The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (23 page)

One day, two years after she’d moved in, he’d packed up her things from the bathroom, her unscented body wash and toothpaste,
The Second Sex
and
Purple Rain
– the kind of things that people bring with them as they move, piece by piece, inside someone else. He’d put a big yellow Ikea bag on the hall carpet and asked her to leave, and she did her best to understand. When she left, he’d been sitting right here, in the café a block away, killing time drinking enough herbal tea to be absolutely sure she was gone.

Broncks grabbed a glass of orange juice and one of the small, somewhat drier cookies still lying on a large baking sheet.

I think about you every day.

He’d asked her to move out. He’d decided she’d got too close, and at that moment he’d had all the power. But he didn’t understand that it could be taken back ten years later in an aluminium boat – and she carried it with her, while he felt only emptiness.

I never think about you.

The three drawings lay in a heap on top of the next pile of moving boxes. Leo lifted the one on top and examined it.
Conveyor belt. Drainage pump. Cement pipe
. He’d designed and drawn every step for the creation of his Skull Cave himself.

He carried the drawing into the only room that contained no boxes, the one to the left of the entrance, the extension that one of the previous owners had used as an office.

As a boy he would spend break time sketching the new parking meters he passed on his way to school, learning how to remove the tops of two rivets on the back of the machine with a chisel and a hammer, prise off the loose cover plate and take out all the small coins. Or pretend to sharpen his pencil during the last class of the day while he gently propped open the window, and then hurry home to set his alarm clock – coming back in the middle of the night with a sleepy Felix, who would stand outside with a black bin bag while Leo jumped in through the open
window and threw out all the building models his teacher had ordered – real Airfix aircraft from World War II and Revell cars like the ones in
American Graffiti
.

He hadn’t realised it until later – if he did what other people didn’t expect, if he made his own rules, then he could control his world.

He’d made up his mind never to do what his father did, make a noise and be seen and get caught. Like his father, he’d make his own rules, but he’d keep them inside where no one else could see them.

John Broncks had had the same office since the day he left uniformed life for civilian clothes. No longer the kind of cop who was first on the scene with his gun ready, he was a detective who arrived later, piecing together what had happened from the fragments left behind – the echo of threatening voices, the heat of a body about to run – slowly mapping the geography of violence.

He opened the folder and flipped past the interviews with witnesses, search reports, expert opinions, to enlarged photographs of shattered glass on the car seat, bullet holes in the car door. Broncks twisted and turned the pictures, moved them from the computer keyboard and opened a register called the Rational Notification Routine, or RNR. He was going back, just as Sanna had suggested, to the place Jafar and Gobakk were last seen, searching for anyone with connections to the abandoned swimming area in Sköndal, someone who’d taken care to hide all physical traces, and yet still left a clear behavioural trace: the use of excessive force.

A large map lay in the second drawer. He unfolded it and began to follow a line with a red felt marker along the shore of Drevikken Lake. He turned his marker down the black line of a street, and then again, until finally it led back to the beach where it had begun, where the trail stopped. An area encompassing seven square kilometres.

One finger inside the square, he stopped at every new street, entered every address into the computer for the first search – people who lived inside the square who had been sentenced to prison for violent crimes.

‘Hi.’

He made a second search – for people who didn’t live there but had been sentenced for violent crimes committed inside the area.

‘John? Hello?’

He looked up from the screen. He hadn’t even heard her come in.

‘Did I wake you?’

Sanna leaned lightly against the doorframe, a stack of papers in her hand.

‘All the cartridges are labelled on the back with the numbers 80 700, which confirms what we already knew – Swedish manufacture, for military use.’

She looked curiously around the room and handed him the stack. An institutional room. Cardboard boxes along the walls and floor. As if he’d never really moved in.

‘How long have you had this office?’

‘Since I got here.’

‘That’s almost ten years. And there’s no sign of you. Not a single personal item. Not a photo, not … anything.’

‘Nope.’

‘John … it doesn’t even smell like you.’

‘That’s how I want it.’

He leafed through the stack of papers without looking up.

‘Are we done here, Sanna?’

He didn’t see when she turned around and walked away.

‘Yes, we’re done, John.’

But heard her steps, which he knew so well, fading down the hallway.

He looked at his computer screen, the RNR system and the results of his first two searches.

He’d received a total of seventeen hits.

The first drawing was still in his hand, the one of the Skull Cave and the solution to their storage problems, when Leo looked out through the room’s only window, towards the entrance, and saw them arriving in the truck, all three sitting in the front seat.

