onday, 2nd May–Tuesday, 3rd May 2005

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.

But after two decades, the Boss felt it was time to think bigger. He found a couple of younger henchmen. The first thing he did was to give each of them a suitably idiotic nickname (one was called Bolt, and the other Bucket) and with their help he then carried out two successful security van robberies.

A third security van robbery, however, ended with four and a half years in a maximum-security prison for all three of them. It was there that the Boss got the idea for Never Again. During stage one, the club would consist of about fifty members, divided into three operative branches: ‘robbery’, ‘narcotics’ and ‘extortion’. The name Never Again came from the Boss’s vision of creating such a professional and watertight structure for this crime that they would never again find themselves in a maximum security prison. Never Again would be the Real Madrid of organized crime (the Boss was crazy about soccer).

In the beginning, the recruitment process in prison went well. But then a letter to the Boss from his mum happened to go astray in the prison. His mum wrote, among other things, that her little Per-Gunnar should take care not to mix with bad company in the prison, that he should be careful with his delicate tonsils and that she was looking forward to playing the Treasure Island Game with him again when he got out.

After that, it didn’t help that the Boss sliced up a couple of Yugoslavs in the lunch line and generally acted like a violent psychotic. His authority was damaged. Of the thirty recruits so far, twenty-seven dropped out. Besides Bolt and Bucket, only a Venezuelan named José Mariá Rodriguez stayed on, the latter because he was secretly in love with the Boss, which he never dared admit to anybody, even himself.

The Venezuelan was given the name Caracas, after the capital city of his home country. However much the Boss threatened and swore, no one else joined his club. And one day, he and his three henchmen were released.

At first, the Boss thought of abandoning the whole idea of Never Again, but Caracas happened to have a Colombian comrade with a flexible conscience and dubious friends, and after one thing and another, Sweden (through Never Again) became the transit country for Eastern Europe for the Colombian narcotics trade. The deals got bigger and bigger, and there was neither need nor staff to activate the branches ‘robbery’ and ‘extortion’.

The Boss convened a war council in Stockholm with Bucket and Caracas. Something had happened to Bolt, the clumsy idiot who had been entrusted with the task of carrying out the club’s largest transaction so far. The Boss had been in contact with the Russians in the morning and they swore that they had received the merchandise – and handed over the payment. If Never Again’s courier had run off with the suitcase then that wasn’t the Russians’ problem.

The Boss assumed for the time being that the Russians were telling the truth. Would Bolt voluntarily have skipped town with the money? No, he dismissed the idea; Bolt was too stupid for that. Or too wise, however you wanted to look at it.

Somebody must have known about the transaction, have waited for the right moment in Malmköping or on Bolt’s journey back to Stockholm, knocked out Bolt and grabbed the suitcase.

But who? The Boss presented the question to the war council and didn’t get an answer. The Boss wasn’t surprised; he had long ago decided that his henchmen were idiots, all three of them.

Anyhow, he ordered Bucket out into the field, because the Boss thought that the idiot Bucket was still not quite as big an idiot as the idiot Caracas. The idiot Bucket would thus have a greater chance of finding the idiot Bolt, and perhaps even the suitcase with the money.

‘Go down to Malmköping and poke around a bit, Bucket. But don’t wear your jacket; police are all over the town. A hundred-year-old guy has disappeared.’ Julius, Allan and the corpse rolled along through the forest. At Vidkärr they had the misfortune to meet a farmer. The farmer was there inspecting his crops when the trio came racing by on the inspection trolley.

‘Good morning,’ said Julius.

‘Nice day,’ said Allan.

The corpse and the farmer didn’t say anything. But the farmer stared at the trio for a long time as they went off into the distance.

The closer the trolley got to the local steel works, the more worried Julius got. He had thought they might pass a lake on the way and that they’d be able to dump the corpse in it. But they didn’t. And before Julius had time to worry any further, the trolley rolled into the foundry yard. Julius applied the brakes just in time. The corpse fell forwards and hit his forehead on an iron handle.

‘That would have been really painful if the circumstances had been a little different,’ said Allan.

‘There are undoubtedly advantages to being dead,’ said Julius.

Julius climbed down from the trolley and positioned himself behind a birch tree to survey the area. The enormous doors into the factory halls were open, but the yard seemed deserted. Julius looked at his watch. It was ten past twelve. Lunchtime, he realised as he spotted a large container. Julius announced that he intended to go off and do a bit of reconnaissance. Allan wished Julius the best of luck and asked him not to get lost.

There wasn’t much risk of that, because Julius was only going to walk the thirty metres to the container. He climbed in and was out of Allan’s sight for just over a minute. Once back at the trolley, Julius announced that he now knew what to do with the corpse.

