onday, 2nd May 2005

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.