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

such a way that Benny did not make any immediate plans to go and visit him.
    Having got this far in Benny’s story, Julius was beginning to worry that it might lead to all-too-personal questions from The Beauty, such as how Benny had ended up with Julius and Allan. But The Beauty didn’t bother with the details, thanks to the beer and the bitters. Instead, she had to admit that she was feeling a bit infatuated, old as she was.
    ‘So what else have you almost become over the years, besides a vet?’ she asked with sparkling eyes.
    Benny understood just as well as Julius that the developments of the last few days shouldn’t be described in too much detail, so he was grateful for the direction of The Beauty’s question. He couldn’t remember everything, he said, but you can cover a lot if you sit at a school desk for three decades, and do your homework once in a while. Benny was an almost-vet, almost-doctor, almost-architect, almost-engineer, almost-botanist, almost-language-teacher, almost-sports-coach, almost-historian and almost quite a few other things. And for a bit of variety he had taken some shorter courses of varying quality and importance. Sometimes he had even taken two courses at the same time.
    Then Benny remembered something else that he almost was. He leapt to his feet, facing The Beauty, and declaimed in very poetic Swedish:
From my pauper’s gloomy life
In my loneliness I sing
An air for you, my lovely wife
Royal jewel and glittering bling
    Complete silence followed; then The Beauty mumbled an inaudible expletive while she blushed.
    ‘Erik Axel Karlfeldt,’ Benny explained. ‘With those words I would like to thank you for the food and the hospitality. I don’t think I said that I am an almost-literary-expert too?’
    Benny might have gone too far when he asked The Beauty if she would like to dance in front of the fire, because she quickly said no, adding that there must be some damned limit to these stupidities. But Julius noticed that she was flattered. She zipped up her tracksuit jacket and smoothed it down to look her best for Benny.
    After which Allan retired for the night while the other three moved on to coffee, cognac optional. Julius happily said yes to the entire offer, while Benny settled for half.
    Julius showered The Beauty with questions about the farm and her own story, partly because he was curious, partly because he wanted to avoid the subject of who they were, where they were going, and why. But he didn’t have to worry. The Beauty had now got up steam and was talking about her childhood, about the man she married when she was eighteen and kicked out ten years later (that part of the story contained even more expletives), about never having children, about Lake Farm which had been her parents’ summer house before her mother died seven years ago and her father had let The Beauty take itover, about her sincerely uninspiring job as a receptionist at the health clinic in Rottne, about the inheritance that was starting to run out and about it soon being time to move on.
    ‘I’m already forty-three,’ said The Beauty. ‘That is damn well halfway to the grave.’
    ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Julius.
     
    The dog-handler gave Kicki new instructions and she moved away from the trolley, sniffing constantly. Chief Inspector Aronsson hoped that the corpse in question would turn up somewhere in the vicinity, but only thirty metres inside the grounds, Kicki started walking in circles, and seemed to be searching at random, before looking up pleadingly at her handler.
    ‘Kicki says she’s sorry, but she can’t figure out where the corpse has gone,’ the dog-handler translated.
    The dog-handler did not convey this message as precisely as he perhaps should have. Chief Inspector Aronsson interpreted the answer as meaning that Kicki had lost track of the corpse as soon as she walked away from the trolley. But if Kicki had been able to talk, she would have told him that the body was definitely moved a few metres into the grounds before disappearing. And then Chief Inspector Aronsson might have investigated whether any shipments had left the foundry in the last few hours. The answer would have been just one: a tractor trailer with a container bound for Gothenburg harbour. Then, the police could have been notified and the tractor trailer intercepted on the main road. But now the corpse had disappeared beyond the borders of Sweden.
    Almost three weeks later, a young