The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared PDF

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Jonas Jonasson ‘Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be.’  Contents The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Title Page...

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Jonas Jonasson ‘Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be.’  Contents The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Title Page Epigraph Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Epilogue Acknowledgements Biographical note International Praise Interview with the Author Reading Group Discussion Questions Copyright The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared  Chapter 1 Monday, 2nd May 2005 You might think he could have made up his mind earlier, and been man enough to tell the others of his decision. But Allan Karlsson had never been given to pondering things too long. So the idea had barely taken hold in the old man’s head before he opened the window of his room on the ground floor of the Old People’s Home in the town of Malmköping, and stepped out – into the flowerbed. This manoeuvre required a bit of effort, since Allan was one hundred years old. On this very day in fact. There was less than an hour to go before his birthday party would begin in the lounge of the Old People’s Home. The mayor would be there. And the local paper. And all the other old people. And the entire staff, led by bad-tempered Director Alice. It was only the Birthday Boy himself who didn’t intend to turn up.  Chapter 2 Monday, 2nd May 2005 Allan Karlsson hesitated as he stood in the flowerbed that ran along one side of the Old People’s Home. He was wearing a brown jacket with brown trousers and on his feet he had a pair of brown indoor slippers. He was not a trendsetter; people rarely are at that age. He was on the run from his own birthday party, another unusual thing for a hundred-year-old, not least because even being one hundred is pretty rare. Allan thought about whether he should make the effort to crawl back in through the window to get his hat and shoes, but when he felt his wallet in his inside pocket, he decided that that would suffice. Besides, Director Alice had repeatedly shown that she had a sixth sense (wherever he hid his vodka, she found it), and she might be nosing around in his room even now, suspicious that something fishy was going on. Better to be on his way while he could, Allan thought, as he stepped out of the flowerbed on creaking knees. In his wallet, as far as he could remember, he had a few hundred-crown notes saved – a good thing since he’d need some cash if he was going into hiding. He turned to take one last look at the Old People’s Home that – until a few moments ago – he had thought would be his last residence on Earth, and then he told himself that he could die some other time, in some other place. The hundred-year-old man set off in his pee-slippers (so called because men of an advanced age rarely pee further than their shoes), first through a park and then alongside an open field where a market was occasionally held in the otherwise quiet provincial town. After a few hundred metres, Allan went around the back of the district’s medieval church and sat down on a bench next to some gravestones to rest his aching knees. It wasn’t such a religious town that Allan worried about being disturbed in the churchyard. He noted an ironic coincidence. He was born the same year as a Henning Algotsson who lay beneath the stone just across from his bench. But there was an important difference – Henning had given up the ghost sixty-one years earlier. If Allan had been more curious he might have wondered what Henning had died of, at the age of thirty-nine. But Allan left other people to themselves, dead or alive. He always had and he always would. Instead, he thought that he had probably been mistaken all those years when he’d sat in the Old People’s Home, feeling that he might as well die and leave it all. However many aches and pains he suffered, it had to be much more interesting and instructive to be on the run from Director Alice than to be lying rigid six feet under. Upon which thought the Birthday Boy, despite his complaining knees, got up and said goodbye to Henning Algotsson and continued on his badly planned flight. Allan cut across the churchyard to the south, until a stone wall appeared in his path. It wasn’t more than a metre high, but Allan was a centenarian, not a high jumper. On the other side was Malmköping’s bus station and the old man suddenly realised that his rickety legs were taking him towards a building that could be very useful. Once, many years earlier, Allan had crossed the Himalayas. That was no picnic. Allan thought about that experience now, as he stood before the last hurdle between himself and the station. He considered the matter so intently that the stone wall seemed to shrink before his eyes. And when it was at its very lowest, Allan crept over it, age and knees be damned. Malmköping is not what you’d call a bustling town, and this sunny weekday morning was no exception. Allan hadn’t seen a living soul since he had suddenly decided not to show up at his own hundredth birthday party. The station waiting room was almost empty when Allan shuffled in. Almost. On the right were two ticket windows, one closed. Behind the other sat a little man with small, round glasses, thin hair combed to one side, and a uniform waistcoat. The man gave him an irritated look as he raised his eyes from his computer screen. Perhaps he felt the waiting room was becoming too crowded, because over in the corner there was already another person, a young man of slight build, with long greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back. It seemed as if the young man might not be able to read, since he was pulling the door of the handicapped toilet, even though there was a sign saying ‘Out of order’. After a moment, he moved to the other toilet, but there he faced a different problem. Evidently he didn’t want to be parted from his big grey suitcase on wheels, but the cubicle was simply too small for the two of them. It seemed to Allan that the young man would either have to leave the suitcase outside while he relieved himself, or allow the suitcase to occupy the cubicle while he himself remained outside. But Allan had more pressing concerns. Making an effort to move his legs in the right sequence, he shuffled with small steps up to the little man in the open ticket window and enquired as to the possibility of public transport in some direction, any at all would do, within the next few minutes, and if so, what would it cost? The little man looked tired. He had probably lost track of things halfway through Allan’s enquiry, because after a few seconds, he said: ‘And where is it you want to go?’ Allan took a deep breath, and reminded the little man that he had already stated that the actual destination, and for that matter the means of transport, were of less importance than a) the time of departure, and b) the cost. The little man silently inspected his timetables and let Allan’s words sink in. ‘Bus number 202 departs for Strängnäs in three minutes. Would that work?’ Yes, Allan thought it would. The little man told him that the bus left from outside the terminal door and that it would be most convenient to buy a ticket directly from the driver. Allan wondered what the little man did behind the window if he didn’t sell tickets, but he didn’t say anything. The little man possibly wondered the same thing. Allan thanked him for his help and tried to tip the hat he had in his haste not brought along. The hundred-year-old man sat down on one of the two empty benches, alone with his thoughts. The wretched birthday party at the home would start at three o’clock, and that was in twelve minutes. At any moment they would be banging on the door to his room, and then all hell would break loose. He smiled at the thought. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Allan saw that somebody was approaching. It was the slightly built young man heading straight for Allan with his big suitcase trailing behind him on four small wheels. Allan realised that he might not be able to avoid engaging the long-haired youth in conversation. Perhaps that wasn’t so bad. He might gain insight into what today’s young people thought about this and that. A conversation did take place, but without the depth of social analysis Allan had anticipated. The young man came to a halt a few yards away, seemed to study the old man for a moment, and then said: ‘Hey.’ Allan replied in a friendly tone, saying that he wished him a good afternoon, and then asked him if there was some way he could be of service. It turned out that there was. The young man wanted Allan to keep an eye on the suitcase while he relieved himself. Or as he expressed it: ‘I need to take a dump.’  Allan replied that, although he was old and decrepit, his eyesight was still in good repair and it did not sound like too arduous a task to keep an eye on the young man’s suitcase. He did recommend that the young man relieve himself with some urgency – without, of course, using the young man’s own terminology – as Allan had a bus to catch. The young man did not hear the last bit. His urgent need drove him towards the toilet before Allan had finished speaking. The hundred-year-old man had never let himself be irritated by people, even when there was a good reason to be, and he was not annoyed by the uncouth manner of this youth. But he couldn’t warm to him either, and that probably played some part in what happened next. Bus number 202 rolled up outside the entrance to the terminal, just a few seconds after the young man had closed the toilet door behind him. Allan looked at the bus and then at the suitcase, then again at the bus and then again at the suitcase. It has wheels, he said to himself. And there’s a strap to pull it by too. And then Allan surprised himself by making what – you have to admit – was a decision to say ‘yes’ to life. The bus driver was conscientious and polite. He stepped down and helped the very old man with the big suitcase to get on the bus. Allan thanked him and pulled out his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. The bus driver wondered if the gentleman was possibly going all the way to Strängnäs, while Allan counted out six hundred and fifty crowns in notes and a few coins. But Allan thought it best to be frugal and so he held out a fifty- crown note and asked: ‘How far will this get me?’ The driver said jovially that he was used to people who knew where they wanted to go but not what it would cost, but this was quite the opposite. Then he looked in his schedule and replied that for forty-eight crowns you could travel on the bus to Byringe Station. Allan thought that sounded fine. The driver put the newly stolen suitcase in the baggage area behind his seat, while Allan sat down in the first row on the right hand side. From there he could see through the window of the station’s waiting room. The toilet door was still closed when the bus rolled off. Allan hoped for the young man’s sake that he was having a pleasant time in there, bearing in mind the disappointment that awaited him. The bus to Strängnäs was not exactly crowded that afternoon. In the back row there was a middle-aged woman, in the middle a young mother who had struggled on board with her two children, one of them in a pram, and at the very front an extremely old man. This passenger was wondering why he had stolen a big grey suitcase on four wheels. Was it because he could and because the owner was a lout, or because the suitcase might contain a pair of shoes and even a hat? Or was it because the old man didn’t have anything to lose? Allan really couldn’t say why he did it. When life has gone into overtime it’s easy to take liberties, he thought, and he made himself comfortable in the seat. So far, Allan was satisfied with the way the day had developed. Then he closed his eyes for his afternoon nap. At that same moment, Director Alice knocked on the door to Room 1 at the Old People’s Home. She knocked again and again. ‘Stop fooling around, Allan. The mayor and everyone else have already arrived. Do you hear me? You haven’t been at the bottle again, have you? Come out this minute, Allan! Allan?’ At about the same time, the door opened to what was, for the time being, the only functioning toilet in Malmköping station. Out stepped a young man who was doubly relieved. He took a few steps towards the middle of the waiting room, tightening his belt with one hand and combing his hair with the fingers of the other hand. Then he stopped, stared at the two empty benches, and looked left and right. Upon which he exclaimed: ‘What the bloody damned hell…!’ Then words failed him, before he found his voice again: ‘You’re a dead man, you old bastard. Once I’ve found you.’  Chapter 3 Monday, 2nd May 2005 Just after three o’clock in the afternoon on 2nd May the calm of Malmköping was shattered. At first Director Alice at the Old People’s Home was worried rather than angry, and pulled out her master key. Since Allan had not concealed his escape route, it was immediately obvious that the Birthday Boy had climbed out of the window. Judging by the tracks, he had then stood among the pansies in the flowerbed, before disappearing. By virtue of his position, the mayor felt he should take command. He ordered the staff to search in pairs. Allan couldn’t be far away; the searchers should concentrate on the immediate vicinity. One pair was dispatched to the park, one to the state-run liquor store (a place that Allan had occasionally frequented, Director Alice knew), one to the other shops on Main Street, and one to the Community Centre up on the hill. The mayor himself would stay at the Old People’s Home to keep an eye on the residents who hadn’t vanished into thin air and to ponder the next move. He told the searchers that they should be discreet; there was no need to generate unnecessary publicity about this affair. In the general confusion, the mayor forgot that one of the pairs of searchers he had just sent out consisted of a reporter from the local paper and her photographer. The bus station was not included in the mayor’s primary search area. In that location, however, a very angry, slightly built young man with long, greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back had already searched every corner of the building. Since there was no trace of either a very old man or a suitcase, the young man took some decisive steps towards the little man behind the only open ticket window, to find out where either or both had gone. Although the little man was generally bored with his work, he still had his professional pride. So he explained to the loud-mouthed young man that the passengers’ privacy was not something that could be compromised, adding firmly that under no circumstances whatsoever would he give him any information of the type that he wished to obtain. The young man stood in silence for a moment. He then moved five yards to the left, to the not very solid door to the ticket office. He didn’t bother to check whether it was locked. Instead he took a step back and kicked the door in with his boot, sending splinters flying in every direction. The little man did not even have time to lift the telephone receiver to phone for help, before he was dangling in the air in front of the young man, who had grasped him firmly by the ears. ‘I might not know anything about privacy, but I’m good at getting people to talk,’ said the young man to the little ticket seller before he let him drop down with a bump onto his revolving office chair. At which point the young man explained what he intended to do with the little man’s genitals, with the help of a hammer and nails, if the little man did not comply with his wishes. The description was so realistic that the little man immediately decided to say what he thought, namely that the old man in question had presumably taken a bus in the direction of Strängnäs. Whether the man had taken a suitcase with him, he couldn’t say, as he was not the sort of person who spied on his customers. The ticket seller then stopped talking to ascertain how satisfied the young man was with what he had said, and immediately determined that it would be best for him to provide further information. So he said that on the journey between Malmköping and Strängnäs there were twelve stops and that the old man could of course get out at any one of those. The person who would know was the bus driver, and according to the timetable he would be back in Malmköping at ten past seven that same evening, when the bus made its return journey to Flen. The young man sat down beside the terrified little man with the throbbing ears. ‘Just need to think,’ he said. So he thought. He thought that he should certainly be able to shake the bus driver’s mobile phone number out of the little man, and then call the driver and say that the old man’s suitcase was actually stolen property. But then of course there was a risk that the bus driver would involve the police and that was not something the young man wanted. Besides, it was probably not so urgent really, because the old man seemed dreadfully old and now that he had a suitcase to drag around, he would need to travel by train, bus or taxi if he wanted to continue his journey from the station in Strängnäs. He would thus leave new tracks behind him, and there would always be somebody who could be dangled by the ears to say where the old man was heading. The young man had confidence in his ability to persuade people to tell him what they knew. When the youth had finished thinking, he decided to wait for the bus to return so he could interview the driver without undue politeness. When he had decided, the young man got up again, and explained to the ticket seller what would happen to him, his wife, his children and his home if he told the police or anybody else what had just occurred. The little man had neither wife nor children, but he was eager to keep his ears and genitals more or less intact. So he gave his word as an employee of the national railways that no one would get a peep out of him. That was a promise he kept until the next day. The two-man search groups came back to the Old People’s Home and reported on what they had seen. Or rather hadn’t seen. The mayor instinctively did not want to involve the police and he was desperately trying to think of alternatives, when the local newspaper reporter dared to ask: ‘And what are you going to do now, Mr Mayor?’ The mayor was silent for a few moments; then he said: ‘Call the police, of course.’ God, how he hated the free press! Allan woke when the driver kindly nudged him and announced that they had now reached Byringe Station. Shortly afterwards, the driver manoeuvred the suitcase out of the front door of the bus, with Allan close behind. The driver asked if he could now manage on his own, and Allan said that the driver had no need to worry in that respect. Then Allan thanked him for his help and waved goodbye as the bus rolled out onto the main road again. Tall fir trees blocked the afternoon sun and Allan was starting to feel a bit chilly in his thin jacket and indoor slippers. He could see no sign of Byringe, let alone its station. There was just forest, forest and forest in all directions — and a little gravel road leading to the right. Allan thought that perhaps there were warm clothes in the suitcase he had on impulse brought along with him. Unfortunately the suitcase was locked and without a screwdriver or some other tool it was surely hopeless to try to open it. There was no other option but to start moving, otherwise he would freeze to death. The suitcase had a strap at the top and if you pulled it, the suitcase rolled along nicely on its small wheels. Allan followed the gravel road into the forest with short, shuffling steps. The suitcase followed just behind him, skidding on the gravel. After a few hundred yards, Allan came to what must be Byringe Station – a closed-down building next to a most definitely and absolutely closed-down former railway line. Allan was a prize specimen as far as centenarians went, but it was all getting to be a bit too much. He sat down on the suitcase to gather his thoughts and strength.  To Allan’s left stood the shabby, yellow two-storey station. All the windows on the bottom floor were covered with planks. To his right you could follow the closed-down railway line into the distance, straight as an arrow even deeper into the forest. Nature had not yet succeeded in entirely eating up the tracks, but it was only a matter of time. The wooden platform was evidently no longer safe to walk on. On the outermost planking you could still read a painted sign: Do not walk on the track. The track was certainly not dangerous to walk on, thought Allan. But who in his right mind would voluntarily walk on the platform? That question was answered immediately, because at that very moment the shabby door of the station building was opened and a man in his seventies wearing a cap and solid boots stepped out of the house. He clearly trusted the planks not to give way and he was entirely focused on the old man in front of him. His initial attitude was hostile, but then he seemed to change his mind, possibly as a result of seeing the decrepitude of this trespasser. Allan sat on the newly stolen suitcase, not knowing what to say and in any case lacking the energy to say it. But he looked steadily at the man, letting him make the first move. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing in my station?’ asked the man with the cap. Allan didn’t answer. He couldn’t decide whether he was dealing with friend or foe. But then he decided that it would be wise not to argue with the only person around, someone who might even let Allan inside before the evening chill set in. He decided to tell it like it was. Allan told the man that his name was Allan, that he was exactly one hundred years old and spry for his age, so spry in fact that he was on the run from the Old People’s Home. He had also had time to steal a suitcase from a young man who by now would certainly not be particularly happy about it; his knees were not for the moment at their best and he would very much like to give them a rest. Allan then fell silent, awaiting the court’s verdict. ‘Is that so,’ said the man in the cap and smiled. ‘A thief!’ He jumped nimbly down from the platform and went over to the centenarian to have a closer look. ‘Are you really one hundred years old?’ he asked. ‘In that case, you must be hungry.’ Allan couldn’t follow the logic, but of course he was hungry. So he asked what was on the menu and if a nip of the hard stuff might be included. The man with the cap stretched out his hand, introduced himself as Julius Jonsson and pulled the old man to his feet. He then announced that he would personally carry Allan’s suitcase, and that roast elk was on the bill if that suited, and that there would absolutely be a nip of the hard stuff to go with it, or rather enough to take care of the knees and the rest of him too. Julius Jonsson had not had anybody to talk to for several years, so he was pleased to meet the old man with the suitcase. A drop of the hard stuff first for one knee and then for the other, followed by a drop more for the back and neck, and then some to whet the appetite, all in all made for a convivial atmosphere. Allan asked what Julius did for a living, and got his whole story. Julius was born in the north of Sweden, the only child of Anders and Elvina Jonsson. Julius worked as a labourer on the family farm and was beaten every day by his father who was of the opinion that Julius was good for nothing. when Julius was twenty-five, his mother died of cancer – which Julius grieved over – and shortly afterwards his father was swallowed by the bog when he tried to rescue a heifer. Julius grieved over that too – because he was fond of the heifer. Young Julius had no talent for the farming life (in this his father had essentially been right) nor did he have any desire for it. So he sold everything except a few acres of forest that he thought might come in handy in his old age. He went off to Stockholm and within two years had squandered all his money. He then returned to the forest. With great enthusiasm, Julius put in a bid to supply 5,000 electricity poles to the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company. And since Julius didn’t concern himself with such details as employment tax and VAT, he won the bid, and with the help of a dozen Hungarian refugees he managed to deliver the poles on time, and was paid more money than he knew existed. So far, all was well. The problem was that Julius had been obliged to cheat a little. The trees were not yet fully grown, so the poles were a yard shorter that what had been ordered. This would probably have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for the fact that virtually every farmer in the area had just acquired a combine harvester. The Hudiksvall District Electrical Company stuck up the poles, with cables criss-crossing fields and meadows in the area, and when it was harvest time, on one single morning the cables were pulled down in twenty-six locations by twenty-two different newly bought combine harvesters. The entire region had no electricity for weeks, as harvests were lost, and milking machines stopped working. It was not long before the farmers’ fury – at first directed against the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company – was turned against young Julius. ‘The town slogan “Happy Hudiksvall” was not on many people’s lips at that time, I can tell you,’ Julius said. ‘I had to hide at the Town Hotel in Sundsvall for seven months and then I ran out of money. Shall we have another swig of the hard stuff?’ Allan thought that they should. The elk had been washed down with beer too, and now Allan felt so comprehensively satisfied that he began to be almost afraid of dying. Julius continued his story. After being nearly run down by a tractor in the centre of Sundsvall (driven by a farmer with a murderous look in his eyes), he realised that the locals weren’t going to forget his little mistake for the next hundred years. So he moved a long way south and ended up in Mariefred where he did a bit of small-time thieving for a while until he tired of town life and managed to acquire the former station building in Byringe for 25,000 crowns he happened to find one night in a safe at the Gripsholm Inn. Here at the station, he now lived essentially via handouts from the state, poaching in his neighbour’s forest, small-scale production and sale of alcoholic spirits from his home-distilling apparatus, and resale of what goods he could get hold of from his neighbours. He wasn’t particularly popular in the neighbourhood, Julius went on, and between mouthfuls Allan answered that he could imagine as much. When Julius suggested having one final snifter ‘for dessert’, Allan answered that he had always had a weakness for desserts of that kind, but that first of all he must seek out a toilet if there possibly happened to be one in the building. Julius got up, turned on the ceiling lamp since it was starting to get dark, and then pointed to the stairs saying that there was a functional lavatory on the right. He promised to have two newly poured drams ready and waiting when Allan returned. Allan found the toilet where Julius had said it would be. He stood in position to pee, and as usual the last drops didn’t quite make it to the bowl. Some of them landed softly on his pee slippers instead. Halfway through the process, Allan heard a noise on the stairs. His first thought was that it was Julius, going off with his newly stolen suitcase. The noise got louder. Somebody was climbing the stairs. Allan realised that there was a chance that the steps he heard outside the door belonged to a slightly built young man with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back. And that, if it was him, then it probably wasn’t going to be a pleasant encounter. The bus returning from Strängnäs arrived at Malmköping station three minutes early. The bus carried no passengers and the driver had accelerated a little bit extra after the last bus stop to have time to catch his breath before continuing the journey to Flen. But the driver had barely lit his cigarette before a slightly built youth with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back, arrived. ‘Are you going to Flen?’ the driver asked a little hesitantly, because there was something about the young man that didn’t feel right. ‘I’m not going to Flen. And neither are you,’ answered the young man. Hanging around waiting for four hours for the bus to come back had been a bit too much for what little patience the youth could muster. Besides, after half that time he had realised that if instead he had immediately stolen a car, he could have caught up with the bus long before Strängnäs. On top of it all, police cars had started to cruise around in the little town. At any time the police could stumble into the station, and start interrogating the little man behind the window in the ticket office as to why he looked terrified and why the door to his office was hanging at an angle on one hinge. The young man had no idea what the cops were doing there. His boss in Never Again had chosen Malmköping as the transaction venue for three reasons: first, it was close to Stockholm; second, it had relatively good transport options; and third – and most important – because the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough to reach there. There were simply no cops in Malmköping. Or, to be more precise: there shouldn’t be, and yet the place was crawling with them. The young man had seen two cars and a total of four policemen; from his perspective that was a crowd. At first, the young man thought that the police were after him. But that would assume that the little man had squawked, and the young man could categorically discount that possibility. While waiting for the bus to come, the young man hadn’t had much to do other than keep an eye on the little man, smash his office phone to bits and patch up the office door as best he could. When the bus eventually came and the young man noted that it had no passengers, he had immediately decided to kidnap both the driver and the bus. It took all of twenty seconds to persuade the bus driver to turn the bus around and drive northwards again. Close to a personal record, the young man reflected as he sat down in the exact seat where the geriatric he was now chasing had been sitting earlier the same day. The bus driver quivered with fear, but got through the worst of it with a calming cigarette. Smoking was, of course, forbidden on board the bus, but the only law the driver was subject to at that moment was sitting just diagonally behind him in the bus and was slightly built, had long, greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back.  On the way, the young man asked where the elderly suitcase-thief had gone. The driver said that the old man had got off at Byringe Station and that was probably entirely random, explaining the backwards way the old man had gone about things, offering a fifty-crown note and asking how far he could get with that. The driver didn’t know much about Byringe Station, except that it was rare for anyone to get on or off there. Supposedly there was a closed-down railway station some way in the forest, and Byringe village was somewhere in the vicinity. The geriatric couldn’t have got much further than that, the driver guessed. The man was very old and the suitcase was heavy, even though it had wheels. The young man immediately calmed down. He had refrained from calling the boss in Stockholm, because the boss was one of the few people who could scare people more effectively than the young man himself. The young man shivered at the thought of what the boss would say about the suitcase going astray. Better to solve the problem first and tell him later. And seeing as how the old man hadn’t gone all the way to Strängnäs or even beyond, the suitcase should be back in the hands of the young man quicker than he had feared. ‘Here’s the Byringe Station bus stop…’ The driver slowly rolled to the side of the road, and prepared to die. But it turned out that his time had not come, although his mobile phone wasn’t so lucky. It met with a rapid death under one of the young man’s boots. And a whole stream of death threats directed at the driver’s relatives spewed out of the young man’s mouth, designed to avert any possible thought of the driver contacting the police instead of turning the bus around and continuing the journey to Flen. Then the young man got off and let the driver and the bus escape. The poor driver was so terrified that he didn’t dare turn the bus round, but continued all the way to Strängnäs, parked in the middle of Trädgårds Street, walked in shock into the Delia Hotel where he rapidly downed four glasses of whisky. Then to the bartender’s horror, he started to cry. After a further two glasses of whisky, the bartender offered him a telephone in case he wanted to phone somebody. The bus driver started to cry again – and called his girlfriend. The young man thought he could make out tracks in the gravel on the road, tracks of a suitcase on wheels. This would be over in no time, which was a good thing, because it was getting dark. Off and on, the young man wished that he had done a bit more planning. It struck him that he was standing in a rapidly darkening forest, and it would soon be pitch black. what would he do then? These troubled thoughts ended abruptly when he first caught sight of a shabby, partly boarded-up, yellow building near the bottom of the hill. And when somebody turned on a light on the upper floor, the young man mumbled: ‘Now I’ve got you, old geezer.’ Allan quickly stopped peeing. Then he carefully opened the toilet door and tried to hear what was happening in the kitchen. Soon enough his worst fear was confirmed. Allan recognised the young man’s voice, bellowing at Julius Jonsson to reveal where ‘the other old bastard’ was. Allan snuck over to the kitchen door, silently because he was wearing bedroom slippers. The young man had grasped Julius by both ears, the same hold he had earlier practised on the little man at the station in Malmköping. while he shook poor Julius, he continued his interrogation. Allan thought the young man should have been satisfied with finding the suitcase which was standing right in the middle of the room. Julius grimaced but made no move to answer. Allan reflected that the old timber merchant was quite a tough guy, and looked around for a suitable weapon. Amidst the junk he saw a small number of candidates: a crowbar, a plank, a container of insect spray and a packet of rat poison. Allan first settled on the rat poison but couldn’t just then figure out a way to get a spoonful or two into the young man. The crowbar, on the other hand, was a bit too heavy for the centenarian to lift, and the insect spray… No, it would have to be the plank. So Allan took a firm hold of his weapon and with four sensationally fast steps – for his age – he was right behind his intended victim. The young man must have sensed that Allan was there, because just as the old man took aim the youth loosened his hold on Julius Jonsson and spun around. He received the plank slap bang in the middle of his forehead, stood still where he was and stared for a second before he fell backwards and hit his head on the edge of the kitchen table. No blood, no groaning, nothing. He just lay there, with his eyes closed. ‘Good one,’ said Julius. ‘Thanks,’ said Allan, ‘now where’s that dessert you promised?’ Allan and Julius sat down at the kitchen table, with the long-haired youth unconscious at their feet. Julius poured the brandy, gave one glass to Allan and raised his own in a toast. Allan raised his glass. ‘So,’ said Julius when they’d emptied their glasses. ‘I’m betting that’s the owner of the suitcase?’ Allan realised that it was time for him to explain a thing or two in more detail.  Not that there was so much to explain. Most of what had happened during the day was hard for Allan himself to understand. But he described the events – his defection from the home, his spontaneous seizure of the suitcase at the station in Malmköping, and the fear at the back of his mind that the young man who now lay on the floor would probably quickly catch up with him. And he sincerely apologised for the fact that Julius now sat there with red and throbbing ears. But Julius said that Allan most certainly shouldn’t be apologising for the fact that there was finally a bit of action in Julius Jonsson’s life. Julius was back in good form. He thought it was high time that they both had a look at what was in the suitcase. When Allan pointed out that it was locked, Julius told him not to be silly. ‘Since when has a lock stopped Julius Jonsson?’ asked Julius Jonsson. But there is a time for everything, he went on. First there was the matter of the problem on the floor. It wouldn’t do if the young man were to wake up and then carry on from where he left off when he passed out. Allan suggested that they tie him to a tree outside the station building, but Julius objected that if the young man shouted loudly enough when he woke up he would be heard down in the village. There were only a handful of families still living there, but all had – with more or less good reason – a bit of a grudge against Julius and they would probably be on the young man’s side if they got the chance. Julius had a better idea. Off the kitchen was an insulated freezer-room where he stored his poached and butchered elks. For the time being the room contained no elks, and the fan was turned off. Julius didn’t want to use the freezer unnecessarily because it used a hell of a lot of electricity. Julius had of course hot-wired it, and it was Gösta at Forest Cottage farm who unknowingly paid, but it was important to steal electricity in moderation if you wanted to keep taking advantage of the perk for a long time. Allan inspected the turned-off freezer and found it to be an excellent cell, without any unnecessary amenities. The six by nine feet was perhaps more space than the youth deserved, but there was no need to make conditions unnecessarily harsh. The old men dragged the young man into the freezer. He groaned when they put him on an upturned wooden chest in one corner and propped his body against the wall. He seemed about to wake up. Best to hurry out and lock the door properly! No sooner said than done. Upon which Julius lifted the suitcase onto the kitchen table, looked at the lock, licked clean the fork he had just used for the evening’s roast elk with potatoes, and picked the lock in a few seconds. Then he beckoned Allan over for the actual opening, on the grounds that it was Allan’s booty after all. ‘Everything of mine is yours too,’ said Allan. ‘We share and share alike, but if there is a pair of shoes in my size then I bags them.’ Upon which Allan opened the lock. ‘What the hell,’ said Allan. ‘What the hell,’ said Julius. ‘Let me out!’ could be heard from the freezer-room.  Chapter 4 1905–1929 Allan Emmanuel Karlsson was born on 2nd May 1905. The day before, his mother had marched in the May Day procession in Flen and demonstrated on behalf of women’s suffrage, an eight-hour working day and other utopian demands. The demonstrating had at least one positive result: her contractions started and just after midnight her first and only son was born. She gave birth at home with the help of the neighbour’s wife who was not especially talented at midwifery but who had some status in the community because as a nine-year-old she had had the honour of curtsying before King Karl XIV Johan, who in turn was a friend (sort of) of Napoleon Bonaparte. And to be fair to the neighbour’s wife, the child she delivered did indeed reach adulthood, and by a very good margin. Allan Karlsson’s father was both considerate and angry. He was considerate with his family; he was angry with society in general and with everybody who could be thought of as representing that society. Finer folk disapproved of him, dating back to the time he had stood on the square in Flen and advocated the use of contraceptives. For this offence he was fined ten crowns, and relieved of the need to worry about the topic any further since Allan’s mother out of pure shame decided to ban any further entry to her person. Allan was then six and old enough to ask his mother for a more detailed explanation of why his father’s bed had suddenly been moved into the wood-shed. He was told that he shouldn’t ask so many questions unless he wanted his ears boxed. Since Allan, like all children at all times, did not want his ears boxed, he dropped the subject. From that day on, Allan’s father appeared less and less frequently in his own home. In the daytime he more or less coped with his job on the railways, in the evening he discussed socialism at meetings far and wide, and where he spent his nights was never really clear to Allan. His father did however take his financial responsibilities seriously. He handed over the greater part of his salary to his wife each week, until one day he was fired after he had turned violent with a passenger who happened to announce that he was on his way to Stockholm with thousands of others to visit the King in the royal palace and assure him of their will to defend their fatherland.  ‘You can start by defending yourself against this,’ Allan’s father had said and punched the man with a hard right so that he fell to the ground. The immediate dismissal meant that Allan’s father could no longer support his family. The reputation he had acquired as a man of violence and advocate of contraception meant that it was a waste of time for him to look for another job. All that was left was to wait for the revolution, or best of all to speed up its arrival, because every little thing nowadays went so damned slowly. Allan’s father was a man who wanted to see results. Swedish socialism needed an international model. That would light a fire under everything and make things hellishly hot for Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson and his capitalist ilk. So Allan’s father packed his bag and went off to Russia to depose the Tsar. Allan’s mother of course missed his salary, but she was otherwise satisfied that her husband had left not only the district but also the country. After the family breadwinner had emigrated, it was up to Allan’s mother and the just-ten-year-old Allan himself to keep the family afloat financially. His mother had the fourteen fully grown birch trees they owned chopped down and then she cut them up and split them herself to sell as firewood, while Allan managed to get a miserably paid job as an errand boy at Nitroglycerine Ltd.’s production branch. In the regular letters she received from St Petersburg (which soon after was renamed Petrograd), Allan’s mother noted to her increasing surprise that Allan’s father had started to waver in his belief in the blessings of socialism. In his letters Allan’s father often referred to friends and acquaintances from Petrograd’s political establishment. The person who was most often quoted was a man called Carl. Not an especially Russian name, Allan thought, and it didn’t get any more Russian when Allan’s father began to call him Uncle Carl or just Uncle. According to Allan’s father, Uncle’s thesis was that people in general didn’t know what was best for them, and that they needed somebody whose hand they could hold. That was why autocracy was superior to democracy, as long as the educated and responsible segment of society made sure the autocrat concerned did a good job. Seven out of ten Bolsheviks can’t read, Uncle had snorted. We can’t hand over power to a load of illiterates, can we? In his letters, Allan’s father had nevertheless defended the Bolsheviks on that particular point, because he said ‘you can’t imagine what the Russian alphabet looks like. It’s no wonder people are illiterate.’ What was worse was how the Bolsheviks behaved. They were filthy, and they drank vodka like the riff-raff back home, the ones who laid the rails criss- crossing central Sweden. Allan’s father had always wondered how the rails could be so straight considering the extent of the workers’ consumption of spirits, and he had felt a twinge of guilt every time Swedish rails swung to the right or left. Be that as it may, the Bolsheviks were at least as bad as the Swedes. Uncle maintained that socialism would end with everybody trying to kill everybody else until there was only one person left to make all the decisions. So it would be better to rely from the start on the Tsar, a good and educated man with a vision for the world. In a way, Uncle knew what he was talking about. He had actually met the Tsar, and indeed more than once. Uncle claimed that Nicholas II had a genuinely good heart. The Tsar had had a lot of bad luck, but surely that couldn’t last. Failed harvests and revolting Bolsheviks had made a mess of things. And then the Germans started to growl just because the Tsar was mobilizing his forces. But he did that in order to keep the peace. After all it wasn’t the Tsar who had killed the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, was it? That was evidently how Uncle (whoever he was) saw it all, and somehow he got Allan’s father to see it the same way. Besides, Allan’s father felt an affinity with the Tsar because of all the bad luck he suffered. Sooner or later such bad luck must change, for Russian Tsars as well as for ordinary honest folk from the vicinity of Flen. His father never sent any money from Russia, but once after a couple of years a package came with an enamel Easter egg that his father said he had won in a game of cards from a Russian comrade, who besides drinking, arguing and playing cards with Allan’s father had no other occupation than making these kinds of eggs. His father sent the Easter egg to his ‘dear wife’, who just got angry and said that the damned layabout could at least have sent a real egg so that the family could eat. She was about to throw the present out the window, when she reconsidered. Perhaps Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson might be interested in it. He always tried to be special and special was exactly what Allan’s mother supposed the egg to be. Imagine Allan’s mother’s surprise when Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson after two days’ consideration offered her eighteen crowns for Uncle’s egg. Not real money of course, just cancelling a debt, but even so. After that, his mother hoped to receive more eggs, but instead she found out from the next letter that the Tsar’s generals had abandoned their autocrat who then had to leave his throne. In his letter, Allan’s father cursed his egg-producing friend, who had now fled to Switzerland. Allan’s father himself planned to stay on and do battle with the upstart clown who had taken over, a man they called Lenin. For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased twelve square metres on which to grow Swedish strawberries. ‘The land didn’t cost more than four roubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,’ wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: ‘Now it’s war!’ And war it certainly was – all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerine Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marvelled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany. And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Tsar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans… So ‘Now it’s war!’ was right. Soon afterwards, one of Lenin’s henchmen had the Tsar executed together with all his family. Allan noted that the Tsar’s bad luck had persisted. A few months later, the Swedish consulate in Petrograd sent a telegram to Yxhult to inform them that Allan’s father was dead. Apparently Allan’s father had nailed some planking around a little bit of earth, and proclaimed the area to be an independent republic. He called his little state The Real Russia but then two government soldiers came to pull down the fence. Allan’s father had put up his fists in his eagerness to defend his country’s borders, and it had been impossible for the two soldiers to reason with him. In the end, they could think of no better solution than to put a bullet between his eyes, so they could go about their task in peace. ‘Couldn’t you have chosen to die in a less idiotic manner?’ said Allan’s mother to the telegram from the consulate. She hadn’t really expected her husband to come home again, but recently she had nevertheless started to hope he might, because she had troublesome lungs, and it wasn’t easy to keep up her old pace when splitting logs. Allan’s mother made a croaky sigh and that was the extent of her mourning. She told Allan philosophically that it was what it was, and that in the future whatever would be would be. Then she ruffled her son’s hair kindly before going out to split more logs. Allan didn’t really understand what his mother meant. But he understood that his father was dead, that his mother coughed and that the war was over. As for himself, by the age of thirteen he had acquired a particular skill in making explosions by mixing nitroglycerine, cellulose nitrate, ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate, wood flour, dinitrotoluene and a few other ingredients. That ought to come in handy some day, thought Allan, and went out to help his mother with the wood. Two years later, Allan’s mother finished coughing, and she entered that imagined heaven where his father was possibly already established. Then, on the threshold of the little house, Allan found an angry Mr Wholesale Merchant who thought that Allan’s mother should have paid her debt of nine crowns before she – without telling anyone – went and died. But Allan had no plans to give Gustavsson anything. ‘That’s something you’ll have to talk to her about yourself, Mr Wholesale Merchant. Do you want to borrow a spade?’ As wholesalers often are, the man was lightly built, compared with the fifteen- year-old Allan. The boy was on his way to becoming a man, and if he was half as crazy as his father then he was capable of anything, was how Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson saw it, and since he wanted to be around quite a bit longer to count his money, the subject of the debt was never raised again. Young Allan couldn’t understand how his mother had managed to scrape together several hundred crowns in savings. But the money was there anyway, and it was enough to bury her and to start the Karlsson Dynamite Company. The boy was only fifteen years old when his mother died, but Allan had learned all he needed at Nitroglycerine Ltd. He experimented freely in the gravel pit behind the house; once so freely that two miles away the closest neighbour’s cow had a miscarriage. But Allan never heard about that, because just like Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, the neighbour was a little bit afraid of crazy Karlsson’s possibly equally crazy boy. Since his time as an errand boy, Allan had retained his interest in current affairs. At least once a week, he rode his bicycle to the public library in Flen to update himself on the latest news. When he was there he often met young men who were keen to debate and who all had one thing in common: they wanted to tempt Allan into some political movement or other. But Allan’s great interest in world events did not include any interest in trying to change them. In a political sense, Allan’s childhood had been bewildering. On the one hand, he was from the working class. You could hardly use any other description of a boy who ends his schooling when he is ten to get a job in industry. On the other hand, he respected the memory of his father, and his father during far too short a life had managed to hold views right across the spectrum. He started on the Left, went on to praise Tsar Nicholas II and rounded off his existence with a land dispute with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His mother, in between her coughing fits, had cursed everyone from the King to the Bolsheviks and, in passing, even the leader of the Social Democrats, Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, and – not least – Allan’s father. Allan himself was certainly no fool. True, he only spent three years in school, but that was plenty for him to have learned to read, write and count. His politically conscious fellow workers at Nitroglycerine Ltd. had also made him curious about the world. But what finally formed young Allan’s philosophy of life were his mother’s words when they received the news of his father’s death. It took a while before the message seeped into his soul, but once there, it was there for ever: Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be. That meant among other things that you didn’t make a fuss, especially when there was good reason to do so, as for example, when they heard the news about his father’s death. In accordance with family tradition, Allan reacted by chopping wood, although for an unusually long time and particularly quietly. Or when his mother followed his father’s example, and as a result was carried out to the waiting hearse. Allan stayed in the kitchen and followed the spectacle through the window. And then he said so quietly that only he could hear: ‘Well, goodbye, mum.’ And that was the end of that chapter of his life. Allan worked hard with his dynamite company and during the first years of the 1920s built up a considerable circle of customers in the county. On Saturday evenings, when his contemporaries were attending barn dances, Allan sat at home and developed new formulae to improve the quality of his dynamite. And when Sunday came, he went to the gravel pit and tested the new explosives. But not between eleven and one, he had finally had to promise the local pastor, in exchange for him not complaining too much about Allan’s absence from church. Allan liked his own company and that was good, because he lived a solitary life. Since he didn’t join the ranks of the labour movement he was despised by socialists, while he was far too working class (not to mention being his father’s son) to be allowed a place at any bourgeois gathering. Gustavsson, for one, would rather die than end up in the company of that Karlsson brat. Just think, what would happen if the boy discovered what Gustavsson had been paid for the enamel egg which he had once bought from Allan’s mother for next to nothing and now sold to a diplomat in Stockholm. Thanks to that bit of business, Gustavsson had become the district’s third proud owner of an automobile. That time he had been lucky. But one Sunday in August 1925, after the church service, Gustavsson’s luck ran out. He went out for a drive, mainly to show off his expensive car. Unluckily for him, he happened to choose the road that passed Allan Karlsson’s house. At the bend, Gustavsson had got nervous (or perhaps God or fate had a hand in the events), and the gears got stuck and one thing led to another and Gustavsson and his automobile went straight into the gravel pit behind the house, instead of following the gentle curve of the road to the right. It would have been bad enough for Gustavsson to set foot on Allan’s land and have to explain himself, but things turned out much worse than that, because just as Gustavsson managed to bring his runaway automobile to a halt, Allan set off the first of that Sunday’s trial explosions. Allan, himself, was curled up for protection behind the outhouse and could neither see nor hear anything. Not until he returned to the gravel, did he realise that something had gone wrong. Bits of Gustavsson’s automobile were spread out over half the pit, and here and there lay bits of Gustavsson himself. Gustavsson’s head had landed softly on a patch of grass. It stared vacantly out over the destruction. ‘What business did you have in my gravel pit?’ Allan asked. Gustavsson did not reply. Over the next four years, Allan had plenty of time to read and improve his knowledge of how society was developing. After the explosion in the quarry, he found himself incarcerated in an asylum, though it was hard to say exactly what for. Eventually, the topic of his father came up when a young and enthusiastic disciple of Professor Bernhard Lundborg, an expert on Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, decided to build his career on Allan’s case. When Allan fell into the clutches of Professor Lundborg, he was immediately sterilised for ‘eugenic and social reasons’ on the basis that Allan was probably a bit slow and there was probably too much of his father in him for the state to allow further reproduction of the Karlsson genes. The sterilization did not bother Allan. On the contrary, he felt he was well- treated at Professor Lundborg’s clinic. Now and then, he had to answer all sorts of questions such as why he needed to blow people and things into bits and whether he had any Negro blood. Allan answered that he saw a certain difference between things and people when it came to the pleasure of lighting the fuse of a load of dynamite. Splitting a rock down the middle, that could make you feel good. But if instead of a rock, it was a person, well, Allan couldn’t see why a person wouldn’t move out of the way under the circumstances. Didn’t Professor Lundborg feel the same way? But Bernhard Lundborg was not the sort of man to involve himself in philosophical discussion with his patients; he repeated the question about Negro blood. Allan answered that you never really know, but both his parents had had skin that was as pale as his, perhaps the professor would take that as an answer? And then Allan added that he was dying to see a black man for real if the professor had one on hand. Professor Lundborg and his assistants did not answer Allan’s questions, but they made notes and hummed and then left him in peace, sometimes for days at a stretch. Allan devoted those days to all kinds of reading: the daily newspapers of course, but also books from the hospital’s extensive library. Add to that three square meals a day, an indoor toilet, and a room of his own, and you can see why Allan found it very comfortable to be locked up in an asylum. The atmosphere had been a little unpleasant only once, and that was when Allan asked Professor Lundborg what was so dangerous about being a Negro or a Jew. For once, the professor didn’t respond with silence, but bellowed that Karlsson should mind his own business and not interfere in other people’s affairs. Allan was reminded of that time many years ago when his mother had threatened to box his ears. The years passed and the interviews with Allan became few and far between. Then parliament appointed a committee to investigate the sterilization of ‘biologically inferior individuals’ and when the report was issued, Professor Lundborg suddenly had so much to do that Allan’s bed was needed for somebody else. In the spring of 1929, Allan was pronounced rehabilitated and fit once again to enter society, and was sent out onto the streets with just enough cash to get him a train ticket to Flen. He had to walk the last few miles to Yxhult, but Allan didn’t mind. After four years behind bars, he needed to stretch his legs.  