The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (74 page)

‘John?’

She’d said she was looking for closure – because she needed it. He hadn’t realised that there was that kind of closure.

‘It’s Christmas Eve. Night. In a few hours … I have to—’

‘Merry Christmas.’

‘You know, John—’

‘That was all. Merry Christmas.’

Then he’d driven into the city. And taken a detour through the still heavily falling snow. Past the Northern Cemetery and past a grave covered by snow.

Past someone he thought about more dead than he’d done when he was alive.

On through a city that would soon awake and stay indoors in the warmth of family and Christmas presents. To a police station as empty now as when he’d arrived there an hour ago.

An entire family. And her closure.

He’d gone to his office room and moved piles of folders aside. The investigation would soon leave his desk and become evidence for the prosecution in an upcoming trial – four thousand pages of preliminary investigations on nine bank robberies, one security van robbery, 221 stolen automatic weapons, attempted aggravated blackmail of the police, and a bomb that had exploded at Stockholm Central Station. And instead he started to approach another preliminary investigation. One that lay in a taped-up box that had been packed up so long it had served as a visitor’s chair.

He cut away the tape that had been wrapped several times around the box, folded open the flaps, and left the room. Out into the deserted corridor and into the kitchenette to the last drop of mulled wine and some leftover gingerbread cookies in a basket.

Returned to the room.

Walked restlessly around the now open box.

A family. Closure.

He pictured Sam standing between two guards as he left the visiting cell of the prison 225 kilometres away, turning to him and whispering,
I never want to see you again
.

John Broncks decided right then. He approached the box. The thick stack of papers was hiding under empty folders and outdated calendars. Another investigation. One that eighteen years earlier had formed the basis for another trial and a life sentence.

He’d already called Sanna, and she had two kids. He didn’t even know where his mother lived any more. And calling Sam wouldn’t work either, since this was about him.

He grabbed the crisp cover page.

All these years, from a teenager to a man in early middle age, and he’d never even touched it.

The first pages resembled the beginning of every preliminary investigation he’d ever worked on. The primary report. Then the list of defence lawyers. Then another report. Then a quick overview of the persons involved. The printout of an emergency call from a heartbroken and shocked woman at 02.32 a.m.

It was there, twenty-three pages into the initial interrogation, that the similarities ended. With the sixteen-year-old John Broncks.

He hadn’t even remembered that someone had talked to him.

It was strange. He didn’t remember it at all. Until he read his own answers. He could have been the cop doing the interview. Maybe he had been, in each and every investigation. And maybe he would be again, tomorrow,
when the interrogation of a father, an older brother, a middle brother and a little brother began.

He knew exactly what the next question would be. Before he even read it. That was a police officer’s task, to seek the truth, to bring order to a random series of events.

He knew the question, but never the answer.
Sometimes … she usually pretends to faint
. Everyone has their answer.
But you must understand he deserved it?
Their own explanation for their violence.
If I’d wanted to kill her … I would have
. He knew the question, but never the answer – not then, not now.

He’d read more when he got back. The interview with his mother. The interrogation of Sam. The forensic report with pictures of a bed and bloody sheets and a knife with small sharp teeth for scaling fish. And the autopsy of a man with three holes in his chest near the heart. But first he needed to visit someone he knew and yet didn’t know at all.

IT WASN’T FAR
, he didn’t even have to go outside. Via three locked doors within the detective department of the Stockholm City Police, through Interpol, Witness Protection and the forensics department, to the taller building facing west – the Swedish Security Service, the National Police Board, the monitoring department, Kronoberg jail. He hadn’t been here since last spring when he’d got some help analysing two late-night conversations; the more the authorities emphasised the need for cooperation between divisions, the less it seemed to happen.

This time Broncks took the lift to the seventh floor. He got out and knocked on the prison guard’s door. It was the middle of the night and he’d come unannounced. But the young and friendly fellow on the other
side of the glass rolled up the hatch and explained that if Detective Broncks sat down and waited for a few minutes, then he would soon be able to visit the suspect, who had arrived a few hours earlier and was now being kept in the western detention hall.

He did so, sat down and waited.

On his way to a locked cell, away from an eighteen-year-old investigation.

From a family, to a family.

What was family? He had no idea any more.

Perhaps a family was something strong, with built-in solidarity, and was therefore a place where violence became purer, more brutal – it turned inwards, against its own, against those its cohesion should have protected.

‘Broncks?’

No one to talk to. No one to share with before it’s too late. Sometimes it ends in a cemetery. Sometimes it ends here.

‘Broncks? Hello?’

‘Yes?’

‘You can go in now.’

He heard a scream from the first cell, a dream or terror, it sounded the same. Then three silent cells. And then sound coming from two cells, but no screams, more like someone doing push-ups in one and someone talking to himself in the other – when days became weeks became months, it was easy to turn your days upside down.

He stopped about halfway down the hall. Detention Cell 7.

‘And you’re sure you’d prefer to be by yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can have an alarm if you want. It’s small, fits in your pocket. For safety’s sake.’

‘Thank you. It’s not necessary. Just a short visit.’

The prison guard’s keys scraped against the door as they were turned twice.

John Broncks let the heavy metal door slide open. A tall, athletic, blond man, much younger than he had imagined, was sitting on the bed and staring straight at the wall.

‘I’m John Broncks. And I’m the one who has been investigating you.’

The blond continued to stare at the grey concrete.

‘Investigating what?’

‘A lot of bank robberies. A rather large weapons theft. And a bomb that will be considered terrorism.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you do … Anna-Karin. And we’ll start discussing it tomorrow.’

‘Nobody will
discuss
anything tomorrow.’

‘You’ve spoken to me before. People like you do that sometimes. Talk. So that things don’t go so badly for their younger brothers.’

