uesday, 3rd May–Wednesday, 4th May 2005

After the afternoon’s press conference, Bucket sat down with a beer to think things over. But however much he thought, he couldn’t make head or tail of it. Would Bolt have started kidnapping centenarians? Or did one thing have nothing to do with the other? All this thinking gave Bucket a headache, so he stopped and phoned the Boss instead, reporting to him that nothing at all had happened that was worth reporting. He was told to stay in Malmköping and await further orders.

The conversation over, Bucket was alone again with his beer. The situation was becoming too taxing. He didn’t like having no idea what was going on, and now his headache came back again. So in his mind he fled to the past, remembering his youth back home.

Bucket had started his criminal career in Braås only about twenty kilometres from where Allan and his new friends now found themselves. There, he had got together with some like-minded peers and started the motorcycle club called The Violence. Bucket was the leader; he decided which newspaper kiosk was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who had chosen the name – The Violence, in English, not Swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English.

The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead. As the rest of the club members had had similar academic success, nobody in the group noticed the mistake.

So everyone was very surprised when one day a letter arrived for The Violins in Braås from the people in charge of the concert hall in Växjö. The letter suggested that, since the club obviously concerned itself with classical music they might like to put in an appearance at a concert with the city’s prestigious chamber orchestra Musica Vitae.

Bucket felt provoked; somebody was clearly making fun of him. One night he skipped the newspaper kiosk, and instead went into Växjö to throw a brick through the glass door of the concert hall. This was intended to teach the people responsible a lesson in respect.

It all went off well, except that Bucket’s leather glove happened to follow the stone into the lobby. Since the alarm went off immediately, Bucket felt it would be unwise to try to retrieve the item of clothing in question.

Losing a glove was not good. Bucket had travelled to Växjö by motorbike and one hand was extremely cold all the way home to Braås that night. Even worse was the fact that Bucket’s luckless girlfriend had written Bucket’s name and address inside the glove, in case he lost it. So by the following morning the police had worked out who the primary suspect was, and picked up Bucket for questioning.

In the interrogation, Bucket explained that there were extenuating circumstances and described how he had been provoked by the management of the concert hall. The story of how The Violence became The Violins ended up in the local newspaper, and Bucket became the laughing-stock of all Braås. In a rage, he decided that the next newspaper kiosk they were robbing should be burned down instead of just having its door smashed in. This in turn led to the Turkish-Bulgarian owner – who had gone to bed in his storeroom to guard against thieves – narrowly escaping with his life. Having decided that one glove was better than none on a cold evening, Bucket wore his remaining glove to the scene of the crime (with the address noted just as neatly as in the first glove), lost it, and not long after found himself on his way to prison for the first time. There he met the Boss, and when he had served his sentence Bucket decided it was best to leave Braås and his girlfriend behind. Both seemed only to bring him bad luck.

But The Violence lived on, and the members retained the misspelled jackets. Lately, however, the club had changed its focus. Now it concentrated on stealing cars and on rolling back the speedometer. Or as the new leader of the group, Bucket’s little brother, used to say: ‘Nothing makes a car prettier than when you suddenly discover it has driven only half the mileage.’

Bucket was occasionally in touch with his brother and the old life, but had no wish to be back there.

‘What a fuck-up,’ was how Bucket concisely summed up his own history.

It was tough to think in new ways and equally tough to remember the old. Better to have a third beer and then, in accordance with the Boss’s orders, check in to the hotel.

It was almost dark when Chief Inspector Aronsson, accompanied by the police dog-handler and Kicki, the dog, arrived at Åker village, after the long walk along the railway track from Vidkärr.

The dog hadn’t reacted to anything along the way. Aronsson wondered if she actually realised that they were working, not just out on an evening stroll. But when the trio came to the abandoned inspection trolley, the dog stood to attention, or whatever it was called. And then she raised one paw and started to bark. Aronsson’s hopes were raised.

‘Does that mean something?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it certainly does,’ answered the dog-handler.

And then he explained that Kicki had different signs, depending on what she wanted to convey.

‘Well then, what is she trying to tell us?!’ asked the increasingly impatient Aronsson and pointed at the dog which was still standing on three legs and barking.

‘That,’ said the dog-handler, ‘means that there has been a dead body on the trolley.’

‘A dead body? A corpse?’

‘A corpse.’

