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

same as Benny and The Beauty, that is, get married, when they were living together anyway. Allan said that Amanda was a young girl in comparison with him, but that he could bring himself to ignore that circumstance. And nowadays he mixed his own drinks so there was no problem there either. So, in short, Allan couldn’t see any decisive objection to what Amanda had just proposed.
    ‘Then it’s a plan?’ said Amanda.
    ‘Yes, it’s a plan,’ said Allan.
    And they held each other’s hand extra hard. For balance.
     
    The investigation into Henrik ‘Bucket’ Hultén’s death was short and without result. The police looked into his past and interrogated Bucket’s former companions in Småland (not far from Gunilla Björklund’s Lake Farm, in fact), but they hadn’t heard or seen anything.
    The colleagues in Riga sought out the drunkard who had taken the Mustang to the scrapyard, but they couldn’t get a sensible word out of him until one of the police colleagues thought of priming him with a bottle of wine. Then the drunkard suddenly started to tell them – that he had no idea who it was who had asked him to take the car to the scrapyard. Somebody just turned up at the park bench one day with a whole bag full of wine bottles.
    ‘I wasn’t sober, admittedly,’ said the drunkard. ‘But I never get so drunk that I’d say no to four bottles of wine.’
     
    Only one journalist got in touch a few days later to find out how the investigation about Bucket Hultén’s death was going, but Prosecutor Ranelid wasn’t there to take the call. He had gone on holiday, booking a cheap last-minute charter flight to Las Palmas. What he really wanted to do was to get away from everything, and he had heard that Bali was nice, but that flight was fully booked.
    The Canary Islands would have to do. And there he sat now in a deck chair under a parasol, with a parasol drink in his hand, wondering where Aronsson had gone off to. He had apparently given his notice, taken all the holiday due to him and just disappeared.  

Chapter 28
    1982–2005
    The salary from the American Embassy had come in handy when Allan returned to Sweden. He found a little red cottage just a few miles from where he had grown up which he paid for in cash. Making the purchase he had to argue with the Swedish authorities about whether he existed. In the end, they gave in and started to pay him a pension – much to Allan’s surprise.
    ‘Why?’ asked Allan.
    ‘You’re a pensioner,’ said the authorities.
    ‘Am I?’ said Allan.
    And he was, of course, and by a good margin too. The following spring he would be seventy-eight, and Allan realised that he had got old, against all odds and without having thought about it. But he was going to get much older…
     
    The years passed, at a leisurely rate and without Allan influencing world developments in any way at all. He didn’t even influence things in the town of Flen, into which he occasionally ventured to buy some groceries (from the grandson of wholesale dealer Gustavsson who now ran the local supermarket and to his good fortune hadn’t a clue that Allan was who he was). The public library in Flen didn’t, however, get any new visits, because Allan had realised that you could subscribe to the newspapers you wanted to read and they landed neatly in the mailbox outside his cottage. Very practical!
    When the hermit in the cottage outside Yxhult turned eighty-three he thought all that biking back and forth to Flen was getting hard, so instead he bought a car. For a moment he thought about combining this with the acquisition of a driving licence, but as soon as the driving instructor had mentioned ‘sight test’ and‘provisional licence’, Allan decided to do without. When the instructor went on to list the ‘books’, the ‘theory lessons’, the ‘driving lessons’, and the ‘final double test’, Allan had long since stopped listening.
    In 1989, the Soviet Union had started to fall to bits, which didn’t surprise the old man in Yxhult with his own vodka distillery in the cellar. The new youth at the helm, Gorbachev, had started his era in power with a campaign against the massive vodka-drinking in his nation. That wasn’t something that would get the masses on your side, was it?
    That same year, in fact on Allan’s birthday, a kitten suddenly appeared on the porch steps, and signalled that it was hungry. Allan invited it into his kitchen and served it milk and sausage. The cat liked