The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (30 page)

‘They get here in the morning and leave in the evening,’ he said, pointing out into the car park. ‘But that one, the Ford, the brown one in the middle, arrived at lunchtime. And the big yellow Dodge … it turned up about an hour ago.’

‘And the yellow one – you didn’t see anybody leave it?’

‘Nobody.’

Broncks guessed there were no more than fifteen metres between the door of the greasy spoon and the getaway car.

‘But that’s not so strange,’ the restaurant owner shrugged. ‘Sometimes they just sit there. Waiting. For someone who’s coming by bus or train. And then they leave again.’

‘And today? You’ve seen
everybody
who arrived and left?’

‘I see everybody every day,’ he replied defensively. ‘There are only ten spaces. And I’m standing here … the whole time.’

Broncks took two napkins from the metal holder on the counter and a pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. He drew ten oblong squares and wrote
brown
on the spot that corresponded to where the old Ford sat and
yellow
where the getaway car was.

‘These are the ones here now. But do you remember any more?’

‘More?’

‘Cars that have been here during the last few hours.’

‘Yep,’ said the restaurant owner, pointing though the window. ‘Over there, for example, a—’

‘Write it down in the boxes.’

‘There … in that space … an estate car. I’ll write it down.
Estate car
. I don’t remember the colour.’

‘Good.’

‘And over there … a dark blue Dodge. Exactly like the yellow one standing there now, but next to it. I’ll write it down.
Dark blue Dodge van
.’

‘And the other spaces?’

‘Nothing. At least not near the end.’

The restaurant owner pushed the napkins across the counter, preparing to go.

‘We’re not finished yet,’ said Broncks. ‘I want to know which ones left after the yellow Dodge was parked.’

‘After?’

‘
After
the getaway car arrived.’

‘I don’t remember!’

‘Try.’

Pen in hand, the restaurant owner glanced at the car park, then at the napkin, then at Broncks, and then put a big ring around the space in the centre, the estate car.

‘That one.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know … maybe ten minutes later.’

‘That’s the only one?’

He tapped the pen absently against the counter, making an annoying sound.

‘Then the other Dodge. The one that was dark blue.’

He drew a ring of ink around the box that said
Dark blue Dodge van
, several times, until it was thick and uneven.

‘Maybe … yeah, it left about two minutes later. Or five. Or … around that.’

‘That one?’

‘Yep. The square one next to the yellow. Right next to it.’

Broncks examined the napkin. The square one next to the yellow van. He looked up from the drawing towards the real parking space. Dim light from the streetlamps seeped in and landed on the tarmac.

‘You’re sure? It drove away straight afterwards?’

‘I’m sure. It didn’t back out.’

‘Back out?’

‘Everybody who parks here drives in front first and has to back out. But that one was the opposite.’

Two cars parked in the parking spaces next to each other. Two cars of the same kind. One with the front facing inwards, the other front outwards.

Broncks crumpled up the napkin and threw it hard at the rubbish bin. And hit.

It was so damn easy, like when two people sleep head to foot. Two similar cars parked close to each other, turned in opposite directions, and therefore less than half a metre apart on their right-hand sides – their sliding doors.

Broncks nodded towards the man who owned the greasy spoon, and let out a defeated sigh as he went back out into the darkness into an ever-expanding search area.

Leo stretched up towards the opening of the Skull Cave, grabbed hold of the sports bag filled with 500-kronor notes, and placed it on one of the shelves on the far wall. The next duffel bag, containing notes of various denominations, he put next to boxes of ammunition.

They’d stopped there in the car park in the middle of rush hour and among all the commuters, with loaded guns and ski masks pulled down. Completely silent. Completely still. The Tunnelbana passed overhead. The bus stopped and dropped off passengers. The voices of two young boys, who’d gone past without realising that only the thin shell of a van separated them from four bank robbers on the run.

‘The vests, Vincent, pass them to me.’

Vincent was kneeling by the hatch, unzipping one of the bags – guns, magazines, ammunition, load-bearing vests.

‘Not that one – the other one.’

The next zip got caught, and he had to coax it a little bit. Bulletproof vests, large, round headphones, the thin microphone. One thing at a time through the safe into Leo’s hands and onto the shelf above the bags filled with money.

They’d stayed there for sixty seconds. Until Felix opened the side door, reached over to the other van, which was parked in the opposite direction, pressed down on the handle and opened its side door. Two identical vans turned into one unit, two open doors opposite each other, hidden from view. A short leap from one getaway car to the next. Felix into the driver’s seat, Jasper and Vincent carrying one bag each, and finally Leo who closed the doors to the two vans, now two separate entities again. The same movements as they’d made five minutes and thirty seconds earlier, when they’d been on their way to the bank. But in reverse.

‘Vincent? Jumpsuits and ski masks should be kept separate – we’ll burn those.’

Their first important car change. Just a few hundred metres from the bank they’d just robbed. The transformation. No one had seen them leave a yellow van, no one knew that they’d driven on in a similar blue van. And the circle had widened. The mathematical formula the police used in every pursuit – the time elapsed since the offence multiplied by the distance to the final getaway car – the circle that became the police’s search area and indicated their chances of catching up.