Chief Inspector Aronsson saw in his mind’s eye how the Never Again member killed the unfortunate centenarian Allan Karlsson. But then this new information merged with what he already knew.

‘It must be the exact opposite,’ he mumbled and felt strangely relieved.

The Beauty served beef and potatoes with lingonberries and beer, followed by a glass of bitters. The guests were hungry, but first they needed to know what sort of animal they had heard from the barn.

‘That was Sonya,’ said The Beauty. ‘My elephant.’

‘Elephant?’ said Julius.

‘Elephant?’ said Allan.

‘I thought I recognised that sound,’ said Benny.

The former hot-dog-stand owner had been struck by love at first sight. And now, at second sight, he felt no different. This constantly swearing redhead with the full figure seemed to have popped straight out of a novel!

The Beauty had discovered the elephant early one August morning in her garden stealing apples. If she had been able to talk she would have said that the previous evening she had absconded from a circus in Växjö to look for something to drink, because the elephant keeper had gone to do the same in town instead of doing his job.

When darkness fell the elephant had reached the shores of Helga Lake and decided to do more than simply quench her thirst. A cooling bath would be very nice, the elephant thought, and waded out in the shallow water.

But suddenly it wasn’t so shallow any more, and the elephant had to rely on her innate ability to swim. Elephants in general are not as logical in their thinking as are people. This elephant was a prime example; she decided to swim two and a half kilometres to the other side of the cove to reach firm ground again, instead of just turning around to swim four metres back to the shore.

The elephantine logic had two consequences. One was that the elephant was quickly declared dead by the circus people and police who rather belatedly thought to follow her tracks all the way to Helga Lake and out in the fifteen-metre deep water. The other was that the still-very-much-alive elephant, under cover of darkness, managed to spirit herself all the way to The Beauty’s apple orchard, without a single soul observing her.

The Beauty didn’t know that, of course, but afterwards she worked out most of what happened when she read in the local paper about an elephant that had disappeared and was now declared dead. How many elephants could be running around in that area, and at that particular time? The dead elephant and the still-very-much-alive elephant were presumably the same item.

The Beauty began by giving the elephant a name. She became Sonya, after her idol, the singer, Sonya Hedenbratt. This was followed by several days’ negotiations between Sonya and the Alsatian, Buster, before the two agreed to get along.

Winter arrived, meaning an endless search for food for poor Sonya who ate like the elephant she was. Conveniently, The Beauty’s father had just popped his clogs and left an inheritance of one million crowns to his only daughter. (When he became a pensioner twenty years earlier, he had sold his successful brush-making factory and subsequently looked after his money well.) So The Beauty resigned from her job at the local clinic in Rottne, to be a stay-at-home mum for a dog and an elephant.

Then spring arrived and Sonya could once more sustain herself with grass and leaves, and then that Mercedes drove into the yard, the first visitor since daddy, bless his dear departed soul, had come to see his daughter one last time two years before. The Beauty said that she wasn’t one to argue with fate, so it never occurred to her to try to keep Sonya a secret from the strangers.

Allan and Julius sat quietly and let The Beauty’s story sink in, while Benny said:

‘But what was that bellowing from Sonya? I feel she must be in pain.’

The Beauty stared at him wide-eyed:

‘How the hell could you hear that?’

Benny took a bite to give himself time to think. Then he said:

‘I’m almost a vet. Do you want the long or the short story?’

They all agreed that they would prefer the long version, but The Beauty insisted that first she and Benny should go to the barn so the almost-vet could have a look at Sonya’s painful left front foot.

Allan and Julius remained at the dinner table, both wondering how a vet with a pony tail could end up as a failure of a hot-dog-stand proprietor in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the county of Södermanland. A vet with a pony tail, what sort of sense did that make? These really were strange times.

Benny examined poor old Sonya with confidence, he had done this sort of thing before, during the practical part of his studies. A broken-off twig had become jammed under her second toenail, and made part of her foot swell up. The Beauty had tried to get the twig out but she had not been strong or dextrous enough. It didn’t take Benny more than a couple of minutes to manage it, with the help of calm talk with Sonya and a pair of tongs. But the elephant’s foot was badly swollen.

‘We need antibiotics,’ said Benny. ‘About a kilo.’

‘If you know what we need, I know how to get it,’ said The Beauty.

