The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (47 page)

‘But not Vincent?’

He smiled at her, putting his hand against her cheek.

‘It’s good to see you too, Mamma.’

They heard a truck coming across the asphalt yard, and moved aside as Felix drove into the garage and parked next to them, a bale of insulation and a couple of ten-litre buckets of paint in the back.

‘Another company truck?’

‘I told you, Mamma. We’re expanding.’

Felix nearly jumped out of the driver’s seat, arms outstretched.

‘Mum!’

He lifted her up in a big hug and spun her around twice, while the
dust from yellow house paint whirled off his work clothes.

‘Now, Felix!’

She laughed, and Leo thought how it was so lovely when Mamma laughed that you wanted to join in with her.

Felix let her go, and now her youngest son opened the truck door.

‘And Vincent!’

She hugged him a little longer than the others. He didn’t really look comfortable, but tried to hide it with a smile.

‘You’ve grown … so big!’

‘Well, I am eighteen years old.’

‘You’re seventeen.’

‘Soon.’

She took a half-step back without letting go.

‘Vincent – you smell of smoke.’

‘Mamma, it’s
me
who smokes,’ said Felix.

‘So now both of you are covering it up,’ she said, looking at Leo with a smile. It was hard to know whether it was sincere. Felix decided that it was.

‘Sometimes it’s better for mothers not to know everything. Right?’

The warm spring sun was only shining in the yard now, and she looked around as they walked towards the house, perhaps looking for a lawn, though she didn’t say so. She linked her arm with Felix’s.

‘How long are you staying?’ he asked.

‘I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. To see Grandma. But you can come with me? All of you? To Sköndal. Leo, how far is it from here?’

A place they’d visited not so long ago. One brother had driven by the little house that belonged to Grandma and Grandpa in a hijacked security van, one had been lying on a hill ready to shoot, and one had landed a getaway boat at the jetty.

‘We can’t, Mamma. We’ve got so much … you know.’

‘I know. You’re
expanding
. Shall we go in?’

Anneli had watched them from the kitchen window, all four in the open garage. They’d hugged and laughed. A togetherness that left no space for anyone else.

She’d seen how Leo headed for the house first, like a surrogate father taking responsibility. Then Felix, who in front of his mother always seemed a few years younger than he was, transformed into the one who made her laugh, a role they both seemed to need. And Vincent just behind them, always the baby, no matter how hard he tried.

She should have known.

The front door opened, and Anneli greeted this woman she’d never really understood. They talked, of course, but not about anything specific. Leo’s mother never said what she was really thinking – and certainly never straightforwardly. She forced you to search for answers by asking her questions, and every time Anneli did so, it felt as if Leo’s mother saw through her – as if she’d done something wrong. Leo could be like that sometimes; they scrutinised every question looking for its intention, preparing themselves to avoid being hurt – as if it were something more than just a simple question.

‘Can you look after Mamma and show her round?’

Leo could hear the television in the living room, as it showed footage from the empty arms dump.

‘I’d like you to accompany me the first time your mother visits us.’

So he did. He tried to rush through the house tour, which took so much longer than he’d hoped because his mother stopped in every room and wanted to know more, be told more, and Anneli, every time she got the opportunity, reiterated how this was only temporary,
I know, Britt-Marie, it’s not much of a garden, but it’ll be better in a year
, explained that they’d buy a much bigger one when the company had grown. First floor and the last room, their bedroom, and he could finally leave them at the window overlooking their neighbour’s apple trees and lawn,
something like that, Britt-Marie, that’s the sort of home I’d like.

Felix and Vincent sat at opposite ends of the living room sofa waiting for a breaking news bulletin that was about to begin.

‘Do they know?’ asked Felix.

‘Yeah. I drove past,’ replied Leo. ‘There were loads of people there.’

The TV host had sat there since they were little, voice calm and face neutral whether he was reporting on the stock market or a death.

Short scenes from a patch of gravel in a forest with a small grey building at its centre. The camera aimed through the open door at a brightly lit, confined space. An unsteady movement, sometimes out of focus as it searches for a big hole, it’s as if the entire camera is tilted forward and pulled down into the image of blackness.

Leo felt the calm again, almost a kind of happiness.

‘But look, Leo … that’s it, that’s what we drove past on the way here!’

Mamma. He hadn’t noticed that she’d come into the room.

‘I told you so. Every time they put up that police tape, it means something bad has happened!’

She squeezed onto the sofa between her younger sons. Felix felt her shoulder against his, but said nothing. He was the one who usually made Mamma laugh; now he had no idea what to say. She didn’t know, of course, but she looked at him as if she did, a look that forgave everything, even his dreadful betrayal of her years earlier. He grabbed the remote and lowered the volume until it was silent. Maybe he should do it now. Maybe he should look at her and say,
Mamma, we were the ones who stole all those guns on the TV, and then we robbed five banks with them
, and maybe she would lean over and hug him.

‘Felix? What’s wrong? What is it?’

More pictures from an empty arms dump. And everyone except his mother knew that what should be lying there was lying under their feet instead.

‘I’m thinking about leaving the … construction company.’

Leo had been quiet since their mother came into the room. Now he jumped a little.

‘You’re thinking about …
what
?’

Felix didn’t look at him. He looked at his mother.

‘Because I don’t think … you know, I’m not really sure I want to be in the building trade.’

‘No?’

‘Mamma, I think I want to start studying.’

