The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (4 page)

Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be.

That meant among other things that you didn’t make a fuss, especially when there was good reason to do so, as for example, when they heard the news about his father’s death. In
accordance
with family tradition, Allan reacted by chopping wood, although for an unusually long time and particularly quietly. Or when his mother followed his father’s example, and as a result was carried out to the waiting hearse. Allan stayed in the
kitchen and followed the spectacle through the window. And then he said so quietly that only he could hear:

‘Well, goodbye, mum.’

And that was the end of that chapter of his life.

Allan worked hard with his dynamite company and during the first years of the 1920s built up a considerable circle of
customers
in the county. On Saturday evenings, when his
contemporaries
were attending barn dances, Allan sat at home and developed new formulae to improve the quality of his
dynamite
. And when Sunday came, he went to the gravel pit and tested the new explosives. But not between eleven and one, he had finally had to promise the local pastor, in exchange for him not complaining too much about Allan’s absence from church.

Allan liked his own company and that was good, because he lived a solitary life. Since he didn’t join the ranks of the labour movement he was despised by socialists, while he was far too working class (not to mention being his father’s son) to be allowed a place at any bourgeois gathering. Gustavsson, for one, would rather die than end up in the company of that Karlsson brat. Just think, what would happen if the boy
discovered
what Gustavsson had been paid for the enamel egg which he had once bought from Allan’s mother for next to nothing and now sold to a diplomat in Stockholm. Thanks to that bit of business, Gustavsson had become the district’s third proud owner of an automobile.

That time he had been lucky. But one Sunday in August 1925, after the church service, Gustavsson’s luck ran out. He went out for a drive, mainly to show off his expensive car. Unluckily for him, he happened to choose the road that passed Allan Karlsson’s house. At the bend, Gustavsson had got nervous (or perhaps God or fate had a hand in the events), and the gears got stuck and one thing led to another and Gustavsson and his
automobile went straight into the gravel pit behind the house, instead of following the gentle curve of the road to the right. It would have been bad enough for Gustavsson to set foot on Allan’s land and have to explain himself, but things turned out much worse than that, because just as Gustavsson managed to bring his runaway automobile to a halt, Allan set off the first of that Sunday’s trial explosions.

Allan, himself, was curled up for protection behind the
outhouse
and could neither see nor hear anything. Not until he returned to the gravel, did he realise that something had gone wrong. Bits of Gustavsson’s automobile were spread out over half the pit, and here and there lay bits of Gustavsson himself.

Gustavsson’s head had landed softly on a patch of grass. It stared vacantly out over the destruction.

‘What business did you have in my gravel pit?’ Allan asked.

Gustavsson did not reply.

Over the next four years, Allan had plenty of time to read and improve his knowledge of how society was developing. After the explosion in the quarry, he found himself incarcerated in an asylum, though it was hard to say exactly what for. Eventually, the topic of his father came up when a young and enthusiastic disciple of Professor Bernhard Lundborg, an expert on Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, decided to build his career on Allan’s case. When Allan fell into the clutches of Professor Lundborg, he was immediately sterilised for ‘eugenic and social reasons’ on the basis that Allan was probably a bit slow and there was probably too much of his father in him for the state to allow further reproduction of the Karlsson genes.

The sterilization did not bother Allan. On the contrary, he felt he was well-treated at Professor Lundborg’s clinic. Now and then, he had to answer all sorts of questions such as why he needed to blow people and things into bits and whether he had
any Negro blood. Allan answered that he saw a certain
difference
between things and people when it came to the pleasure of lighting the fuse of a load of dynamite. Splitting a rock down the middle, that could make you feel good. But if instead of a rock, it was a person, well, Allan couldn’t see why a person wouldn’t move out of the way under the circumstances. Didn’t Professor Lundborg feel the same way?

But Bernhard Lundborg was not the sort of man to involve himself in philosophical discussion with his patients; he repeated the question about Negro blood. Allan answered that you never really know, but both his parents had had skin that was as pale as his, perhaps the professor would take that as an answer? And then Allan added that he was dying to see a black man for real if the professor had one on hand.

Professor Lundborg and his assistants did not answer Allan’s questions, but they made notes and hummed and then left him in peace, sometimes for days at a stretch. Allan devoted those days to all kinds of reading: the daily newspapers of course, but also books from the hospital’s extensive library. Add to that three square meals a day, an indoor toilet, and a room of his own, and you can see why Allan found it very comfortable to be locked up in an asylum. The atmosphere had been a little unpleasant only once, and that was when Allan asked Professor Lundborg what was so dangerous about being a Negro or a Jew. For once, the professor didn’t respond with silence, but bellowed that Karlsson should mind his own business and not interfere in other people’s affairs. Allan was reminded of that time many years ago when his mother had threatened to box his ears.

