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

did not concern him one bit.
    At first, Chief Inspector Aronsson was pleased to have regained visual contact with Gerdin, but considering Gerdin’s speed, the chief’s enthusiasm for the chase diminished. There was no way he would be able to keep up. Might it be better to go and have a look at the place? Gunilla Björklund was the name on the mailbox.
    ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if you’re a redhead, Gunilla,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson.
    So that is how Aronsson’s Volvo arrived in the same farmyard as Henrik ‘Bucket’ Hultén’s Ford Mustang had nine hours earlier, and that Per-Gunnar ‘Boss’ Gerdin’s BMW had a few minutes ago.
    Chief Inspector Aronsson could see, just as the Boss had, that Lake Farm was abandoned. But he did devote a bit more time than the Boss had to searching for various pieces of the puzzle. He found one in the form of that day’s newspapers in the kitchen, and some fresh greens in the fridge. So they hadn’t broken camp until earlier that very same day. Another bit of the puzzle was of course the Mercedes and the Passat behind the barn. One of those told Aronsson a great deal, and he guessed that the other one belonged to Gunilla Björklund.
    Two more clues were waiting to be discovered by Chief Inspector Aronsson. First, he found a revolver lying on the edge of the wooden floor of the farmhouse veranda. What was it doing there? And whose fingerprints were on it? Aronsson guessed Bucket Hultén, and he carefully slipped the revolver into a plastic bag.
    The other discovery was in the mailbox when Aronsson was leaving. Among the day’s post there was an official letter from the Vehicle Licensing Authority which confirmed that a 1992 yellow Scania K113 had changed owners.
    So you are driving around in a bus, the chief inspector said to himself.
    The bus wound its way slowly through the forest. It didn’t take long for the BMW to catch up. But on the narrow road the Boss couldn’t do much more than just stay behind and fantasize about who was in the bus and whether they were transporting a grey suitcase with wheels.
    Blissfully unaware of the danger only five metres behind them, the friends in the bus discussed the situation as it had developed and quickly concluded that things would certainly calm down if they could find somewhere to hide for a few weeks. That had been their intention at Lake Farm, of course, but that good idea had suddenly become terribly bad after they received the unexpected visitor and Sonya sat down on him.
    The problem now was that Allan, Julius, Benny and The Beauty had one thing in common: an almost total absence of relatives and friends. How were they going to find someone who would shelter a yellow bus with four people, a dog and an elephant?
    Allan explained his lack of relatives and friends by the fact that he was one hundred years old, and they had died from one cause or another and that anyway they would have been dead by now for reasons of age. Few people were lucky enough to survive everything, year after year.
    Julius said that his speciality was enemies, not friends. He would like to deepen his friendship with Allan, Benny and The Beauty, but now wasn’t really the time or place.
    The Beauty admitted that she had been extremely antisocial during the years following her divorce so for her too, there was nobody to contact and ask for help.
    That left Benny. He had a brother, didn’t he? The angriest brother in the world.
    Julius wondered whether they could bribe the brother, and then Benny’s face lit up. They did have millions in the suitcase! They might not be able to bribe him, because Bosse was more proud than greedy. But now they were getting into semantics. And Benny had the solution. He would tell his brother that he wanted to do the right thing after all these years.
    Having worked that out, Benny phoned his brother and didn’t manage to do more than say who he was before he was informed that Bosse had a loaded shotgun and that his little brother was welcome to visit if he wanted a load of pellets up his bum.
    Benny said that such a fate was not something he desired, but that he – together with some friends – planned to visit anyway, because he wished to settle their financial dealings. There was, you might say, a certain disagreement between the two brothers over Uncle Frasse’s money.
    Bosse replied that his brother should stop expressing himself in such a bloody complicated way. And then he got straight to the