The Living and the Dead in Winsford

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.’

She handed me a leaflet, and said that she’d been living in Stockholm for about a year now. She had become too much of a celebrity to stay on in Sorsele, she maintained, and since she had met Jesus — and the pastor in charge of the organization, to whom she was now married — her life had taken on a deeper meaning.

She thanked me from the bottom of her heart for allowing her to take part in that television programme. If she hadn’t had the opportunity to tell all and sundry the truth about what had happened to Ragnar, this miracle would never have taken place.

‘Never give up,’ was the last thing she said to me. ‘When things are at their worst and you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, He is with you, and He will comfort you.’

Her eyes were blazing. I have often thought about her. Especially lately, this last month, since we were walking into the wind on that Baltic beach in Poland and my life branched off in a new direction.

About what it must feel like behind blazing eyes like those.

How she must have felt as she sat there on the television sofa, waiting for her turn to speak.