But ‘getting it’ would require a visit to Rottne in the middle of the night, and to pass the evening Benny and The Beauty returned to the dinner table.

They all ate with a good appetite and washed the food down with beer and bitters, all except Benny who drank juice. After the last mouthful, they moved into the living room and the armchairs beside the fire, where Benny was asked to explain how he came to be an almost-vet.

It all began when Benny and his one-year-older brother, Bosse, who grew up just south of Stockholm, spent several summers with their Uncle Frank in Dalarna. Uncle Frank, who was never called anything other than Frasse, was a successful entrepreneur who owned and ran a number of different local businesses. Uncle Frank sold everything from campers to gravel and most things in between. Besides eating and sleeping, work was his great passion. He had some failed romances behind him, since all the ladies soon got tired of Uncle Frasse just working and working, eating and sleeping (and showering on Sundays).

Anyway, during a number of summers in the 1960s, Benny and Bosse had been sent to Dalarna by their father, Uncle Frasse’s older brother, on the grounds that the children needed some fresh air. It is doubtful whether they got much of that, because Benny and Bosse were quickly trained to look after the big stone crushing machine at Uncle Frasse’s gravel pit. The boys liked working there, even though it was hard, and for two months they had to breathe in stone dust rather than fresh air. In the evenings, Uncle Frasse delivered moral sermons, regularly exhorting:

‘You boys make sure you get a proper education; otherwise you’ll end up like me.’

Now neither Benny nor Bosse thought it would be such a bad thing to end up like Uncle Frasse – at least until he fell into the stone crusher and came to a gravelly end – but Uncle Frasse had always been bothered by his own limited schooling. He could hardly write, he was no good at maths, he didn’t understand a word of English and it was only with difficulty he could remember that Norway’s capital was called Oslo, if anybody happened to ask. The only thing Uncle Frasse knew was how to do business. And he ended up rolling in money.

Exactly just how much money Uncle Frasse had at the time of his departure, was hard to say. It happened when Bosse was nineteen and Benny almost eighteen. One day, a lawyer contacted Bosse and Benny, and informed them that they were both mentioned in Uncle Frasse’s will but that the matter was somewhat complicated and that a meeting was required.

Benny and Bosse met the lawyer at his office and discovered that a considerable amount – unspecified – of money awaited the brothers the day they both completed their university education.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the lawyer would supply the brothers with a generous monthly allowance (to be regularly increased according to the rate of inflation) while they were studying. But the monthly allowance would stop if they abandoned their studies, just as it would when they had passed a final examination and should be able to support themselves. There was more to the will, some more or less complicated details, but on the whole what it meant was that the brothers would only be rich once they had both finished their studies.

Bosse and Benny immediately started on a seven-week course in welding skills and the lawyer confirmed that according to the will that would suffice, ‘although I suspect that your uncle Frank might have had something more advanced in mind’.

Two things happened halfway through the course. One, Benny finally had enough of his brother’s bossiness. That’s the way he had always been but it was time to make it clear to big brother that they were both grown and he needed to find someone else to order around. Two, Benny realised that he didn’t want to become a welder and that in any case he had no talent for it. The two brothers argued about this for a while, until Benny managed to talk his way into a course on botany at Stockholm University. According to the lawyer, the will allowed for a change of subject, as long as there was no interruption.

Bosse finished his welder’s training, but didn’t get a penny of Uncle Frasse’s money because his brother Benny was still studying. In addition, the lawyer immediately ended Bosse’s monthly allowance, in accordance with the will.

This, of course, meant that the brothers became enemies. And when Bosse, in a bout of drunken confusion, smashed up Benny’s newly purchased motorcycle (bought with money from his generous study allowance), that was the end of all brotherly love, the end of any relationship whatsoever.

Bosse started to do business deals in the spirit of Uncle Frasse, yet perhaps without his uncle’s talent. After a while he moved to Västergötland, partly in search of new business opportunities, partly to avoid the risk of bumping into his damned brother. Benny, on the other hand, stayed in the academic world, year after year. The monthly allowance was, as explained earlier, generous and by changing his subject just before taking final exams and starting on something new, Benny could live well, while his bullying jerk of a brother had to wait for his money.