The container had been packed half-full of steel cylinders of some sort, each one of them in a protective wooden box with a lid. Allan was totally exhausted once the heavy corpse was finally in place inside one of the two innermost cylinders. But when he closed the wooden lid and saw the address label, he livened up.

Addis Ababa.

‘He’s going to see the world if he keeps his peepers open,’ said Allan.

‘Hurry up,’ Julius said. ‘We can’t stay here.’

The operation went well, and the two men were back under the birch trees well before the lunch break was over. They sat down on the trolley to rest, and soon things started to liven up in the factory yard. A truck driver filled the container with a few more cylinders. Then he closed and locked it, brought over a new container and continued the loading.

Allan wondered what they actually manufactured there. Julius knew it was a works with a history; as far back as the seventeenth century they had cast and supplied cannons to everybody in the Thirty Years’ War who wanted to do their killing more efficiently.

Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs. Then he announced that the break was now over and that it was time to make themselves scarce. Julius’s simple plan was that the two friends would walk the short distance into the more central parts of Åker and once there decide on their next move.

Chief Inspector Aronsson went through the old station building in Byringe without finding anything of interest except a pair of slippers that might have belonged to the centenarian. He would take them with him to show the staff at the Old People’s Home.

There were pools of water here and there on the kitchen floor, leading to an open walk-in freezer, which was switched off. But that was unlikely to be of any significance.

Aronsson continued into Byringe village to knock on doors. There were people at home in three of the houses, and from all three families he learned that a Julius Jonsson lived on the ground floor of the station building, that Julius Jonsson was a thief and a conman whom nobody wanted to have anything to do with, and that nobody had heard or seen anything strange since the previous evening. But they all took it for granted that Julius Jonsson was up to no good.

‘Put him behind bars,’ one of the angriest neighbours demanded.

‘For what reason?’ the chief inspector wondered in a tired voice.

‘Because he steals my eggs from the chicken coop at night, because he stole my newly purchased sled last winter and painted it and called it his own, because he orders books in my name, goes through my mailbox when they arrive and lets me pay the bill, because he tries to sell privately distilled vodka to my fourteen-year-old son, because he –’

‘OK, OK, fine. I’ll put him behind bars,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I just have to find him first.’

Aronsson turned back towards Malmköping and was about halfway there when his telephone rang. A farmer had just phoned in with an interesting tip. An hour or so earlier, a known petty criminal from the district had passed his fields on an inspection trolley on the disused railway line between Byringe and Åker Foundry. On the trolley he saw an old man, a big suitcase and a young man with sunglasses. The young man seemed to be in charge, according to the farmer. Even though he wasn’t wearing any shoes…

‘I don’t get it,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson and turned his car around at such a speed that the slippers on the passenger seat fell onto the floor.

After a couple of hundred metres, Allan’s already glacial walking pace slowed. He didn’t complain, but Julius could see that the old man’s knees were causing problems. In the distance stood a hot-dog stand. Julius promised Allan that if he made it to the hot-dog stand, then Julius would treat him – he could afford it – and then he would find a solution to the transport problem. Allan replied that never in his life had he complained over a bit of discomfort, and that he wasn’t going to start now, but that a hot-dog would hit the spot.

Julius increased his pace; Allan stumbled after him. When he arrived, Julius had already eaten half of his hot-dog. A fancy grilled one. And that wasn’t all.

‘Allan,’ he said, ‘come and say hello to Benny. He’s our new private chauffeur.’

Benny, the owner of the hot-dog stand, was about fifty, and still in possession of all his hair including a pony tail at the back. In about two minutes, Julius had managed to buy a hot-dog, an orange soft drink and Benny’s silver 1988 Mercedes, along with Benny himself as chauffeur, all for 100,000 crowns.

Allan looked at the owner of the hot-dog stand.

‘Have we bought you too, or just hired you?’ he asked finally.

‘The car has been bought, the chauffeur has been hired,’ Benny answered. ‘A hot-dog is included in the price. Can I tempt you with a Viennese wurst?’

No, he couldn’t. Allan just wanted an ordinary boiled sausage if that was all right. And besides, said Allan, 100,000 for such an old car was an extremely high price even if it included a driver, so now it was only fair that he throw in a bottle of chocolate milk too.

Benny agreed instantly. He would be leaving his kiosk behind and a chocolate milk more or less made no difference. His business was losing money anyway; running a hot-dog stand in a small village had turned out to be just as bad an idea as it had seemed at the beginning.

In fact, Benny informed them, even before the two gentlemen had so conveniently turned up, he had been toying with plans to do something different with his life. But private chauffeur, well he hadn’t pictured that.

