When the youth had finished thinking, he decided to wait for the bus to return so he could interview the driver without undue politeness.
When he had decided, the young man got up again, and explained to the ticket seller what would happen to him, his wife, his children and his home if he told the police or anybody else what had just occurred.
The little man had neither wife nor children, but he was eager to keep his ears and genitals more or less intact. So he gave his word as an employee of the national railways that no one would get a peep out of him.
That was a promise he kept until the next day.
The two-man search groups came back to the Old People’s Home and reported on what they had seen. Or rather hadn’t seen. The mayor instinctively did not want to involve the police and he was desperately trying to think of alternatives, when the local newspaper reporter dared to ask:
‘And what are you going to do now, Mr Mayor?’
The mayor was silent for a few moments; then he said:
‘Call the police, of course.’
God, how he hated the free press!
Allan woke when the driver kindly nudged him and announced that they had now reached Byringe Station. Shortly afterwards, the driver manoeuvred the suitcase out of the front door of the bus, with Allan close behind.
The driver asked if he could now manage on his own, and Allan said that the driver had no need to worry in that respect. Then Allan thanked him for his help and waved goodbye as the bus rolled out onto the main road again.
Tall fir trees blocked the afternoon sun and Allan was starting to feel a bit chilly in his thin jacket and indoor slippers. He could see no sign of Byringe, let alone its station. There was just forest, forest and forest in all directions — and a little gravel road leading to the right.
Allan thought that perhaps there were warm clothes in the suitcase he had on impulse brought along with him. Unfortunately the suitcase was locked and without a screwdriver or some other tool it was surely hopeless to try to open it. There was no other option but to start moving, otherwise he would freeze to death.
The suitcase had a strap at the top and if you pulled it, the suitcase rolled along nicely on its small wheels. Allan followed the gravel road into the forest with short, shuffling steps. The suitcase followed just behind him, skidding on the gravel.
After a few hundred yards, Allan came to what must be Byringe Station – a closed-down building next to a most definitely and absolutely closed-down former railway line.
Allan was a prize specimen as far as centenarians went, but it was all getting to be a bit too much. He sat down on the suitcase to gather his thoughts and strength.
To Allan’s left stood the shabby, yellow two-storey station. All the windows on the bottom floor were covered with planks. To his right you could follow the closed-down railway line into the distance, straight as an arrow even deeper into the forest. Nature had not yet succeeded in entirely eating up the tracks, but it was only a matter of time.
The wooden platform was evidently no longer safe to walk on. On the outermost planking you could still read a painted sign: Do not walk on the track. The track was certainly not dangerous to walk on, thought Allan. But who in his right mind would voluntarily walk on the platform?
That question was answered immediately, because at that very moment the shabby door of the station building was opened and a man in his seventies wearing a cap and solid boots stepped out of the house. He clearly trusted the planks not to give way and he was entirely focused on the old man in front of him. His initial attitude was hostile, but then he seemed to change his mind, possibly as a result of seeing the decrepitude of this trespasser.
Allan sat on the newly stolen suitcase, not knowing what to say and in any case lacking the energy to say it. But he looked steadily at the man, letting him make the first move.
‘Who are you, and what are you doing in my station?’ asked the man with the cap.
Allan didn’t answer. He couldn’t decide whether he was dealing with friend or foe. But then he decided that it would be wise not to argue with the only person around, someone who might even let Allan inside before the evening chill set in. He decided to tell it like it was.
Allan told the man that his name was Allan, that he was exactly one hundred years old and spry for his age, so spry in fact that he was on the run from the Old People’s Home. He had also had time to steal a suitcase from a young man who by now would certainly not be particularly happy about it; his knees were not for the moment at their best and he would very much like to give them a rest.
Allan then fell silent, awaiting the court’s verdict.
‘Is that so,’ said the man in the cap and smiled. ‘A thief!’
He jumped nimbly down from the platform and went over to the centenarian to have a closer look.
‘Are you really one hundred years old?’ he asked. ‘In that case, you must be hungry.’
Allan couldn’t follow the logic, but of course he was hungry. So he asked what was on the menu and if a nip of the hard stuff might be included.
The man with the cap stretched out his hand, introduced himself as Julius Jonsson and pulled the old man to his feet. He then announced that he would personally carry Allan’s suitcase, and that roast elk was on the bill if that suited, and that there would absolutely be a nip of the hard stuff to go with it, or rather enough to take care of the knees and the rest of him too.
Julius Jonsson had not had anybody to talk to for several years, so he was pleased to meet the old man with the suitcase. A drop of the hard stuff first for one knee and then for the other, followed by a drop more for the back and neck, and then some to whet the appetite, all in all made for a convivial atmosphere. Allan asked what Julius did for a living, and got his whole story.
