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.
87
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.’
88
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.
POLICE.
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.’
89
LEO RAN STRAIGHT into the white wall, rushed through the woods, through the deep snow towards the car they’d just left co
vered 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.
Until Leo opened the door and left the car with the gun in his hands.
John Broncks was still sitting in his office with a computer monitor and a radio, following a bank robbery that was 110 kilometres away. The last of his colleagues had passed his open door, giggly from the mulled wine, wishing him a merry Christmas, and he’d smiled at them and pretended to look busy even though he wasn’t.
Three patrols were now in place. A fourth was on its way from Uppsala. According to witness statements, three or four robbers had fled in a passenger car, which had just been seen travelling in a northwesterly direction from the crime scene, on a minor road through an area of summer houses which lay somewhere between Heby and Sala.
He massaged his sore lower back, walked in a tight circle between the window and the desk, yawned.
A cup of silver tea always brought him to life. With the kitchenette finally free of Christmas celebrations, he walked towards the hallway to brew a new cup – but was stopped at the door. First, by the sharp beep from the communication radio. Then a colleague, eager.
‘I see them. A car with several passengers.’
A patrol car from Uppsala. A lone policeman.
‘I’m following them.’
John Broncks went closer to the desk and the radio. The car was a few metres away from the policeman, but a hundred kilometres from him.
‘It’s turning off. It’s stopped. It … I’m stopping.’
The sound of his car slowing down.
‘Someone … from the passenger seat … someone’s climbing out. He’s holding something. A gun! And he’s aiming at … me!’
Whirling snow. But Leo could clearly see the uniform. He raised the gun and waited. The door on the driver’s side opened.
His finger on the trigger.
He waited, but no one got out. The uniform just sat there.
So he fired.
A first shot at the engine. And a second. And a third.
Until the lone policeman ran out of the car, threw himself on the ground and rolled down into the snow-filled ditch.
Four more shots – all into the engine. That car wouldn’t be following them any more. He kept his eyes on the ditch as he went back and sat next to Anneli.
‘Drive.’
The situation had changed. To reverse past the police car and continue along the original escape route was no longer possible.
‘Where?’
‘Straight ahead.’
Leo knew where they were – in the middle of an area of uninhabited houses – though he didn’t know how to get out of there. But there was always a way.
The lone policeman’s voice had fallen silent. But it had been easy to understand, even via the radio, what had happened.
A car door had opened: he’d got out. Steps on the snow: he’d tried to escape. A dull thud: he’d thrown himself into shelter.
And then – four more shots. One by one. Burst mode.
Then only the wind.
‘They’ve driven on.’
He was alive. He wasn’t even hurt, from the sound of his voice. But he was still down, probably on the roadside, and it was clear that as he spoke, he was starting to realise what had really happened.
‘He … just stepped out. Methodical. Determined. I was sure I was going to die.’
And – could have happened.
‘He fired at the car and the engine block. An AK4. I saw it.’
When Broncks heard the gunfire, there was no anxiety left. He rushed out into the corridor again, towards the stairs and the garage and the car. More than six months and not a single sign of life. A night spent making one last phone call that should have forced them out. It hadn’t. A few more letters and a few newspaper ads before all contact suddenly ended, and Broncks had begun to doubt himself. Maybe he’d made the wrong decision, misjudged Big Brother. Despite the tips that continued to pour in from the public and an investigative team filling up with profilers and detectives, no breakthrough had come. And as spring became summer and then autumn, he increasingly thought he felt Karlström’s glance – ten years of trust had begun to crumble.
The day before Christmas Eve, and it was as if all of Stockholm had gone home. Christmas trees were lit up in each apartment. After a couple of minutes of driving he passed the tolls at Alvik Bridge at high speed, going towards the E18 west.
‘This is Broncks.’
I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t misjudge Big Brother.
‘I told you to go home,’ answered Karlström, his voice accompanied by Christmas carols and children’s voices. John Broncks remembered last Christmas, his visit to that beautiful house in that beautiful neighbourhood. A year ago. And he was investigating them, still.
‘I’m in the car, heading for Heby, just passing Rinkeby.’
‘John, damn it …’
‘It’s them.’
He reached the Rotebro junction and the traffic light shone red as he drove right through it. Karlström waited, silent. Then he turned the phone towards the room, and the sound of Christmas carols got louder.
; ‘Do you hear that, John?’
An old-fashioned gramophone. A needle scratching against vinyl. ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’.
‘Christmas songs, John. Ham. Mulled wine.’
‘I want the national SWAT team.’
‘John?’
‘I know it’s them.’
‘According to a witness outside the bank, the one who stood guard was significantly older than the others, slower and stiffer than the ones inside the bank.’
‘It’s them.’
‘And there’s never been an old man involved before. Right?’
‘Lennart?’
In ten years he had never used Karlström’s first name.
‘Yes?’
‘We’ve never been this close. But my colleagues in Heby need reinforcements. They’ve already shot at one of the cars.’
‘White Christmas’ was finally over. Now it was ‘Frosty the Snowman’ – a cheerful children’s choir singing a happy Christmas song.
‘John, I can’t contact the police chief tonight and ask her for the national SWAT team, not the day before Christmas Eve. Or any day at all if it’s not our district and if there’s nothing to indicate that it is them.’
‘Faster, Anneli!’
‘I haven’t driven this way before. We didn’t practise—’
‘Faster! We have to get out of here before they close off the roads!’
The snow danced in their headlights in the middle of a dark forest.
Leo had unfurled the map over his knees and the gun that lay there – moving his finger along the road they were on right now, while the car lurched violently and he bumped his shoulder and head on the side window.
‘I don’t know where we are, Leo, I—’
‘Just keep driving!’
She drove, but she wasn’t present any more, she was back there with the seven shots he’d put into a police car. They had opened fire. Those that shoot can be shot at.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 48