Henry Beskow’s death by poisoning turns a failed attempt at murder into a fatal mystery: stew Johnny Beskow laced with rat poison for his mother later reaches Henry, whose death is marked by extensive bleeding. The blue plastic container left on Henry’s table becomes the crucial link between the meal and the poison, though the circumstances of who brought it and why remain contested.

The Stew’s First Target

The poisoned meal begins in Johnny’s home, where his mother is preparing dinner while he stays in his room with his hamster, Butch. As he listens to her move between the kitchen and the lounge, the police’s pursuit presses on his thoughts. When she goes into the bathroom, Johnny takes rat poison hidden behind an old T-shirt in his chest of drawers. The pink grains look like food, but he knows they are deadly; he empties the box into the simmering meat-and-vegetable stew and stirs until the grains are no longer visible.

Johnny hides the empty box beneath his pullover and returns to his room. When his mother hears him leaving, she points out that she has just made dinner; he tells her not to wait for him. She goes back to the stove, and he stays away for several hours, imagining her dying after eating the poisoned food. But his imagined spectacle does not occur: his mother is alive when he sees her again. The pan is empty because she has transferred the stew into a large blue Tupperware container, saying she will freeze the remainder for another meal. Johnny concludes that she may not have eaten enough, or may not have eaten any at all. The container preserves the poisoned stew beyond his failed attempt against her and carries it into the later chain of events.

Henry’s Death and the Container

Henry is found dead in his chair with blood on the floor and his clothes, blood from his mouth and nose, and bleeding gums. The scene initially offers the investigators a disturbing but incomplete picture: he appears to have died while eating, and a blue plastic Tupperware container sits on the table with food still at the bottom, its lid and a spoon beside it. Sejer wonders what could account for the bleeding; the cause is not yet apparent, and the container is a clue before it is an explanation.

Johnny Beskow recognizes the container when he enters the house. He identifies it as his mother’s and says the food is her stew, adding that Henry ate most of it. The recognition joins two otherwise separate episodes: the poisoned dinner Johnny had prepared for his mother and the meal Henry received. Johnny also points suspicion toward his mother, saying she had always wanted Henry’s money and implying that her delivery of food was connected to that interest. His claim gives the container a possible chain of custody, but does not by itself establish who put poison in the food or who brought it to Henry.

The forensic finding supplies the missing mechanism. Snorrason reports that the remaining food contains a large amount of bromadiolone, an anticoagulant used in rat poison; it prevents blood from clotting and is inexpensive and readily available at a supermarket. The substance explains Henry’s extensive bleeding and converts the investigators’ baffling observation into a poisoning case. Trude Beskow is arrested at her home in Askeland on suspicion of poisoning her father.

The arrest does not settle the question of responsibility. Trude insists that Mai Sinok, Henry’s carer, poisoned the food, and alleges that Henry may have promised Mai money or the house. The account thus closes on a distinction between what the evidence establishes—the stew contained rat poison and Henry died after eating it—and what remains disputed: who poisoned or delivered the food, and for what reason.

The Death Johnny Imagined

While he stayed away, Johnny turned the poison into a private spectacle in his imagination. He pictured his mother eating from the spoon, then emptying the pot and scraping its bottom; in his vision, she convulsed, collapsed, and staggered through the house, unable to see clearly or make herself heard. The elaborate scene reveals the violence of his intention, but also the gap between his fantasy and what actually happened: his mother remained alive, and the stew was preserved rather than consumed as he had expected.

When Johnny returned, she was pouring vodka and speaking normally, with colour in her cheeks. He could not answer her; baffled, he went into the kitchen and found the pan empty. The ordinary blue container had quietly defeated the spectacle he had imagined. His disappointment was not relief at her survival: he felt gloomy that he had failed to create a scene or get rid of her, and spent the evening on his bed while Butch scampered across the duvet.

Custody and the Aftermath

After her arrest, Trude Beskow remained sober for longer than she ever had before, but sobriety brought no calm: she could not rein in her rage, and her body seemed to fail like a motor without oil. In jail she was powerless through each shrill second. The officers called her the Cyclone; she threw furniture around her cell and sometimes screamed for long stretches. Her confinement therefore adds a volatile human aftermath to the forensic case: the poisoning has been established, but the scene of her custody supplies no independent resolution of who put the poison in Henry’s food.