Chapter 5 Monday, 2nd May 2005 The local newspaper lost no time in printing a story about the old man who had disappeared into thin air on his hundredth birthday. As the newspaper’s reporter was starved for real news from the district, she managed to imply that you could not exclude the possibility of kidnapping. According to witnesses, the centenarian was all right in the head and probably wasn’t roaming around confused. There is something special about disappearing on your hundredth birthday. The local radio station soon followed the local newspaper, and then came national radio, the websites of the national newspapers and the afternoon and evening TV news. The police in Flen had to hand the case over to the county crime squad, which sent two police cars with uniformed police officers and a Detective Chief Inspector Aronsson who was not in uniform. They were soon joined by assorted reporters who wanted to help search every corner of the area. The presence of the mass media in turn gave the county police chief reason to lead the investigation himself and perhaps to appear on camera in the process. Initially the investigation involved the police cars driving back and forth across the municipality, while Aronsson interrogated people at the Old People’s Home. The mayor, however, had gone home, and turned off his phone. In his opinion, only harm would come from being involved in the disappearance of an ungrateful geriatric. A scattering of tips did come in: everything from Allan being seen on a bike, to him standing in line and behaving badly at the pharmacy. But these, and similar observations, could soon for various reasons be dismissed. The head of the county police organized search parties with the help of about a hundred volunteers from the area, and he was genuinely surprised when this produced no results. Up to now he had been pretty certain that it was an ordinary case of a demented person disappearing, despite the statements of witnesses as to the good quantity of marbles possessed by the hundred-year-old man. So the investigation didn’t at this stage go anywhere, not until the police dog borrowed from Eskilstuna arrived at about half-past seven in the evening. The dog sniffed a few moments at Allan’s armchair and the footprints among the pansies outside the window before it set off towards the park and out the other side, across the street, into the grounds of the medieval church, over the stone wall, coming to a halt outside the bus station waiting room. The waiting room door was locked. An official told the police that the station locked its doors at 7.30 in the evening on weekdays, when the official’s colleague finished work for the day. But, the official added, if the police absolutely couldn’t wait until the following day, they could visit his colleague at home. His name was Ronny Hulth and he was sure to be listed in the telephone directory. While the head of the county police stood in front of the cameras outside the Old People’s Home and announced that the police needed the public’s help to continue with search parties during the evening and night since the centenarian was lightly dressed and possibly in a state of confusion, Detective Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson rang Ronny Hulth’s doorbell. The dog had clearly indicated that the geriatric had gone into the waiting room, and Mr Hulth who had been in the ticket office ought to be able to say whether the old man had left Malmköping by bus. But Ronny Hulth did not open the door. He sat in his bedroom with the blinds drawn, hugging his cat. ‘Go away!’ Ronny Hulth whispered towards the front door. ‘Go away!’ And in the end that is precisely what the chief inspector did. Partly he agreed with his boss’s belief that the geriatric was wandering about locally, or that if the old guy had got on a bus, he was presumably capable of looking after himself. Ronny Hulth was probably visiting his girlfriend. The first task tomorrow morning would be to seek him out on the job. If the geriatric hadn’t turned up by then, that is. At 9.02 p.m., the county police received a call: – My name is Bertil Karlgren and I’m calling… I’m calling on behalf of my wife you could say. Well, yes, anyway, my wife, Gerda Karlgren, has been in Flen for a few days visiting our daughter and her husband. They’re going to have a baby… So there’s always a lot to do. But today it was time to go home and she took, I mean Gerda, Gerda took the early afternoon bus, and the bus goes via Malmköping, we live here in Strängnäs… Well, this might not be anything, the wife doesn’t think so, but we heard on the radio about a hundred-year-old man who’d disappeared. Perhaps you’ve already found him? You haven’t? Anyway, the wife says that there was an incredibly old man who got on the bus in Malmköping and he had a large suitcase as if he was going for a long journey. The wife sat at the back and the old man sat right at the front so she couldn’t see so well and she didn’t hear what the old man and the driver talked about. What did you say, Gerda? Well, Gerda says that she isn’t one of those people who listen to other people’s conversations… The old man got out only halfway to Strängnäs. Gerda doesn’t know what the bus stop is called, it was sort of in the middle of the forest… The conversation was recorded, transcribed and sent by fax to the detective chief inspector’s hotel in Malmköping.  Chapter 6 Monday, 2nd May–Tuesday, 3rd May 2005 The suitcase was stuffed with bundles of 500-crown notes. Julius did some quick arithmetic in his head: ten rows across, five rows high, fifteen bundles in every pile… ‘Thirty-seven point five million if I counted correctly,’ said Julius. ‘That’s a decent amount of money,’ said Allan. ‘Let me out, you bastards,’ the young man shouted from inside the freezer. The young man was acting crazy in there; he yelled and kicked and yelled some more. Allan and Julius needed to collect their thoughts about the surprising turn of events, but they couldn’t do it with all that noise. In the end, Allan thought it was time to cool the young man’s temper a little, so he turned on the freezer fan. It didn’t take many seconds for the young man to notice that his situation had worsened. He quieted down to try to think clearly, not something he usually had much aptitude for, let alone when trapped in a rapidly cooling freezer with a pounding headache. After a few minutes’ deliberation, he decided that threatening or trying to kick his way out of the situation was unlikely to be effective. All that was left was to call for help from outside. All that was left was to call the boss. It was a dreadful thought. But the alternative seemed even worse. The young man hesitated for a minute or two, while it got colder and colder. Finally, he pulled out his mobile phone. No signal. The evening turned into night, and the night became morning. Allan opened his eyes but couldn’t figure out where he was. Had he gone and died in his sleep, after all? A chipper male voice wished him a good morning and informed him that there were two pieces of news to be conveyed, one good and one bad. Which did Allan want to hear first? First of all, Allan wanted to know where he was and why. His knees were aching, so he was alive despite everything. But hadn’t he… and didn’t he then take… Was the man called Julius? The pieces were falling into place; Allan was awake. He lay on a mattress on the floor in Julius’ bedroom. Julius stood in the doorway and repeated his question. Did Allan want the good or the bad news first? ‘The good news,’ said Allan. ‘You can skip the bad news.’ OK, Julius told him that the good news was that breakfast was on the table. There was coffee, sandwiches with cold roast elk and eggs from the neighbour’s. To think that Allan was going to enjoy one more breakfast in his life without porridge! That was good news indeed. When he sat down at the kitchen table, he felt that he was now ready to hear the bad news after all. ‘The bad news,’ said Julius, and lowered his voice a little, ‘the bad news is that when we were well and truly pissed last night, we forgot to turn off the fan in the freezer-room.’ ‘And?’ said Allan. ‘And… the guy inside must be dead cold – or cold dead – by now.’ With a worried look, Allan scratched his neck while he decided whether to let news of this carelessness spoil the day. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘But, on the other hand, I must say that you’ve got these eggs just right, not too hard and not too runny.’ Detective Chief Inspector Aronsson woke at about 8 a.m. in a bad mood. A geriatric who goes astray, on purpose or otherwise, should not be a case for somebody with the chief inspector’s qualifications. Aronsson showered, got dressed and went down to breakfast on the ground floor of the Plevna Hotel. On his way he met the receptionist who gave him a fax that had come in just after reception had closed the previous evening. An hour later, the chief inspector saw the case in a different light. The importance of the fax from the county police was unclear until Aronsson met a pale Ronny Hulth at the station’s ticket office. It didn’t take long before Hulth broke down and told Aronsson what had happened. Shortly afterwards, there was a call from Eskilstuna reporting that the county bus company in Flen had just discovered that a bus had been missing since the previous evening. Could Aronsson call a Jessica Björkman, the live-in girlfriend of a bus driver who had evidently been kidnapped but released? Chief Inspector Aronsson went back to the Plevna Hotel for a cup of coffee and to put all this newly gained information together. He wrote his observations down: An elderly man, Allan Karlsson, goes AWOL from his room at the Old People’s Home just before his hundredth birthday is to be celebrated in the lounge. Karlsson is or was in sensationally good condition for his age. The simple physical fact that he managed to get himself out through a window attests to this – unless the geriatric had had help from outside of course, but later observations would suggest that he was acting on his own. Furthermore, Director Alice Englund has testified that ‘Allan may be old, but he is also one hell of a rascal and he damned well does exactly what he feels like.’ According to the sniffer dog, Karlsson, after trampling down a bed of pansies, walked through parts of Malmköping and eventually into the waiting room at the bus station where, according to witness Ronny Hulth, he had gone straight up to Hulth’s ticket window – or rather shuffled up, since Hulth noticed Karlsson’s short steps and that Karlsson was wearing slippers, not shoes. Hulth’s further statement indicates that Karlsson wanted to get away from Malmköping as quickly as possible, with the direction and the means of transport seeming to be of lesser importance. That is incidentally confirmed by Jessica Björkman, the livein girlfriend of bus driver Lennart Ramnér. The bus driver has not been interrogated as yet, on account of his having taken too many sleeping pills. But Björkman’s statement seemed sound. Karlsson bought a ticket from Ramnér for a predetermined amount of money. The destination happened to be Byringe Station. Happened to be. There is thus no reason to believe that anybody or anything was waiting for Karlsson. There was another interesting detail. The ticketseller had not noticed whether Karlsson had a suitcase before he climbed on board the bus to Byringe but this fact had very soon become apparent to him on account of the violent behaviour of a supposed member of the criminal organisation Never Again. There wasn’t a suitcase in the story Jessica Björkman had managed to get out of her boyfriend, but the fax from the police confirms that Karlsson had presumably – albeit incredibly – stolen the suitcase from the Never Again member. The rest of Björkman’s story, together with the fax from Eskilstuna, tells us that Karlsson, at 3.20 in the afternoon, give or take a few minutes, and then the Never Again member, about four hours later, got off at Byringe Station before walking towards an unknown destination. The former is one hundred years old, dragging a suitcase with him; the latter is about seventy-five years younger. Chief Inspector Aronsson closed his notebook and drank the last of the coffee. It was 10.25 a.m. ‘Next stop, Byringe Station.’ At breakfast, Julius told Allan everything that he had accomplished and plotted during the early morning hours while Allan still slept.  