They parked at the front door, next to the low stairs and makeshift porch. They were on time. They were properly dressed. Felix took off the cover of the truck bed and Jasper and Vincent lifted down the thirty-kilo jackhammer, four spades, four shovels, a wooden tool chest, a bag of surgical masks and gloves, and a case of Coca-Cola.

They filled the room with tools while Leo spoke.

‘We’re the ones who moved the boundaries, changed the rules. Those rules only apply until the day they open that armoury.’

He handed the longer crowbar in the toolbox to Felix, keeping the shorter one for himself. First, they attacked the floor’s thin baseboard, then the yellow plastic underlay, then finally the layer of hardboard and particleboard. Jasper and Vincent carried the pieces out and heaped them up next to the truck.

‘Now we’re going to move the boundaries a little further. Remake the rules again. So that by the time they discover the theft, we’ll have our own armoury.’

He got down on his knees and, using a folding rule and a rough pencil, measured a rectangle in the middle of the floor, two metres long and 1.6 metres wide.

‘We have a head start. And we’re going to use it – we’re going to strike fast. We’ll hit the bank by the roundabout in thirteen days.’

Then came the heavy jackhammer, as Leo looked up at them.

‘And if some cop is sitting in a patrol car nearby, they need to understand we won’t hesitate to use more violence than necessary.’

JOHN BRONCKS WASN’T
sure he’d ever been here before. A church, a commuter train station, an indoor swimming pool, a library. The kind of suburb most people drove through without stopping. He rolled down the car’s side windows; it had warmed up and the rain had turned to mist, making it difficult to see out.

Low buildings were surrounded by car parks, Ösmo Square, and right behind them, a two-storey brick house. That was his destination.

Seventeen hits on the computer screen for seventeen violent crimes recorded in the archives held in the Kronoberg basement, all cases long since closed and prosecuted. John had carried the files up, sorted them out, put them in piles on the floor of his office.

Two of the offenders had died. Three lived outside Stockholm – in Gothenburg, Berlin and on the Spanish Costa del Sol – and had alibis that were confirmed by local police. Four were in prison, behind bars when the robbery was committed. Five had been convicted of rape, aggravated rape and aggravated sexual abuse of children – acts that didn’t really match the profile of this violence.

He slowed down next to a mailbox that the owner had clearly painted himself and parked in front of it. There was someone at the window watching him.

Three preliminary investigations had remained. They were the ones that required dealing with face to face, and he’d taken the files along with him in the car on his way to meeting any ex-cons from the Sköndal area who might have been capable of such deeds.

The first meeting was just two blocks from the police station, on St Erik Street. Convicted for serious drug offences, he was a forty-year-old man with the body of an octogenarian, stooped, with thin hair, sunken cheeks, eyes covered by a hazy film – Broncks had taken one look at the man and ruled him out as a suspect for a robbery that had taken nearly twenty minutes. He promptly left the inner city apartment overlooking the Karlberg canal, and only afterwards realised that they were around the same age and that, if they’d chosen each other’s paths, they might have swapped places. Time wasn’t only measured in hours and seconds.

A brick house with a large garden. He guessed from the veranda and the windows that it must have been built in the 1920s. And he was sure of it now – a man was sitting behind one of those windows.

He’d driven from St Erik Street and continued towards Jakobsberg and the second hit within the search area. Broncks ruled that one out, too. A 47-year-old convicted of manslaughter – at a time when he’d had functioning legs. The offender was an obese man who had retired early, with no hair, who talked quietly, almost whispering, and drank coffee in a terraced house. He’d had prosthetic legs attached at both knees after a methodical attack, reported as retaliation; the investigation had been abandoned after all the witnesses withdrew their testimony.

One left. The one sitting behind a set of ragged curtains.

Broncks opened a folder that had sat in the police station’s archives for fifteen years. It described a 51-year-old man who had emigrated from Yugoslavia in the 1960s and had been to prison several times, the last time for aggravated assault, for which he served eighteen months in the Norrtälje Institution. There were photographs of a woman standing in front of a blue background as if for a school photo, her blonde hair held up in a ponytail so that her injuries were visible. There was severe swelling around her eye, and she had a pronounced fracture on the anterior frontal bone of her skull, the forehead, which a forensic technician had washed clean of blood so the deep gash there could be seen. The rest of her face
was even worse – skin turned into one big hematoma, broken capillaries that shone blue and yellow. The last photos were taken further down and on the right side, showing pale skin around a white bra that intersected with a large blood blister covering the entire area between her armpit and hip. He had been methodical.

Broncks turned over the pile of photographs. But too late. Suddenly, as so often happened, he was flooded by images of his own mother, and he wondered if this was how she would have stood in front of the forensic scientist’s searching lens – hair darker in its ponytail, different swellings and bruises – if she’d ever chosen to report it.