One more kilometre until the next car change, another car park in another neighbourhood, sandwiched between a three-storey house and a copse of trees. Thirty seconds to change out of the jumpsuits and masks into work trousers and shirts, thirty seconds to move the bags and trunks through the copse, twenty-five seconds to climb into the last getaway car – one of their own Construction Ltd pickup trucks that would soon blend in with all the other contractors driving home at the end of the day, Felix and Leo in the front seat, Jasper and Vincent under the cover on the flatbed. Twenty minutes later they were in their living room, listening to the radio as a SWAT team crept and crawled towards nothing.

‘Now I want what’s in the other trunk.’

Leo took both the submachine gun and the AK4 through the hole in the floor, wrapped red tape around one of their barrels and placed the weapons on the bottom shelf.

‘Leo?’

‘Yeah?’

Vincent wanted to say it too. But it felt so strange. He’d never said it before.

‘Just so you know …’

Leo took the last machine gun, which was much larger and weighed more, marked the barrel with red tape as well, and placed it next to the others that would never be fired again. Then looked around. Two hundred and eighteen automatic weapons left.

‘What?’

It was so hard to say, it might sound false or artificial, even though it wasn’t.

‘… I love you too.’

JOHN BRONCKS OPENED
the computer and clicked on the file labelled
SVEDMYRA
. It contained two documents. He put his cursor on the first, named
CAMERA
1 – the surveillance camera above the entrance door. He clicked and slid a thin timeline to a sequence at 17.51, the time at which the three bank robbers in black masks had entered the building.

A total of five seconds of film. No sound, no colour. And jerky, as moving surveillance images always were.

The back of a head. That’s what the camera sees first. A black head with a larger bulge at each ear, and which after the next step turns into a black neck.

Broncks moved forward one frame at a time.

The black head makes a half turn of his upper body, looking for the camera, raises his weapon, aiming.

Frame by frame.
You see me
. Moment by moment.
I see you.

And in the eyes – no anger, fear, stress.

The woman who had just gone up to the counter to be served, holding
a plastic bag in her right hand and her number in her left. Then the shooting.

It’s as if all of her bones and joints are gone. She goes down in the shortest possible time and lands flat on the floor. And even though she’s so scared she can’t understand what’s going on, she turns her head again, up towards the masked face, because she wants to know.

John Broncks clicked on the timeline, froze the image.

Throughout the interview she’d sat in front of him leaning against the window of the bank, bleeding from one ear, from at least one burst eardrum. And afterwards she’d collapsed, her last resources exhausted, still weeping. They’d approached like a firing squad, carrying out an execution without considering who stood blindfolded in front of them – terrifying everyone into obedience.

‘John?’

Sanna, at his door, like last time. Despite how late it was, she was still in the building.

‘I’ve finished my analysis. Altogether a total of eighty-one cartridges were fired inside the bank. Which means, according to the available statistics, this was one of Europe’s most violent robberies. Ever.’

She shifted, now leaning against the doorframe. She was going to stay there.

‘FMJ, 7.62 calibre. Manufactured by the Swedish military. Karlsborg, 1980.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I can’t determine whether or not it was the same weapon, the same suspects as in the security van robbery.’

‘But you can’t rule it out?’

‘An investigator might see patterns indicating as much, John. But no facts.’

‘You mean that we could have two groups equipped with Swedish military weapons, committing robberies in the
same
neighbourhood, in the
same
autumn?’

‘That’s
not
what I mean. But the forensic evidence doesn’t rule it out.’

‘Farsta almost forty shots. And now … eighty-one? First they shot
up a security van, now a bank. Something must have come from the same weapon!’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Nothing has been used twice. I’ve checked everything I can.’

‘There is a pattern. Their behaviour.’

‘Yes. But no facts.’

He looked at her.

‘And if I wanted to hear one more time what Sanna thinks, not what the forensic scientist has been able to establish?’

‘There are … movement patterns that recur. Camera Two. The moment before it was shot down.’

He turned his computer screen to her as she spoke.

‘Legs bent. Low centre of gravity. Those were the security guard’s words exactly, when you questioned him next to the security van. And now – see? That’s exactly how the gunman is standing here too.’

Jerky and silent. But clear.

‘And then, his finger, if you make the picture a bit bigger there … it’s clearly above the trigger guard, perfectly straight along the barrel – as if he’s pointing it at us.’

A few more frames, then Broncks stopped time again and zoomed in on a gloved hand. Sanna leaned in to look.

‘Discipline, John. Never expose your men, every shot should be secure. This is a robber who doesn’t put his finger on the trigger until right before firing – he thinks about weapons safety – so he’s not self-taught. He’s been educated. He’s assumed the firing position thousands of times. He’s been drilled.’

Just four kilometres between crime scenes. Just seven weeks between crimes.

Still – the forensic evidence showed something else.

These could have been carried out by different perpetrators.