The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Sweden

The concept development continued. While Allan, aged a hundred and one, showed Julius, aged sixty-six, how to maximize one’s reach to the proper target group via Facebook ads, Sabine drove around in the hearse to obtain pendulums, crystals, divining rods and nasty-smelling myrrh. She respected the group’s limited budget. For a pendulum she used a plumb line she found on sale at Byggmax. She whittled her own divining rod with the help of a stick stolen from the pension’s garden. Ordinary sea salt would do for crystals. And she produced myrrh with the help of an oil lamp, whose fuel consisted of one part shrimp soup and nine parts oil. The rest of the secret was double wicks: one to burn and one that just glowed, spreading smoke and smell.

The pension manager looked curiously at Sabine’s many tools of the trade and cautiously asked what Mrs Undertaker planned to use all that for. Sabine told it like it almost was: they weren’t only undertakers but had an additional speciality in which they established contact with those they had just helped send into the ground. At this Mrs Lundblad’s enthusiasm was set aflame. Did Mrs Undertaker mean to say she could establish contact with Börje?

The old woman had brought up her deceased spouse time and again in the short period they’d been in her company. In under twenty-four hours Sabine knew everything worth knowing about the spouse’s previous doings, like, for example, that he had been dead for fifteen years. Background knowledge was, after all, everything in the field of clairvoyance.

Why not? A dress rehearsal could only be an advantage before they started their operation for real.

The performance that followed made quite an impression on Allan and Julius. If they hadn’t known better they would have believed that the dead man really was talking to his widow from the other side, via Sabine. The husband swore his eternal love to his widow and sounded distressed when he learned that the cat had died eight years earlier at the age of sixteen. When asked point-blank, he promised he had stopped smoking.

It would have been a resounding success if only the manager had avoided being struck with heart failure when her deceased husband said he pined for her so badly that he cried himself to sleep each night.

‘Oh, my,’ said Julius, as the old woman pitched forward and landed with her nose on the table.

Sabine jumped out of her séance chair in horror and turned on the ceiling light as Julius took a closer look at the old woman.

‘Is she dead?’ Sabine asked.

‘I think so,’ said Julius.

The only one who remained calm was Allan.

‘Then they’ll soon be together again,’ he said. ‘If the old man was lying about his smoking, he’d better snuff it out soon.’

Sabine snapped at Allan and his lack of respect, saying that now she was sure there was something wrong with him. Then she gathered up her things and called an urgent crisis meeting in the kitchen. For the time being they would leave the old woman where she was.

They sat down at the kitchen table, Sabine, with creases on her forehead, Julius, with pen and paper, and Allan, with a ban on speaking.

‘We can’t stay here,’ said Sabine. ‘But where will we go, and why?’

Julius praised her for the brilliant performance she’d just given; he imagined they could rake in some good money from it. Somewhere the customer base was sufficiently large. Time for a snap decision. He wrote ‘Stockholm’ on his paper. Under that ‘Gothenburg’. And under that, ‘Malmö’.

Stockholm was ruled out immediately: there were far too many Nazis there. Julius wrote No.

What about Gothenburg? Sweden’s second-biggest city. Hmm.

Or Malmö? With its proximity to Copenhagen. Almost four million people lived there, if you counted both sides of the bridge.

Julius wrote Yes. Their destination was determined by a vote of two to nil, with one vote declared invalid. All that was left was to decide what to do with the dead woman.

‘Not call the police,’ said Julius.

No, presenting a dead elder to the police the day after they’d found a living one in a coffin seemed like asking for trouble.

Julius took a peek at the woman’s ledger. Two guests from Greece were booked two days later. The woman wouldn’t have to be alone for longer than that.

‘When you’re dead, you’re dead,’ said Julius. ‘It’s not as if she’ll suffer more.’

And that was that. Mrs Lundblad remained where she was.

‘Good decision,’ said Allan.

‘Weren’t you supposed to keep quiet?’ said Sabine.

Inspector Holmlund’s weekend had been ruined. He almost wished he hadn’t stopped those three coffin marauders. Even before his Sunday afternoon coffee break, they had cost him time and mental effort in the form of two phone calls, one stranger than the next.

The first was from an old woman who ran a pension outside the city. She was upset and wanted to know if it was possible to report three specific people for attempted murder. The trio had spent one night at her pension and offered her a séance, the possibility to converse with her husband. When she had fainted in shock, they left her there at the table and had since vanished.

‘Hold on,’ said Inspector Holmlund. ‘Who is it they tried to kill? You? Your husband? Or someone else?’

‘Me, of course. My husband is already dead.’

‘Since when? Didn’t you speak to him?’ The inspector wasn’t entirely familiar with how clairvoyance worked.

The woman explained. When her husband, who had died fifteen years previously, told her how much he missed her, it was as if all the oxygen vanished from her brain, and that was the last thing she recalled. The medium and the others must have thought she had died too, but she wouldn’t go that easily. The old woman was tougher than that and now she demanded justice.

