The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (34 page)

‘Do you know, Sam, that you have more contact with her than I do?’

Steps outside the door, then it was opened by the prison officers. Sam had already started to leave, one of them in front of him and one behind, when he turned round.

‘You should see her. She’s getting old.’

John Broncks watched his older brother disappear down the prison corridor, his broad back between a pair of scrawny men in uniforms, returned his visitor’s badge, passed the central guard post and walked through the gate in the wall, then sat motionless in his car.

Seven-metre-high walls. Four hundred and sixty-three of Sweden’s most violent criminals serving long sentences. One had been elected spokesperson for all of them, one of the few whom everyone spoke to.

His own brother.

And even Sam hadn’t heard anything. The men Broncks was searching for were just as anonymous inside those walls.

He started the car and drove away. The sunlight still glistened on the snow.

STREETS THAT WERE
white and clean outside the walls of the prison turned muddy and dirty 220 kilometres later as the E4 motorway to Stockholm became the Essinge Highway and then the garage entrance in the rock beneath the police headquarters at Kronoberg Park.

He was heading for the lift when he heard a sound from the little garage inside the garage, where the forensic technicians kept the vehicles they were working on. He walked over and went inside, and there was Sanna, just like last time. She lay halfway inside a van with
HEATING SOLUTIONS
written on both sides, an infrared lamp in her hand.

‘First getaway car. A Dodge van.’

Sanna crawled out and went over to the next vehicle, switched to a lamp with ultraviolet light.

‘Second getaway car. A Dodge van.’

The same mechanical voice. He wondered if she was aware of it, or if her voice was only like that when she talked to him.

‘An older model. Stolen the night before the robbery.’

She held up an elongated tool, metal protruding from a wooden handle – aimed it at a small, black, square sticker sitting on the van door just below the side window.

‘It’s just as fast as using a key.’

She was done. Broncks recognised her way of turning her back when she didn’t want to talk. She opened the computer that was on the bonnet of the car. Not even a goodbye. He said it,
bye
, but she didn’t hear, and he was on his way out, halfway to the lift, when she called after him.

‘John? I hadn’t finished.’

He stopped, turned around.

‘You hadn’t?’

‘One more thing.’

She turned the screen towards him, waited for him to come closer.

‘This picture. I want you to look at it again.’

C
AMERA
2. Twelve seconds in. From above. Robbers in blue jumpsuits, black boots, black masks.

‘His microphone. I was trying to find out what make it was, so I enlarged it and concentrated on the collar, seconds before they went inside.’

She rewound, froze the picture.

‘Four seconds in – fifteen frames per second. I want you to look at each one.’

Her voice wasn’t so mechanical. She was standing closer to him. And he knew exactly how she smelled. How strange. As if it were another time. As if they could walk away from here together to the apartment they shared. As if ten years had never gone by.

‘There.’

The first bank robber had only one step left to the door.

Then he stopped.

‘His hand.’

She enlarged the image.

‘Do you see?’

John nodded. He saw it clearly.

The one going in first, leading, stopped and turned round, lowering his weapon and putting his left hand over his collar, where the microphone was, covering it with his palm. He leaned forward and moved the other robber’s headphones with his right hand.

‘The movement …
there
.’

The hand over the microphone. The hand on the headphones. And then, Broncks was sure of it, he … whispered.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Sanna.

She zoomed in on the mouth and its thin lips, two light streaks in dark fabric as they formed words.

‘The hand. The whispering. It doesn’t make sense.’

Sanna, standing close, looked at John – just as the leader in the frozen film frame was standing close to his partner.

‘Intimacy. As if he’s putting his hand over his microphone, then raising the headphones almost lovingly. Do you see? Just before he’s about to start firing live rounds.’

After two months of round-the-clock police investigation, he had no clues, knew nothing about them. But this. John Broncks could see and feel it. He
knew
something now. He wasn’t exactly sure what, but for
the first time in his search for shadows, he saw real people. And they were standing close to each other in a way that two violent bank robbers shouldn’t.

Something he almost recognised.

‘Can you return the picture to its original size? And play the same sequence again? The first four seconds?’

She did so.

‘Stop … there. And enlarge … there. His face. Just that.’

Three robbers in a row on their way into a bank and Broncks’s index finger on the screen. Pointing to the one in the middle.

‘Do you see? He closes his eyes.’

Cursor on the timeline, she moved it manually, frame by frame.

‘He hesitates. He’s worried.’

The eyes in the mask remained closed.

‘He’s scared and that was … like a damn hug! The leader who’s holding his microphone, he’s being protective – they belong together.’

JOHN BRONCKS AVOIDED
the lift. Sometimes he needed to keep moving, force his heart to beat faster, to squeeze every breath through his chest and into his throat.

He practically ran up the stairs.

And then into his office – he threw the windows wide open, let the damp chill from the inner courtyard of the police station hit the dry heat inside.

They’d looked so intimate. Bank robbers shouldn’t look like that. The leader should have been in command – but the other robber’s hesitation had been more important.

Something Broncks recognised.

One who was taller and one who was a little shorter. One who was broader across the shoulders and one who hadn’t finished growing. One who was older and one who was younger.

Intimacy. Trust.

That was what Broncks recognised. The bond between them. Someone
who had always been close by, who’d held him in the evening, who’d said everything would be all right, and then later that night had crept into their parents’ bedroom and put a knife between their father’s ribs. A big brother who’d held him and whispered to him and calmed him down, right before an act of violence.