And Benny continued like this for thirty years, until the extremely aged lawyer one day contacted him and announced that the money in the will was now used up, that there wouldn’t be any more monthly allowances, and of course there was no other money available for anything else. The brothers could forget the inheritance, said the lawyer who was now more than ninety years old and who appeared to have stayed alive for the sake of the will, because just a couple of weeks later he died in his television armchair.

All this had happened just a few weeks ago. Benny had suddenly found himself forced to get a job. But despite being one of the best-educated people in Sweden, he discovered that the labour market was not interested in the number of years he had studied, but rather in his final exam grades. Benny had almost finished at least ten academic degrees, but still found himself investing in a hot-dog stand in order to have something to do. Benny and Bosse were compelled to be in each other’s presence to hear the lawyer’s announcement that the inheritance had now been used up but on that occasion Bosse expressed himself in such a way that Benny did not make any immediate plans to go and visit him.

Having got this far in Benny’s story, Julius was beginning to worry that it might lead to all-too-personal questions from The Beauty, such as how Benny had ended up with Julius and Allan. But The Beauty didn’t bother with the details, thanks to the beer and the bitters. Instead, she had to admit that she was feeling a bit infatuated, old as she was.

‘So what else have you almost become over the years, besides a vet?’ she asked with sparkling eyes.

Benny understood just as well as Julius that the developments of the last few days shouldn’t be described in too much detail, so he was grateful for the direction of The Beauty’s question. He couldn’t remember everything, he said, but you can cover a lot if you sit at a school desk for three decades, and do your homework once in a while. Benny was an almost-vet, almost-doctor, almost-architect, almost-engineer, almost-botanist, almost-language-teacher, almost-sports-coach, almost-historian and almost quite a few other things. And for a bit of variety he had taken some shorter courses of varying quality and importance. Sometimes he had even taken two courses at the same time.

Then Benny remembered something else that he almost was. He leapt to his feet, facing The Beauty, and declaimed in very poetic Swedish:

From my pauper’s gloomy life

In my loneliness I sing

An air for you, my lovely wife

Royal jewel and glittering bling

Complete silence followed; then The Beauty mumbled an inaudible expletive while she blushed.

‘Erik Axel Karlfeldt,’ Benny explained. ‘With those words I would like to thank you for the food and the hospitality. I don’t think I said that I am an almost-literary-expert too?’

Benny might have gone too far when he asked The Beauty if she would like to dance in front of the fire, because she quickly said no, adding that there must be some damned limit to these stupidities. But Julius noticed that she was flattered. She zipped up her tracksuit jacket and smoothed it down to look her best for Benny.

After which Allan retired for the night while the other three moved on to coffee, cognac optional. Julius happily said yes to the entire offer, while Benny settled for half.

Julius showered The Beauty with questions about the farm and her own story, partly because he was curious, partly because he wanted to avoid the subject of who they were, where they were going, and why. But he didn’t have to worry. The Beauty had now got up steam and was talking about her childhood, about the man she married when she was eighteen and kicked out ten years later (that part of the story contained even more expletives), about never having children, about Lake Farm which had been her parents’ summer house before her mother died seven years ago and her father had let The Beauty take it over, about her sincerely uninspiring job as a receptionist at the health clinic in Rottne, about the inheritance that was starting to run out and about it soon being time to move on.

‘I’m already forty-three,’ said The Beauty. ‘That is damn well halfway to the grave.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Julius.

The dog-handler gave Kicki new instructions and she moved away from the trolley, sniffing constantly. Chief Inspector Aronsson hoped that the corpse in question would turn up somewhere in the vicinity, but only thirty metres inside the grounds, Kicki started walking in circles, and seemed to be searching at random, before looking up pleadingly at her handler.

‘Kicki says she’s sorry, but she can’t figure out where the corpse has gone,’ the dog-handler translated.

The dog-handler did not convey this message as precisely as he perhaps should have. Chief Inspector Aronsson interpreted the answer as meaning that Kicki had lost track of the corpse as soon as she walked away from the trolley. But if Kicki had been able to talk, she would have told him that the body was definitely moved a few metres into the grounds before disappearing. And then Chief Inspector Aronsson might have investigated whether any shipments had left the foundry in the last few hours. The answer would have been just one: a tractor trailer with a container bound for Gothenburg harbour. Then, the police could have been notified and the tractor trailer intercepted on the main road. But now the corpse had disappeared beyond the borders of Sweden.

