The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (68 page)

He adjusted his shoulder bag and held it open like a gaping mouth as it swallowed every banknote he pushed in – and no dye packs. He counted quickly. At least three and a half million kronor! More than the double robbery, more than the triple robbery. In a little shitty bank, in a little shitty town with Pappa on guard and Anneli driving.

A woman was talking on the police radio about a bank robbery in Heby, and another woman replied to say a patrol car was on its way from the police station in Sala. None of it mattered to Anneli: she’d drive back just as she had memorised and practised over the past week with Leo in the passenger seat. Not even the snow covering the road, melting on the windscreen and being scoured away by the wipers mattered. Those outside the car, hiding and watching, who would later give their statements without ever knowing that it was a woman who sat behind the wheel, didn’t exist to her. The only thing that existed was encapsulated in a predetermined pattern that she and Leo had created together. Just the two of them, no one else.

Maybe that’s why she saw Leo first, even though all three of them were walking away from the bank, Leo carrying a bag over his shoulder that seemed stuffed full.

And when the car doors slammed, she did what she was supposed to: started in second gear, rolled down the wide pavement and onto the street, speeded up at the church with its black tower. Then right and, almost immediately, right again, around the town and out onto the main road. The gentle snowfall had, within just a few minutes, turned into a blizzard, soft snowflakes with white hard tips. But she was unmoved – she knew every bend and what speed to keep at all times.

‘Three million!’

He’d shouted that several times now.

‘
Over
three million!’

Anneli had never heard Leo’s voice sound like that; it was exploding, becoming almost hoarse he was so happy. Even Jasper’s laughter in the back seat felt good. She didn’t care at all that the visibility was getting even worse, she still knew how she should drive. Soon left, there, at the mailboxes. She even put on the indicators and giggled to herself – a stolen car that had just been used in a bank robbery and she … was putting on the indicators. She giggled more loudly as she turned left onto the snow-covered gravel road. And then, just because it felt so good, and Leo sounded so happy, she put on the indicators again as they turned onto the tiny forest road crossed only by the occasional deer or hare, and again as she turned into the natural parking space between otherwise dense spruce trunks.

They climbed out of the stolen car and into the raging storm. They were changing their clothes again, from robbery gear to Christmas outfits. They’d done it.
She’d
done it. She would soon be exchanging a screwdriver in a stolen car for the keys of a rented car filled with elegantly wrapped Christmas presents. She searched for Leo’s hand, holding it tightly as they ran.

THE DETECTIVE DEPARTMENT
of the City Police was filled with the smells of mulled wine, coffee and Christmas cake, and someone had even positioned an ugly little plastic Christmas tree between the coffee machine and the vending machine.

John Broncks stayed in his office. He didn’t participate. In fact, he had never participated, didn’t celebrate the approaching Christmas Eve, the things that families did. They had barely celebrated it even back then. He had done so on a couple of occasions – long ago – sitting at a pre-arranged time in a visiting room with a warm cake on a rickety table. Sam had baked and brewed coffee like all lifers did before a visit, and without saying a word about it, they’d both chewed the soft cake as if it was any old Monday.

He looked at the computer screen. An alarm. Just a few minutes ago, in a small town over a hundred kilometres away. The Sala police were on their way. The Uppsala police were on their way.
They
had a real reason to avoid drinking mulled wine.

Broncks sighed.

Piles of ongoing investigations lay on his desk.

Fickle snowflakes chased each other across the Kronoberg courtyard.

There was always someone willing to use violence to get what they wanted, and on a day like this, it justified his work; it was important to stick around at least a little longer.

He called Karlström, whose answer was accompanied by the sound of studded tyres driving over grinding asphalt.

‘Did you see it?’

His boss was already halfway home. But at least he’d answered.

‘John?’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow.’

Someone honked a little too long, annoyed. John guessed it was the driver behind Karlström.

‘And … Heby? John, I don’t even know where that is. Somewhere in the Uppsala district. But I know what you’re up to. Don’t use this as an excuse to refuse to go home. It’s not ours.’

Now there were several honking horns; everyone, like Karlström, was heading home to their evening gin and tonics.

‘And John? Listen. Seriously? Who robs a bank the day before Christmas Eve? Someone with no traditions.’

There was crackling. The phone changed hands or places.

‘Wait. I’m just putting on my glasses.’

It crackled again. John Broncks wondered if his boss had stopped or if he was driving slowly without holding the steering wheel, while he read the car’s computer screen.

The honking got even louder, indicating the latter.

‘Two. Two patrols already in place. And another one on its way. You can see that on your screen, too. A hundred and ten kilometres, John. Let them solve their own problems.’

THE DECEMBER DARKNESS
was transformed into something furious, aggressive, a massive white wall of snow that encircled them and became a different kind of darkness. The wipers’ rubber strips beat despairingly against the glass, and Anneli slowed even further – they’d planned to go at ninety but that had turned to seventy and now barely fifty.

They should, according to Leo’s calculations, have gone more than ten kilometres. Now, he guessed they’d gone no more than a couple or so on a road that in place of hard shoulders and lanes had high walls of snow.

Anneli slowed further – in front of them other cars crept forward.

Two, maybe more. To overtake them was impossible. Both the first and the second time she tried, she was forced to stop, return to her own lane. Since visibility was only a few metres, the oncoming traffic was impossible to see until it passed their side window.

But she seemed to be in control, so far. Anneli balanced it with soft wheel movements, maintaining the interplay of brake, accelerator, gearstick, as the tyres failed to grip. Leo put his hand against her cheek, stroked it, and she smiled.