In light of what the hot-dog-stand manager had just told them, Allan suggested that Benny load an entire carton of chocolate milk into the boot of the car. And Julius, for his part, promised that Benny would get his own private chauffeur’s cap at the first opportunity, if only he would take off his hot-dog-stand chef’s hat and leave the stand because it was time for them to be on their way.

Benny didn’t think it was part of his job to argue with his employers, so he did as he was told. His chef’s hat ended up in the rubbish, and the chocolate milk went in the boot. But Julius wanted to keep the suitcase on the back seat with him. Allan had to sit in the front where he could stretch out his legs properly.

So the only hot-dog-stand manager in Åker went and sat in the driver’s seat of what a few minutes earlier had been his own Mercedes, now honourably sold to the two gentlemen in Benny’s company.

‘And where do you two gentlemen want to go?’ asked Benny.

‘What about north?’ said Julius.

‘Yes, that would be fine,’ said Allan. ‘Or south.’

‘Then we’ll say south,’ said Julius.

‘South it is,’ said Benny.

Ten minutes later, Chief Inspector Aronsson arrived at Åker. By following the railway tracks, he discovered an old inspection trolley behind the factory.

But the trolley provided no obvious clues. The workers in the yard were busy loading cylinders of some type into containers. None of them had seen the trolley arrive. But just after lunch they had seen two elderly men walking along the road, one of them dragging a large suitcase. They were headed in the direction of the service station and the hot-dog stand.

Aronsson asked if there were really only two men, not three. But the workers hadn’t seen a third person.

Driving to the service station and the hot-dog stand, Aronsson considered this new information. But it was harder than ever to make sense of it all.

First, he stopped at the hot-dog stand. He was getting hungry, so it was perfect timing. But it was closed. It had to be tough to run a hot-dog stand out in this wilderness, Aronsson thought, and continued on to the service station. There, they had seen nothing and heard nothing. But at least they could sell Aronsson a hot dog, even though it tasted of petrol.

After his quick lunch, Aronsson went to the supermarket, the flower shop and the estate agent. And he stopped and spoke to any natives who had ventured out with dogs, prams or a husband or wife. But nobody had seen two or three men with a suitcase. The trail simply came to an end somewhere between the foundry and the service station. Chief Inspector Aronsson decided to return to Malmköping. At least he had a pair of slippers that required identification.

Aronsson phoned the county police chief from his car and updated him. The county police chief was grateful because he was giving a press conference at the Plevna Hotel at two o’clock and so far he had had nothing to say.

The police chief had something of a theatrical bent; he was not inclined to understatement. And now Chief Inspector Aronsson had given him just what he needed for today’s show.

So the police chief pulled out all the stops during the press conference, before Aronsson had time to get back to Malmköping to stop him (which he wouldn’t have succeeded in doing anyway). The police chief announced that the police had to assume that Allan Karlsson’s disappearance had developed into a kidnapping, just as the local newspaper’s website had suggested the previous day. The police now had information that Karlsson was alive but in the hands of people from the underworld.

There were of course a lot of questions, but the police chief skilfully avoided them. What he could tell the press was that Karlsson and his presumed kidnappers had been seen in the little village of Åker as recently as around lunchtime that very day. And he urged the police authority’s best friend – the General Public – to keep their eyes open.

To the disappointment of the police chief, the TV team hadn’t stayed around for his dramatic announcement. They would surely have been hooked if that sluggard Aronsson had managed to dig out the kidnapping story a little earlier. But at least the national tabloid was there, as were the local paper and a reporter from the local radio. And at the back of the hotel dining room stood another man whom the police chief didn’t recognise. Was he from the national news agency?

Bucket wasn’t from a news agency. But he was becoming convinced that Bolt had skipped town with all the dough — in which case he was now as good as dead.

When Chief Inspector Aronsson arrived at the Plevna Hotel, the press had dispersed. On his way, Aronsson had stopped off at the Old People’s Home and they had confirmed that the slippers did indeed belong to Allan Karlsson. (Director Alice sniffed at them and nodded with a disgusted look on her face.)

Aronsson had the misfortune to stumble upon the county police chief in the hotel lobby. The chief told him about the press conference and ordered him to solve the crime, preferably in such a way that it didn’t contradict what the police chief had said to the press.

Then the police chief went on his way. He had a lot of work to do. It was, for example, high time to appoint a prosecutor to the case.