Almost three weeks later, a young Egyptian watchman sat on a barge which had just emerged from the southern end of the Suez Canal. He noticed a terrible stench from the cargo.

Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wet a rag and tied it around his nose and mouth. In one of the wooden boxes he found the explanation: a half-rotten corpse.

The Egyptian seaman deliberated. He had no desire to leave the corpse there to ruin the rest of the journey. Besides he would almost certainly be subjected to long police interrogations in Djibouti, and everybody knew what the police were like in Djibouti.

Moving the body himself wasn’t a pleasant thought either, but in the end he made up his mind. First he emptied the corpse’s pockets of everything of value – he deserved something for his trouble – and then he shoved it overboard.

And that is how what had once been a young man of slight build, with long blond and greasy hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back, was turned with a splash into fish food in the Red Sea.

The group at Lake Farm split up just before midnight. Julius went upstairs to sleep, while Benny and The Beauty got into the Mercedes to visit the health clinic in Rottne after hours. Halfway there they discovered Allan under a blanket on the back seat. He woke up and explained that he had gone out for a breath of fresh air and once outside he had realised that the car would be a good place to sleep because the stairs up to the bedrooms were a bit too much for his shaking knees, after such a long day.

‘I’m no longer ninety,’ he said.

The duo had become a trio for the nocturnal exercise, but it didn’t matter. The Beauty described her plan in more detail. They would get into the clinic with the help of the key The Beauty had forgotten to return when she resigned. Once inside, they would log in to Doctor Erlandsson’s computer and in Erlandsson’s name send a prescription for antibiotics, made out in The Beauty’s name. For that you needed Erlandsson’s password, but that was no problem said The Beauty, because Doctor Erlandsson was not just pompous, he was also a fool. When the new computer system was installed a couple of years earlier, it was The Beauty who had to teach the doctor how to file electronic prescriptions, and she was the one who chose his username and password.

The Mercedes arrived at the intended crime scene. Benny, Allan and The Beauty got out and inspected the surroundings before committing the actual crime. At that moment a car passed slowly by. The driver was as surprised by the trio as they were by him. A single living being awake at that time of night in Rottne was a sensation. On this particular night there were four.

But the car drove on and darkness and silence settled on Rottne once more. The Beauty led Benny and Allan in through the staff entrance in the back, and then to Doctor Erlandsson’s room. There she turned on Doctor Erlandsson’s computer and logged in.

Everything went according to plan and The Beauty giggled happily until suddenly, she let loose a long stream of curses. She had just realised that you couldn’t simply send a prescription for ‘one kilo of antibiotics’.

‘Write Erythromycin, Rifamin, Gentramicin and Rifampin, two hundred and fifty grams each,’ said Benny. ‘Then we can attack the inflammation from several different angles.’

The Beauty looked admiringly at Benny. Then she invited him to sit down and spell it all out. Benny did and added various other medicines, useful to have on hand in case of future bad luck.

Breaking out of the clinic was just as easy as breaking in. And their journey home was without incident. Benny and The Beauty helped Allan upstairs and when it was almost half-past two in the morning, the last light was turned off at Lake Farm.

After ten at night there weren’t many people awake in that sleepy area. But in Braås, about twenty kilometres from Lake Farm, a young man lay in bed turning restlessly, desperate for a cigarette. It was Bucket’s little brother, the new leader of The Violence. Three hours earlier, he had finished his last cigarette and soon felt an unstoppable need to have another. He cursed himself for having forgotten to buy fags before everything shut for the evening.

At first he had intended to hold out until the following morning, but by midnight he couldn’t stand it any longer. That was when he got the idea of reliving old times, of simply gaining entry to a newspaper kiosk with the help of a crowbar. But it couldn’t be in Braås, where he had a reputation to uphold. Besides, he would be suspected of the crime almost before it was discovered.

It would be best to go a bit further afield, but he needed a smoke so badly that he had to compromise. And the compromise was Rottne, about fifteen minutes away. Dressed inconspicuously he rolled slowly into the little town in his old Volvo 240, a little after midnight. When he drove past the health clinic he was surprised to see three people on the pavement: a woman with red hair, a man with a ponytail and just behind them a terribly old man.

Bucket’s little brother didn’t analyse the event deeply. (He rarely analysed anything deeply, or even superficially.) Instead, he drove on, stopped under a tree quite close to the newspaper kiosk he’d been seeking, failed to break in because the owner had secured the door against crowbars, and then drove home again, just as desperate for a smoke as before.