First, the unfortunate accident in the freezer-room: when Julius realised that the temperature had been below freezing for at least ten hours during the evening and night, he had armed himself with the crowbar and opened the door. If the young man was still alive, he wouldn’t be even close to as awake and alert as he would need to be to stand up to Julius and his crowbar. But the crowbar safety measure was unnecessary. The young man sat hunched up on his empty box, his threatening and kicking days over. He had ice crystals on his body and his eyes stared coldly out at nothing – dead as a butchered elk, in short. Julius thought it was too bad, but also very convenient. They wouldn’t have been able to let that wild man out just like that. Julius turned the fan off and left the door open. The young man was dead, but he didn’t have to be frozen solid. Julius lit the stove in the kitchen to keep the place warm, and checked on the money. It wasn’t the thirty-seven million that he had hurriedly estimated the evening before. It was exactly 50 million. Allan listened to Julius’ account with interest, while he ate his breakfast with a better appetite than he’d had for as long as he could remember. He didn’t say anything until Julius reached the money part. ‘Fifty million is easier to split into two than thirty-seven. Nice and equal. Would you be so kind as to pass me the salt?’ Julius did as Allan requested, saying that he would probably have been able to divide thirty-seven into two as well if it had been necessary, but he agreed that it was easier with fifty. Then Julius became serious. He sat down at the kitchen table opposite Allan, and said that it was high time they left the disused station for good. The young man in the freezer could do no more harm, but who knows what he might have stirred up behind him on the way here? At any moment there could be ten new young men standing there shouting in the kitchen, each one just as ornery as the one who was done shouting. Allan agreed, but reminded Julius of his advanced age and pointed out that he wasn’t as mobile as he once had been. Julius promised to see to it that there would be as little walking as possible involved. But get away they must. And it would be best if they took the young man in the freezer with them. It would do the two old men no good if people found a corpse in their wake. Breakfast was done with, now it was time to get going. Julius and Allan lifted the dead young man out of the freezer and into the kitchen where they put him in a chair while they gathered their strength. Allan inspected him from top to toe, and then said: ‘He has unusually small feet for someone so big. He has no use for his shoes any more, does he?’  Julius answered that although it was clearly cold outside at this time of the morning, there was a greater risk that Allan would get frostbitten toes than that the young man would. If Allan thought that his shoes would fit, then he should go ahead and take them. If the young man didn’t object, that meant he agreed. The shoes were a bit too large for Allan, but solid and much better suited to being on the run than a pair of well-worn indoor slippers. The next step was to shove the young man out into the hall and tip him down the steps. When they all three found themselves out on the platform, two standing and one lying down, Allan wondered what Julius had in mind now. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Julius said to Allan. ‘Not you, either,’ he said to the young man, and jumped down from the platform and headed for a shed at the end of the station’s only siding. Shortly afterwards, Julius rolled out of the shed on an inspection trolley. ‘Vintage 1954,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard.’ Julius did the heavy pedalling at the front. Just behind him, Allan let his feet follow the movement of the pedals, and the corpse sat on the seat to the right with his head propped up on a broom handle and dark sunglasses covering his staring eyes. It was five to eleven when the party set off. Three minutes later, a dark blue Volvo arrived at Byringe’s former railway station. Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson stepped out of the car. Undeniably, the building seemed to be abandoned, but he decided he should probably take a closer look before he moved on to Byringe village to knock on doors. Aronsson stepped cautiously up onto the platform, since it didn’t look entirely stable. He opened the door and called out: ‘Is anybody home?’ Not receiving an answer, he went up the stairs to the first floor. In fact, the building did seem to be inhabited. Downstairs, there were glowing embers in the kitchen stove, and an almost finished breakfast for two on the table. On the floor stood a pair of well-worn slippers. Never Again described itself officially as a motorcycle club, but in fact it was a small group of young men with criminal records, led by a middle-aged man with an even bigger criminal record, all of them with ongoing criminal intentions. The leader of the group was called Per-Gunnar Gerdin, but nobody dared call him anything but ‘the Boss’ because that’s what the Boss had decided and he was almost two metres tall, weighed about 230 kilos and was apt to wave a knife about if anybody or anything crossed him. The Boss had started his criminal career in a rather low-key way. Together with a partner, he imported fruit and vegetables to Sweden and faked the country of origin so as to deprive the state of taxes and get a higher price from consumers. There was a problem with the Boss’s partner – his conscience wasn’t sufficiently flexible. The Boss wanted to diversify into more radical schemes such as soaking food in formaldehyde. He had heard that was how they did things in some parts of Asia and the Boss had the idea of importing Swedish meatballs from the Philippines, cheap and by sea. With the right amount of formaldehyde the meatballs would stay fresh for three months if necessary, even at 100°C. They would be so cheap that the partners wouldn’t even have to label them as ‘Swedish’ to sell them at a profit. ‘Danish’ would suffice, thought the Boss, but his partner said no. In his opinion, formaldehyde was fine for embalming corpses, but not for giving eternal life to meatballs. So they went their separate ways and nothing more came of the formaldehyde meatballs. Instead, the Boss discovered that he could pull a ski mask over his head and rob his most serious competitor, Stockholm Fruit Import Ltd, of their day’s takings. With the help of a machete and an angry shout of ‘Gimme the cash or else!’ in an instant and to his own surprise he had become 41,000 crowns richer. Why slave away with imports when you could earn such nice money for almost no work at all? And thus the course was set. Usually it went well. In almost twenty years as an entrepreneur in the robbery business, he had only had a couple of short involuntary vacations. But after two decades, the Boss felt it was time to think bigger. He found a couple of younger henchmen. The first thing he did was to give each of them a suitably idiotic nickname (one was called Bolt, and the other Bucket) and with their help he then carried out two successful security van robberies. A third security van robbery, however, ended with four and a half years in a maximum-security prison for all three of them. It was there that the Boss got the idea for Never Again. During stage one, the club would consist of about fifty members, divided into three operative branches: ‘robbery’, ‘narcotics’ and ‘extortion’. The name Never Again came from the Boss’s vision of creating such a professional and watertight structure for this crime that they would never again find themselves in a maximum security prison. Never Again would be the Real Madrid of organized crime (the Boss was crazy about soccer). In the beginning, the recruitment process in prison went well. But then a letter to the Boss from his mum happened to go astray in the prison. His mum wrote, among other things, that her little Per-Gunnar should take care not to mix with bad company in the prison, that he should be careful with his delicate tonsils and that she was looking forward to playing the Treasure Island Game with him again when he got out. After that, it didn’t help that the Boss sliced up a couple of Yugoslavs in the lunch line and generally acted like a violent psychotic. His authority was damaged. Of the thirty recruits so far, twenty-seven dropped out. Besides Bolt and Bucket, only a Venezuelan named José Mariá Rodriguez stayed on, the latter because he was secretly in love with the Boss, which he never dared admit to anybody, even himself. The Venezuelan was given the name Caracas, after the capital city of his home country. However much the Boss threatened and swore, no one else joined his club. And one day, he and his three henchmen were released. At first, the Boss thought of abandoning the whole idea of Never Again, but Caracas happened to have a Colombian comrade with a flexible conscience and dubious friends, and after one thing and another, Sweden (through Never Again) became the transit country for Eastern Europe for the Colombian narcotics trade. The deals got bigger and bigger, and there was neither need nor staff to activate the branches ‘robbery’ and ‘extortion’. The Boss convened a war council in Stockholm with Bucket and Caracas. Something had happened to Bolt, the clumsy idiot who had been entrusted with the task of carrying out the club’s largest transaction so far. The Boss had been in contact with the Russians in the morning and they swore that they had received the merchandise – and handed over the payment. If Never Again’s courier had run off with the suitcase then that wasn’t the Russians’ problem. The Boss assumed for the time being that the Russians were telling the truth. Would Bolt voluntarily have skipped town with the money? No, he dismissed the idea; Bolt was too stupid for that. Or too wise, however you wanted to look at it. Somebody must have known about the transaction, have waited for the right moment in Malmköping or on Bolt’s journey back to Stockholm, knocked out Bolt and grabbed the suitcase. But who? The Boss presented the question to the war council and didn’t get an answer. The Boss wasn’t surprised; he had long ago decided that his henchmen were idiots, all three of them. Anyhow, he ordered Bucket out into the field, because the Boss thought that the idiot Bucket was still not quite as big an idiot as the idiot Caracas. The idiot Bucket would thus have a greater chance of finding the idiot Bolt, and perhaps even the suitcase with the money.  ‘Go down to Malmköping and poke around a bit, Bucket. But don’t wear your jacket; police are all over the town. A hundred-year-old guy has disappeared.’ Julius, Allan and the corpse rolled along through the forest. At Vidkärr they had the misfortune to meet a farmer. The farmer was there inspecting his crops when the trio came racing by on the inspection trolley. ‘Good morning,’ said Julius. ‘Nice day,’ said Allan. The corpse and the farmer didn’t say anything. But the farmer stared at the trio for a long time as they went off into the distance. The closer the trolley got to the local steel works, the more worried Julius got. He had thought they might pass a lake on the way and that they’d be able to dump the corpse in it. But they didn’t. And before Julius had time to worry any further, the trolley rolled into the foundry yard. Julius applied the brakes just in time. The corpse fell forwards and hit his forehead on an iron handle. ‘That would have been really painful if the circumstances had been a little different,’ said Allan. ‘There are undoubtedly advantages to being dead,’ said Julius. Julius climbed down from the trolley and positioned himself behind a birch tree to survey the area. The enormous doors into the factory halls were open, but the yard seemed deserted. Julius looked at his watch. It was ten past twelve. Lunchtime, he realised as he spotted a large container. Julius announced that he intended to go off and do a bit of reconnaissance. Allan wished Julius the best of luck and asked him not to get lost. There wasn’t much risk of that, because Julius was only going to walk the thirty metres to the container. He climbed in and was out of Allan’s sight for just over a minute. Once back at the trolley, Julius announced that he now knew what to do with the corpse. The container had been packed half-full of steel cylinders of some sort, each one of them in a protective wooden box with a lid. Allan was totally exhausted once the heavy corpse was finally in place inside one of the two innermost cylinders. But when he closed the wooden lid and saw the address label, he livened up. Addis Ababa. ‘He’s going to see the world if he keeps his peepers open,’ said Allan. ‘Hurry up,’ Julius said. ‘We can’t stay here.’ The operation went well, and the two men were back under the birch trees well before the lunch break was over. They sat down on the trolley to rest, and soon things started to liven up in the factory yard. A truck driver filled the container with a few more cylinders. Then he closed and locked it, brought over a new container and continued the loading. Allan wondered what they actually manufactured there. Julius knew it was a works with a history; as far back as the seventeenth century they had cast and supplied cannons to everybody in the Thirty Years’ War who wanted to do their killing more efficiently. Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs. Then he announced that the break was now over and that it was time to make themselves scarce. Julius’s simple plan was that the two friends would walk the short distance into the more central parts of Åker and once there decide on their next move. Chief Inspector Aronsson went through the old station building in Byringe without finding anything of interest except a pair of slippers that might have belonged to the centenarian. He would take them with him to show the staff at the Old People’s Home. There were pools of water here and there on the kitchen floor, leading to an open walk-in freezer, which was switched off. But that was unlikely to be of any significance. Aronsson continued into Byringe village to knock on doors. There were people at home in three of the houses, and from all three families he learned that a Julius Jonsson lived on the ground floor of the station building, that Julius Jonsson was a thief and a conman whom nobody wanted to have anything to do with, and that nobody had heard or seen anything strange since the previous evening. But they all took it for granted that Julius Jonsson was up to no good. ‘Put him behind bars,’ one of the angriest neighbours demanded. ‘For what reason?’ the chief inspector wondered in a tired voice. ‘Because he steals my eggs from the chicken coop at night, because he stole my newly purchased sled last winter and painted it and called it his own, because he orders books in my name, goes through my mailbox when they arrive and lets me pay the bill, because he tries to sell privately distilled vodka to my fourteen- year-old son, because he –’ ‘OK, OK, fine. I’ll put him behind bars,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I just have to find him first.’ Aronsson turned back towards Malmköping and was about halfway there when his telephone rang. A farmer had just phoned in with an interesting tip. An hour or so earlier, a known petty criminal from the district had passed his fields on an inspection trolley on the disused railway line between Byringe and Åker Foundry. On the trolley he saw an old man, a big suitcase and a young man with sunglasses. The young man seemed to be in charge, according to the farmer. Even though he wasn’t wearing any shoes… ‘I don’t get it,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson and turned his car around at such a speed that the slippers on the passenger seat fell onto the floor. After a couple of hundred metres, Allan’s already glacial walking pace slowed. He didn’t complain, but Julius could see that the old man’s knees were causing problems. In the distance stood a hot-dog stand. Julius promised Allan that if he made it to the hot-dog stand, then Julius would treat him – he could afford it – and then he would find a solution to the transport problem. Allan replied that never in his life had he complained over a bit of discomfort, and that he wasn’t going to start now, but that a hot-dog would hit the spot. Julius increased his pace; Allan stumbled after him. When he arrived, Julius had already eaten half of his hot-dog. A fancy grilled one. And that wasn’t all. ‘Allan,’ he said, ‘come and say hello to Benny. He’s our new private chauffeur.’ Benny, the owner of the hot-dog stand, was about fifty, and still in possession of all his hair including a pony tail at the back. In about two minutes, Julius had managed to buy a hot-dog, an orange soft drink and Benny’s silver 1988 Mercedes, along with Benny himself as chauffeur, all for 100,000 crowns. Allan looked at the owner of the hot-dog stand. ‘Have we bought you too, or just hired you?’ he asked finally. ‘The car has been bought, the chauffeur has been hired,’ Benny answered. ‘A hot-dog is included in the price. Can I tempt you with a Viennese wurst?’ No, he couldn’t. Allan just wanted an ordinary boiled sausage if that was all right. And besides, said Allan, 100,000 for such an old car was an extremely high price even if it included a driver, so now it was only fair that he throw in a bottle of chocolate milk too. Benny agreed instantly. He would be leaving his kiosk behind and a chocolate milk more or less made no difference. His business was losing money anyway; running a hot-dog stand in a small village had turned out to be just as bad an idea as it had seemed at the beginning. In fact, Benny informed them, even before the two gentlemen had so conveniently turned up, he had been toying with plans to do something different with his life. But private chauffeur, well he hadn’t pictured that. In light of what the hot-dog-stand manager had just told them, Allan suggested that Benny load an entire carton of chocolate milk into the boot of the car. And Julius, for his part, promised that Benny would get his own private chauffeur’s cap at the first opportunity, if only he would take off his hot-dog- stand chef’s hat and leave the stand because it was time for them to be on their way. Benny didn’t think it was part of his job to argue with his employers, so he did as he was told. His chef’s hat ended up in the rubbish, and the chocolate milk went in the boot. But Julius wanted to keep the suitcase on the back seat with him. Allan had to sit in the front where he could stretch out his legs properly. So the only hot-dog-stand manager in Åker went and sat in the driver’s seat of what a few minutes earlier had been his own Mercedes, now honourably sold to the two gentlemen in Benny’s company. ‘And where do you two gentlemen want to go?’ asked Benny. ‘What about north?’ said Julius. ‘Yes, that would be fine,’ said Allan. ‘Or south.’ ‘Then we’ll say south,’ said Julius. ‘South it is,’ said Benny. Ten minutes later, Chief Inspector Aronsson arrived at Åker. By following the railway tracks, he discovered an old inspection trolley behind the factory. But the trolley provided no obvious clues. The workers in the yard were busy loading cylinders of some type into containers. None of them had seen the trolley arrive. But just after lunch they had seen two elderly men walking along the road, one of them dragging a large suitcase. They were headed in the direction of the service station and the hot-dog stand. Aronsson asked if there were really only two men, not three. But the workers hadn’t seen a third person. Driving to the service station and the hot-dog stand, Aronsson considered this new information. But it was harder than ever to make sense of it all. First, he stopped at the hot-dog stand. He was getting hungry, so it was perfect timing. But it was closed. It had to be tough to run a hot-dog stand out in this wilderness, Aronsson thought, and continued on to the service station. There, they had seen nothing and heard nothing. But at least they could sell Aronsson a hot dog, even though it tasted of petrol. After his quick lunch, Aronsson went to the supermarket, the flower shop and the estate agent. And he stopped and spoke to any natives who had ventured out with dogs, prams or a husband or wife. But nobody had seen two or three men with a suitcase. The trail simply came to an end somewhere between the foundry and the service station. Chief Inspector Aronsson decided to return to Malmköping. At least he had a pair of slippers that required identification. Aronsson phoned the county police chief from his car and updated him. The county police chief was grateful because he was giving a press conference at the Plevna Hotel at two o’clock and so far he had had nothing to say. The police chief had something of a theatrical bent; he was not inclined to understatement. And now Chief Inspector Aronsson had given him just what he needed for today’s show. So the police chief pulled out all the stops during the press conference, before Aronsson had time to get back to Malmköping to stop him (which he wouldn’t have succeeded in doing anyway). The police chief announced that the police had to assume that Allan Karlsson’s disappearance had developed into a kidnapping, just as the local newspaper’s website had suggested the previous day. The police now had information that Karlsson was alive but in the hands of people from the underworld. There were of course a lot of questions, but the police chief skilfully avoided them. What he could tell the press was that Karlsson and his presumed kidnappers had been seen in the little village of Åker as recently as around lunchtime that very day. And he urged the police authority’s best friend – the General Public – to keep their eyes open. To the disappointment of the police chief, the TV team hadn’t stayed around for his dramatic announcement. They would surely have been hooked if that sluggard Aronsson had managed to dig out the kidnapping story a little earlier. But at least the national tabloid was there, as were the local paper and a reporter from the local radio. And at the back of the hotel dining room stood another man whom the police chief didn’t recognise. Was he from the national news agency? Bucket wasn’t from a news agency. But he was becoming convinced that Bolt had skipped town with all the dough — in which case he was now as good as dead. When Chief Inspector Aronsson arrived at the Plevna Hotel, the press had dispersed. On his way, Aronsson had stopped off at the Old People’s Home and they had confirmed that the slippers did indeed belong to Allan Karlsson. (Director Alice sniffed at them and nodded with a disgusted look on her face.) Aronsson had the misfortune to stumble upon the county police chief in the hotel lobby. The chief told him about the press conference and ordered him to solve the crime, preferably in such a way that it didn’t contradict what the police chief had said to the press. Then the police chief went on his way. He had a lot of work to do. It was, for example, high time to appoint a prosecutor to the case. Aronsson sat down with a cup of coffee to reflect on the latest developments. He decided to focus on the relationship between the three trolley passengers. If the farmer had been wrong about Karlsson and Jonsson’s relationship to the trolley’s third passenger, then it might be a hostage drama. The police chief had just said as much at his press conference, but since he was rarely right, that might be a black mark against the kidnapping theory. Besides, witnesses had seen Karlsson and Jonsson walking around in Åker – with a suitcase. So the question was, had the two old men, Karlsson and Jonsson, somehow managed to overpower the young and strong Never Again member and throw him into a ditch? An incredible but not impossible idea. Aronsson decided to call in the Eskilstuna police dog again. The dog and her handler would need to tak