The years passed and the interviews with Allan became few and far between. Then parliament appointed a committee to investigate the sterilization of ‘biologically inferior individuals’ and when the report was issued, Professor Lundborg suddenly
had so much to do that Allan’s bed was needed for somebody else. In the spring of 1929, Allan was pronounced rehabilitated and fit once again to enter society, and was sent out onto the streets with just enough cash to get him a train ticket to Flen. He had to walk the last few miles to Yxhult, but Allan didn’t mind. After four years behind bars, he needed to stretch his legs.

The local newspaper lost no time in printing a story about the old man who had disappeared into thin air on his hundredth birthday. As the newspaper’s reporter was starved for real news from the district, she managed to imply that you could not exclude the possibility of kidnapping. According to witnesses, the centenarian was all right in the head and probably wasn’t roaming around confused.

There is something special about disappearing on your
hundredth
birthday. The local radio station soon followed the local newspaper, and then came national radio, the websites of the national newspapers and the afternoon and evening TV news.

The police in Flen had to hand the case over to the county crime squad, which sent two police cars with uniformed police officers and a Detective Chief Inspector Aronsson who was not in uniform. They were soon joined by assorted reporters who wanted to help search every corner of the area. The presence of the mass media in turn gave the county police chief reason to lead the investigation himself and perhaps to appear on camera in the process.

Initially the investigation involved the police cars driving back and forth across the municipality, while Aronsson
interrogated
people at the Old People’s Home. The mayor, however, had gone home, and turned off his phone. In his opinion, only harm would come from being involved in the disappearance of an ungrateful geriatric.

A scattering of tips did come in: everything from Allan being seen on a bike, to him standing in line and behaving badly at the pharmacy. But these, and similar observations, could soon for various reasons be dismissed.

The head of the county police organized search parties with the help of about a hundred volunteers from the area, and he was genuinely surprised when this produced no results. Up to now he had been pretty certain that it was an ordinary case of a demented person disappearing, despite the statements of witnesses as to the good quantity of marbles possessed by the hundred-year-old man.

So the investigation didn’t at this stage go anywhere, not until the police dog borrowed from Eskilstuna arrived at about
half-past
seven in the evening. The dog sniffed a few moments at Allan’s armchair and the footprints among the pansies outside the window before it set off towards the park and out the other side, across the street, into the grounds of the medieval church, over the stone wall, coming to a halt outside the bus station waiting room.

The waiting room door was locked. An official told the police that the station locked its doors at 7.30 in the evening on
weekdays
, when the official’s colleague finished work for the day. But, the official added, if the police absolutely couldn’t wait until the following day, they could visit his colleague at home. His name was Ronny Hulth and he was sure to be listed in the telephone directory.

While the head of the county police stood in front of the cameras outside the Old People’s Home and announced that the police needed the public’s help to continue with search parties during the evening and night since the centenarian was lightly dressed and possibly in a state of confusion, Detective Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson rang Ronny Hulth’s doorbell. The dog had clearly indicated that the geriatric had gone into the waiting room, and Mr Hulth who had been in the ticket office ought to be able to say whether the old man had left Malmköping by bus.

But Ronny Hulth did not open the door. He sat in his bedroom with the blinds drawn, hugging his cat.
‘Go away!’ Ronny Hulth whispered towards the front door. ‘Go away!’

And in the end that is precisely what the chief inspector did. Partly he agreed with his boss’s belief that the geriatric was wandering about locally, or that if the old guy had got on a bus, he was presumably capable of looking after himself. Ronny Hulth was probably visiting his girlfriend. The first task tomorrow morning would be to seek him out on the job. If the geriatric hadn’t turned up by then, that is.

At 9.02 p.m., the county police received a call:

– My name is Bertil Karlgren and I’m calling… I’m calling on behalf of my wife you could say. Well, yes, anyway, my wife, Gerda Karlgren, has been in Flen for a few days visiting our daughter and her husband. They’re going to have a baby… So there’s always a lot to do. But today it was time to go home and she took, I mean Gerda, Gerda took the early afternoon bus, and the bus goes via Malmköping, we live here in Strängnäs… Well, this might not be anything, the wife doesn’t think so, but we heard on the radio about a hundred-year-old man who’d disappeared. Perhaps you’ve already found him? You haven’t? Anyway, the wife says that there was an incredibly old man who got on the bus in Malmköping and he had a large suitcase as if he was going for a long journey. The wife sat at the back and the old man sat right at the front so she couldn’t see so well and she didn’t hear what the old man and the driver talked about. What did you say, Gerda? Well, Gerda says that she isn’t one of those people who listen to other people’s conversations… The old man got out only halfway to Strängnäs. Gerda doesn’t know what the bus stop is called, it was sort of in the middle of the forest…

The conversation was recorded, transcribed and sent by fax to the detective chief inspector’s hotel in Malmköping. 

