“Don’t kill us. We don’t have any money,” the man begged. His voice was wheezy and his eyes wide open. Tor could see the fear in them.
“Where are your car keys?” Tor repeated.
“Over there,” the man answered, pointing out of the bedroom with a shaking arm. “On the kitchen wall, next to the sideboard.”
Tor raced out of the bedroom to the kitchen and grabbed the car keys. He took the front-door steps in one bound and jumped into the car. If the fuzz had not yet thrown a steel cordon around Sigtuna, he might just be able to get away scot-free.
Just as he gripped the gear stick, a car turned into the driveway. The strong glare of the headlights blinded Tor and he had to put up his arm in front of his eyes. Suddenly, blue flashing light sliced through the foggy dawn light and the police car’s doors flew open. Tor could not believe his eyes. This could not be happening to him.
Seconds later, he dived out of the Mazda. He aimed the hammer handle at the police car as if it was a gun and shouted that he was going to shoot, while he made his retreat to the house. Both police officers were already on the ground with their weapons pointing at Tor. One shot hit the door frame just as Tor made it inside the house. He dived onto the floor, crawled back to the front door, then pushed it and locked it shut.
Within fifteen minutes, the house would be surrounded by cops. Right now, they would do nothing. They would only mess with the likes of Tor when they were a horde. He went into the bedroom and noticed that the old man was trying to revive his wife. She was hallucinating as a result of her serious concussion.
“Do you have any shooters?” Tor asked.
“Please, leave us alone,” he pleaded. “We have no money.”
“I don’t give a fuck about money,” Tor yelled. “Do you have a gun?”
The man shook his head.
“You’re lying!” Tor shouted and raised his hammer over the woman’s head. “The wall in the hallway is full of stuffed animals. Do you really think I am that stupid, you bastard farmer?”
Tor glared at the man and then at his red-painted hammer.
“There’s an old twelve-bore shotgun,” the man stammered.
“Is it just you two?”
The man nodded.
“Show me the gun.”
Tor followed the man into the cellar. From behind a shelf, the old man retrieved a key. The gun locker was made of grey steel plate and was probably as old as the old geezer. Tor pushed him aside and seized the only weapon in the locker. A double-barrelled shotgun of unknown make. Inside the locker, there was a shelf with a brown packet of cartridges. He stuffed all the cartridges in his pocket and loaded the gun. Then he herded the old guy back up the stairs.
“Get the bitch into the kitchen; I want you two close to me,” he ordered him as he was crouching and crawling towards the front door. He stuck his head up and saw that the policemen had taken cover by the side of the car. Tor poked the shotgun barrels through the broken window and fired off a round in the direction of the police car. A weak fizzle came from one of the trigger hammers.
“Shit. These cartridges are old.” He pulled the second trigger and this time the gun fired with a bang. The shotgun pellets shattered the windscreen of the police car.
“I have hostages!” Tor shouted through the window. “If you try anything, I’ll shoot them!”
Neither of the police officers answered.
Tor turned around as he heard a sound behind him. The old man was struggling to drag his wife into the kitchen.
“Lay her on the sofa,” Tor said.
“I can’t lift her,” the old man said. “She needs medical attention. Please, let us go.”
“Do as I say,” Tor snarled.
“For the love of God . . .”
“Shut your mouth!” Tor screamed. He reloaded the shotgun and pointed it at the man.
The old man raised his hands in supplication. “Take it easy.”
Tor waved at him with the firearm, which now felt heavy and clumsy. Especially with just one arm. “Do you have a hacksaw?”
“A what?”
“A hacksaw,” Tor repeated. “One big enough to cut steel with.”
The man nodded.
“Fetch it,” Tor ordered him.
The old man stroked his wife’s hair and said something to her before he stumbled to the door that led down to the cellar.
Tor took hold of the woman’s arm, which was as thin as a bird’s leg. He pulled her body farther into the kitchen so that he could keep an eye on her. A faint wheezing came from the woman’s mouth. At least she wasn’t dead. Tor rummaged around in the kitchen until he found what he was looking for. From one of the drawers, he pulled out a towel, which he tied around his hand. It was difficult to knot with one hand, so he had to use his teeth. Gasping, the old man came out of the cellar with a hacksaw in his hand. He looked as if he could have a heart attack at any moment. Tor pointed at the kitchen table, indicating where he should put the hacksaw. The old man did as he was told.