When Allan woke up just after eleven o’clock the next morning he felt reinvigorated. He looked out of the window where the forest spread out around a lake. The landscape reminded him of Södermanland. It looked like it was going to be a nice day.

He got dressed, putting on the only clothes he had, and thought that he could perhaps afford to renew his wardrobe a little. Neither he nor Julius nor Benny had even managed to bring a toothbrush with them.

When Allan came downstairs, Julius and Benny were eating breakfast. Julius had been out for a walk while Benny had slept deeply and for a long time. The Beauty had put out plates and glasses and left written instructions about self-service in the kitchen. She herself had gone to Rottne. The note ended with an order that the gentlemen should make sure to leave a reasonable amount of breakfast on the plates, so Buster could have some too.

Allan said good morning and received the same greeting in return. After which Julius added that he had had the idea of staying another night at Lake Farm because the surroundings were so enchanting. Allan asked if perhaps the private chauffeur had had some influence over that decision, considering the passion that had been in the air the previous evening. Julius answered that Benny had indeed given a wealth of reasons for staying on at Lake Farm for the rest of the summer, but that the conclusion was his own. Where would they go anyway? Didn’t they need an extra day to think? All they needed in order to stay was a plausible story explaining who they were and where they were going – and The Beauty’s permission, of course.

Benny followed Allan and Julius’ conversation with interest, clearly hoping that it would end with another night at the same place. His feelings for The Beauty had not diminished since the previous day. On the contrary he was disappointed she wasn’t around when he came down for breakfast. But she had written ‘thanks for last night’ in the letter. Could she have been referring to the poem that Benny had recited? If only she would come back soon!

But it was almost an hour before The Beauty turned into the yard. When she climbed out of her car, Benny saw that she was even more beautiful than the last time he saw her. She had exchanged her red tracksuit for a dress and she might even have been to the hairdresser. He took some eager steps towards her, and exclaimed:

‘My beauty! Welcome home!’

Behind him stood Allan and Julius, enjoying the tender scene. But their smiles disappeared as soon as they saw her demeanour. First she walked straight past Benny and then past the other two, before stopping on the steps of Lake Farm, where she turned round and said:

‘You bastards! I know everything! And now I want to know the rest. Assemble in the living room. NOW!’

Upon which The Beauty disappeared into the house.

‘If she already knows everything, what more does she want to know?’ asked Benny.

‘Just be quiet, Benny,’ said Julius.

‘My words exactly,’ said Allan.

And then they went inside to meet their fate.

The Beauty had started the day by feeding Sonya some newly cut grass and then decided to smarten up a little. Reluctantly, she had admitted to herself that she wanted to be beautiful for that Benny guy. So she had swapped the red tracksuit for a light yellow dress and her frizzy hair had now been tidied into two pigtails. She had also added a little make-up and a touch of fragrance before she got into her red VW Passat to drive to Rottne for supplies.

Buster sat as he always did in the passenger seat and licked his chops when the car headed for the supermarket. Afterwards, The Beauty wondered whether in fact Buster had seen the newspaper headlines – the one for The Express was lit up outside the shop and had two photos, one at the bottom of old man Julius, and one at the top of very-old man Allan. The headline read:

‘Centenarian kidnapped by criminal gang. Hunt on today for notorious master thief – Police’.

The Beauty turned bright red in the face, her thoughts flying in all directions. She was furious and immediately abandoned plans to buy supplies, because those three sly devils would be out of her house before lunch! But first The Beauty went into the pharmacy to pick up the medicine that Benny had ordered the night before, and then she bought a copy of The Express to find out in more detail what on earth was going on.

The more The Beauty read, the angrier she became. But at the same time she couldn’t really piece it all together. Was it Benny who was Never Again? Was Julius a master thief? And who had kidnapped whom? They all seemed to get along so well.

In the end, her anger won over her curiosity. Whatever had happened, she had been conned. And you didn’t con Gunilla Björklund and get away with it! ‘My beauty!’ Hah!

She sat in her car and read the article once more: ‘On his hundredth birthday on Monday, Allan Karlsson disappeared from the Old People’s Home in Malmköping. The police now suspect that he has been kidnapped by the criminal organisation Never Again. According to information received by The Express, the master thief Julius Jonsson is involved.’