The prisoner wore clothes with the prison symbol on his jersey, white chest and brown trousers. Clothes that the person who’d sat there before him had also worn.

Now he turned round. Blue eyes. Thin lips.

There he was.

‘I don’t snitch. We don’t snitch. That’s not how we operate.’

And then he turned away again, towards the concrete wall.

‘You can go. Since I neither want nor need to speak to you now.’

John Broncks lingered in the stuffy air. Breathing in institutional dust.

‘I don’t want to talk to you either. That wasn’t why I came.’

He went out again, holding the door, waited in the corridor until a prison guard with a big bunch of keys arrived.

‘I just wanted to see what you looked like under the mask, Big Brother.’

TIME
.

He always knew precisely how much he had.

He no longer had a wristwatch with red hands and light-brown leather strap. Pappa had been wearing that. But he didn’t need it, never really had, the clock was always ticking
inside
him as he counted the time that remained.

Tick. Less life left. Tick. Less life left. Tick. Less life left.

The heavy iron bars in a grid formation on the cell windows. From now on, he couldn’t, he mustn’t, do what he always did – think in terms of time. He was locked up. And someone in here who knew exactly how many seconds, how many breaths had passed, wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.

Without the days and seasons no bastard could reach him.

He’d tried once before. And it had worked. If he didn’t participate, if
he refused to exist alongside others, the closed door would just be a door he went straight through.

Uniformed men had stood outside then, too. At home. In the apartment. Pappa had thrown a bomb and a house had burned and Mamma and the police had been waiting on the other side of the door he’d locked.

Felix beside him on the bed, Vincent in his arms.

We’ll go straight through them. Straight through.

He’d go straight through this too. The door. The police. The interrogations. He didn’t have to say anything unless he wanted to. He was locked up, but he would decide for himself whether or not to open his mouth.

They each sat behind their own locked door. They weren’t together. But they would be reunited later. That’s how it always was.

If they didn’t think and didn’t count time.

If now was then and then was now.

‘
Anton Svensson
’ is a pseudonym for Stefan Thunberg and Anders Roslund.

Stefan Thunberg
is one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated screenwriters. His body of work spans popular TV series such as Henning Mankell’s
Wallander
and Håkan Nesser’s
Van Veeteren
as well as two of Sweden’s biggest box office successes in recent years:
Hamilton
and
Jägarna 2
. While Thunberg achieved fame as a screenwriter, the rest of his family became infamous in an entirely different way: his father and brothers were Sweden’s most notorious bank robbers, dubbed Militärligan (The Military League) by the media.
The Father
is Stefan Thunberg’s debut novel.

Anders Roslund
is an award-winning investigative journalist and one of the most successful and critically acclaimed Scandinavian crime writers of our time. Roslund is part of the
New York Times
bestselling author duo Roslund & Hellström, who are recipients of many prestigious awards, including the CWA International Dagger, the Glass Key and the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award, and who boast sales exceeding five million copies. Films and TV series based on Roslund & Hellström’s novels are in the works, both in Hollywood and Europe.
The Father
is Anders Roslund’s seventh novel and the first he has co-authored with Stefan Thunberg.

Anders Roslund: To write a novel based on true events is to shatter reality and then put it back together again, and the only way to do this is to begin by finding the novel’s Heartbeat: the central conflict that drives it towards its inevitable end. So, Stefan, what is the heartbeat of this story?

Stefan Thunberg: An event that has haunted me for more than twenty years. It was 23 December, the day before the Christmas holiday, and three bank robbers were pursued by police through a raging blizzard after they had driven their getaway car into a ditch. When I saw it on the news, I knew immediately that two of them were my eldest brother and my childhood friend – but slowly I realised that the third had to be my father. I couldn’t understand how my brother and father had, after years of conflict, decided to commit a bank robbery together – the last heist ever carried out by the ‘Military League’. That night in the snowstorm they fled into a forest and, as the noose tightened, they hid, exhausted, in an abandoned summer cottage. Surrounded by elite police, with no way out, father and son had to resolve the conflict that had followed them throughout their entire lives – throughout
my
entire life. What did they tell each other during those hours, before the police shot tear gas into the cottage and stormed it?

AR: When did you first find out what your brothers were doing?

ST: I was there when they began planning to break into the weapons bunker. I came home to my brother’s apartment and found the others eating pizza and discussing how best to pierce a concrete floor. After that, the first few times I was around they would pause when I arrived, but soon they just continued as if I was part of it. After all, I was one of the family: between us brothers there were never any secrets. And then, after they had committed their first armed robbery, I was sitting there on the sofa as they congratulated themselves, high on adrenalin, and we followed
the police hunt on the TV while working our way through a case of Kronenbourg beer. It may sound strange, but that’s how my brothers and I had been raised by our tough dad – to never, ever, betray anyone in our family.

AR: Which of the main characters are invented and which are more closely inspired by reality?

ST: The three brothers, father and mother in the novel are all closely inspired by reality. Jasper is a fictional character, though elements of him are inspired by a combination of two friends who each took part in some (though not all) of the robberies. They weren’t present in my childhood as early as the book describes. Also, in the ‘present’ section of the book, Jasper has a dramatic function that does not correspond with either of those friends in reality. The character represents alienation, someone who will never be respected on the same terms, never accepted into the brotherhood, and is therefore used by Leo to carry out tasks he does not want to give to his younger brothers. His presence in the story clarifies that the bonds between the brothers are stronger than everything else – for better or worse – and this reinforces the disruption when those bonds crack. Anneli is fictionalised, especially her family situation before she met Leo. Her son Sebastian is inspired by several different kids. John and Sam Broncks are purely fictional characters, constructed to portray the real police work and as a reflection of Leo’s situation.