“Now you can see to the old hag,” Tor said.
The man fell to his knees and tried to get a response from his wife. She muttered something barely audible.
Tor crawled to the front door again. “Get me a doctor,” he yelled.
Still no answer from the police outside.
They were taking cover behind the police car, with their guns aimed at the door. Maybe they were frozen in fear. It might be a pair of those women rookies, who shit themselves when a stone hits the windscreen. Then again, they had actually opened fire first. Tor looked at the cast on his injured hand. Strangely, the pain had stopped. He could not even feel any throbbing. To his horror, he realized that he had lost all feeling in it. From the elbow down, his arm felt as if it had been anaesthetized. His blood sugar was getting dangerously low.
“Get a doctor here now,” Tor roared, “or I’ll shoot one of the hostages.”
The police still didn’t answer.
Were they deaf as well? Tor was beginning to lose it. He went to the kitchen and pulled the old man up from the floor. The old guy weighed about the same as the old woman. Tor was about three heads taller than the man. He had to shuffle on his knees behind him, so that he would not expose too much of himself. He slowly opened the front door, with the shotgun pointed at the back of the man’s head. The old man’s body was shaking.
“I’ll shoot him if you don’t get me a doctor,” Tor yelled. “Are you both soft in the head?”
One of the police officers, a man, answered that the doctor was on the way. He asked Tor to put down his gun and to not hurt anybody. Tor told the policeman to go to hell and closed the front door.
“Take the hacksaw and saw off the barrels,” said Tor, handing over the shotgun. “Shorten the stock too.”
The old man stared at Tor in disbelief.
“Do you understand?”
The man nodded, gripping the gun with both hands. Just as Tor was about to release his hold on the weapon, he pulled it out of the man’s hands. Tor broke open the shotgun and removed both the cartridges. His falling blood sugar was making him careless.
“Would you have shot me?” Tor asked, relieved that he had caught himself at the last second.
The man said nothing and walked to the kitchen table instead. On the floor beside him, his wife was coming to. She turned her head sideways and started to vomit. The old man got quickly on the floor and tried to help his wife.
“Stop fucking around,” Tor shouted. “Start cutting.”
The man stood up and placed the hacksaw blade over the gun barrels. Furiously, he pulled the saw quickly back and forth. The screech from the steel surfaces being ground against each other echoed around the kitchen. Tor opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk and half a ring of Falu sausage. He swigged from the carton and chewed big bites of sausage.
His blood sugar rose and he began to regain his senses. After a while, a tingling started and then spread through his entire arm and down to his hand. It no longer felt like dead meat.
Tor pulled open the curtains and looked out of the window. He was bathed in blue police lights and the day’s early light. More police cars had arrived and it would soon be broad daylight. Nearly all the police vehicles were parked out of range of Tor’s buckshot. The house was almost certainly surrounded now. He walked around closing the curtains and blinds. Now he couldn’t see outside, but neither could the marksmen put a bullet in his head when he was least expecting it. He knew how the bloody game was played.
Suddenly, the phone rang. The old man stopped sawing and went over to a grey, plastic box on the wall. Tor took the phone from his hand and pushed him back towards the table again. Just as he was about to answer, his own mobile phone rang.
Jörgen Blad turned
into the car park of Sigtuna Stadium and got out of the car. Bjarne met him with his phone glued to his ear. Bjarne was a tall man with big shoulders and an even bigger belly. In his thick, quilted jacket, with his hood pulled over his head, he looked like a human in a polar bear’s body.
“He’s managed to slip under the police cordon,” the giant reporter announced.
“Who are you talking about?” Jörgen asked.
“Tor Hedman.”
Jörgen froze. Images of Hedman tearing open his car door flashed before his eyes. He had a vision of his beating, back in his own flat, and how Tor Hedman and Jerry Salminen had rammed his head down into his toilet so hard that he broke his nose. And how he had landed in the middle of their gun battle with Albanian gangsters and barely escaped with his life.
