The bleeding chair

Dr. Arvid Falk was a man of quiet routines. The crisp mornings spent polishing his surgical steel, the afternoon lulls between patients, the evening ledger entries detailing crowns, fillings, and the occasional root canal. It was a life of ordered precision. But on this rain-lashed Tuesday in rural Småland, the order shattered. The last patient of the day, young Liam Sjöberg, never left the plush green chair. His mother, Helena, received the text an hour later, the words cold and digital as the instruments in Dr. Falk’s steriliser: I have your son. 500,000 kronor. No police. Or his smile will be the first thing to go. The silence that followed in the Sjöberg household was more deafening than any dental drill.

* * * * * * * * * *

The call came to Inspector Mats Lundström just as he was contemplating the profound sadness of a microwaved meatball dinner. The station was quiet, the persistent Växjö rain tracing lazy paths down his window. He listened, his large, capable hand cradling the phone, his face, a roadmap of lines etched by decades of Swedish winters and human frailty—betraying nothing.

“A dentist?” he rumbled, his voice like gravel rolling in a bucket. “Arvid Falk? Are we sure?”

The confirmation came. Lundström grunted, ended the call, and pulled on his worn tweed coat. A dentist. It was a new one. Not a crime of passion in a drunken haze, not a greedy farmer disputing a land boundary, but a medical professional holding a boy hostage. It felt… incongruous. Like finding a rotten tooth in a prize-winning apple.

He drove through the slick, dark streets, the windscreen wipers keeping a steady, melancholic rhythm. His thoughts, as they often did, drifted to his son, Tom, in England. He’d sent him a text about the football, a safe, neutral topic. The complexities of fatherhood were a mystery he found far more baffling than any murder.

The Sjöberg house was a portrait of modern distress. Helena Sjöberg was a ghost of herself, clutching her phone as if it were a lifeline, her husband, Peder, a tight coil of furious impotence. Lundström took a statement, his questions gentle but persistent.

“Did Falk seem different lately? Anxious? In debt?”

“No. Quiet, as always. He’d been our dentist for years,” Peder said, his voice cracking. “He gave Liam a toy car after his first filling.”

Lundström’s team set up a trace on the phone. The money was being gathered, a frantic, fearful process. Lundström, however, felt a nagging dissonance. He dispatched a junior officer to pull Falk’s financials and another to discreetly watch the dental practice from a distance. It was a neat, red-brick building on a quiet street, its windows dark. Too dark.

“He’s in there with my boy,” Helena whispered, staring out at the rain as if she could see through the night and the walls.

“Perhaps,” Lundström murmured, more to himself than to her.

An hour later, the financial report landed in his inbox. It was the second piece that didn’t fit. Dr. Arvid Falk was not in debt. He was, in fact, remarkably solvent. No gambling habits, no secret loans, no recent large expenditures. The motive was crumbling.

Lundström stood, his large frame casting a long shadow in the dimly lit room. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

“The ransom demand! He said no police!” Peder Sjöberg cried out.

“He specified ‘no police’ at the house, at the transaction,” Lundström corrected him calmly. “He didn’t say anything about a mid-fifties, divorced man taking a stroll in the rain past his place of business.”

He drove alone, parking a street away. The rain had softened to a fine mist. The dental practice was silent, shrouded. But as he approached on foot, circling around to the back, he saw it—a faint, flickering light in the basement window. A television, perhaps. Or a torch.

The back door was a modern, solid thing, but the lock was standard. Lundström, whose career had begun in an era less reliant on digital forensics, had skills that were sometimes frowned upon by his superiors. A few moments of focused work with a set of picks from an old leather roll, and the lock yielded with a soft click.

The silence inside was absolute, broken only by the hum of a large freezer and the distant, tinny sound of a news broadcast from the basement. The air smelled of antiseptic and something else… fear. He drew his service pistol, the weight familiar and comforting in his hand.

He moved past the reception, past the waiting room with its outdated magazines, and towards the surgery. The door was ajar. He pushed it open slowly.

The scene was surreal. Young Liam Sjöberg was indeed in the dental chair, but he wasn’t tied down. He was wrapped in a blanket, a packet of crisps in his lap, watching a small portable TV on a trolley. He looked up, startled, but not terrified.

And in the corner, slumped in a chair with a bottle of vodka mostly empty on the counter beside him, was Dr. Arvid Falk. His face was puffy, his eyes red-raw. He held not a weapon, but a photograph. He looked at Lundström not with defiance, but with a profound, bottomless despair.

“Inspector,” Falk slurred, his voice thick with drink and grief. “It took you long enough.”

Lundström lowered his gun, his sharp eyes taking in the whole picture. No ransom money here. No accomplice. Just a broken man and a confused, but unharmed, boy.

“Liam,” Lundström said gently. “Are you alright?”

The boy nodded. “Dr. Falk said there was a gas leak. That we had to stay in the basement, but it was safe down there. He gave me crisps. He’s been crying a lot.”

Lundström’s gaze returned to Falk. “A gas leak,” he repeated, the pieces clicking into a different, darker pattern. “Where is she, Dr. Falk?”

Falk’s composure shattered. A ragged sob tore from his throat. He pointed a trembling finger towards the large, walk-in storage cupboard at the back of the surgery.

Keeping Falk in his periphery, Lundström crossed the room and pulled the cupboard door open.

Inside, lying on her side amongst boxes of gauze and surgical gloves, was a woman. She was elegantly dressed, her blonde hair perfectly coiffed. It was Eva Falk. And buried to the hilt in her back was one of her husband’s own, viciously sharp, dental probes.

Lundström closed his eyes for a brief second, the mystery solved, leaving only the tragedy. He called it in, his voice low and steady, requesting an ambulance and backup, though both were now for the living, not the dead.

Back in the surgery, he crouched beside Falk. The story tumbled out in a toxic flood. He’d found out she was leaving him. For his junior partner. The confrontation had happened here, in his sanctum, his place of control. A scream, a shove, and the nearest sharp instrument, grabbed in a blind rage.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Falk wept. “I called Helena Sjöberg to cancel Liam’s appointment, but when I heard her voice… the plan just… came to me. A ransom. A distraction. It would buy me time. Make it look like something else. I never meant to hurt the boy. I just… I couldn’t be alone with her.”

It was all there. The desperate, chaotic act of a man whose life had fractured in one uncontrollable moment. The ransom was never about the money; it was a smokescreen for a murder, a pathetic attempt to redirect the entire machinery of justice.

As uniformed officers led a broken Arvid Falk away, and a paramedic wrapped a foil blanket around a bewildered Liam Sjöberg, Lundström stood in the doorway of the surgery. The bright overhead light gleamed on the chrome and porcelain, a stage for a domestic horror that had spiralled into a public spectacle.

He thought of the neat rows of instruments, each with a defined purpose. And of the messy, unpredictable human heart that could pervert them all. He pulled out his phone and typed a new message to his son in England. Not about football. Just three words.

Thinking of you.

It was, he felt, answer enough to most of the mysteries that truly mattered.

End