The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

his arrest. Why the old guy had climbed out of his window almost a month ago, and what had happened since then remained to be discovered, if it needed to be discovered at all.
    Nevertheless, there was surely time for a little more small talk first. The man who had been run over and killed and was now risen from the dead, Per-Gunnar ‘The Boss’ Gerdin, turned out to be a perfectly regular sort of guy. He had immediately proposed that they should drop the formal titles, and be on first-name terms, and that he in that case preferred to be called Pike.
    ‘That’s fine with me, Pike,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson. ‘You can call me Göran.’
    ‘Pike and Göran,’ said Allan. ‘That rolls off the tongue nicely, perhaps you two should go into business together?’
    Pike said that he wasn’t so sure that he had the necessary respect for the internal revenue authorities and their taxes to be able to run a company in partnership with a police chief inspector, but that he nevertheless thanked Allan for the advice.
    The mood had thus immediately become jovial. And it didn’t get worse when Benny and The Beauty joined them, and shortly after, Julius and Bosse too.
    They talked about all manner of things there on the veranda, except how the events of the past month fitted together. Allan scored a success when he suddenly led an elephant around the corner and together with Sonya put on a short dance performance. Julius became more and more pleased not to be wanted by the police any longer, and started to cut off the beard that he had felt obliged to cultivate before he had dared show himself in Falköping.
    ‘To think that I have been guilty all my life and now I am suddenly innocent!’ said Julius. ‘What a delightful sensation!’
    And Bosse, for his part, thought this was reason enough to fetch a bottle of genuine Hungarian champagne for his friends and the chief inspector to toast each other. The chief inspector lamely protested that he had his car at the farm. A room was reserved at the central hotel in Falköping, but as a chief inspector he could hardly drive there if he was a bit tipsy.
    But then Benny came to the rescue and said that teetotallers in general – according to Allan – were a threat to world peace, but that they were useful to have at hand when you needed a lift somewhere.
    ‘Have a glass of champagne, Inspector, and I shall make sure that you get safely to your hotel.’
    The inspector didn’t need further persuading. He had long suffered from a chronic lack of social life and now that hefinally found himself in pleasant company he couldn’t sit there and sulk.
    ‘Well now, a little toast for the innocence of all of you, I suppose the police force can go along with that,’ he said. ‘Or even two toasts if necessary; there are quite a lot of you…’
     
    Thus passed a couple of hours of general merriment before Chief Inspector Aronsson’s telephone rang again. Once more, it was Prosecutor Ranelid. He told Aronsson that on account of unfortunate circumstances in the presence of the press, he had just announced that the three men and the woman were innocent, and he had done so in a manner that hardly allowed for retraction. Besides, within less than twenty-four hours he must know what had actually happened between the day when the old geezer Karlsson climbed out of his window and the present day, because that was what the press were being summoned to hear at three tomorrow.
    ‘In other words, you are well up shit creek,’ said the slightly drunken chief inspector.
    ‘You must help me, Göran!’
    ‘How? By moving corpses geographically? Or by killing people who have had the poor taste to not be as dead as you would have wished them to be?’
    Prosecutor Ranelid admitted that he had already considered that last solution, but that it probably wouldn’t work. No, he hoped that Göran could cautiously sound out Allan Karlsson and his… accomplices about whether Ranelid would be welcome at the farm the following morning for a little – completely informal – chat about this and that in order to bring clarity as to what had recently taken place in the forests of Södermanland and Småland. And for good measure, Prosecutor Ranelid promised that he would apologize to the four innocent citizens on behalf of the Södermanland Police Force.
    ‘The Södermanland Police Force?’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson.
    ‘Yes… Or, no, on my own behalf,’ said Prosecutor