The suitcase was stuffed with bundles of 500-crown notes. Julius did some quick arithmetic in his head: ten rows across, five rows high, fifteen bundles in every pile…

‘Thirty-seven point five million if I counted correctly,’ said Julius.

‘That’s a decent amount of money,’ said Allan.

‘Let me out, you bastards,’ the young man shouted from inside the freezer.

The young man was acting crazy in there; he yelled and kicked and yelled some more. Allan and Julius needed to collect their thoughts about the surprising turn of events, but they couldn’t do it with all that noise. In the end, Allan thought it was time to cool the young man’s temper a little, so he turned on the freezer fan.

It didn’t take many seconds for the young man to notice that his situation had worsened. He quieted down to try to think clearly, not something he usually had much aptitude for, let alone when trapped in a rapidly cooling freezer with a
pounding
headache.

After a few minutes’ deliberation, he decided that threatening or trying to kick his way out of the situation was unlikely to be effective. All that was left was to call for help from outside. All that was left was to call the boss. It was a dreadful thought. But the alternative seemed even worse.

The young man hesitated for a minute or two, while it got colder and colder. Finally, he pulled out his mobile phone.

No signal.

The evening turned into night, and the night became morning.
Allan opened his eyes but couldn’t figure out where he was. Had he gone and died in his sleep, after all?

A chipper male voice wished him a good morning and informed him that there were two pieces of news to be conveyed, one good and one bad. Which did Allan want to hear first?

First of all, Allan wanted to know where he was and why. His knees were aching, so he was alive despite everything. But hadn’t he… and didn’t he then take… Was the man called Julius?

The pieces were falling into place; Allan was awake. He lay on a mattress on the floor in Julius’ bedroom. Julius stood in the doorway and repeated his question. Did Allan want the good or the bad news first?

‘The good news,’ said Allan. ‘You can skip the bad news.’

OK, Julius told him that the good news was that breakfast was on the table. There was coffee, sandwiches with cold roast elk and eggs from the neighbour’s.

To think that Allan was going to enjoy one more breakfast in his life without porridge! That was good news indeed. When he sat down at the kitchen table, he felt that he was now ready to hear the bad news after all.

‘The bad news,’ said Julius, and lowered his voice a little, ‘the bad news is that when we were well and truly pissed last night, we forgot to turn off the fan in the freezer-room.’

‘And?’ said Allan.

‘And… the guy inside must be dead cold – or cold dead – by now.’

With a worried look, Allan scratched his neck while he decided whether to let news of this carelessness spoil the day.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘But, on the other hand, I must say that you’ve got these eggs just right, not too hard and not too runny.’
Detective Chief Inspector Aronsson woke at about 8 a.m. in a bad mood. A geriatric who goes astray, on purpose or otherwise, should not be a case for somebody with the chief inspector’s qualifications.

Aronsson showered, got dressed and went down to breakfast on the ground floor of the Plevna Hotel. On his way he met the receptionist who gave him a fax that had come in just after reception had closed the previous evening.

An hour later, the chief inspector saw the case in a different light. The importance of the fax from the county police was unclear until Aronsson met a pale Ronny Hulth at the station’s ticket office. It didn’t take long before Hulth broke down and told Aronsson what had happened.

Shortly afterwards, there was a call from Eskilstuna reporting that the county bus company in Flen had just discovered that a bus had been missing since the previous evening. Could Aronsson call a Jessica Björkman, the live-in girlfriend of a bus driver who had evidently been kidnapped but released?

Chief Inspector Aronsson went back to the Plevna Hotel for a cup of coffee and to put all this newly gained information together. He wrote his observations down:

An elderly man, Allan Karlsson, goes AWOL from his room at the Old People’s Home just before his hundredth birthday is to be celebrated in the lounge. Karlsson is or was in
sensationally
good condition for his age. The simple physical fact that he managed to get himself out through a window attests to this – unless the geriatric had had help from outside of course, but later observations would suggest that he was acting on his own. Furthermore, Director Alice Englund has testified that ‘Allan may be old, but he is also one hell of a rascal and he damned well does exactly what he feels like.’

According to the sniffer dog, Karlsson, after trampling down a bed of pansies, walked through parts of Malmköping and
eventually into the waiting room at the bus station where, according to witness Ronny Hulth, he had gone straight up to Hulth’s ticket window – or rather shuffled up, since Hulth noticed Karlsson’s short steps and that Karlsson was wearing slippers, not shoes.

