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

then providing Allan with a princely escort all the way to Lisbon from where the General thought boats would leave for the north.
    From Lisbon, boats left in every direction imaginable, it turned out. Allan stood on the quay and thought about it for a while. Then he waved the letter from the general in front of the captain of a ship sailing under the Spanish flag, and he soon had a free passage. There was no question of his having to pay his way.
    The ship wasn’t actually going to Sweden, but on the quay Allan had asked himself what he would do there, and he hadn’t really come up with a good answer.

Chapter 8
    Tuesday, 3rd May–Wednesday, 4th May 2005
    After the afternoon’s press conference, Bucket sat down with a beer to think things over. But however much he thought, he couldn’t make head or tail of it. Would Bolt have started kidnapping centenarians? Or did one thing have nothing to do with the other? All this thinking gave Bucket a headache, so he stopped and phoned the Boss instead, reporting to him that nothing at all had happened that was worth reporting. He was told to stay in Malmköping and await further orders.
    The conversation over, Bucket was alone again with his beer. The situation was becoming too taxing. He didn’t like having no idea what was going on, and now his headache came back again. So in his mind he fled to the past, remembering his youth back home.
    Bucket had started his criminal career in Braås only about twenty kilometres from where Allan and his new friends now found themselves. There, he had got together with some like-minded peers and started the motorcycle club called The Violence. Bucket was the leader; he decided which newspaper kiosk was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who had chosen the name – The Violence, in English, not Swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English.
    The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead. As the rest of the club members had had similar academic success, nobody in the group noticed the mistake.
    So everyone was very surprised when one day a letter arrived for The Violins in Braås from the people in charge of the concerthall in Växjö. The letter suggested that, since the club obviously concerned itself with classical music they might like to put in an appearance at a concert with the city’s prestigious chamber orchestra Musica Vitae.
    Bucket felt provoked; somebody was clearly making fun of him. One night he skipped the newspaper kiosk, and instead went into Växjö to throw a brick through the glass door of the concert hall. This was intended to teach the people responsible a lesson in respect.
    It all went off well, except that Bucket’s leather glove happened to follow the stone into the lobby. Since the alarm went off immediately, Bucket felt it would be unwise to try to retrieve the item of clothing in question.
    Losing a glove was not good. Bucket had travelled to Växjö by motorbike and one hand was extremely cold all the way home to Braås that night. Even worse was the fact that Bucket’s luckless girlfriend had written Bucket’s name and address inside the glove, in case he lost it. So by the following morning the police had worked out who the primary suspect was, and picked up Bucket for questioning.
    In the interrogation, Bucket explained that there were extenuating circumstances and described how he had been provoked by the management of the concert hall. The story of how The Violence became The Violins ended up in the local newspaper, and Bucket became the laughing-stock of all Braås. In a rage, he decided that the next newspaper kiosk they were robbing should be burned down instead of just having its door smashed in. This in turn led to the Turkish-Bulgarian owner – who had gone to bed in his storeroom to guard against thieves – narrowly escaping with his life. Having decided that one glove was better than none on a cold evening, Bucket wore his remaining glove to the scene of the crime (with the address noted just as neatly as in the first glove), lost it, and not long afterfound himself on his way to prison for the first time. There he met the Boss, and when he had served his sentence Bucket decided it was best to leave Braås and his girlfriend behind. Both