He’d seen that in a documentary on television, broadcast right after one about sharks. Roger wasn’t particularly interested in eggs, but sometimes he sat up late in the evening after Anna-Lena had nodded off, because he didn’t want to wake her and have her move her head from his shoulder.

Ro rubbed her fingertips together, she’s the sort of person who has her emotions there, and said: “He wouldn’t have liked the radiators in the home, either. They’re those modern ones that adjust the temperature indoors according to what the temperature is outside, so you can’t decide for yourself.”

“Urgh!” Roger exclaimed, because he was the sort of man who thought a man should be able to decide the temperature of his home for himself.

Ro smiled weakly.

“But Dad loves Jules, like you wouldn’t believe. He was so proud when I married her, he said she had her head screwed on…,” then she suddenly blurted out: “I’m going to be a terrible parent.”

“No you’re not,” the bank robber said consolingly.

But Ro persisted: “Yes I am. I don’t know anything about children. I babysat my cousin’s kid once, and he didn’t want to eat anything and kept saying ‘it hurts’ the whole time. So I told him it only hurt because his wings were about to grow out, because all kids who don’t eat their food turn into butterflies.”

“That’s sweet,” the bank robber smiled.

“It turned out he had acute appendicitis,” Ro added.

“Oh,” the bank robber said, no longer smiling.

“Like I keep saying, I don’t know anything! My dad’s going to die, and I’m going to be a parent, and I want to be exactly the same sort of parent he is, and I didn’t get around to asking him how to do it. You have to know so much as a parent, you have to know everything, right from the start. And Jules keeps wanting me to make decisions the whole time, but I don’t even know… I can’t even decide if I should buy eggs. I’m not going to be able to do this. Jules says I keep finding fault with all the apartments on purpose just because I’m scared of… I don’t know what. Just scared of something.”

* * *

Roger was leaning heavily against the wall, picking under his thumbnail with the IKEA pencil. He understood very well what Ro was scared of: buying an apartment, finding one single fault with it and having to admit that you yourself were the fault. It hadn’t been hard for Roger to admit this to himself in recent years, he just couldn’t bring himself to admit it out loud because he was so incredibly angry. A man can end up like that as a result of the things old age takes away from him, like the ability to serve a purpose, for instance, or at least the ability to fool the person you love into thinking that you can do that. Anna-Lena had seen through him, he realized that now, she knew he didn’t have anything to offer her. Their marriage had become a fake show of admiration with rabbits hidden in the bathroom, and one apartment more or less wouldn’t make any difference. So Roger picked at his nail with the IKEA pencil until the point broke, then he let out a brief cough and gave Ro the finest gift he could imagine.

“You should buy this apartment for your wife. There’s nothing wrong with it. It could do with a bit of minor renovation, but there’s no damp or mold. The kitchen and bathroom are in excellent condition, and the finances of the housing association are in good shape. There are a few loose baseboards, but that won’t take long to put right,” he said.

“I don’t know how to fix baseboards,” Ro whispered.

Roger was silent for a long, long time before—without looking at her—he said three of the hardest words an older man can say to a younger woman:

“You’ll manage it.”

39

Jim is getting coffee from the police station staffroom, but doesn’t have time to drink it because Jack comes rushing in from his interview with Roger, yelling: “We have to get back to the apartment! I know where he’s hiding! In the wall!”

Jim doesn’t honestly know what on earth that’s supposed to mean, but he obeys. They leave the station, get in the car, and drive back to the crime scene with high hopes that everything is going to fall into place the moment they walk in, that they’ll have missed something obvious that will give them all the answers long before the Stockholmers arrive and try to grab the glory for everything.

They’re partly right, of course. They have missed something obvious.

* * *

There’s a young police officer posted in the lobby to stop journalists and random outsiders from going inside and snooping about. Jack and Jim know him, because the town is too small for them not to, and if people sometimes make jokes about some young police officers not being “the sharpest knife in the drawer,” this young man isn’t even in the drawer. He barely notices when Jim and Jack pass him, and they look at each other in annoyance.

“I wouldn’t let that one guard a crime scene if it was up to me,” Jack mutters.

“I wouldn’t let that one guard my beer while I went to the toilet,” Jim mutters back, without making it quite clear which he thought was more serious. But it’s the day before New Year’s Eve, and they’re too short-staffed to have the luxury of choice.

They split up to search. First Jack uses his knuckles, then his pocket torch to knock on all the walls. Jim tries to look as though he, too, has some good thoughts and ideas, so he lifts the sofa to see if anyone just happens to be hiding underneath it. Then Jim runs out of good thoughts and ideas. There are some pizza boxes on the coffee table, so Jim lifts the lid of one of them to see if there’s anything left. Jack’s nostrils flare to twice their normal size when he sees this.

“Dad, please tell me you weren’t thinking of eating any of that if there’s some left? It’s been sitting there all day!”

His dad closes the lid indignantly.

“Pizza doesn’t go bad.”

“If you’re a goat living in a garbage dump, maybe,” Jack mutters, then goes back to carefully knocking, knocking, knocking at various heights on all the walls, first hopefully, then with increasing desperation, palms feeling across the wallpaper like the very first moments after you accidentally drop a key in a lake. His confident facade starts to crack slightly as an entire day’s suppressed dissatisfactions finally slip out of him.

“No, dammit. I was wrong. There’s no way he’s here.”

He’s standing in front of the part of the wall behind which the gap Roger mentioned ought to be. But there’s no way into it. If the bank robber is in there, someone must have dismantled part of the wall, then sealed him in, and the wall is far too neatly plastered and painted for that. And there wasn’t anywhere near enough time, either. Jack utters a series of expletives combining certain sexual terms with various farmyard animals. His back creaks as he leans against the wall. Jim sees a sense of failure settle on his son’s face, shrinking the distance between his ears and shoulders, so Jim summons up all of his sympathy as a father and tries to encourage him by saying: “What about the closet?”

“Too small,” Jack says curtly.