A few deep breaths at the open window. John Broncks knew now.

For the first time since the beginning of this investigation, he actually knew something, and they were no longer completely faceless, there was an outline.

Intimacy. Trust.

They were brothers.

LEO STOOD AT
the window, which was carefully decorated for Christmas, watching a grey, misty dawn. The weather had turned in the last few weeks. The snow was melting by Christmas Eve, and Christmas morning arrived with steady rain, the ground turning into a dirty mix of ice, snow, gravel and dirt. Leo had been hoping for this – a grey Christmas and snow-free roads. He hoped that it would continue – if the surface were dry it would simplify the getaway after the bank robbery.

Two plants on the windowsill, and between them a porcelain angel – most of the white paint on one side flaked off and only one eye – which had come from Anneli’s childhood home, and now for a few weeks every year appeared in her kitchen next to the poinsettia. Things had popped up everywhere. One oversized plastic Santa by the fridge, another Santa almost as large under the hat rack in the hallway, a few smaller ones on the stairs to the second floor, and one under the Christmas tree in the living room. Things she’d brought into his life, that meant something to her. He could see her joy, her anticipation, as she chose where things went, rearranged them until she found the right place.

A porcelain angel with worn edges and a shitload of plastic Santas, thought Leo. It was just a date. Worth as much as the 25th of November or the 25th of October. Maybe she just needed something to hold on to as time slipped by: New Year’s Eve, Easter, Midsummer, all just dates.
Someone else had made that decision, had used the calendar as a tool to control people’s lives. What mattered was what you yourself decided and carried out. Creating your own calendar – 2 January, when the first triple robbery in Swedish history would take place, or 17 February, 11 March, 16 April, the other dates he’d chosen for robberies, and which therefore meant something.

He lifted up the porcelain angel, turned it round, tried to read the stamp on the bottom, put it down again.

Expectations.

Just as fragile, he’d had to find a way to gently lower hers, explaining that this Christmas wasn’t really Christmas, that they’d celebrate properly next year when all this was finished, just like their neighbours on the other side of the fence, who she liked to watch through the kitchen window, joining them from a distance. She’d gone to the window several times on Christmas Eve. They’d eaten ham and cabbage and meatballs and Jansson’s Temptation, and he’d given her the Christmas present meant for her son who she was going to visit straight after the holidays. They’d even lit candles, and watched a few hours of Donald Duck and Karl-Bertil Jonsson’s Christmas Eve programme, like everyone else in Sweden, until he couldn’t take any more and went down into the Skull Cave to continue working on his own calendar.

Plastic bag in hand, and carrying a tray of food, he walked out into the damp morning darkness. His thin shoes were soaked through by the mix of snow and rain on the asphalt. The garage was the opposite: dry and warmed by the pleasantly buzzing convection heater, well-lit by intense lamps. Vincent, Felix and Jasper were already waiting for him on wooden stools around a table of hardboard and two sawhorses. The map was open on top of it.

‘Coffee and sandwiches,’ said Leo, passing the tray around.

Right across the map ran a red, almost straight line. Starting in the neighbourhood of Kronoberg in central Stockholm, where the majority of Swedish police operations were based, and ending nearly fifty kilo metres away in Ösmo Square where there were two banks sharing one wall. A line that cut through Stockholm and the towns of Huddinge and Haninge and Nynäshamn, and was the key to diverting the police and disappearing from the scene of the crime.

‘Target One.’

A 10-kronor coin in the palm of Leo’s hand. He placed it on one of the grey squares near the end of the red line, which indicated areas of dense population.

‘Target Two.’

Another 10-kronor coin. On top of the first.

‘And here.’

Just outside the window of both targets. The getaway car.

A toy car just as red as the line.

‘That’s you, Felix.’

There was much more where that came from. A cardboard box they all recognised. Three plastic, olive green soldiers that had once stood on the floor of their childhood apartment in Skogås. A few centimetres high, and they smelled just like they had then.

‘This is Vincent. And Jasper. And there … here I come.’

He separated the gold coins, put the final plastic figurine on one of them.

‘Target One – Leo opens the door. Target Two – Jasper and Vincent open the door. At two fifty p.m.’

Now, the Dinky car. A red Volkswagen model 1300, the Beetle, which they still kept in its original packaging, they’d never been able to throw it away, and which Leo had shoplifted for Felix at Toys & Hobbies in the Skogås shopping centre.

‘And Felix takes care of the car. Just like in Svedmyra.’

Another larger box of plastic figurines, but these were brown with rounder helmets than the Americans and had different weapons.

‘Russian soldiers.’

He dumped a whole handful of plastic soldiers onto the red line and lined them up there, and then put a few at the other three locations further away.

‘Cops. Every single one. Most of them work here … at City Police HQ. Then a few here, the Huddinge police, and here, the Handen police. And the fewest here … the Nacka police.’

He made sure they all stood in the right place. And then he moved his arms around them, a giant capturing and slowly pulling them towards the point where the roads, railway tracks and Tunnelbana lines met – the well-connected, grey area that represented central Stockholm.

‘And they’ll all go there, together, to Central Station.’

He looked at Jasper, nodded.

‘Because we’ll have planted a bomb there – a real bomb in a locker.’

Vincent had been silent up to this point, as he usually was. Now he slammed his coffee cup down on the hardboard table and the soldiers who hadn’t yet fallen, toppled over.

‘Vincent, what the hell …’