This was followed by a mish-mash of information and witness statements. Allan Karlsson had been seen at the bus station in Malmköping, then he had climbed on the bus to Strängnäs, and this had made a member of Never Again furious… But hang on… ‘…blond man in his thirties…’ That did not describe Benny. The Beauty felt… relieved?

The confusion continued when she read that Allan Karlsson had been seen the day before on a rail inspection trolley in the middle of the Södermanland forest, together with master-thief Jonsson and the Never Again member who had been so angry with him. The Express could not give an exact description of the relationship between the three men, but the current theory was that Allan Karlsson was in the clutches of the others. That at least was the opinion of farmer Tengroth in Vidkärr.

Finally, The Express had yet another scoop. According to the assistant at the nearby service station, the proprietor of a local hot-dog stand, by the name of Benny Ljungberg, had disappeared without a trace the day before, close to the last known location of the centenarian and the master thief.

The Beauty folded the paper and placed it in Buster’s mouth. Then she headed back to her farmhouse in the forest, where she now knew her visitors consisted of a centenarian, a master thief and the proprietor of a hot-dog stand. This last one was handsome as well as charming and clearly had some medical knowledge, but there was no room for romance here. For a moment, The Beauty was more sad than angry, but she worked up to fury again just as she drove into her yard.

The Beauty pulled The Express out of Buster’s mouth, unfolded the first page with the pictures of Allan and Julius, and started swearing and shouting before reading aloud from the article. Then she demanded an explanation and promised that all three of them would be on their way in five minutes, come what may. Then she folded the paper again and put it back in Buster’s mouth, crossed her arms, and ended with a frigid:

‘Well?’

Benny looked at Allan who looked at Julius who strangely enough broke into a smile.

‘Master thief,’ he said. ‘I’m a master thief. Not bad!’

But The Beauty was not impressed. She was already red in the face and became even redder when she informed Julius that he would soon be a very beaten-up master thief if The Beauty didn’t immediately find out what was going on. And then she told the assembled guests what she had already told herself, namely that nobody conned Gunilla Björklund at Lake Farm and got away with it. To put force behind her words, she pulled an old shotgun down from the wall. It didn’t work, of course, The Beauty admitted, but it would serve well to smash the skulls of master thieves, hot-dog-stand proprietors and old geezers if necessary, and it seemed it would be necessary.

Julius Jonsson’s smile quickly faded. Benny stood there nailed to the floor with his arms hanging limply by his side. As far as he could see, his chance of romance was rapidly evaporating. Then Allan stepped in, and asked The Beauty for time to think. With The Beauty’s permission, he would like to have a private conversation with Julius in the adjacent room. The Beauty agreed with a bit of muttering, but warned Allan not to try any tricks. Allan promised to behave and then he took Julius by the arm and led him into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

Allan asked Julius if he had any ideas which, unlike previous attempts, would not just make The Beauty even angrier. Julius answered that the only way they could save the situation was by inviting The Beauty to partake in some sort of part-ownership of the suitcase. Allan agreed, although he pointed out that no good would come of telling one person a day that he and Julius stole people’s suitcases, killed them when they wanted to get it back and then sent the corpses neatly packaged in wooden boxes to be transported to Africa.

Julius thought Allan was exaggerating. So far only one person had paid with his life and surely he got what he deserved. If they could just stay hidden until things calmed down, then nobody else need meet the same fate.

Upon which Allan said that he himself had had a new idea. He thought that it might be an idea to divide the contents of the suitcase into four: Allan, Julius, Benny and The Beauty. Then there would be no risk of the last two talking too much to the wrong people. And as a bonus they would all be able to stay at Lake Farm for the summer, by which time the motorcycle gang would certainly have stopped looking for them, if they were looking for them at all, which one must assume they were.

‘Twenty-five million for a few months room and board and a chauffeur,’ Julius sighed. But he accepted Allan’s suggestion.

The meeting in the kitchen was finished. Julius and Allan went back into the living room. Allan asked The Beauty and Benny for another thirty seconds’ patience, while Julius went up to his room and returned with the suitcase trailing behind him. He put it on the long table in the middle of the living room and opened it.

‘Allan and I have decided that the four of us will share this equally.’

‘Jesus bloody Christ!’ said The Beauty.