Hulth’s further statement indicates that Karlsson wanted to get away from Malmköping as quickly as possible, with the direction and the means of transport seeming to be of lesser importance.

That is incidentally confirmed by Jessica Björkman, the
livein
girlfriend of bus driver Lennart Ramnér. The bus driver has not been interrogated as yet, on account of his having taken too many sleeping pills. But Björkman’s statement seemed sound. Karlsson bought a ticket from Ramnér for a predetermined amount of money. The destination happened to be Byringe Station. Happened to be. There is thus no reason to believe that anybody or anything was waiting for Karlsson.

There was another interesting detail. The ticketseller had not noticed whether Karlsson had a suitcase before he climbed on board the bus to Byringe but this fact had very soon
become
apparent to him on account of the violent behaviour of a supposed member of the criminal organisation Never Again.

There wasn’t a suitcase in the story Jessica Björkman had managed to get out of her boyfriend, but the fax from the police confirms that Karlsson had presumably – albeit incredibly – stolen the suitcase from the Never Again member.

The rest of Björkman’s story, together with the fax from Eskilstuna, tells us that Karlsson, at 3.20 in the afternoon, give or take a few minutes, and then the Never Again member, about four hours later, got off at Byringe Station before walking towards an unknown destination. The former is one hundred years old, dragging a suitcase with him; the latter is about seventy-five years younger.

Chief Inspector Aronsson closed his notebook and drank the last of the coffee. It was 10.25 a.m.

‘Next stop, Byringe Station.’

At breakfast, Julius told Allan everything that he had
accomplished
and plotted during the early morning hours while Allan still slept.

First, the unfortunate accident in the freezer-room: when Julius realised that the temperature had been below freezing for at least ten hours during the evening and night, he had armed himself with the crowbar and opened the door. If the young man was still alive, he wouldn’t be even close to as awake and alert as he would need to be to stand up to Julius and his crowbar.

But the crowbar safety measure was unnecessary. The young man sat hunched up on his empty box, his threatening and
kicking
days over. He had ice crystals on his body and his eyes stared coldly out at nothing – dead as a butchered elk, in short.

Julius thought it was too bad, but also very convenient. They wouldn’t have been able to let that wild man out just like that. Julius turned the fan off and left the door open. The young man was dead, but he didn’t have to be frozen solid.

Julius lit the stove in the kitchen to keep the place warm, and checked on the money. It wasn’t the thirty-seven million that he had hurriedly estimated the evening before. It was exactly 50 million.

Allan listened to Julius’ account with interest, while he ate his breakfast with a better appetite than he’d had for as long as he could remember. He didn’t say anything until Julius reached the money part.

‘Fifty million is easier to split into two than thirty-seven. Nice and equal. Would you be so kind as to pass me the salt?’

Julius did as Allan requested, saying that he would probably have been able to divide thirty-seven into two as well if it had
been necessary, but he agreed that it was easier with fifty. Then Julius became serious. He sat down at the kitchen table opposite Allan, and said that it was high time they left the disused station for good. The young man in the freezer could do no more harm, but who knows what he might have stirred up behind him on the way here? At any moment there could be ten new young men standing there shouting in the kitchen, each one just as ornery as the one who was done shouting.

Allan agreed, but reminded Julius of his advanced age and pointed out that he wasn’t as mobile as he once had been. Julius promised to see to it that there would be as little walking as possible involved. But get away they must. And it would be best if they took the young man in the freezer with them. It would do the two old men no good if people found a corpse in their wake.

Breakfast was done with, now it was time to get going. Julius and Allan lifted the dead young man out of the freezer and into the kitchen where they put him in a chair while they gathered their strength.

Allan inspected him from top to toe, and then said:

‘He has unusually small feet for someone so big. He has no use for his shoes any more, does he?’

Julius answered that although it was clearly cold outside at this time of the morning, there was a greater risk that Allan would get frostbitten toes than that the young man would. If Allan thought that his shoes would fit, then he should go ahead and take them. If the young man didn’t object, that meant he agreed.

The shoes were a bit too large for Allan, but solid and much better suited to being on the run than a pair of well-worn indoor slippers.

The next step was to shove the young man out into the hall and tip him down the steps. When they all three found
themselves
out on the platform, two standing and one lying down, Allan wondered what Julius had in mind now.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Julius said to Allan. ‘Not you, either,’ he said to the young man, and jumped down from the platform and headed for a shed at the end of the station’s only siding.

Shortly afterwards, Julius rolled out of the shed on an
inspection
trolley.

‘Vintage 1954,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard.’

Julius did the heavy pedalling at the front. Just behind him, Allan 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.