Aronsson sat down with a cup of coffee to reflect on the latest developments. He decided to focus on the relationship between the three trolley passengers. If the farmer had been wrong about Karlsson and Jonsson’s relationship to the trolley’s third passenger, then it might be a hostage drama. The police chief had just said as much at his press conference, but since he was rarely right, that might be a black mark against the kidnapping theory. Besides, witnesses had seen Karlsson and Jonsson walking around in Åker – with a suitcase. So the question was, had the two old men, Karlsson and Jonsson, somehow managed to overpower the young and strong Never Again member and throw him into a ditch?

An incredible but not impossible idea. Aronsson decided to call in the Eskilstuna police dog again. The dog and her handler would need to take a long walk all the way from the farmer’s fields to the foundry in Åker. Somewhere in between, the Never Again member had disappeared.

Karlsson and Jonsson themselves managed to disappear into thin air somewhere between the back of the foundry and the service station – a distance of 200 metres. They disappeared from the face of the earth without anyone noticing. The only thing along the route was a closed hot-dog stand.

Aronsson’s mobile rang. The police had received a new tip. This time the centenarian had been seen in Mjölby, probably kidnapped by the middle-aged man with the pony tail who sat behind the wheel of a silver Mercedes.

‘Should we check it out?’ his colleague asked.

‘No,’ said Aronsson, sighing.

Years of experience had taught Aronsson to distinguish between good and bad tips. That was a consolation when most things were clouded in mist.

Benny stopped in Mjölby to get petrol. Julius carefully opened the suitcase and pulled out a 500-crown note to pay with.

Then Julius said he wanted to stretch his legs a little, and asked Allan to stay in the car and guard the suitcase. Allan was tired after the day’s hardships, and promised not to move an inch.

Benny came back first, and got behind the wheel. Shortly after, Julius returned. The Mercedes continued its journey south.

After a while, Julius started to rustle with something in the back seat. He held out an opened bag of sweets to Allan and Benny.

‘Just look what I found in my pocket,’ he said.

Allan raised his eyebrows:

‘You stole a bag of sweets, when we’ve got fifty million in the suitcase?’

‘You’ve got fifty million in the suitcase?’ asked Benny.

‘Oops,’ said Allan.

‘Not quite,’ said Julius. ‘We gave you a hundred thousand.’

‘Plus five hundred for the petrol,’ said Allan.

Benny was silent for a few seconds.

‘So you’ve got forty-nine million, eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand, five hundred crowns in the suitcase?’

‘You have a head for numbers, said Allan.

Silence reigned until Julius said that it might be better to explain everything to the private chauffeur. If Benny then wanted to break their contract, that would be quite all right.

The part of the story that Benny found hardest to stomach was that a person had been put to death and subsequently packed for export. But on the other hand, it had clearly been an accident, even though vodka was involved. For his part, Benny never touched the hard stuff.

The newly employed chauffeur thought it through and decided that the fifty million had most certainly been in the wrong hands from the very beginning, and that the money might be of more use to humanity now. Besides, it seemed wrong to resign on the very first day of a new job.

So Benny promised to stay on and wondered what the two old men were planning next. Until then, he hadn’t wanted to ask; in Benny’s opinion, curiosity was not a desirable quality in private chauffeurs, but now he had become a bit of a conspirator.

Allan and Julius admitted that they didn’t actually have any plan at all. Maybe they could follow the road until it started to get dark, and then spend the night somewhere where they could discuss the matter in more detail.

‘Fifty million,’ said Benny and smiled, while he put the Mercedes into first gear.

‘Forty-nine million, eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand, five hundred crowns,’ Allan corrected him.

Then Julius had to promise to stop stealing things for the sake of stealing. Julius said that it wouldn’t be easy, he had it in his blood and wasn’t suited to anything else. But he did promise, and one thing Julius knew about himself was that he rarely failed to keep his promises.

The journey continued in silence. Allan soon fell asleep. Julius ate another sweet. And Benny hummed a song whose name he didn’t remember.

A tabloid journalist who senses a story is not easy to stop. It didn’t take long for the reporters to form a much clearer picture of the true course of events than the one the county police chief had presented at the afternoon’s press conference. With a little digging around, The Express was the first to get hold of ticket seller Ronny Hulth, visit him at his home and – upon promising to find a live-in partner for Ronny Hulth’s lonely cat – manage to persuade him to follow the reporter to a hotel in Eskilstuna for the night – out of reach of the rival paper. At first, Hulth had been afraid to talk, as he remembered only too well what the young man had threatened him with. But the reporter promised that Hulth could remain anonymous and assured him that nothing would happen to him now that the police were involved in the case.

But The Express did not make do with Hulth. The bus driver, too, had been caught in the net, as had the villagers in Byringe, the farmer in Vidkärr and various people in the Åker village. All in all, this offered fodder for several dramatic articles the next day. They were of course full of incorrect assumptions, but considering the circumstances the reporter had done well.

