You go to the bank and ask for a loan so that you can afford to work for no wages, but the bank tells you that isn’t possible, because it isn’t a permanent job. You could get fired at any time. And then how would they get their money back? Because you haven’t got any, have you?! You try to explain that if you had money, you wouldn’t need a loan, but the bank can’t see the logic in that.

* * *

So what do you do? You struggle on. Hope that’ll be enough. Then you receive another threatening letter from the lawyer. You don’t know what to do, who to turn to, you just don’t want to start a fight. You run to the bus in the morning, imagine that the girls can’t see how you’re feeling, but they do. You can see in their eyes that they want to sell subscriptions to magazines and give you all the money. When you leave them at school you go into an alleyway and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk and cry because you can’t stop thinking: You shouldn’t have loved me.

All your life you’ve promised yourself that you’ll cope with everything. Not be a chaotic person. Not have to beg for help. But Christmas Eve arrives, and you suffer your way through it in lonely despair, because the girls are going to spend New Year’s Day with you. The day before New Year’s Eve you put the latest letter from the lawyer who wants to take them away from you in your pocket, next to the letter from your landlord which says that if you don’t pay the rent today you’re going to be evicted. Right there, right then, it takes next to nothing to knock you off balance. One really bad idea is enough. You find the toy pistol that looks like a real pistol. You make holes in a black woolly hat and pull it down over your face, you go into the bank that wasn’t prepared to lend you any money because you didn’t have any money, you tell yourself that you’re only going to ask for six thousand five hundred kronor for the rent, and that you’ll return it as soon as you get paid. How? a more ordered mind might be asking, but… well… perhaps you haven’t really thought that far ahead? Perhaps you just think you’ll go back, in the same ski mask and with the same pistol, and force them to take the money back? Because all you need is one month. All you need is one single chance to sort everything out.

Later it turns out that that damn toy pistol, the one that looked almost real, looked real because it was real. And in a stairwell a drawing of an elk and a frog and a monkey flutters on the breeze, and in an apartment at the top of the building is a rug soaked in blood.

* * *

This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out.

21

It wasn’t a bomb.

* * *

It was a box of Christmas lights that one of the neighbors had strung up on his balcony. He had actually been thinking of leaving them up over New Year’s Day, but then he had a row with his wife, because she thought “there are far too many lights, don’t you think? And why can’t we have ordinary white lights like everyone else? Do we have to have flashing lights, all different colors, so it looks like we’ve opened a brothel?” He had muttered back: “What sort of brothels have you been to, if they have flashing lights?” and then she had raised her eyebrows and suddenly demanded to know “what sort of brothels have you been to, seeing as you know exactly what they look like…?” and the row had ended with him going out onto the balcony and pulling the damn lights down. But he couldn’t be bothered to carry the box down to the storeroom in the basement, so he left them on the landing outside the door to their apartment. Then he and his wife went off to her parents’ to celebrate the New Year and argue about brothels. The box was left outside the door, on the floor below the apartment that ended up being the location for a hostage drama. When the postman at the start of this story came up the stairs and suddenly caught sight of the armed bank robber going into the apartment that was open for viewing, obviously he couldn’t get downstairs fast enough and stumbled over the box, accidentally dislodging the wires from the top of it.

It didn’t look like a bomb, it really didn’t, it looked like an overturned box of Christmas lights. From a brothel. But in Jim’s defense perhaps it looked like it could have been a bomb, especially if you’d mostly only heard about bombs but never actually seen one. Or a brothel. Rather like if you’re really frightened of snakes and are sitting on the toilet and feel a slight draft on your backside, and you automatically think, Snake! Obviously that’s neither logical nor plausible, but if phobias were logical and plausible they wouldn’t be called phobias. Jim was considerably more frightened of bombs than he was of Christmas lights, and at times like that your brain and eyes can have a bit of a falling-out. That’s the point here.

So, the two police officers had been standing down in the street. Jim had looked for advice on Google, and Jack had phoned the owner of the apartment where the hostages were to find out roughly how many people might be in there. The owner turned out to be a mother with a young family in a different town altogether. She said the apartment had been passed down to her and that she hadn’t been there in person for a very long time. She didn’t have anything to say about the viewing. “The real estate agent’s in charge of all that,” she said. Then Jack called the police station and spoke to the woman at the café who was married to the postman who first raised the alarm about the bank robber. Unfortunately Jack didn’t find out very much more, except for the fact that the bank robber was “masked and fairly small. Not really small, but normally small! Maybe more normal than small! But what’s normal?”

Jack tried to come up with a plan based on this scant information, but didn’t get very far because his boss called and—when Jack couldn’t immediately present him with a plan—the boss called the boss’s boss, and the boss’s boss’s boss, and all the bosses naturally agreed, predictably enough, that it would probably be best if they called Stockholm at once. All of them apart from Jack, of course, who wanted to deal with something himself for once in his life. He suggested that the bosses should let him and Jim go into the stairwell and up to the apartment to see if they could make contact with the bank robber. The bosses agreed to this, despite their doubts, because Jack was basically the sort of police officer that other police officers trusted. But Jim was standing beside him, and heard as one of the bosses shouted down the line that they should “take it really damn carefully, and make sure there are no explosives or other crap in the stairwell, because it might not be about the hostages, it could be a terrorist incident! Have you seen anyone carrying any suspicious packages? Anyone with a beard?” Jack wasn’t bothered by any of that, because he was young. But Jim was seriously bothered, because he was someone’s father.

The elevator was out of order, so he and Jack took the stairs, and on the way up they knocked on all the doors to see if any of the neighbors were still in the building. No one was home, because the day before New Year’s Eve anyone who had to work was at work, and anyone who didn’t have to work had better things to do, and anyone who didn’t must have heard the sirens and seen the reporters and police officers from their balconies and gone outside to see what was going on. (Some of them were actually afraid that there was a snake loose in the building, because there’d recently been rumors on the Internet that a snake had been found in a toilet in a block of apartments in the neighboring town, so that was pretty much the level of probability for hostage dramas in those parts.)