Julius was born in the north of Sweden, the only child of Anders and Elvina Jonsson. Julius worked as a labourer on the family farm and was beaten every day by his father who was of the opinion that Julius was good for nothing. when Julius was twenty-five, his mother died of cancer – which Julius grieved over – and shortly afterwards his father was swallowed by the bog when he tried to rescue a heifer. Julius grieved over that too – because he was fond of the heifer.
Young Julius had no talent for the farming life (in this his father had essentially been right) nor did he have any desire for it. So he sold everything except a few acres of forest that he thought might come in handy in his old age. He went off to Stockholm and within two years had squandered all his money. He then returned to the forest.
With great enthusiasm, Julius put in a bid to supply 5,000 electricity poles to the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company. And since Julius didn’t concern himself with such details as employment tax and VAT, he won the bid, and with the help of a dozen Hungarian refugees he managed to deliver the poles on time, and was paid more money than he knew existed.
So far, all was well. The problem was that Julius had been obliged to cheat a little. The trees were not yet fully grown, so the poles were a yard shorter that what had been ordered. This would probably have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for the fact that virtually every farmer in the area had just acquired a combine harvester.
The Hudiksvall District Electrical Company stuck up the poles, with cables criss-crossing fields and meadows in the area, and when it was harvest time, on one single morning the cables were pulled down in twenty-six locations by twenty-two different newly bought combine harvesters. The entire region had no electricity for weeks, as harvests were lost, and milking machines stopped working. It was not long before the farmers’ fury – at first directed against the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company – was turned against young Julius.
‘The town slogan “Happy Hudiksvall” was not on many people’s lips at that time, I can tell you,’ Julius said. ‘I had to hide at the Town Hotel in Sundsvall for seven months and then I ran out of money. Shall we have another swig of the hard stuff?’
Allan thought that they sho
uld. The elk had been washed down with beer too, and now Allan felt so comprehensively satisfied that he began to be almost afraid of dying.
Julius continued his story. After being nearly run down by a tractor in the centre of Sundsvall (driven by a farmer with a murderous look in his eyes), he realised that the locals weren’t going to forget his little mistake for the next hundred years. So he moved a long way south and ended up in Mariefred where he did a bit of small-time thieving for a while until he tired of town life and managed to acquire the former station building in Byringe for 25,000 crowns he happened to find one night in a safe at the Gripsholm Inn.
Here at the station, he now lived essentially via handouts from the state, poaching in his neighbour’s forest, small-scale production and sale of alcoholic spirits from his home-distilling apparatus, and resale of what goods he could get hold of from his neighbours. He wasn’t particularly popular in the neighbourhood, Julius went on, and between mouthfuls Allan answered that he could imagine as much.
When Julius suggested having one final snifter ‘for dessert’, Allan answered that he had always had a weakness for desserts of that kind, but that first of all he must seek out a toilet if there possibly happened to be one in the building. Julius got up, turned on the ceiling lamp since it was starting to get dark, and then pointed to the stairs saying that there was a functional lavatory on the right. He promised to have two newly poured drams ready and waiting when Allan returned.
Allan found the toilet where Julius had said it would be. He stood in position to pee, and as usual the last drops didn’t quite make it to the bowl. Some of them landed softly on his pee slippers instead.
Halfway through the process, Allan heard a noise on the stairs. His first thought was that it was Julius, going off with his newly stolen suitcase. The noise got louder. Somebody was climbing the stairs.
Allan realised that there was a chance that the steps he heard outside the door belonged to a slightly built young man with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back. And that, if it was him, then it probably wasn’t going to be a pleasant encounter.
The bus returning from Strängnäs arrived at Malmköping station three minutes early. The bus carried no passengers and the driver had accelerated a little bit extra after the last bus stop to have time to catch his breath before continuing the journey to Flen.
But the driver had barely lit his cigarette before a slightly built youth with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back, arrived.
‘Are you going to Flen?’ the driver asked a little hesitantly, because there was something about the young man that didn’t feel right.
‘I’m not going to Flen. And neither are you,’ answered the young man.
Hanging around waiting for four hours for the bus to come back had been a bit too much for what little patience the youth could muster. Besides, after half that time he had realised that if instead he had immediately stolen a car, he could have caught up with the bus long before Strängnäs.
On top of it all, police cars had started to cruise around in the little town. At any time the police could stumble into the station, and start interrogating the little man behind the window in the ticket office as to why he looked terrified and why the door to his office was hanging at an angle on one hinge.
The young man had no idea what the cops were doing there. His boss in Never Again had chosen Malmköping as the transaction venue for three reasons: first, it was close to Stockholm; second, it had relatively good transport options; and third – and most important – because the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough to reach there. There were simply no cops in Malmköping.
