The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (19 page)

Leo smoked quickly, pacing back and forth across the square.
Snitch
. The bastard still got to him.

Suddenly he stopped.

He’d been here before, but now it was as if he were seeing it for the first time.

Two banks. Next to each other. Like a loving couple.

They stood wall to wall between a supermarket and a flower shop, and it was possible to drive all the way up to them and still have a full view of the square.

Two targets. Same place. Same time. Same level of risk.

And he no longer smoked so quickly – he felt that sense of calm that sometimes washed over him, the calm that not even his father could disturb.

JOHN BRONCKS HAD
tried counting raindrops. It had worked at first. Until they all flowed together and the world outside became blurry. His colleagues running across the courtyard of the police station looked thick and clumsy. Behind him on his desk lay eighteen parallel investigations in various colour-coded folders. And he couldn’t remember a single day it hadn’t rained since the case lying on top had taken over, obscuring everything else – like raindrops on the window.

The only statement from anyone – apart from the two security officers – who’d got close. A boy, six years old.

A child had seen what the adults hadn’t.

A child sometimes sees what’s not real, a fairy tale.

Two heavily armed robbers who looked like Arabs, spoke English like Arabs. Because they were? Or because that’s what you were supposed to see and hear? Their heavy accents. Their choice of Arabic interjections –
jalla jalla, sharmuta, Allahu Akbar
– words he himself would have used to sound like an Arab.

He sat in front of his piles of documents, yawned, got up and walked towards the coffee machine in the corridor for a cup of silver tea. And then on to the vending machine, where he always took number 17: a light, round bread roll with margarine, a slice of cheese, and a tomato in the middle that soaked the bread until it became spongy, a slice of tomato that he started to peel away.

You use violence to force someone to submit to you.

You threaten to kill.

This calculated excessive force was a means to an end and he, if anyone, was well able to recognise it – like the hand of a grown man repeatedly hitting a body that refuses to comply. Violence that worked, that gave you what you wanted.

John Broncks left the vending machine, left the bread roll, threw both
it and the slice of tomato into the bin, walked four doors down to the chief superintendent’s office and knocked on the doorframe as usual.

‘Do you have a minute?’

Karlström closed his book, or at least it looked like a book, and pushed it aside. John went in, sat down in the empty chair and tried to read the title, but could only make out the spine. Some French writer, Bocuse.

‘Yes?’

‘The security van robbery.’

Broncks lay the technical investigation down on Karlström’s desk.

‘I want to prioritise it.’

‘Prioritise it … how?’

‘I want at least a few weeks to devote myself to it.’

Karlström grabbed a binder off a shelf, flipped through it, turned it towards Broncks.

‘You have eighteen parallel investigations. Other investigations. Other suspects.’

‘Yes.’

‘
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT
and
COERCION
in the toilets at Café Opera. A
GGRAVATED ROBBERY
at a jewellery store on Odengatan. A
RSON
at Ming Garden on Medborgar Square.’

‘Yes?’

‘
ATTEMPTED RAPE
in Vitabergs Park. D
RUG TRAFFICKING
, Regerings Street. A
GGRAVATED PIMPING
, Karla Square. C
ONSPIRACY TO COMMIT MURDER
, Lilla Ny Street. A
GGRAVATED
…’

Karlström closed the binder.

‘… do you want me to continue? Who do you think I should order to take over your other investigations?’

‘The perpetrators are experienced. They’ve done this before.’

‘Which one of your colleagues, John, all of whom also have eighteen parallel investigations on their plates?’

‘And they’ll do it again.’

‘I—’

‘They’ll do it again, and they’ll be more violent than they were in Farsta. And then again, even more violently.’

The institution didn’t reign in this room, as it did in John’s: here sat a man who had a life he was proud of, that gave him security. On the wall behind Karlström hung a kind of map of his professional history – a law school diploma, certification from the police shooting club, and a
framed notification of his appointment as chief of the City Police’s detective department. On his desk there was a second map, of his personal history: the back of three photographs that John knew were of his two daughters, siblings adopted from Colombia, five or maybe six years old; and his wife, who John had never heard his boss say anything negative about. Next to the photo frames lay an ergonomic plastic dolphin whose shoulders his boss rubbed every twenty minutes, a letter opener from the police union, and the book by Paul Bocuse, which John now saw was titled
French Cooking
.

‘The robbers were carrying an AK4 and a submachine gun. Military-grade weapons. I’ve looked into every case involving theft from the Home Guard, shooting ranges, military installations. I’ve looked into anyone with a similar record, either free or on probation. I’ve been able to exclude the possibility of an inside job, as far as I can.’