He adjusted his rear-view mirror. Jasper, behind him, leaned over the weapons case counting magazines and cartridges. Ivan, behind Anneli, clasped his left hand tightly in his right, knuckles a bloodless white, a stream of sweat running from his hairline down over his pale skin. He wiped it with the dirty handkerchief he always kept in his pocket.

Withdrawal.

His father had handled it before – every time he decided to quit for some reason. But never like this. Never while on the run from a bank robbery.

‘If you sleep, Dad, it’ll be easier. Lean back. This is taking longer than it should – but in about an hour and a half we’ll be home.’

That’s when they met the car.

He’d actually seen it in the distance, two headlights bright as they broke through the blizzard. But it wasn’t until it was almost alongside them that he realised what it was.

A single driver, in uniform and with eyes straight ahead.

And there, on the side of the car, six capital letters almost obscured by snow.

P
OLICE
.

They were already here.

‘Jasper?’

‘I saw.’

‘Get your weapon ready. And make sure you and Dad disappear under those presents.’

The car passed. It seemed not to have seen them. Leo was very aware that the bag between his shins was full of cash.

‘Smile,’ he said to Anneli. ‘Drive and smile. We’re a happy family.’

It had been a single cop. Beard, short hair. In his fifties. And he’d looked straight ahead, continuing in the direction of Heby, and was then swallowed by the snow.

Jasper and Ivan sat up again, the Christmas presents on their laps on the floor and on the shelf in the rear window. Ivan closed his eyes. Next to him on the narrow seat, Jasper opened the trunk and let the gun slide down again. And then stopped.

‘Ivan? Are you awake?’ Jasper asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where the hell are your magazines?’

‘We don’t need them now.’

‘The magazines? I just want to know that everything’s where it should be! That’s my job.’

Ivan didn’t like the man he was sharing a seat with. But he was sweating outwardly and trembling inwardly. So he did as he was asked, began searching for the little bag that should be sitting on his stomach.

It wasn’t there.

‘They’re … gone.’

‘What do you mean “gone”?’

‘They’re in … the other car. They must still be there.’

‘The getaway car?’

‘Yes.’

Leo had only been half listening. Now he turned round.

‘Dad? Fucking hell, Dad!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Did you touch them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Without gloves?’

‘I … think so. When I packed up. When we changed clothes.’

‘Turn round, Anneli!’

Jasper leaned forward, lowered his voice, as if Ivan and Anneli shouldn’t be able to hear.

‘Leo? We can’t turn round now. You surely understand that? We can’t go back. The cops are already there!’

‘Should I turn round or not?’ Anneli asked Leo again, desperately. She was still in control, but her movements were increasingly jerky.

‘Leo, listen to me,’ Jasper whispered. ‘I realise you don’t want to leave any tracks. But it’s not worth it. We’re not in any police files.’

‘Yes, Anneli,’ Leo replied to her.

‘None of us. That’s why—’

‘My dad,’ said Leo, cutting Jasper off. ‘Those are
his
fingerprints.
He’s
got a police record.’

LEO RAN STRAIGHT
into the white wall, rushed through the woods, through the deep snow towards the car they’d just left covered with pine boughs. He tore away the branches and opened the back door where his father had been sitting, jumped in and searched the seat, the door pockets, the shelf in the rear window. It wasn’t there. He crept in, hands across the driver’s seat, passenger seat, on the dashboard. Then the floor. Fingers in thin leather gloves groping in the dark across the rubber mats, to no avail.

Only one place left. Under the seats. He pressed down his body, stretched out.

And there. Under the front seat, in the middle. There it lay. The bag. He pulled it out, opened it. Two magazines. Bearing his father’s documented and registered fingerprints.

And he ran again, deep breaths and a breast that throbbed and ached as blood was pumped in, pumped out.

Back in the car, they sat in silence. They knew, of course, that there were already police cars in the area. Down the forest road again. Past the barns and out onto the country road.

They’d just started driving back in the right direction. Maybe the wind had eased slightly. Maybe that’s why he could see it when he checked the rear-view mirror.

The same police car. The same cop, who would soon realise that he’d passed that car just a few minutes earlier, and that it had taken a very strange path in the middle of furiously drifting snow, right after a bank robbery just a few kilometres away.

Leo put his hand on Anneli’s arm.

‘It’s there, behind us. Just keep on driving normally.’

He checked the rear-view mirror again – it wasn’t far between them, twenty-five metres, tops.

‘Same speed, same distance. It shouldn’t get any closer.’

He saw how she was looking in the rear-view mirror, too.

‘Just focus on the road, Anneli. And Jasper – give me the gun.’

Jasper pulled the weapon from the trunk and passed it between the two front seats. Ivan had been sitting quietly ever since Jasper discovered the two magazines were missing. Now he took hold of the headrest and pulled his whole body forward until his mouth was near Leo’s ear.

‘Leo? Son, what are you going to do?’

‘Finish the shit you started.’

The gun rested in Leo’s lap while he cocked it.

‘Anneli, in about two hundred metres there’s a road that turns off to the right. Fairly wide, paved. Turn in there. If that cunt follows us then stop when I tell you to.’

‘What the hell … you …’ began Ivan.

‘Nothing will happen if he keeps going.’

She put on her indicator, slowed down and veered to the right.

Leo was breathing slowly and deeply to prepare himself. The exit was five metres away, ten, fifteen. Then the police car turned off, almost invisible in the dense snowfall, a predator following them.

‘Stop.’

Anneli hit the brakes and the car’s tyres slipped on the icy ground; she
pushed down the clutch, adjusted the steering wheel with tiny movements. Until they stopped.