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

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 andeventually 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