Slowly, his life had returned to normal. He could now sleep at night without nightmares waking him and he no longer felt the need to look over his shoulder every time he went out. Now this had happened.
“Who’s there?” Jonna
shouted, aiming her gun towards the shadow. She gripped her Sig Sauer until her knuckles whitened. Then she saw one of the SWAT team’s black uniforms emerge from the murk. She lowered her weapon with her heart in her mouth.
“We just came from the marsh,” said the officer. “The bastard killed both our dogs.”
“He ran this way,” Jonna answered; her mouth was dry as she pointed to the other side of the road. “But we couldn’t see him. There’s not enough visibility.”
The SWAT officer looked at her. “That’s the second time you almost caught Hedman.”
Jonna was not sure how to answer. She had messed up badly, but she could hardly be held responsible for him escaping again – it was impossible to see anything in the dawn fog.
Why had she gone into that damned caravan? What was she trying to prove? That she was just as capable as her male colleagues? Or that she was not as passive as her mother? Perhaps she needed to show that she was strong and independent. Just like her father. She no longer recognized who she had become. She had stopped thinking logically; she had just gone charging forwards, as if she was a member of a lynch mob. It had to be a result of her lack of sleep. She had no other explanation for her behaviour tonight.
Yet another SWAT-team member came out of the fog. The sky was slowly wakening to a new day and the shape of the forest around them was becoming increasingly detailed.
“We’re waiting for the new dog patrol,” Jonna began. “Hedman passed by here just recently, so his trail will survive here a little longer.”
The SWAT officers did not reply. Nothing needed to be said since Jonna could imagine the headlines in their heads. Dumb blonde plays hero and blows entire operation. Mission outcome: two dead police dogs. Jonna just wished the earth would swallow her up and reduce her to dust. Walter, however, interrupted her wallow in self-pity.
“The helicopter will be airborne in thirty minutes,” he called from inside the car. “Let’s drive around on the off chance that he keeps going in the same direction. There’s another road that we can take, according to the map.”
Walter ordered the SWAT team to wait for the tracker dog. He tossed the map to Jonna, accelerated away and performed a high-speed U-turn on the gravel road. Since the visibility had improved, Walter sped down the road.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, turning onto Route 263.
Jonna took her eyes from the sat-nav and stared into the dim light. She paused for a moment.
“Have you ever had the feeling that something was not quite right?” she said. “I mean, something you can’t put your finger on, that niggles like a kind of alarm.”
Walter looked at her, interested.
“People can have premonitions before something bad happens,” she continued. “I know it sounds absurd and I don’t believe in parapsychology, but something just popped into my head.”
“Popped into your head? What was it?”
“A feeling, you might say. It just appeared and it’s difficult to explain.”
“I believe in the application of logic to the facts,” Walter said. “Sometimes our subconscious allows us to think laterally about complex problems. But it’s just a form of intuitive reasoning where imagination outperforms logic. It’s hardly about feelings at all.”
Walter was of course correct. She regretted having brought it up.
“Now I’m curious about what your premonition was,” he said.
“Let’s forget about it,” said Jonna dejectedly.
“I think not,” Walter insisted.
Jonna was surprised by Walter’s persistence. Was he mocking her?
“The safety catch of Martin Borg’s weapon was on.”
“Martin Borg’s gun?” Walter repeated.
“Yes, its safety was on. I saw it with my own eyes. What sort of police officer goes on a raid with his firearm secured?”
“Well,” Walter pondered. “A novice, maybe.”
“That was my first thought and that’s when I got this feeling.”
“Go on,” Walter encouraged her.
“There was something about him. The way he behaved. The way he spoke and so on. It was all . . . fake or contrived, even rehearsed.”
Walter said nothing.
“I think there are two explanations for his gun’s safety catch being on,” said Jonna.
Walter smiled. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Either he forgot to remove the safety, which, as you said, is a beginner’s mistake. Or he never intended to use his weapon.”
Walter thought for a moment. “We can probably rule out the first alternative,” he said. “Borg would never forget to remove the safety catch on his gun. SÄPO are not that incompetent. So, let me tell you why he didn’t intend to use his weapon during the raid.”