What Inspector Holmlund wanted was to focus on the essentials. But he didn’t say so. Instead he explained how the law works: speaking with someone who is dead, at which point someone who isn’t faints, does not fall under the definition of attempted murder. It does not, as far as the inspector could understand, fall under any definition at all. There was no scale of penalty for general tomfoolery. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added.

And he’d hardly hung up when the phone rang again.

This time a man introduced himself as a ‘concerned citizen’. He wished to know more about what had happened during the crackdown against a hearse the previous day.

The inspector told him, since concerned citizens had a tendency to transform from concerned to displeased, which increased the workload many times over for those who only wished to get away relatively unscathed. It had been a case of three people in a hearse who found themselves at a routine checkpoint, which had led to a brief interrogation in which all uncertainties had been cleared up. It could not in any way be described as a ‘crackdown’.

The concerned citizen would not be deterred. He wanted to know where the hearse had gone after the interrogation.

What was wrong with people? The inspector didn’t have time for this! But perhaps if he tossed the concerned customer at the old woman they could bother one another instead. Good idea!

‘I can’t rule out that the people you’re enquiring after spent the night just outside Eskilstuna. For further information I recommend you call Mrs Lundblad at Klipphällen Pension. A lovely woman. I’m sure you’ll have much to talk about.’

Click. The concerned citizen hung up. He didn’t seem as concerned any longer. Great.

Johnny had no intention of calling Mrs Lundblad. But he would pay her a visit. Along with her three guests, if they were still there. Three, incidentally? Sabine Jonsson, Allan Karlsson and who else?

Oh, well, he could always ask the third to introduce himself before he slit his throat.

One week had passed since Kenneth’s accident; one day since the cancelled funeral. Johnny missed his brother something fierce.

Next stop, Malmö. Two of the three were in the front seats of the vehicle; the third was on his back with his black tablet in the coffin at the rear, with a closed lid and freshly drilled ventilation holes. They made their way down Highway 55.

South of Strängnäs, Allan opened the lid for a moment. ‘I lived around here before they tried to lock me up in the home in Malmköping. I blew my house sky-high, or else we could have swung by to take a look.’

‘You blew up your own house?’ said Sabine.

‘Ignore him,’ said Julius.

After Malmköping, the trio ended up on the E4 again, north of Norrköping this time. From there they headed south along Sweden’s busiest highway.

Allan noticed that Sabine and Julius snapped at him no matter what he said, unless he talked about the terror attack. They were all upset by what had happened in the capital city.

He told them that the country seemed preoccupied by the tragic and bewildering incident. Several people had died. The terrorist had been apprehended, to be sure, and had confessed, adding that Allah was the greatest of them all. Allan wasn’t sure how much blame could be placed with Allah for the attack: you never know with gods – they all have their issues. According to the Bible, one deliberately took the lives of ten children in a bet with Satan.

Sabine had never heard of this, but Julius had. ‘The Book of Job, Old Testament,’ he said.

And then he said no more. He shuddered at the memory of his tyrannical father, who had forced him to be confirmed fifty-two years earlier. Even if the boy had spent most of that time stealing Bibles to sell (twenty-five öre per Bible, two for forty), something had stuck with him.

The international press was reporting that Sweden had lost its innocence, that this heaven on earth had been punished for its generous attitude towards the so-called refugees.

Allan muttered over what he read. In just his brief time on earth, Sweden had been afflicted with leftists who blew up boats, right-wingers who blew up editorial offices, and Red Army factions who blew up embassies. And then there was the guy who wanted to kidnap a Swedish minister and lock her into a box. And those who wandered around here and there, shooting foreigners at random until they could be arrested and put behind bars.

What they all had in common was that they had their reasons – including the one who heard voices and killed the Swedish minister for foreign affairs because of them. What the man who’d shot the prime minister on the street was thinking, however, was impossible to know. Partly because he himself was dead now, partly because it might have been someone else.

It was all genuinely sad, of course. But when it came to Sweden’s innocence, Allan suspected that had gone out of the window back in the days of the Vikings.

‘What are you mumbling about back there?’ Julius wondered.

‘I don’t know,’ said Allan.

Everything had been so much easier before the tablet.

Duller. But easier.

The hundred-and-one-year-old surfed on. That was what he did, these days.

It turned out that the dustmen had run into problems in Alvesta in Småland. Someone had discovered that the municipal company Alvesta Refuse AB had been abbreviated as ARAB for thirty-five years. The citizen complained, in a petition to the local authority, that this abbreviation suggested that Arabs, in general, smelt bad.

This was a news item to Allan’s liking, and perfectly necessary to share with the group.

‘Don’t people have lives any more?’ Julius wondered.

‘Alvesta isn’t too far from here, is it?’ Allan said. ‘Should we head over and have a look?’

‘At what?’ Sabine asked.

Allan didn’t quite know, so he didn’t respond. But he did give his black tablet a kiss to thank it for the refuse truck news. All was forgiven.

The journey continued southwards. As they approached Värnamo it began to get dark. With the aid of Allan’s tablet, Sabine found another pension, of the more rustic sort. It was run by an older woman, rather like the one who had just landed on the table nose-first.

‘We’re not holding any séances with this new one, right?’ said Julius.