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

and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back. And that, if it was him, then it probably wasn’t going to be a pleasant encounter.
     
    The bus returning from Strängnäs arrived at Malmköping station three minutes early. The bus carried no passengers and the driver had accelerated a little bit extra after the last bus stop to have time to catch his breath before continuing the journey to Flen.
    But the driver had barely lit his cigarette before a slightly built youth with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back, arrived.
    ‘Are you going to Flen?’ the driver asked a little hesitantly, because there was something about the young man that didn’t feel right.
    ‘I’m not going to Flen. And neither are you,’ answered the young man.
    Hanging around waiting for four hours for the bus to come back had been a bit too much for what little patience the youth could muster. Besides, after half that time he had realised that if instead he had immediately stolen a car, he could have caught up with the bus long before Strängnäs.
    On top of it all, police cars had started to cruise around in the little town. At any time the police could stumble into the station, and start interrogating the little man behind the window in the ticket office as to why he looked terrified and why the door to his office was hanging at an angle on one hinge.
    The young man had no idea what the cops were doing there. His boss in Never Again had chosen Malmköping as the transaction venue for three reasons: first, it was close to Stockholm; second, it had relatively good transport options; and third – and most important – because the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough to reach there. There were simply no cops in Malmköping.
    Or, to be more precise: there shouldn’t be, and yet the place was crawling with them. The young man had seen two cars and a total of four policemen; from his perspective that was a crowd.
    At first, the young man thought that the police were after him. But that would assume that the little man had squawked, and the young man could categorically discount that possibility. While waiting for the bus to come, the young man hadn’t had much to do other than keep an eye on the little man, smash his office phone to bits and patch up the office door as best he could.
    When the bus eventually came and the young man noted that it had no passengers, he had immediately decided to kidnap both the driver and the bus.
    It took all of twenty seconds to persuade the bus driver to turn the bus around and drive northwards again. Close to a personal record, the young man reflected as he sat down in the exact seat where the geriatric he was now chasing had been sitting earlier the same day.
    The bus driver quivered with fear, but got through the worst of it with a calming cigarette. Smoking was, of course, forbidden on board the bus, but the only law the driver was subject to at that moment was sitting just diagonally behind him in the bus and was slightly built, had long, greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back.
    On the way, the young man asked where the elderly suitcase-thief had gone. The driver said that the old man had got off at Byringe Station and that was probably entirely random, explaining the backwards way the old man had gone about things, offering a fifty-crown note and asking how far he could get with that.
    The driver didn’t know much about Byringe Station, except that it was rare for anyone to get on or off there. Supposedly there was a closed-down railway station some way in the forest, and Byringe village was somewhere in the vicinity. The geriatric couldn’t have got much further than that, the driver guessed. The man was very old and the suitcase was heavy, even though it had wheels.
    The young man immediately calmed down. He had refrained from calling the boss in Stockholm, because the boss was one of the few people who could scare people more effectively than the young man himself. The young man shivered at the thought of what the boss would say about the suitcase going astray. Better to solve the problem first and tell him later. And seeing as how the old man hadn’t gone all the way to Strängnäs or even beyond, the suitcase should be back in the hands of the young man quicker than he had feared.
    ‘Here’s the Byringe Station bus stop…’
    The driver slowly rolled to the