The silver Mercedes drove on. Eventually, Julius too fell asleep. Allan was snoring in the front seat, Julius in the back with the suitcase as an uncomfortable pillow. Meanwhile Benny charted their course as best he could. Eventually Benny decided to leave the main road, continuing south, deep into the Småland forests. Here he was hoping to find suitable lodging for the night.

Allan woke up and wondered whether it wouldn’t soon be time to go to bed. That conversation woke up Julius, who looked around, seeing forest everywhere, and asked where they were.

Benny told them that they were now about twenty or thirty kilometres north of Växjö and that he had been thinking while the gentlemen slept. What he had concluded was that for reasons of security it would be best to find a discreet place to stay the night. They didn’t know who was chasing them, but if you stole a suitcase with fifty million, you should not expect to be left in peace. So Benny had turned off the road that led to Växjö, and headed towards a much humbler place called Rottne. Perhaps there might be a small hotel there where they could spend the night.

‘Smart,’ said Julius appreciatively. ‘But perhaps not smart enough.’

Julius explained what he meant. In Rottne there might be, at best, a little shabby hotel that nobody ever found their way to. If three gentlemen without a reservation suddenly turned up one evening it would attract considerable attention from the villagers. Better, in that case, to find a farm or a house somewhere in the forest and bribe their way into a room for the night and something to eat.

Benny found Julius’ reasoning wise, and so he turned down the first insignificant gravel road he saw.

It had just started to get dark when after almost four winding kilometres the three men saw a mailbox at the side of the road. On the mailbox it said: Lake Farm, and next to it was an even narrower track which they presumed would lead to it. And that turned out to be correct. A hundred metres further on they came across a house. It was a proper red two-storey farmhouse with white window frames and a barn. Further along beside a lake there was something that had once been a tool shed.

The place seemed to be inhabited and Benny brought the Mercedes to a halt just in front of the entrance to the farm house. Then, out through the front door came a woman in her early forties, with frizzy red hair, wearing an even redder track suit, and with an Alsatian at her heel.

The three men got out of the Mercedes. Julius glanced at the dog, but it didn’t look as if it would attack them. In fact, it gave the guests a curious, almost friendly look.

So Julius dared to take his eyes off it. He said a polite ‘Good evening’ and explained their quest for a place to sleep and perhaps a bite to eat.

The woman looked at the motley crew in front of her: an old man, a less old man, and a… rather stylish guy, she had to admit. And the right age too. And with a pony tail! She smiled to herself and Julius thought they were set, but then she said:

‘This is not a bloody hotel.’

Allan sighed. He really was longing for something to eat and a bed. Life was exhausting now that he had decided to live a little longer. Say what you like about the Old People’s Home, at least it didn’t give him aches and pains all over his body.

Julius looked disappointed too and said that he and his friends were lost and tired, and that they were naturally prepared to pay their way if only they could stay there the night. If absolutely necessary they could skip the food bit.

‘We’ll pay a hundred thousand crowns per person if you give us somewhere to sleep,’ Julius offered.

‘A hundred thousand crowns?’ said the woman. ‘Are you on the run?’

Julius brushed her rather perceptive question aside and explained again that they had come a long way, and that although he could probably keep going, Allan here was advanced in years.

‘Yesterday was my hundredth birthday,’ said Allan in a pathetic voice.

‘One hundred?’ said the woman, almost frightened. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’

And then she was silent for a moment.

‘What the hell,’ she finally said. ‘I suppose you can stay. But forget the hundred thousand crowns. Like I said, this is not a bloody hotel I’m running here.’

Benny gave her an admiring look. He had never heard a woman swear so much in such a short time. He thought it sounded delightful.

‘My beauty,’ he said. ‘May I pet your dog?’

‘Beauty?’ said the woman. ‘Are you blind? But sure, pet away. Buster is friendly. You can each have a room upstairs, there’s plenty of room here. The sheets are clean, but watch out for the rat poison on the floor. Dinner will be on the table in an hour.’

The woman headed past the three guests towards the barn, with Buster faithfully at her side. Benny enquired in passing what her name might be. Without turning she said it was Gunilla but that she thought ‘Beauty’ sounded fine so ‘just bloody well keep to that’. Benny promised.

‘I think I’m in love,’ said Benny.

‘I know I’m tired,’ said Allan.

At that very moment, they heard a bellowing from the barn that made even the exhausted Allan stand up straight. It must have come from a very large and possibly pained animal.

‘Cool it, Sonya,’ said The Beauty. ‘I’m on my damn way.’