‘Have a seat, and I’ll explain,’ said Julius.

The Beauty found it just as hard as Benny had to digest the part about the corpse, but she was impressed with Allan for climbing out of a window and just disappearing from his earlier life.

‘I should have done the same after fourteen days with that arsehole I married.’

Calm returned to Lake Farm. The Beauty and Buster went off again to pick up supplies. She bought food, drink, clothes, toiletries and lots of other stuff. She paid for everything with a wad of 500-crown notes.

Chief Inspector Aronsson questioned the witness from the service station in Mjölby, a woman in her fifties. Her profession and the way she described what she had seen made her a credible witness. She could also identify Allan in pictures from an eightieth birthday party at the Old People’s Home a week or two earlier, pictures that Director Alice had been kind enough to provide not only to the police but also to the press.

Chief Inspector Aronsson was forced to admit to himself that he had wrongly dismissed this tip the day before. But there was no point in looking back. Instead, Aronsson concentrated on his analysis. From a flight perspective, there were two possibilities: either the old men and the hot-dog-stand proprietor knew where they were going, or they were simply travelling south at random. Aronsson preferred the first alternative given that it’s easier to follow someone who knows where he’s going. But with these people it was hard to know. There seemed to be no obvious link between Allan Karlsson and Julius Jonsson on the one hand, and Benny Ljungberg on the other. Jonsson and Ljungberg might be acquaintances; after all they only lived about twenty kilometres apart. But it was possible that Ljungberg had been kidnapped and forced to drive the car. The centenarian too could have been forced to follow along, although that interpretation had two strikes against it: 1) the fact that Allan Karlsson had got off the bus at Byringe Station and, it would seem, of his own volition sought out Julius Jonsson, and 2) witness statements that Julius Jonsson and Allan Karlsson a) on the inspection trolley through the forest and b) on their walk outside the foundry seemed to be on good terms.

Whatever the circumstances, the service station attendant had noticed that the silver-coloured Mercedes had left the main road and continued towards Tranås. Although twenty-four hours had passed, that fact remained of interest. Somebody heading south along the main road who turns off at Mjölby has immediately limited the number of likely final destinations. They might be going to Oskarshamn and then on to the island of Gotland but there was no sign of them on the ferry passenger lists. All that remained was northern Småland, in which case the Mercedes had hardly chosen the fastest route. But if the old men and the hot-dog-stand proprietor felt they were being chased, then it would be sensible to choose smaller roads.

What spoke in favour of their still being in this area was firstly that the car contained two people without valid passports. They would hardly be going abroad. Secondly, Chief Inspector Aronsson’s colleagues had phoned every imaginable service station in a southern, south-eastern and south-western direction between 300 and 500 kilometres from Mjölby. No one had seen a silver-coloured Mercedes with three conspicuous travellers. Of course, they could have got petrol at an unmanned station, but people usually went to full service stations because after having driven a certain distance they invariably required a bag of crisps, a bottle of fizzy drink or a hot dog. And what additionally spoke in favour of the full service stations was that they had chosen one before, that time in Mjölby.

‘Tranås, Eksjö, Nässjö, Vetlanda, Åseda… and thereabouts,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson to himself in a congratulatory tone, before frowning.

‘And then where?’

When the leader of The Violence in Braås woke after a terrible night, he immediately made his way to the service station to do something about his desperate need for a smoke. On the wall outside the entrance the newspaper headlines screamed down at him. The big picture in The Express showed… the same old guy he had seen in Rottne the previous night.

In his haste he forgot to ask for cigarettes. But he did buy The Express, was astounded by what he read, and then phoned his big brother Bucket.

The mystery of the vanished and presumably kidnapped centenarian caught the attention of the nation. More than 1.5 million viewers, including the centenarian himself and his new comrades at Lake Farm watched a report that didn’t actually reveal anything more than The Express.

‘If I hadn’t known it was me, I would have felt sorry for that old guy,’ said Allan.

The Beauty was less easy going; she thought that Allan, Julius and Benny had better keep well out of sight for a long time. And from now on the Mercedes would remain parked behind the barn. And the next morning she would go off and buy the large bus she had had her eye on for a while. Since many of the seats had been cleared away and it had been fitted with an unusually wide side door, it was perfect for moving especially large cargo. They might have to make a quick getaway very soon, and in that case the whole family was going, including Sonya.