Or, to be more precise: there shouldn’t be, and yet the place was crawling with them. The young man had seen two cars and a total of four policemen; from his perspective that was a crowd.
At first, the young man thought that the police were after him. But that would assume that the little man had squawked, and the young man could categorically discount that possibility. While waiting for the bus to come, the young man hadn’t had much to do other than keep an eye on the little man, smash his office phone to bits and patch up the office door as best he could.
When the bus eventually came and the young man noted that it had no passengers, he had immediately decided to kidnap both the driver and the bus.
It took all of twenty seconds to persuade the bus driver to turn the bus around and drive northwards again. Close to a personal record, the young man reflected as he sat down in the exact seat where the geriatric he was now chasing had been sitting earlier the same day.
The bus driver quivered with fear, but got through the worst of it with a calming cigarette. Smoking was, of course, forbidden on board the bus, but the only law the driver was subject to at that moment was sitting just diagonally behind him in the bus and was slightly built, had long, greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back.
On the way, the young man asked where the elderly suitcase-thief had gone. The driver said that the old man had got off at Byringe Station and that was probably entirely random, explaining the backwards way the old man had gone about things, offering a fifty-crown note and asking how far he could get with that.
The driver didn’t know much about Byringe Station, except that it was rare for anyone to get on or off there. Supposedly there was a closed-down railway station some way in the forest, and Byringe village was somewhere in the vicinity. The geriatric couldn’t have got much further than that, the driver guessed. The man was very old and the suitcase was heavy, even though it had wheels.
The young man immediately calmed down. He had refrained from calling the boss in Stockholm, because the boss was one of the few people who could scare people more effectively than the young man himself. The young man shivered at the thought of what the boss would say about the suitcase going astray. Better to solve the problem first and tell him later. And seeing as how the old man hadn’t gone all the way to Strängnäs or even beyond, the suitcase should be back in the hands of the young man quicker than he had feared.
‘Here’s the Byringe Station bus stop…’
The driver slowly rolled to the side of the road, and prepared to die.
But it turned out that his time had not come, although his mobile phone wasn’t so lucky. It met with a rapid death under one of the young man’s boots. And a whole stream of death threats directed at the driver’s relatives spewed out of the young man’s mouth, designed to avert any possible thought of the driver contacting the police instead of turning the bus around and continuing the journey to Flen.
Then the young man got off and let the driver and the bus escape. The poor driver was so terrified that he didn’t dare turn the bus round, but continued all the way to Strängnäs, parked in the middle of Trädgårds Street, walked in shock into the Delia Hotel where he rapidly downed four glasses of whisky. Then to the bartender’s horror, he started to cry. After a further two glasses of whisky, the bartender offered him a telephone in case he wanted to phone somebody. The bus driver started to cry again – and called his girlfriend.
The young man thought he could make out tracks in the gravel on the road, tracks of a suitcase on wheels. This would be over in no time, which was a good thing, because it was getting dark.
Off and on, the young man wished that he had done a bit more planning. It struck him that he was standing in a rapidly darkening forest, and it would soon be pitch black. what would he do then?
These troubled thoughts ended abruptly when he first caught sight of a shabby, partly boarded-up, yellow building near the bottom of the hill. And when somebody turned on a light on the upper floor, the young man mumbled:
‘Now I’ve got you, old geezer.’
Allan quickly stopped peeing. Then he carefully opened the toilet door and tried to hear what was happening in the kitchen. Soon enough his worst fear was confirmed.
Allan recognised the young man’s voice, bellowing at Julius Jonsson to reveal where ‘the other old bastard’ was.
Allan snuck over to the kitchen door, silently because he was wearing bedroom slippers. The young man had grasped Julius by both ears, the same hold he had earlier practised on the little man at the station in Malmköping. while he shook poor Julius, he continued his interrogation. Allan thought the young man should have been satisfied with finding the suitcase which was standing right in the middle of the room. Julius grimaced but made no move to answer. Allan reflected that the old timber merchant was quite a tough guy, and looked around for a suitable weapon. Amidst the junk he saw a small number of candidates: a crowbar, a plank, a container of insect spray and a packet of rat poison. Allan first settled on the rat poison but couldn’t just then figure out a way to get a spoonful or two into the young man. The crowbar, on the other hand, was a bit too heavy for the centenarian to lift, and the insect spray… No, it would have to be the plank.
So Allan took a firm hold of his weapon and with four sensationally fast steps – for his age – he was right behind his intended victim.
The young man must have sensed that Allan was there, because just as the old man took aim the youth loosened his hold on Julius Jonsson and spun around.
He received the plank slap bang in the middle of his forehead, stood still where he was and stared for a second before he fell backwards and hit his head on the edge of the kitchen table.