeon said. “She has cheated us.”

Ulrika gave the paper to Lena. She read aloud: “That’s what you get, body-snatchers and desecrators of corpses!”

At that moment Roland intervened.

“Enough is enough,” he said.

The four of them turned their surprised and horrified faces towards the door where Roland and I stood.

My neighbour had hung upon my words as I told her the story. Now she thoughtfully looked out over the narrow strait that separated our island from another small rocky islet.

“I guess they had to pay a price for their outrage?” she said.

“Not very much,” I told her. “Ulrika was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for desecration of a grave and disturbing the funeral peace. The others got off with no more than a fright and a fine. According to the statute book, they could all have been given six months. The court obviously considered Laura to have provoked the crime, and they may therefore have found the circumstances somewhat extenuating. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“And that’s the end of the story?”

“Not at all. You see, the week after this ghastly occurrence took place, I, as usual, went for my evening stroll. I put on the jacket I wore the last time I visited Laura and I walked down to the shore. I sat down on a mole, contemplating. It was windy with scudding clouds. The sea ran high and the waves dashed in and flooded the shore over and over again. There were drops of rain and I regretted that I had not put on my rain suit and sou’wester. I was on the verge of returning home when I put my hand in the pocket of my jacket and felt something.”

“Of course! Laura had slipped the diamond into your pocket when you kissed her feverish forehead,” my neighbour whispered.

“That’s right.”

“Don’t tell me that you have the diamond here and will show it to me.”

I smiled at her. “You see, I stood there and I looked at the sea-gulls. They felt, as I did, the storm brewing. I walked out on the pier, and summoning all my strength I threw that calamitous thing worth a fortune as far away as I could into the sea.”

“Calamitous?”

“Yes, jewels such as Kohinoor and the Hope are not calamitous in themselves. But our greed makes them so.

“Anyhow, Laura had a strange sense of humour and she proved it with the last thing she did. She was right in what she said, too: There are no pockets in our graveclothes.”