Felix felt Leo’s questions and eyes, but pretended not to notice them. He just looked at Mamma, who smiled at him.

‘What fun, Felix, of course you should study.’

She hugged him, and then turned to Leo.

‘Right, Leo? Doesn’t that sound right?’

The garage inside the garage. John Broncks knocked and waited for Sanna to ask him to enter.

‘John – you don’t need to knock. You’ve never knocked before, come in.’

‘The Military League. That’s what they’re calling them now.’

When a criminal or a group of criminals were first connected to a pattern of crimes, they were given a name, a label. Military weapons, combat harnesses, boots, precision, communication. The name had seemed so obvious after those first published pictures of an empty arms dump just a few hours earlier.

On the workbench in the forensic scientists’ little nook lay fragments of plastic and hardboard spread out in a sooty puzzle.

‘Right now,’ said Sanna, ‘you’re looking at the plate they used to build the bomb. The plastic explosives were divided into twelve piles and linked together with pentylstubin. And in order to make a hole with a diameter of sixty centimetres, the weight of the explosives would have been around half a kilo.’

‘It must have made a helluva bang.’

‘The plate of explosives lay
under
the foundations. The sound was muffled by the building. And besides – they were far out in the forest.’

She looked at him, tired after a long day of work, eyes that he’d once fallen in love with. She reached for the jacket hanging on the back of the chair.

‘We can carry on talking about this if you walk with me.’

Through the corridors of police headquarters and out onto the street. Beside each other on a deserted block, not talking at all. It was a few hours before midnight, and even colder now.

‘Big Brother. That’s what I call him. The leader. He’s addicted to robbery. And in order to get the same high, the rush, he’ll need a little more and a little more. When he planned the hijacking of that security van in Farsta, sitting in a wheelchair waiting for them to come … that was enough, then. Sitting in a van outside a bank in Svedmyra … that was enough, then. But afterwards … he needs to increase the dose. So he plans to take two banks, simultaneously, one by himself while two of his partners take the other.’

Hantverkar Street ended, and Broncks nodded towards the bridge at the edge of Riddar Bay, and she nodded back and followed him.

‘So next time, he’ll need to do even more. Maybe rob more banks,
maybe do more shooting, maybe … in order to get high, to get a rush, he’ll have to raise the stakes. And for this kind of addict, it won’t stop – not until death stops him.’

The water on the right-hand side was still, the ferries across the archipelago all docked until tomorrow, and the railway tracks to the left peaceful and deserted.

‘Big Brother?’ she said, meaningfully.

He stopped. There was a bench in the middle of the bridge and he leaned against it as he watched her – she who knew him in a way very few others did. Or she
thought
she did.

‘I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not that fucking simple. If you think I’m putting my brother’s face to someone, then you’re wrong. They aren’t … they don’t have the same motivations.’

‘How do you know? Two big brothers who use violence.’

‘But this … he’s doing it for personal gain.’

‘So your brother killed for someone else’s sake, is that what you’re saying?’

He stared coldly at her.

‘Sanna?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Sometimes I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.’

They walked quietly past Riddarholmen, an island of beautiful buildings where no one lived, then on towards Slussen and the contours of Södermalm, which stood up to greet them. Took the stairs outside the hotel to a spot with railings and a gorgeous view of a city about to go to sleep. Looking out over Stockholm, over the rooftops and alleyways, her voice was no longer mechanical, it hadn’t been all day.

‘We … walked past each other once,’ she said. ‘Did you know that, John? On King Street.’

She looked at him in the way he’d hoped she would again someday.

‘I saw you. From afar.’

I saw you.

‘It was summer. I don’t know, a couple years ago. It was a Saturday. Loads of people on the street. I tried to catch your eyes when we passed and you, John, you looked away.’

You saw me. And I chose to look away.

He’d imagined this conversation every day for ten years. Several times a day. She’d been there all that time. When he woke up. When he went
to bed. And he wished he could explain why he’d asked her to move out on that long-ago Thursday, why he’d told her to be gone by the time he came back. He wanted to tell her about the panic attack that had hit him as he approached, that the closer he got, the more overwhelmed he’d been by the thought of what was no longer in the apartment, and how desperately he had fought for each breath. And then that terrible walk through rooms with bare walls, how afterwards he lay on the floor in the hallway with his heart racing, so fucking frightened, two days at the hospital and EKG tests.

And now she was standing in front of him, almost touching him. And if he moved, the moment might be lost. She leaned closer and kissed him, and he only kissed her back when he was sure she meant it.

He wept.

He held her and wept and couldn’t stop. He hadn’t even cried at his father’s funeral, because you can’t cry if you haven’t forgiven.

‘I saw you, too.’

‘What?’

‘That day. On King Street. I saw you but—’

‘You saw me? But you didn’t show it?’

He thought that maybe he should be asking her questions about her life now. About what it was like for her these days.

‘Just like you didn’t show it when we lived together?’

He should ask her about her sister. And if she’d ever bought the house she’d wanted to buy. Ask her why she’d applied for a position in the City Police. And who else had stood this close to her.

‘John, do you remember … do you remember the last time?’

She’s screaming
.

‘No. I don’t remember.’

She screams, ‘You’re so fucking hard.’ She screams, ‘You’re so fucking hard,’ once more, then closes the door and disappears.

‘You don’t remember why you packed up my things in a fucking IKEA bag? You … haven’t changed! You’re still the same, John, as you were then, and you don’t remember. It’s still impossible to reach you.’