He wasn’t sure if his boss was really listening. Karlström had only ever seen violence in the line of duty, but John had grown up with it, lived with it, and then decided to become a police officer in order to face it again.

‘We have two robbers who act single-mindedly and without deviating from a plan. The security van was hijacked, driven at normal speed from Farsta to Drevviken beach, and since the rest of the money was behind a locked door, they shot at it without hesitation, an entire magazine. They were disciplined, extremely focused, and didn’t once break character during a raid that took twenty minutes.’

‘Character?’

‘They haven’t convinced me. I’m not as sure as the guards that these robbers were Arabs. Just like one of them wasn’t really handicapped and in a wheelchair. They could have been men who were born here, putting on a good show under extreme pressure – who handled their guns like tools, as if violence was their craft, as if they were schooled in excessive force.’

The photos of his wife and children stood lined up between them, it felt as if John knew them. Karlström was the type who talked about his family. John never talked about his family. To anyone.

‘And I also don’t think that there were only two people involved. There must have been more. And in that case we’re talking about a gang that will continue to evolve. There was nine million left behind that steel door. They’ll regard that as a failure. They didn’t get what they came for. This time.’

‘You said … schooled in violence.’

‘No, that’s not what I said. Schooled in excessive force.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘That they’ve grown up with it.’

John Broncks had to hurry down the corridor. The case had just become a priority. He could now devote himself to a single folder for a month. He took the stairs three floors down, and headed towards the forensics lab, peering first into the dark room, then into the fibre room for offenders’ clothing, then into the fibre room for victims’ clothing. Sanna wasn’t there.

Sanna, who’d walked away at the scene as if she didn’t even recognise him. Sanna who had returned to the City Police just as suddenly as she’d once left. Sanna, who he’d avoided a few years ago when they passed each other on King Street – he’d seen her from afar, and he’d waited too long to cross the street, so he was forced to keep walking, pretending to look away just as their paths crossed.

Her black case lay on one of the counters in the large lab, next to a roll of gelatine film, a box of cotton swabs, some plastic containers, test tubes, tweezers and a microscope. She stood in front of a metal cabinet filled with CNA fumes, developing fingerprints.

‘Hi,’ he said.

She turned around, looked at him, her face revealing nothing.

‘Hi.’

‘I read your report, Sanna. Several times.’

This was what he’d wanted to avoid: standing here before her indifferent expression.

‘I’m getting nowhere. But I’ve just spoken to Karlström. And he gave me more time.’

She continued to write, then put the notebook in her coat pocket and opened the door to the CNA cabinet, releasing whatever fumes were left.

‘John – as you know, there’s nothing more to add.’

‘I want to go through it once more. With you.’

They walked down the stairs to the garage that lay below the entire block of police buildings.

He wondered if she’d seen him on King Street, and whether she’d seen him look away. She could have recognised him without seeing his face – they’d both worked in witness protection and knew the first thing you had to change in order to form a new identity was your individual way of moving. It’s what the person you’re hiding from recognises first in a crowd – it’s movement that connects everything.

In one corner of the garage there was a small square building the size of four parking spaces, a garage within a garage where the forensic department’s confiscated vehicles were kept. She opened it up and there it stood in the middle of the floor. A white van. Broncks walked over to it and climbed inside. The seats were wrapped in plastic. The shards of glass, documents and security bags were gone. He’d researched and eliminated every report of every stolen car and stolen boat near Farsta and Sköndal during the period before the robbery – and he’d come to believe that the two robbers had probably been delivered to the first crime scene by somebody using their own car and retrieved from the second scene by someone with their own boat.

He crawled into the rear compartment with the open safe. The technical report had shown level four traces of blood, fibres, fingerprints – from the two security guards who’d been overpowered and from other security guards who used the vehicle. Nothing else. No traces from the suspects.

Sanna opened the black case she always carried with her and lined up five cartridges on the bench in front of them.

‘Angle of impact ninety degrees.’

She showed him the holes through the window on the driver’s side and the trajectories towards the door on the passenger side.

‘And here, beside them, five disfigured bullets – fully jacketed, 9 mm; they came to a stop in the truck door. They were fired from the same weapon. A Swedish m/45 submachine gun.’

Mechanical. That was the word John had been searching for. That was how she talked about her work, and he wondered if that was how her briefings usually sounded or if she was just making an effort to seem indifferent to him.