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

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